Written for the Heroes What If meme at livejournal, in answer to the prompt "what if Adam lost his powers?"
The shadow of a god
"Arthur?"
Talk about coming back from the grave.
There are tubes everywhere and that awful smell of the not-quite-alive. Adam's only ever had to endure it a couple of times, never for himself, and always with some measure of… not exactly pity, he guesses. Pity requires some kind of understanding of what the other person is going through. His power prevents him from understanding this.
The guys that brought him drag him across the room, and there's fear in his stomach, rising like bile.
"Arthur! You're..."
… the guy that steals other people's powers.
Barely breathing, barely moving an unsteady hand. (And just like that Adam's panicking, needs a sword, wants to run.)
"Come on, Arthur, is this really necessary? Couldn't we…"
Just a touch. A simple touch. Something is being drained from him, he can feel it, like a tug from the inside, a weakness in his knees, and Arthur Petrelli is suddenly breathing effortlessly, steady, ripping the tubes from his body and letting go. And for a second, just a second, Adam finds hope in the fact that he feels exactly the same, young and strong and immortal. Then, he remembers he's lived too long to be fooled by false hope.
It's over, he thinks. And suddenly the tubes and the bed and the foul smell of disease are way too much to handle.
Arthur lets him go. He's no needed (nor feared) anymore.
"Dust," he tells the bar at large. "That's what we're all gonna be. In eighty, ninety years. Nothing but dust."
"Shut the drunk, Mike!"
"I'm not drunk! Am I?" He turns to apparently-Mike. "I can't be drunk. I don't… I haven't been drunk in..."
There's a Japanese guy with glasses and a round face, and he's yelling "Carp!" before he gets closer and realizes "you're not Carp" with some indignation. Not as much indignation as the Japanese guy, though, who from this distance looks a lot more badass than Hiro.
Four hundred years of experience in battle. Hitting, dodging, slicing. The best fucking swordsman in the whole fucking word. A killing machine. A living god.
He never sees the blow coming.
Guess I'm drunk after all.
It hurts, but it always hurts. He's been hit before. Hit, smashed, thrown against walls, thrown from a cliff, ripped off his limbs, cut open wide, asphyxiated, set on fire, killed, and killed, and killed again. He can take a punch.
Only this time, his face throbs and throbs, and doesn't stop throbbing. Copper taste in his mouth, and he's felt it before, but now there's a wound, a split lip that shouldn't be there, that hurts when prodded with the tip of his tongue, and is that panic rising in his chest?
He can't remember the last time he felt fear (true fear) during a fight. A bad fall, the edge of a table, a hidden knife, a shred of glass, and in a second this could all be over, his eternal life vanished like a trick of the light. Or worse, much worse (his spine shattered, his limbs broken, his brain damaged beyond repair, and a sad existence of tubes and chemicals and foul smell, only the inevitable end to hope for).
He runs.
How much time passes? Is it even a day? Is it weeks?
And of course (but of course), Hiro Nakamura finds him.
"Go away, Carp. I'm useless now."
"The true power of a hero lies not in his ability, but in his heart," he says, in that ten-year-old matter-of-fact voice he likes to use.
"So I was useless before. What do you want?"
"You were a hero before you were a villain, Kensei. We need your help against the bad men who took your power."
There's a plot, apparently. A plot to stop Arthur Petrelli from giving powers to the world at large. And there's a formula that could give him back his eternal life. That has him back on his feet and fighting in no time. He wants life more he fears death, and that's how he beats the panic, sword in hand, a surge of adrenaline, four hundred years of expertise smirking to lesser enemies that fall to the ground, one after the other.
Arthur Petrelli dies at someone else's hand. And the formula, of course, is lost forever.
Peter gets his power back, being Peter. But it turns not be exactly what he had before. And Adam is left there, out in the world, mortal and vulnerable, asking himself if it would be truly better, to have a shadow of what he had, to be the shadow of a god.
He will never grow old. That he knows. He will never grow weak and aching and regretful of the things he didn't have time to do. If he has to go, he has decided, he will go in a surge of adrenaline, in the midst of battle, in the swish of a sword. (Tomorrow. He will start tomorrow. Today there's air to breathe, wine to drink, injuries to avoid.)