Is it because they were weirdly associated with the feminine in the great game of opposites?
Were they shunted to one side exclusively when opposites began to be solely associated with sex?
It's preposterous.
Cats have no idea what gender is.
Cats don't have genders.
In fact, were cats to have a detailed understanding of gender, I am entirely certain that they would blatantly disregard it.
Gender has nothing to do with optimal napping positions
Gender does not flavour a treat or catch a mouse
No gender role will reveal a hidden path in night time darkness
Gender does not sharpen your claws or warm your bones or fill your stomach
Cats are associated with witches because they understand that gender, like fate, is the collections letter from the universe you throw away as soon as you get it
Cats don't need gender just like they don't need bills
What does a cat have to do with taxes? Debt?
Your average cat understands that the heat death of the universe is inevitable
That we will all die someday
Nine lives gives perspective
Nine lives to understand that the only thing that matters is if one has the free will to pursue their own happiness
Happiness and selfishness are the only values cats have
What of names?
Names for cats are just titles
Titles can shift and change as fluidly as the seasons
Nine lives, ninety names, one season a tomcat and the next a calico
What gender could a cat come up with?
With what pronouns could a cat call themselves?
TRICK QUESTION!
The only name a cat has for itself is the one that best allows it to boast of its happiness
A cats name is personal
It is a piece of its soul held close and spoken to no one or nothing
You presume to know your cat's name? It's pronouns?
No one knows your cat's name, not even other cats
The only pronouns cats use are "hey you" and "baby" and "fuckface"
hello i loved your quiz! and I thought your poems were beautiful! the cat one made me smile but I chose the stars one because it was beautiful, your words are beautiful 💕
Thank you!!!! The cat one is floating around in full,,,somewhere! On my writing blog, I'll reblog it and send it to you! Here's the stars one in full. I wrote it for a fanfic that I might not finish:
"There is a beam of sunlight blocked by the trees, do you see it? There is a cloud over the sun, and then there is darkness, and then there are stars. Can you see them?"
"Yes."
"There is grass under your bare feet. Do you feel it, bending and flowing and springing back up behind you? Behind you it searches for the sun. Underneath your feet now are rocks still warm from the kiss of the sun. Can you feel them?"
"Yes."
"They are watching the stars with you, waiting for him to return. They feel the sun, and they're sharing it with you. They don't need to see the stars because they can hold them. But can you see them? Every night you get to see them again. Every sunset you say hello and every sunrise you say goodbye and every night you learn their names. This is something you can hold. Do you feel it in your hands?"
"Yes."
"There is a breeze that comes across the lake. It tells of other trees and flowers and rocks. Can you smell the blooming flowers, the rotten flowers born of summer heat? It too carries warmth, and it has a name. Can you feel it against your skin?
"Yes."
"The name in your hands is a rock warmed by the heat of the sun between the trees. It tells you that you will see the sun again, that there will be new breezes and that rot will turn to sweet fruit. Do you understand?"
Everyone thinks Runaan hates that Gren was talking his ear off in the dungeon but honestly the man is so used to Rayla he's probably just happy to have someone whose non-stop talking doesn't include dragging him to elf hell and back
Ella consults Nine on her gay panic, aka Holy Shit, I can write something that doesn’t have Adam in It
“Hey, Nine?”
Nine looks up from the book’s worth of papers Malcolm had given him to read. Ella had materialized in front of him out of thin air. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and paint and chalk streaked through it. Her oversized jeans were rolled up into cuffs and splattered with paint, and her worn out green shirt wasn’t in much better shape. Paint meant that, somehow, she had been with Marina not too long ago, probably taking her frustrations out on a throwaway canvas. Nine drops the papers into a messy stack on his coffee table and stands up.
“Hey squirt, I don’t remember giving you a key to the place.”
Ella looked away for a moment, but while she was good at lying, she was never very good at looking guilty.
“Sorry,” she lied, “I needed to talk to you.”
Nine waved at her to talk while he shuffled the papers into a better stack and cleared out the trash from the living room. His TV and entertainment system were covered in a fine layer of dust, and the knick knacks and pictures on his shelves weren’t really in any good order, but Ella was sixteen, and teenagers don’t give a crap about dirty rooms. Through all of his speedrun cleaning job she remained quiet. He looked around for the easiest seat to clear, settled for pushing unfolded laundry off of the couch, and gestured for her to sit. Nine sat across from Ella with his arms folded over his knees, waiting.
Ella rolled her shoulders, rubbed her arm, coughed, and made a big deal about dragging out the silence. Nine still waited. Finally she sighed, looked at the ceiling, sighed again in the way teenagers do when something is especially time consuming, and spoke in a rush.
“How did you know you were gay?”
Nine blinks, stunned to silence. He opens his mouth but all that comes out is a cracked and drawn out ‘uum.’ He coughed too now, hoping that by settling his lungs he could settle back into his own head.
“Did you try talking to Marina about this?”
“Yeah, she told me to ask you,” Ella says, deadpan.
In spite of the situation, or maybe because the air in the room was getting too tense for his liking, Nine grinned.
“You’ve been spending time with Adam too, huh?”
Ella jokingly swipes at him and Nine easily dodges. When she laughs he knows he did right.
“So, did you ask him the same thing,” he asked.
She grew quiet and shook her head. When Nine tried to press she waved him off.
