Fic: Changes For The Better (Mohinder, Mira, PG-13)
Title: Changes For The Better
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Mohinder Suresh, Mira Shenoy
Words: 1900
Warnings: Angst and tension. References to an off-screen character death.
Spoilers: Through season 2.
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not writing this for profit.
A/N: This was written for the table I claimed at
un_love_you , prompt #20: "I hate you, you bitch." I'm a bit nervous about this, because we know so little about Mira that I feel like I'm creating an OC by writing about her. I started this quite a while back, and
sinemoras09 was interested in the hints I dropped about it, so I pulled it out and finished it up - I hope it's worth the read after your marathon weekend!
X-posted at
un_love_you and
heroes_fic
Summary: Mohinder tries to deal with a tragedy by escaping back to India and the job offer that Mira, his ex-girlfriend, extended to him months ago. But that turns out to be a mistake, and the anger and frustration he feels is all aimed at her.
The sounds of the city are different now. Eleven months in a foreign country have changed him enough that he’s somehow a stranger in his own land. He stares out the window without really seeing the dawn sky, and finally returns to the bedroom to dress.
He should be grateful for this final chance at a normal life. For respectability. Those are Mira’s words, of course. Respectable. Unlike what he was before, which was a crackpot, a lunatic, a fringe-dweller. She doesn’t say that, of course, but it’s in her eyes, in the small smug smile that congratulates him for coming to his senses.
What he was before, he’s come to realize, was not unhappy.
* * * * * * *
His office is nice and big and pleasantly appointed but it might as well be empty, to match the lack of emotion it brings out in him.
He has a title too, though he can never remember it. And a staff to mold and direct. At first he thought that if he’d been given all this a few years ago, maybe it would have been different -
No. He knows himself well enough to know he wasn’t made for a desk job. He’d wanted to follow his father because of the excitement. He’d stayed in New York partly out of a sense of duty, but largely because it meant he was a part of something vital. It was only after the risk that followed him and his companions finally hit home, that he’d desperately looked for a path to lead him away from it all. Now, though, he sees he should have stayed, should have battled through the pain.
Now, he’s in the middle of a project that’s taken years so far, and will take years more to complete, and all for...what? So that the shareholders and executives of the company can enrich themselves by using that knowledge to help those who can afford their help? That was essentially what he’d been doing in New York, except that there, he could see evidence that he was intervening to make people’s lives better, helping them deal with what was happening to them. And there, he might have been able to work with others to change things, to stop anyone else from going through what he’s been through.
He shoves aside a pile of forecasts and project plans and leans on his hand, staring into nothingness.
“Mohinder.”
A slim figure stands disapprovingly in his doorway.
“How much work remains on the December progress report?”
“It’s nearly finished, Mira.”
“Mohinder. I know you’re capable. And...I’m glad to have you here.” She glances away for a moment. “But I had to do a lot of persuading with the partners to get them to re-extend their offer to you.”
“I know.”
“This is the one remaining chance you have in this field. Sitting there daydreaming isn’t helping your reputation any.”
Daydreaming? Daydreaming? He forces himself to smile despite the pain and anger that fills his mind. “I’ll be finished by the end of the day.”
Her look turns almost pleading before she silently leaves.
He swivels to face the window and lets himself scowl. When did she become his schoolmarm, hovering over him to incessantly correct his behavior?
And when did he let her become it? Was his life so empty now that he was willing to let it happen, just to have something to fill the void?
* * * * * * *
The days pass, one after another, in much the same vein.
Mira prompts him, corrects him, watches him, sometimes with disapproval, sometimes with an air of superiority. And every day, his ire towards her grows a little more. He knows that it’s irrational behavior. The offer may have been hers, but he accepted it of his own free will.
Still, though, the mere sound of her approaching footsteps causes his jaw to clench with stress.
She’s around him all the time - she’s his supervisor, after all - but it’s not until late one afternoon, when he reaches for a pen and her hand winds up on his, that he suddenly realizes that there’s another reason behind her insistence and her hovering. She looks up at him, her eyes wide and pleading again, and his mouth opens in shock as her hand tightens on his.
She pulls away with a comment about needing tea, and glides out the door. As soon as she’s out of earshot, he hurls the pen against the wall and fumes.
Her touch infuriates him because he knows she doesn’t really want him. His work, his father’s research, his sister, the Company, Molly (oh, Molly) - they’re all things that matter to him, but she’s not interested in hearing a word about them. She just wants to mold him into the man she’s looking for. It makes him loathe her.
* * * * * * *
The final straw comes eight days later. He doesn’t feel that he can turn down an invitation to dinner from Mira’s family - they’re perfectly nice people, and her father is influential, and he doesn’t have a ready excuse for refusal.
