Happy Holidays, Aviss! (Pt 1)
Title: Memory Yields
Recipient: aviss
Author: interrobam
Characters: Adam, Pepper, Brian, Wensleydale
Rating: PG
Author's Note: I know this re-gifted story doesn't exactly fit your prompt, but its got supernatural problems, the Them, and angst, so I hope you'll still enjoy it! Happy Holidays!
Summary: The thing about being destined to bring about the apocalypse when you're eleven was that no one quite made plans for how you were supposed to go about the rest of your life.
The thing about being destined to bring about the apocalypse when you're eleven was that no one quite made plans for the how you were supposed to go about the rest of your life.
And at first, no one noticed that. And at first there were apples to eat, tart and small and hard as a fist. At first there were carnivals to attend, and tree branches to feel against the pads of your toes, frogs to catch in streams and neighbors to bother and witches to burn and everything was going just as brilliant as it always had. Adam and Pep and Brian and Wensleydale, saviors of humanity and all around audacious, troublemaking brats. And at first, the rest of your life hardly mattered; a blur of space exploration and heists and revolutions you'll get around to inciting.
Two year later Pepper started developing. That's what the grownups called it, "developing," like she's wasn't enough before, like she was going to get wings or lazer vision or something that would be much much cooler than bumps on her chest, which was, as far as the rest of the Them could tell, the only thing new about her. She got taller, a bit later on, and that was all good and fine because then she could reach the higher up shelves where her mom kept the good books about highland warriors and trembling princesses, although Pep always leaned a bit more on the warrior side of things. Brian and Wensleydale caught up a year later, starting to get hairs about their face and big streaks of acne across their cheeks. Brian ended up beating out Pep by five inches, but she still had Wensleydale by two, so she had that to pick on him for. The three of them compared armpit hairs and blackheads and tried to make each other gag with whatever new and strange concoction of smells their hormones had decided to produce that day. The boys in school started hitting on Pep, and she hit back, although after a while she decided on one or two that she'd let carry her books and touch those lumps on her chest that could have should have been wings. She got bored, after a stretch, and turned her attention to girls, which she maintained were better kissers and knew how to go about things. Brian, unkempt as always, found it a bit harder to attract the romantic attentions of his peers, which didn't stop him from chatting up every guy who let him. Wensleydale, it seemed, was as little into dating as he had been at twelve, although sometimes he would look at Brian chatting up a bloke and make a soft tutting noise of disapproval. All this chemistry, these tongues on teeth and hairs on chins and hands in pants, sufficiently distracted them from Adam until their class pictures came in the mail.
As was their tradition, they went into woods by the quarry and called each other ugly, scribbling black eyes and horns on each other. Brian was the one who, sharpie posed above the glossy surface, ready to add a unibrow and black out a few teeth, noticed it first. Adam, who had always been in the back of the photo on account of his height, who had always been smiling that sly, narrow smile, was sitting in the front. His legs dangled off the chair, they did not touch the ground, and the fat of his face sat high in his cheeks. Huh Brian thought, and he looked up at Adam, laughing as Pepper lovingly drew a crude representation of a penis over Brian's face.
"Huh" he said, and Wensleydale looked up.
"What?" he asked.
"Well," Brian replied, "well." He pointed to Adam's face, leaving an unfortunate dot on the boy's forehead. Wensleydale, after a moment, noticed as well, and made a sniffing sound.
"So he's a late bloomer, many people are, I don't think it matters." Brian nodded, and laughed a little, and agreed. Then he gave Adam a terrible goatee.
Pepper was next, walking down the hall and stopping by Adam's locker to discuss the serious problem of April fools, and whose office they were meant to fill with which type of mess, and how it was going ordering that tub of crickets to leave in the basement. One of her friends, who she cheated off in Maths, stopped and smiled.
"Aw," she said "that your little brother?" Pepper looked at her like she was a philosophy textbook.
"What?" She looked back at Adam, who seemed to be more amused than distraught, and then back at the girl.
"Ain't he?" she asked, cocking her head.
"No, he aint" Pepper scrunched her nose so that her freckles connected, like a field of poppies blown by the wind, but she glanced at Adam after she had said it, and she considered.
It wasn't until they were closer to twenty than twelve that they admitted, privately, that Adam didn't seem to be "developing." Not even in the boring way, with smells and pimples and noses that were too big for faces. At first they thought that perhaps he had developed in that interesting way, that X-Men. They wouldn't put it past him. Older though they may have been, the Them shared a foggy conviction that magic wasn't out of the question. Even Wensleydale, skeptical and prone to interrupting ghost stories to ask how, exactly, an immaterial being could pick up a knife and stab someone, furtively looked for evidence that Adam could read minds or perhaps levitate (just a bit, an inch or two would be enough to explain things.) Approaching adulthood and hesitantly, clumsily, adopting the requisite social graces, they didn't know how to ask. So Adam did to for them.
"I s'pose you've noticed it by now," he says around the piece of toffee stuffed into his mouth, as they sit on the floor of Pepper's bedroom being decisively not too old for sleepovers after a night of being decisively not too old for trick or treating.
"Whatever do your mean?" Wensleydale asked, and the rest of the Them gave him a Look, because they were rather tired of all this showing off of this "Social Graces" stuff he'd been getting from those rubbish books his Father kept giving him in the hope that he'd start using them to get a date. He knew perfectly well what Adam meant.
"Come off it Wensleydale, every house this year asked who's little brother I was."
"Ms. Mable though I was your mum." Pepper added, still nursing the wound on her pride left by the implication.
"So what is it?" Brian pressed. Adam looked away, like something rendered in oils, less Michelangelo and more Caravaggio.
"Oh, I dunno," he lies "dad took me to the doctor, he says I'm not ill." The doctor had not, exactly, described Adam as "not ill." Perfect, the man had said, rifling through the test results, marveling like Thomas knuckle deep in Christ's wounds. There's nothing wrong with him, there's nothing. Mr. Young had asked if he was quite certain, but the doctor hadn't responded, muttering something about running Adams blood a fifth time, maybe, to make sense of it all. "I'm just... this way," Adam nodded sharply "that's that."
And that was that.
It was a bit of a relief, to have decided that Adam's body was nothing of consequence. Other than a few insults from classmates, teachers asking if Adam was in the right class, the rest of humanity seemed to have tacitly agreed with the Them. After a while Lower Tadfield, from Greasy Johnson to Mr. Young, simply let it slip their mind that he wasn't as he was meant to be. Adam made sure of this. He felt guilty, but there was nothing for it. He had tried making himself grow up, he had tried mimicking what he had learned in Biology, what he had seen in his peers. He had warped the world to his wishes, once. He had tailored everything to his preference, he had sent the devil back downstairs.
Adam wasted long nights in front of the mirror, his lamp on the floor throwing his silhouette scattered against the walls of his bedroom. He had never been, will never be, quite able to control it, this thick vague potency at he core of him. He could tell when it rose to the surface: the whole of the world came loose around him. It was like unfocusing his eyes, like diving to the bottom of the pool with faulty swim goggles: loose seals letting chlorine sting his eyes. All of everything like a voice through a fan, choppy and inhuman, and there for him to do with.
Adam wasted long nights turning the rest of the word out of focus, until the surface of his mirror was soft to the touch, until his feet came off of the floor, until he could taste time at the back of his tongue. But it was no use, there was nothing there, he was unmuddleable. His body, his senses, stayed alike. He could not budge them from their setpoints.
It was as if Adam were the constant upon which the rest of reality depended.
He tried not to think about this.
Time continued on, and they started looking at universities. This was an especially difficult decision because it didn't occur to them they might be attending different ones. They spent long nights arguing between Wensleydale's academics and Brian's athletics and Pepper's activism. Adam, for his part, wanted to go somewhere interesting, and was useless for anything but coming up with brochures from halfway around the world.
"They've got thirty-nine flavors of ice cream, remember?" he prodded, waving pamphlets full of white toothy smiles and endless green lawns "and sky's blue all the time."
"I dunno," Brian frowned. "My cousin says it's alright, but they call football 'soccer' and they don't even have rugby."
"I'm having enough trouble finding someplace likely to let the lot of us in here," Wensleydale added, absently chewing on the cap on a pen "if I have to covert our marks into a whole 'nother system..." he trailed off, shaking his head.
"At least we'd be less likely to end up trapped with a bunch of posh tossers always talking about what boarding schools they went to and going on about their holiday to 'the islands.'" Pepper scoffed
In the end they found a small university, a handful of kilometers to their North, with just enough features in just enough categories to meet what each of them would allow the others before starting to feel cheated. They packed their bags, gave distracted hugs and dry kisses to their family, and piled onto a train. Dog came with them, displeased with his kennel but excited for all of the new smells he had been promised.
On the way there they marked their territory in scattered valuables and limbs akimbo. They threw snacks into each other's open mouths, they made promises. They switched seats and told jokes and fell asleep upon each other's shoulders.
"Well, why wouldn't we study together?" Adam asked through a mouth full of lemon drops as they approached their destination.
"With me in the Nutrition course, and Pepper in Sociology, we aren't going to have much in common," Wensleydale explained tirelessly.
"Me and Adam are both in Engineering courses," Brian pointed out. "I mean, I'm in Energy and he's in Aerospace, but same difference right?"
"That's a bit of a... simplified view..."
"Well I dunno about that," Adam shrugged "but it'll work out."
"Yeah." Pepper smiled, eyes bright "it'll work out."
University was not as Adam had imagined it. Each of them found something unexpected, welcome or not, in their first few weeks, but Adam had the roughest time of it. Pepper hadn't found her first period as mythical and soul affirming as her mother's old books had claimed it would be. Wensleydale had been under the mistaken impression that turning 18 would finally get him the respect due to an adult. Brian was left unsatisfied and headachey by his first night of drinking, which he had been lead to believe would be a revolutionary experience.
