fic: You Are Only An Instrument (2/3)
Title: You Are Only An Instrument (2/3).
Author: boombangbing, posted at misfit_fandoms
Artist paperflowered, posted here.
Genre: Gen.
Characters: Molly, Nathan, Claire, Micah, Ando, Simon, Monty, Matt Jr, Daniella + others.
Wordcount: 22,000 approx.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU branching off from I Am Become Death - spoilers up to and including that episode, one vaguely described disgusting scene.
Summary: Molly is thirty four, and disillusioned with her life. Her makeshift family is held together with string, and she hasn't had anything more than one night stands and encounters that end with her giving fake numbers since she was in university. And then her investigation of a gruesome murder begins to uncover what appears to be a conspiracy, and her one ally is the former president of the United States, and Matt's least favourite person in the world, Nathan Petrelli. While dealing with work and family and robots and friends who she doesn't know as well as she thinks she does, Molly has to work out if what she might find is worth her life, or if she's just screwed up enough in the head to become embroiled with the Petrellis again. Sequel to To Protect And Serve (And Some Other Stuff Too). I Am Become Death future!fic.
A/N: Much love to darlas_mom for betaing. And I won't say anything else, because this is getting practically longer than the fic itself.
Part 1|Part 2|Part 3
Claire hasn't left his side in days. In a normal week, they might see each other a few hours a week; he might visit Pinehearst, she might come to the mansion with her grandfather, but they rarely speak of anything other than security and politics. Claire's mind is one track, these days.
But now Nathan can't find a moment to be alone. They still don't talk - if anything Claire speaks less - but she stands at attention when he's at his desk, sits watching the doors when he's having dinner, checks the barrel of her gun when he's reading his book under the big lamp in the study.
“Claire,” he says. “It's late, go to bed.”
“I don't need any sleep.”
“Well.” He closes his book with a snap and leans forward out of the chair. “It's late, I'm going to bed.”
She shadows him out of the room and up the one flight of stairs to his bedroom, the steel toes of her boots click-clacking against the oak floor. When he reaches his door, she pushes in front of him and enters first, gun out, surveying the room.
“Have we got the all clear?” he asks, leaning against the door frame. She doesn't answer, just holsters her gun and runs a hand along her ponytail. He takes it as a yes. She shifts slightly as he comes into the room, but makes no move to leave. He toes a shoe off.
“Claire, you're not staying in my room.”
Nathan has a picture of Claire in his wallet, a much folded clipping from a Texas newspaper about the high school's new cheer squad, because Nathan never had the presence of mind to take a photograph of his daughter when she was young. Properly young, not this... insult to youth that she is now. Some days he takes it out and stares at it, trying to remember if he'd ever known that Claire, or if she kept her blonde hair and her wide smile for her real father. Because this hard-edged girl in front of him is all together too dark and too sharp to be Claire Bennet. She is Petrelli through and through now.
“It's best if I stay in here,” she almost argues, though her tone is flat and unconcerned. “Who knows what powers this man has-”
“I'll be fine, okay? I'm not having you watch me like a guard dog. Stand outside the door if you have to, but you're not staying in here.”
“Nathan.” She purses her lips, her face almost-- hurt, though he knows her better than to think she cares for him. She takes a deep breath and raises her shoulders delicately. “Okay.”
She stalks from the room without another word, slamming the door behind her. He waits several seconds, then steps forward and locks it.
-
Molly's dreaming about India. The market in Chennai where Grandma Suresh would buy food for dinner, the alleyways where the boys would play soccer. She hasn't been back since she was twelve, hasn't stood under that sun, or tasted sambar in twenty one years. Grandma Suresh died a couple of years back, never knowing what became of her son.
Where in reality the market was always too crowded to walk in a straight line (Molly worried for months that one day she'd get lost and no one would be able to find her), in her dream it's empty. Food and fruit and clothes stalls remain, but they're free of customers and holders.
“You are coming home, Molly Walker.” A soccer ball rolls to her feet. She follows its path back to a handsome Indian man.
“You can't live life on the fringes any more,” he says.
A light breeze disturbs her pink and gold sari - one of Grandma Suresh's favourites and greatly admired by a pre-teen Molly. After her death, it was sent to Molly, and it still resides in the box it came in, in the back of her wardrobe.
“Who are you?” she asks. The man smiles.
“You know who I am, and you know why I'm here.”
“I guess you sort of look like Sanjog, but who's to say this isn't just a Tylenol-induced dream?”
The man's eyes certainly remind her of Sanjog. “It is whatever you make it.”
“How very zen of you.”
He inclines his head. “Will you give me my ball back?”
“Oh, sure.” She picks the ball up, and throws it to him. He catches it easily and turns to leave.
“Just remember,” he says as he walks away. “I only come when I'm needed.”
“Yeah,” she murmurs. “I know.”
And then she wakes to tapping on her window.
-
She makes him a coffee. Has to, really; it's started to snow, and even in his thick wool coat, he looks half frozen. Honestly, she feels just a touch awkward - the former president of the United States is in her shitty little kitchen and she's in drawstring pants and a washed out t-shirt. She fronts him out, though, because fuck it, it is her shitty little kitchen.
“What do you want, Mr President?” She leans against the counter as he warms his hands on the cup, silent for a moment or two.
“I needed to talk to you.”
“Heard of a phone?” she says, nodding to the wall mounted phone.
He smiles faintly. “Phone lines get tapped.”
“Not to sound paranoid, or anything,” she adds.
“No, not to sound paranoid. Believe me, it's a real concern.”
She concedes that it just might be. Politicians get up to all sorts of weird shit, after all. “Okay, fair enough. What do you want to talk about? The weather? The Yankees versus the Mets?”
He raises an eyebrow. “The case,” he clarifies shortly. She smiles tightly. “There were things I couldn't say before. Suspects.”
“And you only thought to bring this to someone's attention now. That's five days for the suspects to get away.”
“They're not the kind that are going to run. They're too... untouchable for that.”
Her stomach growls uneasily. Why does this sound so familiar? She nods for him to continue.
“My father,” he says with wry smile, annnd there it is. There's that sinking feeling in her gut.
“And the motive?” she questions, though she really needn't.
Nathan shrugs. “Does he need a motive, really? I guess I haven't been playing it his way recently. Wouldn't be the first time he's tried to kill me.”
This nugget of information doesn't surprise Molly. “But he wouldn't have done it himself,” she says, somewhere between a statement and a question.
“No, he would have someone do it for him.”
“Any ideas?”
“God knows. Maybe Claire did it.”
“Mr President, you really think your daughter would do that?” God, Molly hates Claire more than most, but damn if that girl doesn't love her father. In a creepifying sort of way, but still.
“For fuck's sake, will you quit calling me President? I'm not president any more.” Nathan snaps, rubbing a hand over his face. “I don't know what she'd do. I don't know her at all. I don't know anyone.”
“Okay.” She pulls the chair out next to him and sits. “Okay, Nathan. I believe you. I know Claire's capable, I'm just not sure if I believe that she's willing.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “She's a good soldier, follows orders.”
That really doesn't ring true to Molly. “That's never been my impression of her. She's ruthless, but for her own ends, not someone else's.”
“This would be for her own ends.” Nathan takes a sip of the coffee, and almost manages to cover the accompanying grimace. “My father's one of the few people in the world who could kill her. It's best not to cross him. You know that.”
She sure does. “Fair enough, but they didn't go after you at all, did they?”
“It was a warning. I've been realising a lot of things recently, about the past, and the future. About the things we did back then.”
She watches his hands; it's easier than looking at his face. Easier than being drawn into this conversation.
“I want to introduce a bill to the Senate, to place new restrictions on evo-clinics. Jonathan was helping me with it.”
Oh, she thinks, shit. This is definitely something she should have been told earlier; evo-clinics make huge profits every year, sponsor everything from housing projects to cereal, and anyone trying to pull the plug on that... Well, of all the people, she'd never have guessed it'd be Nathan.
“You're the one who allowed the clinics to open in the first place,” she points out.
“I know.” When she glances up, his gaze is fixed somewhere over her shoulder. “I made a mistake, and now we're all paying for it.”
“What- why are you telling me this?”
His eyes flicker to her. “I need your help.”
“If you're asking me what I think you're asking me...” She shakes her head. “I can't get involved with this again.”
“I understand that-”
“No, you don't understand.” She cuts Nathan off, and he lets her, drops his hands from the mug and looks up at her as she stands. She has cut off the former president of the United States and now she is going to lecture him. “You don't get how your actions, and Claire's and Daphne's and mine, destroyed my family. You knew what would happen, Peter tried and tried to make you see sense, but you just wouldn't.”
“I thought I was doing the right thing.” He doesn't exactly murmur it, but his voice is far from confident.
