SPN/DA crossover fic: Of Desire and the Status Quo (13/38)
Story Title: Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter Title: If a Story Be a Confession
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Summary: In the end, it’s a complete accident that gets Dean Winchester out of Hell.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter XIII: If a Story Be a Confession
“So where’d you learn all that stuff?” Max asks, a mile or so after she and Alec had appropriated the Jeep.
“What stuff?” Alec replies, frowning at her.
Max takes her eyes off the road for a second to look over at Alec. “‘What stuff’?” she mimics in disbelief. “Everything! The medicine, the pharmacology, the Dean saving…I know Manticore wouldn’t teach things like serotonin overdose, given that they were brainwashing people who had a lack of serotonin. So what gives?”
Alec heaves a sigh, and stares out the window that he’d closed once the infamous Washington sky decided to once more pour buckets over every bit of land and water it could find. There isn’t much to see, even with Alec’s ingrained night vision, but he leans his forehead against the cool glass anyway.
Upon hearing Alec’s silence, Max’s senses are on full alert. Alec loves to talk-the only times he doesn’t are on missions where it’s imperative he stays quiet (and even then, it’s be a tossup as to whether he fulfills that or not), or if there’s something huge that’s bothering him. Max unwillingly flashes back to that horrific set of days where she’d been left fully in the dark on the reasons behind Alec’s sudden mood change from happy-go-lucky to pure confusion and desolation.
“This isn’t another…another Ray-” Max stops mid-word, unable to bring herself to say the name of the woman Alec had given his heart to, the rule unspoken and yet paramount. Alec doesn’t talk about it, Max doesn’t ever mention it.
She brushes off most of what Alec does-same as he, a lot of the time-but there are some lines even Max won’t cross, and Rachel is the one foremost. She’d previously thought of Alec as incapable of true affection and caring, that he couldn’t possibly understand the emotions and the repercussions for people like the two of them that love caused. Max knows it well, and she hadn’t expected Alec to know it to the same level. But once she’d learned it, and learned that Alec had been burned quite possibly even worse than she had, well, she isn’t going to unbearably cruelly exploit that part of him.
“I mean, this isn’t another Manticore thing, is it?” Max amends, tightening her fingers around the steering wheel in apprehension, though having a sickening feeling she already knows the answer.
Alec fiddles with the non-functioning radio dial, before he abandons that movement and instead crosses his arms over his chest. “’Course it was,” he scoffs lowly, his eyes staring past the dark rain.
Max nods slowly, expecting as much but hating that she had. “So what happened?” she asks. “And don’t even think about doing your whole stonewalling thing with that ‘I’m always all right’ shit. Tell me what happened.”
Because it’s not just about you anymore, Alec, Max wants to add sadly, but settles for the harsher, more to-the-point approach, the type that defines her personality.
Alec’s face is mutinous for a few seconds, like Max had asked him to slaughter a puppy or something-all right, she allows, maybe it’s wrong to equate Manticore to a puppy, but still-but then the tautness recedes, and he takes a deep breath.
“It was February of 2020, a few weeks after they decided I wasn’t completely defective and not just bound for organ harvest,” Alec says finally, and his voice already has that faraway quality that Max herself adopts when thinking of events she’d really rather not.
Max winces, Zack’s face behind all that tubing and wires coming to her mind. It’s soon overshadowed, however, by her remembering what Alec had told her months ago, at first an offhand mention, and now a crude vignette:
I know that because’a him, I had to spend six months in Psy Ops. They wanted to make sure it wasn’t genetic.
You think life was rough when we were ten? A little schooling, little brainwashing, some maneuvers outside, you think that was tough? Well, take it from me, later on it got a whole lot worse. But you did what you had to do. And you tried to forget. And when you couldn’t forget, they had ways of making you not care…
A vision of Alec, strapped to a table-like Dean had been-helpless, dosed up on concoctions of drugs that did God knows what, a crimson laser piercing through his eye straight into his thalamus, relentlessly, causing all the pain and worse of physical injury, but leaving not a scratch. A vision of him faced off against multiple persons from the Psy Ops series, their extrasensory gifts prodding and mangling and falsifying his brain as they tried to make his memories, memories of Rachel and of a time when he was happy, vanish and in their place inject ones of pure Manticore, pure soldier, pure robotic allegiance.
Max had been morbidly curious about what she’d actually missed post-her escape, and perhaps she still is to a degree, but now that she’s less I-hate-you-Alec-just-go-and-die, and more will-you-be-my-Second-in-Command?, sees just how twisted Manticore could make someone as equanimous and vivacious as Alec, well…she’s not so inclined to know anymore.
“What happened?” Max prompts quietly, the only sounds able to permeate the tension being the torrential rain, and Dean’s labored breathing.
“They sent me undercover again,” Alec bites out, his jaw tight. “With the contingency, obviously, that I’d be watched more carefully than I was before. They flew me over to Manhattan, where I was supposed to pose as an intern in neurology at the Mount Sinai Hospital. The objective was to assassinate the Chief of Staff there; he was a really nice guy, actually, which was probably another Fuck You of Manticore’s, and apparently he’d been looking into neural engineering, into what effects different snips or grafts to certain areas of the brain could cause, too much for Manticore’s liking. Guess they thought killing the man would be a kind of test for me or whatever; if I could do it, kill in such cold, unnecessary blood like that then I really was successfully reindoctrinated.”
