Fic: Dust to Dust (Chap 1)
I can't take it anymore. Reading slightly different versions of the exact same thing is boring me out of my skull. Why didn't I go with the Independence question? Why?
I'm so sorry I've taken so long in getting this out, but as you probably know by now, these essays are evil and have taken over my life.
Title: Dust to Dust (Chap. 1)
Rating: PG
Pairing: Adam/Hiro, Hiro/Ando
Previous part: Prologue
Summary: This continues from Truthful Friends where Hiro and Ando take Adam out of the coffin, so the first part of this chapter is the same as that, but then I took it in another direction.
There was no dissuading Hiro once he’d set his mind on a task, especially if it involved saving the world, even if his soul was crumbling inside.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own words.
Air. Cold. Above ground. Hiro.
“Hiro, you son of a bitch.”
Adam grabbed him by the throat, yanking him forward, wanting to squeeze, to throttle, to scream, How dare you lock me up six feet underground, you bastard? Blackness suffocating, choking, air too thin, too fucking thin, eating through his body like flesh strained through a grater, but he gulped it anyway even as it poisoned him again, world dying into numb pinpricks of memory and he couldn’t even cry. Too many times. Too many damn times dying and dying and he of all people had been the one to put him in there.
Pain erupted in his head. He gasped, but wouldn’t let his hand weaken, turning to the right as a furious voice ringed in his injured ear.
“Let go of him.”
Now who’s this holding a shovel so menacingly over his head?
“No,” he growled, tightening his grip so that Hiro gagged, scrabbling at his hand, desperate fingers prying at his own but Adam’s well practiced at this.
Another jab landed hard into his right eye, vicious enough to render him unconscious for a second, and his hand loosened, allowing Hiro to scramble back half an inch, but almost instantly Adam managed to tighten his grip again even as his crushed, bleeding eye healed.
“Kensei.”
Tiny, piteous squeak, hardly loud enough to startle a mouse, breath thready on his skin. Adam let go.
“What the hell are you doing here?” His voice stung in his throat. “Hadn’t you intended to leave me there forever? Buried under soil and brick and anything else civilization planted on this land until I was as surely dead as these corpses around me?”
Hiro’s face pinched as he rubbed his throat, sad, puppy eyes welling with such tender emotion, but none of it is for him, no. Guilt for the action, for sweet little Hiro could never be so ruthless without beating himself over it endlessly, but not for him.
“I had to do it.”
“Did you? Is that how you console yourself so you can sleep at night?”
“You wanted to kill everyone in the world.”
“Ah. Right. So why not just kill me outright? Nullify the threat once and for all.”
“I c-“
Appalled denial twitched on Hiro’s face, ever the noble innocent, and how much Adam had once loved him for that.
“Hiro’s not a killer. Not like you.”
Well, well. The sidekick spoke. And a loyal one he was, too. Such righteous anger brimmed in his voice, hardening his honest face, just the kind of buddy Hiro would pal around with. He seemed to have appointed himself Hiro’s bodyguard, standing just a tad before him, shovel held menacingly in his hands lest Adam dare attack him again. He wouldn’t last a second if Adam decided to get out of this box and come for him.
“Well, now. Ando, am I right?”
Surprise flickered between them. Now, really. Did they think him stupid?
“How did-“
“Oh, Hiro told me all about you. The faithful friend who waited for him in the future. He was so devoted to writing those letters he put in my sword. I read them, by the way. My apologies.”
Flustered indignation sparked in their faces, as if this was the worst thing he’s done.
“Tell me, is he truly as good a friend to you as he purported to be? Because he didn’t seem all that fussed about coming back.”
A shadow pinched in Ando’s eyes, acknowledged by Hiro’s downcast, supplicant eyes, guilt so raw and tender and palpable that Hiro could never, ever conceal, even when he’s romancing the woman he thought you loved or burying you alive to rot in the bowels of the earth forever.
“What’s this now? Could it be that he’s betrayed you already?”
“He didn’t,” Ando claimed, voice sharper than the shovel he held, but it was too late. Adam had already seen it.
“Oh, but he did. It’s all over his face.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Hiro cut in, old pain bleeding in his voice, but his eyes were firm.
“If you didn’t you wouldn’t have done it.”
Small flinch, but his eyes hardened.
“That didn’t give you the right to betray me and Yaeko to White Beard. You almost destroyed history.”
“You and your sacred history. I can’t stand hearing one more word of it!”
“You never understood that.”
“No, I didn’t. And I don’t care to when it was all a lie.”
Adams pushed himself off that damn coffin and Hiro and Ando scrambled back, Ando raising the shovel, but Adam’s attention was on Hiro, little, beaten looking Hiro, always the victim as if he had no responsibility over the shit he left at Adam’s door.
“It wasn-“
“You were always the hero. Not me. Don’t act so shocked now that I’ve learned my lesson.”
