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knaveofmogadore · 6 years ago

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First Second Meetings

I don’t think I’m ever going to get over these nerds! It’s been YEARS since I’ve put out adive content I think! This is a rework actually of one of my older fics since lost to time, adapted to the current state of canon. This is my, what? Third first meetings fic for Adamus and Five? Frey needs to let them argue already so I can stop writing these

Five kidnaps Adamus in the middle of his third night back at civilization, and that sets off the beginning of a beautiful friendship, with a side of drama, war, and Einar.

Adam sat down on the bed with a relieved sigh. Nearly two years in the arctic, a sudden evacuation of Alaska, a surprise pick up from his friend John Smith, a non stop sting of diplomatic meetings and legal and not so legal fights, and a stress fueled sparring smackdown with Nine all added to two years of terrible sleep and seventy two hours of virtually no sleep at all. His exhaustion was evident in the heavy way he moved, the effort it took to hold his head up. It did not, however, dull the feeling of sitting on an actual bed, in an actual house, in a room that was actually sort of his. Adam fell backward with a soft laugh and sprawled. His head almost hung over the edge against the wall and his feet were planted on the floor. Uncomfortable though the position was and odd though it felt to be on a clean mattress with intact sheets, it was the safest he had felt in years. With a Mogadorian warship and a peacekeeper army near enough to wage war in the Academy’s backyard, that was a bit sad. Ironic even.

Adam sat up when he heard Malcolm Goode appear in the doorway. He smiled in that fatherly way he had. His face screamed stressed, but it seemed to fade in the face of Adam being even marginally happier than he was when he got here. Even at this level of exhaustion Adam can't help but smile back. This place was new, the HGA not something he would ever agree with, but he still felt a little bit at home. Safe. Cared about for the first time in a long time.

“Settling in ok?”

Adam nodded, “It still feels weird, but I promise I'm fine.”

Malcolm nodded back, satisfied, and rested his hand on the doorknob.

“Sam and Six are just down the hall, and I'll be asleep downstairs in my office, probably,” Malcolm looked at Adam in a way that he hopes conveyed that that was an invitation for fellow insomniacs, “so you're not alone here. Try to get some sleep, ok?”

“Yeah, I don't think that sleep is going to be an issue. I feel like I haven't slept in years.”

That didn't help the stress and exhaustion ease from Malcolm at all. He clears his throat and moves to shut the door behind him, before he stops and snaps his fingers.

“Right! I know it's going to be hard, but try and get up early tomorrow. Lexa is coming over to review the security over breakfast and she wants your input.”

Adam nods, “I'll try my best to get up before noon.”

Tomorrow was a rest day for negotiations, a chance for everyone to take a step back and think over legalities, and a chance for the garde at the academy to strategize about other threats. They also hoped it would be a good chance for the mogadorians to not only rest, but curb the tempers that were beginning to run short.

Malcolm smiled one last time and shut the door.

****

Adam shifted under the thin blanket in his sleep. He squeezes the pillow provided in his arms, opting to sleep without one. The mattress was not the most comfortable, which helped Adam get over how weird it felt to sleep on one after all this time. It helped that he was too tired to stay awake without great effort. Twenty minutes of shifting and then laying still and he was out like a light.

He was not usually a deep sleeper, a habit he could never afford growing up with his brother Ivan and his unstable father. He never had a chance to pick it up, either. Especially not since the war ended. Sleeping through being ambushed and even stabbed was a terrible idea.

Tonight Adam was beyond being roused by the soft opening of a window, the lack of footsteps, the even quieter breeze. What did wake him was the metal hand that covered the bottom half of his face. His eyes blinked open, and then he tried to scream and reach around to punch his attacker in the neck. His fingers crack against a solid metal jaw. He is fully roused then, awake enough to notice that he and his now kidnapper were floating out of the window even as he put up a fight.

