At the End of Time
Characters: Mohinder/Adam
Rating: R
Words: 2343
Summary: After the virus destroys the world, Mohinder and Adam have nothing but each other.
A/N: Trying something a little different... This started out as something for comment_fic, but it took on a life of its own.
Mohinder sat up and immediately checked to make sure that he wasn’t the only one in the bed. He sighed with relief when he saw the familiar form sleeping next to him. Rationally, he knew Adam would always be there, and but the fear that one day he’d wake up and find himself alone was one of the many things that prevented Mohinder from sleeping through the night.
He continued looking, drawing comfort from the sound of soft breathing next to him. For the thousandth time, Mohinder was reminded that even if he hadn’t been one of very few available lovers left in the world, Adam would still be the definition of attractive, even now with his shining wit silenced by sleep and his blue eyes obscured by closed lids and long, golden lashes. Mohinder gazed at Adam’s pale, unbruisable skin, topped by a fetchingly shaggy blonde mane. Adam had told Mohinder that he usually kept it quite short, but due to the lack of decent barbers these days---really, the lack of any barbers at all---he’d been experimenting with keeping it long for the first time since his pirating days. Never in his wildest dreams would Mohinder have imagined that he’d end up living with a pirate, but a lot of things had happened in the past couple of years that he never would have imagined.
Swinging his legs off the bed, Mohinder searched in the dark for his slippers. As usual, the apartment was frigid; the building’s heating had stopped working a few weeks before. Although one of Mohinder’s new hobbies was looking up information on how to repair it, neither of them had yet figured out how to fix it, and of course, there was no one left to call. Adam claimed that clothes were insufficient to ward off this chill. He had taken to stripping naked upon entering the house and shrouding himself in cashmere blankets, saying that they were more effective than clothing. It was strange, and never failed to make Mohinder laugh. The sight of Adam making eggs while wrapped in green angora was pretty funny, but they both knew it wasn’t that funny. However, there just weren’t many things to laugh about these days. At any rate, it meant that it was easier to disrobe Adam any time they felt like sex, which was often. Other than their daily walks through the barren streets to get exercise and pick up supplies, they didn’t have much else to do.
After another look at Adam that was filled with as much desperation as actual affection, Mohinder went downstairs, clad in nothing but his slippers. Shivering, he could just make out on the mantel clock that it was 5am. The dawn would come soon. Mohinder picked up one of Adam’s thickest blankets and wrapped it around himself. This was the first time Mohinder had tested the concept. He hadn’t felt this warm inside in weeks. Adam had been right. He almost always was.
Mohinder made his way to the antique drinks cart. The location of the scotch bottle and glasses, and the action of pourin, were by now so familiar that he didn’t need light to do it. He gulped, twice, and liquid comfort rolled down his throat to pool warmly in his stomach. Mohinder savored the third sip, letting it coat his mouth with distilled bliss. This was good stuff. Adam always said his motto was never to settle for anything less than the best---in scotch, in lovers, and anything else. It was a good line that won Adam a kiss every time he said it, but it was also one that Adam should have known he didn’t need to use, because Mohinder was his, not only by choice but by default.
Mohinder took his drink over to the inlaid Japanese cabinet in which they kept their hats. Slipping a wool beanie over his head with one hand, he crossed the living room again and opened the grand French doors that led to the deck. Mohinder rested his elbows and his glass on the high balcony ledge and looked out.
Adam and Mohinder lived in a penthouse triplex on Fifth Avenue that had once belonged to the Rockefellers. Adam had bought it quite fairly when the virus had first started to spread and people fled densely populated areas like New York. The deck was enormous and the view from the 42nd floor magnificent, especially now, with the first faint signs of daybreak creeping across Queens in the east over to Manhattan.
The city that now always slept spread out before him. Surveying it from their palace in the sky, Mohinder was coming to see it as their own personal playground, and in many ways it was, although they were never much in the mood to play. All facilities had been left open by those who had fled and those who had died. The libraries, the museums, the stores… everything became the property of the scant few who remained. Adam and Mohinder saw other people from time to time, frightened stragglers who ran panic-stricken as soon as they spied the couple. For awhile, Mohinder and Adam had tried to talk to them, but that only made them run away faster. Adam still held out hope that he could bring people together, but recently, Mohinder had stopped trying.
He was still looking abjectly into space when he felt a hand on his back. Adam had joined him. He leaned his back against the ledge, sticking his feet forward and his elbows backward.
“Nightmare?” one blanket-clothed male asked the other.
“Not even.”
