Title: The Happiness Trap
Genre: Romance
Rating: T
Pairing: Mohinder x OC
Spoilers: N/A
Summary: She can become anything for you. Wife, lover, best friend, wise man, fool, idol. It isn't a bad life to have everyone in the world at your beck and call.
Word Count: 806
Warnings: N/A
Disclaimer: Not mine. Summary belongs to Star Wars: The Original Series.
A/N: I am pretending Heroes: Reborn doesn't exist.
Contentment (noun) 1. The state of being contented; satisfaction; ease of mind 2. Archaic: the act of making contentedly satisfied
It was hard almost every day to return to his apartment – days when he was distracted walking through the door, so distracted that he still expected Mira to be there, still expected there to be the feeling of life within his walls. But then he would remember that Mira was gone, that he had driven her away. Again. No matter how many times he tried, something always wound up pushing other people away. There was research to be done, people to help, people to escape from. It always drove other people away. No matter how hard he tried to make their relationship work, he was not enough for her. Now he was alone.
The world now – it was different, too, easier, and yet harder, too. When Claire performed her little stunt at the Carnival, it ushered them all – plummeted them into really – the world. People who only knew mutants as comic book characters, as movie heroes and villain, were suddenly, and intensely, confronted with the knowledge that their world was much, much smaller than they had originally thought. They were not special. They were not as evolved as they had imagined. They were not at the top of God's evolutionary ladder.
Some people found it fascinating – it was their childhood dreams come to life. They could meet a real life Wolverine, Professor X, Storm, Ice Man. They could imagine that they, too, someday would realize their own power, could imagine that they were special. They imagined formulas to turn them into Captain America – things that Mohinder knew to be very real. Imagined Spider-Man like accidents in which they acquired their own gifts and skills. They adored this new world. They adored what it represented: possibilities.
But, of course, there is always another side to the coin, always a reverse, a flip side. There are those who do not like to think their place in the world was being disrupted, their chain of command upset. They did not like the thought that they were not the leaders of evolution in their world. They wanted that place back. There was no more rungs on the ladder higher than theirs. There could not be. So they preached that this was not natural evolution, but a mutation, a genetic anomaly, like cancer, like a virus, that needed to be extinguished before it corrupted the entire species. It would infect others, it would kill them, destroy them. The Organization lived to destroy them all.
India, with its Hindus and its strong sense of karma, was as good a place as any to be, even though it reminded him every day of his family, of the life he could have had with Mira here. Its people were more concerned with work and life than with tracking down mutants. There were simply too many people in India's cities to worry about whether or not your neighbor could lift a car with his bare hands. God's plan and design was not up to them to decide. For the most part, he was safe here to conduct his research, as long as he kept to himself, kept his research within the walls of his own sad, empty little home. He could not preach in the streets or teach his findings to his students or ask for research funds, but no one was actively hunting him down here. Not yet. But he needed to go farther with his research, and he was worried that that might bring the wolves sniffing at his door.
With a sigh, he slumped down at his table, dropping his bag to the floor beside him. He didn't want to create more people with abilities. He knew firsthand how tentative and volatile a transformation like that could be. But there were so many things that genetics could be used for simply by introducing a bit of mutant DNA. He could give strength to the weak, heal diseases, repair cognitive functions, grow back limbs. And there were many mutants with abilities that were hard to hide, or hard to function with that he could help. Those whose physical forms were altered by their difference. Those whose gift was painful. If only he had enough funding to conduct his research.
It certainly was a bright new world now, and Mohinder worried every day what that world would bring to his door.