Adam Monroe

[ooc: Peter referred to is hadtobeahero and used with permission]

What it is that pulls him from the sleep he finally managed to fall into, Adam can't say. The fragment of a nightmare, of satin lining or cold eyes or the wheezing sound of a tube in a throat; or a creak as the house settles around them, shifting with age like the grandmother he barely remembers used to in the chair by the fire before everything went to Hell; or the first light of dawn slipping through the shutters and blinds to dance through the dust mites in the air that never go away even when you clean thoroughly. It could be one or all or none, but he shifts in a moment from sleep to waking, breath catching and aware that something is different.

His arms aren't empty. The bed isn't cold next to him. In the space of the heartbeat that realization hits, memory comes as well, and his lips curve in a small smile as he shifts slowly to steal a glance at the sleeping boy next to him. The shadows that have hung over him aren't apparent while he's sleeping. What he's been through, what they did to him...it could just be another nightmare in the peaceful dawn as his eyes roam over the lines of his face like he's never quite seen him before. To be honest, he never allowed himself the luxury of looking. He had a mission, a focus, a target, and Peter had a purpose in it and he couldn't allow long lashes and a crooked smile from lips he wanted to taste divert him from it. But now...

Now everything's different. They're different, both of them tried and tested with new scars no one can see. Peter's changed, and Adam knows he hasn't even scratched the surface of how deep the months have wounded him, or guessed how many pieces he might have broken into. But he's still beautiful, and now he can look his fill, Adam decides, shifting up on one elbow. Reaching out fingers he brushes them through Peter's hair, careful not to wake him, smiling at how rumpled he looks in his T-shirt, burrowed in the covers. He's still stunned that he stayed, knowing what he knows now, knowing the lies for what they were. He still came to him, and he stayed, and Adam can't quite wrap his mind around that.

He doesn't know if he can trust him, given who he is, but, then, he's fairly certain Peter feels the same, given what Adam's done. Arthur might be dead, but Angela's still out there, and while the threat isn't the same, she's still a potential force to be reckoned with, and Adam has no mind to see the inside of a cage again. Hiro could show up at any moment, if he found them, furious Adam ran off, and with Peter near-powerless, what could he do to stop him? He'd do far, far better to just fully disappear. Take a new name, learn Swedish, move to Stockholm--that almost makes him laugh for a moment--and wait out the next fifty years in peace. He gambled, he lost, he almost lost too much, but he's got his freedom...

And he's got a sleeping, broken boy curled up in his bed, who stayed when he asked him to stay, who's been turned on and betrayed by everyone else, who needs him, and, for some reason he cannot fathom, wants him, and, well, if there is one thing Adam thrives on it is being needed and wanted. Snuggling back down in the bed, he curls closer to Peter with a bit of a sigh, pressing close to the warmth of his sleeping form. He should run, but he can't, and he prays to anyone who might still be listening as he presses a kiss to his shoulder that he isn't setting them both up for another fall.

Looks like the rain's pouring down on me
It's drowning me now
And all I want is to come back home
And this old corduroy coat is not keeping me dry
But I can't think of what else to try
That's why the best thing I can give to you
Is for me to go
Leave you alone
You got growing up to do

Sometimes he wondered if he should go. Not out of a lack of feeling, not by a long shot, but...was he helping? Did anything he say, do, feel, get through? Was he banging on glass, desperate, still caged in a world where nothing made sense to the boy on the other side? Sometimes he thought he'd managed, and then the same arguments came flying back at him, the words even the same, nothing changing or showing that he had grasped Adam's point at all.

It was a sideways way of thinking. Adam knew that, understood it, but it came from age, from experience, and watching the boy rip himself to pieces with guilt and angst hurt when if he would just listen. But it was ever the province of the young to think they knew better than those who have come before, especially when they disagree with them. Adam's frustration didn't help, he knew. And he knew that it was something that time would alter. Oh, the boy might not ever become him, but eventually he would grow up or he would be destroyed.

