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Title: Black Edelweiss
Series: Zeitgeist
Follows: One Giant Leap
Wordcount: 2,284
Summary: Two weeks after Claire Bennet's televised leap from the Ferris wheel, the 12th handles it's first case delving into the strange world of specials. Evidence points the investigation toward a former Company Agent, a man Noah Bennet would swear up and down doesn't exist.
Details: Minimal details due to inflation. Full warnings and details in main post.
PREV: Interlude 8 // MAIN // NEXT: Interlude 10
Konrad & Adam—Brooklyn, New York; February, 1959
Konrad wasn't sure how he had managed to stay calm for so long. In the back of his mind he thought he should be feeling...something. He should feel angry, cheated, betrayed—anything—but all he really felt was numb. Even Adam's faint amusement, greeting him smugly as Konrad had opened the door to find the other immortal standing on his hotel doorstep, had failed to phase him in the slightest. Konrad wasn't unaware of how pathetic he looked, of course...
He was simply long past caring.
Konrad sat quietly on the edge of the bed as Adam moved around the small, cheaply furnished room, only peripherally aware of what the other man was doing. He didn't even look up from the abused rug until Adam pressed the glass of scotch into his hands. Konrad stared at it for a long, stupid moment before he finally took a swallow. The alcohol would do nothing for either one of them, but the soft burn still felt good in his chest. He chose to let himself blame that instead for the tightness in his throat, the sting in his eyes.
"It isn't...fair, Fritz," Konrad said eventually, slowly, looking down into his glass. "How can she just cut me out of their lives like that?"
His fingers flexed tightly around the glass, and for a brief moment he thought about letting it break in his hand. And there was his missing anger, welling up from wherever it had been keeping itself hidden.
"Martin is grown enough to make his own choices," he allowed, bitterly, voice gaining volume and speed. "If he doesn't want anything to do with the man who's been a father to him his whole life that's one thing, but Sam is my son, and she has no right—"
"We could just take him," Adam interjected pragmatically, filling his own glass.
"Yes, we—" Konrad cut off, shaking his head once he actually registered his friend's words. "No."
Adam dismissed the rejection of his idea with a light shrug. He took a seat in one of the chairs by the room's small table, seeming almost bored with the situation. Like he was patiently waiting for Konrad to get over this upset and become interesting again. Adam had never put any real effort into disguising how tedious he had found Konrad's life with Sarah and their children. Clearly, there was no reason for that to change now.
"No," Konrad repeated softly, with a sigh. His anger had cooled, leaving him feeling small and empty. "That wouldn't be fair to him."
Setting the glass on the nightstand Konrad ran his hands over his face.
"It wouldn't be fair to Sarah," he continued breathlessly. "This isn't anything I don't deserve. I lied to her, Fritz. I've lied to those boys their entire lives..."
He and Adam had spent a year and a half in England after their supposed return "home" from the prison camp in Dresden. Finally, some itch of restlessness had compelled Adam to move on from there, making his way across the Atlantic to Canada. Konrad had chosen to follow, though he had stayed in Montreal for only a few months. It had been curiosity more than anything that had eventually drawn him south, toward the lights and excitement of the big city everyone talked about. He hadn't wanted to be seduced, but he had seemed to find a different language on every corner, a different world down every street, and Konrad had fallen instantly and hopelessly in love.
Twice, in fact.
Konrad had met Sarah during his first months in New York, when he had shown up at her father's watch shop in Brooklyn looking for work. She had been a smart, energetic young woman, with a gentle disposition...though occasionally emotional and prone to fits of temper. She had lost a young husband in the war, and though it couldn't have been easy raising their two-year-old son on her own, she had refused to simply let her father support her. Though she lived with her father in the apartments above the shop, she had even insisted on paying a modest rent for it from the money she made working at a grocery down the street.
While her father had constantly bemoaned her stubbornness, Konrad had found her enchanting.