“Well, you were wrong, and I damn near died for it. I'm not going to put Matt through that again.”
“I know.” He gets up, dusts his coat down, moves back through to the lounge. She follows. “I was there at the hospital; your father threatened to kill me.”
“Am I supposed to apologise for that?” The window is open, and the breeze makes her pyjama bottoms flutter around her legs. He doesn't answer her question, and she wasn't expecting him to. “Look, I'll keep investigating it, as a homicide, but I'm not getting into it with Pinehearst again. It's not worth it.”
“For you,” he clarifies, setting one foot on her windowsill.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “For me.”
He nods. “Well, thanks for listening.” And just like that, he's gone.
And fuck, she needs a smoke.
-
The first time Molly met Claire, she was thirteen, and sitting waiting to be picked up from school. Matt wouldn't let her walk home alone, and he was working that day, so it fell to Daphne to collect her.
She was an hour late.
Molly stewed over that fact, sitting on the steps outside the school, watching everyone else walk or cycle home like normal people. She stewed and stewed and was considering calling Matt and telling him just what a bitch his wife was when the SUV pulled up in front of her.
Daphne jumped out. “God, I'm so sorry, Molly, it just completely-- I'm sorry, honey.”
Molly shied away from any forthcoming hug, and swung her bag over her shoulder. “You're supposed to be a speedster, how can you be late?”
“I'm sorry,” Daphne repeated, like Molly cared about apologies, like that would suddenly make them best friends or some shit. She shook her head and climbed in the back. Only then did she notice the dark-haired girl in the driver's seat.
“Hello, Molly,” the girl said, watching her in the rear view mirror. Right away, there was something... off about her.
“Hi. Who are you?”
She turned in her seat and extended her hand. “I'm Claire.”
Claire Bennet, the president's daughter.
“I'm a friend of Daphne's,” she said.
Daphne wouldn't let Claire take Molly to Pinehearst. Molly hadn't known this at the time, but Claire had pushed and pushed for her to be brought into Pinehearst, and Daphne had refused point blank, had tried to protect her, while Molly merrily went along hating her.
After Daphne died, Matt shut down. Oh, he kept working, kept eating, kept taking her to school and taking Dani to daycare, but in every other way, he stopped. Stopped going out, stopped talking, certainly stopped laughing. Being at home was like being suffocated, and she couldn't even find air locked away in her bedroom.
When Claire met her at break time one day at school, she said, “Do you want to find Sylar?”
And Molly said, “Yes.”
She had to sneak out in order to go to Pinehearst. Matt still wouldn't let her go out alone, and she didn't have any friends who would cover for her. Didn't have any friends, period, really. But Matt went to bed early now, and by eleven the apartment was silent, and she would tiptoe out, meet Claire down the block, and be taken to Pinehearst.
The first time, Arthur came personally to greet her, held his hand out to her, but Claire pulled her away before they could touch. “He's not as nice as he seems,” she had said.
Molly found Sylar - in Albuquerque, in Michigan, in Toronto - and Claire would dash off with the Haitan and Knox, and sometimes Flint. Molly was always glad when Flint left; he freaked her out.
Claire always came back empty-handed, though. Either Sylar got the jump on them and was gone, or he easily overpowered them.
“You have to do better, you have to find him quicker.” She would pound her fist on the table, and Molly would learn not to jump.
“You're the one who can't catch him! It's not my fault!”
“You want him to die, don't you?” Claire would ask. The answer was yes.
And she would ask, “You want to kill him, don't you?” The answer was still yes.
Sometimes, Nathan was there.
“Jesus,” she heard him mutter once. “It's two in the morning. Does Matt knows she's here?”
“I'm doing a job, Nathan. Does it matter?” Claire shot back loudly, not caring whether she was heard or not.
He didn't answer for a long time, and in her head, Molly could see Sylar moving so fast through Carolina. “I suppose not,” he replied.
In her childhood, Molly had two demons, and one night she found out that one was dead, killed by the other. It was not what she would have hoped. When she looked at Sylar, Sylar looked back.
“They're starting them young now, aren't they?”
Molly tried to pull out, but her feet were stuck in quicksand.
“I killed your parents, didn't I?” he asked, leaning in close as she sunk.
“You killed Maury.” She'd seen him once at Pinehearst, but that was weeks before, and she'd thought that maybe they'd sent him elsewhere for her sake. It wasn't that she hadn't considered other reasons for his absence - she'd just never imagined this.
“You can thank me later.”
Afterwards, they told her that she had tried to stand in the cold grey room they always placed her in to work, but had quickly crumpled to the ground. Claire had carried her to the hospital wing, where she would stay for two months.
Brain haemorrhage, the doctors said. She'd started bleeding from the nose right there on the concrete floor. They'd shot her up with Claire's blood, and it reversed the damage, but didn't bring her out of the coma. Claire's blood doesn't heal psychological damage.
She was stuck, again.
Matt didn't save her this time. He couldn't penetrate the cage Sylar constructed: Molly's home, her first home, her real home, in LA. Her parents were there, and not dead like how Sanjog had showed her. They were alive and they loved her and she didn't want to leave. She was happy.
“Happiness is not real.”
It was endless day there, never getting tired or hungry, never having to be afraid of the dark. She was younger there, eight or nine, still child enough to pluck worms from the ground in the backyard.
“This is not real, Molly.”
She didn't look up. “Go 'way, Sanjog.”
He was older; sixteen, seventeen maybe, and he loomed over her. “This is not you.”
“La la la, I'm not listening,” she sing-songed.
“You called me here.”
“You're just imaginary, I don't have to do what you say!”
He crouched in front of her, gathering up the worms on the ground. “We are the only real things here. Look.” He pushed his hands towards her and the worms were gone, both their hands clean of mud.
“I don't want to,” she whispered, her arms and legs gangly again, acne on her chin and forehead.
“Paradise is no paradise if it was created by your enemy.” Sanjog held his hand out to her.
She woke clutching a hand that wasn't there.
-
She gets on with her life. Nathan doesn't contact her again, by window or any other method, and by November she's heard that he's disappeared off to somewhere 'safe'. The investigation has gone nowhere, and with the Mayor still having a fit over the spate of unexplainable robberies, Aimes's gruesome murder is put on the backburner and promptly forgotten.
In the second week of November, Matt Jr comes up from LA to spend Thanksgiving with them; Janice and her new husband are flying up to Whistler to go skiing, and Matty simply can't risk spending that much time in an airplane. Instead, Molly takes some of her well-deserved vacation time and volunteers to take the round trip to LA and back to fetch Matty.
The trip up there is uneventful and wet. She samples the best motels have to offer in Cleveland, Iowa, and Denver, and arrives in LA at almost midnight four days later. Janice's house is large and right around the corner from the beach - Molly feels kind of conspicuous driving through a neighbourhood with honest to God white picket fences in her 2000 Honda Civic. Drapes flutter when she switches on her headlights and pulls into the drive.
She's known Matty for fourteen years, since Matt discovered that Janice's son was his. She was twenty at the time and screwing around at university, and he was ten and rarely visited. When he did stay, it was awkward at best, and six tear old Dani hated having a brother. So, Matty and Molly had never really got the chance to get close, and if she hadn't wanted to get away from the city for a couple of days, she probably wouldn't have suggested picking him up at all.
Yeah, she feels a little bad for that.
Matty is a big guy, over a foot taller than Molly at six foot two inches, so being hugged by him could be described as similar to being suffocated. He's got dark hair and dark eyes like his father, is, in fact, an awful lot like him in looks and personality. His power, which Molly would have thought would be easier to control since he'd had it since he was baby, is volatile and limiting. He got through high school, barely, never applied for college, and has never held down a steady job. There are other reasons for that, though, than just his power - reasons like why her and Nathan have a shared history. Parents.
But she's not thinking about that any more.
Janice's house is bright and clean, full of things, and Molly crashes in one of the guest bedrooms for the night. One of the guest bedrooms. She can't imagine how Janice would cope at breakfast time in Brooklyn. Not that she's jealous.
Breakfast at Janice's house the next morning is orange juice and pancakes - Matty has the pancakes ready for her by eight am. No one's cooked for Molly since she left India.
“We should get going pretty soon if we want to hit Denver by tonight,” she says, leaning her elbows against polished granite breakfast bar. The kitchen's practically bigger than her whole damn apartment.
“But the sun's out!” Matty complains as he washes up dishes. She notes he wraps a cloth around his hand before turning the faucets on or off. “I wanted to get some surfing in before I'm stuck in the Arctic.”
“Just how many geography classes did you miss?”
He smiles faintly at the joke. “I'm pretty good at it these days, you could come and watch.”
“I don't know how my poor red-head skin would take all that sun - I didn't pack a hat.”
“Oh.” He finishes drying the dishes, and moves to take hers; she hadn't even realised how quickly she'd eaten. “Okay.”
