Reality Check
By Rowe
Summary: Three little boys born at Manticore grew into three very different men in different worlds. But one thing they all shared was their need for a purpose in life. This is their story.
Chapter 10. When things draw to an unnatural conclusion._____________________________________________________________________
The eyes that met his were cautious and spoke of her knowledge. He had to be careful not to let sentiment get in the way. She was dangerous, far more dangerous than any of these humans he had toyed with. She was also far less predictable. Moving towards her with care, he let her name pass his lips. The look of revulsion she could not hide on her face told him everything he needed to know. With a sudden and unexpected push he was past her and out the door, using the element of surprise to evade her.
The priest was trying to help. Ben needed to set it all clear in his mind. Max's obvious distress and inability to comprehend his actions had made him have doubts, something he already had enough of and didn't need more. The calming words and attempts to mollify him were having an effect. Ben fought back the pain and confusion that threatened him and let the voice of the priest work. The little cubicle absolved him of all his doubts. He was hit by a realisation. This man was the one. He was the true test of faith.
His movements were quick and accurate. His hand burst through the little window and grasped the man's throat. He brought his face close and in a whisper told the man. "Prove how much you believe in her and she will set you free."
Like every other time he had much that need to be prepared but this time was a little different. He needed mental preparation because this was could be his final proof of faith. Some instinct told him that this was the end. Maybe Max was the avatar that signalled him, he wasn't sure. Her appearance may have been just another test of his faith. He wouldn't let her distract him again. Not now when it all seemed to be drawing to a natural confusion. What better test than a man who served his lady openly and was acknowledged for it?
The High Place gave him the same sort of freedom to think that they always had. When Max found him there he was both pleased and disturbed. He knew he mightn't like the conclusion she drew, but she, of all people, needed to understand him. The pain her harsh words brought, the confusion enveloping him again, all seemed to point to one thing. He was the anomaly they had feared. He led her back to his lair. He still trusted her and her judgement.
The words screamed to him as his eyes caught them. His mind responded as it had been trained. He was a killer with a mission. He could not fail or let even Max distract him. She was caught unawares...obviously not used to other X5s anymore. His speed and agility was something she was unprepared for. He had her caged before she even knew what was happening.
Ben looked at his quarry. He had been right. This seemed like the end. Tonight his faith would be proven. The Blue Lady would be there for one of them. The man ran... as they always did. Tracking him was like all the others. He wasn't special at all. As the final blow was about to be delivered Max appeared. Her boot in his chest was the answer to his question of faith. The Blue Lady existed but not for him. She had saved the priest and forsaken him to his fate.
Max squared up to prevent him finishing the man. He didn't want to fight her. Now she had adjusted to accommodate their lab-bestowed gifts she wasn't giving him any chances. She was fighting for something she believed in which made her all the more dangerous...and vicious. He knew that from his own experience. Still he held back...this was Max after all. The snapping of the bone and the crashing to the ground in pain took him by surprise. This wasn't how it was supposed to end. The Blue Lady was gone from his mind as the harsh reality that he had lost came to him.
Max dropped to the ground beside him. She cradled him and he felt both her love and pain. In her arms he also finally felt a feeling of redemption. He was home and with the only family he had ever really known. The truth of what his options struck him with a clarity that he could not ignore. He was not going back to become the anomaly that haunted others from the basement...or even worse to be dissected to find the flaws. His pleading reached her. He could see it in her soulful eyes the moment she accepted their fate. Letting himself be distracted by her, he soothed her with their childhood fantasies. His was going to the good place...and that wasn't Manticore.
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The lab boys asked him to behave in ways he couldn't understand. He could kill, yes. They had taught him how to do it, even provided him with the weapons in which to accomplish the task. Simon Lehane's body slumping to the ground was still fresh in his memory. This was different, a little sicker and a lot less cold and unemotional. These were crimes of passion that they were asking about which made the harder to comprehend. They were trying to incite a response in him to them. His mind recoiled at the idea of death without meaning or order. Somehow it served no purpose. It just wasn't logical...and his mind slid to the killing of Rachel ...something else not logical.
