Chapter Text
Alex Mercer didn’t use keys, and he didn’t bother locking his tiny apartment, either.
He didn’t really need to live somewhere, but it was strangely reassuring for him to return to a familiar place on occasion. Besides, it looked odd if he didn’t have somewhere he was supposed to “sleep.” Humans had their little rituals, and they expected him to follow them too.
But as his hand touched the doorknob, the biomass on his palm and fingertips began to tingle, sending back signals to tell him that something had been through here, had touched the door recently enough that the oil from their skin still clung to its surface. Irritated, he paused in the threshold to weigh his options. He really ought to call the police, because it’s what a human would do. He could even just leave and come home later, let them take what they wanted. It’s not like he really needed most of the stuff in his apartment anyway. All of the truly important items he tended to keep on his person: his laptop, his wallet (and wasn’t that novel,) and his phone (not that he really talked to anyone much.)
If he went inside and got into it with this burglar, chances are he’d just end up having to eat them, and breaking and entering wasn’t exactly a consumption worthy offense.
On the other hand, it had been a particularly frustrating day, and he didn’t really have anywhere else he wanted to be at the moment.
In the end he just gave a long suffering sigh before turning the knob and pushing the door open, slowly. He didn’t want to deal with an intruder right now, but perhaps it would be best to leave an impression so that they didn’t mark the complex as an easy target and come back for the other apartments.
If they were really looking to start a fight, they would find themselves with a very ugly surprise on their hands. Maybe he’d break their legs, just to let off a little tension. That would be him being nice. He was pretty hungry, but he didn’t need to add their screams to the chorus in his head, not without a very good reason.
At this point, he was certain he wasn’t wrong; someone was definitely here. Sweat, breath, and the leftover warmth of skin and a beating heart all lingered in the air in hazy swirls. He flicked on his thermal vision, even though he knew it wouldn’t help. The apartments were all so small, so tightly packed together, that warm bodies usually surrounded him on all sides, and through the haze of that extra sense, it could be difficult to judge distance. He switched it off.
“I am really not in the mood for this,” He called out into the bare, dusty living room. There was a sofa and a television, but not much else other than what came with it when he had moved in.
His landlady was a kind faced old Jewish woman named Esther, whose heart had apparently gone out to the “nice young man” that had showed up out of the blue looking desperate and offering to pay cash for a place to stay. She only got one of those descriptors right, but it didn’t stop her from bringing him furniture for his sparse new lair, moved out of storage for the first time in twenty-five years after her sons left for college. He wasn’t accustomed to expressing gratitude, but he decided he would keep an eye on her apartment as well, a few doors down, to make sure she wasn’t bothered. It was the least he could do.
“I’m serious,” He warned, setting down his laptop bag with a carefully practiced gentleness. “There’s nothing here or in any of the other apartments for you to steal, and definitely nothing worth fighting me over. If you just leave right now, I won’t hurt you.”
“Hey, Alex.”
He spun around. In the doorway to an unused bedroom was—
“Dana?!” He stared incredulously for a second. “What the—“ He pushed his hood back. “What are you doing here?” It had been so long since he’d seen her, and he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten what she smelled like. He should have known it was her from the second he walked through the door.
“You mailed me a card for my birthday, remember? It had a sending address on it. What, you aren’t glad to see me?” She hugged herself with one arm, slumping against the frame.
Immensely, Alex wanted to say. Infinitely. But there was a reason he’d stayed gone. He opened his mouth to remind her, to tell her to go home. “Yeah,” he said instead. “You just surprised me.”
She moved into the light he had switched on in the kitchen—which he rarely used either—attached to the living room. Her eyes were a little puffy with lack of sleep, but otherwise she looked well, her face round and flushed and alive. “Can I hug you?” She asked, casually as you please, but her posture was fragile. “Or are you no-touchy right now?”
He didn’t ever want to be touched, not really, but he was so overjoyed to see her that it had overridden every other impulse he had. Humans needed touch, anyway, or so he’d read in one of those psychology books he’d snagged from the library. “Yeah, come here.”
Dana grinned in relief, taking measured steps forward to lean into him, and he wrapped arms like steel around her and rested his chin on her head. “God, it’s good to see you.” He murmured into her hair.