Despite her independence, the pressure had been there socially for her to remarry. She had thought he was sweet enough. Konrad, meanwhile, had been head-over-heels for her, and overjoyed when she had accepted his proposal. Sam had been born two years later. They had been together for seven years when her father's failing eyesight had finally forced him to retire from his work, and the man had all but insisted the shop take his name now that it was his. Konrad had been honored...
Even though, by all rights, it hadn't really been his name.
He had been living as Dory Gray for more than twelve years, and right now every one of them felt like a waste. He cursed the name Adam had given him, cursed the fact that he had already met Sarah by the time he discovered the immortal's joke in giving it. If he had known sooner, he never would have continued to go by something so perversely fitting. Konrad had been twenty-three when he was injured and reassigned to Auschwitz, and he had looked young for it even then. Thirty-eight now, he didn't look a day older than he had that night he and Adam had fled. As he and Sarah spent their life together, the parallel with Wilde's well-known story had become a familiar joke.
Then, slowly, it had become a fact impossible to ignore...
While on its own the peculiarity of his age might have been forgiven he was also never sick, and of course Sarah couldn't in all their years together remember seeing him with as much as a paper cut... Finally, the day had come when she had looked him in the eye and asked him. Confronted with it directly he just hadn't been able to lie to her. Konrad had wound up telling her everything. Now Sarah knew the truth, not just about what he was but about who he had once been. And Sarah had never been shy about expressing what she wanted, so she had made it painfully clear that she wanted him nowhere near her or her family.
Now that life was over.
Losing it hadn't left him much. Dorian Gray had been a watchmaker like his father before him, a husband and the father of two sons. Without his shop, without his family, that man didn't even exist anymore. Without them he hardly knew who to be. He and Adam could have been having this conversation in any of a dozen languages, yet Konrad had stuck to English out of habit. Even the slight Mancunian accent which he had affected as Dorian still clung to his voice, the last tattered shreds of his old identity still surviving his exposure as a fraud.
"God..." The word escaped him hopelessly, as breath abandons one dying. "What am I even going to do with myself?"
"You'll doubtless find something," Adam told him dismissively. "Build a new life. Move on. If you believe for a second this was the worst that could have happened to you, you're being unspeakably naïve. And if you think that this is the worst that will happen to you, Kunz, then I doubt you'll last another century."
Konrad said nothing. After a long, thoughtful moment Adam let out a sigh, moving toward the bed to sit down beside him.
"My first wife's name was Helene," Adam said, sparing him a sideways glance as he took another swallow from his glass. "We were married in the mid-seventeenth century near Bad Berleburg in Germany. Our end was much like yours and Sarah's. I knew when I married her that I could not be killed, but not that I wouldn't age. We were together for twenty years before it became obvious. Still, when I confessed my secret she fled me thinking I was touched by the Devil."
Listening now, Konrad saw the faint smile at the corner of Adam's mouth, as if the memory amused him now more than anything else.
"And my last wife, Theresa..." Adam paused, taking another drink to cover his sneer. "Well, that was only a year ago, and the less said about the way that one ended, the better. But you shouldn't give up, Kunz. I've been married nine times, and they weren't all bad."
Slowly, Adam's smile grew into a soft, fond expression of which Konrad would have never previously thought the man capable.
"In 1786 I met Angelica. I took a chance on her, and when I told her the truth she didn't turn away. We had to travel from time to time to avoid suspicion, and after a while I was forced to pose as her grandson...but we were together for more than sixty years before she died."
"And my seventh, Diane... " Adam grinned. "I still like to return to the home we shared in Montreal, when I can. Ah, she was one of the good ones, Kunz. We only had twenty years together, and even that was almost over before it had its chance to start. Consumption almost took her from me the very year we married..."
Adam went on talking about the loves of his life, some of whom he had married though most he hadn't. Konrad did his best to listen. After all, he knew the man meant well. Yet all his stories seemed to succeed in was reminding Konrad of a brutal and bitter reality. The life he had to look forward to would be an unnaturally long one, and lonely. Even if one day he found someone like Adam's Angelica—someone willing to accept both his past and his changeless nature—whatever life they might enjoy together would still share that same, inevitable end. The cruel fact was that his friendship with Adam, such as it was, might be the only truly enduring relationship Konrad would ever have. A friendship, Adam had long ago taken great pains to assert, that would never be anything more...
