Chapter Text
Adam Jacobs. That was his new name. A chosen name, not an inherited one, taken on as he began the path he hoped would finally lead him toward a truce with the world—toward a truce with his own damnation. He was a creature who, with his eyes fixed on the sun as if searching for a divine sign, tried to shape a destiny he had never asked for.
183 years had passed since he first began to wander the earth, accompanied only by his immortality. Over time, he had learned to live with it, to tolerate it, even to accept it as the one constant in his endless existence. Slowly, he understood that this sentence would never leave him; that in order to survive, he needed to look at it from another angle… perhaps even embrace it.
If the only answer to his suffering was to keep living, then he had to learn to adapt to the humans who inhabited the world: short-lived, ever-changing creatures who rejected him without even understanding what they were rejecting. The peace he sought seemed to slip through his fingers once again.
After his creator’s death, Adam returned to the tower one last time. He wanted to close the circle, confront an origin that felt more like a wound than a birth, and leave it behind so he could keep moving forward—if one could even call this eternal existence “life.”
As he walked through the remains of the place, he examined the photographs he had found during his first visit after the fire. That was when he discovered, buried under debris, a strange machine next to an image of the process in which his hands were being sewn. He stared at it carefully. Camera. That was what the old man who once taught him new words through flashcards had called it.
He didn’t know how it worked, but it was clear that the machine had recorded his creation with an almost unsettling fidelity.
He thought about leaving it there, but the idea struck him with unexpected clarity:
if that object had preserved the testimony of his birth, then he could use it to document his life.
His true beginning.
It took several attempts, clumsiness, and trial and error, but he finally understood how it worked. And with that understanding came absolute fascination: capturing the world through his gaze. Preserving it. Immortalizing it, just like himself.
The beginning wasn’t easy. Settling in a small European village and pretending to be normal was almost absurd for someone with his height and his scars. But he had to try. If he wanted to ease his burden, he had to live. And he couldn’t live without integrating, at least minimally, into a community.
His first village in Germany taught him the harshest lesson: he could never put down roots.
Time always betrayed him.
Others aged. He didn’t.
Scars stopped mattering once the passing years began marking him as a mistake of nature.
So he learned to leave every so often.
Europe started to feel too small, too repeated, too aware of his presence.
Until, in an Italian port, he heard rumors of a new continent.
A place they called “the land of opportunities.”
The United States.
He found work as a photographer: taking portraits of travelers before they boarded, or capturing those on deck as they said goodbye to the ones they left behind. There was something hypnotic about freezing those unique moments.
In a way, photographs were the closest things to him: they didn’t die—they remained.
The camera became his companion, a tangible extension of his immortality. Victor had never wanted to give him a companion… but Adam had found one on his own. Right there, in the place where his curse had begun, he discovered something capable of understanding him without words.
The job was profitable. Few people in that region owned a camera, so demand was high and the novelty did the rest. People paid well to preserve a moment, a memory, a face before the distance.
And even though he disliked earning money from other people’s sentimentality, he needed to eat and pay for a room at the boarding house. So he shut the door on his moral dilemmas and carried on.
He learned to save money and, when he felt his time in Italy was running out, he decided to take the leap. He packed his scarce belongings into a bag and went to buy a ticket. The first available ship sailed to Argentina—a tempting destination, full of migrants as well—but he chose to wait for the next one. The United States had grown too much in his mind to settle for anything else.
The journey was long. He discovered, to his dismay, that the sea made him unbearably nauseous. But after nearly three weeks at sea, he finally reached the port of New York.
The initial impact overwhelmed him: so many people, so many languages, shouted instructions, endless lines.
But amid all that chaos, he found something like relief.
No one looked at him twice.
No one had the time.
Everyone was too busy trying to pronounce their names, fill out forms, find their line.
And when he stepped onto New York soil, he knew.
That chaos could be his home.
That noise, his refuge.
Among the crowds, for the first time, he was free.
Free from the stares, from the rejection, from the fear he always provoked.
There, his existence wasn’t a sentence.
Or at least, not for most.