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Mohinder's POV
Life is strange. If someone had told me a year before that I'd find myself driving down the Rue de Rivoli in a delivery truck, I'd have laughed. Partly out of disbelief at having something so normal and, well, nice, be part of my life, and partly out of the general unlikelihood of the situation given the insanity into which I had been plunged. And yet, there I was, making awkward small-talk with the delivery man as we made our way through mid-afternoon traffic with my latest purchases of a mattress and a sofa.
"Is this your first apartment, or are you buying these things because you just moved to the city?" he asked, after appraising me for a few moments out of the corner of his eye.
It was only week two, so I was still excited about every opportunity to practice my slightly rusty French. "Actually, both," I confessed with the same excitement I'd been unsuccessfully trying to subdue since arriving at the Gare de Lyon a couple of weeks before. "I just moved to the city, but I've never actually outfitted an apartment before… never bought my own furniture. This will be my first night in my first apartment that I can say is all mine."
"An exciting event for you, I am sure," he said prosaically. "And what brings you to Paris?" he continued.
I didn't quite know how to answer such a (unbeknownst to him) weighty question. "It's complicated," I replied.
He winked knowingly and smiled. "Ah, the usual reason things are complicated. To be with a woman, yes?"
Not really, but I didn't feel like explaining, so I simply nodded and smiled back. To be fair, he was right in a way, except for his incorrect, although statistically understandable, assumption of gender. I was here to be with someone, although I doubt the location was as vital as he probably thought. The situation necessitated moving somewhere that was not New York for the near future. Finding myself in Zurich a month ago had been a launchpad. It had been thoughtful of Gabriel to say that he had gone there because of hopeful ideas involving me, but my reasoning was: why live in Zurich if you could live anywhere? I had always secretly entertained dreams of one day living here, but life intervened, as it almost always does, and what was once a goal became a far-off wish. I studied here once, but between needing to finish my degrees in England, the self-inflicted pressure to go back to Chennai for my first professorship in order to save my father and his reputation from himself, and the life-changing events that led me to settle in New York, it was something I had stopped thinking could ever happen. Now it had.
Moving to Paris was one thing, but the circumstances of the situation took the bizzarity of my new reality to a whole new level. If riding in the delivery truck had been out of the realm of imaginable possibilities so many months ago, then the fact that the person waiting for me at our destination---the person with whom I intended to sleep in that bed and eat meals at that table---was Sylar (well, Gabriel, at any rate) was right out. But that was a fact, too, one that I was still almost too dazed to fully process---in the best possible way. There were a couple of hiccups, but nothing I didn't think could be worked out.
We arrived at the building and I rang up to tell Gabriel to come downstairs and help. The delivery man would only take it as far as the door. I'd started to notice that he was less excited about the whole moving-in process than I was. At first I'd been somewhat miffed, but I finally decided that whatever disinterest he had wasn't due to a lack of excitement about being here or being with me, so I assumed it would pass.
Sylar's POV
Paris? Honestly, Paris? I didn't really know why we were here. I had been perfectly fine in Zürich, but Mohinder kept insisting that Switzerland gave him the willies. Switzerland gave him the willies, but not Paris? It was completely baffling. I mean, Paris is just so fucking… French.
Okay, I exaggerate. It's actually a pretty nice place to live. Apart from the fact that it gets almost as much rain as London, even though no one ever talks about it. Apart from the bakery ladies who yell at you when you come in to pay for a baguette with a 20 euro bank note. Apart from the fact that there's some sort of mouvement social (ie., a strike) practically every day in the Metro. Apart from the fact that delivery men don't take stuff upstairs and residential buildings lack elevators for new arrivals who are trying to move heavy furniture up to the fourth floor.
Technically, the furniture moving shouldn't have posed a problem for us, but Mohinder was still having trouble dealing with… stuff. I was trying to give him time to work it out without upsetting him further. So, I bit my tongue and allowed us to unnecessarily almost break our backs lugging our new mattress and sofa up the tiny, circular staircase. But when the damn thing slipped out of his hands and almost crushed him, I had to say something.
"Mohinder, this is ridiculous. Why don't---"
"Just one more flight," he puffed, not letting me finish the sentence he didn't want to hear. "We're doing fine."
"No, we're not. I can hear your vertebrae straining."
Oops. Saying that was almost as bad as what I was trying to propose.
"You… you can?" Mohinder got flustered and looked at me with his usual mixture of awe and… whatever it was that was the matter with him.
