Disclaimer: I don't own Dark Angel.
A/N: First DA fic, playing around with the evolution of 494 into Alec. Let me know what you think.
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Haecceity: (noun) the essence that makes something the kind of thing it is and makes it different from any other
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i
494 was sixty months old the first time someone kissed him.
They were in the middle of weapon assembly when 453 leaned against him and pressed her mouth against his cheek.
It was the first time he was touched without purpose—no medical examination, no training session, no disciplinary agenda to justify physical contact—a simply gesture, unexpected and uninvited, a frivolous exertion of the flesh. It was a kiss, hidden at the corner of her mouth and pressed into his skin. Child-like and born of curiosity, curiosity and emotion that would bleed into his being from her touch.
494 was only sixty month old when 453 brushed her mouth against the side of his face, only five years inside the cinderblock walls that created him, and unknowing of what to do, grabbed her face as though to strike. Instead he pushed his own mouth against hers.
The whole exchange transpired in less than a minute— the context of which would be forgotten in later years or better yet, ignored, because they were programmed to never forget anything—but it didn't go unnoticed.
Nothing went unnoticed.
Less than a minute of inquisitiveness, but it was noted, seen the threat of future subterfuge, and it was dealt with swiftly in the hopes of eradicating any possible sense of devotion to something outside the protocol.
494 was five years old the first time someone kissed him and he spent a month in solitary for it.
ii
494 never slept with Rachel, but he wanted to.
She was warm and young and her face hid nothing. And she wanted him (except that she didn't. She wanted mild mannered Simon whose fingers worked in time with hers along the ivory keys, but it was 494 who wanted her, so he could overlook that).
He wanted her and when she was gone the deep void of truth took him in. There was no purpose for him outside missions and discipline and duty. It never meant much to him before, but after her, after want that was entirely his own, it meant everything he could hate. Because all those things made him a servant to others and he hadn't understood for so long what it was to want something that was his.
So he harbored her memory and horded it away from Phy-Opts doctors and their drugs and their needles and the pain, he buried her inside himself and made a goddess out of her ghost.
iii
452's rejection didn't sting.
It didn't matter how hot she was, she was a bitch, turned hard by years of hating and running and hiding.
He could see the dusty residue of her attempts smeared across the floor, could feel it against the back of his throat with every spoken word. He could have called the guard and gotten Refro and ended it all then and there. But he didn't.
Instead he sat on her bunk and waited it out, waited for her to slip up so they could get what they needed from her, so she could finally be terminated or reprogrammed or go through whatever hell they were going to put her through so he could go on with his existence. Because when that happened, he decided as she paced, it was going to be all on her.
iv
She named him.
All jest and aggression, she baptized him like her brethren had baptized her, forming a new name for him, not so unlike the countless other aliases he was adopted or stolen before.
Except that it wasn't. Smart aleck she called him, because he never shut up, because he tired to get the last word in their banter and he rolled with it. He'd been given names before (Simon and Samuel and Jason and a hundred more with bloodstains) but this one was different.
No one had worn this name before.
v
494 wasn't 494 anymore but the experience was still a first. Because standing in Max's kitchen while her voice dropped further and further, he couldn't help it. It bloomed like the first presses of curiosity, spreading beneath his skin agonizingly slow, until he couldn't stop himself from moving. His limbs were heavy and there was a tightness in his palms where they closed around her arm, pulled her to him. Her hair smelled of exhaust fumes and general grit that clouded the air, but beneath that there was hard tap water and sanitizer—like the Manticore med-centers, like Phys Opts—and artificial cherries.
"Max I'm sorry." It was compassion. Not guilt or pity or regret.
Compassion.
He held her and she cried, spilled her tears for the man whose face he wore—I'm not your brother Maxie, I'm not Ben, I'm not—the man who was responsible for the needles and the drugs and the lasers and the doctors and the smell of sanitarium white that was burned into his brain. But it wasn't about him.
She cried and he…he held her and tried his best to make it easier for someone else.
-End-