“I wanted to ask you. Marina told me how she doesn’t feel...stuff, but I don’t feel things the way she does. I <i>feel</i> things, I get crushes and I think people are cute in more than an aesthetic way and I can kind of see myself getting married in maybe, thirty years?”
Nine laughs and she swats at him again.
“Be serious! I like people in <i>that</i> way but I’ve never wanted to date anyone before,” Ella trails off and ends her sentence with a vague and frustrated hand gesture.
“Before,” Nine says slowly.
Ella hides her darkening face in her hands before the red spreads from her cheeks to her ears. She groans, a sound that is full of pure teenage frustration and self loathing. She put it off in waves, the special kind of self pity that comes from being that age where everything has happened and not enough has happened at once. There is the perspective of loss, but also none of the experience to tell her that this is not the worst thing to ever happen to her. Nine moves to the other couch and wraps his arm around her shoulders.
“Come on,” he shakes her a little, “it can’t be that bad.”
Her voice came through muffled, “I met the prettiest girl I had ever seen this morning and I blew it by talking about krawls.”
Nine’s face twists as he swallows his laughter. He pats her shoulder and makes sympathetic noises.
“And you thought you didn’t like girls! This,” she tries to shove him away and he holds her in the brotherly bear hug of her life, “is the gayest thing I’ve heard since breakfast.”
Ella finally manages to squirm free by pinching his arm and sliding to the floor. Nine left her there for a moment to go to the kitchen. Cups rattled and cabinet doors slammed and soon, the microwave started running.
“What if it’s not! What if I just wanted to be friends! What if it <i>is</i>, what then?”
“Then you get yourself a girlfriend!”
Nine comes back with two mugs and kneels down to hold one out to her. She stares at it for a moment as her brain catches up, then takes it. He sits down beside her on the floor as she takes her first sips of hot chocolate. Nine rests his cup holding arm on his knee as he begins to talk.
“When I first figured it out,” Ella looks up from pondering the mysteries of the universe when he starts, “I was driving down the road with a beautiful boy in my passenger seat. I had already had too long by myself to think, and the road was quiet, and he was asleep. I had thought about it a lot, you know, kissing boys and how they looked and probably felt and,” Nine waves his free hand, “/stuff/. This boy, when I first met him, I thought he was one of the stupidest, strongest people in the whole world.”
Nine obnoxiously slurps his hot chocolate, “I still do, and I love him with all my heart.”
Ella smiles, “That’s pretty gay.”
He snorts into his cup and has to take a moment to cough all of the chocolate out of his nose. She uselessly pats his arm while he chokes on hot chocolate milk and coughs for his life. When he clears his throat. he points at her threateningly, like he didn’t just almost get taken out by milk and chocolate powder, which only makes her laugh harder.
“You shut your sassy ass mouth, I’m not finished. So I’m looking at this boy, and the sun is shining on his face like poetry or some shit,” Ella snorts, “shut up, and it hits me that maybe other boys don’t look at other boys like this.”
Ella leans forward like the story was on the end of a line NIne was pulling in, “And then?”
Another obnoxious slurp, “And then I didn’t figure it out for another four months, and now we’re dating. The End.”
She blinks, “That’s it? That’s your big advice? Wait and maybe I’ll figure it out,” she asks, dumbfounded.”
“Yup,” he said, popping the P.
“That’s bullshit!”
“Sure is! Also watch your language, Marina would beat my ass if she found out I let you swear.”
Ella leans back and groans at her lap. Maybe she was actually groaning at the ground, the very earth, like the Entity would come back into her mind full force to help her through her sexuality crisis. Nine sarcastically clinks his mug against hers, drawing her out of her self pity.
Questions in the current political climate are stressful, so here are 21 questions the sci-fi fiction genre writes about that are actually starting to become important to real life, and one thought experiment, because existential and moral breakdowns are much more fun
How much sapience is enough to gain robots rights? Consciousness?
How much should pleasure be allowed to control your life?
How much control should capitalism have over the pleasure market?
Is it fair to create AIs that can feel pain? Is it necessary? Why?
Is cloning for the sake of organ harvest ethical?
What rights do Clones have to estates and wills?
Is cloning ethical for any reason other than just seeing if we can?
Is cosmetically altering your children's genes necessary? Fair, if you have the means?
What about altering your children's genes to remove chronic disease?
In a world where we can completely remove the human touch, should we?
What kinds of data can be owned and sold and what kinds should not be?
What exactly do people owe a government that owns all their dept and information?
Is human to android transplantation ethical? Desirable?
What are the societal effects of near immortality?
Can death truly be stopped? (Alternatively, is death a human construct in its own right)
What are the implications of a society that groups people by single data points alone?
How much can we modify a human before it stops being human? Before it loses its rights, or should it?
How will evolution affect our progression as a global society?
Should we allow ourselves to evolve? Is there any way to decide without bias what should and shouldn't change about us as a species?
A person sleeps in a medically induced coma. Their mind supports an entire, real and living, universe, but at the cost of their freedom. Do you wake them?
Sometimes Nigel lived so loudly he drowned out even the other voices in Caleb's own head. His obnoxious laughter his breathing his voice his mumbling his moans the soft whisper of a laugh and a joke just for them. All of Nigel lives so loud that he filled a room with a snort, lives so loud that his voice fills Caleb's head until all he can hear is Nigel. Nigel. Nigel.
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.
