Apathy In Action: Part 2
Characters: Mohinder, Adam, Elle; this series is moving to Madam, but this chapter ended up being all about Mohelle...
Rating: PG-13
Words: 3750
Summary: Mohinder runs home to take care of an emergency and Adam's disappointment only increases.
Part 1
Mohinder bounded up the stairs of his building two at a time until he arrived at the sixth floor. He saw Elle, bruised and bloody, curled in an improbable position on his doormat with her head between her knees, and moaning softly through her chattering teeth.
“Elle!” Mohinder cried as he crouched beside her, wracked with worry.
“Hey, you,” she whispered painfully, but with an effort at bravado.
Mohinder finally put his finger on what was wrong with the way she was sitting. It was her arm; it was sticking backwards at a terrible angle. Touching it gently, he asked, “What happened to you?”
“What hasn’t happened to me?” she groused. “Can you put my arm back into place? It’s dislocated. Hurts like a fucking bitch.”
Mohinder gripped her elbow and then nervously released it. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t want to hurt...”
“You can’t make it hurt worse than it already does, so stop being a girl and just do it. Wait. Actually, take me inside first? I’m probably going to yell, and the neighbors…”
Mohinder nodded. He unlocked the door and then bent down to gather her delicately in his arms.
As he crossed the threshold and kicked the door shut behind them, Elle softly joked, “Always pictured this as being more romantic.”
Mohinder deposited her on his bed and stood helplessly over her. “So I simply pull it straight again?”
“Yeah. Don’t pussy-foot around it. Just hold and pull.” Elle’s voice was tough, but Mohinder could hear the exhaustion, the desperate hysteria, bubbling under the surface.
Mohinder put a hand over her mouth, and held and released her arm a couple of times before finally counting to three and yanking it back into place. She screamed into his palm, teeth gnashing against him for a few seconds. Mohinder climbed up on the bed to sit next to her. He ran his thumb over a large bruise on her jaw.
“Where else are you hurt?”
Elle was busy rubbing her shoulder, but pointed at the hem of her blouse. Mohinder lifted it and gasped to see the hideous, bleeding gash across the right side of her abdomen. He jumped up and ran to the bathroom to get some bandages, thinking to himself that this had long crossed the line of too much. He felt like he was always going into the bathroom for the first-aid kit these days, was always patching up Elle. No matter how many times he begged her to speak to her superiors, urged her to ask to be reassigned before she got killed, nothing changed. Upon his return he growled, “Who did this to you this time?” Mohinder swore to himself that whoever it was would pay.
Elle shrugged, and then swore under her breath at the residual discomfort it caused to her arm. Only then did Mohinder notice what else was wrong with her: Elle’s hair, which had been waist-length when he’d last seen her a few days before, was now a jagged and uneven bob that brushed her chin. “What happened to your hair?” he asked incredulously.
“I dunno. Whoever these people are, there’s got to be a girl with them. Only a girl would do something so bitchy. It happened really fast. I walked Jackson to his car because I was helping him with his luggage. He drove off and I was leaving the parking lot when they came out of nowhere. Next thing I knew, my hair was on the floor. I heard a laugh. A girl’s laugh. But I didn’t see her. Just lots of whooshing. Must be a speedster.” Elle leaned back against the headboard, wincing when Mohinder cleaned her wound with an alcohol pad.
“Who cut you? This unseen woman?” Mohinder seethed. He had her shirt pulled up above her bra and was now applying some antibiotics to the cut on her stomach, but his hands shook with rage.
Elle shook her head. “No, I saw the bastard who cut me. It happened while we were fighting. There were two goons. One of them grabbed me, yanked my arms behind my back, but I think he was wearing rubber gloves or something, because I gave him the full blast and nothing happened. Last thing I remember was the other guy’s fist coming to my face. They…” Her voice broke. “When I came to, everything was gone. My luggage, my coat, my wallet.”
Mohinder couldn’t believe it. He knew that Elle had been on a top secret project for the past couple of months. She and her non-powered partner, Jackson, had been gallivanting around the world on an extraction mission that kept getting foiled by various heavies and bad luck. However, this was the first time they’d been waylaid so close to home. What was even more frightening was the fact that Elle didn’t even know what she was working for, what the project was about.
“And you still have no idea who they are?”
Elle shook her head. “Nope. But this is the closest they’ve come to being sloppy.” Carefully, and using her blouse, she pulled a bit of mauve-colored paper out of her pocket. “Not much, but maybe there’s a fingerprint on it or something. Can you put it in the inter-office mail tomorrow morning and send it to Hartsdale for me for analysis?”
“Of course. But, how did you get here?”