“This is pointless!” Ando cut in, interposing himself between Adam and Hiro. “Nothing Hiro did can ever compare to what you did, so don’t even try to justify yourself.”
Adam considered him carefully, tracing the firmness of his jaw, the resolution in his eyes. Such admirable loyalty still. Why? He’d seen the hurt in there, the taste of betrayal he knew so well, acid in his soul.
“What did he do to you?” Adam asked.
“What?”
“He did something. Else he wouldn’t have looked so guilty when I posed the question.”
“He didn’t do anything.”
“I’ve spent four centuries parsing lies from truth. Don’t think you can deceive me.”
Ando’s jaw tightened, his hands flexing on the shovel handle.
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“I considered him my best friend. Look what he did to me.”
Ando’s eyes flinched towards the casket behind Adam, his prison for the past... What? He didn’t even know for how long he’d been locked down there, blind even to his own mind. Even if they weren’t equal circumstances, even if this man didn’t react the same way Adam did, for he smelled the upright heroism in him, so like Hiro’s single minded desire to save the world, the seed was there. Something had happened. Now wasn’t that completely unsurprising?
“Hiro.” Ando’s voice was harder than the casket.
“Ando.” Small, fearful voice. Now Adam was really curious.
“Freeze time.”
Not good. But he couldn’t flee. Hiro would stop him before-
````
“We should put him back underground,” Ando said, his hands tight and furious on the shovel handle. He glared at Adam’s face, which had frozen in an apprehensive frown, that despised face that so far he’d only known from the picture he and Hiro dug up in that box of old files, a stranger smiling as he stood next to the man he killed, the father of the friend who idolized him since childhood, and Ando didn’t need anything else to loathe the man. These last few minutes had only confirmed that. How could anyone not see what an insufferable bastard he was?
“But we can’t,” Hiro said. “We need him to help us get the formula.”
“And would he actually do that? He’ll probably string us along on some other game of his. That’s probably how he got Peter Petrelli.”
Hiro crossed his arms with a harsh breath that went beyond frustration and Ando mentally beat himself as he saw that old, insidious grief that he’d worked so hard to alleviate fall over him again, the combined misery at his father’s death and the vicious betrayal of this man who never, ever deserved his adoration. But that was just the thing. Hiro had adored him, worshipping him since he’d been old enough to understand his father’s bedtime stories of the great Takezo Kensei, and as hard as it was for Ando to comprehend now, Hiro really had considered him a true friend. His joy overflowed in his letters, that bouncing Hiro enthusiasm that amused and exasperated him in equal measure but that he loved anyway as he described their adventures, as he called them. A hero must always have adventures. Except that this time instead of one super powered hero and his sidekick, there’d been two, and Hiro couldn’t have sounded happier. If Ando were being entirely honest with himself, which he made a point of avoiding these days, he might admit that maybe... Yes, alright, he had been jealous. Not of Hiro, who deserved all the fun he could get after the agony that had been New York, but of this Kensei, who Hiro somehow couldn’t seem to leave. He’d even suspected... But, no. That couldn’t be. That better not be for Hiro’s sake.
But never mind what he felt. Hiro needed him now, needed a true friend, for Ando was still his friend despite everything. He truly believed (for how could he do anything else) that Hiro meant his apology and would forget that stupid vision of a future that made no sense and trust him like Ando trusted him. No baneful words from a filthy murderer could make him waver from that conviction.
“Hiro?” he asked, noticing how tense Hiro’s hunched shoulders were, his hands burrowed under his arms, head ducked to the side, skittishly trying to hide within himself. “Are you alright?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” Hiro said much too quickly, straightening his back and steeling his face with that stubborn, tough facade that fooled no one, much less Ando. He was in pain. His whole being screamed it, but he would never back down now. Ando swallowed a frustrated sigh, giving up for now. There was no dissuading Hiro once he’d set his mind on a task, especially if it involved saving the world, even if his soul was crumbling inside. Why couldn’t he forget all that for once and take care of himself? But no. That wouldn’t be his Hiro. He must always stand for right over wrong and save the day, for who else would he be if he didn’t?
“We need him, Ando,” Hiro repeated, finally meeting Ando’s worried gaze, and how could he deny the plaintive plea in those eyes? “He knows these people. He might be the only one who can find out where the formula is. Angela Petrelli wouldn’t have asked us to dig him up if there was another option.”
Damned, Hiro reasoning. Why did he have to chose now to make sense? Ando scratched his mind for something, any other possible option, but the only people they knew had a connection to the formula were Hiro’s father, the Company, and this guy. Angela Petrelli obviously knew more than they did and if even she was willing to resort to this, what choice did they have? Though if she was so determined, why didn’t she dig him up herself?
“Fine,” Ando said, his teeth catching on the word. “But I’m not letting him say another thing about you.”
