Title: White Noise

Author: Lexie Jayne

Fandom: Dark Angel

Characters: Jondy, Zack

Prompt: Family.

Word Count: 776

Rating: T

Summary: They don't sleep, but lie next to each other and pretend that what they have is normal, and what they have will last.

Author's Notes: A back story and continuation to my one-shot Let Go. The idea niggled at me. Each part uses a prompt as given by fanfic100 at live journal. My hard drive died and has been replaced, so huffah! Back to regularly scheduled updates.

The next chapter is the final chapter, and I'm still on the fence whether to make the ending happy or angsty. If you have any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

The ground shakes, another bomb hits. He can hear the buildings coming down on the surface, and transgenics are calling out and running and huddling in corners together. They'd gotten careless – trying to move back into the buildings of Terminal City rather than the underground shanty town they've inhabited for the last two years. They're paying for their lack of judgement now, as the injured and dead are carried into the corner.

Those still alive and uninjured hurry around, trying to do something, their faces white and grey with fear they haven't felt in a long time.

"Max, Max, where's Jondy?" Zack grabs his sister by the arm, his eyes worried as others dash around them, trying to reinforce the sewers as hairline cracks appeared in the roof.

Max blinks. "She was … she was walking with Adam." He'd seen her earlier, her hair pinned up on her head, Adam's tiny hands clinging to her fingers as he stumbled along, gazing up at the cloudy sky, his blonde hair hanging in his eyes.

"I'll check the injured and the bodies," Max says, her eyes wide with horror.

"I'm going up to see if she's still up there," Zack calls after her, moving swiftly through the sea of transgenics trying to find their safe haven. He scans the crowd for Jondy's red hair – washed out, faded, but still red. He listens for Adam's baby talk, his happy giggles as he clings to his mama.

Nothing. Just transgenics with fear in there eyes, splattered with blood. Zack pauses for a second, wondering if he really wants to go out into the war zone to find bodies. Maybe not quite dead, just wounded, crying. He sees in that second, Jondy cradling her dying boy, her eyes wide and her face white. He can picture Adam tugging at his dead mother's clothes, willing her to take him somewhere safe and warm.

He can hear crying as he emerges on the surface. Crying and shouting and screaming. People are crowding around the gates of Terminal City, jeering at the transgenics running for cover, yelling for more blood, more corpses. A few guns are fired, and Zack crouches behind the rubble, trying to filter the chaos out.

The cry is thin, childish and it is that Zack focuses on, five hundred metres or so away. He briefly misses the days when Jondy's hair was so red, he could pick her a mile away. Now, it's pinned tightly to her head and much lighter than it used to be.

He's over there in a split second, his arms looping around her and their boy. Both their faces are covered in dirt, and there's a long cut from Jondy's temple, along her cheek bone and ending underneath her mouth, dried blood staining her throat, bruises darkening her left eye. Adam buries his face in his mama's sweatshirt, unharmed.

"You're okay," Zack breathes into her hair. He tries to wipe the cut on her face. "That's going to scar."

She offers a faint smile and unwittingly huddles against him as another explosion rocks Terminal City.

"Come on, Syl will stitch you up." He takes Adam from her, and wraps one arm around her, guiding her back to the camp.

Terminal City is still that night, the rubble casting strange shaped shadows everywhere. Underground, the wounded lie pale and wait as time crawls by, for sleep or death or some sort of conclusion to the worst day. They sit, somber, in their little camps, the soft conversations creating a hum that is usually cheerful; but not today.

Adam falls asleep in his mother's lap, bathed and in clean clothes, Jondy's fingers running through his blonde hair as he sleeps, his thumb in his mouth. The black stitches that edge her face are a harsh contrast to her pale face, a slap of reality.

"I want to get out of here, Zack," she says quietly, lifting Adam into his little bed, tucking his sheets around his small body, his stuffed giraffe under his little arm. "I want to leave."

Her eyes are sad and he knows she'll leave with or without his help. She's afraid and she's a mother, a powerful combination – a force to be reckoned with.

He kisses her forehead and wonders what it would be like, in Canada with Jondy and Adam, pretending again. Watching his son grow up relatively safe, in a country that's safer and no where near as desperate as America. They could end up dead, tortured, for trying to break out and become anonymous.

Zack wonders how he's going to tell Max he's taking Jondy and Adam, and they're leaving.