Dark Angel fic - "Genetically Engineered Stray"
Continuity's a bitch. What I really wanted to do was post the sequel to this, but it seemed kind of stupid to post the sequel on LJ when the first story wasn't up. I can assume anyone who would meander over here has already read the first one on ff.net, right? Right?
No, I didn't buy it, either.
So I only need to have this up for, like, two seconds before I can post the sequel, right?
"Genetically Engineered Stray"
Spoiler: Set after 'Designate This', when Max is readjusting to life outside of Manticore for a second time.
Somehow, the world outside of Manticore seemed just as different after Max’s second escape as it had after her first.
Max knew it wasn’t that it had changed, really. It was the juxtaposition. It was being ripped from one environment and being thrown into another completely different. It was ice cold water after a scalding bath. The world of filth and chaos back to back with the world of order and discipline. Black and white. Right and wrong. Simple and convoluted.
It was the tearing away of so many lies and beliefs that Max had wrapped so tightly around herself. All the little things she did in her desperate attempts to forget who she was.
Within a matter of days back at Manticore, she was adapted. In so many ways, it was like she had never left.
Because it hadn’t been like being drafted, it had been coming home. Reintroduction of a wild animal into its natural habitat. The claws and teeth she’d kept mostly sheathed were bared in all their ferocity, and they were just as deadly as ever. Her time in the world of average men had not dulled the creature that she was created to be.
As much as she railed against everything Manticore was and everything it had done to her, it was her childhood and her upbringing. The first laws of survival she had learned were the lessons taught by drill instructors, and because they were the first they were, against all her efforts, the most comforting. Nostalgia clung to the rigid structure and singularity of purpose. Duty. Discipline. Teamwork.
Max had forgotten all those dirty little insidious secrets about Manticore. She had buried them so deep that she had fooled herself sometimes into believing she’d ditched the mindless solider Manticore had bred and trained her to be. She still kicked ass, but the way Max kicked ass.
But thrust back into that environment and she discovered just how close to the surface X5-452 was. For all her efforts since her first escape, that person was just waiting for its own escape. X5-452 came back to her as though she had never pushed it all away.
She was so very much the same infantry solider when she ran away the second time that Max felt lost all over again.
She thought she knew where her new place in life was. It was a place she had fought tooth and nail to claim. It was waiting for her, much the same as when she’d left. But she saw it with different eyes now. She saw her dirty apartment with Cindy and compared it to the orderliness of a barracks. She saw people on the street, aimless, shuffling, meandering masses of bedraggled and destitute human beings, and she held them against the unit in formation.
It was the pointless scrabbling of it all that made her jerk, made her see a homeless man on the street (who was really not much worse off than she was) and flinch away from the thought of touching him.
She went back to the world she’d left behind, but Manticore’s grip was still tight around her. The fires were long since extinguished, but Max still felt the heat in her bones.
She was a perfect modern weapon thrown in with clubs and hammers, and she had to go through her day like she didn’t know it. She had to associate with the weak and find camaraderie with them.
Max didn’t say anything to Cindy about what had happened. The hard facts of Manticore, yes, but nothing about becoming X5-452 again. She couldn’t confess those sins.
Familiar, too, was the loneliness of having no one like her to share her plight with. She knew that many other Manticore creations had escaped into the world this time, but she had not fled with them. She didn’t know where they were.
Max had been home about three days. Back in her old apartment with Cindy and her motorcycle and Logan on her periphery whenever she wanted to throw her orbit that way. It was the very existence she’d been unwilling to give up.
She still clung to it, but she wasn’t sure how tightly anymore. Now it was the grip of someone with nothing else to hold on to.
Cindy noted how quiet she was since coming back, but Max would just shake her head and Cindy would back off. Max couldn’t talk to Cindy or Logan about the things she felt and feared, because while they could know they couldn’t understand. She was alone in a world of anarchy all over again. She just hoped adjusting the second time would not take as long as it had the first.
One evening, Cindy was talking incessantly about a girl Cindy had hooked up with. Max was listening politely, her mind only half engaged, when Cindy moved the talk into bedroom antics. Against any conscious effort, Max found herself looking critically at Cindy’s body and wondering who would touch a weak, imperfect, dirty body like that.
That was when Max bolted. She didn’t have anyplace to go, but she couldn’t bear to be in the same room with Cindy and chance more horrible thoughts like that popping into her head.
Cindy was a wonderful person, but all Max saw for a second was frailty.
Max walked the streets of Seattle alone, arms drawn into her sides and hands deep in her pockets. She tried to move without thinking. It was easy to do; Manticore didn’t drill soldiers to think unless ordered to.
It was a cold night. Max’s breath was fogging in front of her face with every breath. The fires lit in barrels that drew the detritus of humanity like a human bug lamp were globes of heat in bitterly chill air.
A few on the street called her name. People knew her here, knew Max. She ignored them and continued walking. She thought maybe, if she walked far enough, she’d outpace her past.
She’d worked so hard to make ‘Max’, and now it seemed that person was the façade. Maybe she was, and always would be, X5-452.
When she found herself, for the briefest moment, longing for direct orders, or a bunk beneath her, or nothing more unpredictable than morning drills, she thought that maybe Alec had been right all along. He’d stayed where he belonged. He became the weapon they bred and trained him to be. He accepted it.
But Max could never just accept it. Her DNA sequence must have been jacked, because she wanted a choice. The ability to choose, to make a decision for her own future, was a necessity she could not suppress.
She was afraid to think that if only Manticore had offered her the choice, then she may have stayed. Maybe if there hadn’t been a brick wall but an open gate, she would have bowed to her genes and crawled back in her bunk that night of the escape.
A catcall to her left caught Max in just the wrong mood. In the days before she was recaptured, she would have mouthed off and walked away. Scum on the outside just did crap like that, and it didn’t deserve to be noticed.
