The Road of Trials, Part 1/2
Title: The Road of Trials (Part 1/2)
Characters/Pairings: Mohinder, Nathan, Peter, a special appearance by Matt (slight Mohinder/Peter pre-slash if you squint)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: vague slashiness
Spoilers: Through Fallout. Also plays with a popular theory about something that happened to Peter at the end of that episode.
Summary: At a loss for answers after the end of Fallout, Nathan seeks help from an unexpected source.
Disclaimer: Heroes and the associated characters don’t belong to me.
Notes: I used Adrian Pasdar and Milo Ventimiglia’s approximate real life age difference as the basis for the age difference between Nathan and Peter in the story. Also, my VCR and computer hate me, so I’ve been unable to review some of the episodes. Apologies in advance for any resulting glaring inconsistencies with canon. Also, still new to lj so apologies for any glaring mistakes in that respect as well.
The Road of Trials
Part One
The phone when Mohinder plucked it from its cradle was still warm from having been clutched in his hand all day and half the night. With Eden still hanging heavily in his mind, he half-expected it to be her, looking to explain her cryptic call from earlier. But the voice on the other end held none of Eden’s soft sharpness. Instead, a male voice, stressed and roughened, asked,
“Is this Suresh?”
Mohinder was cautious, almost defensive in his reply. “Who is this?”
It could have been any number of people. If it couldn’t be Eden, Mohinder wanted it to be one of the many people he’d been trying to contact since his return to New York. One of the few that hadn’t turned up dead or missing, calling him back out of curiosity or intrigue. His more guarded side remembered the armed exterminator he’d found in his apartment the day he’d met Eden, the man in the horn-rimmed glasses riding in the back of his cab.
“My name is Petrelli. Nathan Petrelli. We, uh, met before. Briefly.”
Mohinder sat up straighter in the desk chair he’d been slumped in all day, nearly knocking over the lamp that provided the apartment with its sole source of illumination.
“I remember,” he replied once he’d righted the lamp with minimal damage to the scattered contents of his work space.
What he remembered was the way Nathan Petrelli had so callously dismissed him with a thoughtlessly tossed-off peace sign and a muttered order to have Mohinder dragged away by his bodyguards. More than that, he remembered how Peter Petrelli had shown up on Mohinder’s doorstep hours later, all earnestness and false hope. A man who could take flight and draw the future but not outside the presence of his politician brother or a heroin-addicted artist he himself barely knew. A man who received mysterious messages from the future telling him to rescue high school cheerleaders.
A man, Mohinder had felt at the time, who was either more than slightly delusional or playing some kind of cruel prank. The Petrellis had been a bitter disappointment to him in every way, but still, when the awkward silence had gone on long enough, Mohinder felt himself compelled to ask,
“How can I help you, Mr. Petrelli?”
“I think you might know my brother,” Nathan said. “Peter Petrelli.”
“Yes,” Mohinder said.
“And so you probably know about…”
“Your abilities,” Mohinder filled in, sensing Petrelli’s hesitance. “Yes, Peter mentioned them when we spoke.” It would have been more accurate to say that Peter had gone into great and almost unnecessary detail about his brother’s newfound talent for flight, the gleam of obvious hero worship burning bright in his eyes. Still, Mohinder was feeling diplomatic.
“That book you wrote…,” Petrelli began but this time Mohinder cut him off.
“I didn’t write it,” he corrected. “My father did before he died. I’ve been following up on some of the research he did. The research that was the basis for the book.”
“Oh,” Petrelli said, clearly disappointed. “Then maybe you can’t help me.”
“Help you with what?” Mohinder asked, growing impatient.
Petrelli hesitated and Mohinder got the sense that he was considering hanging up the phone, pretending that the conversation had never taken place. But whatever had driven him to phone Mohinder in the first place, to seek out what he had formerly dismissed, was powerful enough that he pushed ahead with what sounded to Mohinder like great effort.
“It’s about Peter.”
Mohinder’s first uncharitable thought was that Peter Petrelli’s madness had driven him to do something stupid like throw himself off another tall building when no one was there to catch him. Slightly ashamed of himself, he brushed the idea away in time for Nathan Petrelli to rush on without waiting for Mohinder to prompt him.
“He collapsed a few hours ago. He’s in the hospital now and the doctors don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
“Mr. Petrelli, I’m not a physician…”
“I know,” Petrelli said curtly as if Mohinder had been implying that he was stupid. Which, in a way, he had. “The thing is, I’m starting to think that whatever’s wrong with him might have something to do with…with what he can do. And since you know about these things, I thought there was a chance you could help.”
He didn’t say it out loud, but from the tone of his voice, much more human than the indifference he’d displayed at their last meeting, it was clear to Mohinder that contacting him was beyond the last resort for Nathan Petrelli. He seemed almost embarrassed by his own desperation. With this knowledge in mind, Mohinder searched for polite ways to remind the man that he was neither a physician nor a psychiatrist and therefore most likely unqualified to help his brother. But then something Petrelli had said finally registered in his mind.
What he can do.
“What exactly is it that your brother can do?” Mohinder asked.
