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Title: Memories and Dust (1/?)
Fandom: Heroes (Future, AU-ish)
Characters: Matt, Mohinder, Hiro, mention of others
Summary: "Matt scrubbed a hand across his face, wondering how many times a man's life could implode."
Disclaimer: If I owned Heroes, I wouldn't be crying into my student loan statements every month.
Rating: PG-13 for a bit of naughty language.
A/N: This chapter takes place a few years after the prologue, as you can probably see.
Previous Parts: Prologue
Chapter One: Kismet
April 20, 2021
Matt Parkman woke to the sound of his cell phone ringing from his bedside table. The alarm clock behind it read 12:34.
Beside him, Mohinder groaned. “Don’t they know it’s your night off?”
Matt grunted, still too asleep to give an intelligent answer, and fumbled to reach the phone.
“Tell them to piss off,” Mohinder said, burying his face in the covers.
“You can’t tell the NYPD to piss off,” he replied blearily. “It’s illegal.”
“Is not. Free speech,” Mohinder mumbled into the pillow.
“Right. Call the ACLU if I get fired.”
Matt pressed send and held the phone up to his ear. “Parkman. And you better have a damn good excuse.”
“Is this Matthew Parkman?” The voice wasn’t familiar, and another cop wouldn’t have bothered asking for his first name.
“Yes,” he said, sitting up a little and rubbing his eyes. “Who is this?”
“My name is Stan Burke. I represented Mrs. Janice McHenry.”
The statement shocked Matt firmly awake, but left him speechless. All he could manage to think was, Weren’t we past all this?
“Your ex-wife?” the lawyer needlessly clarified.
“I know,” Matt replied irritably. “What is this about?”
Beside him, Mohinder opened an eye. His curiosity was like a soft tug in Matt’s mind, but he ignored it.
There was an awkward silence on the end of the line. “I take it that you haven’t heard.”
Matt growled, “Obviously not. Are you going to tell me, or can I go back to sleep?” He knew he was being rude, but it was nearly one in the morning, and he suddenly remembered Stan Burke from the divorce proceedings. They weren’t exceptionally pleasant memories.
“Mr. Parkman, Janice is dead.”
Everything went still for a moment. Matt would have sworn that his heart even stopped. It was like the one time he had been with Hiro when he teleported; in the instant between point A and point B, there was an infinite moment where he was surrounded by the vast absence of everything. That vacuum was similar to this one.
Then Mohinder sat up and put a hand on his arm, thinking What is it? What’s happened? The world started spinning again.
Matt shook his head and stood up, walking out of their bedroom and into the kitchen to finish the conversation.
***
Twenty minutes later, sitting at the kitchen table, Matt snapped the phone closed and let his head fall into his hands.
“You going to stand there in the dark?” he asked a moment later. “Or are you going to come in and make some tea?”
Mohinder moved out of the shadows of the living room and into the kitchen doorway, smiling sheepishly. “Might as well put the kettle on, I guess.”
“You’d think after thirteen years, you’d realize I knew you were there,” Matt said.
“Ever think that was precisely my plan?” Mohinder asked, raising his eyebrows. Matt leaned back and considered it. There was a kind of weird comfort in that idea, which was probably what the other man was going for.
“So,” Mohinder said, filling the electric kettle from the tap. “Are you going to fill me in? Or did you want to wait till morning?”
“Janice is dead,” Matt said without preamble. Mohinder froze for a moment, then carefully shut off the faucet and set the kettle down on the counter.
I’m sorry, Mohinder thought at him. He did that when he wanted to assure Matt that whatever sentiment he was conveying was sincere.
It’s okay, Matt responded, then corrected himself out loud. “Actually, it’s not. But thank you.”
Mohinder walked behind him and bent down to put an arm around his chest. Matt immediately put his hand on Mohinder’s forearm and squeezed.
“What happened?”
“Car wreck. Two nights ago. They say she fell asleep at the wheel.”