Ando secured his hold on the shovel, bracing himself for any attack Adam might make.
“Ando?”
Ando turned at the soft sound, frowning at Hiro’s worried expression.
“What is it?”
Hiro looked uneasy for a moment, lips twitching to pronounce words that never made it past his tongue.
“Nothing.”
He looked straight ahead at Adam, bracing his shoulders. As much as he hated to, Ando let the matter rest.
Adam appeared to stumble backwards as Hiro restarted time, his hands outstretched at his sides in a quasi-defensive position as if he honestly thought he could ward off Hiro’s power. Idiot. He must have registered their different positions, for he narrowed his eyes at them, glancing quickly between one and the other.
“The formula has been stolen,” Hiro rushed forward. “We need you to help us get it back.”
Adam’s frown intensified, the gears working behind his eyes so obvious that Ando wondered how the hell Hiro didn’t see it before.
“The formula?” he asked, skepticism dripping from his voice like poisonous acid. “You dug me up to acquire the formula?”
“Yes.”
An ugly twist of a sneer crossed Adam’s mouth as he crossed his arms with a mocking toss of his head.
“Well, well. Look who’s following in his father’s footsteps.”
Hiro’s hands clenched at his sides, his whole frame going rigid and Ando raised the shovel. How dare he?
“Don’t you say anything about his father,” Ando ordered, his teeth gritting as Adam threw him a withering glance, as if he wasn’t worthy enough for him to cast his eyes upon.
“Will you beat me if I do?”
Yes, part of Ando screamed, remembering the shadow overtaking Mr. Nakamura before pushing him off the building and the sick look in Hiro’s face as he struggled so hard not to cry when he told Ando who killed his father and the empty hollow in his voice, his being shut down after he came back from this cemetery after burying alive a man he’d considered a friend to keep him from killing everyone in the world, and yes, he wanted to pay him back every last piece of misery he’d made Hiro suffer through. But then he heard that crunch, wet, splintering squelch as Adam’s eye broke under the shovel handle as Ando rammed it in his socket and bile clenched in his throat. No. He was better than that. He would not stoop to this man’s level.
“No,” Ando said, lowering the shovel. “We’ll just put you back in your coffin and let you rot underground for the rest of eternity.”
“But then you wouldn’t have your formula. And its immediate acquisition must be terribly important if you bother knocking on my door in the first place.”
“Start talking, then,” Hiro said, voice twisting on too many agitated emotions and Ando hated that Adam could see how viciously he’d affected Hiro.
“Always so insistent. And here you are again, needing my help to save the world. You never change, do you?”
“Just tell us who would steal the formula from the Company.”
“I don’t know. Foreign spies. Mad scientists. You know, I’ve never given this much credence, but maybe there is an alien conspiracy trying to take over the world.”
Why, the fucking-
“I told you we should have left him down there,” Ando muttered to Hiro in Japanese.
“I do understand Japanese, you know,” Adam replied in kind, exacerbating Ando’s furious nerves.
“Shut up!”
“Such a short temper. I thought you wanted me to talk.”
Did the man honestly want Ando to beat him to death with the shovel? Because he’d be more than willing to oblige if he kept this bullshit up.
“Just answer the question, Kensei,” Hiro said. “We know you can tell us who it is.”
“And how exactly would I know that? I was locked up for thirty years after which you interred me six feet under to slowly asphyxiate to death.”
Ando dared a glance at Hiro. His face was pinched, lips squeezed but he buried it under the closest thing to stony that his face ever got.
“Now,” that damned man continued, “I don’t know for how long you kept me down there before you decided to grace me once more with your presence, but it hardly gave me any time to keep up with the latest happenings.”
“But you know these people. The ones who started the Company. So you should be able to determine who it is.”
“Many things have changed since I was first imprisoned. Thirty years ago, I might have been able to tell you, but now... So I don’t know exactly how you expect me to be able to tell you anything useful. Besides, something that valuable is bound to catch many a greedy eye. They really should have destroyed it when I told them to.”
“Because listening to you is such a smart idea,” Ando said.
“Isn’t that what you’re doing right now?”
“You two, stop it!” Hiro cried out, clearly nearing his breaking point.
Damnit. Shame burned in Ando’s mind. He should have been watching out for Hiro, not embroiling himself in a pointless fight that would only cause him more pain.
“Kensei,” Hiro continued, “Will you help us or not?”
Adam considered him for a moment.
“If I say no, I take it you’ll stick me back in that coffin, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
Hard glass resonated in Hiro’s voice. Adam nodded as if confirming a grim truth.
“Of course. You had no problem doing it the first time.”
