fic: grave (1/10) (adam/claire)
adam/claire, elle/claire
nc-17 (graphic sexuality, disturbing imagery)
part of the passage series; notes must be read here
"a fate worse than death" at 10_inspirations
There are no lines, and everything is gray.
1, a fate worse than death
When Adam arrives in California, the weather is warm.
The first day, his new place already waiting for him, he watches people from behind dark glasses as he wanders Costa Verde without much worry, only pausing to buy drinks or eat meals at outdoor cafes. When the sun falls, he put away the glasses and continues on his way, body relaxed and mind finally beginning to unfold.
Adam finally goes back to his new car and heads to the gated community he’s chosen for himself, small and expensive and filled with people who consider themselves too good to notice him. He lets himself in, turning on the lights as he slips off the cheap flip-flops and makes for the computer blinking on the table.
There are new pictures when he opens the e-mail from Angela, new slashes of paint on canvas.
If he’s honest with himself, there’s no genuine pleasure from being right so many years before, no urge to parrot how he had told them so with his years of experience, his brutal understanding of the world. There’s only quiet bitterness in the place where he wants his arrogance to be, a sick knowledge that this will end the same as the last times he’s tried his experiment, tried to teach them.
Tried to prove himself wrong.
His last prison was white, pristine, untouched and sterile.
This one is dark and suffocating, comes with the feel of the world pressing down on him- and that would be more terrible if he hasn’t already felt that weight for the duration of his long existence.
He blends them together when he gets tired of screaming, loses interest in it the way he does everything, and then the world is made of gray. Some areas are lighter or darker, look different from some angles, but it’s all gray and there are no lines to divide the color and no edges to measure a man against.
There are no lines, and everything is gray.
He knows this.
It’s somehow the only truth that has lasted through the years.
Of course it returns to him now.
Carlos Mendez is insane.
Adam has known this since the first time he met the man, had then spent countless months trying to explain to the group that the man was too dangerous to be allowed in. His warnings had been ignored, of course. What did he know about what human nature, about what the species was capable of?
Just like Richard, and they had ignored those warnings as well, hadn’t they?
When he had thrown proof of the nastier things in their faces, Victoria had preached with wide eyes about the need to stop it but done nothing, and Kaito had avoided the problem entirely, slid even further into his obsession with business. By the time they had realized how wrong the man was, Adam had already been dragged away and some of the rest of them had been doing things just as awful to their own precious children.
Now there’s only a bleak feeling of superiority as he learns just how well Carlos is destroying them, taking everything they have created apart without most of them realizing it.
Carlos Mendez is insane, and too much for them to handle.
That doesn’t change the fact that he is a glorious artist, that he shows the world in a way that can bring people to tears. Carlos paints in stark white and overwhelming black, allows a flat gray that appears and then vanishes so subtly that one cannot always be sure it’s even there at all. The emptiness of it all is what makes the dark red look brighter than it is, is what makes the slashes of color bleed out of the canvas.
The differences and similarities between father and dead son, Adam is learning, are disquieting.
There is color in the younger Mendez’ work, color beyond just the red he employs with the same focus his father always has, and there is eye contact in some, a gaze from a canvas waiting to be met. It is something Carlos has never painted, not once, and the longer Adam is aware of the difference, the heavier it feels. There is something dark always lurking in Isaac’s work, something apparent from the earliest school doodle Adam has scrounged up from Isaac at age seven, from just after he had gone to live with this uncle.
Now Adam thinks of what he’s watched through the generations, what this younger group will never be able to grasp, and slides his tongue across his teeth, experiences an all-too rare moment of raw emotion.
Across the room, the girl is staring at the air without seeing, is actually examining the world.
He learns after only three days spent watching her that she does it constantly, pauses in the middle of whatever she’s doing and loses focus, goes quiet and still and carefully blank. It lasts a few minutes and then she shakes herself and is seemingly fine again, settles back into a body not even fully into its prime.
As he watches, she shakes herself out of this momentary stillness, picks up her coffee and takes a sip, puts it down and types rapidly at the laptop open in front of her. She looks normal again, looks eighteen years old in her trendy top and jeans, her blonde hair pulled back in a distractingly messy little bun. He takes a sip of his own coffee, the taste of it heavy and too sweet, and watches her struggle to fit into her old form.
