Children of the Moon
Title: Children of the Moon
Fandom : Heroes
Author: taxidryer
Rating: PG
Category: Gen, ensemble
Words count: 2300
Spoilers: Season 1 only
Characters/Pairings: Hiro, Claire, Isaac, Sylar, Peter.
Summary: No one goes exactly the same place yet everybody covets the same seat in the same wagon.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my dorkiness.
Archive: heroes_fic
Thanks: to saestina for the beta-read. And for reminding me that Sylar isn’t a romantic guy. It’s so easy to forget… *g*
In New York, Gabriel Gray chews over his irritation because the subway is two minutes late. 7:48 is supposed to be 7:48, not 7:50. No one is waiting for him at the clock store. Still, it’s a matter of principle.
Wherever you are in the world, the subway is crowded between 7:30 and 8:30 AM. No one goes exactly the same place yet everybody covets the same seat in the same wagon. Everybody feigns to ignore the other passengers, yet everybody watches everybody. Except for the few dreamy ones.
Like Peter Petrelli. He’s in the next wagon, the earphones of his iPod in their proper place, so deeply lost in his thoughts he doesn’t notice the two minute lateness. Someone is waiting for him but, hey, no one’s dying. Except someone is.
In Tokyo, Hiro Nakamura is completely oblivious to his surroundings, just like Peter is. He’s standing in the fourth wagon, waiting for it to take him to the Nakamura Building where he will be scolded for being two minutes late, although he really doesn’t see the drama of it.
What others think matters, he has to remind to himself.
He is a Nakamura working for Nakamura. That’s what defines him. He’s a droplet in an ocean, a link in a chain, a tile on a mosaic. He’s nothing but a soldier in an army of workers dressed in white shirts and black ties, and even if he was the best of them, there would still be no chance for him to win the war alone.
You must not be special.
Your only destiny is the one of the clan you belong to. You belong, therefore you exist.
You’re not free to do all you want, but you can be free as long as you do what they want you to. If you don’t try to undo the harmony they have worked centuries to attain, they will leave you in peace.
The only way to actually distinguish yourself is to do it the way it’s always been done. It’s to do what they expect from you with the most utter perfection, to become as unspecial as you can until you blend in completely. It is when you are an integral and perfectly banal part of your surroundings that you’ll be allowed to follow the tide of people crossing the street, that you’ll be allowed to sit at your desk or dive into the subway without bothering anyone and without anyone bothering you.
It’s in this peace that you hang onto the bar, close your eyes, take refuge in your head and let your imagination drift away.
It’s the precise moment when everything becomes extraordinary.
*
What others think matters. Claire Bennett thinks about it all the time.
To be special is to belong.
Your life started with a rejection. Something must have been wrong with you.
Nowadays, you may feel like a Bennett, but you know you will always be an alien. A loved alien, but still an alien that the other aliens wanted nothing to do with.
High school is an everyday test of belonging, and most people fail at it. It is populated with freaks and losers and being special is about not being one of them. As long as you’re among the minority who can afford to reject others, you pass the test.
7:48 AM. It’s the most decisive moment of the day for a fifteen-year-old girl: the time you get dressed.
Belonging is achieved by being popular and being popular is achieved by wearing a red skirt and a superiority complex, so you put both on. It doesn’t matter that outside the games they all wear the same shirt taken from the same magazine cover, the same way they wear the same logo of the same team during the games. Maybe if you wear the proper outfit and shake your pom-poms properly, they won’t notice you’re an alien.
*
Unlike everybody else, at 7:48 AM, Isaac Mendez is still sleeping. It’s not his fault. He goes to bed late every night, exacting from himself to always produce more and more specialness.
You have to be special.
That’s what you do for a living. You have to be original, unexpected, shocking. Always fresh and new and inspired.
In art school they taught you a method to depict the essence of your existence on a canvas, and then they taught you to un-learn everything because there really is no recipe for achieving brilliance.
‘Only a few of you will live from your art.’
You have it or you don’t. Sometimes you doubt the essence of you existence lives up to your ambitions, but your persevere because painting is all you can do.
You permanently suffer from the soul, and if it wasn’t already so heavy to be yourself, you would almost be proud of it. How many times have you been told "You’re an artist, Isaac," as if it justified all the pains you cause to yourself and others.
