changehistory | [MGW] 83. Today

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[MGW] 83. Today

It was all he could concentrate on, truly. Just today, just this breath, just this moment.

If he thought about the past, he could feel the coffin still, close around him. Reaching back he found the cold air on a rooftop, the shock in brown eyes, the fall, the crash, the smell and feel of blood and pain. Further, there were thirty years, the taste of betrayal as father followed in his son's footsteps. There was a reverse legacy there that shadowed his centuries, stretching out its arm to touch everything he tried to do.

If he thought of the future, he felt a tremor of fear run over him. There was too much history, too much darkness, too much they had to overcome. Betrayal, death, darkness, loss. They couldn't go back to those times when they just were together in the sun, in an unspoiled world, with Hiro's hero worship, and his struggling to be the man the boy saw when he looked at him. They could simulate it, perhaps, but they couldn't really go back. He wasn't Kensei anymore, and the things he'd done had changed the boy he knew when he was, in just a short time. He'd driven Hiro to do things that he could feel shattering that sweet, enthusiastic soul. If he looked too far in the future, followed the lines of the changes that could happen...it was the same shadow with no sense of how to change it.

So he concentrated on today. On now. On the rise and fall of Hiro's chest as he slept fitfully next to him. On getting through the day without lashing out, hurting him again. On staying, not walking out the door and away from the tangled mess they were together. On not taking the final step, for either of them.

It was all he could do, and if he let himself think about tomorrow at all, he only allowed it to be a prayer that it would go as well as today.

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Adam rarely sleeps, now. The dreams haunt him, clawing at his hold on sanity, which is tenuous at best it seems. Thirty years in hell, and it's a few...how long was he in there? ... few whatever, comparatively that seems to have broken that hold.

He just sits by the window, most nights, watching the road, watching the vestiges of life that crawl through the night and pushing down all of the darker urges that well up when he isn't looking.

Hiro's movement catches his attention, though, and he turns, watching him with shadowed eyes.

"Shimatta," Hiro mutters as he sits up. The other side of the bed is empty, so his eyes sweep around to find Adam sitting at the window. "Kensei?"

OOC: "Damn."

"I'm here," Adam says quietly, which is a feat in and of itself, to stay. "Bad dreams?"

Hiro nods. He's had this dream the last few nights and he's afraid to sleep, but he can't help it. He has to succumb to it. Then this thing stalks him again.

"There's a change coming." Or maybe his imagination is running away with him.

"What sort of change?" Adam asks with a slight frown.

"I am uncertain, but it's not good. Maybe I'm just going insane." He slumps back against the headboard. "I keep seeing it all go away. Things change, die, corrupt, die, over and over again. Not just people, things, but the entire world. I don't know what it means." He rubs his face with his hand. "Or maybe my imagination is running away from me."

Adam shrugs slightly, lips twisting in a wry sort of smile. "It's called history. It's how things always go."

"You think the world keeps reconstructing itself somehow? I mean, the entire world, not just animals, creatures. What happens to you when it all goes away?"

"Doesn't history and geology tell us it does. Whole continents shift, keep shifting, will shift more. New islands are forming as we speak in Hawaii. It's all in a constant state of flux...most just don't live long enough to see it. Maybe I will...and maybe if the world ends, so will I, finally."

"But what I'm dreaming is not just continental shifts or evolution. It is the entire world going away, then coming back, but not the same. Like someone is blowing it up, then making a new one to take its place. I'm watching it from outside. Like I'm in space. Like it doesn't touch me, except to upset me."

Adam frowns, shaking his head a bit. "Sounds like a nightmare or a disaster movie..."

"It is a nightmare. Perhaps it is an allegory. Perhaps I need more fibre." The last is said with a weak chuckle. He draws his knees up and leans his face into them. "I do not want to be the last one alive. At least, not alone."

"You won't be," Adam says with a slightly dark smile. "I think that fate is reserved for me." A thought occurred to him. "Perhaps it was some distant future you saw? They do say the Earth will fall into the sun one day, or the sun will explode and wipe it out. Those of the literal Revelations translating bent say God will destroy the Earth in fire and then rebuild a new one. That sounds like your dream."

"You don't have to be the last one, Kensei." Hiro looks up at him. "I could be there." He sighs deeply, trying to calm himself. "Do you think god will recreate the earth and put you on it?"

"You'd have to know when it was, carp, and I don't think anyone can predict that." He sighs, running his hand through his hair. "Somehow I doubt very much God would put me on his new Earth."

"I do not consciously make most of my jumps, especially through time. I am drawn to certain times, certain events, certain people." He gets up and pads over to where Adam is sitting. "You do not think you would be on the new world? Why not?"

"Then maybe you'll be pulled there, and I will be amazed, though I really shouldn't. It would complete the circle, would it not?" He turns to look back out the window. "I think even I would be destroyed if the whole earth went, carp."

"Then we would go together, neh? There would be a certain poetry to that." He looks out the window. "I am uncertain whether or not I would miss this world."

Adam frowned eyes sliding back to Hiro with concern. "That doesn't sound like you. All things come to an end, yes, but..."

"It's the detachment. Like after a while, I don't care. Like after so many changes I couldn't feel or I had completely shut down. I don't like that feeling. It's one thing when I do it because the situation calls for it, but to just become that way." He shakes his head.

"You need to care," Adam said sharply with a darker frown. "You, of all people, have to care."

"That's why it frightens me. I don't want to stop caring; I don't want to lose myself like that. As if it had cut my soul from me." He shudders.

"Then you have to hold on to the things that make you care..." Adam says with a frown.

"Can I hold you?"

Adam blinks, the idea of holding not fitting in well with where his thoughts had so recently been, but he nods. "All right..."

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