His puppy dog face is much better than Matt's. “But I suppose an hour or two wouldn't hurt,” she concedes.
-
This is what normal families are like, she guesses. Fights over who's going to drive (“I don't want to get stuck in the middle of Iowa because you touched the steering wheel! And anyway, it's my car.”), fights over what to eat, buying stupid postcards to send to friends and family. She sends a 'postcard to Micah when they pass through Missouri. She spends most of the trip pretending not to feel bitter, because she knows had just a few things happened or not happened, she wouldn't have to wonder what family life is like.
For Thanksgiving, the four of them - her, Matt, Matty, and Dani - crowd into the apartment, eat turkey and watch cartoons. She limits herself to checking her phone once an hour.
Micah calls midway through a Tom and Jerry rerun that had been on just that morning, and she jumps to take it, pulls on her sweater, and stands in the hall.
“How's it hanging?” Micah's voice is somewhere between cheerful and cheerfully smug. It's a line he often walks.
“I got too old for mice pursuing cats with hammers when I was about six.”
He laughs. “Monica's got The Twilight Zone on. It's like our lives, Molls!”
“Like I want to be reminded of that.” Her thumb twitches like it's looking for a lighter; many a night when she was a teenager she would stub out her cigarettes on the threadbare carpets of this hallway. The burns are still there.
“Molly not feeling happy?” Micah asks in his 'talking to babies' voice.
“Shut up, you're only happy because you're drunk.”
“Not just 'cause of that,” he replies.
“Oh yes?”
“It's a secret. You'll find out soon enough. Monica's dishing up seconds for desert - I've got to go.” There are voices in the background - Micah tells Monica he's talking to Molly, and Monica can faintly be heard yelling her greeting.
When Molly gets back into the apartment, Matty's finished off the last of the ice cream, and the pantry is otherwise bare.
Some people have all the damn luck.
-
On Black Friday, Molly does her grocery shopping. She gets: milk, bread, butter, TV dinners, and nachos. She takes these items home, and then heads back out in her car and buys: ten five litre bottles of water, five loaves of bread, a load of ground beef, and three packets of candles. She packs all these things into her car and drives the short distance to Reed Street, parks down an alley, and proceeds to haul the stuff up to 215, ostensibly an abandoned building.
The loft apartment is pitch black as darkness settles at five in the afternoon. She pulls a packet of candles from her pocket and cleans out the old wax hardened holders, setting up and lighting seven candles around the work area.
Somehow, the electricity still works here, though the water has long been shut off, and the TV drones and crackles behind her as she cleans out the mouldy remains of old loaves, and stores the new ones in the freezer. The television is set to twenty four hour news, they're talking about the end of Dylan's trial approaching, and she gets enough of that in her real life, thank you very much.
She crosses the room to turn it off, reaching out in the semi-darkness.
“Leave it,” a voice rasps, and she tries not to let her skin crawl. She withdraws her hand, already sticky with the liquid that covers most of the apartment. She pulls a packet of wet wipes from her other pocket, and scrapes it off before it hardens.
“I brought your stuff. How are you?” she asks, schooling her voice to neutrality.
“Mm,” is all Mohinder says to this. “Did you enjoy your Thanksgiving with Matt?”
“I-” She squints into the darkness, tries to seek him out in all the dimly lit places, but he moves too fast for her. “Not really. It's just another day.”
“Is it?” Mohinder doesn't want an answer. She can tell by his mocking tone he's having a bad month. He wants to get a rise out of her, so that he can scare her out of the apartment to never come back. He succeeded once, when she was in her second year at NYU and things were starting to get serious with Micah. She didn't go anywhere near Reed Street for six months, and when she finally caved, he was almost dead.
She's still not sure if it wouldn't have been the best thing all round if she had just left him to it.
“Are you eating?” she asks, ignoring his anger. She turns back to the kitchen area and tidies the work surface. There's the sickening squelching sound of Mohinder moving behind her.
“Try,” he says. “Tell me about Petrelli. I saw you on the news.”
“Nothing to tell.” She wonders what Matt would do if he knew she came here. Would he come too, make life easier for her? Would he come with a shotgun (and make life easier for her)? “Guy killed Nathan's PA, press went wild, press dug up all my past shit since they didn't have a story. The usual.”
“Nathan?”
She shakes her head. Mohinder had always liked to argue semantics, Grandma Suresh had said. “Petrelli,” she corrects.
“Mhm. It sounds like there's more going on. Newscaster said that the man exploded.”
“There's always more going on with that family,” she hedges. “Shall I make you something to eat?”
She eats sitting in front of the television. She doesn't eat anything from the apartment, because there are bugs and fleas everywhere; she eats a chocolate bar, and leaves a cheese sandwich on the counter for Mohinder. When she turns back to look, it's gone.
Mohinder won't let her even change the channel, and come six o'clock, they're summarising their top stories again.
“At five thirty this afternoon,” the news guy says, “the Attorney General revealed radical new plans for keeping law and order.”
The picture cuts to a press conference, where the Attorney General's already speaking. “These plans are only meant to enhance policing, not deprive anyone of any jobs. We have been working for years on its development, and now the Robotic Electric Guard is ready to be unveiled.” A little thing - it looks like a trash can with arms and wheels to Molly - rolls out on stage with him, and lifts one arm.
“Hello, I am pleased to meet you all,” it says. A ripple of laughter runs through the press.
“By the new year, thirty REGs will be deployed to each police department for a trial period,” the Attorney General says. He takes a breath. “Any questions?”
The press pit, predictably, bursts into life.
Molly leans back. “I have to... I have to go, Mohinder,” she says. She sits for a moment more, stunned, then scrambles up, grabs her coat, and dashes from the room.
“Be careful,” he murmurs, but she's already gone.
-
The first five times she tries to call Micah, he doesn't answer. She sits on her living room floor, television on, sound down, reading the headlines running along the bottom of the screen, chanting 'pick up, pick up, pick up'. On the sixth ring of the sixth call, he does.
“Micah! I've been calling and calling, where have you been?”
“I've just-”
“It doesn't matter,” she says quickly over him. “Have you seen this? The Attorney General?”
Micah snorts. “Yeah, I've definitely seen it, Molls.”
“What are they doing? What are they thinking?” she hisses down the phone.
“What d'you mean?”
She waves frantically at the set. “Robots! Micah, they're going to use robots to keep us in line. I've seen enough science fiction to know that that never ends well.”
Micah snorts again. “They're hardly creating a totalitarian state, Molly. The robots don't work like in I, Robot, and you're not Detective Spooner. They're not just automatons of logic - they learn about human nature. Have consciences.”
“Micah...” she murmurs, turning back to stare at the screen. “You're scaring me.”
“There's nothing to be scared of,” he says, and his voice should calm her, like it always does, but it's not any more. She shuts her eyes, and thinks of him.
He's in Washington.
He's behind that curtain.
He ran a robotics company, then up and sold it last year.
“It's you,” she says quietly. “You built that thing.”
“It's a huge leap forward in science, you should be proud of me.” He sounds utterly confident. He doesn't get it at all. She sees him in her mind's eye, holding his cell to his ear with one hand, and shaking hands with the other. A man comes up behind him, pats him on the shoulder. She shifts her focus away from Micah, takes a wider view of where he is. And the man with him.
Arthur Petrelli.
It's like someone's just come and shot her in the heart. “You should have just gone ahead and called them Sentinels,” she whispers, then slams the phone down before he can reply. In Washington, Micah frowns and stares for a second at his cell, but then gets distracted, and snaps it shut.
She turns the TV off and sits in silence.
-
“Oh, this is good- don't you think this is good?” Claire glances around for the Haitian; he's looking out of the window of Arthur's hotel room.
“I do not what to think, Claire.”
“She'll freak.” She almost manages a smile. “This is a good thing.”
-
She sits on it for three days, spends the last of her vacation watching the news and the phone. Not that anyone calls; Micah has no more to say on the matter, and when she closes her eyes and finds him, she sees him in Fort Lee. Pinehearst.
She wants to talk to someone - rant at someone, really - but the person has previously always been Micah. Talking to Matt would just worry him; she hasn't confided in him about anything since she was a kid, and this would definitely not be the subject to start with now.
She knew it already, but it really hits home: she has no other friends. She can't involve Dani and Matty in this, and she can't bear to go back to see Mohinder again this month.
She tries to talk herself out of it. She stands in front of her mirror with her toothbrush at six am and tells herself, “You've spent all your adult life trying to get away from this, just let it go. Just look the other way.”
She makes breakfast, keeps the television resolutely off, logs into her email account and is presented with a list of old emails, all from m.sanders@sanderscorp.net. She cleans the apartment top to bottom: toilet, bath, underneath the kitchen sink, behind the couch cushions, under the bed.
