AN: This sets us up for things to come. Lovely, isnt it?
Chapter 10:
Logan sat in the small, dank room, no more than the size of one of the closets in his apartment, scanning the file in front of him. When he'd asked for access to the X5s medical records, he didn't exactly expect the reams and reams of paper he'd gotten on each X5 alone.
He considered himself a pretty intelligent guy. He sailed through high school like it was a joke; slept through college with a 4.0, but the files in front of his were so technically written that it had given him a one of those blaring headaches that made you want to curl up into a ball and die.
He did have to give credit to the Manticore executives though. When they'd agreed to the give him access to the base so easily, Logan knew that they planned on doing everything in their powers to make the article bend in their direction. It seemed that apart of that plan was to give him so much paperwork that he's rather stick his head in an oven than hear the words 'genetic enhancements' again.
He'd slowly but surely gone through every file, sorting them into three piles. One, information that he could use. Two, information that had absolutely no meaning to his cause. And three, information that he hadn't the slightest idea how to decipher into lay terminology. He'd gone through all of the files except for one, that being X5-452, Max's, file.
Looking at someone's medical records was like reading their diary, and knowing how much Max disliked even being in the same room with him, he knew perfectly well that this wouldn't be going over very well with her, should she ever find out. He had hesitated to open the file at all, but now that there was no avoiding it any longer, he wondered why her file was any different than the others. He hadn't waited a moment before diving into that information, and had no qualms about it afterwards. Then why was Max's file so different?
The file sat in the empty space in front of him, almost as if it was taunting him. Screw 'to be or not to be'. Should he look at Max's medical and psychological history? That was the real question. Did he really want to see her coldly referred to as 'the subject' and have every incident in her life just as impersonally written down like she wasn't a real person? For whatever reason, reading Zack, Syl, Krit's files, that didn't bother him. He didn't have the slightest idea why the thought of reading Max's did.
Logan swallowed whatever misgivings he had and pulled the file towards him before he could talk himself out of it. Whatever personal reasons he had to not look at Max's file, as if there were really any anyway, he had to put the professional in front of the personal and get this done with.
Logan read for several sickening moments before he came to a page in the psychological evaluations that caught this eye.
Subject: Aged 11- Subject 452 is more attached to the family bonds that she and the other prototypes have formed since the shift in training. Now that they are allowed to show emotion, even in the slightest ways, it seems that the subjects they are flourishing much more than they might have if the training had continued on its previous path.
It was brought to my attention that in the course of a training exercise last week, the subject's team was practicing live explosives. The subject's team failed to complete the guidelines stated by their commanding officer. As punishment for the failure, their CO ordered they run two laps around the perimeter fence. The subject, after asking permission to speak, stated that it was her fault that they had failed the mission, and that only she should be punished for the failure. The subject's CO stated that he didn't care whose fault the mission failure was, he wanted two laps for each member of the ten-person team, he didn't care who they were completed by. Much to the CO's surprise, the subject then proceeded to run all of the laps for her team. Fifteen hours later, X5-452 finished her last lap around the perimeter, where after stating her completion, the subject collapsed and had to be treated for exhaustion and severe dehydration.
It is in my belief that due to the subject's strong over- protectiveness, she would not make an adequate commanding officer. During times of stress, as in the X5-057 incident, X5-452 has displayed incapability of giving orders, and the family ties that she has created leads her away from rational choices and into impulsive decisions that could endanger the team as a whole. While Col. Lydecker and myself had discussed moving X5-452 into a commanding position, I feel that X5-599 is more capable of carrying out the necessary tasks of a leader. Instead, subject X5-452 is a strong candidate for a second in command position. She is a strong leader among her team, despite her age, the older prototypes look to her for inspiration.'
Logan smiled as he finished the passage. Even knowing her for less than a day, it was so utterly Max that he had to laugh. Then he frowned for a moment. Less than a day. Well, a little more if you counted getting assaulted by her in his godfather's office, but he really didn't. So less than a day since he had found out who Veronica Sprouse really was, but why did it seem like ages longer than that.
