Author's Note: First of all, thanks for the reviews everyone. I'd like to answer everyone individually, but I never find the time and I think you'd rather have me write faster. Correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, thanks for the support.
And once again I have had it pointed out to me (by Black Rose, thank you) that my knowledge of DA canon is limited, as I got the date for the Pulse wrong. I didn't know an exact date had ever been mentioned in the show. Anyway, this is an AU, so September 11 it remains.
By the way, Sadie Joyce, you mentioned Alec and that you'd like to see some Faith/Alec interaction. Since Faith can be considered his mother as well (more or less) I hope you meant that in a non-couple way. ;-) Anyway, Alec will probably make an appearance, but not for some time. Remember, at this point in the DA timeline he's still part of Manticore.
Okay, enough foreplay then. On with the show:
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Part 3: Meet the Family
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Checking her watch, Max figured that she had been standing here on this street corner for about an hour now, fidgeting in indecision. She was not normally one to fidget. If anything she was too impulsive, doing things without thinking them through, running headfirst into trouble and hoping that her transgenic head would be tougher than any walls that might come along.
Right now, though, she was fidgeting.
Logan had asked her whether she wanted the address of her mo..., of the woman who had unwillingly donated her DNA to the X-5 generation. It hadn't taken her long to answer it, despite not having a clue what she really wanted to do. So yes, she took the address. And, in typical Max-fashion, she had told Normal, her boss, that she'd be taking a few days off and (not waiting for him to answer) hopped onto her motorbike and made her way to Los Angeles without allowing much thinking to go on.
Now she stood in front of the address in question and heavy thinking was going on. A lot of heavy thinking and internal arguments that she really could have done without.
What was she doing here? It wasn't like this woman would mean anything to her or vice versa. So they had DNA in common. Big deal! Logan had said that this Faith had been a coma patient at the time, so odds were she didn't even know she had kids. Not to mention that she had about a hundred genetically engineered super soldiers as kids, eleven of whom were currently on the run from the US government.
Yeah, that would go over real well.
Then there was that other voice, though, the one that insisted she should do this. There had to be something special about this woman. Normal human DNA had not survived the Manticore enhancements, but Faith's had. Without her the X-5 would never have gotten off the ground, would have been written off as yet another failed experiment, so there had to be something extraordinary about her. Something that ... Max had no idea what she was hoping to find here. Find some kind of ... what? Raison d'ĂȘtre? Self-definition? Family?
She scoffed at that last one. She had managed her whole life without any family apart from her siblings, most of whom she hadn't seen in ten years. She certainly didn't need a mo..., she couldn't even make herself think the word. It had been easy when the whole thing had been an abstract, something from an ancient file. It was a whole lot harder now when she was this close to the person to whom that word applied.
Huffing, she took two steps toward the building. This was getting ridiculous. She had nothing to fear here, nothing at all. This was a reconnaissance mission. She was investigating a lead that could possibly tell her more about Manticore, provide some knowledge that might help bring those bastards down. That was the sole reason she was here. Nothing else. She was a soldier, damn it, looking to discover vital info about her enemy.
How was it that pushing aside whatever humanity she might possess never worked the way it had been drilled into her when she actually wanted it to work?
Night had fallen about two hours ago and Los Angeles, while in better shape than Seattle, was a dark and scary place after dark. Scary to other people, that was. For Max the night was no different from the day, except that it provided better cover for her planned insertion. Yes, she had to think about this in soldier's terms, otherwise she'd screw it up. She didn't want to screw this up. She needed to be a professional here.
It was just that her inner soldier's voice always sounded like Lydecker. She hated that voice.
Beating her inner fidgeting over the head and sending it off crying into a corner she approached the building. She could have entered through the front door, of course, but somehow that didn't seem like the best idea in the world. This was potentially hostile territory, she reminded herself. Better to be sneaky. Half a minute later she had scaled the wall and entered through an unsecured window on the second floor.
The place seemed to have started out as some kind of hotel, though that must have been ages ago. It was clean and well kept, but the wallpapers and carpets were faded and a sense of age seemed to hang in the air. Max carefully moved along the wall, straining her enhanced senses to pick up any sign of life. She had seen light from the outside, but only on the bottom floor and in a single first floor window.
A cursory sweep later she judged the second floor empty and slowly made her way down the stairs. Orientation skills had been drilled into her relentlessly as a child, so she had no problem finding the room she had seen lit from the outside. A peek inside revealed a woman, about forty years of age, getting ready for bed. It wasn't Faith Wilkins, that much was apparent at first glance. Looking around the room Max saw bookshelves lined with volumes upon volumes of scientific texts, but interspaced with what she assumed were novels of some kind. This woman seemed to have a liking for monster stories as well as quantum physics.
Watching her movements for a few seconds Max quickly decided that she was not much of a threat. The soldier inside her barked at leaving a potential hostile where she could presumably come at her from behind, but she ignored that voice and snuck away from the door again. Her target had to be downstairs.
From a first floor balcony she could see the lobby, which looked like it had hosted some kind of gathering not too long ago. A lot of burned-down candles, remains of a buffet in the corner, a lot of empty glasses and dirty dishes carelessly left on tables and what had once been the reception desk. She could hear some voices from an office in the far corner, but those were both male voices. Not her target, either.