You stare at the white canvas and realize that good is not enough.
You have to be provoking.
The critics will despise it and the buyers will ignore it. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter if they don’t understand. It’s their problem if you’re so beyond them. Anyway, you don’t want to be loved, you want to be remembered. If everybody ignores you, it’s just because you’re too avant-garde. If you’re ignored now, you’ll be adored in twenty years.
Your art belongs to the future, you tell yourself.
And then you remember that life is expensive and that you can’t use your art only as a passport for your madness. You have to sell the damn paintings.
You have to sell them to those who, unlike you, have succeeded and make a fortune doing something banal but useful instead of exteriorizing their Oedipal Complex and laying their souls bare on a canvas. People who buy very special paintings for their luxurious buildings in order to make themselves special in the eyes of their friends. Or to forget that they would have liked to have been artists themselves.
So let the upstarts spit the cash. Special things done by tormented people have a price.
*
5:10 PM, change of shift.
‘Yes, I’m a nurse,’ Peter gives as a response to the patient’s surprised expression. ‘And no, I’m not gay,’ he thinks.
The female patients are often distrustful, while male patients are usually unimpressed. This one is just curious.
‘You’re the first male nurse I’ve met. How is it being part of a gender minority?’
‘It’s nothing special. They just make me lift heavy patients more often.’
*
It’s 5:10 PM. It’s a fact. For everybody, it’s an immutable truth. Except for a few eccentrics.
The hours seem long to Hiro Nakamura; that’s why he spends so much time glancing at the clock. When he stares at it and loses himself in the regular movement of the minute hand, he can’t help but wonder who decided the exact duration of minutes and seconds. To him, time is relative. It’s not so much something he knows, it’s just something he feels.
Time is relative, and Gabriel Gray knows it. In fact, it’s time’s indicators that are endlessly imperfect. The only clock that is perfectly tuned with the immaterial passage of time is the one in his head. Like the diapason giving the absolute A, Gabriel Gray has an absolute mental clock, and the other clocks are all faulty in comparison with it.
All the world’s clocks should be tuned with his.
That’s his mission. That’s what he does for a living. He knows people don’t care that much for their watches, unless they’re worth hundreds. If only he took care of their pets or children or even their money, he would feel important somehow.
Yet because it’s what he does every day, he convinces himself that it’s an important mission.
To be special is to be important.
It’s about being superior. Greater. It’s about being worthy of the center of the world. It’s about being looked at the way your mother does.
Your life is planned by the minute. You lock the door of the store at 9:16 PM. At 9:18, you start searching your pocket for your subway pass, and you take the 9:19 train.
You hate public transportation because it’s common and humiliating, on top of being insufferably crowded. It’s with slight disgust that you share your personal space with the ordinary people, that you breathe the same air as the too normal beings, that you defile your hand by hanging onto a bar thousands of uninteresting people have touched. You despise them because they’re all un-great and unworthy of coming out of anonymity. And unlike you, they will always be.
You’re worthy of so much more.
You exit the subway entrance at 9:51 and walk the first steps into your neighborhood at 9:52. At 9:57, you pass a shady backstreet closed in by walls covered with graffiti where two men seem to be making an illicit transaction.
Well, at least you’re not a junkie. You’re so much better than them.
You walk in a puddle of water, blurring the reflection of the moon and your too-banal own shadow. You hate it for reminding that you truly have no idea what you’re worth.
*
The moon is reflected in a puddle of water, and it inspires you without knowing it. You enter the shady backstreet and notice the traces left by pretty good amateurs on the wall. You envy their freedom.
You run a shaky hand in your disheveled hair and nervously look back at the sound of someone stepping in the water puddle.
It’s no one important. You can breath.
You come closer to your pusher, handing him the money with your hand still dirty with dried paint and taking back the bag of powder.
You can already foresee the long hours of agony you’ll suffer in your future rehab. Yes, you will suffer so much more than you already do.
Because being special has a price.
*
In New York, it’s 7 :30 PM when Gabriel Gray turns the TV on to cover the sound of the neighbors’ fucking. He zaps past the football game with impatience. In Odessa, Claire Bennett watches it for three seconds before remembering she doesn’t even really like football.
