A New Day at Midnight, Part 5/19
Title: A New Day at Midnight (5/19)
Characters/Pairings: Mohinder/Peter, discussions of past Peter/Claude
Rating: R
Warnings: AU, character death (past tense), angst
Spoilers: Written during the hiatus following “Parasite,” so anything up through there just to be safe. Loosely shares some themes with the episode “Five Years Gone” but was primarily written without prior knowledge of the episode’s content.
Summary: In an alternate universe where heroes are persecuted rather than celebrated, Mohinder and Peter meet under slightly different circumstances, each hiding dangerous secrets.
Disclaimer: Heroes and the associated characters don’t belong to me.
Previous Parts: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four
A New Day at Midnight
Part 5/19
The more Mohinder stared at the drawings, the more he felt like a patient in a psychiatrist’s office being asked to look at a series of inkblots and share what he thought he saw. One thing was for certain: delusional psychotic or not, Peter Petrelli wasn’t exactly overflowing with artistic talent.
When Mohinder had first stumbled upon the scrap of paper showing the stick figure asleep in bed, he’d put it in his pocket without the conscious intention of looking at it again, much less stealing it. However, one of the many pitfalls of watching someone sleep was the boredom that came with it. The urgency of Peter’s condition fading after a few hours, Mohinder had taken the liberty of finding other ways to pass the time until the other man woke.
Remembering the sketch, he’d pulled it out, flattening it atop the upturned cardboard box Peter used as a makeshift coffee table. Smoothing out its wrinkles, he became curious once again as to the whereabouts of the picture’s second half and had begun a search. As it turned out, he not only found the other pieces to the first drawing, but several more drawings that were also more or less in tact. He worked until nearly dawn piecing them all together like small puzzles. Too tired by the end of it to attempt any kind of interpretation, Mohinder had then gone in search of a book to read. The next thing he remembered was hearing Peter in the bathroom.
Everything that came after that was overshadowed in Mohinder’s memory by what he was coming to think of as his spectacular display of tactlessness, to which Peter had perhaps rightfully responded by asking him to leave. Mohinder hadn’t meant any harm in sharing his father’s story but he of all people should have known better than to tread on such a raw subject. He had pushed and Peter hadn’t been ready. What had happened was his own fault.
He’d arrived back in his own apartment to find the drawings still on him. He’d reasoned that Peter needed time before being approached again. That he would return the artwork when Peter had cooled off. For now, there was no harm in looking.
It went without saying that these were not sophisticated works of art. Peter drew mostly in cryptic symbols and stick figures that would have been comical if not for the deliberate and ominous way in which they’d been drawn. The tranquility of the fragment that had originally caught Mohinder’s attention turned out to be the exception rather than the rule. These were not quiet meditations on tender moments.
The first of the five drawings Mohinder had been able to piece together was perhaps the most tame of the group. It was little more than a rough sketch of a stick figure standing in a wide open space, the line representing his arm extending into what looked like a paint brush. Other stick figures gathered around as if fascinated by the artist’s work. Squares sitting on triangles in the background seemed to represent a gallery of finished pieces and yet it was the work in progress that held the others’ attention so rapt. Something about it reminded Mohinder of the way characters in the movies looked when they were asked to gaze into a crystal ball.
The pieces of a second sketch, when put together, revealed an image of what looked to be a heavily populated cemetery, numerous headstones represented as small arches floating in never ending lines, occasionally punctuated by more elaborate statues. The plot in the foreground featured a headstone that simply read “Petrelli.” Many of the other graves had flowers, but this one had a small, forlorn flag of undistinguished origin sagging before it. Otherwise, it looked to be neglected, covered in grass that was long but flattened, as if someone had trodden upon it on their way to a different site. Two figures stood in the distance--one drawn more lightly than the other, a deliberateness to the technique Mohinder couldn’t interpret. Was it meant to be an indication of race? Or was the lighter figure some kind of ghost?
As he lingered over each image in turn, Mohinder was aware of acute paranoia setting in. The kind that made him feel as though someone was looking over his shoulder. He almost thought he could hear the breathing of another person in the room, footsteps on the floor, a stirring in the air. Once, a book fell off a shelf for no apparent reason. A guilty conscience was apparently a very powerful thing indeed. And yet Mohinder couldn’t put the drawings down. Couldn’t put them away or admit to their creator what he had done.
If the second drawing seemed deeply personal, the third was more general. Arranged like a photo in a newspaper, all it showed was a crudely drawn vehicle--no more than a box with wheels, the name of a florist scrawled across its side--stopped at a strange angle in the middle of the street, represented by two parallel lines. A broken body lay on the road in front of the vehicle while a crowd began to gather around it, bystanders who couldn’t help but gawk at the fresh tragedy. Frozen in shock and fear.
