The Beginning, Part 1
Title: The Beginning, Part 1
Characters: Emma Coolidge, Maury Parkman, Peter Petrelli
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Word count: 8,600
Setting: Shattered Salvation, December 31, 2011
Summary: Emma asks Maury to explain it all. Written for heroes_contest's final challenge, "Endings". Beta by means2bhuman.
It was New Year's Eve and Emma was very ready to have her baby, two weeks past her due date now and bursting out all over. She wasn't worried (much) about the progress of the pregnancy, because she believed Peter's mother when Angela had made a Christmas gift to all of them of a dream she'd had - the child would share a birthday with Noah Petrelli and the birth would be long, but otherwise uneventful. But what she was orried about was the complicated world her daughter Alisha was being born into. It wasn't a world Emma understood - not even the shameful events that had led to her uncle and father being the same person. One of these days, she knew, her child was going to ask for explanations. She wanted them to be better than the evasive ones her own mother had supplied.
She set aside the book she'd been reading most recently (having chewed through Activating Evolution and ending with more questions than answers). This latest was the history of the 1960s jazz scene in New York, as she tried to come to terms with the world her father Chris Coolidge had been living in, to understand why her so very sensible mother had taken her brother as a paramour. Chris was long dead and her mother wouldn't explain herself, but Emma happened to be sitting across from a man who was an expert on motivations. She asked, "How did it all begin?"
Maury snapped his attention from whatever it was he'd been contemplating. "What?" He'd been assigned as one of he two bodyguards (the other being Peter), a necessity she'd argued against but lost. The anniversary of Noah's traumatic birth had made both Gabriel and Heidi very anxious and the only way they'd leave the house was if proper protection was in place for both she and their youngest son Noah. That was how she'd ended up across the living room from Maury Parkman, watching him fondle an unlit cigar and stare off into the distance until her question pulled him out of it.
Peter was curled up in an easy chair with little Noah wedged between him and the arm of the seat. The nearly one-year-old had fallen asleep there after playing to exhaustion in his uncle's lap. Rather than move him, Peter had telekinesed over a laptop and was now streaming a report sent to him by Micah on some Company business. At her question, he raised his head to look between them.
Emma repeated herself in case she hadn't enunciated properly. "How did it all begin?"
"Specials?" Maury said, probably having plucked the subject from her mind. She nodded. "You mean all the way back? She nodded again, although her initial question had only been about the factors that had influenced her immediate family and perhaps that of Peter's. But if there was more, she wanted to know it. "How did specials begin?" Maury laughed a little. "You do like the big questions, don't you?"
Emma waited, pushing her book a little further away on the end table next to the couch to make it clear she wanted to hear him instead.
Maury sighed and put the cigar down. "All the way back, huh?" She nodded, leaning forward with interest. "Okay." He shot a look at Peter, who looked interested as well. Even though Peter's curiosity about abilities was notably limited, it was a more intriguing topic than Company work. The old telepath leaned back, assessing his audience and then letting his thoughts turn to the subject. 'Why am I here?' was the real question she was asking. It was one of those fundamental ones people always asked, along with 'where did I come from?' and 'what's my purpose in life?' Maury didn't have the answers to those, mind-reader or no, but he did know a lot about the events that had led up to this point.
"I'm not sure how far back abilities go. Earliest evidence I've heard of is from ancient Egypt." He rubbed at the scruff on his chin, casting his thoughts back to lively debates and arguments back in the 60s, before either of his listeners had been born. It felt weird to realize not only were they here now, but that members of the next generation were already among them. Back then, he'd been a young man with as many questions as thoughts. No one had told him the story of how they'd come to be. He'd had to scrabble it together from clues and then hoarded the knowledge like the most valuable commodity. At this advanced stage of his life, there wasn't much benefit to keeping those things secret anymore.
"The first we have is some inscriptions about how the pharaoh had a man killed for possessing one of the 'god's' powers. They didn't think of them as normal people with abilities, the way a lot of folks do nowadays. What they could do was direct evidence of the divine and the supernatural. The people with abilities were revered, and given the animal-based religions they had in the day, they each picked an animal spirit, a totem, to represent them. Like a sports mascot." He smiled at how little the psychology of people had changed over the last three or four thousand years. He gestured loosely. "You can see them in the hieroglyphs they left behind - the bodies of men and women with the heads of an ibis, a jackal, or a hippo, maybe a cow. They had a whole religion around it and we have a bunch of signs that the people they were worshipping were like us - 'special'," he said, using the word that the latest generation seemed to favor.
