Their Song Is Ending
Characters: Richard Alpert, Adam Monroe, Jacob, and cameos by a few other Lostaways; Richard/Adam, Richard/Jacob
Rating: R
Words: 8800
Spoilers: For all of Lost; for Adam's entire storyline on Heroes
Summary: Adam and Jacob passive-aggressively fight over Richard... for a really long time. (aka, what's the point of being immortal if everyone keeps dying?)
A/N: This started out as a drabble for
hitlikehammers at the Five Acts Meme, but as you can see, spiralled into an out-of-control melodrama of ridiculousness. Gah. Originally inspired by the prompts "Richard/Jacob", "Adam/anyone" and a bunch of other theme prompts.
2008
“So, how’s this for a funny story?” Miles announces as he exits the bathroom.
“What now?” James asks.
Richard is too busy shaking and sweating for funny stories, so he continues staring straight ahead, knuckles white from gripping both of the armrests so tightly. Given their successful take-off despite impossible circumstances, he assumes Frank is a good pilot, but the closest Richard’s ever been to a plane before today was watching one fall from the sky. He’s so scared that he keeps almost praying, but always stops himself just in time.
More unsettling and personally disturbing is how reminiscent this final departure from the island is to his first arrival; if similar experiences betoken similar futures, then he knows he can’t possibly imagine what to expect.
Miles walks up the aisle until he’s standing beside Richard. He unclenches his hand and a long strip of tissue falls from his palm, right in front of Richard’s face. “Someone left you a note on the toilet paper. In what I think is Latin.”
“One last ‘fuck you’ from the black smoke, I guess?” James reasons, but Richard shakes his head. He knows this handwriting---large, precise, with S’s that look like F’s, the way people wrote them centuries ago. ‘You never know what might come back into fashion,’ had always been Jacob’s response to Richard’s gentle attempts to bring him up-to-date.
His first instinct is to rip it from Miles’s hand, but he restrains himself out of a need to preserve this last missive, the last chance for an explanation. “It’s from Jacob,” he whispers.
“Great.” James rolls his eyes. “What’s the cryptic bastard have to say for himself now?”
“You didn’t know him,” Richard tries to explain. The old masterful tone slips out before Richard can stop himself, and only after he’s said it and watched James’s head recoil in offense does he realize what he sounds like.
“From what I can tell, doesn’t seem like you did either,” James snits.
Ashamed, Richard replies, “I’m sorry. I… I didn’t mean it like that.”
Always getting down to business, Kate asks, “What does it say?”
Miles hands the strip of toilet paper over with a wry smile before taking his seat again.
Dearest Ricardo,
If my estimates are correct, you should be reading this as your long pause comes to an end.
You are angry. You should be furious. I never told you my days were numbered; I did not want you to count them. I never told you about Adam’s death; I did not want to lose you. I never made you a candidate; I wanted you to have the freedom I lacked.
In all my life, you are the only thing I ever wanted for myself. I was wrong to keep you.
Yours,
Jacob
Richard doesn’t know whether to fold or crumple or hang the thing up. Of course Jacob would leave his last words on something that will disintegrate after only a couple of readings. Richard has spent enough time with him to know that Jacob did it precisely to keep him from committing the letter to memory.
“So, what’s it say?” Kate repeats. Her voice shatters the glass bubble he’s been in for the past couple of minutes.
Hysteria bubbles to the surface, and Richard sees nothing but white. He giggles the despairing laugh that comes out when he feels wholly out of his element. These people can’t possibly understand. “Nothing.”
“All that writing to say nothing? Come on, man,” Miles reasons. “You’re not an Other anymore. No more secrets. What’s it say?”
Richard latches onto the only part that still matters; it’s the only thing that’s relevant to the real world, and that’s where Richard’s heading for good now. For almost a year, ever since he discovered that he could no longer locate the man, Jacob had refused to tell him where Adam had gone. And now, just when he least expects it, just when he’s finally come to grips with it… here is the answer to the mystery he’d guessed but never confirmed. Richard could scream. Jacob’s left him, and now Adam’s left him, too. There is literally nothing waiting for him. It’s what he deserves, though; it’s the punishment for having hidden in Jacob’s shadow for so long, for having denied life even though it always beckoned.
“I once had a… a friend,” he starts, tries to explain. Miles and James shoot one another a sarcastic look; Richard ignores it. “We came to the island together. He left a long time ago. He was like me, long before I was ever like… this.” The fact that he is no longer like that is too new; it’ll take some time for him to start describing himself differently. He isn’t even sure there’s a word for what he is now. He isn’t sure of anything anymore.
There’s silence in the plane. “You mean he didn’t age?” Miles asks.
Richard nods. “Yes. But he was something else, something not like Jacob and not like me. He’d been alive for centuries before I met him.” Richard pauses, remembers, breathes, lets go all over again. “It doesn’t matter anymore. He died last year. That’s what the note says.”
He’s so used to being the leader (leader of nothing, it turns out) that he isn’t accustomed to his words falling flat on uninvested ears. Awkwardness pervades the cabin.
James finally breaks the silence. “Being immortal ain’t it’s all cracked up to be if all y’all keep dying.”
“So it would seem.”
Richard can tell they’re all wishing there had been a pre-existing conversation to go back to.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Claire’s small voice says a minute later.
“Me, too.”******************************
1917
Adam can’t pinpoint exactly what sparked this decision, but lord knows he’s had long enough to make up his mind.
The easy answer is the fact that the monster has it in for him. Its attempts to kill him have become more and more creative over the years, and given that he has a feeling Richard’s the only one with special protection, it’s only a matter of time before it succeeds. Another easy answer is boredom; his destiny is too great to be limited to one place, no matter how special that place is. Nothing happens here, and the longer he stays, the harder it becomes to leave; if there’s one thing Adam’s learned over the years, it’s that complacency is as bad as death.
There are harder answers, though, ones that Adam would prefer not to face, because facing them would mean accepting his own shortcomings.
There’s the way Richard has taken to spending one night in three in the statue instead of in the shelter they share. Adam hasn’t brought up the subject; what is there to say? Another is the way Jacob and Richard have started having their own private conversations whenever Adam’s gone off to pick the day’s fruit; he knows all about the job Richard’s been given, but given that they remain the only people on the island, it doesn’t seem to have started yet, so he can’t imagine what there is to discuss. Almost as bad is the way Jacob squints and looks through him, as though Adam isn’t even there. This isn’t new; Jacob’s been doing it since day one. It doesn’t make it any less insufferable, though.
Being on the losing end of one love triangle is more than enough for one lifetime, and it’s obvious he’s headed down that path again. However, it isn’t losing if you forfeit, so that’s what he intends to do.
He knocks on the stone wall. A faint, “Come in!” gives him permission to push it open. The place looks as it always has since the day he got here. Jacob’s at his loom, working on that interminable weaving of his. For the millionth time, Adam stifles the petty desire to rip it apart.
It’s taken this long, but Adam’s finally accepted the fact that Jacob’s the first being he’s ever met who is somehow greater than he is. He hates that Jacob makes him feel so small, and makes him react accordingly.
Yet another reason why he should go.
Jacob turns around and puts down the spindle. “So, you’re leaving us, are you?”
“How did you guess?”
“Something about your gait when you walked in here was different.”
Adam has always considered himself a master when it comes to reading body language, but here, as in bloody everything, it seems as though Jacob has him beat.
“So, how do I do it?” he fumes. He refuses to word it as, ‘Am I allowed to leave?’ He refuses to give Jacob yet another victory.
Jacob rustles through a pile of belongings in the corner and then beckons Adam to follow him outside. They stand together at the edge of the shore. “Do you know the fishing boat that’s moored near the entrance to the caves?”
Adam nods. He and Richard have used it countless times to get to far-flung points on the island.
Jacob turns the compass until it gets to 325. Then he shades his eyes with one hand and points with the other in line with the compass. “Follow this bearing. Follow it all the way out. In a couple of days, you should hit inhabited land. From there, you can make your way.”
“What happens if I stray?”
Jacob studies him. “I don’t know. You’re not like most people. Maybe nothing.”
Adam will follow it, though. He may be immortal, but he isn’t reckless.
“So, I guess this is it,” he observes. It’s strange to end it like this. Fifty years and nothing to say.
“Guess so.” The bastard doesn’t even pretend to care. “Have you told Richard?” Jacob asks.
“Not yet.”
“I see.”
Adam hopes he doesn’t. Working out the details of this part took longer than his actual decision to leave. If he’d gone to Richard first, there’s the chance (albeit a very small one) that Richard would say exactly what Adam wants to hear. But it was most important to confirm in advance that it’s even possible to leave; the last thing he wants to do incur drama with Richard only to find out leaving isn’t an option. He can’t---won’t---look small and weak in front of Richard. With Jacob it doesn’t matter; it’s already a lost cause.
“So… you win.” It’s bitter, but it slips out before Adam can repress it.
Jacob chuckles. “If you say so.”
Sometimes Adam wonders if there’s anything in the world that would produce a straight answer from the man. He’s glad he’ll no longer have to care.
They shake hands.
“I’m not your enemy, you know,” Jacob says.
Maybe he doesn’t mean to come across as condescending, but it certainly always sounds that way. It doesn’t matter anymore.
“If you say so.”
As he walks down the beach he’s traversed so many times now, Adam wonders how he’s going to do it. He could go get the boat and ‘let’ Richard ‘catch’ him making preparations. He could not say anything at all and then create a dramatic climax where Richard only finds out when Adam's seconds from pushing off.
But both of those ways would only show him up as the smaller man, and the reason Adam’s leaving is because he’s tired of being shown up.
Richard’s off getting water for the three of them like he does every day. Over the years, they’ve developed a system, not just for survival, but for alone time. Adam walks to the spot where the make-shift path from the caves opens up onto the beach. Within minutes, Richard emerges from the jungle. His whole face transforms from expressionless slate to pure joy. It’s been doing that every single day, in exactly the same way, for fifty years.
Adam wishes it were enough.
“Let me help you,” he says, and Richard passes him one of the barrels.
Together they walk to their tent, just down the beach from the statue. They’ve fortified it over the years, bit by bit until it’s less of a tent and more of a shanty. A home. This is the longest Adam’s ever spent living in one place, and Richard is the only roommate he’s ever had. Well, more than a roommate…
This place has made him soft. The list of reasons why he leaving is the right decision keeps getting longer.
“Where were you this morning?” Richard asks as he sets down their daily ration of water; the other is for Jacob. “I missed you.”
“I had to speak with Jacob.”
