No reviews? My poor heart is shaken, but you see how nice I am I post
anyway; and not just any chapter but this stunning doublewide masterpiece.
If any of you don't like the direction this story is going, please
criticize gently. If you like what you see cat-call and send candy, or
just review. Peace, love, and enjoy.
* Authors note, there is a section preceded and followed by ********, this is a flashback.
*Disclaimer: I don't own them, and they wouldn't fit in my tiny apartment even if I did. Which I don't. #############################################################
How can we hate those we don't know? How can we not judge each person separately as we would wish to be judged? How could we kill a single child from afar, before that child has lived even a decade because the child's fathers have been bad and wrong? How can we spill blood? #############################################################
They scream for our blood. They beg for it to be spilled like wine across the streets. For every extremist willing to take to the streets in protest, there must have been twenty times as many willing to silently hate us from the comfort of their own homes.
How could so much hate live in the world? My perch atop a dilapidated apartment building does not give me the same rush as sitting on the space needle, but it gives me sufficient height to see the angry mob circulating outside the wall.
The need to escape it all burned at the back of my mind. Less than a week ago I had been a fucking bike messenger; I'd had friends and a job, a social life even.
Now I was a freak. Not just a freak, the queen freak. I needed to get out of here for a night, go out and be a regular girl again.
A few creative lies about certain feminine problems allowed me to elude my friends. Men were so easy sometimes. Then it was just a little matter of squeezing through the bottom of the perimeter fence during the guard rotations.
The noisy clamor at Crash would have been the best medicine for my blues, but I was far too well known there. Instead I walked down to the nearby waterfront and picked a seedy looking bar at random.
On the outside, The Grog was an unprepossessing looking establishment; on the inside it was far dingier. Keeping my head down I bellied up to the bar. This didn't look like the sort of place where one would order a pitcher of light beer.
The mess and ready availability of hard liquor reminded me inextricably of Alec.
"Scotch, on the rocks." It was the least I could do to honor his memory.
I almost gagged on the first swallow, how the hell did he drink this stuff? My nose hairs felt singed, and a deep sneeze bent me forward. As I straightened back up, someone had the deep effrontery to give me a smack on the ass.
"Well their girlie, someone can't hold their liquor." The man, to use the term very loosely, standing behind me looked as though he were the one who couldn't hold his liquor; despite his hulking size. He was striving for an expression of seductive masculinity, but came off looking rather glazed.
"I'm not interested." I strive to control my baser instincts to maim and kill. Maybe if I turn around and ignore the jerk, he'll take hint. My shoulders twitch as a hand pats down on them.
"Interested in what sweetheart?" He let out a falsely hardy chuckle. "I was just thinking that a hot number like you might be looking for a nice time."
"I said Not Interested." Keep looking at the table, don't get pissed.
"Come on Babe." Dinner platter sized hands clap around my waist. Ten years of brutal conditioning made me react without thinking. My elbows cut down shattering his grip on my hips, and my fist shot out smashing into his nose.
The brute backed away clutching his bloodied face, with an expression of shock then aped quickly out the door.
I tried to go back to my drink, but this dive lacked even the dubious charms of Crash. Grabbing my leather jacket, I followed the example of the bleeding behemoth and headed for the door.
Crisp, fishy night air was a welcome change from the smoke of the bar, and the unusually cloudless sky was filled with stars. I leaned against the wall and let starlight fill my eyes.
Alec had told me that Manticore taught him astronomy as a method of orienteering, but I had skipped out long before then. Staring upwards I tried to remember the constellations which he'd showed me that night. I failed to find anything save the North Star.
How useful, now I knew where Canada was. Temptation filled me. So easy to run away to another country, another place where I wasn't known. Blend in, start a new life for myself. It was just a dream though; a leader can't leave their troops.
"Hey there sweetheart." Goddamn my stargazing, the jerk I'd punched in the bar had used my distraction to sneak up on me. I turned around to dispose of him, and my stomach flipped queasily; the jerk had brought along some of his little friends.
Manticore may have made us stronger, faster, and better; but, one little girl up against ten large, neck-less men wasn't good odds. I clung to a vague hope that they mightn't know that I was a transgenic.
We stare at each other for a beat, and then they all rush me at once. Shit, so much for not knowing what I am, they're not taking any chances.
I knock out one with an uppercut, a second with a jaw-shattering kick to the head, but there are too many. Two of them manage to pin my arms while a third winds back his fist. Bravery fails me for a moment and I shut my eyes.
"Ughfff." I hear the explosive sound of fist against flesh, but the corresponding grunt didn't come from my lips. I crack my eyes.
Either he had trailed me at a distance, or his attunement with his animal instincts had allowed him to sniff me out like a bloodhound. Regardless, I counted my blessings that 494 had found me in time.