She leaves for work at ten to nine, gets halfway there on the subway.
“Fuck it,” she mutters, pushing through the crush and heading back in the same direction.
-
Nathan's agents really don't want her to get in. Like, really really. They pat her down, check her over with a metal detector, take her gun, and leave her to wait in foyer under armed guard. It's like they don't want her, or something.
Some ten minutes later, she hears, “Walker.” Claire looks like she's recently been sucking on a lemon as she breezes through the huge double doors. But then she always looks like that. “Come on if you're coming.”
“Oh, thank you, ma'am,” Molly mutters under her breath. Claire glances back with a raised eyebrow, but doesn't comment.
She's not led as far as the last time she came; there's none of that trekking all over the house for a moment with his majesty. In fact, she treads the same ground that she did last time, to Nathan's scene-of-the-crime study.
“He's in there,” Claire says, jerking her head toward a door.
“You not going to hover over me and protect the prince?”
“Are you going to kill him?”
Molly shrugs. “Not today.”
Claire sweeps an arm towards the door. “Then off you go.”
Nathan's study is spotless now; Molly can't help but glance up at the ceiling, but it's bright white and repainted. The whole place has been redecorated: new furniture, new drapes, new light fitting that isn't striped with intestines. It was probably done on Pinehearst's dime.
“Mr President,” she announces, pasting on the biggest smile she can as he turns to look at her. “I just wanted to drop by and keep you up to date with the progress of the case.” She flashes him a quietening look when he opens his mouth, surveying the room discreetly. There are a lot of places that cameras or listening devices could be placed - books, statues, the wall clock.
Paranoia must be infectious.
“Oh... yes?” Nathan says slowly, laying the book he'd been holding down on his desk carefully. “Have you... got a suspect?”
“Not yet, I'm afraid. No new leads have come up. Look, take my card, and if you ever think of anything else that might be helpful, don't hesitate to call.” She slides a card out of her back pocket, holds it print side down.
“I already have your number.”
“It's new,” she says quickly, punctuating it with a nod of her head. She taps the card twice before placing it in his palm. Nathan cocks his head, reading what it says.
“I'll show myself out, Mr President,” she chirps.
Nathan closes his fist, crumbling the card.
We need to talk. Kirby Plaza. 2AM.
-
Maybe he's not coming. It's ten past two in the morning, and it's snowing, and the Company's old building is looming large in front of her. She's knows that Primatech was essentially eaten by Pinehearst, and that this building is now home to a firm of attorneys, but that knowledge doesn't quite allow her to forget about the Shanti virus, blood tests, and creepy ass Thompson.
There's a soft thump, only noticeable because of the general lack of sound in the plaza. She remembers it always being this peaceful - or creepily silent, maybe.
“Detective.” Nathan smooths his hair down before putting his hands in the pockets of his thick black coat. She winds her scarf, a present from Dani, tighter around her neck, and gets up from the bench she'd been sitting on.
“I assume you've been watching the news.” It's not a question. Everyone everywhere is talking about REG, and even if they weren't, Nathan is the kind of guy that keeps himself abreast of new developments.
“Yeah.”
She clicks her tongue. He was always so verbose on television. “Your father's involved.”
Nathan's eyebrows climb to his hairline, then settle. “Oh?”
“I want to-” She casts about for the words; she isn't used to admitting mistakes. “I'm in, okay?”
“In?”
“Don't play dumb, Petrelli. I wanna go all conspiracy theorist and bust Pinehearst open.”
“Oh.” Nathan watches the snowflakes for a second, then focuses on her face. “I'm not doing that any more.”
“You're not-” She doesn't frown at him so much as she gapes. “You're not 'doing that' any more?” He nods, she blinks. And blinks some more. “You're the one who came to me with this.”
“I know. I was mistaken. You were right, Detective, it isn't worth it.”
“No, no, no. No. You snivelled all over me about how you regretted the past, that you wanted to make up for it. What's happening here are the extremes of what your actions put into motion. You can't walk away from this now.”
“I'm sorry, but-”
She holds up a hand. Snowflakes settle on her grey gloves, and at any other time, the flurry of snow caught in the street lamp would be beautiful. “No, I'm sorry, because I somehow got it into my head that you'd changed, or that you wanted to change, but obviously you're as inconsistent as you ever were. Matt told me about how you flip flopped between great plans of how to save the world. If you wanna know why your life sucks and you're still controlled by your daddy, you need look no further.”
Nathan seems caught somewhere between thoughtfulness and anger. He settles for righteous indignation, apparently. “Inconsistent? You're the one who changed your mind, don't go laying it all on me. I wanted to be safe, once and for all, and you didn't care, which is okay, I understand that I'm nobody to you, and that you probably hate me like everyone else-”
“Oh, give the self-pitying bullshit a rest, Nathan!” she yells. “If people hate you it's because you've made them hate you. Your brother, your daughter, Matt, they were all on your side until you drove them away - or had them killed - and now you have no friends because you deserve to have no friends.” Her voice tapers off and dies. Her eyes feel warm, and she swallows thickly, covering her face with her hand.
Snow muffles Nathan's footsteps, so she doesn't realise he's approached her until his hand lands on her shoulder. “Molly, sit down,” he says softly.
She glares at him, but sits anyway, tucking her hands between her legs. “I'm not going to cry,” she tells him.
“Good.” Nathan drops down beside her. “I don't have any tissues.”
Despite herself, she laughs at this, a little. “Look, circumstances have changed since we last talked, but this is the right thing, I know it. It's not the clever thing, but it's the right one.”
“It seems like there's more to this than you're letting on,” Nathan comments.
Micah. That change of circumstance is Micah, and she's really not sure if she's trying to save him or punish him - both options have their benefits, she thinks. “Yeah,” she says in answer to his question, “there is more going on than I'm going to tell you.”
“Okay.” He pauses, running his fingertips along the seam of his coat. “You know, you remind of Claire, a little bit.”
Molly whips her head round to stare at him, near bug-eyed. Her breath comes out in a cloud of white when she says, “Excuse me?”
“Not the way she is now,” Nathan amends, throwing her a sidelong glance. “The way she was, the way she could have been.”
“Uh huh,” Molly murmurs, and begins to hum faintly under her breath. Her gaze settles on the big red sculpture. She's never really been sure of what it is.
“I really hate this place,” Nathan announces suddenly, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.
“Yeah.” Molly sighs. “Me too.”
“Okay. Fuck.” Nathan rubs a hand across his reddening nose. “So what do you need from me?”
-
The best advice Molly probably ever got when she became a detective was 'follow the money'. Upon passing her detective exam, they'd shoved her into Missing Persons - understandably, she supposes, but it still stung that only one of her skills was taken into account. Obviously she was a natural, to point where she was clearing twenty cases a day and going home each night with pounding headaches and nose bleeds, and she was generally disliked for this, but one guy took her under his wing and taught her the real way to investigate cases. He told her that 50% of all murders were motivated by love or lust, 10% were random attacks, and 40% of people were killed for, or because of, money. Everyone messes up somewhere along the line, he told her. They use credit cards when they shouldn't, have suspicious charges on their bank accounts, abruptly close off-shore accounts in an attempt to avoid scrutiny.
Molly tells Nathan that what he needs to do is find a bank statement or an accounting book or something, because the way she sees it, Arthur must be involved in at least one thing that's not entirely legal. She'll never get him on Jonathan's homicide, or any other homicide he's been involved in, but she might - just might - catch him on some fraud or petty technicality.
She hasn't heard anything from Nathan yet, and it's been a week, but then it's hardly like they can meet for coffee; she's as paranoid as he is now. She knows it's bad when she's in her fluffy slippers at three in the morning sweeping her apartment for bugs.
At the precinct, they pile work on her, quite unsympathetic about the dark circles under her eyes from the hours of personal research she does at night. Brad decides - and can't be moved from the opinion - that she's seeing someone, and after denying it for a couple of days, she thinks that maybe it is a good enough that he think that. So, yes, she says, as a matter of fact she is dating someone, someone tall, dark, and handsome and she'll say no more.
And speaking of tall, dark, and handsome...
Simon's loitering on the other side of the office with Alan, both their heads lowered over some piece of paper.
“Hey,” she yells, and uses a foot to push herself away from her desk. “Shouldn't you be in court?”
“We settled,” Simon calls back.
Settled. Settled? She spins once in her chair and then stands up. “The Dylan case?”
“Yup.” Simon's mouth twists unhappily. “He cut a deal. Time served.”
“What? You gleefully told me he was gonna get the death penalty!”
“Thought he was, but, you know...” He shrugs his shoulders as if to say, these things happen.
“What kind of deal?”
“It's confidential. I can't talk about it.” He turns back to Alan, giving her the back of his head to stare at, just short of with her mouth wide open.
