The silence, thick as rubber cement, stretched between Alec and Logan in the wake of Max's departure. They stared at one another for a long moment – Logan squinting in consternation, Alec blinking in innocence – before Logan swiveled in his awesome desk chair and applied all his attention to his newest Eyes Only project.
Alec rolled his only eyes at Logan's back. His thumbs twiddled as he gazed around the room. He wracked his brain for something, anything, that might provide him even a small amount of entertainment while he was stuck at boring old Logie's. He opened his mouth to tease the bespectacled man a little (always a good bit of fun), but then shut it with a snap when he remembered Max's order to behave himself and her promise of ice cream as a reward. The X5 managed to stay quiet for ten whole minutes – a miraculous feat for Alec even when he wasn't suffering from the effects of some kooky drug.
"Logan?"
"Alec." Predictably, Logan didn't even glance away from his computer screen.
"Do you have any blank paper?"
Logan waved distractedly to his right. "By the printer," was his response.
Alec stood and walked to the printer where it sat on the desk next to Logan. He paused to look over Logan's shoulder at the program the older man was working on.
"That's wrong, you know."
Logan huffed and glanced at Alec over the rim of his glasses. "Excuse me?"
"You have to give the variable a finite range," Alec continued. "Otherwise the program will just keep going around and around and around and around and never do anything." He pointed at the offending line of code, leaving a smudged fingerprint on the monitor's flat screen. Logan smacked his hand away and wiped vigorously at the greasy mark with the cuff of his shirt.
"Do you mind? This is very sensitive equipment. And this is a very advanced program requiring intense concentration. Clearly you have no idea what you're talking about."
"I do so!"
Logan turned away from him. "Sure you do. Now, go play or whatever."
Alec stuck his tongue out at Logan's back, swiped an unopened pack of printer paper, and marched back to his side of the room. He plopped down on the floor in front of his chair, ripped open the paper, and began his own little project. He worked diligently at the papers in his hands for the next half hour, occasionally mumbling under his breath comments along the lines of "stupid old ordinaries."
Meanwhile, Logan wallowed in his frustration in dealing with the seemingly impossible computer program. Time and time again he tried to get the computer to follow his apparently impotent commands.
He threw his hands toward the heavens and yelled, "Shit!"
From behind him came a startled gasp. Logan pivoted his chair around to find the younger man sitting in the middle of a pre-historic world created entirely of complex origami figurines. Cavemen were stalked by T-Rexes and saber-cats. Brontosaurs ate from the branches of now-extinct trees. There was even a Pterodactyl perched mid-launch on the peak of what looked like a volcano. Alec stared at Logan with wide hazel eyes and one hand covering his opened mouth.
"Ohhhh! You said a bad word! Wait until Max finds out!"
Logan grumbled a half-hearted "Sorry," and continued to stare at the arts & crafts littering his floor. While Logan was distracted, Alec used his superior transgenic eyesight to focus in on the computer screen.
"You really don't know what you're doing, do you?" At Logan's look of surprise and annoyance, Alec pointed at the computer and rushed on before Logan could interrupt him, "The function of 'x' should equal the sum of 'x' to the three-fifths and eight point three nine all over Pi to the seventh."
His declaration was met by a blank stare from Logan, but Alec didn't notice. He cocked his head to the side, a lock of paint-highlighted hair falling across his brow, and bit his bottom lip, his attention still trained on the program. "Besides," Alec went on, "you have it looking inside your computer for the catalyst, instead of searching outside in other systems." He shook his head. "And that's just silly."
Alec turned his eyes to Logan, who met his gaze with eyebrows raised above his glasses. Then Logan started to giggle, which turned into full-blown, body-doubling, hysterical laughter. Alec crossed his arms over his chest and glared at him with childish indignation.
"Stop laughing at me!" Logan raised a placating hand and attempted to get himself under control. Alec raised his voice again. "I'm right!" That statement was met by a rude snort from Logan.
"Sure you are. Why don't you go find something to eat?" The X5 looked at him with suspicion and mild offense at his attempt to distract and buy silence with food. "Really, Alec. I have some pre-Pulse cereals in the kitchen."
