2011
Genocide. It's a terrible word, but it's the one that Nathan thinks is the solution. I'm examining Nakamura's timeline, trying to find another answer, when I feel a familiar presence brush my mind. Automatically, the hairs on the back of my neck raise and I lift my head to the door. It's him, standing in the doorway of Isaac Mendez's apartment. He looks about the same as always, although his hair is a little greyer now. Greyer than mine, I note with a little pride. Is he fatter now? Okay, maybe that one was bitterness. I can't tell.
"Doctor Suresh," he says. His voice is cool. Even. Passionless.
"Director Parkman," I reply. I try to make my voice sound the same as his, but it wavers a little bit. Isn't this ridiculous? We're on the same side, after all.
"What are you doing here, Suresh?" he asks.
"Nathan asked me to investigate into what happened here yesterday," I say, and he looks angry. Oh, was this your assignment, Parkman? You must be messing it up, then, I think. But out loud, I say, "Look at all of this. Isn't it fascinating?" I ask as I trace some of the lines. "Each string represents a person. Every action, every choice. How people came together, how they were torn apart," and as I say this, I get physically closer to him. This map probably shows how we were torn apart, too. "It's a living map of the past."
Parkman looks confused. "Why would a terrorist care so much about the past?"
I move around a little bit of string, shifting things. Thoughts begin to spring into my head fully formed. "Maybe he thought he could change it," I say. I'm getting excited now. "Hiro Nakamura can stop time. Teleport by folding space. Theoretically, he can fold time as well." Are my theories the truth? Can I stop this terrible thing that Nathan has asked me to do? I spot a comic book sitting on the desk and I pick it up. This is the most excited I've been about my job for a long time. Is it a bad sign that I'm excited for someone on the other side?
Parkman is not nearly so excited. "So you're saying he's a time traveler," he says.
I raise an eyebrow, smile to myself. "Is it any stranger than being able to read someone's mind?" I ask. He's silent for a long moment. I still know where to hit him so it will hurt.
Finally: "Yeah, it is."
I look up at him. "Haven't you ever wished you could change the past? Send your life down a different path?" I know that you did, once.
"I used to be that guy," he says. "Wishing it and making it happen are two different things."
I shake my head. "For Nakamura it isn't. Look here," I say, pointing, and he sighs. "These two dates seem to be the focal points, both in the past. The first is the bomb," I say, pointing to the intersection. I move to the next one. "The other..." I trail off as I recognize the date.
"What? What is it?" he asks, but he seems far away.
"The other is the day I received my father's ashes," I say. There's a long pause as I desperately run through the day's events. Then it hits me. "I was with Peter Petrelli that day. On the subway. He said he saw a man who could freeze time!"
"Nakamura?" he asks.
"I don't know. He said he had a message for Peter," I tell him, and all of the sudden I know that something has to be done. Parkman isn't important anymore, and I start to run out of the room
"What?" he asked. "What was the message?" I ignore him. It isn't hard. "Hey! What was the message?!"
I stop on the landing and look back at him. "Save the cheerleader, save the world."
-----
Less than an hour later, I'm in a holding cell at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. "Save the cheerleader, save the world?" I ask Nakamura as I pace back and forth in front of him. There's blood on his face, and his nose looks a little swollen. "What does that mean?"
"How do you know that?" he asks me. He seems so young, so gullible. I don't think for a second that he's really the man that has plagued this administration for so long. At least, not the man right now.
"Five years ago, Peter Petrelli and I were on the subway," I tell him. "He said he saw a man who could stop time. That's what you do, Mr. Nakamura. Peter and I were on our way to see Issac Mendez, an artist who can paint the future. His work is remarkably accurate. Except this." I lay the comic book that I found down on the table. There's a panel of a man stabbing another man with a sword. The man holding the sword looks an awful lot like Nakamura, and the man on the unfortunate end like Sylar. I'm careful not to turn to the next page, which shows a man injecting a dark man with a syringe of something. The hand holding the syringe has a ring on the thumb. My ring. My thumb. My hand.
"Is that a new Ninth Wonders?" he asks. It's a silly question. And all of the sudden, I realize how hilarious the situation is. I think I'm going crazy. It's hard to keep myself under control, but somehow I manage to do so. Regardless, it sounds like the beginning of a bad joke: So, an Indian geneticist, a Japanese time traveler, and a silent Haitian are sitting in a U.S. Homeland Security holding cell with a prophetic comic book, when the Indian man turns to the Japanese man and says...