“What about?” Richard straightens himself up. Invoking Jacob’s name has always made him serious. Adam refrains from rolling his eyes.
“I’m leaving.”
Richard’s eyes go wide and he looks like a puppy who’s been punched in the face, and yet again, Adam wishes it were enough.
It isn’t.
******************************
1956
Richard’s been feeling exhausted since before the entrées came.
His suit has the uncomfortable stiffness of new clothes. Adam always seems to have something on hand for him, even though Richard never announces his visits and even though they aren’t the same size. His method of travel takes no time, but still leaves him jet-lagged; he’s pretty sure it’s long past his bedtime.
There are so many new faces and so much bustle. Between the doorman at Adam’s hotel and the driver of Adam’s car and the people who keep coming to their table (self-important men with briefcases and stylish women with expectant smiles), he’s gotten up and introduced himself so many times that he’s barely had a chance to talk to the person he’s here to see. He barely has energy left to think. He’s experienced more in the past two hours than in the past two years.
The problem is that he doesn’t come often enough and doesn’t stay for long enough to ever get into a groove. Each visit is a whirlwind from which it takes months to recover.
Adam doesn’t just provide taste of life; he provides various samples. It’s part of his rule; never stay for more than 10 years, or people will start to wonder. It’s an obvious problem accompanying their condition, but one that Richard doesn’t have to worry about. The island never changes and neither does he; Richard is practically part of the scenery.
The role Adam plays remains constant as constant as his face, even as the cities, industries, and hairstyles shift. He’s the power behind the throne, and the mover who agitates the shakers. According to him, that this is the entire point of having this gift.
Richard doesn’t have the heart to tell Adam that this isn’t the kind of life he would ever choose for himself if he lived out here in the world (he also doesn’t have the courage to find out if he’s wrong). None of the lives he’s visited over the past fifty years are. He comes here for Adam; everything else is plain terrifying.
So he bides his time, grins and bears it, and counts the minutes until they tip the driver and get in the elevator. They’re finally alone, and only now will the real Adam come out---the one who’s still in there even if he doesn’t want to admit it, the one underneath the anger and deception and manipulations and false smiles. The one who used to swim with Richard in the lagoons and get equally as wide-eyed at every new ancient relic they discovered. That’s the Adam Richard keeps coming to visit. Richard’s life has felt like a see-saw ever since that awful day when he’d watched the man sail away---pushing and pulling between the island and the world. If only Adam hadn’t left, everything would be so easy… no confusion, no ache, no questions…
“You were fantastic. You charmed them all,” Adam says as they enter his suite. “You always do, you know.”
These rooms are even more impersonal than the apartment Richard visited a few years ago. Everything inside oozes expense, but Richard still misses the little shanty on the beach they used to call home. A storm blew it over soon after Richard moved into the statue, which happened soon after Adam left. “The sea has a way of washing away what is no longer needed,” Jacob had said.
Something in Richard had died that day, but Jacob had done his usual excellent job of distracting him.
Jacob. That reminds him... “I have some business to go over with you before I forget. That’s what I came for.”
“Of course it is,” Adam says, kicking off his shoes. There’s a hint of bitterness in his voice that Richard always tries to ignore. He knows causes it, but he also know he isn’t capable of doing what’s necessary to make it stop.
He reaches for the briefcase he brought as his luggage, and takes out some papers. “Just sign here, and here,” he points.
“What is it?”
“Another front company. I thought it would be good to have someone else’s name on the papers since I’m rarely here. Consider it jointly ours.”
Adam scans the documents. “Mittelos Bioscience?”
Richard shrugs. “I came up with the name last week. Does it sound convincing?”
Adam signs. “It’s perfect. You would do so much better here than you realize. Together, we could take over the world, and then hold it forever.”
Here they are again. This happens every time. Adam won’t just let him visit; he always tries to make him stay. Richard wishes he would stop; this is hard enough as it is.
He never talks about these visits, but he assumes Jacob knows. It’s a weakness he consistently fails to overcome, but he hopes Jacob understands.
Adam’s a tether to a life Richard gave up the chance to ever have, and no matter how much time passes or how deeply he loves Jacob, he can’t quite manage to shake this. Adam was human in a place where there were only two of them and a deity. Adam knew what it was like to come to terms with immortality when it was still new to Richard. Adam knew---still knows---how to make him laugh and think and feel breathlessly alive in a way that, no matter how safe and cared for he is on the island, Jacob never fully makes him feel.
It’s times like now, when Adam’s easing the uncomfortable jacket off, that he wonders what his life would have been like if he’d left with Adam so long ago.
“How long are you here for this time?” Adam asks.
Richard lets himself be dragged into the bedroom. “I think I can stay for a few days.”
He hopes Jacob can forgive him.
******************************
1977
These insufferable children. Adam doesn’t know why he puts up with them or why he’s still doing this. Things were better when he was on his own. The squabbling between Kaito and Linderman, the way Maury leers at Victoria. The insufferable love… whatever shape you want to call it… between all of them is going to drive him crazy; he’s glad he isn’t involved in this one.
With every passing day, his irritation at the whole of humanity grows.
Today’s been yet another exhausting day in a string of exhausting years. They’ve made a breakthrough with the virus. Victoria has isolated the gene causing the illness and linked it to the removal of powers, but it’s still lethal. If only Adam could figure out what to do with it.
He flips on the light switch almost before he’s entered his apartment; he’s never liked darkness.
In less than a second, he’s pinned up against the wall.
“What the…” There isn’t time to get the words out before Richard’s mouth stumbles against his; the taste of whiskey rubs along Adam’s tongue.
It’s ironic, how for such a straight-laced, orderly, and predictable type, Richard’s intermittent visits are the only consistently surprising things in Adam’s life. This one is even more so than usual. The serenity Richard has always tried so hard to copy from Jacob is nowhere in sight; he’s free of his shackles right now, wild and real and unbridled in a way Adam’s never seen before. It’s what he always wanted---the knowledge that he’s won, that he is superior to Jacob in this way, even if it’s the only one. However, if there is to be only one way, Adam would prefer it to be this one.
He tries to shove those feelings away, though. They’re nothing but a weakness, a pathetic tie to maudlin, quotidian humanity that he’s always striven to overcome.
“What is going on?” he asks.
“I’ve been waiting for hours,” Richard pants, frantically pulling Adam’s clothes off, and shoving him into the living room and onto the couch.
Adam’s been waiting for years (it’s been almost two years since Richard’s last---always unannounced---visit), but it doesn’t seem like quite the moment to point that out. He simply lets Richard manhandle him; gives him whatever it is he so obviously needs right now. Nastily, he wonders why the great, the wonderful, the sodding Jacob hasn’t been taking care of this.
Not that Adam’s complaining. About being called upon to satisfy Richard’s needs, at least. He’ll always complain about Jacob.
Richard’s relationship with Jacob, omnipresent though it’s always been, isn’t something Adam’s ever enjoyed thinking about, but he’s always assumed it’s different from this. Richard’s subservient and worshipful attitude towards his deity gives more than enough reason to believe that Richard would never let himself dominate the way he does here. He’s sure that Richard would never allow himself to take from Jacob the way he does from Adam, even if Jacob offered (and Adam’s sure that Jacob’s offered---the extent of his slow-burning infatuation had always been disgustingly obvious to everyone except the innocently humble Richard). It’s why Adam feels power in giving everything to Richard, in focusing on his pleasure in a way he never does with anyone else. Only with Richard does he feel like giving equates conquest, not only over the man on top of him, but the being back on the island.
It’s rough today, where Richard usually prefers something careful. It’s desperate where Richard is usually measured. Adam feels like for the first time since that day they met on the beach, he’s seeing the real man, the human one that existed before and still exists behind the passive oracle he’s gotten so good at projecting.
Adam can’t say he’s completely relieved to discover that man still exists, because if the old Richard is still in there somewhere, what’s to say the old Kensei, the peasant who, on a lark, bought passage on a ship to Japan so long ago, isn’t still in there somewhere? Adam wants to think he’s scratched him out of existence.
Richard finally rolls off him, or as much as he can with both of them still on the couch.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” Adam quips. Richard’s response is a slightly hysterical laugh.
“I needed that,” he says. Adam hears (hopes he hears) the ‘you’ underlying the ‘that’. Richard’s eyes are fluttering and it’s only a matter of minutes before he’s snoring lightly into Adam’s ribcage.
Adam disentangles their limbs. There’s no point in pretending that this is more than a passing visit. This is the system they have, and he’s has finally decided it’s for the best. He vowed long before he ever met Richard never to get attached to anyone ever again; it’s past time that he remembered to stick to this promise. He pours himself a drink and lights a cigarette.
Soon, Richard begins to squirm. Sitting up slowly, he swings his feet to the floor and looks up, his eyes wild with too much stress and too little sleep. Something is wrong. It’s clear that he’s on the verge of cracking up; Richard has never dealt well with shock and change. He’s become too accustomed to his quiet existence on the island; part of why Adam had left was because he’d been afraid of becoming exactly this.
Much as they’ve just enjoyed himself, Adam knows nothing fundamental has changed. This entire tryst was born out of fear. He just doesn’t know yet what sparked it. He doesn’t know why he lets this continue, why these visits remain the only things that mark the passage of time for him. Richard’s everything he should despise. He’s everything Adam usually despises. Richard’s afraid of his own power, afraid of life, afraid of the world.
“How long was I asleep for?”
“Just a few minutes.”
Richard gets up and strolls over to where Adam’s standing. “I didn’t say hello properly.”
“Oh, I think you most definitely did.”
But Adam’s still had a bad day, and he’s still been hanging around a bunch of children who are thankfully too stupid to realize they’re more powerful than he is. He’s tired of being one-upped. So, yes, he’s still in a bad mood, and the bad mood is working itself up to resent the fact that Richard’s using him, and that even after leaving, Adam's pointless 50-year pause on the island continues to affect him in this way. He snaps, “So, what brings you this time?”
Richard always has some semi-convincing excuse for needing to travel. Adam assumes it’s what he uses to justify these visits to his master.
“I need more of that radiation sickness medicine you got for me before.”
“Has someone dug up your bomb?” Adam’s never been able to reconcile the insanity that seems to have taken over the island ever since his departure; during the entire time he was there, the most exciting thing to happen was a fishing boat of dead bodies washing ashore. But now there are hydrogen bombs and time travelers and scientific research groups. He’s never been able to figure out why Jacob allows it.
“Someone’s detonated it.”
