(no subject)
Title: Memories and Dust (7/?)
Fandom: Heroes (Future, AU-ish)
Characters: Molly, Jacob (OC), Mohinder, Matt, mention of others
Rating: PG-13 for a bit of language
Disclaimer: Lies make Mohinder cry. So believe me when I say I don't own anything, and make absolutely no money from this.
Summary:"Did you think that you were the only one?"
A/N: This marks the (somewhat arbitrary) end of part one! Yay!
Previous Chapters: Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
Chapter Seven: Capacity for the Impossible
April 25, 2021
Highway 1, near Santa Monica, CA
Molly cranked the window down as she drove the rental car down the coastal highway. The sea felt like it was right outside her window, chilling the air and saturating it with its heavy scent.
Molly considered herself a New York girl through and through. She'd been to a lot of different places - all over the United States and Canada, to India and Europe and Australia. Maybe it was because she'd never had the time to let herself really experience these places (it was true that they never traveled anywhere unless it was to save a life or bury someone, and such things didn't allow for a whole lot of sight-seeing); but she was never more at home than on New York's hectic, sprawling streets. It had gotten into her bones. She moved, breathed, and lived on that city's rhythm.
But she had never been able to put California entirely from her mind. She still dreamed about it frequently, particularly the ocean: walking through the surf, or diving under its waves.
Molly leaned her head back and let the cold night air wash over her. It was surreal, how familiar it was. Fourteen years away, and the Pacific was still almost intimately familiar. Maybe it always would be.
She checked in on Jacob; he was a couple miles ahead, a skinny boy with a backpack and the hood of his sweatshirt thrown over his head. He was in the same position he had been the last time she'd looked in; standing by an entrance to the highway, thumb out. He'd been standing like that for the last half hour. Not too many people were interested in picking up a passenger at this time of night. Hopefully, his luck wouldn't change before she got there.
On the seat beside her, her phone rang. Crap. She'd been expecting this, but had kind of hoped that her dads would be a little too busy to chew her ear off until later. No such luck.
Tempting as it was to let it go to voicemail, she didn't want them to worry. Might as well just get it over with. She picked it up and turned on the speaker phone.
"Hi guys," she said cheerfully.
"Haven't we talked about you gallivanting off like this?" Mohinder's voice was strained. He was the only person Molly knew that used four-syllable words when he was mad. Or worried. Or both, like in this case.
"I'm not 'gallivanting,' Appa. And last I checked, I was twenty-three. Which means capable of making my own decisions."
"This is different," he said.
He was kind of right, Molly realized, and it annoyed her. "What's the phrase? Better to ask forgiveness than permission?"
"I know for a fact that we didn't raise you to believe that."
"Do as I say, not as I do, you mean?" she snapped. Even as she said it, she regretted it. And not just because she'd been reduced to using clichés.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. "That's not fair, Molly."
Molly bit her lip. "Sorry. But Jacob's trying to hitch a ride north right now. He's not having any luck, but I need to get there before that changed. I didn't want to waste time arguing with you two."
"Jacob is dangerous," he warned her. "I have two burns on my chest that prove that."
"You realize you're talking to someone who had Elle Bishop as a babysitter, don't you?"
There was a pause. "That was only the once, and we were desperate."
Molly smiled. "I'm not blaming you. Besides, we had fun: I'd never seen someone make popcorn by electrocuting it before."
"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," Mohinder said, and Molly had to hold back a laugh.
"I'm just saying that I know how to deal with dangerous people. I work at the Company, remember? You're the one that hired me."
She could hear Matt's voice in the background. She should have figured he was listening in. He sounded kind of pissed. Maybe she shouldn't have brought up her job. He'd never been exactly pleased that Molly had chosen to follow in Mohinder's footsteps in working for the Company. It was partially for his sake that she'd taken a job in emergency services as well. Driving an ambulance wasn't police work, but she knew that it still made him proud.