Max pauses, thinking this over, before she questions, “And you did it?”
“What do you think?” Alec snaps angrily, whipping his head towards her.
Her jaw tenses, and its only when she feels the plastic of the steering wheel bend under the pressure of her clenched fingers that she gets her fury under control. But, unlike it probably would’ve only but three or four months ago, it isn’t at Alec. She’d be the biggest hypocrite in the world if she held something Manticore made him do against him.
“You ended that man’s life, Alec,” Max says placatingly, “but you saved Dean’s with the knowledge you got from that job. And in my book, that’s a pretty damn good thing.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that I killed him.”
“You’ve killed a lot of people, Alec. I’ve killed a lot of people. Dean’s killed a lot of people. All of us have. And it sucks ass, and it hurts like hell, but it’s happened,” says Max firmly, shooting Alec a hard look. “No one can change that, and there’s no point in trying to. All any of us can hope for is to try and make the best of it and do as much good with it as possible.”
Alec is quiet, but this time Max doesn’t press. She glances in the rearview mirror briefly, checking as well she can on Dean. He’s still pale as nothing else, and there’s the intermittent tremor going through him, and he’s muttering a little under his breath, but Max is pretty sure he’s not in immediate threat of death. That said, she edges the pedal a bit more to the floor, pushing the speedometer from eighty-five to a hundred, the whining engine and rain-soaked road merely catalysts.Max, Alec, and Dean are only about a quarter of a mile away from Terminal City’s gates when Max remembers that the military is still very much in play (hey, give her a break, she was a little preoccupied), their twenty-four/seven guard one of the main hindrances for making T.C. livable. Max pulls the Jeep over to the side of the road, shutting off the car and looking over at Alec, who had been more silent than Dean ever since he’d admitted to his murdering the neurologist.
“There’s a sewer entrance not far from here,” Max says, breaking the quietude. “Don’t use it much ‘cause it’s too close for comfort to the barricade.”
She feels the notification is thoroughly unnecessary, given that Alec’s just as aware, if not more so, of the goings-on in T.C. as she is, but honestly, the silence is weirding her out. When Alec doesn’t answer, she punches him in the arm.
“Hey!” Max barks sharply. Alec finally turns to her, his attention focused. “Think you can carry him through the tunnels? Or should we call Mole to send someone to help?”
Alec scowls. “It’s Dean that’s the cripple, not me, Max,” he retorts agitatedly. “I can carry my clone just fine, thank you.”
“He’s not a clone.”
“Whatever. Same difference.”
“Let’s just go already,” Max orders, hopping out of the vehicle and grabbing the bundle of her sweater and Dean’s clothes, which still bears the miraculously unbroken bottles of medicine inside of it. Coming around to Alec’s side, she helps him safely get Dean out of the backseat, and although she’s not happy about the fireman’s carry Alec adopts again, she concedes that it’s the most efficient way. Were Dean about sixty pounds lighter, she wagers Alec would go with just holding Dean over both arms, but as it is, Dean might as well be a sack of potatoes.
It’s about one klick to the sewer entrance, and they make it there in a few minutes, but that isn’t the part that’s most difficult. Max heaves open the manhole cover and Alec sets Dean gently on the ground for a moment so that he can jump down into the sewer-a splash of something echoing throughout-and Max can awkwardly pass Dean through the entrance and into Alec’s hold again. Taking a last, quick survey of her surroundings to make sure no one saw them, Max then steps down into the tunnel, pulling the metal cover back over her.
Alec wastes no time in griping over anything and everything, soon making Max wonder why exactly she’d so wanted him to start talking in the car ride. More unfortunate still, his blabbering is made twice as long due to that many more breaths he has to take owing to Dean’s deadweight. Max thinks Alec’s exaggerating, considering it’s not like Dean’s, say, Brain’s size, but, to Alec’s credit, Dean was overdosed with a lethal level of narcotics, so there’s that.
“You know, really, I still don’t get this devotion you have to the guy,” Alec continues, still on his favorite topic-Max and Dean. “I mean, he’s basically me, and you don’t like me this much.”
Max rolls her eyes. “Dean is so not you, Alec,” she says. “He’s way more mature.”
Alec snorts ungracefully, coming to a puddle of water-ish liquid and splashing some of it on Max, which really only serves to further her point. “Come on, you barely know the man,” he whines, and Max can’t truthfully deny that. “And is it not completely messed up that he looks barely thirty when he should be, what, forty-something? Not to mention the rap sheet. Kinda careless, if you ask me.”
“Didn’t,” Max retorts. “And yeah, it’s really fucking whacked, but unless you’ve got something new to say, just shut up. I’ll get answers, but it’s not like anyone can give them besides Dean, now is it?”
“Wow, Logan can’t magic his way into finding it out? My mind is sufficiently boggled,” Alec says, putting his free hand over his heart to emphasize his words.
