Chapter Text
I.
Something different about her.
He sipped his whiskey and twitched every time she came up for a refill and a few rounds of banter with him. Invisible wire stretched from her sternum to his vertebrae: he felt her movements in his spine. Something different. What was it?
She invited him to her table with a smile that seemed sincere, but he turned it aside with a sneer and a flick of his hand. He liked being close to her a little too much tonight, and he knew by now that meant stay away. She wanted to wallow in doom, that was her business, but he didn't have to sentence himself to the same fate. She couldn't touch Logan, he couldn't touch her: a whole party of nobody touching nobody. That sure sounded like fun. He grimaced and sipped his whiskey.
And yet he still kept tabs on her through the reflection in that handy barback mirror. Nothing different. Same clear olive skin, brilliant eyes, lips like pillows. Same perfect figure, taut butt, slender doe legs, which moved him even though it'd been designed by the same perverts who'd designed him. And wasn't that a fun thought? His cock, modeled in wireframe on a computer screen, studied in all its glorious 360 by some guy who smelled like Fritos, before he'd even been conceived. Designed for maximum use, just like the rest of him.
Something different.
She stopped by again and she didn't have the pitcher in her hand, which meant she'd come by just to talk. Lucky him. He turned to her to tell her in no uncertain terms to get the hell away from him unless she meant to climb aboard and that was when it hit him. The difference.
Her smell.
It was her smell that had him feeling raw-edged and aggressive, a kind of squirmy, restless-legs itch beneath his skin that made him want to run or brawl to get rid of it.
Oh fuck no.
She was still standing there, waiting for him to climb out of his head and acknowledge her, so it wasn't bad yet. She probably wasn't even aware it was coming on. Didn't she keep a calendar or something? This was totally irresponsible, utterly against regs, and... she wasn't Manticore.
For all his talk about living high and free, he was still Manticore's wind-up toy.
He finished his whiskey.
“You know the date, Maxie?” he asked.
“September the tenth,” she said.
He subtracted six months from that as he gestured for another drink. His metabolism did neat things with booze: a stiff drink, taken fast, barreled through him and made him drunk for five minutes, then evaporated with no aftereffects.
So he gulped the new drink and waited for it to hit before he said, “Remember what you were doing March the eleventh?”
“What is this, some kind of dumb game?” she said. “Eidetic memory, factory installed. 'Course I remember.”
He waited. The alcohol warmed him, not that he needed it. Her scent, her closeness, did a fine job without it.
She wasn't answering him. She needed a prompt. “So what were you doing that day, Max?”
He glanced to the side and saw the penny drop, like a nuke on an island city. She was slumped against the bar, her hand on her forehead, frozen in the act of raking her hair out of her face. He grinned. “Or should I say, who?”
“God,” she moaned.
“Wow,” he said, raising the drink. “You do get around.”
II.
She hadn't appreciated that joke, but she let him escort her home. He must have been crazy to offer. Hormones. The geeks at Manticore just loved hormones, pheromones, all those little subliminal diplomats. They wanted their infiltrators to talk a good game, move non-threateningly, put out the right smells. Alec had what his ops manager back in the Core used to call “an elite-level pheromone profile.” Geek speak. He put out the right smells.
Only right now he was on the receiving end of Manticore's chemical warfare, and he didn't appreciate it one little bit.
He should never have offered to escort her home, never ever. Every inch of him liked the idea way too much, and she was spoken-for. Sure, by a guy who couldn't touch her without coming down with an extreme case of death, but they both seemed married to the idea of making it happen, and who the hell was he to judge?
He saw her into her apartment. She made a beeline for her bedroom as he hovered by the door, not knowing what to do with his hands. Walk through it, man. Simple. First step was to say “Good night.” Easiest fucking thing in the world. “Good night, Max.”
What came out instead: “Where's Original Cindy?”
“I think she's gone cherchez la femme,” Max said from her bedroom.
Getting to be a popular pastime. The door, 494. Turn around, grab the handle, get the hell out.
But she reappeared. She leaned against the jamb of the door to her room, watching him. Her eyes were huge and vulnerable.
“This...” she said. “Do you know anything about this? What did they do when this happened, at Manticore?”
“I know they thanked their lucky stars for it when they started that breeding program,” he said.
“Does this—”she gestured to herself, “—happen to you?”
“Um, yeah. Something like it, anyway,” he said, moving away from his exit, towards her, his footsteps heavy with irony and self-loathing. But... shit. She knew nothing about herself. Nothing. What little he knew, he felt obligated to share.
"The girl who marched in front of me in my unit? We were at chow one day. You remember, heads bobbing in lines, maintain your interval. Only this girl, 466, she didn't want to maintain her interval. She kept backing up on me. Or I kept running up on her. Got blurry after awhile, who was doing what.”