She had gotten into some of his clothes, not that he needed them, but he did sometimes wear them just for the normalcy of it. He also kept them on the off chance the landlady wandered in at some point, as it would look pretty weird if he didn’t have any and she liked to drop by from time to time to check on him or drop off some of her home cooking. It was amusing and very sweet of her.
Alex had a good four inches in height on Dana though, and the stolen hoodie draped loosely across her tiny shoulders. It made her look very small. It also made her smell different, more like him, the lingering human scent now a little easier to ignore. Not enough, but he appreciated it all the same.
“How long are you planning to stay?” Alex suddenly felt a little self-conscious. “I don’t really have much in the way of, you know…”
She bounced on the balls of her feet. “Well,” she drew out the syllable, “forever?”
His world ground to a halt like a record scratch. “What?”
“I want to live here,” She said slowly, as if he was an idiot. “With you. Where you are.”
He had had a few too many shocks in the past five minutes. “Why?” He demanded, aghast.
“…Because I missed you? Because I was lonely? Because you’re my baby brother and you’re living this whole life that I was missing out on?” Her face was downcast.
“Dana,” he said exasperatedly. “I bought you a house. It was a nice house.”
“And I sold it,” She shrugged. “I’d rather buy one here. Do you want me here?”
It sounded… good. Fantastic, even. His own life, with his sister, far away from chaos and blood and Blackwatch, a fresh start. But he knew it was too good, that it couldn’t last, that he would put her in danger. Worse, it was a lie. Alex groaned, hanging his head. “Why couldn’t you just stay there? Why couldn’t you just stay safe?”
“Don’t give me that bullshit,” A touch of steel entered her voice. “Do you want me around or not?”
“I do,” He answered automatically, and he meant it. “I just… I can’t live with a… With someone else.” He finished, in lieu of saying human.
“Why not?” She sat down on a barstool at the counter and fiddled with the hem of the hoodie, watching him, trying to understand. “We lived together before, for a few months. You seemed alright with it. How is this different?”
Before, he’d been incredibly well-fed. He had still been mopping up some of the hives in Manhattan, if only because he had to get out, since he couldn’t ever really sit still. He didn’t tell her that he had often had a hard time just being in the same building, breathing the same air she was. He hated that it smelled like food.
“Dana, you can’t. You will never be able to have a normal life.” He evaded. “Not if you stay here.”
From her frown, she hadn’t missed that he’d neglected to answer her question, but she didn’t push it. “I wouldn’t have, anyway.”
“Don’t.” Alex ran a hand over his face. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s true,” she went on, ignoring his protest. “Who else could understand what I— what we have been through? After everything I’ve seen, after that hunter…“ She lifted a hand to her throat, swallowing visibly. “But I’d rather be with the only family I have left.” She moved her hand halfway across the table, reaching for him, but giving him the option of pulling back.
Alex dropped gingerly onto the stool across from her and took it. Her hand was warm in his, and he pointedly ignored the way it excited the virus that made up his skin. “There are still things you don’t know,” He told her.
“Fine.” She answered, without hesitation.
“I don’t want to tell you them. I probably never will.”
“Fine. Don’t.”
“You’re insane,” he declared, but he hurt with how much he loved her.
She burst out laughing, breaking some of the tension. “Oh, I’m insane? Really, am I? Because I have literally, with my own two eyeballs, watched you jump from the top of the Empire State Building. You can’t say a thing.”
He didn’t have a stomach, but it lurched anyway. “When was this?”
“Remember? You read that stupid thing about dropping a penny off the top of it, how it could hit someone hard enough to kill them? And it was a cleared area at the time, so you went and jumped off the top because you wanted to see if the impact you made would bring the whole building down. It was close, for sure. A for effort.”
“I didn’t know you were watching that.” It had been fun, though. Nothing like freefalling from a thousand feet in the air before slamming into solid concrete at terminal velocity. It hurt, of course, but what a rush.
