Disclaimer: I own no part of the intellectual property that is Dark Angel, nor do I lay claim to it. I promise to put everything back where I found it when I am done. Or at least as close to where I found it as nevermind.
A/N: An answer to prompt #14 at Raising Hell.
Perceptions
"If you squint you can see the guard towers." Alec mumbled to himself, one scarred hand rising to brush hair from his eyes.
Max didn't respond, aside from rolling her eyes. Then again her voice had been damaged in The War and even a whisper hurt. Mostly she just conveyed her thoughts and feelings through body and sign language.
These days Alec was her interpreter, having become more than proficient in Max speak in the decade they had known each other.
"So you think I should get over myself?" he asked with a smile. A small hand slipped into his and pressed once. She nodded, then shook her head, before launching into a lightning-quick display of hands and fingers, which Alec had no problem following.
"Accept the things I can not change." He spoke aloud the words she had signed. There was no need to answer, it was an old, often repeated exchange of words that changed nothing. His free hand dropped to rub slow circles in the small of her back, an action she truly appreciated and rewarded with a purr.
His gaze rose to look at the vista spread before them, the long valley resting at the foot of high mountains, a green so vibrant it hurt your eyes to look at it. A lake nestled like a shining jewel at the other end, glinting in the sunlight. Snow still gleamed on the highest peaks, despite it being the middle of summer.
You could make out some fields in the distance where the wheat was just turning the slightest shade of gold, as it ripened in the sun. Bees buzzed in the heavy, light-drenched air, flitting from tree to tree, narrowly avoiding cows' tails as they swished through the air.
He felt Max sigh, as she settled more securely in his arms, leaning heavily into his side, drifting off into dreamland as she was wont to do in these, the late stages of her pregnancy.
With two of her pregnancies already under his belt, Alec was well aware of Max's foibles and weaknesses when she was carrying, the increased weariness, the urge to cuddle, to be secure in her surroundings.
Mole was taking care of their two children for the day, along with his three spawn. His words not Alec's. All three of Mole's kids looked more like their mother, an X-5 called Brianna, who had somehow fallen in love with the smoking, swearing lizard man.
No doubt the five were off somewhere raising hell in the village, but as long as no screams of fury or pain reached his ears, Alec was content to regard his parental duties as suspended.
Their town spread out below them, in a seemingly unruly mass. There was not a single straight road, they all meandered, following the lines of the land instead of imposing their will on it.
They lived with the land and from the land, here in this far corner of the world. It was beautiful and peaceful, everything they had hoped and fought for in the long years of The War.
Dreamed of as they threw themselves at the phalanxes of Familiars. Saw in their mind's eye as they lay broken and dieing on the ground. They had won their dream, although it was a near thing. Sixty percent of the world's population had not survived The War, succumbing to disease and the Familiar virus. Mostly in the underdeveloped countries of the world where it was simply a logistical impossibility to generate enough vaccine.
And then, one day, it was done. Over. The last of the Familiars lay gasping their last at their feet. Blood soaking into dry earth, turning to a glistening red ooze that clung to all present.
Max and Alec, leaders of the transgenic stormtroops, stood side by side, watching impassively as Ames White lay dieing, lungs filling with his own life's blood, choking him, trickling from his mouth and staining teeth and lips a cherry red. After all the pain, the deaths of their friends, Logan, Cindy, Sketchy and all the others, it was strangely anticlimatic.
Yet already they could feel the stares, the whispers from the humans they had fought beside for so long, bled for, died for, saved. Could see the distrust, the superstition and honest to god fear in their eyes.
The humans hid it well of course, behind smiling faces and lying tongues. A reward they said. A place to call their own. To be all they can be. The words turned to ash in their mouths, the fear of the strange bitter on their tongues.
The transgenics were given a place to call their own, here in the far south of the planet they had been created on. One of two great islands, it was a land of rolling hills and valles, high soaring mountains and cold, icy rivers. They had been gently encouraged to take their living, wounded and dieing and leave, away from the humans they were so similar to and yet too different from.
Yet as Alec said, you could see the guard towers if you squinted. At sea, the planes in the sky, the unseen satellites, the large numbers of watchful eyes that would ensure the transgenics did not think to finish what the Familiars had begun.
Their home was a prison, a beautiful, clean, near limitless place, but a prison none the less.
It made no difference that they had saved humanity, or that on a genetic level they were not that different. Nine times out of ten you would not be able to pick a transgenic out of a line-up. None of that mattered. To the humans they were just different enough.
For in the end, it doesn't matter what you are, it only matters what people think you are.