His pulse synced to the sound of the marching, making the floor throb, the walls, everything. The smell of X5-466's hair. He'd never noticed it before, but today he couldn't get away from it. He wanted to taste the smooth space behind her ears. He wanted to reach for her hips and haul her back against him. Eight inches wasn't there yet, but what was liked the hard curve of her buttocks when they made contact. At thirteen, she was taller than he was, stronger, but right then he felt like being bigger than her somehow. He wanted her to look up at him. He was thirteen years old and he didn't understand shit and he wanted to touch her and he couldn't and he wanted to be bigger and he wasn't.
“Yeah, I embarrassed myself,” he said.
“You shoot your wad?” Max asked, and grinned, a little embarrassed at the crudity of her bald question.
“No," he snorted. "I wish. Way worse. I burst into tears. Guess that clued in the higher-ups, cos X5-466 got diverted the next day.”
“Diverted?” He was standing too close to her. He could feel her body heat. Goddammit, but he wasn't in control of this at all and he hated that.
“Yeah, they figured they'd turn the bug into a feature. Started a whole separate division.”
“Spy whores,” Max said. She scuffed the floor with her foot.
“Probably,” he said. He tried to step out of her space, but it just wasn't happening. “What did you do, out here? How did you handle it?” Twelve years old, thirteen years old, how old were you, who went there? That's what he really wanted to know.
“Unsuccessfully,” she said, in a voice filled with ghosts.
Suddenly she was in his arms. He was hard, but ignoring it; that wasn't what this was about, and he couldn't be blamed for that reflex. He just wanted to comfort her somehow. No, that wasn't right. He wanted to comfort himself.
What the hell for though? he wondered with black humor. His body didn't get hijacked every six months. He didn't lose the ability to select his partners. She'd been raped every six months like clockwork for how many years? She'd consented, but she'd never consented, not in her heart. But her voice had said “yes” and in the eyes of the law, that was what mattered.
He understood how it felt. Yeah, okay, there was no way he could ever truly and all that, but he understood anyway. He'd been Manticore's weapon. He'd murdered for them. That stained his soul, and it wasn't gonna wash clean, because even though he'd been manipulated, brainwashed, trained and bred... he'd consented with his voice.
So he had to let her go, and he had to get the hell out of this apartment, and she had to get on with it, with what her body needed her to do. That was the only way this could go down.
And then he had an idea.
III.
“You want to babysit me?”
“That's the offer,” he said. He drummed his fingers on the counter, shifted a metal can filled with long-handled whisks and ladles so the light broke in a more interesting way off its surface. Glanced at her.
She paced along the windows at the far end of the room, arms crossed beneath her breasts, hands gripping her elbows. Her nipples were hard, and he hated himself for noticing.
“So you're saying you want to tie me down and then sit in a chair and stare at me like some kind of sick weirdo—no! Hell no!”
“You want to go through a heat without dragging some nobody into your life, hating yourself, betraying Logan, right?”
“Yeah, that'd be nice,” she gritted out.
“So you have a shot at it if someone who understood things was here with you,” he said. Someone strong enough to kick your ass if you happened to break free, he didn't add.
“And that's you?” Max's eyes flashed. “The guy who was holding a gun against my hip not half an hour ago during what was meant to be—I'm assuming, here—an innocent hug?”
“Aw, c'mon, you can't blame me for that,” he said. He met her eyes in a challenge. “Any more than I can blame you for that little grind you did at the end, huh? Fair enough?”
She broke the stare first. “I guess,” she grumbled. She paced, then whirled and stared him down. “Why?”
“Why? Why, what? What why?”
“Why do you give a shit what happens during my heat?”
He was halfway through a sentence about how she got him all wrong and then he stopped, backtracked, and sighed. “Cos Rachel,” he said.
Max looked blank. The thing about Max? She had endless patience and compassion for everyone in the world who was not him. When he was in the room with her, the Max Show played on every channel, and the commercials featured Logan. He usually took it as a compliment. He was the one person in her life who didn't claw at her, needing her. She could be self-absorbed around him because she knew he'd take care of himself. Times like this, though, it sucked.
She said, still all tabula rasa, “The woman who died, right?”
He'd have to explain. He walked toward her. “Yeah, but what you don't know is, they ordered me to 'play along with her infatuation.' Left to my own devices, that wouldn't have gone anywhere—I had no clue what I was doing—but orders were orders, and she did. Know what she was doing, I mean. So that went well, right up to the moment they ordered me to kill her.” He clenched his fists.
“We're weapons, Max. We ruin lives. So you think I don't understand how you feel, what you go through, well, I do. If I can help, I want to. If you don't want my help, then—” He didn't finish. Because the logical end of that sentence was, “I'll get out of here and let you deal with it yourself,” and, well, hadn't he already proved to himself that wasn't going to happen?
“All right,” Max said. She turned away, hugging her elbows again, and her voice was a husk as she said, “I guess we can try.”
IV.
Original Cindy listened, stanza and verse, to today's rendition of “the X-5 blues,” and then said she had a girlfriend she could stay with and beyond that, she don't want to hear nothing else about it. She packed a duffel and booked.
Leaving Alec to deal with Max.