"The events in this comic. History didn't happen like this. You didn't kill Sylar. You tried to change the past! Trying to stop Sylar, is that it?" My voice is rising. I'm getting frantic. It's not the hilarity anymore. It's the implications.
He looks right at me, as if he can see down in to my very soul. "If you could save millions of lives," he asks, "wouldn't you?"
I'm not holding back laughter anymore. I'm dead serious. I open my mouth to answer, but then my phone rings. "Hello?" I ask.
"Mohinder, it's Nathan. What have you found out?"
"I think I need to speak to you in person. I have some very exciting news."
"Can you meet me at Isaac Mendez's apartment in an hour?"
"Absolutely, Mr. President."
2006
Almost exactly five years ago, when it was clear that Sylar was going to explode, I took Molly and we ran. Parkman came with us. I didn't quite know where I where we could go to avoid the fallout, but we ran anyway. Underground seemed as good a place as any. We made it into the subway tunnels, took one of the trains heading out of town. When it happened, we were in a subway packed with people. Parkman knew it was coming, could hear the wave of cries coming towards us. He shielded both Molly and I with his body, just selflessly threw himself in front of us without even a thought, and took four pieces of shrapnel to his chest for his effort. Molly and I escaped without a scratch.
I'd admit, that moment was the first time that I ever had an sexual thought about Matthew Parkman. He was bleeding out on the floor, which was not necessarily a turn-on, but he had saved my little girl, so I loved him.
It was a long recovery for Parkman. Matt, I mean. I called him Matt then. The hospitals were chaotic, but I managed to get a doctor to stabilize him. They didn't have the time or the space for anything more, so I took him back to my apartment, which was, thankfully, undamaged. I nursed him though the night and through the next several weeks. It was touch-and-go at times, but he made it fine.
Molly lived with us. The city was too busy dealing with the blast to worry about who was taking care of a little orphan girl. Now that things were out in the open, there was a huge anti-evolved human sentiment within the population, so I kept them both hidden.
Those weeks after the tragedy were terrible. I hadn't lost anyone that I was especially close to, but it was difficult not to get caught up in the mass mourning. Sometimes I would walk by the buildings and be overwhelmed by the women crying. The man who I used to buy newspapers from was gone. The woman who used to sell me ginger was gone. I could hear the woman who lived above us sobbing, pounding on the floor in agony when she was told that her husband was dead. I didn't even know any of their names. I wasn't sure that I wanted to. In heavy winds, flower petals from memorials lifted off of their stems and swirled to the ground together with the ashes, as heavy as rain.
It was all so much worse because I might have been able to have done something to have stopped it. If I had been smart enough or fast enough or whatever enough. I had known that it was coming, but that didn't change anything.
It was even worse for Matt. I didn't let him out of the apartment for three weeks because he was too busy healing, but I think that he could hear the cries of the city all the same, constantly going through his head. I realized after a week that he wasn't sleeping. He couldn't. To many thoughts, too many cries, too many screams. Some of them were his, but most weren't. His gift was a terrible burden during those times. The next week, I tried knocking him out with sleeping pills, but he resisted. Hated me for it.
The third week I stopped fighting him. Decided to listen instead. It was a good thing, because that was when he decided to talk. "Sometimes I can hear every single one of them, individually," Matt told me. "And sometimes it's just one unified cry." He shook his head. "What if I had been braver in Kirby Plaza?" he asked. "What if I had stayed and shot Sylar? I could have prevented all of this."
"You were brave enough," I said. "You saved Molly. You saved me."
"You saved me, too," he replied. "You're saving me right now. All of those thoughts out there kill me, but sometimes just having you in the apartment makes me feel better. The sound of your thoughts makes me feel better. You're just so calm."
I lay down beside him on the bed, and our shoulders touched for the first time. I hummed a lullaby from my childhood in my head, hoping that it would do the trick. It did. After a few minutes, he fell asleep, peacefully, not fighting all the way like he used to.
As I watched him sleeping, I realized that this was the first time that I had ever seen him smile.
