Title: Love/Hate
Author: Brynn McK
Feedback: Yes please!
Here or at tmeyerswa@yahoo.com
Spoilers: first season, through AJBAC
Rating: PG-13 or R for language and angst
Disclaimer: I don't
own any of them, this isn't for profit.
A/N: I know I'm jumping on the bandwagon. But since I've already challenged Max
physically, I wanted to challenge her emotionally. And the finale worked perfectly to put her in that place. So that's my excuse. One other little thing. At one point Max mentions a character named
Jasen. He's from another fic of mine,
"Black Sheep" (coincidentally, the one where Max gets challenged
physically). So check it out if you
haven't, or at least know that I'm not pulling that name out of my ass, but
he's not canon either. Also, thanks to
Nevermore for giving me a digital kick in the ass, as it were, to get me
writing this. :)
-----------------------------------------
Renfro
couldn't contain a slow smile of triumph as she looked through the small window
at X5-452 slumped and shackled on the narrow regulation cot. She was healing well; they'd been able to
keep her drugged most of the time to prevent her from hurting herself during
the healing process, either accidentally or intentionally. She had a nasty scar, but she was
strong. She'd recover. The time had come for reprogramming.
Her smile
twisted derisively as she remembered Lydecker's methods of
reindoctrination. He was a man of such
limited vision, such single-minded military unoriginality. Rat, plague, traitor, indeed, she
thought scornfully. She didn't think
for a minute that pseudo-Nazi crap would work on X5-452, at least not in any
permanent way. Fortunately, she had a
degree in psychology and realized there was more to breaking a subject than
simple word-image association. She had
her own plan for X5-452. And no matter
how hard the girl fought, Renfro was confident that in the end, she'd break.
They all
did.
-------------------------------
Max
shoveled food mechanically into her mouth, not noticing or caring about either
its gray-green color or its supercharged nutritional value. She thought that once she might have enjoyed
eating, relished a good meal. Now she
just lost herself in the repetition of spoon to mouth and tried not to feel
naked.
She sat
alone in a corner of the mess hall, and it was obvious that the others had been
given orders not to speak to her. That
was nothing new; she was just glad to be allowed in the mess hall at all. It was good to be around people—real
people—again, even if she couldn't talk to them. Even if they stared at her, and tried not to, and stared
anyway. Hence the naked feeling. She did some watching of her own, couldn't
seem to draw her eyes away from where the X-7s were seated, across the hall,
clustered close at a single table. They
didn't seem to be talking much, but she remembered hearing somewhere that
they'd been designed with hive minds.
Maybe they could communicate telepathically or something. Because they were definitely
communicating—they were pretty good at covering, but she'd been in their
position and she knew how and where to look for furtive grins, quirks of
eyebrows that spoke volumes.
At first the shock of seeing them,
those echoes of her and her siblings, had shaken her badly every time. But the feeling had dulled over time; she
felt almost like a ghost anyway, drifting the hallways with everyone pretending
not to see her, so there didn't seem to be any conflict with her current self
and her younger self occupying the same space.
Mostly she just watched them and envied their closeness. Remembered a time when she had had a family,
when they had all been together. Been
alive.
And there it was. She was surprised she'd gone so long without
thinking of it. She knew she would have
thought of it often enough anyway, but apparently someone had decided to give
her a little help. Her room was tiny,
barely large enough for her cot and space to walk around it. And there were three images hanging on the
metal walls: one of her brother Ben, lifeless on the forest floor with his neck
at an unnatural angle; one of her brother Zack, covered in blood and slumped
over a body she assumed was hers; and one of herself after they'd killed the
Nomlie, a streak of blood marring her cheek.
In the beginning, she had clawed her way out of drugged sleep only to be
greeted by the life-sized faces of her dead brothers and herself at one of the
darkest moments of her life. The shock
had nearly unhinged her right then and there, and then she'd heard Zack's voice
in her head, as he had whispered in her ear while she lay unconscious: Fight them, Maxie.
So she'd tried, for him. She'd shut her eyes against the images of
what she had done, who she had been, and tried to cling to something
stable. But she wasn't finding much. She hadn't realized how much of a bedrock
Zack's implacable presence had been until it was gone. She felt like she'd had her legs knocked out
from under her and she was falling, always falling, always trying to catch something
and never succeeding. And each time she
opened her eyes, there they were. Ben,
the poet, the storyteller, the mystic, whose pulse had slowed and stopped under
the fingers that had snapped his neck.