It was shortly after Logan got into the reports on Max's high sodium levels, and as exciting as that was, he pulled off his glasses and laid his head on the table, groaning in frustration. If he was going to get locked into a room with nutrition reports whenever he tried to get any access, then this was really going to be a waste…
His thoughts trailed off as he heard the door open. Sitting up in his chair, he was quite surprised to see Jondie standing in the doorway. "Bad time?" She asked tapping a nail against the doorframe.
"Not at all. Save me from these nutrition reports, please dear god." Logan said dramatically as he shoved the file away from him.
Jondie crossed the room, glancing down at the file. "Max's medical files. As exciting as this is for the nutritionist, it bores the hell out of me, and I'm supposed to be the medic of the group."
"Yeah well, to be honest, I could care less." Logan said pulling off his glasses to rub his eyes.
"Well that is nice to know, cause Max'll kick your ass for you, or anyone, seeing this." Jondie said as she subtly slipped the file under a stack of papers, automatic protectiveness of her little sister, an action that Logan didn't miss. "Lydecker sent me out here, said you wanted to do interviews or something similar."
Logan scratched the back of his head, surprised. He'd casually asked for one on one interviews, barely in passing, and here she was. This kid of corporation was not the kind you trusted. "Right…I didn't know he was sending someone in here this quick."
"I'm bored, everyone else has something to do, so they sent me to you. Amuse me, please." Jondie said as she dropped into a chair across the table from Logan.
It took a few moments before Jondie had settled down in the chair across the table from Logan, and another moment for Logan to wade through the piles of files to find a pad of paper and a pen to take notes with. "Where shall we begin?" Jondie asked with a smile, finding the thought of being interviewed by one of the nation's most predominant journalist more than a little exciting.
"Why don't we start from the very beginning? What is your first memory of your training?"
"The first time we had live ammunition practice." Jondie smiled briefly, as she remembered being six and having her shoulder dislocated because the recoil of the large machine gun had thrown her small frame back like a rag doll. And she remembered Lydecker's disapproving eyes upon her as the base doctor had twisted her arm back into place.
Despite the excruciating pain of her injury, she'd calmly joined her fellow soldiers, they hadn't been allowed to call them siblings yet, and she finished riddling with bullets the corpse of the deer that had been hung from a tree five hundred feet in front of her.
"Is there anything you wish that you could do that you are unable to do because of what…or who you are?" Logan asked.
"Go to the movies." She said assertively without a moment's hesitation, shaking the disturbing memory out of her head gladly in favor of the wistful thinking.
Logan looked up from the paper he was taking notes on. "Huh? Go to the movies?"
"Yeah. As you probably can gather, we all love to watch movies. We do it quite a bit. None of us have ever even stepped foot inside a movie theater before."
"Why not?" Logan asked confused. How can you never have been to a movie theater before? Even post-pulse when the already ridiculous prices of seven dollars a movie rose to almost twenty, everyone still went.
"We weren't allowed to leave base unless sent on a mission till I was, let's see, about nineteen. Then after we, and by we I really mean Maxie and Zane, talked Lydecker in giving us a metaphorical day pass, we had to much to see, too much to experience to take three hours of the little bit of time we had to see a movie. Now it is just plain laziness. We are always working, even at home, and when we aren't working we are usually dead tired and cant find the energy to go anywhere but the kitchen and living room."
"So, obviously you have had the military training. What was the psychological training like?"
Logan watched as Jondie's green eyes iced over. He didn't know what he said, but she obviously hadn't liked it.
The images flashed through her head quickly and violently. Duty. Mission. Teamwork. The words filtered through her subconscious no matter how hard she tried to block them. "Different." She said coldly.
Logan knew from years of interviewing skittish witnesses when to back off a touchy subject. Little did he know that the next thing he said was the worst thing he could have possible brought up.