“How much damage was sustained?” The fact that Richard’s here, looking for medicine that’s obviously not for him, is enough to confirm that whatever’s happened, it wasn’t catastrophic.
“It happened underground, at one of the island’s special places. Only the people involved died. But now… There seem to be side effects.”
“Such as?”
“My people are getting sick. Mild symptoms, but they’re similar to what happened 20 years ago, when the bomb first came. But what worries me is our leader. I dropped her at a hospital before coming to see you. She was three months pregnant before the incident. She’s getting sick now, just like one of our other women who was pregnant. Jacob says that from now on, all pregnant women on the island will die.”
“Well, that’s arbitrary.” Adam pours himself another drink. He doesn’t care about Richard’s job. He doesn’t care about the island’s little troupe of natives. He has a feeling Jacob only brought them there to try to replace Adam himself, to give Richard a reason to visit less often.
He can feel anger brewing. Apparently the old wounds still rankle, after all.
Richard gives him a dirty look; his devotion to Jacob has made him unreasonably sensitive about the place. “It’s the way things work.”
“Who detonated the bomb?”
“More people from the future. Friends of the ones I told you about a couple of years ago.”
Adam shakes his head. “This is becoming a bloody epidemic.”
“Something about that pocket of electromagnetism being the reason their plane crashes on the island in the future,” Richard mumbles, as if still trying to clarify for himself, let alone for Adam. “Something about using the bomb to make it so that they never come to the island. They said they wanted to reset everything, even at the cost to their own lives. It didn’t make any sense.”
Adam freezes. It may not make sense to Richard, but makes sense to him. It’s brilliant. This is the plan he’s been searching for all this time. This is the plan that will bring it all together and give all his aimless work a purpose. A reset. A reset of everything.
“Did it work?” He’s careful, excited.
“I don't know. I suppose if a plane never crashes, it will have worked. I wasn’t given a date to wait for. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that my people are dying. Can you help?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Adam mutters, but his mind is elsewhere. He’s busy extrapolating. The virus is the perfect weapon. He can wipe it all away and set himself up as the leader. Jacob had always said there was the island and there was the outside world; he’d always said it as though the two were of equal importance. If Adam can start everything over, he’ll be god of the outside world. They’ll be on equal footing. This passive-aggressive competition will finally be at an end, and Adam will have won.
“What are you thinking?” Richard asks. They know one another too well. You don’t spend a mortal’s lifetime with someone without learning how to read his mind.
“I’m thinking there’s something in your time travelers’ line of thinking.”
Richard gets up and walks towards him. Pulling his hand downwards, he pleads, “Don’t.”
Adam shakes Richard off. “What do you care? You’re Jacob’s man. I’m sure no matter what I do, your precious island won’t be affected.”
He knows Richard hears him and knows he understands, and yet the response is still, “What if it didn’t work for them? What if it can’t for you?”
If there’s anything that would have turned this plan from an idea into a passion, it’s Richard’s inability to give in, even now. So, Adam shrugs. “Then it won’t work. But at least I’ll have tried.”
Richard backs up. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Probably. But admit it; you enjoyed it.” Adam makes up the distance Richard’s step back has created. He’s in his face, practically feeling his eyelashes brushing against his own. He’s giving Richard one last chance. He needs him to take it. For extra emphasis, he adds, “You feel alive with me in a way you never do with him.”
“I did. I do.” It’s honest, and it’s the best Adam’s going to get right now. However, in winning this small victory, he’s pushed Richard too far. The expressionless mask falls back into place as Richard announces, “I’m going to go now. Send the medicine to the usual drop-off spot. I’ll see you… whenever I see you.”
As Richard silently puts his clothes back on, Adam knows he should think of some way to make him stay, but his blood is hot and his brain is whirring with plans. And anyway, until he’s proven himself, he doubts anything will change.
Richard doesn’t shut the door behind him as he goes.
******************************
2001
It’s a day’s walk to the lighthouse, from any point of origin. Richard knows by now that it isn’t anywhere in particular; in order to find it, one has to know where he’s going and why. Jacob made it that way, but seems like an unnecessary rule, given that they’re the only two people allowed in here. They’re the only two people the door will open for. The day Jacob granted him access, almost a century ago, was a day that meant something.
There aren’t many of those, the little voice in the back of his head, increasingly constant, reminds him.
He climbs the stairs with a weary tread; by now, his feet have memorized each step’s particular height. The reason for today’s journey is no different from the reason for any of his journeys here over the past almost 25 years. The only thing that changes, intensifies, is how pathetic it is, how irrationally needy. As the years go by, Richard finds that he has fewer and fewer regrets; that last fight with Adam is now the one that haunts him the most.
The mirrors slide easily. They don’t stick like they used to; Richard comes here too often. He moves it past the last number. Most of the base is for Jacob, most likely for some great purpose. Richard’s been given the small unmarked area beyond. There’s no need to write names down like Jacob does, because ever since Locke was added to the official register, Richard’s only ever wanted to look for one person.
The vision shimmers into place, and there it is, the same picture he’s been coming to visit for so long. Adam, clad all in grey, comfortable and cotton, sits on the edge of his grey cot in his grey room. He stares off into space, not even pretending to read the book that’s beside him.
If Adam was Richard’s constant before, the concept has taken on epic, not to mention depressing, proportions. He’s literally a still-life now. Where before his face never changed despite the morphing world around him, now not even the world changes around Adam.
The voice in his head---Richard wishes it would hush, stop disturbing his complacency---nags, Are your lots really so different? Were they ever?
Part of it is true. He doesn’t often leave the island these days; Widmore had always been keen to take care of mainland business on his own; Ben doesn’t want to make the same mistakes as his predecessor, so he stays and Tom has stepped up to take that role. Truth be told, Richard’s lost interest in traveling.
He also doesn’t have the time. Recently (if 25 years can be described as ‘recently’), things started to shake and stagger beyond his predictable ken. It’s been an ongoing headache of unlikely events, one that Richard doesn’t feel equipped to medicate, and which Jacob’s petting soothes but doesn’t cure.
This is why coming to see Adam is so reassuring, so grounding, now more than ever, no matter how painful it is. The book by his side is the only thing in the picture that ever changes. Well, that and the blonde Richard’s happened to see a few times. She’s grown over the years, from a little girl to a silly teenager to…
Richard had looked away that day. He still wishes he hadn’t had to see that. He didn’t come back to the lighthouse for almost a year afterwards.
What makes it worse is that there’s nothing he can do. Jacob’s made it very clear that there’s island business and there’s real-world business; Richard’s job is solely to focus on the former, and that means not using the island’s special properties to influence the latter.
Richard had tried to argue, back when Adam had first been locked up, that this was island business, that Adam was one of their own, but Jacob had said no. “Adam left. He belongs to the outside world now,” he’d said, looking off into the jungle, not making eye contact, his hand tight and possessive on Richard’s shoulder.
The mirrors are still mirrors, no matter what magical property allows these images to be projected. It’s neither healthy nor rational, but Richard shifts his head and contorts his body so that he can see himself in the mirror, positioning his reflection beside his erstwhile companion’s so he can simultaneously pretend they’re together in the underground prison and together in the tall lighthouse. He knows by now not to touch the glass---touching makes the image disappear; touching implies too much investment in things that are fleeting. Like Jacob, the power is too impersonal, too long-seeing, to allow that.
But perhaps there are exceptions, Richard always hopes. Because is not Richard Jacob’s great exception? Did not Jacob make it so that Richard would no longer be fleeting?
Adam continues to stare off into space, and Richard can only guess what’s going through his head. Probably the same things that used to go through his head back when they were together on the island, so long ago, when Adam’s life was as still as it is now, when they were in this together.
“He’s plotting his escape,” a quiet voice intones behind him. “He’s plotting revenge.”
Richard spins around, embarrassed to have been caught. He’s developed ears like a cat over the years. Jacob’s now the only one who can still sneak up on him unawares.
“Do you think he’ll succeed?” Richard asks. His unvoiced question, his desperate silent plea is, ‘Should I go help him?’
Jacob knows him well enough to answer both questions with one word. “No.” And then: “Not this time.”
But Richard doesn’t know which question that answers, and therefore can’t derive hope from it. It would be silly hope anyway, because while Jacob is a lot of things, he isn’t telepathic. Or at least Richard hopes.
There’s nothing more to say, and there’s definitely nothing new to see. Plus, Jacob’s probably here for his own reasons, so Richard politely turns the wheel back to the starting point. The clear blue ocean behind him is reflected in the mirror as though nothing at all is strange about the glass.
He clears his throat and says, “Ben wants me to go to Miami next week. There’s a fertility doctor he thinks could help us.”
“What do you think?”
Richard pauses. Does it matter? Of course it does, he tells the frustrated part of himself; Jacob appreciates his help, respects his opinions, returns his love. “This island is radioactive. Ben doesn’t, but you and I both know this problem is beyond doctors, no matter how brilliant they are. How could this woman possibly help?”
“You’re right. She can’t.”
Richard sighs with relief. He was right; Jacob agrees with him. He secretly lords it over the errant traitor in his subconscious. But only for a minute because…
“Bring her anyway,” Jacob says.
“Why?”
“It’s all part of the story.”
Jacob’s taken to saying this ever since the bomb and the time travelers. Richard has stopped trying to understand what it means.
However, this time he’s saying it with Adam in sight, and it’s the closest to the proverbial straw Richard’s ever come. “And when does this story end?” he (almost) snaps, and immediately wishes he could take it back.
The punishment for his momentary lack of faith is Jacob’s hauntingly sad expression. “Soon.”
Jacob’s story can never end; that would be against everything Richard has come to believe in this world. So that can’t be what he means. Richard thinks of himself, but Jacob has promised to care for him always, so it can’t be him either. He looks into the mirror at Adam.
“For him?” he blurts out, only because he knows he won’t get an answer. Besides the fact that Jacob’s policy is never to tell other people’s stories, this is the only one Richard is certain he doesn’t want to hear.
But Jacob surprises him.
“It ends for Adam in a few years. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you should do.” He looks at Richard pointedly, and if ever there was a test of his devotion, it’s this.
“Why?”
“Why does it have to end?” Jacob shrugs. “Because everything does.”
Richard shakes his head. “No. Why are you telling me this? Why are you---” He wants to say ‘hurting me’, but thinks better of it. What he’s doing here… it’s a more elevated and unique version of the holy brotherhood: renounce your old-world ties, relinquish your possessions, give yourself (soul and body) to your god. This is a test. It’s a hard test, but he intends to pass, so he lets it drop.
