Title: Of Cabbages and Kings (1/1)
Author: SecretAgentSmutGirl
Rating: PG
Summary: Mohinder has a very specific routine, he wonders why he keeps to it when it doesn't work.
Disclaimer: I don't even own the computer this was typed on yet.

A/N: The Mohinder perspective, just begged itself into being.

Science makes sense to Mohinder.

Long tallies, lab results, petri dishes- those are the things the he pursues and dreams about. His mind can make ten non-linear leaps a heartbeat but abstracts, real every day problems and relations, make him fall short.

His assistant, drops off the evening labs without a word.

Mohinder watches her go, considers wishing her a good night but doesn't bother. People, they don't make much sense and he's pretty well given up on changing that fact. He is bad at reading people but he is pretty sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that his assistant hates him. He's sure he's been perfectly civil to her, but her figures are always wrong and his coffee is always cold, and it never crosses his mind that she might not be that bright.

It does cross his mind that she might actually be a company minder more than a proper assistant. He is oblivious to a lot of things, more accurately was oblivious but he is bright and he is catching on, to being babysat and kept under camera surveillance. He's ok with not being trusted because science speaks for itself.

If he lives for science, it's routines and timetables that make him tick.

Every day he wakes up and gets Molly off to school, with attention to combed hair and pressed clothes. He makes himself tea, using a kettle and never the microwave, but tends to forget it at home in his mad dash rush to get to his lab. Every day is the same morning routine. Every day he is nearly late for work. Mohinder, as a rule, is never late. Logically the routine doesn't make sense if it isn't organized in such a way as to keep him from being tardy.

Patterns clearly need to be adjusted.

The Shanti Virus. Even that makes sense to him, now but not before, since he was able to make contact with Claire Bennet under the company radar. Noah Bennet wanted her safe from the company, but Claire Bennet wanted to do right by her biological father. So blood is donated, life goes on with nary a nefarious purpose and for the life of him, he doesn't know why he isn't gratified.

Clicking off the light to the microscope, Mohinder buried his head in his hands and tries to reason out his life.

It's never that easy.

Once he'd read the suicide rates amongst scientists, not that he'd been surprised of the results because genius breeds madness, and though he can't remember the figures he never considered the cause. Morbid thoughts, like idle thoughts and dirty thoughts, were things that he no longer entertained in mixed company. Not that he could tell you why, but he was an organized man. It only made sense that he'd organize his random thoughts the same way he'd color code his shirts or put boxes of cereal in order by height.

Which are perfectly normal things to do.

Molly doesn't organize and lately she doesn't verbalize, and Mohinder wonders what caused the change in demeanor. He doesn't wonder about the organization. She's 10. It's hard to believe that she's ten and seen a lifetimes worth of pain and complicated adult emotion. Parents murdered, detained by men in black, or rather man in horned rimmed glasses, and then loss. More loss.

There's more to it than just that, but that bears consideration he's not quite sure he' ready for that train of thought.

Molly cries on her birthday and Mohinder is baffled.

It's late, past the cake and presents and even television broadcasting isn't trying to market to the under 20 market, and she sits on the couch with her knees pulled up to her chest and cries. She looks forlorn for lack of a better word, though there should be a better word because the world isn't right if a ten year old is forlorn, and it is breaking his heart.

He's never been good with people or emotion, but Molly loves him as her dad and he's taken her into his arms before his brain even processes how he should deal with her grief. She's fused into his shoulder, sniffling into the arm of of his pink polo which he only wears to make her laugh so things are all wrong, and he whispers, "Why are you crying," which only makes her cry more.

If there had been a course at University on social niceties he would have taken it and excelled- but some things you have to learn on your own.

Stupid genius, but lucky to be good looking.

When the tears stop and the television turns into a crime drama, they all look the same to him, Molly pulls back and looks him calmly in the eye and she says, earnest and tear soaked, "Make Matt come home. Please, Mohinder, it's all I really want for my birthday. Tell him I won't be bad anymore."

If his heart were made of glass instead of muscles and tendons, blood and tissue, it would have cracked. Shattered. It does shatter, despite it's organic make up, and in that instance there is adrenaline and surety and Mohinder knows that he has to do whatever it takes to make things right.

He kisses the crown of her head, so soft, closes his eyes and reassures her, "It's nothing that you did, sweetheart," but his mind is reeling that she thinks Matt left because she misbehaved. That she could do anything to push anyone way. He thinks, what a ludicrous thought for such a well behaved child- then for the first time in months he stops thinking all together- but his brain is quick to start moving again.

Matt left.

It is a tired cliché, pithy and beneath him even if he does have a weakness for bad jokes, but life in that instant starts to make sense again. There has been something missing. A whole person missing. The person who gets Molly ready for school, who hands him his tea on the way out the door and makes the mess that he is always so convinced he is going to find when he comes home from work. The reason he censors his thoughts and lets crime dramas play as ambient noise as he slaves over his laptop, alone well into every night.

The reason there are too many pillows in his bed and at the same time too much room.

He's been so stupid, and it all comes so clear that he can't be mad at himself for not noticing or even mad at Matt for leaving. However, he is mad that his lap is full of their crying daughter who thinks that she's done wrong.

Mohinder imagines finding Matt after all this time and can't conjure up any anger on his part, yet it's Molly who suffers. If he possessed an ability such as Matt's, who is to say he wouldn't have taken the same way out, bow out with no fanfare and hide in his lab like they always joked he might. Hadn't he tried to flee, before Matt and Molly because cowardice breeds true, but he knows now that running from things isn't the answer.

He left and Eden died.

Nathan Petrelli died and Matt left.

They always find you, the universal odds and the law of bad luck. They always find you, the monsters, the boogeymen, the Sylars of the world. They always find the ones you love, hurt the ones you love, kill the ones you love and Mohinder knows why Matt did what he did even if the truth doesn't make it any less appalling.

What kind of self loathing was the man living in now? He could imagine, he didn't have to imagine, because he'd seen Matt in that shadow box before. After Kirby Plaza. Post Maury Parkman. Now Nathan Petrelli.

He'd laugh bitterly but it would only upset Molly. Wallowing isn't a logical course of action and if Molly is organic global positioning he imagines that his brains capability to reason out puzzles is his very own special ability.

Matt had left them for nothing, was suffering for nothing.

His brain itemizes. Sylar is the business of the Company, released into the wild but tagged like any other beast by satellite and he knows that Molly glances for him, like any other child would say their prayers, before bed. A boogeyman, unsubstantial, fit for nightmares. The crux of it, the bitter irony, is that Nathan Petrelli is, thanks to his daughter, alive and kept secret, kept safe.

With all the causes gone there should be no more symptom and it's done.

It's only logical.

So he finds him.

And when he he says "Come home", Matt follows