Disclaimer: The TV show Dark Angel, all of the characters that appeared on it (Max, Zack, Jondy, etc.), and everything else that has to do with the show belong to their respective owners, not to me. No money is being made off of this fic. I only own the original characters (Elle/X5-164, etc.).

Chapter 52: Jack (X5-417)

"Why the hell are we here?" Ben muttered as he threw his duffel bag onto one of the beds in the bedroom of the hotel suite.

I closed my eyes and prayed for my sanity. "Because we need to find, tail, and then assassinate the German billionaire who's gotten his hands on some of our government's chem warfare plans and his twin sons who are in it as deep, if not deeper, as their daddy. This twins convention is the best chance that the government is going to get at them for at least a year, so here we are."

"But if this is a twins convention, why are you here?" Alec asked, grinning.

I sighed as Ben laughed. The week that this assignment was supposed to last couldn't go fast enough. "I'm here because I'm posing as a volunteer to help keep things running and to take out the father while you guys assassinate the younger guys and more importantly, because somebody back at Manticore finally realized that the two of you can't think worth a damn when you're put together so they need somebody to handle the problems that are more complex than two plus two equals four."

"Of course. How could we have forgotten?" Ben deadpanned.

"That's it. I give up," I declared. I set my own duffel bag near the dressers and sat down in the armchair in the corner of the room. "Let's just get this mission over with so we can get back home."

Alec snorted. "Yeah, get back home to the breeding program."

Ben and I winced and then all three of us were silent for several long moments. I know I have my issues with the breeding program, and I'm reasonably sure that both Ben and Alec have their own problems with it as well. Who wouldn't? I could barely think about it, it was tearing me up that badly. How the hell am I—or any of us—going to get through the next how ever long it was going to last?

"Can't get around it, can we?" I finally spoke up. "The brass can send us on as many assignments as they want for as long of a stretch as they please, but it'll still be there waiting for us when we get back. Damn, this is…it's not going to be fun."

"I think you've just won the Understatement of the Year award, Jack," Ben said dryly.

"No shit, Sherlock," I snapped. I took a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Ben. I didn't mean to bite your head off like that."

"No offense taken," Ben assured me.

I shook my head. "I know that I don't have to worry about Jondy being paired up with another man because Parker is going to get into the system and tweak things there. That's not the problem. My God, I'm going to have to make a baby with the woman that I love more than anything in the world and have to give said child up to the people that I hate the most. How the fuck can I look at myself in the mirror everyday if and when I do that?"

"Then don't, man," Alec said.

"Give my not-yet-conceived child up to Manticore or look at myself in the mirror everyday?"

"Neither."

Ben looked skeptical. "Are you being serious, bro? Don't get me wrong, I completely understand where you're coming from. I hate this situation as much as all of us do, but is it at all possible for us not to give up our kids to the assholes who made our respective childhoods a living nightmare? Yeah, Zack said that he would try to think of some kind of a solution. Yeah, I believe Zack and I would trust him with anything and everything. I think, though, that we might have found the one problem that even Zack can't find a feasible way out of."

"I am being serious. At least, I think that I am." Alec shook his head. "I don't know. My head's still screwed up from everything that's happened to me over the past couple of months." He snorted. "Now here's something to get my mind off of my own lovely set of troubles, huh? Have sex with a random woman every damn night. Talk about getting thrown out of the frying pan and into the fire. There's nothing like Manticore's solutions to life's problems."

"If you want Parker to get somebody in particular assigned to you, he'll do it," I reminded him. "It won't be a problem for him. At least, it shouldn't be."

Alec shook his head. "I know, but it's okay. Maybe it's for the better for me if it's somebody that I barely know. I'll take my chances with the breeding partner lottery."

"Why are they assigning people randomly?" Ben wondered. "I would have thought that they would try to assign people together to get certain specialties out of the children. Put an infiltration specialist together with another infiltration specialist, explosives with explosives, that kind of thing. That doesn't make too much sense."

"Who knows?" I said. "Maybe they realized that we don't always turn out quite the way that they had originally intended us to."

"What do you mean?" Alec asked.

"Take Rena and Sasha, or Rena since she was the one who was originally engineered and Sasha decided to surprise everybody by existing," I said. "They were designed for speed, but they turned out to also excel in stealth, escape and evade, and they both ended up as snipers. You guys were designed for infiltration, but you're also stellar at hand-to-hand, stealth, and speed, among other things. Zack, Becky, and Jeff were all engineered to be hand-to-hand specialists, but all three of them are fantastic across the board. They made us to be one way and we turned out at least to some degree another." I smirked. "Not just in our skill sets, either."

"Who knew that 786 would turn out to be a super slut?" Alec agreed.

"Or that Xavier would be an X-Men fan," Ben added.

"Or that Jondy would have weird taste in coffee." I chuckled. "I love her more than life itself, but I will never understand how anybody can like French Roast Nut coffee. What's worse is that Wayne has similar taste and his idea of trying to get me to taste some was one morning he'd switched the cup of regular that I'd grabbed at breakfast with a cup of his crap that he'd made the night before when he'd had kitchen duty because he'd gotten caught by some guards trying to prank Zane that afternoon."

"That was when you'd dumped the cup into his lap last year, wasn't it?" Ben recalled, laughing. "Oh, to see the looks on everybody else's faces when sweet Jack poured a cup of scalding hot coffee right onto Wayne's lap. The bastard wasn't walking right the rest of the day. Alec, if you hadn't been out on a mission when this happened, you would have just cracked up seeing Wayne trying to fake marching correctly or trying to participate in martial arts. It was the best."

"It was that bad?" Alec said, laughing.

"It was," I confirmed. "Wayne was fine by the next day, thank goodness." I couldn't help chuckling at the memory. I'd been in a rare bad mood that particular day and Wayne just happened to pick the wrong time to pull a prank on me. Under normal circumstances, I would have laughed it off or maybe, at worst, encouraged one of my other brothers to pull a prank on Wayne that he'd already been planning.

Ben's smile slowly faded from his face. "I wish that this could last, you know?"

"Here, here," Alec agreed. "Hold that thought." He walked over to where he'd put his bag, unzipped it, and pulled out a bottle of alcohol and a box. He handed the liquor to Ben, opened the box, and pulled out three glasses from it. "Just a little thing I picked up when we were wandering around in the city killing time before it was check-in time here."

My eyes widened when I recognized the label on the bottle. "Holy crap, Alec, you stole this? This scotch normally costs at least two hundred dollars a bottle."

"I didn't steal it," Alec insisted. He grinned wickedly. "I liberated some rich idiot of his wallet, went into the liquor store, and bought the scotch and set of glasses legit. Well, relatively legit." He took the bottle back from his twin, opened it, and poured each of us a glass of the alcohol before raising his up in a toast. "Here's to us taking a breather before going back into the lion's den."

"Here, here," Ben concurred.

"I'll definitely drink to that," I said. I clinked my glass with my friends' and downed the scotch. We need a breather. A long one. I'd thought that the week couldn't go fast enough before, but it really couldn't go slowly enough for me.

TBC