A/N: Same stuff applies as in the Author's Notes chapter. Oh, and unfortunately I neither own Supernatural nor Dark Angel. Just this.
A/N part two: Specific episodes of Supernatural mentioned are: "Skin," "Crossroad Blues," "Jus In Bello," and "No Rest for the Wicked." Specific episodes of Dark Angel mentioned are: "Pollo Loco," "Designate This," "She Ain't Heavy," and "Freak Nation."
A/N part three: Go here: www(dot)flickr(dot)com/photos/40075795(at)N07/sets/72157622636515436/ for screenshots of the reports, in order, mentioned later in this chapter. Remember to change the symbol words to their respective symbols.
Of Desire and the Status Quo
Chapter V: Be Careful What You Wish For
Max had been thinking of what she's going to say to Logan the whole trip from Cindy's to Joshua's old digs, but she's still not clear on what words to use. She plans on doing what she does best—winging it. So, letting her motorcycle fall back on its kickstand and removing her sunglasses, she walks up to the door and raps her knuckles on it.
She hears quiet footfalls from within, and soon the whirring of Logan's exoskeleton, before the door is cautiously opened. As soon as Logan sees Max's face, he opens the door wider to let her in. It's awkward between them, that much is noticeable; Max remains confused over what Logan's actions on the day Terminal City's flag was raised meant, and she's not had a lot of time to think of all the ramifications, let alone discuss it with him.
Which would make it doubly hard to talk to him about something that concerns, of all the people in the world that it could be, Alec, the second of two obstacles (the other being the virus of course) that has played a part in hindering their relationship ever since Max got out of Manticore for the second time.
"Hey, Logan," Max says, removing her biking gloves.
"Hey, yourself," Logan replies, his tone gentle. He moves immediately to a box by the door that is filled with latex gloves, which was his idea to allow them to touch, at least as much as possible.
Max tries not to eye them disdainfully as she thinks of how much she used to take skin-to-skin contact for granted, how real and warm (if feverish) Dean's face felt on her palm; her hand swatting Alec's shoulder; hugging Cindy when times got tough; hell, Mole restraining her arm. The feel of plasticky gloves isn't particularly her idea of romance. But she's not here for that. She's here to figure out just who Dean is—and, really, all she's got is his name and description, that'll be easy to glean information from—why he's here now, how he connects to Alec (and Ben for that matter), and what in God's name is the significance of Dean and Hell.
She hopes with all she has that Dean isn't crazy. She's not sure if she could deal with another person gone off the deep end, never mind that he just may be Alec and Ben's genetic brother. She's never met Dean when he's conscious, so she doesn't have practically any ties with him as she does his lookalikes, but she definitely can't bear to have a repeat of Ben. She doesn't necessarily want another Alec either (shit, that'd be torture for her already thin patience), but she'd rather that than another schizophrenic. Unfortunately, all she can do is wait and see what Dean's personality is like. Or maybe, hopefully, Logan would be able to provide some insight.
Yeah, right.
But Max stows her cynicism for the moment and walks over to Logan's desk, sitting on the edge of it and feeling guilty that White destroyed his penthouse. He'd "acquired" most of the electronics that he'd had in Fogle Towers, but they aren't quite as up to date, and aren't nearly as fast as they used to be, considering Joshua's house isn't fitted with as much electricity or internet connection. Logan's done his best, though, she knows.
"So, what's up?" he asks, voice now somewhat stilted. She guesses he's picked up on her tenseness, and how could he not, considering she's radiating it like a neon sign? He's known her long enough to recognize the signs: she's riled up about something huge.
His counterpart sighs, and runs a hand over her face. "I need you to look something up for me," Max says, as calmly as she can manage, given how even more fucked up her life has gotten just in the past half hour. She amends, after a second thought, "Please."
Logan frowns. "I thought you had people to do that," he says, attempting to keep any bitterness out of his tone. He's aware that he's acting childish being jealous of Dix and Luke's computer prowess—they were made just for that—but he can't help it. Then again, Max is at his place, asking him for help. That counts, just a little.
Max scowls, crossing her arms protectively underneath her breasts. "It's not something I really want public, Logan," she responds, and ah, shit, she's used his name at the end of a sentence. Logan keeps it in mind to back off on his unintentionally confrontational posturing.
"Okay, okay, I get it," Logan placates. He opens up his browser of hacking federal agency databases and asks, "What do you need?"