“Jumped the turnstile and took the subway. Gotta love New York City,” she snorted. “Bleeding girl with a dislocated arm gets on the A train, and no one even bats an eye. We’re not allowed to go to regular hospitals, and I knew the company doctors would all be at the party, so I came here and hoped that since I hadn’t called you to go to the party with me, that you were being your usual dorky self and sitting at home.”
“You know, Elle, you’re here so often, you might as well move in,” Mohinder opined.
There was a beat, and then Elle’s voice quietly asking, “Is that an invitation?”
Mohinder looked up at her questioning face and saw the sincerity behind her eyes. That hadn’t been what he’d meant by the comment, but now that it was out there… “Do you want it to be?”
She looked away, ashamed to have let her guard down to completely. The edge returned to her voice as she explained, “Well, it’s a long way from Hartsdale to JFK; living in Brooklyn would ease my commute. And… well, since Daddy got reassigned to the outsourcing in China, having that big house all to myself has been less exciting than I thought it would be. And,” she continued slyly, looking back at him, “it’d make it easier for me to look after you.”
Mohinder considered this. Although the current situation suggested otherwise, Mohinder had to acknowledge that Elle did almost as much caretaking of Mohinder as he did of her---albeit in different ways. Through distracting calls that peppered his work days, she reminded him to eat lunch, to leave the office when it got too late, to pay his rent, all while prattling on about nothing until he sometimes had to hang up the phone in smiling irritation.
Ever since Matt had taken Molly with him to restart his life in LA, Mohinder’s own had been singularly empty. The Petrelli’s ignored his existence, either through selfish forgetfulness or due to an order from their ogre-like mother. Either way, all of his pre-Primatech associations had faded away and he was left with nothing but work and no one to care about him… except for Elle, who was now devouring him with those eyes that wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So, trying to rationalize to himself that this was actually more for her good than for his, Mohinder teasingly replied, “Do I need to make you a new copy of the keys, or can you appropriate the spare pair without losing them?”
“Fuck you.” But she smiled and exhaled the deep breath she’d been holding as she awaited his answer. Elle tried to move to hug him, but then groaned, between her still tender arm and the other cuts and bruises. “Come here,” she ordered.
Mohinder slid himself closer to her on the bed, slipping an arm tightly around her and burying his nose in her hair. She nuzzled into him, tilting her head up so that she could smile at him.
“I’ll have to call in a debrief tomorrow, but other than that, I don’t have anything to do for another couple of days. I can call the movers tomorrow. I don’t have much stuff, I swear,” she promised.
“It doesn’t matter. There’s more than enough room. The only problem I foresee is the mess. I think we should probably hire a maid. I don’t think our combined predilection for disorder will make for a very habitable space.”
He expected a laugh or sarcastic agreement, but instead heard a sob. Gazing down at her, Mohinder saw that she had started softly crying. He pulled her in even tighter. Even though he knew the answer would be a host of things---her strange upbringing, her current physical pain, her frustration with failure, her unfortunate coiffure---he asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” she sobbed, snuggling even closer into him and breaking his heart with her wide, limpid eyes. “Thanks for picking up the phone tonight.”
“Of course,” Mohinder assured her. He kissed the top of her head and said with a rakish wink, “I think I know what might cheer you up.”
*********************************************************
After another couple of hours of scowling at the world in increasingly drunken oblivion, Adam finally called for his car to take him home. He stumbled into his townhouse and threw his coat on the floor. He was too drunk and in too foul of a mood to be tidy. He stopped by the kitchen just long enough to grab a bottle of seltzer from the fridge before galumphing into his bedroom and stripping down to nothing. Standing in the middle of the room atop his discarded pile of clothes, Adam downed the entire bottle of water, and then threw it angrily across the room.
This particular funk had been instigated by his disappointment regarding that random scientist. Adam wasn't used to people giving him mixed signals; the man had given him a couple of looks that day that left no question of at least some level of attraction, but he'd run off so rudely, apparently unconcerned about the fact that they hadn't exchanged any contact information.
As he pulled back the sheets on his tightly made bed, Adam wasn’t even sure what he was so upset about. The scientist wasn't really what was wrong. He’d been through this before; the 1710s, back when he’d finally come to terms with the idea that he would neither age nor die, had been a similarly traumatic period for him, and he’d gotten over it by getting involved in a conspiracy against the French crown with Philippe d’Orléans. It was an intriguing project, one that required a lot more personal activity than he'd been engaging in as of late. He resolved to start taking action to fix the rut he was in the very next day.
In the meanwhile, alcohol, tiredness, and annoyance encouraged sleep to overtake him. He was almost completely unconscious when the phone rang.
“Hello?” he snapped once he’d fumbled in the dark to find the handset on the night table.