But Max was too close to X5-452 at that particular second, and she whirled to the lecherous man and had his throat in her fist before he could blink.
“Go rut with your own kind, you dirtbag,” Max snarled, and with a heave she tossed the guy like he was nothing. He was nothing.
Max turned to continue on her way.
Her enhanced vision caught sight of something, and she stopped cold in her tracks.
It was a person huddled between a trash can and a soaked and soggy cardboard box. His knees were drawn up and his arms wrapped around his shins. His head was bowed.
It should not have given Max a second’s pause. It was just another pathetic creature in a world of flawed, inferior beings.
It was the haircut, she decided, that caught her eye. It was clean. Military.
Max stared. Then she moved.
She crouched down in front of the ball of limbs and frowned, eyes taking in details. She reached out a hand to barely touch a forearm.
A fist shot out at her and would have clocked her if she hadn’t been more than merely human. Max jerked out of the way and threw an answering block that off-balanced the man.
Alec.
Max blinked at him. She hadn’t thought of him, really, since the fire. She knew he’d escaped the blaze, but she hadn’t really wondered where he went. He was an obnoxious ass and of all her fellow X5s, she cared about him the least.
Even if he had helped her escape in his own self-serving and traitorous way.
Max pushed the thought away. Unconsciously, she assessed Alec’s condition. The battle triage was innate; she couldn’t help the quick visual once-over of his status. He’d run afoul of some nasty characters, it seemed. His face was bruised and his bottom lip was bleeding. What worried her most was the teetering sense of balance. Alec was made to be more coordinated and agile than that.
“Alec?”
Alec blinked, taken aback, and then took a good look at her. He seemed puzzled. “Max?”
“Yeah… what happened to you?” she reached out to touch his face.
Alec stiffened and pressed back against the chain length fence behind him.
It was definitely a change from the loud-mouth breeding partner she’d met in the barracks.
“Stop it,” Alec snapped. “It’s nothing.”
“Right. What are you doing out here?”
Alec tensed and looked away. There was almost shame in his body language.
“Hey…” Max jostled his shoulder.
“I’m just trying to get some sleep… is that all right with you?” he asked peevishly.
Max narrowed her eyes. His lethargy, lack of coordination, uncharacteristic behavior… it could all be exhaustion.
“Here?” she asked incredulously, looking around him at the squalor he’d found in which to hunker down.
Alec dropped his head on to his knees and the muscles of his body seemed to go slack. “Yeah, doesn’t it look cozy to you?”
“Looks like a rat-hole to me.”
Alec brought up his head and it lolled as he pinned her with a hot and glassy stare. “I found a place… the guys who were living there weren’t really the sharing type.”
Max frowned thoughtfully and pressed her fingers to a cut on his eyebrow. “Is that where you got these?”
Alec pulled his head away from her hand. “This is all your fault, you know. If it weren’t for you, I’d be in my bunk right now.” Alec’s head fell to his knees again, as though it were an immense effort to hold his own head up.
Max had to figure he had been awake since the fire.
She pondered his state a moment, then stated as fact, “You’ve never been on a long-term mission.”
“I’ve been on plenty,” he snarled.
“Any where you didn’t go back to Manticore at night?”
Alec didn’t answer.
“Any mission where you had to find a place to sleep on your own?”
Alec leaned his head back against the fence and let his eyes close. “You want to be useful? Just… keep eyes out for me so I can catch a few minutes. That’s all I need.”
Max looked around at the riffraff around them. They looked meek and harmless enough. “You expecting trouble?”
Alec, even dead tired, managed a slow and cocky smirk. “There are a few less bikers from that man-love pad than there was when I showed up looking for a bunk to crash on. They’re probably not too happy about that.”
“Damnit, Alec.”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion.”
Max stood and stared down reprovingly at him. He was oblivious, looking for all the world like he intended to make good on his word to take a combat nap for whatever time he might have Max on watch.
She wanted to hate him, but she looked at him and saw a lost brethren. She thought of him, abandoned in a world he didn’t really know, so clueless and alone he didn’t even know how to find a decent place to sleep.
She remembered how hard it had been to sleep at first, alone, when she’d lived the whole of her life until that moment with her fellow soldiers on lookout for her while her guard was down.
Until then, she had never really thought about just how vulnerable one was while they slept. Alone, it was painfully, frighteningly obvious.
“You can’t sleep here,” Max said.
“I could if you’d shut up.”
“Get up.”
“Just a few minutes!” Alec barked. He looked physically incapable of fighting with anything more than words. “I just want ten fucking minutes of your time so I can…” he started to drift mid-sentence.
Max sighed. “I know I’m going to regret this. Let’s go.”
Alec cracked weary eyes open at her. “Do you hate me that much? I’m not asking for an honor guard here, just a catnap.”
“On your feet, that’s an order.”
Alec rose ponderously. “I don’t take orders from you,” he said sharply, though Max noticed he had stood at her command nonetheless.
“Come with me.” Without checking to see if he would follow, she turned back toward her apartment building and started walking.
A minute later, she heard Alec behind her ask in a very tired voice, “Where are we going? If you want to work me over for not hating Manticore with every fiber of my being, I’m really not in the mood right now.”
“Do you want to sleep or not?” she snapped, turning quickly to look at him. He was smaller out here in the world than inside Manticore, she noticed. Drawn in tight and defensive. The strain of being on his own with no backup, no home base, had chipped away at X5-494 and left Alec in its place. And Alec was a tired, homeless, lost man with no one to turn to.
Max remembered all too well what that was like. It made her take pity on him. He might be a jackass and a jerk, but he didn’t deserve that feeling of helplessness. For a solider, there was nothing worse. Max knew.
And, in a screwed up way, he was family.
She might detest him at times, but she couldn’t leave him on the street.
Alec said remarkably little the rest of the way to Max’s apartment. He was so weary that he’d take orders from Max.
