Fic: Resistance is Futile (Claude/Adam) 6/9
Title; Resistance is Futile
Pairing; Claude/Adam
Summary: Fifteen years ago, Claude comes across someone he shouldn't have in the Company basement. Now, he must face him again.
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five
Rating: This part PG; the whole thing NC-17
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own words.
Fifteen years ago
Adam looked up from his book as Claude punched in the security code on the alarm pad.
“Hey,” Claude said, turning visible as he opened the door.
Adam got up from the bed, smiling.
“I was wondering if you’d come today.”
He’d been wondering that himself. This wasn’t like the previous time were he could just come in, have some fun, and then leave. He had to make a decision, in or out, and it wasn’t coming easy. Adam handed him the book so he could wedge it between the door and the frame, preventing the door from locking. They kissed, arms slipping around each other’s backs. Usually this was the part where they took off their clothes, eager to feel the bare heat of each other’s skins, but Claude couldn’t get into it. Adam’s question weighed on his mind as sharply now as it had for the past day, knocking around in his skull like a three ton tumbleweed. Adam touched his nape, fingers weaving into his hairline, thumb stroking the hollow behind his ear.
“Have you thought about it?” he murmured, lifting his head a few inches to look him in the eye.
Claude’s gut instinct was to look away, disentangle himself from Adam’s limbs and walk right back out the door, never coming here again, and that’s what he should have done, would have done if he’d been thinking clearly, but he never realized just how muddled his reasoning had become around Adam until it was already too late.
“Yes,” he said, glancing at the clinical white of Adam’s bed sheets.
“And?”
Adam gripped his shoulder, urging him to look back at him, and Claude regretted doing so as soon as he saw the soft expectation in Adam’s face, eyes insistent, lips slightly parted, ready to murmur a tender please any moment now. And Claude didn’t know what to say. He didn’t have an answer. If he said no, Adam would be furious and force him to leave and he’d never be able to come again. But if he said yes, the risk might kill him. Maybe he could deflect the question, say he didn’t know (which would be the honest answer, anyway) and hope Adam might eventually convince him one way or the other.
But fate wasn’t that kind. A faint rattling reached his ears, coming from down the corridor. It sounded like-
“The elevator,” Adam whispered sharply, rushing toward the window. “Someone’s coming.”
Oh shit. Claude instantly turned invisible, backing up towards the door as Adam turned back to him, frowning in dismay and rising panic as he searched the room.
“Claude? Are you still here?”
They were marching down the corridor. Two men, maybe three. Claude could hear their footsteps clicking on the white tile, loud and menacing, each one a promise of a small, grey room just like this one, forever and ever. He had to go. Now.
“Claude?”
Aw, bugger. He grabbed Adam’s hand, turning him invisible as he rammed into the door, slipping on the discarded book before running down the hallway in the other direction, Adam in tow. Not that he knew where he was going or even if there was another exit besides the elevator, which was surely being guarded by someone, because this couldn’t be a coincidence. Someone appearing mere minutes after he disengaged the alarm in a prisoner’s cell didn’t happen by random chance. They’d been found out. Shocking that it hadn’t happened earlier, really. He would have least have avoided this whole prison break business, instead here he was, fleeing down a corridor with nothing but cells, cells, and more cells and no exit in sight. Voices echoed on the walls like great, uncoiling snakes snapping at their heels and even over the sound of their own footsteps he could swear he heard others hurrying towards them, and those weren’t friendly gents they’d be dealing with. They were probably thugs with guns trained to shoot at anything that moved with razor sharp accuracy, and even though he and Adam were invisible, he wouldn’t bet on them not having some sort of x-ray vision or super-hearing. Or maybe they were telepaths and were listening to Claude’s terrified thoughts right this second.
“How do we get out of here?” he asked, his voice no higher than a murmur.
“There’s an emergency staircase just round the corner. This corridor’s u-shaped, so they can’t get to it before we do.”
