Title: Copy of a Shadow
Author: Brynn McK
Feedback: Yes
please! Good or bad, here or at tmeyerswa@yahoo.com
Rating: PG-13 (death, angst, nothing that the show hasn't
already dealt with)
Spoilers: Through
AJBAC
Disclaimer: I am
neither Cameron, nor Eglee, nor Fox.
And I'm not making even a shiny nickel off of this.
A/N: This is a
companion piece to another fic of mine, "Love/Hate." You don't have to read "Love/Hate" to understand this one, but I
certainly wish you would. :) Thank you
very, very much to Nevermore for beta-reading this, giving me a few things to
ponder, and generally making this a better fic.
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Krit
huddled against the dirty brick wall, the whites of his eyes the only thing
separating him from the shadows. For as
long as he could remember, he'd lived for the night—the velvet dark, the quiet,
the mystery, the potential. At
Manticore he'd sneak away almost every evening after lights out, shimmy up to
the roof and just lie there for hours, drifting. Later, after the escape, he'd prowl the streets ceaselessly,
always alert, always searching. He'd
never yet found a girlfriend who understood it. It scared them, he knew, made them wonder if he had some secret
double life. Mild-mannered, skinny
smart-ass by day, daring agent of darkness by night.
Right. If only they knew.
It was all
because of Max, he was sure. She was a
creature of the night if ever there was one, and for as long as he could remember,
he'd wanted to be like her. As a child,
whenever they'd had a few moments to themselves he'd shadowed her silently
everywhere he could, imitating her swagger, the sarcastic quirk of her lips,
her defiance. Of course she caught him
at it more often than not, and it became something of a game with them, their
own version of escape and evade—a game which usually ended with him tripped or
swept or thrown on his back, and her laughing above him. "Lost
again, little brother," she'd tell him, cuffing him playfully and mussing
his hair. She had been one of the few
who'd ever dared to laugh in that place.
Lying there, looking up at her mischievous face, he'd felt almost
normal. Over a decade later, and he
still hadn't forgotten that feeling. He
didn't think he ever would.
He'd lost
track of her completely after the escape, just like he'd lost track of
everyone. He hitched as far as Billings
on pure instinct, then found himself alone on a street corner, shivering
uncontrollably as the realization hit him that he was an eight-year-old soldier
who had been separated from his CO and from his troop, and he had no idea what
to do. He panicked, briefly and
utterly. Then he forced himself to take
a deep breath and consider the situation.
Enemy territory. Unfamiliar
surroundings. No commander. Limited resources. There seemed only one appropriate question, his automatic
response to any confusion or uncertainty: What would Max do?
The answer
was obvious: she'd find a way to survive until she hooked up with the
others. And she'd do it with attitude
and style. Even at eight, he knew that
much. So he'd stolen and worked and
made friends where he could, trying not to draw attention to himself,
waiting. When the Pulse hit, he figured
that'd slow the process down, but he could be patient. His faith never wavered for a second. And sure enough, when he was around fifteen
he came home to his hole-in-the-wall apartment in Minneapolis and found himself
face-to-face with Zack.
"Hey," he
remarked, offhandedly, as if order hadn't suddenly returned to his chaotic
world. By this point he had almost
perfected Max's trademark nonchalance.
"Hey," Zack
replied. "You doing all right?"
Krit
gestured mockingly at the peeling walls, the clothes ankle-deep on the
floor. "Master of all I survey."
Zack didn't
seem to be listening, not really. He
inspected Krit, and then Krit's apartment, with a thoroughness that made his
brother feel awkward and slightly naked.
Then he nodded, satisfied, shoved a piece of paper into Krit's hand, and
turned to go.
Twenty-three-year-old
Zack was a party compared to eighteen-year-old Zack.
In a moment of weakness, Krit lost
his hard-won cool. He lunged after
Zack's retreating form. "Wait!"
Zack
turned. "What?"
As
nonchalance was now out of the question, Krit decided to go with outright
pleading. "How many?"
Zack smiled
a little. They'd all asked the same
question, in the same tone. "Twelve."
"Where are
they?"
"You know I
can't tell you that, Krit. They're all
safe, and the best way for them to stay that way is if I'm the only one who
knows where they are." He gestured at
the piece of paper in Krit's hand.
"There's a contact number there—I check it three times a day. Call if you need help." He started out the door again.
"Zack!" Krit's cry stopped Zack in spite of
himself. He knew he shouldn't say
more. But then he turned and saw Krit's
desperate face, so much like hers, and he softened.
