Work Text:
He’s been waiting for this moment his whole life, ever since he was old enough to understand the dynamics of the world he’d been born into. He’s learned to live with the anxiety of not being good enough, with the fear of actually being enough. He’s grown up knowing that, someday, he’d receive the call and he’d have to fight for his life. And now that moment has come, but it’s two in the morning and he’s been sleeping as peacefully as one can when his own existence is hanging on a thin thread, and he’s definitely not ready for this. The sirens keep wailing, and all the screens in the small capsule apartment he lives in are alive with the same word, repeated over and over.
Run.
Alex Manes is about to be chased.
Hastily, he gathers his clothes from where they’ve spent the night, scattered across the floor after a horrible shift gone awry — as most of them have been as of late, if he’s being honest with himself — and hurries to throw a sweater over his head. He fights the pants that get caught around the mechanism holding his prosthesis in place against his stump, and slips into the first pair of shoes he can find. There’s a loud bang on his door; he almost trips over himself in his rush to reach it, and when he opens, a uniformed man wearing the badge of Antar Corp is already glaring at him.
“You should have opened three seconds ago, Manes,” he spews, clicking the clipboard in his hands. “Tardiness isn’t approved, you already knew that.”
“Yes, sir,” he mutters as he straightens his sweater and tries to catch his breath. How has he been late when his whole apartment could fit in the bathroom of one of Antar Corp’s smaller headquarters?
“As punishment, you will start tonight’s race in the last position,” the man announces, voice low and threatening, and Alex can do nothing but nod in agreement. At his right, standing at attention, Kyle Valenti shoots him an apologetic glance that catches the man’s attention.
“I see we have a solidarity streak going on here,” he says, pointing at Kyle with his clipboard. “You will join Manes tonight, Valenti. That’s a shame, because you come from quite a breed of runners, but you’ve already chosen your own fate. And to think that some rebels still believe you runners can’t really choose your destiny!”
No one else dares to look at him after that.
Alex hates himself on a daily basis — being the cripple, the one who lost a leg in an accident two years ago and brought shame on the long line of Manes men who had won their own races in their own time — but right now the hatred has reached an unimaginable level. He’s not only managed to get himself checked into the worst place to start a run, but he’s also dragged his best friend into being chased by his side. No one would ever want that kind of companion when their lives are at risk — they will all be fighting to survive, and there will be no friends out there.
Alex knows, has known for a while, that he’ll be the first one hunted down in his own race, when the time comes. He’s not as fast as he used to be; he can’t also be responsible for another person being chased and killed because of his own inability to be on time.
“Of all the times to be late,” he mutters under his breath. It’s certainly the second time in his whole life that he’s been late to anything, and just like the first time, this is bound to end up in a disaster.
That first one, he hadn’t reached the safety spot in the factory in time because he’d been trying to help Mimi DeLuca to save herself when the sirens started, announcing that a breach in security had been detected and that everyone should leave their posts, for there had been a fire started in one of the lower levels, quickly catching up with them. Mimi hadn’t been feeling good, and her range of movement had been affected somehow, so Alex had grabbed her by the waist and he’d all but thrown her into one of the safety nooks before the flames caught up with him. Next thing he knew, he’d woken up with no recollection of the accident and half his leg blown up.
His life had never been the same.
“Don’t worry,” Kyle whispers to him when the officer moves on to verbally torture someone else.
“You’re going to be dead as a deer in a second because of me, Kyle,” Alex whispers back furiously. “Don’t tell me not to worry.”
“I have a plan.”
“A plan?” Alex has to bite back the scoff threatening to bring even more attention to himself. “What kind of plan, Kyle? We’re going to be the nearest to the hunters once this race starts! As if being exhausted because they’re keeping us up all night wouldn’t be enough!”
“When the race starts,” Kyle instructs him, voice still a murmur, but Alex can hear it perfectly, “keep by my side. Don’t run astray from me. I will protect you.”
“Kyle—”
“Do you trust me, Alex?” Kyle says with pleading eyes, and Alex finds himself nodding.
“Yeah, I do.”
He’s completely, utterly, terrifyingly doomed.
The chase is going surprisingly well, given the circumstances.
