Token:

Written for the prompt - Stained Glass.

Mohinder groaned, his brain dazzled by bright lights even before he opened his eyes.

It was dark, but the flashbulbs going off in his skull persisted and his head angrily pounded when he tried to push himself up off the sofa.

There had been a fight, he remembered, grinding the heels of his hands against his eye-sockets, gritting his teeth as he tried to focus his tumultuous thoughts. A fight with blinding bright bursts of power and fury, blue and white and red all pounding their way past the reinforced steel door. And god… oh god, he'd killed the Haitian.

He spread his clenched fists so that his wide palms cradled his head as he sat, shaking from head to foot. He'd killed a man, a man he'd worked with many times for several years. He had killed him on the basis that a frankly befuddled and childlike little man from the past might yet save them all.

He'd betrayed the President – Nathan, who'd trusted and believed in him when others had screamed for his blood, who'd he'd even grown to like once he'd shed his remote façade – to aid the terrorists Hiro Nakamura and Peter… Peter.

He'd seen Peter wrenched through the door just minutes before that dreadful battle had begun beyond it. Had he survived? Was it Peter who had somehow taken Mohinder to wherever he was now or…?

He uncovered his eyes, trying to force his eyes to clear of the bolts of colour and pain, peering into the darkened room. It was not as bad as it had first appeared, dim rather than dark with seams of soft light showing at the edges of what he supposed to be curtains and doorways. But where was he?

He eased himself upright, one hand at the back of the sofa to steady himself. He stumbled slightly, knocking his knee against what felt like a small table. He reached out, his hand snatching at air and bumping alien objects until he found something that made him smile, albeit grimly. He certainly knew a lamp when he felt one.

Pressing the switch, he gasped then swallowed quickly, both his worst fear and biggest hope realised as the eagle on the carpet betrayed his location.

So… Nathan had found him. Nathan must have realised that Mohinder had betrayed him so why wasn't he dead?

Mohinder's mind flicked back to the fight once more, remembering the metal buckling, shrieking with the strain at his back as he'd tried in vain to hold it closed. Perhaps Peter had brought him here? No… Nathan must have had someone on his taskforce, someone capable of fighting the less dead than previously supposed Petrelli brother… but if Peter was alive and Nathan had known it, then why…

His train of thought stopped short and then died off completely as a shaft of light lanced through his mind, the pain near blinding as he gasped and covered his eyes again. He stood, swaying, even as the creak of the door swinging closed told him to run, hide, anything but remain there, feeble and shaking with pain in the semi darkness.

"Does your head hurt very badly?" He knew that voice, like sandpaper wrapped in silk, all the will and drive of a man headed towards the sky mixed with the humility of a family man who just wanted to make the world a better place.

"Nathan," Mohinder breathed, staggering and opening his eyes warily to find that the offensive light had disappeared when the door was closed. "Nathan, I…"

"You were found trapped beneath a security door. You probably have a concussion, but it appears that might have saved your life."

Nathan Petrelli, leader of the free world and closeted powered being, strode towards Mohinder, his face impassive, barring his eyes, which were as penetrative and direct as ever.

"Everyone else - everyone who was in that building - is dead, Mohinder. Parkman and his team, Nakamura and his terrorist friends… even my own brother, Mohinder, my brother - with his power to survive anything, even nuclear explosions - is dead."

Steely eyes met Mohinder's, looking almost to the core of him.

"Why do you suppose that is, Mohinder? That you are alive when so many others lay dead?"

Mohinder shook his head helplessly, wincing as the action caused his already bruised synapses to fire angrily in response.

"I… I…" he stammered, stopping when Nathan lifted an imperious hand to silence him. Nathan walked to his desk and Mohinder realised they must be in Nathan's private study off of the main Presidential suite.

"I want to show you something, Mohinder, something only four people have seen. Three of those people are now dead." Nathan bent and unlocked one of the lower desk drawers, then lifted a rectangular box out into the muted light.