After the second time Adam almost made his attacker drop him, he realized that it maybe was not the best idea to make someone let hi go while they were suspended several hundred feet above the ground. He quieted instead, and allowed the rogue garde, and they must be a rogue garde, John would never scare him like this and no one else would dare, to carry him by his armpits. It was as terrifying and death defying as the first time he rode a flying garde into the early morning, but Adam still found himself sort of enjoying the sensation. He was not going to die right away, or he would have been killed at any point so far. He allowed himself to enjoy, just for the moment, the feeling of wind in his hair, the sight of San Francisco and all of her lights below him. If he was with a garde he trusted, Adam would have smiled.

The peace didn’t last long. Just as Adam’s shoulders were starting to cramp like they would be stuck that way, a ship came into view. Not just any ship, a skimmer, and one that was in pretty poor shape at that. It hovered mid-air above the city, waiting to land. Wires trailed from the underbelly and flapped in the wind, the paint job needed a serious retouching, and the ship was more dented than would ever be allowed by an self respecting engineering officer.

Adam’s mind was already running through escape plans. It would be easy enough to pilot the thing once he could lock himself in the cockpit, he had been flying skimmers since he was a child. He had the blueprints for the ship already clear in his mind, exhausted though he was he could clearly map his way on and off even the rattiest looking model. He figures if push comes to shove he could blow half of the floor away with the smallest seismic wave. Maybe even by just stomping too hard.

The rogue approached the ship and opened the doors from the air. Adam had hoped that the ship would land, but at least this way he knows that they are probably alone, and the garde is holding him by one arm. The keypad sparks and the doors open. Adam waits, and the doors slide closed behind them. Just a few more seconds, the garde is close to, and then Adam’s feet touch the floor.

With an acrobatic twist that would make Six proud Adam shoves his hand against the garde’s chest and puts enough of his legacy into it that the wave sends the garde sailing into the opposite wall, where there were already considerable dents. Adam lands lightly on his feet and prepares for a fight, casting his eyes around for something, anything he can hit with.

In the meantime his attacker is back off his feet already. He clutches at his chest, and between his rage and the pins and needles feeling in his ribs he doesn’t notice that his hood has fallen down. Adam turns full bodied to the movement, his cockpit plan forgotten for the sake of not dying before he gets there, and then he freezes. His face pales, his expression stricken, his stance stiff and off kilter with the realization of how many garde, exactly, both have more than one legacy and can fly.

Five’s nostrils flare and he growls. For a brief moment before his metal skin takes over Adam can see black scars snaking across his cheek from his neck. He is beyond unhappy. There is murder in his eyes, barely restrained. Adam’s realization and one fact turned lie overshadows all of that.

“Five! You’re alive!”

Five charged Adam and lifted him by his shirt to slam him against the wall of the ship, then took him away just to slam him again. Adam grabbed into Five's hand. He tries his best to maintain eye contact as Five tries to crush him into the wall.

“Five,” Adam wheezes, “listen to me..”

“I'm done listening! I know you, Adamus, I know how you like to talk! I'm not gonna listen to it!”

Adam grasps Five's meaty metal wrist firmly, but not to pull at at. He just holds it. Five has murder in his eyes but Adam is unruffled, unflappable. He reminds Five of Einar and through some conditioned response this calms him enough to listen anyway. He does not ease up his grip, forcing Adam to talk softly and breathe shallowly.

“You..you're angry. You're hurt. You feel like you have been abandoned, I know how that feels..”

It was too soon for empathy, Five smacked Adam's back against the wall for a third time.

“Like hell you know how this feels! You isolated yourself and they still welcomed you back with open arms! You betrayed your entire race and you're. Still. Here!”

With every pause Five slammed Adam into the wall again. A dent is starting to form behind him, and black spots are swimming in his vision. Time for the tough truths approach, he decided.

“Do,” Adam wheezed in a breath, “do you think that you scare me? Do you think you're the first person to attack me in my own home? The first to try and kill me in the middle of the night? The first to pick me up and beat the shit out of me?”

