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laniew1New chapter of Missing on Monday, new chapter of Measures of Insanity Tuesday (?).
Alarms getting triggered first thing in the morning were getting to be kind of annoying Max decided.
Title: The Importance of Genetics
Fandom:Supernatural/Dark Angel
Pairings: Sam/Jess, Alec/Max (mentions of Logan/Max)
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: So totally AU that it isn’t even funny. Instead of John Winchester going to Jericho, Dean went instead and subsequently disappeared.
The Importance of Genetics – Pt 4
Alarms getting triggered first thing in the morning were getting to be kind of annoying Max decided.
Especially alarms that had been trigged not two hours after you finally managed to fall asleep.
She pushed and shoved her way through the gathered crowd of her brethren and decided that she really didn’t want to deal with whatever was so interesting that it had managed to wrest them all from their beds and maybe she would get lucky and Alec or Zack had already appeared to handle the next big crisis and she could go back to sleep.
Of course her luck didn’t run that way. When she finally got through, after only stepping on a few toes and elbowing two awestruck X6’s she saw three people that didn’t look like they should be interesting enough to draw this big a crowd.
An old man, and another man and a woman who were only a maybe a few years older than whatever age Joshua was and she didn’t recognize any of them.
She’d really rather not have to deal with this, and she wasn’t sure how she knew but these were natural borns and thus not her responsibility.
Maybe she could pawn them off on Logan.
She would totally have done that had Alec not appeared, hiding a yawn behind his hand and subsequently causing the older man to go sheet white, the younger man to start violently before he too paled and the female to just stare.
As if they’d all seen a ghost of some sort.
Max sighed, because everything that caused her to lose sleep lately seemed to be tied to Alec in one way or another.
“All right, everyone clear out,” Mole announced after a discreet hand signal from Max.
“Alec stay,” Max growled as the bane of her existence turned to leave with the rest of the crowd.
“Max,” he grumbled petulantly. “I’ve only had an hour and half of sleep. It’s not my turn to deal with alarms.”
“Yeah well seeing as how I’m up and this is probably your mess I’m going to have to clean up why should you get to go back to bed?”
Alec wrinkled his nose and frowned, he studied the trio that was still staring at him and Max had known him long enough to know that he didn’t recognize them.
“I don’t see how this involves me,” he muttered finally. “I don’t even know them.”
“Is he okay?” Zack asked suddenly interrupting Max and Alec’s glaring match.
“It’s just,” the younger male started and stopped suddenly.
“We knew, but we didn’t know. John is just taking this kind of hard.”
Mole gestured to a chair and the older man, John sank into it gratefully. Max waited for the other two to do something.
Like explain why there were in the middle of Terminal City, how they’d gotten there and what they wanted.
“I’m Sam Winchester,” the younger male finally held out his hand deliberately to Mole, Mole stared at it for a second before laughing harshly and taking it.
“This is my wife Jessica and my father John.”
The blonde smiled, the older man at least had stopped staring at Alec long enough to glance around the room at the other occupants.
“Why are you here?” Max asked finally.
Sam and Jessica looked at each other and Sam shrugged out of his backpack, he moved over to the table that Mole had set John at and unzipped the bag.
Max fell into a defensive position, noticed Alec and Zack doing the same, Mole fingered the butt of his gun and Sam withdrew a folder. They all relaxed.
Silently he flipped the folder open. One picture he removed and lay on the table, he flipped through the folder, removed a second and set it by the first. Then he stepped back, standing behind his father placing a hand on his shoulder. Jessica moved to stand beside him.
Max stepped up to the table, stared down at the pictures.
Her eyes flicked up to Alec then back to the pictures, then back again. Beside her Zack was doing the same thing.
Alec was just staring at them.
“What the hell is this?” Alec narrowed his eyes and looked up to stare at Sam.
“The one picture is you…” Sam began.
“Yeah, I know. I do recognize myself. Is the other picture is supposed to be me too? Because you know I can put you in touch with some people that can do better work than that.”
“No…” Sam shook his head but didn’t continue. Alec growled in frustration and Max wanted to echo the sound.
“The other picture is my oldest son, Dean. Twenty-one years ago he was on a job and vanished. Facts that we’ve gleaned since then indicate that he was taken by a military organization,” John’s voice started out strong and went softer and softer as he spoke.
“It didn’t have an official designation back then,” Sam kneeled at his fathers side before his eyes rose to meet Max’s once more. “About five years after my brother was taken they were given the official designation of Manticore.”
******************************************************************************
“This can’t be right,” Alec said it again. For the sixtieth time or so, he’d lost count after the first half a dozen times.
“The files appear to be genuine,” Joshua brushed his hair back from his face, glancing up at Max who was hovering over his shoulder staring down at the same files that Joshua had been perusing.
“Well still,” he grumbled.
