"Before you go, I want you to have this", Adam said, depositing on the girl's hands a beautifully wrapped package, careful as so his naked hands would not brush hers.
Long ago he had learned of how she liked to avoid skin on skin contact. Mostly with males.
Especially older males.
On his part, the scientist liked to avoid thinking of what that might mean.
Terra opened her gift slowly, delicately, although a great part of her had doubts about keeping it – whatever it was – from the start.
The girl ended up finding, under the colorful, tasteful wrapping, a leather-bound book which must certainly have seen better moments and brought its owner great pleasure in its ancient reading and teaching – if the marks of use and hand-made notes on the pages were anything to go by – and that now was all old and falling apart.
It was Adam's old copy of "All that I am is yours: The Full Teachings of Rabi Akiva."
And he was giving it to her? Why...
She kept staring at it, not really accepting the gift, but not really rejecting it either.
To be true, Terra had once been the proud owner of a copy herself. One she had kept with great care from the moment she had been given it by her siblings, when she had turned ten, only to lose it months later when it had happened and she saw herself being forced to fake her death to her own family and having to travel on her own.
Then, before she had to leave the Titans Tower for the umpteenth time, this time with her baby siblings – in search of their older ones – she had been given another copy by the teenage heroes themselves, and swore to herself that, under no circumstance, she would ever be separated from it.
Which also ended up not working, because that book had become lost forever in the night she had first fought the Dominium.
And met the man who now stood before her, slightly disappointed.
"You don't like it?"
"No, please, I don't like it. It hurts, stop, please, stop ..."Terra shock her head, but not the memories – never the memories – away.
"I love it! You know how I admire Rabi Akiva and his words... But I can't accept it." Her voice started as a squeal and died on the way, as she tried to push the book back into his hands.
Like her, however, Adam wouldn't budge.
"Yes, you can. It's mine to give and yours to have it."
Terra fidget on her spot. Thinking. Pondering.
Suddenly, she clutched the book to her chest with one hand while the other grabbed, not his hand, but his wrist – the only amount of foreign skin she knew she could deal with at the moment – and squeezed it.
"Thank you so much, Adam", she whispered, almost imperceptibly.
Adam smiled. "You're welcome, Terra."
From the hall, a red-haired watched the scene, seeing it for what it was.
Progress.