Aaron's eyes fluttered open and he found himself wondering how long he had been knocked out. Apparently long enough to be tied up, he noticed and looked down at himself. And he though that being tied to a chair was only something in the movies.
"Sleeping Beauty's awake." Mole grunted.
"Shame." Alec muttered.
"What're you going to do with him?" Asha asked.
"I hadn't really thought that completely through." Alec told her honestly. "I just knew that I'd be more comfortable if this lying skeezebag wasn't able to scamper off."
"Could you please tell me why you keep calling me a liar?" Aaron asked. "It's really annoying."
"Don't act like you don't know." Alec said and shook his head. "You're lucky only the X5s and X6s heard the crap you've been spreading and it hasn't gotten to the others yet, or you probably wouldn't have woken up."
"What am I spreading? If I'm spreading it, I'd really like to know what it is."
"I think he really doesn't know." Asha said quietly.
"The plan!" Joshua said. "The new plan. Max and Aaron gettin' busy."
"What?" Aaron asked. "Max and I have never... gotten busy, as you say."
"So... it wasn't you who told everybody that you did?" Alec asked.
Aaron shook his head. "No. I didn't even know that's what people thought. Damn 3%."
Joshua moved around to the back of the chair that Aaron was tied to and untied the ropes. Aaron stretched and stood up. He looked at them all. "Now I know what that transgenic was talking about."
"What transgenic?" Asha asked.
"One of them, a man, came up to me when I was in the cafeteria." He told them all. "Before Alec came. He kept talking about Max and how I was just playing dumb and how I had done something, but he wouldn't say what. Now I know what."
"Does Max know?" Alec asked.
"I don't know. I did notice a few X5s giving her some looks, but I don't know if she knew what they were for." Aaron told him. "I certainly didn't."
"So, no new plan?" Joshua asked.
"No, no new plan." Alec told him, trying to think of a way to remedy the situation.
* * *
Max opened her eyes, feeling as if she had slept for days. She adjusted her vision to look at the clock on Logan's laptop and saw that she had only been asleep for a few hours. She pushed the covers off herself and sat up. She looked around the room, wondering where Logan had gone to. She stretched and went to sit in front of his laptop, deciding not to go out and receive more looks. She opened Minesweeper and started playing.
A few minutes and seven Minesweeper wins later, the door opened and Logan entered the room with a grocery bag. Max turned to face him, eagerly eyeing up the bag. "What've you got there?"
"Just some things I asked Asha to drop off." He told her and set the bag down next to the laptop. "She left them outside the door, and I guess she left."
"And what are these things?" She asked as her hand crept up to the mouth of the bag.
He pulled it from her grasp and grinned. "Not everything in here is for your eyes."
"Ah, you got some unmentionables in there?"
"No unmentionables." He told her and reached into the bag. "Just something you can't see."
"Well, anything that I can see?" She asked.
He removed mostly all of the items from the bag, only leaving something small in it. He folded up the bag and tucked it away in a drawer.
Max eyed the food in front of her hungrily, then looked up at him, her eyes asking the question.
"What's mine is yours."
Max looked at the food before her and her eyes fell upon one of a pair of apples. She remembered that she hadn't gotten to eat the last apple she was able to get her hands on, so she reached for it. She took a bite out of it and sat chewing, watching Logan pick up the other apple. She swallowed and before taking another bite, deciding to tell him.
"Logan..."
He looked at her, telling her to go on with his eyes.
"I want to tell you what happened - what made me come here."
Fearing it would be very bad news, he braced himself. "Oh?"
"Yeah." She sighed, then went on. "Well, I'd been getting weird looks from X5s and 6s all day and I had no idea why. Then - then I overheard some of them talking. They think I slept with Aaron because he and I came in late last night together."
Seeing the look on his face, she continued quickly. "I mean, I didn't. We didn't. We went to - to talk about stuff that was going on here, that's all. But I guess someone saw it as something different and now everyone thinks..."
She sighed. "I mean, it's not even that that I was so bothered by that, I mean, since when have I cared when people thought stuff like that about me? I think I just finally crashed. I haven't been able to really relax since this whole thing started. There's always been at least one little thing on my mind... and I guess it was the final straw."
He wanted to take her hand and tell her it was okay, but knew he couldn't do that, and possibly never could again.
* * *
Alec looked out at the crowd of X5s and X6s that had managed to squeeze into the cafeteria. Asha gave him a small supportive smile and he climbed on top of a table. He waited for them to quiet down before he spoke.
"I know that there's been a certain rumor flying around the X5s and X6s." He said loudly so they all could here. "But I'm here to tell you that it isn't true and you've just got to shut up about it. Someone got their facts messed up and I hope whoever it is feels like a total ass, to be honest. I'm just glad it didn't get around to everyone, and I'd appreciate it if it stayed that way. It's not true and that's the end of it. Thank you."
He stepped down from the table and watched the transgenics leave the room, mumbling. Mole walked over to him.
"I doubt any of 'em really believed it." He said. "It was probably their only source of entertainment around here."
"Even so." Asha said. "It really wasn't right."
Alec turned to smile at her.
* * *
Max set her apple core down and sighed. "I really don't want to go back out there."
"Well, you can stay here as long as you want." Logan told her. "Though I'm sure you'd get sick of sharing this confined space with me."
"I'm sure I wouldn't." She told him quietly.
Damn virus. They both thought.
* * *
Orion looked up when the door to his room opened. He expected to see TJ, who had been visiting him regularly as he was healing, but was surprised to see Aaron - a bruised Aaron - standing in his doorway. "What happened to you?"
"Just a misunderstanding." Aaron replied and closed the door behind him. "So, how are you? Statistically you just be almost completely healed by now."
"I am." Orion answered. "But the medics don't want me out of here yet since they don't have the proper equipment to see if my leg will stay on or whatever."
Aaron noted the new carefree attitude that Orion appeared to develop. He seemed quite a way from the CO at beautiful old Manticore. "I'll have a word with them. Give them my professional opinion."
"Thanks."
"So, I take it you read the information I gave you."
"Once or twice." Orion said. "And you were right, it did answer a lot of my questions."
"I can tell." Aaron replied. "You don't have that look in your eye anymore."
"What look?"
"Before you knew about my past, there was always this look in your eye." Aaron explained. "It was a look that plainly said you weren't sure if you could really trust me because you didn't know everything."
"I suppose that look was there." Orion admitted. "But I've changed quite a lot while here."
"I noticed."
* * *
Max closed the door to Logan's room, full but not as happy as she thought she'd be after she finished with the food. She had wanted to tell him that she was three quarters on the way to getting rid of the virus, but then a nasty little voice in her head had asked what would happen if one of the deals didn't go through and she didn't end up with the money and the thought of telling him flew out the window.
She turned the corner, ready to face more horrible looks from more transgenics, but she didn't find a single one. Everyone had returned to the way they had been before, as if they hadn't just been whispering about who she was sleeping with. She found that very odd, but she found the sight of Asha and Alec playing a game of Go Fish in the communications room much more odd.
"What's going on?" She asked.
"Alec fixed it." Asha said. "Got any threes?"
"No." Alec said. "Any twos? Yeah, I came to the rescue. It was quite a moment, you should've been there."
"Plan's the same." Joshua said to her, a goofy grin plastered on his face.