Adam can feel Five's metal fist digging its fingernails into his skin through his nightshirt. He shook his hair out of his eyes to the best of his ability and looks down at Five's fist. He moves his hands up to cradle it and sends just a tickle of his legacy into the metal flesh. Small waves, barely as strong as the force of a splash dive into the pool. He knows the force has Five's hand ringing anyway with pins and needles, the metal of his skin amplifying the effects of Adam's legacy. Five's fingers loosen enough to give him more breath and his grip doesn't tighten again.

Adam sucks in a deep breath with a quiet gasp. He savours the feeling of being able to expand his chest and he swallows, trying to clear away the stickiness in his throat. His ribs ache with the strain but his head clears. The ringing in his ears subsides a fraction. His hair falls back into his eyes and he leaves it, better than Five not see his face. Empathy seemed to enrage him, so tears would also, Adam reasons.

“My entire life has been like this, from the day of my birth to this moment. Always afraid of screwing up, always under threat of consequences, never good enough, never strong enough, never coming from the right place.”

Adam's hands begin to shake around Five's hand and he allows them to for the first time in years.

“I was afraid, and then I was angry. I was angry that he could never see how hard I was trying, I was pissed that they just used me and tossed me back onto the trash pile once they were done, I was so, so angry that they thought they could hunt children like beasts and I never stopped being angry, Five. I'm still angry. It's what my legacy relies on.”

Five looks down, stops trying to meet Adam's eyes through his fringe to look at his shaking hands. The movement is the most anxiety he's seen come from any Mogadorian. Not anxiety. Not anger, either. Exhaustion. Distress. His eyes snap back up when Adam composes himself and continues talking.

“So I do get it. I have always gotten it. You're angry, you feel used and discarded and hated, you think that no one cares about you and that you're all alone in this world because there is one group if people in this whole wide universe that doesn't love you.”

Five's hand begins to shake and it puts Adam on edge, but there was no stopping now. He plows forward and pays it no heed. He makes a point of not looking up at Five's face in case he was wrong.

“That isn't how the universe works, Five. Just because the people you want to love you don't show you what you want, that does not mean you are not loved, cannot be loved. We make our own lives, our own destinies, our own families out of whatever and whoever we want.”

Adam looks up through his overgrown bangs and sighs tiredly at Five. His eyes are downcast, his shoulders slumped. Tears shine from the corners of his eyes and threaten to show over his cheeks. Adam taps his fingers against the metal of his skin to gain his attention. Tink, tink, tink. He looks up and searches Adam's expression for deceit.

“Put me down, Five.”

Five's fist tightens its grip instead. His flesh and bone and scarred fist.

“What if I wanted to kill you instead? That was a nice speech, but I still think you're dead wrong.”

Adam is untroubled, though his voice comes out tired.

“If you were ever going to kill me you would have done it when you took me. You don't play with your prey, we both know that. You were never going to kill me in the first place.”

Five slams Adam into the wall one last time for good measure. A petulant, last ditch effort to make Adam feel like he is wrong about Five. His own odd way of trying to enforce his own self deprecating thoughts, his own self hatred. Adam saw straight through it, even if Five did not. Maybe not yet, but he thinks that someday he will. He does not smile, no, but he suddenly looks less tired, more hopeful. Five no longer intimidates him, forget scaring him.

The change in Adam’s demeanor suddenly puts Five on edge. No one apart from Einar acted like they weren’t afraid of them, everyone hated Five, or was scared of him, but Adam seemed practically at ease in his presence. He hated that, he decided. Adam had no reason to feel anything for him but hatred. He hated that he acted like he could understand any of this. He hated that Adam could understand. Five betrayed his own people, the people Adam betrayed his people to help. There are few people who have more reasons to hate Five than he does.

Five growls and drops him.

“Stop that!”