Even more violent than this, the fourth sketch showed a figure with a triangle around its waist (probably a skirt) laying atop a table, hovered over by a group of other figures all dressed in what looked like surgeon’s caps and masks, holding up sharp-looking instruments. Dozens of wires attached the girl’s body to a series of machines by her bed. Blood had gathered on the floor, exaggerated pools of it that filled the entire bottom half of the page. The girl’s face featured no mouth with which to represent a scream, but the girl’s chest was lifted as if she was crying out in terror and excruciating pain. She was being tortured. But why? And by whom?
And then there was the drawing that had so captured Mohinder’s attention in the first place. It stood in stark contrast to the other four in the relative serenity of its characters. As Mohinder had suspected, the diagonal line across the first figure’s waist was indeed the arm of a second figure. They lay in bed together as they would be seen from above--the first on its back, the second on its side. Their eyes were drawn as slanted lines; they both looked deeply asleep. Small lines of worry wrinkled both their foreheads, but the embrace was comforting. Affectionate. All the more fascinating considering the fact that both figures appeared to be male.
As a rule, Mohinder did not make a habit of involving himself in the love lives of others. He was barely involved in his own love life, such as it was (or wasn’t). That Peter was an attractive man was never a question in Mohinder’s mind. But up until now, he’d appreciated Peter’s aesthetic appeal only as someone might admire a beautiful piece of artwork they didn’t quite understand. Distancing himself in this way meant that the problem of Peter’s sexual orientation was never a consideration. Seeing this picture made it all much more immediate, much more personal as Mohinder couldn’t stop himself from wondering in idle moments what it would be like to be that second figure, wrapped around Peter’s body, asleep and content but for the worry brought on by dreams.
The phone rang with a suddenness that startled Mohinder out of his reverie and nearly out of his chair. Recovering himself, he considered ignoring the call in favor of continuing his contemplation of Peter’s drawings, on figuring out the story he was sure could be found in them somewhere. But the habit of answering was firmly ingrained and so he reached for the receiver just as the thing was about to bleat for the third time.
“This is Suresh,” he said.
“Where have you been?” the familiar, slightly distorted voice replied, the tone a firm tug on an imaginary leash.
The government. The calls came at irregular intervals, always when Mohinder had forgotten to expect them. He was never given a name for the person on the other end. Never even certain that it was the same person every time.
“I was helping a sick neighbor,” Mohinder replied curtly. “I would have called if something had changed.” He’d written the number they’d given him on a piece of masking tape and stuck it to the side of the phone’s cradle.
“It doesn’t matter,” the voice responded, equally curt. “You know the procedure. You are there when we call.”
“I’ll just let my neighbor drown in a pool of his own vomit next time, then,” Mohinder said, bristling.
“Do that,” the voice said, not exactly joking. “Or maybe while you’re holding back his hair you can ask him for ideas on passwords since you appear to be incapable of coming up with one on your own.”
Mohinder sighed. This was becoming a familiar argument. “I’ve told you a thousand times. I’m a geneticist, not a technological expert or a psychic,” he said. “I’m sure there are any number of people in your employ who could figure out this password in a matter of minutes. Or find a way around it. All I can do is make educated guesses based on what I knew of my father, which really amounts to very little.”
“Our people have more important things to work on,” the voice said. “Unless you’re no longer interested in helping us find a way to properly deal with monsters like Sylar…”
“Of course I’m still interested,” Mohinder said. “I just feel that there are better uses of my skills and knowledge. If you would just let me see my father’s notes, other parts of his research I could help you come up with a cure or some other way of suppressing special abilities in those who would use them to do violence--”
“Your father’s notes are classified information,” the voice informed him.
“But the file he encrypted apparently isn’t,” Mohinder retorted.
“It could be nothing.”
“It could be everything,” Mohinder countered. “And I would be the first to see it.”
A pause.
“Don’t give us a reason to believe we can’t trust you, Mr. Suresh.”
Mohinder swallowed, sensing the underlying threat. A far cry from the compassion and reassurance with which they’d originally approached him. The man who’d killed his father was locked up, they’d said. But others like him were still running free. As the only son of one of their victims, it was Mohinder’s responsibility to contribute to the global effort to stop the violence. Back then, they would have had him believe that the encrypted file was the key to it all. Now this.
“Do you understand, Mr. Suresh?”
Mohinder inhaled deeply. “I understand,” he said.
“Good.”