-----
"It's not mine," Matt said to me after he got off of the phone one night, at the end of the third week. "The baby? Janice took a paternity test, and I'm not the father. She says that she's glad that the baby's father isn't someone...someone like me."
And this was just one more terrible punch in the gut for him. I didn't know if he needed to cry or something, so I didn't say anything, just sat there as we leaned against each other. "I need something that's real," he said.
I knew that he was talking about Us. Us, with a capitol "u". He could read minds. I tried to keep my thoughts under control, but I couldn't police myself every hour of the day. Stray thoughts sometimes escaped my mind like marbles rolling across the floor. He'd have to be a very dumb man not to know how I felt about him. And Matthew Jacob Parkman certainly isn't dumb.
"I don't want to be your rebound," I said. "That isn't fair to Molly. Or me."
"I know," he replied. "I don't know what I can do to prove to you that you aren't my way of making up for Janice. All I do is hope that you trust me when I say that I've been watching you ever since I moved in, but I didn't want to say anything for fear of hurting my family in L.A. But they're not my family anymore, you and Molly are, and there's a part of me that doesn't even care about what Janice said, is glad, actually, because I can finally admit that I've fallen for you, Mohinder Suresh." The he kissed me for the first time. I kissed back. I'm not a dumb man, either.
Later that night, I'd discover that his big hands very nearly fit around my waist. "I'm sorry for being so skinny," I murmured into his hair.
"You're just right," he replied. And when I thought about it, I agreed. There was something terrifying and out of control about the way that the world had been spinning these past few weeks, and it felt good to know that there was someone who could hold me down. And I think that he liked being able to hold on to something.
In the darkness, he nibbled along my jaw line, ran his fingers down my neck, sent shivers to a place that hadn't felt like this in a very long time. Maybe never. I hoped that I made him feel the same way, but when I saw the look on his face after he came, after we kissed, after I read Molly a bedtime story, after we brushed shoulders in the hallway, I didn't have to hope anymore, because I knew that I did. He was mine. I was his. We made sense.
So we fit together, as cliché as it sounds, like puzzle pieces. While the whole city, the whole nation, the whole world mourned, we held tight to each other to keep from falling off of the ground. Molly, too. Three people clinging together, awash after a great tragedy, and finding happiness. For about a month, it was perfect.
-----
And then it became time for Congressman Nathan Petrelli to assume office. He had already received accolades for his leadership in times of trouble, and people were already, even then, predicting bright things for his future. Maybe even the Presidency.
He called me on New Year's Eve 2006 and asked for a meeting. We had only met a handful of times, one of them when he thought that I was completely crazy, but I agreed to the meeting anyway in his old office. It was mostly cleared out by that point in preparation for the move the next day, but there were still two chairs. I found him gazing out of the window to the city below. Not all of the fires had been put out yet.
"Congressman Petrelli," I said. "Good evening."
He turned around to face me. "Nathan. Call me Nathan, please." Was there something familiar in his eyes? He didn't greet me, just started talking. "There's going to be a war, Mohinder. The people are already calling out for it. In revenge for what happened here two months ago, the people will cry for the blood of anyone else who has an ability. They will be slaughtered."
"People who are like you. I know what you can do, Nathan."
"We all do what we must to survive. Even at the expense of others. Isn't that some kind of genetic imperative, Professor?"
"I don't understand what you're asking of me," I said.
He turned around to face me. "There are quite a few of these people who are very dangerous. I was not elected to help those few. I was elected to help everyone else. Now we have a problem on our hands. This danger. We must eliminate it."
"What part do you want me to play?" I asked.
"I need your mind, Mohinder. I need you to develop a cure, one that can take these abilities away. If you can do that, we can save countless lives, those belonging to people with powers who just want to live ordinary lives, and those belonging to humans who might be killed if something like this ever happens again."
"I'll help you," I said. In those days, it was true that I wanted to help. Anyone with a heart would, after seeing all of the crying faces on the news, throughout the city. Even someone who was hiding two people with abilities in his own apartment.
"Do you vow to help me end this, whatever the cost?" he asked me.
"Whatever the cost."
After that, I went home. Nathan's voice rang in my head all night. We let Molly stay up until midnight to watch the ball drop, and then we tucked her into bed. Like fathers do. Like we were then.
