Over the mountains
Title: Over the mountains
Author: windfallswest
Fandom: Dark Angel/Star Trek/YuYu Hakusho
Characters: Max Guevara, Logan Cale, Mark McHenry
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: <----
Length: 2K
Summary: It wasn't that they always argued. It was just that they rarely agreed.
Notes: Also at AO3. Follows the blue of happy days.
"Cool. When are we leaving?"
And that's when the argument began.
To call it an argument in its own right is not entirely inaccurate, but unquestionably deceptive. It was a variant of a much larger, broader Argument that had been taking place almost since Logan's and Max's first words to each other. The Argument was very like a civil war. Battles were fought, blood drawn, truces agreed upon, breeched and circumvented. And as in all wars, the little words found themselves to have much in common and became rather attached to one another, while the dominating contestations clashed and trumpeted like generals. Losses were conceded and new offensives launched, and neither side could envisage a life without it anymore. It wasn't that they always argued. It was just that they rarely agreed.
This particular phase of the Argument had already seen its first skirmish, which had ended in mutual retreat. Chloe sat Max down in front of a movie and fed her ice cream and bitched about men with her. Max wasn't quite sure which was worse, Chloe's mostly-joking attempts to lure her into a life of kinky gay sex or her more serious insinuations about the nature Max and Logan's relationship. Which were completely ridiculous, but that was another Argument. Anyway, it was good to have a friend she didn't have to lie to.
Work was killer. Normal was acting like something had crawled up his ass and bit him there. Not to mention the usual hassle of life and haggling. The hot water in Max and Chloe's building died, again. It was a conspiracy, Max was almost convinced, and if she ever found the persons responsible, she was really going to liven up their lives. According to Chloe, this leaked out of her demeanour somehow and it "makes the plumber nervous because he thinks you're going to scramble his brains and drink them from his skull, so why don't you go mooch off your sugar-daddy for a couple hours?"
To which Max replied with a rude gesture. Then, softening, she asked, "Do people really think I'm going to drink their brains?" Max wrinkled her nose.
Chloe gave her a Look. "If anyone in that family of yours drinks brains, it's that Zack character. Now shoo."
"All right! All right! I'm going," Max surrendered. "See you in a few hours, boo."
"I won't wait up," Chloe shouted as Max closed the door behind her.
So Max schlepped over to Logan's on her hoverbike. She didn't want him slipping away on her, in any case. Bling opened the door for her. When she asked where Logan was, the answer was packing. Which led directly to the resumption of the Argument.
"What about your job?"
"My job sucks. Zack keeps telling me to move anyway; too many of the wrong sort of people know I'm here."
"And what will you do for money?" Logan argued. Which was grasping, really.
"You need a bodyguard, don't you? Then you can actually pay me. Besides, it's not like I didn't have ways of collecting pocket-change before you came along," Max shot back. They were just getting into the swing of it when they were interrupted.
Logan's back was to the door when it opened for a man with federal marshal stamped all over him. Before Max got all the way across the room, Logan grabbed the man by the neck in a vice-like grip and hung on. The fed went limp in less time than it took a man to pass out from hypoxia. Logan let him topple to the floor. There was a faint tremulus in his hands.
"I can take care of myself," Logan said evenly.
"You probably shouldn't keep doing that."
"Beats pulling his fingernails out. The cop woke up yesterday." Logan stared down at the fed with a contemplative look on his face.
Max tried not to be creeped. "So how bad is it?" she asked.
"We have two days; no more," Logan said.
Max nodded. "Right. So here's the plan. Get your people to keep their heads down or they can kiss their asses goodbye. You give me the key; I give it to Chloe. She moves your stuff, boxes and ships it or sells it and ships us the money. I grab my kit and you, me, and Bling hop on whatever boat you have reserved and make tracks."
"Our boat's going up six hours from now. I'm almost finished. Bling's ready. I'll need to talk with Chloe."
"Knew you couldn't get rid of me, huh?"
"I decided to be prepared."
The next few hours passed in a controlled flurry of tightly-lidded hysteria that resulted in the three of them being safely stowed on board in time for lift-off. Max could hear the low murmur of Logan's voice through the curtain that served her as a door. Chloe had taken the whole blue thing pretty well. It made enough sense, considering Chloe's obsession with the trippy side of the 'verse. When they left, Chloe hugged her good-bye and told her not to get herself killed or dissected.
