Author's Note: Hi! I think I really really like writing Jondy. She's so liberating…I still might have to kill her but I like her anyway. Now I think it's time that put your Zack questions to rest. Zack is one of those really important characters that you hear about a lot but will only be shown in the story for a short time. It's mean of me but it's how I need to do this, for now. It might or might not change but how things are looking now it's not going to. Sorry. I wrote this whole story because of one scene that I had in my head before I started this. (Strangely enough that's how a lot of my stories are started, I write a whole world around one scene.) The scene I wrote this around is the Zack one…for those who are wondering about "Has Anyone ever?" that was written around the "Want" "Need" scene that so many drooled over…me included. Anyways…one with the story.

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Comin' to Get You

Chapter 16: For the Mad

"Ain't nothing working, ain't nothing right. There's a hole in me that I can't fill, no matter how hard I try " someone was singing. Off in the distance, far, far away. "Hey, bartender, hit me with a double, and introduce me to that girl with the bubble. I'm looking for trouble tonight. No momma don't trust me tonight. You be the center, baby; I'll be the quarterback. Hike hit the tailback, watch it on playback. Jaw smash that hitting that redbone, up in the end zone biting on the collarbone." Far away, as in on another planet or a parallel universe where she was some chick in a dorm room typing at her computer.

"I just want your company I want you to comfort me just come with me," at least whoever they were, they were singing a good song. "Hey, bartender, hit me with another. I just about had to kill this brother. Shit, I'm looking for trouble tonight. No momma don't trust me tonight." A bit offensive, but a nice song anyway. Nice voice too. "You be the beauty – baby, I'll be the beast. Don't give a fuck take it to the bedroom. Take it the streets. Take it like a man, muthafucker. Yo bitch chose me, muthafucker."

Wa-ait a second. That was her voice. Someone had stolen her voice. 'Give it back, you rat bastard! I need that voice. Voicenappers!' She tried to yell it but it didn't really work since someone had stolen her voice. The singing went on, "I just want your company. I want you to comfort me, just come with me. Take me there. Take me with you, I can't be alone tonight. I can't trust myself tonight. I can't trust myself tonight. Baby, please don't trust me tonight. No you can't trust me tonight." That couldn't be her voice, could it? If that was her voice it would mean she had a mouth, which would mean she had a face. Now if she had a face it would only be logical to assume she had a head, and a head meant that she had a body complete with fingers and toes. Maybe she even had a name to go with it all.

She didn't feel any fingers or toes. She was just a nameless consciousness that floated in space, a mind without a body. That was possible right? Time to test the theory. 'Toes…move!' She waited, patiently for anything. Nothing happened so she tried again. 'Fingers…wiggle!' Nothing happened again. 'Humph…wait a cotton pickin' minute!' Something happened, a toe moved, and with the movement came the sudden overwhelming sense of being solid. She wasn't just a mind she was a pretty face too. With a name, she was a Jondy with the simple movement of her big toe. 'Woohoo!' Now it was time for the big stuff. 'Open on up eyes.'

It seemed to take forever for her to open her eyes; every fiber of her being was focused on that one task. She could see again, it was a miracle. 'The Lord said "Let there be light", and it was go-ood.' She was still singing, mumbling the words to the song that she absently identified as "Bartender." Good song, fun song, though the lyrics seemed to be clearer from far away. "Ain't nothing working. Ain't nothing right. There's a hole in me that I can't fill no matter how hard I try. Ain't nothing sweeter, there ain't nothing wrong. All the pain that I receive keeps me strong. It keeps me moving on."

She heard voices now, outside. Through a door she thought closing her eyes, a small sense of triumph filling her when they obeyed readily. "How is she doing?" someone snapped.

'I don't think he really cares. I think I'm gonna cry.' Her lip jutted out without her having to tell it to.

"Other than scrapes and bruises she's in perfect health."

'I can't move, you baffon, you call that perfect health?'

"You're telling me, this girl killed that many of my men without even a broken bone?"

'You want me to have broken bones? That's it, you're not my friend, I'd say anymore but I don't think I've actually met you before.' Jondy managed to twitch a shoulder as the door to the room she had apparently been stashed in came open with a metallic crash.

There were soft footsteps and then, "X5-210, can you hear me?" The words were spoken from above her, in a harsh deep voice.

Blue eyes snapped open at meet with brown, she looked up at him with a smile, "I just realized," she managed to get out in a voice that sounded like gravel. "Give me a nine and an 'o' and I'm a really bad teenage version of a soap opera."

She watched smiling as he leaned over her, his eyebrows drawing together in confusion. "There's less animal in your eyes today," he commented absently.