And then it was just us awake in the apartment, but he didn't move towards me. Just laid his big hands out on the table and stared me in the face. "Whatever the cost? What does that mean, Mohinder?" he asked. "It's been on loop in your head ever since you got home. You haven't thought about anything else. No countdown from ten, no auld lang syne, no nothing."
I told him about my meeting with Nathan.
"That flying son of a bitch," Matt said. "He's going to sell the rest of us out to protect his own skin."
"He has a point, though," I said. "If I can cure this, then I can save a lot of people."
"Molly doesn't need to be cured. I don't need to be cured," he said.
"Even if it would save your life?" I asked. He didn't say anything, so I continued. "Even if your sacrifice meant that thousands, maybe millions of other lives were saved by eliminating those few of you who aren't good people? Besides, if I don't go to work for him, then he might start to dig up information on me. How long before he finds out that I'm hiding you and Molly?"
"I don't think that working for him will be the best way to keep him out of your personal life."
"I won't be working for him, really," I said. "I'll be in a lab, on my own. Maybe with some other researchers. He'll just be my political support. But he's a vindictive man. He knows what he wants. If I tell him no, he might not stop until he destroys me, and you and Molly in the process."
"It's just a really shitty situation. Mohinder."
"The world is looking shitty right now, but I think that this is the best way to fix things, Matt. You might not be able to read minds, but at least there will be peace. Isn't that what you've always wanted?" I asked.
He sighed. "Are you sure that you're not just doing this so that it can be said that you were the one who saved the world? So that it can be said that you're special?"
That was a low blow. What a way to start 2007.
On January second, I moved in to my new lab. Matt moved on to the couch. But then he moved back one night later.
-----
After he healed, Matt didn't just sit idle in my apartment all day. He had been going out, talking to those with abilities. Peter Petrelli. Hiro Nakamua. Niki Sanders. Hana Gittleman. Others. But it was hard on him. Too hard. All of these people were so deeply in mourning that sometimes he would just come home and cry. I begged him to stop seeing those people, but he didn't. Many nights he came home after Molly went to sleep and collapsed on our bed. I would lean over him and knead out all of that tense muscle, think the calm thoughts that made him feel so much more grounded.
But on one particular night, I couldn't. I still massaged his back, rubbed my hands across the hard lines of his shoulders. But I couldn't calm him. It had been a long day in the lab for me, too. Six months, and I was still no closer to a cure. Worse yet, I had had a bad meeting with Nathan earlier in the day. He had insinuated things that I wasn't comfortable with. i didn't want to make Matt anymore upset, but these were pressing concerns.
"I think Nathan knows that I'm hiding Molly," I said.
"What?" Matt asked.
"I think he knows. He made a comment to me today that rubbed the wrong way. Your research would go a lot smoother if you had some way to track all of these people down, wouldn't it, Mohinder? Like a tracking system?"
"Fucking hell," Matt said.
"I know."
"We have to send her underground," Matt said. "They talk about implementing these measures for identifying people with abilities and isolating them so that they can lead better lives, but it's all a ploy. I know it. If they take her, they'll experiment on her, twist her morals. Her life will be hell."
"Underground?" I asked. "How do we even do that?"
"Hiro Nakamura," he said. "He has some sort of connection with someone who can hide those with abilities. Keep them safe." This was in the days before Nakamura became quite so dangerous. Before Matt became quite so dangerous. They were able to meet back then, without being afraid of the other, long before Matt cut Nakamura out of the process entirely and dealt directly with Bennet. Or so I heard. By the time that happened, Matt and I weren't speaking, either.
We talked about other options for Molly. India, maybe. We could all go to India, stay with my family. But it was just a pipe dream. I was needed here, in America. To develop a cure. And I just couldn't wrangle a passport for Molly. So we gave her to Hiro. I cried like a baby, and she did, too, when she threw her thin arms around me.
"It's going to be all right, sweetie," I told her. "There's a family, in Colorado. They're going to take care of you. Keep you safe. They'll love you."
"But I love you, Mohinder!" she said. I'm pretty sure that that was the first time I really, really hated my job with a burning passion.
"I'll look for you every day," she said to us as she left, and I hoped that Matt and I wouldn't die for a long, long time. For us, of course, but also because I didn't want her to get the news standing over a map in some distant state.
