A/N: Here's chapter 2, sorry for the delay, but my exams are nearing and my teacher is keeping me occupied with homework. Special thanks to Random Rose, for being my faithful beta. Beta want a keyboard?
Eek, forgot to mention this in the last chapter, Italics are thoughts, sentences with an 'Italics and apostrophe' are military hand signals.
Disclaimer: Dark Angel does not belong to me, yadda, yadda, yadda…
Chapter 2: Doubts About The WorldThe first thing Li noticed when she woke up was the soft, comfortable mattress she was lying on and the warm linen blankets that she was curled up in. Bolting upright instantly, she flipped to her feet. Or at least, she tried to. Li fell, rather ungracefully for an X5; the blankets entwining itself around her legs.
The past events of the last few hours came back to her, and she remembered meeting Zack, her seizure, and Zack jabbing the… Zack is going to pay for that. Soon as I get out of these linen shackles…
Li untwined the blanket while her brain entertained fantasies of the torture she would do to Zack as payback. Li looked up when she finally got loose to see Zack standing in the doorway.
"Zack!" She scowled, "Who or what gave you the idea that I would like you to drug me?"
Zack smirked at her, then shrugged.
"Come closer, I want to dismember you."
"I come bearing food," He offered in a placating tone.
Zack turned around and was out of the female transgenic's line of sight for a few seconds. When he came back into the doorway, he held a carton of what looked like Chinese takeout.
Li suspicions were confirmed when the smell of fried noodles wafted over to her seat on the floor.
"All is forgotten," Li smiled. "Now hand over the food."
Zack obliged. Li began shovelling the food into her mouth at a super fast rate as if afraid that it would disappear any second.
"Whoa, slow down, sis. The food's not going anywhere."
"You try living off nothing but what you can scrounge up for a few weeks."
Zack frowned, obviously deep in thought. "Listen, I have some errands I have to run, why don't you finish up here. There are some clean clothes on the table." He gestured towards the tabletop, "and the bathroom is through that door, as you have probably figured out."
"Bye," Li called out as Zack turned away.
He left and Li resumed eating, her green eyes taking in her surroundings. The room she was in was meagrely furnished, the floor was tiled and the walls painted with what used to be white but was now a yellowy brown colour.
There was a bed – the one she fell from – a desk with a mismatched chair in front of it, a bedside table, three windows and two doors leading somewhere. One of them, the one she saw Zack leaving through, she guessed led to the rest of the building, and the other to the aforementioned toilet.
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Fifteen minutes later, Li had showered and dressed in the clean clothes Zack had left for her. They consisted of a tank top, black long sleeve shirt, jeans, some underwear and a pair of combat boots. Where Zack had procured all this she didn't know and she didn't particularly want to.
Feeling considerably more human – as human as she could get being a genetically engineered super soldier –, Li wandered out of the room to explore the rest of what turned out to be an apartment.
Despite the run-down appearance of the building, the apartment was pretty well organized. She supposed Zack, being the Manticore soldier that he was, had kept the habit of keeping his quarters clean even though they'd escaped from Manticore for six months already.
The living room consisted of a beaten up cream coloured couch, a coffee table and a television. Li had seen one of these back at Manticore before. They – the X5s – had been allowed to use it in the rec room, but the only channels that it had was news from all around the world.
This one however, begged to differ, as she undoubtedly found out when she turned it on. A Caucasian girl with long blonde hair and baby blue eyes appeared on the screen along with a boy. His hair was black and dreadlocked and his grey eyes were inspecting his sneakers.
The girl appeared to be crying and the boy handed her a piece of tissue. Li stared at this for a few minutes, before deciding that all this girl was going to be doing was cry and she changed the channel quickly.
What appeared next, she immediately termed as weird. A man appeared; stuffing what looked like a piece of maggot infested cheese from a red plate into his mouth and swallowing it down; a horrible frown marring his features.
Li's mind jumped to the conclusion that the man was being tortured. The screen moved further back and showed a group of people behind him, watching him eat the cheese; a guy in a immaculate suit holding a microphone was saying there were only two more pieces of cheese on the plate.
Li found this mildly interesting and plopped down on the couch to watch. The man finished of the plate and stepped back. The sound of audience clapping filled her ears, but her thoughts remained undisturbed.
The man – who the announcer called William Atkins – was not tied up or anything and no one was forcing him to eat the cheese, so why was he eating it so willingly? A plate full of maggot infested cheese didn't exactly make her mouth water, and if ever presented with it, she would only ever eat it if it were a life and death situation.
Another man, an African American this time moved up next. The plate had apparently been replenished. This man went by the designation Dante McMillan; age 26, as the information bar popped up in the bottom left corner of the screen.