"I wonder if you'll recognise it – you do, after all, have as much a connection to it as I do." Blunt fingers, dominated by the heavy signet ring, placed the carved wooden case on the desk top, turning the tiny key already pressed into the lock and easing the box open. "Come and see, Doctor."

Mohinder couldn't quite explain why his breath felt frozen, stymied in his chest. He walked towards the desk as though approaching a venomous snake, holding back by just one step to peer, craning his neck to look inside.

He squinted, his glasses long since lost in the fight, frowning in concentration as he scrutinized the contents of the box.

"It, it looks like… glass? Dirty glass?" he muttered, face contorted, confused as Nathan carefully lifted the shard from the box. He held it up to the weak light, letting it play over the jagged edges, smudges of flaking brown residue still clinging to its surface.

Nathan let a tiny sad smile creep onto his face before shooting Mohinder a stern glare as he held the ragged, splintered glass out to the still trembling and unsure geneticist. Mohinder swallowed as he took it from him with gentle, wary fingertips.

"I suppose it is just that, Mohinder… but it's also so much more. Look again."

Mohinder took a shaky breath, expelling it slowly, turning the shard over in his hands to peer more closely at the dried remnants staining the otherwise clear glass. "Is… is that blood?" he asked with slow dawning horror, abruptly repulsed by the apparent weapon in his hands.

"It is," Nathan nodded as he walked slowly into the shadows to pull back a curtain and let the soft illumination from the watch lights beyond the White House window spill in, spreading a little more light over the two men. "But a more pertinent question might be - whose blood is it?"

Mohinder's mouth went dry as his brain kicked into gear. He could see a strand of long black hair crusted into the blood. "Is this…? Peter once told me, that when… when he died in my apartment, that the glass…" He trailed off, staring at the bloodied fragment. "This is it. The glass that killed Peter, that Claire pulled out of his brain-stem… you kept it?"

"He asked me to," Nathan murmured, "After he blew up New York and we decided to… conceal Peter's involvement, he sent it to me. He'd kept it, you see, unable to let go of something as monumental as the instrument of his death. I stored this box along with the letter explaining his inability to see past his mortal roots in a safe deposit box, just left it there to gather dust."

Nathan turned to face Mohinder, his face cast into shadow as the meagre light from the window settled about his shoulders. "A few years ago," he continued, his voice soft, almost verging on nostalgic, "I decided to… take stock of my life and what was important to me and I found myself looking back on decisions… choices that I had made previously, wondering if I was on the right path."

Mohinder remembered the sudden shift in the President's behaviour - he had seemed to become less fraught, more certain of himself and his actions, actually taking the time to listen and discuss Mohinder's opinions rather than overriding him as he had done so frequently before. It was only really from that time onwards that Mohinder had ever felt comfortable calling the President by his given name, regarding him as a friend of sorts, albeit a dangerous and powerful one, slowly being torn apart by the newfound hatred for his work and the respect he felt for Nathan and his dreams for a better world.

"I found the box then," Nathan continued, unaware of Mohinder's unease as the doctor recalled their tentative friendship and his subsequent betrayal, "and it was as though I'd never really seen it before. Here was the one thing that had, briefly, brought about the death of someone who one might consider to be the most powerful man on the earth."

Nathan moved forwards, slowly, as though he expected Mohinder to run from his careful advance, finally standing before him, gaze heavy on his face, his eyes lit with something Mohinder could only wonder at.

"He kept it, because he didn't know how else to deal with it and then, after he exploded, he didn't want to deal with it so he left it for big brother Nathan to take care of." Mohinder wondered briefly at the barely restrained scorn in the President's tone, blinking as Nathan took another step closer. "He never saw it the way I do."

He lifted a hand to rest it, straight armed and firm on Mohinder's shoulder, squeezing meaningfully as his next words fell, oddly warm, intimate, between them. "Like the way I see you, Mohinder."

Mohinder's skin prickled, icy fingers seizing him, shaking him as he tried to process the elder Petrelli's words, blinking rapidly against the ice cool stare holding his gaze.

