[JMM] Maya Angelou quote
[Young!Mickey, set just after he loses his handler and escapes from Manticore.]
“I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.”
Whether they’re geneticially engineered to be a weapon, or just raised in a normal household, or children have at least a flimsy grasp of what it means to be family. Even those who are raised in homes with multiple brothers and sisters don’t always get it what it really means to be sisters and brothers, while children made indiscernible and anonymous by those that have bred and raised them can band together and be brothers and sisters. It was strange, and maybe it didn’t quite make the most logical sense in the world, but it was there, and there was no way that they could deny that.
It was a trick of psychology, he reasoned. That their traumatized child minds expected certain things on instinct. Cats were loners by natures, but even as kittens they had their litter and children were supposed to grow up in families and houses, have some kind of normality to their life. If a shrink ever had a look at an X5, they might find that as children they banded together because their tiny minds knew that those people were going to be all they had. And despite the brainwashing, intense training, and constant edge of competition, they knew that the only people they could count on to look out for them were the other X5s in their unit. Their brothers and sisters. The group from the Alpha Unit had shown that much already, in a way that Lydecker and his goons hadn’t expected, and it resulted in the kids being taken apart and put back together again, only that hadn’t changed much.
Yes, they didn’t seem as loyal. Yes, they didn’t put up much of a fight when they the guards came after one of their own. But oh, did it make them angry. In the backs of their minds-that was still their brother or sister. That was their family. They didn’t really have much more than that.
And Mickey was abandoning them.
The hopeful section of his brain, whatever was left of it, told him that they would understand. It was coming down to the end of the line for him, and he needed to take his opportunities when he had them, rather than wait till it was too late for him to do much else. His siblings would understand. It would make sense to them. That was what he wanted to believe more than anything in the world-that when he didn’t come home after this one, they would understand, and they would know why. And they wouldn’t hate him.
Reason said that that wasn’t going be the case. That optimism wasn’t going to make them understand, that him disappearing without a trace was only going to hurt more than it was going to help. They wouldn’t understand why he left, if only because he was leaving without them and that was what would hurt most of all. That he didn’t take them with him. That he didn’t try to save them as well, before he even began. He crouched in the darkness of the cargo hold of the ship, feeling the ship rock beneath him, and he leaned back against the wall, studying the edges of the boxes in the dark, taking note of what the cargo was, what he could find, anything that would be of use to him before the trip was over. He tried to think of everything he could possibly need to find in order to make sure that he survived the long trip across the ocean, and wished silently that he had someone with him, someone to think of the things he wouldn’t, to watch his back from the monsters that were hidden in the edges of darkness that he couldn’t see, but he knew he wasn’t going to get that wish. He was completely alone.
And that was the one thing he hated more than anything.
652 words
“I don't believe an accident of birth makes people sisters or brothers. It makes them siblings, gives them mutuality of parentage. Sisterhood and brotherhood is a condition people have to work at.”
Whether they’re geneticially engineered to be a weapon, or just raised in a normal household, or children have at least a flimsy grasp of what it means to be family. Even those who are raised in homes with multiple brothers and sisters don’t always get it what it really means to be sisters and brothers, while children made indiscernible and anonymous by those that have bred and raised them can band together and be brothers and sisters. It was strange, and maybe it didn’t quite make the most logical sense in the world, but it was there, and there was no way that they could deny that.
It was a trick of psychology, he reasoned. That their traumatized child minds expected certain things on instinct. Cats were loners by natures, but even as kittens they had their litter and children were supposed to grow up in families and houses, have some kind of normality to their life. If a shrink ever had a look at an X5, they might find that as children they banded together because their tiny minds knew that those people were going to be all they had. And despite the brainwashing, intense training, and constant edge of competition, they knew that the only people they could count on to look out for them were the other X5s in their unit. Their brothers and sisters. The group from the Alpha Unit had shown that much already, in a way that Lydecker and his goons hadn’t expected, and it resulted in the kids being taken apart and put back together again, only that hadn’t changed much.
Yes, they didn’t seem as loyal. Yes, they didn’t put up much of a fight when they the guards came after one of their own. But oh, did it make them angry. In the backs of their minds-that was still their brother or sister. That was their family. They didn’t really have much more than that.
And Mickey was abandoning them.
The hopeful section of his brain, whatever was left of it, told him that they would understand. It was coming down to the end of the line for him, and he needed to take his opportunities when he had them, rather than wait till it was too late for him to do much else. His siblings would understand. It would make sense to them. That was what he wanted to believe more than anything in the world-that when he didn’t come home after this one, they would understand, and they would know why. And they wouldn’t hate him.
Reason said that that wasn’t going be the case. That optimism wasn’t going to make them understand, that him disappearing without a trace was only going to hurt more than it was going to help. They wouldn’t understand why he left, if only because he was leaving without them and that was what would hurt most of all. That he didn’t take them with him. That he didn’t try to save them as well, before he even began. He crouched in the darkness of the cargo hold of the ship, feeling the ship rock beneath him, and he leaned back against the wall, studying the edges of the boxes in the dark, taking note of what the cargo was, what he could find, anything that would be of use to him before the trip was over. He tried to think of everything he could possibly need to find in order to make sure that he survived the long trip across the ocean, and wished silently that he had someone with him, someone to think of the things he wouldn’t, to watch his back from the monsters that were hidden in the edges of darkness that he couldn’t see, but he knew he wasn’t going to get that wish. He was completely alone.
And that was the one thing he hated more than anything.
652 words