Zack, her big brother as if he defined the term, the weight of the world
on his shoulders, proving with his last desperate act that he wasn't nearly as
tough as he'd led them to believe, that even he couldn't always practice what
he preached. And herself, the wild
animal inside her, and the face of her would-be killer as well. Trapped in a tiny room with all of them
looming over her.
She might have slept to escape it,
but they didn't let her. At least, not
much. For a while there had been a
guard posted outside her door whose sole duty was to wake her up every time she
fell asleep. Held almost motionless by
restraints welded into steel, she couldn't defend herself. Time passed incalculably. She was engineered to go without sleep, but
not for interminable periods of time.
When they did let her drift, her body scrambled to catch up on lost REM
sleep, and her dreams were vivid and often horrifying. Dreams where she was being hunted or, worse,
where she was the hunter, and she woke with her hands twisted in the sheets,
trying to clean off nonexistent blood.
And then there were times when she woke up with a hauntingly familiar
scent in her nose, taste in her mouth, the feel of arms around her and a voice
slipping away in her head, overwhelmed with an aching sense of loss. She didn't dare chase the memories because
she distantly recalled using Lydecker's memory-blocking technique as soon as
they'd begun questioning her, and knew that she had forgotten deliberately and
for a reason. But the emptiness
remained, like phantom pain from a missing limb, and she couldn't help but
wonder what she'd lost. Meanwhile, the
images maintained their constant vigil.
Max began to wonder if maybe she
was going just the slightest bit crazy.
But then, almost immediately,
things improved. Brin came to see her
one day, just sat silently by her bed and watched her, then got up and left
without a word. She'd returned almost
every day since, and they'd spoken a little more each time, and slowly she was
starting to rekindle the connection with her sister. Things were different, no question, but Max scrambled for even
the tiniest hint of contact.
Brin began to train with her,
carefully, mindful of Max's recent wound.
As they ducked and weaved and grappled on the mat, Max felt alive for
the first time since her return. A few
days later, tracking a rabbit through the forest with Brin, she remembered out
of nowhere what Jasen had told her, however long ago: "You X-5s left Manticore
too soon." Brin was so strong, and Max
was so tired of feeling weak. She
couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to have them all together again,
burnished in whatever new regimen Brin had obviously gone through. She banished the thought almost as soon as
it came, and Zack's voice shouted Fight them Maxie!, but the idea only
skittered into a corner and refused to disappear. Later, she was surprised to look down and discover the rabbit
dead in her blood-smeared hands, fur and flesh torn. Deliberately, she drew a line of blood along her cheek, testing.
Maybe this is who I am.
Of course she knew it was all part of the plan to
re-program her. And with Zack
constantly yelling at her to fight them, she couldn't exactly give in. But if she gained from it, it wasn't giving
in, was it? If it meant all of them
together again, strong, like they were meant to be? On the outside, she had killed one brother, failed to rescue her
sister, and as good as killed yet another brother. She'd been responsible for his death, and sometimes she felt like
his heart was so heavy in her that even her genetically enhanced body wasn't
strong enough to carry it. She couldn't
stand to have another death on her hands.
And if they all came back here, at least they'd be safe. They could protect each other. If they were together, newly trained and
hardened, who could stand in their way?
She tried, so hard, not to think it, but it kept
sliding around in her mind anyway, seductive and insidious. She left the mess hall on autopilot and
returned to her room. Looked at the
images, realized she had come to welcome the familiarity of them.
Fight them, Maxie!
This time, she shouted back silently, all of her
frustration and hurt focused in a mental scream. Like you did, Zack? By
killing myself? By denying who I
am? We're the hunters, we're not
supposed to be hunted! Maybe we belong
here! She regretted it instantly,
as if he could hear her, and a quiet, watchful corner of her was horrified by
the force behind her argument against him.
She mumbled out loud, "I'm sorry, Zack, I'm sorry, I'll try, I'm just so
tired and they won't let me sleep and I miss you…" Realizing she was babbling, and whining, she clapped her mouth
shut. But Zack's voice had fallen
silent.