A silence, during which Mohinder could hear the background noise he hadn’t noticed before. The ever-restless activity of a hospital. A nurse shouting something to a doctor. The sirens of an ambulance in the distance, growing closer. The pneumatic sound of an automatic door opening and closing.
“I thought you could tell me,” Petrelli said finally. “Isn’t that what he went to you for?”
“Yes,” Mohinder said. “He said that he’d had some experience flying, but only when he was around you. And that he had briefly been able to draw the future but only after coming into contact with a heroin addicted artist that could do the same.”
“Isaac Mendes.” Petrelli volunteered the name a little to easily, but not without a slight note of dismay in his voice.
“He said all this, but was unable to demonstrate any kind of special ability on his own or even properly introduce me to anyone who could. Naturally, I was skeptical.”
Does that sound as lame as I think it sounds? Peter’s blushing voice echoed in his mind.
“Listen, no one knows better than me how flaky my brother can sound when he’s babbling on about all of that,” Petrelli said with surprising force. “Mostly he’s just a pain in the ass and an idiot besides, but what I can tell you is that he does fly. When he’s around me.”
It was as much an unexpected admission of Nathan’s own powers as it was of Nathan’s suspicions about Peter’s powers.
“You’ve seen this?” Mohinder said.
“Yes,” Petrelli said.
Mohinder was quiet for a moment as he considered. “I don’t know what you expect me to do for your brother, Mr. Petrelli.”
“Neither do I,” Petrelli said. “But it’s not like I can tell anybody here what I think might be going on.”
It was true enough.
“All right,” Mohinder said, taking up a pad of paper and a pen off his desk. “What hospital are you at?”
Again, Petrelli hesitated.
“The thing is, we’re not in New York.”
***
If there were any bright sides to having your father violently murdered in a foreign city and having to identify his body after the fact, the lack of suspense involved was one of them. Mohinder didn’t like to think of how his father had died. But neither did he like to think of him lingering in the cold detachment of a hospital either, his body a motionless placeholder for the person he’d once been, stuck in a stalemate with the inevitable. He also didn’t like to think of himself or his mother in the place of Nathan Petrelli, resolutely holding onto a hand that couldn’t hold his back.
That Peter Petrelli was sick Nathan had conveyed over the phone. What he’d failed to mention was that Peter was in a coma and deteriorating slowly. For all that he wasn’t a doctor, Mohinder felt he might still have been able to put on a good show if he’d been able to ask Peter where it hurt and how much. But Peter’s pain, if he felt any, went without communication and Mohinder could only loiter at his bedside, listening as Nathan relayed exactly what had happened in choked tones.
“They had him in custody for a while. There was a murder at a local high school and they held Peter for interrogation,” Nathan recited without any discernible inflection. He kept glancing toward Peter as if expecting some kind of interjection, receiving none.
“What was he doing at a high school in Texas?” Mohinder asked, thinking there was no end to the eccentricities of Peter Petrelli’s story.
“Trying to save a cheerleader,” Nathan said dismissively, as if this were only a minor detail.
But Mohinder was interested. “He said something about a cheerleader to me once,” he said, remembering the purpose with which Peter had recited the line: Save the cheerleader, save the world. “We were on the subway, heading back from that painter’s loft. One moment he was standing next to me, planning out a career in professional stalking. The next he was at the other end of the car, raving about a Japanese man who’d bent time and space to bring him a message from the future.”
Now it was Nathan’s turn to look mildly enlightened. “A Japanese guy who could time travel?” he said.
Mohinder nodded.
Nathan looked sick in the same way someone might if they’d just finished off a bottle of salad dressing only to find it was a year past its expiration date. “I think I met him. In a diner outside of Las Vegas. He…saw me. Flying. He started talking about how he was special too. I thought he was crazy, but if Peter saw him…”
Mohinder sighed, sitting back in his chair. He restrained himself from the sudden and irrational urge to glare petulantly at the young man on the bed, who remained oblivious to the revelation of his own apparent sanity. How was it that a boy like this could have such luck stumbling on the very people Mohinder was trying to contact when he’d had only the barest of hints and Mohinder had an entire list to guide his own fruitless efforts? Why had no one come from the future to advise Mohinder when he’d been on the verge of giving up, frustrated and disheartened?
The urge to glare left him as he observed from up close just how sick Peter appeared to be. Face the color of parchment, maddening hair swept out of his face, blankets tucked tightly around him as though the rails were not enough to keep him from falling off the bed should he happen to experience any sudden movements, which he wouldn’t.
When Mohinder had met him, Peter had been full of nervous movement, anxious with the need to be believed and the need to understand what was happening to him. To see him confined to this unnatural stillness unsettled Mohinder.
“The cheerleader too, by the way,” Nathan added.
“The cheerleader what?” Mohinder asked, allowing himself to be pulled back to the present.
“Just before he collapsed, he was rambling on about how he’d had these dreams and how he could do things when he was near other people who could do things,” Nathan explained. “It was heavily implied that there was something the cheerleader could do and that he had mimicked her. Oh, and a cop who’d read his mind. But he was pretty out of it by then, so who knows how much of that is true.” He paused. “I mean, there can’t be that many of us, can there?”