"This would be so much easier if you'd just let me do it my way. You're being stupid, Mohinder," I complained, putting my hands in the air and letting my end of the mattress hold itself up.
"Don't do that!" he yelled. I heard the lady whose apartment door we were in front of peer through the peephole to see what the commotion was all about. I grabbed the mattress again, less out of deference to Mohinder's command and more because I didn't want her to see what I was doing.
"Fine," I snapped, and rolled my eyes so that he would know that although I was doing what he wanted, I didn't like it. I grabbed the bottom again to drag it physically up the stairs. "Heave ho."
After some more struggling, we finally got it inside the apartment. Despite the ginormous windows, the apartment didn't actually get all that much sunlight, especially in the later part of the day. True to form, it didn't occur to Mohinder to turn on the goddamn lights, and heaven forbid I use my ability to turn them on while my hands were full. I'd noticed this even back in New York the few times I'd ever been to either of his apartments. He'd blunder around in the darkness, not noticing that the sun had set. It was something uniquely him, and I couldn't understand where it came from. It wasn't an energy conservation issue, and it wasn't because he'd been brought up not to. His father had always lit the lamps. It was one of a few things about him that were slowly starting to annoy me.
"Hey, Mohinder, can you flick the switch?"
"What?" he asked, busy looking for the right place to put the sofa. My arms were getting tired, but out of respect for his wishes, I didn't want to simply pretend to hold the thing with my arms. I wanted him to be ok with my abilities, not to have to use them in secret. In the meantime, I wanted to at least be able to settle for winning the smaller domestic battles.
"The lights, Mohinder. Turn them on," I repeated in an annoyed clip.
"I can see fine. What do you think of putting it over there?" He was so absent-minded that he hadn't even noticed the irritation in my voice---as usual. I dropped my end of the sofa on the ground in a huff, not really caring if it disturbed Mme. Lescaux downstairs, and walked around turning on all the lamps.
"What?" Mohinder was finally jolted out of his daze by the glare. "What's all the stomping about?"
"Nothing," I replied, scowling.
"Well, whenever you want to stop and actually be useful, just let me know," he barked.
That was it. I walked over to the coat rack and started putting on my jacket.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I need some space."
Mohinder didn't even get it, which only annoyed me further. "But I was just gone for an hour and a half…"
"It's not about how long." And I stormed out.
The thing is, something I hadn't quite registered about Mohinder back before everything had worked out like this was what a pissy bastard he could be, and was, quite a lot of the time, in fact.
Maybe that's why he felt so immediately at home with the French.
Seriously, though, it's the sort of thing you don't really notice when you're carrying on the kind of secret, tryst-like relationship we'd had, full of lies and sneaking around to have quickies in inappropriate locations. It's the sort of thing that only becomes an issue when you're cooped up with someone in a small space day after day. And a large part of the problem is that I hadn't been cooped up with anyone since I was a kid living at home. I'd spent most of the past many years almost completely alone. Adjusting to constant company, even of someone I cared about as much as Mohinder, was tough, and the snippy comments didn't help.
I walked due north, hoping to get away as quickly as possible from our picturesque little street and into something a little less perfect and pristine.
We had gotten an apartment in a seventeenth-century building in a historic part of town. Mohinder said that now he was living in Paris, why would we settle for anything less than something with winding staircases and moldings and the works? Well, even though it wasn't my personal priority, I suppose he had a point. However, what shocked me was the realization that he was just slightly less low-key about things than I had always given him credit for. It actually wasn't all that expensive, at least for people accustomed to the New York City housing market, but it was Mohinder's insistence on so many details that confused me. Sure, he was anything but snobbish about people and things that really mattered, but now that I was with him in a situation in which we had to make daily decisions on random little things, I was seeing a new side of him. I guess I just always forgot that he'd been brought up a lot more privileged than I was and had been taught to care about a longer list of things than I had. So, I ended up opting out of most of the shopping and planning we'd been doing for the move. I let him take care of it.
I guess it was more about me. I was the one used to him living in the shabby Brooklyn apartment he inherited from his father, and the equally shabby Lower East Side apartment he moved into when I showed up again all those months ago. And maybe I had assumed---or wanted to assume---that he thought of those places as fondly as I did. But now that I was seeing the truth, there was really no reason why that should have been the case. Those were all makeshift situations, and yes, Mohinder had borne them with a good-natured (and very blinding) smile, but I now realized that I must have merely romanticized those places during the more difficult times, because they were what I thought of when I thought fondly of him, but that didn't mean they were him.