As a pair, we made short work of the remaining cretins.
"You're cut ma'am." He tilts my face up and traces his thumb gently across my eyebrow. The breathless rush of blood to my head numbs the pain as he press a scrap of cloth torn from his shirt against the jagged tear across my brow.
************ "You're cut Maxie." We'd just finished rescuing a pair of badly beaten X-6's from certain death at the hands of White.
The rush of blood to my head numbs the pain as he gently presses a bit of cloth against it. For just a moment my eyes meet his, and the warmth in their hazel depths holds me breathless. ************
For just a moment our eyes meet, but no spark stirs their depths this time.
"Mutant freaks." His eyes widen for a moment and 494 crumples to the ground. My eyes snap to the man standing behind him.
We had neglected to count the pile of brainless men lying on the ground. Now it appeared that one of the first two that I had disposed of had recovered sufficiently to grab a piece of broken glass off the filthy sidewalk and avenge his mates.
I snarl wordlessly at the man. He whimpers with fright as he realizes that his makeshift weapon is still buried in 494's flesh.
Moments like these are boundless in their clarity. There is no fog, no haze, just you and the stars. One step, two hands, and then a little crunch. I turn from the pile of meat and bone and run back to my comrade's side.
He lay like a dead dog on the road in a pool of blood. No emotion lines his face, and I realize that somehow even this pain is kept at bay. He is such a product of training that even the distraction of death is kept at bay.
I pull off my shirt without reservations and press it against the hole in his side. Fortune had saved me the brutal task of pulling out the glass, it had fallen out on its own when he had hit the pavement.
"Stay with me buddy, listen to my voice." It doesn't seem right to call him 494, not when he lays cradled and bleeding across my lap.
Alec's cell phone, did 494 still carry it? My hands riffled as gently as possible through his clothes, and finally hit pay dirt in his left jacket pocket.
Please pick up, please pick up. Biggs's voice was like heaven on the other line. "Biggs, don't talk, we're on the corner of Ransted and Waterfront down by the piers. Alec is wounded, badly. Please just hurry." I hang up quickly before he can offer any comfort, I don't deserve it.
"Can you still here me?" His hands are so cold and his pulse beats threadily against my fingers.
A languorous tear drips down the side of his face, with a shock I realize that it is from his own eyes and not one of mine.
"Alec, are you in there? Damnit I know you're still in there and you can't screw this up again you dick. Don't die, not because of me, not again."
A light flutter of eyelashes drew my attention back to his eyes. He blinked them open with torturous slowness, and my eyes locked on his. I felt frozen, I could see all of it in their hazel depths; fright for his life, sadness for my tears, and some other indefinable emotion which warmed my stomach.
"Maxie." He nodded once at me, and then began to shake with deep, shuddering, convulsions.
I held him tight with one arm, while grasping for his pulse with the other hand. Against all hope it felt stronger and steadier, and the paroxysms began to lessen.
I swear that my eyes never left his face, but when his eyes opened again minutes later, they were as cold and opaque as ever. ###########################################################
Pain lanced through my sleep waking me more effectively than any alarm.
With the ease of practice, I began to focus the pain into a tangible thread. In the week or so that I had been trapped in this grey hell, 494 had broken an arm, sprained an ankle sparring, and acquired contusions and bruises to numerous to mention.
My friends left to live their lives on the outside had often remarked on 494's ability to ignore his pain while continuing to fight. They didn't know that the asshole ignored his pain by burying it deep in his mind, burying it in the same portion of subconscious in which I resided.
For every little scraped knee that 494 got, I had suffered; but then I had wised up. Everything in the Grey, as I had come to refer to my subconscious, was malleable, a controllable dream. I had learned to take the pain in and make it tangible. Then the pain could be walled away behind a figurative brick wall where it couldn't hurt me.
All of the pain that is, with the seeming exception of this pain. What the hell had that moron done to us this time? This was suffering beyond anything I had endured, even at the hands of Manticore.
It was pain undiluted by endorphins or any other little tricks of the body. There were distinct disadvantages to being non-corporeal.
My concentration began to fail as the burning in my side became unbearable. I stopped trying to wall the sensations away, and instead allowed them to wash over me.
As though from a great deal of blood-loss, the room began to blur and fade. Heaviness made my eyelids droop and I allowed them to shut.
Suddenly as it had come, the pain began to recede and I wondered dumbly whether this was what it felt like to die.
New sensations bit into my skin, a chill wind, wet pavement, and the smell of salt and for some reason dead fish.
My eyes blinked open.
"Maxie." I didn't know if she was an angel or a hallucination. I soaked in the vision as she began vibrate.