The apartment was dark and quiet when Max eased open the door. She paused in the doorway and listened for Cindy. She couldn’t hear even the sound of her breathing. She must be out with that woman she’d been talking about endlessly.
Good.
Max entered the apartment and held the door open for Alec. “Home sweet home,” she cracked dryly.
Alec shuffled in after her and seemed too tired to notice it. But he had to. Training ingrained in him the inability to fail to notice the lay of his surroundings. The exits, the weak spots, the defensible positions.
He just did a quick and cursory job of it.
“What a dump,” he grumbled.
“I can gladly throw you back out on the street if you don’t think my place is good enough for you.”
Alec looked at her and said nothing. His look said it all. No matter how much he’d love to give her hell about the apartment and her life and her take on the universe, he needed her too badly. He was in the worse tactical position and he knew it.
Max grabbed him by the back of his jacket like he was an errant puppy taken in jaw by the nape of its neck by its mother and she hauled him into her bedroom.
Alec’s eyes fell on the bed and she felt him nearly fold under her hand at the sight of promised rest.
“One word and I’ll kick your ass,” Max said with a shove that pushed Alec toward the bed.
Alec stumbled into the bedroom, blinked almost reverently at the bed, then he slipped his jacket off his shoulders. It pooled on the floor. His shirt followed. Shoes. Pants. Underwear. He stripped down to nothing in front of her, uncaring and unashamed that she was in the same room with him.
Max’s years outside of Manticore told her to recoil at such blatant nudity outside of someone she meant and chose to sleep with. Nudity was a big deal to normal people.
In Manticore, it had been merely the machine under its dressings. The engine under the hood. It was only the soldier, the weapon. She wanted to feel the disgust of the average person at a naked body, the flagrant flaunting of private skin (particularly the body of someone for whom she didn’t have any affection), but she just didn’t. She was an X5 and so was Alec. It was just flesh over muscle and bone and she couldn’t make herself see it as anything cruder than that.
Of course, if their bodies weren’t honed weapons, conditioned and strong - if their bodies were as ugly as average human beings’ bodies, flabby and hairy and imperfect - maybe the children of Manticore would be more modest about nudity, too.
But they weren’t built to be something to be ashamed of.
Alec, bare and exhausted, all but fell onto the bed and the last of his energy vanished. She doubted she could have gotten him out of bed then if she tried.
That wasn’t true. She could bark an order and he’d jump. He had nothing left, but he’d jump just the same.
He sprawled on her bed face-down for a moment, just relishing the sense of impending sleep, then he habitually rolled on to his side, back to the middle of the bed, his long body only taking up exactly half of the mattress.
It was unconscious. Training instilled since childhood.
It was his proffered position of reciprocal watch while they slept.
Max wanted to be put out and storm back to the living room to spend an uncomfortable night on her and Cindy’s lumpy, ancient couch. She wanted to take that moral high ground, with Alec more than most. She wanted to do what a normal person would do.
But she was so little of Max these days and so much of X5-452.
Without feeling, without emotion, she stripped down to nothing and climbed into bed with Alec.
He was already asleep by the time she joined him.
She turned her back to him and lay on her side. Her eyes watching his back, and his eyes watching hers, symbolically if nothing else.
Max closed her eyes and hated just how quickly and easily sleep came with a fellow soldier pressed to her back.
**************
If her bedmate had been a normal man, she would have woken up with him sprawled all over her. Human men were oafish dogs like that. They tangled and trapped their partners. When a man was with Max, who had a body and face designed to be surpassingly attractive, the possessive sprawl was even worse. Men could not believe their fortune to have slept with such a gorgeous woman, and they flopped over her in bed every chance they got, as though they could physically hold her down and keep her. They knew, instinctively, they could hold on to her in no other manner. Men had a way of knowing they’d slept with someone out of their league and had the most pathetic panic reaction to it.
Every time Max woke underneath the arm, leg, or body of someone she’d had sex with, momentarily her heart would race. She didn’t think it was romantic or sweet or comforting. She was pinned. If an enemy burst through the door, she’d have to untangle herself from mister whoever-at-the-moment before she could face an attacker.
This time, she woke in just the same position she had fallen asleep in, and Alec was exactly where he had fallen asleep. Their backs touched and nothing else.
Part of Max wanted to scream ‘yes! that’s what I want the person in my bed to do!’. Instead, she lifted her head and listened to the sounds in the apartment beyond Alec’s breathing. Cindy was back; Max could hear her moving around with obvious caution in the kitchen.
Glancing over her shoulder at Alec, Max gauged the rhythm of his breathing. He was still deeply asleep.
Careful not to rouse him, Max slipped out of bed, dressed in fresh clothes, and left her bedroom.
Cindy was giving her the ‘boo, spill’ look the second Max laid eyes on her roommate.
Max rested her elbows on the kitchen counter and Cindy lifted an eyebrow. “Well… looks like I wasn’t the only one who got lucky last night.”
The thought of her and Alec breeding… but Max didn’t want to explain who and what Alec was. She was still trying to rebuild the wall that used to exist between Manticore and her world outside the Constantine wire. The further apart she could keep Cindy and Alec for now, the better.
“Heading out early?” Max asked, noting Cindy was already dressed and ready to head out the door.
“Yeah, boo. I’ve got some business to take care of before I hit the Pony. But I will be getting details tonight.” Cindy wagged a finger at Max, at the bedroom where Alec slept, then back at Max.
Max just gave Cindy the answer she wanted so she’d leave it alone. “Sure. Later.”
When Cindy was gone, Max rummaged around the kitchen for breakfast and a glass of milk.
An hour later, she heard Alec get up. She braced herself for his entrance. He’d been compliant last night because he was dead tired. Now he’d be rested, in top Alec form, and that meant Max would want to skin him alive after the first thing that came out of his overactive mouth.
