Disclaimer: Kay, Paige, Sate, Jacob, and Curtis are mine. Wow, my list is growing.
Black Ice
By Be Boring
Chapter 11: Couple's Therapy
Alec stood outside the door to his own apartment, torn between going in there and confronting Jondy or leaving and avoiding her at all costs. He loved her, but she was no fun to be around when she was angry, especially when she was angry with him. Finally he groaned in defeat and opened the door. Jondy was sitting on the couch, looking like the perfect picture of an affronted little girl. The pout on her face was mostly for show, but the way that her fingers dug into the soft flesh of her upper arms while they were crossed certainly wasn't.
"What are you doing here?" she asked huffily.
"You know perfectly well that I wasn't going to let it end there. If I did that, I'd probably be sleeping on the couch tonight, and you know I wouldn't go for that."
She didn't even smile at the joke. "You don't know how embarrassing it was for me when you threw me out right in front of Ben. The least you could have done was talk to me in private. What's the big idea of choosing another woman over your pregnant girlfriend?"
"Who said that I was choosing Kay over you? Look, I like Kay and all, but she's not the one I want to be having my baby, and she's not the one I want lying next to me every night. I just needed to get you away from Ben. You know how you're feeling right now? Well that's how you were probably making Ben feel. Whether you like it or not, he cares about her in at least one small way, and it probably didn't help anything to hear you talking about her like she's the scum of the earth. Jondy, I've got to ask you something, and you need to answer me honestly and not get defensive on me. Okay?" She nodded sulkily, so he continued. "Do you still have feelings for Ben?"
Jondy stared at him in shock. "What made you think I had feelings for him in the first place?"
"Oh, I don't know, maybe it was how you used to get so excited whenever his name was mentioned, or maybe it was because of how you suddenly, inexplicably decided to hate Kay after you found out that she and Ben had been a couple. You can't lie to me, I'm sure you at least used to have feelings for him."
"Fine, I had a little bit of a crush on him when we were teenagers, so it pissed me off a little that he got together with Kay with Zack's approval, while Zack only let me see him once and refused to let me stay with him. I know you won't want to hear it, but I think if Zack had let me stay with him then that he wouldn't have kept killing and we would probably still be together and very happy. Are you happy? I told you what you wanted to hear."
"You still haven't answered my question, though. Do you still have those feelings?"
She shrugged. "I still care about him, but you know perfectly well that I love you. Would I have stuck with you if I loved someone else more than you?"
Alec tentatively walked over and sat on the couch next to her. "Don't you find it a little funny that you used to have feelings for Ben and now you're dating his clone? Maybe you just placed your affections on me because we have the same face. Is that what happened?"
Her glare normally would have made him shy backwards, but he really wanted to hear the answer to that question. "No, and you should know better than to ask. I fell in love with you because I got to know you, not because you looked like someone I had an infatuation with. In fact, your looks were a mark against you because your likeness to Ben made me uncomfortable. You were so different from him that I felt weird whenever I looked over and saw that familiar face with such unfamiliar expressions on it. The fact that I'm with you now just shows that I really fell hard."
Well, that made him feel better. He didn't really like conversations like this. Anything to do with emotions was best left to the saps like Max and Logan, not people like him. "I'm sorry I accused you of that, but I had to know. You seemed so happy to see him at Logan's house."
"Of course I was happy to see him. We were so close when we were little, after Max he was my best friend. It wasn't because I was secretly in love with him. I really care about him, and that's why this whole thing with Kay makes me so mad. I know you'll hate me for saying it, but I think she deserves whatever she gets."