Adam was hoping very hard for the former rather than the latter, but to get him there, Adam had to wonder -- was he standing in the way? Was his experience, his point of view, clouding the boy's judgment and ability to grow? Was he pushing too hard, saying too much, destroying their chance at having anything by his own need to save him from himself? If he went away for a year, two, a decade, two, a century...would it change? Would he change until they found themselves more in line with one another, truly partners instead of this twisted mentorship where the mentee had no desire to learn?

Adam didn't know. But the thought plagued him sometimes.

Maybe he should go. Not forever, but for a while. Come back later, when the boy had grown up. It might be best for everyone, that way. Put distance between other things as well. But every time he tried to leave, his feet wouldn't move, and Adam found himself waiting, suspended, holding his breath and hoping more than he thought he had left to hope that it would be enough.

[AU 'verse]

The journal is a modern style, with a magnetic flap and fake leather faked to look old and distressed. Of course, now it is, and how they had kept it all this time still amazes him, but it had been something precious in a way--proof that Peter was who he said he was, from when he said he was--so Adam had kept it wrapped in oilcloth, kept from the elements and preserved. It's falling apart now, the ink nearly illegible, preserved like other old books, and almost never taken out, never touched. He's copied it, though, so as not to lose it, painstakingly writing out each entry that spanned four weeks that never happened, but carefully document the reasons why it never occurred, why a boy came back to save a man he loved from becoming a monster.

He's read it enough over the years that each entry is nearly memorized, but he pulls out a copy again. The code was a simple one, one he and his siblings had worked out as they learned to write. It had been Mary who'd thought it up and taught the boys, letting them work it into their compositions for the school mistress, saying all sorts of things they oughtn't. A child's game, but with that...it tucked into the journal entries, carefully worded in ways Peter would never have deciphered should he have picked it up. The code had been what convinced him the boy was telling the truth, because for all he now knew a code breaker could probably sort it out fairly quickly, then...no one else would have known.

Tonight is different. He hasn't visited the pages in over a year, as if reading them could bring them into being as the dates on the pages coincided with those on the calendar, evoking events he has no knowledge of outside of story and Peter's memory. He tucked the pages far away in the back of his desk at home, bound up to protect the present from becoming what it was, had been. But it is past, now, the last date, and things have remained as they have made them, and so he pulls forth the pages again wondering if tonight they will make more sense in truth, in fact, than just in words he translates in his head.

These were his words. This was his plan. This dark bitterness, softened only by Peter's presence, but even that not enough to stop him from his murderous purpose. Kaito's death. Angela's attack. The feel of the gun in his hand and how it felt to watch Victoria fall, blood pooling around her, the shock on her face, the fierce sense of accomplishment at it's doing...and the excitement that laced each line as they drew closer and closer to the goal. He was giddy with it, it seems, hungry to watch the world fall around him, to build it anew, drunk on rage and vengeance and righteousness, a sense of being so far above those around him that their lives mattered not. Worry, some, that the boy would fall away, that he might lose him, rambles on how to keep him by his side, to not lose this opportunity, but only here and there, and more of a sense that it must be done, and he would find a way to fix it with Peter after.

He wishes he could toss it away and say he doesn't believe it, to toss off the fetters of the life that now never was. It seems the journal should have disappeared, never written, because that man never existed, but it remains here, in his hands, tangible proof of who he was. Who he was. Because it was him, and he was that person, and it is useless to deny it. The guilt that weighs on him isn't rational, perhaps, but he sometimes thinks it isn't for who he was that he feels it, but because it is who he could become. Even now, even with a past filled with love and laughter, and partnership, it is hard not to think he is better than them, to not be certain that he and Peter are meant to rule, not guide. They are everlasting, and his father's words, words Peter couldn't erase the way he erased the other boy's betrayal, still echo. The arrogance in the words on the page, he recognizes. The anger, he knows, if not so bitterly. The injustice in the world, he wants to rectify. The sense that it is all spinning out of humanity's control, and that something must be done, he shares.