Part 3
Author: boombangbing, posted at misfit_fandoms
Artist paperflowered, posted here.
Genre: Gen.
Characters: Molly, Nathan, Claire, Micah, Ando, Simon, Monty, Matt Jr, Daniella + others.
Wordcount: 22,000 approx.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU branching off from I Am Become Death - spoilers up to and including that episode, one vaguely described disgusting scene.
Summary: Molly is thirty four, and disillusioned with her life. Her makeshift family is held together with string, and she hasn't had anything more than one night stands and encounters that end with her giving fake numbers since she was in university. And then her investigation of a gruesome murder begins to uncover what appears to be a conspiracy, and her one ally is the former president of the United States, and Matt's least favourite person in the world, Nathan Petrelli. While dealing with work and family and robots and friends who she doesn't know as well as she thinks she does, Molly has to work out if what she might find is worth her life, or if she's just screwed up enough in the head to become embroiled with the Petrellis again. Sequel to To Protect And Serve (And Some Other Stuff Too). I Am Become Death future!fic.
A/N: Much love to darlas_mom for betaing. And I won't say anything else, because this is getting practically longer than the fic itself.
Part 1|Part 2|Part 3
Claire hasn't left his side in days. In a normal week, they might see each other a few hours a week; he might visit Pinehearst, she might come to the mansion with her grandfather, but they rarely speak of anything other than security and politics. Claire's mind is one track, these days.
But now Nathan can't find a moment to be alone. They still don't talk - if anything Claire speaks less - but she stands at attention when he's at his desk, sits watching the doors when he's having dinner, checks the barrel of her gun when he's reading his book under the big lamp in the study.
“Claire,” he says. “It's late, go to bed.”
“I don't need any sleep.”
“Well.” He closes his book with a snap and leans forward out of the chair. “It's late, I'm going to bed.”
She shadows him out of the room and up the one flight of stairs to his bedroom, the steel toes of her boots click-clacking against the oak floor. When he reaches his door, she pushes in front of him and enters first, gun out, surveying the room.
“Have we got the all clear?” he asks, leaning against the door frame. She doesn't answer, just holsters her gun and runs a hand along her ponytail. He takes it as a yes. She shifts slightly as he comes into the room, but makes no move to leave. He toes a shoe off.
“Claire, you're not staying in my room.”
Nathan has a picture of Claire in his wallet, a much folded clipping from a Texas newspaper about the high school's new cheer squad, because Nathan never had the presence of mind to take a photograph of his daughter when she was young. Properly young, not this... insult to youth that she is now. Some days he takes it out and stares at it, trying to remember if he'd ever known that Claire, or if she kept her blonde hair and her wide smile for her real father. Because this hard-edged girl in front of him is all together too dark and too sharp to be Claire Bennet. She is Petrelli through and through now.
“It's best if I stay in here,” she almost argues, though her tone is flat and unconcerned. “Who knows what powers this man has-”
“I'll be fine, okay? I'm not having you watch me like a guard dog. Stand outside the door if you have to, but you're not staying in here.”
“Nathan.” She purses her lips, her face almost-- hurt, though he knows her better than to think she cares for him. She takes a deep breath and raises her shoulders delicately. “Okay.”
She stalks from the room without another word, slamming the door behind her. He waits several seconds, then steps forward and locks it.
-
Molly's dreaming about India. The market in Chennai where Grandma Suresh would buy food for dinner, the alleyways where the boys would play soccer. She hasn't been back since she was twelve, hasn't stood under that sun, or tasted sambar in twenty one years. Grandma Suresh died a couple of years back, never knowing what became of her son.
Where in reality the market was always too crowded to walk in a straight line (Molly worried for months that one day she'd get lost and no one would be able to find her), in her dream it's empty. Food and fruit and clothes stalls remain, but they're free of customers and holders.
“You are coming home, Molly Walker.” A soccer ball rolls to her feet. She follows its path back to a handsome Indian man.
“You can't live life on the fringes any more,” he says.
A light breeze disturbs her pink and gold sari - one of Grandma Suresh's favourites and greatly admired by a pre-teen Molly. After her death, it was sent to Molly, and it still resides in the box it came in, in the back of her wardrobe.
“Who are you?” she asks. The man smiles.
“You know who I am, and you know why I'm here.”
“I guess you sort of look like Sanjog, but who's to say this isn't just a Tylenol-induced dream?”
The man's eyes certainly remind her of Sanjog. “It is whatever you make it.”
“How very zen of you.”
He inclines his head. “Will you give me my ball back?”
“Oh, sure.” She picks the ball up, and throws it to him. He catches it easily and turns to leave.
“Just remember,” he says as he walks away. “I only come when I'm needed.”
“Yeah,” she murmurs. “I know.”
And then she wakes to tapping on her window.
-
She makes him a coffee. Has to, really; it's started to snow, and even in his thick wool coat, he looks half frozen. Honestly, she feels just a touch awkward - the former president of the United States is in her shitty little kitchen and she's in drawstring pants and a washed out t-shirt. She fronts him out, though, because fuck it, it is her shitty little kitchen.
“What do you want, Mr President?” She leans against the counter as he warms his hands on the cup, silent for a moment or two.
“I needed to talk to you.”
“Heard of a phone?” she says, nodding to the wall mounted phone.
He smiles faintly. “Phone lines get tapped.”
“Not to sound paranoid, or anything,” she adds.
“No, not to sound paranoid. Believe me, it's a real concern.”
She concedes that it just might be. Politicians get up to all sorts of weird shit, after all. “Okay, fair enough. What do you want to talk about? The weather? The Yankees versus the Mets?”
He raises an eyebrow. “The case,” he clarifies shortly. She smiles tightly. “There were things I couldn't say before. Suspects.”
“And you only thought to bring this to someone's attention now. That's five days for the suspects to get away.”
“They're not the kind that are going to run. They're too... untouchable for that.”
Her stomach growls uneasily. Why does this sound so familiar? She nods for him to continue.
“My father,” he says with wry smile, annnd there it is. There's that sinking feeling in her gut.
“And the motive?” she questions, though she really needn't.
Nathan shrugs. “Does he need a motive, really? I guess I haven't been playing it his way recently. Wouldn't be the first time he's tried to kill me.”
This nugget of information doesn't surprise Molly. “But he wouldn't have done it himself,” she says, somewhere between a statement and a question.
“No, he would have someone do it for him.”
“Any ideas?”
“God knows. Maybe Claire did it.”
“Mr President, you really think your daughter would do that?” God, Molly hates Claire more than most, but damn if that girl doesn't love her father. In a creepifying sort of way, but still.
“For fuck's sake, will you quit calling me President? I'm not president any more.” Nathan snaps, rubbing a hand over his face. “I don't know what she'd do. I don't know her at all. I don't know anyone.”
“Okay.” She pulls the chair out next to him and sits. “Okay, Nathan. I believe you. I know Claire's capable, I'm just not sure if I believe that she's willing.”
He pinches the bridge of his nose. “She's a good soldier, follows orders.”
That really doesn't ring true to Molly. “That's never been my impression of her. She's ruthless, but for her own ends, not someone else's.”
“This would be for her own ends.” Nathan takes a sip of the coffee, and almost manages to cover the accompanying grimace. “My father's one of the few people in the world who could kill her. It's best not to cross him. You know that.”
She sure does. “Fair enough, but they didn't go after you at all, did they?”
“It was a warning. I've been realising a lot of things recently, about the past, and the future. About the things we did back then.”
She watches his hands; it's easier than looking at his face. Easier than being drawn into this conversation.
“I want to introduce a bill to the Senate, to place new restrictions on evo-clinics. Jonathan was helping me with it.”
Oh, she thinks, shit. This is definitely something she should have been told earlier; evo-clinics make huge profits every year, sponsor everything from housing projects to cereal, and anyone trying to pull the plug on that... Well, of all the people, she'd never have guessed it'd be Nathan.
“You're the one who allowed the clinics to open in the first place,” she points out.
“I know.” When she glances up, his gaze is fixed somewhere over her shoulder. “I made a mistake, and now we're all paying for it.”
“What- why are you telling me this?”
His eyes flicker to her. “I need your help.”
“If you're asking me what I think you're asking me...” She shakes her head. “I can't get involved with this again.”
“I understand that-”
“No, you don't understand.” She cuts Nathan off, and he lets her, drops his hands from the mug and looks up at her as she stands. She has cut off the former president of the United States and now she is going to lecture him. “You don't get how your actions, and Claire's and Daphne's and mine, destroyed my family. You knew what would happen, Peter tried and tried to make you see sense, but you just wouldn't.”
“I thought I was doing the right thing.” He doesn't exactly murmur it, but his voice is far from confident.
“Well, you were wrong, and I damn near died for it. I'm not going to put Matt through that again.”
