Disclaimer: This work is based on James Cameron's Dark Angel. The characters that you recognise from the show do not belong to me and I am not making any money off this fic.
AN: Please feel free to leave comments and criticism. I'm especially interested in hearing what you think of my original characters as it's always hard to strike a balance with them in fanfic.
Hope
It always seems to be raining. It was raining on the night of the fire. The kind of rain that you don't really feel but it soaks you to the bone anyway. I saw the signal to return to command that night. A beacon in the sky, leading us home but for some reason I knew not to follow it. I'm not a great soldier, sometimes I barely pass for average, but I'm thankful for whatever good sense made me run that night. Even if I did look back a few times.
I'm not one of those people who hate Manticore and everything to do with it but I like being free. There's a lot to be said for waking up in the morning and cracking open the window, even if the air is far from fresh.
I don't have a name yet. I don't really know anyone here and my old unit mates don't talk to me that much. Or at all. It seems pretty silly to pick a name just to refer to myself and I wouldn't know what to pick either. I thought about Delilah, but that's been taken.
At my worst moments, I remember hard beds and regular helpings of grey, mushy slop. A whole world away from sleeping on cold floors and eating only after a successful food run. All I've done is swap one cage for another and although I really don't think I would go back to Manticore if I had the choice, sometimes I wish I had never learned of anything different.
I question the trade I've made, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. All the boasting and bravado has quickly been eroded by the stink of rot and damp. Youthful thoughts of rebellion and making a stand don't seem as romantic and brave when you're cold and hungry and haven't bathed for a month. My beaten camies cling to me with grease and grime until I get a chance to wash them when it rains.
I don't know anything about this world. And words like honour and dignity are tied up with the American flag and snapshots of war heroes in my sheltered mind but even I feel something is wrong when I see people cooking rats over a flaming garbage bin in order to stave of their hunger for just one more night. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
At least out here, we have a chance, which is more than we had back at Manticore. I cling to that thought everyday. It's hard for me to explain what I mean, but it's the feeling that things might get better. That something good is just around the corner. That maybe things aren't as bad as they seem.
It's hard to know what to do sometimes. Everybody is always moving at the same time, rushing to make things better. All my attempts to help have left me feeling like I'm in the way, under their feet. I wonder sometimes if I'm missing the crucial component that lets them all instinctively know what to do and how to react.
Even back at Manticore, I was always lagging behind on missions, making stupid mistakes that my superior ability should have put me beyond but it never bothered me that much because I never knew anything different. I always thought I was okay, not great but good enough. It wasn't until I got to Terminal City that I realised just how normal and average I was compared to the rest of my unit.
It would take somebody special to show me why that wasn't a bad thing.