changehistory | Entries tagged with verse: by your side

He talks to her when Elle is asleep. He'd feel pretty silly talking to her when Elle could hear. Truth be told, he feels rather silly doing it anyway, but there's something magical in the news that she can hear him, that she's learning his voice, to get to know him that way. That she doesn't understand a word he says, he's pretty certain. She has no images to relate the sounds to, no experiences. She cannot see the world around her yet, the towering buildings that rise up around them as he and Elle stroll through the town, and so cannot begin to understand or imagine how he reshapes them for her with his words in the dark of the night, bringing to life another, earlier time, when he walked these streets and the world was different.

While Elle sleeps, he lets himself tell the stories of his life to their daughter, arms settled around his wife, cheek to her stomach as he murmurs softly to the child growing inside of her. He tells her things he's never told anyone. Not the bad things, never those, but the good he's buried just as deeply. The boy he was is not the man he became, but the unborn child has no need to know that, not yet. It is something they can share, in his mind: the wonder of London as children. She'll walk the same streets he did, dance in the shadow of the same buildings that cast their shades over him. For the first time in a long time, he has a sense that he's come home.

Other images rise with it, though, because he cannot tell her the stories of his childhood without remembering that little boy. Calling him to mind with vivid recollection for her seems to raise his ghost from the grave Adam tossed him in centuries ago alone with all of those he loved. What he's become, that boy couldn't have imagined. Not just the wealth, the education, the ability, but so much more, and less. He swallows, pressing a kiss to the rise of Elle's stomach, fingers lightly stroking, wondering if the child can feel his touch. The darkness that has enveloped him for so many years now...the boy couldn't have grasped it, not even with the horrors he saw. Will it touch her, too? Will his own innocence lost so long ago live again in her? Or will his lack of it touch her, taint her? Will she stare at him with the horror he fancies the ghost of his forgotten self does?

He wants the world to be safe for her, to be the hero, for her, to be all a father should be. But every time he conjures the wonders of the past in the soft cadence of the storyteller's voice, he sees the betrayed eyes of the child he was, and wonders if he'll let her down as well.

lifetimedreamer: Return of the Jedi film cell
Star Wars USB drive
Yoda slippers
Okay, yes. After being all romantic for Peter's birthday, he's being a bit of a dork...

hadtobeahero: (s3 Fixed) Travel journal - something to start keeping track of things. It's a good idea for forever.
(For s3Fixed & Lord what fools) Platinum poesy promise ring inscribed with vous el nul autre "You and none other"

not_myfirstday Handpainted rainbow scarf.
A spa day to pamper herself after having to go through all the ups and downs of first trimester. No water immersion treatments, obviously.
Cute black boots, sans heel, so she can still feel fashionable while not causing her back to ache any more than shifting center of gravity is already doing.
And maybe, okay, possibly, if it's important to her, they can go bail the idiots in America out of their latest mess.

snarky_blonde Hand painted floral batik scarf.

Merry Christmas, loves.

He'd come through betrayal, imprisonment, torture, defeat, even the grave, and was still here, watching in grim satisfaction as one by one the rest of them fell.

He shouldn't let such a commonplace thing--a thing millions of people do around the world every day--affect his mood quite so much, but the thought of her carrying his child has Adam breaking into a smile at the most random moments for a week.

My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul
changehistory goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as a pirate.
deep_red_bells gives you 17 light green cinnamon-flavoured jawbreakers.
hadtobeahero gives you 17 light yellow blueberry-flavoured jawbreakers.
heroslayer tricks you! You get a toothbrush.
humanmapquest gives you 1 orange coconut-flavoured gummy bats.
its_notluck gives you 2 green strawberry-flavoured pieces of taffy.
mapetrelli tricks you! You lose 34 pieces of candy!
not_myfirstday gives you 7 mauve cola-flavoured wafers.
notacargojet tricks you! You lose 1 pieces of candy!
powered_otaku tricks you! You lose 4 pieces of candy!
youngerpetrelli gives you 13 mauve grapefruit-flavoured gummy bats.
changehistory ends up with 18 pieces of candy, and a toothbrush.
Go trick-or-treating! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern.