Time for regret at helping him to show itself.
Instead of Alec meandering into the living room, she heard him go into the bathroom and close the door. A minute later, the shower started.
A short reprieve.
Max finished eating and wandered into the living room to look over her motorcycle. Cindy wasn’t mechanically inclined, and doubtless while Max was a captive her baby had missed some much-needed TLC.
Alec was still in the shower. Max cast a glance toward the bathroom, irritated. Manticore did not stand for dawdling in the shower. Soap up, scrub down, rinse off, get out. It just figured primping and half-hour long showers would be the kind of crap Alec would pick up from the outside world.
She ignored him as long as she could, but when she really began to think there wouldn’t be any hot water left for her, she marched up to the bathroom door and pounded on it.
“Hey, Alice! Today!”
There was no answer.
Max pounded harder. “Some others would like to shower this year!” Max scowled in sudden annoyance when a thought occurred to her. “You better not be jerking off in there, you pig.”
“… a minute…” came Alec’s voice.
It was strained. Taut.
Max froze.
Something was wrong.
“Alec?”
No answer.
Max glanced hesitantly at the doorknob, up at the painted white of the door, then put her hand on the doorknob and opened the door.
The air in the bathroom was steamy and thick from the hot water running in the shower.
“Alec?”
A shaky voice answered from within the shower. “Leave… m’lone. I’ll… b’okay…”
Max moved to the shower and pulled back the curtain.
Alec was curled on the shower floor. His hands were braced against the wall, hot water cascading over his shoulders and back. He was jerking and shaking violently. His muscles were tight, fighting the seizure, trying to control it, but Max knew that the shakes could not be fought like that.
“Shit,” she murmured.
Alec’s head was bowed, his body jerking, muscles jumping, spine going into uncontrollable spasms. “I… be fine…”
“Shut up,” Max snarled, but there wasn’t fire in her voice. She felt sorry for him. She knew what the seizures were like and she wouldn’t wish them on anybody, not even pain-in-her-ass Alec.
She turned off the water and left Alec twitching in the shower to paw through her medicine cabinet. She hadn’t needed them since she got back; she hoped her bottles, like her motorcycle, had been left alone in the time she was gone.
She found one of her bottles of tryptophan and returned to the shower.
She hoped she’d see some small sign of improvement during her short absence, but no such luck. Alec was having a particularly bad one this time.
Max wrapped her arms around his chest from behind and hauled him out of the shower and on to the bathroom floor. Alec twitched on his back, helpless to fight her. Max was drenched just from trying to hold his wet body to her with one arm as she popped the cap on her pill bottle with the other.
She worked loss three pills, palmed them, and brought her hand up to Alec’s mouth. His lips were closed, his neck muscles corded as he tried to swallow the whimpers. That was training from Manticore they had never had a class for. Everyone knew what happened to soldiers when it was discovered they had the shakes. If Alec was still alive, he’d learned to hide it.
“Open your mouth,” Max said gently.
Alec opened his eyes and looked at her. Panic and pain were in his eyes as he locked gazes with her. There was silent pleading in his eyes.
They fought like crazy, they’d threatened each other with injury and death a dozen times at least, they hated each other and made it no secret. Alec had no reason to trust Max and accept whatever she was trying to make him swallow.
Without a sound, Alec opened his mouth and Max put the pills in.
Alec swallowed with effort and closed his eyes, body jerking and twitching.
Max wrapped both arms around him and held him tight. She was soaked from holding on to him. She held him and waited for the pills to help.
She looked over his flinching, seizing body in her arms. His muscled chest and stomach, his long legs and defined arms, his inviting face with bright, lively eyes. For whatever could be said about his character and personality, he was a beautiful specimen. Manticore made them all beautiful, and Alec was no exception.
It seemed like hours before Alec’s shakes began to abate, though Max knew it could not have been more than fifteen minutes. The savagery of the convulsions coursing through his body lessened as she held him to her. His breathing went from tight and shallow to deep gulps for air. His muscles relaxed and he went from rigid and tight against her to sagging loosely in her embrace.
Max discovered, with some embarrassment, that she was raking her fingers through his hair. She didn’t really mean to do it. She just did for him what Logan had done for her once. She remembered finding it unspeakably comforting. But that had been Logan. She was afraid to find out what kind of recriminations and mockery Alec would throw her way for being so sentimental.
Instead, Alec sighed and closed his eyes, turning his face slightly into her calming touch.
Finally, all signs of the seizure were gone. Alec lay in Max’s lap, limp and motionless but for his breathing, propped semi-upright against her chest.
For a long time, neither of them spoke. Max got the sense neither of them wanted to reintroduce who exactly they were into the moment. Because when Alec and Max were brought back to the present, they would start bickering.
Alec broke first. He rolled out of her lap, out of her arms, and struggled to his hands and knees. Using the bathroom wall for balance, he rose to his feet. He didn’t look at her.
Max stood and faced him. “Alec…”
Alec, looking peaked and spent, tensed at her voice.
The telephone rang.
Max almost ran to answer it.
It was Logan. He wanted her to come over and look at some research he had. She wasn’t sure what it pertained to this time. Max, honestly, was only half-listening. She was too conscious of Alec in the apartment with her, moving around in the background.
When she got off the phone with Logan and turned to go change clothes, Alec was dressed and heading for the door.
“Hey,” Max called after him.
Alec froze. After a second of silence, he turned and finally looked at her. He offered up a cocky smirk, “I took some of your pills.”
“You’re going to pay me back for those,” she retorted angrily.
“Whatever. I take back what I said last night about this place,” Alec said with a glance around the room. “It’s not a dump.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s a shit-hole.”
“Get out.”
“See you around, Max.”
“Are you trying to ruin my day?”
“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” Alec said expansively then left the apartment with a grand, arrogant gesture of self-adoration.