"I was reading through one of the files, and a X5 was mentioned…" Logan started flipping through Max's file trying to find the delegation number. "I couldn't find any files on a X5-057."
Logan could have sworn the temperature of the room had dropped ten degrees.
When he looked up from the file, Jondie was staring directly at him, but she wasn't really seeing anything, of that he was sure.
She was cold. That thought mixed with the image of her sister lying dead at her feet, a single clean hole in the center of her forehead, the blood seeping out onto her bare feet. 'Eve? Evie? Come back. Please. Evie?'
Jondie felt the bile rise to the back of her throat. She ruthlessly shut off her overworked mind, the disturbing images of her lost childhood stopping almost on command. It had taken her a long time to learn how to block those memories out, and she didn't like having them brought up again. "Yeah, you're not going to find much on X5-057." She wasn't a goddamn number, Jondie thought bitterly, but left this unsaid. She was Eva, and she had pretty brown eyes. "You wont find much because she's dead."
"Oh." Logan would have gladly shoved his foot into his mouth at the moment. "I'm sorry…I…didn't know." Even as the words left his mouth, he knew how pathetic they sounded.
"Yeah. Well." Despite Jondie's best efforts, one last image escaped and flashed in front of her eyes, exactly that the nightmare it was. Max, being supported by the protective arms of Zane and Krit, her frail body shaking lightly as the aftershocks of her first major seizure left her body. Their eyes met a moment, dark brown meeting turbulent violet, and that second of realization passed between them, and that moment that Jondie had struck out, whatever way should could cope with what she had just saw, the emotions that she didn't understand coursing through her blood. She thought, for that one fleeting moment that their eyes were locked, 'Look what you've done Max.' That day in her life was a day she mourned, not only because of the death of her oldest sister, but because of the way she had hurt her youngest.
"Listen to me now, and listen to me closely." Jondie said, rising out of her chair to slap her hands down on the table in front of Logan. "You will not, under any circumstances, bring Ev-X5-057 up to anyone else. If you want my corporation, you will promise me that right now. All of us blame ourselves some way or another for the elimination of X5-057, and we've all worked quite hard to move on from what happened that night. Don't you even try and bring it up, or you are going to seriously find out how protective we are, especially Krit, of the ones that we have lost. You think Max can get pissed? You go ahead and mess with this, and you will see how much X5s can fuck you up." Jondie said as she knocked over the table with a single flick of her wrist.
"Goddamn, Logan." Max's voice rang with what had to be amusement from the doorway. "You can piss off pretty much anyone cant you? Or do you just have a fetish with S&M?"
Jondie's head snapped around, her eyes carefully curtained. Max was grinning like an idiot, so obviously she hadn't been there too long, because if she'd heard this outsider, especially one that threw her off so much, mention Eva, there might not have been enough left to identify Logan with dental records. "Max. How long have you been standing there?"
Jondie watched as she narrowed her eyes, the familiar way she straightened when she sensed danger. "I caught something about X5s fucking him up, and it just grabbed my interest." Her eyes shrewdly scanned the room, Logan's stunned face; Jondie's carefully blank one. Something wasn't right. "But if you want a chance to beat on Cale here, Jond, you're going to have to take a number, because a waiting list is quickly forming." Her voice was smooth, only Jondie picking up the underlying question.
The threats didn't even faze Logan, not because he was used to it by now, but because Jondie's words were still stuck in his head. The elimination of X5-057? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Death was one thing; it could mean accident, mission gone wrong…it could be any number of things. Elimination was something altogether different. It meant that X5-057 was… He couldn't even bare to think it.
"We just had a little disagreement over how this interview should go." Logan heard Jondie say calmly, relaxing from her attack pose to a more relaxed one. "Did you need something?"
"Nope, just checking to see what you were up too. Wanted to let you know that I've been sent off to do the obstacle course so the X-8s can watch and learn from the master." Max murmured, still trying to gauge the situation. If Cale had managed to piss Jondie off, it had to be good. Maybe she'd do them all a favor and end his miserable excuse for a career by ripping out his trachea. "I think I'll just step out and leave you too to your business." If Jondie were going to hurt him, she'd probably like to have her privacy in it.