...That was just mean, Angela...

[ooc: Cross-verse, as it applies]

Please. I can justify anything I choose to. Call this what I will bother with justifying:

1. Killing Kaito Nakamura
2. Killing Harry Fletcher
3. Killing Paula Gramble
4. Killing Carlos Mendez
5. Killing Victoria Pratt
6. Killing whatshername.
7. My plans to kill Bob Bishop.
8. My attack on Angela Petrelli.
9. Forming the Company.
10. My using Maury Parkman.
11. Using Peter to escape.
12. My plans for the virus.
13. Seducing Elle.
14. Joining with White Beard. (I'm feeling nostalgic. Might as well toss it in.)
15. Drugging Hiro.
16. Marrying Yaeko's great-grand daughter.
17. Asking Claire to move in. (Not that needs justification, but I can and will should I be called upon to do so).
18. My arrangement and friendship with Sylar.
19. My school plans.
20. Anything else you feel the need to fucking question me on.

Current Mood: cranky

Part of him had considered just walking away from it all. One day, Hiro would realize he was no longer buried where he had left him, if he hadn't already, and he would come. One day, Peter might take it into his head to come looking, to see what had happened, to neutralize the threat. Those were possibilities every morning when he woke and every evening when he bolted doors and flipped on the alarm system that could not keep out the only two who could stop him.

It would be wisest, of course, if they had nothing to stop. If they found him merely living his life, outside of the Company's control, reacquainting himself with this new century and living in peace, having seemingly seen the errors of his ways.

Except, well. He hadn't. He still believed with everything in him that he had been right.

It galled him that he'd been so sloppy as to be stopped by Hiro, to have been bested, to have allowed himself to have been traumatized how he had. He'd lost control of Peter, as well, and that was just uncalled for on so many levels. He should have had it all, right there in his hands. Everything he'd ever wanted, ever dreamed of had been within his grasp. Decades of work and planning his vengeance shimmered before him, just to be stripped away again.

It was unacceptable.

To walk away would be unthinkable. He could outwait most of them, yes, but now Peter would always be there, and if he didn't wrest control of the situation back, he would never have it again. That thought was galling. He had walked this earth for nearly 400 years. He could survive anything, and he would continue to walk this Earth until it was destroyed, and possibly beyond. It was his destiny, to live, to rise above, to be something the world had never seen. He was meant to be a hero, not living in a house, collecting art and music and living some quiet life of a repentant sinner.

The world needed to know his name, to know who he was, what he was. Never again was he going to let someone take control from him. Never again was he going to taste the bile of failure, or bow down to someone or something that thought itself greater than he. His original plan was out of his grasp, it was true, but there were other instruments out there, others waiting for a leader to rise and give them direction, others searching for a cause, a goal, someone to believe in.

Who was he to deny them?

Patient: Adam Monroe
Fandom: Heroes
Words: 306
Partner: Elle ~~Bishop~~ Monroe -

not_myfirstday

We both made a lot of them, back when neither of us had the means to follow through. It was easy, there in the dark, to promise the world, forever, all of me. It made her smile, made her light up, and when she lights up like that, she shines. Curled up in the dark, the cameras off, we were able to steal time to spin dreams the way two captives do. Oh, I had plans, but whether I would be able to achieve them in her life time, I didn't know. I'd been in there so long, held away from the world. I knew I'd get out, eventually. A chance would present itself, a road, a path. I promised that when it did, I would take her with me, but part of me wondered if she would be with me still, then, or if time would have taken her.

Then fate dropped Peter into the cell next to mine.

Honestly, it was like Christmas. Or, more, all those Christmases I missed, when the only gift was some horrid book from Bob that no one else would take off his hands. When she told me about the things he could do, it was as if God himself had reached down and given me everything I'd ever wanted, rewarding me for my patience and handing me the means to a higher mission. And with that mission, with that freedom, I was given a chance to live up to the promises I'd murmured in the dark, never knowing if I'd be called upon to keep them.

There was a choice to be made, to follow through or to let her fall. But one thing I have always been is a man of my word. I promised her, and I kept my promises. The world, forever, all of me.

I don't regret it.

