Title: Zero-Sum

Author: OpheliacAngel

Pairing: Ames/Alec

Genres: Angst/Romance

Rating: Teen

Summary: Ames was the one who had to live through it and he was either winning or losing, or both.

A/N: Fill for h/c_bingo Round 7! for the prompt 'unconsciousness.' To anyone reading the series, Part 3 is halfway done and longer :)

Soundtrack: Placebo's 36 Degrees

Series: Part 2 of The Reverence Complex

Zero-Sum - in which whatever is lost by one side is gained by the other; a state of selfishness

~With hindsight, I was more than blind, lost without a clue

Thought I was getting carat gold, and what I got was you

Stuck inside the circumstance, it's lonely at the top

I've always been an introvert, happily bleeding

Someone tried to do me ache (it's what I'm afraid of)~

Ames tipped back the bottle and took a generous swallow of the whiskey that stank of gasoline and tasted even worse, wondering half-heartedly if he should mercifully save some for Alec later and deciding quickly against it. Ames was the one who had to live through this right now, being the only one awake, that is.

While he had no qualms about shooting Alec to break him away from the other freaks, he was having second doubts about his plan, and his intentions he didn't even want to think about because he couldn't entirely explain them. Using X5-494 as leverage had been the intention shortly before shooting him, the transgenic who had the brass enough to call himself Alec, but it displeased Ames to have never seriously considered going back to the Conclave or even the government and bringing his prize along with him. It had only been a brief thought, something he hadn't wanted and still didn't want to think about.

Now they were in the last shitty, pathetic excuse for a motel just before the border. Wallpaper peeled easily off the yellowed walls without Ames so much as touching the dry, unpleasant material, just as easily as anger peeled away from Ames' carefully guarded walls. He should be angry, at Alec, at himself, instead he was the furthest thing from it.

It didn't make sense how much he had wanted Alec at the time, when he couldn't have him because he couldn't get at him, and it was too dangerous to continue with his disgusting behavior. Hell, he was berating himself now more than the Conclave had for expressing brief doubts over their plan for Ray. Betraying himself as he locked the door behind him, made sure the sheets still covered the windows, and stared down at a fitfully sleeping Alec. The transgenic he had shot. The one he couldn't stop staring at for the goddamn life of him. Because this would get Ames killed, compromising himself like this, it was a matter of if not when, how not why.

No, he hadn't thought and clearly he wasn't thinking now either.

He could kick Alec out on his ass into the cold, act like none of this had happened, but the first gunshot wound was worryingly infected and the second that he had inflicted mere hours prior well on its way to becoming it with both Ames' luck and Alec's. The saddest pair to have ever graced the world: one Familiar who was bred to kill every one of the transgenic scum that got in his way, and one of those transgenics managing to worm his way past Ames' better judgment, past all those years of drills and mantras and carefully concealed assignments all leading to the greater good. There should have been no question what to do.

Still, while he decided, he might as well amuse himself.

X5-494 stirred minutely as the Familiar laid a hand just below the wound on his shoulder. He could convince Alec all he wanted that he was inspecting the first bullet wound Ames had seen fit to give him, but he knew there was no convincing himself. He wanted his hands on the transgenic all the goddamn time, to quell the bone-deep ache in him, and it wasn't for the purposes he was meant to adhere to. He was meant to either kill Alec or bring him in dead or alive. The term he used to refer to the transgenic was the first problem curled up inside Ames like an infection, already seeping out of his carefully controlled walls, out from underneath his impenetrable skin.

Ames White wasn't meant to fall in love, he hadn't been born for this, trained for this.

These twisted fantasies that had laid dormant inside him for so long, ones he had denied and put off for too much time, they were never supposed to surface. He had fulfilled some of those fantasies of a home and a family and a child with Wendy, but never the true fantasies his mind sought fit to conjure up, deep, dark thoughts that were lower than him and that itched constantly, even at the very back of his mind. His mission had been to marry Wendy, no love required but that same love not entirely against protocol unless it interfered with the Conclave's ancient goals. It hadn't. Ames had stuck by his vows - the only ones that mattered being the Conclave's - and went through with the rituals. He was angry at himself and at Wendy for what had befallen her, but that anger was soon obscured by a pride towards Ray as he was set to fulfill his purpose, and with it Ames' full purpose as well.

So the home and the family hadn't lasted, and Ray had been taken from him by X5-452. The Familiar had been all too content to be rid of the remainder of those fantasies, 'cause who the hell even knew if they existed anymore?

And then the hostage situation happened and the way he remembered Alec slithered all too unbidden and even more unwelcome into his pressing goals. Crept in and curled up inside Ames White as if he belonged there. As if Ames had been waiting for him all this time.