Max sneers at him, and would totally sweep her leg into his ankles and send him sprawling into the sludge if it weren’t for the precious cargo he’s in charge of. “Logan found out lots of stuff about Dean, for your information,” Max says. “I mean, maybe not something-”
“Useful?” Alec interjects, to Max’s glare.
“No,” she snipes. “Maybe not something that explains the whole dopplegänger thing is all. You never know, maybe Dean’s just…youthful for his age.”
“That’s total bullshit and you know it,” Alec says matter-of-factly. “You just don’t want to admit that neither you nor Logan have jack squat. Or that you’re dying to find out what’s the deal with all of this.”
Max grits her teeth, really, really wishing Alec weren’t so intuitive. On missions, it helped. Times like now? Yeah, it so doesn’t. “What do you want from me, Alec?”
“I want to know just why the hell a homicidal maniac Ordinary from over a decade ago is suddenly walking around with my face,” Alec states, jerking Dean on his shoulder. “It’s like freakin’ 493 all over again, only without the schizophrenia crap.”
“Don’t say that,” Max snaps. “Don’t you talk about Ben like that.”
“Max, lay off,” Alec sighs, glancing sideways at her. “I’m just trying to work through this, same as you. It’ll succeed a lot better if you don’t keep sabotaging me with your heatseeker rhetoric every two seconds.”
She hates when Alec does this, says something with just the right amount of ambiguity as to whether he’s insulting you or complimenting you. Max just isn’t sure. “Well, you just know everything, don’t you?”
“Scary, isn’t it?”
Max grits her teeth, repeating the furious mantra in her head that she can’t kick Alec’s ass. Yet. “All right, fine. What do you suggest, Your Omniscience?”
“I’d be so flattered if your voice wasn’t dripping with sarcasm,” Alec remarks, grinning at her. Max death-glares at him, and it has zero effect on Alec after all this time and the countless ones she’s bestowed on him, but he complies anyway. “Sam.”
It’s all Alec says, and Max waits for a few seconds, like she’s expecting him to go on, but he doesn’t. “Sam?” Max inquires, the younger brother coming up on the “What do we do now?” lists more and more often lately. That isn’t to say Max knows anything more about Sam now than she did when Cindy gave the suggestion, but Max thinks she should maybe drop Sam’s name first next time. It’s been the number one answer so far. “Okay, what about him?”
“Come on, Maxie,” Alec says, purposefully riling her up with the nickname that was Ben’s for her. “If there’s anyone that can provide answers for Dean, besides Dean himself, who’s kinda crazy at this point-don’t look at me like that, it’s totally true-it’ll be his brother, right?”
Alec’s logic is sound, Max will give him that. There is just one problem, and the same one she’d encountered previously: “Yeah, and where do you propose we find him, huh? Who’s to say the guy’s even alive?”
“Already got Dix working on it,” says Alec with a full grin. “I presume Sam’d be too careful to let himself get caught in a pattern of suspicious deaths or whatever by the feds, but I’m betting he’d never banked on a genetically engineered geek looking for him.”
Max looks at him, considering. “All right, a) how’d you know to look for Sam, and b) what exactly did you ask Dix to search for? ‘Brutal ritual killings by a potentially dead serial killer’?”
“Actually, yeah, basically,” Alec replies with a straight face. Then, it turns uncomfortable, and he adjusts Dean on his shoulders again. “Right. That nightmare I had?”
Max frowns, Alec’s writhing and purely terrified form in the throes of a horrific dream that she’d been simultaneously afraid and eager to wake him from all too vivid in her mind. “Of course,” she responds instead, that episode being crucial to their locating of White’s compound. “Was there something else about it?”
“Well, look, you said you and O.C. heard Dean muttering something about Sam, something about not hurting him,” Alec says. “I figure if we actually bring him to Dean, maybe it’ll fix him or at least make him talk. Or not. I dunno.”
Once again, Max can’t exactly find fault in Alec’s theory, and yet it’s still a daunting one. It isn’t just the schematics of finding Sam that fills Max with misgivings. She has more than enough faith in her people and in technology that they’d be able to find Sam (eventually). No, what has her apprehensive about the whole thing would be how exactly she-and maybe Alec, although that’d probably screw it all up more-could convince Sam that she both isn’t some creeper, and that she really does have Dean. Not to mention the necessity for Sam to be at least neutral on the whole transgenic front. If he weren’t, well, Max doubts he’d even let her get one word out.
Alec sighs. “Oh, great,” he bemoans. “You’ve got that face again.”
“What face?”
“The Alec’s-nuts-but-I’m-just-going-to-ignore-him-and-his-awesome-plan face.”
Max fixes him with another glare. “You know, for an X5, you’re really co-dependent,” Max observes. She notes the writing on the side of the next tunnel junction they come across and, knowing they’re close to T.C., quickens her pace.
She mentally counts down from three before Alec’s retort comes. “First of all, I’m not co-dependent,” Alec snaps, right on schedule. “Secondly, with your fascist ruling, how can I not be insecure, you rightist, you?”
“Fascist?!”
“Yeah, you know, Ordinary evil dictator stuff,” Alec supplies. “Slap a swastika and half-stache on you, and you’re a regular Hitler. Albeit more attractive.”