The man-child tried not to come off as too eager when he jumped up. "Fine," he said, lifting his chin in mild defiance and placing his hands on his hips in a very Max-like stance. "But, I'm not leaving because I'm wrong. I'm right. I'm just hungry." He turned, carefully stepped over his creations, and left for the kitchen with his head held high.
Logan pushed his glasses up and turned his attention back to the code on his computer screen. He shook his head and muttered, "Kids."
A yell sounded out from the kitchen. "I heard that!"
"Ow."
The crunch of his forehead hitting the keyboard had woken Logan from his nap. It happened all the time. He sat up and lifted his glasses to rub at his eyes. Once his glasses were firmly back in place, he glanced at the screen. He was in the exact same place he'd been before he sent Alec off to the kitchen over an hour earlier. Absolutely no forward progress had been made and he wasn't any closer to getting his program to work.
"Maybe I should take my own advice and get something to eat." He was talking to himself. It happened all the time.
Logan backed away from his desk and walked toward the kitchen. On the way, he stopped to examine Alec's origami. He shook his head, a smug grin on his face. "The Dawn of Man didn't arrive until after dinosaurs were extinct." Content with this affirmation that Alec really didn't know anything about anything, Logan continued on his path. His confident, but noisy, electronic stride was brought up short when he arrived at his destination.
The kitchen was a war zone. Every single cabinet and cupboard door was swung wide. All of the metal pots and pans appeared to be missing, along with several of the cooking utensils. The entire contents of the refrigerator had been emptied, from the freezer to the vegetable bin and everything in between. The majority of the food seemed to have been consumed – given the enormous pile of ripped wrappers, empty boxes and dirty dishes – but some had been picked up and strewn by the whirlwind of chaos as it swept through.
Apparently, Alec had been conducting science experiments using the microwave. There was a still-bubbling and oozing mess that had exploded. Logan couldn't even begin to identify what went into its creation, but he could have sworn he saw egg shells stuck to one of the walls of the electronic box. Several bottles of expensive pre-pulse condiments had been used to create finger paintings on the countertops. Alec must have squeezed the plastic ketchup bottle a little bit too hard, because the red paste was splattered on one corner of the counter and over a good portion of the floor in Pollock-esque splotches. It looked like the transgenic had tried using his already gunk-splattered jacket to mop up some of the mess. His attempts had only succeeded in spreading it.
Logan was speechless. Just thinking about the effort and time it was going to take to restore his kitchen to its former pristine glory was giving Logan a migraine. He put a hand to each temple, rubbing gently, and took a deep breath. He closed his eyes for a moment, hoping that when he opened them again he would be drooling on his keyboard, and this whole catastrophe would be a very, very bad dream. He opened one eye at a time, sighed, shoulders slumping, and left the room in search of the wayward hellion who'd created his waking nightmare.
Upon stepping into the living room, Logan almost had a heart attack. All of his expensive leather furniture had been rearranged and overturned to create a formidable fort. The fort was decorated using his Egyptian cotton, 500-thread count sheets. Metal cooking utensils had been twisted and bent into a sturdy pole from which hung a black bed sheet neatly folded into a flag. Logan's collection of rare Russian figurines were posted as sentries along the top of the fort. The mystery of the missing pots and pans was solved by the existence of a miniature catapult that sat off to one corner. The machine looked functional, it just needed to be tested…using a vase from the Ming Dynasty that sat in the middle of a frying pan. Logan gasped and snatched up the antique, which had been in his family for five generations, and placed it gingerly on the floor.
"Alec!" Logan stormed through the house looking for the transgenic. "Get in there and put my living room back the way you found it!" He searched the entire house. Every room had some evidence of Alec's passing: food wrappers created a trail of litter through the hallways, the sheets had been pulled from the mattresses in all the bedrooms, most of the books had been removed from their shelves and placed in piles around the library floor. Oddly enough, the bathrooms remained in their usual immaculate conditions. Logan looked everywhere, but Alec was nowhere to be found.
Finally, Logan returned to his study and found Alec sitting in front of the computer, mustard-stained fingers flying over the keys. Logan's jaw worked up and down, but no sound emerged as he stood there staring at one of his worst nightmares. The shock sent fine tremors running though his body. His voice shook with them when at last he forced words past a throat tightened with rage.