"Look," she said. "I'm the best person to do this. He's probably convinced that you hate him, and... well, Dad's a telepath. That freaks out anybody who isn't used to it. I'm probably the least intimidating of us."
"That does not make me feel any better," she heard Matt say in the background.
God, they were so dense sometimes. "If either of you had shown up, he would have either panicked like he did this afternoon..." She lingered on the last word, to remind them of what happened when Jacob panicked. "Or he'd have run away. Even if he runs away from me, it's not like I can lose him."
"And if he panics this time?" Matt said.
"Then I'll handle it." Honestly, it was like she was still fourteen. Molly looked up, catching sight of the sign for her exit. She said quickly, "I have to go, my exit is coming up."
"Molly-"
"Love you both, and I'll call you in an hour or so. Bye!"
"Wait, Molly!"
She hung up, feeling sort of guilty. But she knew she was right; Matt or Mohinder showing up would have been a disaster. And sometimes, the only way to handle two overprotective fathers was by sheer stubbornness. She set the phone on silent, just in case they tried calling her back, and turned onto the road where Jacob was standing.
She could see him just ahead. She put on her blinker and pulled over, stopping the car about thirty feet in front of him. She watched in the rear-view mirror as Jacob gathered up his backpack and ran towards the car. He opened the door and got in without even looking at her, and Molly had to wonder where his instinct for self-preservation was.
Of course, when he did see her, he shrank against the door. A variety of emotions flickered across his face - fear, anger, suspicion - in such quick sequence, it was like watching a zoetrope animation.
"There's an all-night diner a few exits back," Molly said, as his hand went toward the door handle. "Let me buy you a hot chocolate and some french fries, and we can talk."
"I don't want to talk to you," Jacob spat out.
"Fine," Molly said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. "I'll talk and you can listen."
He glared at her, not taking his hand from the handle. Molly's instincts told her that he was about five seconds from bolting.
"Look," she said quickly. "You can either come with me now, or you can run away. You do that and you'll probably wind up sleeping on the side of the road, because nobody is going to pick you up tonight. And then tomorrow, we can do this all over again somewhere else on the highway, except Matt and Mohinder will be with me, and we're all going to be in very bad moods."
"Or you could just leave me alone," Jacob growled. "You don't want to mess with me. You've seen what I can do."
Molly had to admire his audacity, even if she didn't quite believe the threat behind it. "You don't want to hurt anyone," she said. "You're capable of it, but you sure as hell don't like it. That's what I saw, anyway."
Jacob visibly deflated. Molly relaxed a little; it had just been an educated guess, on her part, that Jacob wouldn't try and hurt her. Matt had said what happened that afternoon was an accident, but even telepaths got it wrong sometimes.
"So," she said. "French fries and hot chocolate? Or do you want to run away and sleep under an overpass?"
Jacob sighed, a short, angry puff of air escaping from his teeth. "I want a mocha. Not hot chocolate."
Molly rolled her eyes - his brattiness really awe-inspiring - but she was smiling. She switched the car into drive and got back on the highway.
***
"How did you find me?" Jacob asked after they ordered. He'd gotten a hamburger in addition to the mocha and french fries, while Molly had just ordered some tea.
"I thought you didn't want to talk to me," she said. She was a little cranky at how expensive Jacob's mocha and burger had been. Roadside diners had changed since she was a kid.
"Not if you're just going to tell me a bunch of crap about how your two dads are really great and wonderful and how much they care for me. Sounds boring."
"It would be. Though they are great," she added, because she had to. She decided not to say that she seriously doubted that either of them liked Jacob much yet. The kid certainly didn't make it easy.
"So I want to know how you found me," Jacob said, blithely ignoring her second statement. "Did Matt, like, hear my thoughts from long distance?"
Molly shook her head. "No, he didn't know you were gone until I told him."
"So how did you know?"
"That Delores lady called me when she found you weren't in your bed," Molly said. "She was in a bit of a panic," she added.
Jacob looked slightly guilty at this, but not too much. Molly didn't blame him.