Alec studied her for a minute, realizing he was going to have to take a different route with this. "Do me a favor for a second. Shut your eyes. Don't give me a funny look, just do it. Okay, now I want you to picture all of this as I talk. I just died, and you're in the hands of the enemy. You get lonely, confused, and you make a big mistake. You have a one-night stand with one of your captors. Hey, keep your eyes shut. I know that's not something you'd do, but picture it anyway. Now, you feel really bad about it, but you get caught by one of your friends. You're close with Max, so let's say her. Max discovers you in the arms of the enemy, and now she's royally pissed at you. Max wouldn't do what Zack did, so we're going to skip the heat part and cut straight to the pregnancy. No one understands why you slept with the enemy, so you have a big fallout with everyone and you're forced to leave, which is when you find out that you're pregnant. The father finds out and decides to take you in to keep this humiliation private, so he takes you away with him. Now you're trapped in a house with a man you hate, you're going to have a baby, and none of your friends are there to help you out. You don't even know if they would help you out even if they knew. With me so far? Okay, now you've had your baby and you've fallen head over heels in love with him or her, you can pick whichever one you want. Suddenly, someone runs off with the baby and heads straight back to Seattle where all your friends are that hate you. The lights go out and you can't find your baby, you run into your friends again and they make you feel like crap, then when you finally find your baby, you get caught by the enemy again who you know is going to kill you while the friends that hate you run off with your innocent, unsuspecting child. Now you're behind enemy lines, your baby is in the hands of people you aren't sure you can trust anymore, and you have no prospects of escape. How would you feel?"
Jondy opened her eyes again, pouting stubbornly. "I don't know how I would feel. I don't think I would ever get myself into that situation."
Alec rolled his eyes at her. "I'm going to ignore that last part and give you a little nudge in the right direction. You'd feel lonely, depressed, and scared out of your mind. I know you can't feel that for yourself just by imagining it, but I know you could at least sympathize with someone else that's feeling it. That's how I'm sure Kay is feeling right now. Her daughter is being taken care of by Ben, who, let's face it, even with all his good qualities, is a psychotic serial killer that is angry with her and loathes the father of the baby. I'd be pretty scared for my kid, wouldn't you?" Jondy nodded grumpily, still pouting away. "That's why we've got to get her out of there, wherever she is. As bad as her mistakes have been, they're nothing compared to how great she was before. I know if you had gotten to know her back then that you might have even been friends with her. She helped Logan out a lot with his Eyes Only stuff, and she was a really good friend. If you needed her, she was there, no questions asked. She might ask some questions after the whole mess was sorted out, but not while she was helping you. She constantly joked that she was running a fugitive circus in Canada. Think about it, first she had Zack, someone she had hated with a passion but couldn't blame because he had amnesia, then she got White's wife, who she became really good friends with before she died, then she came across Ben, who wanted to kill her, and to top it all off, she found Brin and Lydecker. Brin was in complete soldier mode still, and she had lots of reasons for hating Lydecker."
"We all did," Jondy commented obstinately.
"Not quite as much as she did. I found out from Max that Lydecker took advantage of her during her first heat cycle."
"What!" Jondy's mouth dropped open in unabashed horror at the thought.
"Yeah, so she wasn't exactly ecstatic at the idea of having him around, but she had no choice because let's face it, he was a useful guy. Then, after White killed Wendy and Max took Ray away, she got stuck with Ray and his aunt. She's the one who kept Zack distracted from killing Logan when he got his memory back and without her, Ben probably wouldn't have stopped killing. She's helped save a number of transgenics and she's the one that gave the cure for the virus to Logan even after Max turned away from her. I think all of that completely overshadows one night with White. I know she did more after that, but that's what started it all. I don't know about you, but I can't just leave her with the familiars. Besides, we need to get her out of there for other reasons too, if you don't like the thought of just going in there for her. The cult can use her offspring to start the Coming. We need to rescue her before they manage to repeat the whole Manticore process and start making more keys by putting her eggs in surrogates. I don't know about you, but I don't really fancy a world with just us and those inbred 'Fen'os tol' freaks."
Max sat on the kitchen table, holding an egg roll in her hand but without much interest in eating it. Today had seemed to get completely out of control, but the biggest shock to her had been when Logan admitted that he had known about Kay being in town and was even working closely with her. How could he have lied to her for over a week? It wasn't like Logan to lie to her, not now that they were together. Even if it didn't involve her, he usually made her privy to everything he was working on.
"Hey," Logan said quietly as he walked into the kitchen. The moment she looked at him, he knew she was going to be asking some questions.