"What happened to them?" Emma asked.
He shrugged. "If they weren't immortal, then they probably just died. I suppose it stopped breeding true at some point. They knew abilities were passed down genetically and you can see that in the way the royal family propagated itself. They married brother to sister, father to daughter, mother to son. And cousins, but the closer the better. I'm not sure how healthy that is in the long run. A lot of people tell me it's not. All the domestic animals we do that with … well, apparently it's really tough to keep a line pure and strong at the same time. And if I know anything about human nature, I'll bet that the breeding wasn't as closely controlled for the pharaoh's lineage as it is for English Spaniels." Even in the Founder's little claque of specials, infidelity had been the rule rather than the exception. Arthur's theory was that their nature as superior beings came with a drive to spread that gift to others, at times more literally than others.
"The ..." Emma made a sign for incest, uncomfortable with speaking the word out loud even though Noah was asleep and his vocabulary was rudimentary at best. "It happened even back then?"
"Yeah. And I think that might be where our person got the idea."
"Our person?" Emma paused, but there was only one entity she knew of who Maury persistently refused to name. "You mean Lilith?"
Maury smiled, embarrassed a little as his habitual avoidance of the name. "You know, once upon a time we thought that saying her name drew her attention, but yeah, Lilith. Selective breeding of people for abilities was her idea, but it wasn't a new one. People have been marrying up animals and people with the goal of getting better traits out of the progeny since the beginning of civilization. Plants, too. Some of the earliest writing we have is about picking which seeds to save and the Egyptian writings are explicit that the royal family wanted their kids to inherit their 'divinity'. At some point, though, it didn't work and I don't know why. Egypt wasn't the only place it happened, either. You can find some pretty damning evidence in India, China, and northern Europe. Some more speculative in Mesoamerica. If we could get the Dalai Lama to share, we'd know a lot more - he's a special, with an ability that's a match for that person … eh, Lilith's. Some people have run their mouths about the Judeo-Christian prophets, but I don't know about an that or certain. Just because people report miracles or UFOs doesn't mean anything really happened."
Peter snorted softly at the strangeness of Maury believing in the abilities of the Dalai Lama and various Egyptian gods without a problem, but balking when dealing with his own faith.
Emma asked, "What about time travel? Didn't anyone ever go back to see for sure?"
Maury waggled his head ambivalently. "You know, time travel's not all that different from painting the future or having prophetic dreams - you don't get to pick where you go or what you see. A really powerful traveller can force it, but doing that screws up the grey matter. They're trying to plow upstream, direct against the current of history, and that's more than a human being can process. It would be like Gabriel trying to use his telekinesis to stop the Earth from rotating - just not possible. He'd give himself an aneurism first. So we can't send someone back to 1865 to stop John Wilkes Booth from shooting Abraham Lincoln, much less to see if Moses really parted the Red Sea. There's too many events downstream that would change. All that weight and momentum of history against the fragility of the human brain? The brain gives way first.
"It doesn't work. We've played around with related powers. There's one that lets you paint the past, for example. Might not seem the most useful, but it's sure interesting. Then there's object-reading, like your husband has." Maury paused for a moment, confused by her thoughts. "No, I meant the other guy. Gabriel." Another pause. "Well, yes, he's not your direct husband, right. Whatever. You young people and your hippy free love," he laughed jokingly. "And anyway, Peter has that ability, too, I think." He glanced over to see Peter bob his head briefly. Maury went on, "None of those powers go very far back - a few years normally, maybe a few decades for a vision that's really important and personal. It ain't gonna get you to Bethlehem."
"So … wha do e know for sure?"
"What we know is that around 1500, the man we call Adam was running around. Hiro Nakamura left contemporaneous writings confirming it, but the main source of information is from me getting inside his head - Adam's head, that is. No one's sure how old he is, not even Adam."
"Is, or was?" Peter said, tilting his head to one side.
"Oh … well … he lived for so long," Maury said drily. "Was. Anyway." He turned back to Emma, ignoring Peter's narrowed eyes and continuing, "Adam's earliest memory was of waking up on the western shore of Japan after a storm, washed up with planks and crates. He didn't bother to check them for writing and he's always regretted that. He had reason, a lot of reason, to believe he'd regenerated extensively. Part of that reason was his lack of personal memories. He still knew English and a few other languages, along with a little history and vague memories of places he'd been - nothing specific, though. He staggered inland and sold his services as a mercenary. He didn't know he could regenerate at the time. Hiro showed him that later. Adam just kept thinking he was having miraculous escapes and injuries that weren't as bad as he'd thought at first blush."