"That still doesn't explain how you found me," Jacob said.
The waitress came by with Molly's tea and Jacob's mocha. Molly added in sugar and milk as she waited for the woman to walk out of earshot.
"I'm clairvoyant," she said in a low voice. "I can find pretty much anybody or anything, so long as I know what I'm looking for. People are easiest, though."
She could do more than that now, but it got more complicated and harder to explain. Easier to just leave it at that.
"You're clairvoyant," Jacob said. Not quite disbelievingly, which was something. She couldn't quite place the meaning of his tone, but at least he wasn't running for the door.
"Yep."
"And Matt is telepathic."
Molly nodded. "Yeah."
"Jesus. What can the other guy do?"
"Mohinder?" Molly pretended to think for a moment. "He's a great cook. And he can recite P.G. Wodehouse and Victor Frankl from memory." Not to mention a whole other slew of philosophers, yogis, poets, scientists, and English satirists; but his Bertie Wooster voice had always made Molly giggle, and Man's Search for Meaning had occupied a space on her bookshelf since she was fifteen.
"Who?" Jacob asked, eyebrows crinkling in confusion.
"Never mind. Basically, he's a genius."
"Okay," Jacob said, while his tone said, So what? "But what's his power?"
"He doesn't have one. Not like us." Molly saw no need to go into the whole Shanti virus thing, and how Mohinder's antibodies were still the only sort-of cure that had ever been produced. "But he's been studying people like us forever."
The Company was another thing that could be explained later. Preferably by someone who wasn't her.
"People like us?" Jacob asked. He sounded amazed, maybe even a little overwhelmed. "How many of us are there?"
She looked at him over the rim of her tea cup, really looked at him for the first time since searching him out from her room in New York. She saw a skinny, scared, tired, grief-stricken kid who'd been thrown into a situation that was unthinkable for most people - not just his parents' death, but suddenly being gifted with the capacity to do the impossible.
"You've never met another evolved human?" Molly asked.
Jacob looked away and shrugged, a quick jerk of his shoulders that could signify anything.
"There's quite a few of us," Molly said. "Nobody really knows how many."
"Where? I mean, are you all in New York?"
Molly blinked. Did he think this was the world of the X-Men or something? That every person with powers lived in some mansion upstate? "We're everywhere. All over the world," she said.
Jacob looked awestruck. Molly couldn't help laughing a little at his expression. "Did you think you were the only one?"
"Of course not!" he said. The words were said a little too loudly and too quickly for it to be the truth, and they both knew it. He dropped his gaze and glowered into his mug.
Oh my god, Molly thought. Jacob had thought he was all alone. His reaction to Matt reading his mind that afternoon suddenly made a lot more sense.
She felt another wave of anger at Matt's ex-wife. What the hell was wrong with her? She'd known there were other people like Jacob (hell, she'd been married to one of them) and she'd never tried to reach any of them. Never told Jacob that there were others out there. Was it too much to ask that Janice tell her son that he wasn't a complete freak of nature? Did she think she was trying to protect him by keeping him ignorant? What was that woman's deal?
Molly continued to fume silently as Jacob's food arrived. She watched him dig enthusiastically into his burger, thinking that he was probably an all right kid once you got past the layers of bristling resentment. Even if he wasn't, he didn't deserve what all had happened to him.
"How old were you when you first..." Jacob made some vague gesture.
"I was seven." Molly smiled at the memory. "My gerbil got out of his cage, and my mom was going crazy trying to find him. I told her to look in the bathroom closet, beneath the towels, and there he was. What about you?"
Jacob shrugged again. "Eleven." He took a massive bite out of his hamburger, as if to fend off any other questions. "Did your Mom have powers too?"
"No. My dad was cryokinetic, though." At Jacob's look of confusion, she clarified, "He could freeze things."
The perplexed look didn't go away. If anything, it deepened. "Matt can freeze things too?"
Oh. That's why he was confused. "Matt's not my biological dad," Molly told him. "He and Mohinder adopted me."