He too cleaned up the plate of cheese. She switched the channel; watching people eat plates of maggot infested cheese to her was frankly, quite mind numbing.
This time, the screen switched to a desert scene. A blue Road Runner dashed by on the screen, followed closely by a brown, scrawny coyote. The screen changed scenes again, showing the coyote trying to capture the bird with a rope, a sling-shot, a rotating circle of spiked balls, a booby-trapped ladder, and a pile of rocks.
The bird just went "Beep Beep" and continued running again, oblivious to the coyote's painstaking plan.
Li grinned watching as the coyote thought up another plan, which the beeping bird, who seemed to have wheels for feet just foiled with ease.
She deduced that this was a type of show was called 'Cartoons', a film made by photographing a series of cartoon drawings to give the illusion of movement when projected in rapid sequence. She'd read about them in some of the books she'd read in the vast Manticore library during rec time.
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When Zack returned an hour later, it was to find a grinning Li paying rapt attention to the television, which showed Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote – he'd seen and read about them before –, running across the screen.
"Enjoying the TV too much to pay attention to your surroundings are we, baby sis?"
"Well hello to you too Zack."
Zack rolled his eyes to the ceiling in frustration.
"We leave for San Francisco at 2330 hours," Zack spoke to her without turning around. "You'll get a foster family there."
"WHAT?" Li turned to stare at him. "Why can't I stay with you?"
"The less contact we maintain, the safer we are, and we'll have a better chance at not getting captured."
"Zack! I can take care of myself. I stayed out here," Li gestured around her, "Without your help for six months."
"Yeah, and look how well you were doing when I found you."
"I managed to stay out of trouble; I even had contacts supplying me with tryptophan!" Li snapped exasperatedly.
"You forget Li that I am your C.O and you have no business questioning my orders, soldier."
"Yes, sir." Li bit out through gritted teeth. She had seen the Manticore mask of utter perfection slide down during their conversation. It was no use trying to question his orders now.
Li turned and headed towards the room, her expression a cross between a frown and a scowl.
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It took twelve hours to get to San Francisco. Zack had left her in front of the social services building with an envelope containing a letter, a thick stack of small bills – enough to last her for about three months, excluding her foster family – and her clothes.
He'd then given her a hug, whispered something to her about lying low and left. Li hadn't been paying attention to him. She was in a daze.
She knew what she had to do; Zack had told her her orders on the way here. She had to go in there, the building that after the pulse somewhat resembled Manticore, with its drab grey walls, hard plastic seats, and the waiting.
Li had never been a patient person. Syl had rubbed off on her, making Li impatient, and thus inheriting that itchy trigger finger. Lydecker and the trainers had reprimanded her more than once for twitching continuously during waiting periods.
I spent six months looking for my big brother, now he says we have to split up, with the same lame assed excuse. What's the point then, of escaping? At least there we were together. That way, Eva wouldn't have died. Kit wouldn't have been recaptured, or possibly killed.
What's the point of living on the run? Always looking over your shoulder in case Lydecker was on your tail, wondering who made it out and who didn't, who you might never see again because they were shot and killed during the escape.
I have my doubts about this world, this world outside; but I'm a good soldier, I listened to Zack, because he's my CO and my big brother, my biggest brother. The brother, who, after Syl killed Raven and was punished, did his best to keep us safe.
One thing's for certain though, although Zack may know the answers to a lot of things, he won't know the answer to this. Maybe Ben will know?
Ben used to know a lot of things, why we were in Manticore, what was outside, why there were nomilies in the basement. I'll have to ask him when I see him. Though the chances of that are slim.
The social worker is shaking me, I realised that I have fallen asleep on the hard plastic chairs. Who would have thought I could actually fall asleep on these chairs?
My foster family is here to pick me up. There is a black SUV outside. It reminds me of the one Colonel Lydecker used to drive.
I fall asleep on the drive to the house.
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Li woke up to find herself in another bed. Groaning, she pulled herself up. "Whose bed am I in now?"
"You're in your new bed, you're safe now, Linette." Her new foster mother, Anne Fuller said. She looked French, with a delicate facial structure, arresting green eyes, brown hair tied carefully into a bun and a petite frame.
She had a soft and gentle voice, so unlike the trainers and Colonel Lydecker, it unnerved her. She reminded Li of her nurse, back in the days when she wasn't part of Zack's unit yet.
Her new alias was Linette Sanchez. Her parents had died in a car crash trying to get out of the city soon after the pulse. Rubbing her eyes groggily, she spoke up. "What time is it?"
