Disclaimer: I do not own Dark Angel or anything related to it. Dark Angel is owned by other people and they're stupid because they didn't give us more than two seasons. Of course they at least gave us those, which is good.

Disclaimer Part Two: I do however own Blaze, Heresy, Leo, Two and other things that might seem unfamiliar. Luxie is owned by Monica

Pairings: Logan/Max, Alec/Heresy, Alec/Blaze, Alec/Luxie…

Pack Instinct

4 – The New Girl

Oh God. I had almost killed Alec. I slumped down into my corner, tears running down my face. Bastard! Why didn't he listen? How was I supposed to regain respect in this new pack when I was already picking out and almost killing its members?

I felt ashamed and devastated but there was another feeling I wasn't quite sure where to place. I had let down my pack and they were sure to cast me out. Alec would tell them what happened and Max would realize keeping me here was a bad mistake. Logan would confess he knew but everything would be okay because he was already part of the team. I had already broken my chance a day after coming. I was lost.

Sure, I was a bit pessimistic but it was due to my upbringing where I was told that a failed soldier was a dead soldier.

Luckily, Max had thrown most of her Manticore training out of the window and slapped me across the face for whining once I came out. I found it a bit of a loose statement but she promised she'd get me a better cage for my 'raging female hormones'.

"Girl's got fire," her best friend, Original Cindy, said after having met me and hearing the story of my overcoming Alec's charms even in my darkest hour. Heresy had found the situation quite amusing for a few weeks and then she got bored with tormenting him and I expect they worked it out over sex. It seemed that's how they solved their problems and although I wouldn't have found it much of a problem if anyone else had done it that way, there was a pang of pain in my heart.

"So, you're not one of Max's little escapee pals?" Original Cindy asked me after our first meeting. I shook my head.

"But Max says you've been out in the real world for a while, though? Was it a special ops mission or something?" Sketchy asked. He was another non-transgenic friend of Max's. He looked quite rugged and sometimes it seemed as if he felt a bit uncertain about being around us. I found out he had been an anti-transgenic before he realized that we also only people.

"I ran away from Manticore three months after Zack's unit did," I said.

"Good job, sister," Original Cindy said and patted me on the back. "That Manticore was a bitch." I nodded. I didn't know how much the two of them knew about my past and 'heritage' and I decided that they didn't really need to know.

"Heard you kicked Alec up a bit?" Sketchy said with a wide grin towards Alec who was off to see what Leo wanted of him. Alec showed Sketchy the finger. I suspected he had gotten tired of people taunting him over me.

"I was in a phase," I explained. "I get violent sometimes." Sketchy shifted back a bit and I gave him a small smile. "It's generally on a schedule," I explained. "Our friends at Manticore like making us feel a bit of pain from time to time." Sketchy nodded.

"Here," Max said and handed Logan the papers she had gotten from Blaze. "Blaze wrote down what she figured out."

Logan looked over the papers and Max pretended to be doing the same. She was watching him instead. He was so brave.

"I think she's getting there," Logan said with a hint of happiness in his voice. "It seems there's something missing." He looked up at Max who was smiling at him.

"I'm sure she'll get my little problem going soon," she said with a smile. She placed her gloved hand onto Logan's mouth and then gave her hand a short kiss. She grinned and then ran out.

"We have another one!" Leo yelled. "Alec, Heresy, she's being held in cop captivity down in Sector 2."

"Why do I have to go with him!" Heresy whined.

"Why do I have to go with her!" Alec whined simultaneously. Alec had been very despondent to sexual feelings in the last few days which Heresy related to her mocking him and Blaze's presence.

"Because your presence pisses me off," Leo responded without showing the feeling. He was tranquil as always and eventually he got the two of them onto a pair of motorbikes and dash off into the sunset, which might have sounded romantic but since this was Seattle – not a chance.

"What's she like?" Mole asked. "X-Series?"

"Yeah. Looks X6, I think," Leo said with a glance at his monitors. "Let's just hope Alec doesn't explode with all these females coming in."