They stood in silence for awhile, shoulder to shoulder but facing in opposite directions. Mohinder continued to watch the sun’s slow proclamation of self to the east while Adam contemplated the mouldings above the French doors they had just come through. Lost in thought, neither of them really saw what they were purportedly looking at.
“This hasn’t turned out as I envisioned,” Mohinder barely heard Adam confess to himself in a disappointed murmur.
“What hasn’t?”
Adam had never told Mohinder that he’d been the one to release the virus. He’d never told him he’d been the one to create it in the first place. All Mohinder knew was that the organization Adam founded to help the world had become perverted at around the time Adam’s disciples decided to lock him up for thirty years. Like all effective lies, it was mostly true.
But what Adam didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that the majority of Mohinder’s most important relationships---friends, family, lovers---had revolved around secrets and lies. Adam was simply a piece in a pattern. If he had known that, perhaps he would have found a way to laugh off the twinge of guilt that sometimes nagged, uncharacteristically, at the corner of his consciousness. Or perhaps it would have gotten him to confess the truth, because, while Adam was many things, he was not a statistic.
“Life,” Adam finally sighed. That, too, was true. His plan of waiting until the virus had ravaged the world, leaving only a few select to fall under his benevolent rule, had not come to pass. All he had now was the most beautiful lodging he’d ever lived in, and Mohinder, the most perfect companion he’d ever had. Neither were to be sneezed at, but they had come at such a price.
“Have you ever believed in God?” Mohinder suddenly asked. Maybe it was the crisp morning air affecting him, or maybe it was the calming effects of the scotch. Mohinder had been brought up an atheist. Only recently, with nothing except Adam left to hold on to, had he found himself wondering. Mohinder considered these thoughts a sign of weakness and desperation, and had worked hard to suppress them. But this morning, he found himself needing to voice them.
“I believe in us,” Adam stated with confidence after a minute.
“I wasn’t asking for relationship affirmation,” Mohinder snapped. He immediately felt embarrassed for having brought it up. However, in a way, it was exactly what he’d needed to hear. Somehow, Adam’s response had cured him, for the moment, of the hateful yearning for something more to believe in.
But Adam hadn’t yet let it go. Mohinder’s question, although resulting for one of them in a rejection of faith, had reminded Adam of his own. He clung to it, silently thanking Mohinder for giving him an opportunity to vocalize it to someone other than himself. “I’m not feeding you a line, love. The one man who can’t fall prey to this plague and the one man who can heal from any malady, together. That is no coincidence; that is destiny, Mohinder. We alone are capable of accomplishing anything in this new world. Who is god, if not us?”
“But what is there to accomplish?” Mohinder asked in a hollow voice, with hollow eyes.
“Just give it time. Everything will turn out fine. Trust me,” Adam urged, drawing comfort from his own words.
“What if there is nothing after this? What if this is the end of time?”
Adam shook his head and sipped his drink calmly. “It never is.”
As he searched Mohinder’s face for a reaction that never came, Adam felt a pang, a pang which a few years ago he’d never imagined himself capable of feeling about anyone or anything. The thought that Mohinder might be gone by the time the universe sorted itself out was too much to bear. Adam had never stayed around anyone for long enough or given enough of a damn to see if constant infusions of his blood would keep another person young and healthy and alive along with himself. The time had not yet come to broach the subject with Mohinder and begin testing his hypothesis. The death of billions was too much at the forefront of Mohinder’s depressed mind to think about prolonging his own existence indefinitely. Soon, Adam resolved, soon he would bring it up.
Mohinder broke the silence by apathetically saying to himself, “I wonder if there’s a way get old film reels from the library and play them in the movie theatres. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the movies. I think I’ll look into that during today’s walk.”
With his scientific knowledge now completely useless, the pathologically driven Mohinder had started latching onto whatever ideas or hobbies came into his head. Adam knew they kept him sane, so he usually went along with the other man’s random schemes. They almost always ended up being at least passingly diverting.
Continuing to admire the mouldings of their building, Adam momentarily considered lighting a cigarette, but changed his mind when he happened to turn and look at Mohinder, whose profile was even more striking in the faint light. Condensation curled out of his slightly parted lips, like Adam’s own personal dragon... or Roman emperor? Only now, and with great pleasure, did Adam realize what Mohinder was wearing. Adam had always found the imitative form of flattery arousing, especially when practiced by someone as stubborn and self-assured as Mohinder.