"What happened to your real parents?" He was looking at her like she'd just made a coin appear from mid-air, or pulled a rabbit from a hat; suddenly she had become interesting. She wasn't sure that she liked it.
"They died," Molly said shortly, hoping to intimidate him into not asking anymore questions. Sylar was definitely on the list of things someone else could explain to Jacob.
Jacob's hamburger and fries had been forgotten, apparently. "How?"
"Does it matter?" she said sharply.
"They're your parents, you tell me. How did they die?"
"God, Jacob!" she said forcefully. "Take a hint. I don't want to talk about it."
There was another of those flickering sequences of emotions on his face; shock, then anxiety, then dull anger. She watched all of Jacob's sullen defenses rise back to the surface of his face, and realized she'd probably lost whatever ground she might have gained with him. He slouched back in his seat and pushed his plate away, looking away from her and out the window. Molly sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose. God damn, it had been a long day.
"They were killed. Murdered." Molly took a deep breath. Why was this so hard? It had been almost fifteen years. It shouldn't have hurt like this anymore. Maybe it was being in California again, the setting of so many of her dreams and nightmares. "I was eight," she added.
Jacob swirled the dregs of his mocha in the mug. "My dad was killed too. When I was eleven."
That this was the same year that he'd apparently manifested didn't escape Molly's notice. Neither did the fact that this was the first time Jacob had volunteered any information without being asked for it. She didn't know what to make of either of these details. She wished Micah was here. He would have known how to talk to another orphan.
"I know," she said. "I'm sorry."
Jacob shrugged again, but it was different from the previous ones. Cautious where the other ones had been full of attitude. He still wasn't looking at her, continuing to concentrate on the last inch of espresso in his cup instead. "Did they ever catch the guy who did it?" Jacob asked her. "The one who killed your parents?"
Molly blinked. "Yeah. Eventually."
Two words; they couldn't sum up the years of terror, couldn't do justice to the number of victims, couldn't even hint at how much pain that bastard had caused before he was killed.
Still, Jacob nodded as if he understood. "Good," he said.
Hell, maybe he did understand. Molly wasn't in a position to deny the possibility of anything right now. She took a deep breath. God, she felt so tired. Glancing at her watch, she saw why: it was past one in the morning. This was the longest day of her life. Or at least her twenties.
"Are you finished with your food?"
Jacob looked down at his plate as if he'd forgotten it was there. "Yeah. I'm not that hungry."
"Okay," Molly said. "In that case, here are your options: I can drop you off at that woman's house. I can drop you off at that lawyer's house. You can try and run away again, and sleep next to the highway somewhere. Or you can come back to the hotel with me, and we can try and find you some cot bed to sleep on."
Jacob crossed his arms and sighed, slouching back into the booth.
***
Mohinder picked up the phone on the first ring.
"Molly? Is everything all right? Did you find Jacob?" She could hear Matt in the background again, speaking in some kind of urgent undertone.
"Yeah," she said. "Yes to both. I'm bringing him back with me. Can you go try and get a camp bed or something from the front desk?"
She could hear the surprise in the silent pause between his breaths. Matt had fallen silent in the background too. "Yes," he said finally. "I'm sure I can get something."
"Good. Because I'm not giving up my bed and I doubt he'll want to share."
"Ah. I see," Mohinder said doubtfully. There was a longer pause, and then he asked, "Are you sure you're all right, sweetheart? You sound--"
"I'm fine, Appa. We had a long talk and got some food. I'm just tired." She looked over at Jacob in the front seat and rolled her eyes. He turned away, but she caught a slim curve of a smile as he did.
"Okay," Mohinder said. "I suppose we'll see you when you get here. Er, both of you."
"Yep. Love you. Bye." She hung up the phone and turned on the ignition. She caught the skeptical look Jacob was giving her and smiled at him.
"You'll get used to them," she said. She put the car in drive, and added, "You're lucky: I've already broken them in for you."