I tried so hard to hold onto her, but the world faded again to grey. ###########################################################
*There really was a point to this chapter, other than teasing you. Honestly, would I lie?
* Authors note, there is a section preceded and followed by ********, this is a flashback.
*Disclaimer: I don't own them, and they wouldn't fit in my tiny apartment even if I did. Which I don't. #############################################################
How can we hate those we don't know? How can we not judge each person separately as we would wish to be judged? How could we kill a single child from afar, before that child has lived even a decade because the child's fathers have been bad and wrong? How can we spill blood? #############################################################
They scream for our blood. They beg for it to be spilled like wine across the streets. For every extremist willing to take to the streets in protest, there must have been twenty times as many willing to silently hate us from the comfort of their own homes.
How could so much hate live in the world? My perch atop a dilapidated apartment building does not give me the same rush as sitting on the space needle, but it gives me sufficient height to see the angry mob circulating outside the wall.
The need to escape it all burned at the back of my mind. Less than a week ago I had been a fucking bike messenger; I'd had friends and a job, a social life even.
Now I was a freak. Not just a freak, the queen freak. I needed to get out of here for a night, go out and be a regular girl again.
A few creative lies about certain feminine problems allowed me to elude my friends. Men were so easy sometimes. Then it was just a little matter of squeezing through the bottom of the perimeter fence during the guard rotations.
The noisy clamor at Crash would have been the best medicine for my blues, but I was far too well known there. Instead I walked down to the nearby waterfront and picked a seedy looking bar at random.
On the outside, The Grog was an unprepossessing looking establishment; on the inside it was far dingier. Keeping my head down I bellied up to the bar. This didn't look like the sort of place where one would order a pitcher of light beer.
The mess and ready availability of hard liquor reminded me inextricably of Alec.
"Scotch, on the rocks." It was the least I could do to honor his memory.
I almost gagged on the first swallow, how the hell did he drink this stuff? My nose hairs felt singed, and a deep sneeze bent me forward. As I straightened back up, someone had the deep effrontery to give me a smack on the ass.
"Well their girlie, someone can't hold their liquor." The man, to use the term very loosely, standing behind me looked as though he were the one who couldn't hold his liquor; despite his hulking size. He was striving for an expression of seductive masculinity, but came off looking rather glazed.
"I'm not interested." I strive to control my baser instincts to maim and kill. Maybe if I turn around and ignore the jerk, he'll take hint. My shoulders twitch as a hand pats down on them.
"Interested in what sweetheart?" He let out a falsely hardy chuckle. "I was just thinking that a hot number like you might be looking for a nice time."
"I said Not Interested." Keep looking at the table, don't get pissed.
"Come on Babe." Dinner platter sized hands clap around my waist. Ten years of brutal conditioning made me react without thinking. My elbows cut down shattering his grip on my hips, and my fist shot out smashing into his nose.
The brute backed away clutching his bloodied face, with an expression of shock then aped quickly out the door.
I tried to go back to my drink, but this dive lacked even the dubious charms of Crash. Grabbing my leather jacket, I followed the example of the bleeding behemoth and headed for the door.
Crisp, fishy night air was a welcome change from the smoke of the bar, and the unusually cloudless sky was filled with stars. I leaned against the wall and let starlight fill my eyes.
Alec had told me that Manticore taught him astronomy as a method of orienteering, but I had skipped out long before then. Staring upwards I tried to remember the constellations which he'd showed me that night. I failed to find anything save the North Star.
How useful, now I knew where Canada was. Temptation filled me. So easy to run away to another country, another place where I wasn't known. Blend in, start a new life for myself. It was just a dream though; a leader can't leave their troops.
"Hey there sweetheart." Goddamn my stargazing, the jerk I'd punched in the bar had used my distraction to sneak up on me. I turned around to dispose of him, and my stomach flipped queasily; the jerk had brought along some of his little friends.
Manticore may have made us stronger, faster, and better; but, one little girl up against ten large, neck-less men wasn't good odds. I clung to a vague hope that they mightn't know that I was a transgenic.
We stare at each other for a beat, and then they all rush me at once. Shit, so much for not knowing what I am, they're not taking any chances.
I knock out one with an uppercut, a second with a jaw-shattering kick to the head, but there are too many. Two of them manage to pin my arms while a third winds back his fist. Bravery fails me for a moment and I shut my eyes.
"Ughfff." I hear the explosive sound of fist against flesh, but the corresponding grunt didn't come from my lips. I crack my eyes.
Either he had trailed me at a distance, or his attunement with his animal instincts had allowed him to sniff me out like a bloodhound. Regardless, I counted my blessings that 494 had found me in time.
As a pair, we made short work of the remaining cretins.