“I know.” He gets up, dusts his coat down, moves back through to the lounge. She follows. “I was there at the hospital; your father threatened to kill me.”
“Am I supposed to apologise for that?” The window is open, and the breeze makes her pyjama bottoms flutter around her legs. He doesn't answer her question, and she wasn't expecting him to. “Look, I'll keep investigating it, as a homicide, but I'm not getting into it with Pinehearst again. It's not worth it.”
“For you,” he clarifies, setting one foot on her windowsill.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “For me.”
He nods. “Well, thanks for listening.” And just like that, he's gone.
And fuck, she needs a smoke.
-
The first time Molly met Claire, she was thirteen, and sitting waiting to be picked up from school. Matt wouldn't let her walk home alone, and he was working that day, so it fell to Daphne to collect her.
She was an hour late.
Molly stewed over that fact, sitting on the steps outside the school, watching everyone else walk or cycle home like normal people. She stewed and stewed and was considering calling Matt and telling him just what a bitch his wife was when the SUV pulled up in front of her.
Daphne jumped out. “God, I'm so sorry, Molly, it just completely-- I'm sorry, honey.”
Molly shied away from any forthcoming hug, and swung her bag over her shoulder. “You're supposed to be a speedster, how can you be late?”
“I'm sorry,” Daphne repeated, like Molly cared about apologies, like that would suddenly make them best friends or some shit. She shook her head and climbed in the back. Only then did she notice the dark-haired girl in the driver's seat.
“Hello, Molly,” the girl said, watching her in the rear view mirror. Right away, there was something... off about her.
“Hi. Who are you?”
She turned in her seat and extended her hand. “I'm Claire.”
Claire Bennet, the president's daughter.
“I'm a friend of Daphne's,” she said.
Daphne wouldn't let Claire take Molly to Pinehearst. Molly hadn't known this at the time, but Claire had pushed and pushed for her to be brought into Pinehearst, and Daphne had refused point blank, had tried to protect her, while Molly merrily went along hating her.
After Daphne died, Matt shut down. Oh, he kept working, kept eating, kept taking her to school and taking Dani to daycare, but in every other way, he stopped. Stopped going out, stopped talking, certainly stopped laughing. Being at home was like being suffocated, and she couldn't even find air locked away in her bedroom.
When Claire met her at break time one day at school, she said, “Do you want to find Sylar?”
And Molly said, “Yes.”
She had to sneak out in order to go to Pinehearst. Matt still wouldn't let her go out alone, and she didn't have any friends who would cover for her. Didn't have any friends, period, really. But Matt went to bed early now, and by eleven the apartment was silent, and she would tiptoe out, meet Claire down the block, and be taken to Pinehearst.
The first time, Arthur came personally to greet her, held his hand out to her, but Claire pulled her away before they could touch. “He's not as nice as he seems,” she had said.
Molly found Sylar - in Albuquerque, in Michigan, in Toronto - and Claire would dash off with the Haitan and Knox, and sometimes Flint. Molly was always glad when Flint left; he freaked her out.
Claire always came back empty-handed, though. Either Sylar got the jump on them and was gone, or he easily overpowered them.
“You have to do better, you have to find him quicker.” She would pound her fist on the table, and Molly would learn not to jump.
“You're the one who can't catch him! It's not my fault!”
“You want him to die, don't you?” Claire would ask. The answer was yes.
And she would ask, “You want to kill him, don't you?” The answer was still yes.
Sometimes, Nathan was there.
“Jesus,” she heard him mutter once. “It's two in the morning. Does Matt knows she's here?”
“I'm doing a job, Nathan. Does it matter?” Claire shot back loudly, not caring whether she was heard or not.
He didn't answer for a long time, and in her head, Molly could see Sylar moving so fast through Carolina. “I suppose not,” he replied.
In her childhood, Molly had two demons, and one night she found out that one was dead, killed by the other. It was not what she would have hoped. When she looked at Sylar, Sylar looked back.
“They're starting them young now, aren't they?”
Molly tried to pull out, but her feet were stuck in quicksand.
“I killed your parents, didn't I?” he asked, leaning in close as she sunk.
“You killed Maury.” She'd seen him once at Pinehearst, but that was weeks before, and she'd thought that maybe they'd sent him elsewhere for her sake. It wasn't that she hadn't considered other reasons for his absence - she'd just never imagined this.
“You can thank me later.”
Afterwards, they told her that she had tried to stand in the cold grey room they always placed her in to work, but had quickly crumpled to the ground. Claire had carried her to the hospital wing, where she would stay for two months.
Brain haemorrhage, the doctors said. She'd started bleeding from the nose right there on the concrete floor. They'd shot her up with Claire's blood, and it reversed the damage, but didn't bring her out of the coma. Claire's blood doesn't heal psychological damage.
She was stuck, again.
Matt didn't save her this time. He couldn't penetrate the cage Sylar constructed: Molly's home, her first home, her real home, in LA. Her parents were there, and not dead like how Sanjog had showed her. They were alive and they loved her and she didn't want to leave. She was happy.
“Happiness is not real.”
It was endless day there, never getting tired or hungry, never having to be afraid of the dark. She was younger there, eight or nine, still child enough to pluck worms from the ground in the backyard.
“This is not real, Molly.”
She didn't look up. “Go 'way, Sanjog.”
He was older; sixteen, seventeen maybe, and he loomed over her. “This is not you.”
“La la la, I'm not listening,” she sing-songed.
“You called me here.”
“You're just imaginary, I don't have to do what you say!”
He crouched in front of her, gathering up the worms on the ground. “We are the only real things here. Look.” He pushed his hands towards her and the worms were gone, both their hands clean of mud.
“I don't want to,” she whispered, her arms and legs gangly again, acne on her chin and forehead.
“Paradise is no paradise if it was created by your enemy.” Sanjog held his hand out to her.
She woke clutching a hand that wasn't there.
-
She gets on with her life. Nathan doesn't contact her again, by window or any other method, and by November she's heard that he's disappeared off to somewhere 'safe'. The investigation has gone nowhere, and with the Mayor still having a fit over the spate of unexplainable robberies, Aimes's gruesome murder is put on the backburner and promptly forgotten.
In the second week of November, Matt Jr comes up from LA to spend Thanksgiving with them; Janice and her new husband are flying up to Whistler to go skiing, and Matty simply can't risk spending that much time in an airplane. Instead, Molly takes some of her well-deserved vacation time and volunteers to take the round trip to LA and back to fetch Matty.
The trip up there is uneventful and wet. She samples the best motels have to offer in Cleveland, Iowa, and Denver, and arrives in LA at almost midnight four days later. Janice's house is large and right around the corner from the beach - Molly feels kind of conspicuous driving through a neighbourhood with honest to God white picket fences in her 2000 Honda Civic. Drapes flutter when she switches on her headlights and pulls into the drive.
She's known Matty for fourteen years, since Matt discovered that Janice's son was his. She was twenty at the time and screwing around at university, and he was ten and rarely visited. When he did stay, it was awkward at best, and six tear old Dani hated having a brother. So, Matty and Molly had never really got the chance to get close, and if she hadn't wanted to get away from the city for a couple of days, she probably wouldn't have suggested picking him up at all.
Yeah, she feels a little bad for that.
Matty is a big guy, over a foot taller than Molly at six foot two inches, so being hugged by him could be described as similar to being suffocated. He's got dark hair and dark eyes like his father, is, in fact, an awful lot like him in looks and personality. His power, which Molly would have thought would be easier to control since he'd had it since he was baby, is volatile and limiting. He got through high school, barely, never applied for college, and has never held down a steady job. There are other reasons for that, though, than just his power - reasons like why her and Nathan have a shared history. Parents.
But she's not thinking about that any more.
Janice's house is bright and clean, full of things, and Molly crashes in one of the guest bedrooms for the night. One of the guest bedrooms. She can't imagine how Janice would cope at breakfast time in Brooklyn. Not that she's jealous.
Breakfast at Janice's house the next morning is orange juice and pancakes - Matty has the pancakes ready for her by eight am. No one's cooked for Molly since she left India.
“We should get going pretty soon if we want to hit Denver by tonight,” she says, leaning her elbows against polished granite breakfast bar. The kitchen's practically bigger than her whole damn apartment.
“But the sun's out!” Matty complains as he washes up dishes. She notes he wraps a cloth around his hand before turning the faucets on or off. “I wanted to get some surfing in before I'm stuck in the Arctic.”
“Just how many geography classes did you miss?”
He smiles faintly at the joke. “I'm pretty good at it these days, you could come and watch.”
“I don't know how my poor red-head skin would take all that sun - I didn't pack a hat.”
“Oh.” He finishes drying the dishes, and moves to take hers; she hadn't even realised how quickly she'd eaten. “Okay.”