It shouldn’t have surprised Mohinder that a man so firmly ensconced in denial up until now should be so ignorant of the magnitude of the phenomenon to which he was so closely tied. Mohinder couldn’t help but think that his own denial had provided for him the opposite experience. To him, the phenomenon was impersonal. It was always “out there.” Only when he’d found out about Ashanti had it become smaller and more personal.
“On the contrary, my father kept a rather long list of people he thought might have potential,” Mohinder said. “I’ve been spending time in New York trying to contact some of them, but it seems a disproportionately high number are either dead or missing. I have trouble believing it’s a coincidence.” A thought occurred to him. “Could Peter’s illness have been caused by someone trying to harm him?”
Nathan shrugged, the helpless motion of someone too hollowed out by worry to narrow down the possibilities. “The doctors have run tests, but so far nothing,” he said. “The only thing they can say for sure is that he’s getting worse and they don’t know why.”
Nathan’s grip on his brother’s hand tightened as though holding on more tightly to Peter’s physical form could somehow halt the downward spiral of his spiritual one. Otherwise, he remained stoic. Despite his rumpled clothing and burgeoning stubble, Nathan’s exterior was that of an unyielding politician. Peter’s condition was a battle Nathan fully intended to fight and Mohinder had been drafted into the fray. But Mohinder didn’t have the energy to put on a brave façade of his own and so allowed his expression to fall into a grim frown as his mind began to work.
***
“So what can you do?” Nathan asked some time later, taking the Styrofoam cup of coffee Mohinder was pushing into his hands and setting it aside without a second glance. Mohinder wasn’t sure how to help Peter, but he was reasonably sure that a hunger strike wasn’t the solution.
With a sigh, Mohinder sat in the chair that had become his, considering not only the question but the timing of it. Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since his arrival in Texas. He hadn’t even checked into a hotel yet, had barely slept. In all that time, he’d gotten little conversation from Nathan apart from the initial recounting of Peter’s collapse. Now this.
“Are you asking if I have a power like yours and Peter’s?” Mohinder replied once he’d settled the curve of his back so that it rested as comfortably as possible in the awkward curve of the chair.
“Don’t you?” Nathan asked as if he hadn’t considered it might be otherwise.
“I can sort through other people’s research and break into strangers’ apartments,” Mohinder said. “I can drive a cab and teach an advanced course on genetics. I can stubbornly maintain skepticism in the face of all evidence.” As he spoke, his chin had lifted, a show of mock pride taken in the list of dubious achievements. He lowered it again as he admitted, “No, Nathan. I have no powers. I’m not special the way you and Peter are.”
Nathan nodded and it appeared he would have been satisfied with this answer but somehow Mohinder felt compelled to go on.
“I had a sister. Ashanti,” he said. “She was special. In fact, she inspired my father’s research.”
“What happened to her?” Nathan asked, apparently having noted Mohinder’s use of the past tense.
“I don’t know,” Mohinder said. “I didn’t even know she existed until recently. She died at a very young age.”
Nathan nodded, absorbing this neutrally. “Peter wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.
If there was a way to respond to this seeming non sequitur with anything but confusion, Mohinder didn’t know what it was. “How do you mean?” he asked.
“I was almost a teenager when Peter was born,” Nathan said. “He wasn’t supposed to happen. I mean, my parents wanted a second child and there were miscarriages, but they’d given up on that whole idea by the time I started going to school. They thought five years was too big of an age gap between siblings.” He snorted. “Anyway, when I was eleven or twelve, it just happened. Suddenly I had a little brother.”
“That must have been strange for you,” Mohinder commented.
Nathan shook his head. “Not as strange as you would think,” he said. “I mean, I was raised in this house with the ghosts of all these children my parents had lost. So when Peter came along it was almost a relief because finally there weren’t ghosts anymore, there was a real person, sitting at the dinner table with us and talking and laughing and…everything.” He sighed. “Don’t get me wrong. From the day he was born Peter’s been a big pain in the ass. Basically a good kid, but a major pain nonetheless. Always the naïve little dreamer. I was always the practical one.”
Mohinder watched as Nathan twisted a wedding ring around his finger until the skin turned a raw red underneath.
“I remember when I found out about…what I can do,” Nathan said. “All I could think was ‘Thank God it’s me and not Peter.’”
“Why?” Mohinder asked, though he could guess the reason. Nathan, after all, had a sense of discretion where Peter had none. The practicality he’d mentioned was what had kept him from going too far, testing his powers by diving off buildings. Peter had no such practicality. Peter was blind with eagerness to understand what was happening to him. Nathan had put it on a shelf.
“I remember once when I was baby-sitting him he sent himself sailing through a glass door because he thought he was Superman,” Nathan went on as though Mohinder hadn’t spoken. “He cut his arm up pretty good. There was blood all over. He passed out in the car on the way to the hospital. I was eighteen and I’d never been so scared in my life.” He shook his head, lost in the memory. “That was nothing compared to the day when Peter came to me, talking about how he’d dreamed he could fly. I forgot I could be that scared.”