Sensing his reminiscence was not having the desired effect Adam paused, casting Konrad a speculative glance.
"You should come with me on my next venture," Adam told him finally, standing. He set his empty glass aside. "You need a fresh start, and I think it would provide you the perfect chance."
"What kind of venture?" Konrad asked, though what he felt was less curiosity than it was wary apprehension.
"Right now this country's government has plans in motion to construct a facility out in some God-forsaken part of the desert," Adam said, smirking faintly. "A place for the study of...unique individuals."
Konrad's breath caught—or rather he caught it before it his breathing could run away into panicked hyperventilation.
His mind grasped emptily before he was able to focus on the room that he was in, because for a few brief seconds he hadn't been. Pulling back from his initial reaction, Konrad shoved the sudden memory of chill steel and spilled blood back into the unseen depths of his mind where it belonged. He fought the urge to do the same with the fresh, cold dread he now felt—just a little, just enough to think about things rationally—but he knew the temptation there was too great. There were too many things in his life right now he didn't want to feel or remember, and if he started down that road he might not be able to stop...
"A research camp," he finally managed. His voice sounded oddly lifeless, and his chest still felt painfully tight. "In America?"
Adam confirmed it with a faint noise.
"Honestly, Konrad, you didn't think your new adopted home was perfect, did you?" Adam said, sounding faintly amused. "I even hear a few of their prized researchers for this place are former countrymen of yours."
Konrad said nothing, refusing to rise to the bait. Anyway, there was nothing he could say.
"It seems Uncle Sam has learned of our existence," Adam continued, "or at least, those like us. I intend to be on hand to look over their shoulders and learn whatever it is they manage to learn about us."
"The way you were at Auschwitz," Konrad said, a little distantly. It wasn't a question, and needed no answer, though he finally did ask, "You don't think it can turn out any better, do you Fritz?"
And when Adam's smirk simply broadened it was all the answer Konrad needed. Not for the first time, he was disturbed by Adam's casual callousness. At times it seemed like the immortal barely acknowledged the short-lived others around them as human. By that same esteem, he often treated Konrad himself like a child.
"I...I'll think about it," Konrad told him hesitantly.
Adam nodded, though the smile had slipped from his lips turning into something mirthless and shark-like. Neither acknowledged it, but they both knew Adam had understood Konrad's answer as easily as if he had voice his refusal in any of the numerous languages they shared.
Conversation turned to other things for a while, though a chilly undercurrent lurked beneath its surface, and by the time Adam left Konrad felt strangely exhausted. Even the thought of undressing for bed felt like too much effort by half. Instead he lay down, clothed atop the bedsheets, letting his eyes roam the faded patterns in the peeling wall paper, letting them find meaningless pictures among the cracks in the ceiling. Anything to keep his thoughts from straying to the framed photograph of his family lying face down on the nightstand beside him.
His efforts were pathetically unsuccessful, and a different tightness constricted his chest squeezing the air from his lungs.
Once again, Konrad's entire life had been torn viciously from his grasp. Not for the first time, and he was painfully certain it wouldn't be the last. Still, shutting his eyes, Konrad forced himself to admit Adam had been right about one thing at least. He would need to find a new start. Create a new life for himself...
It wasn't as if he had any other choice.
PREV: Interlude 8 // MAIN // NEXT: Interlude 10
Author's Note: Sorry, these just seem to get longer and longer... Not only is it the longest interlude I've written yet, with this entry and One Giant Leap (which I consider the prologue), Black Edelweiss has officially cracked 50k words. Yikes.
Also, if you haven't seen it yet, I've done a couple of manips for this story.
Edit: On a reread, it occurred to me this scene goes through each one of the stages of grief pretty much in order...
