A/N: Vignette-type thing. Fairly typical of my convoluted writing style, and fairly nonsensical. Also terribly outdated, given that Dark Angel was canceled, and there's been almost no mention of the other X5s for most of the second season. Title is from 'Without You', by Jonathan Larson.
Suggestions would be much appreciated - I haven't written anything for quite some time.
For Rubiana, Kylara, and Alexian, whom I love. I would come home if I could - but I can't. And I'm *sorry* . . .
But I'm Gone
We know the second you make it over the walls that you're not coming back.
It's there for anyone to read in the way the barbed wire rips open your palms, the beautiful petals of blood that you left on the hard cement of the training grounds where we practiced obstacle courses over and over. There in the way that water drips down your faces and off your eyelashes as you climb out of the pool and take in a deep breath of air after your requisite four and a half minutes, and we can't tell whether you are crying or not - or whether we are. There in the way that you limp slightly down the hallways after you brushed too close to the dog runs and they'd snarled and nearly taken off a chunk of your calf.
There in the way that you shake at night, and you aren't sure whether it is seizures, fear, or something deeper, beyond even those basic things.
Believe us, we know the exact second that you bolt out into the merciless snow, feet tearing on ice, and it's so cold that you're scared you'll freeze to death, but you're even more afraid of the bullets right behind you.
The sirens don't go off for us like they do for you, but we know that eerie blasting sound, and we huddle under our blankets, shaking just slightly in fear and anticipation. We don't know whether the fear is for us or for you - and it doesn't really matter, since we are you.
Your feet are slick on the ice, and you stumble, expecting solid ice to be under you, but suddenly it isn't so solid anymore. You fall to your knees, and that slight impact sends everything crumbling. You fall into the water, and it's even colder than the snow was. And you've done that drill - so have we - so we know you'll survive. You have to.
You get hit by tazers, trying to go back for the others, and you go down in a heap of jerking limbs. Everything is light and dark and bright white madness that blinds you, and we can't help but sit up in our beds and stare out into the night, still seeing those afterimages emblazoned on the back of our eyelids.
You're lying on the floor of the hallway, a bullet hole in your head, and your eyes are wide and glassy as you stare out at whatever you dream in the world beyond, a blood pool forming a halo around your head.
You feel the bullets take you in the back, and you fall, arms and legs sprawling under you, ignominiously and ungracefully onto your face. You look at the soldiers, and you will yourself to lie still and surrender, but you can't quite put enough of that will to work, because you find yourself thinking of 766, and you're on your feet and running at the guards. You don't even care when the bullets hit you again - this time in the ribs and abdomen - because you know you're dead anyway, whether your body lives or not.
And you feel yourself hit the fence hard, going up it like a cat, so hard and fast that your palms are slashed open like they were before - only it isn't a drill this time, and you don't have any time to look at the blossoming roses on the ground below you. You make it to the top, and you drop hard, pray you won't break a limb, and when you land, you say a prayer to your god and take off, feet bleeding onto the asphalt road.
We know you're not coming back, but we let ourselves dream in those few hours between your escape and roll call that you will.
But you don't.
They come for us, and they take us away. Our feet ache slightly in sympathy for what yours have endured in your terrifying night of flight as we march down the smooth hallways toward Psy Ops.
We don't quite know what it is, then. But they teach us, slowly, day by day, and we learn to endure. We learn what pain is, and we learn what betrayal is.
They emblazon your faces in our mind, endless conditioning. Traitor, we shout, looking into our own eyes. Snake, rat, plague, we recite, and the lips we say this with were coded with the same nucleotide bases that yours were.
Adenine thymine cytosine guanine. Three million base pairs. All those codons for the amino acids for the proteins that form the cells that form our tissues bodies organs. Everything the same - up to that last digit of our barcodes. One digit out of twelve, but that's enough to make the difference.
We count the days. The days turn into weeks into months. Six months of this, and then they return us to the main barracks, slightly older, slightly bitterer - and we still pray for your return.
We know what you endure in the Outside world.
We know your fears, the way you run constantly, afraid to stay still for fear they'll get you when you're sleeping. We know how you stay up all night for two weeks on end, one time when they chase you, and how you start to go quietly insane, seeing Lydecker behind every shadow.
We know your first kiss, the way you'll lean into the boy so tentatively, because you know he could break you with a single word. And we know, later, how you weep when he leaves you because you're too strange, too different, and there's too much you don't tell him -
We know the first time you'll kill someone - you'll be a teenager, and you'll have blood on your hands like you did when you were just a kid. You'll know how to clean the blood off, how to scrub every single trace out of your skin, how to dump the body where nobody will find it, because you were trained to, just like we were, but you'll call Zack anyway, sobbing on the other end of the phone line because you're afraid of what you're becoming - us.
You'll pray to whatever god you believe in that they won't catch you. You'll pray, and at the same time, you'll wish that you'd never run. But still, you keep running because anything is better than that . . . .
We knew the moment you went over the walls that you weren't coming back. We'd hoped for it, prayed for it, but we knew. And even through our bitter despair and anger at your betrayal, we begged you to come back.
But you don't, and we knew you wouldn't.
Why would you, after all?
You knew what to expect, after all. You saw it, just like we did, all those years long ago when we were still children, and you knew what our lives would be.
And we wouldn't have gone back if it had been us over those walls, running for our lives, us out in the cold hard world that should be - and almost is - better than Manticore.
No, we can't blame you for not coming back to save us, because we wouldn't have.
Not even for you.