"Why didn't you tell me? You've never kept something like this from me before."
"I just knew that whatever she was searching for was important to her, and she made it clear that she would talk to all of you after she was done with the search, but she didn't want any distractions while we were looking. I thought this was going to be done a week ago because I'm sure that after Matt ran the scans of Ben's fingerprints through the database, he would have come up as Timothy Ryan's killer and we would have found him right away. Then she would have had a baby to show you, and I think you would have treated her much better than it sounds like you did."
"Who told you?"
"Zack, surprisingly enough. He wasn't happy with how that reunion went down at all. Even his personal reunion with her went better than that, and that's after what he did to her. I feel bad, too, I'm the one that talked her into going to see you guys. Now she's going to be a broodmare for the cult."
Max sighed and set the egg roll down untouched next to her on the table. "As angry as I am with her, we can't leave her there."
Logan scratched the back of his ear thoughtfully. "Why are you so angry with her? For some reason it seems to have grown in her absence."
"I don't know. I didn't even realize how mad I was until I saw her, and then nothing she said seemed to be a good enough explanation. She didn't even actually explain anything, although I suppose I know why now. If she had announced she was looking for her child with White, I don't think I would have reacted very well. It makes it sound like she never would have come back if the cult hadn't come after Paige."
"She probably wouldn't have. Can you blame her? You guys are a tough crowd, and she has a baby to raise. Why should she go out of her way to make her life more complicated than it already was?" After a moment of uncomfortable silence, he asked, "Has anyone talked to White again?"
She shook her head. "No, as far as I know he's still in the basement where Zack and Alec put him. I don't see why we don't just kill him. I know it's against your morals, but he's dangerous."
"There's something you might want to think about first."
"What?"
"Ray. We know for a fact that White had him before, so he must have stashed him somewhere before he started looking for Kay. We should get him set up with a safe place before we kill the only parent he has left."
"Hey, it's not my fault his father killed his mom and is dead set on causing trouble for us, so don't try and make me feel guilty. What do you suggest we do with him? If we're planning on getting Kay out, he's just going to go after her again to try and get back his place in the cult, and that's exactly what we don't want. We can't keep him locked in the basement for the rest of his natural life. I don't know about you, but I don't think we'll be able to have any fun around here until he's gone. Having a cult freak in the basement doesn't exactly get me all hot and bothered."
Logan grinned and threw away the forgotten egg roll. "Yeah, I see your point. Tell you what, as soon as he's expendable, Zack and whoever else wants to be involved can take him out of this house and do whatever they want with him off of my property. I just don't want to know any details."
Max gave one quick nod. "Fair enough. Now we've just got to find a way to track down wherever the Conclave took Kay without using electricity. I can't wait to figure that one out."
Kay had to grin when she caught a glimpse of Curtis in the next room. They must have sedated him, because he was flopped out on his back on the floor in the room to her left. It's what the bastard deserves. At least she had managed to inflict pain on one of them.
"Do you find something funny about this, 358?" Jacob asked as he stepped into her room and closed the door that had allowed her to see Curtis's condition. "You'll have to be punished for injuring our best marksman. We've been thinking about breaking your arms as well, just to see if you enjoy it as much as Curtis does. Unlike him, however, we won't bother to reset your arms. After your disgusting spawn are born and we're sure they are viable keys, we'll just kill you anyway. Who says we have to be hospitable?"
"Is this why you signed up for this mission? So you'd have a defenseless living thing to torture? I'll bet you lit hamsters on fire and pulled wings off flies as a kid, or maybe dangled kittens helplessly above rabid dogs. Were any of those your childhood hobbies?"
He smirked and sat down across from her. "Do you think I'm a sadist? I think you've already met the most sadistic member of our group." He glanced uneasily at the door to their right, where she knew Sate was lounging around.
She watched his face, curious about the relationship Sate had with the rest of the team. "I take it you guys don't like him?"
He looked at her suspiciously. "Why do you care?"
"Just curious. I'm sure you heard how the transgenics all hated the psy-ops, I was just curious to see if you guys hated your mentally empowered people as well. Is it that big of a deal to tell me? Who can I tell?"