Adam took the lead , gripping Claude’s hand hard as they turned the corner and there it was about five meters away, a grey metal door with a big STAIRS marked in fading red paint. Adam reached it first, turning the handle. It opened with a screech, making Claude wince, but it was too late to lay low now. Then he heard that familiar, metallic click he knew so well from the movies and he paled upon seeing a gun aimed right at him from the corner of the hall. The guard could see them. Claude didn’t know how, but he could see them.
“Come on,” Adam hissed and they pushed past the door, but Claude wasn’t fast enough. He felt it before hearing the shot smash on his eardrums. Pain ripped through his hip, crimson agony so fierce he couldn’t do anything but scream. Ridged cement dug into his bones as he fell, crashing on the stairs, but he barely felt it, his eyes squeezed shut, hands slipping on blood seeping through his fingers. So much blood. Oh, God. He was going to die. He was bleeding to death, and if that didn’t kill him, the next bullet would. Then the dull think of the door’s bolt banged next to his ear and Adam was holding him up, mouth to his, biting clear through Claude’s bottom lip, a tiny, squeamish pain compared to the one ripping his veins wide open.
“Bite my tongue,” Adam said sharply.
“What?” Claude’s breath burned in his throat.
“Bite my tongue.”
Adam plunged his tongue into Claude’s mouth, dragging it along Claude’s upper teeth, and he quickly found the groove cut within it, biting with every ounce of agony in his body. Blood spilled onto his tongue, the warm taste cloying his mouth, and on pure instinct he spread it on his injured lip. Adam pulled away. Their eyes met, one second lost in the dust, then Adam vanished up the stairwell as the banging started on the door.
||||
“Voila,” Claude exclaimed, returning to visibility to reveal the large tray he held in his arms, topped to the brim with breakfast goodies. It’d been a tad problematic to get it into the motel, past the cluster of guests assembled in the lobby, into the elevator (which had been annoyingly occupied by a small man in a checkered shirt who insisted on wandering up and down the left hand rail), and up to the room, though it was quite hilarious to see people freak out when they turned around and saw no body accompany the footsteps clacking on the floor. Always amusing, that one. However, despite all the troubles he’d gone through to steal it (grabbing a two and a half foot tray from a busy kitchen brimming with waiters was challenging enough to be considered an art), Adam didn’t appear impressed. He merely raised an eyebrow, peering at the tray as if it contained friend rat instead of freshly cooked eggs. He didn’t even bother getting up from the bed.
“It’s a little much, don’t you think?” he said in that supercilious voice of his.
Claude scowled. So much for gratitude.
“You don’t have to eat any. I’ll just keep it all for myself.”
He carefully set the tray on the bed, moving the glasses to the bedside table so they wouldn’t spill over. Adam folded his legs under him, sitting up, and leaned over the tray.
“You’re going to eat,” he said, “five plates full of pancakes, sausages, bacon, hash browns, French toast, eggs. What’s this?”
He pointed to a cream colored meal in a bowl.
“That would be grits. It’s made from corn. You’ve never had grits before?”
“It may shock you to learn that I have not in fact tasted every type of food on the planet.”
Claude sat down at the edge of the bed, keeping some distance from Adam, and picked up a plate full of pancakes.
“Could have fooled me since you’re in such a hurry to destroy it all.”
He grabbed the syrup and poured some on his pancakes until they were completely soaked, just the way he loved it.
“Are you ever going to stop bringing that up?” Adam said with a touch of vexation.
“Are you?”
Claude met Adam’s eyes, challenging him to speak. He didn’t. Claude turned back to his pancakes, stuffing a hastily cut piece in his mouth. He tasted its sweet plumpness, but couldn’t savor it properly, his mind turned to sour thoughts.
“Claude.”
“You should eat something. The food’s getting cold.”
“Claude.” Adam voice was sharper this time.