It’s impossible. She’ll never be able to do it.
But she’s determined and sits for long minutes on the other side of the overpriced coffee house with her homework and her too-expensive drink, only the slight tension in her neck giving her state away.
Not that anyone else would notice it anyway.
People don’t notice these things until they can no longer ignore them.
He does not regret the running jump with Kaito (bastard deserved it, and even Kaito knew it, Adam saw it in his eyes as they fell) and he surely does not regret Victoria, the hypocritical bitch she’d always been.
As for the virus, well.
Not everyone lives long enough to understand but those who do always learn.
And them, they’ll be in the thick of it the way their mommies and daddies were, will have to stare at the world with open eyes. They’ll lie when they’re old, of course, deny the truth, but they’ll know and it’ll eat them alive the way it always does with them, turn them inside out.
He’ll be out of here by then, will get to watch them squirm.
That’s enough to keep him sane.
Claire Bennet should by rights be rocking in a corner, muttering.
Instead she’s settling into college with the determination that only an unhinged person could possess, dresses herself in bright colors and sticks to bright places, wraps herself in the image of the California beach bunny like her life depends on it. It doesn’t, but the same can’t be said for her sanity, he knows.
There are some things that a human mind is not meant to survive.
When Angela had come to him just hours after he was rescued from his grave, she’d been at the end of her rope, had bent and twisted everything she could for twenty years only to finally give up on that option. Exhausted, forced to rethink decades of decisions, Angela had told him everything, every last nasty little secret that the group had kept in the thirty years since he’d been put away.
Most of it he’d already seen coming decades before, but having such a blatant validation is nice.
Richard had wrenched a neat portion of the Company for himself, had created two rabid dogs out of his sons and from what Angela told him, the younger one is nearly as unhinged as Bishop’s little sociopath. ‘Not the older brother,’ she’d added when she’d noticed Adam’s expression. ‘I thought so for a while but he’s… been acting differently, we might be able to salvage him.’ It's a good thought, an encouraging thought, especially if the boy took after his father when it comes to just how impressive his power is. Potential.
Maury is still out of commission but Angela isn’t holding her breath, hasn’t been holding it since his body had been taken from his bed, slipped away in the middle of the night.
It’s only a matter of time until Maury wakes up, goes scuttling back to Richard if he’ll take the telepath and he will, Adam’s sure of it. Compared to the others, telepaths are a dime a dozen, yes, but the powerful ones, the real ones… nobody wants to just kill them off unless they have to. Their spine gave out after a while, he’s learned, too much ugliness in their head, too much understanding of the world. Maury’s every bit as nasty as the others but he’s weaker and it’s only a matter of the right pressure before he spins apart. Besides, Maury won’t let himself go anywhere until his little pet project comes through.
That’s two they have to deal with, and when Carlos is added…
Oh ho, he’d been right about Carlos, too, hadn’t he?
His dead little drug addict of a son is proof of that now, isn’t he?
It’s a lot, too much to handle at once, and Adam knows better than to turn any attention to Richard or Maury now, knows that Carlos is the one he really needs to worry about, the one who managed to set it all in motion. He’s the one who kidnapped Angela’s granddaughter, unraveled her so severely, and he’s the only one insane enough to be a danger right now.
He’s the one Adam is vaguely excited about killing as soon as he gets the chance.
Adam hears a noise.
The world is a blur of dark gray and he listens, his body refusing to rest, his mind refusing to slow. After a time, he starts to count down the minutes, sixty seconds at a time and as patient as he’s ever been.
And then hands grab him, a body pressing hard down against his, and he stiffens.
In the next moment, he’s on a bed in his spoiled clothes, limbs tight and body trembling.
He blinks at the opulent hotel room around him, blinks again and finds her staring, the change in her appearance from the last time Adam had seen her startling for a moment. There are bags under her eyes, the unmistakable glint of fear in her gaze, and though she stands in her perfect-looking skirt suit with the subtle but unyielding grace that Hiro will never understand, she looks half-dead.
“Adam,” Kimiko greets quietly, and she doesn’t put him back.
She always had been the only Nakamura worth anything.