Maury toyed with his cigar again, thinking back through all of the immortal's many memories. "We had him … in a cell at the Company for nearly thirty years. The incarceration wasn't a big deal for him, but the Company … we ... did some things that were beyond the pale." He rolled the cigar back and forth between his fingers. "Vivisection, killing him a lot, but most of all, the utter lack of treating him like a person who had any dignity or right to it. We shunned him, ostracized him, cast him out even though we kept him there in a cell and made him deal with our disapproval of him day in and day out. They brought me in to sort him out, because he got to where he wouldn't cooperate, wouldn't talk, wouldn't do anything but lash out.
"He hadn't gone crazy, you see," Maury said, circling his finger near his temple. "Not the same way we understand mental illness today in terms of unbalanced neurochemicals and such. Regeneration prevents that. But when the rational, sane, mentally stable response to your environment is to remove yourself from it … well. I had to go in there and bring him back and the only way to do that was to make 'back' somewhere he wanted to be. The main problem wasn't in his head, it was in mine. And that of the other Founders." He glanced over at Peter, who had put aside his laptop and, with one hand on baby Noah's leg, was watching Maury intently.
"How's that?" Peter asked.
"They had to quit hating him. We, that is. People can't survive as an object of hate. Worst punishment possible in most ancient societies wasn't killing someone, it was shunning them. He couldn't take it. He had to have at least one person who understood, who empathized." Maury rolled the cigar pensively between his fingers and looked to the former empath. "You know what I mean, Peter."
"How did that happen?" Peter asked softly, projecting his thoughts so Emma could hear him without watching his lips. "It was you who gave him that connection, right?"
Instead of answering, Maury sighed and said, "You know what pisses me off? No one wanted to know that. They didn't want to know what I'd had to do. They didn't want to know who Adam was or what had happened to make him a man who thought wiping out most of humanity was a good answer. They just confirmed every reason he'd ever had in how much not a damn one of them gave a shit!" The cigar broke between trembling fingers. This was something Maury had never shared with anyone - his reasons for siding with Adam, along with Daniel, Bob, Carlos, and Paula. But they were all dead, even Adam, despite Maury's unintentional slip of the tongue and deliberate vagueness with Peter. Maury was the only one left from one side of a feud so few knew about, but had nearly torn the world apart several times.
"I understand," Peter said simply and Maury's head pulled around to him after he finished brushing off the stray tobacco leaves. Maury probed to see what it was Peter thought he 'understood'. In a moment, he could see it. The world had abused Gabriel and neglected him, creating a man who could casually murder. Deed accomplished, Gabriel was then held to task for the sins he'd never wanted to commit - for being the person everyone in his life had made him to be. It was such a disgustingly elegant and simple trick, leaving all of the perpetrators guiltless while they blamed the instrument of their inhumanity. Peter saw a parallel between Gabriel and Adam, between the world who framed Gabriel and the Founders who were too afraid to look into Adam's motivations.
"You saved yours," Maury told him.
"You helped."
"That's just because I'd seen it before," the old man grumbled. "You're right - same pattern. But him killing my son was hard for me to deal with."
Peter nodded. "Was that … was that the beginning of the rift between you and my father?"
Maury snorted. "Not really. There were a lot of things. Your father was always fine with pushing people harder than they could take. If they broke, he didn't care. Everything and anything was possible with abilities."
Peter's eyes widened, as he'd said something very similar to his mother when he'd set himself on the course of getting Nathan 'back' from Sylar after that fateful Thanksgiving. "And you didn't agree?" It was weird and startling to see Maury as the moral one here.
"Given that I was usually the one tasked with putting people back together … it wasn't that I didn't agree, but that I couldn't ignore the impact of what we were doing. My own son ..." He shook his head and then gave an example. "We had a program for a while, a school for the kids of specials where we thought we'd train them up in their abilities so they'd be comfortable with them - a sort of 'school for the gifted'. Didn't work. I used telepathy to try to augment their learning, make them focus, concentrate, and hopefully tap into their powers early. Instead, it fucked them up. Gave Matt some sort of dyslexia. Gave one of our youngest girls a split personality. They started to disintegrate, because you can't heal with a scalpel. I quit, walked out, but your dad thought those were acceptable casualties. He was always okay with certain costs and losses."