Ando almost knocked his own head against the shovel in frustration. Why did they need to go to this man? Every word coming out of his mouth was designed to twist and slash into Hiro’s heart so the wound he’d stabbed through it would never have any hope of scaring over. It already couldn’t heal to begin with. Ando had an aunt, his mother’s older sister, die when he was ten. She’d nurtured and cared for him like her own child since she hadn’t been able to have any of her own. Sadness still tinged his memories of her. This was the second parent Hiro had to bury. And the most sickening part of it all was that Adam planned it like this.
“Well,” Adam’s odious voice barged through his thoughts. How the hell could anyone find such an ugly sound charming? “If those are my choices, I suppose I’ll come up with something. I should be able to deduce a couple of names.”
With a 90% chance that they were all lies. This was pointless. No, much worse. It was dangerous and senseless and would probably get them killed, but like Hiro said, they had no choice. Any source of information, no matter how malicious or repulsive, needed to be explored. But Ando would take any of his suggestions with a gargantuan grain of salt.
“Come on, then.”
“Here? A tad conspicuous, don’t you think?”
Adam regarded the darkness cloaking the very wide open cemetery, broken around them only by the lamp sitting at their feet, casting foreboding shadows over his arrogant face. As much as Ando was determined to be in complete disagreement with anything he said, he did have a point. It’d taken him and Hiro two hours to dig up six feet of dirt with a ten minute break in which they’d collapsed on the ground, panting, every muscle in their bodies so totally exhausted that neither wanted to get back up for another seven hours, but they had to drag themselves upright again to pull the coffin up to the surface with an improvised set of ropes and pulleys that made both feel like beasts of burden and made Ando vow never to take the wonders of modern technology in vain. They’d lingered here too long. But they couldn’t leave the grave open like this, and not just because someone might trip into it in the dark.
“Then we’ll go someplace else,” Ando said. “But first you need to fill in that grave.”
“Me?” Adam raised a skeptical eyebrow, studying the pile of dirt behind him with annoyance.
Ando peered at Hiro, who shared a light smile, eyes comforting if not as bright as they should be.
“Yes,” Hiro said, raising his chin in a commanding posture. “As part of your punishment.”
“Are you putting me in a chain gang now? Lifetime imprisonment. Hard labor. Will I be scrubbing your floors next?”
“It’s a thought,” Ando said, returning Adam’s spiteful glare with a smug smile.
“Fine.” Adam yanked off his jacket, folding it before setting it down carefully on the grass far away from the monumental pile of dirt. Ando felt the sudden, childish urge to stomp on it. “At least it’ll prevent you from putting me back in there.”
“Oh, there are other places where we can put you.”
“Like a really deep cave system.” Hiro said.
“Or the middle of the Sahara.”
“Or the South Pole.”
Adam stopped pushing the coffin towards the hole, glowering them with a disgusted look that failed to have the proper terror that Ando wanted.
“Do you two talk like this all the time?”
“Like what¨?” Hiro asked.
“Like two six-year-olds telling their mother what bright, new thing they learned in school today.”
For a moment, Ando pondered the moral ramifications of breaking the nose of a man who would heal in seconds anyway, but he chose to poke him in the ribs with the shovel instead. Hard.
“Ow!”
“Just shut up and fill that in. We don’t have all night.”
If Ando had thought that Adam’s glares couldn’t get any more murderous, he was wrong. Adam pushed the coffin with an angry huff, picking up Hiro’s discarded shovel as his former prison thumped to the bottom of the ragged trench Ando was positive had been pointless to dig. Unfortunately, Adam’s work was only half as hard as theirs had been, consisting merely of shoving the dirt back in, and it wasn’t like he would end up with a sore back and aching sides for the next few days. He probably hadn’t even felt that jab. Asshole.
Hiro left Ando’s side to go pick up one of the water bottles they’d brought with them. Two empty ones and Ando’s second one lay beside it, nearly depleted itself. Ando watched him down the last drops from his bottle, rubbing his throat as he did so. Keeping a close watch on Adam from the corner of his eye, Ando approached Hiro.
“Does it hurt?” he asked in a low voice so Adam wouldn’t hear.
“A little. It’s just sore.”
He sounded so... worn. Like a shirt so washed out that the threads were almost as insubstantial as the air between them. Shit. When were they ever going to get past this?
“You can drink the rest of my water if you want,” he said.
“But what if you get thirsty?”
“I’ll be fine,” Ando said, shaking his shoulders in an uneasy shrug. He turned towards Adam, who continued shoveling the soil into the grave.
“Ando?”
“Mmm?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”
“You already apologized for that.”
“I know, but I need you to know that I mean it.”
“I do know.”
He tried his absolute best to smile sincerely for Hiro, and it was genuine enough to reassure him, for a flicker of that gentle smile dawned on Hiro’s mouth for a moment. He lifted the bottle to his mouth again, shaking out the very last drops, and Ando’s eyes lingered on his lips for a second before he stopped down, picking up his bottle, and held it out to him. This time Hiro accepted it. But for a moment, the tiniest, little second as Hiro unwound the lid, he glanced at Adam before cocooning itself in the safety of a water bottle.