Max shook her head, fuming, and went to change her clothes. She knew Alec was right, though. They’d be seeing each other again.
For better or worse, Alec in her life would definitely make it different.
END
No, I didn't buy it, either.
So I only need to have this up for, like, two seconds before I can post the sequel, right?
"Genetically Engineered Stray"
Spoiler: Set after 'Designate This', when Max is readjusting to life outside of Manticore for a second time.
Somehow, the world outside of Manticore seemed just as different after Max’s second escape as it had after her first.
Max knew it wasn’t that it had changed, really. It was the juxtaposition. It was being ripped from one environment and being thrown into another completely different. It was ice cold water after a scalding bath. The world of filth and chaos back to back with the world of order and discipline. Black and white. Right and wrong. Simple and convoluted.
It was the tearing away of so many lies and beliefs that Max had wrapped so tightly around herself. All the little things she did in her desperate attempts to forget who she was.
Within a matter of days back at Manticore, she was adapted. In so many ways, it was like she had never left.
Because it hadn’t been like being drafted, it had been coming home. Reintroduction of a wild animal into its natural habitat. The claws and teeth she’d kept mostly sheathed were bared in all their ferocity, and they were just as deadly as ever. Her time in the world of average men had not dulled the creature that she was created to be.
As much as she railed against everything Manticore was and everything it had done to her, it was her childhood and her upbringing. The first laws of survival she had learned were the lessons taught by drill instructors, and because they were the first they were, against all her efforts, the most comforting. Nostalgia clung to the rigid structure and singularity of purpose. Duty. Discipline. Teamwork.
Max had forgotten all those dirty little insidious secrets about Manticore. She had buried them so deep that she had fooled herself sometimes into believing she’d ditched the mindless solider Manticore had bred and trained her to be. She still kicked ass, but the way Max kicked ass.
But thrust back into that environment and she discovered just how close to the surface X5-452 was. For all her efforts since her first escape, that person was just waiting for its own escape. X5-452 came back to her as though she had never pushed it all away.
She was so very much the same infantry solider when she ran away the second time that Max felt lost all over again.
She thought she knew where her new place in life was. It was a place she had fought tooth and nail to claim. It was waiting for her, much the same as when she’d left. But she saw it with different eyes now. She saw her dirty apartment with Cindy and compared it to the orderliness of a barracks. She saw people on the street, aimless, shuffling, meandering masses of bedraggled and destitute human beings, and she held them against the unit in formation.
It was the pointless scrabbling of it all that made her jerk, made her see a homeless man on the street (who was really not much worse off than she was) and flinch away from the thought of touching him.
She went back to the world she’d left behind, but Manticore’s grip was still tight around her. The fires were long since extinguished, but Max still felt the heat in her bones.
She was a perfect modern weapon thrown in with clubs and hammers, and she had to go through her day like she didn’t know it. She had to associate with the weak and find camaraderie with them.
Max didn’t say anything to Cindy about what had happened. The hard facts of Manticore, yes, but nothing about becoming X5-452 again. She couldn’t confess those sins.
Familiar, too, was the loneliness of having no one like her to share her plight with. She knew that many other Manticore creations had escaped into the world this time, but she had not fled with them. She didn’t know where they were.
Max had been home about three days. Back in her old apartment with Cindy and her motorcycle and Logan on her periphery whenever she wanted to throw her orbit that way. It was the very existence she’d been unwilling to give up.
She still clung to it, but she wasn’t sure how tightly anymore. Now it was the grip of someone with nothing else to hold on to.
Cindy noted how quiet she was since coming back, but Max would just shake her head and Cindy would back off. Max couldn’t talk to Cindy or Logan about the things she felt and feared, because while they could know they couldn’t understand. She was alone in a world of anarchy all over again. She just hoped adjusting the second time would not take as long as it had the first.
One evening, Cindy was talking incessantly about a girl Cindy had hooked up with. Max was listening politely, her mind only half engaged, when Cindy moved the talk into bedroom antics. Against any conscious effort, Max found herself looking critically at Cindy’s body and wondering who would touch a weak, imperfect, dirty body like that.
That was when Max bolted. She didn’t have anyplace to go, but she couldn’t bear to be in the same room with Cindy and chance more horrible thoughts like that popping into her head.
Cindy was a wonderful person, but all Max saw for a second was frailty.
Max walked the streets of Seattle alone, arms drawn into her sides and hands deep in her pockets. She tried to move without thinking. It was easy to do; Manticore didn’t drill soldiers to think unless ordered to.
It was a cold night. Max’s breath was fogging in front of her face with every breath. The fires lit in barrels that drew the detritus of humanity like a human bug lamp were globes of heat in bitterly chill air.
A few on the street called her name. People knew her here, knew Max. She ignored them and continued walking. She thought maybe, if she walked far enough, she’d outpace her past.
She’d worked so hard to make ‘Max’, and now it seemed that person was the façade. Maybe she was, and always would be, X5-452.
When she found herself, for the briefest moment, longing for direct orders, or a bunk beneath her, or nothing more unpredictable than morning drills, she thought that maybe Alec had been right all along. He’d stayed where he belonged. He became the weapon they bred and trained him to be. He accepted it.
But Max could never just accept it. Her DNA sequence must have been jacked, because she wanted a choice. The ability to choose, to make a decision for her own future, was a necessity she could not suppress.
She was afraid to think that if only Manticore had offered her the choice, then she may have stayed. Maybe if there hadn’t been a brick wall but an open gate, she would have bowed to her genes and crawled back in her bunk that night of the escape.
A catcall to her left caught Max in just the wrong mood. In the days before she was recaptured, she would have mouthed off and walked away. Scum on the outside just did crap like that, and it didn’t deserve to be noticed.
But Max was too close to X5-452 at that particular second, and she whirled to the lecherous man and had his throat in her fist before he could blink.