“If you don’t, I’ll just eat it all myself.”
“You can’t.”
“Watch me.”
Claude’s knife shrieked on the plate as he cut across the pancake.
“I’m not going to eat until we get this settled.”
“Get what settled? It’s not like you can go back and not try to release the virus.”
“If we were to be tried for everything we attempted to do, the entire world would be dammed.”
“Yeah, well, we’re all damned, anyway.”
“Claude.” Adam leaned forward, catching Claude’s eyes. “Did I ever lie to you?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Yes or no. Did I ever lie to you?”
Claude threw his fork on the plate, breathing hard.
“Not that I can tell. But you weren’t completely honest with me either, now were you?”
“I couldn’t be. You would have left. I would have never had a chance.”
“A chance to brainwash me so you could escape and kill everyone? That’s what it was about, wasn’t it?”
“No, it wasn’t. And I didn’t brainwash you. You wanted me before you went in my cell.”
“And you made sure to take every advantage of that, didn’t you?”
“You can’t fault me for wanting to escape from that place.”
“No, but if I had known why you were really in there, I wouldn’t have even considered getting you out.”
“ So I warrant a life sentence for a mistake I committed thirty years ago?”
“A mistake? You call nearly murdering the entire human race a mistake?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“What the hell does that mean? Murder is murder.”
“Attempted murder. There’s a difference.”
“So now you’re a lawyer, is that it? Throwing terminology at me, trying to jump through some little loophole as if that could somehow disguise what you are. Well, it’s not going to work. I’m sure that wasn’t the first time you attempted murder. I’m sure you’ve succeeded quite a few times.”
“Like you haven’t killed anyone. The Company doesn’t give you a gun for you to use as a paperweight. You must have used it lots of times and some of those bullets found their mark.”
The syrup went stale in Claude’s mouth. Bastard. Fucking, sodding bastard. Suddenly, the eggs smelled like gunpowder, fresh on his hands as he pulled the trigger on another of his kind, bang. And down the body falls. He never aimed to kill, but... Accidents happen. But even if they weren’t accidents, when he was ordered to kill, premeditated thought to butcher another human being, it was so much worse. Some were genuinely dangerous, murderers themselves, reveling in the screams and suffering. The world was better off, or so he told himself, but he could never wash the stench of blood and guilt from his fingers, no matter how hard he tried, scrubbing them until his own blood broke through his skin, red and raw and no less than he deserved.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Adam continued, his voice a rake scrapping over Claude’s naked bones. “They made you hunt your kind, our kind, and kill them when it suited their plans. But you refused at last, disgusted with yourself for dragging it out this far.”
“Shut up,” Claude whispered.
“You weren’t playing by the rules anymore. So they decided to eliminate you.”
“Don’t. Please don’t.”
Claude squeezed his eyes shut. He felt the bitter wind scrapping his cheeks, the river plunging down below his feet, cold and merciless, and saw Bennet draw his gun from his holster, gleaming iron sharp, blinding him with its harsh glare, and point it at him, barrel a gaping maw ready to swallow him up, and there was nowhere to run. His own friend. Best he’d ever had.
“It was your partner, wasn’t it? The one who shot you.”
Pain tore through his shoulder, agony screaming tears in his eyes and the rail jabbed into his back, barely holding him up and he couldn’t even shout as he did the only thing he could.
“They ordered him to kill you. And he did.”
“Shut up!”
Claude scrambled off the bed, shaking with a fury that made his limbs shake, his nails clawing into his palms. He wanted to punch Adam and smash that sickening knowledge right off his face. He’d never yearned to hit someone so badly in his life. He stood, rooted to the spot, reigning in his muscles so firmly that his teeth ached, then he ripped his coat from the closet hanger and slammed out the door. Adam’s voice rang out behind him, calling his name, but he wouldn’t listen, ever again. He ran, out the door, out the car park, down the street. Low on the horizon, the setting sun streaked the sidewalk red.