In addition, I had thought of those places as us. But now that we were supposed to be building an actual us, I found myself feeling like I was merely acquiescing to a place that was all about him---a Mohinder I hadn't been acquainted with before. We'd spent the last two days moving in, but I found myself already missing the anonymous hotel we'd been staying in while we looked for a place.
And the whole thing about him refusing to deal with the fact that my abilities were back was just a whole other headache. What's worse is that he always avoided actually talking about it; he just made it clear in these weird roundabout ways that he didn't want me to use them and didn't want to deal with it.
Yeah, they were ill-gotten gains from a previous part of my life, and I really did get why he was uncomfortable with them, but they were hardwired into my brain. I couldn't help hearing stuff, or seeing how things worked, or remembering everything. And sure, I could have never used the more consciously active ones like telekinesis and freezing, but if I was using the others, then why make an arbitrary distinction? Whether or not I would choose to steal them all over again, why repress something that was now a natural part of me?
For example… Back when we were discussing where to move (I still don't get what was wrong with Zurich; so what if it's dull?) Mohinder had asked me if I spoke French. I had lied then when I told him yes, but I wasn't lying anymore. It was the work of a couple of secret nights after he'd fallen asleep to pick it up. Sure it was a lie, and it was power usage, but it had ended up making him happy, since he was so dead set on coming here. I knew that the 'what you don't know can't hurt you' stance isn't a good one to take, but in cases such as these, it was true. Right? Deep down, part of me knew that this wasn't quite the right mentality, but on some level I guess I didn't want to deal with all the remifications either. So, that was my story, and I was sticking to it.
Anyway, I was taking the walk to calm down, not to work myself up, so I stopped thinking about it. In less than an hour, I had somehow found myself near Père Lachaise. I figured I might as well explore, so I got a panini on the street before entering. I'd been walking around aimlessly for awhile when I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket. It was Mohinder.
"Hi," I said tremulously. This was basically our first fight (there had only been one back in New York). This one went much deeper than the insecurities and genuine misunderstanding of the last one and I didn't know how to handle it.
"Where are you?" I couldn't tell from his tone what he was thinking, but I noticed that there was no apology.
"Père Lachaise."
There was a pause. "The cemetery? Whatever for?"
I knew I should be smoothing things over, but the judgmental derision in his voice made my blood boil. "I like it. Do you have a problem with that?"
"That's dark, Gabriel, really dark." Asshole. I wasn't going to respond to that, so there was silence for awhile until he finally asked, "Are you there?"
"Yeah."
"So…" Mohinder trailed off. I could tell he was trying to sound casual, and it was gratifying to see that he was as bad at dealing with these kinds of fights as I was. "Are---are you coming home soon?"
If he had been less obnoxious about the cemetery thing, I would have said yes and taken the metro back, but not now. I looked at the half-eaten sandwich in my hand. It wasn't enough to replace dinner, but maybe I could get something else to supplement it. "Later. I'm going to walk around here some and then run some errands. Go ahead and eat without me."
He was quiet again. I knew he wanted to ask me more persistently to come back, but was too proud. "Ok, I'll see you later, then," he said faux-breezily, and disconnected.
I had no errands to run and five minutes later it started to drizzle, but I couldn't go home after all that. So I kept walking. The route I happened to take back was pretty uninspiring. I was still figuring out how the city was pieced together (I missed the beautifully logical grid system of New York), but I'd left in too dramatic of a rush to pick up my map. Damn.
Mohinder's POV
It was the first dinner I'd eaten alone in a month. In addition, the excitement I'd had about our first night in our own apartment sleeping in our own bed had been killed. Wandering around cemeteries, indeed.
After scrounging in the empty refrigerator, I finished moving things to where I thought they should go and made the bed by the time he came back at around ten thirty. I didn't actually know what we were fighting about, but I definitely wasn't going to back down. There was almost palpable tension in the air as we silently went through our nightly rituals. We'd found out in the past few weeks that we did the exact same thing: shirt off, floss, brush teeth (I tried not to feel that he was doing that spitting from way too far above the sink on purpose to annoy me), glass of water, pants and underwear off, lights out, under the sheet.