"She's all
right. But I can't tell you where. I can't even contact her myself—it's too
risky. She never did follow orders very
well."
Krit's grin
broke out like a flash of lightning, and Zack was suddenly glad he'd told
him. They stood there for a minute,
grinning at each other almost shyly, but in perfect understanding.
"Good to
see you, little brother," Zack told him, and for a second the look in his eyes
made Krit feel like Max was mussing his hair again.
"You
too." Blissfully.
And then Zack was gone, but Krit
found he didn't mind so much. His
siblings were alive and well, twelve of them.
Maxie. Someday he would see her again. And if that was the case, then he had a lot
to do.
Krit had never exactly been the
poster child for motivation, but knowing he had to be prepared to meet Max at
any time gave him a relentless drive and rock-solid determination. Up to this point, most of his life had been
about waiting; now, it was about action.
He couldn't bear the thought of her being disappointed in him. The nights he had used for wandering and
dreaming became valuable training time.
He pushed his body to its limits, running through every training
exercise they'd ever been given at Manticore and making up a few of his own
when he felt his muscles settling into a pattern. He studied strategy and tactics, tracked unsuspecting pedestrians
and policemen. He practiced his biting
one-liners. Through it all, he could
almost feel Max over his shoulder: Good
work, little brother, or, A little
slow on that follow-through, I'd have you on your ass by now. He hadn't seen her in seven years and he'd
never felt closer to her. Slowly but
surely, his world resumed its revolution around her. It wasn't romantic, it wasn't complicated. He wasn't in love with her, like Zack
was. It was pretty simple, really.
Christians worshiped God. Ben had worshiped the Blue Lady. Krit worshiped Max.
He was twenty and living in
Sacramento when Zack's voice on the phone seemed to shoot from the earpiece
directly into his heart: "Lydecker has Max.
Come to Seattle." The idea that
Max might really be in danger never entered his mind. Her death or capture seemed about as likely as the sun suddenly
falling out of the sky. So, as he
absentmindedly hotwired his way up the coast, he mostly thought about what he
would say and do when he saw her again.
He spent hours perfecting his opening line, the casual hug.
But when he saw her step out of the
humvee, all black leather and dark eyes and bright smile, he found his mind
completely blank and his tongue numb.
All he could do was grin foolishly and do his best not to spontaneously
combust from pure joy.
"Max," he managed, cleverly, as she
threw her arms around him. Even with
Lydecker in the room, he could hardly take his eyes off her. He couldn't wait to impress her with how
much he'd learned. He didn't even mind
that Zack was giving him the patented Zack Look, the
"your-unadvised-emotional-attachment-is-jeopardizing-the-mission" look, or that
Syl couldn't quite hide a small, indulgent smile. In fact, it even made him feel at home in a strange way, with all
of them picking up their accustomed roles right where they'd left off. At that moment, Krit pretty much felt that
everything was as right as it could be in a world that no longer held Tinga and
Ben. He knew, of course, that Brin was
back at Manticore, but he was sure they'd be able to bring her around. This was, after all, his family—together again, doing what they were made to
do. This was the chance to know Max,
the chance to take down Manticore. And
he wasn't about to let anything get in the way of that. It was what he'd been preparing for all his
life.
Twenty-four hours later, he was trying without much
success to figure out how his life could so completely fragment in so little
time. Zack was gone; maybe dead,
definitely captured. And Max… Maxie. Initially, on that nightmarish, endless trip
back from Gillette, even the flash of her name in his mind had made his heart
contract so painfully he could barely breathe.
So he'd tried to think wordlessly, in abstracts, but that was even
worse. He thought it might have been
easier if he'd been able to see the body.
But as it was, it had been left up to his imagination--which, he was
discovering, was much more creative and vivid than he'd ever expected. It was amazing how many mental pictures he
could conjure up from just the smell of her blood, soaking Logan's clothes as
he lay unconscious in the back of the van.
KIA. KIA.
KIA. Almost absently, he'd
turned the letters over and over in his head,
trying to make them mean something. But his brain could only react, not
dissect. He couldn't seem to stop the
flow as the images came unbidden: blood pumping steadily from a wound—the head
or the chest, he didn't know which, but he could see both options with perfect
clarity; her eyes gone glassy and dimming; that perfect body sprawled
gracelessly, unnaturally. He could
hardly bear to think of it, but his mind refused to focus on anything
else. He tried to take deep breaths,
find the center like they'd been taught, but all he had were questions. Maybe she'd been scared. Maybe she'd wanted him there. Maybe he should have been paired with her
instead of Zack.