But of course, this… this is the question Jacob surprisingly decides to answer. “You knowing… that, too, is part of the story.”
“Is that why you won’t let me save him?”
Jacob nods.
It’s so uncharacteristically cold that Richard can only assume this is his punishment for having been so attached all these years. He strives to correct his fault. “I am yours,” he reminds Jacob, and steps forward to close the gap between them.
The words are true, but his eyes still drift towards the mirror just as his body drifted to the mainland so often during the first three-quarters of the 20th century. No matter how strongly he feels his duty, there’s always been this pull to life that he’s tried to quash in the deep troth of his need for Jacob.
Jacob wraps his arms around him and breathes hot and strangely sad against the skin on the back of his neck. “Yo sé. Lo siento.”
In his grasp, Richard shivers. It’s the first time Jacob’s ever spoken to him in his own tongue.
He only wishes he had any idea what Jacob might have to be sorry for.
“Come,” Jacob says, pulling him gently towards the stairs, in the low and intoxicating way that Richard can never refuse. “Come home with me.”
“Weren’t you going to look for someone?” Richard asks as they begin their descent.
“I found him.”
******************************
2007
Adam gasps.
He’s died more times than he can count. But just as Arthur stealing his power felt different---a new definition of permanence---so, too, does this reanimation feel strange. It’s as if he’s being pieced together ---cellular regeneration at an atomic level. This is pain like he’s never felt.
Not all of him works immediately. The reconstituting sensation starts at head, as it always does, but he can’t open his eyes or move or even properly think until it’s past his shoulders. With difficulty, he lifts his head and opens his eyes. What he sees is enough to make him shut them again: his legs are ashes, somehow swirling about and taking on color and form.
“This had to happen to you. Forgiveness. Fear. Failure. I’m sorry if it hurts.”
It’s been almost a century and it doesn’t match the surroundings at all, but Adam would recognize that soft voice in even in a din, even a thousand years from now, even in space. He’d recognize that cryptic bullshit. He cracks one eye open.
Jacob belongs between a fire and a loom, between the ocean and the jungle. He doesn’t belong here in New Jersey, in Pinehurst’s offices, in the majestic sick-room where Arthur Petrelli killed Adam and left his ashes on the floor as though his remains were little more than everyday dust.
“You have to keep your voice down,” Jacob whispers. “They’re still in the next room. But if you crawl out the window and never look back, no one will ever know.”
Adam nods. It’s an easy promise to make. He’s done with all this anyway; he’d been done with it ever since Hiro dug him out of the grave and offered the olive branch. And anyway, something more worrying is now gripping him with fear. There’s the island, and there’s the world; Richard is the only one who crosses the chasm. That had been the official pretense for why Jacob had immortalized Richard, or at least so Adam has always thought. If Jacob is here, then…
“What’s happened?” For the first time ever, his first thought is not for himself.
“You died. For real this time.” Jacob has always had a knack for answering the question one hasn’t yet asked. Adam doesn’t know how Richard dealt with it all these years---patience of a saint, that one.
“Obviously not,” he scoffs. But the resigned smile playing across Jacob’s lips more than gives away the truth: the pain in his head, the heaviness in his limbs, and the sluggishness in his blood all point to one thing. Adam hasn’t felt like this in over 300 years, since before a small, bespectacled man disrupted his life. A cold dread spreads over him.
“No. Fix it. Please.” He can’t remember the last time he begged for anything, but he’s begging now. He’s begging the person whose superiority has been a thorn in his side. Adam feels as though he’s officially lost everything now.
“I can’t give back what someone else took from you.”
“Rubbish. You did it with Richard. Help me like you helped him.”
Jacob shakes his head no. “I never helped Richard. I only helped myself.”
Adam can guess what Jacob’s talking about, but he no longer cares about any of that. The old rivalries and petty jealousies are now utterly irrelevant. He’s going to die, really die, and Richard…
“Why didn’t you come before? Why didn’t either of you help me?”
“I told him not to. But now you can. Will you help me, Adam? Will you help Richard?”
Jacob’s always been big on giving people choices that aren't actually choices. Adam knows he can refuse, but he won’t. Like Adam, Jacob never begs, but he’s begging now. The words haven’t been uttered, but Adam knows Jacob is finally letting Richard go.
Now that they’re no longer the same, Adam realizes that maybe he was never that different from Richard, after all; no matter how far he’s run, he can’t resist Jacob’s requests either. He’s spent so many years simmering with anger at both of them, for leaving him to rot, for cutting him out of their little club of two, but… He’s going to die. The word reverberates over and over in his head. Everything’s changed now.
It turns out this is the reset he’s been looking for.
“Just tell me what I need to do.”
******************************
2008
Frank’s yelling incoherently in the cockpit. “Hey, people! You’re gonna want to hear this.”
James and Miles and Kate all unstrap themselves and go running, but Claire catches Richard’s eye. Neither of them feels secure enough to walk around. Richard’s ready to sit still, tell himself he’s giving her moral support when the truth is that he’s too scared to get up.
“That means you, too, Alpert!”
Richard’s knees shake as he stumbles down the aisle. Claire follows him timidly.
Everyone’s huddled behind Frank’s seat. “I was just fooling around to see what worked in this thing when the radio kicked in. This started up a couple of minutes ago. It’s on some sort of loop.” He turns the volume dial up so everyone can hear.
Richard has to hold onto the wall in order to keep from falling down, but this time his dizziness is not from nerves. It’s crackly and far-away, but the voice is unmistakable. “Hello, Ajira 316. Don’t worry. This is not any registered authority. This is a special frequency that only you can hear. If you are out there, follow a bearing of 209 to get to the island of Oeno and land where you see the signal fire. You’ll be safe.”
“Like hell we will,” James laughs. “How stupid do these people think we are?”
“That was pretty much my line of thinking,” Frank agrees, “but I thought you all ought to hear it, too.”
Richard, not quite recovered yet, clears his throat. “Do it. Do what he says.”
They all turn to stare at him. “What?” Kate asks, her face screwed up into a picture of disgust.
Miles is the only one who doesn’t immediately jump down his throat. He’s the only one who’s gotten to know Richard enough to give him a real chance. “Why?”
He doesn’t know how it’s happening or what’s going on but… “I know this voice. It’s okay.”
“More of your people?”
“Not the ones you know. Someone else.”
“What’s the vote?” Frank asks. “I only have so much gas in the tank. No time for dilly-dallying. And this bus only has one stop in her.”
“Do you trust them?” Kate asks.
Richard can’t be sure. One the one hand, he can’t imagine how it can be true. Adam is dead; Jacob said so. On the other hand, if it somehow is him, he can only imagine how angry the man must be.
Either way, he has to see for himself.
“Yes.” He isn’t lying.
Within the hour, Frank announces that he’s spied land.
“Miles, where’re the guns you all had with you? I ain’t going out there unarmed.”
Miles gets up and reaches for the overhead compartment. “In here.”
“If the people waiting for us mean us harm, guns won’t stop them. Trust me.”
The rest of them look at one another with concern. Too late, Richard reads the fear he’s just accidentally given them.
“It isn’t another monster. Don’t worry.”
“I think worrying’s been hard-wired into me at this point,” Miles grouses.
Frank yells that he can see some sort of tent and something huge and grey covering a large portion of the beach. As promised, a large signal fire burns a column of smoke into the air. Other than that, the island is completely uninhabited and undeveloped.
Richard’s the first to the exit. “I’ll go first.”
Miles tries to stop him. “It isn’t any safer for you. You’re just like one of us now.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He pushes the door open and surveys the island. Someone emerges from the tent under the trees.
Richard’s never noticed until just now how similar they look---both blonde and serene. But this isn’t Jacob.
“It took you long enough,” Adam snaps, but he’s smiling behind his feigned irritation.
“We had to wait for some late arrivals,” he says, pointing at Claire and Kate, who are now hesitantly disembarking.
They dispel with the small-talk after that and Adam pulls Richard into a hug, They’re still drinking one another in when Richard hears Frank clearing his throat behind him.
Taking Adam’s hand, he says, “This is Adam. The friend I was telling you about.”
“I thought you said he died?” Kate asks.
Adam nods his head. “I did.” Then turning to Richard, he whispers, “I will.”
Richard can feel a scar along one of Adam’s fingers that was never there before.
Finally, he understands Jacob’s note.
“Me, too.”
“Hate to spoil this beautiful reunion and all, Dicky, but can we take a time out to get on the same page?” James asks. “What’s going on? Is this a rescue?”
Adam snaps to attention, suddenly business-like. “Indeed it is. I have 280 bodies in that refrigerator over there.” He points at the large grey box down the beach. “All I have to do is call my men and they’ll put them in the plane before sinking it. You all get to start over.”
“How…?” Richard tries to ask.
Adam understands, though. With a wry smile he answers, “Mittelos Bioscience has been having a banner year.”
******************************
1867
It’s taken almost two days, but Adam finally stumbles out of the brush and onto the beach. As the crow flies, it’s less than a day’s walk, but he’s been playing it safe. He’d ducked and hidden at every noise in the jungle.
He’s seen a lot of things in his time, but whatever lives on this island almost has him scared for the first time in centuries. He doesn’t know what this place is, but it’s nowhere he’s ever been before. He’s never been anywhere where black smoke can rampage through a ship and tear people limb from limb and then materialize into human form.
This doesn’t seem like someone with a power. This is just a monster.
It’s a good thing he’s become an expert at playing possum. Pretending the captain’s sword had run him through had been easy; the hard part was cracking an eye open to watch the aftermath without letting that thing realize there was someone left to kill.
The sudden sunshine almost blinds him, so he can’t quite make out where the voices are coming from.
“Hola!”
Adam squints and looks up. There’s a gigantic ruin down way the beach from where he’s standing. Near it are two figures sitting on a log---the first living people he’s seen on this island.
His shoes fill with sand as he staggers down to meet them.
There’s something off about the blond man. He’s pretty much the opposite of the dark-haired monster, and also pretty much the doppelganger of Adam himself. He looks surprised and somewhat non-plussed to see Adam, who is interrupting what looks like a first meeting between these two.
“I didn’t realize there were any other survivors,” the blonde says blandly.
“I’m hard to kill.”
It’s the vaguely familiar dark-haired one who stands up to greet him properly. “I know your face,” he says in Spanish. “You were on the ship. You were the doctor.”
It clicks then. He does remember seeing this man among the slaves in the hold. “That I was,” Adam replies in Spanish. “I’m Adam.” It isn’t a name he’s used since before he went to Japan, but it feels right, now and in this place.
