[Fan Fiction] Secret Codes (Heroes)
Title: Secret Codes
Author: kleenexcow
Rating: G
Summary: Mohinder’s jealous, and Molly wants it to stop.
A Note: I’ve wanted to write something about this scene into roughly every fic I’ve ever written, but it’s never really fit. But consider Molly picking up this particular skill kleenexcow canon from here on out.
Matt and Molly have a special language.
It’s true, that Matt can read almost anyone. And he’s gotten really good at talking back in return. But he and Molly have something special. The Nightmare Man could see her when she looked for him, and it becomes apparent one day that the Nightmare Man’s son can do it, too. But Matt is on the other side of the spectrum from nightmares, surely the stuff of dreams turned real, and would never hurt her. So they practice and now when she looks for him, they can talk to each other, hold a conversation no matter where how close or far apart they are. It's their special, mental language.
It’s funny, really, because Mohinder is originally the one who encourages developing this connection. He's the one who grills them and takes endless notes and gives them daily updates on his theories. The experiments they do are all ones of his design, and sometimes they are so draining that Molly and Matt want nothing more than to just lie on the couch and sleep off their headaches. But they get up and do them anyway because it’s hard to resist the sheer force of Mohinder’s passion, especially when they both love him so.
But after the tests, the experiments, after it is clear that they have discovered every facet of Molly’s connection to Matt and his to her and there is no more scientific exploration that can be done, Mohinder takes her aside one day and says that he wants to test to see if she could communicate with normal (his voice wavers a bit on the word) people. So he sends her into her room and she pictures him in her mind and she tries speaking to him and she tries yelling at him and she tries reaching out with her astral hands and shaking him by the shoulders, but he doesn’t react at all. And this is the truth, the limit of her power: for everyone but Matt, she is just an observer. To everyone, including Mohinder.
So when she comes back into Mohinder’s office and he asks “Did you try, sweet-pea?”, but his voice is flat because he knows the answer, her heart breaks a thousand times and then a thousand times again. She has a secret language with one daddy, but not the other.
Molly has seen enough in her life to know that adults are not infallible. They kill, they die, they imprison little girls in tall buildings or in nightmares or on the business end of a gun. And they are not exempt from feelings. Even jealousy.
She sees it in Mohinder’s eyes, sometimes, a little streak of envy-green that pierces eyes usually dark brown. When she’s out grocery shopping with Mohinder, and Matt contacts her to let her know that he forgot to say that they’re out of eggs. When she gets scared at a sleepover and instead of waking someone up to use the phone she projects herself into the apartment so that she can talk to Matt. When Mohinder comes to pick Molly up on a day that’s usually Matt’s and he starts to tell her that Matt had to work late, but without thinking she interrupts and says “I know, he already told me.” It’s times like these when he flinches, just slightly, and looks away.
And it’s painful for her to see because they’ve both saved her life, multiple times. Matt saved her from the Boogeyman, then Mohinder from her sickness. They both saved her from the mean man with the horn-rimmed glasses and the gun. And then Matt saved her from the Nightmare Man, and Mohinder from the Boogeyman again. And above all, they took her in and loved her when she had nowhere else to go, which certainly saved her life in ways that a nine-year-old girl, even one who has seen so much, can’t quite articulate.
She loves Matt for his strength and his bravery and his deep, limitless love, for pizza nights, for his impossibly comfortable hugs, for the way that he never protests when she asks him to play Barbie with her. And at the exact same time, she loves Mohinder for his strength and his bravery and his deep, limitless love, for his nightly ritual of soothing back her hair and kissing her forehead while he’s tucking her into bed, for the way that sometimes when he gets excited he talks really fast and says intellectual things that are just as exotic and soothing as his lullabies, for teaching her how to play soccer even though he calls it “footie." She doesn’t have a favorite, between her two fathers. She couldn’t possibly.
But it’s hard to communicate this to Mohinder when it’s clear that she and Matt are members of an exclusive little club that he can study, but will never actually be a part of.
She worries about this, attacks the problem with every ounce of nine-year-old ferocity she can muster. She thinks and thinks and thinks and one day she is standing at the subway stop holding Mohinder’s hand. Her hand is a year larger than it was the first time they met, but it still fits perfectly inside his, nesting inside, and she feels safe. “Mohinder?” she asks, and he kneels next to her so that their eyes on the same level.
“Yes, my darling?"
“Will you teach me Tamil?” she asks.
He chuckles, like maybe she’s joking about it. And why-would-she-joke, so she just grips his hand tighter. Time seems to stop as realization hits his face. “You’re serious?” he asks.
“Serious times infinity,” she replies. “It’s not fair that you have to talk to me all the time in my language, especially when yours is so pretty. And then,” she says, at her most lovingly manipulative, “you and I will have our own secret code that no one else understands, not even Matt.”
There is a light in his eyes and he says something hurried and excited about the pre-pubescent brain and second-language acquisition and how for her it will probably still be easy and ablative cases and irrational nouns and all sorts of other things that go way over her head. And this is Mohinder at the very height of his Mohinder-ness. As the subway comes, he stands up and asks, “Would you like to start now?”
When she nods, he says several words that make no sense to Molly, but she feels a little fluttering inside when she realizes that they will, soon. The phrase is full of as and ns and ks, and it seems to catch in his throat strangely, but in an entirely different way than the word normal once had. “What does that mean?” she asks him.
“I love you,” he says, and when she repeats it back as best she can, he is beaming so big that there isn’t a dark corner in Molly’s entire world. And neither is there any more green in Mohinder’s eyes.