Maybe he
didn't know what to do without her.
Lydecker
had left almost as soon as they'd returned to Seattle. Krit was glad. The whole pseudo-father-figure-turned-mortal-enemy-turned-friend-and-commander
gig had been a little too much for him.
He and Syl had stayed at Logan's, and one night stretched into a week
into a month until one day Krit realized he really didn't have any intention of
leaving in the near future. And he
didn't think Syl did, either. Logan
didn't seem to mind. Though, to be
honest, Krit didn't think Logan would mind the apocalypse at this point. Sometimes, as they sat staring at the hockey
game on TV, Logan would talk about her.
A brief story, a moment, something she'd done for one of her friends,
sometimes just how she'd looked at a certain instant. Logan would talk, and Krit would listen, and neither would take
their eyes from the TV screen. It
helped a little, to hear about Max from someone who knew her well, knew who
she'd become. Sometimes he'd respond
with a story of his own, from their childhood.
And sometimes they'd just sit in silence, as if nothing had
happened. He didn't know if it helped
Logan or not. Their tenuous connection
didn't stretch so far yet, and he didn't know if it ever could.
But Krit
stayed, because it made him feel closer to Max, and because he really didn't
know what else to do. It wasn't
easy. Krit had no idea how he might
have reacted had he met Logan under different circumstances. Basically a nice guy, with a little bit of a
martyr complex, but there were worse things you could say about a man. And Krit was ready to at least try to like
anyone Max was—had been, he reminded himself silently—in love with. But the relationship between him and Syl and
Logan had been formed so unnaturally that they couldn't relate normally, their
bizarre little trio crowded and surrounded by unmentioned ghosts.
It was
three days after their pyrrhic victory at Manticore when the numbness wore off
enough for Krit to realize the tension had built to a breaking point. All of them grieving, and even he and Syl
didn't know what to say to each other—she'd always been close to Tinga and
Zack, Krit knew, so somehow they couldn't talk about their separate and shared
sorrows. As if that wasn't enough, he
began to notice Logan flinching every time he looked at him. Krit knew why, of course. He had been startled, himself, to discover
how much he'd grown to resemble his adored older sister. And he'd even caught himself off guard, a
few times, with a half-reflection in a darkened window that had electrified his
heart with hope and left it torn and bleeding again in disappointment. So he didn't look in mirrors much
anymore. Awkward at the pain in Logan's
eyes and Syl's retreat into constant meditation, he'd finally had enough, and
had wandered out into the night, searching aimlessly for something, anything to
distract him.
He found it
in a cliché of a place, a dingy, nameless bar and a drunk patron. He'd taken exception to something Krit had
done, or something he was, or whatever—Krit couldn't remember, only that they'd
both been looking for a fight. Krit had
practically danced outside into the alley behind the bar, welcoming the rush of
adrenaline that seemed to sweep his veins clean for the first time since he'd
returned to Seattle. Finally, he
wouldn't have to think, he could just act.
The other man had stumbled out, slowed with drinking, and slurred an
insult. Krit's fist had distorted the
drunken mouth before he'd even gotten the words out. That turned out to be the only blow necessary; the man had been
halfway to unconsciousness already, and Krit's fist merely accelerated the process. He peered down at his prey in the
half-light, disappointed the fight was over so quickly. That was when his disordered world had
finally cracked completely.
Staring
down at the slack mouth and sprawled limbs, suddenly all Krit could see was
Max, bruised and bloody and gasping out her last breath on the ground. He blinked, trying to shake free of the
image, but when he opened his eyes again she was still there, this time looking
at him pleadingly. The smell of her
blood filled his nose. He thought he
might have gone a little bit crazy then.
He bit his tongue to hold in a scream and ran, pushing his
genetically-enhanced speed to its limits.
He didn't remember much after that, only that somehow he found his way
back to Logan's. Fortunately they were
both asleep, Syl in her habitual sprawl on the couch, and Logan slumped over
the wreckage of his once-orderly desk.
Krit had never been so glad of Syl's love of useless sleep. He'd caught a glimpse of his own face in a
window on the way into the building—the wildness in it had shocked him, but not
half as much as the tears he hadn't even felt soaking his cheeks. He didn't want to think about the questions
Syl and Logan might have asked, had they seen him in his current state.
He'd
fidgeted his way through the following day, trying to process what had
happened. Logan didn't know him well
enough to notice. Syl looked at him
strangely a couple of times, but said nothing.
