changehistory | Open 'verse RP [Open -- Separate threads fine]

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verse: choices

Open 'verse RP [Open -- Separate threads fine]

He'd come home out of some weird need to find his roots, again. Or something. At the current moment he couldn't remember. Souvenir shops lined the streets he roamed too long ago. The house had burned over three centuries before and even the alleys were swept now. There had been nothing to bury, and no money for more than a mass grave had there been, so there were no markers, nothing to see, nothing to kneel at.

Wandering into the new St. Paul's, built after he left, after the fire that took them, he nonetheless felt something settle. He sat in a pew for hours, trying to remember what it had felt like when he came home, saw this, sat here the first time, a different man. Not Matthew. Not Takezo Kensei. Something else, someone else. A man without country, time, family.

For a time, he'd thought to find it again, but now the dream seemed farther away than it had even when trapped in that cell, and he was cold.

It was well after dusk when he left. He found a pub, a table in a corner, and with a wry smile that cursed all the years in between, he ordered a whiskey and asked the bartender to leave the bottle, working to bury himself in the one thing left that had any familiarity or link to the old.

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"Not directly, no. But she was a member of the Company, it seems. They all turned against me, and she feared for herself and her children if she spoke out against them." He takes another long drink. "Perhaps she's even telling the truth."

"It's that woman again, isn't it?" Hiro eyes him narrowly. "You were in love with her."

"It wasn't love," Adam says automatically, before the alcohol forced him toward something like truth. "Or maybe it was. Once. I don't know anymore what it was."

"If it wasn't love, what was it?" Hiro just takes his next swig directly from the bottle. "You spared her. If you truly wanted her dead, you have more than enough opportunity to kill her."

"Nostalgia. Remembrance. The need to have someone to survive who truly knows me now." He shrugs, finishing his glass.

"Or maybe it was always love."

"Does she really know you? Or do you just like the face you show her?" He takes another swig from the bottle. "I hope you can actually love her. I hope I didn't destroy that."

"She knows more than most, carp, of the faces I show and what lies underneath." Finishing his glass, he reaches for the bottle.

"You didn't destroy my ability to love. To trust, perhaps, but not to love."

Hiro pours more into his glass. "How long have you known her?"

"I am sorry I did that to you. I cannot change it. I would cause a rift if I were to go back and meet myself."

"Forty years, give or take a few years," Adam said, quietly, taking another sip of the whiskey. "Since she was sixteen."

He shrugged off the apology. "It was a long time ago, carp."

"Was she very different back then?"

Hiro tilts back the bottle. "If you really felt that way, you wouldn't still be angry with me."

"She was younger, more innocent." Until he'd gotten hold of her, at least. "More hopeful, perhaps. Before things twisted back. Before I twisted her all up."

Adam studied the bottle with a frown. "You think I'm angry about then?"

"Why twist her then? Isn't that why you like children - their innocense? You want them to grow up in peace. Why take it from her?"

Hiro takes another drink from the bottle. "I think you're angry at me for many reasons."

"Because I needed her honed, sharp as any blade. My blade. My right arm. She was perfect."

Adam snagged the bottle, taking a very long drink. "Perhaps I am, carp. I don't even know anymore."

"What is her power? Why did you need it so much?"

He takes back the bottle. "What do you feel?"

"I didn't need her for her power, carp, useful as I suppose it can be. I needed her for her vision. For her." He shrugged a little. "I don't know that I can explain it anymore. Perhaps just that...she believed. In me."

Adam watched him for a long time, then half smiled. "You sound like a therapist. I hear it's become a very popular profession these days."

Hiro's eyes are actually mischievous. "Believed in you? Like someone you knew before?"

He takes another drink. "I don't have the degree to be a therapist. Anyway my advice would probably always sound the same."

Adam shoots him a slight glare and shrugs. "Perhaps."

"And what would that advice be?"

Hiro snickers a little. He's a little buzzed.

"'Don't worry, be happy'." He takes another drink.

Adam's eyebrows go up a bit. He's more than a little buzzed, but having been locked up when the song came out, it means nothing.

"That's....um...good advice."

Hiro starts singing the song, off-key, until the bartender glares at him.

Adam stares at him for a long moment, then, surprisingly, giggles.

Hiro starts giggling with him.

Adam can't quite believe he's giggling, but now that he is, he can't seem to stop, which makes him laugh harder.

Adam's giggling is making Hiro giggle harder. He is nearly doubled over on the stool.

Adam's fairly sure he's never going to be able to catch his breath, as the giggles dissolve into absolute laughter until he can't remember what's so funny even.

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