“Hello, sir. This is Brian Greene. Mr. Mayhews assigned me to provide you with information on Mohinder Suresh.”
Adam wasn’t quite sure what to complain about first: the fact that this Brian person had woken him up, or the indecent sex noises in the background. He didn’t waffle for long, though: sex always won.
“Where are you calling me from?” he barked. “A brothel?”
“No, I’m in a van outside the subject’s apartment, listening in through a bug I planted in his bedroom window.”
Adam barely heard the explanation; he was too busy being distracted by the moans of pleasure he could hear.
“Ah… ah… mind… Oh, what a mess,” an accented male’s voice exclaimed. Mohinder.
“I don’t mind licking it off you,” a tinkly female voice gushed in ecstasy. There was a brief pause during which Adam pictured some faceless woman writhing up and down the perfect body he’d just seen a few hours earlier. Jealousy curled angrily in his stomach. Then the woman sighed, “Oh god, Mohinder, that was so good. Too good.”
Mohinder sounded self-satisfied as he replied, “I aim to please.”
Adam was stunned. The man was straight? The ‘friend’ he’d run off to see was his girlfriend? Adam hadn’t misread a person or a situation this badly in longer than he could remember. How had this socially-retarded, bumbling scientist managed to pull the wool over his eyes so completely?
However, despite his acute disappointment, Adam was left feeling even more intrigued.
In the meanwhile, he took his frustration out on the agent. “I asked for information, not audio pornography,” he raged. “Turn that off.”
“It---” Brian began, but Adam irritatedly shut him up.
“I said, turn it off.”
The noises were silenced as Brian disabled the equipment. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Monroe. I thought this mission was urgent. I guess it wasn’t?”
“Just make sure to leave a report on his previous activities on my desk tomorrow morning. That’s all I wanted. I have no interest in what goes on in his bedroom,” Adam lied.
“Sorry, sir. Good night, sir.” Brian was about to hang up, but then Adam realized that a question would keep him up until morning unless he asked it now.
“Wait a minute. Who is the girl?”
“Elle Bishop. Daughter of Bob Bishop. She’s one of the agents who have been working on Project X. Not doing a particularly good job, as I’m sure you already know. She and the subject appear to be extraordinarily close. In fact, he just asked her to move in with him. She said yes.”
Adam pursed his lips and huffed quietly through his nose. “That will be all, Brian. Good night.”
This time, it was the phone, yanked from its outlet, which was thrown angrily across the room.
*********************************************************
“How’d you know that Half Baked is my favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor?” a finally sated Elle moaned happily after she’d finished licking all the ice cream off her spoon. Next to her, and slightly ruing his exception to the no-eating-in-bed rule, Mohinder watched her pink tongue greedily slurp off every last bit. It was positively indecent, as were the noises she’d been making for the past few minutes, but he was glad to have made her feel more at ease. She seemed almost to have forgotten about her injuries. Mohinder polished off the last of his own mug-full of ice cream, and couldn’t help letting out yet another one of his own moans of pleasure.
“Are you feeling better now?” he asked.
“Yeah. Thanks, doc,” she said, and gave him an impetuous kiss on the cheek.
“Good,” he grinned. He stood up and began to put the lids back on the ice cream cartons. Now that he was certain that Elle would be fine, other topics from the day returned to his mind. There was something that might be worth asking her about. “Oh, by the way, I met someone today, someone you might know.”
“Yeah?” Elle called after him as he left to put the ice cream back in the freezer. Mohinder stopped by the bathroom to put toothpaste on his brush before coming back into the bedroom, where he found her sitting up brightly.
“Yes, one of the accountants,” he replied, with his mouth full of foam.
“Why would you think I know any of the accountants?” she asked disparagingly.
“I remember that their floor is above the agent offices. Perhaps you ride the elevator together. His name is Adam.”
“I don’t know any of their names,” she scoffed. “What’s he look like?”
“Blonde, blue eyes, high forehead---”
“Cut to the chase, Mohinder. Is he cute or is he not cute?”
Mohinder hesitated, and then turned to head back to the bathroom so that she wouldn’t be able to read his face as he answered. “I think you would find him attractive,” he mumbled into his toothbrush.
However, he couldn’t escape her penetrating gaze that easily. Almost as soon as he made it back into the bathroom, he heard her hobbling up behind him. Elle thrust her head around his body like a curious owl to check his expression. “I would find him attractive, or you would?”
“Anyone would,” Mohinder said evasively and bent his head down to spit.
“Uh huh,” she deadpanned knowingly as she reached for the toothbrush that had been reserved for her for the past couple of months. “Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him. I notice all the cute boys.”
“Perhaps he’s new. Actually, I think he was,” Mohinder offered as he dried his face, remembering the man’s strangely unprofessional demeanor.