"For a nosy reporter, you're awfully sweet. Keep your head down, boo."
Chloe let her go. "Now leave before I'm incapacitated by a storm of girly weeping."
"What do they know?" Max asked when she, Logan and Bling were alone in Max's cabin on the Heart of Darkness. It was small, but slip-ships were fast, hard to see, and hard to catch. Plus, it was a good bet the captain would be more or less used to operating on the shady side of legal. Most private merchants were, these days.
Logan was standing in a corner of the room with the cowl of the coarse, baggy robe he'd adopted for travelling pushed back. "They know more about Rogue than she suspected. They have at least some inkling of her psychic powers and-unusual physiology. The Alliance was tracking her, albeit from a distance. When they got reports of my turning blue, they put two and two together and decided to check it out. Right now, there's a cruiser sitting tight in orbit waiting for that agent's orders. He won't be missed until we're well gone."
There was silence while everyone digested that.
"Where are we going?" Max asked.
"Jarvis Station is our first stop. It orbits Mustafar in the Ciernes sector. A little bit out of the way, but it might serve to break our trail a little bit."
"I've heard of Jarvis," Bling volunteered. "Law doesn't have much to do there."
Max nodded. "Real high-class establishment. The feds squat under it on Mustafar and gnash their teeth up at the sky."
"Irina Derevko runs it. She has her own means of regulating who comes and goes. One of the biggest crooks in the sector," Logan added regretfully.
"So what makes you think she wouldn't be interested in us?" Max was getting a bad feeling about this.
"She won't know we're coming. Captain Kuwabara says she puts into Jarvis with some frequency, which hopefully means Derevko won't look twice at her," explained Logan. If she wasn't Derevko's stool pigeon. Right. "From there, we'll catch a local hopper to our final destination."
"Which is...?" Max prompted.
"I want to see a cousin of mine who has certain useful contacts," Logan replied evasively.
For reasons of prudence, Logan stayed in the cabin he and Bling were sharing both for economy's sake and because of the slip-ship's limited space. His tail was still growing, which Max wasn't sure she wanted to think about, and it had to hurt like a mother-fucker. So she tried not to bother him too much and inflict the necessity of being macholy stoic. Unusual physiology. That was one way to talk about being blue, furry, and tailed; although Logan's feet and hands didn't show any sign of fusing together into the wider, stronger digits Rogue had had. Logan called her Rogue, and Max supposed he would know. She wondered if Rogue had been born like that or if she'd caught it off someone else the way Logan had caught it off her when she died.
Max hung around with the crew to pass the time. Practically an all-male crew. You could smell the testosterone in the refiltred air. Max could, anyway. Just the relaxing atmosphere she needed. Oz and McHenry were cool, but man, the other three needed very much to chill. It was kind of a trade-off. The bridge was quieter than the engine room, what with the clanking and the Kuwabara kid, who kept apologising for swearing in front of her; but Max (and she'd really thought she'd mellowed these past few years) had to stomp on the urge to grab the controls every time she looked over and saw McHenry lounging half-asleep with his feet on the controls. They were nowhere near in thin enough space for that to be in any way safe; headed Core-wards especially. At first Max thought he was just incompetent, but every once in a while he dropped his feet, leaned forward and made some adjustments. He rarely bothered doing more than glance out the window; it was driving Max crazy. Of its own volition, her fancy brain clicked and ground the numbers, which always added up to not very reassuring. People just did not do that. Max was a genetically engineered superfreak, and she couldn't calculate hyperspace gravitic vectors in her head.
McHenry's brown eyes blinked distantly at her, like maybe they were trying to bring her into focus. Max realised she'd stopped talking, shut her mouth, and failed to remember what she'd been saying.
"Sometimes, I think everyone works on a boat is running from something," McHenry mused. The old why-are-you-here question; right. Zack would've killed her for asking it, inviting as it did reciprocation. Never lie if you don't have to, don't tell real truth if it's not necessary: the first rule of flying low.
"Running from what?" Max wondered. "Not a lot of room to run on one of these things. Back on Earth-that-was, before space-travel, they had submarines. Used to take a long look into everyone's head before setting off, make sure no one was going to develop a mad-on for the cook or go all stir-crazy. Nowadays, we just pile in a boat and if someone gets knifed you grab a warm body at the next port. Kind of makes you think."
