{ he might succumb to what you haven't seen }
I bring the homodrama, oh yes I do...
Title: On the Other Side of Morning, 1/?
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Mohinder/Peter (eventually)
Spoilers: Everything leading up to 1x23
Summary: Two months since the events of "How To Stop An Exploding Man." Some heroes are dead, some are missing, and others are just trying to figure out what to do now.
A/N: An AU set after the events of 1x23. I began writing this before the release of the season two spoilers, so while a few details will be admittedly similiar to the writers' vision, a great deal of it will not be.
Background song: Gorillaz, El Manana (Tomorrow)
Death is not extinguishing the light;
It is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.
-- Rabindranath Tagore
--
Above him the sky was a milky blue. It turned the sea beneath him into a rolling field of green, some great moving thing that slipped in and out of focus between the webbing of outstretched fingers. The world itself turned, tipping, akin to the slow spin of the arms of a windmill, and somewhere behind his eyes it made a sound like bones breaking.
That’s when everything changed.
--
Mohinder didn’t dream.
Well, perhaps he did, from time to time. But he knew that if he had it wouldn’t be of anything important, or worth the trouble of remembering. It was in this way that he would dream, most often, of his mother’s hands. Cleaning rice for the day’s supper while as a boy he had watched inquisitively from the edge of the kitchen table, barely taller than the counter itself as he stood on his tiptoes to quietly watch her work. He dreamt of his father as well, as they had been in what he could call ‘better times,’ without ugly words and slamming doors, and of his sister too. Both the little girl - no bigger than Molly, he often imagined, in a way that always felt a little hollow by association - and the faceless woman, with their mother’s eyes and a voice that spoke of futures with children and memories not meant to be.
Sometimes he dreamt of death, and a man named Gabriel with his hands at his throat. Others he dreamt of maps and ideas like old photographs, spilling out from somewhere else like tumbling rolls of Polaroid film. And sometimes, when he shouldn’t have dreamt at all, he dreamt of dying stars.
Pulsing lights and a fire in the sky, bisecting the dust- and gasoline-peppered atmosphere into quadrants of empty space. Every now and again he still dreamt of the man he thought he knew, or could have known, rather, in another place or time. Dark eyes, dark hair, sad/sweet features sewn into white skin grayed like an aged photograph, translucent and wrapped over his slender skeleton in waning strips of cellophane. The man that had slipped out of his little fishbowl of a world eight weeks ago - like his cab and his apartment before it - to explode over the New York skyline.
And Mohinder dreams of him as he was then, flying-floating-falling, and when he does it’s nearly always the same.
Tumbling headlong, down down down through the lower atmosphere in splashes of heat iridescent in the emptiness of implied space. A trembling mass of heat and energy and something he can’t quite place, something like despair and electricity, tasting the way burnt wires smell. And the world, it’s still spinning, churning out of proportion like the eye of an invisible storm and all one can do is go into its death-cold embrace and fall --
But when Mohinder wakes at 5:28 to a set of blue eyes peering intently from the side of his bed, he knows that like all his dreams before it, there’s nothing of it worth remembering.
Peter was dead; Mohinder knew this too. That is why everyone else was still alive. And life went on like it always did because of it.
Right now it’s a two full minutes before he needs to get up. His alarm clock is set to go off at 5:30, as it every morning, but that doesn’t matter, either. Because like most mornings, for reasons that will remain largely unknown to his sleep-fogged mind, Molly manages to beat the alarm.
Mohinder learned some time ago that she had, by unknown means, determined that he would wake if stared at long enough, as though made somehow aware of the eyes burrowing holes into his forehead from the edge of his bed. He had surmised then that it was just the lingering edges paranoia, from the days when his research was still being watched for by the kinds of people that made things go bump in the night. Or perhaps any of the countless nights spent staring at his bedroom ceiling, half-waiting for the seemingly inevitable snap of psychic fingers around his throat when Sylar finally returned for him, or for Molly. Some random unnatural terror, he’d decided; a fight-or-flight response, unwittingly tapped into by a child’s natural keenness.
But, well. Mohinder was beginning to doubt that, in favor of something he was starting to recognize as a paternal form of ESP. Especially given how easily swayed he had become whenever Molly wanted something and he was balking - and wasn’t that just a little terrifying when he thought about it? - from where she had now quietly (and frequently) perched herself after stealing into his bedroom, still wearing the patterned Easter-yellow nightgown and fuzzy house shoes she’d put on the night before.