Mohinder didn’t say anything, but his thoughts were a confused and conflicted jumble; Matt didn’t bother listening too closely, letting them mostly wash over him. Random words floated into his consciousness: sorry… careless… waste… love… family. On the last word, he squeezed Mohinder’s arm again and said, “There’s something else.”
Mohinder sat down across the table from him, leaving his hand in Matt’s grasp. He leaned forward. “What is it?”
“It’s Jacob.”
Who is-
“Her son.” Matt took a deep breath. “According to Janice’s will-”
Oh god, please don’t tell me…
“-She wanted me to be his guardian if anything happened to her. And no, I’m not joking.”
Mohinder groaned and let his head fall onto the table.
“No, this isn’t a bad dream either,” Matt said preemptively.
“Now you’re just doing that to annoy me,” Mohinder said, voice muffled underneath his arms.
Matt shut up; it was probably true. Misery loved company, after all. He scrubbed a hand across his face, fingers rasping through stubble as he wondered just how many times one man’s life can implode.
One night, in some kind of fit of melancholy, Matt had decided to make a mental list of all the events that spectacularly changed his life, for better or worse. His father leaving. His mother dying. Marrying (and divorcing) Jan. Becoming telepathic. Getting shot in the chest by a psychopathic megalomaniac bent on mass destruction. Adopting Molly with Mohinder. Nathan Petrelli’s assassination, and the resulting shit storms.
Add in the various near-death experiences he’d had, the few spectacular arrests he’d made, and the few times that he’d saved the world (or at least helped other people save it), the list had numbered twenty-eight. Twenty-eight singular events that, in the course of forty-nine years, had irrevocably altered the course of his life. And occasionally human history, according to Hiro at least.
That was the first and only time he’d ever tried it. Some things shouldn’t be attentively recorded; the enormity of it all became just a little too overwhelming. Especially considering that most of those events had happened within a few years of each other.
Mohinder looked up from the table at him. “Are you actually considering going through with all this? Doesn’t Jacob have family to take care of him? Where’s his father?”
“McHenry died two years ago. The lawyer didn’t mention anything about the rest of the family, but…” He shrugged.
Mohinder got up, resuming his task of making tea with tense, mechanical movements. Matt felt the other man’s mind whirring. The temptation was there to delve further, but it was better to let Mohinder choose his words carefully when he was irritated like this.
Finally, he turned back to Matt. “I… I don’t know if I want to be a parent again.”
“Nobody’s asking you to be,” Matt said petulantly.
There’s a furious outburst in Mohinder’s mind, and Matt backpedaled immediately. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. That came out really wrong.”
“Have I ever told that it’s really annoying when you apologize before I have a chance to yell at you?” Mohinder said.
“A few times,” Matt said, hiding his grin until Mohinder turned back to their tea.
“Takes all of the joy out of it,” he grumbled. He poured the hot water before continuing. “I’m serious, Matt. We raised Molly. We took care of Micah a month or two out of every year. We even took in Claire’s daughter for a while when she went underground. I don’t have a single regret about any of that, but…” He trailed off.
“But what?”
Mohinder sighed and squeezed the bridge of his nose. I’m not sure there’s a way to say this without sounding like a heartless bastard.
Matt stood and put a hand on the counter on either side of Mohinder’s body, then leaned in to kiss him. “I know better than that,” he murmured. “Besides, better I hear it from you than-”
“-Than just plucking it out of my brain. Fine.” Mohinder sighed again. “Honestly, I don’t resent taking care of Micah or Gracie, and you know with Molly-”
“I know,” Matt interrupted, somewhat impatiently. He wasn’t questioning the other man’s love for their daughter.
“I just don’t see how taking in your ex-wife’s son is going to be good for any of the parties involved. He’s never met us, he’d be leaving everything he knows behind, he might have never met someone with abilities, and… wait, how old is he?”
Matt did the math. “He turned thirteen in March.”
Mohinder groaned and let his head fall into Matt’s shoulder. “Oh, no. Not thirteen.”
Matt fought down a grin at the other man’s reaction. Molly had put them through hell at that age; they’d all barely managed to get through it with their sanity intact. He placed his hands on Mohinder’s arms, squeezing the wiry muscles.
