(Amnesty) Challenge 16: Wing!fic - Aspirations
Aspirations - Matt/Mohinder & Molly, PG, 389 words, early second season spoilers
Some people were born to be heroes... Molly slips into her cardboard wings, and hopes she can live up to expectations...
Aspirations
This city was morbid, and had beheld its fair slice of chancers on this window ledge. There was the elusive Peter Petrelli who swooped through the air without a suicidal scratch, a real flying man, and more than usual thereafter, who thought they might draw lots from the same notion. Road pizzas, steaming, carted by mopeds - to you within thirty minutes. Or your money back. It was a cruel world, but the pair of feet that now balanced on the brink, piggy toes poking over the top, were surprisingly small. Why would something so minute and dainty, ever want to end it all?
A pair of toy wings bobbed in the still midnight air, enveloped in brown paper like overseas parcels, franked with foreign stamps. She fantasised about getting away from it all, seeing the world, and less of herself and her own trivial troubles. Anything but this. They sat upon a child, who was wearing them as a backpack, ready and set to roam. And by the sight of her Wonder Woman PJs, with her trusty lasso - for those parents who thought that it was an icon far too provocative and mature for a girl of ten, this little one was growing up by the second. 'I wish I was strong like her,' she pouted, 'Quick maybe, nimble, or real smart - if only I could fly, and then I'd show them...' She spread out her arms and closed her eyes, anticipating a place where he could never find her.
'Molly!' Mohinder shrieked, 'What are you doing here?' He lifted her up from under the arms. 'I don't know,' she squirmed in his grasp, 'I thought it might work.' Her voice had gotten choked up in trying to rationalise her ideas of superheroes and special powers, and all the doting doc could do, was sooth her gentle sobs. 'I guess I just wanted to be like you... and Officer Parkman,' she acknowledged Matt, standing by the stairs, 'You've done so much for everybody.' Shrugging the cardboard from her shoulders, they flumped onto the floor in failure, and she in turn held onto her favourite supermen, tugging along flopsy bunny, who'd been on quite the adventure himself in these early morning hours. 'Come on,' the joining policeman said, 'Let's be getting you in to bed.'