fridgetothefire | 065 ☣ fish for fallen light

[There are several sides to Alec, each kept in their neat little box, most with their different names, none of them more than a negligible percentile of what little he knows or remembers of his true self. What fewer people still know than even know this is that he can flip between them at will: open a door, flip a switch and be standing in a different dressing room, close the door gently behind him. His smile fades, leaving the weight of his gaze behind, missing nothing as it never once did.

There is no recognition for this - whatever this is, this communication, this message - in him when she signals the connection is secure. He already knows it's as secure as it can be from his side, locked to the laptop through Eyes Only's channels and resources, piggybacked into half a dozen stolen IP addresses and tied up neatly to nowhere. It's only wherever the hell she's sitting that he's worried about, but he already gambled once on her attention to detail and he is free now.]

What do you need?

[A wedged smile; she has what she needs, if not everything she wants. Ben is Ben is Ben is back, and Cassel will mend, and the ship is sailing straightish again. It warms her to see him, all the more to hear his concern. She wants things he cannot touch. She also wants him to be well. It surprises her how deeply, even though really it shouldn't. Her entire acquaintance with him was pressed under the unbearable deep-sea weight of her search, which made her affection for him as himself, briefly glimpsed, seem tiny by comparison. But anything would.]

Tell me how you're doing now. Really.

That's it? This is a social call?

It's an opportunity. And a rare one. Communications are - stringently limited, where I am now.

I wasn't sure who I'd reach, to be honest. But I'm glad I got you.

[He considers this with the strange, silent intent of his series, what it sounds like to his ears, which were trained to hear the things others say in certain ways that few enough ever do. He hears several markers that touch the cold, wire-thin line of steel fear shot through every transgenic, though he wears his own wrapped around his own wrist, makes sure he controls it instead of the other way around, makes sure no one knows that until it's too late.

Considers if he's a hero yet, and knows that he's not, but still hears himself repeating with ever so slightly cooler deliberation:]

What do you need?

Edited 2015-02-07 07:38 (UTC)

[And she quavers.]

...my brother went to a thing like PsyOps. I need him to be okay. Someday.

Tell me that can happen.

Edited 2015-02-07 07:46 (UTC)

[It isn't at all what he was expecting. Coordinates, data points, weapon specifications, a contact; not reassurance. He'd been unsure about being able to produce the rest of it, but he's even less certain of being able to say that anyone, anything, can ever be okay. Especially when the word PsyOps sends a shiver ghosting down that piano wire fear.

He's still for a moment, weighing the dark of the cells of solitary, the searing of lasers straight into the brain, and the flickering firelight of an entire empire consuming itself. Then, as deliberately, as smoothly as the original transition, he eases back through the door separating X5-494 from Alec McDowell and smiles for her, crooked, easy, and natural. His mask, as ever, is perfect.]

Sure it can. Poor bastard, but if there's anything of him left, he can build on that. [To a point. Painstakingly, choosing which pieces to discard and which to rename, which to hide away where no one will ever see them again, if there is any of him left to hang on the walls for others to see.]

There's some left. She wasn't trying to take it all.

[And yet. And yet the horror of it goes as deep, in some ways, for all that it was less broad. Her voice is quiet and certain and fraught all at once. She knows it's his mask. But. But. Here he is, donning it.]

I did find who I was looking for. Or. Technically he found me. We're as safe as we ever expect to be.

[I need him to forgive me, she thinks without saying, partly because she is not at all sure that is the right verb, or that there is a right verb. Even in German.

She assumes he could tell, watching her rip apart place after place. There was nothing especially subtle about her unwavering need to scrutinize before scouring. She doesn't need him to go on a mission. But he can turn the doorknob between 494 and Alec under his own power, and his own purpose. Because she asked.]

[But here he is, and he still owns himself, against every odd and every expectation. There isn't a single day that goes by that Alec doesn't remember that he is the only one that bet on himself, and he was the one that was right.

It's the kind of victory that only matters to him, not to anyone else, and he won't try to make it. He does raise one eyebrow at her admission.]

Well, that's not something you hear every day. I mean, you meet someone who isn't supposed to be there in a place like Manticore, digging into the deepest, darkest corners and then lighting the place on fire, a guy kind of figures it's not the sort of story that means a happy ending for most people.

[Alec does not have much energy to spare to wonder about others; he'd had questions, of course, during and after. But once the decision to commit had been made, he'd only wondered in bits and pieces, never tried to imagine what could happen to fill in the blanks. He knew she was searching for someone. He has even, over the several months she was working and the several more months after she disappeared, wondered if it had something to do with him or someone who looked like him, but he never followed up. Didn't matter, not until she popped up on his computer screen again today.]

[This isn't their ending; she's not even sure if they are happy. And yet. And yet. They also are happy, all things considered.]

We're working on it.

Can you not afford a social call at the moment? Because I'm a social creature.

[A helpful sort of person would ask. Alec is not, on the whole, a helpful person. He is curious of course - cat DNA, he blames it on that - but that only takes a guy so far down the rabbit hole.

