Chapter 1: What the Heart Wants

Heller and his daughter move into an apartment in the yellow zone.

While Heller sleeps, he experiences pain and a nightmare. His eyes snap open and he violently sits up and examines the room to make sure there's nothing in the room with him. His brow hardens as he realizes something's not right. He was completely alone in the room, and yet...something was wrong. He gets out of bed, almost like an out of body experience. He walks into his daughter's room and a memory he collected begins to play:

Evolved: "Do you want us to kill Heller's Daughter sir?"

Heller is unable to control himself as he activates his Blade.

Mercer: "No, I want him to witness what I can do to her..."

Heller's face is terrified and angry, tears streaming from his face as he realized what was influencing him, raises his blade over his daughter.

Mercer: "First hand!"

Alex was standing in the apartment that him and Dana used to share. He had nowhere else to go right now and this was the first place he could think of, the only place where he could forget the world completely hated him. He looked around the living room for a brief second, everything was the same as he remembered, the same sense of clutter and disorder, the same stale, murky air, the same fitful swirl of dust in the murky sunlight that pushed through the smudged window, every out-of-place thing was in its place, undisturbed.

Those captivating blue eyes that would strike fear into even the hardest Blackwatch soldier or the strongest hunter, became ridden with regret and self pity. Something the whole world would enjoy immensely.

Newspaper Headline: Alex Mercer spotted in yellow zone!

He looked at the article with almost hesitation, as he read each sentence that did nothing but talk about how the monster was going to kill everyone, and why shouldn't they? He had tried to control or kill every living thing on planet.

He looked around the cluttered residence, stacks upon stacks of dusty, ripped newspapers and magazines that, like the one in his hand, also had articles of her brother becoming more and more corrupt and evil as the days went on. He relished the memories he still had about when the things he did could loosely be considered a good thing.

He knew where she was after consuming Heller from the inside out, but he couldn't face her, as indestructible as he was, he betrayed her and she hated him now. The numbness of those thoughts finally start seeping in as a pained expression rippled his face when he thought about Dana looking where her brother went, her sad face and crying eyes ringing in his head.

She was only looking after him and loving him when no one else did. He walked slowly, examining every item before he stopped before the window that she always scolded him for entering in, along with all the smudges, it had a large crack in the glass. A small sentimental smile cut its way across the otherwise saddened expression, and a moment later he was gone.

Alex stood on the roof of a building that was overlooking an intersection. He stared off into the distance with a pensive, almost regretful expression, as he thought back to when he was the monster the world ever so hated for. Something in him just snapped. After months of being hunted down like an animal, having to evolve just to survive a walk in the street, he grew tired of their actions.

He had tried to get away from it all, to just forget and live a new life, but when he saw how the human race treated their own, with disgust and hatred, he decided he'd had enough. It was his place as the apex predator of the earth to fit his environment as he saw fit, an environment completely under his control, but once you've been undisputed and uncontested for as long as he had, one can't remember where their mortality ends and the legends begin.

Mercer had grown used to easily slaughtering anything that got in his way. He forgot what an even fight was, and he got sloppy...

When Heller defeated him, Alex could remember what his last words were. With a calm, almost bemused tone he said "Huh...welcome to the top of the food chain." He remembered what it was like to be consumed, to have every muscle in his body feel on fire and hurt, every where the foreign virus touched was like a hot coal running through his veins, and then he loosened up and blackness fell over him.

His subconscious was still there, simply because the strain of Blacklight, Heller was carrying in his body was the exact one Mercer was carrying in his. Alex had the ability to consume Heller from the inside out because Mercer was a lot more evolved than Heller.

While Heller was going through the various tasks Mercer sent him to do and the tasks Heller took it upon himself to do, Mercer was evolving at an enormous rate. Maybe even faster than Heller was, but he was satisfied that his fighting mutations were enough to put him on top, so he simply worked on evolving his survivability even more than what it already was.

He created new strains that Heller knew nothing about and after they grew stronger...Mercer grew stronger as well.

Heller was indeed more than what Mercer originally intended, and with time could have even rivaled him, but that's not the way nature does it. Potential means nothing if another organism has beaten you to your goal. After he had gotten out of Heller, he had no idea what he was going to do. He wasn't going to try and take over the world again, but that left him with nothing: nowhere to go, no one to go to...

It was now, the time where Alex was never stronger, never more indestructible, and never more powerful than he was at this moment, that he felt the most dead inside. He could see why Heller attacked him. If it was Dana he would have done the same thing. He didn't want to kill Heller but had to, to survive. Killing Heller's daughter was when Alex finally woke up, finally realized just how evil he really had become.

After leaving that apartment it was now that Alex knew he had a lot to do if he could reclaim himself...that is...if he ever could. The fact of the matter is that what Mercer did was unforgivable.

Alex shuddered at the thought of him losing control and...hurting Dana, but that was the past...a different Alex Mercer and he was determined to show the world that the old one, while not being perfectly innocent was going to change.

He looked at the intersection and could plainly see that Blackwatch and the military were still there. If anything in even more numbers than they had been previously, no doubt they knew he was alive longer than the newspaper. It was nothing he was afraid of. He was the most powerful thing alive and he knew it, and they knew it as well.

It was one of the many things that was always perplexing to Alex, when a man faces something that is stronger than he is, something he cannot destroy, he destroys himself instead. Because that's all they do when they try to kill him, destroy themselves by facing the most dangerous, almost perfect predator...almost.

He had a lot to do before he could forgive himself, but before any of that, he had someone he had to see...

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