Adam Monroe

He keeps insisting that he's an impossible thing. Something the Doctor said, that Jack was impossible, but it makes Adam frown slightly every time. Because if Jack is impossible, then so is he. In fact...no. That fixed point in time, unchanging, a fact of the universe? It isn't completely true, is it? He ages, albeit slowly. He changes. He ... things alter him, even if he can heal from wounds, stays alive. He isn't fixed, unchanging.

He isn't Adam.

The sort of forever it might take to pull him from him, for age to kick in and make him something different, let time finally do its work, creeping in to part them, might be the time that even at nearly 400 years Adam cannot fathom, but curled up in bed sometimes, not needing sleep often, just watching him, Adam thinks of it. He's always had a morbid tendency that way, finding the worst in the situation. Better to prepare himself, he would tell you. But the worst would be losing him, after all that time. Of still, even if it takes millions of years, watching time creep itself across Jack's face and form, as it always does, as it always has. And still he will be there, unchanged, as perfect as he was the day the arrow pierced his heart.

Will he go mad, then? Or will he already be? Will he be tired, ready to let go? The end of the universe...staring out into the void...will he be there with the children of Earth who become something else, a horror, a monstrosity? Will that destroy him as well, trillions of years from now, finally? How long will he have been back alone by then? Will it matter? Locked inside a never changing form, watching even this fall away from him eventually...what will be left of the boy who set out to make his fortune with no idea what life would hold for him?

Most nights he can brush the thought aside. It is so very far in the future, incomprehensible even for him to think of truly living that long, seeing that much, traveling that far. He doesn't need to borrow trouble millions of years before he need worry.

But other nights, he does, and he pulls Jack a bit closer, almost clinging, and wondering just which of them is the impossibility, and what happens when they finally find that out.

Adam was learning to like Cardiff well enough, getting past his natural inclination to say, "But it's Wales," at least out loud. And it wasn't as if he wasn't used to being inactive, after thirty years in a far too small room. But his brief spurt of murder, mayhem, and attempts at world destruction, followed by his, thankfully brief, burial, rescue and relocation had left him feeling a bit at loose ends.

Jack had Torchwood, had the Doctor, sometimes, had the world to save in ways that Adam couldn't really help with. Or hadn't helped with. He didn't know where he fit, at the least. Not part of the team, not part of that part of Jack's life, but there, in Jack's house, with Jack, with the cat, with...his memories, his past, his ghosts, his dreams.

So he took to wandering. He left shortly after Jack in the mornings, roaming the streets, learning them, learning their pathways and byways. He found cafes and little bookstores, made friends with their proprietors. He spent far too much time at the library, and far more on the water, just breathing the fresh air, and appreciating the freedom to come and go. But he felt like a ghost through most of it, drifting in the shadows of the city Jack protected, with nothing truly his, nothing to strive for, no idea where to start, even, because every plan he came up with he was fairly certain Jack would shoot down.

He'd walked most of the morning, carving out new paths to ramble, when he found the gallery, tucked away in a charming niche. The display in the window was bright and warm, and the day was grey and chilly, perfect weather for brooding, but he was getting tired of brooding, and the window beckoned. It wasn't a gallery he'd explored before, not an owner he'd exchanged words with yet, and the novelty alone would have appealed as much as the colors. Putting a charming, if neutral, smile on his face, he stepped inside, drifting toward the art on the far wall, its colors immediately drawing his eye.

I am here still waiting though I still have my doubts
I am damaged at best, like you've already figured out - "Broken" by Lifehouse

The world seems to have slowed again, though it isn't a prison he's pacing, but a home, one he's making, one he's building, one he's happy to have found. But time crawls. He wanders the town, plays with the cat, ducks in and out of art galleries, and spends far too much time thinking. Time and thoughts have plagued him for too long, leading to darker places, and even now, even here, he can feel himself tumbling into that pattern too simply. The news upsets him, fury lacing through him at the waste of so much of it. Promises that it will get better only help so much when he has nothing but time still stretching out before him. It isn't alone, it isn't a desolate landscape of time that will never end while he watches those he loves fade away into dust.

He won't fade. He won't die. He'll be there, unless he gets tired of Adam's moods, Adam's passions, Adam's schemes, Adam's itching fingers reaching out to reshape something, anything, to mold, to meld, to form, to fire and glaze...

He has coffee by the water, a glass of wine in a cafe. He relearns the world, and what he learns sickens him more than what there was before. It's only gotten worse, as he said it would, and no one listened then, and "it will get better" doesn't help the fury in his head. He is nothing here, no one, and, yes, that feeds into it as well. Even locked away in the Company's cells he was someone. He was dangerous. He needed watching. He was a mystery to be solved. He was an apocalypse to be stopped. He was feared, because they knew what he was capable of, that their lives, once so precious to him, now meant less than nothing because of their betrayal.

They should still fear, but here he sits, sipping coffee in Cardiff and wondering if he should buy the cat a new toy, or if Jack will be home for dinner. The latent fury that lingers under the veneer of domestic contentment has nowhere to go, but he can feel it there, feeding on despair and darker schemes, and his eyes take on a more intent gaze as he scans the paper and contemplates what it would take to make the disconnect heal and the aching stop. He needs something, but he doesn't know what, and until he finds it he cannot help but still feel caged.

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 )

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?