He would lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling and then… the world closing around him, closing down like a book being shut and reopening to the most ridiculous thing: hands stitching up the wound in the transgenic's shoulder. The next moment his hands would be pressing that very same transgenic down, leaving a damned lasting imprint in the bed, his hands wrapping around Alec's neck and squeezing, squeezing and squeezing and squeezing until he could get himself back again. He would toss and turn, trying to break the vicious cycle. The harsh truth was that Ames White was losing it, and oh, if the Conclave could see him now.

If Ames could see himself. If he looked in the mirror and saw the same person staring back at him, but he wasn't going to try that… yet.

Instead, he memorized the sound Alec made as he gasped like a fish out of water, burned into memory the bruises on Alec's arms, the ones he had made, the ones designating Alec as his property when he was locked up in that poison city. Might as well be a thousand miles away. And Ames couldn't breathe then, let alone Alec. He furiously grasped at the air as the transgenic started to disappear, slipped underneath the sheets and the bed as if he were no more than water.

"Alec!"

Ames glanced down at a very real Alec now, watching his eyelashes flutter, eyelids shifting with determination as he struggled to wake up, desperate to protect himself. The last thing he would ever believe, let alone figure out, was that Ames didn't even consider himself capable of hurting Alec anymore. Short of shooting him, that is, and while necessary even that weighed on him like a lead ball.

He had waited so long: three and a half weeks; more like three and a half years. He had never waited so long for anything. Why this?

Why now?

Maybe Ames drank too much, too much for still being twenty-five clicks shy of the fence serving as an obstacle to his freedom, as it divided Seattle from the rest of the north. Maybe he just needed to goddamn sleep and stop dreaming. More than likely, there was little chance of either.

In this dream, courtesy of drowning himself in whiskey strong enough to knock anyone out… in this dream he was watching Alec stride across the parking lot, holding a bag of takeout in one hand and a pair of keys in the other. He was wearing… Ames' jacket? And the Familiar could smell him from several feet away, could hear him breathing and could feel his silky soft skin under his hand. He could see everything laid out before him, like an open road, could see a smile that he wanted to slap right off his face. This wasn't him. This wasn't the future the Conclave had shown him. He couldn't possibly he happy like this. But he was.

In the dream, Ames White loved.

He loved what he was supposed to hate, what he was supposed to loathe and desire to destroy with every fiber of his being. But here in his deepest, darkest and most glorious dreams, all he did was crave.

"Keep going, keep going," Alec would later mumble and then demand and Ames would, leaning down to kiss those soft, beautiful lips because he couldn't not, burying himself deeper inside Alec. He would hold Alec like he was something precious and the two of them were infinite. He had been opened up, all the bitter and agonizing parts of him having been scooped out and leaving behind so much affection and anticipation and contentment that he imagined he should have already drowned in it. Alec's smile and sass and junk food addiction only pulled Ames in like a fish caught on a baited hook, and Alec's tortured past only convinced him to stay. Sometimes he saw them in bed, windows opened and thin drapes billowing out into the breeze. Sometimes he saw them hunting, tracking down leads, Alec shot at and Ames breaking the guy's clavicle, taking delight in it before finishing him off, Alec making some snarky comment that fit too well.

Sometimes he just saw himself, that same wicked grin, same gleam in the eye, but for an entirely different reason.

He woke with the alcohol still bitter on his tongue and regardless, his name on his lips, barely able to shove it back down with everything else swimming down there. His lips found the mouth of the bottle again without even looking, but that didn't mean his mind wasn't screaming, the scream clawing underneath his skin, trying to draw him down a road he didn't want to tread.

The bottle was empty. Alec was still quiet, too quiet, skin always tantalizing even thought sweat-soaked. He could stare and not lose his dignity because no one was watching. His fingers could scramble at the sheets for balance, to get a grip, because no one would witness it but himself. And that was the problem.

Ames clawed at the sheets more for trying to remember exactly how soft the transgenic's skin was.

X5-494 whimpered in his sleep and it was like someone else was inside Ames, shoving itself outside of his body and the Familiar completely immobile, only able to watch hands - hands that weren't his but were - cup the transgenic's - Alec Alec Alec - face to soothe what was caving in Ames, what was crumbling him as Alec was torn apart and stripped down, seeming to know it even in his sleep. Lips that weren't his but were shushed him, the back of his hand that he knew every crease of stroking along Alec's toned chest, words a mantra in his head that Alec would stay asleep and rest and heal, that he wouldn't make Ames worry.

It was a little too late before Ames realized that this one wasn't a dream. His fingers were still on Alec's face except he could feel them now, could feel something beating thunderously inside his chest. He had never looked at Wendy like this, had never loved her like this.

And for the first time in his life, Ames had no true idea of whether this time he was winning or losing.

FIN