Series: Zeitgeist
Follows: One Giant Leap
Wordcount: 2,284
Summary: Two weeks after Claire Bennet's televised leap from the Ferris wheel, the 12th handles it's first case delving into the strange world of specials. Evidence points the investigation toward a former Company Agent, a man Noah Bennet would swear up and down doesn't exist.
Details: Minimal details due to inflation. Full warnings and details in main post.
PREV: Interlude 8 // MAIN // NEXT: Interlude 10
Konrad & Adam—Brooklyn, New York; February, 1959
Konrad wasn't sure how he had managed to stay calm for so long. In the back of his mind he thought he should be feeling...something. He should feel angry, cheated, betrayed—anything—but all he really felt was numb. Even Adam's faint amusement, greeting him smugly as Konrad had opened the door to find the other immortal standing on his hotel doorstep, had failed to phase him in the slightest. Konrad wasn't unaware of how pathetic he looked, of course...
He was simply long past caring.
Konrad sat quietly on the edge of the bed as Adam moved around the small, cheaply furnished room, only peripherally aware of what the other man was doing. He didn't even look up from the abused rug until Adam pressed the glass of scotch into his hands. Konrad stared at it for a long, stupid moment before he finally took a swallow. The alcohol would do nothing for either one of them, but the soft burn still felt good in his chest. He chose to let himself blame that instead for the tightness in his throat, the sting in his eyes.
"It isn't...fair, Fritz," Konrad said eventually, slowly, looking down into his glass. "How can she just cut me out of their lives like that?"
His fingers flexed tightly around the glass, and for a brief moment he thought about letting it break in his hand. And there was his missing anger, welling up from wherever it had been keeping itself hidden.
"Martin is grown enough to make his own choices," he allowed, bitterly, voice gaining volume and speed. "If he doesn't want anything to do with the man who's been a father to him his whole life that's one thing, but Sam is my son, and she has no right—"
"We could just take him," Adam interjected pragmatically, filling his own glass.
"Yes, we—" Konrad cut off, shaking his head once he actually registered his friend's words. "No."
Adam dismissed the rejection of his idea with a light shrug. He took a seat in one of the chairs by the room's small table, seeming almost bored with the situation. Like he was patiently waiting for Konrad to get over this upset and become interesting again. Adam had never put any real effort into disguising how tedious he had found Konrad's life with Sarah and their children. Clearly, there was no reason for that to change now.
"No," Konrad repeated softly, with a sigh. His anger had cooled, leaving him feeling small and empty. "That wouldn't be fair to him."
Setting the glass on the nightstand Konrad ran his hands over his face.
"It wouldn't be fair to Sarah," he continued breathlessly. "This isn't anything I don't deserve. I lied to her, Fritz. I've lied to those boys their entire lives..."
He and Adam had spent a year and a half in England after their supposed return "home" from the prison camp in Dresden. Finally, some itch of restlessness had compelled Adam to move on from there, making his way across the Atlantic to Canada. Konrad had chosen to follow, though he had stayed in Montreal for only a few months. It had been curiosity more than anything that had eventually drawn him south, toward the lights and excitement of the big city everyone talked about. He hadn't wanted to be seduced, but he had seemed to find a different language on every corner, a different world down every street, and Konrad had fallen instantly and hopelessly in love.
Twice, in fact.
Konrad had met Sarah during his first months in New York, when he had shown up at her father's watch shop in Brooklyn looking for work. She had been a smart, energetic young woman, with a gentle disposition...though occasionally emotional and prone to fits of temper. She had lost a young husband in the war, and though it couldn't have been easy raising their two-year-old son on her own, she had refused to simply let her father support her. Though she lived with her father in the apartments above the shop, she had even insisted on paying a modest rent for it from the money she made working at a grocery down the street.
While her father had constantly bemoaned her stubbornness, Konrad had found her enchanting.