She laughed, "but not mu-uch."

"Do you know how many of my men you killed yesterday?'

"Yesterday? Really? Wow, I've been out for a really long time. I've never been asleep that long in my life…let's see. I shot one in the head, I snapped someone's neck, I bit someone's throat out," she smacked her lips and looked at him with a small frown. "By the way, do you think I could have some water to get his taste out of my mouth?" She smiled and closed her eyes, "that's three. Too bad I couldn't make it four. That would have been fun." She lifted her head off the ground slowly and looked up at the long red welts on his neck outlined in dark purple and blue bruises. "I almost got you, bi-atch." She let her head fall back as he started talking.

"We were just going to kill you when we saw you at the club, we still might, but you managed to do something that so far only one other transgenic has come close to doing. So we did some research…look at me."

"Nu-uh."

"And why not."

"Bored now. Bored. Bored. Bo-ored." She lifted her arm off the floor and inch and dropped it back down for emphasis. When she realized what she did she grinned. "Ooh. Squeak!"

The dark man just blinked down at her, "Squeak?"

"I moved my arm…it was an uplifting moment…that's over now." She sighed and pouted down at her arm, "bored again."

"You are this close," he held his thumb and finger half an inch apart, "to dying. This close," he shoved his fingers in her face, making sure that she could see them. "And you're bored?"

"Uh huh," she smirked up at him.

He leaned down next to her and she squinted up at him, not sure why he was so angry about her unconcern. "Is there something we could talk about that wouldn't leave you bored?"

"Hmm…let's talk about the-o-lo-gy," She said slowly, trying to gain the rest of her motor functions.

"You want to talk about God?" He looked like he had eaten something disgusting. "You, transgenic freak that you are, want to talk about God?"

"Why not?"

"What would you know about God?" He sneered down at her and she grinned up at him, showing fang.

"Man is God."

"Excuse me?" She caught him off guard, how cool is that?

"God is the creator, and in many cases also the destroyer, is he not?" She didn't wait for him to reply. "Man created us and he certainly was, and is, good at hurting and killing us. So man is God…but unlike man and his God we were created as a more perfect image…well, most of us were." He lifted an eyebrow as he looked down at her smile. "Its all one really big joke."

"A joke?" he spit out.

Blue eyes were lucid for one second, the gleam in them dying before burning brighter again. "In the beginning there was neither the Word, nor Love, but laughter, the roaring eternal laughter whose echoes are more deceitful than the mirages of the desert."

"And did you come up with that all on your own?"

"The Accident, by Elie Weisel. From The Night Trilogy, you illiterate fuck." As he looked down at those eyes he had the feeling she was angry more because he didn't know the book she was talking about then the fact that he had kidnapped her.

"Now you're quoting things at me?"

"I could quote other things." She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively, stopping her eyes went wide, "You will be alone at last/ in the sanity of your friends. / Brilliance will fade away from you/ and you will settle in dimmed light. / You will not remember how to mourn/ your dying difference. / You will not be better but/ they will say you are well."

"And what was that?"

"Lucille Clifton's 'For the mad.'"

"How appropriate," he said dryly.

"I thought so," she looked down at her left arm and frowned. Looking at her he could tell that she was no longer paying any attention to him.

He narrowed his eyes and grabbed her chin, forcing her eyes on him. "We might let you live, you just have to help us."

She sighed and rolled her eyes, "and how should I do that?"

"As I told you, we decided to do some research…our information tells us that you were one of the twelve that escaped in '09. The transgenic X5-452 thinks of you as her sister, we could use you."

She blinked up at him; "You want me to be afraid of you, don't you?"

He smiled down at her, eyes that weren't lucid but something more, something dangerous, looked back up at him unflinching, "yes."

"It must kill you inside to see how very much I don't care. By the by, my name is Jondy, not 210, and it's Max, not 452. What's your name?"

His eyes narrowed, "Ames White."

"Sucks to be you."

"You're going to die," he sneered as he brought his face closer to hers.

"One can hope." She smiled, laughed, and before he knew what was happening her right hand was on his throat. Her nails bit into flesh and she pulled him down until her lips almost brushed his. "One can only hope. I just might take you with me, too," she snarled. The first sign of the animal that she had been the night before.

White laughed, "you're too weak to choke me to death this time, 210."

Her smile was back in place; he liked the snarl better. "Who said anything about choking you? I can still bite your face off." She clicked her teeth together so close to his nose that he could feel the air that she disturbed with them. She dropped her hand and let her head fall back to the floor.