The only difference tonight was that Gabriel pulled his never-worn pajama pants out of the drawer and put them on. I was annoyed. It was pretty clear I wasn't getting any sex that night; he didn't need to go out of his way to remind me. I lay in the bed, watching him change his pants, even though he wouldn't look at me. When he was done, he walked over to the bed. As he lifted a leg to get in, I felt myself about to snap at him for forgetting to switch the lights off, but then he waved his hand and the room went dark.
Ah. So that's what this was about. I cringed involuntarily, as I always did when he used his powers around me, but I bit my tongue for the moment.
"What did you eat?" he asked after a minute, his voice muffled in the pillow as he faced away from me. It was the first thing he'd said since coming home, but it didn't help to ease the anger simmering under the surface.
"Just some cheese. That's all we had in the fridge." I thought for a minute. "What about you?"
"Sandwich," he replied curtly. I wondered why he'd even bothered with that pointless course of conversation.
Then we were quiet again. I hated it. I tried to think of a way to relieve the tension without openly caving. I refused to apologize; I hadn't done anything wrong. I thought some more before coming up with, "So, do you want to talk about it?"
"Not if you ask like that," was the strained reply. I guess my tone had been accusatory.
I took a deep breath. This was turning out to be more like caving than I wanted. "I want to know what's wrong, Gabriel," I said as politely as I could.
I felt Gabriel shift in his usual dramatically angry way (it always made me strangely nervous). Then the lights were on again, seemingly of their own accord. I shielded my eyes from the sudden glare. He was sitting up in the bed with his arms crossed and looking straight ahead, not at me. I rolled over on my side and propped myself up on an elbow, not wanting to be at too much of a lower vantage point.
"I'm allowed to like visiting cemeteries," he said bluntly.
Ok. "Of course you are," I replied.
He continued, "It's not as morbid as it sounds. It's just a historical place that's pretty and quiet. It doesn't mean I'm fixated on death or 'dark' or anything like that."
Between this statement and the telekinetic light-switching, I'd pieced together where he was heading with this, so I decided to let him go there if it would make him feel better, even if I didn't really want to deal with it. "Fine."
"Just like how using my powers to lift furniture doesn't mean I'm going to go back to killing people."
That bald statement hung in the air.
We'd been so happy in New York. Well, we were still incredibly happy now… at least, I had thought so until today's strange drama had shown that perhaps there were chinks in what I had assumed was domestic bliss, but…
I remembered how ironic I had found it when it occurred to me that Gabriel was the only friend I had who didn't have powers. But I loved it. Exciting as I found abilities---it almost frightened me to know how exciting I found them---it was nice to have not just one person, but the most important person, in my life be as normal as myself. When he showed me what he could do again on that first night in Zurich, I balked.
First of all, there was the obvious element of discomfort. Being pinned to the ceiling, Dale Smithers lying dead in a pool of blood, Matt shot with his own bullets… it was hard to mentally separate the powers of a god from the mania of a killer. And, whether or not it was strictly logical, it scared me to wonder how repentant he could actually be for everything if he still used the abilities he'd literally ripped people's heads open to get.
It somehow tainted the whole relationship, in my mind. Not only had this new development made me lose that important other normal person in my life, but it relegated me to this almost emasculated state in which he could do everything better than I could. I couldn't bear that. But I was also too proud to actually say it… which is why I was constantly engineering it for us to not talk about it. He'd gotten that I didn't like it, and I hoped (at least until today) that he'd understand and slowly overcome the desire to use them.
"Well?" he asked when over a minute had elapsed without a reply on my part.
"I know," I said. And the thing is that I did, know, rationally at least. But that didn't mean I liked it.
He turned to me with a surprised and sweetly tender look on his face. It gave me a lump in my throat. I immediately felt guilty for harboring any negative feelings, but I still couldn't give them up. And I definitely wasn't ready to give up my silent injunction. However, I realized as I saw his face glow with relief, that maybe we needed to work it out more actively than we had been.
"Good," he said. He got out of the bed, walked over to the door, and manually turned the light off before climbing in again. I felt his hand cover and squeeze mine, a quiet sign that although not actually resolved, the fight (or whatever it had been) was over and we'd be ok. I stretched my inner leg over to pull his foot closer to me. He grumbled that adorable sleepy murmur that I always loved to hear, and I sighed contentedly. I was more tired than I had hitherto realized and was drifting off to sleep when I heard him whisper something completely unexpected.
"I don't really like the sofa you bought."
My jaw dropped in the darkness. What? I inhaled, about to start arguing but… I was sleepy and we had fought enough for one day. Tomorrow.