How quickly we get to the heart of at least one issue. All right. Her father kept me prisoner for thirty years in a cell in a facility I created and ran until he and his friends turned on me. I met Elle when she was just a child, though I'm not sure how much of it she remembers. He brought her to live there when she was six years old. I didn't meet her for a couple of years more, when her father decided to start to test her powers.

Oh, look, there I was. The perfect subject, yes? Whatever she did to me, I could heal from, and she could learn varying degrees of control. That much power singes. That much just jolts. That much burns a man to a crisp. Fun times for all.

Of course, as she aged, and learned more control, she also figured out that up to a certain point--usually the actual burning skin point--I wasn't adverse to the shocks she set off. When she reached a certain age, she started using that to her advantage. I had, by that time, been locked away nearly twenty two years without benefit of pleasant company, and she was a very sweet sixteen.

One thing led to another, and here we are today, both of us free of her father and newlyweds. Not really a conventional start, I'll admit, but it worked for us.

Word Count: 239
Partner:

not_myfirstday

In her eyes, my world's reborn.

All verses:

1. My father's desertion.
2. The things Stephen and I let gentlemen do to us to put food on the table.
~~3. Losing Stephen.~~
3. Hiro. And Yaeko. And Hiro.
4. Wanting to release the virus. Twice.
5. Thirty years in captivity in the Company cells and adjusting on the outside, as it were, and what they did to me in those thirty years, though I doubt there are many therapists who could stomach it.
6. Being buried alive.

( Cut for specific therapist issues by RP 'Verse )

"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed". -G. K. Chesterton

He waits now, always. There are shadows that make him skittish, imagining a blade within them. Where before, eternity stretched out at his fingertips dragging on with limitless possibilities, he feels now that he treads lightly forward on borrowed time. He listens, always alert, breathing slow and shallow, as soft as he can make it so it won't cover the whisper of sound of time about to stop.

It's futile, though. When time stops, he'll never know it, he'll have no warning. He's clawed his way back into this world, holding tightly to renewed life, but in an instant it could be gone. It is a frightening glimmer of mortality that haunts his steps now. Once escaped, he cannot truly think he'll be imprisoned again. It won't be a captor that comes for him, hand on his shoulder, fingers cutting in with a passion born from twisted responsibility. It will be Death.

Time was not the dragon, not truly. He was, always, and now he knows himself to be hunted. An empty grave lies waiting for him, and the hero has always known how it must end, if it is to truly be over. A blade, his blade no less, swift and sure. It won't be fair, steel to steel. He won't even see it coming, he knows. A breath, a moment frozen, a flash of steel, and the dragon will fall. Today. Tomorrow. A week from now. A month. A year. A century. It doesn't matter, when time dances at the hero's will, and he can skip across it like a stone across a lake, never resting. Wherever the dragon goes, he will be found. However long the hunt takes, one day it will be over.

Even he knows enough to know that is how the story must end. It is just a matter of time.

330 words

1. Patience -- I was thirteen; she was fifteen and worked in the tavern around the corner from our rooms. It was my birthday and my first kiss, and I followed her around for the next year trying to do enough errands and odd jobs that she'd waive her usual fee to grant me more.

2. Yaeko -- Considering she had slapped me silly just a few days before, needless to say it took me by surprise. It was destiny, I thought, and I imbued it with all of that and more.

3. Hiro -- The kiss that wasn't, that should have been. More than once, but I didn't know what I was feeling. I let the opportunity slide.

4. Marie Antoinette -- She really was quite the flirt, lovely and lost, and fond of masked balls. It went no further, though she tried to convince me to come to her room. Too many rules attendant on being the Queen's lover, and too many risks in that world

5. Angelica -- The day I told her my ability. We'd been wed for five years already, and she was the first person I had told in centuries. If she was going to leave, I wanted to know that before I fell further in love with her. She was shocked, but unlike my first wife, she did not run screaming into the night. Instead she watched me for a long moment, then came and sat on my lap. I remember it still, the way she asked how I bore the loneliness. Then she kissed me and for the first time since Hiro left...I felt safe.

