[MGW] 83. Today

[changehistory]

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.

Comments

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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?"

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

"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."

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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."

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

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

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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."

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

"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."

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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?"

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

"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."

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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?"

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

"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."

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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."

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

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

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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.

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

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

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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.

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

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

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"Can I hold you?"

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

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

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

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.

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

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?

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

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?"

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

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."

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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...

[changehistory.livejournal.com]

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."

[powered-otaku.livejournal.com]

"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?"