Adam, however, had always found things to conform to his expectations: winters were blustery, springs were fresh, summers dry, falls crisp. Each season became the next as seamlessly as sunset becomes night. Graduation was grand, holidays exciting, friendships made for life.
University was different. It refused to conform to the television specials and movies. Suddenly schoolwork wasn't effortless, suddenly his classmates didn't admire him, suddenly things took work. Adam didn't like it, didn't understand it. He looked around at his friends, struggling and sleeping and puzzling as if they had expected it. As if they, not he, were capable of premonition.
Adam realized one night, laying on the floor of the Them's flat, the breathing of his friends soft around him, what was different. They had spent the night studying for their first exams of the term, three of them nodding off around five in the morning. Adam couldn't sleep, he was alight with contemplation. He had had nearly twenty years to work on Tadfield: subconsciously shaping the bend of every tree and every river. It had morphed in small, soft, eroding waves into everything an English boy might expect out of a childhood. It had never occurred to him to hide hornets nests in bushes, slime atop river stones, mold on wild strawberries. Why would it, after all, Just William had never thought to mention them.
This university, this place, wasn't Tadfield. He had never seen this town or these people. He hadn't had the chance to assume them: slowly, compellingly, into his fantasy. He hadn't had time to invent them. Mulling it over, he reminded himself that he didn't want to. He looked around him. His friends lay sloppily in their sleep, like the dead on a battlefield, as Dog moving in his dreams. He remembered the quarry: their bones moving to his accord, the fabric of the world like cat's cradle between his fingers, the terribleness of his power. He didn't want that. Uni would be hard. It would not be everything he had hoped, but he'd rather have that than something invented. But a thought danced into the edge of his mind but...
How much of this have you invented?
Adam touched this thought like half worn seaglass: like something soft and curled and frosted at the same moment as it is sharp and brittle. Like something taken out of the womb prematurely, unformed and to be turned with care. He did not examine it, this word implies some intent, some power behind the process. He grasped, blind and hurting.
Because hadn't he always been the one to bring them together? Hadn't he always been the one settling fights and cheering up and creating connections? Hadn't he wanted friends and found them? Hadn't everyone always found themselves pleased when he was happy and cross when he was mad, helpless against the tide of his worldview?
"Nah" he whispered, not because he hadn't but because he can't have meant it that way. Adam noticed what a small word that is: meant. Such a weak, defensive word. A levy of sticks and leaves against the depth of his influence. You hadn't meant Tadfield either. He swallowed. Well, so what? So what if you maybe-possibly-probably-not made them like you. Liking people is nice ain't it? It isn't like you've been messing people up. He pressed firm on the seaglass thought, and it cut the pad of his thumb open like a blooming flower.
Hadn't you been cross with Greasy Johnson the night before he broke his arm?
"Nah."
Hadn't you told Wensleydale to stop moping about his grandmum right before she passed? Hadn't you wished Pep would break up with Tracy S. and she did? Hadn't you asked Brian-
"Nah... nah." Adam sat up, moved in the spaced between flashcards and elbows, wandered into the bathroom, stared hard and futile at his pale face in the fluorescent light.
"No way."
Adam failed his first exam.
"I figure I'm going to take a break," Adam announced one day as they were gathered in the library for what was supposed to be a late night cram session: textbooks, notes, chairs and limbs scattered across the carpet as if by a hurricane. The blankets and cushions about their kingdom made it look like they were huddled in the middle of an aborted pillow fort, an impression was not too far from the truth. "Jus' for a bit, until spring term."
"Ain't we on break in jus' a week?" Brian asked nervously. Forgetting that school would be in session a week from then was something he might do.
"Nah, not from university. I mean from, y'know," Adam gestured impotently from his position on the floor, his stomach against the rough rug "all of this." The Them were quiet for a moment.
"What 'all of this'?" Wensleydale finally asked, narrowing his eyes "'All of this' is university, and in just a bit-"
"We're- you're going back to Tadfield with us ain't you?" Pepper interrupted. Adam looked hard at his notes, as if studying, a ruse that the rest of the Them saw through immediately.
"I jus' I need to... go somewhere."
Wensleydale opened him mouth.
"I mean somewhere else."
"Like where" Brian asked.
Adam shrugged. For a long while the Them were without words. They wanted to go back to Tadfield, to the woods and their families and the possibilities of youth. And yet, they each thought in their own way, is there such a thing as a Tadfield without Adam? Would the lake freeze as thick and the trees be as pale and the snow shine as bright as morning under the streetlamps? Adam, who for so long was the star they'd navigated their adventures by, (second to the north, straight on until midnight, all of everything). No one wanted to let him go, no one knew what to say to keep him there. But someone had to break the silence.
"You rat Adam," Pepper laughed, all unease and mourning, all suffering and impotence. "You're trying to get out of our presents ain't you?"
"Pep, I'd never!" Adam laughed back "I'll come back with presents."
"Bloody good presents, they'd better be" she sniffed.
"A bag of crisps won't gonna cut it this year," Brian added.
"And I don't want to find another dictionary under a mess of newspaper and tape," Wensleydale said, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.
"Alright Alright," Adam turned his notebook to an empty page, propping himself up onto his elbows. "What do you lot want?"
Brian's action figure was the easiest to get. All of the world's riches to offer and he wanted something that Adam could pick up at the local toy store. But rarity did not make desire, especially in Brian.
After waving goodbye to his friends at the train station, Dog barking his farewells at his feet, Adam found the closest store and selected the specified superhero. He refused a bag, putting the toy and his change directly into his knapsack. He had places to be.
He left England for France, began looking for his next present. With luck and promise and confidence Adam and Dog explored the whole of Europe, moving through it's every corner and country. Adam had always had an ear for language, and he found the words and customs and idioms easy enough to pick up. He did not stay very long in one place, sleeping in trees and benches and shelters, in the homes of new friends and the pews of churches. He moved, he ate, he spoke, he learned. He took up odd jobs when he wanted for cash, paying debts and earning favors with bright eyes and fluent banter. He had Dog do tricks in the streets, dancing on his hind legs to the delighted screams of children. He nearly forgot himself. One night, opening his knapsack to stuff in a few apples for later, he noticed Brian's action figure. The superhero laid lonely in his beg, the print on his box rubbing off at the corners, and brought Adam back to his mission. Wensleydale had requested a wax anatomy model, preferably a head. It proved trying to find. There were a great lot of them in museums, but hardly any for sale. He frequented antique stores and auction blocks of every order, with no luck.
He caught wind one night in Bruges of a medical museum on Egypt that was closing its doors and selling its collection. He made his way to Africa.
He won a lovely depiction of a man with his eye sliced in half. He dilly dallied in celebration, riding giraffes and befriending monkeys. He ran through tall savannah grass and climbed the kinking branches of thirsty trees. He met with a host of people and befriended them as easily as he might sneeze. He decided to swear of shoes.
Of course, Adam had never been one to take care about presentability, so it wasn't until they were split toe to heel, useless at keeping water and stones out, that he discard his sneakers. Barefoot, Adam resolved, was the way to go. All of the greats: pirates and warriors and boy kings and the like, didn't go for shoes. The fleshy pad of his foot, the arch of it, wept with sores for two days, with the exciting type of pain that cries no threat of eternity, that is bound to fade.
Growing bored, he returned to Europe, found his way to Asia.
What with the shifting latitudes and longitudes, the distance and proximity to the sun, Adam couldn't trust the heat of the wind or the smells of plants to tell him the season. And so, when he arrived in Jaipur, he walked up to a man in the street and asked him the season. The man thought on this for a moment, eyeing his clothes with curiosity.
"Nearly spring."
Adam had given himself until the first thaw to enjoy himself but realized, guiltily, that he hadn't gotten Pepper's present yet. Her gift was causing him the most trouble, probably out of intention. She wanted an axe: "a big one" made of obsidian and "quality, it's gotta be quality." It seemed that the best place to get her one would be South America, but he was nowhere near there. Just until summer then. I'll stay away a bit longer, but only until summer. He knew, with guilt, that he was breaking one promise for another.
The Them would understand.
Adam continued on through Asia, the great expanse of it's mainland and the trail of islands that came out of it like earth left to bleed into the water. He stopped by Australia, intending to be brief, to verify the spiders he had heard of and move on. But Dog took a liking to it, barking wildly at the strange hopping animals the populated the landscape. He wandered off one night, Adam laughing and yelping behind him. By sunrise they were deep in the outback, and Adam remembered a story he had read in school, two children lost meeting a third during his walkabout. Though the orbit of the earth around the sun nagged at him, he couldn't resist so charming an adventure. He wandered among hot red stones, through sunsets and sunrises, digging up roots for their water.
He met a group of travelers, learned their language and their instruments in an afternoon, showed them how Dog would roll over if he pretended to shoot him.
Finally he came to South America, rich with jungles to explore and wet air to clean the dirt from his cheeks. He decide to stick to the jungles this time.
He swam in the joint of two mighty rivers, he ate a piranha whole. He swam with dolphins. Small fish ate his dead skin and large bugs drank his blood. He stumbled on more lost cities than an archeologist would be lucky to find in ten lifetimes. He met with a group of men at the bend of a river. Noticing their arsenal, he negotiated an old axe from them for three candy bars, a riddle, and a handmade comic book.
It was a rather one sided trade, but Adam had a way of making his company part of the bargain, and this was hard to resist.
Present in hand, Adam considered heading North: to the states and 39 flavors of ice cream. He was sorely tempted, but he knew he had waited long enough. And, in any case, he was getting just a bit tired of adventures.