"Hum." McHenry pursed his lips and sort of stared unfocussedly out into the interstellar distance. "You can tell, though. Some people, this is just a job. Some people, this is the only way to breathe. There's something behind all of us."
"And what is that, exactly?" Max looked out the big, convex windows displaying the streaking, muted view that was hyperspace and tried to relax.
"There're all sorts of things to run from," McHenry said. "The law, for a start. Memory, the past. What you see looming up in front of you. I mean, look at it all." A sweep of his arm indicated the off-black expanse of space on the other side of the dimensional film. "People occupy invisible specks around those tiny points. They're points in normal space, at least." In hyperspace, stars showed up as sort of prismatic smears. "A point-coordinate system doesn't have much meaning in hyperspace. Neither does space, really, outside of the warp bubble generated by a ship's engines-"
McHenry broke off, seeming suddenly to notice Max again. Max was listening with less than the usual ratio of bemused to glazed-over. Shizuru usually hit him over the head with something at about this point in the conversation. He had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed.
"But that's beside the point. Plus a couple of infinitesimal blips like this one. Biggest part of the rest of everything is what we call empty. That's a lot of space for us to fill up, with a lot of different reasons."
"What are your reasons?" Max asked. She really kind of wanted to know, and it wasn't such an odd question for a kid like Erin Weh to ask.
"Running from how planets run themselves, I suppose. Here for instance, Shizuru worries about everything, while all I have to worry about is Shizuru. Gives me time to think."
Max bit back a smirk. "Is that what you're doing every time I walk in here and you've got your feet up and your eyes closed?"
"Of course," McHenry replied haughtily. "Haven't you ever seen a body communing with the vastness of existence before?"
"That what they're calling it nowadays?" This time the smirk escaped. "Hey, you really go in for that sort of stuff?"
McHenry shrugged. "I like being out here with the larger-than-I. It helps me keep perspective."
No offence to your shorty, Herbal, Max thought, but I've found you a soul-mate. She looked at McHenry thoughtfully.
Author: windfallswest
Fandom: Dark Angel/Star Trek/YuYu Hakusho
Characters: Max Guevara, Logan Cale, Mark McHenry
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: <----
Length: 2K
Summary: It wasn't that they always argued. It was just that they rarely agreed.
Notes: Also at AO3. Follows the blue of happy days.
"Cool. When are we leaving?"
And that's when the argument began.
To call it an argument in its own right is not entirely inaccurate, but unquestionably deceptive. It was a variant of a much larger, broader Argument that had been taking place almost since Logan's and Max's first words to each other. The Argument was very like a civil war. Battles were fought, blood drawn, truces agreed upon, breeched and circumvented. And as in all wars, the little words found themselves to have much in common and became rather attached to one another, while the dominating contestations clashed and trumpeted like generals. Losses were conceded and new offensives launched, and neither side could envisage a life without it anymore. It wasn't that they always argued. It was just that they rarely agreed.
This particular phase of the Argument had already seen its first skirmish, which had ended in mutual retreat. Chloe sat Max down in front of a movie and fed her ice cream and bitched about men with her. Max wasn't quite sure which was worse, Chloe's mostly-joking attempts to lure her into a life of kinky gay sex or her more serious insinuations about the nature Max and Logan's relationship. Which were completely ridiculous, but that was another Argument. Anyway, it was good to have a friend she didn't have to lie to.
Work was killer. Normal was acting like something had crawled up his ass and bit him there. Not to mention the usual hassle of life and haggling. The hot water in Max and Chloe's building died, again. It was a conspiracy, Max was almost convinced, and if she ever found the persons responsible, she was really going to liven up their lives. According to Chloe, this leaked out of her demeanour somehow and it "makes the plumber nervous because he thinks you're going to scramble his brains and drink them from his skull, so why don't you go mooch off your sugar-daddy for a couple hours?"
To which Max replied with a rude gesture. Then, softening, she asked, "Do people really think I'm going to drink their brains?" Max wrinkled her nose.
Chloe gave her a Look. "If anyone in that family of yours drinks brains, it's that Zack character. Now shoo."