Something feels off about the conversation, though, and he finally realizes that Mira’s parents assume that he’s come back to this country, to this job, for her.
And Mira is doing nothing to disabuse them of this notion.
He takes a long drink from his glass to keep his mouth occupied before his temper makes it run out of control. He looks over, and Mira is giving him a small smile that he supposes denotes fondness. Why? Because she thinks he’s given in, and that he’ll fall in with whatever future she’s got mapped out, with long-range forecasts and timetables and regular goals and a nice neat empty death at the end of it all?
The heat that the thought causes crystallizes something inside him, and he realizes what he has to do.
* * * * * * *
The knock on his door interrupts his packing. He pauses and considers ignoring it, but then it comes again, more loudly. He sighs and throws the shirt he was folding into his suitcase.
Of course. Mira.
She knows he’s home, so he takes a deep breath and opens the door.
“Take it back, Mohinder.” She holds out a folded paper. His letter of resignation.
He shakes his head wordlessly and walks back into the apartment. She shuts the door behind her and follows him.
“You don’t want to do this.”
“What do you know about what I want?”
“Mohinder...please.” He forces himself to turn to face her.
“I didn’t realize how much I had missed you, until you came back. I’d hoped...I’d hoped that maybe we could make things work out this time. Now that you’d gotten everything out of your system -”
“What?” He turns back to look at her. “Is that how you view everything I’ve been through? Some childish fantasy that I had to give up on?”
“I know your father was important to you. And I know you felt an obligation to try to uphold his beliefs. But, Mohinder, I thought you’d finally come to your senses.”
“That’s why you think I came back?”
“Isn’t it? You’d clung so tightly to these delusions that when you called to tell me you were back in India, I assumed you’d seen the light.”
Mohinder clenches and unclenches his fists. “I came back,” he says very carefully, “because I had lost someone who was dear to me, and I started to question whether what I was doing was worth the sacrifice. I thought maybe coming back here would heal me. But then, you’ve never bothered to ask me about any of that, have you?”
She looks down at the paper she’s clutching. She says in a quiet voice, “I didn’t want to talk to you about that because I didn’t want to encourage you to keep thinking about it all. I see now that it was a mistake.” Her eyes come back up. “But you’re here now. You’re got your life back on track. Why are you trying to throw the future away over this, this insanity from your past?”
“Some people might think that this is the insanity,” Mohinder answers tightly.
Mira touches his cheek with her hand, and kisses him, and presses herself gently against him. There was a time when he thought her breasts were lovely, but now they’re as impersonal to him as plastic. Or maybe, more like ice: something that’s slowly melted away out of his life and left no trace of its existence behind. And the thought of pulling it back in, willingly allowing it to freeze him again, makes him ill.
He almost shoves her away from him, and she takes a step back, her face startled and hurt.
They stand there, opposing each other. Finally she says, “You didn’t use to be like this.”
“People change.”
“Not always for the better.”
“If by that, you meant that any changes you don’t approve of are automatically for the worse, then I suppose you’re correct.”
Mira crumples the letter in her hand. Mohinder closes his eyes and wishes she would just leave. He thinks about the airline ticket to Los Angeles in his jacket pocket.
“I’d hoped that maybe I could dissuade you from this. But if you’re determined to be this way -”
“I’m not ‘being’ this way. I am this way.” Mohinder lets his disgust flow into his voice. “If you’re not willing to accept that, I’m not sure why you even bothered to come here. I’m afraid you’re going to have to look elsewhere for a trained lapdog.”
Her cheeks pink up. “I’m not after a ‘lapdog’ -”
“Aren’t you?” Mohinder interrupts again. “You’ve created a role that you’re trying to thrust me into.”
“I’m doing it because I care about you, and I don’t want you to -”
“Caring about someone means accepting them. As they are. It doesn’t mean cutting them off from the parts of their life that make you nervous.”
She sets her jaw and nods slowly, and Mohinder wants to scream. He knows that expression. It’s the one that says she’s shutting out everything he has to say. He’s not sure why he expected a different reaction - after all, he wouldn’t be so angry with her if he thought she might change, would he? Or had a piece of him remembered the days when they were good together, and vainly hoped that she might be willing to change for him? He doesn’t care any more. He’s just ready for this conversation to be over.
Mira must be feeling the same way. “Goodbye, Mohinder,” she says, and she’s out the door.
He wants to smash something, but he forces himself to sink into a chair instead. He closes his eyes and draws a long, deep breath.
In thirty-one hours, he’ll be in California. He can pay a visit to a little grave, to apologize for being weak and hiding instead of fighting onwards. He knows he’d be forgiven, but he needs to do it anyway. And then he can call Peter, and he knows he’ll be given an unconditional welcome, and that he’ll have someone who will give back to him instead of just taking.