"You're cut ma'am." He tilts my face up and traces his thumb gently across my eyebrow. The breathless rush of blood to my head numbs the pain as he press a scrap of cloth torn from his shirt against the jagged tear across my brow.
************ "You're cut Maxie." We'd just finished rescuing a pair of badly beaten X-6's from certain death at the hands of White.
The rush of blood to my head numbs the pain as he gently presses a bit of cloth against it. For just a moment my eyes meet his, and the warmth in their hazel depths holds me breathless. ************
For just a moment our eyes meet, but no spark stirs their depths this time.
"Mutant freaks." His eyes widen for a moment and 494 crumples to the ground. My eyes snap to the man standing behind him.
We had neglected to count the pile of brainless men lying on the ground. Now it appeared that one of the first two that I had disposed of had recovered sufficiently to grab a piece of broken glass off the filthy sidewalk and avenge his mates.
I snarl wordlessly at the man. He whimpers with fright as he realizes that his makeshift weapon is still buried in 494's flesh.
Moments like these are boundless in their clarity. There is no fog, no haze, just you and the stars. One step, two hands, and then a little crunch. I turn from the pile of meat and bone and run back to my comrade's side.
He lay like a dead dog on the road in a pool of blood. No emotion lines his face, and I realize that somehow even this pain is kept at bay. He is such a product of training that even the distraction of death is kept at bay.
I pull off my shirt without reservations and press it against the hole in his side. Fortune had saved me the brutal task of pulling out the glass, it had fallen out on its own when he had hit the pavement.
"Stay with me buddy, listen to my voice." It doesn't seem right to call him 494, not when he lays cradled and bleeding across my lap.
Alec's cell phone, did 494 still carry it? My hands riffled as gently as possible through his clothes, and finally hit pay dirt in his left jacket pocket.
Please pick up, please pick up. Biggs's voice was like heaven on the other line. "Biggs, don't talk, we're on the corner of Ransted and Waterfront down by the piers. Alec is wounded, badly. Please just hurry." I hang up quickly before he can offer any comfort, I don't deserve it.
"Can you still here me?" His hands are so cold and his pulse beats threadily against my fingers.
A languorous tear drips down the side of his face, with a shock I realize that it is from his own eyes and not one of mine.
"Alec, are you in there? Damnit I know you're still in there and you can't screw this up again you dick. Don't die, not because of me, not again."
A light flutter of eyelashes drew my attention back to his eyes. He blinked them open with torturous slowness, and my eyes locked on his. I felt frozen, I could see all of it in their hazel depths; fright for his life, sadness for my tears, and some other indefinable emotion which warmed my stomach.
"Maxie." He nodded once at me, and then began to shake with deep, shuddering, convulsions.
I held him tight with one arm, while grasping for his pulse with the other hand. Against all hope it felt stronger and steadier, and the paroxysms began to lessen.
I swear that my eyes never left his face, but when his eyes opened again minutes later, they were as cold and opaque as ever. ###########################################################
Pain lanced through my sleep waking me more effectively than any alarm.
With the ease of practice, I began to focus the pain into a tangible thread. In the week or so that I had been trapped in this grey hell, 494 had broken an arm, sprained an ankle sparring, and acquired contusions and bruises to numerous to mention.
My friends left to live their lives on the outside had often remarked on 494's ability to ignore his pain while continuing to fight. They didn't know that the asshole ignored his pain by burying it deep in his mind, burying it in the same portion of subconscious in which I resided.
For every little scraped knee that 494 got, I had suffered; but then I had wised up. Everything in the Grey, as I had come to refer to my subconscious, was malleable, a controllable dream. I had learned to take the pain in and make it tangible. Then the pain could be walled away behind a figurative brick wall where it couldn't hurt me.
All of the pain that is, with the seeming exception of this pain. What the hell had that moron done to us this time? This was suffering beyond anything I had endured, even at the hands of Manticore.
It was pain undiluted by endorphins or any other little tricks of the body. There were distinct disadvantages to being non-corporeal.
My concentration began to fail as the burning in my side became unbearable. I stopped trying to wall the sensations away, and instead allowed them to wash over me.
As though from a great deal of blood-loss, the room began to blur and fade. Heaviness made my eyelids droop and I allowed them to shut.
Suddenly as it had come, the pain began to recede and I wondered dumbly whether this was what it felt like to die.
New sensations bit into my skin, a chill wind, wet pavement, and the smell of salt and for some reason dead fish.
My eyes blinked open.
"Maxie." I didn't know if she was an angel or a hallucination. I soaked in the vision as she began vibrate.
I tried so hard to hold onto her, but the world faded again to grey. ###########################################################
*There really was a point to this chapter, other than teasing you. Honestly, would I lie?