So, instead of smoking, Adam took another long drink of scotch before placing his and Mohinder’s glass on the deck table. Before the other man had a chance to protest, Adam crept up behind him and pinned Mohinder between his arms. He found an opening in the folds of Mohinder’s garment. He knew his hand was cold and, as he slid it inside, he anticipated the other man’s jump and order to stop. But he held firmly onto Mohinder’s hip, which was the first part of his body he’d found. Pressing himself forward so that Mohinder was almost squeezed between him and the ledge, Adam waited for his hand to warm up, and then began sliding it slowly up and down Mohinder’s side, always threatening but not quite venturing sideways.
Mohinder squirmed and twisted in Adam’s arms. He managed to turn himself around so that they could face each other. In doing so, the tuck in his blanket came undone, and cold air smacked his bare torso for a moment before Adam’s body covered it again. Always quick to seize an opportunity, Adam re-wrapped them so they were naked together in a warm, soft cocoon. Their hands pressed and groped along one another’s torsos, kneading skin into muscles and creating a more internal kind of warmth to share as their tongues played a familiar game of tug-of-war. Twining one leg around Mohinder’s, Adam slid their bodies together rhythmically, the friction bringing them both to hardness. Reaching a hand between them, he took them both in hand and stroked until the apathy in Mohinder’s eyes was replaced by a desire to live---or at least hunger, which was close enough.
Mohinder nibbled on the bit of Adam’s neck that was exposed. Remembering what they had been working towards recently, he forced himself to bite harder and harder. Adam had long been urging Mohinder to be less gentle with him, but it took some getting used to. With so many dead and hurting, he was loath to inflict pain on the one person he had left to care about. Adam soon groaned in pleasure, and Mohinder moved his head back to watch the ugly mark slowly and miraculously disappear. This was the one thing had helped Mohinder to acquiesce to Adam’s desires to have it rougher. Those with abilities had been the first to go; temporarily damaging Adam like this was the only way to still see powers at work---something that Mohinder had cherished once upon a time.
Sweetly liquored exhalations heated their exposed faces and necks as they kissed, at first lazily, but then with increasing passion. Soon Mohinder was panting with need, and Adam’s hand slid down and around with all too clear intent.
“Here? You want to do this here?” Mohinder looked at the neighboring skyscrapers, hoping rather than fearing that someone could be watching.
Adam pulled Mohinder to the ground and settled himself between his legs. “Who’s going to see?”
Rating: R
Words: 2343
Summary: After the virus destroys the world, Mohinder and Adam have nothing but each other.
A/N: Trying something a little different... This started out as something for comment_fic, but it took on a life of its own.
Mohinder sat up and immediately checked to make sure that he wasn’t the only one in the bed. He sighed with relief when he saw the familiar form sleeping next to him. Rationally, he knew Adam would always be there, and but the fear that one day he’d wake up and find himself alone was one of the many things that prevented Mohinder from sleeping through the night.
He continued looking, drawing comfort from the sound of soft breathing next to him. For the thousandth time, Mohinder was reminded that even if he hadn’t been one of very few available lovers left in the world, Adam would still be the definition of attractive, even now with his shining wit silenced by sleep and his blue eyes obscured by closed lids and long, golden lashes. Mohinder gazed at Adam’s pale, unbruisable skin, topped by a fetchingly shaggy blonde mane. Adam had told Mohinder that he usually kept it quite short, but due to the lack of decent barbers these days---really, the lack of any barbers at all---he’d been experimenting with keeping it long for the first time since his pirating days. Never in his wildest dreams would Mohinder have imagined that he’d end up living with a pirate, but a lot of things had happened in the past couple of years that he never would have imagined.
Swinging his legs off the bed, Mohinder searched in the dark for his slippers. As usual, the apartment was frigid; the building’s heating had stopped working a few weeks before. Although one of Mohinder’s new hobbies was looking up information on how to repair it, neither of them had yet figured out how to fix it, and of course, there was no one left to call. Adam claimed that clothes were insufficient to ward off this chill. He had taken to stripping naked upon entering the house and shrouding himself in cashmere blankets, saying that they were more effective than clothing. It was strange, and never failed to make Mohinder laugh. The sight of Adam making eggs while wrapped in green angora was pretty funny, but they both knew it wasn’t that funny. However, there just weren’t many things to laugh about these days. At any rate, it meant that it was easier to disrobe Adam any time they felt like sex, which was often. Other than their daily walks through the barren streets to get exercise and pick up supplies, they didn’t have much else to do.