Adam braces himself against the wall and holds his chest in both of his arms. His ribs throbbed and his back felt like Five crushed it into dust. A bruise was loudly and angrily forming over his sternum. He was a little too preoccupied in that moment to listen to anything Five said, too focused on standing up straight and not passing out from how suddenly tired he was. He looked up, not bothering to hide his confusion, when Five steadied him with hands on his shoulders. He coughed and looked to the side, revealing more scarring down the back of his neck. Adam shoved down deep an urge to trace them with his fingers.

“...Thank you.”

Five shrugged, “It’s nothing. Um.”

“Why did you take me in the first place? The only thing you could accomplish by removing me from the equation is war, and I doubt you’re helping someone experiment on garde.”

Five looked more flustered by the second. The longer Adam’s penetrating stare examined him the more he felt like he was being dissected. Adam’s eyes were a scalpel and prod, and Five was on the operating table. He was never someone anyone could successfully lie to. Five is taken back, for a moment, to when he had first met the other Loric garde. If Adam had been there he would have never gotten away with any of it. Five gives up on any secrecy right then and there. He also backs away from Adam a step, just in case.

“Einar is hoping to convert you to his cause. He figures that if anyone would back him up about the Earth’s governments not having the right to control the fate of the world and all of the garde in it, it would be you. He thinks you can get all of your people on his side.”

Adam’s sigh carries so much exhaustion that it makes Five want to lay down on the floor and sleep. He pinches the bridge of his nose and takes in, then releases, a long breath. He starts to say something, then takes even more seconds to calm himself and rethink. He does that two more times before he knows he won’t have a complete breakdown where he stands.

“The kid’s heart is in the right place, I think,” he begins, speaking evenly, carefully, “but his techniques, his ideas, his schemes are unrefined. They are dangerous even, especially ones where he interferes in things he has no way of understanding. Einar may come from mogpro, but he has never met a Mog, he has no idea what he thinks he’s trying to accomplish here.”

“Adamus..”

Adam talked right over Five. He is using this moment as a sort of release for all of the frustration he has been forced to shove down from the past two years. Later, he will feel guilty about taking it out on Five. Right now his careful speech gives way to his mounting irritation and diplomacy flies out the window, shrieking and trailing feathers behind her.

“It was hard enough getting the mogadorians on earth to follow my lead in renouncing Setrakus Ra, and even then the ones being evacuated from Alaska are just a fraction of my people now. Getting Vontezza to even listen to me has been a headache! The children of my people are in more danger now than they were when Setrakus Ra was in power, the mogs are no closer to not succumbing to extinction, and now you are telling me some child wants to add his hairbrained schemes to the mix?”

“Adam…”

“Tell Einar that he can eat the general’s sword scrap by scrap if he wants a Mogadorian’s help in destabilizing the situation further, and that is my final word.”

Adam finally quieted and held his hand to his side to quell the fresh pain in his ribs from shouting. Five stood there, defeated and at a total loss. He figured out halfway through Adam’s speech that he was not the target, and now all he wanted to do was fix this. Tentatively he reached out and rested his hand on Adam’s shoulder. He looked down at Five through his fringe and was hit with a small pool of guilt in his stomach at the remorse in his expression. Adam has shot the messenger.

“Let me take you home, if,” Five winced, “since, since your answer is no.”

The flight back was in silence. Five carried him bridal style this time, with extra special care given to his ribs and back. Adam enjoyed the flight more this time, in spite of the ache. With his head clear of escape plans and fear of death it was easier to appreciate the lights of the city. The wind flipped his hair into a mess and pressed a chill into his skin. Without thinking he pressed closer to Five. Five without a word dropped his metal skin. Adam pretended not to notice the scar tissue he could feel through Five’s shirt.

In spite of the ache and the chill and the circumstances, it was pleasant. Quiet. Adam thinks, possibly, that he could grow to trust Five this time around. Five thinks, maybe, that he and Adam could become friends once all of this is over. With the HGA coming into view, it did not feel like a final parting. It wouldn’t be.

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