There is no virus; Peter saw to that. There is no deadly weapon at his hand save Peter himself, and in that, perhaps they differ, because to use Peter is to him unthinkable, where to the other, to the man he was, it was necessary and inevitable. That angers him, sometimes, knowing what Peter risked, what Peter gave up to save...this man, who wrote these words, who had these thoughts, and who didn't care what he demanded of those who followed him...and knowing, still, that he still does that, daily, weaving his webs of words around his still faithful followers. He's learned from journal what not to do, what path doesn't work, what plans have to fail, and how to succeed. He's learned from his past mistakes, from his past self, but the lesson learned might not be the one that some might hope.

Because no matter the anger at the fool he thinks he was, he knows, reading those words and hearing the soul behind them, that when you strip away the man he's learned to be, and the man he once became with their lives so differently lived...his once past and his now present are not so far apart as one might think.

He likes to find them young. Not children, by any means, his inclinations have never slid that way (though there is something of an urge to see what raising one, molding one from that young would be like). But his lovers he prefers to find, to take, to seduce when they are still young, balancing on the cusp of adulthood. It isn't a physical preference in such a way as to discriminate against those older as society seems to dictate in ways he finds abhorrent. Having taken a lover, or a wife, he has more than once stayed with them to the end of their natural lives, faithful and true and never straying. But it is the start of the thing, the place it begins.

The young are so easy to mold and manipulate. Affection, attention, treating them like adults when the world still treats them like children (you may die for your country, but you cannot handle beer; you may drive or buy a vehicle, but you may not rent one). They are so impressionable and so very eager, that it makes him smile just to think of it. They are a canvas waiting to be turned into a masterpiece, growing in the direction he dictates to become stronger than they ever imagined they could be. (She is proof of that, he thinks, proud of her even when they fight, proud of the woman she has become, of the force she is to be reckoned with. And the other...ready and on the verge of finding herself, stepping into her own strength, her own power, confident because he is confident of her. She, too, will become a woman of strength and courage, with the vision to guide those around her in just the way he would like them to go.) His vision, imprinted, burned into their minds, fed out from them to those around them, carrying further in exponential growth until the world changes under their powerful hands.

He likes to find them young. He likes to mold them and watch them grow. And he loves to watch what they work in the world, as decade by decade his endgame stretches toward its conclusion.

[ooc: More meta than verse specific, and I hesitate to call it "canon" because we don't have all the facts. So...metaish speculation?]

Forget...

...The way her eyes were bright with unshed tears when you told her what you had done. The words you tried not to say, love him, always, forever, trying to phrase it so carefully, but knowing the truth was sliding out of you unbidden with each shard of her heart you saw break.

...The way he looked at you, like you were some sort of monster he could not understand, when you hungered for the blood of your tormentor, and vengeance roared through you in barely leashed fury. The promises pulled out of you, when the two of them combined. Can't lose them, can you, chained by need you don't want to hold you back, but you let it anyway.

...The shattered look in his eyes when he told you the truth that ripped his world apart, calling into question all he thought he knew about who he was, what his life had been. You want to tell him that blood doesn't change things, not truly, and a parent is more than blood and seed. You think of your granddaughter, of the man she calls father who isn't the one before you, and wonder if the two of you will ever share that common bond, understanding, pain, but you don't say anything like that, not now. Maybe not ever.

...The feel of wood and stone surrounding you, the weight of the Earth pressing down, suffocating you as the air thins and visions dance before your eyes. The blood that ran down your skin where you slammed your hands into the wood, ripping skin that healed, pushing splinters back out. Nothing impure allowed to remain, except everything that's in your soul. The taste of bile and tears and the stink of fear and loss as darkness comes.

Let it go.

( Forget... )

"There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness." - Josh Billings

He doesn't understand it, even now, watching him sleep. His face is so young in sleep, trusting. His hand rests on Adam's chest as it rises and falls, and Adam finds he is loath to move, to pull away, shifting instead to watch him. He curls close, dark hair a mess, heightening the impression of youth, though the bruises on his neck deny that truth. He isn't a child, no matter what Kensei thought at first, but a man. Young still, perhaps, though there are shadows under his eyes that were not there a year ago, longer. The brightness that sparkled in them in Japan 340 years before is gone, dead. It doesn't sparkle, even when he smiles.