Blinking the haze from the corners of his eyes, he sighed at the intent stare that had settled mere inches from his face. “Yes?” he ventured patiently, out of practice more so than a legitimate interest. At 5:28 in the morning, one is as good as the other.
“Mohinder ran out of lizard food,” she explained quietly, voice thinned in a whisper as though she were telling a grave secret. The iguana. Of course. “I wanted to feed him after I got up but he didn’t have any.”
“Did you check the cupboard beneath the tank?” he rejoined in the same hushed tone, from drowsiness as opposed to discretion. She gave him an impatient look that clearly indicated he was an idiot for even asking, to which he simply yawned, stretching, enjoying the warm sheets once more before willing himself from them.
“There should be some sliced kiwi leftover in the refrigerator,” he said, levering himself from the mattress’s too-tempting softness and shifting his legs over the side. 5:29, and he hit the ‘off’ button on the alarm. “Feed him a few pieces of that, and I’ll pick up some more fruit pellets from the pet shop after work.”
“You won’t forget this time?” she chirped in a half-hearted reprove.
“Of course I won’t forget,” Mohinder assured her, and stood to guide Molly gently towards the door. “I managed to keep him from going hungry long before he met you. And please, can you wait until I’ve at least showered before you come to me with any future iguana emergencies?”
But bouncing off to retrieve the fruit from the kitchen for the assuredly famished reptile, Molly only smiled. Outside the sky above New York shifted from black to ink-blue, and chased away any traces of dead stars or Peter Petrelli from his memories.
--
A shower and an awkward serpentine through the upright columns of cardboard boxes that cluttered the still half-unpacked apartment and it was 6:03. Breakfast in the kitchen so far largely bare, and there’s no dreaming of anything at all. Just toast, juice and scrambled eggs (which he didn’t touch, but knew Molly liked) on the table in twenty minutes, followed by coffee and Molly’s lunch for school. The things that mattered.
Domesticity is still a slightly peculiar feeling but by 6:22 it hardly registered over the familiar scratching of wax tracing tight circles across the surface of construction paper at his back. After eight weeks it’s about as normal as it’s ever going to be, and Mohinder doesn’t mind it. Molly, the research…even his day job, demeaning and stereotypical though it may be. Two months’ time had made each seem to fall into its own little niche somehow. Like pieces of a larger puzzle, to make something that looked and felt on its face surprisingly…normal.
His mother had said he seemed happy the last time they spoke, when he called to give her the new apartment’s address. Perhaps he was. It had everything to do with Molly, he suspected, and he didn’t mind that either.
It felt something like progress, and that's all that really mattered.
The morning news is on in the next room but he isn’t listening, not really. The account is bland. Recounting the waning search efforts for the missing Congressman elect and district attorney from New York City by a fresh-faced anchorwoman in a beige suit jacket, the distant noise of television drowned by the hissing of cooking eggs.
Familiar faces and names changed to protect the innocent plastered on the screen in quickly moving panels of PR images and video feeds. Faces like the bereaved wife and her lost-looking young sons standing helplessly by, or the stern-faced matriarch immaculately groomed for the lights and the cameras and the certain outpour of public sympathy. The ill younger brother, with the big bright eyes, an allegedly unbalanced young nurse who had vanished from a Manhattan hospital bed ten weeks prior, now joining his prominent sibling in the list of those reported missing or dead on the night of November 8th.
Molly glanced up from her paper and crayons to watch Mohinder for a moment, fumbling distractedly with the coffee maker. “It’s on the news again,” she said, small voice thinned in a curious sort of prudence.
It’s the kind of caution that must follow certain topics with him, as it is with most adults. Even now, in the new apartment, without the tension of events she had yet to fully grasp still whispering in the walls. People or places or dates that she knows from first hand experience make him bristle, just a little, even when he tries to hide it with a smile. Because she knows that smile, the one he gets whenever they talk about that day on the news, and he just squeezes her shoulder, and tells her everything’s going to be okay, even though she already knows it will be.
But he doesn’t look up, doesn’t hear it. Perhaps he just doesn’t want to. Either way, she decides, it’s probably for the best.
The news just seemed to make him a little sad anyway.
--
Mohinder still saw him, from time to time. But like most things that didn’t mean anything either.