Author: kleenexcow
Rating: G
Summary: Mohinder’s jealous, and Molly wants it to stop.
A Note: I’ve wanted to write something about this scene into roughly every fic I’ve ever written, but it’s never really fit. But consider Molly picking up this particular skill kleenexcow canon from here on out.
Matt and Molly have a special language.
It’s true, that Matt can read almost anyone. And he’s gotten really good at talking back in return. But he and Molly have something special. The Nightmare Man could see her when she looked for him, and it becomes apparent one day that the Nightmare Man’s son can do it, too. But Matt is on the other side of the spectrum from nightmares, surely the stuff of dreams turned real, and would never hurt her. So they practice and now when she looks for him, they can talk to each other, hold a conversation no matter where how close or far apart they are. It's their special, mental language.
It’s funny, really, because Mohinder is originally the one who encourages developing this connection. He's the one who grills them and takes endless notes and gives them daily updates on his theories. The experiments they do are all ones of his design, and sometimes they are so draining that Molly and Matt want nothing more than to just lie on the couch and sleep off their headaches. But they get up and do them anyway because it’s hard to resist the sheer force of Mohinder’s passion, especially when they both love him so.
But after the tests, the experiments, after it is clear that they have discovered every facet of Molly’s connection to Matt and his to her and there is no more scientific exploration that can be done, Mohinder takes her aside one day and says that he wants to test to see if she could communicate with normal (his voice wavers a bit on the word) people. So he sends her into her room and she pictures him in her mind and she tries speaking to him and she tries yelling at him and she tries reaching out with her astral hands and shaking him by the shoulders, but he doesn’t react at all. And this is the truth, the limit of her power: for everyone but Matt, she is just an observer. To everyone, including Mohinder.
So when she comes back into Mohinder’s office and he asks “Did you try, sweet-pea?”, but his voice is flat because he knows the answer, her heart breaks a thousand times and then a thousand times again. She has a secret language with one daddy, but not the other.
Molly has seen enough in her life to know that adults are not infallible. They kill, they die, they imprison little girls in tall buildings or in nightmares or on the business end of a gun. And they are not exempt from feelings. Even jealousy.
She sees it in Mohinder’s eyes, sometimes, a little streak of envy-green that pierces eyes usually dark brown. When she’s out grocery shopping with Mohinder, and Matt contacts her to let her know that he forgot to say that they’re out of eggs. When she gets scared at a sleepover and instead of waking someone up to use the phone she projects herself into the apartment so that she can talk to Matt. When Mohinder comes to pick Molly up on a day that’s usually Matt’s and he starts to tell her that Matt had to work late, but without thinking she interrupts and says “I know, he already told me.” It’s times like these when he flinches, just slightly, and looks away.
And it’s painful for her to see because they’ve both saved her life, multiple times. Matt saved her from the Boogeyman, then Mohinder from her sickness. They both saved her from the mean man with the horn-rimmed glasses and the gun. And then Matt saved her from the Nightmare Man, and Mohinder from the Boogeyman again. And above all, they took her in and loved her when she had nowhere else to go, which certainly saved her life in ways that a nine-year-old girl, even one who has seen so much, can’t quite articulate.
She loves Matt for his strength and his bravery and his deep, limitless love, for pizza nights, for his impossibly comfortable hugs, for the way that he never protests when she asks him to play Barbie with her. And at the exact same time, she loves Mohinder for his strength and his bravery and his deep, limitless love, for his nightly ritual of soothing back her hair and kissing her forehead while he’s tucking her into bed, for the way that sometimes when he gets excited he talks really fast and says intellectual things that are just as exotic and soothing as his lullabies, for teaching her how to play soccer even though he calls it “footie." She doesn’t have a favorite, between her two fathers. She couldn’t possibly.
But it’s hard to communicate this to Mohinder when it’s clear that she and Matt are members of an exclusive little club that he can study, but will never actually be a part of.
She worries about this, attacks the problem with every ounce of nine-year-old ferocity she can muster. She thinks and thinks and thinks and one day she is standing at the subway stop holding Mohinder’s hand. Her hand is a year larger than it was the first time they met, but it still fits perfectly inside his, nesting inside, and she feels safe. “Mohinder?” she asks, and he kneels next to her so that their eyes on the same level.
“Yes, my darling?"
“Will you teach me Tamil?” she asks.
He chuckles, like maybe she’s joking about it. And why-would-she-joke, so she just grips his hand tighter. Time seems to stop as realization hits his face. “You’re serious?” he asks.
“Serious times infinity,” she replies. “It’s not fair that you have to talk to me all the time in my language, especially when yours is so pretty. And then,” she says, at her most lovingly manipulative, “you and I will have our own secret code that no one else understands, not even Matt.”
There is a light in his eyes and he says something hurried and excited about the pre-pubescent brain and second-language acquisition and how for her it will probably still be easy and ablative cases and irrational nouns and all sorts of other things that go way over her head. And this is Mohinder at the very height of his Mohinder-ness. As the subway comes, he stands up and asks, “Would you like to start now?”
When she nods, he says several words that make no sense to Molly, but she feels a little fluttering inside when she realizes that they will, soon. The phrase is full of as and ns and ks, and it seems to catch in his throat strangely, but in an entirely different way than the word normal once had. “What does that mean?” she asks him.
“I love you,” he says, and when she repeats it back as best she can, he is beaming so big that there isn’t a dark corner in Molly’s entire world. And neither is there any more green in Mohinder’s eyes.