"You could always tell Sate."
She chuckled and rolled her eyes. "I'm sure he already knows whether or not you guys like him, so what's the harm in telling me? What am I going to do about it?"
He studied her and shrugged. "Touché. I don't think anyone likes the guy. If we had known he was going to be on the team, we probably wouldn't have signed up. I wouldn't have even given it a second thought. I've gotta say I don't envy you at all. We may not like him, but at least he doesn't hate us in return. He just ignores us most of the time."
"You were in the room with him before you first came to talk to me. What were you talking about?"
"We were on the speaker phone with the High Priest, so I had no choice but to be in there. Thankfully, as soon as you're in a secure location, we're free of him. You're not, though. It seems that he also requested to be one of your guards, so you'll be stuck with him until the Conclave decides to kill you. Like I said, I don't envy you at all. I wonder if they'll let him be the one to kill you?"
"You're such a cheery guy. Do you do birthday parties?"
"Well, aren't you the little comedian? I don't really care, you won't be joking for long. Sate shared with us how you've been having problems with your friends. It seems that after he first met you, he started using psy-ops with mind-reading abilities to find out everything he could about you. It sounds like you haven't been the best little girl, and I also don't think you'll have anyone coming to get you. It looks like you're staying with us."
"I'm looking forward to it." She watched him walk back through the door to her left. He was right, would anyone come after her? With Sate around, she couldn't exactly get out on her own. He wouldn't even have to be within arm's reach of her to stop her, as he'd demonstrated earlier. What chance did she have? She glanced at the door that blocked him from her view. The others didn't like him, maybe she could exploit that. She didn't have long, so she would have to get going.
Brin had been sitting in the guest room with Ben ever since White had been moved to the basement. She just didn't want to face Zack right now. She knew he would be angry with her for her reaction to Kay, and she didn't want to deal with his anger at the moment. A part of her wanted to remain stubborn and let Kay get whatever was coming to her, but another part, the one that clearly remembered their friendship, wanted to get her back and revive it. She was almost ashamed of how she had acted at Crash, but she couldn't help it. Kay hadn't said anything to explain why she was gone for so long, even though now it made sense, and the fact that she didn't seem to want to offer any extra information had finally gotten to her. Now she wished she hadn't been such a bitch.
She and Ben weren't actually talking, but his presence calmed her down all the same. She had to remind herself that he had done the same thing to Kay before her life went downhill, and he hadn't even changed his mind about his treatment of her yet. Kay wasn't the only thing on her mind, however, even though she was the one who had started her train of thought. The thing that really bugged her was Zack. It wasn't that he'd lied to her, it was the fact that he had been so willing to help Kay, just like he was so willing to help Max out all the time. The more she thought about it, the more she wished she'd never become involved with him. He had been in love with Max before he killed himself for her, then he had fallen in love with Kay when he was Adam Thompson. Was he using her as a replacement for those two women? She had developed many of their characteristics while she was recovering from her reindoctrination. Maybe he wasn't even seeing her whenever they were together. She always had to work to get him to do something he didn't feel like doing, but every time Max needed him, he was right there. He had done the same thing earlier with Kay. It was very rare that he was willing to give Brin a ride to Ben's hotel, but the second Kay asked him to do it, he sprung into action. It just wasn't fair.
"Is something wrong?" Ben asked quietly, watching the mass of emotions swim across her face as she thought. The longer she sat there, the more dejected she looked, so he finally decided to interrupt and find out what was bothering her.
"Ben, if you found another woman that had a personality very similar to Kay's, would you use her as a replacement?"
"What?" That certainly wasn't what he was expecting. "No, I wouldn't. No matter how similar she is, she still wouldn't actually be Kay. Where is this coming from?"
"I've, well, I've been wondering if that's what Zack is doing. You know he loved both Max and Kay, and I've become a lot like them because they've been my closest friends. He's so quick to help them both, and he just doesn't do that for me. Am I the rebound girl?"
