The Beginning, Part Two
Title: The Beginning, Part Two
Characters: Emma Coolidge, Maury Parkman, Peter Petrelli
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Word count: 8,600 (total)
Setting: Shattered Salvation, December 31, 2011
Summary: Emma asks Maury to explain it all. Written for heroes_contest's final challenge, "Endings". Beta by means2bhuman.
Part One
"But I'm getting ahead of myself. I was talking about her 'projects'. Jews weren't the only ones. She had others - different groups, different places. Aside from direct possession, by the 1930s she had enough mental power to compel people together, long enough to have the kids she wanted them to have. We've speculated that she had some power of fertility, too, but at some point we'd started to think she had every scary, bogey-man power known. There was just a hell of a lot of coincidences."
Emma put her hand on her stomach. "Like how Alisha and Noah will have the same birthday, Gabriel and Heidi conceived right away, and Peter and I …?"
"Yeah, those sorts of things. You start looking back through history at narrow misses and unlikely events, ships passing in the night and unexpected one-night stands resulting in a kid who has powers … makes you wonder. Triggers off all the superstitious fears a person might have. We started calling it 'Fate', 'Destiny', sometimes 'Serendipity' if we were feeling generous. You see, this was before we got crossways with her in the mid-70s. Before that, we didn't know she existed. We knew what had happened, but the idea there might be one person behind all of that?" He made a rude, disparaging noise. "We wouldn't have believed it if we'd been told. We had to see it for ourselves to really get it. We'd been pulled together to Coyote Sands and then after, it just sort of snowballed - more and more specials came to our attention. Adam showed up with the idea that we put science to work finding out where abilities came from. I think he was working for her then, setting us up to be an arm of her globe-spanning plans. She was riding Chandra in those days."
"Chandra Suresh?" Peter asked softly.
"Yep. He wasn't the same man in those days as the guy you met."
Peter shook his head slightly. "I never met him."
"You didn't?" Maury looked over at him.
Peter shrugged. "I tried. But by the time I found out about him, I was meeting Mohinder."
"Huh. Well, the original Chandra showed up to us in the early 70s and several remembered him from the Coyote Sands. They didn't trust him, but he didn't care. Chandra talked about these trials of testing that had been done on children, two to three years old, trying to short-cut the breeding process and create abilities in them directly. Didn't work. But for whatever reason, he thought it would work to round up a bunch of kids of specials and inject them.". He nodded towards Peter. "That's how Nathan got his power. Remember what I said about your dad and acceptable casualties?" Peter nodded. "Most of the kids survived. Not all, though, and that started a backlash. It took a while, because the people Lilith was dealing with had all just sort of coincidentally been okay with letting some weird Indian guy inject their precious baby with an untested compound, but it's really tough to brainwash someone into thinking it's okay for you to kill their kid.
"How did you know it was her?" Emma asked.
"We didn't at first. We blamed Chandra. We'd been researching Coyote Sands for a while and we decided he must have some power beyond what we'd expected. People with multiple abilities weren't unknown to us, so we assumed he had more than we knew of. We went after him for using mental commands to coerce people into letting him experiment on their kids, experiments that killed some of them.
"After we failed to corner Chandra a few times, Adam … more or less came clean with us. What he left out was that he was still occasionally talking to her even while we were fighting her. But he told us the rest of what he knew about Lilith and we organized against her. He had no idea how to kill her. At first, we thought she was mortal just like any of the rest of us, aside from the body jumping. We killed her, or at least her hosts a half dozen times. Never took. At first, we thought we were handling the body wrong - maybe burial wasn't good enough and we needed to cut the head off, then next time we tried cremation and so on. We had all kinds of wild theories. I don't know if I can convince you of how paranoid a person gets when they don't understand how something like that works.
"All in all, it was kind of pointless because she wouldn't stay dead. We'd have done better if we'd tried to talk things out with her, but although different people would suggest that at different points, there were a few too many dead babies and rapey liaisons for negotiations to go very far. By 1977, we thought we'd finally won, but fighting her had caused us to put a lot of energy into trying to come up with super-weapons to use against her."
"Wait," Peter interjected. "What were you guys doing to stop her?"