Something of that excitement must have shown on his face, because she grinned, tightening her grip on his hand. The heat of her living cells was getting distracting, but he didn’t let go yet. “I used to hack traffic cameras on the main roads and take shots every time you went flying past at like a hundred miles per hour.” She confessed. “If you took out the traffic camera, I did two.”
“Oh my god, really?” He almost smiled, then cringed. “You probably saw some… unpleasant shit, too.”
“What, your whole noodle monster thing? Pssh.” She waved a hand. “The stuff Blackwatch did was usually worse. That’s old news.”
He had intended to take a moment to listen to her pulse, to see if she was lying and actually afraid of him, but her words caught him off guard. “I— You—” he sputtered, before settling on, ”Noodle?!”
“You won’t let me call them tentacles!”
“They’re not!”
“Alright, what do you call them, then?”
He stared at her for a long moment, only now realizing that he didn’t know what he would call them, before just laying his head on the table and laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. After a second she broke and joined him.
They giggled together for a second, letting a more comfortable silence fall before he admitted defeat and disentangled his hand carefully from hers before the virus did anything he couldn’t take back. She let it go, still looking at him like she’d actually, truly missed him. She was so good, and kind, and fragile.
Something was tightening in his chest, and it was drawing his whole body tight with it. He couldn’t do this to her. She deserved better.
“Dana,” he started, a touch more subdued now.
Her face dropped, and she visibly braced herself for his words. “Please don’t say it.”
“I want you to stay here, Dana.” He said, and he meant it. God, he wanted her to stay. “But I can’t,” he insisted, his voice cracking slightly on the last syllable. “I can’t be around someone all the time.”
“I’m not going to hang off of you every second,” she replied tetchily. “You have boundaries. I get it. And believe it or not, I am going to have my own life to live, too. I won’t be home constantly. And if you need me to leave for a few hours, I will. It’s not the end of the world. We both already know what that looks like.”
“That’s— It’s not—“ He grasped uselessly. “That’s not the only problem.”
“It doesn’t matter,” She was sure.
“It does.” He insisted, because she didn’t get it.
“Alex, you’re my brother. Of course it doesn’t.”
But it did, because he wasn’t, and he couldn’t do this.
“You— You don’t know!” Alex stood up quickly, the stool flying out from underneath him, cast aside by an errant tendril of biomass. He could feel his body overheating as it readied for a fight that wouldn’t come. “What happens when Blackwatch catches up with me? Or— Or what happens if you come home one day, and it’s been a few too many hours since I’ve eaten? What then? What then?!” He shouted, feeling wretched when she flinched but not enough to stop. He had to push her away. She had to leave, to live. “What happens when you come home, and you say hey Alex, and I don’t know who that is?!”
He knew he was acting insane.
He was unstable, mercurial, and he knew this, and she knew it too, and she couldn’t be around him because the people who got too close always got hurt. She had to leave, for her sake.
Hive. We must not—
He shoved aside Her input and shot back, there is nothing I must not. Be quiet.
Dana had drawn back a few inches, her eyes wide. Her pulse had spiked, but not enough to mean that she was really afraid. “Is that normal?” She asked him quietly.
Alex leaned over the counter, bracing himself against it. Suddenly, he just felt so heavy and tired.
“I’m having a good day,” he told her, devoid of emotion, not meeting her eyes. He was ashamed of his outburst, but he didn’t know what else to do to make her go. “I know who I am, and what I am, and who you are. But it isn’t always a good day, Dana.”
She looked startled for a minute, then stuck out her jaw stubbornly. “Then we’ll deal with that, too. Together.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed.” He insisted.
“No, I won’t.” She shot back. “I’m an adult, Alex. I don’t need you to cosset me.”
“How are you not afraid of me?”
“Of course I’m afraid of you! I’ve— What you are is terrifying to a human by default. You were—Blacklight was built that way. Yeah, it’s a lot to take in and it was a lot to get used to. Since you’ve been away, I've had time to think about it. To come to terms with the things that are scary and the things that I realize probably shouldn’t be.” She rubbed at her face for a second, brushing away a traitorous wetness that lingered at the corners of her eyes.
“Dana, I’m not…” He went taut with anxiety. “You know I’m not him, right?” When she gave him a blank look, he dropped his eyes to his hands and sighed. “I’m not actually your brother. You… you know that, don’t you?”