"I'm sure Heresy and Max will keep his keys in his pockets," Mole said laughing and walked off. Leo looked back at the monitor. The girl show in the freeze-frame was quite attractive and with her long black hair covering her tattoo and brown cat-like eyes she looked quite similar to Max. It even looked like she had Max's spunk judging from the way she was punching a guy in the nose at the time. However, she was younger and that meant if she was to be anything like Max, she still had a few years to go.

"Heresy will keep him in check until we bring her back," Leo muttered and closed the picture. A picture of his older twin brother, Zack showed up and a deep sigh escaped him. He wished Zack were still with them, fighting the good fight.

Alec was gone now and Original Cindy and Sketchy had left due to the contamination in Terminal City. Apparently there poisonous gases here, but us transgenics weren't affected due to our wonderful upbringing. I walked over to where I usually found Joshua but he wasn't around, so I sat down and looked up. A flag caught my eye. It had three stripes, black, red and white and there was a pigeon on the centre.

"Free," I muttered. As little as I knew about art and culture over my years outside, I had found that birds, especially a white pigeon, stood of freedom. I wondered what the stripes meant and then I noticed some lines running down from the red. Bloodstains? No, a barcode, Max's barcode.

"I drew that," Joshua said and I jumped. I had been so absorbed in my thoughts that my wolf senses had dropped and I hadn't noticed my friend approach. "Did I scare Blaze?" he asked me with a smile, baring his teeth. I nodded and got up.

"What does it mean?"

"The black is Manticore," he said slowly, sadly. "The red is now, because our blood is being shed. And the white is…"

"Where we're going. Freedom," I finished and noticed a tear running down my face.

"I heard about Blaze and Alec," Joshua said as the two of us sat down on the floor, looking up to the flag.

"I feel bad, because everyone's praising me and making fun of Alec," I said. Joshua laughed.

"Alec is always making fun of others," he said as if he were on the other side. "But Alec is a good boy. Alec is right."

"He wasn't even afraid," I said. "He felt the true strength in me and he wasn't afraid. I was when it happened with my pack."

"Alec is strong." I nodded and the two of us sat in silence, watching the flag, thinking.

"So, making any sense from her notes yet?" Max asked. Logan looked up. She was standing in the doorway watching him.

"Yeah, but why am I doing this and she's not?" Max shrugged.

"Maybe her brain sources are tapped for the time. She's having it a bit rough with the whole… thing," Max said. She wasn't exactly sure why Blaze refused to continue working on the formulae to Max's virus, but when she had asked the part wolf earlier, Blaze had simply said she didn't want to and might some other time. "I really hope she gets it on track soon."

An awkward silence filled the room when Logan knew no response to the sentence, nor Max found another topic to start up.

"If she's getting this close," Logan began quietly. Max looked up from where she had been staring at the wall. "I guess I could wait a few more days."

"Are you that certain it's going to work? You were so negative when she started," Max informed him with a wide grin. Making Logan aware of his mistakes was one of her more enjoyed hobbies.

"Well, I understand enough about biology to understand the complex structure of your virus, but I don't understand a lot of her calculations, which is way, I'm quite on the upbeat side of this," he said sounding quite cheery.

"Upbeat, huh?" She gave him a seductive grin. "Well, I'll see if I can rustle up her inspiration a bit then."

"Go for it."

Luxie sat in her cell scratching little numbers, words of hatred and barcodes into the wall. She was quite pissed off that neither the wall nor the double-rowed steel bars would bend or break under her inhumane strength. There were a number of dents in the wall where she had punched it or giving it a kick in the ass. The same went for the bars but some of them even had a few tooth marks on them.

"I'm gonna get you, bastards," Luxie yelled and felt the two guards tremble under her hatred. She wasn't in fact yelling at the guards, but at the bars whom she knew if she gnawed, kicked and punched for long enough would break under a knock of her superior mental mind. "Hey, can I get something to drink?" she asked, although she knew she would get no response. "You're quite hot there, wanna come give me some," she tried to taunt the guard. She walked over to the bars and hung her arms over one of them. An extra half a metre from her arms was another row of bars, just in case she did get through the first. She turned her head and gnawed. "Hungry, you know."