6. Diana -- She hovered near death. I knew my blood might help, but I'd never been sure, never outright tested it. But I had nothing to lose. I injected her and then I waited, watched. In moments, her eyes opened, her breath coming in without a cough. I kissed her then, grateful for a chance to have her with me just a little longer.

7. Theresa -- The bitch betrayed me, shot me, and dumped me in the ocean. I stabbed her lover as he slept in my bed, flushed with triumph from my murder and counting my money in his sleep, then kissed her while I strangled her to death. Why, no. I don't deal well with betrayal. What made you ask?

8. Angela -- On her wedding day. In a closet. We danced and I couldn't imagine being without her until she got back from her honeymoon. I had to remind her what she had waiting for her back home.

9. Peter -- The sheer exuberance of the fresh air, the freedom, the sky above us, and him, there, so beautiful it made me hurt to look at him. Kissing him was the most natural thing in the world, easy to drown in, to want more of, but there were things that needed doing, and eventually I had to ease back and let him go.

10. Elle -- The day they pronounced us man and wife, when I knew once and for all that she was mine, no matter what else came after or where we went from there. It was a victory on so many levels, and a moment I shall cherish, always.

Title: Wicked Games
Authors:

not_myfirstday /

takezo_kensei
Format: Cleaned up AIM RP
Rating: NC-17 - explicit themes of abuse, dominance, and sado-masochism within. Please don't complain that we didn't warn you.
Notes: For Muse-Erotica Prompt done as RP instead of Topic

Wicked Games (link to post in Elle's journal)

"You realize, of course, that an eye for an eye won't be enough. I want him dead." Adam sipped his whiskey slowly in the smoky bar, watching the woman across the table, pausing to reconsider that statement. "Of course, an eye for an eye, or an arm for an arm, or a leg for a leg...or, well, all of the above would eventually lead to his death. So, perhaps I do want it all."

The Rani smirked, eyes not leaving him. "I'd say that sounds fair, all things considered."

Adam frowned a bit, fingers tapping against the table. "That's where you come in."

"Oh?" One delicate eyebrow lifted and normally he would have paused in his thoughts to admire that perfect arch, but he was far too focused on the task at hand.

"Yes. I need somewhere secure to hold him. Ideally, this could take a very long time, especially if we give him regular infusions of my blood to heal him before I start again." He barely refrained from squirming a bit in his chair at the flash of heat that thought brought.

"Of course," she nodded in approval. "He won't be able to escape, and my lab is there for anything you'd need to revive him."

"An I.V. should do it," Adam said with a shrug. "More than just a syringe if he actually dies and I want to bring him back. I wonder if I could actually make him regenerate limbs..." His eyes were a little unfocused, just seeing something in the back of his mind, a fantasy stretching out across decades.

"We could start with something small, as I'm sure they did with you," the Rani suggested, sliding into what he deemed her scientist tone. "A toe, or a finger, perhaps, then some of your blood. See what happens. It would be an intriguing test of the limit of your ability to work on others as well."

Adam gave a brisk nod. "Yes. I want him to know what it felt like, to do what he did to me, to be that trapped, that helpless...to know there was no way out. To wonder when it will end." There was a flash of darkness then, something broken deep inside. "Of course, he has to know I'll tire of the game. He'll die, eventually, one too many times, and I won't bother bringing him back. He can hope for that, wait for it. Beg for it, and eventually...I will give it to him."

Reaching out her hand, the Rani set it gently over his. He watched their joined hands for a moment, then glanced up and gave her a bleak smile. "That's more hope than he ever gave me."

She was silent then, because, really, what could you say to that? Eventually Adam's eyes cleared and he leaned across the table, heedless of the whiskey and started discussing the particulars of how to make his dream come true.

ooc:

thisway_comes used with her mun's permission, though any faults in characterization or voice are solely mine.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days of auld lang syne?

Some days he wished he could forget. More than anything, really, parts of him wanted to wash the memories from his mind and make it seem as if it never had been. The breezes were warm in Santorini, as the old man had said to him, once. Even now, on the eve of a New Year, they wrapped themselves around him with soft promise of things to come, things that could be. The balcony of the suite overlooked the ocean. To the east, the horizon was a lighter grey than the darkness overhead, though the sun had not yet pushed its way up over the lip of the world.

