Fic: Blah, Blah, Meow, Meow: Part One
At most workplaces, or so Alec had heard, if your employment got terminated it meant a pink slip, a final pay check, an escort off the premises, and then you were pretty much fucked until you could find yourself a new job.
People who got terminated by Manticore were pretty much just fucked, because Manticore believed in terminating employment with extreme prejudice, which meant that, mostly, you got escorted off the premises in a body bag. Occasionally somebody was allowed to move on with their heart still beating; because they had powerful family; because they had knowledge Manticore might need in the future; because it suited Manticore that they remain alive, for the moment.
After the compound burned to the ground, everyone who didn’t run far enough, fast enough was terminated with extreme prejudice. And then Ames White and his team started searching out, rounding up and gunning down anyone who’d ever worked for Manticore, ever, no matter what knowledge they had or how powerful their family.
Geneticist Dr Virginia Rossi may have been a leading expert in Molecular Genetics, specialising in Gene Expression and Mutation, she may have been the person responsible for the annoying as fuck reappearing barcodes that made it difficult for the x-series to truly pass as human, but she was also paranoid enough to go completely off the grid when she left Manticore five years ago.
Luckily for her, White and his cronies hadn’t been able to find her.
Luckily for Alec, he had skills that the Familiars would balk at using outside of their precious breeding program; skills that he may have been taught by Manticore trainers, but which he’d perfected all on his lonesome. Well, no. Not exactly all on his lonesome, because it took two (at least) to tango, so to speak. Anyway, the point being that Alec certainly wasn’t above using any of his skills for the good of a mission and when he’d gotten a bead on Dr Rossi through his contacts among the steelheads, when he’d staked out the bar where she spent most of her evenings unwinding and saw the way she churned through attractive young men, well, Alec had seen an in.
Raising Joshua’s flag above Terminal City had been…it had been important strategically. If Alec had also found that it caused an ache in his chest, a lump in his throat and a whole bunch of squishy feelings that would definitely have earned him a stint in Psy-ops, back in the day, well…that was nobody’s business but his own.
The snarling, spitting racists and the religious nuts had made it clear in their television interviews that they didn’t even see Transgenics as people, so it became important that they adopted the trappings of civilised human nationhood; a recognisable territory, a system of government and a recognisable leadership-a figurehead the humans could negotiate with. Alec wasn’t stupid; he knew that minorities always got fucked over, but the Manticore alumni had been built for survival. If only people would stop actively trying to kill them, he was sure they could hold their own alright, out in the real world.
Terminal City held its first democratic elections the day after the flag went up, and Max and Mole were elected joint leaders of Terminal City. It had been Max’s suggestion that they needed two leaders, one to represent the interests of the x-series and another to represent the interests of the anomalies. The two groups of Transgenics had different needs and concerns and the anomalies had initially been hostile to the x-series, because they could (and did) pass as human (barcodes and higher body temperatures notwithstanding). Mole was a natural leader, just as Max was; he was concerned for the well-being of his people and he had the potential to cause trouble if he didn’t feel listened to. Putting him up for election as co-leader had been a smart strategic move. Luke had been elected Mole’s deputy and Alec had somehow found himself elected Max’s deputy - he hadn’t even been aware he’d been nominated and in all honesty, he still wasn’t quite sure how he felt about it.
The majority of Alec’s Manticore training had been for solo missions; assassinations mostly, but also industrial espionage and retrievals-goods, people, whatever it was Manticore decided they wanted brought to them. But he’d done his fair share of team missions too. Alec played well with others; he was funny, attractive and personable, he knew how to get what he wanted from people and he was always at the center of everything; the life of the party. When he wanted to be.
He was also good at recon and infiltration, which is why Max had tasked him with finding safe passage (past the military blockade and the vigilantes) in and out of Terminal City for their human allies. It took him all of six hours to determine the best location for Dix and his team of anomalies to make a tunnel and then he went back to his own pet project, trying to figure out a way to permanently remove the barcodes, because now that there were so many of them, breaking into tattoo parlors to laser them off every two weeks was going to be a logistical nightmare. And while they could (and would if they had to) steal a few medical lasers to keep in TC, a permanent solution to the barcode problem would be tactically advantageous. And what better person to help with the problem than the person who’d caused it in the first place?
Alec didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, so he didn’t bother to tell Max-or anyone else-what he was up to. He sauntered across the compound and had almost made it to the tunnel entrance when he was stopped by Max’s voice.
“Hey, Alec. Got a minute?”
“Sorry, Max,” he rolled his shoulders. “I’m just on my way out to hustle up a little cash for the cause.”
Max looked him over with what could only be described as disapproval.
“What?” Alec glanced down at his tight jeans and even tighter tee-shirt. “There a problem?”
Max put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow. “Showing a lotta skin there, Alec. Just wondering what type of ‘hustling’ you’re planning.”
Alec gave her a bright, empty smile. “Whatever works, right Maxi?”
Max drew her lips in tightly, her expression pissy.
“Oh that’s right,” Alec drawled, before she could presume to pass judgement on him, “you skipped out of Manticore way before puberty, didn’t you? Missed out on all the ‘special’ training.”