Tadfield was a disappointment after all of the elephants and jungles and unreasonable weathers: the offerings the world had laid at his feet, like a bleeding bleating lamb, to do with as he may. Adam wasn't surprised, but neither was he at peace with it, kicking up a patch of gravel he had found by the side of the road.
He had come back by plane. Security had stared at him like a shoeless tramp, but he had a way with words and feelings and intent, and he had found a seat by the window without fuss. After landing in London he had taken a cab, fanning through a book of currency until he found the corner where he had tucked his pounds, to the outskirts of Tadfield. And now he was back, and Tadfield was different than he had remembered, duller and browner and grainy. Dog sniffed at it like he might have a stranger.
Adam could feel his friends like a heartbeat, like a body between sheets. They were waiting. It took him a while to find the path to the Quarry. Grass had taken it over in his absence, but the earth was still packed tight, familiar to his toes. He opened the ziper of his knapsack, assured himself that their presents were still there. He'd made them wait all spring for them, after all, and he hoped they would make up for his tardiness. When he came up to the lip of the Quarry, as dusty and ragged as it had always been, he could make out three figures. Over the course of his adventures he'd grown used to looking a child, he'd gone back to thinking in terms of “grownups,” that vague and humorless stage of life somewhere between fifteen and eighty. It was strange, he mused, to see his friends and think of them that way.
“Hullo!” he called, spreading his arms at the lip of the quarry, eyes alight as his friends tuned to look at him.
Pepper began making queer movements. She put her hands over her face and turned from him, and then took her hand away, placed them back, turned about again. She muttered like a prophet. Wensleydale took to the sight of Adam like a deer to headlights, hunched on a milk crate, staring through thick, owlish glasses, his hands deep in his jacket. He did not begin to breathe for a very long time. Brain smiled.
"Hullo Adam" he said. At the speaking of his name Pepper made a sound like a fairy touching iron, began to rub her arms. Adam laughed, slid down the sloping chalk wall to the bottom of the quarry, Dog following behind and leaping up at Brian.
“Adam,” Pepper said low, doubtful. Her hands were away from her face.
“Ain't you goin' say hi Pep?” Adam grinned “I've been gone almost half a year, ain't you lot missed me?” He turned to Wensleydale. He wasn't blinking. He turned back to Pepper, her eyes were dark and smooth as a skipping stone, her lips parted. “Mates?”
Something was wrong. Adam could feel it creeping across his spine, the something wrong, like an itchy you cannot originate. Wensleydale was staring, staring hard. Adam could feel a pulling, a slackening, a muddle about the world. Edges were starting to blur.
“You'll catch flies,” he joked towards Pepper's gaping mouth, and then with irritation and insecurity spoke again:“What?I- I haven't been gone a whole year have I? I might've lost track of time for a spell but-” He looked back into their faces.
“Oh Adam,” Pepper said, and that was pity and that was fear in her voice. Pepper, playing dirty in scuffles and slaying a horseman, and pity and fear. “No.” Adam licked his lips, frowned.
“Two?” he offered.
“Thirty” Wensleydale's voice was a rustle.
It was quiet. It was the type of quiet that freezes dust motes in the air.
"No," the word in Adam's mouth was like a mealy cake, the more he chewed the drier his tongue. "No, it was last December, it was just this winter remember? I got-" he fumbled in his knapsack and pulled out Pepper's axe, showed it to her "Your presents-"
"What is it?"Pepper asked, turned her head to the side.
"It's what you wanted, you asked for it," Adam thrust it forward, begged her to take it in hand. She didn't move. He put the axe down on the ground, fumbled into his knapsack once more. “An- and Brian” he took out a tattered cardboard box, which Brian took at once.
“Cor!” he cheered “Thanks Adam.”
Adam smiled, unease and relief overpowering him as his mind scrambled for purchase.
“Wensley's- he's having a joke at me, ain't he Brian?”
“Nah.” Brian shook his head, extracting his action figure from it's box and admiring it with pleasure. “He's right, thirty years.”
“It hasn't been,” Adam looked at Pepper, begged her to tell him otherwise. He stood, Iranon amidst Aira, wreathed with laurels he had woven himself. He doubted.
“This explains why all of us ended up in the quarry,” Brian mused, once the lot of them had retreated to Pepper's house. “You should have seen us Adam, wandering in there when we hadn't been in years. We got that feeling, like in, uh, Sixth Encounters of the Third Sense with the mountain.”
“Like someone expected us there,” Pepper added. Adam grunted, in response, from the corner of her living room. He was sulking against the wall, Dog panting curiously at his feet.
“We really weren't expecting you, y'know?” Brian smiled, “It's a nice surprise.”
Adam grunted louder. There was the sound of spoons brushing the insides of teacups.
“Am I going to have to say it?” Wensleydale snapped, finally, leaning back in his chair. He hadn't spoken for a while, and the rest of the Them looked at him as if they had forgotten he could. He sighed because, apparently, he would.
“Adam isn't real,” Wensleydale said. “Remember Pepper, Brian? He isn't real. We made him up.” Pepper and Brian spared a glance towards the, to their eyes very real, Adam, who was too shocked to grunt.
“You were a good idea.” Wensleydale continued, with the finality of a headmaster. “Adam, you were a brilliant idea, like Peter Pan you were. Always coming up with adventures... and when we got in trouble 'Ah, it was Adam's idea'...” he looked urgently towards Brian and Pepper “You remember, like Peter Pan.”
“I remember, yeah.” Pepper whispered like a confessor.
“But come on Wensley,” Brian smiled nervously, as if he weren't quite sure what everyone was getting so worked up about “he's here right now, exactly like he was. Good ol' Adam.”
“Exactly like he was” Wensleydale took off his spectacles and reached into his pocket, cleaned the lenses with one of those special cloths, precisely like optometrists say to. He looked briefly at Adam, and then away “Lets say we keep pretending. Lets say it's all real. You'd hate to be alone wouldn't you? You'd just hate it, I know it, I've made you hadn't I, I should know. That'd be the worst.”
“But the thing is, you will be. You must've figured out by now that Humans won't last. Even if we don't off ourselves, there's a sort of cosmic guarantee, Earth won't be habitable forever. Do you know... do you know the sun's getting brighter? It is, that's what stars do, and in a billion years it'll be too hot for us to have water on Earth. And, and for us that won't be a problem, we'll be dead. And maybe for a bit it'll be alright for you too. But you know what's going to happen in five billion years? The sun goes Red Giant, and it'll swallow up Earth. Alright, so let's pretend you move farther away, to another planet. A couple million years and the sun's a white dwarf, it's too cold, nothing can live here anymore. You've got to find another solar system, if you want to find someone else, if you don't want to be alone. So say you travel to the next closest universe, no guarantee of people being there, and even if it is their Sun'll just go the same way as ours. So you'll have to keep going and going,” W gestured wildly with his glasses in an attempt to indicate, in one swing of an arm. the whole of eternity.
“And more suns'll die, that's entropy that is. More and more gone away, so you've only got some dim red giants, hardly any habitable range on those. And then those die too, and the- the whole galaxy goes off. You're just left there... floating... with a bunch of particles.” He was quiet, the dust motes took an intermission in their dance.
“Jeez Wensley,” Brian said low.
“And that...” Wensleydale paused, cleared his throat, continued, “and that shouldn't, it can't happen to Peter Pan.” He put the cloth back into his pocket, looked into his glasses like another face. “'Death will be an awfully big adventure.'” Adam, still slouched in his corner, kicked the wall (hard, to the detriment of his toes).
"Well," he began, all guilt and righteous martyrdom, "s'not my fault you guys forgot about me. I tho't we were-" Wensleydale stood so fast and so defiant that the seat of his chair struck his calves to bruising before it fell to the floor with a clap.
"We waited for you," he said, quiet at first " we waited a long time for you Adam. When you went off on your adventure, we were here, we were patient."
"Come off it Wensley"
"I will not 'come off it' Pep. We came back after winter holiday, all anxious for you, and you didn't show. 'Alright', we said, 'Adam's keen on adventures', we said 'but he'll come back'-"
"I came back" Adam, in a less noble mood, might have whined these words.
"-and we said it in the summer, and the winter again, and the next holiday and the next holiday. We waited Adam, we thought 'maybe he's told his Dad where he's gone.' So we go to your old house and your father-”
“Shut up Wensleydale,” Brian hissed.
“And your father,” he spoke loud and firm, he paused. He dared any of the Them to stop him amidst his silence. “He asks us who Adam is. He asks us. And then-” he swallowed “and then we had to admit it, there was nothing for it. You weren't real. We'd made you up.” Adam, curled into his corner, fumed. “And you know what? That was good. Peter Pan, Adam, people like you can't be real. They shouldn't be real. They-”
“Alright!” Adam yelped “Alright, fine! Things were going to be jus' like they used to, I wanted y'know, to- an'- an' see if I let you in my club now!” He hefted his knapsack to his shoulder, set out for the door in a terrific slouch. “Come on Dog.”
“Adam,” Pepper called, and waited, and then louder “Adam.”
The heft of the door made it marvelous for slamming closed in anger, and Adam took full advantage of this feature as he passed the threshold.
The forest had missed him. As Adam and Dog ran deep into it's embrace, the skeletons of leaves underfoot, low branches slapping at them, the path they forged took on a welcoming dappled light. As if he had been missed. Adam vaulted over fallen trees, scraped his palms on new bark, gasped until spit pooled beneath his tongue. A knotted root sent him to the ground, and he roared so that the world nearly tore, so that Dog's hair stood at attention. Adam curled up on his side, new grass brushing his flesh, put calloused hands around soft ears. He sobbed with fury and sorrow. Dog whimpered, head low, approaching his Master unsurely. He pressed a cold nose to his Master's neck, licked him once, evoked an involuntary giggle. Adam turned onto his back and pushed Dog's head away.