I'm so sorry I've taken so long in getting this out, but as you probably know by now, these essays are evil and have taken over my life.
Title: Dust to Dust (Chap. 1)
Rating: PG
Pairing: Adam/Hiro, Hiro/Ando
Previous part: Prologue
Summary: This continues from Truthful Friends where Hiro and Ando take Adam out of the coffin, so the first part of this chapter is the same as that, but then I took it in another direction.
There was no dissuading Hiro once he’d set his mind on a task, especially if it involved saving the world, even if his soul was crumbling inside.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own words.
Air. Cold. Above ground. Hiro.
“Hiro, you son of a bitch.”
Adam grabbed him by the throat, yanking him forward, wanting to squeeze, to throttle, to scream, How dare you lock me up six feet underground, you bastard? Blackness suffocating, choking, air too thin, too fucking thin, eating through his body like flesh strained through a grater, but he gulped it anyway even as it poisoned him again, world dying into numb pinpricks of memory and he couldn’t even cry. Too many times. Too many damn times dying and dying and he of all people had been the one to put him in there.
Pain erupted in his head. He gasped, but wouldn’t let his hand weaken, turning to the right as a furious voice ringed in his injured ear.
“Let go of him.”
Now who’s this holding a shovel so menacingly over his head?
“No,” he growled, tightening his grip so that Hiro gagged, scrabbling at his hand, desperate fingers prying at his own but Adam’s well practiced at this.
Another jab landed hard into his right eye, vicious enough to render him unconscious for a second, and his hand loosened, allowing Hiro to scramble back half an inch, but almost instantly Adam managed to tighten his grip again even as his crushed, bleeding eye healed.
“Kensei.”
Tiny, piteous squeak, hardly loud enough to startle a mouse, breath thready on his skin. Adam let go.
“What the hell are you doing here?” His voice stung in his throat. “Hadn’t you intended to leave me there forever? Buried under soil and brick and anything else civilization planted on this land until I was as surely dead as these corpses around me?”
Hiro’s face pinched as he rubbed his throat, sad, puppy eyes welling with such tender emotion, but none of it is for him, no. Guilt for the action, for sweet little Hiro could never be so ruthless without beating himself over it endlessly, but not for him.
“I had to do it.”
“Did you? Is that how you console yourself so you can sleep at night?”
“You wanted to kill everyone in the world.”
“Ah. Right. So why not just kill me outright? Nullify the threat once and for all.”
“I c-“
Appalled denial twitched on Hiro’s face, ever the noble innocent, and how much Adam had once loved him for that.
“Hiro’s not a killer. Not like you.”
Well, well. The sidekick spoke. And a loyal one he was, too. Such righteous anger brimmed in his voice, hardening his honest face, just the kind of buddy Hiro would pal around with. He seemed to have appointed himself Hiro’s bodyguard, standing just a tad before him, shovel held menacingly in his hands lest Adam dare attack him again. He wouldn’t last a second if Adam decided to get out of this box and come for him.
“Well, now. Ando, am I right?”
Surprise flickered between them. Now, really. Did they think him stupid?
“How did-“
“Oh, Hiro told me all about you. The faithful friend who waited for him in the future. He was so devoted to writing those letters he put in my sword. I read them, by the way. My apologies.”
Flustered indignation sparked in their faces, as if this was the worst thing he’s done.
“Tell me, is he truly as good a friend to you as he purported to be? Because he didn’t seem all that fussed about coming back.”
A shadow pinched in Ando’s eyes, acknowledged by Hiro’s downcast, supplicant eyes, guilt so raw and tender and palpable that Hiro could never, ever conceal, even when he’s romancing the woman he thought you loved or burying you alive to rot in the bowels of the earth forever.
“What’s this now? Could it be that he’s betrayed you already?”
“He didn’t,” Ando claimed, voice sharper than the shovel he held, but it was too late. Adam had already seen it.
“Oh, but he did. It’s all over his face.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Hiro cut in, old pain bleeding in his voice, but his eyes were firm.
“If you didn’t you wouldn’t have done it.”
Small flinch, but his eyes hardened.
“That didn’t give you the right to betray me and Yaeko to White Beard. You almost destroyed history.”
“You and your sacred history. I can’t stand hearing one more word of it!”
“You never understood that.”
“No, I didn’t. And I don’t care to when it was all a lie.”
Adams pushed himself off that damn coffin and Hiro and Ando scrambled back, Ando raising the shovel, but Adam’s attention was on Hiro, little, beaten looking Hiro, always the victim as if he had no responsibility over the shit he left at Adam’s door.
“It wasn-“
“You were always the hero. Not me. Don’t act so shocked now that I’ve learned my lesson.”