Her look of horror was suitably gratifying and his anger carried him down through the tunnel and up out onto the street.
Alec knew he had to get his head back in the game quickly; the streets were a dangerous place for a Transgenic these days, a view that was vindicated when a sector cop stepped out of his vehicle, right into Alec’s path. He had one of those new temperature gauges in his hand. “Hold it right there,” he barked at Alec.
Alec held a finger up in the air and then made a big show of sneezing and coughing.
“Ah man,” he said, wiping his forearm across his nose. “This goddamn ‘flu sux ass, just can’t shake it,” he frowned. “I hope it ain’t AIDS cuz clients always pay extra for uncovered. Anyway,” he leered at the cop and then cocked out a hip in a nasty parody of a seductive pose, “what can I do for you, officer?”
The cop couldn’t get away from him fast enough. Alec watched his retreat with a cynically twisted lip and then sighed. “Fuck my life,” he said to the sky, before continuing to the bar where Virginia Rossi liked to pick up toy boys.
It didn’t take long to attract Virginia’s attention; just a boisterously loud pool game, complete with a lot of unsubtle cue fondling and bending over the table wiggling his ass. As soon as he’d collected his winnings (which he fanned out and waved around obnoxiously) he went to the bar for a drink. When he tried to pay, the bartender shook his head. “Already taken care of,” he nodded behind him. Alec looked over his shoulder and Virginia raised her champagne glass in his direction.
“Cool,” Alec muttered, raising his own glass. “Free beer.”
The barkeep rapped on the table in front of him. “Go and say thank you, kid. Least you can do when a lady buys you a drink.”
Alec raised an eyebrow and then shrugged and sauntered across to Virginia’s table.
“Thanks for the drink,” he said.
Virginia smiled a bright red smile. Matching long red fingernails were wrapped around the stem of her champagne flute. She tossed her short, dyed black hair and then thrust out her substantial bosom in the kind of obvious gesture that Alec appreciated. She was the wrong side of forty, but she wasn’t unattractive. He could totally do this.
“Have a seat, kitten,” she purred.
Kitten? That was a new one. Alec sat. He took a gulp of his beer and then grinned at his benefactress.
“I’m Alec,” he said.
“Virginia. By name, not by nature.”
Alec raised an eyebrow and took a sip of his beer. “So,” he said, “I take it you’re a fan of pool?”
Virginia chuckled. “I’m a fan of tight young asses bent over pool tables.”
Alec stared at her. “Huh. Well, I’m a fan of women who aren’t afraid to go after what they want. So I guess the question is,” he leaned forward, his eyes fixed on hers, “what do you want, Virginia?”
Virginia smiled. “I want you, Alec,” she said.
She took him back to her place, a condo with a lot of glass and chrome. It was in the same district that Logan used to live in, before White and his cronies smashed his place to pieces. Alec whistled low and loud. “Nice place,” he ran a casual hand over the bookshelf and then paused, picking out a text book on evolutionary genetics that his eagle eye had spotted from the doorway.
“Is this how you made your money?”
Virginia narrowed her eyes. “What do you know about genetics?”
Alec ran a hand over the back of his neck, drawing her attention, and then turned around, letting her get a good look at his barcode-free neck. Goddamn that lasering hurt like a bitch.
“I’m majoring in molecular bioscience at UW. Was planning on working for a biotech company once I graduate, but with all that freaky Manticore shit that’s been going down, I bet everyone in the biotechnology sector is gonna have a lot of trouble getting funding, the next few years.”
Virginia inclined her head and studied him like a specimen under a microscope. “You’re studying molecular bioscience?”
“Hey! Just because I’m hot, it doesn’t mean I don’t have a brain too. And if you’re gonna objectify me,” Alec sidled up to her and put his hands on her hips, “you could at least wait until we’re in bed.”
“Hands at your side, soldier,” Virginia barked, and Alec barely stopped himself from snapping to attention.
He gave her a cheeky grin. “Role play. Alright. I can get into that.” He put his arms by his sides. “Command me, baby.”
By the end of the evening Alec was exhausted and his tongue was really sore, but Virginia ordered him to stay the night and he was only too happy to comply. As soon as Virginia was asleep, he would have a perfect opportunity to go through her office looking for any papers on the barcode technology, and to download the contents of her computer onto a flash drive. Alec closed his eyes and bided his time, letting Virginia’s slow, even breathing lull him.
He woke up some time later, shackled to a narrow cot in a cage.
“Morning, Kitten,” Virginia trilled from outside the cage. “And what an apt moniker that is for you too, given the amount of feline DNA in your cocktail.”
Alec frowned at her. His mouth felt dry and cotton woolly and his head ached.
“You drugged me?”
“I did. Just a little gas I’ve developed, specifically for x-series Transgenics; one little puff, straight in your face, while you were lying next to me in bed. And don’t bother trying to lie your way out of this, Kitten. I ran your DNA while you were unconscious. You’re X-5; 494 to be exact.”
Alec ran a hand across his mouth.
“What are you gonna do? Hand me over to White and hope that he doesn’t kill you too?”
Virginia chuckled. “Oh no, Kitten. I’ve got something much more lucrative in mind for you.”
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