And then, as always, a dial tone.
Part Six
Characters/Pairings: Mohinder/Peter, discussions of past Peter/Claude
Rating: R
Warnings: AU, character death (past tense), angst
Spoilers: Written during the hiatus following “Parasite,” so anything up through there just to be safe. Loosely shares some themes with the episode “Five Years Gone” but was primarily written without prior knowledge of the episode’s content.
Summary: In an alternate universe where heroes are persecuted rather than celebrated, Mohinder and Peter meet under slightly different circumstances, each hiding dangerous secrets.
Disclaimer: Heroes and the associated characters don’t belong to me.
Previous Parts: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four
A New Day at Midnight
Part 5/19
The more Mohinder stared at the drawings, the more he felt like a patient in a psychiatrist’s office being asked to look at a series of inkblots and share what he thought he saw. One thing was for certain: delusional psychotic or not, Peter Petrelli wasn’t exactly overflowing with artistic talent.
When Mohinder had first stumbled upon the scrap of paper showing the stick figure asleep in bed, he’d put it in his pocket without the conscious intention of looking at it again, much less stealing it. However, one of the many pitfalls of watching someone sleep was the boredom that came with it. The urgency of Peter’s condition fading after a few hours, Mohinder had taken the liberty of finding other ways to pass the time until the other man woke.
Remembering the sketch, he’d pulled it out, flattening it atop the upturned cardboard box Peter used as a makeshift coffee table. Smoothing out its wrinkles, he became curious once again as to the whereabouts of the picture’s second half and had begun a search. As it turned out, he not only found the other pieces to the first drawing, but several more drawings that were also more or less in tact. He worked until nearly dawn piecing them all together like small puzzles. Too tired by the end of it to attempt any kind of interpretation, Mohinder had then gone in search of a book to read. The next thing he remembered was hearing Peter in the bathroom.
Everything that came after that was overshadowed in Mohinder’s memory by what he was coming to think of as his spectacular display of tactlessness, to which Peter had perhaps rightfully responded by asking him to leave. Mohinder hadn’t meant any harm in sharing his father’s story but he of all people should have known better than to tread on such a raw subject. He had pushed and Peter hadn’t been ready. What had happened was his own fault.
He’d arrived back in his own apartment to find the drawings still on him. He’d reasoned that Peter needed time before being approached again. That he would return the artwork when Peter had cooled off. For now, there was no harm in looking.
It went without saying that these were not sophisticated works of art. Peter drew mostly in cryptic symbols and stick figures that would have been comical if not for the deliberate and ominous way in which they’d been drawn. The tranquility of the fragment that had originally caught Mohinder’s attention turned out to be the exception rather than the rule. These were not quiet meditations on tender moments.
The first of the five drawings Mohinder had been able to piece together was perhaps the most tame of the group. It was little more than a rough sketch of a stick figure standing in a wide open space, the line representing his arm extending into what looked like a paint brush. Other stick figures gathered around as if fascinated by the artist’s work. Squares sitting on triangles in the background seemed to represent a gallery of finished pieces and yet it was the work in progress that held the others’ attention so rapt. Something about it reminded Mohinder of the way characters in the movies looked when they were asked to gaze into a crystal ball.
The pieces of a second sketch, when put together, revealed an image of what looked to be a heavily populated cemetery, numerous headstones represented as small arches floating in never ending lines, occasionally punctuated by more elaborate statues. The plot in the foreground featured a headstone that simply read “Petrelli.” Many of the other graves had flowers, but this one had a small, forlorn flag of undistinguished origin sagging before it. Otherwise, it looked to be neglected, covered in grass that was long but flattened, as if someone had trodden upon it on their way to a different site. Two figures stood in the distance--one drawn more lightly than the other, a deliberateness to the technique Mohinder couldn’t interpret. Was it meant to be an indication of race? Or was the lighter figure some kind of ghost?
As he lingered over each image in turn, Mohinder was aware of acute paranoia setting in. The kind that made him feel as though someone was looking over his shoulder. He almost thought he could hear the breathing of another person in the room, footsteps on the floor, a stirring in the air. Once, a book fell off a shelf for no apparent reason. A guilty conscience was apparently a very powerful thing indeed. And yet Mohinder couldn’t put the drawings down. Couldn’t put them away or admit to their creator what he had done.
If the second drawing seemed deeply personal, the third was more general. Arranged like a photo in a newspaper, all it showed was a crudely drawn vehicle--no more than a box with wheels, the name of a florist scrawled across its side--stopped at a strange angle in the middle of the street, represented by two parallel lines. A broken body lay on the road in front of the vehicle while a crowd began to gather around it, bystanders who couldn’t help but gawk at the fresh tragedy. Frozen in shock and fear.
