Fic: man in a landscape (Heroes/BSG; Adam)
Spoilers for the mid-season 4 finale of Battlestar Galactica. Title is adapted from Jonathan Lethem's Girl in Landscape.
Adam Monroe. PG. Earth is not a dead planet.
I am here to live
while the soul permits,
and here to die,
when the hour arrives
- Miguel Hernandez, 'Sitting Upon the Dead'
man in a landscape
there were some that mistook him for one of the gods
He walked out of the forest toward the source of the noise, the arcane rumble that upset the stillness of the birds. He stopped before they could see him, cloaking his nakedness in the icy fronds. Two-legged silhouettes against the grey sky. The gas-fire stink of an engine.
His voice recovered, but other words were inadequate. Driftwood, signifying nothing. How to describe, communicate, the strange new world? It would have to be renamed: one beast, one bud, one follicle at a time. It was his due.
Adam, he fought to remember himself. A man.
It was his world; they would not claim it with their alien tongues.
others thought he might be Cylon
After observing for two more days, and noting that none grew sick and died, he wakened his companion. Her blonde locks had grown only a fraction in the intervening years (decades), were as dark and filthy as the rusty metal bar he pulled out of the base of her skull.
Shh, shh, he calmed her, stroking her wide-eyed, gasping face. Shh. This was not the first time. She did not need him to remind her, You're alive, still.
He had been practicing - breathing more often, more deeply than he needed to, forming the shapes again with his lips. Claire, he said.
To him, it meant You. It meant My only.
he was not, it was obvious, one of them
There is no one, he told the brown-haired woman, one more time. There's only us.
Resigned, he watched as she removed her - what was it? - spectacles with a trembling hand, and her gaze moved over Claire's hand-woven clothes, their long wild hair, the calloused but clear skin on both their young bodies. Envy and incomprehension and fear in her eyes; he watched, despising her for it.
2 September 2008
Adam Monroe. PG. Earth is not a dead planet.
I am here to live
while the soul permits,
and here to die,
when the hour arrives
- Miguel Hernandez, 'Sitting Upon the Dead'
man in a landscape
there were some that mistook him for one of the gods
He walked out of the forest toward the source of the noise, the arcane rumble that upset the stillness of the birds. He stopped before they could see him, cloaking his nakedness in the icy fronds. Two-legged silhouettes against the grey sky. The gas-fire stink of an engine.
His voice recovered, but other words were inadequate. Driftwood, signifying nothing. How to describe, communicate, the strange new world? It would have to be renamed: one beast, one bud, one follicle at a time. It was his due.
Adam, he fought to remember himself. A man.
It was his world; they would not claim it with their alien tongues.
others thought he might be Cylon
After observing for two more days, and noting that none grew sick and died, he wakened his companion. Her blonde locks had grown only a fraction in the intervening years (decades), were as dark and filthy as the rusty metal bar he pulled out of the base of her skull.
Shh, shh, he calmed her, stroking her wide-eyed, gasping face. Shh. This was not the first time. She did not need him to remind her, You're alive, still.
He had been practicing - breathing more often, more deeply than he needed to, forming the shapes again with his lips. Claire, he said.
To him, it meant You. It meant My only.
he was not, it was obvious, one of them
There is no one, he told the brown-haired woman, one more time. There's only us.
Resigned, he watched as she removed her - what was it? - spectacles with a trembling hand, and her gaze moved over Claire's hand-woven clothes, their long wild hair, the calloused but clear skin on both their young bodies. Envy and incomprehension and fear in her eyes; he watched, despising her for it.
2 September 2008