It was a sliver. Just a fraction of him, small and splintered at the edges. Any one of his faces hidden in the background of a crowded city street like a piece in a mosaic, culled from memories of his recent history in glimpses of big brown eyes or a lopsided slice of mouth. Just when he was in the right part of town, outside the former Petrelli campaign building, or the apartment he and Nathan had gone one afternoon to find Peter before he disappeared again. And only when he wasn’t really of mind.
But he never looked twice. No, he knew better than that. He had no right, no reason to; it wasn’t as though anything was lost to him that night. Anything that could’ve mattered, at least. Seeing things, all because of a silly little dream --
A brassy sounding honk from two car lengths’ back brings his eyes back to the light of East 87th and 2nd Avenue, as traffic began to flow around his standstill taxi. Blinks twice; applies the gas pedal with a muttered dismissal. Doesn’t check his rearview mirror for a familiar black-coated body melting into the crowd.
Doesn’t see the spot of light in the sky, darting from nowhere like a comet without a tail, intersecting the mirror’s narrowed field of view with the organic shimmer of an orphaned star as it plummeted towards the earth.
--
Somewhere else. Everything smelled of clean air, and the whole world hurt in a way that doesn’t make sense.
Fresh sunlight paints his face in distraction from the ringing in his ears, heating his skin. Lashes don’t pull open at first, sticking together as though melded with wax. Bones ache; lungs ache, skin like rice paper. His insides feel old somehow, brittle from wear and disuse. That doesn’t make much sense either.
Eyelids finally disentangle themselves and when they do the sky hanging overhead is a sickly sort of blue. Not a blue one would imagine when considering the sky, this one chalky and somehow faded, cloudless and empty, sunlight burning nebulous holes in his retinas until he blinked them into tiny black stars. Black stars like miniature supernovae, a thought that rattles emptily around behind his eye sockets before he remembers to breathe again as though on command, drawing breath into his lungs over a thinned pained sound that he doesn’t immediately recognize.
He doesn’t recognize anything anyway. Because he was going to explode, and now he isn’t - or maybe he had and doesn’t realize it yet. Maybe he’s dead; maybe he’s dreaming. Maybe he’s neither. And staring up into the empty sky, the only thing that Peter knows for sure over the ringing in his ears is that he is now, as he had wanted to be, somewhere far, far away.
TBC
Title: On the Other Side of Morning, 1/?
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Mohinder/Peter (eventually)
Spoilers: Everything leading up to 1x23
Summary: Two months since the events of "How To Stop An Exploding Man." Some heroes are dead, some are missing, and others are just trying to figure out what to do now.
A/N: An AU set after the events of 1x23. I began writing this before the release of the season two spoilers, so while a few details will be admittedly similiar to the writers' vision, a great deal of it will not be.
Background song: Gorillaz, El Manana (Tomorrow)
Death is not extinguishing the light;
It is putting out the lamp because dawn has come.
-- Rabindranath Tagore
--
Above him the sky was a milky blue. It turned the sea beneath him into a rolling field of green, some great moving thing that slipped in and out of focus between the webbing of outstretched fingers. The world itself turned, tipping, akin to the slow spin of the arms of a windmill, and somewhere behind his eyes it made a sound like bones breaking.
That’s when everything changed.
--
Mohinder didn’t dream.
Well, perhaps he did, from time to time. But he knew that if he had it wouldn’t be of anything important, or worth the trouble of remembering. It was in this way that he would dream, most often, of his mother’s hands. Cleaning rice for the day’s supper while as a boy he had watched inquisitively from the edge of the kitchen table, barely taller than the counter itself as he stood on his tiptoes to quietly watch her work. He dreamt of his father as well, as they had been in what he could call ‘better times,’ without ugly words and slamming doors, and of his sister too. Both the little girl - no bigger than Molly, he often imagined, in a way that always felt a little hollow by association - and the faceless woman, with their mother’s eyes and a voice that spoke of futures with children and memories not meant to be.
Sometimes he dreamt of death, and a man named Gabriel with his hands at his throat. Others he dreamt of maps and ideas like old photographs, spilling out from somewhere else like tumbling rolls of Polaroid film. And sometimes, when he shouldn’t have dreamt at all, he dreamt of dying stars.
Pulsing lights and a fire in the sky, bisecting the dust- and gasoline-peppered atmosphere into quadrants of empty space. Every now and again he still dreamt of the man he thought he knew, or could have known, rather, in another place or time. Dark eyes, dark hair, sad/sweet features sewn into white skin grayed like an aged photograph, translucent and wrapped over his slender skeleton in waning strips of cellophane. The man that had slipped out of his little fishbowl of a world eight weeks ago - like his cab and his apartment before it - to explode over the New York skyline.
