What is He?
Written for the fic-promptly prompt of : Dark Angel, Alec, what was he-knight, king, or pawn?
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What is He?
Alec had been many things in his time, raw recruit, trained assassin, undercover agent and failure. How close had he been to being thrown into the cellar dungeons with the nomalies permanently no one else would ever know. Those few days between reindoctrination sessions there had been enough, enough to make him determined never to go back. He'd rather have died than that.
He'd spent his whole life striving to be the best, striving to come out on top. It was the whole point of existence or so he'd thought. They'd bred them, trained them to be better than everyone else, to think of themselves and their unit to the exclusion of all others. Hell, even as what ordinaries would call 'children' they'd fought to the death, killed without qualm and thought it was the norm.
So many years wasted in his life, aiming to be king, leader of the pack. That had never been his role. He'd always had a leader to tell him what to do until Max's unit had run and then his unit had been disbanded, re-evaluated. . . How long had it taken for them to come up with a plan of action for all the clones of Max's team? Alex doubted anyone in his team would ever be able to put a time on it – in his mind it was just too long of excruciating agony and he'd have done anything, agreed to absolutely any way out of that. Weak or maybe, maybe that was where his strength really lay.
He'd known that to survive he needed to submit at least for a while, long enough for them to believe in him and his loyalty again, not that he'd ever done anything then. Would they ever understand that the first shreds of doubt came from their treatment of him after Max's unit escaped? The first time he thought that maybe, just maybe this wasn't all true.
He'd got no point of reference, nothing to support those doubts, so he'd buried them, not let his mind travel those paths and instead he'd submerged himself in learning all they had to teach.
After Max's unit, they'd all been re-assigned, retrained to be solo assassins and undercover agents. Individuals, out for their own ends, no striving to be King for now they were all Knights travelling their paths alone.
It had lasted right the way up until Rachel . . . he'd been fallible and they'd found his weakness. He had an instant of realization then, one that they'd torture out of him and it would take time on the outside, time after Manticore for him to rediscover.
Now, supposedly he was free, or as free as he could ever be, for the past was a prison that travelled with him in his memories. He'd learnt more, gained knowledge of the 'real world' and the world that he'd been forced to believe in. He wondered if he would ever understand the reality of how the world came to be like this; he thought probably not.
He was left with the fact that he'd never been going to be a King, at best he'd been a knight on a leash. In reality, he'd spent his life as a pawn in someone else's game and now . . . he wasn't sure that much had changed, even now.