That night he had gone out again, picked a fight again, his heart
pounding as he dodged and swung, a lifetime of training the only thing keeping
him under control. His opponent this
time was a better fighter: about Krit's age, sober, street-trained, and
angry. But it wasn't long before Krit saw
the opening he was looking for. A quick
punch to the stomach, and his knee connected with the other man's head with a
satisfying shock that Krit was too nervous to appreciate. He watched in fearful anticipation as his
opponent crumpled to the ground.
Sure
enough, something in the unnatural disarray of limbs clicked in Krit's tortured
brain, and the man's blond hair became dark curls, matted with blood. It was a chest wound this time, some corner
of Krit's mind noted clinically, and one of his messier versions. Her eyes held his above the ruin of her
torso. He couldn't breathe. Unconsciously, his hands dug into his hair,
into his scalp, trying to pull the image out of his skull. He backed away slowly, her haunted, loving
gaze following him down the alley until he hit the street and broke into a wild
run.
He didn't
sleep at all that night, afraid of nightmares, and as the sun rose the next
morning he sat on an abandoned dock and tried to think. Manticore had enhanced his physical
strength, given him extensive training on how to mend flesh wounds, yet here he
was defenseless as a child, and just as confused. Even normal humans would have had trouble dealing with having the
focal point of their lives ripped away; Krit didn't have a chance. For the second time in his life, he had no
idea what to do—and this time, he had no one to guide him. His troop was dwindling. His CO was missing, probably dead. His XO, his idol, was decomposing in a
Wyoming forest. Syl hardly spoke to
him, and he didn't know where any of the others were. And, worst of all, he was a soldier who was afraid to fight, who
couldn't even take refuge in pure devotion to what he was made to do because
every opponent turned into a twisted parody of his sister. He needed help, but there was no one to ask.
Still, it
wasn't in him to admit defeat, so he attacked the problem with the same rigid
discipline he'd used in training to impress Max. Manticore had tried to toughen them by making them face their
fears—children afraid of the dark were left in windowless cells for days;
arachnophobics were restrained, screaming, while spiders crawled all over
them. Fear was a weakness that could
only be forced from the body by head-on collisions. It was the only way he knew.
So, because he had always been
strongest at night, he tried to face his demons in the darkness. He wandered the streets, as he had in the
days after the escape, but this time with a purpose. He watched people, studied them until he knew the look as well as
he knew his own face: the look of someone searching for a fight. He tried—tried—to
oblige them. But he discovered, after
the first few encounters, that his body simply shut down and refused to attack,
like a burned animal refusing to approach a fire. Those initial opponents laughed at him, would have beaten him
bloody if he hadn't been able to defend himself, if he hadn't been able to
run. Their derisive, mirthless laughter
followed him down alleys and past streetlamps until he began to hate
himself. Once he had been a soldier;
now he was a coward. Physically, he
remained healthy—only the aching hollowness in his dark eyes betrayed how lost
he truly was. If Syl and Logan noticed,
they didn't want to talk about it.
Despite his repeated failure, he
kept driving himself out at night, doggedly.
Every time he failed to attack, the fear and the shame grew greater,
until he could do nothing but huddle against walls, as he was doing now, and
watch as the world moved around him, hoping that one day he might find the
courage to fight again. He didn't know
what else to do. It occurred to him
that he'd spent his life making himself into a sort of copy, a slightly
younger, male version of Max. And now
that the original was gone, he was adrift.
He wasn't sure he could fill her place, and he was pretty sure he didn't
want to. And, aside from the brief snippets
Logan had shared, how did he even know that she was who he thought she
was? How did he know if he was like
her? And if he wasn't like her, then
who was he?
A psychiatrist might have told him
that Manticore had emotionally handicapped him, that he simply wasn't equipped
to deal with a loss of such magnitude; but to Krit, psychiatrists were nothing
but empty-eyed malice and clipboards, to be avoided at all costs, second only
to Nomlies and surgeons. So he only
knew that, for the first time in his life, he felt completely alone.
But he kept struggling, knowing
somehow that the struggle was the only thing keeping him sane. He kept trying, and failing, and refusing to
give up, and through it all he kept waiting for the hole in his heart to close. It hadn't yet. He wondered if it ever would.
He wondered if he was losing this battle, the only kind of battle he
could fight these days. He wondered if
Max missed him as much as he missed her.
He wondered if he would ever feel again like he'd felt when she was
mussing his hair, all those years ago at Manticore. Mostly, as he leaned his head back against the wall, he wondered
why he couldn't seem to stop crying.