Alex had been right all along — they had been holed up for the whole night, after having been woken up at an ungodly hour, and the ten or twelve runners had been thrown unceremoniously into a cell before the show even started. They had been denied water and food, and they had been kept awake by blaring music at every single second. Alex knows it’s a technique from older wars, from a time when humans had actually meant something and the world hadn’t been ruled by Antar Corp with its extraterrestrial equipment and its alien staff.
Then, after endless hours of being caged, they had been released into an open field so Antar Corp’s customers could enjoy the experience they had paid for — hunting and killing humans like humans had done to animals for centuries, just because it had been fun.
Alex doesn’t understand what fun it can be found in chasing down living beings, but he isn’t about to start a speech about the unfairness of the situation when he can hear the bullets being shot around him, when he can see other runners dropping to the ground in a heap of bloody limbs. He sticks to Kyle, just like his friend had told him to, and he jumps from one spot to another, hiding behind trees and using traps on the ground to his own benefit while trying to survive the only chance at a race that he will ever have.
Everyone knows that runners only get called to a chase once in their lifetime, if they ever do. Not every born-runner gets a chance at showing off their skills in a live hunt; but those who do only have one shot — they survive or they don’t, and only a few survive. Alex has always known that he’d be one of the several to perish in the hunt, if only because of his injury. Even though he comes from a long line of runners who have survived — his father and his three older brothers sport battle wounds but they are pretty much alive, much to Alex’s chagrin sometimes — he’s always been the family disgrace, and thus his father has never tried to help him climb the ranks of Antar Corp so he wouldn’t have to run a difficult race like he did for Greg and Flint and James.
His father has been trying to get Alex killed ever since he found him with another man — with an alien — back when he was seventeen and naïve and hopeful. His father had snatched every single ounce of hope he’d ever had with a hammer and the promise of all hell broke loose as he destroyed everything Alex had ever loved with one single strike. And afterwards, after everything had been said and done and Alex had watched the love of his life bleeding out on the floor — for not being the right gender for a Manes man, not even for him being a different race altogether — Jesse Manes had managed to turn himself away from his son and leave him behind without any remorse while he allowed Alex to rot in the lowest part of Antar Corp, buried deep in the worst the world had to offer.
Alex has always known he’d be alone in his quest for survival, but he’d never have thought that he would find Kyle Valenti fighting beside him.
Kyle is now beckoning him to move forward, to jump in between fallen branches while the bullets keep coming, and Alex would have yelled something about being crazy at him if Kyle’s strategy hadn’t proved to be successful. Alex nods and waits for the perfect moment — he doesn’t know how he knows, he just knows he does — and jumps forward, falling in Kyle’s arms and rolling along with him to the ground.
“I got you,” Kyle tells him, straightening them both behind the tree, catching their breaths. “We’re almost there.”
“Almost where?” Alex has to ask. He’s thought they were running for their lives, but that run had always been aimless in his mind, not a race towards a finish line.
“I told you to trust me,” Kyle repeats. “I’m saving your life.”
“How come you are saving life if this is your first time out here too?”
“Because I know things, okay?” Kyle whispers furiously, looking around among the trees until he sees whatever he’s looking for. “Remember Jenna Cameron?”
“The first woman to ever survive a race and the one who mysteriously disappeared into thin air a few days after that?” Alex questions back, walking behind Kyle when his friend makes a beeline for a different tree. “No, I don’t think I do.”
“Funny,” Kyle scoffs. “We could be dying, and you’re joking.”
“Well, you said to trust you not to get killed out here today, Valenti. I’m just playing along.”
“She didn’t disappear,” Kyle insists, voice still low, while he searches the ground with his hands, bent over a spot Alex wouldn’t have even spared a second glance. “She found the way to freedom.”
“If that’s a euphemism for death, I swear, Kyle—”
“It isn’t,” Kyle grunts as his hands still, seemingly grabbing something. Alex can hear a metallic click and all of a sudden there’s a trapdoor being opened, the leaves on the ground flying away by the movement. “This is the way to freedom, Alex.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you remember the stories my dad used to tell us when we were kids?” Alex nods — Jim Valenti’s tales were what got him through most of his nights when his father had been away parading one or two of his brothers so they could get sponsors in their races and get out of them alive. “He used to say that not everyone in Antar Corp was bad. That there were good aliens among them. Well, Alex,” Kyle sighs as he lifts the lid of the trapdoor fully, “I think we’ve found the way down to them.”
