Disclaimer:
I don't own Max Steel, I am not profiting from this, kiss kiss love love, cheery bye...sic transit vir
by Alhazred
Josh always felt funny when he came down from an adrenaline high. It was something he had never quite gotten used to, the rush, the energy, and the fall.
But the fall was never this bad before. It didn't feel like that odd, natural drug this time. It felt more like being low on T-juice, having no energy, no motivation to take one more step. He wanted to curl up and pretend none of this was happening... not out of denial, but simply because he felt too tired, too shocked and angry to deal with it.
The vial dropped from his hand and shattered on the floor; he hardly noticed. It didn't matter, L'Étranger didn't have it and that was the important thing.
Important, but a hollow victory if ever there was one.
Josh had gone straight to the infirmary as soon as his Hawk had touched down, but he was too late, too late by a minute or so. Of course, he already was too late to stop any of it when he'd arrived in the first place, but he'd been too late to offer any kind of solace, any kind words, any... anything.
He'd walked into the doorway just in time to see the doctors pull the sheet over Berto's head and note the time of death. Rachel was there; maybe that had been some comfort to him. Maybe.
She turned and saw Josh stumble back out, following him almost immediately. He'd pressed his back up against the wall, his hand was shaking, the one that had been holding the vial. His eyes were squeezed shut, holding back tears that didn't come.
"Josh."
She'd startled him, apparently. Or maybe it was just a coincidence that his hand balled into a fist and smacked the wall. But he opened his eyes. "Did... was it... was it really that bad? There... there was a lot of blood but..."
He was kidding himself if he thought anything could've been done, and she knew it. And she knew he knew it. For him, the simple thought of the medical staff being at fault was sadistic, selfish, and sweeter then candy, and he wouldn't realize he was thinking like that until he could think straight again.
She put a hand on his shoulder. "Josh... L'Étranger shot him with one of our grapple guns... it just... tore him up, inside."
Of course, he knew that. He'd known because Berto could barely talk when he'd found him bleeding to death under the rubble in the nanotech lab, and he'd ran to the Ops room after the medics had come, to check the security camera.
It was quite clear, really. L'Étranger hadn't been spotted by anything except that camera, he'd no longer cared about being secret after reaching his objective. Berto had seen it, of course, and he'd alerted Jefferson, and Jefferson had broken through the chaos the explosion had caused and sent agents down.
Except Berto was closer, and he knew it, so he tried to stop L'Étranger himself. Maybe he felt particularly confident against the masked man, considering how he'd quite literally flushed him down the drain that time. Or maybe he just knew how desperate the situation was once he saw that the one enemy N-Tek had who cared for nothing more then money was taking a sample of the nanoprobes.
He'd tried to hold up L'Étranger with a grapple gun, but L'Étranger had overpowered him and went for the deceptively deadly gadget. Berto had held on tight; too tight. He'd held on when L'Étranger jammed an elbow into his ribs, and he'd held on after being backed into the wall.
He'd held on and tried desperately to turn his improvised weapon back around when L'Étranger twisted his arm and pointed it backward. But there was no regard for human life in L'Étranger, and he simply took the opportunity to pull the trigger.
The camera caught it so well it was morbid. Berto had cried out and gone limp as soon as the grapple went in; L'Étranger simply tossed him aside and into the debris. The agents on their way never caught sight of Berto in the lab; L'Étranger had met them halfway and floored them all.
But Max had found him. He'd known something was wrong a second after setting foot on the island. Smoke was billowing out from underwater where the sub bay was located, and firefighters were racing about, combating the moderate flames on some of the upper levels.
He hadn't bothered trying to go through them; firefighters never let you go inside, at least not in the movies. But then, he didn't need to worry about it; he just took the elevator.
The underground areas were a little better off, but not by much. Agents were running around like chickens with their heads cut off, alarms were blaring, debris cluttered the corridors like a sunken ship that had just been raised.
Hermano, we might have a problem down here,
Berto had said... Jefferson wants you to report in.And the feed had pretty much gone dead after that... but he'd gotten to N-Tek so fast it had to be a new response time record.
His father had been topside dealing with the authorities. Needless to say, he was a little surprised when Rachel had gotten on the Biolink.
She hadn't known where Berto was, so he'd gone looking in the chaos.