"All right! All right! I'm going," Max surrendered. "See you in a few hours, boo."
"I won't wait up," Chloe shouted as Max closed the door behind her.
So Max schlepped over to Logan's on her hoverbike. She didn't want him slipping away on her, in any case. Bling opened the door for her. When she asked where Logan was, the answer was packing. Which led directly to the resumption of the Argument.
"What about your job?"
"My job sucks. Zack keeps telling me to move anyway; too many of the wrong sort of people know I'm here."
"And what will you do for money?" Logan argued. Which was grasping, really.
"You need a bodyguard, don't you? Then you can actually pay me. Besides, it's not like I didn't have ways of collecting pocket-change before you came along," Max shot back. They were just getting into the swing of it when they were interrupted.
Logan's back was to the door when it opened for a man with federal marshal stamped all over him. Before Max got all the way across the room, Logan grabbed the man by the neck in a vice-like grip and hung on. The fed went limp in less time than it took a man to pass out from hypoxia. Logan let him topple to the floor. There was a faint tremulus in his hands.
"I can take care of myself," Logan said evenly.
"You probably shouldn't keep doing that."
"Beats pulling his fingernails out. The cop woke up yesterday." Logan stared down at the fed with a contemplative look on his face.
Max tried not to be creeped. "So how bad is it?" she asked.
"We have two days; no more," Logan said.
Max nodded. "Right. So here's the plan. Get your people to keep their heads down or they can kiss their asses goodbye. You give me the key; I give it to Chloe. She moves your stuff, boxes and ships it or sells it and ships us the money. I grab my kit and you, me, and Bling hop on whatever boat you have reserved and make tracks."
"Our boat's going up six hours from now. I'm almost finished. Bling's ready. I'll need to talk with Chloe."
"Knew you couldn't get rid of me, huh?"
"I decided to be prepared."
The next few hours passed in a controlled flurry of tightly-lidded hysteria that resulted in the three of them being safely stowed on board in time for lift-off. Max could hear the low murmur of Logan's voice through the curtain that served her as a door. Chloe had taken the whole blue thing pretty well. It made enough sense, considering Chloe's obsession with the trippy side of the 'verse. When they left, Chloe hugged her good-bye and told her not to get herself killed or dissected.
"For a nosy reporter, you're awfully sweet. Keep your head down, boo."
Chloe let her go. "Now leave before I'm incapacitated by a storm of girly weeping."
"What do they know?" Max asked when she, Logan and Bling were alone in Max's cabin on the Heart of Darkness. It was small, but slip-ships were fast, hard to see, and hard to catch. Plus, it was a good bet the captain would be more or less used to operating on the shady side of legal. Most private merchants were, these days.
Logan was standing in a corner of the room with the cowl of the coarse, baggy robe he'd adopted for travelling pushed back. "They know more about Rogue than she suspected. They have at least some inkling of her psychic powers and-unusual physiology. The Alliance was tracking her, albeit from a distance. When they got reports of my turning blue, they put two and two together and decided to check it out. Right now, there's a cruiser sitting tight in orbit waiting for that agent's orders. He won't be missed until we're well gone."
There was silence while everyone digested that.
"Where are we going?" Max asked.
"Jarvis Station is our first stop. It orbits Mustafar in the Ciernes sector. A little bit out of the way, but it might serve to break our trail a little bit."
"I've heard of Jarvis," Bling volunteered. "Law doesn't have much to do there."
Max nodded. "Real high-class establishment. The feds squat under it on Mustafar and gnash their teeth up at the sky."
"Irina Derevko runs it. She has her own means of regulating who comes and goes. One of the biggest crooks in the sector," Logan added regretfully.
"So what makes you think she wouldn't be interested in us?" Max was getting a bad feeling about this.
"She won't know we're coming. Captain Kuwabara says she puts into Jarvis with some frequency, which hopefully means Derevko won't look twice at her," explained Logan. If she wasn't Derevko's stool pigeon. Right. "From there, we'll catch a local hopper to our final destination."
"Which is...?" Max prompted.
"I want to see a cousin of mine who has certain useful contacts," Logan replied evasively.