“The random knowledge you have is disturbing,” Max comments, not very familiar herself with fascism or Hitler, seeing as how even the Ordinary educational system is pretty fucked up, and it isn’t like Manticore exactly taught History. (If they had, Max has a feeling the transgenics would have related them to fascists anyway, so perhaps it’d been in Manticore’s best interests after all.)
Alec shrugs, obviously not affected by Max’s observation. In his experience, the more knowledge you have the better, regardless of its content. Case in point: Dean. Granted, Alec’s not fond of just how he acquired that information, but it proved useful nonetheless, even though beforehand Alec never would’ve thought it would be an asset. Unfortunately, in this instance, Alec has no insight (random or otherwise) on Sam, let alone on how to find him and bring him to Dean. All he has is that nightmare, which isn’t really comprehensible in the first place.
“We’ll try,” Max says, and Alec turns to her, surprised. He’s pretty positive he would’ve been able to get Max to come around, but he hadn’t thought it’d be this fast. “I don’t know how soon we’d be able to find any info, but we’ll try.”
“Um…good,” Alec says stiltedly, wondering if he’d shown something on his face that Max interpreted to be so pathetic she had to agree with him. He doesn’t think he did… “How’s about we get him to T.C. first, though, huh? Dude’s getting heavy.”
Max rolls her eyes, she and Alec quickly falling back into their typical roles. “I think you should be glad he’s knocked out,” she says lightly. “It’d be much harder to get him through the tunnels and let Rade look him over if he were conscious, don’t you think?”
“It’d be better if he weren’t mortally injured and he were complacent,” Alec counters. “But when have we ever been that fortunate?”
“I’m continuously in awe of your abilities to lighten a situation,” says Max dryly. Of course, her statement isn’t always ironic, since Alec does have a certain knack for lightening situations, but at the present time, she doesn’t find his cynicism very helpful.
Alec looks like he’s going to reply with something considerably perverted, but then catches the light at the end of the tunnel (literally), and sighs in relief. “Finally,” he remarks, and steps up his pace. “It’s really too bad Manticore had to funnel all that money into making us, when they should’ve been making some kind of teleportation device.”
Max stares at him strangely, but decides to play along. “Yeah, ‘cause even if they had, they totally would have given one to us, right?”
“Dream killer.”
Groaning, Max jogs ahead to get the sentry guarding this particular door into T.C. to take five; she hasn’t yet figured out how she’ll break the news about Dean to the rest of the transgenics (well, Plan A is simply not to tell them, but she’s in the process of coming up with Plans B through H just in the strong likelihood that Plan A won’t work out), so for now she’ll just go for the escape and evade tactic.
But being a leader of people has its benefits, and although the sentry eyes Max weirdly, he clears off, and Alec arrives right on cue, muscles straining as he again adjusts Dean on his shoulder. “Where do you recommend we stash him?” Alec asks impatiently.
“Um…” Max hadn’t quite thought that far ahead yet. She supposes she should have at least during their trip from White’s to T.C., but she’d been distracted with Alec’s story, and with Dean, and she’d initially envisioned Dean up and walking, which it turned out he isn’t. That said, it doesn’t take long to come up with a solution. “Try one of the recovery rooms in the back. I doubt they’re being used, and you know Rade doesn’t allow anyone to just hang out in there or whatever. Dean should be safe enough until we can find another arrangement.”
“Who’s to say Rade won’t flip when she notices a room’s occupied with, you know, a dude nearly identical to me?” Alec opposes, greatly uncomfortable with how Dean is pressing right on his clavicle.
Max purses her lips, irritated that Alec just has to poke holes in everything. “Just-would you just go with me on this?” she snaps. “Or come up with a different option. Either way, do it fast.”
After a few moments of rapid thinking, Alec has to confess she’s right. There’s really no other feasible place to put Dean, not without more than a couple people noticing. “All right, fine,” he agrees reluctantly, starting to walk in the direction of the medical bay.
Max is grateful that there isn’t anyone milling around in the wing, that no one had managed to injure themselves badly enough for Rade to look them over, and she throws open the door of the first recovery room (the label pretty sizably exaggerates the actual furnishing and materials of the room, but the intent’s there). Since Rade is on the verge of OCD in terms of keeping her surroundings clean-a useful attribute, given that being as excellent a medic as she’s capable, bearing in mind the circumstances, is her drive-the room is spotless. The fairly threadbare sheets are pulled tight around the pathetic mattress, the floors are dust-free, and there’s a tray of clean bandages and antiseptic on a small metal end table next to the bed.
It’s not remotely up to medical par, but it’s the best T.C. can do, and it’s certainly good enough for Alec, who’s more than happy to be released of his quarry, setting Dean down on the bed with less grace than Max would like. He immediately commences rolling and massaging his shoulder, and instead of giving him flack for being a baby about it, Max sets Dean’s clothes in a pile by the door then goes over to straighten him out on the bed, and wishes there were more she could do.
But Alec had said there isn’t, so with a last pitying glance at Dean, she and Alec step out of the room, Max already going through what the best future course of action is, Alec beelining to T.C.’s limited supply of hard liquor. Transgenics can’t get drunk, but by hell, Alec’s going to try. He thinks he deserves it.