“I’m going to meet with the precinct’s lawyer tomorrow. This guy Burke is faxing over some paperwork. I haven’t agreed to anything just yet.”
“Good.”
“But if Jacob needs us-”
Mohinder let out an explosive sound, midway between a growl and a sigh, and leaned back to glare at him.
“Don’t give me that look,” Matt plead. “The kid just lost his mom, his dad died two years ago, and besides, he’s… He’s Janice’s son,” he said, after a small hesitation.
Mohinder kept the glare up. “You do realize you’re talking about your ex-wife to your current partner? And don’t you dare make some kind of stupid ‘common law’ joke,” he added aloud.
Matt shut his mouth. He still couldn’t legally marry to Mohinder in New York. Sometimes, the future was a disappointing place.
“Sorry. What I mean is… he could have been mine. Jacob, I mean.”
Mohinder’s glare faded from his face a little, and Matt went on. “I don’t have any regrets either. Not about leaving Janice or meeting you, or any of it -”
And it was true, which was the amazing part. Matt knew how rare that was.
“-But if things had fallen out differently, Jacob would have been…” He trailed off, not sure how to finish without sounding like even more of an asshole than he already did.
Mohinder’s expression had faded from anger to plain weariness. Matt watched as he rubbed his eyes. “It’s past one,” he said. “Let’s just talk about this in the morning, shall we?”
“Okay." He pulled Mohinder close, kissing him deeply. Mohinder resisted for a moment, then gave back in kind.
“I love you,” Matt said. “I’m going to meet with this lawyer tomorrow, see what the deal is. And if you still feel the same in the morning, we can-”
“Argue some more?” Mohinder asked, an exhausted smile on his lips.
Matt kissed him again. “I was going to say that I’ll honor your decision, smartass. I couldn’t do this without you, so it seems fair for you to get some vote in it.”
“How magnanimous.”
“Of course, if you want to argue-”
Mohinder smacked him lightly on the arm. “I’ve always enjoyed fighting with you. The makeup sex is fantastic.”
***
April 21, 2021
“Where the hell is that tie?” Matt called.
“What tie?” Mohinder answered distractedly. He was at the kitchen table, cup of chai in his hand, New York Times crossword in front of him.
“The one Molly gave me two years ago. With the stripes.”
“Top drawer of the dresser,” Mohinder called back automatically, trying to think of a five letter word for destiny.
He had given up and moved on when Matt rushed back into the kitchen.
“I’m running late. Are you going to be here when I get back? Or should I call?”
“It’s my day off,” he said, not looking up from the crossword. “I’ll be here when you get back. We can-”
Mohinder was cut off by Matt's fingers on his jaw, gently tilting his face upwards. Matt’s lips met his, tongue teasing his mouth open for a long, satisfying kiss.
“Mm. Wow,” Mohinder said, when they finally broke apart. He was sort of breathless.
“I meant what I said last night,” Matt said earnestly. “If you really are against this, I’m not going to try and force you into it.”
Mohinder smiled at him, cupping his face in his hand. He kissed Matt again, quickly. “I know. Thank you.”
“I love you, you know.”
Mohinder grinned. “I love you too. But you’re going to be late.”
“Shit!” Matt said, sweeping out of the kitchen. Mohinder chuckled, watching Matt as he gathered his things and rushed out the door, loud footfalls receding down the hallway.
He’d gotten most of the crossword filled in when there was a knock at the door. Mohinder looked up, curious as to who would be calling so early. It was barely nine.
“Just a minute,” he called. He ran over to the bedroom, slinging on his robe, then went to answer the door.
Mohinder had to blink a few times, until he was absolutely sure of who he was seeing. Hiro had grown a beard since the last time he’d seen him, a week ago. Also, he’d grown rather older. Mohinder guessed that his age at about 40.
“My name is Hiro Nakamura,” Hiro said. “And I’m from the future.”
Oh, for god's sake, Mohinder thought to himself. Not again.