The man gives him a blinding smile of joy and relief. “Ricardo.”
“It’s nice to see you again.”
Rating: R
Words: 8800
Spoilers: For all of Lost; for Adam's entire storyline on Heroes
Summary: Adam and Jacob passive-aggressively fight over Richard... for a really long time. (aka, what's the point of being immortal if everyone keeps dying?)
A/N: This started out as a drabble for
hitlikehammers at the Five Acts Meme, but as you can see, spiralled into an out-of-control melodrama of ridiculousness. Gah. Originally inspired by the prompts "Richard/Jacob", "Adam/anyone" and a bunch of other theme prompts.2008
“So, how’s this for a funny story?” Miles announces as he exits the bathroom.
“What now?” James asks.
Richard is too busy shaking and sweating for funny stories, so he continues staring straight ahead, knuckles white from gripping both of the armrests so tightly. Given their successful take-off despite impossible circumstances, he assumes Frank is a good pilot, but the closest Richard’s ever been to a plane before today was watching one fall from the sky. He’s so scared that he keeps almost praying, but always stops himself just in time.
More unsettling and personally disturbing is how reminiscent this final departure from the island is to his first arrival; if similar experiences betoken similar futures, then he knows he can’t possibly imagine what to expect.
Miles walks up the aisle until he’s standing beside Richard. He unclenches his hand and a long strip of tissue falls from his palm, right in front of Richard’s face. “Someone left you a note on the toilet paper. In what I think is Latin.”
“One last ‘fuck you’ from the black smoke, I guess?” James reasons, but Richard shakes his head. He knows this handwriting---large, precise, with S’s that look like F’s, the way people wrote them centuries ago. ‘You never know what might come back into fashion,’ had always been Jacob’s response to Richard’s gentle attempts to bring him up-to-date.
His first instinct is to rip it from Miles’s hand, but he restrains himself out of a need to preserve this last missive, the last chance for an explanation. “It’s from Jacob,” he whispers.
“Great.” James rolls his eyes. “What’s the cryptic bastard have to say for himself now?”
“You didn’t know him,” Richard tries to explain. The old masterful tone slips out before Richard can stop himself, and only after he’s said it and watched James’s head recoil in offense does he realize what he sounds like.
“From what I can tell, doesn’t seem like you did either,” James snits.
Ashamed, Richard replies, “I’m sorry. I… I didn’t mean it like that.”
Always getting down to business, Kate asks, “What does it say?”
Miles hands the strip of toilet paper over with a wry smile before taking his seat again.
If my estimates are correct, you should be reading this as your long pause comes to an end.
You are angry. You should be furious. I never told you my days were numbered; I did not want you to count them. I never told you about Adam’s death; I did not want to lose you. I never made you a candidate; I wanted you to have the freedom I lacked.
In all my life, you are the only thing I ever wanted for myself. I was wrong to keep you.
Yours,
Jacob
Richard doesn’t know whether to fold or crumple or hang the thing up. Of course Jacob would leave his last words on something that will disintegrate after only a couple of readings. Richard has spent enough time with him to know that Jacob did it precisely to keep him from committing the letter to memory.
“So, what’s it say?” Kate repeats. Her voice shatters the glass bubble he’s been in for the past couple of minutes.
Hysteria bubbles to the surface, and Richard sees nothing but white. He giggles the despairing laugh that comes out when he feels wholly out of his element. These people can’t possibly understand. “Nothing.”
“All that writing to say nothing? Come on, man,” Miles reasons. “You’re not an Other anymore. No more secrets. What’s it say?”
Richard latches onto the only part that still matters; it’s the only thing that’s relevant to the real world, and that’s where Richard’s heading for good now. For almost a year, ever since he discovered that he could no longer locate the man, Jacob had refused to tell him where Adam had gone. And now, just when he least expects it, just when he’s finally come to grips with it… here is the answer to the mystery he’d guessed but never confirmed. Richard could scream. Jacob’s left him, and now Adam’s left him, too. There is literally nothing waiting for him. It’s what he deserves, though; it’s the punishment for having hidden in Jacob’s shadow for so long, for having denied life even though it always beckoned.
“I once had a… a friend,” he starts, tries to explain. Miles and James shoot one another a sarcastic look; Richard ignores it. “We came to the island together. He left a long time ago. He was like me, long before I was ever like… this.” The fact that he is no longer like that is too new; it’ll take some time for him to start describing himself differently. He isn’t even sure there’s a word for what he is now. He isn’t sure of anything anymore.
There’s silence in the plane. “You mean he didn’t age?” Miles asks.
Richard nods. “Yes. But he was something else, something not like Jacob and not like me. He’d been alive for centuries before I met him.” Richard pauses, remembers, breathes, lets go all over again. “It doesn’t matter anymore. He died last year. That’s what the note says.”
He’s so used to being the leader (leader of nothing, it turns out) that he isn’t accustomed to his words falling flat on uninvested ears. Awkwardness pervades the cabin.
James finally breaks the silence. “Being immortal ain’t it’s all cracked up to be if all y’all keep dying.”
“So it would seem.”
Richard can tell they’re all wishing there had been a pre-existing conversation to go back to.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Claire’s small voice says a minute later.
“Me, too.”
1917
Adam can’t pinpoint exactly what sparked this decision, but lord knows he’s had long enough to make up his mind.
The easy answer is the fact that the monster has it in for him. Its attempts to kill him have become more and more creative over the years, and given that he has a feeling Richard’s the only one with special protection, it’s only a matter of time before it succeeds. Another easy answer is boredom; his destiny is too great to be limited to one place, no matter how special that place is. Nothing happens here, and the longer he stays, the harder it becomes to leave; if there’s one thing Adam’s learned over the years, it’s that complacency is as bad as death.
There are harder answers, though, ones that Adam would prefer not to face, because facing them would mean accepting his own shortcomings.
There’s the way Richard has taken to spending one night in three in the statue instead of in the shelter they share. Adam hasn’t brought up the subject; what is there to say? Another is the way Jacob and Richard have started having their own private conversations whenever Adam’s gone off to pick the day’s fruit; he knows all about the job Richard’s been given, but given that they remain the only people on the island, it doesn’t seem to have started yet, so he can’t imagine what there is to discuss. Almost as bad is the way Jacob squints and looks through him, as though Adam isn’t even there. This isn’t new; Jacob’s been doing it since day one. It doesn’t make it any less insufferable, though.
Being on the losing end of one love triangle is more than enough for one lifetime, and it’s obvious he’s headed down that path again. However, it isn’t losing if you forfeit, so that’s what he intends to do.
He knocks on the stone wall. A faint, “Come in!” gives him permission to push it open. The place looks as it always has since the day he got here. Jacob’s at his loom, working on that interminable weaving of his. For the millionth time, Adam stifles the petty desire to rip it apart.
It’s taken this long, but Adam’s finally accepted the fact that Jacob’s the first being he’s ever met who is somehow greater than he is. He hates that Jacob makes him feel so small, and makes him react accordingly.
Yet another reason why he should go.
Jacob turns around and puts down the spindle. “So, you’re leaving us, are you?”
“How did you guess?”
“Something about your gait when you walked in here was different.”
Adam has always considered himself a master when it comes to reading body language, but here, as in bloody everything, it seems as though Jacob has him beat.
“So, how do I do it?” he fumes. He refuses to word it as, ‘Am I allowed to leave?’ He refuses to give Jacob yet another victory.
Jacob rustles through a pile of belongings in the corner and then beckons Adam to follow him outside. They stand together at the edge of the shore. “Do you know the fishing boat that’s moored near the entrance to the caves?”
Adam nods. He and Richard have used it countless times to get to far-flung points on the island.
Jacob turns the compass until it gets to 325. Then he shades his eyes with one hand and points with the other in line with the compass. “Follow this bearing. Follow it all the way out. In a couple of days, you should hit inhabited land. From there, you can make your way.”
“What happens if I stray?”
Jacob studies him. “I don’t know. You’re not like most people. Maybe nothing.”
Adam will follow it, though. He may be immortal, but he isn’t reckless.
“So, I guess this is it,” he observes. It’s strange to end it like this. Fifty years and nothing to say.
“Guess so.” The bastard doesn’t even pretend to care. “Have you told Richard?” Jacob asks.
“Not yet.”
“I see.”
Adam hopes he doesn’t. Working out the details of this part took longer than his actual decision to leave. If he’d gone to Richard first, there’s the chance (albeit a very small one) that Richard would say exactly what Adam wants to hear. But it was most important to confirm in advance that it’s even possible to leave; the last thing he wants to do incur drama with Richard only to find out leaving isn’t an option. He can’t---won’t---look small and weak in front of Richard. With Jacob it doesn’t matter; it’s already a lost cause.
“So… you win.” It’s bitter, but it slips out before Adam can repress it.
Jacob chuckles. “If you say so.”
Sometimes Adam wonders if there’s anything in the world that would produce a straight answer from the man. He’s glad he’ll no longer have to care.
They shake hands.
“I’m not your enemy, you know,” Jacob says.
Maybe he doesn’t mean to come across as condescending, but it certainly always sounds that way. It doesn’t matter anymore.
“If you say so.”
As he walks down the beach he’s traversed so many times now, Adam wonders how he’s going to do it. He could go get the boat and ‘let’ Richard ‘catch’ him making preparations. He could not say anything at all and then create a dramatic climax where Richard only finds out when Adam's seconds from pushing off.
But both of those ways would only show him up as the smaller man, and the reason Adam’s leaving is because he’s tired of being shown up.
Richard’s off getting water for the three of them like he does every day. Over the years, they’ve developed a system, not just for survival, but for alone time. Adam walks to the spot where the make-shift path from the caves opens up onto the beach. Within minutes, Richard emerges from the jungle. His whole face transforms from expressionless slate to pure joy. It’s been doing that every single day, in exactly the same way, for fifty years.
Adam wishes it were enough.
“Let me help you,” he says, and Richard passes him one of the barrels.
Together they walk to their tent, just down the beach from the statue. They’ve fortified it over the years, bit by bit until it’s less of a tent and more of a shanty. A home. This is the longest Adam’s ever spent living in one place, and Richard is the only roommate he’s ever had. Well, more than a roommate…
This place has made him soft. The list of reasons why he leaving is the right decision keeps getting longer.
“Where were you this morning?” Richard asks as he sets down their daily ration of water; the other is for Jacob. “I missed you.”
“I had to speak with Jacob.”
“What about?” Richard straightens himself up. Invoking Jacob’s name has always made him serious. Adam refrains from rolling his eyes.