Mohinder wondered what his own life might have been like had his sister lived. What it would mean to have a sibling with abilities like the Petrellis had. Would Ashanti have been practical like Nathan? Would she have tried to hide it under the pretense of a normal life? Or would she have embraced her powers and gone with their father on a quest for meaning? Which would have been easier for him to accept as her brother? He couldn’t imagine.
“I forgot I could be that scared,” Nathan repeated into the silence.
***
The next day a dark-haired man with a crookedly tacked tie and a badge came to visit Peter and it was then, of all moments, that something finally happened.
Matt Parkman entered the room almost shyly, announcing himself as one of the officers who had interrogated Peter about the incident at the high school. He had just finished establishing how he’d tracked Peter down in the hospital after hearing of his collapse when the machines attaching Peter to the world around him began to wail. The color immediately drained from Matt’s face and Mohinder didn’t miss the film of sweat that suddenly appeared on his upper lip, the way his hand flew to his forehead while Nathan flew across the room, searching for a call button. Medical staff soon flooded the room and Mohinder allowed himself to be pushed into the hallway, bringing the still unsettled Matt with him.
“Are you all right?” Mohinder asked as Matt fell against the blank wall opposite Peter’s room, a faint redness appearing just under his nostrils.
“Yeah, I…,” Matt began, but trailed off. Brow furrowing, he dabbed at his nose with the tips of his fingers, his eyes on Mohinder all the time. He wiped the resulting redness on the sides of his dark suit pants and held his sleeve up to his nose, his full cheeks reddening as he cast about for a tissue or perhaps a men’s room.
“I think it stopped,” Mohinder said, noticing that no further blood came off on Matt’s sleeve.
Matt pulled his arm away and glanced down. “Good,” he said, lowering his arm to his side and then pushing himself away from the wall only to lean wearily against it once more. He cleared his throat and nodded toward the room. “Are you a friend of his?” he asked.
Mohinder realized he hadn’t gotten a chance to introduce himself after the surprise of the man’s sudden appearance and the chaos that had followed.
He considered his answer carefully, knowing that there was nothing about their dubious relationship that qualified Mohinder and Peter as friends. But how to explain what a man who barely knew Peter was doing sitting vigil in his hospital room? How did he know this man didn’t mean Peter some kind of harm?
“I didn’t mean to do it,” Matt said before Mohinder had a chance to reply.
Mohinder looked up. “Do what?” he asked.
“Whatever happened in there,” Matt said, nodding toward the room where doctors and nurses were still struggling to stabilize Peter. Matt stared at Mohinder for a moment and Mohinder shifted, a feeling of invasion washing over him at Matt’s probing look. “You know about him, don’t you? About what he can do?”
Mohinder raised his eyebrows. “I do,” he admitted carefully. “Do you?”
Matt nodded. “When we were in the interrogation room with him, he could hear my thoughts,” Matt said. “And I, uh, I could hear his.”
Understanding dawned on Mohinder. At least this explained why Matt had gone to such great lengths to seek Peter out.
“And you were trying to read his thoughts just now?” Mohinder asked, beginning to wonder if that was what had caused Peter’s distress and then clamping down on the thought, knowing Matt might be able to hear him.
“I wasn’t trying to hear him,” Matt said. “It’s all sort of new to me, so I can’t really control it yet. Sometimes I hear things I’m not supposed to and…well, he was broadcasting pretty loudly. So was his brother.”
Mohinder tilted his head. “What did you hear?” he asked. “From Peter, I mean.” He had no interest in violating Nathan’s privacy by asking about his thoughts. But the inner workings of Peter’s mind might give him some clue as to what was wrong with him.
“Nonsense, mostly,” Matt said and the apology in his voice made it clear to Mohinder that he’d overheard Mohinder’s expectation. “I guess I should have stayed away. He had an intense reaction last time, too, when he realized he could read my thoughts.”
Mohinder crossed his arms. “Was he trying to read you just now?” he asked. “In there?”
Matt shrugged. “I got the idea that he picked up that I was there,” he said. “It’s weird. Being near him. It’s like holding a mirror up to a mirror. There’s all these thoughts bouncing around and you’re not really sure what the hell is going on. But yeah. He might have read me a little bit while I was in there. And you two.”
Mohinder nodded slowly, feeling his lips fall open as if to give voice to some thought he wasn’t aware he was having. Self-consciously, he closed it again as he glanced back toward the room. Through the doorway he could see Nathan being restrained by a male nurse as Peter was examined. Once again, he thought of Peter as he’d known him that first day, bangs falling into his eyes as he tried to put into words the experience of his new powers, enthusiasm flagging in the face of Mohinder’s open display of skepticism.
Does that sound as lame as I think it sounds?
The words rushed toward him again and he thought of how ridiculous it had sounded at the time. But in the long run, what Peter had been saying turned out to be true. With his brother in Nevada, he couldn’t fly. And with the junkie psychic painter nowhere to be found, he couldn’t draw the future. But physical proximity made their powers temporarily his. He absorbed the abilities of others.
And when he’d absorbed Matt’s ability, his steady deterioration had suddenly gained significant momentum.