"What the hell are you doing!?"
Alec smiled up at him. "I fixed it."
Logan rushed to the desk, causing the desk chair to roll a couple of feet away as he shoved Alec aside. Alec giggled as the chair spun on its wheels. Logan stared wildly at the screen, gripping the sides of the monitor with white-knuckled hands.
"You've changed everything!"
"I know." Alec twirled around in the chair again, his smiled widening. "It'll work now."
Logan typed various keys in an attempt to recover his lost data, but of course Alec had saved all the changes permanently to the hard drive. Logan couldn't even begin to figure out how to return his program to its former state. His face turned an unhealthy shade of purple as the realization hit him. He was out of his depth.
He turned angry and accusing eyes on the young man still twirling in his chair. "You no good little lout! You've completely ruined everything!"
Alec jumped up. "Just try it, you watermelon head!"
"It's not even the right season for watermelon!" He stepped up into Alec's face. "And I don't need to try it. Anyone with as much expertise as I have would know at a glance that it's wrong."
"Yeah, well people with your stupid expertise let the Pulse happen, so there!"
Logan returned to the computer, shaking his head. "I can't understand why Max puts up with you." Without another thought, he deleted the entire program, determined to fix it later when Alec and his so-called help were gone. Satisfied, he turned to glare at the stunned transgenic. "She should have just let that bomb explode in your head."
At those snarled words, Alec snatched the keyboard from beneath Logan's hands and hurled it across the room. It flew through space, taking out several cameras before embedding itself firmly in Logan's plasma screen television.
Logan pushed at Alec and screeched, "You little fuck!"
Alec aimed a kick at Logan's left leg with all the power of a full-grown, adult X5. Lucky for Logan's knee Alec's foot turned at the last second. Unfortunately for the rest of Logan's body the kick impacted squarely on a joint of the exoskeleton, smashing the metal and short-circuiting the entire contraption. Logan collapsed to the floor with a yelp, his legs jerking wildly amidst flying sparks and electronic screaming.
Max chose that exact moment to return. The sight of Alec standing over the writhing form of her not-boyfriend, his hands clenching and unclenching, rage bubbling up from the deep green depths of his eyes, stopped her where she stood. She hesitated for a moment before running forward to jerk Alec back away from Logan.
"What the hell is going on?" She knelt beside Logan, hovering but not touching. She looked up at Alec. His own rage melted away under her icy brown glare. "Answer me Alec! What did you do this time?"
He shook his head in protest. "I didn't do anything."
Max raised her eyebrows and threw her arms out, her gesture taking in Logan as well as the whole of the room.
Alec bit his lower lip, his shoulders slumping in resignation. "Well, okay, I did do something." He actually looked repentant before he pointed a finger at Logan. "But, he started it!"
She put up a hand to ward off his explanations. "I don't want to hear it, Alec."
Alec continued his attempts to convince her. "I was trying to help and he started saying mean things and calling me bad names!"
Logan huffed from the floor, where his legs were still twitching. Max looked down at him with utter concern, as if Alec had kicked a puppy instead of a grown man. Logan returned her look with eyes imploring and pathetic. "I think he shattered the wiring when he smashed the casing."
Max stood in one fluid movement and closed the distance between herself and Alec. She jabbed at Alec's chest with one accusing finger. "How could you do this Alec? You know that Logan's not as fast as we are, not as strong as we are. How could you be this cruel. What's wrong with you?!"
"But Max – "
"You can't ever doing anything right, can you?!"
That shut him up. A myriad of emotions chased each other across his face. In the end only one remained: absolute anguish. The look in his eyes made Max feel like she'd just kicked a puppy. But the expression on his face was almost one of pleading. It reminded her of the way her brother had looked in the end. She watched, stunned, as unshed tears pooled in Alec's eyes. With a gasping sob, he turned and blurred toward the wall of windows in the living room. Glass shattered everywhere as he crashed through.
A shocked cry was ripped from Max's throat. "Alec!" She ran to the windows in time to see him take off across the roof of another building, an escape route she'd once used. "Alec, wait!" She stood on the threshold between Logan's penthouse and the stormy outside and watched as a flash of lightening illuminated Alec's rapidly disappearing figure. Her hand gripped the window frame as warring emotions roared inside her. A jagged piece of glass nicked the palm of her hand, sending a single drop of red to splash unnoticed among the shards littering the floor.
