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“The trick is,” Jacobi tells her sometime, sitting in her lab, neck full of fresh bruises and bite marks, “to be dead inside, but just a little. Just enough to not care about how horrible we are. Not enough to be incapable of enjoying it.”
“Yeah,” she says, nods. “Yeah.” She’s a little high on energy drinks, and it makes perfect sense, really.
*
“It’s Christmas, kids!”
They know. It’s been Christmas the whole day, all the while they were driving here. She doesn’t get why he’s bringing it up at all, and why now. Kepler shouldn’t sound so excited, anyway, she thinks. It gives off a vibe that’s too normal, too human. What would it mean to him? Why would it mean anything to him?
“Sure is.” Jacobi doesn’t fake even the hint of enthusiasm.
“So. You wanna do something? It is still early.”
They’re all sitting in Kepler’s hotel room, and Maxwell has no idea why.
Jacobi looks at him. “... What do you have in mind?”
“Church visit?”
Something inside of Maxwell clenches painfully, and he fucking knows it. His eyes are on her. She forces a joyful tone. “What a great idea. Let’s blow up a church, Jacobi.”
“... As tempting as this sounds, I don’t think-”
“No,” Kepler says, in that voice she and Jacobi call his military accent, that affected drawl that could just as well just be for show and drama. Noo-oo. “Just a nice visit. Listening to the sermon.”
“Sounds boring,” Jacobi says.
“No offense, sir, but you wouldn’t get me to set foot into a church even if you had your gun pointed at my head,” Maxwell says.
Kepler shrugs. “As you wish.” His eyes never leave her, and he’s smiling.
She smiles back.
Kepler sends them away three hours later, tells them to go to their own rooms, to sleep, to meet him by the car at 0700 the next morning. They both leave, and Maxwell still doesn’t know why they were even sitting in his room together.
Hers is much smaller, her bed less comfortable than Kepler’s looked like. She doesn’t mind. She lies down and stares at the ceiling, blinking slowly.
It’s interesting, she thinks, how different the dynamics between Kepler and her is, compared to the one he and Jacobi share.
Jacobi surrenders himself to some sort of barely tangible helplessness time after time, voluntarily, frantically, dedicated. Maxwell is sure he’s more self-aware than most would give him credit for; he knows what he is doing. She just doesn’t know whether he actually wants it or just lacks the ability to care. Maybe they should talk about it.
But then again.
Maybe not.
(They could. They can talk about anything, everything. But some topics somehow just never come up, and she’s okay with that.)
As for her, she likes to think she’s not quite as helpless. Likes to think that she doesn’t view Kepler through rose-tinted glasses the way Jacobi sometimes does. Oh, sure, he makes her feel helpless - he is incredibly good at that, she’s a little impressed, actually - but that doesn’t mean that she is.
Kepler seems to think the same. He commands them both with a never-faltering sense of certainty - he knows both of them will follow without hesitation; he trusts them to abide by his rules, to a degree-
(it’s that trust that makes Maxwell lie awake at night)
-but the nuances in which he orders them both around shift whenever he’s addressing one or the other.
Jacobi is simpler, she thinks. All he needs - all he wants, really, is Kepler’s firm, demanding voice, a tone that leaves no room for interpretation nor protest. He’s ever eager to please, he strives for Kepler’s praise, ready to lose himself in it.
Kepler’s voice is different when he’s talking to her. Still demanding, but tighter, with a hint of a … challenge? She can never quite put her finger on it, and she was never good at analyzing humans, anyway, but Kepler seems to expect something, anything from her. Disobedience? Maybe. Perhaps he’s aware that his grip on her is of a different nature - firm, surely, but it’s not as profound, not as secure, simply because he’s not fucking her.
Still. They stick together. They … belong together, she’s very, very aware of that. Painfully so.
… And what comes off all that, in the end, is a deadly, monstrous unit, dependent and codependent, abusive, supporting, dangerous. It’s fucked up and feels right, in ways none of which Maxwell ever feels herself capable of grasping fully.
But this is her life.
When she walks up to the car Goddard provided Kepler with two minutes before seven the next morning, Jacobi is already there. Kepler arrives at 0700 sharp.