“Go 'way” he said in his most serious voice. Dog cocked his head, wagged his tail. Adam sighed. He reached out, cupped Dog's head in his hands. Dog let his tongue loll out his mouth and his ears perk.
“Ain't you s'posed to have whiskers?” Adam accused. “Grey whiskers, thas' what happens when dogs get old. Aunt May's hound was all sorts of grey aroun' the muzzle, n' laying down all the time on count of her art-tide-us. Thirty years 'n human time's like a hundred years 'n dog time.” Dog licked his muzzle once, turned to the noise of a squirrel.
“You should've tol' me” Adam said, even as he knew how silly a thing that was to ask of a dog.
Adam thought of the roads he had passed on his way to the quarry, how the houses had looked. They were different, absolutely. He had known and denied that even then. But they were strange in their difference, beyond the passage of time. They weren't right.
How much of this have you invented? his shadow had been in wait for him, dangling the ghosts of the epiphanies Adam had tried and failed to kill. It's a fair question, he thought. How many houses, how many trees, how many people. They hadn't warped in my absence, had they? They've un-warped. They had righted themselves. The quarry, the lanes, his friends, they had gone back to what they might have been without his meddling. Things hadn't really been extraordinary.
But Adam thought they had too been extraordinary. I almost caused the Apocalypse didn't I? I nearly destroyed the world. Adam despised himself, for he had been the one to make them stop remembering. And surely if he had let them remember they would have remembered him.
And surely if I let them remember now- but he recoiled from this thought. How sure are you? How sure that you'd be letting them remember, and not messing with them? Couldn't you have made pretend. Adam didn't like this trail of thought. He put it away, like a chocolate with a nasty filling, back in it's box.
“Forget about that,” he lectured himself aloud “We'll worry on that later.” his mind dashed on, now preoccupied with the thought of Tadfield before the messing. If he could remember how it had been, if he could recall what had changed by his hand. I'd do something.
Adam reached back into the foggy past, grasping blind as if in a nightmare. He remembered the temples he had found in Brazil, the tiger he had befriended in India, taunting Death. There he thinks, before all that. Vague shapes form and squabble. Pepper is there with a flaming sword, they are resting their bikes against the fence to the military base, they are pretending to drown a girl in a lake. And then. Adam closed his eyes. And then.
Deep in the woods, where he sat upon a stump, birds cried for one another.
“Come on” he muttered “what then.” There must have been something then. He must have been a baby, yes, there had been pictures of him swaddled and blonde on top of the mantle. He must have been a baby, because Sarah would tell him how bothersome he had been. But Adam figured that most people don't remember being a baby anyhow, and his family wasn't his anymore, and he was afraid to seek them out. But there had to be something. If there wasn't something, a memory before the summer that he nearly broke the world, Tadfield unmuddled, then he might have been eleven forever.
He might have been eleven forever.
All around him, birds went quiet.
Adam felt it again, the air around him go loose: everything through leaking swim goggles.
“I haven't” he hissed, to his own disbelief. The outlines of things were beginning to foam, Dog was barking from far away, and what if he had.
“I haven't, because- because Pep an' We- an', an' Brian'll remember. They will.”
And what if I had.
An image came into his awareness, an eleven year old boy alone with the particles of the universe, a star among starstuff. A God. And He was lonely, and He was making a little blue sphere, and He had forgotten nearly everything, and no. No, no no.
“Nah,” he whispered “no way.”
When Adam came back it was nightfall, and Wensleydale was gone, and they did not speak of that.
“Me and Brian are sticking with you,” Pepper resolved, arms crossed decisively.
“I always knew you were real,” Brian added, and Adam waited for Pepper to agree, and she did not. And Adam accepted that perhaps she did not owe him that.
Adam stayed with Pepper and Brian for a while. Pepper's house was large and empty, and Brian was between boyfriends anyway, and they made a small and broken family. They tried to start back up where they had left off.
Time passed quickly and slowly all at the same time. Days were longer than weeks, weeks were longer than months, months were infinite when compared to decades. This strange deformed time would sneak up on Adam when he least expected it. When he was bending to tie his sneakers (he had decided to get used to shoes again) he would move his fingers and realize that he'd never be done. He would be tying sneakers forever, every day: for the rest of the rest of eternity. He abandoned shoes, for a year or two, after that. But time came back, and he realized that it did not matter if it was tying shoes or eating breakfast or combing hair, he would do it again and again. He would wear grooves in his mind with it.
They did not talk about Wensleydale for a long time. When they did, it was with every care to be casual. Have you heard Wensleydale's got a new job in London? Fancy that. Adam pretended not to feel him in the night, like a missing arm.
Once or twice great bursts of need arose in Adam. He would catch on something. The angels, he'd think they were there and they will know and they'll tell me everything. He would visit SoHo and peer into a long abandoned bookstore, a flat inhabited by a perfectly mortal woman. He would wander around a lake he had read about in the back of the fallen one's mind. He would feed the ducks and stare at them, hard, to see if they pulled any angelic funny business. He thought about letting Pepper and Brian remember. He thought about making Pepper and Brain remember.
Mostly, though, he stayed with Pepper. A couple years after the reunion and disbandment in the quarry, Brian mets someone lovely. Adam sat in the church at their wedding, helped them adopt their daughter, watched her grow like Pepper had. There was a part of Adam that was deeply, viciously mad at Brian, mad at his husband, mad at their daughter. There was a part of Adam that demanded the world be stopped, halted on it's axis: he wanted to get off. There was a part of Adam still shadow, still pale and flat and gray, dividing the world into parts. He was dearly afraid of it.
Adam did not talk to Brian much after that.
He and Pepper were happy by themselves. They slept the same room, beds at each side. They kept each other awake with puzzles and jokes and debates. Adam drank every word like a man in a desert, like handling the last egg of a dying species. He had missed too much already. They went out sometimes, by cab or by rail or just into the forest. Slowly, Pepper was mistaken less often for his mother and more often for his grandmother.
"Your granmum," Pepper scoffed, the soft spots in her pride unchanged.
He slipped, on occasion, despite his vow to keep his hands off of Tadfield, off of his friends. When he was scared, when he was angry, he felt reality go in and out like a soft shallow breath. He always stopped himself before damage could be done, but each time was slower. Each time he coasted just a bit more. He had begun to wonder what the point of it was, trying to preserve something already broken.
Once Pepper asked him if he thought there was such a thing as heaven. Adam considered the voice of Metatron, his friends in robes with harps on clouds. Adam considered eternal life and eternal damnation.
“I hope not,” he answered.
Adam's urges intensified. He would return, like a pilgrim to the bones of a saint, to the bookstore in SoHo. He would circle the lake, urgently, Dog at his heels. Pepper would sit at one of the benches and laughed at him whenever he stepped in duck droppings. He asked the perfectly mortal woman, for the thousandth time, if she knew where the previous owner had gone off to.
He became desperate. He began loitering around fad dieters and litterers, people who had recently won pub fights. He began looking hard at faces for a familiar paleness, thinness, flame. But everyone came out a stranger.
Pepper's hair started falling out. At first it came off in strands and then in great clumps.
“What's going on?” Adam asked.
“I'm getting old,” Pepper answered.
Brian went off to find Wensleydale. Pepper wanted to see him.
Brian told Adam this and he laughed long and hard before realizing he was serious. Adam asked why, and his friend smiled at him with the best of his nature. There was an obvious answer, of course, but Adam had been tasting and spitting and that thought back into it's box for weeks.
He was not about to swallow.
Brian was away when Pepper went to hospital, and Adam let the doctors think he was a grandson so that he could sit in the hard chair at the other side of the room and drink her like he'd never see water again. She was there for three nights. She slept a lot, and Adam didn't. He had to keep the world from boiling over.
On the fourth night Adam reached out, his hand shaking. It was a moment of weakness, a moment of despair and loneliness and stubborness. He felt eleven again, dividing up the world, painting the sky the color of blood, stomping his feet into the dirt and demanding what was his. This would not happen, this was not allowed.
"No" Pepper said, quietly, hoarsely. And for a thrilling moment he thought she agreed, he thought she understood that he couldn't, but her eyes opened and they were so lucid and angry that he knew better. Chastised, he withdrew his hand and picked at his pilling jumper.
"Come on Pep, all those books about stuff like this, noble dyin', you know better. You know just 'cause you're old-"
"I'm sorry," he voice cracked, she sounded like Brian back when puberty was some new adventure, back when none of them had noticed yet "I'm sorry Adam, but I can't." Now Pepper is being childish, he thought, now she's being selfish.
"I just need to be ready. Give it another year, I'll be ready."
"You can't be ready for this kind of thing."
"Pep, I will, you'll see, I can. How about a month? Give me just a month."
"It's terrible for you. It's terrible, I'm sorry, but you can't make it terrible for me. It's not playing fair Adam."
Inside Adam there was a hurricane. There was something moving too fast for him to get close to, intangible. There was a wound, and around it thoughts buzzed like flies and laid eggs. There was an unbearable awareness that he could do it. He didn't need her permission, he could bring them all back if he wanted, he could make them stay.
Inside Adam there were awful things that mankind was lucky not to have words for.
Pepper whispered something, it sounded like "don't I know you." Adam did not answer, he did not look at the dark corner where her eyes rested.
"A minute, a minute, just another minute," he muttered, rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb, as if he had all the time in the world. "Just a minute, just one" as if she were not cold and heavy.
