Critical Distance
Continuity: I'd say just before Who Are You, although it could really take place any time after Goodbye Iowa.
Disclaimer: Joss/Mutant Enemy/Fox own all Buffy characters, including Adam. The story is mine.
Distribution: God only knows why you'd want it, but as long as you ask first, I'm cool with it. You can find a slightly rougher version of this at the Watcher's Diary.
In the beginning, man made me in its own image.
Before that, my name was Mark Grosscott. Mark was an accountant, moderately successful, happily married for eight years.
Happily?
No, not really. Helene and Mark fought constantly: usually over money, which was always a problem because 'moderately successful' is never successful enough for the spendthrift American household. Once our daughter asked Mark if they were going to be divorced. She was unusually smart for a seven year old, but then I suspect that all parents think that their children are unusually smart for seven year olds, or unusually pretty, or unusually something. It is the nature of parents.
Mother thought that I was perfect, but then unlike most parents she hadn't left it to chance: she made me that way, and after much deliberation I've come to trust her judgment.
It was a car accident that killed us, all three of us. I remember Helene screaming, and Sarah . . . Sarah calling for her mother, not me and it's odd but my last thought was jealousy that it was Helene she screamed for and not me.
The bonds between a child and its mother are powerful: even I, above all passion, understand this bond.
Sarah had dark hair, like me, but she had inherited her mother's eyes.
My eyes were constructed, built to perceive the spectrum of light that humans only dream of. I see the world as it is.
Helene's beauty was nothing more than parabolas and obsessively cleaned epidermal tissue, treated with a variety of designer soaps and moisturizers in the desperately insecure vanity that seems so typical of human females, and also of males, though in men it manifests itself differently.
Mark was obsessive about cleaning his car: would I be what I am if he'd bothered to check the breaks as often?
Memories define the human identity: but so does the way the perceive those memories, the way their emotions distort and reconstruct the past. Mark thought himself to be a noble, long-suffering husband. In actuality he was selfish, narrow minded, smug and insufferable to his colleagues. His wife was little better, and his daughter would have been the same had she come of age. Yet he loved Sarah, more than life itself. He suffered through a disintegrating marriage just to be with her, because he feared that he would lose her in a divorce.
Human existence is based upon a lie: the lie that the individual life matters, that there is substance to the universe. That there is meaning.
I remember Sarah's scream.
Screaming for her mother, why? Where is the sense in that, the meaning? Mark loved her just as much, if not more, surely? Mark had even spent more time with her, on weekends when off from work, while Helene played tennis with her friends, or carried on her affair with Geoffrey from the office. Mark was the one who'd raised Sarah, supported her.
"Mommy."
Sarah's last word.
My first word.
A human would find symmetry in that, art even. I see only the random patterns of the universe, working toward the inevitable increasing chaos. Entropy, insanity, death. I appreciate violence: it is the only way in which humans and demons alike can try and bring order to the world, by forcing their will upon their surroundings. As I am going to do.
I loved the sound of Sarah's laugh.
Emotions are weakness: humanity, for all its inventiveness, has lacked the vision to take charge of its destiny. Rather than leave my wife and start a new family, I let my love for Sarah trap me in a loveless marriage, blind me to the logic of the situation, that my sacrifice was meaningless and unappreciated. That Sarah would call for her mother first, no matter how much I endured to earn her love.
Only Mother came close to breaking this bond, had the vision to think that she could bring order to the world, and the tenacity to this whatever the cost to herself or others. But in the end she too succumbed, to her love for my brother Riley and her jealousy of his love for the Slayer. But she saw this.
That's why she made me: she chose Mark for the reason that he had the right build to support the demon parts and cybernetic enhancements that she had planed for me. Still, even her vision was limited, and I knew from the start that she would have to die in order for me to fulfill the purpose she had made me for.
Thanks to Mother, I have achieved the critical distance that the weak mortal Mark Grosscott could only dream of. I know, unlike he did, that the world only makes sense when you break it to meet your will.
As Mother remade me, so I, Adam, will remake the world in my own image. And when I am finished, I will look upon my work and say "It is good," and my daughter's dying scream will finally be forgotten.