Part Seven
Pairing; Claude/Adam
Summary: Fifteen years ago, Claude comes across someone he shouldn't have in the Company basement. Now, he must face him again.
Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five
Rating: This part PG; the whole thing NC-17
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own words.
Fifteen years ago
Adam looked up from his book as Claude punched in the security code on the alarm pad.
“Hey,” Claude said, turning visible as he opened the door.
Adam got up from the bed, smiling.
“I was wondering if you’d come today.”
He’d been wondering that himself. This wasn’t like the previous time were he could just come in, have some fun, and then leave. He had to make a decision, in or out, and it wasn’t coming easy. Adam handed him the book so he could wedge it between the door and the frame, preventing the door from locking. They kissed, arms slipping around each other’s backs. Usually this was the part where they took off their clothes, eager to feel the bare heat of each other’s skins, but Claude couldn’t get into it. Adam’s question weighed on his mind as sharply now as it had for the past day, knocking around in his skull like a three ton tumbleweed. Adam touched his nape, fingers weaving into his hairline, thumb stroking the hollow behind his ear.
“Have you thought about it?” he murmured, lifting his head a few inches to look him in the eye.
Claude’s gut instinct was to look away, disentangle himself from Adam’s limbs and walk right back out the door, never coming here again, and that’s what he should have done, would have done if he’d been thinking clearly, but he never realized just how muddled his reasoning had become around Adam until it was already too late.
“Yes,” he said, glancing at the clinical white of Adam’s bed sheets.
“And?”
Adam gripped his shoulder, urging him to look back at him, and Claude regretted doing so as soon as he saw the soft expectation in Adam’s face, eyes insistent, lips slightly parted, ready to murmur a tender please any moment now. And Claude didn’t know what to say. He didn’t have an answer. If he said no, Adam would be furious and force him to leave and he’d never be able to come again. But if he said yes, the risk might kill him. Maybe he could deflect the question, say he didn’t know (which would be the honest answer, anyway) and hope Adam might eventually convince him one way or the other.
But fate wasn’t that kind. A faint rattling reached his ears, coming from down the corridor. It sounded like-
“The elevator,” Adam whispered sharply, rushing toward the window. “Someone’s coming.”
Oh shit. Claude instantly turned invisible, backing up towards the door as Adam turned back to him, frowning in dismay and rising panic as he searched the room.
“Claude? Are you still here?”
They were marching down the corridor. Two men, maybe three. Claude could hear their footsteps clicking on the white tile, loud and menacing, each one a promise of a small, grey room just like this one, forever and ever. He had to go. Now.
“Claude?”
Aw, bugger. He grabbed Adam’s hand, turning him invisible as he rammed into the door, slipping on the discarded book before running down the hallway in the other direction, Adam in tow. Not that he knew where he was going or even if there was another exit besides the elevator, which was surely being guarded by someone, because this couldn’t be a coincidence. Someone appearing mere minutes after he disengaged the alarm in a prisoner’s cell didn’t happen by random chance. They’d been found out. Shocking that it hadn’t happened earlier, really. He would have least have avoided this whole prison break business, instead here he was, fleeing down a corridor with nothing but cells, cells, and more cells and no exit in sight. Voices echoed on the walls like great, uncoiling snakes snapping at their heels and even over the sound of their own footsteps he could swear he heard others hurrying towards them, and those weren’t friendly gents they’d be dealing with. They were probably thugs with guns trained to shoot at anything that moved with razor sharp accuracy, and even though he and Adam were invisible, he wouldn’t bet on them not having some sort of x-ray vision or super-hearing. Or maybe they were telepaths and were listening to Claude’s terrified thoughts right this second.
“How do we get out of here?” he asked, his voice no higher than a murmur.
“There’s an emergency staircase just round the corner. This corridor’s u-shaped, so they can’t get to it before we do.”