Next Part: Auld Lang Syne
Fandom: Heroes (Future, AU-ish)
Characters: Matt, Mohinder, Hiro, mention of others
Summary: "Matt scrubbed a hand across his face, wondering how many times a man's life could implode."
Disclaimer: If I owned Heroes, I wouldn't be crying into my student loan statements every month.
Rating: PG-13 for a bit of naughty language.
A/N: This chapter takes place a few years after the prologue, as you can probably see.
Previous Parts: Prologue
Chapter One: Kismet
April 20, 2021
Matt Parkman woke to the sound of his cell phone ringing from his bedside table. The alarm clock behind it read 12:34.
Beside him, Mohinder groaned. “Don’t they know it’s your night off?”
Matt grunted, still too asleep to give an intelligent answer, and fumbled to reach the phone.
“Tell them to piss off,” Mohinder said, burying his face in the covers.
“You can’t tell the NYPD to piss off,” he replied blearily. “It’s illegal.”
“Is not. Free speech,” Mohinder mumbled into the pillow.
“Right. Call the ACLU if I get fired.”
Matt pressed send and held the phone up to his ear. “Parkman. And you better have a damn good excuse.”
“Is this Matthew Parkman?” The voice wasn’t familiar, and another cop wouldn’t have bothered asking for his first name.
“Yes,” he said, sitting up a little and rubbing his eyes. “Who is this?”
“My name is Stan Burke. I represented Mrs. Janice McHenry.”
The statement shocked Matt firmly awake, but left him speechless. All he could manage to think was, Weren’t we past all this?
“Your ex-wife?” the lawyer needlessly clarified.
“I know,” Matt replied irritably. “What is this about?”
Beside him, Mohinder opened an eye. His curiosity was like a soft tug in Matt’s mind, but he ignored it.
There was an awkward silence on the end of the line. “I take it that you haven’t heard.”
Matt growled, “Obviously not. Are you going to tell me, or can I go back to sleep?” He knew he was being rude, but it was nearly one in the morning, and he suddenly remembered Stan Burke from the divorce proceedings. They weren’t exceptionally pleasant memories.
“Mr. Parkman, Janice is dead.”
Everything went still for a moment. Matt would have sworn that his heart even stopped. It was like the one time he had been with Hiro when he teleported; in the instant between point A and point B, there was an infinite moment where he was surrounded by the vast absence of everything. That vacuum was similar to this one.
Then Mohinder sat up and put a hand on his arm, thinking What is it? What’s happened? The world started spinning again.
Matt shook his head and stood up, walking out of their bedroom and into the kitchen to finish the conversation.
***
Twenty minutes later, sitting at the kitchen table, Matt snapped the phone closed and let his head fall into his hands.
“You going to stand there in the dark?” he asked a moment later. “Or are you going to come in and make some tea?”
Mohinder moved out of the shadows of the living room and into the kitchen doorway, smiling sheepishly. “Might as well put the kettle on, I guess.”
“You’d think after thirteen years, you’d realize I knew you were there,” Matt said.
“Ever think that was precisely my plan?” Mohinder asked, raising his eyebrows. Matt leaned back and considered it. There was a kind of weird comfort in that idea, which was probably what the other man was going for.
“So,” Mohinder said, filling the electric kettle from the tap. “Are you going to fill me in? Or did you want to wait till morning?”
“Janice is dead,” Matt said without preamble. Mohinder froze for a moment, then carefully shut off the faucet and set the kettle down on the counter.
I’m sorry, Mohinder thought at him. He did that when he wanted to assure Matt that whatever sentiment he was conveying was sincere.
It’s okay, Matt responded, then corrected himself out loud. “Actually, it’s not. But thank you.”
Mohinder walked behind him and bent down to put an arm around his chest. Matt immediately put his hand on Mohinder’s forearm and squeezed.
“What happened?”
“Car wreck. Two nights ago. They say she fell asleep at the wheel.”