“Go rut with your own kind, you dirtbag,” Max snarled, and with a heave she tossed the guy like he was nothing. He was nothing.
Max turned to continue on her way.
Her enhanced vision caught sight of something, and she stopped cold in her tracks.
It was a person huddled between a trash can and a soaked and soggy cardboard box. His knees were drawn up and his arms wrapped around his shins. His head was bowed.
It should not have given Max a second’s pause. It was just another pathetic creature in a world of flawed, inferior beings.
It was the haircut, she decided, that caught her eye. It was clean. Military.
Max stared. Then she moved.
She crouched down in front of the ball of limbs and frowned, eyes taking in details. She reached out a hand to barely touch a forearm.
A fist shot out at her and would have clocked her if she hadn’t been more than merely human. Max jerked out of the way and threw an answering block that off-balanced the man.
Alec.
Max blinked at him. She hadn’t thought of him, really, since the fire. She knew he’d escaped the blaze, but she hadn’t really wondered where he went. He was an obnoxious ass and of all her fellow X5s, she cared about him the least.
Even if he had helped her escape in his own self-serving and traitorous way.
Max pushed the thought away. Unconsciously, she assessed Alec’s condition. The battle triage was innate; she couldn’t help the quick visual once-over of his status. He’d run afoul of some nasty characters, it seemed. His face was bruised and his bottom lip was bleeding. What worried her most was the teetering sense of balance. Alec was made to be more coordinated and agile than that.
“Alec?”
Alec blinked, taken aback, and then took a good look at her. He seemed puzzled. “Max?”
“Yeah… what happened to you?” she reached out to touch his face.
Alec stiffened and pressed back against the chain length fence behind him.
It was definitely a change from the loud-mouth breeding partner she’d met in the barracks.
“Stop it,” Alec snapped. “It’s nothing.”
“Right. What are you doing out here?”
Alec tensed and looked away. There was almost shame in his body language.
“Hey…” Max jostled his shoulder.
“I’m just trying to get some sleep… is that all right with you?” he asked peevishly.
Max narrowed her eyes. His lethargy, lack of coordination, uncharacteristic behavior… it could all be exhaustion.
“Here?” she asked incredulously, looking around him at the squalor he’d found in which to hunker down.
Alec dropped his head on to his knees and the muscles of his body seemed to go slack. “Yeah, doesn’t it look cozy to you?”
“Looks like a rat-hole to me.”
Alec brought up his head and it lolled as he pinned her with a hot and glassy stare. “I found a place… the guys who were living there weren’t really the sharing type.”
Max frowned thoughtfully and pressed her fingers to a cut on his eyebrow. “Is that where you got these?”
Alec pulled his head away from her hand. “This is all your fault, you know. If it weren’t for you, I’d be in my bunk right now.” Alec’s head fell to his knees again, as though it were an immense effort to hold his own head up.
Max had to figure he had been awake since the fire.
She pondered his state a moment, then stated as fact, “You’ve never been on a long-term mission.”
“I’ve been on plenty,” he snarled.
“Any where you didn’t go back to Manticore at night?”
Alec didn’t answer.
“Any mission where you had to find a place to sleep on your own?”
Alec leaned his head back against the fence and let his eyes close. “You want to be useful? Just… keep eyes out for me so I can catch a few minutes. That’s all I need.”
Max looked around at the riffraff around them. They looked meek and harmless enough. “You expecting trouble?”
Alec, even dead tired, managed a slow and cocky smirk. “There are a few less bikers from that man-love pad than there was when I showed up looking for a bunk to crash on. They’re probably not too happy about that.”
“Damnit, Alec.”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion.”
Max stood and stared down reprovingly at him. He was oblivious, looking for all the world like he intended to make good on his word to take a combat nap for whatever time he might have Max on watch.
She wanted to hate him, but she looked at him and saw a lost brethren. She thought of him, abandoned in a world he didn’t really know, so clueless and alone he didn’t even know how to find a decent place to sleep.
She remembered how hard it had been to sleep at first, alone, when she’d lived the whole of her life until that moment with her fellow soldiers on lookout for her while her guard was down.
Until then, she had never really thought about just how vulnerable one was while they slept. Alone, it was painfully, frighteningly obvious.
“You can’t sleep here,” Max said.
“I could if you’d shut up.”
“Get up.”
“Just a few minutes!” Alec barked. He looked physically incapable of fighting with anything more than words. “I just want ten fucking minutes of your time so I can…” he started to drift mid-sentence.
Max sighed. “I know I’m going to regret this. Let’s go.”
Alec cracked weary eyes open at her. “Do you hate me that much? I’m not asking for an honor guard here, just a catnap.”
“On your feet, that’s an order.”
Alec rose ponderously. “I don’t take orders from you,” he said sharply, though Max noticed he had stood at her command nonetheless.
“Come with me.” Without checking to see if he would follow, she turned back toward her apartment building and started walking.
A minute later, she heard Alec behind her ask in a very tired voice, “Where are we going? If you want to work me over for not hating Manticore with every fiber of my being, I’m really not in the mood right now.”
“Do you want to sleep or not?” she snapped, turning quickly to look at him. He was smaller out here in the world than inside Manticore, she noticed. Drawn in tight and defensive. The strain of being on his own with no backup, no home base, had chipped away at X5-494 and left Alec in its place. And Alec was a tired, homeless, lost man with no one to turn to.
Max remembered all too well what that was like. It made her take pity on him. He might be a jackass and a jerk, but he didn’t deserve that feeling of helplessness. For a solider, there was nothing worse. Max knew.
And, in a screwed up way, he was family.
She might detest him at times, but she couldn’t leave him on the street.
Alec said remarkably little the rest of the way to Max’s apartment. He was so weary that he’d take orders from Max.
The apartment was dark and quiet when Max eased open the door. She paused in the doorway and listened for Cindy. She couldn’t hear even the sound of her breathing. She must be out with that woman she’d been talking about endlessly.