"I don't think he would have stayed with you so long if you were the rebound girl. Listen, I'm not good at all this relationship stuff. It's not like I've had a lot of experience, and look how it turned out. I'm babysitting Kay's baby with another man. Do you really want to be taking love advice from me?"
She smiled at him, grateful that he was at least trying to cheer her up. "Who should I talk to, then?"
"If I were you, I'd start with Zack."
"Zack? That's ridiculous, he never talks about his feelings. He'll probably just blow me off when I ask him. Maybe I should get Max to talk to him." She said the last part with such resentment in her voice that Ben's face became alarmingly stern.
"Now you're just feeling sorry for yourself. Get out there and talk to him, or I'll go get him and bring him to you."
She was shocked, Ben never usually talked so forcefully, but she knew he was right. She was just being self-pitying, and it didn't suit her. With a deep sigh, she stood up and walked out into the living room, where Zack was sitting on the couch with his elbows on his knees and his fingertips all touching as he thought. He didn't even look up until she reached him and tapped him on the shoulder. "We really need to talk."
He nodded and followed her outside, ready for her to start blowing off steam about Kay, but that's not quite what he got. "Zack, do you love me?"
Where had that come from? "Of course I do, what would make you think otherwise?"
"It's just that you always help out Max and Kay the moment they ask for it, but I nearly kill myself trying to convince you to help me out when I need it. I'm starting to think that I'm just a substitute for them. I know you used to be in love with them, so did you turn to me as a stand-in for them?"
He looked into her eyes for a long time, then slowly nodded. "Yeah, I did."
Her eyes widened, she hadn't expected him to admit it right away. "So this entire time you've been imagining someone else?" She felt like she could fall apart and start crying on the spot. She had invested a lot in this relationship, the last thing she wanted was to find out it had all been a lie.
He shook his head quickly. "No, I haven't."
"But you said—"
"I meant that I originally turned to you as a substitute for them. Brin, that changed a long time ago. To be honest, I was going to break up with you nearly a month after we first started really dating. I knew that I was being really unfair to you, so I thought it would be easier if I broke it off, but while I was waiting for the right time to talk to you, I started really noticing you. I started paying attention to the things that made you an individual, rather than the characteristics that were similar to Max and Kay. Then I decided that I wouldn't break up with you until I was sure things wouldn't work out, and it was during that time that I really fell in love with you. Not reaffirming my feelings for the other two, but falling in love with a completely different person. I know you're not happy, because for a while our relationship wasn't real, but it is now. Brin, I couldn't be happier with anyone else than I am with you. If I felt otherwise, I wouldn't still be with you."
"But what about how eager you are to help them? You're never that quick to help me."
"I think you've just been exaggerating things since you've been given time to think everything over. You're my top priority, not anyone else. Even if I don't say it nearly enough, I love you. Can you at least forgive me for lying to you in the beginning?"
She sighed and rubbed her forehead wearily. Even with how mixed up she was feeling, she recognized that Zack was making a real effort to have an actual discussion with her about this and not be the uptight, militant ass he usually was. "Not right away, but I'll work on it. Just promise me that you won't find someone else you think is a suitable replacement for me and go after her, okay?"
He smiled and pulled her to him. "Deal."
Ben watched them share a kiss from the window as he rocked Paige gently in his arms. With so many couples around him, he felt even lonelier here than he had when was actually traveling alone. He had heard Max and Logan make up in the kitchen, he was sure Alec had won Jondy over wherever they were, and now Zack and Brin were happy again. Where was he? Stuck watching a baby. Not that he minded, he adored Paige and enjoyed spending time with her, but it wasn't the same as having an adult woman to spend time with. That used to be Kay, but as far as he was concerned, she wasn't even an option anymore. He knew the others would be starting to make plans for a rescue mission, but he wasn't quite sure he wanted to be a part of it. Did he really want to face her again? The more he thought about it, the more he confirmed that he wanted no part in rescuing her. If she gets out, good for her, and if she doesn't, oh well. Part of him cringed at the coldness of the thought. Did he really feel that way? He wasn't quite sure, but he knew he'd figure it out quickly when things actually went into motion.
Author's Note: Like always, please read and review!