After another look at Adam that was filled with as much desperation as actual affection, Mohinder went downstairs, clad in nothing but his slippers. Shivering, he could just make out on the mantel clock that it was 5am. The dawn would come soon. Mohinder picked up one of Adam’s thickest blankets and wrapped it around himself. This was the first time Mohinder had tested the concept. He hadn’t felt this warm inside in weeks. Adam had been right. He almost always was.
Mohinder made his way to the antique drinks cart. The location of the scotch bottle and glasses, and the action of pourin, were by now so familiar that he didn’t need light to do it. He gulped, twice, and liquid comfort rolled down his throat to pool warmly in his stomach. Mohinder savored the third sip, letting it coat his mouth with distilled bliss. This was good stuff. Adam always said his motto was never to settle for anything less than the best---in scotch, in lovers, and anything else. It was a good line that won Adam a kiss every time he said it, but it was also one that Adam should have known he didn’t need to use, because Mohinder was his, not only by choice but by default.
Mohinder took his drink over to the inlaid Japanese cabinet in which they kept their hats. Slipping a wool beanie over his head with one hand, he crossed the living room again and opened the grand French doors that led to the deck. Mohinder rested his elbows and his glass on the high balcony ledge and looked out.
Adam and Mohinder lived in a penthouse triplex on Fifth Avenue that had once belonged to the Rockefellers. Adam had bought it quite fairly when the virus had first started to spread and people fled densely populated areas like New York. The deck was enormous and the view from the 42nd floor magnificent, especially now, with the first faint signs of daybreak creeping across Queens in the east over to Manhattan.
The city that now always slept spread out before him. Surveying it from their palace in the sky, Mohinder was coming to see it as their own personal playground, and in many ways it was, although they were never much in the mood to play. All facilities had been left open by those who had fled and those who had died. The libraries, the museums, the stores… everything became the property of the scant few who remained. Adam and Mohinder saw other people from time to time, frightened stragglers who ran panic-stricken as soon as they spied the couple. For awhile, Mohinder and Adam had tried to talk to them, but that only made them run away faster. Adam still held out hope that he could bring people together, but recently, Mohinder had stopped trying.
He was still looking abjectly into space when he felt a hand on his back. Adam had joined him. He leaned his back against the ledge, sticking his feet forward and his elbows backward.
“Nightmare?” one blanket-clothed male asked the other.
“Not even.”
They stood in silence for awhile, shoulder to shoulder but facing in opposite directions. Mohinder continued to watch the sun’s slow proclamation of self to the east while Adam contemplated the mouldings above the French doors they had just come through. Lost in thought, neither of them really saw what they were purportedly looking at.
“This hasn’t turned out as I envisioned,” Mohinder barely heard Adam confess to himself in a disappointed murmur.
“What hasn’t?”
Adam had never told Mohinder that he’d been the one to release the virus. He’d never told him he’d been the one to create it in the first place. All Mohinder knew was that the organization Adam founded to help the world had become perverted at around the time Adam’s disciples decided to lock him up for thirty years. Like all effective lies, it was mostly true.
But what Adam didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that the majority of Mohinder’s most important relationships---friends, family, lovers---had revolved around secrets and lies. Adam was simply a piece in a pattern. If he had known that, perhaps he would have found a way to laugh off the twinge of guilt that sometimes nagged, uncharacteristically, at the corner of his consciousness. Or perhaps it would have gotten him to confess the truth, because, while Adam was many things, he was not a statistic.
“Life,” Adam finally sighed. That, too, was true. His plan of waiting until the virus had ravaged the world, leaving only a few select to fall under his benevolent rule, had not come to pass. All he had now was the most beautiful lodging he’d ever lived in, and Mohinder, the most perfect companion he’d ever had. Neither were to be sneezed at, but they had come at such a price.
“Have you ever believed in God?” Mohinder suddenly asked. Maybe it was the crisp morning air affecting him, or maybe it was the calming effects of the scotch. Mohinder had been brought up an atheist. Only recently, with nothing except Adam left to hold on to, had he found himself wondering. Mohinder considered these thoughts a sign of weakness and desperation, and had worked hard to suppress them. But this morning, he found himself needing to voice them.
“I believe in us,” Adam stated with confidence after a minute.
“I wasn’t asking for relationship affirmation,” Mohinder snapped. He immediately felt embarrassed for having brought it up. However, in a way, it was exactly what he’d needed to hear. Somehow, Adam’s response had cured him, for the moment, of the hateful yearning for something more to believe in.