“I’m leaving.”
Richard’s eyes go wide and he looks like a puppy who’s been punched in the face, and yet again, Adam wishes it were enough.
It isn’t.
1956
Richard’s been feeling exhausted since before the entrées came.
His suit has the uncomfortable stiffness of new clothes. Adam always seems to have something on hand for him, even though Richard never announces his visits and even though they aren’t the same size. His method of travel takes no time, but still leaves him jet-lagged; he’s pretty sure it’s long past his bedtime.
There are so many new faces and so much bustle. Between the doorman at Adam’s hotel and the driver of Adam’s car and the people who keep coming to their table (self-important men with briefcases and stylish women with expectant smiles), he’s gotten up and introduced himself so many times that he’s barely had a chance to talk to the person he’s here to see. He barely has energy left to think. He’s experienced more in the past two hours than in the past two years.
The problem is that he doesn’t come often enough and doesn’t stay for long enough to ever get into a groove. Each visit is a whirlwind from which it takes months to recover.
Adam doesn’t just provide taste of life; he provides various samples. It’s part of his rule; never stay for more than 10 years, or people will start to wonder. It’s an obvious problem accompanying their condition, but one that Richard doesn’t have to worry about. The island never changes and neither does he; Richard is practically part of the scenery.
The role Adam plays remains constant as constant as his face, even as the cities, industries, and hairstyles shift. He’s the power behind the throne, and the mover who agitates the shakers. According to him, that this is the entire point of having this gift.
Richard doesn’t have the heart to tell Adam that this isn’t the kind of life he would ever choose for himself if he lived out here in the world (he also doesn’t have the courage to find out if he’s wrong). None of the lives he’s visited over the past fifty years are. He comes here for Adam; everything else is plain terrifying.
So he bides his time, grins and bears it, and counts the minutes until they tip the driver and get in the elevator. They’re finally alone, and only now will the real Adam come out---the one who’s still in there even if he doesn’t want to admit it, the one underneath the anger and deception and manipulations and false smiles. The one who used to swim with Richard in the lagoons and get equally as wide-eyed at every new ancient relic they discovered. That’s the Adam Richard keeps coming to visit. Richard’s life has felt like a see-saw ever since that awful day when he’d watched the man sail away---pushing and pulling between the island and the world. If only Adam hadn’t left, everything would be so easy… no confusion, no ache, no questions…
“You were fantastic. You charmed them all,” Adam says as they enter his suite. “You always do, you know.”
These rooms are even more impersonal than the apartment Richard visited a few years ago. Everything inside oozes expense, but Richard still misses the little shanty on the beach they used to call home. A storm blew it over soon after Richard moved into the statue, which happened soon after Adam left. “The sea has a way of washing away what is no longer needed,” Jacob had said.
Something in Richard had died that day, but Jacob had done his usual excellent job of distracting him.
Jacob. That reminds him... “I have some business to go over with you before I forget. That’s what I came for.”
“Of course it is,” Adam says, kicking off his shoes. There’s a hint of bitterness in his voice that Richard always tries to ignore. He knows causes it, but he also know he isn’t capable of doing what’s necessary to make it stop.
He reaches for the briefcase he brought as his luggage, and takes out some papers. “Just sign here, and here,” he points.
“What is it?”
“Another front company. I thought it would be good to have someone else’s name on the papers since I’m rarely here. Consider it jointly ours.”
Adam scans the documents. “Mittelos Bioscience?”
Richard shrugs. “I came up with the name last week. Does it sound convincing?”
Adam signs. “It’s perfect. You would do so much better here than you realize. Together, we could take over the world, and then hold it forever.”
Here they are again. This happens every time. Adam won’t just let him visit; he always tries to make him stay. Richard wishes he would stop; this is hard enough as it is.
He never talks about these visits, but he assumes Jacob knows. It’s a weakness he consistently fails to overcome, but he hopes Jacob understands.
Adam’s a tether to a life Richard gave up the chance to ever have, and no matter how much time passes or how deeply he loves Jacob, he can’t quite manage to shake this. Adam was human in a place where there were only two of them and a deity. Adam knew what it was like to come to terms with immortality when it was still new to Richard. Adam knew---still knows---how to make him laugh and think and feel breathlessly alive in a way that, no matter how safe and cared for he is on the island, Jacob never fully makes him feel.
It’s times like now, when Adam’s easing the uncomfortable jacket off, that he wonders what his life would have been like if he’d left with Adam so long ago.
“How long are you here for this time?” Adam asks.
Richard lets himself be dragged into the bedroom. “I think I can stay for a few days.”
He hopes Jacob can forgive him.
1977
These insufferable children. Adam doesn’t know why he puts up with them or why he’s still doing this. Things were better when he was on his own. The squabbling between Kaito and Linderman, the way Maury leers at Victoria. The insufferable love… whatever shape you want to call it… between all of them is going to drive him crazy; he’s glad he isn’t involved in this one.
With every passing day, his irritation at the whole of humanity grows.
Today’s been yet another exhausting day in a string of exhausting years. They’ve made a breakthrough with the virus. Victoria has isolated the gene causing the illness and linked it to the removal of powers, but it’s still lethal. If only Adam could figure out what to do with it.
He flips on the light switch almost before he’s entered his apartment; he’s never liked darkness.
In less than a second, he’s pinned up against the wall.
“What the…” There isn’t time to get the words out before Richard’s mouth stumbles against his; the taste of whiskey rubs along Adam’s tongue.
It’s ironic, how for such a straight-laced, orderly, and predictable type, Richard’s intermittent visits are the only consistently surprising things in Adam’s life. This one is even more so than usual. The serenity Richard has always tried so hard to copy from Jacob is nowhere in sight; he’s free of his shackles right now, wild and real and unbridled in a way Adam’s never seen before. It’s what he always wanted---the knowledge that he’s won, that he is superior to Jacob in this way, even if it’s the only one. However, if there is to be only one way, Adam would prefer it to be this one.
He tries to shove those feelings away, though. They’re nothing but a weakness, a pathetic tie to maudlin, quotidian humanity that he’s always striven to overcome.
“What is going on?” he asks.
“I’ve been waiting for hours,” Richard pants, frantically pulling Adam’s clothes off, and shoving him into the living room and onto the couch.
Adam’s been waiting for years (it’s been almost two years since Richard’s last---always unannounced---visit), but it doesn’t seem like quite the moment to point that out. He simply lets Richard manhandle him; gives him whatever it is he so obviously needs right now. Nastily, he wonders why the great, the wonderful, the sodding Jacob hasn’t been taking care of this.
Not that Adam’s complaining. About being called upon to satisfy Richard’s needs, at least. He’ll always complain about Jacob.
Richard’s relationship with Jacob, omnipresent though it’s always been, isn’t something Adam’s ever enjoyed thinking about, but he’s always assumed it’s different from this. Richard’s subservient and worshipful attitude towards his deity gives more than enough reason to believe that Richard would never let himself dominate the way he does here. He’s sure that Richard would never allow himself to take from Jacob the way he does from Adam, even if Jacob offered (and Adam’s sure that Jacob’s offered---the extent of his slow-burning infatuation had always been disgustingly obvious to everyone except the innocently humble Richard). It’s why Adam feels power in giving everything to Richard, in focusing on his pleasure in a way he never does with anyone else. Only with Richard does he feel like giving equates conquest, not only over the man on top of him, but the being back on the island.
It’s rough today, where Richard usually prefers something careful. It’s desperate where Richard is usually measured. Adam feels like for the first time since that day they met on the beach, he’s seeing the real man, the human one that existed before and still exists behind the passive oracle he’s gotten so good at projecting.
Adam can’t say he’s completely relieved to discover that man still exists, because if the old Richard is still in there somewhere, what’s to say the old Kensei, the peasant who, on a lark, bought passage on a ship to Japan so long ago, isn’t still in there somewhere? Adam wants to think he’s scratched him out of existence.
Richard finally rolls off him, or as much as he can with both of them still on the couch.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” Adam quips. Richard’s response is a slightly hysterical laugh.
“I needed that,” he says. Adam hears (hopes he hears) the ‘you’ underlying the ‘that’. Richard’s eyes are fluttering and it’s only a matter of minutes before he’s snoring lightly into Adam’s ribcage.
Adam disentangles their limbs. There’s no point in pretending that this is more than a passing visit. This is the system they have, and he’s has finally decided it’s for the best. He vowed long before he ever met Richard never to get attached to anyone ever again; it’s past time that he remembered to stick to this promise. He pours himself a drink and lights a cigarette.
Soon, Richard begins to squirm. Sitting up slowly, he swings his feet to the floor and looks up, his eyes wild with too much stress and too little sleep. Something is wrong. It’s clear that he’s on the verge of cracking up; Richard has never dealt well with shock and change. He’s become too accustomed to his quiet existence on the island; part of why Adam had left was because he’d been afraid of becoming exactly this.
Much as they’ve just enjoyed himself, Adam knows nothing fundamental has changed. This entire tryst was born out of fear. He just doesn’t know yet what sparked it. He doesn’t know why he lets this continue, why these visits remain the only things that mark the passage of time for him. Richard’s everything he should despise. He’s everything Adam usually despises. Richard’s afraid of his own power, afraid of life, afraid of the world.
“How long was I asleep for?”
“Just a few minutes.”
Richard gets up and strolls over to where Adam’s standing. “I didn’t say hello properly.”
“Oh, I think you most definitely did.”
But Adam’s still had a bad day, and he’s still been hanging around a bunch of children who are thankfully too stupid to realize they’re more powerful than he is. He’s tired of being one-upped. So, yes, he’s still in a bad mood, and the bad mood is working itself up to resent the fact that Richard’s using him, and that even after leaving, Adam's pointless 50-year pause on the island continues to affect him in this way. He snaps, “So, what brings you this time?”
Richard always has some semi-convincing excuse for needing to travel. Adam assumes it’s what he uses to justify these visits to his master.
“I need more of that radiation sickness medicine you got for me before.”
“Has someone dug up your bomb?” Adam’s never been able to reconcile the insanity that seems to have taken over the island ever since his departure; during the entire time he was there, the most exciting thing to happen was a fishing boat of dead bodies washing ashore. But now there are hydrogen bombs and time travelers and scientific research groups. He’s never been able to figure out why Jacob allows it.
“Someone’s detonated it.”
“How much damage was sustained?” The fact that Richard’s here, looking for medicine that’s obviously not for him, is enough to confirm that whatever’s happened, it wasn’t catastrophic.