“Dean Winchester wasn’t the only human to be taken, there were six other humans that were taken as well.” Joshua flipped through the rest of the folder. A series of photos were taped to the last page and he flipped through them.
Five of them were of people that he didn’t recognize in the slightest, possibly their clones had never made it to maturity?
But the final two.
Dean.
“Fuck,” Zack closed his eyes and oh yeah, Alec could commiserate.
“William Anderson,” Max read the tag under the picture and then looked back at Zack.
“Any information in there about him?” Zack asked quietly.
Max shook her head. “The file appears to be information gathered on Dean Winchester, probably for his family. It looks like the pictures were just added as a side bar, maybe leads to investigate?”
Joshua left the folder open to that page and pushed away from the table, prowling the room restlessly. Alec wondered why he was the one filled with restless energy when Alec (and Zack) had been the ones told they’d been cloned from real live people instead of just matter.
“Do you think they’re still alive?” Mole asked around his cigar. Chewing on the end, shotgun resting against his shoulder.
“The folder seems to indicate that they are,” Max waved at the table and then perched on it. Feet dangling as she leaned back.
“Father would not have agreed to this,” Joshua said emphatically, hand gestures punctuating the words.
And Alec realized why Joshua was so restless, agitated.
“He might not have had any choice,” Zack leaned against the table beside Max. Glancing back at the picture that was not of him again.
“Taking people from their families, Father would not be part of this.”
“And Zack’s right, he might not have had any choice,” Max stared at Alec. He squirmed and wondered if she was trying to see that other guy, Dean in him.
“And he might have been long gone by the time they made the decision to start snatching people off the street, we know he left the Breeding cult, we know he left Manticore. What’s to say that after he left whoever Lydecker took his orders from didn’t decide to stop using dead people and start looking for people that were already soldiers. Warriors,” Alec said softly.
Max stared at him, their eyes locked together until Mole cleared his throat.
“What are we gonna do with the normals?”
“Leave them for now; we’ll want to talk to them again.”
“They’re gonna want to try and rescue their boy.”
Max smiled grimly. “And if we can help them without getting ourselves killed we’ll probably end up helping them.”
******************************************************************************
Jessica never got used to the sight of blood.
For a while, at the beginning, she’d tried to clean the t-shirts and jeans that had gotten blood on them. Sam hadn’t told her not to once or twice before he’d stopped, maybe he knew that it the fact that blood didn’t come out was something that she needed to learn for herself.
And it didn’t, she could scrub and scrub until her fingers bled themselves but the stains remained resiliently locked into the material.
Finally she’d given up and did what Sam and John did.
She tossed her bloody t-shirts into the fires, the jeans too if they needed to be destroyed. She would buy the cheap fifteen dollar jeans four at a time and the t-shirts in packs of four whenever they passed a Wal-Mart or a K-Mart or a Target. She packed her surviving fifty dollars jeans into a duffle bag and forgot about them.
She found them again in the bottom of her bag when she was dumping it out on the bed. The little room they’d been shown to had a dresser and even if they were only allowed to stay a few days before they got kicked out she liked the thought of having to take clothes from drawers instead of digging through her bag for them.
She held the jeans in her hands, turning them over before she allowed them to uncurl and the legs were stiff, the creases were dark and Sam laughed from the doorway drawing her attention.
“I used to love seeing you in those jeans,” he smiled softly, leaning against the doorway.
“I probably couldn’t even get them over my hips,” she said morosely. She’d loved them to, she’d felt sexy and confident in them. And she’d liked the way Sam looked at her when she wore them. Like she was his universe.
She stared down at them and felt tears pricking her eyes, for no reason that she could discern other than they were so close to Dean and suddenly the years that they’d spent searching for him were weighing on her.
“You are still beautiful to me,” he touched her face softly and she looked up in surprise because she’d not even heard him move from the doorway. “You will always be.”
She smiled at him, let him cup her cheek and kiss her softly on the lips. Let him lie to her because she certainly wasn’t the eighteen year old girl that she’d been when they’d met and she hadn’t fit into those jeans in years.
“How’s dad?”
“He’s resting, this has all been…” Sam shook his head. Turned away.
“Sam?” She bit her lip, tossed the jeans on the bed and walked over to him. Wrapping her arms around his waist and resting her cheek against his back.
“He just looks so much like Dean, and the attitude…” Sam laughed harshly. “That’s all Dean. All cocky confidence and self-assurance. I don’t think that I ever saw Dean face a situation that he couldn’t charm the hell out of.”
“We’ll find him,” Jess promised.
Sam bowed his head and rested his hands lightly against her arms.
“Dad is already thinking of this kid Alec like he’s a grandson or something, because he’s made from Dean’s DNA.”
“You have a problem with that?”
“No,” Sam shook his head. “I just think that Dean might have a problem with it, with dad just accepting this kid like he’s one of us.”