“Let’s go,” he says, and gets two “Yes, sir”s in return, in unison. This is her life.
The ride isn’t long, they exit the car, ditch it a few side roads away from their actual designation, and she remembers a line she read in one of Dean Koontz’s book once. It stuck with her, because it’s always sentences like these that stick with her. (She will never set foot into a church again.)
Listen, child - if you’re at a party with a hundred people and one of them is the devil, he’ll be the last one you’d suspect.
She looks at Kepler, studying the blueprint of the building they’re about to enter one last time. He’s calm. Collected. But she knows. Knows better. Knows that he’s wearing the skin of a person, but that he is hardly human. He’s violence, hidden, not repressed, just waiting to be activated.
She looks at Jacobi, sees him staring at Kepler every few seconds, sees him fiddling with the remote control in his left hand. He seems fidgety. But she knows. Knows better. That’s just because he hasn’t been given a direct order yet. Jacobi is like a bomb himself, waiting for Kepler to prime him, to pull the pin, to tell him to go off, damage, destroy, break, break, break, Maxwell has never been so overly aware of the subtlety of linguistics.
“Doctor Maxwell.” Kepler’s hand on her shoulder and his voice at her ear, and he’s standing close, far, far too close, this is in no way appropriate, and she leans back against him, into his touch. The grip on her shoulder tightens. “I asked … whether you are ready.”
She hadn’t heard. Too lost inside her head. She nods. “I’m ready whenever you want me to be ready, Major.” She looks up, stares into his eyes, she can do that, she trained herself to not avoid eye contact, and suddenly she can see his teeth, and she doesn’t know whether it’s a smile or something else.
… And what difference would it even make.
Jacobi is looking at them, and for a second, Maxwell is absolutely certain he’ll be- But he smiles at her, and he looks almost happy.
She never got human emotions.
She hacks into the security system, and the door clicks open, and they enter the building.
This is their life, and it mostly works out perfectly, all according to plan, Jacobi and her act as a collective, guided by Kepler’s voice, and just as he trusts them to obey, they trust him to have things figured out.
But sometimes, they fuck up. Sometimes, Kepler fucks up.
(This time, it’s him who does. They will not talk about this.)
She’s walking in front of the other two; she’s needed, right now, to open locked doors, to slip through the empty spaces between the lines of code. She’s the first who sees the security detail rounding the corner - the security detail that shouldn’t be there; the building should be empty according to Kepler. She sees them first, and she reaches for her gun immediately, manages to yell a quick warning for Jacobi and Kepler.
Then there’s chaos, the sound of bullets and Jacobi, trying to bring himself between Kepler and their enemies. Suddenly everything seems to happen very, very slowly, she can feel panic well up in her chest,
more gunshots,
the sound of bodies hitting the floor,
blood,
silence, finally,
and then: relief as she realizes that Jacobi’s okay, that he was not quick enough.
(Guilt, then, because she’d rather see Kepler hurt than Jacobi.)
The smell of copper hangs sickeningly in the air, and Kepler is clutching his left arm. Blood is welling up, dripping down between his fingers.
“All things considered,” he says, voice slightly strained, “this could have ended much worse.”
Maxwell wants to slap him. She tries to convince herself that she would if he wasn’t injured.
“Let’s get this over with.” Jacobi, determined, driven by adrenaline and anger, and maybe fear.
They get this over with. The sound of the explosion is still ringing in Maxwell’s ears an hour later, while they’re back at the hotel, back in Kepler’s room.
She doesn’t like to watch him bleed. She’s not worried - Jacobi is, she knows, can see it in his eyes -, she’s … indifferent, really, but she doesn’t like it. It makes him seem so much more human than he is, it makes him look tangible where he’s nothing but vague concepts and the shadow of a puppet guided by Cutter.
His blood is on her hands, because she’s the one stopping the bleeding, and she looks into his eyes once, then looks away quickly, regretful. There’s the faint idea of pain somewhere behind his calm, collected demeanor, and all that’s in her head is ‘No’, is
01010111 01110010 01101111 01101110 01100111
again and again like a broken program, like a system failure report.