Adam is halfway through a coffee two weeks after he’s started following her (he’ll stop soon, she’s not that special or that important) when he realizes she’s staring at him across the coffee shop. He’s actually startled for a moment, unused to being taken by surprise, but then he’s grinning as he gets to his feet and heads to join her, sliding into the uncomfortable chair opposite hers.
“You’re Adam,” she says before he can say a word, his name sound like an accusation.
Funny how often his names sound like that.
“And you’re Claire.” She looks less than impressed. “Your grandmother told you about me?”
“I know everything,” and there’s such a threat there that he’s startled again, blinking in surprise as something curls through his gut, a feeling he quickly labels ‘approval’ and decides to think about when he has the time to focus. He has no doubt that everything means everything, not just the ability and the age but the virus, her uncle, his long years in a little white box that Kaito used to make himself feel merciful.
The last he doesn’t mind at all, may actually feel grateful for.
“If she told you everything, that means she told you about Kaito.” Something on her face twitches, something bleak that she’s trying to push down, and he finishes his coffee, sets his cup on the table and reaches to touch the book she’s studying. It slides easily from under her palms and when he turns it, images stare back at him, grainy pictures in shades of gray of bodies living and dead. The text is dry, the staggering loss of life cut down into neat numbers in straight lines, but he notices she’s underlined the statistics in black, highlighted them yellow and circled them in thin red ink. “This is morbid.”
Claire Bennet doesn’t say anything, fingers folded into her palms and knuckles white.
She is young, distraught, is fighting to find lines, to find how the world divides, to make sense of it.
She is trying not to understand what her body has taught her.
Adam almost touches her hand, her wrist, but knows it’s useless and so doesn’t. Instead he closes the book and pushes it back to her, watching her muscles flex as she prepares to jump up, get away. He reaches for her discarded pen before she can, clicks it open and scratches his address onto a bare spot of paper on her open notebook. “I’m always available,” he promises as he picks up his empty cup and gets to his feet.
Her mouth opens, no doubt as attempt to throw whatever sharp comment she has against him, but then her spine loosens and her lips press together, her eyes losing focus, interest.
Very few people can understand the feeling.
Adam leaves her alone with her books and her coffee, goes home to wait.
nc-17 (graphic sexuality, disturbing imagery)
part of the passage series; notes must be read here
"a fate worse than death" at 10_inspirations
There are no lines, and everything is gray.
1, a fate worse than death
When Adam arrives in California, the weather is warm.
The first day, his new place already waiting for him, he watches people from behind dark glasses as he wanders Costa Verde without much worry, only pausing to buy drinks or eat meals at outdoor cafes. When the sun falls, he put away the glasses and continues on his way, body relaxed and mind finally beginning to unfold.
Adam finally goes back to his new car and heads to the gated community he’s chosen for himself, small and expensive and filled with people who consider themselves too good to notice him. He lets himself in, turning on the lights as he slips off the cheap flip-flops and makes for the computer blinking on the table.
There are new pictures when he opens the e-mail from Angela, new slashes of paint on canvas.
If he’s honest with himself, there’s no genuine pleasure from being right so many years before, no urge to parrot how he had told them so with his years of experience, his brutal understanding of the world. There’s only quiet bitterness in the place where he wants his arrogance to be, a sick knowledge that this will end the same as the last times he’s tried his experiment, tried to teach them.
Tried to prove himself wrong.
His last prison was white, pristine, untouched and sterile.
This one is dark and suffocating, comes with the feel of the world pressing down on him- and that would be more terrible if he hasn’t already felt that weight for the duration of his long existence.
He blends them together when he gets tired of screaming, loses interest in it the way he does everything, and then the world is made of gray. Some areas are lighter or darker, look different from some angles, but it’s all gray and there are no lines to divide the color and no edges to measure a man against.
There are no lines, and everything is gray.
He knows this.
It’s somehow the only truth that has lasted through the years.
Of course it returns to him now.
Carlos Mendez is insane.
Adam has known this since the first time he met the man, had then spent countless months trying to explain to the group that the man was too dangerous to be allowed in. His warnings had been ignored, of course. What did he know about what human nature, about what the species was capable of?
Just like Richard, and they had ignored those warnings as well, hadn’t they?