She stretched out on the bed. She didn't want to think anymore, didn't
want to fight, just wanted to be with the people she loved. Maybe Zack wouldn't notice if she took just
a few minutes off from being the strong, vigilant soldier. Maybe they'd let her sleep this time. Maybe she'd wake up and it would all be a
long, bad dream.
She closed her eyes and welcomed oblivion.
--------------------------------
Again,
Renfro watched X5-452 through the bulletproof glass, watched the way her brow
was creased and her lips tight, even in sleep.
It was taking a little longer than she'd expected, but that would only
make her eventual success sweeter. She
turned to her companion.
"She'll
never be useful offensively against the others. But once her reindoctrination is complete, you won't find an
operative more determined to recover them and bring them home." She smiled, delighted as a child with a new
toy. "I really think she's going to be
one of our best agents. Let her
sleep—two hours, no more. She's going
to earn it."
-------------------------------
It was
nearly three in the morning when Logan realized he could no longer make the
lines on the screen resolve themselves into any kind of coherent shapes. He sighed and sat back, tugged off his
glasses and rubbed tired eyes with cramped fingers. He was doing this too much lately, he knew, but he couldn't seem
to stop himself. He'd make a firm
promise to spend only two hours, or three, and then the next thing he knew it
was the middle of the night and he hated himself, because the nights were the
worst and once he started thinking, he couldn't sleep. The tranquility he'd always felt in these
wee hours was shattered by the knowledge that there was one less shadow out
there, one less black cat prowling the streets.
He shook
himself and wondered how long it would be before he could stop his thoughts
from spiraling to her every time he let his guard down. It had been two months. Two months tonight, which was why he'd
buried himself in his work with even more dedication than usual. But he had to come up for air eventually,
and when he did the silence of his apartment pressed on him until he thought he
would scream.
Stop it,
he told himself for the hundredth time, and forced his arms to propel him
purposefully towards the kitchen. He
still used his wheelchair most of the time, saving the exoskeleton for when he
really needed it. Repairs were
expensive and somehow just knowing he had the option of walking made
being in the chair easier. From the
outside, he might have looked at it philosophically, seen the great cosmic
justice in having gained one part of his life back in exchange for losing
another. But as he was on the inside,
he didn't think about it at all as he reached for the bottle and poured dark
amber liquid into a glass.
Initially,
he'd thought that his reduced financial circumstances were going to be a
problem. Then he'd discovered that Jack
Daniels burned in exactly the same way that single-malt scotch did, numbed
fingers and toes and heart just as effectively. And was a hell of a lot cheaper.
So that was his drink of choice these days, though he had enough of
himself left to ration it, save it for special occasions. And this, he thought, definitely
qualified. The first gulp slid down
like fire. In his line of work, he
dealt with a lot of people who'd lost loved ones, so he'd thought it was only
fair to educate himself, and had read book after book on the grieving process
and moving on and coping. Which, he was
rapidly discovering, didn't mean fuck-all when you were living it. Besides, wasn't Whiskey one of the Seven
Stages of Grief? If it's not, it
should be, he thought as another swallow made his fingertips start to
tingle.
He wheeled
partway back out into the living room, drink cradled in his hand, savoring
it. The ends of Syl's blond hair
dangled over the arm of the sofa, sprawled in the same careless fashion that
her body undoubtedly was. He'd learned
that even though she didn't have to sleep, Syl liked to sleep. A lot. And she seemed to store it up somehow, too; last week he'd sent
her out on a stakeout and she'd gone six days, barely moving, never so much as
a yawn. Then she'd come back and slept
for fourteen hours, just for the heck of it.
Krit was
out doing whatever he did at night. He
was practically nocturnal, disappearing around midnight most nights and
returning in time to catch an hour of sleep before lunch. Logan never knew what Krit did on those
late-night excursions, and he never asked.
As long as he didn't discover any large stashes of cash or drugs around
the place, what Krit did was Krit's business.
Lydecker, not surprisingly, had
left town not long after their return from Manticore. Running, so much like Zack in a way that Logan felt sorry for
him. But Krit and Syl had stayed,
though they'd never asked and Logan had never offered. It was instinct for all of them, blind
puppies squirming together for comfort.