Adam took the lead , gripping Claude’s hand hard as they turned the corner and there it was about five meters away, a grey metal door with a big STAIRS marked in fading red paint. Adam reached it first, turning the handle. It opened with a screech, making Claude wince, but it was too late to lay low now. Then he heard that familiar, metallic click he knew so well from the movies and he paled upon seeing a gun aimed right at him from the corner of the hall. The guard could see them. Claude didn’t know how, but he could see them.
“Come on,” Adam hissed and they pushed past the door, but Claude wasn’t fast enough. He felt it before hearing the shot smash on his eardrums. Pain ripped through his hip, crimson agony so fierce he couldn’t do anything but scream. Ridged cement dug into his bones as he fell, crashing on the stairs, but he barely felt it, his eyes squeezed shut, hands slipping on blood seeping through his fingers. So much blood. Oh, God. He was going to die. He was bleeding to death, and if that didn’t kill him, the next bullet would. Then the dull think of the door’s bolt banged next to his ear and Adam was holding him up, mouth to his, biting clear through Claude’s bottom lip, a tiny, squeamish pain compared to the one ripping his veins wide open.
“Bite my tongue,” Adam said sharply.
“What?” Claude’s breath burned in his throat.
“Bite my tongue.”
Adam plunged his tongue into Claude’s mouth, dragging it along Claude’s upper teeth, and he quickly found the groove cut within it, biting with every ounce of agony in his body. Blood spilled onto his tongue, the warm taste cloying his mouth, and on pure instinct he spread it on his injured lip. Adam pulled away. Their eyes met, one second lost in the dust, then Adam vanished up the stairwell as the banging started on the door.
||||
“Voila,” Claude exclaimed, returning to visibility to reveal the large tray he held in his arms, topped to the brim with breakfast goodies. It’d been a tad problematic to get it into the motel, past the cluster of guests assembled in the lobby, into the elevator (which had been annoyingly occupied by a small man in a checkered shirt who insisted on wandering up and down the left hand rail), and up to the room, though it was quite hilarious to see people freak out when they turned around and saw no body accompany the footsteps clacking on the floor. Always amusing, that one. However, despite all the troubles he’d gone through to steal it (grabbing a two and a half foot tray from a busy kitchen brimming with waiters was challenging enough to be considered an art), Adam didn’t appear impressed. He merely raised an eyebrow, peering at the tray as if it contained friend rat instead of freshly cooked eggs. He didn’t even bother getting up from the bed.
“It’s a little much, don’t you think?” he said in that supercilious voice of his.
Claude scowled. So much for gratitude.
“You don’t have to eat any. I’ll just keep it all for myself.”
He carefully set the tray on the bed, moving the glasses to the bedside table so they wouldn’t spill over. Adam folded his legs under him, sitting up, and leaned over the tray.
“You’re going to eat,” he said, “five plates full of pancakes, sausages, bacon, hash browns, French toast, eggs. What’s this?”
He pointed to a cream colored meal in a bowl.
“That would be grits. It’s made from corn. You’ve never had grits before?”
“It may shock you to learn that I have not in fact tasted every type of food on the planet.”
Claude sat down at the edge of the bed, keeping some distance from Adam, and picked up a plate full of pancakes.
“Could have fooled me since you’re in such a hurry to destroy it all.”
He grabbed the syrup and poured some on his pancakes until they were completely soaked, just the way he loved it.
“Are you ever going to stop bringing that up?” Adam said with a touch of vexation.
“Are you?”
Claude met Adam’s eyes, challenging him to speak. He didn’t. Claude turned back to his pancakes, stuffing a hastily cut piece in his mouth. He tasted its sweet plumpness, but couldn’t savor it properly, his mind turned to sour thoughts.
“Claude.”
“You should eat something. The food’s getting cold.”
“Claude.” Adam voice was sharper this time.
“If you don’t, I’ll just eat it all myself.”
“You can’t.”
“Watch me.”