Alarms getting triggered first thing in the morning were getting to be kind of annoying Max decided.
| Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 |
| Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 |
Title: The Importance of Genetics
Fandom:Supernatural/Dark Angel
Pairings: Sam/Jess, Alec/Max (mentions of Logan/Max)
Rating: PG
Author's Notes: So totally AU that it isn’t even funny. Instead of John Winchester going to Jericho, Dean went instead and subsequently disappeared.
The Importance of Genetics – Pt 4
Alarms getting triggered first thing in the morning were getting to be kind of annoying Max decided.
Especially alarms that had been trigged not two hours after you finally managed to fall asleep.
She pushed and shoved her way through the gathered crowd of her brethren and decided that she really didn’t want to deal with whatever was so interesting that it had managed to wrest them all from their beds and maybe she would get lucky and Alec or Zack had already appeared to handle the next big crisis and she could go back to sleep.
Of course her luck didn’t run that way. When she finally got through, after only stepping on a few toes and elbowing two awestruck X6’s she saw three people that didn’t look like they should be interesting enough to draw this big a crowd.
An old man, and another man and a woman who were only a maybe a few years older than whatever age Joshua was and she didn’t recognize any of them.
She’d really rather not have to deal with this, and she wasn’t sure how she knew but these were natural borns and thus not her responsibility.
Maybe she could pawn them off on Logan.
She would totally have done that had Alec not appeared, hiding a yawn behind his hand and subsequently causing the older man to go sheet white, the younger man to start violently before he too paled and the female to just stare.
As if they’d all seen a ghost of some sort.
Max sighed, because everything that caused her to lose sleep lately seemed to be tied to Alec in one way or another.
“All right, everyone clear out,” Mole announced after a discreet hand signal from Max.
“Alec stay,” Max growled as the bane of her existence turned to leave with the rest of the crowd.
“Max,” he grumbled petulantly. “I’ve only had an hour and half of sleep. It’s not my turn to deal with alarms.”
“Yeah well seeing as how I’m up and this is probably your mess I’m going to have to clean up why should you get to go back to bed?”
Alec wrinkled his nose and frowned, he studied the trio that was still staring at him and Max had known him long enough to know that he didn’t recognize them.
“I don’t see how this involves me,” he muttered finally. “I don’t even know them.”
“Is he okay?” Zack asked suddenly interrupting Max and Alec’s glaring match.
“It’s just,” the younger male started and stopped suddenly.
“We knew, but we didn’t know. John is just taking this kind of hard.”
Mole gestured to a chair and the older man, John sank into it gratefully. Max waited for the other two to do something.
Like explain why there were in the middle of Terminal City, how they’d gotten there and what they wanted.
“I’m Sam Winchester,” the younger male finally held out his hand deliberately to Mole, Mole stared at it for a second before laughing harshly and taking it.
“This is my wife Jessica and my father John.”
The blonde smiled, the older man at least had stopped staring at Alec long enough to glance around the room at the other occupants.
“Why are you here?” Max asked finally.
Sam and Jessica looked at each other and Sam shrugged out of his backpack, he moved over to the table that Mole had set John at and unzipped the bag.
Max fell into a defensive position, noticed Alec and Zack doing the same, Mole fingered the butt of his gun and Sam withdrew a folder. They all relaxed.
Silently he flipped the folder open. One picture he removed and lay on the table, he flipped through the folder, removed a second and set it by the first. Then he stepped back, standing behind his father placing a hand on his shoulder. Jessica moved to stand beside him.
Max stepped up to the table, stared down at the pictures.
Her eyes flicked up to Alec then back to the pictures, then back again. Beside her Zack was doing the same thing.
Alec was just staring at them.
“What the hell is this?” Alec narrowed his eyes and looked up to stare at Sam.
“The one picture is you…” Sam began.
“Yeah, I know. I do recognize myself. Is the other picture is supposed to be me too? Because you know I can put you in touch with some people that can do better work than that.”
“No…” Sam shook his head but didn’t continue. Alec growled in frustration and Max wanted to echo the sound.
“The other picture is my oldest son, Dean. Twenty-one years ago he was on a job and vanished. Facts that we’ve gleaned since then indicate that he was taken by a military organization,” John’s voice started out strong and went softer and softer as he spoke.
“It didn’t have an official designation back then,” Sam kneeled at his fathers side before his eyes rose to meet Max’s once more. “About five years after my brother was taken they were given the official designation of Manticore.”
“This can’t be right,” Alec said it again. For the sixtieth time or so, he’d lost count after the first half a dozen times.
“The files appear to be genuine,” Joshua brushed his hair back from his face, glancing up at Max who was hovering over his shoulder staring down at the same files that Joshua had been perusing.
“Well still,” he grumbled.