“Through a trapdoor in the middle of the woods?” Alex shakes his head. “How on Earth does a trapdoor show up in the middle of the fucking woods?”
“Because this is not really nature, Alexander,” Kyle explains patiently, as though they have all the time in the world, while Alex can still hear the bullets cutting the air. “This is actually a setup, created by Antar Corp to make us think that we have our own fate in our hands, when they dictate every movement in here. But this?” he points at the hole in the ground; Alex can see a ladder going down into the darkness, and shudders. “This is our only chance to get out of this race alive. To actively choose our own fate. C’mon, follow me.”
He jumps into the hole, planting his feet on each side of the ladder before looking up at Alex with so much hope in his eyes that Alex has to follow. But when he’s already getting into the trapdoor, his prosthesis grazing the ladder and his foot still balancing him on the ground, he hears a sudden ruckus and a rising voice that keeps screaming, “They’re trying to escape!”
The last thing he hears, the last thing he feels, is a gun being fired, a blazing pain on his side, before his whole world dims out.
There’s a searing pain in his right flank when he comes to. He groans, trying to roll on his side but he feels a hand on his arm preventing him from any movement. He has yet to open his eyes, but he has an inkling that wherever he is, it’s way too bright for his vision.
“Easy there, private,” he hears in a voice he never thought he’d hear again. He tries to get rid of the steel grip on his arm, but the fingers only dig deeper into his skin. “Easy, Alex, please. You’ll bleed yourself to death. Just rest, okay? We’ll be here when you wake up again.”
The next time he regains consciousness, he’s actually capable of opening his eyes a crack against the light. He takes in his surroundings with a slight apprehension — he’s lying on a sterile bed, all white and metal, in the middle of a room with a closed door, where a machine keeps beeping. He turns his head and realizes that said machine is hooked up to himself, to his left index finger, while a vial of some transparent liquid is dropping into his veins. He shakes his head to clear it, and the machine beeps even stronger.
The door instantly opens.
“You’re awake!” he hears before he can see the person it belongs to, before he can really believe his ears when they’re paired up to what he’s seeing, because he thought he’d never be able to have this again. “I thought we’d lost you out there!”
“Guerin?” he questions, voice trembling like it had that one night ten years ago, when he’d found himself even before he’d known he’d been lost. “Is it really you?”
He finds himself lost in a sea of whiskey-colored eyes and a rebel curl that falls across a forehead Alex had known by heart when he’d been seventeen — and he can’t lie to himself, because he thinks he still does — as his heart skips a beat.
“I’ve spent ten years looking for you,” the vision says — for Alex refuses to believe this is real. “I didn’t think I’d find you, so when Cam said there was a way to get to you, I just—”
“Cam?”
“Jenna Cameron,” the vision explains, shifting weirdly, still not daring to close the space left between the bed and himself, as Alex takes him in — dressed like a cowboy from older times, an open shirt and jeans tighter than tight — before continuing, “I thought you were dead, Alex. When your father found us and he—and he—God, I don’t know—”
“Are you real?” Alex asks again. He doesn’t want to remember the night of his downfall, even if he’s been reliving the best parts of it for the past decade, because it’s still too painful and it still leaves him too raw, but this vision is talking and talking and Alex doesn’t even know if it’s not another hallucination — if he isn’t actually dead, fallen during the first and last race of his short life.
“I am, Alex,” comes the painful reply, and the vision moves forward, snatching a chair Alex hasn’t seen before and taking a seat beside the bed. “I am real, I swear. I’m sorry it took me so long.”
“Dad said you were dead,” Alex mutters. “You have to be dead.”
“Your father is a monster, Alex,” the vision says. “I know you know that.”
“He said you were part of Antar Corp,” Alex mutters, refusing to look the vision in the eye. “He said I’d killed you, he said it was my fault. He said I should be punished. He said—”
“Touch me,” the vision cuts him off, reaching out. Alex stares at the palm offered to him and shivers. He’s staring at a mangled hand, at pink puckered skin, at scars that never healed properly. He wants to look away, but he can’t. “Alex, please, touch me.”