"Uh, a little help here?" Logan's nasal voice finally penetrated the fog surrounding Max. She turned her head slowly toward him. He was trying to pull himself up onto the desk chair, but his own weight and the constant twitching of his robotic legs kept pushing it out from under him. Max hesitated a moment before she walked over to hold the back of the chair so that it wouldn't roll away. Her shallow cut was already healing, but the blood on her palm left a tacky smear on the black leather.
With Max steadying the chair Logan finally managed to settle himself in place. He mumbled half to himself, half to Max the whole time. "Couldn't he have used the door like a normal person? It's going to cost me hundreds to replace that glass again." He tried to hold his legs still with one arm as his hands worked to get the malfunctioning machine off him. "Not to mention the thousands it will take to replace my exo." Max remained silent during his rant. His legs spasmed uncontrollably. "Damn him! Selfish brat. Well, at least he's gone." Logan disconnected the exo's power source. The twitching ceased and he sat back with a sigh. "And good riddance. Even child-like he's vicious."
Logan didn't notice Max's utter stillness or the distant look glazing over her eyes as she remembered her own childhood. Unwanted visions traipsed through her mind. She stood in formation among her sisters and brothers. Training, sparring, tracking. Learning control. Fighting, hunting, killing. Without regret. Without remorse. There was blood on her lip, in her mouth, and it wasn't her own. Guiltless. Innocent. Instinct. Freedom.
Max gripped the back of the chair hard enough to reopen the wound on her hand. A stinging ache rippled through her arm, clearing away the haze of her memories and pushing them back to the darkness where she kept them locked. She realized that Logan was still talking and caught just the end of his sentence, "…probably end up just like his psychotic twin."
She jerked away from him as if he'd slapped her. "What did you just say?" Her voice was a breathy whisper in her own ears. A fine trembling had started running through her limbs. Logan grunted, straightening before turning his gaze on her. His expression was gentle and sympathetic, but she saw the condescension in his blue eyes.
"Max, I know you miss your brother, but, really, it's just as well that Manticore put him down before he hurt anyone else."
"Shut up." She thought she'd spoken aloud, but maybe she hadn't because Logan continued on as if he hadn't heard. With his words came more traitorous memories.
"And Alec…well, it must be a genetic defect because I can already see the violent tendencies getting out of control." In her mind, Max was running with Ben, tearing the 'nomalie' apart with her siblings. Logan spoke again, "Maybe we'd all be safer without him around."
Max clapped hands over her ears and screamed, "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"
Logan held up both his hands in a gesture that managed to be both placating and defensive. His words held a thread of panic as he watched Max's hard-won control crack down the center. "Max, Max just calm down."
Her brown eyes were wide and wild. "You don't know. You don't know!" There was a hysteria in her voice that he'd never heard before. She was looking at him, but she wasn't seeing him. She was seeing doctors with their tests, feeling red lasers burning into her eyes, suffocating as she tried to push back walls that shrank in on her while she screamed out her own name. Alec's words echoed in her mind, "You wouldn't understand. You can't understand – you weren't there. You ran." And with a snap, clarity returned to her. She couldn't do it again. She couldn't abandon her unit.
Logan was pleading with her, backpedaling to keep her away from what he thought was the edge of her sanity. "Max –"
She cut him off. "You have no right to talk about him, about them – about any of it. You weren't there." She was distancing herself from him, moving slowly toward the door.
"Max, I didn't mean anything." His spider-like fingers gripped the arms of his chair, powerless to stop her retreat. "Max, I'm sorry."
She stared at him with brown eyes gone cool with indifference, renewed control wrapping around her like armor, and spoke with a voice devoid of emotion. "We don't want your pity," she said, and then turned and walked away.
Alec moved blindly through the dark streets of Seattle. He was unaware of the autumn rain pouring down on him, making the paint in his hair flow in rainbow rivulets over his barcode and mix with the tears on his face. He blurred through barren streets and past sector checkpoints. He ran toward solace.
TBC