Elle leaned again the wall, watching him. “Yeah, maybe. But wait a sec. What were you doing in Hartsdale?”
Mohinder shook his head. “I didn’t meet him in Hartsdale.”
“Ohhhh, at the party, huh?” she asked eagerly. “I’m hurt, Mohinder. You went without me. I thought I was your wingman.”
Mohinder rolled his eyes. “You’re a terrible wingman, Elle. Everyone always assumes we’re together; maybe that’s why no one ever approaches us. At any rate, I didn’t meet him at the party. Not technically. He stopped by earlier today to ask about my research with inhibitors and how much it was costing. And then I ran into him again at the party. It was fun. He’s the first person in that hellhole that I’ve liked other than you.”
“You really shouldn’t be so down on the company, Mohinder. It isn’t all bad.”
This was enough to make Mohinder seethe. “Not all bad? How can you stand there after everything that’s just happened and say that?”
“We’ve helped people, Mohinder. You’ve helped people. We take dangerous specials off the streets. Your work with the inhibitors is improving lives. Yeah, it isn’t all roses but---”
Mohinder couldn’t believe his ears. “It doesn’t outweigh the evil that they do. What sort of organization sends a young woman out to her death every week with no one to help her but that powerless, incompetent fool, Jackson?”
Elle simply shrugged and then rinsed her mouth out before answering, “I dunno, but the company’s all I’ve got.”
He grabbed her hands passionately and led her back into the bedroom. “Except that it isn’t! It doesn’t have to be. You don’t know how much is out there in the world. Why don’t you leave---”
“For the same reason you don’t leave. Because they’d never let us. Not alive, anyway. So you might as well deal with it. Being angry about it won’t do you any good.” Elle shot Mohinder a withering glance as he gingerly helped her change into an over-sized tee-shirt of his and a pair of boxer shorts. She seemed resigned to both of their fates as she slid between the sheets.
“How did I ever get myself into this? Why did I ever think this was the way to do some real good? Now I’m trapped,” Mohinder muttered to himself as he disrobed and got into bed as well.
“Just try not to think about it too much. Something’ll work out one day,” Elle advised with a sigh. Changing the subject she added, “Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’re making more friends. Just don’t sleep with this Adam guy, whatever you do.”
Mohinder pursed his lips and snapped at her. “Watch out, or I’ll rescind my offer.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t let it pass,” she chuckled blithely, and switched off the closest lamp to her, leaving Mohinder swallowed in half-darkness and insecurity.
Things hadn’t always been quite as fraternal as they were now. One rainy night on Mohinder’s third and last mission as an agent, the hotel he had reserved turned out to have been flooded, with only half the rooms available. So, instead of two rooms, they had to squeeze into one. An easy attraction, hitherto repressed on Mohinder’s part for professional reasons, but from the start laid quite bare on Elle’s, finally manifested itself. One thing had led to another, but what Mohinder had always considered ‘getting into his groove’ with a girl was apparently so awkward and uncomfortable that it caused Elle to release a number of high voltage self-defense shocks that sent him rushing to the emergency room. Elle had invented an explanation for what had happened and stifled her laughter as Mohinder was subsequently forced to listen to the doctors condescend to him about the stupidity of a grown man sticking his ‘finger’ in an ‘outlet.’
“No one has ever complained before,” he had protested in a devastated whisper while the nurses were out of the room.
“Yeah, most people wouldn’t. You’re so pretty that people are probably too grateful to say anything. I certainly didn’t mean to let you know. But think about it; I’ll bet you haven’t had that many repeat customers, have you?”
Mohinder had thought about it, and found that she was right. However, he couldn’t help but retort, “Well, if you don’t get your power under control, you won’t have many repeat customers either.”
They’d decided then and there not to do it again. By resolving any lingering tension between them, the experience had solidified their friendship, while simultaneously leaving them individually insecure.
“What do you think this mission is about?” he now asked her in the darkness, eager to change the subject.
“There’s something that speedy bitch has that we’re supposed to be getting, but we can’t get close enough. No idea what it is. I’ll tell you what, though.” Mohinder could hear Elle grit her teeth beside him. “As soon as they give me the next mission detail, I’m going to find out. I will not let them get past me again.”
Mohinder sighed. She was stubborn and persistent, and it scared him. He couldn’t fault her for it, for so was he, if not even more so. But Mohinder couldn’t bear the thought of those bastards, her bosses, sending her out again. The possibility of losing his only friend seemed to increase every time she was sent out, and he couldn’t bear it. He’d become too complacent, Mohinder realized. He hadn’t done anything to achieve his goal of either ridding the world of the company or helping the wider population in months. Tomorrow, he resolved, tomorrow he would take action.
