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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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"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?"

Adam is quiet for a long moment, not wanting to discuss death, watching those he loves die, or the sure knowledge that Hiro will follow them some day. Everything is still far too raw inside of him to let his mind linger there without some sort of violence lashing back out at fate.

"Yes," he says, simply, after a moment. "I do."

"Was my father so ambitious? Do you think he would have unleashed it?" There's a small huff as Hiro smirks. "Was my father interested in Victoria? He seemed very 'friendly' with her in the lab."

Adam scowls a bit, thinking of Kaito and his interest in women Adam considered his. "He was very ambitious, yes. I do not know if he would have released it...but Daniel would have. Arthur. Even Angela...given certain conditions, they would all have acted. And, I suspect your father was interested in most things I had, including my women."

He didn't add the natural comparison there, didn't bring up Yaeko, but it had hit, had rankled, to see him watching Victoria and Angela.

Edited 2008-05-05 18:54 (UTC)

The smirk becomes a frown. "But you wanted it released. Why would the ones who would have done the same allowed my father to imprison you because he did not?"

He, too, sees the comparison to Yaeko and his father's desires, but won't comment on it. "My father was fooling around with many women? Was he that upset at having an arranged marriage?"

"Arthur hated me. Daniel did what Arthur wanted. Maury had no pull, and Angela .... would not go against both Arthur and Daniel," Adam said, voice even and a bit cold, distant, as he explained.

"I suspect it was as much about competing for dominance in the group as any actual desire for them."

"Our parents sound rather Machiavellian. I don't understand what any of them were thinking."

Hiro sighs again. "He had to have them because you had?" Is it the fate of Nakamura men to fall for women who are supposed to be Adam's?

"The Prince was required reading," Adam mutters with a scowl, fingers curling a bit against the window sill to press it into his palm. What they'd forgotten, of course, was that he'd been reading it far longer.

He shrugs a bit. "Likely. He didn't love either of them." Not like he had.

"I read it in college." He remembers several conversations in class about it - part of him agreed with it. What did that say about him?

"I guess I am too much a romantic. I have to have some feeling for the people I sleep with. Something other than taking someone who belongs to someone else." He looks sad. "I never intended to take Yaeko from you. I wish I had had more fortitude not to act on my feelings."

"And what did you think?" Adam asks, half curious.

He tenses against Hiro's arms, old wounds and newer ones mingling in a variety of ways. "Perhaps some things were never truly meant to be. It was a long time ago."

"I...could understand why one would feel that way, understand, especially in the arena of politics and war, why one would have to consider that kind of ruthlessness. I could be that ruthless, if I needed to, but I do not wish to be."

He feels Adam tense. "Yes, it was. And I will not bring it up again. Except to offer one last apology for my weakness."

"Sometimes it is for the best, to find that part of yourself," Adam murmurs, eyes far away again. "Only if you stay there for too long..."

There is rarely a way back.

He nods slightly at the apology, unable to say anything to it that won't come out harsher than he intends.

"...you find yourself swallowed by it. War will do that. It makes humans so entirely human and subhuman at the same time." War is not something he wants to involve himself in, but it may be unavoidable.

Hiro accepts the nod, knowing certain things still hurt. "Moonlight becomes you." It makes his pale skin silver.

"Not just war," Adam murmurs, again, a slight frown tugging his brows. Vengeance. Power games. Everything his life had been for so very long now.

He pulls back to the present enough to give Hiro a faint smile. "Does it?"

"No. Any arena where games are played."

Hiro smiles. "Your skin is so pale. The moonlight makes you look...ethereal."

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