“It happened underground, at one of the island’s special places. Only the people involved died. But now… There seem to be side effects.”
“Such as?”
“My people are getting sick. Mild symptoms, but they’re similar to what happened 20 years ago, when the bomb first came. But what worries me is our leader. I dropped her at a hospital before coming to see you. She was three months pregnant before the incident. She’s getting sick now, just like one of our other women who was pregnant. Jacob says that from now on, all pregnant women on the island will die.”
“Well, that’s arbitrary.” Adam pours himself another drink. He doesn’t care about Richard’s job. He doesn’t care about the island’s little troupe of natives. He has a feeling Jacob only brought them there to try to replace Adam himself, to give Richard a reason to visit less often.
He can feel anger brewing. Apparently the old wounds still rankle, after all.
Richard gives him a dirty look; his devotion to Jacob has made him unreasonably sensitive about the place. “It’s the way things work.”
“Who detonated the bomb?”
“More people from the future. Friends of the ones I told you about a couple of years ago.”
Adam shakes his head. “This is becoming a bloody epidemic.”
“Something about that pocket of electromagnetism being the reason their plane crashes on the island in the future,” Richard mumbles, as if still trying to clarify for himself, let alone for Adam. “Something about using the bomb to make it so that they never come to the island. They said they wanted to reset everything, even at the cost to their own lives. It didn’t make any sense.”
Adam freezes. It may not make sense to Richard, but makes sense to him. It’s brilliant. This is the plan he’s been searching for all this time. This is the plan that will bring it all together and give all his aimless work a purpose. A reset. A reset of everything.
“Did it work?” He’s careful, excited.
“I don't know. I suppose if a plane never crashes, it will have worked. I wasn’t given a date to wait for. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that my people are dying. Can you help?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Adam mutters, but his mind is elsewhere. He’s busy extrapolating. The virus is the perfect weapon. He can wipe it all away and set himself up as the leader. Jacob had always said there was the island and there was the outside world; he’d always said it as though the two were of equal importance. If Adam can start everything over, he’ll be god of the outside world. They’ll be on equal footing. This passive-aggressive competition will finally be at an end, and Adam will have won.
“What are you thinking?” Richard asks. They know one another too well. You don’t spend a mortal’s lifetime with someone without learning how to read his mind.
“I’m thinking there’s something in your time travelers’ line of thinking.”
Richard gets up and walks towards him. Pulling his hand downwards, he pleads, “Don’t.”
Adam shakes Richard off. “What do you care? You’re Jacob’s man. I’m sure no matter what I do, your precious island won’t be affected.”
He knows Richard hears him and knows he understands, and yet the response is still, “What if it didn’t work for them? What if it can’t for you?”
If there’s anything that would have turned this plan from an idea into a passion, it’s Richard’s inability to give in, even now. So, Adam shrugs. “Then it won’t work. But at least I’ll have tried.”
Richard backs up. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Probably. But admit it; you enjoyed it.” Adam makes up the distance Richard’s step back has created. He’s in his face, practically feeling his eyelashes brushing against his own. He’s giving Richard one last chance. He needs him to take it. For extra emphasis, he adds, “You feel alive with me in a way you never do with him.”
“I did. I do.” It’s honest, and it’s the best Adam’s going to get right now. However, in winning this small victory, he’s pushed Richard too far. The expressionless mask falls back into place as Richard announces, “I’m going to go now. Send the medicine to the usual drop-off spot. I’ll see you… whenever I see you.”
As Richard silently puts his clothes back on, Adam knows he should think of some way to make him stay, but his blood is hot and his brain is whirring with plans. And anyway, until he’s proven himself, he doubts anything will change.
Richard doesn’t shut the door behind him as he goes.
2001
It’s a day’s walk to the lighthouse, from any point of origin. Richard knows by now that it isn’t anywhere in particular; in order to find it, one has to know where he’s going and why. Jacob made it that way, but seems like an unnecessary rule, given that they’re the only two people allowed in here. They’re the only two people the door will open for. The day Jacob granted him access, almost a century ago, was a day that meant something.
There aren’t many of those, the little voice in the back of his head, increasingly constant, reminds him.
He climbs the stairs with a weary tread; by now, his feet have memorized each step’s particular height. The reason for today’s journey is no different from the reason for any of his journeys here over the past almost 25 years. The only thing that changes, intensifies, is how pathetic it is, how irrationally needy. As the years go by, Richard finds that he has fewer and fewer regrets; that last fight with Adam is now the one that haunts him the most.
The mirrors slide easily. They don’t stick like they used to; Richard comes here too often. He moves it past the last number. Most of the base is for Jacob, most likely for some great purpose. Richard’s been given the small unmarked area beyond. There’s no need to write names down like Jacob does, because ever since Locke was added to the official register, Richard’s only ever wanted to look for one person.
The vision shimmers into place, and there it is, the same picture he’s been coming to visit for so long. Adam, clad all in grey, comfortable and cotton, sits on the edge of his grey cot in his grey room. He stares off into space, not even pretending to read the book that’s beside him.
If Adam was Richard’s constant before, the concept has taken on epic, not to mention depressing, proportions. He’s literally a still-life now. Where before his face never changed despite the morphing world around him, now not even the world changes around Adam.
The voice in his head---Richard wishes it would hush, stop disturbing his complacency---nags, Are your lots really so different? Were they ever?
Part of it is true. He doesn’t often leave the island these days; Widmore had always been keen to take care of mainland business on his own; Ben doesn’t want to make the same mistakes as his predecessor, so he stays and Tom has stepped up to take that role. Truth be told, Richard’s lost interest in traveling.
He also doesn’t have the time. Recently (if 25 years can be described as ‘recently’), things started to shake and stagger beyond his predictable ken. It’s been an ongoing headache of unlikely events, one that Richard doesn’t feel equipped to medicate, and which Jacob’s petting soothes but doesn’t cure.
This is why coming to see Adam is so reassuring, so grounding, now more than ever, no matter how painful it is. The book by his side is the only thing in the picture that ever changes. Well, that and the blonde Richard’s happened to see a few times. She’s grown over the years, from a little girl to a silly teenager to…
Richard had looked away that day. He still wishes he hadn’t had to see that. He didn’t come back to the lighthouse for almost a year afterwards.
What makes it worse is that there’s nothing he can do. Jacob’s made it very clear that there’s island business and there’s real-world business; Richard’s job is solely to focus on the former, and that means not using the island’s special properties to influence the latter.
Richard had tried to argue, back when Adam had first been locked up, that this was island business, that Adam was one of their own, but Jacob had said no. “Adam left. He belongs to the outside world now,” he’d said, looking off into the jungle, not making eye contact, his hand tight and possessive on Richard’s shoulder.
The mirrors are still mirrors, no matter what magical property allows these images to be projected. It’s neither healthy nor rational, but Richard shifts his head and contorts his body so that he can see himself in the mirror, positioning his reflection beside his erstwhile companion’s so he can simultaneously pretend they’re together in the underground prison and together in the tall lighthouse. He knows by now not to touch the glass---touching makes the image disappear; touching implies too much investment in things that are fleeting. Like Jacob, the power is too impersonal, too long-seeing, to allow that.
But perhaps there are exceptions, Richard always hopes. Because is not Richard Jacob’s great exception? Did not Jacob make it so that Richard would no longer be fleeting?
Adam continues to stare off into space, and Richard can only guess what’s going through his head. Probably the same things that used to go through his head back when they were together on the island, so long ago, when Adam’s life was as still as it is now, when they were in this together.
“He’s plotting his escape,” a quiet voice intones behind him. “He’s plotting revenge.”
Richard spins around, embarrassed to have been caught. He’s developed ears like a cat over the years. Jacob’s now the only one who can still sneak up on him unawares.
“Do you think he’ll succeed?” Richard asks. His unvoiced question, his desperate silent plea is, ‘Should I go help him?’
Jacob knows him well enough to answer both questions with one word. “No.” And then: “Not this time.”
But Richard doesn’t know which question that answers, and therefore can’t derive hope from it. It would be silly hope anyway, because while Jacob is a lot of things, he isn’t telepathic. Or at least Richard hopes.
There’s nothing more to say, and there’s definitely nothing new to see. Plus, Jacob’s probably here for his own reasons, so Richard politely turns the wheel back to the starting point. The clear blue ocean behind him is reflected in the mirror as though nothing at all is strange about the glass.
He clears his throat and says, “Ben wants me to go to Miami next week. There’s a fertility doctor he thinks could help us.”
“What do you think?”
Richard pauses. Does it matter? Of course it does, he tells the frustrated part of himself; Jacob appreciates his help, respects his opinions, returns his love. “This island is radioactive. Ben doesn’t, but you and I both know this problem is beyond doctors, no matter how brilliant they are. How could this woman possibly help?”
“You’re right. She can’t.”
Richard sighs with relief. He was right; Jacob agrees with him. He secretly lords it over the errant traitor in his subconscious. But only for a minute because…
“Bring her anyway,” Jacob says.
“Why?”
“It’s all part of the story.”
Jacob’s taken to saying this ever since the bomb and the time travelers. Richard has stopped trying to understand what it means.
However, this time he’s saying it with Adam in sight, and it’s the closest to the proverbial straw Richard’s ever come. “And when does this story end?” he (almost) snaps, and immediately wishes he could take it back.
The punishment for his momentary lack of faith is Jacob’s hauntingly sad expression. “Soon.”
Jacob’s story can never end; that would be against everything Richard has come to believe in this world. So that can’t be what he means. Richard thinks of himself, but Jacob has promised to care for him always, so it can’t be him either. He looks into the mirror at Adam.
“For him?” he blurts out, only because he knows he won’t get an answer. Besides the fact that Jacob’s policy is never to tell other people’s stories, this is the only one Richard is certain he doesn’t want to hear.
But Jacob surprises him.
“It ends for Adam in a few years. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. There’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing you should do.” He looks at Richard pointedly, and if ever there was a test of his devotion, it’s this.
“Why?”
“Why does it have to end?” Jacob shrugs. “Because everything does.”
Richard shakes his head. “No. Why are you telling me this? Why are you---” He wants to say ‘hurting me’, but thinks better of it. What he’s doing here… it’s a more elevated and unique version of the holy brotherhood: renounce your old-world ties, relinquish your possessions, give yourself (soul and body) to your god. This is a test. It’s a hard test, but he intends to pass, so he lets it drop.
But of course, this… this is the question Jacob surprisingly decides to answer. “You knowing… that, too, is part of the story.”