His puppy dog face is much better than Matt's. “But I suppose an hour or two wouldn't hurt,” she concedes.
-
This is what normal families are like, she guesses. Fights over who's going to drive (“I don't want to get stuck in the middle of Iowa because you touched the steering wheel! And anyway, it's my car.”), fights over what to eat, buying stupid postcards to send to friends and family. She sends a 'postcard to Micah when they pass through Missouri. She spends most of the trip pretending not to feel bitter, because she knows had just a few things happened or not happened, she wouldn't have to wonder what family life is like.
For Thanksgiving, the four of them - her, Matt, Matty, and Dani - crowd into the apartment, eat turkey and watch cartoons. She limits herself to checking her phone once an hour.
Micah calls midway through a Tom and Jerry rerun that had been on just that morning, and she jumps to take it, pulls on her sweater, and stands in the hall.
“How's it hanging?” Micah's voice is somewhere between cheerful and cheerfully smug. It's a line he often walks.
“I got too old for mice pursuing cats with hammers when I was about six.”
He laughs. “Monica's got The Twilight Zone on. It's like our lives, Molls!”
“Like I want to be reminded of that.” Her thumb twitches like it's looking for a lighter; many a night when she was a teenager she would stub out her cigarettes on the threadbare carpets of this hallway. The burns are still there.
“Molly not feeling happy?” Micah asks in his 'talking to babies' voice.
“Shut up, you're only happy because you're drunk.”
“Not just 'cause of that,” he replies.
“Oh yes?”
“It's a secret. You'll find out soon enough. Monica's dishing up seconds for desert - I've got to go.” There are voices in the background - Micah tells Monica he's talking to Molly, and Monica can faintly be heard yelling her greeting.
When Molly gets back into the apartment, Matty's finished off the last of the ice cream, and the pantry is otherwise bare.
Some people have all the damn luck.
-
On Black Friday, Molly does her grocery shopping. She gets: milk, bread, butter, TV dinners, and nachos. She takes these items home, and then heads back out in her car and buys: ten five litre bottles of water, five loaves of bread, a load of ground beef, and three packets of candles. She packs all these things into her car and drives the short distance to Reed Street, parks down an alley, and proceeds to haul the stuff up to 215, ostensibly an abandoned building.
The loft apartment is pitch black as darkness settles at five in the afternoon. She pulls a packet of candles from her pocket and cleans out the old wax hardened holders, setting up and lighting seven candles around the work area.
Somehow, the electricity still works here, though the water has long been shut off, and the TV drones and crackles behind her as she cleans out the mouldy remains of old loaves, and stores the new ones in the freezer. The television is set to twenty four hour news, they're talking about the end of Dylan's trial approaching, and she gets enough of that in her real life, thank you very much.
She crosses the room to turn it off, reaching out in the semi-darkness.
“Leave it,” a voice rasps, and she tries not to let her skin crawl. She withdraws her hand, already sticky with the liquid that covers most of the apartment. She pulls a packet of wet wipes from her other pocket, and scrapes it off before it hardens.
“I brought your stuff. How are you?” she asks, schooling her voice to neutrality.
“Mm,” is all Mohinder says to this. “Did you enjoy your Thanksgiving with Matt?”
“I-” She squints into the darkness, tries to seek him out in all the dimly lit places, but he moves too fast for her. “Not really. It's just another day.”
“Is it?” Mohinder doesn't want an answer. She can tell by his mocking tone he's having a bad month. He wants to get a rise out of her, so that he can scare her out of the apartment to never come back. He succeeded once, when she was in her second year at NYU and things were starting to get serious with Micah. She didn't go anywhere near Reed Street for six months, and when she finally caved, he was almost dead.
She's still not sure if it wouldn't have been the best thing all round if she had just left him to it.
“Are you eating?” she asks, ignoring his anger. She turns back to the kitchen area and tidies the work surface. There's the sickening squelching sound of Mohinder moving behind her.
“Try,” he says. “Tell me about Petrelli. I saw you on the news.”
“Nothing to tell.” She wonders what Matt would do if he knew she came here. Would he come too, make life easier for her? Would he come with a shotgun (and make life easier for her)? “Guy killed Nathan's PA, press went wild, press dug up all my past shit since they didn't have a story. The usual.”
“Nathan?”
She shakes her head. Mohinder had always liked to argue semantics, Grandma Suresh had said. “Petrelli,” she corrects.
“Mhm. It sounds like there's more going on. Newscaster said that the man exploded.”
“There's always more going on with that family,” she hedges. “Shall I make you something to eat?”
She eats sitting in front of the television. She doesn't eat anything from the apartment, because there are bugs and fleas everywhere; she eats a chocolate bar, and leaves a cheese sandwich on the counter for Mohinder. When she turns back to look, it's gone.
Mohinder won't let her even change the channel, and come six o'clock, they're summarising their top stories again.
“At five thirty this afternoon,” the news guy says, “the Attorney General revealed radical new plans for keeping law and order.”
The picture cuts to a press conference, where the Attorney General's already speaking. “These plans are only meant to enhance policing, not deprive anyone of any jobs. We have been working for years on its development, and now the Robotic Electric Guard is ready to be unveiled.” A little thing - it looks like a trash can with arms and wheels to Molly - rolls out on stage with him, and lifts one arm.
“Hello, I am pleased to meet you all,” it says. A ripple of laughter runs through the press.
“By the new year, thirty REGs will be deployed to each police department for a trial period,” the Attorney General says. He takes a breath. “Any questions?”
The press pit, predictably, bursts into life.
Molly leans back. “I have to... I have to go, Mohinder,” she says. She sits for a moment more, stunned, then scrambles up, grabs her coat, and dashes from the room.
“Be careful,” he murmurs, but she's already gone.
-
The first five times she tries to call Micah, he doesn't answer. She sits on her living room floor, television on, sound down, reading the headlines running along the bottom of the screen, chanting 'pick up, pick up, pick up'. On the sixth ring of the sixth call, he does.
“Micah! I've been calling and calling, where have you been?”
“I've just-”
“It doesn't matter,” she says quickly over him. “Have you seen this? The Attorney General?”
Micah snorts. “Yeah, I've definitely seen it, Molls.”
“What are they doing? What are they thinking?” she hisses down the phone.
“What d'you mean?”
She waves frantically at the set. “Robots! Micah, they're going to use robots to keep us in line. I've seen enough science fiction to know that that never ends well.”
Micah snorts again. “They're hardly creating a totalitarian state, Molly. The robots don't work like in I, Robot, and you're not Detective Spooner. They're not just automatons of logic - they learn about human nature. Have consciences.”
“Micah...” she murmurs, turning back to stare at the screen. “You're scaring me.”
“There's nothing to be scared of,” he says, and his voice should calm her, like it always does, but it's not any more. She shuts her eyes, and thinks of him.
He's in Washington.
He's behind that curtain.
He ran a robotics company, then up and sold it last year.
“It's you,” she says quietly. “You built that thing.”
“It's a huge leap forward in science, you should be proud of me.” He sounds utterly confident. He doesn't get it at all. She sees him in her mind's eye, holding his cell to his ear with one hand, and shaking hands with the other. A man comes up behind him, pats him on the shoulder. She shifts her focus away from Micah, takes a wider view of where he is. And the man with him.
Arthur Petrelli.
It's like someone's just come and shot her in the heart. “You should have just gone ahead and called them Sentinels,” she whispers, then slams the phone down before he can reply. In Washington, Micah frowns and stares for a second at his cell, but then gets distracted, and snaps it shut.
She turns the TV off and sits in silence.
-
“Oh, this is good- don't you think this is good?” Claire glances around for the Haitian; he's looking out of the window of Arthur's hotel room.
“I do not what to think, Claire.”
“She'll freak.” She almost manages a smile. “This is a good thing.”
-
She sits on it for three days, spends the last of her vacation watching the news and the phone. Not that anyone calls; Micah has no more to say on the matter, and when she closes her eyes and finds him, she sees him in Fort Lee. Pinehearst.
She wants to talk to someone - rant at someone, really - but the person has previously always been Micah. Talking to Matt would just worry him; she hasn't confided in him about anything since she was a kid, and this would definitely not be the subject to start with now.
She knew it already, but it really hits home: she has no other friends. She can't involve Dani and Matty in this, and she can't bear to go back to see Mohinder again this month.
She tries to talk herself out of it. She stands in front of her mirror with her toothbrush at six am and tells herself, “You've spent all your adult life trying to get away from this, just let it go. Just look the other way.”
She makes breakfast, keeps the television resolutely off, logs into her email account and is presented with a list of old emails, all from m.sanders@sanderscorp.net. She cleans the apartment top to bottom: toilet, bath, underneath the kitchen sink, behind the couch cushions, under the bed.