Fandom: Heroes (Future, AU-ish)
Characters: Molly, Jacob (OC), Mohinder, Matt, mention of others
Rating: PG-13 for a bit of language
Disclaimer: Lies make Mohinder cry. So believe me when I say I don't own anything, and make absolutely no money from this.
Summary:"Did you think that you were the only one?"
A/N: This marks the (somewhat arbitrary) end of part one! Yay!
Previous Chapters: Prologue | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six
Chapter Seven: Capacity for the Impossible
April 25, 2021
Highway 1, near Santa Monica, CA
Molly cranked the window down as she drove the rental car down the coastal highway. The sea felt like it was right outside her window, chilling the air and saturating it with its heavy scent.
Molly considered herself a New York girl through and through. She'd been to a lot of different places - all over the United States and Canada, to India and Europe and Australia. Maybe it was because she'd never had the time to let herself really experience these places (it was true that they never traveled anywhere unless it was to save a life or bury someone, and such things didn't allow for a whole lot of sight-seeing); but she was never more at home than on New York's hectic, sprawling streets. It had gotten into her bones. She moved, breathed, and lived on that city's rhythm.
But she had never been able to put California entirely from her mind. She still dreamed about it frequently, particularly the ocean: walking through the surf, or diving under its waves.
Molly leaned her head back and let the cold night air wash over her. It was surreal, how familiar it was. Fourteen years away, and the Pacific was still almost intimately familiar. Maybe it always would be.
She checked in on Jacob; he was a couple miles ahead, a skinny boy with a backpack and the hood of his sweatshirt thrown over his head. He was in the same position he had been the last time she'd looked in; standing by an entrance to the highway, thumb out. He'd been standing like that for the last half hour. Not too many people were interested in picking up a passenger at this time of night. Hopefully, his luck wouldn't change before she got there.
On the seat beside her, her phone rang. Crap. She'd been expecting this, but had kind of hoped that her dads would be a little too busy to chew her ear off until later. No such luck.
Tempting as it was to let it go to voicemail, she didn't want them to worry. Might as well just get it over with. She picked it up and turned on the speaker phone.
"Hi guys," she said cheerfully.
"Haven't we talked about you gallivanting off like this?" Mohinder's voice was strained. He was the only person Molly knew that used four-syllable words when he was mad. Or worried. Or both, like in this case.
"I'm not 'gallivanting,' Appa. And last I checked, I was twenty-three. Which means capable of making my own decisions."
"This is different," he said.
He was kind of right, Molly realized, and it annoyed her. "What's the phrase? Better to ask forgiveness than permission?"
"I know for a fact that we didn't raise you to believe that."
"Do as I say, not as I do, you mean?" she snapped. Even as she said it, she regretted it. And not just because she'd been reduced to using clichés.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. "That's not fair, Molly."
Molly bit her lip. "Sorry. But Jacob's trying to hitch a ride north right now. He's not having any luck, but I need to get there before that changed. I didn't want to waste time arguing with you two."
"Jacob is dangerous," he warned her. "I have two burns on my chest that prove that."
"You realize you're talking to someone who had Elle Bishop as a babysitter, don't you?"
There was a pause. "That was only the once, and we were desperate."
Molly smiled. "I'm not blaming you. Besides, we had fun: I'd never seen someone make popcorn by electrocuting it before."
"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," Mohinder said, and Molly had to hold back a laugh.
"I'm just saying that I know how to deal with dangerous people. I work at the Company, remember? You're the one that hired me."
She could hear Matt's voice in the background. She should have figured he was listening in. He sounded kind of pissed. Maybe she shouldn't have brought up her job. He'd never been exactly pleased that Molly had chosen to follow in Mohinder's footsteps in working for the Company. It was partially for his sake that she'd taken a job in emergency services as well. Driving an ambulance wasn't police work, but she knew that it still made him proud.
"Look," she said. "I'm the best person to do this. He's probably convinced that you hate him, and... well, Dad's a telepath. That freaks out anybody who isn't used to it. I'm probably the least intimidating of us."