A sharp burst of pain accompanied her memory and his mind recoiled. She was forbidden ground. They had warned him about this. He let her image recede and focused back on the corpse they were showing him. The blood was something he could deal with, the odd tattooing of the barcode so very like his own and missing teeth were something else.
He let his mind drift and images and emotions that weren't quite his own began to embrace him, carrying him beyond the walls of Manticore. The basement receded once again and he let his eyes close and his mind relax. He could feel the adrenalin surging. It was a feeling he hadn't experienced since he was young. An unfettered, wild urge to hunt. It was what they had unleashed in them in kill exercises before instilling discipline over the natural urges as they had gotten older. His senses were totally bamboozled. The smells of the basement were invading his nostrils and giving him a headache but simultaneously he could sense the heart beat racing and the excitement in his veins, the thrill of the chase. 494 knew it had to be a dream. It came as a welcome escape from the nightmares of torture he had been enduring. He felt like he had a purpose but he wasn't sure quiet what. He rode the waves before sleep once again became blackness.
As he awoke, he seemed once again caught between consciousness and that elusive connection that seem to be touching his mind. From outside of these cell walls something reached out in pain and confusion. Not that he hadn't felt these emotions before, most recently they had seemed the only feelings that had been his own. This was different, it was foreign and invasive and he couldn't shake it away. Tears streamed down his bruised face as the hopelessness overwhelmed him. Maybe this was what they were wanting to find in him. This flaw in his psyche. The one that made him feel, let him empathise. The bruises were starting to heal, it must be about time for another dose. Every time his body began to regenerate he was taken away to receive another battering. They liked him weak. They also seemed to take pleasure in his pain. His bunk had become a welcome refuge. It seemed the only place that he experienced the feelings of escape.
This time it all came faster, stronger, more potent than ever before. The adrenalin surges, the pain, the thrill of the hunt. His heart pumped till he thought it was going to burst. Then abruptly, it all stopped. His tortured mind received something different. Visions from beyond his cell. 494 began to see things, abstract glimpses that were random and strange. A blue idol of a robed woman, a childhood memory of Manticore barracks, like his own, yet strangely different. He saw a glimpse of the face of a dark angel in distress and was overwhelmed by a sense of serenity before all went black.
For a moment 494 felt like he was set adrift. All the emotions he had been experiencing seemed to have just been cut off. He felt like he was coming down from a drug induced fantasy.
Then he felt like he had been hit.
An epiphany both painful and powerful took his breath away. No longer was he a pawn in the game. Someone had shown him another perspective, the bigger picture, where the system could be used and it was right to not just submit. An overwhelming feeling of understanding brought him to a conclusion. Manticore would never be able to beat him again.
The guards opened the door to see him sitting on his bunk with a cheeky grin. The looks of confusion on their faces was almost comical...as was the look of fear. What faced them was so different from the broken man they had dumped in here a few days before, this man scared them with his cocky and self assured presence.
494 found it all amusing. Manticore would be working for him now, rather than the other way around.
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The four walls of his cell weren't there. Instead they were the four walls of his childhood home. The aroma he could smell was his Mom's fresh bread. He sought refuge in the memories. They kept his pain at bay for at least a little while. He made his bunk his place of solace. At home and in the church, he had always had somewhere he could still his thoughts and pause for reflection. Trying to reestablish some of those routines would be the only way he could survive. And survive he must. He didn't believe that God would abandon him to this hell.
Now the initial shock of what he had been forced to endure was receding, Cain had begun to see it all as a test. Keeping control of his urges was just one of the self appointed tasks in the service of God he had allotted himself. Saving the souls of these poor children was another. They needed to be guided. Maybe that was his new purpose. He had been sent to the place where he was needed the most.
He had become adept at pretending. The Colonel believed he was the perfect soldier indoctrinated in their cruel ways. He let them all believe he a relinquished his past. At least by pretending he was one of them the session of mental torture had become less frequent. Those lab-coated sadists seemed to delight in breaking him and trying to rebuild him in the image of Manticore. The smell of the labs was enough to set off panic in him.
Discovering his true abilities was also a challenge. He had never known that he had such power. It seemed impossible that he had been so blind. He had always been a meek man, never fighting physically when verbal confrontation would save the situation. Now his speed and strength were constantly amazing him. For someone who had always been humble about his abilities, he had discovered a latent pride in his achievements.