For two days they had sat in silence, hardly moving, stunned. Somewhat to Logan's surprise, there had been
no talk of a rescue. He'd been
relieved, and ashamed of that relief, and relieved again in an endless
cycle. But they had no way of knowing
if Zack was alive, and they'd lost too many of their tiny family already. They'd needed time to regroup, to deal with
their current losses before they went chasing new ones.
Eventually, they'd settled into a
sort of tentative domesticity, about as far from the nuclear family as you
could get. Logan began sending them out
on Eyes Only missions because they seemed to need something to do, to chase the
shadows of dead siblings from their eyes for a little while at least. He discovered his gourmet cooking skills were
pretty much wasted on Krit, who appeared to live on cheeseburgers and the
occasional bucket of fried chicken. Syl
was more appreciative, but he couldn't play chess with her because behind those
innocent blue eyes was a phenomenal head for strategy (not to mention an
encyclopedic knowledge of weaponry), and even Logan could only stand to lose so
many times. Which was just as well,
because chess reminded him of brown eyes and smug smile and he found he
couldn't really focus on the game anyway.
So he spent his days with Krit
watching hockey on TV and his nights with Syl, tapping away at the keyboard
while she read or meditated or practiced gymnastics in the hallway. To be honest, it was a relief to have Krit
gone sometimes, especially at night, which had always been her time, and he
looked so much like her that sometimes Logan couldn't stand to look at him, he
was so tired of crying and aching and feeling helpless. The scientific side of his brain jumped
automatically to speculation on the differences and similarities in X-5 DNA
before he remembered that thoughts of DNA led invariably to thoughts of
Manticore and strategy and dark forests and blood and her smile when she said
his name and—
Logan
looked down in surprise at the feel of whiskey running over his hand, realized
his body had jerked involuntarily, the way it did sometimes when his emotions
were on overload. Some nights were
definitely better than others. His eyes
flickered to his office and paused on the shredder poised neatly on the edge of
his desk above the garbage can. And
because everything in his apartment reminded him of her, he thought about
shredding the picture that Lydecker had sent him, about the streak of blood on
that young, feral face, and thought that the greatest tragedy was that he had
never really told her. Not that he
loved her. She must have known
that. But that he didn't hate or fear
her past, that she'd triumphed over it.
"I know who you are," he'd told her, and, "I know, but you got
moves." Vague. Inadequate.
He wanted her to know how proud he was of her, to have grown up with
that darkness inside her and still been able to exude the quiet joy he'd seen
right before she kissed him, to love her family and friends with such selfless
devotion. It was too late, now, but he
screamed mentally at her anyway, the only sort of screaming he allowed himself
these days. He'd never believed in an
afterlife, but now he couldn't quite convince himself that a life force so
strong could be completely erased from the world. So he shouted at her, putting his heart into it, hoping that
whatever part of her might still be hanging around would hear him:
You're
not that girl anymore. You hear
me? You beat it. I know you, and I know that. You're not that girl anymore.
He laughed
a little at his own ridiculous fancies, bitterly and quietly, so as not to
disturb Syl. If any part of her was
still around, he hoped she'd found better things to do than hang around waiting
for him to make belated confessions of his faith in her. Staring into his glass, he suddenly found
that he'd lost his taste for the whiskey.
He swirled it around and around aimlessly, listened to Syl's breathing,
and tried not to think.
-------------------------------------------------------
Max woke
with a start, that forgotten, familiar voice echoing in her head: You're not that girl anymore. You're not that girl anymore. Her eyes flew, as they always did, to the
images on the walls, her dead brothers and her own face, the face that had
nearly killed her, that she had tried to become again. You're not that girl anymore. She forced her eyelids down like shutters to
hold in the tears, gripped the sheets, and tried with everything in her to
believe it.
---------------------------------------------------
A/N, Part 2: So, judging by the reviews I've been getting
(and thank you so much to those of you who have taken the time!!!), I think I
may have been a little misleading here.
This isn't the first chapter of a longer fic; it's meant to stand on its
own. I don't have any plans for adding
to it, though I suppose if I get a great idea, I may revisit it. But basically, I just wanted to explore what
might break Max (not necessarily what would or what will), and how
Renfro might go about it—not what happens next. Sorry if anyone's disappointed; I hope you enjoyed the fic
anyway. :)