On the next channel, she gets a glimpse of the candidates running for Congress in New York on the news. She zaps it too because politics bore her more than anything else. Gabriel Gray watches the debate long enough to tell himself that Nathan Petrelli is a nasty bastard, which prevents his burning jealousy from reaching the surface.
On the third channel, there’s a reality show and - god! - it annoys him. These people can’t do anything special. Why would they become stars? It’s like, ‘if you can’t achieve anything great enough for television, achieve something stupid enough for television. Just as long as you make it on tv.’
If you can’t be a hero, be the villain. As long as you’re someone.
He gets the idea out of his head and goes back to football.
Claire finally finds what she was looking for. A reality show with some girls who can’t really do anything special but who have the right size breasts and wear the right brand of jeans.
She knows it’s shallow but she watches it anyway. She might actually learn something. But in the end, it only makes her feel sadder because that’s not exactly who she is either.
She knows she will never belong anywhere completely, and she would be comforted by the thought that that makes her special, if only being special didn’t make her more lonely than she already is.
*
Everyone is special.
Yes, aging sucks. Yes, old people become useless and grumpy. They talk about the past as if they belonged to the first generation to witness the decline of respectable values and the decay of youth.
So what?
You hold the hand of someone who’s about to die and you appreciate each look, each word. This fading life can only be special. How can a human life not be special?
What’s wrong with coming from past times? It’s as good an epoch as any other.
Of course, some are more outstanding or significant. They turn the world upside down and give it new direction. Each era has its great war, its great epidemic and its great revolution.
As the sun affects the slow march of men, the moon affects people’s lives. That’s what old people talk about when they relate their good and bad tricks, the turning points that changed everything and made them who they are. From the succession of disillusions and regrets to everything they loved and learned.
Even the ones who keep forgetting your name and the ones who wear diapers are treasures of living about to pass away. Maybe you can even apply it to yourself. However lost and indecisive you’ve been, despite all the people who ignored you or walked on your feet, when the end comes, your life will have been extraordinary.
It’s simple. Every single person you meet, you can connect with somehow. That’s what you tell yourself, although you turn up the volume of your iPod the second you step into the crowd.
The End.
Fandom : Heroes
Author: taxidryer
Rating: PG
Category: Gen, ensemble
Words count: 2300
Spoilers: Season 1 only
Characters/Pairings: Hiro, Claire, Isaac, Sylar, Peter.
Summary: No one goes exactly the same place yet everybody covets the same seat in the same wagon.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my dorkiness.
Archive: heroes_fic
Thanks: to saestina for the beta-read. And for reminding me that Sylar isn’t a romantic guy. It’s so easy to forget… *g*
In New York, Gabriel Gray chews over his irritation because the subway is two minutes late. 7:48 is supposed to be 7:48, not 7:50. No one is waiting for him at the clock store. Still, it’s a matter of principle.
Wherever you are in the world, the subway is crowded between 7:30 and 8:30 AM. No one goes exactly the same place yet everybody covets the same seat in the same wagon. Everybody feigns to ignore the other passengers, yet everybody watches everybody. Except for the few dreamy ones.
Like Peter Petrelli. He’s in the next wagon, the earphones of his iPod in their proper place, so deeply lost in his thoughts he doesn’t notice the two minute lateness. Someone is waiting for him but, hey, no one’s dying. Except someone is.
In Tokyo, Hiro Nakamura is completely oblivious to his surroundings, just like Peter is. He’s standing in the fourth wagon, waiting for it to take him to the Nakamura Building where he will be scolded for being two minutes late, although he really doesn’t see the drama of it.
What others think matters, he has to remind to himself.
He is a Nakamura working for Nakamura. That’s what defines him. He’s a droplet in an ocean, a link in a chain, a tile on a mosaic. He’s nothing but a soldier in an army of workers dressed in white shirts and black ties, and even if he was the best of them, there would still be no chance for him to win the war alone.
You must not be special.
Your only destiny is the one of the clan you belong to. You belong, therefore you exist.
You’re not free to do all you want, but you can be free as long as you do what they want you to. If you don’t try to undo the harmony they have worked centuries to attain, they will leave you in peace.