And just as suddenly, Mohinder had the theory he’d been searching for.
TBC
Characters/Pairings: Mohinder, Nathan, Peter, a special appearance by Matt (slight Mohinder/Peter pre-slash if you squint)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: vague slashiness
Spoilers: Through Fallout. Also plays with a popular theory about something that happened to Peter at the end of that episode.
Summary: At a loss for answers after the end of Fallout, Nathan seeks help from an unexpected source.
Disclaimer: Heroes and the associated characters don’t belong to me.
Notes: I used Adrian Pasdar and Milo Ventimiglia’s approximate real life age difference as the basis for the age difference between Nathan and Peter in the story. Also, my VCR and computer hate me, so I’ve been unable to review some of the episodes. Apologies in advance for any resulting glaring inconsistencies with canon. Also, still new to lj so apologies for any glaring mistakes in that respect as well.
The Road of Trials
Part One
The phone when Mohinder plucked it from its cradle was still warm from having been clutched in his hand all day and half the night. With Eden still hanging heavily in his mind, he half-expected it to be her, looking to explain her cryptic call from earlier. But the voice on the other end held none of Eden’s soft sharpness. Instead, a male voice, stressed and roughened, asked,
“Is this Suresh?”
Mohinder was cautious, almost defensive in his reply. “Who is this?”
It could have been any number of people. If it couldn’t be Eden, Mohinder wanted it to be one of the many people he’d been trying to contact since his return to New York. One of the few that hadn’t turned up dead or missing, calling him back out of curiosity or intrigue. His more guarded side remembered the armed exterminator he’d found in his apartment the day he’d met Eden, the man in the horn-rimmed glasses riding in the back of his cab.
“My name is Petrelli. Nathan Petrelli. We, uh, met before. Briefly.”
Mohinder sat up straighter in the desk chair he’d been slumped in all day, nearly knocking over the lamp that provided the apartment with its sole source of illumination.
“I remember,” he replied once he’d righted the lamp with minimal damage to the scattered contents of his work space.
What he remembered was the way Nathan Petrelli had so callously dismissed him with a thoughtlessly tossed-off peace sign and a muttered order to have Mohinder dragged away by his bodyguards. More than that, he remembered how Peter Petrelli had shown up on Mohinder’s doorstep hours later, all earnestness and false hope. A man who could take flight and draw the future but not outside the presence of his politician brother or a heroin-addicted artist he himself barely knew. A man who received mysterious messages from the future telling him to rescue high school cheerleaders.
A man, Mohinder had felt at the time, who was either more than slightly delusional or playing some kind of cruel prank. The Petrellis had been a bitter disappointment to him in every way, but still, when the awkward silence had gone on long enough, Mohinder felt himself compelled to ask,
“How can I help you, Mr. Petrelli?”
“I think you might know my brother,” Nathan said. “Peter Petrelli.”
“Yes,” Mohinder said.
“And so you probably know about…”
“Your abilities,” Mohinder filled in, sensing Petrelli’s hesitance. “Yes, Peter mentioned them when we spoke.” It would have been more accurate to say that Peter had gone into great and almost unnecessary detail about his brother’s newfound talent for flight, the gleam of obvious hero worship burning bright in his eyes. Still, Mohinder was feeling diplomatic.
“That book you wrote…,” Petrelli began but this time Mohinder cut him off.
“I didn’t write it,” he corrected. “My father did before he died. I’ve been following up on some of the research he did. The research that was the basis for the book.”
“Oh,” Petrelli said, clearly disappointed. “Then maybe you can’t help me.”
“Help you with what?” Mohinder asked, growing impatient.
Petrelli hesitated and Mohinder got the sense that he was considering hanging up the phone, pretending that the conversation had never taken place. But whatever had driven him to phone Mohinder in the first place, to seek out what he had formerly dismissed, was powerful enough that he pushed ahead with what sounded to Mohinder like great effort.
“It’s about Peter.”
Mohinder’s first uncharitable thought was that Peter Petrelli’s madness had driven him to do something stupid like throw himself off another tall building when no one was there to catch him. Slightly ashamed of himself, he brushed the idea away in time for Nathan Petrelli to rush on without waiting for Mohinder to prompt him.
“He collapsed a few hours ago. He’s in the hospital now and the doctors don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
“Mr. Petrelli, I’m not a physician…”
“I know,” Petrelli said curtly as if Mohinder had been implying that he was stupid. Which, in a way, he had. “The thing is, I’m starting to think that whatever’s wrong with him might have something to do with…with what he can do. And since you know about these things, I thought there was a chance you could help.”
He didn’t say it out loud, but from the tone of his voice, much more human than the indifference he’d displayed at their last meeting, it was clear to Mohinder that contacting him was beyond the last resort for Nathan Petrelli. He seemed almost embarrassed by his own desperation. With this knowledge in mind, Mohinder searched for polite ways to remind the man that he was neither a physician nor a psychiatrist and therefore most likely unqualified to help his brother. But then something Petrelli had said finally registered in his mind.
What he can do.
“What exactly is it that your brother can do?” Mohinder asked.