"It's 8.00 p.m. now. I've asked the cook to save you some dinner. You must be hungry."
"Yeah." She'd arrived in San Francisco at 11.30. That meant she'd slept for eight and a half hours or so.
She only needed four hours of sleep every week, which meant that she was going to be extremely hyper. "Thank you, ma'am."
"Please, call me mom. You're my daughter now."
Li didn't really know what this 'mom' person was, but if Mrs Fuller wanted her designation to be 'mom', Li would call her that.
Anne pulled back the bed sheets. "Come on downstairs. Rune wants to meet you, and I'll have Paige, our resident cook – and a good one I might add – heat up the food for you."
Pulling herself out of bed, Li followed Anne downstairs. Anne led Li towards the dining room.
There was a hard oak dining table in the middle of the room and eight evenly aligned chairs lined it four sides. A glass bowl holding sweet smelling lavender petals sat in middle of the table. With Li's enhanced sense of smell, she could smell it strongly.
"Paige, can you get the warm up the food in the fridge please?" Anne called towards the kitchen.
A plump Italian woman came out through the kitchen doorway. "I see it is Miss Linette." The woman, Paige, had a heavy Italian accent. "I shall go heat up the food for you."
A girl sat at the table with an open book propped open in front of her. She looked up when they came into the room. "Hi, Linette. It's nice to finally have somebody my age in the house. "
"Hi, Rune." Rune's shoulder length brown hair was tied up in a ponytail and her baby blue eyes were staring thoughtfully at Li.
Rune was about the same age as Li, but Li was still taller than her by about three inches. She wore a spaghetti strap top and a pair of faded jeans.
"I'll leave you two girls to yourselves. I'll be in the library if you need me." Anne said.
"Okay, mom." Getting up, Rune dragged Li on to a seat next to her. "So, what's your story?"
Li knew the answer to that question. "My parents died in an automotive vehicle accident trying to get out of the city of Seattle soon after the pulse happened."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"Doesn't matter, I don't remember them that much really" That wasn't even a lie; she didn't really know her mother since Manticore hadn't really been big on family.
"Mom's going to be sending you to the same school I'm going to tomorrow." Rune said. "I'll show you around, and you can meet Lily, she's my best friend in the whole world."
Li was about to reply when Paige came back out again and placed a plate of spaghetti in front of her.
"Enjoy, Miss Linette." She walked back into the kitchen.
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Five minutes later and Rune was leading her in an abbreviated tour around the house. They ended back in Li and Rune's room.
Li had never been so full before. She'd had more food today then she got in her daily rations and that was only one meal.
Rune had showed Li where her new clothes were. And she was about to have a shower in the big marble bathroom that connected to their room.
Stepping into the bathroom, she shut the door and pulled off her clothes, kicking them into a laundry pile. She stood under the faucet and stared at the knobs protruding from the wall. One had a 'C' on it; the other had a 'H'.
She had never operated a showering facility before, the ones back at Manticore had been controlled by the command centre and were timed for exactly five minutes. Her superior mental processing went to work figuring out how to operate the shower.
Knobs are meant to be turned, right? Right. Great now I'm answering my own questions.
Li wondered briefly if the after effects of the drug Zack had jabbed her with were still here, but quickly dismissed it.
'H' could stand for Hydrogen and 'C' could stand for Chlorine, which is not entirely impossible, but why would a bathroom faucet have Hydrogen and Chlorine? 'H' could also stand for heat and 'C' for cool or cold.
Deciding to do it the old-fashioned trial and error way, Li reached out towards the 'C' knob. She turned it on and immediately a blast of cool water came out. The water temperature was the same as the one back at Manticore, so Li didn't really mind.
Until, the water temperature started to drop.
Li shrieked and turned the water off. Deciding that the 'H' knob stood for hot, she reached towards it, and to prevent a repeat of the previous episode, she turned on the cold water as well.
She reached out tentatively and felt the water; it was warm. She stood under it to get herself wet and began to scrub at her skin with the soap.
Li showered and dressed quickly. Pulling out the makeup she had stolen before she met Zack, she used it to hide her barcode; combed her drying hair and stepped out of the bathroom.
Rune was asleep on one of the twin beds, when she came out. Walking over to the bookshelf in the corner of the room, Li chose a book and settled down on her bed to read the night away.
BlueAngel137 Thanks for the support.
Mystic Faith Thanks. Does not. It doesn't matter. If you read other Dark Angel stories, you'll find that that is very common. BTW, what's with the changing of your account name every few months?
HoneyX5-452 Thanks and no. The pairing is not going to be Li/Zack.
Calistra Thanks.