"It's…well, if you can find what I hope you will, don't look at me like I'm insane. I'm already wired enough about it," Max entreats, adding after Logan's raised eyebrows, "And if you can, start with Manticore's files."
Logan's curiosity is instantly piqued, but he doesn't show it. "All right," he agrees. "Tell me what you know."
Dean's face immediately pops into the forefront of Max's mind, and she tries not to wince just thinking of his horrific nightmare, and the means she'd had to resort to—not to mention the memories dredged up—in order to just calm him down to where his terrors were isolated to purely internal despair.
She attempts to see past that, though, see his body as she imagines it's supposed to look. She sees a military haircut (but one that he seems to be defiantly growing out) and not sweat-slicked; bright, expressive green-amber irises that spark with enthusiasm under usual circumstances, not crazed, haunted, rapidly-moving ones; smooth, shaped lips that curve into a smirk, a grin, a charming and heartfelt smile, not broken and lifeless ones that can only frown and twitch in anger or fear; strong, muscled shoulders and arms that carry their owner with a certain amount of swagger, but also alertness, not hunched and dull; roughened and calloused but nimble hands and fingers that she imagines could be both for hard work and soft caresses, not bloodied and cracked, grayish skin stretched too tautly across the knuckles.
She sees Dean, a guy she's known for maybe fifteen minutes, but of whom she already has a concrete image, an ideal image of which she has no idea the legitimacy, but that she hopes is close to real. In any case, she doesn't want the way Dean looked to her just now to be the way he's always looked. So what if she wants a carefree and mostly innocent, if womanizing, guy who takes life to the fullest and damn the consequences, not a masked happiness and yet internally damaged guy who only pretends to be untroubled (which is what Max knows Alec to be, and wishes he weren't).
Max relays Dean's attributes to Logan, but not insofar as she'd seen him. Just the basics, which, okay, are really all she knows, but she's left out the extrapolations she's drawn. She's pretty certain Logan doesn't want to listen to her inferring Dean's hands are capable of "soft caresses," especially if she'd told him he was an Alec facsimile. Somehow, she thinks he'd be less inclined to dig up information for her if she said as much.
Logan, however, is fully cognizant of her anxiety, and purses his lips at it, wanting desperately to know what the issue is, but knowing that if he prods, she will only retreat further into herself. And then, he'd be even farther away from coaxing it out of her than he is now. So he lets her think he's completely oblivious to her tension, and instead focuses on the scant details she's given him.
Scant details that make him think of a certain Manticore alumnus, but whom Max obviously can't be describing, because why would she have him looking for Alec when she knows perfectly well where he is, and Logan knows Ben's long dead? (A still sore spot for him, given that Max has never told him what specifically happened to her late brother, not even what the man looked like; Logan had even searched for Ben before secretly, but that part of the Manticore files were omitted. Either because Ben had become defective by Manticore's standards and so they deleted any evidence of him, or it was part of the records that Logan hadn't been able to salvage.)
It takes him a wearily long time to find the sketchiest of matches, but when he does, he rubs his itchy eyes and turns the computer monitor towards Max, hoping hers aren't swimming like his are. He hadn't found any affiliations with Manticore—there was a Dean, but he was in his sixties, balding, and decidedly unfit—so he'd had to widen his search to, well, everywhere.
The Pulse had, of course, made finding records more difficult, but thankfully, pre-Pulse agencies had archived the files for the more dangerous criminals, all the federal officials, and the like. Not that Max had said specifically that this Dean person was a criminal, but Logan didn't have much to work with in the first place.
Max takes the mouse from him and scrolls down, reading at a rapid speed, faster than Logan could ever hope to, and her face becomes tighter as she gets farther down, obviously not finding what she wants. Thirty-two persons later, though, Max's finger wavers over the mouse, and she clicks on the file.
Logan watches her face carefully, profiling her much as he would do with a new contact. Her eyes widen the slightest bit, and her mouth opens a little, somehow the air around her gets darker, and yet Logan knows that the new expression means she's nothing less than stunned, with a side order of bewilderment.
"Son of a bitch," Max mutters, staring at the text. Then, in a strangled voice, she manages, "Thanks, Logan." She snatches the whole pile of matches that Logan had preemptively printed out, and blurs out of the house so fast that some of his folders fall off the desk. The door closes quietly enough, but it's barely half a second after that that Logan hears the rumble of Max's motorcycle start and tires squeal against the pavement as she speeds away.