“I know.” She held his eyes, and there must have been horror in them, but she faced it head on, because that’s what Dana did. “You would never let anyone hurt me. You would never hurt me. And maybe you’re not human, but you’re a person. Look, we have time now. We can work on whatever we need to. Whatever you can. The only thing I’ve ever asked is that you are with me, Alex. You know, our mom…” she shook her head sheepishly. “My mom, for all of her faults, she always used to say that love isn’t just an emotion you feel, but also a choice. It’s decisions you make every day, when they’re not easy but you do them anyway.”
He remembered her saying that, but it wasn’t his memory. Not his mother. “I—“
“I know you can’t be something that you’re not. I miss him, but I don’t want you to be him. I want you to be you. I loved my big brother because he was by brother, and you’re my brother because I love you.” She wrapped an arm around herself again, and she looked a little self-conscious of her speech. “Alex, of course there’s things about you that scare me. Instinctually, that will always be the case, and I’m trying, Alex, but I have very little control over that. But I trust you, because you’re my baby brother, and that is the choice I am making.”
Alex just looked at her, unable to decide if he wanted to throw up or cry. He settled for slumping his shoulders, because he knew that look on her face now; it was the same one that had survived Manhattan, and the same one that had looked him in the eye the first time she’d seen him kill a person. It was the same one he’d seen on his own face, reflected in car windows when he charged onward to face an enemy he knew he had beat.
“So if you want me to be here, ignoring all of the other factors and things that frighten you, then I’m staying. If I can woman up about this whole thing, you damn well can too.”
Alex didn’t know if he’d won or lost.
* * *
“What the hell is this?” The officer halted in front of him, favoring him with an unimpressed once-over. “Really, is this some’s idea of a joke? Who the fuck thought this was amusing? Where’s his file?” The officer snapped his fingers demandingly.
“Here, sir. Cross, Robert T. Age seventeen. Jesus Christ.”
They stared at his file for a moment, not flipping past the first page. “Ethnicity… Russian? Really?” He looked up. “Are you a Ruski, soldier?”
Oh, real nice. Very professional. “I couldn’t say, sir.” Robert Cross lied, unmoved. He did know, of course, that his father had been. He didn’t know anything else about the man.
“Why is he lined up for this mission? He’s practically a child. The major asked for veteran for this, someone who knows what they’re doing. Not some—” he waved a hand, “—whatever this is supposed to be. And a Ruski to top it all off. Christ.” The officer shook his head.
Cross didn’t move, just stared blankly into the distance. He hadn’t exactly stepped forward for this, but his CO had dragged him here, saying he had a “good feeling” about it. He fought the urge to scoff, outwardly betraying nothing. Down the line was a handful of sixteen other men, all higher-ranking officers and battle-tested soldiers, all standing at rapt attention. Cross knew they were listening, could feel their awareness of him. They found the situation amusing. That was fine by him, he just wanted this to be over so he could get back to work.
He honestly had more important things to do today, and this was a waste of his time and everyone else’s. Sending him in for something that was black-op for the US government and still more high-profile than his usual tastes was the nuclear option. It was like hitting a butterfly with a school bus.
He had no idea what he was even doing here, either.
“It’s a good thing the major isn’t here, I’m telling you.” The officer went on. “What an embarrassment.”
“He’s… he’s here now, sir.” Said the other soldier, pointing.
The officer whirled around, realized that he was right, and snapped to attention. “Sir!”
“At ease,” the major waved a hand, almost eager.
“We weren’t expecting you today, sir.” Said the officer.
“Yes, well. This mission is a little more important than usual, so the general asked me to pick the squad personally.” The major turned to look at them, noting their discomfort. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“No, sir. Right this way, sir.”
There was a pause. “Anderson, Jacob. Nineteen successful missions, two commendations for—”
Oh, god, were they going to do it this way? This was going to take forever.
“…and this one, sir. Peterson, James. He’s got twenty-five successful operations under his belt already, and he…”
The officers worked their way down the line from the opposite end, saving Cross for next to last. Goodie. He wished they’d just hurry this along. The tarmac was hot, the blackness of it soaking in the midday sun and practically boiling them in their dress uniforms like lobsters.