~end
Happy Holidays, aviss, from your Secret Writer!
Recipient: aviss
Author: interrobam
Characters: Adam, Pepper, Brian, Wensleydale
Rating: PG
Author's Note: I know this re-gifted story doesn't exactly fit your prompt, but its got supernatural problems, the Them, and angst, so I hope you'll still enjoy it! Happy Holidays!
Summary: The thing about being destined to bring about the apocalypse when you're eleven was that no one quite made plans for how you were supposed to go about the rest of your life.
The thing about being destined to bring about the apocalypse when you're eleven was that no one quite made plans for the how you were supposed to go about the rest of your life.
And at first, no one noticed that. And at first there were apples to eat, tart and small and hard as a fist. At first there were carnivals to attend, and tree branches to feel against the pads of your toes, frogs to catch in streams and neighbors to bother and witches to burn and everything was going just as brilliant as it always had. Adam and Pep and Brian and Wensleydale, saviors of humanity and all around audacious, troublemaking brats. And at first, the rest of your life hardly mattered; a blur of space exploration and heists and revolutions you'll get around to inciting.
Two year later Pepper started developing. That's what the grownups called it, "developing," like she's wasn't enough before, like she was going to get wings or lazer vision or something that would be much much cooler than bumps on her chest, which was, as far as the rest of the Them could tell, the only thing new about her. She got taller, a bit later on, and that was all good and fine because then she could reach the higher up shelves where her mom kept the good books about highland warriors and trembling princesses, although Pep always leaned a bit more on the warrior side of things. Brian and Wensleydale caught up a year later, starting to get hairs about their face and big streaks of acne across their cheeks. Brian ended up beating out Pep by five inches, but she still had Wensleydale by two, so she had that to pick on him for. The three of them compared armpit hairs and blackheads and tried to make each other gag with whatever new and strange concoction of smells their hormones had decided to produce that day. The boys in school started hitting on Pep, and she hit back, although after a while she decided on one or two that she'd let carry her books and touch those lumps on her chest that could have should have been wings. She got bored, after a stretch, and turned her attention to girls, which she maintained were better kissers and knew how to go about things. Brian, unkempt as always, found it a bit harder to attract the romantic attentions of his peers, which didn't stop him from chatting up every guy who let him. Wensleydale, it seemed, was as little into dating as he had been at twelve, although sometimes he would look at Brian chatting up a bloke and make a soft tutting noise of disapproval. All this chemistry, these tongues on teeth and hairs on chins and hands in pants, sufficiently distracted them from Adam until their class pictures came in the mail.
As was their tradition, they went into woods by the quarry and called each other ugly, scribbling black eyes and horns on each other. Brian was the one who, sharpie posed above the glossy surface, ready to add a unibrow and black out a few teeth, noticed it first. Adam, who had always been in the back of the photo on account of his height, who had always been smiling that sly, narrow smile, was sitting in the front. His legs dangled off the chair, they did not touch the ground, and the fat of his face sat high in his cheeks. Huh Brian thought, and he looked up at Adam, laughing as Pepper lovingly drew a crude representation of a penis over Brian's face.
"Huh" he said, and Wensleydale looked up.
"What?" he asked.
"Well," Brian replied, "well." He pointed to Adam's face, leaving an unfortunate dot on the boy's forehead. Wensleydale, after a moment, noticed as well, and made a sniffing sound.
"So he's a late bloomer, many people are, I don't think it matters." Brian nodded, and laughed a little, and agreed. Then he gave Adam a terrible goatee.
Pepper was next, walking down the hall and stopping by Adam's locker to discuss the serious problem of April fools, and whose office they were meant to fill with which type of mess, and how it was going ordering that tub of crickets to leave in the basement. One of her friends, who she cheated off in Maths, stopped and smiled.
"Aw," she said "that your little brother?" Pepper looked at her like she was a philosophy textbook.
"What?" She looked back at Adam, who seemed to be more amused than distraught, and then back at the girl.
"Ain't he?" she asked, cocking her head.
"No, he aint" Pepper scrunched her nose so that her freckles connected, like a field of poppies blown by the wind, but she glanced at Adam after she had said it, and she considered.
It wasn't until they were closer to twenty than twelve that they admitted, privately, that Adam didn't seem to be "developing." Not even in the boring way, with smells and pimples and noses that were too big for faces. At first they thought that perhaps he had developed in that interesting way, that X-Men. They wouldn't put it past him. Older though they may have been, the Them shared a foggy conviction that magic wasn't out of the question. Even Wensleydale, skeptical and prone to interrupting ghost stories to ask how, exactly, an immaterial being could pick up a knife and stab someone, furtively looked for evidence that Adam could read minds or perhaps levitate (just a bit, an inch or two would be enough to explain things.) Approaching adulthood and hesitantly, clumsily, adopting the requisite social graces, they didn't know how to ask. So Adam did to for them.
"I s'pose you've noticed it by now," he says around the piece of toffee stuffed into his mouth, as they sit on the floor of Pepper's bedroom being decisively not too old for sleepovers after a night of being decisively not too old for trick or treating.
"Whatever do your mean?" Wensleydale asked, and the rest of the Them gave him a Look, because they were rather tired of all this showing off of this "Social Graces" stuff he'd been getting from those rubbish books his Father kept giving him in the hope that he'd start using them to get a date. He knew perfectly well what Adam meant.
"Come off it Wensleydale, every house this year asked who's little brother I was."
"Ms. Mable though I was your mum." Pepper added, still nursing the wound on her pride left by the implication.
"So what is it?" Brian pressed. Adam looked away, like something rendered in oils, less Michelangelo and more Caravaggio.
"Oh, I dunno," he lies "dad took me to the doctor, he says I'm not ill." The doctor had not, exactly, described Adam as "not ill." Perfect, the man had said, rifling through the test results, marveling like Thomas knuckle deep in Christ's wounds. There's nothing wrong with him, there's nothing. Mr. Young had asked if he was quite certain, but the doctor hadn't responded, muttering something about running Adams blood a fifth time, maybe, to make sense of it all. "I'm just... this way," Adam nodded sharply "that's that."
And that was that.
It was a bit of a relief, to have decided that Adam's body was nothing of consequence. Other than a few insults from classmates, teachers asking if Adam was in the right class, the rest of humanity seemed to have tacitly agreed with the Them. After a while Lower Tadfield, from Greasy Johnson to Mr. Young, simply let it slip their mind that he wasn't as he was meant to be. Adam made sure of this. He felt guilty, but there was nothing for it. He had tried making himself grow up, he had tried mimicking what he had learned in Biology, what he had seen in his peers. He had warped the world to his wishes, once. He had tailored everything to his preference, he had sent the devil back downstairs.
Adam wasted long nights in front of the mirror, his lamp on the floor throwing his silhouette scattered against the walls of his bedroom. He had never been, will never be, quite able to control it, this thick vague potency at he core of him. He could tell when it rose to the surface: the whole of the world came loose around him. It was like unfocusing his eyes, like diving to the bottom of the pool with faulty swim goggles: loose seals letting chlorine sting his eyes. All of everything like a voice through a fan, choppy and inhuman, and there for him to do with.
Adam wasted long nights turning the rest of the word out of focus, until the surface of his mirror was soft to the touch, until his feet came off of the floor, until he could taste time at the back of his tongue. But it was no use, there was nothing there, he was unmuddleable. His body, his senses, stayed alike. He could not budge them from their setpoints.
It was as if Adam were the constant upon which the rest of reality depended.
He tried not to think about this.
Time continued on, and they started looking at universities. This was an especially difficult decision because it didn't occur to them they might be attending different ones. They spent long nights arguing between Wensleydale's academics and Brian's athletics and Pepper's activism. Adam, for his part, wanted to go somewhere interesting, and was useless for anything but coming up with brochures from halfway around the world.
"They've got thirty-nine flavors of ice cream, remember?" he prodded, waving pamphlets full of white toothy smiles and endless green lawns "and sky's blue all the time."
"I dunno," Brian frowned. "My cousin says it's alright, but they call football 'soccer' and they don't even have rugby."
"I'm having enough trouble finding someplace likely to let the lot of us in here," Wensleydale added, absently chewing on the cap on a pen "if I have to covert our marks into a whole 'nother system..." he trailed off, shaking his head.
"At least we'd be less likely to end up trapped with a bunch of posh tossers always talking about what boarding schools they went to and going on about their holiday to 'the islands.'" Pepper scoffed
In the end they found a small university, a handful of kilometers to their North, with just enough features in just enough categories to meet what each of them would allow the others before starting to feel cheated. They packed their bags, gave distracted hugs and dry kisses to their family, and piled onto a train. Dog came with them, displeased with his kennel but excited for all of the new smells he had been promised.
On the way there they marked their territory in scattered valuables and limbs akimbo. They threw snacks into each other's open mouths, they made promises. They switched seats and told jokes and fell asleep upon each other's shoulders.
"Well, why wouldn't we study together?" Adam asked through a mouth full of lemon drops as they approached their destination.
"With me in the Nutrition course, and Pepper in Sociology, we aren't going to have much in common," Wensleydale explained tirelessly.
"Me and Adam are both in Engineering courses," Brian pointed out. "I mean, I'm in Energy and he's in Aerospace, but same difference right?"
"That's a bit of a... simplified view..."
"Well I dunno about that," Adam shrugged "but it'll work out."
"Yeah." Pepper smiled, eyes bright "it'll work out."
University was not as Adam had imagined it. Each of them found something unexpected, welcome or not, in their first few weeks, but Adam had the roughest time of it. Pepper hadn't found her first period as mythical and soul affirming as her mother's old books had claimed it would be. Wensleydale had been under the mistaken impression that turning 18 would finally get him the respect due to an adult. Brian was left unsatisfied and headachey by his first night of drinking, which he had been lead to believe would be a revolutionary experience.