Mohinder didn’t say anything, but his thoughts were a confused and conflicted jumble; Matt didn’t bother listening too closely, letting them mostly wash over him. Random words floated into his consciousness: sorry… careless… waste… love… family. On the last word, he squeezed Mohinder’s arm again and said, “There’s something else.”
Mohinder sat down across the table from him, leaving his hand in Matt’s grasp. He leaned forward. “What is it?”
“It’s Jacob.”
Who is-
“Her son.” Matt took a deep breath. “According to Janice’s will-”
Oh god, please don’t tell me…
“-She wanted me to be his guardian if anything happened to her. And no, I’m not joking.”
Mohinder groaned and let his head fall onto the table.
“No, this isn’t a bad dream either,” Matt said preemptively.
“Now you’re just doing that to annoy me,” Mohinder said, voice muffled underneath his arms.
Matt shut up; it was probably true. Misery loved company, after all. He scrubbed a hand across his face, fingers rasping through stubble as he wondered just how many times one man’s life can implode.
One night, in some kind of fit of melancholy, Matt had decided to make a mental list of all the events that spectacularly changed his life, for better or worse. His father leaving. His mother dying. Marrying (and divorcing) Jan. Becoming telepathic. Getting shot in the chest by a psychopathic megalomaniac bent on mass destruction. Adopting Molly with Mohinder. Nathan Petrelli’s assassination, and the resulting shit storms.
Add in the various near-death experiences he’d had, the few spectacular arrests he’d made, and the few times that he’d saved the world (or at least helped other people save it), the list had numbered twenty-eight. Twenty-eight singular events that, in the course of forty-nine years, had irrevocably altered the course of his life. And occasionally human history, according to Hiro at least.
That was the first and only time he’d ever tried it. Some things shouldn’t be attentively recorded; the enormity of it all became just a little too overwhelming. Especially considering that most of those events had happened within a few years of each other.
Mohinder looked up from the table at him. “Are you actually considering going through with all this? Doesn’t Jacob have family to take care of him? Where’s his father?”
“McHenry died two years ago. The lawyer didn’t mention anything about the rest of the family, but…” He shrugged.
Mohinder got up, resuming his task of making tea with tense, mechanical movements. Matt felt the other man’s mind whirring. The temptation was there to delve further, but it was better to let Mohinder choose his words carefully when he was irritated like this.
Finally, he turned back to Matt. “I… I don’t know if I want to be a parent again.”
“Nobody’s asking you to be,” Matt said petulantly.
There’s a furious outburst in Mohinder’s mind, and Matt backpedaled immediately. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. That came out really wrong.”
“Have I ever told that it’s really annoying when you apologize before I have a chance to yell at you?” Mohinder said.
“A few times,” Matt said, hiding his grin until Mohinder turned back to their tea.
“Takes all of the joy out of it,” he grumbled. He poured the hot water before continuing. “I’m serious, Matt. We raised Molly. We took care of Micah a month or two out of every year. We even took in Claire’s daughter for a while when she went underground. I don’t have a single regret about any of that, but…” He trailed off.
“But what?”
Mohinder sighed and squeezed the bridge of his nose. I’m not sure there’s a way to say this without sounding like a heartless bastard.
Matt stood and put a hand on the counter on either side of Mohinder’s body, then leaned in to kiss him. “I know better than that,” he murmured. “Besides, better I hear it from you than-”
“-Than just plucking it out of my brain. Fine.” Mohinder sighed again. “Honestly, I don’t resent taking care of Micah or Gracie, and you know with Molly-”
“I know,” Matt interrupted, somewhat impatiently. He wasn’t questioning the other man’s love for their daughter.
“I just don’t see how taking in your ex-wife’s son is going to be good for any of the parties involved. He’s never met us, he’d be leaving everything he knows behind, he might have never met someone with abilities, and… wait, how old is he?”
Matt did the math. “He turned thirteen in March.”
Mohinder groaned and let his head fall into Matt’s shoulder. “Oh, no. Not thirteen.”
Matt fought down a grin at the other man’s reaction. Molly had put them through hell at that age; they’d all barely managed to get through it with their sanity intact. He placed his hands on Mohinder’s arms, squeezing the wiry muscles.