Claude’s knife shrieked on the plate as he cut across the pancake.
“I’m not going to eat until we get this settled.”
“Get what settled? It’s not like you can go back and not try to release the virus.”
“If we were to be tried for everything we attempted to do, the entire world would be dammed.”
“Yeah, well, we’re all damned, anyway.”
“Claude.” Adam leaned forward, catching Claude’s eyes. “Did I ever lie to you?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Yes or no. Did I ever lie to you?”
Claude threw his fork on the plate, breathing hard.
“Not that I can tell. But you weren’t completely honest with me either, now were you?”
“I couldn’t be. You would have left. I would have never had a chance.”
“A chance to brainwash me so you could escape and kill everyone? That’s what it was about, wasn’t it?”
“No, it wasn’t. And I didn’t brainwash you. You wanted me before you went in my cell.”
“And you made sure to take every advantage of that, didn’t you?”
“You can’t fault me for wanting to escape from that place.”
“No, but if I had known why you were really in there, I wouldn’t have even considered getting you out.”
“ So I warrant a life sentence for a mistake I committed thirty years ago?”
“A mistake? You call nearly murdering the entire human race a mistake?”
“Wasn’t it?”
“What the hell does that mean? Murder is murder.”
“Attempted murder. There’s a difference.”
“So now you’re a lawyer, is that it? Throwing terminology at me, trying to jump through some little loophole as if that could somehow disguise what you are. Well, it’s not going to work. I’m sure that wasn’t the first time you attempted murder. I’m sure you’ve succeeded quite a few times.”
“Like you haven’t killed anyone. The Company doesn’t give you a gun for you to use as a paperweight. You must have used it lots of times and some of those bullets found their mark.”
The syrup went stale in Claude’s mouth. Bastard. Fucking, sodding bastard. Suddenly, the eggs smelled like gunpowder, fresh on his hands as he pulled the trigger on another of his kind, bang. And down the body falls. He never aimed to kill, but... Accidents happen. But even if they weren’t accidents, when he was ordered to kill, premeditated thought to butcher another human being, it was so much worse. Some were genuinely dangerous, murderers themselves, reveling in the screams and suffering. The world was better off, or so he told himself, but he could never wash the stench of blood and guilt from his fingers, no matter how hard he tried, scrubbing them until his own blood broke through his skin, red and raw and no less than he deserved.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Adam continued, his voice a rake scrapping over Claude’s naked bones. “They made you hunt your kind, our kind, and kill them when it suited their plans. But you refused at last, disgusted with yourself for dragging it out this far.”
“Shut up,” Claude whispered.
“You weren’t playing by the rules anymore. So they decided to eliminate you.”
“Don’t. Please don’t.”
Claude squeezed his eyes shut. He felt the bitter wind scrapping his cheeks, the river plunging down below his feet, cold and merciless, and saw Bennet draw his gun from his holster, gleaming iron sharp, blinding him with its harsh glare, and point it at him, barrel a gaping maw ready to swallow him up, and there was nowhere to run. His own friend. Best he’d ever had.
“It was your partner, wasn’t it? The one who shot you.”
Pain tore through his shoulder, agony screaming tears in his eyes and the rail jabbed into his back, barely holding him up and he couldn’t even shout as he did the only thing he could.
“They ordered him to kill you. And he did.”
“Shut up!”
Claude scrambled off the bed, shaking with a fury that made his limbs shake, his nails clawing into his palms. He wanted to punch Adam and smash that sickening knowledge right off his face. He’d never yearned to hit someone so badly in his life. He stood, rooted to the spot, reigning in his muscles so firmly that his teeth ached, then he ripped his coat from the closet hanger and slammed out the door. Adam’s voice rang out behind him, calling his name, but he wouldn’t listen, ever again. He ran, out the door, out the car park, down the street. Low on the horizon, the setting sun streaked the sidewalk red.
Part Seven