The Walker Tracking System (2/?)
Summary: "She’s raised by two men so I suspect she might grow up to be a tomboy. She’s a little paranoid because she did see her parents get killed in front of her." -Interview with Adair Tishler
Rating: Part: PG Entire Thing: NFC
Reviews: Keep me away from the Mylar communities.
Warnings: Goes from Fluff to Angst in less than five seconds
Let’s get one thing straight before I continue: I did not have a crappy childhood.
I mean, it wasn’t idyllic, but with my biological parents having been murdered, a serial killer stalking us, Appa’s Company always trying to manipulate things, emotionally unstable specials showing up on our doorstep wherever we were, and the fact that we couldn’t always afford to live in a good part of town, I think we pulled off the whole domestic bliss thing fairly well. Time wise, I’d even say the happy, family-type moments even outnumbered the horrific life-or-death ones.
There were the birthday waffles for Appa that we burned every year, but gradually became less charcoal and more edible as time wore on and I began to master the art of the waffle iron. The teachers and neighbors who gay-bashed in their thoughts too loudly and suddenly found their houses egged, their secrets revealed, their paper stolen, and their cars reassembled in their bedrooms. How proud Appa and Dad were of me when I earned my black belt in Judo. All the times we had a conversation about pets and ended up confusing Mohinder the father with Mohinder the lizard. The look on Appa’s face when I wowed my seventh-grade teacher by writing a book report on Activating Evolution and she called home about it. How happy Dad was after he got his groovy blue-tinted glasses and was able to read. How happy Appa and I were when he started wearing the contacts instead.
There were the amusing-in-hindsight dramas, too. That New Year’s Eve at the Petrelli’s house where the champagne got mixed up with the sparkling cider, and Simon’s power to climb up any surface manifested itself (Both were discovered only after Monica, Monty, Micah and I started to loudly slur the Spiderman theme song as he climbed up the foyer wall). There were my many and unsuccessful attempts to play yenta between my fathers, most of which ended up being documented in photographs Micah holds as blackmail material over me to this day. The semi-war the fathers had over how I fulfilled my need for sci-fi, where Dad bought me comic books in bulk and DVDs of Batman Returns and Teen Titans, and Appa kept pushing Doctor Who and Douglass Adams and Kurt Vonnegut into my hands, and it got to the point where they nearly came to blows over their argument of TARDIS vs. Flux Capacitors.
Okay, that last one was funny for me even when it happened. Because seriously, Arthur Dent owns the universe, and the graphic novel is a perfectly legitimate form of artistic and intellectual expression. My fathers can be so stupid sometimes.
But getting back to the subject at hand, the fact that I survived my childhood is pretty impressive. The fact that I survived it with very few physical scars, and that the psychological ones I have don’t impede my day-to-day living, is nothing short of miraculous and a total credit to my parents.
For the fact that this could all go down the toilet, I blame two people: Sylar, and myself.
Sylar, because he’s Sylar, obviously. He killed people. He hurt people. He may have started out with a twisted sense of purpose, a semi-logical directive, but he slide into enjoying what he did, taking pleasure in the pain he caused. Myself, because after what I did last week, I’m not too sure I’m all that different from how he was.
I have no excuse- and no idea how I’m going to explain this to everyone, my friends, my parents, anyone, if I can’t explain it to myself.