Next
Chapter Title: If a Story Be a Confession
Fandom(s): Supernatural, Dark Angel
Summary: In the end, it’s a complete accident that gets Dean Winchester out of Hell.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter XIII: If a Story Be a Confession
“So where’d you learn all that stuff?” Max asks, a mile or so after she and Alec had appropriated the Jeep.
“What stuff?” Alec replies, frowning at her.
Max takes her eyes off the road for a second to look over at Alec. “‘What stuff’?” she mimics in disbelief. “Everything! The medicine, the pharmacology, the Dean saving…I know Manticore wouldn’t teach things like serotonin overdose, given that they were brainwashing people who had a lack of serotonin. So what gives?”
Alec heaves a sigh, and stares out the window that he’d closed once the infamous Washington sky decided to once more pour buckets over every bit of land and water it could find. There isn’t much to see, even with Alec’s ingrained night vision, but he leans his forehead against the cool glass anyway.
Upon hearing Alec’s silence, Max’s senses are on full alert. Alec loves to talk-the only times he doesn’t are on missions where it’s imperative he stays quiet (and even then, it’s be a tossup as to whether he fulfills that or not), or if there’s something huge that’s bothering him. Max unwillingly flashes back to that horrific set of days where she’d been left fully in the dark on the reasons behind Alec’s sudden mood change from happy-go-lucky to pure confusion and desolation.
“This isn’t another…another Ray-” Max stops mid-word, unable to bring herself to say the name of the woman Alec had given his heart to, the rule unspoken and yet paramount. Alec doesn’t talk about it, Max doesn’t ever mention it.
She brushes off most of what Alec does-same as he, a lot of the time-but there are some lines even Max won’t cross, and Rachel is the one foremost. She’d previously thought of Alec as incapable of true affection and caring, that he couldn’t possibly understand the emotions and the repercussions for people like the two of them that love caused. Max knows it well, and she hadn’t expected Alec to know it to the same level. But once she’d learned it, and learned that Alec had been burned quite possibly even worse than she had, well, she isn’t going to unbearably cruelly exploit that part of him.
“I mean, this isn’t another Manticore thing, is it?” Max amends, tightening her fingers around the steering wheel in apprehension, though having a sickening feeling she already knows the answer.
Alec fiddles with the non-functioning radio dial, before he abandons that movement and instead crosses his arms over his chest. “’Course it was,” he scoffs lowly, his eyes staring past the dark rain.
Max nods slowly, expecting as much but hating that she had. “So what happened?” she asks. “And don’t even think about doing your whole stonewalling thing with that ‘I’m always all right’ shit. Tell me what happened.”
Because it’s not just about you anymore, Alec, Max wants to add sadly, but settles for the harsher, more to-the-point approach, the type that defines her personality.
Alec’s face is mutinous for a few seconds, like Max had asked him to slaughter a puppy or something-all right, she allows, maybe it’s wrong to equate Manticore to a puppy, but still-but then the tautness recedes, and he takes a deep breath.
“It was February of 2020, a few weeks after they decided I wasn’t completely defective and not just bound for organ harvest,” Alec says finally, and his voice already has that faraway quality that Max herself adopts when thinking of events she’d really rather not.
Max winces, Zack’s face behind all that tubing and wires coming to her mind. It’s soon overshadowed, however, by her remembering what Alec had told her months ago, at first an offhand mention, and now a crude vignette:
I know that because’a him, I had to spend six months in Psy Ops. They wanted to make sure it wasn’t genetic.
You think life was rough when we were ten? A little schooling, little brainwashing, some maneuvers outside, you think that was tough? Well, take it from me, later on it got a whole lot worse. But you did what you had to do. And you tried to forget. And when you couldn’t forget, they had ways of making you not care…
A vision of Alec, strapped to a table-like Dean had been-helpless, dosed up on concoctions of drugs that did God knows what, a crimson laser piercing through his eye straight into his thalamus, relentlessly, causing all the pain and worse of physical injury, but leaving not a scratch. A vision of him faced off against multiple persons from the Psy Ops series, their extrasensory gifts prodding and mangling and falsifying his brain as they tried to make his memories, memories of Rachel and of a time when he was happy, vanish and in their place inject ones of pure Manticore, pure soldier, pure robotic allegiance.
Max had been morbidly curious about what she’d actually missed post-her escape, and perhaps she still is to a degree, but now that she’s less I-hate-you-Alec-just-go-and-die, and more will-you-be-my-Second-in-Command?, sees just how twisted Manticore could make someone as equanimous and vivacious as Alec, well…she’s not so inclined to know anymore.
“What happened?” Max prompts quietly, the only sounds able to permeate the tension being the torrential rain, and Dean’s labored breathing.
“They sent me undercover again,” Alec bites out, his jaw tight. “With the contingency, obviously, that I’d be watched more carefully than I was before. They flew me over to Manhattan, where I was supposed to pose as an intern in neurology at the Mount Sinai Hospital. The objective was to assassinate the Chief of Staff there; he was a really nice guy, actually, which was probably another Fuck You of Manticore’s, and apparently he’d been looking into neural engineering, into what effects different snips or grafts to certain areas of the brain could cause, too much for Manticore’s liking. Guess they thought killing the man would be a kind of test for me or whatever; if I could do it, kill in such cold, unnecessary blood like that then I really was successfully reindoctrinated.”