She leaves for work at ten to nine, gets halfway there on the subway.
“Fuck it,” she mutters, pushing through the crush and heading back in the same direction.
-
Nathan's agents really don't want her to get in. Like, really really. They pat her down, check her over with a metal detector, take her gun, and leave her to wait in foyer under armed guard. It's like they don't want her, or something.
Some ten minutes later, she hears, “Walker.” Claire looks like she's recently been sucking on a lemon as she breezes through the huge double doors. But then she always looks like that. “Come on if you're coming.”
“Oh, thank you, ma'am,” Molly mutters under her breath. Claire glances back with a raised eyebrow, but doesn't comment.
She's not led as far as the last time she came; there's none of that trekking all over the house for a moment with his majesty. In fact, she treads the same ground that she did last time, to Nathan's scene-of-the-crime study.
“He's in there,” Claire says, jerking her head toward a door.
“You not going to hover over me and protect the prince?”
“Are you going to kill him?”
Molly shrugs. “Not today.”
Claire sweeps an arm towards the door. “Then off you go.”
Nathan's study is spotless now; Molly can't help but glance up at the ceiling, but it's bright white and repainted. The whole place has been redecorated: new furniture, new drapes, new light fitting that isn't striped with intestines. It was probably done on Pinehearst's dime.
“Mr President,” she announces, pasting on the biggest smile she can as he turns to look at her. “I just wanted to drop by and keep you up to date with the progress of the case.” She flashes him a quietening look when he opens his mouth, surveying the room discreetly. There are a lot of places that cameras or listening devices could be placed - books, statues, the wall clock.
Paranoia must be infectious.
“Oh... yes?” Nathan says slowly, laying the book he'd been holding down on his desk carefully. “Have you... got a suspect?”
“Not yet, I'm afraid. No new leads have come up. Look, take my card, and if you ever think of anything else that might be helpful, don't hesitate to call.” She slides a card out of her back pocket, holds it print side down.
“I already have your number.”
“It's new,” she says quickly, punctuating it with a nod of her head. She taps the card twice before placing it in his palm. Nathan cocks his head, reading what it says.
“I'll show myself out, Mr President,” she chirps.
Nathan closes his fist, crumbling the card.
We need to talk. Kirby Plaza. 2AM.
-
Maybe he's not coming. It's ten past two in the morning, and it's snowing, and the Company's old building is looming large in front of her. She's knows that Primatech was essentially eaten by Pinehearst, and that this building is now home to a firm of attorneys, but that knowledge doesn't quite allow her to forget about the Shanti virus, blood tests, and creepy ass Thompson.
There's a soft thump, only noticeable because of the general lack of sound in the plaza. She remembers it always being this peaceful - or creepily silent, maybe.
“Detective.” Nathan smooths his hair down before putting his hands in the pockets of his thick black coat. She winds her scarf, a present from Dani, tighter around her neck, and gets up from the bench she'd been sitting on.
“I assume you've been watching the news.” It's not a question. Everyone everywhere is talking about REG, and even if they weren't, Nathan is the kind of guy that keeps himself abreast of new developments.
“Yeah.”
She clicks her tongue. He was always so verbose on television. “Your father's involved.”
Nathan's eyebrows climb to his hairline, then settle. “Oh?”
“I want to-” She casts about for the words; she isn't used to admitting mistakes. “I'm in, okay?”
“In?”
“Don't play dumb, Petrelli. I wanna go all conspiracy theorist and bust Pinehearst open.”
“Oh.” Nathan watches the snowflakes for a second, then focuses on her face. “I'm not doing that any more.”
“You're not-” She doesn't frown at him so much as she gapes. “You're not 'doing that' any more?” He nods, she blinks. And blinks some more. “You're the one who came to me with this.”
“I know. I was mistaken. You were right, Detective, it isn't worth it.”
“No, no, no. No. You snivelled all over me about how you regretted the past, that you wanted to make up for it. What's happening here are the extremes of what your actions put into motion. You can't walk away from this now.”
“I'm sorry, but-”
She holds up a hand. Snowflakes settle on her grey gloves, and at any other time, the flurry of snow caught in the street lamp would be beautiful. “No, I'm sorry, because I somehow got it into my head that you'd changed, or that you wanted to change, but obviously you're as inconsistent as you ever were. Matt told me about how you flip flopped between great plans of how to save the world. If you wanna know why your life sucks and you're still controlled by your daddy, you need look no further.”
Nathan seems caught somewhere between thoughtfulness and anger. He settles for righteous indignation, apparently. “Inconsistent? You're the one who changed your mind, don't go laying it all on me. I wanted to be safe, once and for all, and you didn't care, which is okay, I understand that I'm nobody to you, and that you probably hate me like everyone else-”
“Oh, give the self-pitying bullshit a rest, Nathan!” she yells. “If people hate you it's because you've made them hate you. Your brother, your daughter, Matt, they were all on your side until you drove them away - or had them killed - and now you have no friends because you deserve to have no friends.” Her voice tapers off and dies. Her eyes feel warm, and she swallows thickly, covering her face with her hand.
Snow muffles Nathan's footsteps, so she doesn't realise he's approached her until his hand lands on her shoulder. “Molly, sit down,” he says softly.
She glares at him, but sits anyway, tucking her hands between her legs. “I'm not going to cry,” she tells him.
“Good.” Nathan drops down beside her. “I don't have any tissues.”
Despite herself, she laughs at this, a little. “Look, circumstances have changed since we last talked, but this is the right thing, I know it. It's not the clever thing, but it's the right one.”
“It seems like there's more to this than you're letting on,” Nathan comments.
Micah. That change of circumstance is Micah, and she's really not sure if she's trying to save him or punish him - both options have their benefits, she thinks. “Yeah,” she says in answer to his question, “there is more going on than I'm going to tell you.”
“Okay.” He pauses, running his fingertips along the seam of his coat. “You know, you remind of Claire, a little bit.”
Molly whips her head round to stare at him, near bug-eyed. Her breath comes out in a cloud of white when she says, “Excuse me?”
“Not the way she is now,” Nathan amends, throwing her a sidelong glance. “The way she was, the way she could have been.”
“Uh huh,” Molly murmurs, and begins to hum faintly under her breath. Her gaze settles on the big red sculpture. She's never really been sure of what it is.
“I really hate this place,” Nathan announces suddenly, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.
“Yeah.” Molly sighs. “Me too.”
“Okay. Fuck.” Nathan rubs a hand across his reddening nose. “So what do you need from me?”
-
The best advice Molly probably ever got when she became a detective was 'follow the money'. Upon passing her detective exam, they'd shoved her into Missing Persons - understandably, she supposes, but it still stung that only one of her skills was taken into account. Obviously she was a natural, to point where she was clearing twenty cases a day and going home each night with pounding headaches and nose bleeds, and she was generally disliked for this, but one guy took her under his wing and taught her the real way to investigate cases. He told her that 50% of all murders were motivated by love or lust, 10% were random attacks, and 40% of people were killed for, or because of, money. Everyone messes up somewhere along the line, he told her. They use credit cards when they shouldn't, have suspicious charges on their bank accounts, abruptly close off-shore accounts in an attempt to avoid scrutiny.
Molly tells Nathan that what he needs to do is find a bank statement or an accounting book or something, because the way she sees it, Arthur must be involved in at least one thing that's not entirely legal. She'll never get him on Jonathan's homicide, or any other homicide he's been involved in, but she might - just might - catch him on some fraud or petty technicality.
She hasn't heard anything from Nathan yet, and it's been a week, but then it's hardly like they can meet for coffee; she's as paranoid as he is now. She knows it's bad when she's in her fluffy slippers at three in the morning sweeping her apartment for bugs.
At the precinct, they pile work on her, quite unsympathetic about the dark circles under her eyes from the hours of personal research she does at night. Brad decides - and can't be moved from the opinion - that she's seeing someone, and after denying it for a couple of days, she thinks that maybe it is a good enough that he think that. So, yes, she says, as a matter of fact she is dating someone, someone tall, dark, and handsome and she'll say no more.
And speaking of tall, dark, and handsome...
Simon's loitering on the other side of the office with Alan, both their heads lowered over some piece of paper.
“Hey,” she yells, and uses a foot to push herself away from her desk. “Shouldn't you be in court?”
“We settled,” Simon calls back.
Settled. Settled? She spins once in her chair and then stands up. “The Dylan case?”
“Yup.” Simon's mouth twists unhappily. “He cut a deal. Time served.”
“What? You gleefully told me he was gonna get the death penalty!”
“Thought he was, but, you know...” He shrugs his shoulders as if to say, these things happen.
“What kind of deal?”
“It's confidential. I can't talk about it.” He turns back to Alan, giving her the back of his head to stare at, just short of with her mouth wide open.
Part 3