James Cameron and Charles Eglee own Dark Angel. My use is in no way meant to challenge their copyrights. This piece is not intended for any profit on the part of the writer, nor is it meant to detract from the commercial viability of the aforementioned (or any other) copyright. Any similarity to any events or persons, either real or fictional, is unintended.
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Author's Note: While the events herein are occurring, Alec is off on his own, running another errand for Max. You can read all about it in Three Hail Mary's, which is a stand-alone story written to complement this one. In fact, it'll likely complement it to the point that some of the events that occur there may have bearing on this story later on, so I highly recommend that you read Three Hail Mary's if you want to keep up on everything. Also, thanks lots for the feedback. It not only helps motivate me, but it also made me realize I was overlooking something that needed to be addressed in this chapter. It was a minor point, true, but I hate overlooking some of the details.
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VIII – Somebody To Lean OnMax looked up at Foggle Towers, grinning at the memories of all the good times she'd spent in the building. It was the best robbery of my life, she thought happily. I had no idea at all how much I would profit from that job. A botched break-in led to her being discovered, and the owner had eventually become a close friend, a man she had sometimes thought of as her soul mate.
She had already felt as if she'd been run through the wringer during the past month, only to be shocked at the events of the night. Another good soldier dead! she cursed. And this time there's no denying it was because of me. After all, she was my decoy. She only hoped that Alec would be all right as he tracked down needed supplies by himself. Max had hated sending him off alone, but in the end she realized she had little choice.
Max chased the disturbing thoughts from her mind and opened the front door to the building, immediately feeling more comfortable in the familiar surroundings. She strolled into the lobby, smiling at Freddy, the retired cop that worked nighttime security.
"Max," he said with a warm, grandfatherly smile as he looked the young woman over. "You're sure a sight for sore eyes. I was afraid I'd never see you again after that incident upstairs at Logan's."
"Well, you know Logan," Max replied happily. "He never did know when to stay away, whether some gang-bangers were pissed at him or not." If only it had actually been gang-bangers, Max thought. Then Logan's decision to move in wouldn't be quite so asinine. And then he has the nerve to try to force Syl out. The decision to send Syl to Logan's made lots of sense in Max's mind, and she'd figured that Logan would express some resistance to the idea, but she hadn't actually expected him to call her up to request that Syl be removed. That particular move had come as a surprise, and Max had been offended when she realized how much Logan didn't want her help.
"So you gonna be able to keep coming around?" Freddy asked.
"We'll see," Max promised.
"Well if you ever need a place to lay low for a bit, you feel free to come here, okay?"
"Huh?" Max asked in surprise.
"Come on, Max, I watch the tube from time to time," Freddy said, "though you might not guess that by looking at me," he added sarcastically, patting his large stomach. "I know what you're into, and I know you're good people."
"Thanks, Freddy," Max said, knowing her eyes were likely as wide as saucers. "I'll keep that in mind." She strode past the guard and walked into the elevator, enjoying her growing feeling of bliss as she made the trip up to Logan's. Once there she knocked softly on the door and waited patiently to be welcomed in.
"Who is it?" she heard Syl ask from inside. Well, at least Logan's smart enough to let Syl answer the door for him.
"It's Max," she answered impatiently. "Think you could let me in before someone sees me out here?" She had hardly finished her question before the door was opened wide and she saw Syl looking her over, as if she was searching her for any sign that she could be a threat. "Hey," she muttered, noting that the other X5's unexpected behavior didn't let up as she spoke.
"Logan didn't tell me to expect you," Syl commented. "Let me see if he's available." She turned and walked away toward Logan's office, leaving Max standing alone at the door, feeling like some unwanted door-to-door salesman.
See if he's available? she thought incredulously. You've gotta be kidding. She waited several minutes, hearing slight murmurings from Logan's office but not being able to pick out any words from the conversation. Finally, Logan came walking out, his face somewhat impassive though his eyes definitely displayed his pleasure at having the visit.
"How's it going?" he asked, an awkward, almost forced smile giving his face a slightly unreal appearance. He almost reminded Max of an older version of a Ken doll.