Max pauses, thinking this over, before she questions, “And you did it?”
“What do you think?” Alec snaps angrily, whipping his head towards her.
Her jaw tenses, and its only when she feels the plastic of the steering wheel bend under the pressure of her clenched fingers that she gets her fury under control. But, unlike it probably would’ve only but three or four months ago, it isn’t at Alec. She’d be the biggest hypocrite in the world if she held something Manticore made him do against him.
“You ended that man’s life, Alec,” Max says placatingly, “but you saved Dean’s with the knowledge you got from that job. And in my book, that’s a pretty damn good thing.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that I killed him.”
“You’ve killed a lot of people, Alec. I’ve killed a lot of people. Dean’s killed a lot of people. All of us have. And it sucks ass, and it hurts like hell, but it’s happened,” says Max firmly, shooting Alec a hard look. “No one can change that, and there’s no point in trying to. All any of us can hope for is to try and make the best of it and do as much good with it as possible.”
Alec is quiet, but this time Max doesn’t press. She glances in the rearview mirror briefly, checking as well she can on Dean. He’s still pale as nothing else, and there’s the intermittent tremor going through him, and he’s muttering a little under his breath, but Max is pretty sure he’s not in immediate threat of death. That said, she edges the pedal a bit more to the floor, pushing the speedometer from eighty-five to a hundred, the whining engine and rain-soaked road merely catalysts.Max, Alec, and Dean are only about a quarter of a mile away from Terminal City’s gates when Max remembers that the military is still very much in play (hey, give her a break, she was a little preoccupied), their twenty-four/seven guard one of the main hindrances for making T.C. livable. Max pulls the Jeep over to the side of the road, shutting off the car and looking over at Alec, who had been more silent than Dean ever since he’d admitted to his murdering the neurologist.
“There’s a sewer entrance not far from here,” Max says, breaking the quietude. “Don’t use it much ‘cause it’s too close for comfort to the barricade.”
She feels the notification is thoroughly unnecessary, given that Alec’s just as aware, if not more so, of the goings-on in T.C. as she is, but honestly, the silence is weirding her out. When Alec doesn’t answer, she punches him in the arm.
“Hey!” Max barks sharply. Alec finally turns to her, his attention focused. “Think you can carry him through the tunnels? Or should we call Mole to send someone to help?”
Alec scowls. “It’s Dean that’s the cripple, not me, Max,” he retorts agitatedly. “I can carry my clone just fine, thank you.”
“He’s not a clone.”
“Whatever. Same difference.”
“Let’s just go already,” Max orders, hopping out of the vehicle and grabbing the bundle of her sweater and Dean’s clothes, which still bears the miraculously unbroken bottles of medicine inside of it. Coming around to Alec’s side, she helps him safely get Dean out of the backseat, and although she’s not happy about the fireman’s carry Alec adopts again, she concedes that it’s the most efficient way. Were Dean about sixty pounds lighter, she wagers Alec would go with just holding Dean over both arms, but as it is, Dean might as well be a sack of potatoes.
It’s about one klick to the sewer entrance, and they make it there in a few minutes, but that isn’t the part that’s most difficult. Max heaves open the manhole cover and Alec sets Dean gently on the ground for a moment so that he can jump down into the sewer-a splash of something echoing throughout-and Max can awkwardly pass Dean through the entrance and into Alec’s hold again. Taking a last, quick survey of her surroundings to make sure no one saw them, Max then steps down into the tunnel, pulling the metal cover back over her.
Alec wastes no time in griping over anything and everything, soon making Max wonder why exactly she’d so wanted him to start talking in the car ride. More unfortunate still, his blabbering is made twice as long due to that many more breaths he has to take owing to Dean’s deadweight. Max thinks Alec’s exaggerating, considering it’s not like Dean’s, say, Brain’s size, but, to Alec’s credit, Dean was overdosed with a lethal level of narcotics, so there’s that.
“You know, really, I still don’t get this devotion you have to the guy,” Alec continues, still on his favorite topic-Max and Dean. “I mean, he’s basically me, and you don’t like me this much.”
Max rolls her eyes. “Dean is so not you, Alec,” she says. “He’s way more mature.”
Alec snorts ungracefully, coming to a puddle of water-ish liquid and splashing some of it on Max, which really only serves to further her point. “Come on, you barely know the man,” he whines, and Max can’t truthfully deny that. “And is it not completely messed up that he looks barely thirty when he should be, what, forty-something? Not to mention the rap sheet. Kinda careless, if you ask me.”
“Didn’t,” Max retorts. “And yeah, it’s really fucking whacked, but unless you’ve got something new to say, just shut up. I’ll get answers, but it’s not like anyone can give them besides Dean, now is it?”
“Wow, Logan can’t magic his way into finding it out? My mind is sufficiently boggled,” Alec says, putting his free hand over his heart to emphasize his words.