Maury sighed. "It was a big, frustrating, cat-and-mouse game. We'd track down the people she was working through, like Chandra, the other scientists working on her projects, different employees, and the like. We'd check them for any signs of recent personality shift. We'd go read their minds. When we found her, we tried different things, like I said - shooting, incineration, whatever. We tried locking her up once, but she just bailed out of the body at some point."
"Was this here in the US?" Emma asked, trying to get some context.
"Most of it. And some in India. We thought if we could just get the right abilities, we could stop her. So Victoria came up with this formula and Adam brought her the catalyst."
"What was that?" Peter asked of that mysterious power that had reactivated his own original ability. "The catalyst - what was it?"
Maury's face did something strange - it formed a small, sweet smile while he considered the answer - before his eyes cleared and he focused on Peter. "Love."
"L … love?"
"Love. 'For He so loved the world that He gave his only …' the only life he had to give." Maury watched as Peter blinked at the unexpected Biblical paraphrase, then waited patiently for the old man to explain. "Love of another great enough that you would extinguish yourself for them. And not just that you would, but that y have. Surrender your life force, martyr yourself willingly for another, and your love will outlast you. Adam called it a 'Deeper Magic', but he'd read that out of some idiot book he'd read twenty years before. The thing is, the human soul has a power. I don't think you'll argue that." Peter shook his head to show he wasn't arguing; Emma nodded to show she agreed. Maury was amused, but understood the meaning behind both gestures. "Our abilities come from our souls and they tend to defy scientific explanation. I'm not going to try it now. Maybe someday someone will be able to quantify all of it in replicable experiments, but what we knew for certain was that without the catalyst, the formula was just a mindless mutation. Variations of it included viruses that could kill billions of people. But if you add the catalyst - love, empathy, humanity - and instead of bringing death, it brought miracles."
"'In the end, all that matters is love'," Peter muttered.
Maury smiled a little. "Charles used to say that."
Peter nodded, because that was who had said it to him.
Emma said, "It sounds like magic."
Maury's smile broadened. "And what would you call my telepathy or your ability to manipulate sound?"
Emma cocked her head, lips pursed and hand rubbing her tummy. "I don't like the idea of magic. It's too unpredictable."
Maury shrugged. "Fear it or not, it's here. And abilities seem to foll some gical rules. Just not very many."
With a perturbed sigh, Emma brought the conversation back to something more definable. "Was that Lilith's plan? To have you come up with this catalyst that would let you give people abilities?"
Maury puckered his lips. "No. I know it's tempting to imagine it was all one grand, evil scheme with a single villain orchestrating everything, but we came up with that on our own. Now I'm not going to say it wasn't an arms race. Once we'd found out about her and been unable to get rid of her, we poured a lot of energy into coming up with how to get bigger and better powers."
Peter's mouth dropped open for a moment before he said, "I was born in 1978. My … they said …" He blinked a few times. "They said they said they went to a lot of trouble to get me, that I was bred for this."
"And so you were."
Thinking more on a conversation Peter had had with his father, months before when his father had been stripped of abilities and jailed by the Company, he remembered something else. "He quoted something to me out of that book, about the great evolutionary agency of the universe being love." His eyes met Maury's. "They made me to stop Lilith, didn't they?"
"Well," Maury said, "I can't say I was privy to your parent's plans until recently, but yes, that's true."
"And … Gabriel?"
"Their plans for him don't have anything to do with Lilith."
"Yeah, but what about the rest of their plans for him? I know they had them. Have them."
"I'm not going to speak of the future." For several long, tense moments, there was silence.
Emma said, "Can you tell us more of history, then?"
"Of course," Maury said cooperatively. "What would you like to know?"
"You said you thought you'd won in 1977. What happened next?"
"The Company consolidated. We started pursuing a pattern of persecution against specials - anything to drive them underground. We threatened. We isolated. We hunted. We trained an entire generation of mundane and special agents to feel nothing for the people they were after. We inculcated a philosophy that specials were less than human, a danger to everyone."
"But ..." Emma asked, perplexed, "you were specials."