When the door was firmly shut and Jondie was sure that Max wasn't standing outside of the door eavesdropping, she turned back to the still stunned Logan. "I'll apologize for flipping out on you. I was out of line, but as you can tell, Eva, X5-057, she's a touchy subject, especially for Maxie. Please don't pursue this angle of the story. It will only bring back bad things. For all of us." Jondie said in a quiet voice as she picked the table back up into its original position.
"Jondie." Logan said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice that had her looking up. "I know what it is like to lose someone you love. I just lost my parents a few months ago." And it still stung to remember the way he'd been so wrapped up in work he'd barely had the chance to talk to his mother in months, meet his father for drinks and argue politics in longer than that. And before he'd had the chance to right the wrong, they were gone. He took a deep, calming breath before he trudged on. "They were murdered; no reason at all really, just some random act of violence. If I had known that your sister had been killed, I wouldn't have even brought it up, not less been as insensitive enough to push the matter. As much as you guys think I am out to hurt you, I'm really not."
Jondie considered him a moment as she began to straighten files that had been spilled across the floor. She tapped the edges of Zack's medical records together as she considered what she was about to do. Max was going to beat on her for it, but she figured she owed the man. "You know, Max is usually a rather calm and mild mannered with norms." Jondie was pretty sure she heard Logan discreetly snort. "Whenever she really cops an attitude with one, it is usually because they are really throwing her off. I figure the way she freaks out about you, she's just about been knocked on her ass." Jondie flashed a smile that would cut most men off at the knees. Logan wondered why it didn't faze him in the least. "If you want to get anywhere with Maxie, you've got to outsmart her, so find her weakness and play on it. At the moment, it seems her weakness is…" She paused for the simple reason of dramatic effect. "You."
Logan laughed, genuinely, as Jondie quietly walked out of the room.
Chapter 10:
Logan sat in the small, dank room, no more than the size of one of the closets in his apartment, scanning the file in front of him. When he'd asked for access to the X5s medical records, he didn't exactly expect the reams and reams of paper he'd gotten on each X5 alone.
He considered himself a pretty intelligent guy. He sailed through high school like it was a joke; slept through college with a 4.0, but the files in front of his were so technically written that it had given him a one of those blaring headaches that made you want to curl up into a ball and die.
He did have to give credit to the Manticore executives though. When they'd agreed to the give him access to the base so easily, Logan knew that they planned on doing everything in their powers to make the article bend in their direction. It seemed that apart of that plan was to give him so much paperwork that he's rather stick his head in an oven than hear the words 'genetic enhancements' again.
He'd slowly but surely gone through every file, sorting them into three piles. One, information that he could use. Two, information that had absolutely no meaning to his cause. And three, information that he hadn't the slightest idea how to decipher into lay terminology. He'd gone through all of the files except for one, that being X5-452, Max's, file.
Looking at someone's medical records was like reading their diary, and knowing how much Max disliked even being in the same room with him, he knew perfectly well that this wouldn't be going over very well with her, should she ever find out. He had hesitated to open the file at all, but now that there was no avoiding it any longer, he wondered why her file was any different than the others. He hadn't waited a moment before diving into that information, and had no qualms about it afterwards. Then why was Max's file so different?
The file sat in the empty space in front of him, almost as if it was taunting him. Screw 'to be or not to be'. Should he look at Max's medical and psychological history? That was the real question. Did he really want to see her coldly referred to as 'the subject' and have every incident in her life just as impersonally written down like she wasn't a real person? For whatever reason, reading Zack, Syl, Krit's files, that didn't bother him. He didn't have the slightest idea why the thought of reading Max's did.
Logan swallowed whatever misgivings he had and pulled the file towards him before he could talk himself out of it. Whatever personal reasons he had to not look at Max's file, as if there were really any anyway, he had to put the professional in front of the personal and get this done with.