Shaking himself out of his astoundment, Logan turns the computer screen back towards him, glad Max hadn't thought to close the document, and scans over what she'd been so deer-in-the-headlights about. Once he gets through it all, though, he understands why.
There are multiple records for the guy, somewhat surprisingly, of various severity, and some come with a picture, but Logan clicks on two that look the most promising. He quickly reads the details of the police report, disregarding the pictures for the moment:
St. Louis Police Department
Name: Dean Winchester
DOB: January 24, 1979
POB: Lawrence, Kansas
Height: 6'1"
Weight: 175 lbs.
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Brown
Notes: No distinctive marks
The date of birth catches Logan off-guard, because it's not anything like what Max had detailed. Unless, of course, the man looks remarkably youthful for his age. Because if his birth year is right, and the ones on official reports usually are, then it would put him currently at about forty-two and a half years of age, and Max had given Logan an age of somewhere around twenty-six to thirty-one. It doesn't make sense. So Logan switches to the next record.
WANTED BY THE FBI
MURDER, ROBBERY, ESCAPE FELON
DEAN WINCHESTER
Aliases: J. Mahoggoff, Jerry Garcia, John Smith, Donald Strump, etc.
Age: 26
Height: 6'1"
Weight: 175 lbs.
Eyes: Hazel
Hair: Lgt. Brown
Build: Fit
Complexion: Fair
Race: White
Nationality: American
Markings: Unknown
Language: English
Occupation: Unknown
It's equally as puzzling to him, even if he ignores the glaring error in this report (which marks him as twenty-six, and yet the record was filed in 2007, making him twenty-eight at the time of the arrest). It matches what the first statement said, the guy being forty-two as of this January. So what's the deal?
Logan looks closer at the information, at the names, and he leans back in his chair, passing a hand through his hair once he recognizes it. Unlike Max and Alec, he remembers very vividly the string of crimes that Dean Winchester—and his brother's name is Sam, Logan recalls—committed, and all the mystery that shrouded it, bearing in mind that he was seventeen and devoted to journalism when they first began, not five or six, like Max and Alec were.
He closes his eyes as he thinks back almost thirteen to sixteen years ago, and the numerous newscasts he'd read and heard. Logan remembers doing a whole series of articles on the Winchester murders, identity and credit card fraud, and countless other misdemeanors, intrigued by their methods and weird array of felonies, capitalizing on their sensationalism. He was left bone-dry by early March of 2008, the last information on them being that they might have been the two "fugitives from justice" caught in a police station explosion in Monument, Colorado. Although there was that gruesome triple homicide slash triple disappearance of a family (and one unrelated, young blonde woman) in New Harmony, Indiana that had been suspicious.
Judging by the appearance of the crime scene—a line of a powdery substance in front of the double doors leading to the dining room that police never were able to identify; blood in broad, arcing splatters across the hardwood, table, and even hitting the opposite walls; the grandfather's neck snapped a hundred and eighty degrees around; the smell of sulfur in the air; and possibly the weirdest were the deep scratches in the floor, as if made by giant dogs, wolves even, which officials wrote off as knife marks—yeah, whatever—the media had attributed it to the Winchester brothers, even though they'd been off grid for three months. (Not that they'd not been off grid for longer than that before, but it was a reaching connection regardless.)
After that disaster, though, there'd been absolutely nothing for so long that the media and feds began to let the Winchesters fall under the "Unsolved Cases" (a.k.a. "Pains In Our Ass, But We Can't Find Them") category, and moved on to other, more pertinent cases. Logan had done some idle digging and found a few strange incidents in various cities across the U.S. that seemed in the Winchester vein, but they weren't often enough or solid enough to be distinct ascriptions.
As a result, Logan had left the brothers to the wayside, and instead altered his attentions to more normal and recent events, the serial killers melding into the vague "Oh yeah, I kinda remember them; one was really tall, and one was really cute, right?" sections of people's memories, much like the serial killers of the past.
Logan discovers that he's forgotten the Winchesters enough to where he can't pick out their faces worth any decency, which is an annoyance, but then again, he did find those files on Dean. He hadn't yet looked at the pictures, and damn it but he's kicking himself for that one, and is going to blame it on his trying to recall a quarter of a century ago for two people who made it their mission to stay as under the radar as possible, and who for the most part succeeded damn well. Yeah, that's it.