Even more violent than this, the fourth sketch showed a figure with a triangle around its waist (probably a skirt) laying atop a table, hovered over by a group of other figures all dressed in what looked like surgeon’s caps and masks, holding up sharp-looking instruments. Dozens of wires attached the girl’s body to a series of machines by her bed. Blood had gathered on the floor, exaggerated pools of it that filled the entire bottom half of the page. The girl’s face featured no mouth with which to represent a scream, but the girl’s chest was lifted as if she was crying out in terror and excruciating pain. She was being tortured. But why? And by whom?
And then there was the drawing that had so captured Mohinder’s attention in the first place. It stood in stark contrast to the other four in the relative serenity of its characters. As Mohinder had suspected, the diagonal line across the first figure’s waist was indeed the arm of a second figure. They lay in bed together as they would be seen from above--the first on its back, the second on its side. Their eyes were drawn as slanted lines; they both looked deeply asleep. Small lines of worry wrinkled both their foreheads, but the embrace was comforting. Affectionate. All the more fascinating considering the fact that both figures appeared to be male.
As a rule, Mohinder did not make a habit of involving himself in the love lives of others. He was barely involved in his own love life, such as it was (or wasn’t). That Peter was an attractive man was never a question in Mohinder’s mind. But up until now, he’d appreciated Peter’s aesthetic appeal only as someone might admire a beautiful piece of artwork they didn’t quite understand. Distancing himself in this way meant that the problem of Peter’s sexual orientation was never a consideration. Seeing this picture made it all much more immediate, much more personal as Mohinder couldn’t stop himself from wondering in idle moments what it would be like to be that second figure, wrapped around Peter’s body, asleep and content but for the worry brought on by dreams.
The phone rang with a suddenness that startled Mohinder out of his reverie and nearly out of his chair. Recovering himself, he considered ignoring the call in favor of continuing his contemplation of Peter’s drawings, on figuring out the story he was sure could be found in them somewhere. But the habit of answering was firmly ingrained and so he reached for the receiver just as the thing was about to bleat for the third time.
“This is Suresh,” he said.
“Where have you been?” the familiar, slightly distorted voice replied, the tone a firm tug on an imaginary leash.
The government. The calls came at irregular intervals, always when Mohinder had forgotten to expect them. He was never given a name for the person on the other end. Never even certain that it was the same person every time.
“I was helping a sick neighbor,” Mohinder replied curtly. “I would have called if something had changed.” He’d written the number they’d given him on a piece of masking tape and stuck it to the side of the phone’s cradle.
“It doesn’t matter,” the voice responded, equally curt. “You know the procedure. You are there when we call.”
“I’ll just let my neighbor drown in a pool of his own vomit next time, then,” Mohinder said, bristling.
“Do that,” the voice said, not exactly joking. “Or maybe while you’re holding back his hair you can ask him for ideas on passwords since you appear to be incapable of coming up with one on your own.”
Mohinder sighed. This was becoming a familiar argument. “I’ve told you a thousand times. I’m a geneticist, not a technological expert or a psychic,” he said. “I’m sure there are any number of people in your employ who could figure out this password in a matter of minutes. Or find a way around it. All I can do is make educated guesses based on what I knew of my father, which really amounts to very little.”
“Our people have more important things to work on,” the voice said. “Unless you’re no longer interested in helping us find a way to properly deal with monsters like Sylar…”
“Of course I’m still interested,” Mohinder said. “I just feel that there are better uses of my skills and knowledge. If you would just let me see my father’s notes, other parts of his research I could help you come up with a cure or some other way of suppressing special abilities in those who would use them to do violence--”
“Your father’s notes are classified information,” the voice informed him.
“But the file he encrypted apparently isn’t,” Mohinder retorted.
“It could be nothing.”
“It could be everything,” Mohinder countered. “And I would be the first to see it.”
A pause.
“Don’t give us a reason to believe we can’t trust you, Mr. Suresh.”
Mohinder swallowed, sensing the underlying threat. A far cry from the compassion and reassurance with which they’d originally approached him. The man who’d killed his father was locked up, they’d said. But others like him were still running free. As the only son of one of their victims, it was Mohinder’s responsibility to contribute to the global effort to stop the violence. Back then, they would have had him believe that the encrypted file was the key to it all. Now this.
“Do you understand, Mr. Suresh?”
Mohinder inhaled deeply. “I understand,” he said.
“Good.”
And then, as always, a dial tone.
Part Six