A silence, during which Mohinder could hear the background noise he hadn’t noticed before. The ever-restless activity of a hospital. A nurse shouting something to a doctor. The sirens of an ambulance in the distance, growing closer. The pneumatic sound of an automatic door opening and closing.
“I thought you could tell me,” Petrelli said finally. “Isn’t that what he went to you for?”
“Yes,” Mohinder said. “He said that he’d had some experience flying, but only when he was around you. And that he had briefly been able to draw the future but only after coming into contact with a heroin addicted artist that could do the same.”
“Isaac Mendes.” Petrelli volunteered the name a little to easily, but not without a slight note of dismay in his voice.
“He said all this, but was unable to demonstrate any kind of special ability on his own or even properly introduce me to anyone who could. Naturally, I was skeptical.”
Does that sound as lame as I think it sounds? Peter’s blushing voice echoed in his mind.
“Listen, no one knows better than me how flaky my brother can sound when he’s babbling on about all of that,” Petrelli said with surprising force. “Mostly he’s just a pain in the ass and an idiot besides, but what I can tell you is that he does fly. When he’s around me.”
It was as much an unexpected admission of Nathan’s own powers as it was of Nathan’s suspicions about Peter’s powers.
“You’ve seen this?” Mohinder said.
“Yes,” Petrelli said.
Mohinder was quiet for a moment as he considered. “I don’t know what you expect me to do for your brother, Mr. Petrelli.”
“Neither do I,” Petrelli said. “But it’s not like I can tell anybody here what I think might be going on.”
It was true enough.
“All right,” Mohinder said, taking up a pad of paper and a pen off his desk. “What hospital are you at?”
Again, Petrelli hesitated.
“The thing is, we’re not in New York.”
***
If there were any bright sides to having your father violently murdered in a foreign city and having to identify his body after the fact, the lack of suspense involved was one of them. Mohinder didn’t like to think of how his father had died. But neither did he like to think of him lingering in the cold detachment of a hospital either, his body a motionless placeholder for the person he’d once been, stuck in a stalemate with the inevitable. He also didn’t like to think of himself or his mother in the place of Nathan Petrelli, resolutely holding onto a hand that couldn’t hold his back.
That Peter Petrelli was sick Nathan had conveyed over the phone. What he’d failed to mention was that Peter was in a coma and deteriorating slowly. For all that he wasn’t a doctor, Mohinder felt he might still have been able to put on a good show if he’d been able to ask Peter where it hurt and how much. But Peter’s pain, if he felt any, went without communication and Mohinder could only loiter at his bedside, listening as Nathan relayed exactly what had happened in choked tones.
“They had him in custody for a while. There was a murder at a local high school and they held Peter for interrogation,” Nathan recited without any discernible inflection. He kept glancing toward Peter as if expecting some kind of interjection, receiving none.
“What was he doing at a high school in Texas?” Mohinder asked, thinking there was no end to the eccentricities of Peter Petrelli’s story.
“Trying to save a cheerleader,” Nathan said dismissively, as if this were only a minor detail.
But Mohinder was interested. “He said something about a cheerleader to me once,” he said, remembering the purpose with which Peter had recited the line: Save the cheerleader, save the world. “We were on the subway, heading back from that painter’s loft. One moment he was standing next to me, planning out a career in professional stalking. The next he was at the other end of the car, raving about a Japanese man who’d bent time and space to bring him a message from the future.”
Now it was Nathan’s turn to look mildly enlightened. “A Japanese guy who could time travel?” he said.
Mohinder nodded.
Nathan looked sick in the same way someone might if they’d just finished off a bottle of salad dressing only to find it was a year past its expiration date. “I think I met him. In a diner outside of Las Vegas. He…saw me. Flying. He started talking about how he was special too. I thought he was crazy, but if Peter saw him…”
Mohinder sighed, sitting back in his chair. He restrained himself from the sudden and irrational urge to glare petulantly at the young man on the bed, who remained oblivious to the revelation of his own apparent sanity. How was it that a boy like this could have such luck stumbling on the very people Mohinder was trying to contact when he’d had only the barest of hints and Mohinder had an entire list to guide his own fruitless efforts? Why had no one come from the future to advise Mohinder when he’d been on the verge of giving up, frustrated and disheartened?
The urge to glare left him as he observed from up close just how sick Peter appeared to be. Face the color of parchment, maddening hair swept out of his face, blankets tucked tightly around him as though the rails were not enough to keep him from falling off the bed should he happen to experience any sudden movements, which he wouldn’t.
When Mohinder had met him, Peter had been full of nervous movement, anxious with the need to be believed and the need to understand what was happening to him. To see him confined to this unnatural stillness unsettled Mohinder.
“The cheerleader too, by the way,” Nathan added.
“The cheerleader what?” Mohinder asked, allowing himself to be pulled back to the present.
“Just before he collapsed, he was rambling on about how he’d had these dreams and how he could do things when he was near other people who could do things,” Nathan explained. “It was heavily implied that there was something the cheerleader could do and that he had mimicked her. Oh, and a cop who’d read his mind. But he was pretty out of it by then, so who knows how much of that is true.” He paused. “I mean, there can’t be that many of us, can there?”
