Dark Angel, Alec, Max, and all the rest of them aren't mine. The story is. Please don't steal. Also, one of the lines here was originally aired on BtVS. See if you can place which one.
Protector of Man
I wonder, sometimes, if she really realizes what she did.
It was just a job, for me. Manticore was all I'd ever known. I didn't hate them, not really.
Max, if she were reading this, would probably insert some righteous comment about now. She'd declaim at length about how they were the (insert finger-quote here) "bad guys", how they "used us". She'd probably wrap it up with some sappy quote about how they 'took away our freedom, and we have to take it back'. Blah blah blah.
Please.
The company was our world. Perhaps she's forgotten that, after all her time on the outside. Sure, it's great to be free of those jerks. I have just as much reason to hate them as any transgen. Now.
While I was there, back in the time when I had a number and not a name, I didn't really hate them at all. They weren't good, or evil. Such concepts didn't really exist.
Maybe it's the cat in me. Animals don't really see the world in shades of right or wrong. Back then? I saw them as a force of nature, something that could be cruel at times, sure, but to be accepted.
I wonder, sometimes, if Max forgets. She's spent so much time pretending to be other, to fit in, to be human, but there's part of her that isn't human at all. It's a stone cold truth. We aren't, and have never been, any of the Ordinaries.
It was purely human, what she did that night. Beasts have no concept of vengeance.
Back then, when I was lying on the floor, that gun pointed at me by a dying man with shaking hands, she didn't even stop to consider the ramifications of what she was doing. She wanted blood. She wanted to hurt them, to hurt the ones that dared harm what was hers.
She's never been good at controlling herself. If there's something she wants, she gets it, and there's no concept of compromise whatsoever. Want, take, have, that's her thought process.
She stomped over to the microphone, and in thirty seconds flat told the country exactly where we were born and how to get there. She shattered the world that night. My world, our world.
No one ever, ever expected that she'd go that far. She did it out of revenge.
Does she even know what she did?
I could care less about Manticore, at the time. But even I, the man Max claims has no sense of right and wrong, who is despicable, who cares only for himself… There are some things I cared about. Some things I care about.
Does she know how many people she killed?
Not just people. Our people, our kind. And not just any of our species. She killed children. The luckier ones died of smoke inhalation. Others burned, becoming living pillars of flame.
Only flame doesn't writhe and twitch. Fires don't scream and plead for help with desperate voices.
She unlocked some of the barracks. Kind of her to think of us transgens while she was "heroically" rushing off to save her boyfriend. She didn't unlock them all. Some doorways were blocked by debris. Some of the hallways had collapsed.
I watched it all. I stood there on the hill, and I literally could not believe what she had done. Even if she hated Manticore, even if she hated the place, surely she cared for us?
At least a little?
I stood and I watched. What else could I do? I knew that if I ran down the slope, if I if I ran and pried at the window bars, if I tried to clear the doorways… Well. If I had tried, I'd have been dead before I reached the bottom.
So I did the only thing I could. I stood there, and I watched it all. I kept witness. I stayed until only the embers glowed.
Then I left.
OOO
So yeah, Max is hot. And she cares about us. I mean, why else would she do all the stuff she does? Only sometimes, I wonder exactly who she does it for.
Does she do it for revenge? For herself? So she can say that she's a good girl, that she's doing the right thing, upholding herself in her mind as some tragic little heroine, some pathetic little crusader for justice?
I wonder how many of our people know what she did. And how they would react if they found out.
And I can't help but wonder, sometimes…
Does she realize what she did?