"Erin's dead," Max muttered. "Someone tried to kill me, and she took the bullet."
"I'm sorry," Logan said sympathetically. "Why don't you sit down?" Max nodded her head as she walked farther into the apartment, plopping herself down heavily on Logan's living room sofa. "Can I get you anything?" Logan offered. "How 'bout a beer?"
"Sounds great," Max responded, trying to muster a thankful smile. Moments later Logan walked out to join her, a beer in each hand.
"Would it help to talk about it?" Logan asked, though Max detected something strange in his voice. Or is it the lack of something that's actually strange? she wondered. Logan simply sounded different to her, though she couldn't place exactly how.
"There's really not much to talk about," Max muttered. "We went to the meeting, and right after we disconnected the line with you someone opened up on the group. Erin went down right away. Alec dragged me away, and Erin threw a grenade. I think she actually blew herself up to take out whoever hit us."
"You have any idea who did it?" Logan asked, some of his cool, disinterested attitude melting away as he focused intently on Max's words.
"My first guess was that McElroy set us up," Max answered, "but within minutes I got a message on my pager from Cassandra. When I got in touch with her, she said she saw several black-clad figures moving in our direction, but she'd been unable to warn us. Thing is, she's assigned to the senator now, and nothing will make her break off from protecting him, at least until either one of them is dead, or she's formally reassigned. She wanted to warn us, but she couldn't risk endangering her charge, no matter the cost. She just had to hope we could take care of ourselves."
"Anything else?" Logan asked as he stared blankly into space, the wheels of his mind appearing to work double-time to absorb everything that Max told him.
"She said whoever those people were, they sure weren't ordinaries," Max added. "They moved too quickly. I don't know, Logan. Either the Familiars actually figured out what we're up to, or I just got betrayed by some of my own people. I honestly don't know which prospect frightens me more. It seems like everything that happens to me has some kind of major importance, and one crisis keeps following closely on the heels of the one that preceded it. It's just too much to take."
"I'm sorry," Logan said again as his intense interest vanished once more, his sudden, unemotional tone prompting Max to feel as if he was anything but sorry.
"This is all crazy," Max complained. "I was a delivery girl, Logan. I never asked to fight some kind of uber-man cult. I never asked to be the visionary leader of my people. And I never, ever asked for people to sacrifice themselves to save me. I don't understand any of this."
"I'm sorry," Logan said once more, causing Max to wonder if he was capable of saying anything else.
"You gonna need anything?" Syl asked Logan as she walked out of his office and into the living room, her eyes scanning Max thoroughly, still appearing as if she was searching for a trace of a threat that she was convinced was there.
"No, I'll be fine," Logan assured her. Once she had gone into the spare bedroom, Logan turned back to Max. "She's very protective," he commented.
"That's the whole idea," Max responded glumly.
"And as much as I appreciate the gesture, I really don't need her," Logan assured Max. "I'm perfectly safe here."
"You know, that would have been far less believable two weeks ago, before you covered up all the bullet holes," she countered. "But just because you put up new drywall doesn't mean I'm gonna forget what happened once already."
"I mean it," Logan assured her. "I don't need a bodyguard."
"I don't remember asking," Max said. "I have enough on my plate right now, Logan. I can't afford to spend my time worrying about whether or not you're safe."
"I never asked you to," Logan countered coldly.
"What?" Max was now certain that Logan's behavior was definitely wrong somehow. He's conversational enough, but there's none of the warmth that I used to get from him. It's almost like he thinks of me as… Her mind wandered as she desperately sought an answer to her own question. As she found a suitable analogy, she visibly shuddered. He's treating me like an ex-girlfriend, she concluded. She felt as though someone had plunged a knife in her gut as she looked at Logan, finally seeing clearly in his eyes that he had dispatched a great deal of the affection that had been there only weeks earlier.
"I don't need any watching over, Max," Logan assured her.
"What's going on here?" Max asked.
"What do you mean?" Logan asked innocently, though Max could see all too well that he knew exactly what she meant.