He almost wishes he hadn't clicked on the reports, though, a second later when he sees the photos. He's transfixed on them, his eyes seeing Alec, but his brain refusing to accept that what he's looking at is the transgenic they'd all come to know and love. (All right, so maybe not love, in Logan's case particularly, but same difference.)
The first report, the one from St. Louis, Missouri, has a photo that looks younger than Max had cited of the guy—and way younger than forty-two—is in washed-out color, and looks much like the usual convicts one might see, perhaps even the more doped-up ones, albeit more handsome and less meth-scarred than most. The second, from Little Rock, Arkansas, appears more akin to what you'd see on that old show America's Most Wanted, complete with grainy security-camera shot and two mug shots, one profile and one straight on.
Logan might be able to write the pictures off as this Dean person happening to look eerily like Alec, and really, they do say that everyone has a twin out there somewhere, right? (He petulantly ignores the fact that many of the people he knows actually do have a twin out there, a literal clone, because no way is Dean a Manticore grad. He's too old for that.)
The only problem with this refusal is that Dean's smirking face is too similar to Alec's to be completely a fluke. Logan's well aware that a lot of guys are cocky and smirk a lot, but he is, and has been, around Alec enough—too much, in his opinion—to recognize the patented Alec McDowell, even X5-494 Logan would bet, smirk when he sees it. And Dean Winchester, serial murderer and all-around freaky dude, is wearing it in plain sight. Logan sighs in exhaustion, and sets his glasses down on the table. Max really doesn't thank him enough.
Logan's game for a challenge just as much as the next guy, especially one that settles into mostly the logic and reasoning category, but this is a little too rich for his blood. Well, fuck it all, but he's resigned now to the inevitability that he's got a long couple nights, maybe even weeks, ahead of him. He stands up to go make some double-caf coffee for himself. And maybe a painkiller or two just as a precaution.
Looks like he's going to be delving into his past journalism career, hoping he'd been as thorough as he remembers, investigating not only the Winchesters, but also even the most remote connections they may have to Manticore. Oh, joy of joys.
Max races back to Original Cindy's apartment faster than she usually would, avoiding as many sector checkpoints as possible, and most definitely shattering the speed limits on the roadways. Not that she can really bring herself to care about them; she has much more important things to think about at the moment.
Like how, you know, there is a very real possibility that a convicted mass murderer could very well be Alec and Ben's genetic donor, if not, by some convoluted series of events, their clone. And Max had freakin' hummed the guy to sleep. She knows full well that she's a deadly weapon by herself, and could definitely kick the guy's ass, but even she's had her ass kicked on occasion, usually as a result of being caught off guard. She'd classify trying to calm down a freaked Alec lookalike as being caught monumentally off guard.
She was—and still is—sure that Dean's nightmare was legit, but that doesn't mean jack squat in matters of self-preservation. If Dean had seen Max as a threat, well, she probably wouldn't currently be able to drive. Or at least that's what she guesses from the short time she'd met the man. His grabbing of her wrist was certainly fast and hard enough to echo extensive training: there are specific ways that one can incapacitate another by even the smallest appendages, and most people, when grabbing a wrist, wouldn't necessarily be able to prevent their opponent from twisting out of it.
But Dean, even with his theoretical disadvantage on the couch, had held her wrist by the ulnar and medial nerves, pinching them to where she could feel her hand tingle, and she is under no illusions that he couldn't have pulled an aikido lock on her in a second or two flat. Sure, she'd probably be able to stop him before he could finish it, but it was the ability that had her wary.
Armed with the stack of matches Logan had printed out, Max steps off her motorcycle, hides it underneath a piece of tarp, and walks into the apartment building, a feeling of déjà vu coming over her; that is, if the déjà vu were incredibly foreboding.
Cindy opens her door after one knock of Max's, like she'd been waiting right beside it, and one quick glance over to the couch lets Max know Dean is still asleep. Cindy's expression turns to intrigue when she sees a mix of uncertainty, fury, and agitation on her friend's face. No one could ever accuse her of having an uneventful friendship with Max, that much is for sure.
"So?" Cindy prompts, her voice muted. She hitches her thumb towards Dean. "Is clone boy over there livin' up to his name or what?"
Max blows out a breath and gestures for Cindy to follow her into the bedroom. Taking a seat on the bed, Cindy joining her a moment later, she hands the files to her friend. "Number forty-four, Cin."
