Adventures of Matt Parkman, Chapter 22: Packing up
Maury Parkman was a hard man. He liked Clint Eastwood, John Wayne and westerns. When Matt figured out the key to dealing with him was to avoid engaging him emotionally, things went much better between them. It didn't matter that Maury knew Matt's feelings. What mattered was that Matt kept up a stoic face and didn't make an issue of it.
Maury would get downright sadistic in grinding someone into the ground if they asked him for mercy or sympathy. Matt felt lucky to have learned that one by observation, not direct experience, but Matt was not the personality himself to ask for someone to lighten up - not on his behalf, at least. His father was rough on him, but he had a goal and he was rough on anyone who got in his way.
Two weeks had passed and Matt was packing up his things to go to New York. He was sitting in the living room folding freshly laundered clothes, putting them directly in shipping boxes. Patty had been recruited into the Company and had left for formal training the week before, taking all of her personal things with her when she went.
It had been a grueling fortnight. Matt wasn't sure what the worst part was - kicking the drugs and suffering withdrawal, being abused by his father, or realizing the degree to which he'd ruined his life. He was feeling better though. He was eating better, sleeping better and had stopped fighting what was happening. He was starting to see how all of this would help him.
Maury was sorting through a stack of files he'd had delivered to him, making sure they hadn't missed anyone, at least on paper. He made notes in some of them. Matt still didn't understand why the old man thought he needed to put El's drug ring back the way it was. They could have just dismantled it altogether. Matt's ideas of how society should be structured didn't hold much weight with his father.
"That's one assignment done." Maury stood up and put about a third of his files into a Primatech paper box. He sat back down, sighing heavily. "And now to start the next one." He picked up a cover letter and scanned over it, then sorted through the files as if making sure everything was there. "Huh. I need more agents if she expects me to be able to do this. Or maybe I could get you to help out." He looked over at Matt. "What languages do you speak?"
"English, a little Spanish, a few words of French. Why?"
"Looks like we're going somewhere. Hopefully all we'll need is English. I thought maybe while you were living with this guy…" He shrugged, set the letter down and opened the first file.
Matt's brow furrowed. "I thought we were going to New York."
"We are. For now." He closed the file and sorted through the others, pulling one out from near the bottom. He opened it on top of the others. It flopped a bit. Matt caught sight of a picture on it that looked familiar. He held his place for a moment. His father glanced up at him, sensing his curiosity. When the older man went back to reading, Matt took that as a sign it was okay to look closer.
He walked over and looked at Mohinder's photograph. He reached down and after another obligatory pause, pulled it sideways out of the paperclip that held it to the file. His father ignored him, so he looked down at the other files. The only names on them he recognized were Molly's and Mohinder's family. Matt frowned and set Mohinder's photo down in the middle of the table. He pulled out Chandra Suresh's file and opened it, sitting across from his father. Almost all of it was redacted. "This is useless! Why'd they black all this out?"
Maury extended a hand for it without looking up. Matt gave it to him. He looked through it briefly and then tossed it back on the stack and gave Matt Molly's file instead. "That's a restricted file. They send those for completion, so you know there's something out there, but they're not willing to tell you what it is. I can get the full version if we need it, but we probably don't. He's dead anyway."
Matt frowned and reached out for Chandra's file again. He paused with his hand on it for a second, then took it back when his father didn't object. He'd learned a few of his father's hot buttons over the previous two weeks. One of them was people taking things he considered 'his.' Matt opened it and looked at it more carefully, slowly reading what little wasn't marked out. There were a few interesting things, like dates and places, and references to reports archived at Primatech in Hartsdale. "Didn't Primatech burn down?"
"Uh-huh. Pinehearst too. Too bad we're self-insured. Treasury kind of took a big hit there."
"Did we lose all these files, these records this says were stored there?"
Maury shrugged. "Not my business. Not yours, either. Start reading that girl's file or go finish packing. I'm trying to work here."
Matt opened Molly's file. He couldn't focus on the words so he put his finger along the line, reading them slowly and carefully. He had a feeling of being watched and looked up to see his father staring at him with a very strange expression, almost sad. Maury told him brusquely, "Scratch that. Go finish packing."
Matt rolled his eyes and walked over, tossing clothes into the box angrily. They'd be wrinkled later, but he didn't care at the moment. He thought his father pitied him because of his dyslexia. He didn't want his pity. "I read fine, Dad. It just… takes me longer than most people."
"Yeah," his father said slowly. "You know what you tried to do with your son?"
Matt paused and looked at him, thinking about trying to get little Matty to say the word 'red.'
Maury went on, still looking down at the file he was ostensibly reading, "It doesn't work that way. I gave you your problem." He shook his head, looking up at him. "You can't make people better with this ability we have, Matt, but you sure as hell can screw them up."
"You…" Matt didn't finish, even in his mind. Things half-remembered and disjointed from his early childhood flitted through his mind, but he couldn't focus on them, not even now. There was an answer there, or perhaps here, in what his father was saying.
"Yep. Me. I enrolled you in the program, thought it would help you out. I didn't want to be doing to other kids what I wouldn't do to my own. I didn't want to be a hypocrite." He closed the file, giving up the pretense of reading it. "It takes a long time to breed better people. Why wait when you can make them out of what you already have?" He shook his head. "That's what's been going on, you know? Next wave of the arms race."