Suddenly she heard a double crack and both the guards fell to the ground motionlessly. Luxie stood up straight but was still short enough to look like she was leaning on the bars casually. She knew anyone could have done it, but if her hopes were doing a good enough job, they might have been transgenics.

And sure enough two X5s walked in.

"Took you long enough," she muttered as she looked at her saviours. The first was a tall young woman with bright green bangs and clothing that made her look slightly like a stripper/whore. The second was a rather attractive male wearing casual clothing and a cocky grin on his face.

"Heire made me stop at the pharmacy on the way," the male said and crouched down next to one of the guards. He began checking the guys pockets.

"Ain't none there," Luxie said casually. "White doesn't trust me even with walls that are four inches thick and two rows of bars made from something I can't even get my teeth into."

"Looks like you did a pretty good job, though," the girl said. "Name's Heresy, X5."

"And pretty boy over there," Luxie asked with a wide grin. Alec got up from his crouching position.

"Alec. But he's a bastard, don't even think about it," Heresy said and took a bar in each hand. She shook at them but nothing but a bit of rattling happened.

"Well, you're not a bowl of sugared strawberries either, Heire," Alec spat and walked over to Heresy. He leaned on the bars just as Luxie was. "What's your name then, Miss Behind-Bars?"

"Luxie, thank you very much. X6-847," she said with a shrug.

"Know how we can get you out?"

"I guess you could get the keys from him," Luxie said with a nod. Heresy and Alec turned and fell into an offensive position. Standing before them was White, angry at the intrusion and neck-breaking of his guards. "But he's kinda greedy."

"I see you've found some friends, 847," White said calmly. Luxie shivered at the way he seemed so icy towards the situation. He was, if she ever got out, outnumbered three to one. Of course, he had that insane breeding cult he belonged to, but there was always a chance that Alec and Heresy had a plan going and there were more transgenics outside.

"Well, we're more just acquaintances," she muttered. "We'd like to shake hands, but…"

"White," Heresy spat, literally and a big gob of spit landed on his shoes.

"Nice to see you again too, 419," White said smiling. "Always were one for politeness."

"She's worse now, and angrier," Alec informed him and the two of them jumped towards White. Although he was stronger and definitely less pain-receptive, the two of them were faster and within nanoseconds they Alec had grabbed an arm behind his back and Heresy had given White a punch in the face and his stomach. When he bent over she kneed him in the face once for good measure and twice for the way he'd almost taken her guts out of her body while she watched. He fell to the ground unconscious.

"Hey, I was gonna do that," Luxie moaned. She was standing upright now, no longer in her leisurely position. "Oh and, the keys are in his left pocket." Heresy kicked him over and with her foot firmly she moved her hand into his pocket and pulled out the keys. She threw them over to Alec who began unlocking the bars.

Heresy walked over and once Alec had unlocked the four locks on the first door she gave it a hard tug which pulled at the hinges a little but didn't do much. Luxie was watching Alec, the excitement of being free again getting to her.

"Come on, come on, come on," she tried to rush him.

"Ain't no use rushing him," Heresy said with a glare. "He does everything in his own time frame." The way she said 'everything' made Luxie repeat the word and receive a grin from the other female.

"You going in heat soon?" Alec asked once he'd unlocked the last one. Luxie looked at him confused.

"I'm going into a kitchen for some food soon," she relied and jumped out of the cave with a triumphant gesture. She did a little jig which made the other look at her confused.

"You're kidding me?" Alec asked and looked from the dancing girl to Heresy. "Y'all go into to heat, right?"

"Sure do. And she seems like the cat kinda girl. Hey, you got cat, right?"

"Got cat?" Luxie asked with a wide grin and meowed. Heresy and Alec looked at each other as if Luxie were an immature child.

Yes! Here's Luxie. I thank Monica for letting me use this awesome girl. I love Luxie so much because she's such a freak

Read her story All American Girl for her take on Luxie! Go now!

Next chapter, Luxie's feline side is exposed