Adam, however, had always found things to conform to his expectations: winters were blustery, springs were fresh, summers dry, falls crisp. Each season became the next as seamlessly as sunset becomes night. Graduation was grand, holidays exciting, friendships made for life.
University was different. It refused to conform to the television specials and movies. Suddenly schoolwork wasn't effortless, suddenly his classmates didn't admire him, suddenly things took work. Adam didn't like it, didn't understand it. He looked around at his friends, struggling and sleeping and puzzling as if they had expected it. As if they, not he, were capable of premonition.
Adam realized one night, laying on the floor of the Them's flat, the breathing of his friends soft around him, what was different. They had spent the night studying for their first exams of the term, three of them nodding off around five in the morning. Adam couldn't sleep, he was alight with contemplation. He had had nearly twenty years to work on Tadfield: subconsciously shaping the bend of every tree and every river. It had morphed in small, soft, eroding waves into everything an English boy might expect out of a childhood. It had never occurred to him to hide hornets nests in bushes, slime atop river stones, mold on wild strawberries. Why would it, after all, Just William had never thought to mention them.
This university, this place, wasn't Tadfield. He had never seen this town or these people. He hadn't had the chance to assume them: slowly, compellingly, into his fantasy. He hadn't had time to invent them. Mulling it over, he reminded himself that he didn't want to. He looked around him. His friends lay sloppily in their sleep, like the dead on a battlefield, as Dog moving in his dreams. He remembered the quarry: their bones moving to his accord, the fabric of the world like cat's cradle between his fingers, the terribleness of his power. He didn't want that. Uni would be hard. It would not be everything he had hoped, but he'd rather have that than something invented. But a thought danced into the edge of his mind but...
How much of this have you invented?
Adam touched this thought like half worn seaglass: like something soft and curled and frosted at the same moment as it is sharp and brittle. Like something taken out of the womb prematurely, unformed and to be turned with care. He did not examine it, this word implies some intent, some power behind the process. He grasped, blind and hurting.
Because hadn't he always been the one to bring them together? Hadn't he always been the one settling fights and cheering up and creating connections? Hadn't he wanted friends and found them? Hadn't everyone always found themselves pleased when he was happy and cross when he was mad, helpless against the tide of his worldview?
"Nah" he whispered, not because he hadn't but because he can't have meant it that way. Adam noticed what a small word that is: meant. Such a weak, defensive word. A levy of sticks and leaves against the depth of his influence. You hadn't meant Tadfield either. He swallowed. Well, so what? So what if you maybe-possibly-probably-not made them like you. Liking people is nice ain't it? It isn't like you've been messing people up. He pressed firm on the seaglass thought, and it cut the pad of his thumb open like a blooming flower.
Hadn't you been cross with Greasy Johnson the night before he broke his arm?
"Nah."
Hadn't you told Wensleydale to stop moping about his grandmum right before she passed? Hadn't you wished Pep would break up with Tracy S. and she did? Hadn't you asked Brian-
"Nah... nah." Adam sat up, moved in the spaced between flashcards and elbows, wandered into the bathroom, stared hard and futile at his pale face in the fluorescent light.
"No way."
Adam failed his first exam.
"I figure I'm going to take a break," Adam announced one day as they were gathered in the library for what was supposed to be a late night cram session: textbooks, notes, chairs and limbs scattered across the carpet as if by a hurricane. The blankets and cushions about their kingdom made it look like they were huddled in the middle of an aborted pillow fort, an impression was not too far from the truth. "Jus' for a bit, until spring term."
"Ain't we on break in jus' a week?" Brian asked nervously. Forgetting that school would be in session a week from then was something he might do.
"Nah, not from university. I mean from, y'know," Adam gestured impotently from his position on the floor, his stomach against the rough rug "all of this." The Them were quiet for a moment.
"What 'all of this'?" Wensleydale finally asked, narrowing his eyes "'All of this' is university, and in just a bit-"
"We're- you're going back to Tadfield with us ain't you?" Pepper interrupted. Adam looked hard at his notes, as if studying, a ruse that the rest of the Them saw through immediately.
"I jus' I need to... go somewhere."
Wensleydale opened him mouth.
"I mean somewhere else."
"Like where" Brian asked.
Adam shrugged. For a long while the Them were without words. They wanted to go back to Tadfield, to the woods and their families and the possibilities of youth. And yet, they each thought in their own way, is there such a thing as a Tadfield without Adam? Would the lake freeze as thick and the trees be as pale and the snow shine as bright as morning under the streetlamps? Adam, who for so long was the star they'd navigated their adventures by, (second to the north, straight on until midnight, all of everything). No one wanted to let him go, no one knew what to say to keep him there. But someone had to break the silence.
"You rat Adam," Pepper laughed, all unease and mourning, all suffering and impotence. "You're trying to get out of our presents ain't you?"
"Pep, I'd never!" Adam laughed back "I'll come back with presents."
"Bloody good presents, they'd better be" she sniffed.
"A bag of crisps won't gonna cut it this year," Brian added.
"And I don't want to find another dictionary under a mess of newspaper and tape," Wensleydale said, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose.
"Alright Alright," Adam turned his notebook to an empty page, propping himself up onto his elbows. "What do you lot want?"
Brian's action figure was the easiest to get. All of the world's riches to offer and he wanted something that Adam could pick up at the local toy store. But rarity did not make desire, especially in Brian.
After waving goodbye to his friends at the train station, Dog barking his farewells at his feet, Adam found the closest store and selected the specified superhero. He refused a bag, putting the toy and his change directly into his knapsack. He had places to be.
He left England for France, began looking for his next present. With luck and promise and confidence Adam and Dog explored the whole of Europe, moving through it's every corner and country. Adam had always had an ear for language, and he found the words and customs and idioms easy enough to pick up. He did not stay very long in one place, sleeping in trees and benches and shelters, in the homes of new friends and the pews of churches. He moved, he ate, he spoke, he learned. He took up odd jobs when he wanted for cash, paying debts and earning favors with bright eyes and fluent banter. He had Dog do tricks in the streets, dancing on his hind legs to the delighted screams of children. He nearly forgot himself. One night, opening his knapsack to stuff in a few apples for later, he noticed Brian's action figure. The superhero laid lonely in his beg, the print on his box rubbing off at the corners, and brought Adam back to his mission. Wensleydale had requested a wax anatomy model, preferably a head. It proved trying to find. There were a great lot of them in museums, but hardly any for sale. He frequented antique stores and auction blocks of every order, with no luck.
He caught wind one night in Bruges of a medical museum on Egypt that was closing its doors and selling its collection. He made his way to Africa.
He won a lovely depiction of a man with his eye sliced in half. He dilly dallied in celebration, riding giraffes and befriending monkeys. He ran through tall savannah grass and climbed the kinking branches of thirsty trees. He met with a host of people and befriended them as easily as he might sneeze. He decided to swear of shoes.
Of course, Adam had never been one to take care about presentability, so it wasn't until they were split toe to heel, useless at keeping water and stones out, that he discard his sneakers. Barefoot, Adam resolved, was the way to go. All of the greats: pirates and warriors and boy kings and the like, didn't go for shoes. The fleshy pad of his foot, the arch of it, wept with sores for two days, with the exciting type of pain that cries no threat of eternity, that is bound to fade.
Growing bored, he returned to Europe, found his way to Asia.
What with the shifting latitudes and longitudes, the distance and proximity to the sun, Adam couldn't trust the heat of the wind or the smells of plants to tell him the season. And so, when he arrived in Jaipur, he walked up to a man in the street and asked him the season. The man thought on this for a moment, eyeing his clothes with curiosity.
"Nearly spring."
Adam had given himself until the first thaw to enjoy himself but realized, guiltily, that he hadn't gotten Pepper's present yet. Her gift was causing him the most trouble, probably out of intention. She wanted an axe: "a big one" made of obsidian and "quality, it's gotta be quality." It seemed that the best place to get her one would be South America, but he was nowhere near there. Just until summer then. I'll stay away a bit longer, but only until summer. He knew, with guilt, that he was breaking one promise for another.
The Them would understand.
Adam continued on through Asia, the great expanse of it's mainland and the trail of islands that came out of it like earth left to bleed into the water. He stopped by Australia, intending to be brief, to verify the spiders he had heard of and move on. But Dog took a liking to it, barking wildly at the strange hopping animals the populated the landscape. He wandered off one night, Adam laughing and yelping behind him. By sunrise they were deep in the outback, and Adam remembered a story he had read in school, two children lost meeting a third during his walkabout. Though the orbit of the earth around the sun nagged at him, he couldn't resist so charming an adventure. He wandered among hot red stones, through sunsets and sunrises, digging up roots for their water.
He met a group of travelers, learned their language and their instruments in an afternoon, showed them how Dog would roll over if he pretended to shoot him.
Finally he came to South America, rich with jungles to explore and wet air to clean the dirt from his cheeks. He decide to stick to the jungles this time.
He swam in the joint of two mighty rivers, he ate a piranha whole. He swam with dolphins. Small fish ate his dead skin and large bugs drank his blood. He stumbled on more lost cities than an archeologist would be lucky to find in ten lifetimes. He met with a group of men at the bend of a river. Noticing their arsenal, he negotiated an old axe from them for three candy bars, a riddle, and a handmade comic book.
It was a rather one sided trade, but Adam had a way of making his company part of the bargain, and this was hard to resist.
Present in hand, Adam considered heading North: to the states and 39 flavors of ice cream. He was sorely tempted, but he knew he had waited long enough. And, in any case, he was getting just a bit tired of adventures.