The only way to actually distinguish yourself is to do it the way it’s always been done. It’s to do what they expect from you with the most utter perfection, to become as unspecial as you can until you blend in completely. It is when you are an integral and perfectly banal part of your surroundings that you’ll be allowed to follow the tide of people crossing the street, that you’ll be allowed to sit at your desk or dive into the subway without bothering anyone and without anyone bothering you.
It’s in this peace that you hang onto the bar, close your eyes, take refuge in your head and let your imagination drift away.
It’s the precise moment when everything becomes extraordinary.
*
What others think matters. Claire Bennett thinks about it all the time.
To be special is to belong.
Your life started with a rejection. Something must have been wrong with you.
Nowadays, you may feel like a Bennett, but you know you will always be an alien. A loved alien, but still an alien that the other aliens wanted nothing to do with.
High school is an everyday test of belonging, and most people fail at it. It is populated with freaks and losers and being special is about not being one of them. As long as you’re among the minority who can afford to reject others, you pass the test.
7:48 AM. It’s the most decisive moment of the day for a fifteen-year-old girl: the time you get dressed.
Belonging is achieved by being popular and being popular is achieved by wearing a red skirt and a superiority complex, so you put both on. It doesn’t matter that outside the games they all wear the same shirt taken from the same magazine cover, the same way they wear the same logo of the same team during the games. Maybe if you wear the proper outfit and shake your pom-poms properly, they won’t notice you’re an alien.
*
Unlike everybody else, at 7:48 AM, Isaac Mendez is still sleeping. It’s not his fault. He goes to bed late every night, exacting from himself to always produce more and more specialness.
You have to be special.
That’s what you do for a living. You have to be original, unexpected, shocking. Always fresh and new and inspired.
In art school they taught you a method to depict the essence of your existence on a canvas, and then they taught you to un-learn everything because there really is no recipe for achieving brilliance.
‘Only a few of you will live from your art.’
You have it or you don’t. Sometimes you doubt the essence of you existence lives up to your ambitions, but your persevere because painting is all you can do.
You permanently suffer from the soul, and if it wasn’t already so heavy to be yourself, you would almost be proud of it. How many times have you been told "You’re an artist, Isaac," as if it justified all the pains you cause to yourself and others.
You stare at the white canvas and realize that good is not enough.
You have to be provoking.
The critics will despise it and the buyers will ignore it. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter if they don’t understand. It’s their problem if you’re so beyond them. Anyway, you don’t want to be loved, you want to be remembered. If everybody ignores you, it’s just because you’re too avant-garde. If you’re ignored now, you’ll be adored in twenty years.
Your art belongs to the future, you tell yourself.
And then you remember that life is expensive and that you can’t use your art only as a passport for your madness. You have to sell the damn paintings.
You have to sell them to those who, unlike you, have succeeded and make a fortune doing something banal but useful instead of exteriorizing their Oedipal Complex and laying their souls bare on a canvas. People who buy very special paintings for their luxurious buildings in order to make themselves special in the eyes of their friends. Or to forget that they would have liked to have been artists themselves.
So let the upstarts spit the cash. Special things done by tormented people have a price.
*
5:10 PM, change of shift.
‘Yes, I’m a nurse,’ Peter gives as a response to the patient’s surprised expression. ‘And no, I’m not gay,’ he thinks.
The female patients are often distrustful, while male patients are usually unimpressed. This one is just curious.
‘You’re the first male nurse I’ve met. How is it being part of a gender minority?’
‘It’s nothing special. They just make me lift heavy patients more often.’
*
It’s 5:10 PM. It’s a fact. For everybody, it’s an immutable truth. Except for a few eccentrics.
The hours seem long to Hiro Nakamura; that’s why he spends so much time glancing at the clock. When he stares at it and loses himself in the regular movement of the minute hand, he can’t help but wonder who decided the exact duration of minutes and seconds. To him, time is relative. It’s not so much something he knows, it’s just something he feels.
Time is relative, and Gabriel Gray knows it. In fact, it’s time’s indicators that are endlessly imperfect. The only clock that is perfectly tuned with the immaterial passage of time is the one in his head. Like the diapason giving the absolute A, Gabriel Gray has an absolute mental clock, and the other clocks are all faulty in comparison with it.
All the world’s clocks should be tuned with his.