Logan read for several sickening moments before he came to a page in the psychological evaluations that caught this eye.
Subject: Aged 11- Subject 452 is more attached to the family bonds that she and the other prototypes have formed since the shift in training. Now that they are allowed to show emotion, even in the slightest ways, it seems that the subjects they are flourishing much more than they might have if the training had continued on its previous path.
It was brought to my attention that in the course of a training exercise last week, the subject's team was practicing live explosives. The subject's team failed to complete the guidelines stated by their commanding officer. As punishment for the failure, their CO ordered they run two laps around the perimeter fence. The subject, after asking permission to speak, stated that it was her fault that they had failed the mission, and that only she should be punished for the failure. The subject's CO stated that he didn't care whose fault the mission failure was, he wanted two laps for each member of the ten-person team, he didn't care who they were completed by. Much to the CO's surprise, the subject then proceeded to run all of the laps for her team. Fifteen hours later, X5-452 finished her last lap around the perimeter, where after stating her completion, the subject collapsed and had to be treated for exhaustion and severe dehydration.
It is in my belief that due to the subject's strong over- protectiveness, she would not make an adequate commanding officer. During times of stress, as in the X5-057 incident, X5-452 has displayed incapability of giving orders, and the family ties that she has created leads her away from rational choices and into impulsive decisions that could endanger the team as a whole. While Col. Lydecker and myself had discussed moving X5-452 into a commanding position, I feel that X5-599 is more capable of carrying out the necessary tasks of a leader. Instead, subject X5-452 is a strong candidate for a second in command position. She is a strong leader among her team, despite her age, the older prototypes look to her for inspiration.'
Logan smiled as he finished the passage. Even knowing her for less than a day, it was so utterly Max that he had to laugh. Then he frowned for a moment. Less than a day. Well, a little more if you counted getting assaulted by her in his godfather's office, but he really didn't. So less than a day since he had found out who Veronica Sprouse really was, but why did it seem like ages longer than that.
It was shortly after Logan got into the reports on Max's high sodium levels, and as exciting as that was, he pulled off his glasses and laid his head on the table, groaning in frustration. If he was going to get locked into a room with nutrition reports whenever he tried to get any access, then this was really going to be a waste…
His thoughts trailed off as he heard the door open. Sitting up in his chair, he was quite surprised to see Jondie standing in the doorway. "Bad time?" She asked tapping a nail against the doorframe.
"Not at all. Save me from these nutrition reports, please dear god." Logan said dramatically as he shoved the file away from him.
Jondie crossed the room, glancing down at the file. "Max's medical files. As exciting as this is for the nutritionist, it bores the hell out of me, and I'm supposed to be the medic of the group."
"Yeah well, to be honest, I could care less." Logan said pulling off his glasses to rub his eyes.
"Well that is nice to know, cause Max'll kick your ass for you, or anyone, seeing this." Jondie said as she subtly slipped the file under a stack of papers, automatic protectiveness of her little sister, an action that Logan didn't miss. "Lydecker sent me out here, said you wanted to do interviews or something similar."
Logan scratched the back of his head, surprised. He'd casually asked for one on one interviews, barely in passing, and here she was. This kid of corporation was not the kind you trusted. "Right…I didn't know he was sending someone in here this quick."
"I'm bored, everyone else has something to do, so they sent me to you. Amuse me, please." Jondie said as she dropped into a chair across the table from Logan.
It took a few moments before Jondie had settled down in the chair across the table from Logan, and another moment for Logan to wade through the piles of files to find a pad of paper and a pen to take notes with. "Where shall we begin?" Jondie asked with a smile, finding the thought of being interviewed by one of the nation's most predominant journalist more than a little exciting.
"Why don't we start from the very beginning? What is your first memory of your training?"