His eyebrows stay raised even when the rest of his expression smooths into an easy, smirking smile. He spreads his hands to show the sub-one level of the abandoned parking garage where he's currently sitting.

What's the point in being free if you can't be social whenever you want? [There's a small twist to it, because it hasn't been freedom without a price, and he's willing to pay it but many aren't. He knows how to work in this new world, even if it would be so much easier if he could justify cutting ties and running on his own. He can't.

Maybe he's the helpful sort after all.] You can call me Alec.

[She doesn't pick up all the nuances in that, but she gets enough; that he calls himself free is nearly as good as the gift of the name. There's always a price, but for people like them - well, they make it work out.]

I'm very pleased to meet you, Alec.

[The emotion wells up like an ocean behind the formulaic levee of the words; vast and surging and alive, spilling over the edges in playful white wave-crests, the twinkles at the corners of her eyes, the dimples her smile forces into her cheeks.]

[For people like them, it's worth it; perhaps the only thing worth it. He's able to settle, now, into the persona he's named, able to relax into being this person he's decided he's going to be now.

And if his smile back to her is just a little more satisfied than it is sly, well. That can be a silent signal, too, that disappears a moment later behind his much more characteristic banter.]

Most people are, sweetheart. I suppose you've found somewhere safe from all this, then? Which I wouldn't be too busy to hear about, incidentally.

It's. Well. Safe-ish. That might be generous.

[No one gets yelled at, and no one gets punished, and no one disappears. Zero for three. Also, the small but constant possibility of Manticore memories, histories, relapses and overlappings. Not safe from the thing even after it's unmade. But he's asked, in his backhanded way, and far be it from Anya to keep information from - well. Not anyone. But the sum of a friend and and ally which is more than its parts.]

It's a place outside the world. Yours, mine, anyone's.

[He will, she thinks, not be entirely shocked by the implication that she is from a different one, even if it necessarily raises more questions than it answers.]

The guy in charge collects people who fucked up and died, gives them another chance and keeps them captive until they have their heads screwed on a little straighter. I was one. Now I help save the new generation from themselves for room and board and the occasional broadly defined wish.

It does fuck with your head quite a bit but - in a way that lets you see more, instead of less.

[He isn't, and it does. Not that he's ready to swallow everything she says wholesale because he is someone who always makes a point of chewing whatever he bites off, but the truth is something no one would ever expect because he won't let them expect it. The truth is he knows so staggeringly little about the world and what's in it, what's possible, that as insane as it sounds he cannot immediately and completely discount it.

It does make him a little uncomfortable, though, because he is from a place that kept captives, that collected operatives that fucked up, that gave them another chance if their heads were screwed on tighter. The language can be slanted the same, but the outcomes? How similar are they? But he is back on form now and with his discomfort comes a small laugh.]

Was that what this whole thing was? Saving the new generation from themselves? Or was that the seeing more instead of less.

[It's hard to articulate why the barge is different - but there's a degree to which she doesn't try. He has a right to know exactly how damning the similarities can be.]

'This whole thing' was - a detour. Missing crewmate, and I was worried he'd gotten dragged back where he came from.

Seeing more - well. A few months prior, I spent three days living the life of someone I could have been. X5-159. It's not like a hallucination, or like the things they'd try to convince you of. It's not like anything, except being someone else, wholly and completely. And then you're you again, but you remember it. So I knew.

[What he was in for, if he was there.]

A lot of useful things.

You knew.

And you came anyway. And that is what you did with the knowledge.

Knowledge is not the same as experience.

[The hushed sort of somber.]

I knew, but I'm not - the person it happened to. 159 could not have done it.

[Could not, not would not.]

I love him more than I know how to say. Except: yes, that is what I did.

[It sounds like bullshit, of course; the only way Alec has ever heard of someone becoming someone else, they don't get the option to go back to being themselves. It's ridiculous to ask him to believe this, except... he almost does. It would explain a lot of how she managed to get inside Manticore without being a part of it, without being transgenic, which she is clearly not.

There are other explanations, too, of course; explanations he is better equipped to understand in the world where he grew up. A world that did not give him the context to understand the kind of love that one does not know how to explain, the kind of love that would bring her into a hellish place like where they met not because she had to, but for someone else.

He is not completely without that context, but he doesn't think of Rachel. He has conditioned himself not to think of Rachel, and it is a betrayal even now, but he has conditioned himself to that as well. It was the only way to break Manticore's hold over him once and for all.]

I've never understood that. I mean, I can't exactly complain considering I'm sitting here instead of there - [And even with all its certain to be shortlived flaws, Terminal City is so much better than Manticore ever was.] - but it doesn't make any sense.

I never met a 150, so I can't confirm either way. They must've been a pretty brave lot.

[He says brave like most people would say stupid; not entirely unkindly, but a conclusion nonetheless. Stupid transgenics don't last long in Manticore, not if their stupidity comes in the form of bravery. Maybe this is why he never met one. Maybe it isn't. It is still, as far as he can see, certainly true.]