Cross stopped listening, bored. He was getting a little hungry.
“And who’s this?” The major said, finally coming to him. “This is unusual. He’s a little young for this, isn’t he?”
“Yes, sir.” Said the officer who’d been berating him earlier, a hint of derisiveness in his tone. “His CO put in his name for him.”
“Why was that?” The major asked, looking at him. Cross met his eyes and held them, disinterested, but unwilling to back down. “Quite a stare he’s got.”
“He’s…” The officer flipped through is file, then froze almost comically at the amount of redacted and blacked out text. The only thing that wasn’t highly classified was...
“F-fifty-eight successful missions. I…”
The major smiled wolfishly. “Interesting.”
The petty officer that had arrived with the major slipped his sidearm out of its holster and fired it into the sky.
The major flinched a little at the volume alone, even though it was obvious he had been expecting it. The rest of the men down the line all gave shouts and spasms of surprise in varying degrees, before schooling their expressions into something a little more officer-worthy and returning to attention.
Cross hadn’t broken his gaze, hadn’t seen the officer draw his weapon. He didn’t so much as twitch.
“This one.” The major said, pleased. “He’ll do.”
* * *
A shrieking alarm clock was the first thing he heard that morning, as with most other mornings, and god did Cross hate that noise.
A hand shot out from beneath grey weighted blankets to slam down on the mute button, cracking the cheap plastic of the screen, distorting the simple red digits for an instant before they shorted out entirely. He didn’t know why he’d chosen that model anyway; he’d spent so long in the Quarantine zone that he hated the color red now.
He spent the first hour of his day deconstructing his stun baton for service, absentmindedly plunging a syringe into his forearm while he did so. He took a deep breath to force down the nausea that always came after and spent a good ten minutes waiting for it to abate, all the while contemplating the charging issues he’d been having with his choice weapon lately. It had been taking a few extra cycles to power up, and that extra second of wait time could be fatal in a Red Zone.
Weapons maintenance was as important a part of his daily routine as brushing his teeth. It was a mindless enough task to take his mind off of the discomfort that the suppressant brought, and to give him time to go over other problems.
Like this month’s duty roster for his new Wisemen team, for example, because he couldn’t very well leave lieutenant Anders where he was if he was going to keep—
His phone chimed a loud alert noise, disrupting his train of thought. He took another sip of his coffee while he ignored both his phone and the rolling of his stomach. Whatever they needed, it could wait another five minutes.
It didn’t help that one of his other Wisemen had taken a nasty blow during their last mission, which honestly should have been a milk run. It was just their luck that a simple search and rescue had led them to stumble into one of the largest and nastiest hives Cross had seen yet. By then they had disturbed the nest, and in retaliation the hive released her swarm. The Wisemen’s living scent had drawn walkers like maggots to meat, and though they escaped it had been a near thing, and they didn’t get out fast enough to keep Lt. Santiago from having her eye slashed by a hunter’s wild swipe.
Now he was a teammate short, and most of their formations relied on having a certain number of people to complete them before they were really effective. They could adapt, no doubt; he would never have chosen troops for his team that couldn’t handle a little change of plans, but it was still a pain in the ass all the same.
His pager beeped.
He also had to deal with a rather short-lived breach of his personal servers. There were some secure files that had been compromised, ones that no one had any business getting into, and though the perpetrator had been caught—allegedly a disgruntled Gentek employee with petty beef against Blackwatch—there was a lot of data in those files that might cause problems should they make it into the public eye, or any eye besides his own, for that matter.
It all came down to what was accessed and who else had the data. Any of the black projects would be a big problem for obvious reasons. Anything related to his previous encounters with Zeus would be a disaster of the highest degree.
His phone began to ring, and his pager beeped loudly at the same time.
“Alright, god dammit, hang on,” he grumbled, downing the last of his coffee in one gulp, ignoring how it scalded his throat and tongue on the way down. He set down his hand and popped in his earpiece, somewhat irritably. “Cross here,” he answered when the call connected, and the words from the other end pulled the world out from under his feet.