When he had thrown proof of the nastier things in their faces, Victoria had preached with wide eyes about the need to stop it but done nothing, and Kaito had avoided the problem entirely, slid even further into his obsession with business. By the time they had realized how wrong the man was, Adam had already been dragged away and some of the rest of them had been doing things just as awful to their own precious children.
Now there’s only a bleak feeling of superiority as he learns just how well Carlos is destroying them, taking everything they have created apart without most of them realizing it.
Carlos Mendez is insane, and too much for them to handle.
That doesn’t change the fact that he is a glorious artist, that he shows the world in a way that can bring people to tears. Carlos paints in stark white and overwhelming black, allows a flat gray that appears and then vanishes so subtly that one cannot always be sure it’s even there at all. The emptiness of it all is what makes the dark red look brighter than it is, is what makes the slashes of color bleed out of the canvas.
The differences and similarities between father and dead son, Adam is learning, are disquieting.
There is color in the younger Mendez’ work, color beyond just the red he employs with the same focus his father always has, and there is eye contact in some, a gaze from a canvas waiting to be met. It is something Carlos has never painted, not once, and the longer Adam is aware of the difference, the heavier it feels. There is something dark always lurking in Isaac’s work, something apparent from the earliest school doodle Adam has scrounged up from Isaac at age seven, from just after he had gone to live with this uncle.
Now Adam thinks of what he’s watched through the generations, what this younger group will never be able to grasp, and slides his tongue across his teeth, experiences an all-too rare moment of raw emotion.
Across the room, the girl is staring at the air without seeing, is actually examining the world.
He learns after only three days spent watching her that she does it constantly, pauses in the middle of whatever she’s doing and loses focus, goes quiet and still and carefully blank. It lasts a few minutes and then she shakes herself and is seemingly fine again, settles back into a body not even fully into its prime.
As he watches, she shakes herself out of this momentary stillness, picks up her coffee and takes a sip, puts it down and types rapidly at the laptop open in front of her. She looks normal again, looks eighteen years old in her trendy top and jeans, her blonde hair pulled back in a distractingly messy little bun. He takes a sip of his own coffee, the taste of it heavy and too sweet, and watches her struggle to fit into her old form.
It’s impossible. She’ll never be able to do it.
But she’s determined and sits for long minutes on the other side of the overpriced coffee house with her homework and her too-expensive drink, only the slight tension in her neck giving her state away.
Not that anyone else would notice it anyway.
People don’t notice these things until they can no longer ignore them.
He does not regret the running jump with Kaito (bastard deserved it, and even Kaito knew it, Adam saw it in his eyes as they fell) and he surely does not regret Victoria, the hypocritical bitch she’d always been.
As for the virus, well.
Not everyone lives long enough to understand but those who do always learn.
And them, they’ll be in the thick of it the way their mommies and daddies were, will have to stare at the world with open eyes. They’ll lie when they’re old, of course, deny the truth, but they’ll know and it’ll eat them alive the way it always does with them, turn them inside out.
He’ll be out of here by then, will get to watch them squirm.
That’s enough to keep him sane.
Claire Bennet should by rights be rocking in a corner, muttering.
Instead she’s settling into college with the determination that only an unhinged person could possess, dresses herself in bright colors and sticks to bright places, wraps herself in the image of the California beach bunny like her life depends on it. It doesn’t, but the same can’t be said for her sanity, he knows.
There are some things that a human mind is not meant to survive.
When Angela had come to him just hours after he was rescued from his grave, she’d been at the end of her rope, had bent and twisted everything she could for twenty years only to finally give up on that option. Exhausted, forced to rethink decades of decisions, Angela had told him everything, every last nasty little secret that the group had kept in the thirty years since he’d been put away.
Most of it he’d already seen coming decades before, but having such a blatant validation is nice.
Richard had wrenched a neat portion of the Company for himself, had created two rabid dogs out of his sons and from what Angela told him, the younger one is nearly as unhinged as Bishop’s little sociopath. ‘Not the older brother,’ she’d added when she’d noticed Adam’s expression. ‘I thought so for a while but he’s… been acting differently, we might be able to salvage him.’ It's a good thought, an encouraging thought, especially if the boy took after his father when it comes to just how impressive his power is. Potential.