“Goodbye, Mira,” he says aloud, and the relief that floods through him is almost overwhelming.
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Mohinder Suresh, Mira Shenoy
Words: 1900
Warnings: Angst and tension. References to an off-screen character death.
Spoilers: Through season 2.
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not writing this for profit.
A/N: This was written for the table I claimed at
un_love_you , prompt #20: "I hate you, you bitch." I'm a bit nervous about this, because we know so little about Mira that I feel like I'm creating an OC by writing about her. I started this quite a while back, and
sinemoras09 was interested in the hints I dropped about it, so I pulled it out and finished it up - I hope it's worth the read after your marathon weekend!
X-posted at
un_love_you and
heroes_fic
Summary: Mohinder tries to deal with a tragedy by escaping back to India and the job offer that Mira, his ex-girlfriend, extended to him months ago. But that turns out to be a mistake, and the anger and frustration he feels is all aimed at her.
The sounds of the city are different now. Eleven months in a foreign country have changed him enough that he’s somehow a stranger in his own land. He stares out the window without really seeing the dawn sky, and finally returns to the bedroom to dress.
He should be grateful for this final chance at a normal life. For respectability. Those are Mira’s words, of course. Respectable. Unlike what he was before, which was a crackpot, a lunatic, a fringe-dweller. She doesn’t say that, of course, but it’s in her eyes, in the small smug smile that congratulates him for coming to his senses.
What he was before, he’s come to realize, was not unhappy.
* * * * * * *
His office is nice and big and pleasantly appointed but it might as well be empty, to match the lack of emotion it brings out in him.
He has a title too, though he can never remember it. And a staff to mold and direct. At first he thought that if he’d been given all this a few years ago, maybe it would have been different -
No. He knows himself well enough to know he wasn’t made for a desk job. He’d wanted to follow his father because of the excitement. He’d stayed in New York partly out of a sense of duty, but largely because it meant he was a part of something vital. It was only after the risk that followed him and his companions finally hit home, that he’d desperately looked for a path to lead him away from it all. Now, though, he sees he should have stayed, should have battled through the pain.
Now, he’s in the middle of a project that’s taken years so far, and will take years more to complete, and all for...what? So that the shareholders and executives of the company can enrich themselves by using that knowledge to help those who can afford their help? That was essentially what he’d been doing in New York, except that there, he could see evidence that he was intervening to make people’s lives better, helping them deal with what was happening to them. And there, he might have been able to work with others to change things, to stop anyone else from going through what he’s been through.
He shoves aside a pile of forecasts and project plans and leans on his hand, staring into nothingness.
“Mohinder.”
A slim figure stands disapprovingly in his doorway.
“How much work remains on the December progress report?”
“It’s nearly finished, Mira.”
“Mohinder. I know you’re capable. And...I’m glad to have you here.” She glances away for a moment. “But I had to do a lot of persuading with the partners to get them to re-extend their offer to you.”
“I know.”
“This is the one remaining chance you have in this field. Sitting there daydreaming isn’t helping your reputation any.”
Daydreaming? Daydreaming? He forces himself to smile despite the pain and anger that fills his mind. “I’ll be finished by the end of the day.”
Her look turns almost pleading before she silently leaves.
He swivels to face the window and lets himself scowl. When did she become his schoolmarm, hovering over him to incessantly correct his behavior?
And when did he let her become it? Was his life so empty now that he was willing to let it happen, just to have something to fill the void?
* * * * * * *
The days pass, one after another, in much the same vein.
Mira prompts him, corrects him, watches him, sometimes with disapproval, sometimes with an air of superiority. And every day, his ire towards her grows a little more. He knows that it’s irrational behavior. The offer may have been hers, but he accepted it of his own free will.
Still, though, the mere sound of her approaching footsteps causes his jaw to clench with stress.
She’s around him all the time - she’s his supervisor, after all - but it’s not until late one afternoon, when he reaches for a pen and her hand winds up on his, that he suddenly realizes that there’s another reason behind her insistence and her hovering. She looks up at him, her eyes wide and pleading again, and his mouth opens in shock as her hand tightens on his.
She pulls away with a comment about needing tea, and glides out the door. As soon as she’s out of earshot, he hurls the pen against the wall and fumes.
Her touch infuriates him because he knows she doesn’t really want him. His work, his father’s research, his sister, the Company, Molly (oh, Molly) - they’re all things that matter to him, but she’s not interested in hearing a word about them. She just wants to mold him into the man she’s looking for. It makes him loathe her.
* * * * * * *
The final straw comes eight days later. He doesn’t feel that he can turn down an invitation to dinner from Mira’s family - they’re perfectly nice people, and her father is influential, and he doesn’t have a ready excuse for refusal.
Something feels off about the conversation, though, and he finally realizes that Mira’s parents assume that he’s come back to this country, to this job, for her.