He killed it, Adam thinks, knows. First Kaito, then the vault, the virus, the guilt. Hiro had almost died, almost left him, and that he pulled him back from the brink of it all matters, but maybe not enough. He changed the world, their world. Destroyed it, tore it down, and built it back up into something new. That he finds it better, fresh and clean, he knows isn't a view most take. Sorrow laces through his friends and lovers and only Peter can he hope will live long enough and finally come to see it was for the best after all. Hiro will always mourn, and deep inside him, he knows on a level where everyone else only suspects. Adam did this. He did it on purpose. He did it because of all the words between them and all the time that twisted in his head. For vengeance and salvation and anarchy into order. He did this. He killed them all, and somewhere inside of him, he knows Hiro knows, and that he does not understand how it was necessary.

And yet, still, he curls closer to him in sleep, soft hand brushing Adam's skin. Awake, he stands behind him, guarding, protecting, watching over him, pushing him toward things, people, that make him smile. He frets and makes him sleep, makes him eat, kisses him, calls him his own.

It's almost impossible to bear. He wishes, sometimes, that Hiro would scream, blame him, hurt him, leave--all the things he understands, expects. All the things he knows most would do, if not outright seek his death. He killed Hiro's father. He killed the world. And Hiro kisses him goodnight with sad eyes and a heartbreaking sweetness that hurts more than any biting words ever could.

He wonders if he knows, if that is his plan, this his conscious vengeance, because even as he pulls him closer, snuggling back down beside him and presses a kiss to Hiro's shoulder, Adam cannot believe that anyone could truly forgive him.

From Alice in Wonderland:
Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."

His throat had healed from the screams that ripped it raw, making him taste blood, as soon as he stopped screaming. Even so, he imagined he could still feel the tightness there, threatening to boil over and rip through him and start him screaming again. Except, of course, that there was nothing to scream about anymore, was there? He stood at the window of a perfectly decent flat in Cardiff, looking down on a city lit up with Christmas lights shining in the dark. Despite the time of the year and the temperature, the window stood open, fresh air blowing in cold over the bare skin of his chest, still red from the scalding heat of the shower.

Every light in the flat was on, pushing the darkness back until even the corners were flooded and bare, with no shadows for anything to lurk inside of waiting to leap from nightmare into life. They were still there in his head, though, all those thoughts that came when the darkness was absolute and closing in around you with a smothering weight of dirt and silence broken only by ragged, terrified breaths.

He’d broken. He knew that. In 400 years, he hadn’t let himself do that, and his own screams still echoed in his head followed by flashes of shame. The wood of the casement was smooth under his palms, but he curled his hands tight over it anyway, feeling the phantom splinters of the shattered casket digging in, though his body had pushed them back out hours before.

He was free. He was safe. It was a litany, soft and sure that he kept up in his head. Not in the cell. Not in the coffin. Not in the States. Not in Japan. Hiro could find him here. He knew that, but the kanji burned across his brain and when all trust and all faith were gone, he found he could still cling to a sliver of hope. Only now, only here, in the silence that fell at the center of a busy city when the noises from the street were nothing so much as white, could he fully run his mind back over it, pushing through the horror and the betrayal to the one kernel of fact that stood stark and bright against the night.

He had failed.

It was a thought as empty as the grave, sliding through him and slipping into the cavernous, dark places in his soul. Everything he had plotted for was dust, like so many ashes in his mouth or the dirt that pressed and smothered him so recently. He had his vengeance, empty as it was. Kaito lay buried next to that empty casket, rotting to worms for the sins of his family. Victoria, too, wasn’t coming back any time soon. A cloud of suspicion would hang over Angela, always, and she had lost her power to manipulate her beautiful boys.