“Is that why you won’t let me save him?”
Jacob nods.
It’s so uncharacteristically cold that Richard can only assume this is his punishment for having been so attached all these years. He strives to correct his fault. “I am yours,” he reminds Jacob, and steps forward to close the gap between them.
The words are true, but his eyes still drift towards the mirror just as his body drifted to the mainland so often during the first three-quarters of the 20th century. No matter how strongly he feels his duty, there’s always been this pull to life that he’s tried to quash in the deep troth of his need for Jacob.
Jacob wraps his arms around him and breathes hot and strangely sad against the skin on the back of his neck. “Yo sé. Lo siento.”
In his grasp, Richard shivers. It’s the first time Jacob’s ever spoken to him in his own tongue.
He only wishes he had any idea what Jacob might have to be sorry for.
“Come,” Jacob says, pulling him gently towards the stairs, in the low and intoxicating way that Richard can never refuse. “Come home with me.”
“Weren’t you going to look for someone?” Richard asks as they begin their descent.
“I found him.”
2007
Adam gasps.
He’s died more times than he can count. But just as Arthur stealing his power felt different---a new definition of permanence---so, too, does this reanimation feel strange. It’s as if he’s being pieced together ---cellular regeneration at an atomic level. This is pain like he’s never felt.
Not all of him works immediately. The reconstituting sensation starts at head, as it always does, but he can’t open his eyes or move or even properly think until it’s past his shoulders. With difficulty, he lifts his head and opens his eyes. What he sees is enough to make him shut them again: his legs are ashes, somehow swirling about and taking on color and form.
“This had to happen to you. Forgiveness. Fear. Failure. I’m sorry if it hurts.”
It’s been almost a century and it doesn’t match the surroundings at all, but Adam would recognize that soft voice in even in a din, even a thousand years from now, even in space. He’d recognize that cryptic bullshit. He cracks one eye open.
Jacob belongs between a fire and a loom, between the ocean and the jungle. He doesn’t belong here in New Jersey, in Pinehurst’s offices, in the majestic sick-room where Arthur Petrelli killed Adam and left his ashes on the floor as though his remains were little more than everyday dust.
“You have to keep your voice down,” Jacob whispers. “They’re still in the next room. But if you crawl out the window and never look back, no one will ever know.”
Adam nods. It’s an easy promise to make. He’s done with all this anyway; he’d been done with it ever since Hiro dug him out of the grave and offered the olive branch. And anyway, something more worrying is now gripping him with fear. There’s the island, and there’s the world; Richard is the only one who crosses the chasm. That had been the official pretense for why Jacob had immortalized Richard, or at least so Adam has always thought. If Jacob is here, then…
“What’s happened?” For the first time ever, his first thought is not for himself.
“You died. For real this time.” Jacob has always had a knack for answering the question one hasn’t yet asked. Adam doesn’t know how Richard dealt with it all these years---patience of a saint, that one.
“Obviously not,” he scoffs. But the resigned smile playing across Jacob’s lips more than gives away the truth: the pain in his head, the heaviness in his limbs, and the sluggishness in his blood all point to one thing. Adam hasn’t felt like this in over 300 years, since before a small, bespectacled man disrupted his life. A cold dread spreads over him.
“No. Fix it. Please.” He can’t remember the last time he begged for anything, but he’s begging now. He’s begging the person whose superiority has been a thorn in his side. Adam feels as though he’s officially lost everything now.
“I can’t give back what someone else took from you.”
“Rubbish. You did it with Richard. Help me like you helped him.”
Jacob shakes his head no. “I never helped Richard. I only helped myself.”
Adam can guess what Jacob’s talking about, but he no longer cares about any of that. The old rivalries and petty jealousies are now utterly irrelevant. He’s going to die, really die, and Richard…
“Why didn’t you come before? Why didn’t either of you help me?”
“I told him not to. But now you can. Will you help me, Adam? Will you help Richard?”
Jacob’s always been big on giving people choices that aren't actually choices. Adam knows he can refuse, but he won’t. Like Adam, Jacob never begs, but he’s begging now. The words haven’t been uttered, but Adam knows Jacob is finally letting Richard go.
Now that they’re no longer the same, Adam realizes that maybe he was never that different from Richard, after all; no matter how far he’s run, he can’t resist Jacob’s requests either. He’s spent so many years simmering with anger at both of them, for leaving him to rot, for cutting him out of their little club of two, but… He’s going to die. The word reverberates over and over in his head. Everything’s changed now.
It turns out this is the reset he’s been looking for.
“Just tell me what I need to do.”
2008
Frank’s yelling incoherently in the cockpit. “Hey, people! You’re gonna want to hear this.”
James and Miles and Kate all unstrap themselves and go running, but Claire catches Richard’s eye. Neither of them feels secure enough to walk around. Richard’s ready to sit still, tell himself he’s giving her moral support when the truth is that he’s too scared to get up.
“That means you, too, Alpert!”
Richard’s knees shake as he stumbles down the aisle. Claire follows him timidly.
Everyone’s huddled behind Frank’s seat. “I was just fooling around to see what worked in this thing when the radio kicked in. This started up a couple of minutes ago. It’s on some sort of loop.” He turns the volume dial up so everyone can hear.
Richard has to hold onto the wall in order to keep from falling down, but this time his dizziness is not from nerves. It’s crackly and far-away, but the voice is unmistakable. “Hello, Ajira 316. Don’t worry. This is not any registered authority. This is a special frequency that only you can hear. If you are out there, follow a bearing of 209 to get to the island of Oeno and land where you see the signal fire. You’ll be safe.”
“Like hell we will,” James laughs. “How stupid do these people think we are?”
“That was pretty much my line of thinking,” Frank agrees, “but I thought you all ought to hear it, too.”
Richard, not quite recovered yet, clears his throat. “Do it. Do what he says.”
They all turn to stare at him. “What?” Kate asks, her face screwed up into a picture of disgust.
Miles is the only one who doesn’t immediately jump down his throat. He’s the only one who’s gotten to know Richard enough to give him a real chance. “Why?”
He doesn’t know how it’s happening or what’s going on but… “I know this voice. It’s okay.”
“More of your people?”
“Not the ones you know. Someone else.”
“What’s the vote?” Frank asks. “I only have so much gas in the tank. No time for dilly-dallying. And this bus only has one stop in her.”
“Do you trust them?” Kate asks.
Richard can’t be sure. One the one hand, he can’t imagine how it can be true. Adam is dead; Jacob said so. On the other hand, if it somehow is him, he can only imagine how angry the man must be.
Either way, he has to see for himself.
“Yes.” He isn’t lying.
Within the hour, Frank announces that he’s spied land.
“Miles, where’re the guns you all had with you? I ain’t going out there unarmed.”
Miles gets up and reaches for the overhead compartment. “In here.”
“If the people waiting for us mean us harm, guns won’t stop them. Trust me.”
The rest of them look at one another with concern. Too late, Richard reads the fear he’s just accidentally given them.
“It isn’t another monster. Don’t worry.”
“I think worrying’s been hard-wired into me at this point,” Miles grouses.
Frank yells that he can see some sort of tent and something huge and grey covering a large portion of the beach. As promised, a large signal fire burns a column of smoke into the air. Other than that, the island is completely uninhabited and undeveloped.
Richard’s the first to the exit. “I’ll go first.”
Miles tries to stop him. “It isn’t any safer for you. You’re just like one of us now.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
He pushes the door open and surveys the island. Someone emerges from the tent under the trees.
Richard’s never noticed until just now how similar they look---both blonde and serene. But this isn’t Jacob.
“It took you long enough,” Adam snaps, but he’s smiling behind his feigned irritation.
“We had to wait for some late arrivals,” he says, pointing at Claire and Kate, who are now hesitantly disembarking.
They dispel with the small-talk after that and Adam pulls Richard into a hug, They’re still drinking one another in when Richard hears Frank clearing his throat behind him.
Taking Adam’s hand, he says, “This is Adam. The friend I was telling you about.”
“I thought you said he died?” Kate asks.
Adam nods his head. “I did.” Then turning to Richard, he whispers, “I will.”
Richard can feel a scar along one of Adam’s fingers that was never there before.
Finally, he understands Jacob’s note.
“Me, too.”
“Hate to spoil this beautiful reunion and all, Dicky, but can we take a time out to get on the same page?” James asks. “What’s going on? Is this a rescue?”
Adam snaps to attention, suddenly business-like. “Indeed it is. I have 280 bodies in that refrigerator over there.” He points at the large grey box down the beach. “All I have to do is call my men and they’ll put them in the plane before sinking it. You all get to start over.”
“How…?” Richard tries to ask.
Adam understands, though. With a wry smile he answers, “Mittelos Bioscience has been having a banner year.”
1867
It’s taken almost two days, but Adam finally stumbles out of the brush and onto the beach. As the crow flies, it’s less than a day’s walk, but he’s been playing it safe. He’d ducked and hidden at every noise in the jungle.
He’s seen a lot of things in his time, but whatever lives on this island almost has him scared for the first time in centuries. He doesn’t know what this place is, but it’s nowhere he’s ever been before. He’s never been anywhere where black smoke can rampage through a ship and tear people limb from limb and then materialize into human form.
This doesn’t seem like someone with a power. This is just a monster.
It’s a good thing he’s become an expert at playing possum. Pretending the captain’s sword had run him through had been easy; the hard part was cracking an eye open to watch the aftermath without letting that thing realize there was someone left to kill.
The sudden sunshine almost blinds him, so he can’t quite make out where the voices are coming from.
“Hola!”
Adam squints and looks up. There’s a gigantic ruin down way the beach from where he’s standing. Near it are two figures sitting on a log---the first living people he’s seen on this island.
His shoes fill with sand as he staggers down to meet them.
There’s something off about the blond man. He’s pretty much the opposite of the dark-haired monster, and also pretty much the doppelganger of Adam himself. He looks surprised and somewhat non-plussed to see Adam, who is interrupting what looks like a first meeting between these two.
“I didn’t realize there were any other survivors,” the blonde says blandly.
“I’m hard to kill.”
It’s the vaguely familiar dark-haired one who stands up to greet him properly. “I know your face,” he says in Spanish. “You were on the ship. You were the doctor.”
It clicks then. He does remember seeing this man among the slaves in the hold. “That I was,” Adam replies in Spanish. “I’m Adam.” It isn’t a name he’s used since before he went to Japan, but it feels right, now and in this place.
The man gives him a blinding smile of joy and relief. “Ricardo.”
“It’s nice to see you again.”