For reasons of prudence, Logan stayed in the cabin he and Bling were sharing both for economy's sake and because of the slip-ship's limited space. His tail was still growing, which Max wasn't sure she wanted to think about, and it had to hurt like a mother-fucker. So she tried not to bother him too much and inflict the necessity of being macholy stoic. Unusual physiology. That was one way to talk about being blue, furry, and tailed; although Logan's feet and hands didn't show any sign of fusing together into the wider, stronger digits Rogue had had. Logan called her Rogue, and Max supposed he would know. She wondered if Rogue had been born like that or if she'd caught it off someone else the way Logan had caught it off her when she died.
Max hung around with the crew to pass the time. Practically an all-male crew. You could smell the testosterone in the refiltred air. Max could, anyway. Just the relaxing atmosphere she needed. Oz and McHenry were cool, but man, the other three needed very much to chill. It was kind of a trade-off. The bridge was quieter than the engine room, what with the clanking and the Kuwabara kid, who kept apologising for swearing in front of her; but Max (and she'd really thought she'd mellowed these past few years) had to stomp on the urge to grab the controls every time she looked over and saw McHenry lounging half-asleep with his feet on the controls. They were nowhere near in thin enough space for that to be in any way safe; headed Core-wards especially. At first Max thought he was just incompetent, but every once in a while he dropped his feet, leaned forward and made some adjustments. He rarely bothered doing more than glance out the window; it was driving Max crazy. Of its own volition, her fancy brain clicked and ground the numbers, which always added up to not very reassuring. People just did not do that. Max was a genetically engineered superfreak, and she couldn't calculate hyperspace gravitic vectors in her head.
McHenry's brown eyes blinked distantly at her, like maybe they were trying to bring her into focus. Max realised she'd stopped talking, shut her mouth, and failed to remember what she'd been saying.
"Sometimes, I think everyone works on a boat is running from something," McHenry mused. The old why-are-you-here question; right. Zack would've killed her for asking it, inviting as it did reciprocation. Never lie if you don't have to, don't tell real truth if it's not necessary: the first rule of flying low.
"Running from what?" Max wondered. "Not a lot of room to run on one of these things. Back on Earth-that-was, before space-travel, they had submarines. Used to take a long look into everyone's head before setting off, make sure no one was going to develop a mad-on for the cook or go all stir-crazy. Nowadays, we just pile in a boat and if someone gets knifed you grab a warm body at the next port. Kind of makes you think."
"Hum." McHenry pursed his lips and sort of stared unfocussedly out into the interstellar distance. "You can tell, though. Some people, this is just a job. Some people, this is the only way to breathe. There's something behind all of us."
"And what is that, exactly?" Max looked out the big, convex windows displaying the streaking, muted view that was hyperspace and tried to relax.
"There're all sorts of things to run from," McHenry said. "The law, for a start. Memory, the past. What you see looming up in front of you. I mean, look at it all." A sweep of his arm indicated the off-black expanse of space on the other side of the dimensional film. "People occupy invisible specks around those tiny points. They're points in normal space, at least." In hyperspace, stars showed up as sort of prismatic smears. "A point-coordinate system doesn't have much meaning in hyperspace. Neither does space, really, outside of the warp bubble generated by a ship's engines-"
McHenry broke off, seeming suddenly to notice Max again. Max was listening with less than the usual ratio of bemused to glazed-over. Shizuru usually hit him over the head with something at about this point in the conversation. He had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed.
"But that's beside the point. Plus a couple of infinitesimal blips like this one. Biggest part of the rest of everything is what we call empty. That's a lot of space for us to fill up, with a lot of different reasons."
"What are your reasons?" Max asked. She really kind of wanted to know, and it wasn't such an odd question for a kid like Erin Weh to ask.
"Running from how planets run themselves, I suppose. Here for instance, Shizuru worries about everything, while all I have to worry about is Shizuru. Gives me time to think."
Max bit back a smirk. "Is that what you're doing every time I walk in here and you've got your feet up and your eyes closed?"
"Of course," McHenry replied haughtily. "Haven't you ever seen a body communing with the vastness of existence before?"
"That what they're calling it nowadays?" This time the smirk escaped. "Hey, you really go in for that sort of stuff?"
McHenry shrugged. "I like being out here with the larger-than-I. It helps me keep perspective."
No offence to your shorty, Herbal, Max thought, but I've found you a soul-mate. She looked at McHenry thoughtfully.