"Like…? Nathan, how could I possibly remind you of… of this?" He gestured, helplessly, even a touch hysterically, with the tarnished shard, his voice rising as he attempted to laugh off his growing unease. "I know I'm concussed, but surely…"

"Do you know what my poor late brother's problem was?" Nathan ruthlessly cut in, removing his hand from Mohinder's quaking form to walk back to the desk, leaning against its edge with his arms crossed against his chest. "He got cocky."

Mohinder's rocketing panic took an abrupt yet welcome nosedive.

"Cocky?" he repeated dully, dumbfounded. Peter Petrelli - whose only fault, as far as Mohinder had been able to glean, had been that his heart was so full of feeling for his fellow man that his powers had frequently overwhelmed him – had never been precisely what Mohinder would describe as overconfident, let alone it being his downfall.

"My brother was given the gift of immortality," Nathan smoothly asserted, "And instead of appreciating it for what it was, he accepted it as though it had always been his by right." He pushed away from the desk once more, beginning his now expected approach back towards the nervous geneticist as though each loop from desk to doctor was a needed step in this bizarre conversation. "He kept that shard because to begin with he simply couldn't believe he'd lived, survived to hold his own murder weapon and it helped him, it gave him a sense of purpose, of self. It gave him the chance to make order of chaos… and he put it in a box and sent it away."

He circled Mohinder now, pacing circles around the doctor that seemed to decrease even as Mohinder's mind reeled against this odd summation of Peter's actions.

"I keep it here, in my desk, so that from time to time when I feel infallible, when I feel myself slipping into the certainty that this world is mine to pluck from the fingers of the unworthy, to serve as a reminder that no matter how powerful, how seemingly invulnerable I become, all it takes is a fragile, ragged piece of glass to tear that world asunder."

Mohinder's breath burned in his chest, held too long, his body locked in sudden, horrifying certainty. "And how," he whispered hoarsely, wetting quivering lips with a suddenly dry tongue-tip, "does that shard which reminds you of… of all that make you think of me?"

Nathan ceased his pacing, stood immediately behind Mohinder now, his breath warm at the darker man's nape. "You betrayed me, Mohinder," he murmured, "At a time when it would have served you best to submit, you chose to defy me, to fight when the odds were so utterly against you that you had to believe you would die in the attempt."

"I had to stop you," Mohinder whispered, eyes falling shut, "I couldn't, couldn't let you do it…"

"I know," Nathan murmured as he rested warm hands on either side of Mohinder's hips, "and that's why I could never send you away… you could never just sit back and let me do what I felt needed to be done. You would always be there in the shadows, waiting to stop me, weakening me with uncertainty until the day I'd have to kill you… and I don't want you dead, Mohinder. I've never wanted that."

"N, no?" Mohinder whispered, shaking in earnest now.

"No, Mohinder," Nathan replied as he looped his firm, hard hands about Mohinder's waist and pulled him close to his lean form, "And no matter what they say, you are not to blame for the death of everyone else there tonight because your betrayal makes my triumph all the sweeter… you keep me sharp, Mohinder, you… you make me what I am today."

A tiny, muffled sob broke past Mohinder's clenched, trembling lips as he tried to bite back the feelings tearing at the confines of his heart, swallowing hard as the grip around him tightened.

"Ssshhh." Warm lips brushed the doctor's earlobe as Nathan crooned softly, "It's alright, I forgive you for betraying me, I do… there's just one thing I need from you and we can forget this whole night ever happened and go back to the way we were before… Wouldn't you like that, Mohinder?"

Mohinder nodded, head jerking seemingly without his permission, his eyes burning as the shadows around them stretched and skewed, his head falling back to rest against a slender chest, heart pounding as long, sinewy arms wrapped down and around his body.

"Say my name," the dark voice ordered, the words like ice against his skin and as Mohinder's quaking, bloodless fingers released their grip upon the glass, a glittering, clear teardrop fell to splash silently on the large hand lifting to cup his face.

"Sylar," he whispered and the shard shattered at his feet.

Fin.