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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"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..."

Hiro comes up and scoots behind him. He spoons against Adam's back and leans his head against Adam's shoulder as his arms go around Adam's waist. "I'm not sure where these things are coming from. Possibly my own fears for the future. I cannot tell the future like Mr. Isaac did. I wouldn't want to. To see things that will happen and be helpless to stop them or have to hope that you can find someone to stop them in your stead." He sighs deeply. Holding the one he loves is a balm to his soul.

Adam brushes his fingers over Hiro's hands, almost tentative, before they settle, hand over hand, his arms falling lightly to rest against Hiro's. "Perhaps they are merely nightmares then, brought on by visions of apocalypse and doom, the things you saw in the future feeding into them," he suggests. Or the things he did, almost did. The world will end, somehow, someday, and humanity will be no more. It could be millions of years, but, it will happen. The question only remains of when and how. Is it no wonder people dream of the terror?

Adam feels Hiro nod against his back. "It would make sense." He feels strange, but Adam's arms resting on his keeps him at least attached to the earth, if nothing else. "Do you want to live for a million years or is it something you just feel you cannot avoid?"

Adam stares out the window for a long time. "I...don't know. It stretches out, and I want to scream sometimes at the length of it. Only...I do not want to die, ever."

"Does it...scare you, to think of all those endless years?" Adam can feel Hiro's lips as they move against his back. He's not sure he could stand that. Day upon day upon day into forever...

Adam shrugs, just a bit, still staring at the streets below as if they hold some answer except the teeming mass of humanity that floats all around them.

"Sometimes," he admits after a moment. "Especially the way things seem to go in the world."

"That we seem to be content to rush to our destruction?" Hiro's head turns to the same direction as Adams, trying to figure out what he sees in all that traffic below. "That we have turned into such greedy creatures?"

"I don't think you even realize the destruction that's coming," Adam murmurs, still staring. "You rape the planet, taking without giving back. You destroy each other with your pointless wars that solve nothing. You breed worse and worse diseases to destroy...I may have tried to release one, yes, but I wasn't the one who kept it all these years. I wasn't the one who experimented on it, wasn't the one who created new and far worse things than that in a lab, for..what? Fun?"

"You are human, too, Kensei. If the destruction comes, it will hurt you as well. Perhaps not kill you, but you will be profoundly alone with possibly only Peter and Claire as survivors with you. I have to believe that we are smart enough to minimize its effects if we cannot stop it entirely. If we cannot, then perhaps it is only right that we bring on our own destruction."

Hiro leans his forehead against Adam's back again. "I don't know why my father told Victoria to keep it. She begged him to destroy it and I cannot argue with her reasoning."

"Human...yes. Barely, sometimes I think. But I just...always walk outside what the rest of you see, the way the rest of you live. Even when I marry, even when I...have a family, I'm always outside of time. Things will hurt me, perhaps, or maybe they won't touch me anymore than anything else has in all this time." His lips twisted in a not smile. "I am always alone, carp, no matter how many people walk the Earth."

He shrugs a bit. "Because part of them knew I was right."

"Nothing touches you?" He doesn't let go, but something tells him that perhaps Adam has already left him. He wouldn't be surprised. Everyone he loves leaves him one way or other. It seems inevitable.

"I don't understand why my father kept it. He didn't believe you were right. That's why he imprisoned you because he knew you'd convince the others if he didn't."

"I didn't say that," Adam says softly. "Things touch me, but then they are gone, sometimes so fast I barely can register that they were there to begin with." Fleeting lives, lovers, children, friends gone in the space of one heart beat to the next. Sometimes there was warning, a chance to say goodbye, but too often there was nothing.

"Because the others ... they likely wouldn't have allowed its destruction anyway. He risked his own rise to power if he went against them any more than imprisoning me."

Such is the burden of immortality. Only Peter and Claire and anyone else born with their powers will be there at the end of all things. He could be, but that will mean letting go of the life he knows at some point. Right now what they have is what he wants. "I can't imagine having to lose everything like that. Especially since you aren't an overly material man."

He gently kisses the back of Adam's neck. "I can't imagine any good coming from such a thing. I can't imagine why they had to keep it even though they knew what it could do."

"You get used to it," Adam lies with a shrug. "People die. It is a fact of nature unless you are me. It is better to accept it..."

He closes his eyes at the kiss, with a sigh.

"I don't know either."

"Even as a fact of nature, I don't think I could get that used to it. I guess being so short-sighted, I could never quite see it the way you do. Even with my ability, I still could not get used to it."

Hiro's arms tighten around him. "You said that you were only doing what they were afraid to. Do you really believe that?"

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