It happened shortly after, like a badly scripted dramatic moment in a movie. For a second, there was no one around and it cleared the air for his hearing to pick up something in the background, nothing more then a whimper.
But he would know Berto's voice if he squeaked like a mouse.
And he found him under the rubble in the lab, bleeding to death, desperate to tell someone, anyone what had happened, forming just enough words around the blood in his throat for Max to know their intruder had to be stopped.
He left for the Ops room as soon as Rachel came with the medics and called up the camera records, seeing the entire thing plain as day...
L'Étranger...
Of course, it made perfect sense. The sub bay didn't explode; he'd shot it out with a torpedo from the Akyna to distract everyone, and then waltzed right in to get what he wanted.
Rachel had gone to the Ops room as soon as she realized he'd taken off in a Hawk, and not before rigging it with an EMP missile that nicely knocked the Akyna's systems offline and forced L'Étranger to surface.
And she watched him drop like a rock into the bay and climb on the deck, fighting off the crew like they were nothing until L'Étranger himself showed. She remembered one very particular part of that exchange.
"If I'd known hurting your friends made you this unbalanced, I would've done it long ago."
And his reply, no hint of rage in it whatsoever, "you haven't seen me unbalanced."
He snatched the vile of nanoprobes right from L'Étranger's belt and knocked him off the deck, towards one of the screws. With any luck, it had still been spinning.
And he ended up here, propped up against the wall, barely able to breath, the vile broken and unimportant now. "Why can't I cry for him, Rach?"
"You will," she told him. She leaned on the wall herself and slid down until she was sitting on the floor, hands rubbing at her temples. "We both will... he was my friend too. It's kind of funny, we think we're supposed to break down right off the bat, but it doesn't always work that way."
"You've been through this before," he surmised, almost chuckling a little. "I think... I'm in denial. How can I have just seen him like that, and know, and be in denial?"
It was her turn to laugh. "If I knew the answers to things like that, I'd be a sage."
She stood and took a deep breath. "L'Étranger killed two other agents... I should tell Jefferson."
Max followed. "We'll tell him."
---
He knocked on the door.
"Max, you don't have to do this, I can do it..."
"Rach, you're supposed to be moral support here," he whispered, grinning sadly for a second. "Besides, I already knocked, and you're not here."
A patented Rachel sigh came through the Biolink. "I know, I know... sorry. Just remember you're there to deliver the worst news they may ever hear; they may not particularly like you for it. Watch out for, um... bitch-slaps."
Rachel's unsure tone of voice during her sudden drop in vocabulary was quite obviously an attempt to lighten the mood, considering she had to fish deep down for the slightest bit of vulgarity she had. But she deserved points for effort, Max decided. "Thanks for the warning."
"I speak from experience," she added. "I always felt this job had the added responsibility of being a pin cushion for whatever the family feels the first few minutes..."
"That's a comfort," he muttered, shutting his mouth when he heard the door unlock. He wondered, briefly, if it was a good idea to do this as Max... but it just felt right after all the jams Berto had gotten him out of.
Rachel shut her mouth, too. She sat back and watched, watched Max go through the routine she had in the past. It wasn't like she'd had to bury so many friends that the joy was gone from the world, but it was, obviously, not the sort of thing one forgets.
Max had decidedly better luck then she'd ever had: Berto's father wasn't home, mother turned into an instant wreck as soon as the news was in the open, his two little sisters stood quietly in the corner, probably not fully understanding the severity of it all...
They were, Rachel was thankful for, in for news that would be better consolation then most families had during this. Berto had probably done more good then he realized by not telling him what he actually did for a living. Of course, there was the chance they'd blame Max, accuse the big hero of not being there to do his job... then again, Max was part of Berto's legacy in some ways; he'd saved his life, after all. And a legacy like that, made from helping others and things as noble as that last sacrifice made to even try making existence harder for the people who had no respect for life in the first place, that had to count for more.
Max waited for his mother to calm down and his father to return home before he began. "You should be proud of him. You see, there's... something you don't know..."
~fin~
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The ref list:
-"Sic Transit Vir" is a Latin phrase used as the title of a Babylon 5 episode. The usage here is not meant to be a pun. The title was a toss up between that and "sic transit gloria mundis."