"The first time we had live ammunition practice." Jondie smiled briefly, as she remembered being six and having her shoulder dislocated because the recoil of the large machine gun had thrown her small frame back like a rag doll. And she remembered Lydecker's disapproving eyes upon her as the base doctor had twisted her arm back into place.
Despite the excruciating pain of her injury, she'd calmly joined her fellow soldiers, they hadn't been allowed to call them siblings yet, and she finished riddling with bullets the corpse of the deer that had been hung from a tree five hundred feet in front of her.
"Is there anything you wish that you could do that you are unable to do because of what…or who you are?" Logan asked.
"Go to the movies." She said assertively without a moment's hesitation, shaking the disturbing memory out of her head gladly in favor of the wistful thinking.
Logan looked up from the paper he was taking notes on. "Huh? Go to the movies?"
"Yeah. As you probably can gather, we all love to watch movies. We do it quite a bit. None of us have ever even stepped foot inside a movie theater before."
"Why not?" Logan asked confused. How can you never have been to a movie theater before? Even post-pulse when the already ridiculous prices of seven dollars a movie rose to almost twenty, everyone still went.
"We weren't allowed to leave base unless sent on a mission till I was, let's see, about nineteen. Then after we, and by we I really mean Maxie and Zane, talked Lydecker in giving us a metaphorical day pass, we had to much to see, too much to experience to take three hours of the little bit of time we had to see a movie. Now it is just plain laziness. We are always working, even at home, and when we aren't working we are usually dead tired and cant find the energy to go anywhere but the kitchen and living room."
"So, obviously you have had the military training. What was the psychological training like?"
Logan watched as Jondie's green eyes iced over. He didn't know what he said, but she obviously hadn't liked it.
The images flashed through her head quickly and violently. Duty. Mission. Teamwork. The words filtered through her subconscious no matter how hard she tried to block them. "Different." She said coldly.
Logan knew from years of interviewing skittish witnesses when to back off a touchy subject. Little did he know that the next thing he said was the worst thing he could have possible brought up.
"I was reading through one of the files, and a X5 was mentioned…" Logan started flipping through Max's file trying to find the delegation number. "I couldn't find any files on a X5-057."
Logan could have sworn the temperature of the room had dropped ten degrees.
When he looked up from the file, Jondie was staring directly at him, but she wasn't really seeing anything, of that he was sure.
She was cold. That thought mixed with the image of her sister lying dead at her feet, a single clean hole in the center of her forehead, the blood seeping out onto her bare feet. 'Eve? Evie? Come back. Please. Evie?'
Jondie felt the bile rise to the back of her throat. She ruthlessly shut off her overworked mind, the disturbing images of her lost childhood stopping almost on command. It had taken her a long time to learn how to block those memories out, and she didn't like having them brought up again. "Yeah, you're not going to find much on X5-057." She wasn't a goddamn number, Jondie thought bitterly, but left this unsaid. She was Eva, and she had pretty brown eyes. "You wont find much because she's dead."
"Oh." Logan would have gladly shoved his foot into his mouth at the moment. "I'm sorry…I…didn't know." Even as the words left his mouth, he knew how pathetic they sounded.
"Yeah. Well." Despite Jondie's best efforts, one last image escaped and flashed in front of her eyes, exactly that the nightmare it was. Max, being supported by the protective arms of Zane and Krit, her frail body shaking lightly as the aftershocks of her first major seizure left her body. Their eyes met a moment, dark brown meeting turbulent violet, and that second of realization passed between them, and that moment that Jondie had struck out, whatever way should could cope with what she had just saw, the emotions that she didn't understand coursing through her blood. She thought, for that one fleeting moment that their eyes were locked, 'Look what you've done Max.' That day in her life was a day she mourned, not only because of the death of her oldest sister, but because of the way she had hurt her youngest.