He pulled away with a hand on his throat, and glared down at her. "Give her more sedative. I'll ask her again tomorrow."

"Sir, it hasn't been long enough since the last dose…"

"Do it!"

"Yes, sir."

Jondy's eyes met with White's as she flashed fang and started to sing. "Can't keep me down. Can't keep me down, no. Hey, hey, man, what's your problem? I see you tryin' to hurt me bad, don't know what you're up against. Maybe you should reconsider, come up with another plan, cause you know I'm not that kind of girl that'll lay there, let you come first." She didn't stop singing when the needle slipped into her side or when the door closed behind the two men.

"You can push me out the window I'll just get back up. You can run me over with your 18-wheeler truck and I won't give a fuck. You can hang me like a slave I'll go underground. You can run me over with your 18-wheeler but you can't keep me down." They could still hear her and she knew it. She kept singing until the world went bright and then black once again. "Everywhere that I go there's someone waiting to chain me. Everything that I say, there's someone trying to shortchange me. I am only this way cause of what you have made me, and I'm not gonna break. You can push me out the window I'll just get back up. You can run me over with your 18-wheeler truck and I won't give a fuck."

~*~

Alec looked down at the broken lamp that Zane had yet to clean up, and sighed. Max and Zane were talking about their options and he could only manage to listen with half an ear. The entire apartment was a mess; the only thing that Zane had cleaned up was the blood. As though seeing it suggested that it was Jondy's. He wasn't complaining, he didn't much want to see the blood that may or may not have been his friend's.

He wished though that he had cleaned some of it up. The wreckage around him suggested things about the fight that he didn't want to think about. Like with how so many things were smashed, at least five against one, and in most circumstances he would lay his money down on Jondy but this didn't look like most circumstances. Some of the damage looked more like it was an animal attack than human, which led him to wonder what Jondy's state of mind had been when she was fighting. He worried that Jondy had lost it and, if she had, it meant that she'd been terrified. If she had been it meant that she had been losing; badly. He picked up a book off her floor and looked at it sadly, running light fingers over the spine he bit his lip.

"Alec!" he looked up at Max and blinked slowly. "Are you listening?" She had a hand on her hip as she looked down at him with a raised brow.

"Sorry, I'm just worried."

He watched as her face softened while Zane's went hard, "yeah, well, it would help more if you would pay attention.

Max sighed and gave Zane a look that said 'back off' before she turned back to Alec. "I asked who you thought did this."

"My first guess is White, though this looks messier than his usual work…though I'm sure it being Jondy would account for that. My second would be someone she pissed off." He ran a hand down his face in frustration. "If its someone she pissed off it would be easier, if its White we're going to have some trouble. Either way we have to find where they're keeping her, if she's still alive…"

"Don't even…"

"Face it, Zane, there's a good chance that if it's White she's already dead," he stared Zane down, something yesterday he wouldn't have been able to do, but the thought of Jondy's death seemed to twist something inside of him so that he gave up. Alec went on, "then we have to put together a rescue that won't get us killed."

"We can do it," Max said quietly lifting her chin in determination, her full lips pulled into a tight line.

"We can, but we have to figure out who did it first."

"She's with White," she said sitting down. "This just screams him."

"Yeah, I was just hoping otherwise," Alec ran a hand through his har and his eye met with Zane's. "Before we start doing anything we need to clear something up." Zane just raised and eyebrow," about me and Jondy."

"I don't want to hear it," he growled standing up suddenly.

"Nothing happen…" he waited for the look of disbelief that he knew was coming. "We're friends, that's it. You got mad at her for no reason…I just wanted to make sure that you being angry at me for something I didn't do, didn't get in the way."

"Why should I believe…"

"Because he's with me," Max bit out glaring at her brother.

"If you want to get Jondy back you're gonna have to believe us. Put on your game face and get over it," Alec frowned at Zane but let a sigh of relief escape his lips when he saw his stance relax.

"I can do computer stuff but I'm not very good at it," Zane started without preamble. "Jondy always took care of that," he said quietly to his hands as they picked at a tear in the couch.

"We can take care of that…Alec and I will go talk to Logan."

"Are you sure you want to do that?" Deep green eyes met brown and he lifted an eyebrow in concern.

"We can handle it," Max smiled and then shrugged. "I can guilt trip him into just about anything at this point."

Alec's eyes narrowed, "guilt trip him my ass. You want to make him jealous."

"Yup," she smiled again. "I think I'm entitled, and who better to help me than my new boyfriend?"

"I'm your boyfriend? I hadn't realized we'd made it official." He laughed at her glare and followed her out of the apartment with a wave at Zane.