"Don't play games," Max pressed. "I'm not some stupid kid, Logan."
"I don't have the vaguest idea what you're talking about." Now he almost sounded condescending, and that was something Max was completely unwilling to tolerate.
"Fine," Max spat. "Lie to me if that's what you want."
"Lie to you?" Logan asked, placing his beer on the coffee table as he stood up, forcing Max to conclude that he was seeking some kind of psychological advantage by looking down on her. She swore it wouldn't work. "Oh, that's rich," he said, his voice steadily rising as he spoke. "This coming from the girl that told me she was getting together with another guy just so that she wouldn't have to deal with the burden of telling me the truth."
"The truth?" Max asked. "The truth about what?" Suddenly she felt the urge to busy her mind with something other than shouting, so she chugged half of her beer as Logan continued to rip into her.
"The truth about how you're scared," Logan told her, his eyes boring into hers as she looked at him down the length of her beer bottle.
"I'm not scared of anything," Max suddenly retorted, slamming her bottle down on the wooden table, almost knocking Logan's adjacent bottle down with the force of her movement as she rose to come face to face with her host.
"Really?" Logan asked. "Then why did you break up with me?"
"We weren't ever together," Max countered. "I can't break up with someone that I'm not together with."
"Oh, so that's the story now?" Logan asked as he turned his back on her, taking a few angry strides before whirling around to face her again. "So we were never together? Is that why you and I worked so hard to find a cure for the virus? Is that why you felt a need to tell me you were with Alec so that I would get some false sense of closure? You may be a genius and one hell of a soldier, Max, but it's obvious you spent your formative years in a military barracks, because you really have a hell of a lot to learn about relationships."
"Oh, that's nice," Max said. "I guess Eyes Only has spoken, huh? Yeah, you're real good with relationships too, Logan. You spend your time here alone in your ivory tower, your only interpersonal contact coming as a pair of eyes on a television screen. And you dare give me advice on relationships."
"At least I've had relationships," he retorted, his voice rising steadily until he was on the verge of shouting. "So yeah, I've been married and it didn't work out. At least I had the guts to take the chance on opening up to someone enough to let them hurt me. And despite the pain, I'd do it again. I tried with you, too, but you wouldn't let me."
"Is that what you're doing?" Max asked incredulously. "You tryin' to open up to me? Is this how you expect to get me to want to be with you?"
"No," Logan answered evenly, his voice suddenly little more than a whisper. "I'm not trying anymore, Max. The time for that is past. You know that as well as I do. We're done."
Max gasped as Logan spoke, completely surprised that he would say such a thing. But this is what you wanted all along, isn't it? she asked herself. Didn't you try to provoke this very reaction when you told him you were with Alec? Isn't this as easy as you wanted it to be? Max slumped back down onto the couch while Logan continued to hover over her, each of them glaring at the other, neither one backing down in their staring match. It seemed to Max that time stood still, that she and Logan were held transfixed in that one moment for an eternity. Finally he moved, grabbing his beer and draining it in only a few short gulps. Then he looked at the bottle, slightly puzzled, and Max's stomach bottomed out worse than it ever had before. He drank from the wrong bottle!
She realized that her bottle was the one that was almost empty, while his had been almost full. That's why he was surprised to finish it so quickly.
"Oh my God, Logan," Max yelled. "We have to get you to a hospital." No sooner had she said the words than Syl was racing into the room, appraising the situation as her left hand went around her back, gripping the Walther PPK that Max knew she concealed there.
"It's okay, Syl," Logan said with a suddenly warm, strangely amused smile. "Go on back to your room." Syl hesitated for a few moments, looking over the two for a bit, but finally complied with Logan's instructions.
"What?!" Max asked once Syl had gone, moving closer to Logan so that she could catch him when he finally, predictably, fell to the floor. "It's not all right, Logan. We have to get you to a doctor." But he still hasn't fallen, Max noticed, her mind trying to count off the seconds as she waited for the inevitable reaction Logan always had to her virus.