Good.
Max entered the apartment and held the door open for Alec. “Home sweet home,” she cracked dryly.
Alec shuffled in after her and seemed too tired to notice it. But he had to. Training ingrained in him the inability to fail to notice the lay of his surroundings. The exits, the weak spots, the defensible positions.
He just did a quick and cursory job of it.
“What a dump,” he grumbled.
“I can gladly throw you back out on the street if you don’t think my place is good enough for you.”
Alec looked at her and said nothing. His look said it all. No matter how much he’d love to give her hell about the apartment and her life and her take on the universe, he needed her too badly. He was in the worse tactical position and he knew it.
Max grabbed him by the back of his jacket like he was an errant puppy taken in jaw by the nape of its neck by its mother and she hauled him into her bedroom.
Alec’s eyes fell on the bed and she felt him nearly fold under her hand at the sight of promised rest.
“One word and I’ll kick your ass,” Max said with a shove that pushed Alec toward the bed.
Alec stumbled into the bedroom, blinked almost reverently at the bed, then he slipped his jacket off his shoulders. It pooled on the floor. His shirt followed. Shoes. Pants. Underwear. He stripped down to nothing in front of her, uncaring and unashamed that she was in the same room with him.
Max’s years outside of Manticore told her to recoil at such blatant nudity outside of someone she meant and chose to sleep with. Nudity was a big deal to normal people.
In Manticore, it had been merely the machine under its dressings. The engine under the hood. It was only the soldier, the weapon. She wanted to feel the disgust of the average person at a naked body, the flagrant flaunting of private skin (particularly the body of someone for whom she didn’t have any affection), but she just didn’t. She was an X5 and so was Alec. It was just flesh over muscle and bone and she couldn’t make herself see it as anything cruder than that.
Of course, if their bodies weren’t honed weapons, conditioned and strong - if their bodies were as ugly as average human beings’ bodies, flabby and hairy and imperfect - maybe the children of Manticore would be more modest about nudity, too.
But they weren’t built to be something to be ashamed of.
Alec, bare and exhausted, all but fell onto the bed and the last of his energy vanished. She doubted she could have gotten him out of bed then if she tried.
That wasn’t true. She could bark an order and he’d jump. He had nothing left, but he’d jump just the same.
He sprawled on her bed face-down for a moment, just relishing the sense of impending sleep, then he habitually rolled on to his side, back to the middle of the bed, his long body only taking up exactly half of the mattress.
It was unconscious. Training instilled since childhood.
It was his proffered position of reciprocal watch while they slept.
Max wanted to be put out and storm back to the living room to spend an uncomfortable night on her and Cindy’s lumpy, ancient couch. She wanted to take that moral high ground, with Alec more than most. She wanted to do what a normal person would do.
But she was so little of Max these days and so much of X5-452.
Without feeling, without emotion, she stripped down to nothing and climbed into bed with Alec.
He was already asleep by the time she joined him.
She turned her back to him and lay on her side. Her eyes watching his back, and his eyes watching hers, symbolically if nothing else.
Max closed her eyes and hated just how quickly and easily sleep came with a fellow soldier pressed to her back.
**************
If her bedmate had been a normal man, she would have woken up with him sprawled all over her. Human men were oafish dogs like that. They tangled and trapped their partners. When a man was with Max, who had a body and face designed to be surpassingly attractive, the possessive sprawl was even worse. Men could not believe their fortune to have slept with such a gorgeous woman, and they flopped over her in bed every chance they got, as though they could physically hold her down and keep her. They knew, instinctively, they could hold on to her in no other manner. Men had a way of knowing they’d slept with someone out of their league and had the most pathetic panic reaction to it.
Every time Max woke underneath the arm, leg, or body of someone she’d had sex with, momentarily her heart would race. She didn’t think it was romantic or sweet or comforting. She was pinned. If an enemy burst through the door, she’d have to untangle herself from mister whoever-at-the-moment before she could face an attacker.
This time, she woke in just the same position she had fallen asleep in, and Alec was exactly where he had fallen asleep. Their backs touched and nothing else.
Part of Max wanted to scream ‘yes! that’s what I want the person in my bed to do!’. Instead, she lifted her head and listened to the sounds in the apartment beyond Alec’s breathing. Cindy was back; Max could hear her moving around with obvious caution in the kitchen.
Glancing over her shoulder at Alec, Max gauged the rhythm of his breathing. He was still deeply asleep.
Careful not to rouse him, Max slipped out of bed, dressed in fresh clothes, and left her bedroom.
Cindy was giving her the ‘boo, spill’ look the second Max laid eyes on her roommate.
Max rested her elbows on the kitchen counter and Cindy lifted an eyebrow. “Well… looks like I wasn’t the only one who got lucky last night.”
The thought of her and Alec breeding… but Max didn’t want to explain who and what Alec was. She was still trying to rebuild the wall that used to exist between Manticore and her world outside the Constantine wire. The further apart she could keep Cindy and Alec for now, the better.
“Heading out early?” Max asked, noting Cindy was already dressed and ready to head out the door.
“Yeah, boo. I’ve got some business to take care of before I hit the Pony. But I will be getting details tonight.” Cindy wagged a finger at Max, at the bedroom where Alec slept, then back at Max.
Max just gave Cindy the answer she wanted so she’d leave it alone. “Sure. Later.”
When Cindy was gone, Max rummaged around the kitchen for breakfast and a glass of milk.
An hour later, she heard Alec get up. She braced herself for his entrance. He’d been compliant last night because he was dead tired. Now he’d be rested, in top Alec form, and that meant Max would want to skin him alive after the first thing that came out of his overactive mouth.
Time for regret at helping him to show itself.
Instead of Alec meandering into the living room, she heard him go into the bathroom and close the door. A minute later, the shower started.