And Mira is doing nothing to disabuse them of this notion.
He takes a long drink from his glass to keep his mouth occupied before his temper makes it run out of control. He looks over, and Mira is giving him a small smile that he supposes denotes fondness. Why? Because she thinks he’s given in, and that he’ll fall in with whatever future she’s got mapped out, with long-range forecasts and timetables and regular goals and a nice neat empty death at the end of it all?
The heat that the thought causes crystallizes something inside him, and he realizes what he has to do.
* * * * * * *
The knock on his door interrupts his packing. He pauses and considers ignoring it, but then it comes again, more loudly. He sighs and throws the shirt he was folding into his suitcase.
Of course. Mira.
She knows he’s home, so he takes a deep breath and opens the door.
“Take it back, Mohinder.” She holds out a folded paper. His letter of resignation.
He shakes his head wordlessly and walks back into the apartment. She shuts the door behind her and follows him.
“You don’t want to do this.”
“What do you know about what I want?”
“Mohinder...please.” He forces himself to turn to face her.
“I didn’t realize how much I had missed you, until you came back. I’d hoped...I’d hoped that maybe we could make things work out this time. Now that you’d gotten everything out of your system -”
“What?” He turns back to look at her. “Is that how you view everything I’ve been through? Some childish fantasy that I had to give up on?”
“I know your father was important to you. And I know you felt an obligation to try to uphold his beliefs. But, Mohinder, I thought you’d finally come to your senses.”
“That’s why you think I came back?”
“Isn’t it? You’d clung so tightly to these delusions that when you called to tell me you were back in India, I assumed you’d seen the light.”
Mohinder clenches and unclenches his fists. “I came back,” he says very carefully, “because I had lost someone who was dear to me, and I started to question whether what I was doing was worth the sacrifice. I thought maybe coming back here would heal me. But then, you’ve never bothered to ask me about any of that, have you?”
She looks down at the paper she’s clutching. She says in a quiet voice, “I didn’t want to talk to you about that because I didn’t want to encourage you to keep thinking about it all. I see now that it was a mistake.” Her eyes come back up. “But you’re here now. You’re got your life back on track. Why are you trying to throw the future away over this, this insanity from your past?”
“Some people might think that this is the insanity,” Mohinder answers tightly.
Mira touches his cheek with her hand, and kisses him, and presses herself gently against him. There was a time when he thought her breasts were lovely, but now they’re as impersonal to him as plastic. Or maybe, more like ice: something that’s slowly melted away out of his life and left no trace of its existence behind. And the thought of pulling it back in, willingly allowing it to freeze him again, makes him ill.
He almost shoves her away from him, and she takes a step back, her face startled and hurt.
They stand there, opposing each other. Finally she says, “You didn’t use to be like this.”
“People change.”
“Not always for the better.”
“If by that, you meant that any changes you don’t approve of are automatically for the worse, then I suppose you’re correct.”
Mira crumples the letter in her hand. Mohinder closes his eyes and wishes she would just leave. He thinks about the airline ticket to Los Angeles in his jacket pocket.
“I’d hoped that maybe I could dissuade you from this. But if you’re determined to be this way -”
“I’m not ‘being’ this way. I am this way.” Mohinder lets his disgust flow into his voice. “If you’re not willing to accept that, I’m not sure why you even bothered to come here. I’m afraid you’re going to have to look elsewhere for a trained lapdog.”
Her cheeks pink up. “I’m not after a ‘lapdog’ -”
“Aren’t you?” Mohinder interrupts again. “You’ve created a role that you’re trying to thrust me into.”
“I’m doing it because I care about you, and I don’t want you to -”
“Caring about someone means accepting them. As they are. It doesn’t mean cutting them off from the parts of their life that make you nervous.”
She sets her jaw and nods slowly, and Mohinder wants to scream. He knows that expression. It’s the one that says she’s shutting out everything he has to say. He’s not sure why he expected a different reaction - after all, he wouldn’t be so angry with her if he thought she might change, would he? Or had a piece of him remembered the days when they were good together, and vainly hoped that she might be willing to change for him? He doesn’t care any more. He’s just ready for this conversation to be over.
Mira must be feeling the same way. “Goodbye, Mohinder,” she says, and she’s out the door.
He wants to smash something, but he forces himself to sink into a chair instead. He closes his eyes and draws a long, deep breath.
In thirty-one hours, he’ll be in California. He can pay a visit to a little grave, to apologize for being weak and hiding instead of fighting onwards. He knows he’d be forgiven, but he needs to do it anyway. And then he can call Peter, and he knows he’ll be given an unconditional welcome, and that he’ll have someone who will give back to him instead of just taking.
“Goodbye, Mira,” he says aloud, and the relief that floods through him is almost overwhelming.