[meme] - AU drabbles
Shanti is cured and Shandra didn't die
He is born early enough to save his sister. His very special sister.
His first memory as a boy is asking his mother why his father lives far away and does not visit often. She tells him, "Your sister, Shanti, is very special. Your father and Shanti are doing very important work."
His classmates spend weekends with their parents, tell stories about visiting their fathers' jobs, but Mohinder can only say, "My sister is very special. My father does important work."
He does well in school, very very well. Better than his special sister who, he learns, can make pictures in other peoples' minds. But his sister becomes a geneticist, not as good a geneticist as he would be, and his father only comes home for birthdays.
Mohinder becomes a model, the first Indian male supermodel. He takes a series of very visible American and Asian lovers, both men and women. His brain dislikes the stagnation, so he becomes an actor - a Bollywood star.
When he visits his father and very special sister in New York, his mother comes with him. Mohinder goes out to the flash of cameras and the adulation of tourists. His father asks his wife, Mohinder's mother, "An actor, of all things. The boy was brilliant. Why an actor?"
His wife, Mohinder's mother, replies sadly, "His sister is very special, and you love her very much. Be thankful he is not a serial killer."
Molly doesn't wake up
Hour after hour he watches her, but she does not wake up. She is alive. She breathes. Her eyelids flutter with rapid eye movement beneath them, but she does not wake up.
They send him to New Orleans, to Las Vegas, to Los Angeles, to Uzbekistan, and he goes. Wherever they send him, he goes, and always returns here to her bedside. His life, his skills, in exchange for hers.
She is alive. She breathes. She grows. He cannot pull the plug, because there is no plug to pull. They could stop feeding her, but before Sylar killed Parkman, she asked them not to. Asked Parkman, because he has not heard her voice, seen her smile, since Parkman sent her.
He and Niki find Parkman's father. Their orders are to kill him, but Mohinder wants something first. He wants him to let Molly go. They torture him - curare proving useful again - but he will not let Molly go. In the end, Niki does what they must.
Mohinder hurries back - maybe, maybe, she will be awake and looking for him. She is not. But she is finally dead.
When he is done with his weeping, Mohinder marries Niki Sanders. It isn't a perfect marriage. They both sleep around, sometimes with the same people. But they are good parents to Micah and their daughter Shantih, named for his sister, and Mali, for her, of course.
Niki tries to tell him he did all he could when the nightmares come, when he weeps alone over a glass of scotch. He lets her soothe him in the way she can, but she is wrong. Molly is another verse in the story of his life: too much love, too little logic, too late.
Mohinder has a power
The first time it happens, he doesn't believe it. He's thirty-five years-old. It should've happened long before now. It's a fluke, a rush of adrenalin, it's nothing.
The second time its two days later, and he hasn't had a chance to run the tests yet. It's not a fluke, he really did it, looked at a Bennet's computer screen and knew the passwords.
He runs the tests that night, just to be sure. At home, in his kitchen, with the shades drawn. He wonders if his father knew, and that was why. That was why...
Like Hiro, he has to practice his ability. Stretch it and test its limits. But he must do it alone, because no one can know.
Over the years, it develops. There is no lock he cannot open. No puzzle he cannot solve. No password he cannot crack. No code he cannot decrypt. It's the last that finally cracks the mystery for him of how the abilities work.
The mutation is the same, the manifestation individual. Environmnental or psychological stress triggers the expression, always in the form most needed.
It opens the doors to expansions, to the possibility of more like Sylar or Peter, but stable. But he has learned over these years and he says nothing. The science not as important as the work they do; the discovery not as important as the lives he saves.