-----
I wrote up a report for Nathan, about what evolved humans could to, how they could affect the world. It was a much darker work than my father's had been. I concluded with possible solutions. About one of the solutions, I said "They wouldn't be the first species to be exterminated for the preservation of another." Matt picked this sentence out of my mind one evening at dinner. He didn't speak to me for two days, but I included it in the report anyway.
-----
I wasn't home when Matt got the call from Nathan, but he told me all about it in our apartment that now seemed far too big for just two people.
"He said that he got my cell phone number from Audrey Hanson. She and I worked together once, when we were trying to track down Sylar. She knows what I can do," he said, and I thought, motherfucker. I'd been hiding him in my apartment for nearly a year and he goes and answers his damn cell phone? "He wants me to come and work for him," Matt said.
"Doing what?" I asked.
"Department of Homeland Security. Working as an agent tracking down evolved humans. He said that he thought that my, quote, particular skills, unquote, would be of particular use to the agency."
"And what did you tell him?" I asked.
"I told him to go fuck himself, that I wasn't going to turn against my own kind." Like Nathan did, was the unsaid statement. He had already pushed through a bill that required all evolved humans (himself excluded, of course. What the public didn't know wouldn't hurt them) to put themselves on a national registry. And recently, after an attack on a college that had left thirty-eight students dead, he was starting to talk about enforced sterilization programs.
"I'll bet he didn't take that well," I replied.
"No, he didn't." Matt turned to me, and all of the sudden I realized that his face was filled with grief. "And then he told me about a little baby in Los Angeles named Matthew Parkman who tested positive for the genetic marker today. Said that it would be a shame if the government were to do anything to hurt him."
I gasped. I couldn't help myself. Was Janice's baby Matt's after all? And would Nathan really harm a child?
"I hung up the phone and called Janice," he continued. "I told her that I knew the truth, but I wanted an answer. She said that after the explosion, after people...like me...were found out, she didn't want anything more to do with powers or abilities or saving the world. Didn't want to believe that maybe the child that she was carrying might have something to do with all of this. But she never took a paternity test."
He leaned forward and buried his head in my chest. I wrapped my arms around the back of his head and ran my hands though his hair. "I can't let Nathan kill my son," he said, muffled within my shirt. "I told the son of a bitch that I'd do it. I'm done with hiding."
Matt turned Janice and Matthew over to Nakamura, of course. But he was still scared of what Nathan could do. In an instant, all of his old contacts dropped him, of course. So now it really was just him and me. We were secretive enough that no one knew that we lived together. We weren't ashamed, really. But after all of those years of hiding, it was second nature.
-----
Two weeks later, he came home with a look in his eyes that I had never seen before. Wild. Excited. Manic, even. He kissed me so hard that I was worried about bruises, and then we had the most fantastic sex we'd ever had, fast and passionate and so full of an emotion that I can't even put words to, right there on the kitchen floor.
When we finished, the tile was messy and warm, but we laid there anyway. "What's gotten into you?" I asked in between breaths.
"I killed my first evolved human today," he said.
"Oh, no, Matt," I whispered. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't be," he replied. "The fucker had super speed. He was running around us in circles, taking our guns from us and using them to shoot. He killed six agents before I read his thoughts, knew where he was going to be, and blew his head off." He turned, propped himself up on his elbow to look at me. "And you know what, Mohinder? It felt good. He killed some of ours, so I killed him. It makes me think of what I said to you before we were together. Remember? That I should have stayed and shot Sylar. If I had been brave enough to do that, then maybe New York wouldn't have exploded. Maybe the world wouldn't be in this terrible place."
"You can't think like that, Matt. It's all in the past now."
"But don't you ever wish that you could have taken a different path? Made a different choice?"
"All the time. But I'm a scientist. I don't have control of the past."
He settled back down on the tile next to me. "I don't, either. But I can control the future. I want to make sure that I prevent another Sylar from happening again. Ever."
-----
Things changed after that. Matt got more ruthless. In the beginning, I would ask him about his day at work, but as the months went by, it started to make me sick. The things that Matt would do to get answers, retribution, absolution. It started at killing, but it progressed to torture.
Where was my Matt Parkman? Where was the man that I loved? Every day he slipped a little bit further away from me. Sometimes he would come home with blood on his hands, actual blood, and I refused to touch him.