On to Part 3...
Rating: PG-13
Words: 3750
Summary: Mohinder runs home to take care of an emergency and Adam's disappointment only increases.
Part 1
Mohinder bounded up the stairs of his building two at a time until he arrived at the sixth floor. He saw Elle, bruised and bloody, curled in an improbable position on his doormat with her head between her knees, and moaning softly through her chattering teeth.
“Elle!” Mohinder cried as he crouched beside her, wracked with worry.
“Hey, you,” she whispered painfully, but with an effort at bravado.
Mohinder finally put his finger on what was wrong with the way she was sitting. It was her arm; it was sticking backwards at a terrible angle. Touching it gently, he asked, “What happened to you?”
“What hasn’t happened to me?” she groused. “Can you put my arm back into place? It’s dislocated. Hurts like a fucking bitch.”
Mohinder gripped her elbow and then nervously released it. “I’ve never done this before. I don’t want to hurt...”
“You can’t make it hurt worse than it already does, so stop being a girl and just do it. Wait. Actually, take me inside first? I’m probably going to yell, and the neighbors…”
Mohinder nodded. He unlocked the door and then bent down to gather her delicately in his arms.
As he crossed the threshold and kicked the door shut behind them, Elle softly joked, “Always pictured this as being more romantic.”
Mohinder deposited her on his bed and stood helplessly over her. “So I simply pull it straight again?”
“Yeah. Don’t pussy-foot around it. Just hold and pull.” Elle’s voice was tough, but Mohinder could hear the exhaustion, the desperate hysteria, bubbling under the surface.
Mohinder put a hand over her mouth, and held and released her arm a couple of times before finally counting to three and yanking it back into place. She screamed into his palm, teeth gnashing against him for a few seconds. Mohinder climbed up on the bed to sit next to her. He ran his thumb over a large bruise on her jaw.
“Where else are you hurt?”
Elle was busy rubbing her shoulder, but pointed at the hem of her blouse. Mohinder lifted it and gasped to see the hideous, bleeding gash across the right side of her abdomen. He jumped up and ran to the bathroom to get some bandages, thinking to himself that this had long crossed the line of too much. He felt like he was always going into the bathroom for the first-aid kit these days, was always patching up Elle. No matter how many times he begged her to speak to her superiors, urged her to ask to be reassigned before she got killed, nothing changed. Upon his return he growled, “Who did this to you this time?” Mohinder swore to himself that whoever it was would pay.
Elle shrugged, and then swore under her breath at the residual discomfort it caused to her arm. Only then did Mohinder notice what else was wrong with her: Elle’s hair, which had been waist-length when he’d last seen her a few days before, was now a jagged and uneven bob that brushed her chin. “What happened to your hair?” he asked incredulously.
“I dunno. Whoever these people are, there’s got to be a girl with them. Only a girl would do something so bitchy. It happened really fast. I walked Jackson to his car because I was helping him with his luggage. He drove off and I was leaving the parking lot when they came out of nowhere. Next thing I knew, my hair was on the floor. I heard a laugh. A girl’s laugh. But I didn’t see her. Just lots of whooshing. Must be a speedster.” Elle leaned back against the headboard, wincing when Mohinder cleaned her wound with an alcohol pad.
“Who cut you? This unseen woman?” Mohinder seethed. He had her shirt pulled up above her bra and was now applying some antibiotics to the cut on her stomach, but his hands shook with rage.
Elle shook her head. “No, I saw the bastard who cut me. It happened while we were fighting. There were two goons. One of them grabbed me, yanked my arms behind my back, but I think he was wearing rubber gloves or something, because I gave him the full blast and nothing happened. Last thing I remember was the other guy’s fist coming to my face. They…” Her voice broke. “When I came to, everything was gone. My luggage, my coat, my wallet.”
Mohinder couldn’t believe it. He knew that Elle had been on a top secret project for the past couple of months. She and her non-powered partner, Jackson, had been gallivanting around the world on an extraction mission that kept getting foiled by various heavies and bad luck. However, this was the first time they’d been waylaid so close to home. What was even more frightening was the fact that Elle didn’t even know what she was working for, what the project was about.
“And you still have no idea who they are?”
Elle shook her head. “Nope. But this is the closest they’ve come to being sloppy.” Carefully, and using her blouse, she pulled a bit of mauve-colored paper out of her pocket. “Not much, but maybe there’s a fingerprint on it or something. Can you put it in the inter-office mail tomorrow morning and send it to Hartsdale for me for analysis?”
“Of course. But, how did you get here?”
“Jumped the turnstile and took the subway. Gotta love New York City,” she snorted. “Bleeding girl with a dislocated arm gets on the A train, and no one even bats an eye. We’re not allowed to go to regular hospitals, and I knew the company doctors would all be at the party, so I came here and hoped that since I hadn’t called you to go to the party with me, that you were being your usual dorky self and sitting at home.”