And Mohinder dreams of him as he was then, flying-floating-falling, and when he does it’s nearly always the same.
Tumbling headlong, down down down through the lower atmosphere in splashes of heat iridescent in the emptiness of implied space. A trembling mass of heat and energy and something he can’t quite place, something like despair and electricity, tasting the way burnt wires smell. And the world, it’s still spinning, churning out of proportion like the eye of an invisible storm and all one can do is go into its death-cold embrace and fall --
But when Mohinder wakes at 5:28 to a set of blue eyes peering intently from the side of his bed, he knows that like all his dreams before it, there’s nothing of it worth remembering.
Peter was dead; Mohinder knew this too. That is why everyone else was still alive. And life went on like it always did because of it.
Right now it’s a two full minutes before he needs to get up. His alarm clock is set to go off at 5:30, as it every morning, but that doesn’t matter, either. Because like most mornings, for reasons that will remain largely unknown to his sleep-fogged mind, Molly manages to beat the alarm.
Mohinder learned some time ago that she had, by unknown means, determined that he would wake if stared at long enough, as though made somehow aware of the eyes burrowing holes into his forehead from the edge of his bed. He had surmised then that it was just the lingering edges paranoia, from the days when his research was still being watched for by the kinds of people that made things go bump in the night. Or perhaps any of the countless nights spent staring at his bedroom ceiling, half-waiting for the seemingly inevitable snap of psychic fingers around his throat when Sylar finally returned for him, or for Molly. Some random unnatural terror, he’d decided; a fight-or-flight response, unwittingly tapped into by a child’s natural keenness.
But, well. Mohinder was beginning to doubt that, in favor of something he was starting to recognize as a paternal form of ESP. Especially given how easily swayed he had become whenever Molly wanted something and he was balking - and wasn’t that just a little terrifying when he thought about it? - from where she had now quietly (and frequently) perched herself after stealing into his bedroom, still wearing the patterned Easter-yellow nightgown and fuzzy house shoes she’d put on the night before.
Blinking the haze from the corners of his eyes, he sighed at the intent stare that had settled mere inches from his face. “Yes?” he ventured patiently, out of practice more so than a legitimate interest. At 5:28 in the morning, one is as good as the other.
“Mohinder ran out of lizard food,” she explained quietly, voice thinned in a whisper as though she were telling a grave secret. The iguana. Of course. “I wanted to feed him after I got up but he didn’t have any.”
“Did you check the cupboard beneath the tank?” he rejoined in the same hushed tone, from drowsiness as opposed to discretion. She gave him an impatient look that clearly indicated he was an idiot for even asking, to which he simply yawned, stretching, enjoying the warm sheets once more before willing himself from them.
“There should be some sliced kiwi leftover in the refrigerator,” he said, levering himself from the mattress’s too-tempting softness and shifting his legs over the side. 5:29, and he hit the ‘off’ button on the alarm. “Feed him a few pieces of that, and I’ll pick up some more fruit pellets from the pet shop after work.”
“You won’t forget this time?” she chirped in a half-hearted reprove.
“Of course I won’t forget,” Mohinder assured her, and stood to guide Molly gently towards the door. “I managed to keep him from going hungry long before he met you. And please, can you wait until I’ve at least showered before you come to me with any future iguana emergencies?”
But bouncing off to retrieve the fruit from the kitchen for the assuredly famished reptile, Molly only smiled. Outside the sky above New York shifted from black to ink-blue, and chased away any traces of dead stars or Peter Petrelli from his memories.
--
A shower and an awkward serpentine through the upright columns of cardboard boxes that cluttered the still half-unpacked apartment and it was 6:03. Breakfast in the kitchen so far largely bare, and there’s no dreaming of anything at all. Just toast, juice and scrambled eggs (which he didn’t touch, but knew Molly liked) on the table in twenty minutes, followed by coffee and Molly’s lunch for school. The things that mattered.
Domesticity is still a slightly peculiar feeling but by 6:22 it hardly registered over the familiar scratching of wax tracing tight circles across the surface of construction paper at his back. After eight weeks it’s about as normal as it’s ever going to be, and Mohinder doesn’t mind it. Molly, the research…even his day job, demeaning and stereotypical though it may be. Two months’ time had made each seem to fall into its own little niche somehow. Like pieces of a larger puzzle, to make something that looked and felt on its face surprisingly…normal.