It shouldn’t have surprised Mohinder that a man so firmly ensconced in denial up until now should be so ignorant of the magnitude of the phenomenon to which he was so closely tied. Mohinder couldn’t help but think that his own denial had provided for him the opposite experience. To him, the phenomenon was impersonal. It was always “out there.” Only when he’d found out about Ashanti had it become smaller and more personal.
“On the contrary, my father kept a rather long list of people he thought might have potential,” Mohinder said. “I’ve been spending time in New York trying to contact some of them, but it seems a disproportionately high number are either dead or missing. I have trouble believing it’s a coincidence.” A thought occurred to him. “Could Peter’s illness have been caused by someone trying to harm him?”
Nathan shrugged, the helpless motion of someone too hollowed out by worry to narrow down the possibilities. “The doctors have run tests, but so far nothing,” he said. “The only thing they can say for sure is that he’s getting worse and they don’t know why.”
Nathan’s grip on his brother’s hand tightened as though holding on more tightly to Peter’s physical form could somehow halt the downward spiral of his spiritual one. Otherwise, he remained stoic. Despite his rumpled clothing and burgeoning stubble, Nathan’s exterior was that of an unyielding politician. Peter’s condition was a battle Nathan fully intended to fight and Mohinder had been drafted into the fray. But Mohinder didn’t have the energy to put on a brave façade of his own and so allowed his expression to fall into a grim frown as his mind began to work.
***
“So what can you do?” Nathan asked some time later, taking the Styrofoam cup of coffee Mohinder was pushing into his hands and setting it aside without a second glance. Mohinder wasn’t sure how to help Peter, but he was reasonably sure that a hunger strike wasn’t the solution.
With a sigh, Mohinder sat in the chair that had become his, considering not only the question but the timing of it. Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since his arrival in Texas. He hadn’t even checked into a hotel yet, had barely slept. In all that time, he’d gotten little conversation from Nathan apart from the initial recounting of Peter’s collapse. Now this.
“Are you asking if I have a power like yours and Peter’s?” Mohinder replied once he’d settled the curve of his back so that it rested as comfortably as possible in the awkward curve of the chair.
“Don’t you?” Nathan asked as if he hadn’t considered it might be otherwise.
“I can sort through other people’s research and break into strangers’ apartments,” Mohinder said. “I can drive a cab and teach an advanced course on genetics. I can stubbornly maintain skepticism in the face of all evidence.” As he spoke, his chin had lifted, a show of mock pride taken in the list of dubious achievements. He lowered it again as he admitted, “No, Nathan. I have no powers. I’m not special the way you and Peter are.”
Nathan nodded and it appeared he would have been satisfied with this answer but somehow Mohinder felt compelled to go on.
“I had a sister. Ashanti,” he said. “She was special. In fact, she inspired my father’s research.”
“What happened to her?” Nathan asked, apparently having noted Mohinder’s use of the past tense.
“I don’t know,” Mohinder said. “I didn’t even know she existed until recently. She died at a very young age.”
Nathan nodded, absorbing this neutrally. “Peter wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said.
If there was a way to respond to this seeming non sequitur with anything but confusion, Mohinder didn’t know what it was. “How do you mean?” he asked.
“I was almost a teenager when Peter was born,” Nathan said. “He wasn’t supposed to happen. I mean, my parents wanted a second child and there were miscarriages, but they’d given up on that whole idea by the time I started going to school. They thought five years was too big of an age gap between siblings.” He snorted. “Anyway, when I was eleven or twelve, it just happened. Suddenly I had a little brother.”
“That must have been strange for you,” Mohinder commented.
Nathan shook his head. “Not as strange as you would think,” he said. “I mean, I was raised in this house with the ghosts of all these children my parents had lost. So when Peter came along it was almost a relief because finally there weren’t ghosts anymore, there was a real person, sitting at the dinner table with us and talking and laughing and…everything.” He sighed. “Don’t get me wrong. From the day he was born Peter’s been a big pain in the ass. Basically a good kid, but a major pain nonetheless. Always the naïve little dreamer. I was always the practical one.”
Mohinder watched as Nathan twisted a wedding ring around his finger until the skin turned a raw red underneath.
“I remember when I found out about…what I can do,” Nathan said. “All I could think was ‘Thank God it’s me and not Peter.’”
“Why?” Mohinder asked, though he could guess the reason. Nathan, after all, had a sense of discretion where Peter had none. The practicality he’d mentioned was what had kept him from going too far, testing his powers by diving off buildings. Peter had no such practicality. Peter was blind with eagerness to understand what was happening to him. Nathan had put it on a shelf.
“I remember once when I was baby-sitting him he sent himself sailing through a glass door because he thought he was Superman,” Nathan went on as though Mohinder hadn’t spoken. “He cut his arm up pretty good. There was blood all over. He passed out in the car on the way to the hospital. I was eighteen and I’d never been so scared in my life.” He shook his head, lost in the memory. “That was nothing compared to the day when Peter came to me, talking about how he’d dreamed he could fly. I forgot I could be that scared.”