"That does not make me feel any better," she heard Matt say in the background.
God, they were so dense sometimes. "If either of you had shown up, he would have either panicked like he did this afternoon..." She lingered on the last word, to remind them of what happened when Jacob panicked. "Or he'd have run away. Even if he runs away from me, it's not like I can lose him."
"And if he panics this time?" Matt said.
"Then I'll handle it." Honestly, it was like she was still fourteen. Molly looked up, catching sight of the sign for her exit. She said quickly, "I have to go, my exit is coming up."
"Molly-"
"Love you both, and I'll call you in an hour or so. Bye!"
"Wait, Molly!"
She hung up, feeling sort of guilty. But she knew she was right; Matt or Mohinder showing up would have been a disaster. And sometimes, the only way to handle two overprotective fathers was by sheer stubbornness. She set the phone on silent, just in case they tried calling her back, and turned onto the road where Jacob was standing.
She could see him just ahead. She put on her blinker and pulled over, stopping the car about thirty feet in front of him. She watched in the rear-view mirror as Jacob gathered up his backpack and ran towards the car. He opened the door and got in without even looking at her, and Molly had to wonder where his instinct for self-preservation was.
Of course, when he did see her, he shrank against the door. A variety of emotions flickered across his face - fear, anger, suspicion - in such quick sequence, it was like watching a zoetrope animation.
"There's an all-night diner a few exits back," Molly said, as his hand went toward the door handle. "Let me buy you a hot chocolate and some french fries, and we can talk."
"I don't want to talk to you," Jacob spat out.
"Fine," Molly said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. "I'll talk and you can listen."
He glared at her, not taking his hand from the handle. Molly's instincts told her that he was about five seconds from bolting.
"Look," she said quickly. "You can either come with me now, or you can run away. You do that and you'll probably wind up sleeping on the side of the road, because nobody is going to pick you up tonight. And then tomorrow, we can do this all over again somewhere else on the highway, except Matt and Mohinder will be with me, and we're all going to be in very bad moods."
"Or you could just leave me alone," Jacob growled. "You don't want to mess with me. You've seen what I can do."
Molly had to admire his audacity, even if she didn't quite believe the threat behind it. "You don't want to hurt anyone," she said. "You're capable of it, but you sure as hell don't like it. That's what I saw, anyway."
Jacob visibly deflated. Molly relaxed a little; it had just been an educated guess, on her part, that Jacob wouldn't try and hurt her. Matt had said what happened that afternoon was an accident, but even telepaths got it wrong sometimes.
"So," she said. "French fries and hot chocolate? Or do you want to run away and sleep under an overpass?"
Jacob sighed, a short, angry puff of air escaping from his teeth. "I want a mocha. Not hot chocolate."
Molly rolled her eyes - his brattiness really awe-inspiring - but she was smiling. She switched the car into drive and got back on the highway.
***
"How did you find me?" Jacob asked after they ordered. He'd gotten a hamburger in addition to the mocha and french fries, while Molly had just ordered some tea.
"I thought you didn't want to talk to me," she said. She was a little cranky at how expensive Jacob's mocha and burger had been. Roadside diners had changed since she was a kid.
"Not if you're just going to tell me a bunch of crap about how your two dads are really great and wonderful and how much they care for me. Sounds boring."
"It would be. Though they are great," she added, because she had to. She decided not to say that she seriously doubted that either of them liked Jacob much yet. The kid certainly didn't make it easy.
"So I want to know how you found me," Jacob said, blithely ignoring her second statement. "Did Matt, like, hear my thoughts from long distance?"
Molly shook her head. "No, he didn't know you were gone until I told him."
"So how did you know?"
"That Delores lady called me when she found you weren't in your bed," Molly said. "She was in a bit of a panic," she added.
Jacob looked slightly guilty at this, but not too much. Molly didn't blame him.
"That still doesn't explain how you found me," Jacob said.