Closing his eyes, Adam breathed in the smell of the sea, listened to the stirring of the streets, early risers making their way out, winding down to fishing boats he couldn't see from the spa, but knew were there. It was sharp, overlaid by flowers and the scents that lingered from the bath oils they'd used the night before, and the chlorine of the hot tub that shared his morning watch.

He still couldn't sleep the night through, waking startled whenever he sunk too deep toward oblivion. He found it was better, now, when he could wrap himself around her, use her warmth to anchor him here. But sleep had never been a priority anyway, so he'd given up in the darkest hour of the wolf, pulling himself out here, brandy in hand to banish the memories of enclosed spaces and pain biting through him with the smell of the sea air and a different sort of oblivion than the one found in heat and friction, though in truth, that was all he'd found to truly warm him.

His fingers rubbed absently over his sword arm. Not the one he'd cut so feverishly, again and again on a warm spring afternoon, watching in disbelief as it healed. It wasn't that arm anymore, nor the one that came after, nor the one after that. Thirty years was a very long time to be at the mercy of the demented scientists he'd hired. A sip of brandy, then, to ease the ache of a limb that no longer existed but insisted on imposing itself over the one that did. Strong, perfect, but some days he wondered if it was truly part of him--if anything was anymore, or if he'd been reduced to a medley of new parts like some organic tin man from a children's story he'd heard long ago.

If he kept his eyes closed, if he listened, he could almost hear the sound of her breathing out here above the wind. Perhaps not in fact, but in imagination. It was a soft sound to anchor him here and now and stop him drifting back through ghosts of memories and regrets. A warm presence to ease the cold of the grave. A naughty secret in the darkness to relieve the suffocating closing in of walls that tightened more around him each year when hope grew dim. But if he drifted back, further, it was pain, like everything else. A child allowed to test her powers under the ice cold smile of a man who wanted him dead but was stopped by others, constrained by Kaito's honor, if nothing else. Another sip, to find forgiveness and let the now erase the then.

Thoughts of Kaito pushed him back, further, falling into the darkness of memory. Of a smile, bright as the sun that sparked things in him and inspired him to be more than he thought he could be, before it was extinguished in slashing pain and loss and darkness so complete he'd never thought to see light again. He couldn't stay there, though, couldn't linger on what ifs and regrets that could eat him alive, when pride and belief slid to disappointment and anger and a broken look that should have been triumph but which tore into him as brutally as he'd meant Hiro to feel. Another sip of brandy for that pain, then, too.

The darkness had lifted, he noted, as the first tendrils of the sun crept slowly over the horizon and the grey became tinged with pink. But as it had before, her words echoed back. Shot. Hurt. Critical. No one knew. And gone, perhaps. No one to ask, no one to beg for news, no one to answer questions that pounded around him begging for answers for nearly 40 years. There was nothing but loss there, at the thought of what if, and the family that could have been his, had he not let ambition blind him beyond bearing. He could have asked. She would have said yes. He could have been his, in truth, without the questions. A family--something he'd never allowed himself and when it teased there at his fingertips, he'd pushed it into another man's arms for the sake of all of their advancement. A fourth sip burned down his throat.

He closed his eyes again imagining the sun rising higher, the sea below becoming a spreading sparkle of turquoise, bright and brilliant and pure enough to wash away the past, let it slide from him, with them, and warm enough to banish the chill of too many ghosts that flowed through his memory in laughter and tears. A new year. A new start. A new plan. It was time to let them go, and concentrate on moving forward, on eliminating them from his mind, one by one, until they burned up in the heat of flames he'd find a way to rekindle. He had to. He knew that. If he didn't, they'd pull him down with them, and he would drown in their cloying arms and never be truly free.

1. The moment my father left.
2. The moment my mother died.
3. The moment I first stepped foot in Japan.
4. The moment I met Hiro.
5. The moment the arrow wound healed.
6. The moment I formed the Company.
7. The moment Kaito locked me away.
8. The moment I met Peter.
9. The moment Hiro appeared in the vault, and what came after.
10. The moment Elle rescued me.*

* -- based on RP in