In your reality, they were all non-viable at the blastocyst stage. I checked.

[Because certainly that's easier to examine than the nature of consuming love.]

I don't know if they'd have been anything like me or the people I remembered, or if it was just a convenient empty place the barge could wedge me into.

[She runs a hand through her hair, smiles faintly and ruefully. It's a tell and she knows it's a tell, but she lets it happen anyway, because it soothes her, because she trusts him enough to show her vulnerability, her bemused mix of embarrassment and pride. She understands the kind of stupid bravery he's talking about, has always associated it with people like Dean, not herself.]

It didn't feel brave at the time. Losing him -

[A caught breath, a tiny shudder, more willful leaving the mask down.]

That was terrifying. Maybe not unbearable, in the very long run. But losing him because I did nothing -

[She won't lose him because she did something. They will work it out. They've promised, and she has to trust him, trust both of them.]

It felt necessary. And a little inescapable, absolute driving - I have, on occasion, been obsessive. And this time I didn't fight it, except to be careful, because a certain amount of care was necessary to hope for success. Because I couldn't help him or anyone else if I were caught.

[It sort of was the stupid kind of bravery. Which is strange to consider, surreal and warm, a golden Dali sunset.]

It's okay not to understand it. We barely understand it. And it can ruin people, loving that much, that way. I've seen that. It is not gentle.

[She thinks of her father. She does come by it honestly. It feels a little like a betrayal, to hold her feelings for Ben and his for her in the same hand - but it is, she realizes, the same overwhelming tenor.]

[He marks it as a tell, of course, habitually and thoughtlessly; so too the hitch in her breath. Alec has made his living - literally hinged his survival - on reading other people, on relying on his instincts for knowing truth from lie, and he sees no reason to go against it now.

But she finishes up as honest as she started, and that much he understands. He shakes his head, a long blink buried in the motion, an admission of a tell of his own if it isn't quite clear what the admission is exactly.]

Nothing gentle survives. Maybe that's all it means. [This is not optimism, but a twisted, practical sort of realism; if it cannot be understood, if it bites back, if it ruins, maybe it is real. Alec knows nothing else for truth in his own life and if whoever she came to get - whoever she lost - is from Manticore originally, then certainly it applies to both of them as well.]

I see now why we get along. Tell your boy careful, or I might come looking to steal your heart. [He smiles, makes it a flirtatious jest with an effortless twist of his expression and his eyes, but it's true: not that he is capable of any of the things she's talking about, of loving that deeply, of being excessive and careful and stupidly brave. But he is intimately, starkly familiar with the worst parts of himself, doesn't flinch from them or from using them when it is necessary.

It's how people like them survive.]

[That makes her smile and swallow a lump in her throat at the same time; because of course he never could, but also he already has, just a little.]

Nothing survives forever.

[Gentleness, while it endures, can change a lot.]

Listen - there's a war, where I come from. I haven't decided to go back and fix it, but if I did -

[I will, he thinks savagely for just a moment, doesn't say because he taught himself not to say it no matter what. It is the least of all Manticore owes him. They took so much from him, he will take the rest of his life and he will run with it, and he will never lay down quietly. None of this reaches further than the crooked grin he gives her, the easy glint of his eyes.

Both of which sharpen almost imperceptibly when she mentions war. He is, after all, a soldier. Here it comes, as it always must.]

But if you did? [If she's going to ask, he's going to make her say it, both eyebrows raised in a caricature of innocence.]

If I did, there's no one I'd rather have at my back.

[It's true, plain and warm with it. It's true partly because she hates to be the one pressing Ben to be a soldier again, because Alex and Jean are mutants and she doesn't want to put them in a position to have to fight that war, because Cassel for all his terrifying power is very squishy and her baby brother, because she doesn't want to ask Bruce to kill again. But she'd pick him, if she got one choice, for virtuosity and raw, delicate trust, for sheer competence all the parts of war that aren't combat.]

Would you come?

[She will ask, for all that he seemed ready to scale the trenches earlier on nothing but her face and suspicion, because there are no debts that override this, because if they did, she would have done nothing for him at all: if he is free, he get the choice.]

[It isn't that he's forgotten that he was ready to launch some kind of counter attack earlier; and even though she asks, even though the asking releases him from the debt, the fact of the matter is the debt is there. He wouldn't honor it if he saw fit to ignore it, he has always listed hard line morals under the stupid kind of bravery, but the debt is there.

The first part clearly bemuses him, make him a special, deliberate kind of wary. Just because he's arrogant, just because he would tell anyone there's no one better to have behind them, doesn't mean he is vulnerable to flattery. He doesn't ask how two people would win a war. They already have, the two of them. The only war he couldn't win on his own.

He pushes his lips out in a caricature of consideration to mask the fact that he's already decided with humor, with the kind of behavior that suggests he takes nothing seriously at all.]

Has anyone ever told you that you have awesome taste in travel accessories? [If she did, he would go.

It surprises even him.]

065 ☣ fish for fallen light

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