Alex wasn't entirely sure what he was doing here, crouched on top of a military base, just… watching. They had no idea he was there, that their lives literally hung on his whim. It would take so little effort to just drop from the roof and tear into them with serrated claws, painting the walls with blood as he put the fear of Blacklight into them. But he didn't.
He just sat. And listened. He could hear every heartbeat, every breath, every muttered comment and nervous twitch as the soldiers went about their business on a rotation like clockwork. There were always two guards at either entrance, one with a rocket launcher and one with an assault rifle. There was always a single Commander, shaking in his boots as he made the rounds outside the base. Alex grinned.
The Commanders had become nervous wrecks over the past few weeks. Few of them lived long after being posted to the Manhattan area, seeing as how Alex needed to consume them in order to access the base. He was surprised no one had seemed to connect the dots and made it more difficult to get inside. This base, he knew, held nothing of interest for him. He'd poked around a few days back and come away with nothing but the familiar gnawing hunger and a few grenades for his trouble.
Alex listened as the guards to his left began to whisper under their breath, their voices loud as if they stood at his side despite the great distance between them. He considered dropping down and joining them, letting the Blackwatch uniform shimmer over his skin with tendrils of ink and flame, but discarded the notion and remained where he was. Infiltrating the bases was becoming more trouble than they were worth.
He shot a glare towards the nearest viral detector and resigned himself to an uneventful day of people-watching. Since he'd consumed Elizabeth Greene, the Infected Zones had become more and more scarce, and now when Hunters showed up they arrived in groups of one or two, rather than four or five. Hardly a challenge for someone—something—like Alex Mercer. Very little was a challenge for him now. He was constantly adapting, changing, shifting to give him a continuous edge over the military that hounded him. They could never hope to keep up with him, yet they continued to try and pin him down and haul him away.
What did they intend to do if they did capture him, he wondered? When he'd allowed himself to be taken away in order to get to McMullen, breaking free and finding the man in his lab had been child's play. Were the humans so arrogant to assume they held any sort of control over him?
He was Blacklight, the virus plaguing Manhattan in the wake of Redlight's fading. The military may as well have been children playing war for all the good they'd do if it ever came to a real fight between them. It seemed excessive and wasteful to continuously rip the army apart as they threw themselves into his claws or onto his blade, so he tended to evade them as often as he stood and fought.
Blackwatch, though… he always stayed if Blackwatch came. They were a disease—he appreciated the irony—that needed to be burned away so the city could heal, rather than continue to fester. Not that he cared, but if the city fell apart around him he would have to find a new place to live. He'd become used to Manhattan and its towering skyscrapers, dark back alleys, all those shadows and cubbies he could use to duck out of sight and blend seamlessly into the crowd. The perfect hunter.
As Alex watched the two marines chatting away, he wondered if he had ever been like them. If he had ever stood by a door, just… talking. He had no one to talk to but himself and the voices in his head, not since he'd stopped visiting Ragland so the doctor could work. But of course he'd never been like them.
He had never been human in the first place.
The scattered and jagged images that flitted across the back of his subconscious were all that remained of Dr. Alex Mercer. A voice, the touch of skin on bare skin, the feeling of eyes on his back even in an empty room. Little remained of the man he used to be; just another whisper in the chorus, slightly hoarser than the rest from all the screaming.
The other, newer memories from those he'd recently consumed, stayed at the forefront for a few days at most, before drifting back into the writhing mass of hate and venom that comprised his existence. This most recent, John Rogers, had spoken like that to the other marines. He had spent time guarding doors and talking, as if a murderous virus was not crouching above them on the roof like an Infected hawk.
Alex stood and leapt across the street to the high-rise across the way, scaling the slick wall with ease, perching on the lip of its roof and glancing again at the quiet base. If he so much as showed his face, even for something as harmless as a simple conversation, that silence would be shattered by the wail of klaxons and the scream of helicopters and the low grumble of tanks. The only way he could ever be even remotely human was if he took another's skin.
Like a parasite. But wasn't that what he was?
Alex shook his head and headed across the roof towards Ragland's morgue, hands in his pockets as he carelessly hopped from one roof to another. He wondered what it would be like to have a real conversation with someone. Someone who isn't sobbing or begging for their lives, who isn't trembling in fear or revulsion, someone who treated him like Alex and not like viral strand DX-1118 C.
And then he wondered why he cared.
A/N: I have hereby decided that these will be a bunch of connected one-shots, because I have enough plot-stories going on already to make my head implode. Pretty sure they'll all be from Alex's POV, since it's HIS character study, after all. They won't all be serious, but it's hard to be light and fluffy when your main character is a sociopathic personification of the world's most deadly bioweapon. Just sayin'.