The waitress came by with Molly's tea and Jacob's mocha. Molly added in sugar and milk as she waited for the woman to walk out of earshot.
"I'm clairvoyant," she said in a low voice. "I can find pretty much anybody or anything, so long as I know what I'm looking for. People are easiest, though."
She could do more than that now, but it got more complicated and harder to explain. Easier to just leave it at that.
"You're clairvoyant," Jacob said. Not quite disbelievingly, which was something. She couldn't quite place the meaning of his tone, but at least he wasn't running for the door.
"Yep."
"And Matt is telepathic."
Molly nodded. "Yeah."
"Jesus. What can the other guy do?"
"Mohinder?" Molly pretended to think for a moment. "He's a great cook. And he can recite P.G. Wodehouse and Victor Frankl from memory." Not to mention a whole other slew of philosophers, yogis, poets, scientists, and English satirists; but his Bertie Wooster voice had always made Molly giggle, and Man's Search for Meaning had occupied a space on her bookshelf since she was fifteen.
"Who?" Jacob asked, eyebrows crinkling in confusion.
"Never mind. Basically, he's a genius."
"Okay," Jacob said, while his tone said, So what? "But what's his power?"
"He doesn't have one. Not like us." Molly saw no need to go into the whole Shanti virus thing, and how Mohinder's antibodies were still the only sort-of cure that had ever been produced. "But he's been studying people like us forever."
The Company was another thing that could be explained later. Preferably by someone who wasn't her.
"People like us?" Jacob asked. He sounded amazed, maybe even a little overwhelmed. "How many of us are there?"
She looked at him over the rim of her tea cup, really looked at him for the first time since searching him out from her room in New York. She saw a skinny, scared, tired, grief-stricken kid who'd been thrown into a situation that was unthinkable for most people - not just his parents' death, but suddenly being gifted with the capacity to do the impossible.
"You've never met another evolved human?" Molly asked.
Jacob looked away and shrugged, a quick jerk of his shoulders that could signify anything.
"There's quite a few of us," Molly said. "Nobody really knows how many."
"Where? I mean, are you all in New York?"
Molly blinked. Did he think this was the world of the X-Men or something? That every person with powers lived in some mansion upstate? "We're everywhere. All over the world," she said.
Jacob looked awestruck. Molly couldn't help laughing a little at his expression. "Did you think you were the only one?"
"Of course not!" he said. The words were said a little too loudly and too quickly for it to be the truth, and they both knew it. He dropped his gaze and glowered into his mug.
Oh my god, Molly thought. Jacob had thought he was all alone. His reaction to Matt reading his mind that afternoon suddenly made a lot more sense.
She felt another wave of anger at Matt's ex-wife. What the hell was wrong with her? She'd known there were other people like Jacob (hell, she'd been married to one of them) and she'd never tried to reach any of them. Never told Jacob that there were others out there. Was it too much to ask that Janice tell her son that he wasn't a complete freak of nature? Did she think she was trying to protect him by keeping him ignorant? What was that woman's deal?
Molly continued to fume silently as Jacob's food arrived. She watched him dig enthusiastically into his burger, thinking that he was probably an all right kid once you got past the layers of bristling resentment. Even if he wasn't, he didn't deserve what all had happened to him.
"How old were you when you first..." Jacob made some vague gesture.
"I was seven." Molly smiled at the memory. "My gerbil got out of his cage, and my mom was going crazy trying to find him. I told her to look in the bathroom closet, beneath the towels, and there he was. What about you?"
Jacob shrugged again. "Eleven." He took a massive bite out of his hamburger, as if to fend off any other questions. "Did your Mom have powers too?"
"No. My dad was cryokinetic, though." At Jacob's look of confusion, she clarified, "He could freeze things."
The perplexed look didn't go away. If anything, it deepened. "Matt can freeze things too?"
Oh. That's why he was confused. "Matt's not my biological dad," Molly told him. "He and Mohinder adopted me."