He’s never been able to deny Michael Guerin anything, and he isn’t about to begin now, even if he’s just interacting with a hallucination. He reaches out as well, and places one shaky finger on the palm that’s being offered to him.
His world becomes colorful again.
He’s back once again to that night, back to turning seventeen, back to being in love and in lust and happy, so happy he felt he could burst. He’s back to lips that fell onto his with a passion he’d never known, back to hands roaming his body reverently, back to eyes watching him as though he was the best thing to ever happened.
He’s back to being seen.
“Guerin,” he breathes, because now he believes. Now he knows. Now it’s real. “It’s really you.”
“Told you so, private,” Guerin laughs, poking at his hand until Alex gives in and laces his fingers with Guerin’s. “I thought I’d lost you again, out there.”
“What happened?” Alex asks, because he doesn’t have any recollection of whatever went wrong.
“Valenti found the trapdoor in time,” Guerin explains. “Isobel had been trying to get into everyone’s minds for so long, trying to make you all believe—”
“Isobel?”
“My sister,” Guerin explains with a shrug, as if Alex didn’t remember who Isobel Evans was. “She can influence people, so she’s been trying to influence everyone we once knew just to make them find the trapdoor, but she couldn’t find you. She found Liz and she found Cam, and then she found Valenti, but she couldn’t find you and I thought—I really thought—”
“Shhh,” Alex finds himself comforting Guerin, who’s now at the brink of tears. “I’m here now. I’m alive, thanks to you.”
“Cam said you were alive. She said you were with Maria and Mimi and Valenti,” Guerin chokes out, almost drowning in his own sobs. Alex can feel tears welling up in his eyes, and he allows a few of them to roll down his cheeks. “I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but then Valenti found the trapdoor and you were with him and then you weren’t and—”
“What do you mean, I wasn't?”
“You got shot,” Guerin sighs. “It was touch and go for a few hours here. We thought we’d lose you. And I couldn’t afford losing you, you know? I’d have torn down the whole Antar Corp, and I wouldn’t have minded. I’d have done that ten years ago, but Max thought it wouldn’t have been good for us.”
“You shouldn’t have to go against your own blood, Guerin,” Alex shakes his head, but it flares up in pain, so he stops. “Your father and your uncle are the ones running Antar Corp, they’re the ones deciding for everyone else. They’re powerful. If they’d know you’re helping people escape—”
“What would they do?” Guerin laughs mirthlessly. “Would they send us back to being chased, just like they allow you humans to be chased? I’d rather have that than live another single day without you, Alex.”
Alex can see in those fiery eyes the truth behind Guerin’s words, the inexplicable reality they’ve been living in for ten years — a half-life that neither of them could truly enjoy, because they were trapped either in a chase for life or a golden cage. He has to look away at the fierce feelings he can sense coming off Guerin.
“You say you have Liz too? And Maria and Mimi?”
“They made it before we could get to you. There are several trapdoors scattered throughout the field,” Guerin explains. He still has to let go of Alex’s hand. “Yours was further into the woods, but we needed you to slip away without it being too obvious. Having to explain how one Manes man is missing has to be a nightmare for Antar Corp’s PR.”
Alex has to laugh at that, finding himself looking back into Guerin’s eyes. “You’d risk so much to get me back?”
“I’d risk everything”, Guerin says, voice a whisper. “I wish I could take all these years back so you wouldn’t doubt it for another second.”
Alex closes his eyes and nods slightly. He feels Guerin lift their joined hands to his lips, and he shudders. Just a touch shouldn’t make him feel like he’s about to be swept off his feet, but right now he feels invincible. He thought being a runner was all about learning to win battles, but in the end he realizes that the truest race of them all is being able to get to the finish line alive, no matter the cost. No matter the time.
“Go back to sleep,” Guerin coaxes him. “You need it. I’ll explain everything else once you feel stronger, but for now, just rest.”
“Will you lie with me?” Alex finds himself asking, eyes laden with a tiredness he hasn’t been able to feel before. He’s halfway asleep when he feels the bed dip under Guerin’s weight, one hand still holding his and another sneaking around his waist cautiously so as not to disturb everything tying him to the machine and keeping him, seemingly, alive.
“Always,” Guerin whispers, and that’s the last thing Alex hears before falling back to sleep.