That’s his mission. That’s what he does for a living. He knows people don’t care that much for their watches, unless they’re worth hundreds. If only he took care of their pets or children or even their money, he would feel important somehow.
Yet because it’s what he does every day, he convinces himself that it’s an important mission.
To be special is to be important.
It’s about being superior. Greater. It’s about being worthy of the center of the world. It’s about being looked at the way your mother does.
Your life is planned by the minute. You lock the door of the store at 9:16 PM. At 9:18, you start searching your pocket for your subway pass, and you take the 9:19 train.
You hate public transportation because it’s common and humiliating, on top of being insufferably crowded. It’s with slight disgust that you share your personal space with the ordinary people, that you breathe the same air as the too normal beings, that you defile your hand by hanging onto a bar thousands of uninteresting people have touched. You despise them because they’re all un-great and unworthy of coming out of anonymity. And unlike you, they will always be.
You’re worthy of so much more.
You exit the subway entrance at 9:51 and walk the first steps into your neighborhood at 9:52. At 9:57, you pass a shady backstreet closed in by walls covered with graffiti where two men seem to be making an illicit transaction.
Well, at least you’re not a junkie. You’re so much better than them.
You walk in a puddle of water, blurring the reflection of the moon and your too-banal own shadow. You hate it for reminding that you truly have no idea what you’re worth.
*
The moon is reflected in a puddle of water, and it inspires you without knowing it. You enter the shady backstreet and notice the traces left by pretty good amateurs on the wall. You envy their freedom.
You run a shaky hand in your disheveled hair and nervously look back at the sound of someone stepping in the water puddle.
It’s no one important. You can breath.
You come closer to your pusher, handing him the money with your hand still dirty with dried paint and taking back the bag of powder.
You can already foresee the long hours of agony you’ll suffer in your future rehab. Yes, you will suffer so much more than you already do.
Because being special has a price.
*
In New York, it’s 7 :30 PM when Gabriel Gray turns the TV on to cover the sound of the neighbors’ fucking. He zaps past the football game with impatience. In Odessa, Claire Bennett watches it for three seconds before remembering she doesn’t even really like football.
On the next channel, she gets a glimpse of the candidates running for Congress in New York on the news. She zaps it too because politics bore her more than anything else. Gabriel Gray watches the debate long enough to tell himself that Nathan Petrelli is a nasty bastard, which prevents his burning jealousy from reaching the surface.
On the third channel, there’s a reality show and - god! - it annoys him. These people can’t do anything special. Why would they become stars? It’s like, ‘if you can’t achieve anything great enough for television, achieve something stupid enough for television. Just as long as you make it on tv.’
If you can’t be a hero, be the villain. As long as you’re someone.
He gets the idea out of his head and goes back to football.
Claire finally finds what she was looking for. A reality show with some girls who can’t really do anything special but who have the right size breasts and wear the right brand of jeans.
She knows it’s shallow but she watches it anyway. She might actually learn something. But in the end, it only makes her feel sadder because that’s not exactly who she is either.
She knows she will never belong anywhere completely, and she would be comforted by the thought that that makes her special, if only being special didn’t make her more lonely than she already is.
*
Everyone is special.
Yes, aging sucks. Yes, old people become useless and grumpy. They talk about the past as if they belonged to the first generation to witness the decline of respectable values and the decay of youth.
So what?
You hold the hand of someone who’s about to die and you appreciate each look, each word. This fading life can only be special. How can a human life not be special?
What’s wrong with coming from past times? It’s as good an epoch as any other.
Of course, some are more outstanding or significant. They turn the world upside down and give it new direction. Each era has its great war, its great epidemic and its great revolution.
As the sun affects the slow march of men, the moon affects people’s lives. That’s what old people talk about when they relate their good and bad tricks, the turning points that changed everything and made them who they are. From the succession of disillusions and regrets to everything they loved and learned.
Even the ones who keep forgetting your name and the ones who wear diapers are treasures of living about to pass away. Maybe you can even apply it to yourself. However lost and indecisive you’ve been, despite all the people who ignored you or walked on your feet, when the end comes, your life will have been extraordinary.
It’s simple. Every single person you meet, you can connect with somehow. That’s what you tell yourself, although you turn up the volume of your iPod the second you step into the crowd.
The End.