His thoughts brushed over Peter with a sharp point of pain, of loss, of something there he couldn’t look too closely at that whispered about loneliness and the long road and the slow path. And Nathan…she had never answered him, when he’d asked her the question years ago before everything went to hell, his eyes resting on the dark haired toddler Arthur had brought in with him that day. Claire seemed an answer that Angela wouldn’t give, perhaps, or maybe he just wanted her to be one, because she, too, had a flush of forever around her and there was a fierceness somewhere inside him that wanted her to be his. Not just like him, but blood of his blood, finally, after all these centuries, his gift reborn in someone else.

Empty, though, reckless thought and hopeless meandering. Angela would never tell him plain, and he would never know, and Nathan lay close to death, and he couldn’t get to him to heal him even without the promises he’d made Jack to stay. To walk in to that room would be capture, would be the hell of being buried again in a cell if not a grave, if Peter would even let him near, with what he had to know now. He could spin it, in another day, another week, twist it back on itself and call Bob and everything else into question, but not today. Not in this hour, when exhaustion clung to him like a specter of the remembrance of death, however brief.

A sound, a door opening, the smell of takeout, sharp and unrelenting and delicious and sickening all at once. The past, the plotting, the present, the despair, the future, the hope all mingled and merged and scored claw marks across his brain, raking deep and drawing bloody thoughts that scabbed and healed and smoothed and left an empty pit in the hollow of his stomach and the atriums of his heart. It hurt to feel so lost, a physical pain almost, as he forced himself to close Jack’s window and step forward.

He wouldn’t be a coward. He wouldn’t break again, no matter how terrifying the whisper he hadn’t heard in 400 years, clamoring for an answer when he had none to give. He let it surface for a moment, turned it over, then stuffed it back into the recesses of himself to ponder when the feel of decay didn’t still cling to him, when he could breathe without tasting dirt and feel himself alive again.

Then, maybe, he’d find an answer to shut up the whisper that clawed itself through each of his cells, asking, What now?

I Win by Abra Moore –

(ooc: Hiro used w/o permission of his mun and nothing in the ficlet should be seen as binding on any muse unless they wish to adopt it for themselves)

All right all right I lied about loving
A man that I love, a love I won't have.
It's true It's true I'm falling apart
And I can't get you out of my heart.
Kiss me under the table and we'll make believe in love
And dream with me under the table
It makes me feel it makes me feel alive.

Something is filling my heart full of secrets
Something is filling my heart full of lies.
Something is taking my lover for granted
Something is making me cry.
Can't get you out of my heart

OK I win you've finally lost me
You're letting me go, I'm walking away
It's true It's true I'm falling apart
And I can't get you out of my heart
Holding on to something so wrong.

 He’s supposed to want to kill him, Adam thinks, not kiss him.  There’s a way this is supposed to go, and while it involves screaming and tears, it doesn’t end with him cradling the boy in his arms, fighting back tears of his own.  There should be triumph, now, victory at hand after waiting for so long.  He left him, and that can’t be forgiven, can it? So he does something unforgivable, because if Hiro can’t forgive him, he can feel better about the wall around what used to be his heart.

 Except the wall cracks, it crumbles.  Small holes appear of what-might-have-been, if there had been no princess or they’d both been wise enough to pay her not the least bit of mind.  If his arms had wrapped around a different form, and lips paid homage elsewhere than against hers.  Nightmare fantasies and dreams tangle up with a hatred too deep, too ingrained to be uprooted where it settles in his soul and twists around the roots of something too close to love for comfort.

 So he lashes out and does the unthinkable and knows that the boy will have to release his hold, now.  How can he not?  He’ll have to stop with the worship, the belief, the faith that tears at Adam when he can’t sleep at night.  Kaito’s blood stains his hands and seeps inside him, a secret he holds as a weapon to wield, only it’s thrown in his face before the dénouement he has planned.  Eyes hold, something breaks, fingers cling to weapons and skin, and he knows that it doesn’t matter how far he walks away, or if Hiro releases him with all the power at his disposal. 

Part of him will always remain behind.