None of the answers to this quiz were anything I would do, so the answer is clearly wrong.

Your Defense Mechanism is Projection

It's not you, really. It's everyone else. At least, that's what you keep telling yourself. You may not have noticed, but you tend to hate in others what you fear most in yourself. Projection is a seductive defense mechanism because you never end up noticing that there is anything wrong with you. If everyone you know is a jerk, then there's a good chance that you're the one acting like a jerk!

What's Your Defense Mechanism?

I mean, really: If you end up falling for someone forbidden, how do you handle it?

There is not a single answer there even close to "make them mine anyway." What has "forbidden" got to do with it?

[TM] 294. Passing

[ooc: Companion piece to this.]

All of his life he's prided himself on being unique, one of a kind, a god among men. He walked through them, untouched as time slid by, watching as rulers rose and fell, and an empire crumbled, and a new power came to stretch its shadow across the Earth like an eagle spreading its giant wings. It, too, would fall, crumbling to dust as men and monarchies had before it, and he would stand in the ashes as always. This time, however, he wouldn't be alone. Others had come whose blood copied his, blood of his blood, or DNA rearranging itself to match in a complicated process none of them fully understood. Three of them, by their very natures, stood by his side, and where once he would have resented his loss of uniqueness, centuries of loneliness had taught him the price of being a god, and he found he welcomed their arrival.

Then there was the boy and his project and the vials of his blood and the slices of his skin all filed away in the geneticist's lab. They moved through the streets together and a convenient lie started to form on their lips at curious looks, for all he'd denied it at the wedding. The resemblance was more than a passing one, more than one a second glance would dispel. With a care to the variation in their accents, they could step into each others' lives and pass one for the other, just as they were now, but for two things. The boy bore scars under his well tailored clothes that Adam would never share and should a blade or a bullet pierce the boy's skin, he wouldn't heal, but find himself with new scars, or taking that walk into a darkness Adam would never know.

When the geneticist said he could do it, that he'd gotten the apparatus built, the formula worked out, and had been able to alter some of the boy's donated tissue using Adam's samples, the seeming that had been a trick of fate stood before them as a possibility, something they could make true in all but timing of birth. Suresh had even managed to figure out how to remove the deliberate flaw pressed into the design to tell one from the other, though he thought it likely wouldn't have mattered anyway, given they were changing the boy at a cellular level, but not a structural one. It was really a far smaller, and yet far more profound, code rewriting than it would have been had he put say, himself, into the chamber. He went on talking, explaining, as Adam ran his fingers along the cold metal, and looked up to meet the boy's eyes across it. He'd given his own assent, his willingness to allow this when he gave the Indian his tissue to test, but now he watched the boy with a question in his eyes, and the full enormity of what it meant, of what they would create, the three of them, through this would mean washed over him.

The boy swallowed, and there was a flicker of fear in his eyes, as he, too, grasped what it would and could, entail, and life stretched taut, moments culling down to heartbeats and stilling, before he nodded and they snapped back into place and began passing at their normal speed once more.

"Let's do it."

Something queer twisted in Adam's gut, and he smiled, and the boy across from him echoed the smile back at him, identically manic and ambitious as they rewrote destiny.