"What did my mother think of that?" Peter asked, leaning forward with an odd intensity in his eyes.
"She was against Adam's plan from the start. So was Arthur, but for different reasons - you can't have a new world order without anyone in it. Angela's motivations stemmed more from the apocalypse she was always trying to avert. Her ability would show her disasters we'd try to avoid and Adam's was one of them. For a while, her goals and Arthur's were the same, but as the years went by, they diverged. Whenever she'd try to oppose him, he'd fix her with mental commands. Like I said," Maury shrugged, "with Arthur, losing her was just as acceptable a casualty as Nathan or you."
"Why didn't she see that in him?"
Maury smiled sadly. "Peter, it is a lucky thing for men that women don't see us as we are." Emma rolled her eyes at the casual sexism and Maury went on with a nod to modern sensibilities and the family of his companions, "Or our partners. Love blinds, regardless. But in any case, in the early days of our little group it was Charles and Bob and Angela and a few others. They tried to accomplish things the soft way and honestly, it didn't work. There's a level at which force needs to be applied and I'm not trying to defend your father - I think he went overboard - but he brought a mentality and a severity to the group that got things done. That was attractive." He sighed. "I think your mother doubted herself a lot. She went through a period of being addicted to sleeping pills and even in the beginning, your father was good at twisting things around."
On that depressing disclosure, the group was quiet for a while until Emma said, "So there were Egyptians and different ancient groups, then Adam several hundred years ago, then the Company. Was there anything in between?"
"There's a few disconnected occurrences here and there, but nothing had a bigger impact on where we are today than Lilith. Adam ran into her in the 1850s. It wasn't the first special he'd come across - he'd seen a few of those, but it was the first one he'd seen who might stick around like he did. Adam was in America at the time. He'd just lost the love of his life - was with her nearly sixty-five years, longer than most people lived - and a friend was trying to hook him up with young women. The lady he was introduced to had a checkered past and a child out of wedlock, but she was rich, widely traveled, smart, and sexually unrestrained - not the usual combination, but his friend knew Adam well enough to know they might hit it off famously.
"They didn't, but they became good friends and palled around for a year or so, finding out they had more in common than Adam's friend had suspected. Adam wanted to love her, desperately, and for a while he was in love with th idea f loving her - another immortal, someone he'd never lose. But it didn't work. They had sex, don't get me wrong, and they could have been as loving a couple as a lot I've seen, but they'd both lived long enough to know what did it for them and it wasn't one another - for whatever reason.
"At that point in time, Lilith only had one ability and Adam was pretty sure of that. She could possess people and that was it. She confessed to Adam that she'd been born around 1800 and had burned through a couple bodies in the process to getting where she was now. She was smart enough not to give details of her power, but it was clear she had no natural born body of her own she was tied to and that she could survive the death of her host just fine. That's an incredible power, but it's not beyond the ken of a really accomplished telepath or psychic. Like I said earlier, the Dalai Lama does the same thing."
Peter asked, "So … he's … that stuff about the Dalai Lama's spiritual transference is true?"
Maury's brows lifted at how Peter put faith in his God without proof, but questioned someone having an ability he'd personally seen in action. "Did you ever doubt Adam's age?"
"No."
"There you are. Yeah, it's true. But like I said, he doesn't want to talk to us about his ability. He's a little too wrapped up in spiritual fulfillment and peace and harmony and all that crap."
Peter snorted and laughed, then cut himself off when Noah squirmed next to him. They all observed a moment of silence as the toddler stretched and yawned adorably, then settled into a new position, burrowing against Peter's outer thigh.
Eventually Maury continued. "Actually, the Dalai Lama is a good example of something you two know as well as anyone: having abilities doesn't make you not a person. You've still got goals and intentions and all that, loved ones and enemies, prejudices and maybe even superstitions. Mr. Holy Harmony there has his own mission in life, or lives, or whatever. Adam never really settled on one, which was why he wasn't meshing up with Lilith too well. She had her own goal. She lost her son to disease within a few months of meeting Adam and ever after she was obsessed with the idea of having a family of people like her. Maybe talking to Adam about all the women he'd married over the years had an influence on her. She was the one who knew about the Egyptians. I don't know where she got that piece of information, but she told Adam, who told the Company Founders, who were able to verify a lot of it, so it seems to be true.
"That's so stereotypical," Emma complained. "A woman wanting a family."