Maury is still out of commission but Angela isn’t holding her breath, hasn’t been holding it since his body had been taken from his bed, slipped away in the middle of the night.
It’s only a matter of time until Maury wakes up, goes scuttling back to Richard if he’ll take the telepath and he will, Adam’s sure of it. Compared to the others, telepaths are a dime a dozen, yes, but the powerful ones, the real ones… nobody wants to just kill them off unless they have to. Their spine gave out after a while, he’s learned, too much ugliness in their head, too much understanding of the world. Maury’s every bit as nasty as the others but he’s weaker and it’s only a matter of the right pressure before he spins apart. Besides, Maury won’t let himself go anywhere until his little pet project comes through.
That’s two they have to deal with, and when Carlos is added…
Oh ho, he’d been right about Carlos, too, hadn’t he?
His dead little drug addict of a son is proof of that now, isn’t he?
It’s a lot, too much to handle at once, and Adam knows better than to turn any attention to Richard or Maury now, knows that Carlos is the one he really needs to worry about, the one who managed to set it all in motion. He’s the one who kidnapped Angela’s granddaughter, unraveled her so severely, and he’s the only one insane enough to be a danger right now.
He’s the one Adam is vaguely excited about killing as soon as he gets the chance.
Adam hears a noise.
The world is a blur of dark gray and he listens, his body refusing to rest, his mind refusing to slow. After a time, he starts to count down the minutes, sixty seconds at a time and as patient as he’s ever been.
And then hands grab him, a body pressing hard down against his, and he stiffens.
In the next moment, he’s on a bed in his spoiled clothes, limbs tight and body trembling.
He blinks at the opulent hotel room around him, blinks again and finds her staring, the change in her appearance from the last time Adam had seen her startling for a moment. There are bags under her eyes, the unmistakable glint of fear in her gaze, and though she stands in her perfect-looking skirt suit with the subtle but unyielding grace that Hiro will never understand, she looks half-dead.
“Adam,” Kimiko greets quietly, and she doesn’t put him back.
She always had been the only Nakamura worth anything.
Adam is halfway through a coffee two weeks after he’s started following her (he’ll stop soon, she’s not that special or that important) when he realizes she’s staring at him across the coffee shop. He’s actually startled for a moment, unused to being taken by surprise, but then he’s grinning as he gets to his feet and heads to join her, sliding into the uncomfortable chair opposite hers.
“You’re Adam,” she says before he can say a word, his name sound like an accusation.
Funny how often his names sound like that.
“And you’re Claire.” She looks less than impressed. “Your grandmother told you about me?”
“I know everything,” and there’s such a threat there that he’s startled again, blinking in surprise as something curls through his gut, a feeling he quickly labels ‘approval’ and decides to think about when he has the time to focus. He has no doubt that everything means everything, not just the ability and the age but the virus, her uncle, his long years in a little white box that Kaito used to make himself feel merciful.
The last he doesn’t mind at all, may actually feel grateful for.
“If she told you everything, that means she told you about Kaito.” Something on her face twitches, something bleak that she’s trying to push down, and he finishes his coffee, sets his cup on the table and reaches to touch the book she’s studying. It slides easily from under her palms and when he turns it, images stare back at him, grainy pictures in shades of gray of bodies living and dead. The text is dry, the staggering loss of life cut down into neat numbers in straight lines, but he notices she’s underlined the statistics in black, highlighted them yellow and circled them in thin red ink. “This is morbid.”
Claire Bennet doesn’t say anything, fingers folded into her palms and knuckles white.
She is young, distraught, is fighting to find lines, to find how the world divides, to make sense of it.
She is trying not to understand what her body has taught her.
Adam almost touches her hand, her wrist, but knows it’s useless and so doesn’t. Instead he closes the book and pushes it back to her, watching her muscles flex as she prepares to jump up, get away. He reaches for her discarded pen before she can, clicks it open and scratches his address onto a bare spot of paper on her open notebook. “I’m always available,” he promises as he picks up his empty cup and gets to his feet.
Her mouth opens, no doubt as attempt to throw whatever sharp comment she has against him, but then her spine loosens and her lips press together, her eyes losing focus, interest.
Very few people can understand the feeling.
Adam leaves her alone with her books and her coffee, goes home to wait.