“Dean Winchester wasn’t the only human to be taken, there were six other humans that were taken as well.” Joshua flipped through the rest of the folder. A series of photos were taped to the last page and he flipped through them.
Five of them were of people that he didn’t recognize in the slightest, possibly their clones had never made it to maturity?
But the final two.
Dean.
“Fuck,” Zack closed his eyes and oh yeah, Alec could commiserate.
“William Anderson,” Max read the tag under the picture and then looked back at Zack.
“Any information in there about him?” Zack asked quietly.
Max shook her head. “The file appears to be information gathered on Dean Winchester, probably for his family. It looks like the pictures were just added as a side bar, maybe leads to investigate?”
Joshua left the folder open to that page and pushed away from the table, prowling the room restlessly. Alec wondered why he was the one filled with restless energy when Alec (and Zack) had been the ones told they’d been cloned from real live people instead of just matter.
“Do you think they’re still alive?” Mole asked around his cigar. Chewing on the end, shotgun resting against his shoulder.
“The folder seems to indicate that they are,” Max waved at the table and then perched on it. Feet dangling as she leaned back.
“Father would not have agreed to this,” Joshua said emphatically, hand gestures punctuating the words.
And Alec realized why Joshua was so restless, agitated.
“He might not have had any choice,” Zack leaned against the table beside Max. Glancing back at the picture that was not of him again.
“Taking people from their families, Father would not be part of this.”
“And Zack’s right, he might not have had any choice,” Max stared at Alec. He squirmed and wondered if she was trying to see that other guy, Dean in him.
“And he might have been long gone by the time they made the decision to start snatching people off the street, we know he left the Breeding cult, we know he left Manticore. What’s to say that after he left whoever Lydecker took his orders from didn’t decide to stop using dead people and start looking for people that were already soldiers. Warriors,” Alec said softly.
Max stared at him, their eyes locked together until Mole cleared his throat.
“What are we gonna do with the normals?”
“Leave them for now; we’ll want to talk to them again.”
“They’re gonna want to try and rescue their boy.”
Max smiled grimly. “And if we can help them without getting ourselves killed we’ll probably end up helping them.”
Jessica never got used to the sight of blood.
For a while, at the beginning, she’d tried to clean the t-shirts and jeans that had gotten blood on them. Sam hadn’t told her not to once or twice before he’d stopped, maybe he knew that it the fact that blood didn’t come out was something that she needed to learn for herself.
And it didn’t, she could scrub and scrub until her fingers bled themselves but the stains remained resiliently locked into the material.
Finally she’d given up and did what Sam and John did.
She tossed her bloody t-shirts into the fires, the jeans too if they needed to be destroyed. She would buy the cheap fifteen dollar jeans four at a time and the t-shirts in packs of four whenever they passed a Wal-Mart or a K-Mart or a Target. She packed her surviving fifty dollars jeans into a duffle bag and forgot about them.
She found them again in the bottom of her bag when she was dumping it out on the bed. The little room they’d been shown to had a dresser and even if they were only allowed to stay a few days before they got kicked out she liked the thought of having to take clothes from drawers instead of digging through her bag for them.
She held the jeans in her hands, turning them over before she allowed them to uncurl and the legs were stiff, the creases were dark and Sam laughed from the doorway drawing her attention.
“I used to love seeing you in those jeans,” he smiled softly, leaning against the doorway.
“I probably couldn’t even get them over my hips,” she said morosely. She’d loved them to, she’d felt sexy and confident in them. And she’d liked the way Sam looked at her when she wore them. Like she was his universe.
She stared down at them and felt tears pricking her eyes, for no reason that she could discern other than they were so close to Dean and suddenly the years that they’d spent searching for him were weighing on her.
“You are still beautiful to me,” he touched her face softly and she looked up in surprise because she’d not even heard him move from the doorway. “You will always be.”
She smiled at him, let him cup her cheek and kiss her softly on the lips. Let him lie to her because she certainly wasn’t the eighteen year old girl that she’d been when they’d met and she hadn’t fit into those jeans in years.
“How’s dad?”
“He’s resting, this has all been…” Sam shook his head. Turned away.
“Sam?” She bit her lip, tossed the jeans on the bed and walked over to him. Wrapping her arms around his waist and resting her cheek against his back.
“He just looks so much like Dean, and the attitude…” Sam laughed harshly. “That’s all Dean. All cocky confidence and self-assurance. I don’t think that I ever saw Dean face a situation that he couldn’t charm the hell out of.”
“We’ll find him,” Jess promised.
Sam bowed his head and rested his hands lightly against her arms.
“Dad is already thinking of this kid Alec like he’s a grandson or something, because he’s made from Dean’s DNA.”
“You have a problem with that?”
“No,” Sam shook his head. “I just think that Dean might have a problem with it, with dad just accepting this kid like he’s one of us.”
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Date: 2006-01-29 11:52 am (UTC)