He picked up Chandra's file and shook it at Matt. "This idiot with all his evolution crap. He never got the point - of course we didn't tell him - he thought it must be god or science or whatever bunk it was he believed in, coming from that shit hole country of his. All these people with powers didn't come out of nowhere, some evolutionary nonsense. It was purposeful. It was planned! It's still going on. We've gotten a lot better at it. It's working now, but we didn't know what we were doing when you were a kid, with Elle, with any of them. We tried too much, too fast, too direct."
Maury sighed and reached out and picked up Mohinder's photo, clipping it to the file again. Matt thought about Kassidy Singer and how she was far ahead of where a kindergartner should be. He thought about Mazy, whom her grandmother had said was given to them by the 'strange school' she went to. Maury smirked at him. "Yeah, that's not the Company, but it is us. We're not alone in this. Your longer term assignment's going to be in Boston, watching some government guys who are watching us."
Maury and Matt looked at each other for a long moment, while Maury considered telling Matt the truth about those 'government guys.' Finally the older man said, "Keep packing. We have a lot of work to do. Got to get the Walker System back online since Hana took out our satellite and the bag-and-tag's been taken off the menu. That was a tedious, dangerous, labor-intensive process anyway, so it's probably for the best. The satellite was a big problem though. It had a lot of other functions than tracking those guys."
He pointed at Matt and said, "I know this one matters to you, but I don't want to hear any crap out of you about it. It's important. It's part of something way bigger than you are. Suck it up and do your job and she'll be fine."
Matt sat back down and pulled out the clothes he'd tossed in without folding. He folded them quietly for a while, thinking about the past, thinking about Molly. His time with Mohinder wasn't something he'd ever wanted his father to know about. He was surprised the man had said nothing about it. Finally, unable to leave well enough alone, Matt asked, "What are you going to do about Mohinder?"
Maury shrugged. "That's why I'm reading his file."
"You should let me talk to him," Matt said quietly.
Maury grunted.
Matt folded more clothes for a while, until his father closed the file and reached out for the one Matt had been looking at earlier - Molly's. He skipped to the last pages, apparently familiar with the rest. Matt said, "He's not going to want to turn her over. He and I agreed we'd keep her out of the Company, keep her out of all this."
His father grunted again. Matt growled, annoyed by the one-way nature of their link. "What does that mean?"
"It means his wishes are immaterial. I have an assignment to get Molly Walker and take her to New York. I am going to get Molly Walker and take her to New York. That's the way I work. You're going to help me. If Chandra's boy is a problem, I'll make him not a problem. I never liked Chandra much anyway. Normal son of a bitch. Deserved what he got."
"What?"
"What?" Maury looked at Matt blankly for a moment, having failed to listen to his thoughts while reading and talking at the same time. He had his limits. After a moment, he said, "He was normal. No abilities. And he was a son of bitch. He got nearly all his memories wiped. It improved him." The old man smirked in a moment of remembered pleasure.
Matt frowned. Way to go, Dad, with the prejudice against normal people.
"Oh, stuff it. You believe it too or you wouldn't act like you do."
Matt snorted and said hotly, "If I believed it, I wouldn't have tried to make a life with Janice!" He clamped down on his emotions, but he'd slipped and he knew it.
His father glared at him. "And see where that got you."
He refused to let his father rile him further. It was the only way to avoid a fight he would definitely lose. In a calm, even tone, Matt said, "It got me a son… and we had good times together." He swallowed and focused on folding a shirt. "Not all relationships last anyway, no matter what kind of person they're with." His thoughts went to Mohinder for some reason. He had an ability now, but it hadn't made a difference.
"Point taken. Some of the most twisted people I know have abilities. A friend of mine had a theory it was some effect of power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely. Basically, who's going to call you on your morality if you can crush them with a thought? Lends itself to a lot of experimentation if there's nothing really to stop you and you're already a freak by society's lights." Maury went back to reading. "Speaking of which, you lived with this guy."
"Yes," Matt said. He didn't need to elaborate. His thoughts did it for him.
Again though, his father didn't care what they'd done together. He stayed focused on business. "What sort of mental defenses did he have?"
"None." Matt finished the basket he'd been working on and started another, the last.
"Good. I'll just flip him and we'll take her. Shouldn't be too tough."
"I don't want you… messing with him."
Maury looked up at him for a long time. Quietly he said, "I do a good job, Matthew. I have a lot of experience with it. You're emotionally involved. One of us has to do it."
"It should be me. I can talk to him, work something out." Matt's chest was tight. He kept thinking about the painting of Mohinder bleeding to death on the floor. If he let his father handle things, it would get out of hand. Maybe if he did it, he could prevent it. "It's important to me."
Maury flipped Molly's file shut and took up that of Mohinder's mother. "It said there that he had enhanced strength. You know how well you control people after having your neck broken?" He paused for a moment and moved his neck as if it was stiff. "Not very well, trust me."
Matt laughed. "How would you know?"
"You think I've never been dead?" Maury chuckled, turning a page. "Kids these days," he muttered, smiling. Matt gave him a mystified look. There had been a reason why the founders had kept Adam locked up where they had easy access to him and his precious blood for thirty years, but Matt didn't know that. "My point is that if things go bad, they'll go bad fast and with his power you can be dead quicker than you can do anything about it."
"He wouldn't do that to me. Not as long as I don't use my powers on him."
"You think so, huh? Well, we'll see."
"You'll let me do it my way?" Matt was surprised.
"Sure. We'll do it your way, but you'd better like hell make it fast."