He had almost come to terms with his beginning. He had forgiven his parents in his own mind for their betrayal. They had loved him, he was sure of that, but they had also been a part of the horror for far longer than he could have been if he'd been given the choice. Choice just wasn't something he had now. Manticore owned his body, but he would never let them take his soul. That belonged to something far greater.
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He wasn't happy. He liked everything precise and regimented but this was spiralling further and further out of control. It had gotten to the point where he couldn't keep the information out of the news and someone sooner or later was going to put two and tow together about the barcodes on the victims. She had made him sacrifice the boy. His orders were to retrieve and terminate. The body was to be brought back for study the lab boy would pick over the carcass like the vultures they were.
It all made him so angry. Maybe he should have foreseen what was going to happen that night they had escaped. If he had, he could have prevented the deaths and the pain that had resulted. Even worse he had lost her. He knew she had been here today. Somehow he could sense her presence. This X5 did not take his own life and from the battered state of his body he would guess only another X5 could have been here. Someone with a conscience. Someone like his Max. She was killer...they all were...but he knew her heart.
He leant down and felt for a pulse. The still blood under the warm skin was all his fingers could feel and somehow it broke his heart. Another one was gone. This one he felt was partly his fault. Never before had he had such doubts about what he was doing. This was definitely a low point. His career was in the dirt and his life wasn't all that safe. How much lower could he sink before he hit rock bottom?
For the first time in his life he began to truly question the wisdom of Manticore.
In his cell X5-494 had begun to cause a stir. His miraculous return to apparent health. Both mental and physical. had left the guards wary to set foot in his presence. Lydecker wasn't a superstitious man but he had his suspicions. Manticore had invested a lot of time and energy in twin studies, these soldiers had been prime candidates in those studies. Transmission of strong emotions and traumatic events seemed plausible, especially with the enhanced mental capacity and possibly also low level psychic abilities of the X5s. As he stepped into the cell he was greeted by the seemingly resurrected form of 494. He looked Lydecker up and down and smiled without any fear. Deck could see it in his eyes, this man had seen hell and seemed to have made peace with that. This past six months of mental examination hadn't broken him.
Approaching cautiously, Lydecker circled the X5. "We were not sure that you would make it 494." The look of calm confidence on 494s face unsettled him. "Yet you appear ready to resume active duty." Lydecker watched as the nearly broken man of only a few days before walked passed him seeming totally whole. Something strange seemed to definitely have occurred. This was like a man reborn. "Are you sure you are alright?"
With a wry grin 494 passed through the door and along the corridor- back to the world upstairs. He knew the truth. Manticore would never beat him. What he had experienced in this cell had set his soul free.
"I'm always alright!"
******
Row upon row of fatigue-adorned soldiers stood at ease awaiting deployment into training squads. More than a few shared the same face, all shared the same expression. They were Manticore's finest specimens, the X5s. Yet still, they were a flawed product. Armed men waited along the perimeter watching their charges. These kids weren't prisoners, but more like livestock. Expensive and highly trained livestock, yet if needed were to be put down like any rogue animal if they became dangerous.
The face of the soldier in the front row, to all outward appearances impassive and attentive, proved that sometimes they were more than they appeared. His beauty was unmistakable, he was created that way. Amongst his fellow creations he did not stand out. They were all perfect. His mask of controlled attention was mirrored on the faces of dozens of others across the parade ground.
As the civilian couple moved to stand in front of him he did not move, he made no indication to acknowledge their presence. Even when the woman couldn't restrain herself from placing her hand on his arm. He didn't even blink. As her husband ushered her away soothing the quiet sobbing, Lydecker allowed himself a small smile of satisfaction. He felt somehow he had redeemed the situation to some extent- Cain was no more, and in his place was X5-495. Another soldier for the cause.
Nobody saw the tear that slid silently and unrestrained down the cheek of the statue-like soldier. Nobody saw as it dropped to the ground and the blinkers dropped for a split second to reveal the anguish hidden behind a stone-like facade. Nobody saw the man trapped back inside the haunting world of horror from which he had been spawned.
This was Manticore.