“This is pointless!” Ando cut in, interposing himself between Adam and Hiro. “Nothing Hiro did can ever compare to what you did, so don’t even try to justify yourself.”
Adam considered him carefully, tracing the firmness of his jaw, the resolution in his eyes. Such admirable loyalty still. Why? He’d seen the hurt in there, the taste of betrayal he knew so well, acid in his soul.
“What did he do to you?” Adam asked.
“What?”
“He did something. Else he wouldn’t have looked so guilty when I posed the question.”
“He didn’t do anything.”
“I’ve spent four centuries parsing lies from truth. Don’t think you can deceive me.”
Ando’s jaw tightened, his hands flexing on the shovel handle.
“It has nothing to do with you.”
“I considered him my best friend. Look what he did to me.”
Ando’s eyes flinched towards the casket behind Adam, his prison for the past... What? He didn’t even know for how long he’d been locked down there, blind even to his own mind. Even if they weren’t equal circumstances, even if this man didn’t react the same way Adam did, for he smelled the upright heroism in him, so like Hiro’s single minded desire to save the world, the seed was there. Something had happened. Now wasn’t that completely unsurprising?
“Hiro.” Ando’s voice was harder than the casket.
“Ando.” Small, fearful voice. Now Adam was really curious.
“Freeze time.”
Not good. But he couldn’t flee. Hiro would stop him before-
````
“We should put him back underground,” Ando said, his hands tight and furious on the shovel handle. He glared at Adam’s face, which had frozen in an apprehensive frown, that despised face that so far he’d only known from the picture he and Hiro dug up in that box of old files, a stranger smiling as he stood next to the man he killed, the father of the friend who idolized him since childhood, and Ando didn’t need anything else to loathe the man. These last few minutes had only confirmed that. How could anyone not see what an insufferable bastard he was?
“But we can’t,” Hiro said. “We need him to help us get the formula.”
“And would he actually do that? He’ll probably string us along on some other game of his. That’s probably how he got Peter Petrelli.”
Hiro crossed his arms with a harsh breath that went beyond frustration and Ando mentally beat himself as he saw that old, insidious grief that he’d worked so hard to alleviate fall over him again, the combined misery at his father’s death and the vicious betrayal of this man who never, ever deserved his adoration. But that was just the thing. Hiro had adored him, worshipping him since he’d been old enough to understand his father’s bedtime stories of the great Takezo Kensei, and as hard as it was for Ando to comprehend now, Hiro really had considered him a true friend. His joy overflowed in his letters, that bouncing Hiro enthusiasm that amused and exasperated him in equal measure but that he loved anyway as he described their adventures, as he called them. A hero must always have adventures. Except that this time instead of one super powered hero and his sidekick, there’d been two, and Hiro couldn’t have sounded happier. If Ando were being entirely honest with himself, which he made a point of avoiding these days, he might admit that maybe... Yes, alright, he had been jealous. Not of Hiro, who deserved all the fun he could get after the agony that had been New York, but of this Kensei, who Hiro somehow couldn’t seem to leave. He’d even suspected... But, no. That couldn’t be. That better not be for Hiro’s sake.
But never mind what he felt. Hiro needed him now, needed a true friend, for Ando was still his friend despite everything. He truly believed (for how could he do anything else) that Hiro meant his apology and would forget that stupid vision of a future that made no sense and trust him like Ando trusted him. No baneful words from a filthy murderer could make him waver from that conviction.
“Hiro?” he asked, noticing how tense Hiro’s hunched shoulders were, his hands burrowed under his arms, head ducked to the side, skittishly trying to hide within himself. “Are you alright?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” Hiro said much too quickly, straightening his back and steeling his face with that stubborn, tough facade that fooled no one, much less Ando. He was in pain. His whole being screamed it, but he would never back down now. Ando swallowed a frustrated sigh, giving up for now. There was no dissuading Hiro once he’d set his mind on a task, especially if it involved saving the world, even if his soul was crumbling inside. Why couldn’t he forget all that for once and take care of himself? But no. That wouldn’t be his Hiro. He must always stand for right over wrong and save the day, for who else would he be if he didn’t?
“We need him, Ando,” Hiro repeated, finally meeting Ando’s worried gaze, and how could he deny the plaintive plea in those eyes? “He knows these people. He might be the only one who can find out where the formula is. Angela Petrelli wouldn’t have asked us to dig him up if there was another option.”
Damned, Hiro reasoning. Why did he have to chose now to make sense? Ando scratched his mind for something, any other possible option, but the only people they knew had a connection to the formula were Hiro’s father, the Company, and this guy. Angela Petrelli obviously knew more than they did and if even she was willing to resort to this, what choice did they have? Though if she was so determined, why didn’t she dig him up herself?
“Fine,” Ando said, his teeth catching on the word. “But I’m not letting him say another thing about you.”
Ando secured his hold on the shovel, bracing himself for any attack Adam might make.