Mohinder wondered what his own life might have been like had his sister lived. What it would mean to have a sibling with abilities like the Petrellis had. Would Ashanti have been practical like Nathan? Would she have tried to hide it under the pretense of a normal life? Or would she have embraced her powers and gone with their father on a quest for meaning? Which would have been easier for him to accept as her brother? He couldn’t imagine.
“I forgot I could be that scared,” Nathan repeated into the silence.
***
The next day a dark-haired man with a crookedly tacked tie and a badge came to visit Peter and it was then, of all moments, that something finally happened.
Matt Parkman entered the room almost shyly, announcing himself as one of the officers who had interrogated Peter about the incident at the high school. He had just finished establishing how he’d tracked Peter down in the hospital after hearing of his collapse when the machines attaching Peter to the world around him began to wail. The color immediately drained from Matt’s face and Mohinder didn’t miss the film of sweat that suddenly appeared on his upper lip, the way his hand flew to his forehead while Nathan flew across the room, searching for a call button. Medical staff soon flooded the room and Mohinder allowed himself to be pushed into the hallway, bringing the still unsettled Matt with him.
“Are you all right?” Mohinder asked as Matt fell against the blank wall opposite Peter’s room, a faint redness appearing just under his nostrils.
“Yeah, I…,” Matt began, but trailed off. Brow furrowing, he dabbed at his nose with the tips of his fingers, his eyes on Mohinder all the time. He wiped the resulting redness on the sides of his dark suit pants and held his sleeve up to his nose, his full cheeks reddening as he cast about for a tissue or perhaps a men’s room.
“I think it stopped,” Mohinder said, noticing that no further blood came off on Matt’s sleeve.
Matt pulled his arm away and glanced down. “Good,” he said, lowering his arm to his side and then pushing himself away from the wall only to lean wearily against it once more. He cleared his throat and nodded toward the room. “Are you a friend of his?” he asked.
Mohinder realized he hadn’t gotten a chance to introduce himself after the surprise of the man’s sudden appearance and the chaos that had followed.
He considered his answer carefully, knowing that there was nothing about their dubious relationship that qualified Mohinder and Peter as friends. But how to explain what a man who barely knew Peter was doing sitting vigil in his hospital room? How did he know this man didn’t mean Peter some kind of harm?
“I didn’t mean to do it,” Matt said before Mohinder had a chance to reply.
Mohinder looked up. “Do what?” he asked.
“Whatever happened in there,” Matt said, nodding toward the room where doctors and nurses were still struggling to stabilize Peter. Matt stared at Mohinder for a moment and Mohinder shifted, a feeling of invasion washing over him at Matt’s probing look. “You know about him, don’t you? About what he can do?”
Mohinder raised his eyebrows. “I do,” he admitted carefully. “Do you?”
Matt nodded. “When we were in the interrogation room with him, he could hear my thoughts,” Matt said. “And I, uh, I could hear his.”
Understanding dawned on Mohinder. At least this explained why Matt had gone to such great lengths to seek Peter out.
“And you were trying to read his thoughts just now?” Mohinder asked, beginning to wonder if that was what had caused Peter’s distress and then clamping down on the thought, knowing Matt might be able to hear him.
“I wasn’t trying to hear him,” Matt said. “It’s all sort of new to me, so I can’t really control it yet. Sometimes I hear things I’m not supposed to and…well, he was broadcasting pretty loudly. So was his brother.”
Mohinder tilted his head. “What did you hear?” he asked. “From Peter, I mean.” He had no interest in violating Nathan’s privacy by asking about his thoughts. But the inner workings of Peter’s mind might give him some clue as to what was wrong with him.
“Nonsense, mostly,” Matt said and the apology in his voice made it clear to Mohinder that he’d overheard Mohinder’s expectation. “I guess I should have stayed away. He had an intense reaction last time, too, when he realized he could read my thoughts.”
Mohinder crossed his arms. “Was he trying to read you just now?” he asked. “In there?”
Matt shrugged. “I got the idea that he picked up that I was there,” he said. “It’s weird. Being near him. It’s like holding a mirror up to a mirror. There’s all these thoughts bouncing around and you’re not really sure what the hell is going on. But yeah. He might have read me a little bit while I was in there. And you two.”
Mohinder nodded slowly, feeling his lips fall open as if to give voice to some thought he wasn’t aware he was having. Self-consciously, he closed it again as he glanced back toward the room. Through the doorway he could see Nathan being restrained by a male nurse as Peter was examined. Once again, he thought of Peter as he’d known him that first day, bangs falling into his eyes as he tried to put into words the experience of his new powers, enthusiasm flagging in the face of Mohinder’s open display of skepticism.
Does that sound as lame as I think it sounds?
The words rushed toward him again and he thought of how ridiculous it had sounded at the time. But in the long run, what Peter had been saying turned out to be true. With his brother in Nevada, he couldn’t fly. And with the junkie psychic painter nowhere to be found, he couldn’t draw the future. But physical proximity made their powers temporarily his. He absorbed the abilities of others.
And when he’d absorbed Matt’s ability, his steady deterioration had suddenly gained significant momentum.
And just as suddenly, Mohinder had the theory he’d been searching for.
TBC