"Says the woman so pregnant we ought to be thumping her belly for that hollow sound watermelons make when they're ripe," Maury shot back. Emma frowned at him and Maury went on, "You know what's also stereotypical? That you're assuming she's a woman at all. According to Adam, she'd just left twenty or thirty years of being a man and she'd mentioned men before that whom she'd possessed. She was presenting as a woman when Adam met her, but I've seen her in more male forms than female over the years. The only reason we all," Maury paused for a moment, "and by 'we' I mean the Founders, call her female is because Adam did. And I think the only reason Adam did was because he wanted to be in love with her and couldn't imagine having that feeling for a man."
Peter dipped his head and Maury, currently the recipient of all of Emma's attention, declined to shoot the younger Petrelli a look. He hoped Adam had found a little human connection after getting out of that prison. He'd certainly needed it and Peter probably had, too. But obviously it hadn't lasted, whatever they'd shared.
"Maybe that's the real reason why it didn't work out between Adam and her - because maybe at some level it was Adam and him and Adam wasn't that way for anything long term. She had the idea of getting more specials in the world and to do that, she started trying to locate the ones who were already out there. It was only a few years later that she and Adam parted ways, but they kept in touch by letter for a while. She could hook people up with who she wanted by the simple trick of hijacking their body for a bit, getting it on with whoever she thought was a good candidate, and then bailing out to pull the same trick on the next victim. Black out periods and hysteria were kind of a fad in psychology at the time. It makes me wonder."
"She was a body snatcher," Peter said with a curl of his lip.
Maury nodded. "Around the turn of the century, Lilith picked up another ability - pretty much Molly's. Don't know how she got it, but it wasn't the only time she picked up something new and kept it when she transferred from body to body. As decades passed, she quit sending letters and because she could telepathically contact Adam at a distance. After a while, she could detect specials and then she seemed to develop different powers of precognition and understanding probabilities … maybe other stuff. It wasn't like she blurted out everything she could do to Adam, who was off living his own life for most of this. He was happy about having a pen pal through the decades and they stayed aware of one another's projects, but they didn't work together much.
"Lilith had a lot of involvement in eugenics circles, so it shouldn't surprise you that she was in Nazi Germany for a lot of the build-up to World War II, but it might surprise you that she was more interested in preserving the Jews than the Aryans. Adam was there, too. It was kind of a focal point. A lot of people with abilities, like my family, she pulled out of camps and got us to the US. I didn't know it at the time - I was just a kid. But the Zimmermans, the Liebermans, and the Parczaks were projects of hers. We anglicized to Parkman when we got to the US. Given that none of us knew she was involved and there's no guarantee she was using the same face all the time, we probably talked to her off and on without realizing it."
"Wait," Peter interrupted. "Are you saying that Lilith and Adam caused the rise of Nazi Germany?"
Maury blinked at him for a moment, then laughed a little. "No. Absolutely not. What I'm saying is that like anyone else living around that time, they had opinions that put them on one side of the fence or the other. Check your history - the US was rife with their own selective breeding crap, miscegenation laws, sterilizing different segments of the population. Same for Germany, but a little more intense. Lilith was looking for opportunities to breed people, so of course she went to where it looked like it might be easiest. Adam was just there because he was - no particular reason except that he'd been bouncing around Europe for quite a while at that point."
"She wasn't a Nazi?"
Maury shrugged. "I have no idea, but like I said, the people she was working on at that time were Jewish, not Aryan. Not that she's particularly pro-Semite either. She hit a lot of different racial groups, which only makes sense as abilities show up across all races."
Emma's brow furrowed. "What happened to the people after she possessed them? Didn't they notice? You mentioned black-out periods earlier."
Maury shrugged. "Depended. From what Adam said, the first people she possessed, she rode to the grave. But later on, she got to where she just skimmed. Now whether that's a natural evolution of her own power, or something she could do all along and didn't, or something she picked up later is anyone's guess. But it's clear that by the last half of the 20th century, she could control a person's every action like the body was hers, or she could ride inside of their consciousness so deeply buried that not only did they not know it, but even a telepath like myself might miss it." His dry tone of voice left little doubt that he thought he'd been duped at times. "We also know that some of the people she possessed worked with her willingly and others had no memory of what had happened while under her sway. By the time I was savvy enough to be chasing her, she had more skill with telepathy than I'll ever hope to have, so what state she left people in was really up to her.
Part Two