And then, one night, the breaking point. We were eating some sambar and rice that I had made the day before. I remember this because it didn't taste as good as it did fresh. I had asked him about his day, even though I didn't really want to know.
"We heard that there was a boy in New York that was helping Nakamura. Giving him food, that sort of thing. We heard that he could turn invisible, that's how he was getting it. So I went in, POW!, with the tazer," he said. I think the worst part was how proud of himself he was, even though he could look into my mind and see my disgust. "And we got him. Took him back to HQ. He put up a good fight, but I got the information out of him in the end. He's in holding now, and we know where the food drop is. We'll be able to surprise Nakamura tomorrow," he said.
"How old was he?" I asked.
"I don't think that matters," he replied.
"It does to me."
Matt sighed. "Thirteen."
"Thirteen, Matt?"
"You need to understand that we had to do it. We have to kill Nakamura."
"Why? Why all of the killing?"
"Nakamura makes other evolved humans like me look bad. Men like him are the reason why innocent people like me have to live in hiding. Why we're not allowed to have children. Why we're tracked like animals! Because he does things that make the public fear us. He kills people. He's dangerous."
"How is that any different from what you do?" I asked.
"I'm trying to save the rest of us from what we went through after Sylar!" he shouted.
"If you kill all of the evolved humans yourself, Matt, there will be no one left for you to save."
"And what about you, Mohinder?" he asked. "You've been in Petrelli's pocket since day one! Trying to find a cure! Trying to fix me! There's nothing wrong with me. I know the cure, and it's tracking down scumbags like Nakamura so that one day I can live in peace. You're just like me, Mohinder. But because you wear a fancy lab coat and live in your three-steps-removed scientific world, you can pretend that you're not killing people, too."
"There's a monster in this kitchen," I said slowly. "And it's not me."
The look on his face was the most terrible one that I have ever seen on another human being. He shook his head. Spit on my floor as he stood up. He picked up the box that I used to store magazines in by the couch and emptied them all out. He started putting other things in the box. His wallet, his uniform, his gun, some pictures of Molly, a few other personal things. And then he left the apartment, slamming the door behind him.
-----
He wouldn't set foot in my apartment again until 2011. He left the city entirely, moved to D.C., I think.
I listened to the government news, and I found out that not long after that, Agent Parkman became Director Parkman, head of Homeland Security. Sometimes I couldn't tell what game Nathan was playing, declaring his war on evolved humans when he himself was one, then elevating a man who can read minds to track down others with abilities. I was just a scientist, always one step out of time with the elaborate game being played by supermen, by gods, so I did my best to stay in my lab all day, every day. Tried to develop something that would bring peace and make the world make sense to me again.
But as much as I couldn't understand it, I couldn't deny that Parkman was good at his job. There was a test out there that was able to identify these people, but it could be tricked. Parkman, on the other hand, never was.
-----
The next time I saw him was around Christmas 2008, at one of the endless parties held to celebrate Nathan's ascension to the presidency. I didn't feel like celebrating, but it was clear that all of his staff had to attend this one, so I put on my best suit and tie and went.
"There's someone I'd like you to meet," Nathan said. "He might prove useful in your research." He lowed his voice, put his mouth close to my ear. "And not just because he's the most successful director we've ever hand in tracking down evolved humans."
Nathan lead me over, and it was him.
"Doctor Suresh, I'd like you to meet Matthew Parkman, the head of the Department of Homeland Security. Director Parkman, this is Mohinder Suresh, my Chief Medical Advisor."
"We've met," I said, narrowing my eyes as we shook hands like etiquette required. There might have been an edge of anger in my voice. I felt him trying to slip into my mind, so I pictured a blank, white canvas and thought of nothing else.
He frowned. "Always a pleasure to see you again, Dr. Suresh," he said, but there was an undertone of frustration. He turned and walked away.
Nathan raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
I never did tell Nathan about what had happened between Parkman and I in those earlier days. I couldn't imagine that Parkman would, either. But somehow, I think, Nathan knew. Even though Parkman and I were both highly ranked members on his staff, we rarely were scheduled to be in meetings together. And when it was imperative, unavoidable, that we were both present, we were always seated across the room from the other. That was just one more thing that unremarkably normal Mohinder couldn't understand: why Nathan, a man otherwise so ruthless, would try to spare me the reminder of something beautiful that I had once had.