Maury laughed a little. "Yeah, kind of fucked up, isn't it? We did it anyway. We were afraid of what Adam had almost unleashed. We were afraid of all the artificial specials Lilith might have made. We were afraid of all the ones being born that we didn't know about. And then in 1985, we got a rude shock when we found out Lilith was alive and well, hanging out in one of our own facilities. She'd come in to talk to Adam in the flesh, so to speak, and after she was done with that, she went snooping through our files. Adam had the impression she was pissed at him for not telling her she'd finalized the formula. It seemed to be what she was looking for. She stumbled across Charles, who realized who he was dealing with, then she fled when she couldn't immediately convince him to forget it. The chase was on, then. We tailed her back to India and after a lot of adventures managed to corner her as Chandra, and drained every memory and power she had. Or at least that Chandra had, not that he'd ever had any ability other than being able to detect specials."
"He could detect specials?" Peter said, startled by that even though it made perfect sense.
"Yes. Originally. Your father took that from him. I checked Chandra out from one end to the other, destroying everything that he was in a lesser version of what Matt did to Sylar. It was revenge. We were torturing him for having been her willing vessel, though I'm not sure how much free will anyone had in dealing with her. We left him a husk whose major accomplishment was being potty-trained. We thought that his later rapid recovery was because he'd had a lot of friends with abilities. He still had a family, people who knew him, and all that. We thought they'd pitched in to help. He certainly didn't come back fully healed - he wasn't the brilliant scientist he once was. Since then, I've realized Lilith must have lent a hand in putting him back together as much as possible. I saw something similar with Mohinder last spring. It's not like the damage never happened, but Chandra was able to walk and talk and even teach classes pretty soon."
Emma snorted this time. Given the questionable capability of some of the tenured university professors she'd seen in her day, being able to teach class wasn't necessarily an accomplishment.
"Ye-ah." Maury smiled thinly at her thoughts. "We thought she was gone, though - for the second time. It was kind of a problem for us that one trait she never had was vengefulness. You know, you wrong some people and they'll keep trying to wrong you back for the rest of their lives. Her, though? Nah. She was just more careful about the next time. That made it awful tough to tell when she was dead and gone or just off doing her own thing somewhere else."
"Couldn't you use someone like Molly to locate her?" Emma asked.
"Good idea, but it didn't work. We had a guy who could enter people's dreams, but he had to know them first. Molly had a similar limitation. You can't just say, 'Hey, find this person who possesses people, but we don't know who they're possessing right now, or what they call themselves, or who they were born as, or where they've been lately, but we want you to find them anyway.' Or, well, you could say that, but it isn't enough to go on." Emma nodded, seeing the problem. "What we ended up doing instead was investigating and tracking the people she might be possessing and then using telepathy, empathic reading, and related powers to do the final identification. It was costly in terms of time and labor, but it made us really good at tracking normal specials. We built a whole infrastructure around that."
"What else was going on with the Company aside from dealing with her?"
"Well … after the Chandra incident, the Company started taking on a biomedical route. In the course of tracking them down, we'd uncovered a lot of research that looked really promising and we were finally big enough to start employing mundane scientists rather than just working off of Vicki's ability to manipulate organic molecules. Victoria had parted ways with us anyway and Charles and Kaito had largely retired, too, putting their families before the business. Remember those Zimmermans I mentioned? They got hired in to run it. Arthur and some of the others who were still active wanted the Company to go back to figuring out how to enhance and grant abilities. For the next fifteen years, they'd find people with abilities and bring them in for a round of experiments, then wipe their memories and dump them back out. We expanded the organization, built facilities on every continent, recruited and trained heavily, and became the juggernaut you saw five years ago when your abilities first manifested," he said, with a nod at Peter.
"We had two satellites in orbit, we had developed an injectable radiographic or something substance that could be detected from space," Maury went on with a hand wave to indicate he didn't understand the details of the advance but just that it had been done, "and we had this program for bagging and tagging with a big database to track people. We had a really good idea of what abilities were out there, what they were capable of, and how they worked. We'd done things like what happened to Elle - pushed her as hard as possible, traumatized the shit out of her, and left her mentally warped, just to find out how those things worked."
"And that," Peter said slowly, feeling his way through how he would have responded in that environment, "was the backdrop for my mother and father … how did you put it? Not agreeing with each other anymore? And then he was using mental commands to make her go along anyway."