A short reprieve.
Max finished eating and wandered into the living room to look over her motorcycle. Cindy wasn’t mechanically inclined, and doubtless while Max was a captive her baby had missed some much-needed TLC.
Alec was still in the shower. Max cast a glance toward the bathroom, irritated. Manticore did not stand for dawdling in the shower. Soap up, scrub down, rinse off, get out. It just figured primping and half-hour long showers would be the kind of crap Alec would pick up from the outside world.
She ignored him as long as she could, but when she really began to think there wouldn’t be any hot water left for her, she marched up to the bathroom door and pounded on it.
“Hey, Alice! Today!”
There was no answer.
Max pounded harder. “Some others would like to shower this year!” Max scowled in sudden annoyance when a thought occurred to her. “You better not be jerking off in there, you pig.”
“… a minute…” came Alec’s voice.
It was strained. Taut.
Max froze.
Something was wrong.
“Alec?”
No answer.
Max glanced hesitantly at the doorknob, up at the painted white of the door, then put her hand on the doorknob and opened the door.
The air in the bathroom was steamy and thick from the hot water running in the shower.
“Alec?”
A shaky voice answered from within the shower. “Leave… m’lone. I’ll… b’okay…”
Max moved to the shower and pulled back the curtain.
Alec was curled on the shower floor. His hands were braced against the wall, hot water cascading over his shoulders and back. He was jerking and shaking violently. His muscles were tight, fighting the seizure, trying to control it, but Max knew that the shakes could not be fought like that.
“Shit,” she murmured.
Alec’s head was bowed, his body jerking, muscles jumping, spine going into uncontrollable spasms. “I… be fine…”
“Shut up,” Max snarled, but there wasn’t fire in her voice. She felt sorry for him. She knew what the seizures were like and she wouldn’t wish them on anybody, not even pain-in-her-ass Alec.
She turned off the water and left Alec twitching in the shower to paw through her medicine cabinet. She hadn’t needed them since she got back; she hoped her bottles, like her motorcycle, had been left alone in the time she was gone.
She found one of her bottles of tryptophan and returned to the shower.
She hoped she’d see some small sign of improvement during her short absence, but no such luck. Alec was having a particularly bad one this time.
Max wrapped her arms around his chest from behind and hauled him out of the shower and on to the bathroom floor. Alec twitched on his back, helpless to fight her. Max was drenched just from trying to hold his wet body to her with one arm as she popped the cap on her pill bottle with the other.
She worked loss three pills, palmed them, and brought her hand up to Alec’s mouth. His lips were closed, his neck muscles corded as he tried to swallow the whimpers. That was training from Manticore they had never had a class for. Everyone knew what happened to soldiers when it was discovered they had the shakes. If Alec was still alive, he’d learned to hide it.
“Open your mouth,” Max said gently.
Alec opened his eyes and looked at her. Panic and pain were in his eyes as he locked gazes with her. There was silent pleading in his eyes.
They fought like crazy, they’d threatened each other with injury and death a dozen times at least, they hated each other and made it no secret. Alec had no reason to trust Max and accept whatever she was trying to make him swallow.
Without a sound, Alec opened his mouth and Max put the pills in.
Alec swallowed with effort and closed his eyes, body jerking and twitching.
Max wrapped both arms around him and held him tight. She was soaked from holding on to him. She held him and waited for the pills to help.
She looked over his flinching, seizing body in her arms. His muscled chest and stomach, his long legs and defined arms, his inviting face with bright, lively eyes. For whatever could be said about his character and personality, he was a beautiful specimen. Manticore made them all beautiful, and Alec was no exception.
It seemed like hours before Alec’s shakes began to abate, though Max knew it could not have been more than fifteen minutes. The savagery of the convulsions coursing through his body lessened as she held him to her. His breathing went from tight and shallow to deep gulps for air. His muscles relaxed and he went from rigid and tight against her to sagging loosely in her embrace.
Max discovered, with some embarrassment, that she was raking her fingers through his hair. She didn’t really mean to do it. She just did for him what Logan had done for her once. She remembered finding it unspeakably comforting. But that had been Logan. She was afraid to find out what kind of recriminations and mockery Alec would throw her way for being so sentimental.
Instead, Alec sighed and closed his eyes, turning his face slightly into her calming touch.
Finally, all signs of the seizure were gone. Alec lay in Max’s lap, limp and motionless but for his breathing, propped semi-upright against her chest.
For a long time, neither of them spoke. Max got the sense neither of them wanted to reintroduce who exactly they were into the moment. Because when Alec and Max were brought back to the present, they would start bickering.
Alec broke first. He rolled out of her lap, out of her arms, and struggled to his hands and knees. Using the bathroom wall for balance, he rose to his feet. He didn’t look at her.
Max stood and faced him. “Alec…”
Alec, looking peaked and spent, tensed at her voice.
The telephone rang.
Max almost ran to answer it.
It was Logan. He wanted her to come over and look at some research he had. She wasn’t sure what it pertained to this time. Max, honestly, was only half-listening. She was too conscious of Alec in the apartment with her, moving around in the background.
When she got off the phone with Logan and turned to go change clothes, Alec was dressed and heading for the door.
“Hey,” Max called after him.
Alec froze. After a second of silence, he turned and finally looked at her. He offered up a cocky smirk, “I took some of your pills.”
“You’re going to pay me back for those,” she retorted angrily.
“Whatever. I take back what I said last night about this place,” Alec said with a glance around the room. “It’s not a dump.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s a shit-hole.”
“Get out.”
“See you around, Max.”
“Are you trying to ruin my day?”
“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” Alec said expansively then left the apartment with a grand, arrogant gesture of self-adoration.
Max shook her head, fuming, and went to change her clothes. She knew Alec was right, though. They’d be seeing each other again.
For better or worse, Alec in her life would definitely make it different.
END