Tadfield was a disappointment after all of the elephants and jungles and unreasonable weathers: the offerings the world had laid at his feet, like a bleeding bleating lamb, to do with as he may. Adam wasn't surprised, but neither was he at peace with it, kicking up a patch of gravel he had found by the side of the road.
He had come back by plane. Security had stared at him like a shoeless tramp, but he had a way with words and feelings and intent, and he had found a seat by the window without fuss. After landing in London he had taken a cab, fanning through a book of currency until he found the corner where he had tucked his pounds, to the outskirts of Tadfield. And now he was back, and Tadfield was different than he had remembered, duller and browner and grainy. Dog sniffed at it like he might have a stranger.
Adam could feel his friends like a heartbeat, like a body between sheets. They were waiting. It took him a while to find the path to the Quarry. Grass had taken it over in his absence, but the earth was still packed tight, familiar to his toes. He opened the ziper of his knapsack, assured himself that their presents were still there. He'd made them wait all spring for them, after all, and he hoped they would make up for his tardiness. When he came up to the lip of the Quarry, as dusty and ragged as it had always been, he could make out three figures. Over the course of his adventures he'd grown used to looking a child, he'd gone back to thinking in terms of “grownups,” that vague and humorless stage of life somewhere between fifteen and eighty. It was strange, he mused, to see his friends and think of them that way.
“Hullo!” he called, spreading his arms at the lip of the quarry, eyes alight as his friends tuned to look at him.
Pepper began making queer movements. She put her hands over her face and turned from him, and then took her hand away, placed them back, turned about again. She muttered like a prophet. Wensleydale took to the sight of Adam like a deer to headlights, hunched on a milk crate, staring through thick, owlish glasses, his hands deep in his jacket. He did not begin to breathe for a very long time. Brain smiled.
"Hullo Adam" he said. At the speaking of his name Pepper made a sound like a fairy touching iron, began to rub her arms. Adam laughed, slid down the sloping chalk wall to the bottom of the quarry, Dog following behind and leaping up at Brian.
“Adam,” Pepper said low, doubtful. Her hands were away from her face.
“Ain't you goin' say hi Pep?” Adam grinned “I've been gone almost half a year, ain't you lot missed me?” He turned to Wensleydale. He wasn't blinking. He turned back to Pepper, her eyes were dark and smooth as a skipping stone, her lips parted. “Mates?”
Something was wrong. Adam could feel it creeping across his spine, the something wrong, like an itchy you cannot originate. Wensleydale was staring, staring hard. Adam could feel a pulling, a slackening, a muddle about the world. Edges were starting to blur.
“You'll catch flies,” he joked towards Pepper's gaping mouth, and then with irritation and insecurity spoke again:“What?I- I haven't been gone a whole year have I? I might've lost track of time for a spell but-” He looked back into their faces.
“Oh Adam,” Pepper said, and that was pity and that was fear in her voice. Pepper, playing dirty in scuffles and slaying a horseman, and pity and fear. “No.” Adam licked his lips, frowned.
“Two?” he offered.
“Thirty” Wensleydale's voice was a rustle.
It was quiet. It was the type of quiet that freezes dust motes in the air.
"No," the word in Adam's mouth was like a mealy cake, the more he chewed the drier his tongue. "No, it was last December, it was just this winter remember? I got-" he fumbled in his knapsack and pulled out Pepper's axe, showed it to her "Your presents-"
"What is it?"Pepper asked, turned her head to the side.
"It's what you wanted, you asked for it," Adam thrust it forward, begged her to take it in hand. She didn't move. He put the axe down on the ground, fumbled into his knapsack once more. “An- and Brian” he took out a tattered cardboard box, which Brian took at once.
“Cor!” he cheered “Thanks Adam.”
Adam smiled, unease and relief overpowering him as his mind scrambled for purchase.
“Wensley's- he's having a joke at me, ain't he Brian?”
“Nah.” Brian shook his head, extracting his action figure from it's box and admiring it with pleasure. “He's right, thirty years.”
“It hasn't been,” Adam looked at Pepper, begged her to tell him otherwise. He stood, Iranon amidst Aira, wreathed with laurels he had woven himself. He doubted.
“This explains why all of us ended up in the quarry,” Brian mused, once the lot of them had retreated to Pepper's house. “You should have seen us Adam, wandering in there when we hadn't been in years. We got that feeling, like in, uh, Sixth Encounters of the Third Sense with the mountain.”
“Like someone expected us there,” Pepper added. Adam grunted, in response, from the corner of her living room. He was sulking against the wall, Dog panting curiously at his feet.
“We really weren't expecting you, y'know?” Brian smiled, “It's a nice surprise.”
Adam grunted louder. There was the sound of spoons brushing the insides of teacups.
“Am I going to have to say it?” Wensleydale snapped, finally, leaning back in his chair. He hadn't spoken for a while, and the rest of the Them looked at him as if they had forgotten he could. He sighed because, apparently, he would.
“Adam isn't real,” Wensleydale said. “Remember Pepper, Brian? He isn't real. We made him up.” Pepper and Brian spared a glance towards the, to their eyes very real, Adam, who was too shocked to grunt.
“You were a good idea.” Wensleydale continued, with the finality of a headmaster. “Adam, you were a brilliant idea, like Peter Pan you were. Always coming up with adventures... and when we got in trouble 'Ah, it was Adam's idea'...” he looked urgently towards Brian and Pepper “You remember, like Peter Pan.”
“I remember, yeah.” Pepper whispered like a confessor.
“But come on Wensley,” Brian smiled nervously, as if he weren't quite sure what everyone was getting so worked up about “he's here right now, exactly like he was. Good ol' Adam.”
“Exactly like he was” Wensleydale took off his spectacles and reached into his pocket, cleaned the lenses with one of those special cloths, precisely like optometrists say to. He looked briefly at Adam, and then away “Lets say we keep pretending. Lets say it's all real. You'd hate to be alone wouldn't you? You'd just hate it, I know it, I've made you hadn't I, I should know. That'd be the worst.”
“But the thing is, you will be. You must've figured out by now that Humans won't last. Even if we don't off ourselves, there's a sort of cosmic guarantee, Earth won't be habitable forever. Do you know... do you know the sun's getting brighter? It is, that's what stars do, and in a billion years it'll be too hot for us to have water on Earth. And, and for us that won't be a problem, we'll be dead. And maybe for a bit it'll be alright for you too. But you know what's going to happen in five billion years? The sun goes Red Giant, and it'll swallow up Earth. Alright, so let's pretend you move farther away, to another planet. A couple million years and the sun's a white dwarf, it's too cold, nothing can live here anymore. You've got to find another solar system, if you want to find someone else, if you don't want to be alone. So say you travel to the next closest universe, no guarantee of people being there, and even if it is their Sun'll just go the same way as ours. So you'll have to keep going and going,” W gestured wildly with his glasses in an attempt to indicate, in one swing of an arm. the whole of eternity.
“And more suns'll die, that's entropy that is. More and more gone away, so you've only got some dim red giants, hardly any habitable range on those. And then those die too, and the- the whole galaxy goes off. You're just left there... floating... with a bunch of particles.” He was quiet, the dust motes took an intermission in their dance.
“Jeez Wensley,” Brian said low.
“And that...” Wensleydale paused, cleared his throat, continued, “and that shouldn't, it can't happen to Peter Pan.” He put the cloth back into his pocket, looked into his glasses like another face. “'Death will be an awfully big adventure.'” Adam, still slouched in his corner, kicked the wall (hard, to the detriment of his toes).
"Well," he began, all guilt and righteous martyrdom, "s'not my fault you guys forgot about me. I tho't we were-" Wensleydale stood so fast and so defiant that the seat of his chair struck his calves to bruising before it fell to the floor with a clap.
"We waited for you," he said, quiet at first " we waited a long time for you Adam. When you went off on your adventure, we were here, we were patient."
"Come off it Wensley"
"I will not 'come off it' Pep. We came back after winter holiday, all anxious for you, and you didn't show. 'Alright', we said, 'Adam's keen on adventures', we said 'but he'll come back'-"
"I came back" Adam, in a less noble mood, might have whined these words.
"-and we said it in the summer, and the winter again, and the next holiday and the next holiday. We waited Adam, we thought 'maybe he's told his Dad where he's gone.' So we go to your old house and your father-”
“Shut up Wensleydale,” Brian hissed.
“And your father,” he spoke loud and firm, he paused. He dared any of the Them to stop him amidst his silence. “He asks us who Adam is. He asks us. And then-” he swallowed “and then we had to admit it, there was nothing for it. You weren't real. We'd made you up.” Adam, curled into his corner, fumed. “And you know what? That was good. Peter Pan, Adam, people like you can't be real. They shouldn't be real. They-”
“Alright!” Adam yelped “Alright, fine! Things were going to be jus' like they used to, I wanted y'know, to- an'- an' see if I let you in my club now!” He hefted his knapsack to his shoulder, set out for the door in a terrific slouch. “Come on Dog.”
“Adam,” Pepper called, and waited, and then louder “Adam.”
The heft of the door made it marvelous for slamming closed in anger, and Adam took full advantage of this feature as he passed the threshold.
The forest had missed him. As Adam and Dog ran deep into it's embrace, the skeletons of leaves underfoot, low branches slapping at them, the path they forged took on a welcoming dappled light. As if he had been missed. Adam vaulted over fallen trees, scraped his palms on new bark, gasped until spit pooled beneath his tongue. A knotted root sent him to the ground, and he roared so that the world nearly tore, so that Dog's hair stood at attention. Adam curled up on his side, new grass brushing his flesh, put calloused hands around soft ears. He sobbed with fury and sorrow. Dog whimpered, head low, approaching his Master unsurely. He pressed a cold nose to his Master's neck, licked him once, evoked an involuntary giggle. Adam turned onto his back and pushed Dog's head away.