"Yep. The Company had become callous and inhuman. Arthur was the chairman and he'd become a really, really frightening man. He'd accumulated so many powers that he put even Samson Gray to shame. The power differential was so extreme that none of the other Founders really had much say in things. He made sure none of us who were still active got too uppity with our opinions. I went back to doing field work - finding people with powers and convincing them not to show them to anyone. Daniel and I ended up working together a lot."
"You and Daniel were close?" Peter asked.
"Platonically. Fraternally might be a better word. He saved my life a lot. He'd gotten tired of playing second fiddle to Arthur's pomposity. Daniel had a little trick he could do with his power that wiped out all of Arthur's commands on a person's mind. After Arthur tried to have Nathan killed and ordered Angela not to know about it, Daniel stepped in and healed her."
Peter nodded, putting it together in his mind. For a long time, he'd harbored a lot of anger towards his mother. Knowing more of her story and how she came by her decisions made so much of it more understandable.
"What about 9/11?" Emma asked. "And the different things happening in the world. Were specials responsible for any of that?"
He shrugged. "Not particularly. You know, we made a difference here and there, but by and large every member of humanity does their own thing and the gestalt moves forward at its own pace. There's no Illuminati running everything, even if there are groups that have more power and influence than others. Specials - they have a lot of power and influence, more when they work together. Halo might have had something to do with 9/11, but it's not like people can't get themselves into wars and terrorism without someone with an ability at the bottom of it. The Company wasn't about to take sides or try to take over an actual government. There were some noises about that when we all got together towards the end of 2005. Several precogs were predicting the same event with a high degree of certainty, which had caused the Founders to pull together a big meeting to discuss it. Even those who had left the Company showed up."
"The bomb?" Peter guessed.
"Heh. You wish." Maury said, amused at how Peter thought things revolved around him. "No. The eclipse. It was going to cause a mass activation, more manifestations than we could predict and intercept. And in the fallout from something that massive, yeah, the bombing of New York was a strong possibility. We spent most a month bashing our brains out about the problem. Your parents and Daniel came up with this 'brilliant' plan to blow up New York City and then Nathan would become president. A lot of people didn't like that. It was too Petrelli-centric. Old grievances were aired. Kaito and Victoria bowed out, Charles was on his last legs anyway health-wise, others took off in different directions. Since no one was sticking around to object, the plan went forward.
"For about two months. That was when, in the course of examining his eldest son for fitness in holding the highest office in the land, controlling the government of the most powerful nation on Earth, Arthur discovered he'd been secretly buggering his baby brother for the better part of a decade."
Peter cleared his throat uneasily and muttered, "It wasn't that long." Maury shrugged at the minor equivocation. Emma looked distinctly uncomfortable with the topic, regardless of exact number of years.
"Doesn't matter," Maury said. "Arthur went off the deep end. Really, he'd handled his wife's infidelities a lot better than his kid's peccadillos." Peter sighed prominently, uncomfortable in how much and how little he agreed with his mother's adultery. "That was when I left. It wasn't like I hadn't had hints between you and Nathan, but really, I hadn't been looking. Paying attention to Arthur and Angela's brats wasn't on my list of things to do and I didn't come around all that often anyway. People entertain idle fantasies all the time and so even though I'd overheard a few things, I'd ignored them. But in the state Arthur was in, finding out that I'd known something and hadn't mentioned it might have been fatal, so I skedaddled."
Drily, Peter said, "I thought he was just angry I was actually graduating as a nurse."
Maury gave him an odd half-smile. "That didn't win you any points, let me tell you. But while I was out, the whole thing fell apart. Next thing I know, you're lighting up the sky the evening after the election. Everything after that was scrambling for damage control. I think you've been more or less in the loop for that."
Peter nodded, but he was looking at Emma, who nodded as well after a moment.
"Our children," Emma said slowly, "are being born into a very dangerous world. How do we keep them safe?"
Maury leaned forward, speaking seriously. "Over the years, the things that have worked are working together, protecting each other, knowing as much as you can, and having each other's backs when the going gets rough. The things my generation failed at, that it looks to me like you guys might get right, are in being supportive, forgiving, and trusting." He smiled, tears dampening his eyes as he thought about all the hate, fear, and unresolved grudges he'd seen. "Like Angela says, we mortgaged our souls for you, to make a world where you could find one another and find love. The debt's been paid; invest wisely."