Concentrating she picked up some muffled sounds coming from somewhere off to the right. A corridor led into the rear wing of the building and, judging by the layout, she guessed it would end up at some kind of ballroom or such. There was little in the way of cover, so Max darted down at her best speed. There was no one there to see her, but even if there had been they would have seen little more than a blur. Finally she reached a large double door and the noises coming from the other side were ones she had no trouble identifying.
Fighting noises.
For a moment she froze, a thousand theories flashing through her mind. Had Lydecker followed her? Had he figured out whom she was looking for and decided to take Faith as bait? Had a gang broken into the building? A burglar? Something very much like panic nearly overwhelmed her for a moment and she took two deep breaths to force it down again. This was getting ridiculous. She knew nothing about this woman. The thought of something happening to her shouldn't be scaring her like this, should it?
Besides, there was but one way to find out what was really going on inside that room. A soldier shouldn't make blind assumptions. A soldier should base her actions on the hard facts available. Barging in through the main doors seemed like a bad idea, so she spent a few seconds looking around and spotted something she hoped was some kind of service entrance. Some way for the waiters and hotel personnel to go about their business without getting in the way of the guests.
A minute and several dark and dusty corridors later she reached another door, small and unobtrusive, and heard the same fighting noises from behind it. Whatever was happening in there, it was still going on. She closed the distance without making a sound and carefully nudged the door open the slightest bit, just enough to take a peek into the room.
It was a ballroom, or at least it had started out as one. There were no tables or chairs, though; instead the largest part of the floor was laid out with training mats. Some gym equipment was set up in the far corner. Max took all that in within the span of a heartbeat, but her eyes were immediately riveted to the women currently practicing on the mats.
There were seven of them, all between the ages of thirty and forty, and they weren't kidding around. This wasn't aerobics, despite the music playing the background. It was full contact sparring without any padding and no one seemed to be pulling any punches. Max could only stare as they moved with the practiced ease of accomplished combatants and went through routines that would have pushed even an X-5 to her limits.
She realized what she had just thought and a moment later her observations confirmed it. The speed of the movements, the obvious strength behind the blows, all well above what was normal. As she watched one of the women moved to evade a blow and her features blurred with the speed. Something very strange was going on here.
A moment later Max stopped thinking as one of the women turned around and allowed her a good look at her face.
It was almost the same face she had seen in Logan's file. The passing of twenty years since the picture had been taken hadn't changed it much, yet at the same time a lot. It wasn't any sort of physical change, or at least not anymore than you'd expect in the difference between a person aged sixteen and one aged thirty-six. It was something else, something in the eyes.
The teenager in the picture had looked angry, full of loathing for the world at large and herself as well. Max had seen girls like that in Seattle; most of them didn't reach adulthood. The woman she was looking at now was different. There was sadness in those eyes, yet also a certainty of self that Max almost envied. This woman knew exactly who she was, why she was here, and what she had to do.
Most disturbing, of course, was the fact that the eyes of Faith Wilkins looked almost exactly the same as those Max always saw in the mirror.
Her soldier's mind clicked on again and took but a few moments of observation to figure out that the other six women present regarded Faith as an authority figure. It was visible in their body language, the way they looked at her, the way Faith moved among them even in the midst of sparring. She seemed to be the oldest present, but not by much. They moved like a unit, her inner soldier said, and Faith was the unit commander.
Shaking her head, she tried to piece the clues together. Okay, so she had known that there had to be something special about her mo... about Faith. She had expected it to be some kind of genetic anomaly, a DNA mutation that just happened to click with the Manticore enhancements.
Now it appeared as if something much stranger was going on here. These women couldn't be human, or at least no more human than Max herself was. Could they be products of Manticore as well? No, they were too old for that. Maybe prototypes from some kind of Manticore-predecessor? Max didn't know much about natural mutations, but she doubted that nature could produce people with superhuman abilities such as these without some help from humanity along the way.
The file Logan had shown her hadn't said anything about Faith being part of some kind of government project. In fact, it had seemed as if they hadn't had a clue who she was and how her DNA could be as special as it was. There had been nothing on what had happened to Faith later on, though. Maybe she had been recruited after recovering from her coma? Enhanced with the same superhuman abilities as her children? It was certainly a possibility, in which case Max had better make fast tracks out of here. She'd had too many close brushes with Manticore these last few months.
She was still wrestling with herself, the soldier's instinct to fall back and gather more background information warring with her natural curiosity, when the ballroom's doors opened. A man walked in, younger than the women present, dressed all in black. There was something about him, something that made the hairs on Max' neck stand up straight, but she couldn't put her finger on it.
"What's up, big guy?" Faith asked, almost causing Max to start. "You up for some Slayer-style sparring?"
The man smiled at her, but it was a subdued smile, one that never quite reached his eyes.
"That kind of sparring usually leaves me hurting for days," he answered. "I might be dead, but I ..."
He paused, leaving Max wondering what he meant by 'dead'. A frown on his face, his eyes moved across the room. Was he ... sniffing? A moment later his eyes settled directly on Max.
"We have a visitor," he announced calmly.
Now you've done it, the soldier inside Max scolded.
TO BE CONTINUED