-----
And so it went for years.
2011
Same apartment. Same strings exploding outward into the same dizzying 3-D map. Different hour of the day. "Nakamura was trying to find a way to kill Sylar before he exploded," I say.
"Do you think he can make that happen?" Nathan asks me.
"I do. Think about it," I say as I lift a pair of scissors to the string. "Without Sylar, the world would have never considered these people to be dangerous. None of this would have ever happened. Imagine the possibilities! If he kills Sylar, he can change the past." As I say this, I cut one of the pieces, right at an intersection, and the whole thing falls down. I look at Nathan, and he doesn't seem impressed.
"I don't have that luxury," he says. "I need to find answers in the here and now."
What he is saying? "Genocide is not an answer!"
"Is that what this is about?" he asks, and I hate it when he tries to put words in my mouth. "Feeling bad because you came up short?"
No, you asshole. This isn't about me publishing some research to get me on the tenure track, it's about saving lives! "It's wrong!
"I was elected to make hard decisions," he says, and I'm glad that I can't vote in this country. "I understand how things work."
"And how is this going to work?" I ask him. There's some edge in my voice.
"Today, I'm going to announce that you've developed a treatment to reverse this."
I'm silent for a long moment as I think about the implications. Again, thank God I can't vote. "You're going to lie?" Fucking American politicians.
"The world will cheer," he says.
"And what happens when people start dying?"
He makes a face. "I'll say you made a mistake. A fatal error. At first, the world will mourn. They'll be united in grief. And then they'll just be united." He pauses and looks at me. "Mohinder, I need to know if I can trust you. I need to know if you're with me. Are you with me on this?"
A thousand things run through my head, most of them expletives. But he gives me that look, that president look, and I know that I can't tell him no. So I say the only thing that I can say, even if I hate myself for doing so. "Of course." And I probably will end up helping him, too. I am such a fucking hypocrite.
And then a feeling. A voice. It's Parkman. "Mr. President," he says as he enters the apartment a little breathlessly. "There are two of them, Sir. Two...Hiros."
Nathan looks surprised. "You're sure?"
"I am," he says. Of course he is. He's never wrong, and I hate him for it. Hate him for using the information I gave him to twist around for his own fucked up agenda. "I think we got the younger one. It explains the gaps in his knowledge. I want to put him down."
Nathan looks at me, and I stare back. "No," he says. "I want Dr. Suresh to do it."
It's one of his crazy loyalty tests. Maybe he wants to make sure that he can trust me on this one before he trusts me on The Announcement. I swallow. "Yes, Sir."
Parkman interrupts again. "Mr. President. He's not the only thing that I found in Texas." He tells Nathan all about Claire, the cheerleader, his daughter. I don't really understand. Doesn't she need to be saved? In the past, I mean. Time travel is confusing.
Then Nathan leaves, a whole gaggle of secret security agents following in his wake. And it's just me and Parkman and a metric shit-ton of scribbled notes and pictures and cut string. The line that I'm pretty sure represents me is still hanging up, and I run my finger across it.
"This one's yours," I say, pointing to a dark brown one. It's still hanging, too. He touches his and traces it. It leads to an obvious point, where our paths crossed for the first time the night of the explosion. We reach the knot in the string at the same time. Our hands touch.
"I've been thinking a lot about you, lately," he says. "Since this morning."
"I've been thinking about you," I reply. It's the truth. Hell, I've just relived our entire love story, if you can call it that. The Rise and Fall of the Parkesh Empire, maybe. I don't know what it is about this place that makes me think about what we used to have. We had never even stepped foot in here together before this morning. Maybe it's because Isaac's apartment, Isaac himself, used to represent the good fight. The fight against the bomb. The fight we lost.
Or maybe it's just the familiar feeling of him sliding into my brain. Like he's a big, warm dog curling up on the rug that's my mind. I don't know if I was supposed to feel it, but I always did.
The two strings run together for a long time before they separate. How did Nakamura know about this? Fucking Peeping Tom.
I look up at him, and our eyes meet. I don't have to me a mind reader to know what he's thinking, because I'm thinking the same thing. "So, do you want to go to dinner sometime?" Parkman asks. "You know, for old time's sake?" Proving once again that he's the braver of the two of us. Brave enough to take a load of shrapnel for Molly while I cowered inside his bear-like embrace, brave enough to try and face what we once had together, after all these years.