“You know, Elle, you’re here so often, you might as well move in,” Mohinder opined.
There was a beat, and then Elle’s voice quietly asking, “Is that an invitation?”
Mohinder looked up at her questioning face and saw the sincerity behind her eyes. That hadn’t been what he’d meant by the comment, but now that it was out there… “Do you want it to be?”
She looked away, ashamed to have let her guard down to completely. The edge returned to her voice as she explained, “Well, it’s a long way from Hartsdale to JFK; living in Brooklyn would ease my commute. And… well, since Daddy got reassigned to the outsourcing in China, having that big house all to myself has been less exciting than I thought it would be. And,” she continued slyly, looking back at him, “it’d make it easier for me to look after you.”
Mohinder considered this. Although the current situation suggested otherwise, Mohinder had to acknowledge that Elle did almost as much caretaking of Mohinder as he did of her---albeit in different ways. Through distracting calls that peppered his work days, she reminded him to eat lunch, to leave the office when it got too late, to pay his rent, all while prattling on about nothing until he sometimes had to hang up the phone in smiling irritation.
Ever since Matt had taken Molly with him to restart his life in LA, Mohinder’s own had been singularly empty. The Petrelli’s ignored his existence, either through selfish forgetfulness or due to an order from their ogre-like mother. Either way, all of his pre-Primatech associations had faded away and he was left with nothing but work and no one to care about him… except for Elle, who was now devouring him with those eyes that wouldn’t take no for an answer.
So, trying to rationalize to himself that this was actually more for her good than for his, Mohinder teasingly replied, “Do I need to make you a new copy of the keys, or can you appropriate the spare pair without losing them?”
“Fuck you.” But she smiled and exhaled the deep breath she’d been holding as she awaited his answer. Elle tried to move to hug him, but then groaned, between her still tender arm and the other cuts and bruises. “Come here,” she ordered.
Mohinder slid himself closer to her on the bed, slipping an arm tightly around her and burying his nose in her hair. She nuzzled into him, tilting her head up so that she could smile at him.
“I’ll have to call in a debrief tomorrow, but other than that, I don’t have anything to do for another couple of days. I can call the movers tomorrow. I don’t have much stuff, I swear,” she promised.
“It doesn’t matter. There’s more than enough room. The only problem I foresee is the mess. I think we should probably hire a maid. I don’t think our combined predilection for disorder will make for a very habitable space.”
He expected a laugh or sarcastic agreement, but instead heard a sob. Gazing down at her, Mohinder saw that she had started softly crying. He pulled her in even tighter. Even though he knew the answer would be a host of things---her strange upbringing, her current physical pain, her frustration with failure, her unfortunate coiffure---he asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” she sobbed, snuggling even closer into him and breaking his heart with her wide, limpid eyes. “Thanks for picking up the phone tonight.”
“Of course,” Mohinder assured her. He kissed the top of her head and said with a rakish wink, “I think I know what might cheer you up.”
*********************************************************
After another couple of hours of scowling at the world in increasingly drunken oblivion, Adam finally called for his car to take him home. He stumbled into his townhouse and threw his coat on the floor. He was too drunk and in too foul of a mood to be tidy. He stopped by the kitchen just long enough to grab a bottle of seltzer from the fridge before galumphing into his bedroom and stripping down to nothing. Standing in the middle of the room atop his discarded pile of clothes, Adam downed the entire bottle of water, and then threw it angrily across the room.
This particular funk had been instigated by his disappointment regarding that random scientist. Adam wasn't used to people giving him mixed signals; the man had given him a couple of looks that day that left no question of at least some level of attraction, but he'd run off so rudely, apparently unconcerned about the fact that they hadn't exchanged any contact information.
As he pulled back the sheets on his tightly made bed, Adam wasn’t even sure what he was so upset about. The scientist wasn't really what was wrong. He’d been through this before; the 1710s, back when he’d finally come to terms with the idea that he would neither age nor die, had been a similarly traumatic period for him, and he’d gotten over it by getting involved in a conspiracy against the French crown with Philippe d’Orléans. It was an intriguing project, one that required a lot more personal activity than he'd been engaging in as of late. He resolved to start taking action to fix the rut he was in the very next day.
In the meanwhile, alcohol, tiredness, and annoyance encouraged sleep to overtake him. He was almost completely unconscious when the phone rang.
“Hello?” he snapped once he’d fumbled in the dark to find the handset on the night table.
“Hello, sir. This is Brian Greene. Mr. Mayhews assigned me to provide you with information on Mohinder Suresh.”