You’re made of atoms, she thinks, half-hysterical, of skin and flesh and bones, there’s organs inside of you, there’s blood, oh, God, Major, you’ve got a heart that’s pumping all that blood through your- Are you even aware that you evidently have a heart, are you okay with this-
She wants to scream and get away, but she continues, “It’s not that bad,” she says, but it is, it is, he’s got a heart, she stitches him up, crudely, the stitches are too tight, too close together, the scar will not look very good, she thinks about how Jacobi will kiss it and trail his fingers over it, she feels sick and Kepler politely thanks her, and she stares down at her hands, unshaking, calm, full of his red, red blood. She feels sick.
Hours later. She’s drunk. She doesn’t like getting drunk around Kepler. She doesn’t trust herself - with what, she can’t say, but she doesn’t trust herself. But she’s drunk. Jacobi’s drunk too, and that’s fine, that’s routine. Kepler is … a little drunk, perhaps, it’s hard to tell with him, but his eyes are not quite as sharp and focused as usual. Might be the whisky. Might be the painkillers. Both. Both, she decides. She watches Jacobi half-stumble into his room, and she’s got her own keycard already in her hand, and Kepler is about to turn away, is about to walk to his own room, but she can’t get the picture of Jacobi trying to shove Kepler out of the way out of her head, Jacobi, trying to take the a bullet for him, Jacobi not hesitating at all, not considering the consequences.
“Sir?” she says, because she’s drunk, her voice is calm, all the trembling happening on the inside of her body.
He stops, looks at her, waits, patiently, more patiently than one would ever expect him capable of.
The words are stuck somewhere inside her throat, or still embed in her chest, it feels like they are choking her, but she’s, for all her sassy, snide remarks, not half as brave as Jacobi or Kepler think.
“Doctor … Maxwell. Do you need … permission to speak? Because you have it.”
“No,” she says without considering her words first. “I’d tell you this even if you told me to shut the fuck up.” Oh, Maxwell, you’re on thin, thin ice. She takes a deep breath. “Sir. We both know I am loyal to a fault. I would never betray you. I would never disobey a direct order. You know better than me that I’d … probably die for you. But if you drive Jacobi to do something … incredibly stupid, I will kill you with your own gun.”
There it is. Her little speech, pre-prepared at the bar, because she can’t talk to others without thinking it through a thousand times first.
She braces herself, whole body tense and rigid with fear and adrenaline, heart hammering faster than it did in surrounded by enemies earlier.
Kepler looks at her for a long, long moment.
And then he laughs.
“Good night, Doctor Maxwell,” he says, and it sounds almost affectionate, a mockery of the sentiment and somehow genuine all the same, and he brushes his hand over her drawn-up shoulders while he passes by her. His hand is very, very warm.
She can feel herself relax immediately at the touch.
“Good night, sir.”
She goes to bed.
The door to her hotel room opens two hours and twenty minutes later. She left it unlocked on purpose. She might not be good at understanding and analyzing humans, or emotions, but she’s very, very good at recognizing patterns, at memorizing them. The mission went a little wrong, and Jacobi was drunk.
A few footsteps, and the sound of the door being closed again, then locked.
“Alana?” Jacobi’s voice is barely even a whisper. “You awake?”
She is. She keeps silent, doesn’t move even when Jacobi walks over and lies down next to her. He sighs, cuddles up against her, relaxes against her. “Love you,” he mumbles. She stays still, doesn’t even know why, and then, after another second, she realizes that he smells a lot like Kepler. She slowly lifts her hand, eyes closed, pushes the collar of his shirt away and runs her fingers over his neck, finding a few bite marks there. Jacobi breathes out slowly, a little shakily, and she puts both arms around him, hugs him, inhales his scent and Kepler’s.
“Love you too,” she says, and he nods.
*
She’s far from straight, she doesn’t even think she’s actually attracted to him in the first place, but she’d like to kiss him, sometimes, just to know what it’s like.
“Sometimes I kind of want to kiss you,” she says, in the car, from behind him, while they’re on their way back. Jacobi’s asleep in the passenger’s seat, which is the only reason she dares saying it.
Kepler looks at her via the driving mirror. He laughs softly. “I know,” he says, and it echoes in her ears, and his voice is nice, and it doesn’t make her feel bad, of course he knows.
He always knows.