Cindy takes the records from Max, and curiously flips through all the subjects until she gets to the one Max dictated. She sees first the pictures, and they're unmistakably Dean, although she's amazed to see how unburdened he looks in them, even though they're prison shots, in comparison to how he looks now, tossing and turning in the throes of another nightmare.
She's saved from the shock of Dean looking exactly like Alec, given that she dealt—well, dealt being a relative term—with it before seeing these arrest reports. Assuming Max isn't banking on Cindy's reaction just to the photos, she scans the rest of the print, reading Dean's stats and his impressive display of offenses.
She's pretty sure she's supposed to have a deep revelation about what she's reading, and there may be a tickle at the back of her mind, but she's not coming up with much. She turns to Max, shrugging her shoulders. "I got nothin', boo," she says with a touch of apology.
Max rolls her eyes and points to the pages in Cindy's hands. "You really don't remember hearing about Sam and Dean Winchester?" she hisses, gesturing at the wall, in the general direction of where Dean is. "Come on, those guys that everyone went on about how freakish and cultish their crimes were? Devil worship and black magic and shit like that? Pretty much the only concrete fact the cops had was that Dean drove this old, black Chevrolet; they were pretty big news, Cin. Logan told me once he did a whole set of articles on the Winchester brothers when he was younger, only I didn't put it together until now."
Cindy thinks there's some recollection she has, a vague remembrance of years and years ago when there was some appalling crime spree or something, but she was young, so really hadn't paid much attention to it, and apparently that is now coming back to bite her in the ass.
"Sugar, Original Cindy ain't Superwoman," Cindy says with a smile. "You and your fine transgenic brain remember, but I was jus', what," Cindy glances at the earliest date on Dean's files again, "six when that boy first got suspected of icin' that sister? Sorry, Max, I just don' remember."
Max gives Cindy an apologetic smile. Sometimes she forgets that Cindy really is an Ordinary, that she didn't grow up with being forced to keep things in her mind or else, to remember even the littlest facts. Granted, Manticore didn't exactly laser focus on civilian arrests and crimes—under which Manticore would undoubtedly classify the Winchesters—but Max had kept them in the back of her mind nonetheless. Manticore might even have used the brothers as one of their examples on civilians that would require special handling in order to terminate. Max wouldn't put it past them.
Doesn't mean the Winchesters were a daily occurrence in her mind, though, especially after she escaped. Her memory and brain in general were tampered with, but Cindy's wasn't, and it's not her fault she doesn't remember, particularly because she was only six when Dean was accused of the first murder, and barely nine when the brothers went for good on the lam.
"Sorry, O.C.," Max says. Then her brows draw together as she looks at Dean's stats and then at the wall again. "It's just—I don't know, I get a weird feeling about all this."
Cindy laughs. "I'd wonder what's wrong wit' you if you din't," she replies. "Boy's ramblin' about Hell, and now you got proof he's some kinda fine-lookin' nutjob who, what, goes knocking about graveyards? It's freaky, aiight."
"Yeah," Max agrees, "but that's not what I mean." Cindy looks at her quizzically. "I mean, if he's really some badass criminal or whatever, why's he suddenly reappearing in Seattle, looking like he's got no idea what's going on in the world, or why he's here? And, going by what the news and Logan have said, it's not like Dean was this dude who was really affected by all he did. You saw his picture, right? Seriously, what guy who's so haunted by his crimes—you can't say that nightmare wasn't real, Cin—pulls off that kind of expression to the cops? It just feels like there's something else going on here is all."
Cindy stares at Max for a few moments, and then nods slowly. "Okay, girl, you think there's somethin' not straight with all this, we'll figure it out."
Max's face is still in a frown, like she's trying to understand something for which she doesn't have all the necessary variables. Which she doesn't, and she knows it. "Well, the only way we can start is to talk to this Dean guy, see what he says," Max proposes, standing up slowly. "'S long as he doesn't try to kill me again."
Cindy follows Max's movements, setting the documents aside. Wouldn't do anyone any good if Dean thought he was only being talked to because they saw him as a criminal. He is, but they don't want him to know they're aware of it. Max speculates he's betting on that they were too young to hear what he and Sam did in the past. What he also isn't betting on, unfortunately, is that Max is damn good at getting information out of people, and even though she knows Dean's public background now, that doesn't change her skills.
When she walks out of Cindy's bedroom, however, she stops cold. "Girl, what—?" Cindy starts, and then halts just as Max had.
The couch is empty, and the window's open.
Dean's gone.