Adam wasn’t quite sure what to complain about first: the fact that this Brian person had woken him up, or the indecent sex noises in the background. He didn’t waffle for long, though: sex always won.
“Where are you calling me from?” he barked. “A brothel?”
“No, I’m in a van outside the subject’s apartment, listening in through a bug I planted in his bedroom window.”
Adam barely heard the explanation; he was too busy being distracted by the moans of pleasure he could hear.
“Ah… ah… mind… Oh, what a mess,” an accented male’s voice exclaimed. Mohinder.
“I don’t mind licking it off you,” a tinkly female voice gushed in ecstasy. There was a brief pause during which Adam pictured some faceless woman writhing up and down the perfect body he’d just seen a few hours earlier. Jealousy curled angrily in his stomach. Then the woman sighed, “Oh god, Mohinder, that was so good. Too good.”
Mohinder sounded self-satisfied as he replied, “I aim to please.”
Adam was stunned. The man was straight? The ‘friend’ he’d run off to see was his girlfriend? Adam hadn’t misread a person or a situation this badly in longer than he could remember. How had this socially-retarded, bumbling scientist managed to pull the wool over his eyes so completely?
However, despite his acute disappointment, Adam was left feeling even more intrigued.
In the meanwhile, he took his frustration out on the agent. “I asked for information, not audio pornography,” he raged. “Turn that off.”
“It---” Brian began, but Adam irritatedly shut him up.
“I said, turn it off.”
The noises were silenced as Brian disabled the equipment. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Monroe. I thought this mission was urgent. I guess it wasn’t?”
“Just make sure to leave a report on his previous activities on my desk tomorrow morning. That’s all I wanted. I have no interest in what goes on in his bedroom,” Adam lied.
“Sorry, sir. Good night, sir.” Brian was about to hang up, but then Adam realized that a question would keep him up until morning unless he asked it now.
“Wait a minute. Who is the girl?”
“Elle Bishop. Daughter of Bob Bishop. She’s one of the agents who have been working on Project X. Not doing a particularly good job, as I’m sure you already know. She and the subject appear to be extraordinarily close. In fact, he just asked her to move in with him. She said yes.”
Adam pursed his lips and huffed quietly through his nose. “That will be all, Brian. Good night.”
This time, it was the phone, yanked from its outlet, which was thrown angrily across the room.
*********************************************************
“How’d you know that Half Baked is my favorite Ben & Jerry’s flavor?” a finally sated Elle moaned happily after she’d finished licking all the ice cream off her spoon. Next to her, and slightly ruing his exception to the no-eating-in-bed rule, Mohinder watched her pink tongue greedily slurp off every last bit. It was positively indecent, as were the noises she’d been making for the past few minutes, but he was glad to have made her feel more at ease. She seemed almost to have forgotten about her injuries. Mohinder polished off the last of his own mug-full of ice cream, and couldn’t help letting out yet another one of his own moans of pleasure.
“Are you feeling better now?” he asked.
“Yeah. Thanks, doc,” she said, and gave him an impetuous kiss on the cheek.
“Good,” he grinned. He stood up and began to put the lids back on the ice cream cartons. Now that he was certain that Elle would be fine, other topics from the day returned to his mind. There was something that might be worth asking her about. “Oh, by the way, I met someone today, someone you might know.”
“Yeah?” Elle called after him as he left to put the ice cream back in the freezer. Mohinder stopped by the bathroom to put toothpaste on his brush before coming back into the bedroom, where he found her sitting up brightly.
“Yes, one of the accountants,” he replied, with his mouth full of foam.
“Why would you think I know any of the accountants?” she asked disparagingly.
“I remember that their floor is above the agent offices. Perhaps you ride the elevator together. His name is Adam.”
“I don’t know any of their names,” she scoffed. “What’s he look like?”
“Blonde, blue eyes, high forehead---”
“Cut to the chase, Mohinder. Is he cute or is he not cute?”
Mohinder hesitated, and then turned to head back to the bathroom so that she wouldn’t be able to read his face as he answered. “I think you would find him attractive,” he mumbled into his toothbrush.
However, he couldn’t escape her penetrating gaze that easily. Almost as soon as he made it back into the bathroom, he heard her hobbling up behind him. Elle thrust her head around his body like a curious owl to check his expression. “I would find him attractive, or you would?”
“Anyone would,” Mohinder said evasively and bent his head down to spit.
“Uh huh,” she deadpanned knowingly as she reached for the toothbrush that had been reserved for her for the past couple of months. “Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him. I notice all the cute boys.”
“Perhaps he’s new. Actually, I think he was,” Mohinder offered as he dried his face, remembering the man’s strangely unprofessional demeanor.
