A/U: Written fresh after watching the season finale and in one sitting, couldn't help myself.
His whole life, all twenty-two years of the goddamn thing, he had remembered the snow.
The sensation of running and waiting behind the frost-covered ledge, eagerly anticipating the next familiar face that would appear at the top of the hill. Running towards them. Running towards him. Falling surrounded and waking up with the adrenaline pumping fresh through his veins and nearly drowning in fear because he must have been left behind, must have been weak, if he was seeing the metal bars of Manticore's prison cells. Then, freeing whomever he could, scaling the walls of the compound and running without looking back.
Zach had remembered for the entirety of his existence, since he really existed that first step outside that wire fence, the snowy night they had escaped. He would close his eyes and try to sleep over the lid of a dumpster, some stranger's car tarp over his shivering body; but the only thing he would think about was how beautiful the stars looked as he remembered them those years ago, branded on the inside of his eyelids.
And yet in his dying hour, dying minute, he remembers none of those things.
When the doctors declare Max dead and the despicable Manticore woman is confirming the state of Max's organs like they were free to be carted to the next seller, he feels like he's watching the scene from outside his own body. Like his real self is floating in a haze inside of his mind, dizzied and disorientated, wrapped in a fog. Like he had already died.
Who knows if he did it out of love? He didn't know. All he felt was wild desperation. They drilled them during classroom lessons when they were children, repeating: never panic. But there he was, panicking, watching himself through the haze kicking a man to the ground, thrusting a gun in the woman's neck.
He goes savage as if it would save Max, that limpness and lifelessness, and he doesn't wonder whether it will work. He only knows he has to do something, and whether it was out of love or out of familial affection; whether he would have done the same if any other X-5 was laying on that bed stained crimson like a surgical disaster... He doesn't know.
Nothing feels better than pulling that trigger. He just wishes that instead of a whirlwind of emotions, he could have remembered that snowy night - their first taste of freedom, excited to explore the world ahead of them. Just a bunch of naïve, clueless children at the happiest moment of their lives.
(Sin los desastres. Without the disasters.)
end.