“Go 'way” he said in his most serious voice. Dog cocked his head, wagged his tail. Adam sighed. He reached out, cupped Dog's head in his hands. Dog let his tongue loll out his mouth and his ears perk.
“Ain't you s'posed to have whiskers?” Adam accused. “Grey whiskers, thas' what happens when dogs get old. Aunt May's hound was all sorts of grey aroun' the muzzle, n' laying down all the time on count of her art-tide-us. Thirty years 'n human time's like a hundred years 'n dog time.” Dog licked his muzzle once, turned to the noise of a squirrel.
“You should've tol' me” Adam said, even as he knew how silly a thing that was to ask of a dog.
Adam thought of the roads he had passed on his way to the quarry, how the houses had looked. They were different, absolutely. He had known and denied that even then. But they were strange in their difference, beyond the passage of time. They weren't right.
How much of this have you invented? his shadow had been in wait for him, dangling the ghosts of the epiphanies Adam had tried and failed to kill. It's a fair question, he thought. How many houses, how many trees, how many people. They hadn't warped in my absence, had they? They've un-warped. They had righted themselves. The quarry, the lanes, his friends, they had gone back to what they might have been without his meddling. Things hadn't really been extraordinary.
But Adam thought they had too been extraordinary. I almost caused the Apocalypse didn't I? I nearly destroyed the world. Adam despised himself, for he had been the one to make them stop remembering. And surely if he had let them remember they would have remembered him.
And surely if I let them remember now- but he recoiled from this thought. How sure are you? How sure that you'd be letting them remember, and not messing with them? Couldn't you have made pretend. Adam didn't like this trail of thought. He put it away, like a chocolate with a nasty filling, back in it's box.
“Forget about that,” he lectured himself aloud “We'll worry on that later.” his mind dashed on, now preoccupied with the thought of Tadfield before the messing. If he could remember how it had been, if he could recall what had changed by his hand. I'd do something.
Adam reached back into the foggy past, grasping blind as if in a nightmare. He remembered the temples he had found in Brazil, the tiger he had befriended in India, taunting Death. There he thinks, before all that. Vague shapes form and squabble. Pepper is there with a flaming sword, they are resting their bikes against the fence to the military base, they are pretending to drown a girl in a lake. And then. Adam closed his eyes. And then.
Deep in the woods, where he sat upon a stump, birds cried for one another.
“Come on” he muttered “what then.” There must have been something then. He must have been a baby, yes, there had been pictures of him swaddled and blonde on top of the mantle. He must have been a baby, because Sarah would tell him how bothersome he had been. But Adam figured that most people don't remember being a baby anyhow, and his family wasn't his anymore, and he was afraid to seek them out. But there had to be something. If there wasn't something, a memory before the summer that he nearly broke the world, Tadfield unmuddled, then he might have been eleven forever.
He might have been eleven forever.
All around him, birds went quiet.
Adam felt it again, the air around him go loose: everything through leaking swim goggles.
“I haven't” he hissed, to his own disbelief. The outlines of things were beginning to foam, Dog was barking from far away, and what if he had.
“I haven't, because- because Pep an' We- an', an' Brian'll remember. They will.”
And what if I had.
An image came into his awareness, an eleven year old boy alone with the particles of the universe, a star among starstuff. A God. And He was lonely, and He was making a little blue sphere, and He had forgotten nearly everything, and no. No, no no.
“Nah,” he whispered “no way.”
When Adam came back it was nightfall, and Wensleydale was gone, and they did not speak of that.
“Me and Brian are sticking with you,” Pepper resolved, arms crossed decisively.
“I always knew you were real,” Brian added, and Adam waited for Pepper to agree, and she did not. And Adam accepted that perhaps she did not owe him that.
Adam stayed with Pepper and Brian for a while. Pepper's house was large and empty, and Brian was between boyfriends anyway, and they made a small and broken family. They tried to start back up where they had left off.
Time passed quickly and slowly all at the same time. Days were longer than weeks, weeks were longer than months, months were infinite when compared to decades. This strange deformed time would sneak up on Adam when he least expected it. When he was bending to tie his sneakers (he had decided to get used to shoes again) he would move his fingers and realize that he'd never be done. He would be tying sneakers forever, every day: for the rest of the rest of eternity. He abandoned shoes, for a year or two, after that. But time came back, and he realized that it did not matter if it was tying shoes or eating breakfast or combing hair, he would do it again and again. He would wear grooves in his mind with it.
They did not talk about Wensleydale for a long time. When they did, it was with every care to be casual. Have you heard Wensleydale's got a new job in London? Fancy that. Adam pretended not to feel him in the night, like a missing arm.
Once or twice great bursts of need arose in Adam. He would catch on something. The angels, he'd think they were there and they will know and they'll tell me everything. He would visit SoHo and peer into a long abandoned bookstore, a flat inhabited by a perfectly mortal woman. He would wander around a lake he had read about in the back of the fallen one's mind. He would feed the ducks and stare at them, hard, to see if they pulled any angelic funny business. He thought about letting Pepper and Brian remember. He thought about making Pepper and Brain remember.
Mostly, though, he stayed with Pepper. A couple years after the reunion and disbandment in the quarry, Brian mets someone lovely. Adam sat in the church at their wedding, helped them adopt their daughter, watched her grow like Pepper had. There was a part of Adam that was deeply, viciously mad at Brian, mad at his husband, mad at their daughter. There was a part of Adam that demanded the world be stopped, halted on it's axis: he wanted to get off. There was a part of Adam still shadow, still pale and flat and gray, dividing the world into parts. He was dearly afraid of it.
Adam did not talk to Brian much after that.
He and Pepper were happy by themselves. They slept the same room, beds at each side. They kept each other awake with puzzles and jokes and debates. Adam drank every word like a man in a desert, like handling the last egg of a dying species. He had missed too much already. They went out sometimes, by cab or by rail or just into the forest. Slowly, Pepper was mistaken less often for his mother and more often for his grandmother.
"Your granmum," Pepper scoffed, the soft spots in her pride unchanged.
He slipped, on occasion, despite his vow to keep his hands off of Tadfield, off of his friends. When he was scared, when he was angry, he felt reality go in and out like a soft shallow breath. He always stopped himself before damage could be done, but each time was slower. Each time he coasted just a bit more. He had begun to wonder what the point of it was, trying to preserve something already broken.
Once Pepper asked him if he thought there was such a thing as heaven. Adam considered the voice of Metatron, his friends in robes with harps on clouds. Adam considered eternal life and eternal damnation.
“I hope not,” he answered.
Adam's urges intensified. He would return, like a pilgrim to the bones of a saint, to the bookstore in SoHo. He would circle the lake, urgently, Dog at his heels. Pepper would sit at one of the benches and laughed at him whenever he stepped in duck droppings. He asked the perfectly mortal woman, for the thousandth time, if she knew where the previous owner had gone off to.
He became desperate. He began loitering around fad dieters and litterers, people who had recently won pub fights. He began looking hard at faces for a familiar paleness, thinness, flame. But everyone came out a stranger.
Pepper's hair started falling out. At first it came off in strands and then in great clumps.
“What's going on?” Adam asked.
“I'm getting old,” Pepper answered.
Brian went off to find Wensleydale. Pepper wanted to see him.
Brian told Adam this and he laughed long and hard before realizing he was serious. Adam asked why, and his friend smiled at him with the best of his nature. There was an obvious answer, of course, but Adam had been tasting and spitting and that thought back into it's box for weeks.
He was not about to swallow.
Brian was away when Pepper went to hospital, and Adam let the doctors think he was a grandson so that he could sit in the hard chair at the other side of the room and drink her like he'd never see water again. She was there for three nights. She slept a lot, and Adam didn't. He had to keep the world from boiling over.
On the fourth night Adam reached out, his hand shaking. It was a moment of weakness, a moment of despair and loneliness and stubborness. He felt eleven again, dividing up the world, painting the sky the color of blood, stomping his feet into the dirt and demanding what was his. This would not happen, this was not allowed.
"No" Pepper said, quietly, hoarsely. And for a thrilling moment he thought she agreed, he thought she understood that he couldn't, but her eyes opened and they were so lucid and angry that he knew better. Chastised, he withdrew his hand and picked at his pilling jumper.
"Come on Pep, all those books about stuff like this, noble dyin', you know better. You know just 'cause you're old-"
"I'm sorry," he voice cracked, she sounded like Brian back when puberty was some new adventure, back when none of them had noticed yet "I'm sorry Adam, but I can't." Now Pepper is being childish, he thought, now she's being selfish.
"I just need to be ready. Give it another year, I'll be ready."
"You can't be ready for this kind of thing."
"Pep, I will, you'll see, I can. How about a month? Give me just a month."
"It's terrible for you. It's terrible, I'm sorry, but you can't make it terrible for me. It's not playing fair Adam."
Inside Adam there was a hurricane. There was something moving too fast for him to get close to, intangible. There was a wound, and around it thoughts buzzed like flies and laid eggs. There was an unbearable awareness that he could do it. He didn't need her permission, he could bring them all back if he wanted, he could make them stay.
Inside Adam there were awful things that mankind was lucky not to have words for.
Pepper whispered something, it sounded like "don't I know you." Adam did not answer, he did not look at the dark corner where her eyes rested.
"A minute, a minute, just another minute," he muttered, rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb, as if he had all the time in the world. "Just a minute, just one" as if she were not cold and heavy.
~end
Happy Holidays, aviss, from your Secret Writer!