Despite her independence, the pressure had been there socially for her to remarry. She had thought he was sweet enough. Konrad, meanwhile, had been head-over-heels for her, and overjoyed when she had accepted his proposal. Sam had been born two years later. They had been together for seven years when her father's failing eyesight had finally forced him to retire from his work, and the man had all but insisted the shop take his name now that it was his. Konrad had been honored...
Even though, by all rights, it hadn't really been his name.
He had been living as Dory Gray for more than twelve years, and right now every one of them felt like a waste. He cursed the name Adam had given him, cursed the fact that he had already met Sarah by the time he discovered the immortal's joke in giving it. If he had known sooner, he never would have continued to go by something so perversely fitting. Konrad had been twenty-three when he was injured and reassigned to Auschwitz, and he had looked young for it even then. Thirty-eight now, he didn't look a day older than he had that night he and Adam had fled. As he and Sarah spent their life together, the parallel with Wilde's well-known story had become a familiar joke.
Then, slowly, it had become a fact impossible to ignore...
While on its own the peculiarity of his age might have been forgiven he was also never sick, and of course Sarah couldn't in all their years together remember seeing him with as much as a paper cut... Finally, the day had come when she had looked him in the eye and asked him. Confronted with it directly he just hadn't been able to lie to her. Konrad had wound up telling her everything. Now Sarah knew the truth, not just about what he was but about who he had once been. And Sarah had never been shy about expressing what she wanted, so she had made it painfully clear that she wanted him nowhere near her or her family.
Now that life was over.
Losing it hadn't left him much. Dorian Gray had been a watchmaker like his father before him, a husband and the father of two sons. Without his shop, without his family, that man didn't even exist anymore. Without them he hardly knew who to be. He and Adam could have been having this conversation in any of a dozen languages, yet Konrad had stuck to English out of habit. Even the slight Mancunian accent which he had affected as Dorian still clung to his voice, the last tattered shreds of his old identity still surviving his exposure as a fraud.
"God..." The word escaped him hopelessly, as breath abandons one dying. "What am I even going to do with myself?"
"You'll doubtless find something," Adam told him dismissively. "Build a new life. Move on. If you believe for a second this was the worst that could have happened to you, you're being unspeakably naïve. And if you think that this is the worst that will happen to you, Kunz, then I doubt you'll last another century."
Konrad said nothing. After a long, thoughtful moment Adam let out a sigh, moving toward the bed to sit down beside him.
"My first wife's name was Helene," Adam said, sparing him a sideways glance as he took another swallow from his glass. "We were married in the mid-seventeenth century near Bad Berleburg in Germany. Our end was much like yours and Sarah's. I knew when I married her that I could not be killed, but not that I wouldn't age. We were together for twenty years before it became obvious. Still, when I confessed my secret she fled me thinking I was touched by the Devil."
Listening now, Konrad saw the faint smile at the corner of Adam's mouth, as if the memory amused him now more than anything else.
"And my last wife, Theresa..." Adam paused, taking another drink to cover his sneer. "Well, that was only a year ago, and the less said about the way that one ended, the better. But you shouldn't give up, Kunz. I've been married nine times, and they weren't all bad."
Slowly, Adam's smile grew into a soft, fond expression of which Konrad would have never previously thought the man capable.
"In 1786 I met Angelica. I took a chance on her, and when I told her the truth she didn't turn away. We had to travel from time to time to avoid suspicion, and after a while I was forced to pose as her grandson...but we were together for more than sixty years before she died."
"And my seventh, Diane... " Adam grinned. "I still like to return to the home we shared in Montreal, when I can. Ah, she was one of the good ones, Kunz. We only had twenty years together, and even that was almost over before it had its chance to start. Consumption almost took her from me the very year we married..."
Adam went on talking about the loves of his life, some of whom he had married though most he hadn't. Konrad did his best to listen. After all, he knew the man meant well. Yet all his stories seemed to succeed in was reminding Konrad of a brutal and bitter reality. The life he had to look forward to would be an unnaturally long one, and lonely. Even if one day he found someone like Adam's Angelica—someone willing to accept both his past and his changeless nature—whatever life they might enjoy together would still share that same, inevitable end. The cruel fact was that his friendship with Adam, such as it was, might be the only truly enduring relationship Konrad would ever have. A friendship, Adam had long ago taken great pains to assert, that would never be anything more...