But Adam hadn’t yet let it go. Mohinder’s question, although resulting for one of them in a rejection of faith, had reminded Adam of his own. He clung to it, silently thanking Mohinder for giving him an opportunity to vocalize it to someone other than himself. “I’m not feeding you a line, love. The one man who can’t fall prey to this plague and the one man who can heal from any malady, together. That is no coincidence; that is destiny, Mohinder. We alone are capable of accomplishing anything in this new world. Who is god, if not us?”
“But what is there to accomplish?” Mohinder asked in a hollow voice, with hollow eyes.
“Just give it time. Everything will turn out fine. Trust me,” Adam urged, drawing comfort from his own words.
“What if there is nothing after this? What if this is the end of time?”
Adam shook his head and sipped his drink calmly. “It never is.”
As he searched Mohinder’s face for a reaction that never came, Adam felt a pang, a pang which a few years ago he’d never imagined himself capable of feeling about anyone or anything. The thought that Mohinder might be gone by the time the universe sorted itself out was too much to bear. Adam had never stayed around anyone for long enough or given enough of a damn to see if constant infusions of his blood would keep another person young and healthy and alive along with himself. The time had not yet come to broach the subject with Mohinder and begin testing his hypothesis. The death of billions was too much at the forefront of Mohinder’s depressed mind to think about prolonging his own existence indefinitely. Soon, Adam resolved, soon he would bring it up.
Mohinder broke the silence by apathetically saying to himself, “I wonder if there’s a way get old film reels from the library and play them in the movie theatres. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the movies. I think I’ll look into that during today’s walk.”
With his scientific knowledge now completely useless, the pathologically driven Mohinder had started latching onto whatever ideas or hobbies came into his head. Adam knew they kept him sane, so he usually went along with the other man’s random schemes. They almost always ended up being at least passingly diverting.
Continuing to admire the mouldings of their building, Adam momentarily considered lighting a cigarette, but changed his mind when he happened to turn and look at Mohinder, whose profile was even more striking in the faint light. Condensation curled out of his slightly parted lips, like Adam’s own personal dragon... or Roman emperor? Only now, and with great pleasure, did Adam realize what Mohinder was wearing. Adam had always found the imitative form of flattery arousing, especially when practiced by someone as stubborn and self-assured as Mohinder.
So, instead of smoking, Adam took another long drink of scotch before placing his and Mohinder’s glass on the deck table. Before the other man had a chance to protest, Adam crept up behind him and pinned Mohinder between his arms. He found an opening in the folds of Mohinder’s garment. He knew his hand was cold and, as he slid it inside, he anticipated the other man’s jump and order to stop. But he held firmly onto Mohinder’s hip, which was the first part of his body he’d found. Pressing himself forward so that Mohinder was almost squeezed between him and the ledge, Adam waited for his hand to warm up, and then began sliding it slowly up and down Mohinder’s side, always threatening but not quite venturing sideways.
Mohinder squirmed and twisted in Adam’s arms. He managed to turn himself around so that they could face each other. In doing so, the tuck in his blanket came undone, and cold air smacked his bare torso for a moment before Adam’s body covered it again. Always quick to seize an opportunity, Adam re-wrapped them so they were naked together in a warm, soft cocoon. Their hands pressed and groped along one another’s torsos, kneading skin into muscles and creating a more internal kind of warmth to share as their tongues played a familiar game of tug-of-war. Twining one leg around Mohinder’s, Adam slid their bodies together rhythmically, the friction bringing them both to hardness. Reaching a hand between them, he took them both in hand and stroked until the apathy in Mohinder’s eyes was replaced by a desire to live---or at least hunger, which was close enough.
Mohinder nibbled on the bit of Adam’s neck that was exposed. Remembering what they had been working towards recently, he forced himself to bite harder and harder. Adam had long been urging Mohinder to be less gentle with him, but it took some getting used to. With so many dead and hurting, he was loath to inflict pain on the one person he had left to care about. Adam soon groaned in pleasure, and Mohinder moved his head back to watch the ugly mark slowly and miraculously disappear. This was the one thing had helped Mohinder to acquiesce to Adam’s desires to have it rougher. Those with abilities had been the first to go; temporarily damaging Adam like this was the only way to still see powers at work---something that Mohinder had cherished once upon a time.
Sweetly liquored exhalations heated their exposed faces and necks as they kissed, at first lazily, but then with increasing passion. Soon Mohinder was panting with need, and Adam’s hand slid down and around with all too clear intent.
“Here? You want to do this here?” Mohinder looked at the neighboring skyscrapers, hoping rather than fearing that someone could be watching.
Adam pulled Mohinder to the ground and settled himself between his legs. “Who’s going to see?”