Title: Into Nirvana
Author: kenzimone
Disclaimer: Don't own
Fandom: Heroes
Character: Mohinder
Rating: R
Summary: For the first time in years, Mohinder Suresh feels something akin to hope stir in the recesses of his soul.
Note: Well, it seemed like a good idea at three in the morning. A Five Years Gone coda. Missing scenes, if you so will. Also, please forgive me for totally butchering Indian culture. Thank you. Unbeta'd, so all mistakes are my own.
The strings form a web of time, a spectrum of colors mapping year upon year. In its threads he can read moments of sorrow and joy, of sacrifices and battles and birth and death. He reads chance encounters between strangers, long awaited reunions, bonds torn apart and severed, and the events and people they bore.
Red and white and blue and black, all crisscrossing back and forth, above and behind and before him, all connected. Small news paper clippings, photographs and scrawled notes; pinned, clipped, taped, littering the web like some sort of bizarre attempt at decoration.
The past five years, all so simply summed up in this one creation. It's astounding.
And he's struck by a thought. Maybe – perhaps – this wouldn't have to be? This moment, this precise second of being; maybe it could all be undone.
Maybe it's as simple as a web of string; If he touches one thread, the whole structure trembles. If he cuts one, the past dissolves.
For the first time in years, Mohinder Suresh feels something akin to hope stir in the recesses of his soul.
...
The summer days of Chennai are hot and dry. Mohinder's grandmother prefers to stay indoors during the days, helping her daughter in the kitchen or sitting at one of the windows, watching the sun beat down on the outside world.
Sometimes Mohinder joins her, taking a seat on the floor by her chair and letting her place a hand on his head, sifting thick curls between her fingers. She's old now, and withered; her sight isn't as good as it once was, and her hearing's failing as well. But she's still beautiful; long grey hair falling down her back in the form of a braid, dressed in a bright red shalwar qamiz with her dupatta draped over her shoulders. And she tells wonderful stories, too.
Mohinder's early childhood is filled with tales of gods and goddesses, of love and hate and battles till the death. He is told of prophets and visions and of the great Swami Sivananda Saraswati, whom his grandmother met just a few years before he passed, when she was a little girl no older than Mohinder is now.
'The Master said many wise things,' she murmurs, eyes staring off into the sunshine. 'He said, "Only when you become nothing can you become everything". Remember that, Mohinder. It is good to remember such things.'
Mohinder nods, and tells her that he will. And he does remember – he thinks of it a few months later, when his grandmother's body is lowered onto the pyre, and the fire starts to consume her clothes.
And he thinks that yes, it was a wise thing to have said, because the empty shell being consumed by fire is not his grandmother any more, but the breeze touching his hair is just like what her hand against his cheek used to feel like.
...
They leave him with scissors in his hand and the past lying discarded on the floor. Walk out, no looking back.
There will be a cleaning crew in by the afternoon, tearing down what's left of Hiro Nakamura's work, destroying it. Burning what-ifs and second chances because no one seems to understand what this might mean. To all of them.
Kill him? How can Mohinder kill the one person who can save them all?
The black string still stretches like a poisonous snake across the floor, like oil on the surface of clear water. Sylar. Still there, still tangled up into everything.
Even five years passed, he's still the cause of everything gone wrong.
...
Getting a hold of a cab is easy to do, and the drive to the Petrelli mansion won't take long, he's promised.
Mohinder closes his eyes and tries to clear his mind. Recites mathematical equations, chemical formulas. The molecular structure of the cure that will by his hand end another's life. End many lives.
On the seat beside him lies the late Isaac Mendez's comic book, unfinished and unopened.
Mohinder turns his face away, towards the window and the overhead sun. He's so very tired.
...
'Mr. President. It's not the only thing I found in Texas.'
Parkman had volunteered no more, and Mohinder hadn't asked. It hadn't concerned him, not like it apparently had the President – the way his jaw had clenched and his posture had stiffened. For a moment Mohinder had wondered exactly who the mind reader of the two was.
...
He doesn't recognize her at first. Her hair is a different color, and she's lost most of the baby fat from the last time he saw her. She's on the floor in front of the desk, the blood pooling around her head. It's cut open, split and empty, like a cookie jar left on too low a kitchen shelf.
He realizes he's fallen to his knees only because of the pain of hitting the hardwood floor, his fingers already ghosting above her cheek. She's dead, no doubt to speak of, eyes glazed and chest unmoving.
He wipes a speck of blood from her forehead – a thumb print in red – and the knowledge of the only one who could have done this is horrifyingly clear. It's the only thing. He doesn't know what she was doing here, why she was meeting with the President, why she was so important.
He doesn't even know her name.
For a moment it replays itself, a quick glimpse of a figure on a staircase as he stumbles out of this very house, guilt resting heavily on his shoulders, convinced that he's just delivered a man to his final resting place. It's a flash of feelings, no longer.
There's an engagement ring on her finger – it glints in the glow of the desk light as he rises to his feet – and his eyes are drawn to the crumpled comic book that lies by her hand. It's been dropped haphazardly, shock relaxing his fingers, opening itself to the near to last page.
A guide to what should have been, and might still become. Mohinder lowers himself back down onto the floor, and begins to read.
The girl's blood is not yet dry, and he knows what he has to do.
...
The heat is unimaginable.
He can feel his skin burning, can feel it tearing as he moves his hands to better push up against the door. His bloody palms are making it harder and harder to hold on. The light is getting brighter, to the point of hurting his eyes – he hasn't opened them in what seems like a lifetime, yet they still sting behind his eyelids.
Hiro lies dead somewhere beyond. The other Hiro, the younger one, is no longer anywhere near. It took nothing more than closed eyes and a wish for him and his friend to disappear. Mohinder hopes they found their way home. He really does.
Here, in the present, there is nowhere to flee.
The air ripples in the heat – it vibrates against his skin – and his eyelids do nothing to help against the growing brightness. It hurts, like nothing he's ever felt before. They won't come out of this alive, none of them – not he, or Peter, or Nathan. This is where it ends.
And then, it does end. It stops. Everything stops. And it's suddenly quiet, an eerie calm that promises little but obliteration, broken only by a low humming sound that radiates into the very depths of his bones.
And in the last fleeting second before the roar of the heat draws back and engulfs him, in the silence before the passing, Mohinder wonders if maybe this is what the Master meant when he spoke of 'becoming nothing'.