Sensing his reminiscence was not having the desired effect Adam paused, casting Konrad a speculative glance.
"You should come with me on my next venture," Adam told him finally, standing. He set his empty glass aside. "You need a fresh start, and I think it would provide you the perfect chance."
"What kind of venture?" Konrad asked, though what he felt was less curiosity than it was wary apprehension.
"Right now this country's government has plans in motion to construct a facility out in some God-forsaken part of the desert," Adam said, smirking faintly. "A place for the study of...unique individuals."
Konrad's breath caught—or rather he caught it before it his breathing could run away into panicked hyperventilation.
His mind grasped emptily before he was able to focus on the room that he was in, because for a few brief seconds he hadn't been. Pulling back from his initial reaction, Konrad shoved the sudden memory of chill steel and spilled blood back into the unseen depths of his mind where it belonged. He fought the urge to do the same with the fresh, cold dread he now felt—just a little, just enough to think about things rationally—but he knew the temptation there was too great. There were too many things in his life right now he didn't want to feel or remember, and if he started down that road he might not be able to stop...
"A research camp," he finally managed. His voice sounded oddly lifeless, and his chest still felt painfully tight. "In America?"
Adam confirmed it with a faint noise.
"Honestly, Konrad, you didn't think your new adopted home was perfect, did you?" Adam said, sounding faintly amused. "I even hear a few of their prized researchers for this place are former countrymen of yours."
Konrad said nothing, refusing to rise to the bait. Anyway, there was nothing he could say.
"It seems Uncle Sam has learned of our existence," Adam continued, "or at least, those like us. I intend to be on hand to look over their shoulders and learn whatever it is they manage to learn about us."
"The way you were at Auschwitz," Konrad said, a little distantly. It wasn't a question, and needed no answer, though he finally did ask, "You don't think it can turn out any better, do you Fritz?"
And when Adam's smirk simply broadened it was all the answer Konrad needed. Not for the first time, he was disturbed by Adam's casual callousness. At times it seemed like the immortal barely acknowledged the short-lived others around them as human. By that same esteem, he often treated Konrad himself like a child.
"I...I'll think about it," Konrad told him hesitantly.
Adam nodded, though the smile had slipped from his lips turning into something mirthless and shark-like. Neither acknowledged it, but they both knew Adam had understood Konrad's answer as easily as if he had voice his refusal in any of the numerous languages they shared.
Conversation turned to other things for a while, though a chilly undercurrent lurked beneath its surface, and by the time Adam left Konrad felt strangely exhausted. Even the thought of undressing for bed felt like too much effort by half. Instead he lay down, clothed atop the bedsheets, letting his eyes roam the faded patterns in the peeling wall paper, letting them find meaningless pictures among the cracks in the ceiling. Anything to keep his thoughts from straying to the framed photograph of his family lying face down on the nightstand beside him.
His efforts were pathetically unsuccessful, and a different tightness constricted his chest squeezing the air from his lungs.
Once again, Konrad's entire life had been torn viciously from his grasp. Not for the first time, and he was painfully certain it wouldn't be the last. Still, shutting his eyes, Konrad forced himself to admit Adam had been right about one thing at least. He would need to find a new start. Create a new life for himself...
It wasn't as if he had any other choice.
PREV: Interlude 8 // MAIN // NEXT: Interlude 10
Author's Note: Sorry, these just seem to get longer and longer... Not only is it the longest interlude I've written yet, with this entry and One Giant Leap (which I consider the prologue), Black Edelweiss has officially cracked 50k words. Yikes.
Also, if you haven't seen it yet, I've done a couple of manips for this story.
Edit: On a reread, it occurred to me this scene goes through each one of the stages of grief pretty much in order...
