Title: Death By Carp

Author: SabaceanBabe

Rating: R for language

Word count: 412

Character: Adam Monroe

Spoilers: for Powerless

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He closed his eyes, so fucking beyond tired that he wanted to laugh. Almost. But he'd already screamed his throat raw – again – and it hadn't healed yet. Despite what anyone else thought of who he was, what he could do, what could be done to him, he still felt pain in all its raw glory.

God, even after all these years, he still felt the pain as if it had all happened yesterday.

He would have opened his eyes again as the tissue of his throat finally knitted itself back together, a curious tingling sensation that was just the wrong side of irritation. But the Carp had sealed him truly and well into this coffin. There was no light. There was no air. There was no point. His body slowly died of suffocation.

Truth be told, that realization was what had stopped the screams. No fucking point. After four hundred years and everything that fate and his own demons had thrown at him, a funny little man who could travel through space and time was his downfall.

He did laugh then, a sound of true amusement, albeit touched with hysteria.

This wasn't the first time he'd died, but it might just be the last. He blinked in the darkness, took a deep breath, just to see if he still could. Little lights flashed at the edges of his vision, white and silver and yellow. The air was close, already stale, quite a bit of it used up when he'd freaked out at waking up buried alive by a man he'd once loved and trusted.

Hiro Nakamura. A smile stretched his lips, nothing of amusement in it. In fact, if Hiro had been able to see the expression, it might have made him take a step back and hie himself off across his bloody space-time continuum as fast and as far as he could.

Adam Monroe – Takezo Kensei – allowed his eyes to drift closed again as consciousness faded away into the darkness of the grave. Unexpected and unwanted tears tickled his cheeks as they ran into his ears. "I will not die, Carp," he whispered. "This is fucking Japan. If nothing else, a bloody earthquake will toss me up to the surface and crack this prison open like an egg." The sparking lights at the edge of his vision invaded the forefront as the lack of oxygen took its toll. "I will find you, Carp. And if you think I was angry before…"