Max sneers at him, and would totally sweep her leg into his ankles and send him sprawling into the sludge if it weren’t for the precious cargo he’s in charge of. “Logan found out lots of stuff about Dean, for your information,” Max says. “I mean, maybe not something-”
“Useful?” Alec interjects, to Max’s glare.
“No,” she snipes. “Maybe not something that explains the whole dopplegänger thing is all. You never know, maybe Dean’s just…youthful for his age.”
“That’s total bullshit and you know it,” Alec says matter-of-factly. “You just don’t want to admit that neither you nor Logan have jack squat. Or that you’re dying to find out what’s the deal with all of this.”
Max grits her teeth, really, really wishing Alec weren’t so intuitive. On missions, it helped. Times like now? Yeah, it so doesn’t. “What do you want from me, Alec?”
“I want to know just why the hell a homicidal maniac Ordinary from over a decade ago is suddenly walking around with my face,” Alec states, jerking Dean on his shoulder. “It’s like freakin’ 493 all over again, only without the schizophrenia crap.”
“Don’t say that,” Max snaps. “Don’t you talk about Ben like that.”
“Max, lay off,” Alec sighs, glancing sideways at her. “I’m just trying to work through this, same as you. It’ll succeed a lot better if you don’t keep sabotaging me with your heatseeker rhetoric every two seconds.”
She hates when Alec does this, says something with just the right amount of ambiguity as to whether he’s insulting you or complimenting you. Max just isn’t sure. “Well, you just know everything, don’t you?”
“Scary, isn’t it?”
Max grits her teeth, repeating the furious mantra in her head that she can’t kick Alec’s ass. Yet. “All right, fine. What do you suggest, Your Omniscience?”
“I’d be so flattered if your voice wasn’t dripping with sarcasm,” Alec remarks, grinning at her. Max death-glares at him, and it has zero effect on Alec after all this time and the countless ones she’s bestowed on him, but he complies anyway. “Sam.”
It’s all Alec says, and Max waits for a few seconds, like she’s expecting him to go on, but he doesn’t. “Sam?” Max inquires, the younger brother coming up on the “What do we do now?” lists more and more often lately. That isn’t to say Max knows anything more about Sam now than she did when Cindy gave the suggestion, but Max thinks she should maybe drop Sam’s name first next time. It’s been the number one answer so far. “Okay, what about him?”
“Come on, Maxie,” Alec says, purposefully riling her up with the nickname that was Ben’s for her. “If there’s anyone that can provide answers for Dean, besides Dean himself, who’s kinda crazy at this point-don’t look at me like that, it’s totally true-it’ll be his brother, right?”
Alec’s logic is sound, Max will give him that. There is just one problem, and the same one she’d encountered previously: “Yeah, and where do you propose we find him, huh? Who’s to say the guy’s even alive?”
“Already got Dix working on it,” says Alec with a full grin. “I presume Sam’d be too careful to let himself get caught in a pattern of suspicious deaths or whatever by the feds, but I’m betting he’d never banked on a genetically engineered geek looking for him.”
Max looks at him, considering. “All right, a) how’d you know to look for Sam, and b) what exactly did you ask Dix to search for? ‘Brutal ritual killings by a potentially dead serial killer’?”
“Actually, yeah, basically,” Alec replies with a straight face. Then, it turns uncomfortable, and he adjusts Dean on his shoulders again. “Right. That nightmare I had?”
Max frowns, Alec’s writhing and purely terrified form in the throes of a horrific dream that she’d been simultaneously afraid and eager to wake him from all too vivid in her mind. “Of course,” she responds instead, that episode being crucial to their locating of White’s compound. “Was there something else about it?”
“Well, look, you said you and O.C. heard Dean muttering something about Sam, something about not hurting him,” Alec says. “I figure if we actually bring him to Dean, maybe it’ll fix him or at least make him talk. Or not. I dunno.”
Once again, Max can’t exactly find fault in Alec’s theory, and yet it’s still a daunting one. It isn’t just the schematics of finding Sam that fills Max with misgivings. She has more than enough faith in her people and in technology that they’d be able to find Sam (eventually). No, what has her apprehensive about the whole thing would be how exactly she-and maybe Alec, although that’d probably screw it all up more-could convince Sam that she both isn’t some creeper, and that she really does have Dean. Not to mention the necessity for Sam to be at least neutral on the whole transgenic front. If he weren’t, well, Max doubts he’d even let her get one word out.
Alec sighs. “Oh, great,” he bemoans. “You’ve got that face again.”
“What face?”
“The Alec’s-nuts-but-I’m-just-going-to-ignore-him-and-his-awesome-plan face.”
Max fixes him with another glare. “You know, for an X5, you’re really co-dependent,” Max observes. She notes the writing on the side of the next tunnel junction they come across and, knowing they’re close to T.C., quickens her pace.
She mentally counts down from three before Alec’s retort comes. “First of all, I’m not co-dependent,” Alec snaps, right on schedule. “Secondly, with your fascist ruling, how can I not be insecure, you rightist, you?”
“Fascist?!”
“Yeah, you know, Ordinary evil dictator stuff,” Alec supplies. “Slap a swastika and half-stache on you, and you’re a regular Hitler. Albeit more attractive.”