“I’m going to meet with the precinct’s lawyer tomorrow. This guy Burke is faxing over some paperwork. I haven’t agreed to anything just yet.”
“Good.”
“But if Jacob needs us-”
Mohinder let out an explosive sound, midway between a growl and a sigh, and leaned back to glare at him.
“Don’t give me that look,” Matt plead. “The kid just lost his mom, his dad died two years ago, and besides, he’s… He’s Janice’s son,” he said, after a small hesitation.
Mohinder kept the glare up. “You do realize you’re talking about your ex-wife to your current partner? And don’t you dare make some kind of stupid ‘common law’ joke,” he added aloud.
Matt shut his mouth. He still couldn’t legally marry to Mohinder in New York. Sometimes, the future was a disappointing place.
“Sorry. What I mean is… he could have been mine. Jacob, I mean.”
Mohinder’s glare faded from his face a little, and Matt went on. “I don’t have any regrets either. Not about leaving Janice or meeting you, or any of it -”
And it was true, which was the amazing part. Matt knew how rare that was.
“-But if things had fallen out differently, Jacob would have been…” He trailed off, not sure how to finish without sounding like even more of an asshole than he already did.
Mohinder’s expression had faded from anger to plain weariness. Matt watched as he rubbed his eyes. “It’s past one,” he said. “Let’s just talk about this in the morning, shall we?”
“Okay." He pulled Mohinder close, kissing him deeply. Mohinder resisted for a moment, then gave back in kind.
“I love you,” Matt said. “I’m going to meet with this lawyer tomorrow, see what the deal is. And if you still feel the same in the morning, we can-”
“Argue some more?” Mohinder asked, an exhausted smile on his lips.
Matt kissed him again. “I was going to say that I’ll honor your decision, smartass. I couldn’t do this without you, so it seems fair for you to get some vote in it.”
“How magnanimous.”
“Of course, if you want to argue-”
Mohinder smacked him lightly on the arm. “I’ve always enjoyed fighting with you. The makeup sex is fantastic.”
***
April 21, 2021
“Where the hell is that tie?” Matt called.
“What tie?” Mohinder answered distractedly. He was at the kitchen table, cup of chai in his hand, New York Times crossword in front of him.
“The one Molly gave me two years ago. With the stripes.”
“Top drawer of the dresser,” Mohinder called back automatically, trying to think of a five letter word for destiny.
He had given up and moved on when Matt rushed back into the kitchen.
“I’m running late. Are you going to be here when I get back? Or should I call?”
“It’s my day off,” he said, not looking up from the crossword. “I’ll be here when you get back. We can-”
Mohinder was cut off by Matt's fingers on his jaw, gently tilting his face upwards. Matt’s lips met his, tongue teasing his mouth open for a long, satisfying kiss.
“Mm. Wow,” Mohinder said, when they finally broke apart. He was sort of breathless.
“I meant what I said last night,” Matt said earnestly. “If you really are against this, I’m not going to try and force you into it.”
Mohinder smiled at him, cupping his face in his hand. He kissed Matt again, quickly. “I know. Thank you.”
“I love you, you know.”
Mohinder grinned. “I love you too. But you’re going to be late.”
“Shit!” Matt said, sweeping out of the kitchen. Mohinder chuckled, watching Matt as he gathered his things and rushed out the door, loud footfalls receding down the hallway.
He’d gotten most of the crossword filled in when there was a knock at the door. Mohinder looked up, curious as to who would be calling so early. It was barely nine.
“Just a minute,” he called. He ran over to the bedroom, slinging on his robe, then went to answer the door.
Mohinder had to blink a few times, until he was absolutely sure of who he was seeing. Hiro had grown a beard since the last time he’d seen him, a week ago. Also, he’d grown rather older. Mohinder guessed that his age at about 40.
“My name is Hiro Nakamura,” Hiro said. “And I’m from the future.”
Oh, for god's sake, Mohinder thought to himself. Not again.
Next Part: Auld Lang Syne