Her heat was close now. The buttery scent of a horny female. He bet no one else ever noticed it, but it spoke on a level below the conscious, right to the primal part of him. A feature, not a bug.
They talked ways and means while she still had enough of a grip on reality to weigh in on it, though he caught her staring at him more and more often, her eyes lingering on his shoulders, his hips. The invisible wires in his spine seemed to have gone metastatic, tiny hooks all through his skin, so he prickled when she moved.
“Not—cuffs,” she said when he held them up. She squirmed.
“Well, you've already shot down duct tape and rope,” Alec said. “We're running out of options here.”
“Look, what about a combination?” she said, fast and jagged. “You need to control my joints. Elbows. Knees. If I have those, I can break out.”
The bondage associations were close. Max, tied in one of those intricate Japanese schemes, kneeling, wrists bound to ankles bound to shoulders bound to breasts. Yesterday, bondage didn't move his furniture. Today was a different story.
They experimented. He bit the inside of his mouth until it bled as he wound duct tape around her ankles, her knees, cuffed her taped wrists to the radiator.
She struggled and then looked up at him through her lashes, sweat beaded on her brow. She nodded. “I think this'll work.”
“Can't say I'm looking forward to spoon-feeding you,” he said.
“Maybe I can get time off for good behavior.”
Her voice purred.
Guess it was time to test his bondage skills in the field.
V.
The next three days were the worst of Alec's life.
Okay. That was over-dramatic. He'd had worst days, surely. Just not three of them in a row.
Max stayed cuffed to the radiator, but not for lack of trying. Whenever he left the room, she worked her bonds until the radiator pipes creaked. And as her heat went on, he had to leave the room a lot.
Having him around made her insane. She rubbed her thighs together, rode the seam of her jeans, and moaned, and shuddered, and gasped, and moaned again. She glared at him through the voluptuous waves of her sweaty hair and cursed him for a bastard and worse. Her promises ranged from sweet to filthy. She pleaded with him to free her feet, just her feet.
He couldn't imagine what good having her feet free would do her, and he never found out, because he left them taped. She sawed her hips and cried.
The cat wore itself out every once in awhile and Max came back. He caught her in those dozy downslopes so he could take her to the bathroom, give her something to eat. She slept in his arms as he gently lowered her to the floor so he could reattach her cuffs to the radiator, only to wake a few minutes later.
Throughout the whole degrading, unlovely thing, he had an erection.
He hated it. Lust all knotted up with pity and self-loathing in his stomach, which ached with desire. He was unrelentingly hard and throbbing and he wanted to touch her, and the snake in him listened when she begged and bargained and went into detail about the things she would do, would let him do, if only he'd turn her loose.
It was frustrating, and so, so very annoying, because he had a short attention span and the snake wouldn't let him look at, or think of, anything but her. Even lust got old eventually.
“You can take care of yourself if you want,” Max said. He couldn't see her eyes through her hair but her husky voice was soft; she sounded sorry. “I promise I won't call you a pig.”
She drew in a shuddering breath. His cock twitched at the promise of release, and the snake wondered if she meant for him to do it where he was, where she could watch.
He took his own shuddering breath through a half-closed throat. “I won't, Max.”
The cat took over then, and she talked awhile about how she wouldn't mind seeing it. The snake listened, but Alec tried to tune it out.
Three days like that.
At the end of the third, she looked up at him with embers still burning in the depths of her eyes, but the wildness was gone.
“Welcome back,” he said hoarsely.
VI.
She cried a little while he undid her bonds, and he pretended he didn't hear. He hadn't so much as copped a feel and she was crying. Well, he'd done his best. He'd followed mission parameters exactly.
Later, after they'd both showered and she'd changed her clothes, she made tea and they sat at the table with the small lamp glowing between them. They didn't have much to say to each other. She was a little thinner, haggard, hollows under her eyes.
She stared into her tea. “Thank you,” she said.
He swallowed. “Did it help?”
“I don't know,” she said. She made eye contact that flashed through him, throat to groin. Then back to the tea. If she wanted to read her future, she had the wrong setup. You could do that with loose leaves, but she had a bag in there.
He shook it off. Losing his mind. “Ask you tomorrow?”
“No...” She dipped her tea bag, pushed a wing of dark hair behind her ear. “It helped,” she said, her voice stronger. “I mean, I'm glad. Nobody bringing me motor oil or... or hanging around with pizza. But having you watch me go through that...”
Had she hit “you” a little harder than the rest of the sentence? If this were Manticore, he could consult a tape. Here, all he had to rely on was his squishy, truth-bending brain.
“Talk about embarassing.” She laughed a sad little laugh, wiped a dribble of tea off the side of her cup with her thumb, and sipped.
He wanted to ask if he'd made it worse for her, being around a male X5, but he didn't. “You don't have anything to be—”
“Skip it,” she said. “That whole freakshow, let's just forget about it, okay?”
He raised his mug and eyed her over its rim. “But what happens next March, Max?”
She looked away and didn't answer.