“Ando?”
Ando turned at the soft sound, frowning at Hiro’s worried expression.
“What is it?”
Hiro looked uneasy for a moment, lips twitching to pronounce words that never made it past his tongue.
“Nothing.”
He looked straight ahead at Adam, bracing his shoulders. As much as he hated to, Ando let the matter rest.
Adam appeared to stumble backwards as Hiro restarted time, his hands outstretched at his sides in a quasi-defensive position as if he honestly thought he could ward off Hiro’s power. Idiot. He must have registered their different positions, for he narrowed his eyes at them, glancing quickly between one and the other.
“The formula has been stolen,” Hiro rushed forward. “We need you to help us get it back.”
Adam’s frown intensified, the gears working behind his eyes so obvious that Ando wondered how the hell Hiro didn’t see it before.
“The formula?” he asked, skepticism dripping from his voice like poisonous acid. “You dug me up to acquire the formula?”
“Yes.”
An ugly twist of a sneer crossed Adam’s mouth as he crossed his arms with a mocking toss of his head.
“Well, well. Look who’s following in his father’s footsteps.”
Hiro’s hands clenched at his sides, his whole frame going rigid and Ando raised the shovel. How dare he?
“Don’t you say anything about his father,” Ando ordered, his teeth gritting as Adam threw him a withering glance, as if he wasn’t worthy enough for him to cast his eyes upon.
“Will you beat me if I do?”
Yes, part of Ando screamed, remembering the shadow overtaking Mr. Nakamura before pushing him off the building and the sick look in Hiro’s face as he struggled so hard not to cry when he told Ando who killed his father and the empty hollow in his voice, his being shut down after he came back from this cemetery after burying alive a man he’d considered a friend to keep him from killing everyone in the world, and yes, he wanted to pay him back every last piece of misery he’d made Hiro suffer through. But then he heard that crunch, wet, splintering squelch as Adam’s eye broke under the shovel handle as Ando rammed it in his socket and bile clenched in his throat. No. He was better than that. He would not stoop to this man’s level.
“No,” Ando said, lowering the shovel. “We’ll just put you back in your coffin and let you rot underground for the rest of eternity.”
“But then you wouldn’t have your formula. And its immediate acquisition must be terribly important if you bother knocking on my door in the first place.”
“Start talking, then,” Hiro said, voice twisting on too many agitated emotions and Ando hated that Adam could see how viciously he’d affected Hiro.
“Always so insistent. And here you are again, needing my help to save the world. You never change, do you?”
“Just tell us who would steal the formula from the Company.”
“I don’t know. Foreign spies. Mad scientists. You know, I’ve never given this much credence, but maybe there is an alien conspiracy trying to take over the world.”
Why, the fucking-
“I told you we should have left him down there,” Ando muttered to Hiro in Japanese.
“I do understand Japanese, you know,” Adam replied in kind, exacerbating Ando’s furious nerves.
“Shut up!”
“Such a short temper. I thought you wanted me to talk.”
Did the man honestly want Ando to beat him to death with the shovel? Because he’d be more than willing to oblige if he kept this bullshit up.
“Just answer the question, Kensei,” Hiro said. “We know you can tell us who it is.”
“And how exactly would I know that? I was locked up for thirty years after which you interred me six feet under to slowly asphyxiate to death.”
Ando dared a glance at Hiro. His face was pinched, lips squeezed but he buried it under the closest thing to stony that his face ever got.
“Now,” that damned man continued, “I don’t know for how long you kept me down there before you decided to grace me once more with your presence, but it hardly gave me any time to keep up with the latest happenings.”
“But you know these people. The ones who started the Company. So you should be able to determine who it is.”
“Many things have changed since I was first imprisoned. Thirty years ago, I might have been able to tell you, but now... So I don’t know exactly how you expect me to be able to tell you anything useful. Besides, something that valuable is bound to catch many a greedy eye. They really should have destroyed it when I told them to.”
“Because listening to you is such a smart idea,” Ando said.
“Isn’t that what you’re doing right now?”
“You two, stop it!” Hiro cried out, clearly nearing his breaking point.
Damnit. Shame burned in Ando’s mind. He should have been watching out for Hiro, not embroiling himself in a pointless fight that would only cause him more pain.
“Kensei,” Hiro continued, “Will you help us or not?”
Adam considered him for a moment.
“If I say no, I take it you’ll stick me back in that coffin, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
Hard glass resonated in Hiro’s voice. Adam nodded as if confirming a grim truth.
“Of course. You had no problem doing it the first time.”
Ando almost knocked his own head against the shovel in frustration. Why did they need to go to this man? Every word coming out of his mouth was designed to twist and slash into Hiro’s heart so the wound he’d stabbed through it would never have any hope of scaring over. It already couldn’t heal to begin with. Ando had an aunt, his mother’s older sister, die when he was ten. She’d nurtured and cared for him like her own child since she hadn’t been able to have any of her own. Sadness still tinged his memories of her. This was the second parent Hiro had to bury. And the most sickening part of it all was that Adam planned it like this.