His mother had said he seemed happy the last time they spoke, when he called to give her the new apartment’s address. Perhaps he was. It had everything to do with Molly, he suspected, and he didn’t mind that either.
It felt something like progress, and that's all that really mattered.
The morning news is on in the next room but he isn’t listening, not really. The account is bland. Recounting the waning search efforts for the missing Congressman elect and district attorney from New York City by a fresh-faced anchorwoman in a beige suit jacket, the distant noise of television drowned by the hissing of cooking eggs.
Familiar faces and names changed to protect the innocent plastered on the screen in quickly moving panels of PR images and video feeds. Faces like the bereaved wife and her lost-looking young sons standing helplessly by, or the stern-faced matriarch immaculately groomed for the lights and the cameras and the certain outpour of public sympathy. The ill younger brother, with the big bright eyes, an allegedly unbalanced young nurse who had vanished from a Manhattan hospital bed ten weeks prior, now joining his prominent sibling in the list of those reported missing or dead on the night of November 8th.
Molly glanced up from her paper and crayons to watch Mohinder for a moment, fumbling distractedly with the coffee maker. “It’s on the news again,” she said, small voice thinned in a curious sort of prudence.
It’s the kind of caution that must follow certain topics with him, as it is with most adults. Even now, in the new apartment, without the tension of events she had yet to fully grasp still whispering in the walls. People or places or dates that she knows from first hand experience make him bristle, just a little, even when he tries to hide it with a smile. Because she knows that smile, the one he gets whenever they talk about that day on the news, and he just squeezes her shoulder, and tells her everything’s going to be okay, even though she already knows it will be.
But he doesn’t look up, doesn’t hear it. Perhaps he just doesn’t want to. Either way, she decides, it’s probably for the best.
The news just seemed to make him a little sad anyway.
--
Mohinder still saw him, from time to time. But like most things that didn’t mean anything either.
It was a sliver. Just a fraction of him, small and splintered at the edges. Any one of his faces hidden in the background of a crowded city street like a piece in a mosaic, culled from memories of his recent history in glimpses of big brown eyes or a lopsided slice of mouth. Just when he was in the right part of town, outside the former Petrelli campaign building, or the apartment he and Nathan had gone one afternoon to find Peter before he disappeared again. And only when he wasn’t really of mind.
But he never looked twice. No, he knew better than that. He had no right, no reason to; it wasn’t as though anything was lost to him that night. Anything that could’ve mattered, at least. Seeing things, all because of a silly little dream --
A brassy sounding honk from two car lengths’ back brings his eyes back to the light of East 87th and 2nd Avenue, as traffic began to flow around his standstill taxi. Blinks twice; applies the gas pedal with a muttered dismissal. Doesn’t check his rearview mirror for a familiar black-coated body melting into the crowd.
Doesn’t see the spot of light in the sky, darting from nowhere like a comet without a tail, intersecting the mirror’s narrowed field of view with the organic shimmer of an orphaned star as it plummeted towards the earth.
--
Somewhere else. Everything smelled of clean air, and the whole world hurt in a way that doesn’t make sense.
Fresh sunlight paints his face in distraction from the ringing in his ears, heating his skin. Lashes don’t pull open at first, sticking together as though melded with wax. Bones ache; lungs ache, skin like rice paper. His insides feel old somehow, brittle from wear and disuse. That doesn’t make much sense either.
Eyelids finally disentangle themselves and when they do the sky hanging overhead is a sickly sort of blue. Not a blue one would imagine when considering the sky, this one chalky and somehow faded, cloudless and empty, sunlight burning nebulous holes in his retinas until he blinked them into tiny black stars. Black stars like miniature supernovae, a thought that rattles emptily around behind his eye sockets before he remembers to breathe again as though on command, drawing breath into his lungs over a thinned pained sound that he doesn’t immediately recognize.
He doesn’t recognize anything anyway. Because he was going to explode, and now he isn’t - or maybe he had and doesn’t realize it yet. Maybe he’s dead; maybe he’s dreaming. Maybe he’s neither. And staring up into the empty sky, the only thing that Peter knows for sure over the ringing in his ears is that he is now, as he had wanted to be, somewhere far, far away.
TBC