Elle leaned again the wall, watching him. “Yeah, maybe. But wait a sec. What were you doing in Hartsdale?”
Mohinder shook his head. “I didn’t meet him in Hartsdale.”
“Ohhhh, at the party, huh?” she asked eagerly. “I’m hurt, Mohinder. You went without me. I thought I was your wingman.”
Mohinder rolled his eyes. “You’re a terrible wingman, Elle. Everyone always assumes we’re together; maybe that’s why no one ever approaches us. At any rate, I didn’t meet him at the party. Not technically. He stopped by earlier today to ask about my research with inhibitors and how much it was costing. And then I ran into him again at the party. It was fun. He’s the first person in that hellhole that I’ve liked other than you.”
“You really shouldn’t be so down on the company, Mohinder. It isn’t all bad.”
This was enough to make Mohinder seethe. “Not all bad? How can you stand there after everything that’s just happened and say that?”
“We’ve helped people, Mohinder. You’ve helped people. We take dangerous specials off the streets. Your work with the inhibitors is improving lives. Yeah, it isn’t all roses but---”
Mohinder couldn’t believe his ears. “It doesn’t outweigh the evil that they do. What sort of organization sends a young woman out to her death every week with no one to help her but that powerless, incompetent fool, Jackson?”
Elle simply shrugged and then rinsed her mouth out before answering, “I dunno, but the company’s all I’ve got.”
He grabbed her hands passionately and led her back into the bedroom. “Except that it isn’t! It doesn’t have to be. You don’t know how much is out there in the world. Why don’t you leave---”
“For the same reason you don’t leave. Because they’d never let us. Not alive, anyway. So you might as well deal with it. Being angry about it won’t do you any good.” Elle shot Mohinder a withering glance as he gingerly helped her change into an over-sized tee-shirt of his and a pair of boxer shorts. She seemed resigned to both of their fates as she slid between the sheets.
“How did I ever get myself into this? Why did I ever think this was the way to do some real good? Now I’m trapped,” Mohinder muttered to himself as he disrobed and got into bed as well.
“Just try not to think about it too much. Something’ll work out one day,” Elle advised with a sigh. Changing the subject she added, “Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’re making more friends. Just don’t sleep with this Adam guy, whatever you do.”
Mohinder pursed his lips and snapped at her. “Watch out, or I’ll rescind my offer.”
“Sorry. Couldn’t let it pass,” she chuckled blithely, and switched off the closest lamp to her, leaving Mohinder swallowed in half-darkness and insecurity.
Things hadn’t always been quite as fraternal as they were now. One rainy night on Mohinder’s third and last mission as an agent, the hotel he had reserved turned out to have been flooded, with only half the rooms available. So, instead of two rooms, they had to squeeze into one. An easy attraction, hitherto repressed on Mohinder’s part for professional reasons, but from the start laid quite bare on Elle’s, finally manifested itself. One thing had led to another, but what Mohinder had always considered ‘getting into his groove’ with a girl was apparently so awkward and uncomfortable that it caused Elle to release a number of high voltage self-defense shocks that sent him rushing to the emergency room. Elle had invented an explanation for what had happened and stifled her laughter as Mohinder was subsequently forced to listen to the doctors condescend to him about the stupidity of a grown man sticking his ‘finger’ in an ‘outlet.’
“No one has ever complained before,” he had protested in a devastated whisper while the nurses were out of the room.
“Yeah, most people wouldn’t. You’re so pretty that people are probably too grateful to say anything. I certainly didn’t mean to let you know. But think about it; I’ll bet you haven’t had that many repeat customers, have you?”
Mohinder had thought about it, and found that she was right. However, he couldn’t help but retort, “Well, if you don’t get your power under control, you won’t have many repeat customers either.”
They’d decided then and there not to do it again. By resolving any lingering tension between them, the experience had solidified their friendship, while simultaneously leaving them individually insecure.
“What do you think this mission is about?” he now asked her in the darkness, eager to change the subject.
“There’s something that speedy bitch has that we’re supposed to be getting, but we can’t get close enough. No idea what it is. I’ll tell you what, though.” Mohinder could hear Elle grit her teeth beside him. “As soon as they give me the next mission detail, I’m going to find out. I will not let them get past me again.”
Mohinder sighed. She was stubborn and persistent, and it scared him. He couldn’t fault her for it, for so was he, if not even more so. But Mohinder couldn’t bear the thought of those bastards, her bosses, sending her out again. The possibility of losing his only friend seemed to increase every time she was sent out, and he couldn’t bear it. He’d become too complacent, Mohinder realized. He hadn’t done anything to achieve his goal of either ridding the world of the company or helping the wider population in months. Tomorrow, he resolved, tomorrow he would take action.
On to Part 3...