“The random knowledge you have is disturbing,” Max comments, not very familiar herself with fascism or Hitler, seeing as how even the Ordinary educational system is pretty fucked up, and it isn’t like Manticore exactly taught History. (If they had, Max has a feeling the transgenics would have related them to fascists anyway, so perhaps it’d been in Manticore’s best interests after all.)
Alec shrugs, obviously not affected by Max’s observation. In his experience, the more knowledge you have the better, regardless of its content. Case in point: Dean. Granted, Alec’s not fond of just how he acquired that information, but it proved useful nonetheless, even though beforehand Alec never would’ve thought it would be an asset. Unfortunately, in this instance, Alec has no insight (random or otherwise) on Sam, let alone on how to find him and bring him to Dean. All he has is that nightmare, which isn’t really comprehensible in the first place.
“We’ll try,” Max says, and Alec turns to her, surprised. He’s pretty positive he would’ve been able to get Max to come around, but he hadn’t thought it’d be this fast. “I don’t know how soon we’d be able to find any info, but we’ll try.”
“Um…good,” Alec says stiltedly, wondering if he’d shown something on his face that Max interpreted to be so pathetic she had to agree with him. He doesn’t think he did… “How’s about we get him to T.C. first, though, huh? Dude’s getting heavy.”
Max rolls her eyes, she and Alec quickly falling back into their typical roles. “I think you should be glad he’s knocked out,” she says lightly. “It’d be much harder to get him through the tunnels and let Rade look him over if he were conscious, don’t you think?”
“It’d be better if he weren’t mortally injured and he were complacent,” Alec counters. “But when have we ever been that fortunate?”
“I’m continuously in awe of your abilities to lighten a situation,” says Max dryly. Of course, her statement isn’t always ironic, since Alec does have a certain knack for lightening situations, but at the present time, she doesn’t find his cynicism very helpful.
Alec looks like he’s going to reply with something considerably perverted, but then catches the light at the end of the tunnel (literally), and sighs in relief. “Finally,” he remarks, and steps up his pace. “It’s really too bad Manticore had to funnel all that money into making us, when they should’ve been making some kind of teleportation device.”
Max stares at him strangely, but decides to play along. “Yeah, ‘cause even if they had, they totally would have given one to us, right?”
“Dream killer.”
Groaning, Max jogs ahead to get the sentry guarding this particular door into T.C. to take five; she hasn’t yet figured out how she’ll break the news about Dean to the rest of the transgenics (well, Plan A is simply not to tell them, but she’s in the process of coming up with Plans B through H just in the strong likelihood that Plan A won’t work out), so for now she’ll just go for the escape and evade tactic.
But being a leader of people has its benefits, and although the sentry eyes Max weirdly, he clears off, and Alec arrives right on cue, muscles straining as he again adjusts Dean on his shoulder. “Where do you recommend we stash him?” Alec asks impatiently.
“Um…” Max hadn’t quite thought that far ahead yet. She supposes she should have at least during their trip from White’s to T.C., but she’d been distracted with Alec’s story, and with Dean, and she’d initially envisioned Dean up and walking, which it turned out he isn’t. That said, it doesn’t take long to come up with a solution. “Try one of the recovery rooms in the back. I doubt they’re being used, and you know Rade doesn’t allow anyone to just hang out in there or whatever. Dean should be safe enough until we can find another arrangement.”
“Who’s to say Rade won’t flip when she notices a room’s occupied with, you know, a dude nearly identical to me?” Alec opposes, greatly uncomfortable with how Dean is pressing right on his clavicle.
Max purses her lips, irritated that Alec just has to poke holes in everything. “Just-would you just go with me on this?” she snaps. “Or come up with a different option. Either way, do it fast.”
After a few moments of rapid thinking, Alec has to confess she’s right. There’s really no other feasible place to put Dean, not without more than a couple people noticing. “All right, fine,” he agrees reluctantly, starting to walk in the direction of the medical bay.
Max is grateful that there isn’t anyone milling around in the wing, that no one had managed to injure themselves badly enough for Rade to look them over, and she throws open the door of the first recovery room (the label pretty sizably exaggerates the actual furnishing and materials of the room, but the intent’s there). Since Rade is on the verge of OCD in terms of keeping her surroundings clean-a useful attribute, given that being as excellent a medic as she’s capable, bearing in mind the circumstances, is her drive-the room is spotless. The fairly threadbare sheets are pulled tight around the pathetic mattress, the floors are dust-free, and there’s a tray of clean bandages and antiseptic on a small metal end table next to the bed.
It’s not remotely up to medical par, but it’s the best T.C. can do, and it’s certainly good enough for Alec, who’s more than happy to be released of his quarry, setting Dean down on the bed with less grace than Max would like. He immediately commences rolling and massaging his shoulder, and instead of giving him flack for being a baby about it, Max sets Dean’s clothes in a pile by the door then goes over to straighten him out on the bed, and wishes there were more she could do.
But Alec had said there isn’t, so with a last pitying glance at Dean, she and Alec step out of the room, Max already going through what the best future course of action is, Alec beelining to T.C.’s limited supply of hard liquor. Transgenics can’t get drunk, but by hell, Alec’s going to try. He thinks he deserves it.
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