"You should probably leave, Max," Logan said. "We've both said a lot of things we'll probably regret once we have time to reflect on it all."
"What's going on here?" Max asked, still gazing expectantly at her friend, unable to process that he had not yet succumbed to the virus.
"I'm cured," Logan said. "Sorta thought you'd have figured that out by now."
"You're cured?" Max asked. "How? When?" She was instantly assaulted by what felt like every negative emotion it was possible for a human to feel, and she wondered whether she was going to throw up, or pass out, or scream.
"Lydecker gave me the information on a vaccine right before your assault on Megiddo," Logan said, drawing Max's attention away from her own inner turmoil and back to the conversation at hand. "It's based on the same technology Sandeman used to make you immune to the Familiars' pathogen for The Coming; it helped my body build up its own immunity to the virus. Lydecker told me it was something he wanted to give us to make up for some of the things he'd done."
"And you didn't tell me," Max muttered. "How could you keep that from me?"
"Deck asked me to, so that you wouldn't be thinking about that while you had a job to do," Logan answered.
"I don't mean then," Max said. "I mean now. You've had this for a month, and you never told me?"
"You still have a job to do," Logan pointed out. "You're in the middle of something very important, Max. And so am I. This isn't the time to try to force a relationship that's had plenty of opportunities in the past, only to fail every time."
"You made that decision for both of us?" Max asked furiously. "What gave you the right?"
"The same thing that gave you the right to end our relationship not too long ago, despite the fact that I wasn't done trying," Logan said, his voice holding a sharp, malicious edge. Max couldn't help but wonder whether Logan actually enjoyed hurting her. And the worst part was that she couldn't actually blame him – she thought he had the right to a little payback for all that she had put him through. "You're the one that introduced the idea of one of us unilaterally calling off any further attempts to make this whole thing work, remember?"
"That's not fair," Max said, stifling a sob that appeared quite unexpectedly. She'd never known Logan to be so indifferent, so… cruel. And the worst part is that he's right, she realized. He really isn't doing anything that I haven't done before, myself.
"Life isn't fair, Max," Logan said. "If life were fair, you would never have been held in a secret government program for half your life. If life were fair, your people wouldn't be under siege right now in Terminal City."
"And if life were fair, we could have been happy," Max muttered.
"Yeah, I think we could have been," Logan agreed. "But life isn't fair."
"Okay," Max replied, wiping away a stray tear that welled up in the corner of her eye. "If this is how you want it."
"I didn't say that," Logan told her. "This is just the way it has to be, given the situation."
"So you're going to tease me with hope for the future?" Max asked, trying to finish the conversation and leave with a shred of dignity before she started crying uncontrollably.
"Let's just say that we're not saying 'goodbye,' " Logan countered. "It's just 'until later.' We both have huge responsibilities, Max. Neither one of us could turn our back on that, even if we wanted to."
"Then until later," Max echoed. "Until the mess we've made of our lives is cleaned up a little."
"Yeah," Logan agreed. "We've waited this long already, right? What's a little while longer?"
"Right," Max mumbled, turning toward the door. She left quickly, bolting down the hall and stumbling into the stairway as she raced out of sight of any curious eyes that might have been watching. Her sobs grew stronger once she was alone, and she began to think over everything that had happened.
I can't believe he didn't tell me, she cursed silently, consciously avoiding thinking about any of her own deceptions over the past few months. She sat down and thought things through, and realized that she felt far worse after her visit to Logan's than she had when she arrived. And now there's no one else for me to go to, she thought miserably. There's no one else that understands me like Logan does, no one else that I can just be myself around. Then, unexpectedly, her heart skipped a beat as she thought of one other person that might be able to relate to everything she was going through.
Without another thought, Max raced down the stairs and burst out onto the street below, hopping onto her bike and tearing out across the city. She decided to take the long way home, to let the wind blow through her hair as she enjoyed a few brief hours of freedom away from the siege. But I won't take too long, she decided. I have responsibilities I can't afford to avoid. And besides, there's someone I have to talk to.
To be continued……………………………