"Listen to me now, and listen to me closely." Jondie said, rising out of her chair to slap her hands down on the table in front of Logan. "You will not, under any circumstances, bring Ev-X5-057 up to anyone else. If you want my corporation, you will promise me that right now. All of us blame ourselves some way or another for the elimination of X5-057, and we've all worked quite hard to move on from what happened that night. Don't you even try and bring it up, or you are going to seriously find out how protective we are, especially Krit, of the ones that we have lost. You think Max can get pissed? You go ahead and mess with this, and you will see how much X5s can fuck you up." Jondie said as she knocked over the table with a single flick of her wrist.
"Goddamn, Logan." Max's voice rang with what had to be amusement from the doorway. "You can piss off pretty much anyone cant you? Or do you just have a fetish with S&M?"
Jondie's head snapped around, her eyes carefully curtained. Max was grinning like an idiot, so obviously she hadn't been there too long, because if she'd heard this outsider, especially one that threw her off so much, mention Eva, there might not have been enough left to identify Logan with dental records. "Max. How long have you been standing there?"
Jondie watched as she narrowed her eyes, the familiar way she straightened when she sensed danger. "I caught something about X5s fucking him up, and it just grabbed my interest." Her eyes shrewdly scanned the room, Logan's stunned face; Jondie's carefully blank one. Something wasn't right. "But if you want a chance to beat on Cale here, Jond, you're going to have to take a number, because a waiting list is quickly forming." Her voice was smooth, only Jondie picking up the underlying question.
The threats didn't even faze Logan, not because he was used to it by now, but because Jondie's words were still stuck in his head. The elimination of X5-057? What the hell was that supposed to mean? Death was one thing; it could mean accident, mission gone wrong…it could be any number of things. Elimination was something altogether different. It meant that X5-057 was… He couldn't even bare to think it.
"We just had a little disagreement over how this interview should go." Logan heard Jondie say calmly, relaxing from her attack pose to a more relaxed one. "Did you need something?"
"Nope, just checking to see what you were up too. Wanted to let you know that I've been sent off to do the obstacle course so the X-8s can watch and learn from the master." Max murmured, still trying to gauge the situation. If Cale had managed to piss Jondie off, it had to be good. Maybe she'd do them all a favor and end his miserable excuse for a career by ripping out his trachea. "I think I'll just step out and leave you too to your business." If Jondie were going to hurt him, she'd probably like to have her privacy in it.
When the door was firmly shut and Jondie was sure that Max wasn't standing outside of the door eavesdropping, she turned back to the still stunned Logan. "I'll apologize for flipping out on you. I was out of line, but as you can tell, Eva, X5-057, she's a touchy subject, especially for Maxie. Please don't pursue this angle of the story. It will only bring back bad things. For all of us." Jondie said in a quiet voice as she picked the table back up into its original position.
"Jondie." Logan said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice that had her looking up. "I know what it is like to lose someone you love. I just lost my parents a few months ago." And it still stung to remember the way he'd been so wrapped up in work he'd barely had the chance to talk to his mother in months, meet his father for drinks and argue politics in longer than that. And before he'd had the chance to right the wrong, they were gone. He took a deep, calming breath before he trudged on. "They were murdered; no reason at all really, just some random act of violence. If I had known that your sister had been killed, I wouldn't have even brought it up, not less been as insensitive enough to push the matter. As much as you guys think I am out to hurt you, I'm really not."
Jondie considered him a moment as she began to straighten files that had been spilled across the floor. She tapped the edges of Zack's medical records together as she considered what she was about to do. Max was going to beat on her for it, but she figured she owed the man. "You know, Max is usually a rather calm and mild mannered with norms." Jondie was pretty sure she heard Logan discreetly snort. "Whenever she really cops an attitude with one, it is usually because they are really throwing her off. I figure the way she freaks out about you, she's just about been knocked on her ass." Jondie flashed a smile that would cut most men off at the knees. Logan wondered why it didn't faze him in the least. "If you want to get anywhere with Maxie, you've got to outsmart her, so find her weakness and play on it. At the moment, it seems her weakness is…" She paused for the simple reason of dramatic effect. "You."
Logan laughed, genuinely, as Jondie quietly walked out of the room.