“Well,” Adam’s odious voice barged through his thoughts. How the hell could anyone find such an ugly sound charming? “If those are my choices, I suppose I’ll come up with something. I should be able to deduce a couple of names.”
With a 90% chance that they were all lies. This was pointless. No, much worse. It was dangerous and senseless and would probably get them killed, but like Hiro said, they had no choice. Any source of information, no matter how malicious or repulsive, needed to be explored. But Ando would take any of his suggestions with a gargantuan grain of salt.
“Come on, then.”
“Here? A tad conspicuous, don’t you think?”
Adam regarded the darkness cloaking the very wide open cemetery, broken around them only by the lamp sitting at their feet, casting foreboding shadows over his arrogant face. As much as Ando was determined to be in complete disagreement with anything he said, he did have a point. It’d taken him and Hiro two hours to dig up six feet of dirt with a ten minute break in which they’d collapsed on the ground, panting, every muscle in their bodies so totally exhausted that neither wanted to get back up for another seven hours, but they had to drag themselves upright again to pull the coffin up to the surface with an improvised set of ropes and pulleys that made both feel like beasts of burden and made Ando vow never to take the wonders of modern technology in vain. They’d lingered here too long. But they couldn’t leave the grave open like this, and not just because someone might trip into it in the dark.
“Then we’ll go someplace else,” Ando said. “But first you need to fill in that grave.”
“Me?” Adam raised a skeptical eyebrow, studying the pile of dirt behind him with annoyance.
Ando peered at Hiro, who shared a light smile, eyes comforting if not as bright as they should be.
“Yes,” Hiro said, raising his chin in a commanding posture. “As part of your punishment.”
“Are you putting me in a chain gang now? Lifetime imprisonment. Hard labor. Will I be scrubbing your floors next?”
“It’s a thought,” Ando said, returning Adam’s spiteful glare with a smug smile.
“Fine.” Adam yanked off his jacket, folding it before setting it down carefully on the grass far away from the monumental pile of dirt. Ando felt the sudden, childish urge to stomp on it. “At least it’ll prevent you from putting me back in there.”
“Oh, there are other places where we can put you.”
“Like a really deep cave system.” Hiro said.
“Or the middle of the Sahara.”
“Or the South Pole.”
Adam stopped pushing the coffin towards the hole, glowering them with a disgusted look that failed to have the proper terror that Ando wanted.
“Do you two talk like this all the time?”
“Like what¨?” Hiro asked.
“Like two six-year-olds telling their mother what bright, new thing they learned in school today.”
For a moment, Ando pondered the moral ramifications of breaking the nose of a man who would heal in seconds anyway, but he chose to poke him in the ribs with the shovel instead. Hard.
“Ow!”
“Just shut up and fill that in. We don’t have all night.”
If Ando had thought that Adam’s glares couldn’t get any more murderous, he was wrong. Adam pushed the coffin with an angry huff, picking up Hiro’s discarded shovel as his former prison thumped to the bottom of the ragged trench Ando was positive had been pointless to dig. Unfortunately, Adam’s work was only half as hard as theirs had been, consisting merely of shoving the dirt back in, and it wasn’t like he would end up with a sore back and aching sides for the next few days. He probably hadn’t even felt that jab. Asshole.
Hiro left Ando’s side to go pick up one of the water bottles they’d brought with them. Two empty ones and Ando’s second one lay beside it, nearly depleted itself. Ando watched him down the last drops from his bottle, rubbing his throat as he did so. Keeping a close watch on Adam from the corner of his eye, Ando approached Hiro.
“Does it hurt?” he asked in a low voice so Adam wouldn’t hear.
“A little. It’s just sore.”
He sounded so... worn. Like a shirt so washed out that the threads were almost as insubstantial as the air between them. Shit. When were they ever going to get past this?
“You can drink the rest of my water if you want,” he said.
“But what if you get thirsty?”
“I’ll be fine,” Ando said, shaking his shoulders in an uneasy shrug. He turned towards Adam, who continued shoveling the soil into the grave.
“Ando?”
“Mmm?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”
“You already apologized for that.”
“I know, but I need you to know that I mean it.”
“I do know.”
He tried his absolute best to smile sincerely for Hiro, and it was genuine enough to reassure him, for a flicker of that gentle smile dawned on Hiro’s mouth for a moment. He lifted the bottle to his mouth again, shaking out the very last drops, and Ando’s eyes lingered on his lips for a second before he stopped down, picking up his bottle, and held it out to him. This time Hiro accepted it. But for a moment, the tiniest, little second as Hiro unwound the lid, he glanced at Adam before cocooning itself in the safety of a water bottle.