"What happened to your real parents?" He was looking at her like she'd just made a coin appear from mid-air, or pulled a rabbit from a hat; suddenly she had become interesting. She wasn't sure that she liked it.
"They died," Molly said shortly, hoping to intimidate him into not asking anymore questions. Sylar was definitely on the list of things someone else could explain to Jacob.
Jacob's hamburger and fries had been forgotten, apparently. "How?"
"Does it matter?" she said sharply.
"They're your parents, you tell me. How did they die?"
"God, Jacob!" she said forcefully. "Take a hint. I don't want to talk about it."
There was another of those flickering sequences of emotions on his face; shock, then anxiety, then dull anger. She watched all of Jacob's sullen defenses rise back to the surface of his face, and realized she'd probably lost whatever ground she might have gained with him. He slouched back in his seat and pushed his plate away, looking away from her and out the window. Molly sighed, and pinched the bridge of her nose. God damn, it had been a long day.
"They were killed. Murdered." Molly took a deep breath. Why was this so hard? It had been almost fifteen years. It shouldn't have hurt like this anymore. Maybe it was being in California again, the setting of so many of her dreams and nightmares. "I was eight," she added.
Jacob swirled the dregs of his mocha in the mug. "My dad was killed too. When I was eleven."
That this was the same year that he'd apparently manifested didn't escape Molly's notice. Neither did the fact that this was the first time Jacob had volunteered any information without being asked for it. She didn't know what to make of either of these details. She wished Micah was here. He would have known how to talk to another orphan.
"I know," she said. "I'm sorry."
Jacob shrugged again, but it was different from the previous ones. Cautious where the other ones had been full of attitude. He still wasn't looking at her, continuing to concentrate on the last inch of espresso in his cup instead. "Did they ever catch the guy who did it?" Jacob asked her. "The one who killed your parents?"
Molly blinked. "Yeah. Eventually."
Two words; they couldn't sum up the years of terror, couldn't do justice to the number of victims, couldn't even hint at how much pain that bastard had caused before he was killed.
Still, Jacob nodded as if he understood. "Good," he said.
Hell, maybe he did understand. Molly wasn't in a position to deny the possibility of anything right now. She took a deep breath. God, she felt so tired. Glancing at her watch, she saw why: it was past one in the morning. This was the longest day of her life. Or at least her twenties.
"Are you finished with your food?"
Jacob looked down at his plate as if he'd forgotten it was there. "Yeah. I'm not that hungry."
"Okay," Molly said. "In that case, here are your options: I can drop you off at that woman's house. I can drop you off at that lawyer's house. You can try and run away again, and sleep next to the highway somewhere. Or you can come back to the hotel with me, and we can try and find you some cot bed to sleep on."
Jacob crossed his arms and sighed, slouching back into the booth.
***
Mohinder picked up the phone on the first ring.
"Molly? Is everything all right? Did you find Jacob?" She could hear Matt in the background again, speaking in some kind of urgent undertone.
"Yeah," she said. "Yes to both. I'm bringing him back with me. Can you go try and get a camp bed or something from the front desk?"
She could hear the surprise in the silent pause between his breaths. Matt had fallen silent in the background too. "Yes," he said finally. "I'm sure I can get something."
"Good. Because I'm not giving up my bed and I doubt he'll want to share."
"Ah. I see," Mohinder said doubtfully. There was a longer pause, and then he asked, "Are you sure you're all right, sweetheart? You sound--"
"I'm fine, Appa. We had a long talk and got some food. I'm just tired." She looked over at Jacob in the front seat and rolled her eyes. He turned away, but she caught a slim curve of a smile as he did.
"Okay," Mohinder said. "I suppose we'll see you when you get here. Er, both of you."
"Yep. Love you. Bye." She hung up the phone and turned on the ignition. She caught the skeptical look Jacob was giving her and smiled at him.
"You'll get used to them," she said. She put the car in drive, and added, "You're lucky: I've already broken them in for you."