I want to tell him no. I know all of the things he does. The blood on Nakamura's face today was probably from something that he did. But then again, I just consented to help with genocide. Maybe Parkman was right all those years ago. I try to talk a moral game, but maybe I'm just like him.
So, I say, "sure." I interpret "sometime" to mean "tonight," and we go back to my place, the same old apartment as always. It's all but empty now, just me and a lizard who goes by the same name. We sit on the couch next to each other. There should be a little girl between us. We don't say anything.
Finally, Parkman says, "You know, I never could eat Indian food after I moved out." There's something sad in his voice. "Just the smell of it makes me remember."
"That's all you can say? How much you miss my cooking?"
He looks at me and for a second I think that he's about to tell me to fuck off. Then he just shakes his head. "How much I miss you is so big that if I didn't think about it in little parts, I'd probably go mad." I miss him too, sometimes. I miss our family. I miss the woman who sold me ginger and the man who lived upstairs.
I miss Molly. Sometimes I wonder what time of day it is that she looks for me. In the morning, when she wakes up? Or in the night as she goes to sleep, like reaching for a favorite teddy bear?
Or does she even do it anymore? Has she forgotten me?
I don't know what to do, so I kiss him then, which isn't a very good choice but still the only one I can think of. He kisses back, lifts his hands to trace my jaw line under the hair.
"I don't like the beard," Parkman murmurs. "The stubble was so much better." I know this. That's why I grew it out in the first place.
One thing leads to another, and pretty soon I'm helping him out of his shirt, he's helping me out of my pants. He still remembers all of the places that I like to be touched, the right amount of pressure, the right amount of time. Maybe it's instinctual. Maybe it's something he never forgot.
Or maybe I remember where his hands used to fit on my body, and he's just pulling the memories out of my mind.
"I'm sorry," he says. "For everything." He doesn't mean it.
"I know," I reply. "Me, too." I don't think that I do, either.
Nevertheless, we move back to my bedroom. We make love there, like we used to, but we both know that this time it's different. We're just going through the motions. We're trying to rekindle a fire that was drowned in water years ago, and the tinder is still far too wet. I'm pleased on a physical level, my body is satisfied, but there's a gaping hole in my emotions that keeps me from being satisfied. When I climax, part of me feels like crying.
When we finish, he's lying in bed next to me. We don't touch. A lump in my throat catches and won't go away. What happened to us? He's done terrible things.
So have I.
We wish that we were stronger men. We'd both rather be on the front lines, resisting, like Nakamura or Bennet. Even Peter Petrelli. Not that I want to be dating Niki, of course, but at least Peter's out there, doing something other than aiding this corrupt administration. I think that that's why Parkman and I have hated each other so much over the years. We're both sellouts: horrible, despicable people. I see myself in him, and him in me. I don't say anything out loud, but I wonder if he's reading my mind.
"Do you think that Nakamura can do it?" he asks finally, breaking the silence. I don't think that he was reading my mind because I wasn't think about Nakamura. This must be really digging into him, then, this two Nakamuras thing, if he is so deep in his own thoughts that he isn't looking outwards for conversation. "Change the world, I mean?"
"Travel though time? I hope he can," I say. "I want him to succeed."
"But he's a terrorist. It's our job to stop him," Parkman says. "Your job, actually, according to Petrelli."
"I don't care. I'd do anything to save our daughter," I tell him.
"She never was our daughter, Mohinder," he says: softly, tenderly. It's the first time in at least three years that he hasn't called me "Suresh."
"Maybe not in this timeline," I reply.
When I wake up, Matt's gone. No note. Just an empty place on the floor where his clothes had been last night.
As I'm packing up my supplies that morning, I place a syringe and the bottle with the so-called "cure" in a specially padded case. I meant what I said. I won't use it on the wrong person. If Nakamura has the ability to change what's happened to Molly, to Matt, to me, I won't use it on him. I wouldn't even if I hadn't seen in the issue of Ninth Wonders what it was my destiny to do.
I don't have an ability, and I never will. I got over that complex years ago. But have my part in saving the world, too. Or at least in saving my family.