Title: Snapshots: Zack (1/1)
Summary: Glimpses into Zack's life.
Rating: PG, maybe?
Disclaimer: Cameron, and Eglee (sp?).
Date: March 3-7, 2001.
Note: I'm terrible with remembering anything beyond the broadest plots, so please excuse anything below that contradicts established fact or characterization.
Thank you to everyone who answered my infoquest.

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It has been ten years now, and the world still takes him by surprise. He has survival bred into his genes. He was taught to live and fight and kill, to lead, to follow, to snap to attention - yes, sir! He escaped, a child with death in his head, and found the world something he could not recognize.

Take now, this very instant. There's a woman and a child. Woman. Child. Mother. Son. The words are simple. The meanings are anything but. He has a mother and a father, somewhere, maybe. Except his father isn't a man, a life, a history. He was sperm waiting to be matched with the proper material. His mother -- and that's a joke, too. His mother was a teenager, carrying him in her body for the promise of cash. That had been normal. He and the others just _were_.

Zack has been out in the world for ten years, now. He feels like he has been a bit of everywhere, running and hiding and searching. He has watched the world around him, studied humans in all their interactions, searching for what makes them what he is not. He tries to shape himself to what those around him are. Most people don't look closely enough to see the cracks in his presentation of normalcy. Some do.

Because he's good - he was born and bred to be the best - but there's some things that Manticore couldn't provide. He doesn't get mothers and fathers and siblings. He was never tucked into bed. Never read a bedtime story. He never played catch in the backyard. Never had a parent hold onto him as he learned to ride a bike. He never opened gifts at Christmas, or fought with brothers or sisters over who got what when.

The woman is clucking irritably. She bends slightly, chapped hands fumbling with her son's coat. She finds the zipper, struggles it into place. She zips it all the way up, the upturned collar brushing the underside of the boy's smudged chin. She holds out her hand. The boy takes it, sure and easy, and Zack knows that it is something the child has done a thousand times in the past. Zack doesn't hold hands. Wouldn't, even if he had someone to do so with. He needs his hands free. He feels constrained and ill-prepared for action when he's not free to move easily and quickly.

He doesn't think about his mother. She is an unknown, immaterial. Zack thinks about survival, of freedom and responsibility. He is here. He is alive. He is free. The hows and whys aren't for him to consider. Wondering, feeling the loss of the unknown and unknowable is a distraction he can't allow himself.

Zack has family, one bound together by something far stronger than blood, and they can no more forget one another than they can pieces of themselves. They are fear and death and survival together. He lives for them. Separating was the right thing to do, strategically. But he ached, he hungered for them. He wonders what their creators would think of such emotions. They were born to serve as warriors. And each of them longs for their fellows. They are incomplete when apart. Zack won't admit to dreaming. He does, though. He dreams of them, together, safe.

Dreams aren't real. There is and there never shall be a time where a them, together, safe will be possible. The world is set against them. They are caught up in something that will never release them, no matter how hard and fast they run, no matter who they leave dead behind them. He has killed for them, for himself. The act, the feel, sight, scent of death are easy and familiar to him. Max hadn't understood, and he had wondered how she possibly could not.

He has to sleep. He curls up, his body on edge, waiting, even as he begins to drift. Defenses fall, and he is laid open, bared and vulnerable to the thoughts and memories and feelings that writhe inside him. The world is black and grey and blue, held against his closed eyelids. Small and silent with carefully neutral faces, he sees them as they were. Events unfold with the painful clarity his creators bred into his memory. He wakes, breath quick and rasping before he remembers that he is free and strong and he will _never_ go back.

He thinks of Brin, freedom wiped from her mind, body returned to their creator. He mourns for her, deep inside himself beyond conscious thought. Zack found Brin early, years ago. They fumbled, awkward without Manticore restraining their actions, before finally leaning towards each other and falling into desperate arms. She had a small apartment, and they had sat on her bedding, piled blankets and a thin mattress in the corner of the room. They had talked, and words had become something beautiful and true. She had gripped his hand as he moved to leave. He had bent towards her, placed a kiss against her cheek and drawn in the scent of her. She won't be that Brin ever again.

Zack bears a silent awe for them all. They emerged into the world as small tortured souls and have grown strong and beautiful and free. They play with words, denying the silence which shaped their earliest years. They smile and laugh and touch. He leaves them that because they still fear and worry and wait, and he will be there for them. Max accused him of still being trapped in Manticore - and maybe he is, but he doesn't think he has a choice. Max can integrate herself into the outside world, can shift from that one to the one she left. He can't. He has to take care of all of them. He can't forget how their trainers thought, how they felt and acted. He must be a soldier at all times, on guard. There is no one to watch his back should he step away from the man they made him.

...~*~...

He can't remember where it was, but he found himself in a park one morning not so long after the escape. The grass was flat and brown, still wet with the melting snow and the earth squelched beneath his stolen sneakers as he walked. The swings had been put up all ready, and there were children there that day. He had watched, amazed, as they laughed and screamed and ran and... he hadn't had the words for it. This scene, those children, were nothing his experiences had ever prepared him for. Zack hadn't spoken to them, and they hadn't approached him.

He watched them until they wandered away from the swing-set in favour of other areas. Zack claimed a swing, wrapped his hands against the metal chains on either side of him, and had dug the toes of his shoes into the damp sand. He kicked out his legs and swung, and wondered why the children had laughed into the air racing against their faces.

...~*~...

He was working in a restaurant in Michigan when he met her. Her name was Michelle, and she came in every morning. She would talk to him while Zack grunted noncommittally in response to her determinately cheerful chatter. Her clothes were always dull with repeated washings and the cuffs of her jacket were frayed with use. She squinted, struggling to see clearly without the aid of the glasses she couldn't afford. Michelle laughed often, would call out to Zack across the room and he had given in and sat down across from her.

Michelle finally asked him out one day as he came off his shift. He'd stared at her, a polite refusal hovering at his lips. And he had agreed instead. They had kept their money to themselves and wandered about. She had asked questions and Zack had lied in response. Michelle had waited, and he had questioned her in turn. She had tried to hold his hand and he had shifted away. Michelle had shrugged and laughed. And laughed. And laughed. Her laughter didn't mean anything. It was empty, an insult to the depth and meaning of the laughter of the others of his kind.

Michelle didn't show up at the restaurant at her regular time, and Zack found himself nearly missing her. He had quietly packed up all his belongings that evening and driven as far as possible away from her and near emotion.

Zack can't understand why Max won't simply pick up and leave. Are her friends, her familiar terrain, _Logan_ really worth her life? She knows what he knows. She's felt Lydecker at her back. And she dug in her heels and refused the safety he held out to her. He can't figure out where Max is different from the rest of them. The others have made friends. The others, maybe, have even loved. And they have stepped away from the lives they've created when necessary. Max simply... won't. Zack stood face to face with her and found himself suddenly, startlingly helpless. He wants to protect her, and she won't let him do so in the only way he knows how.

Max is infuriating. He loves her, anyway. Zack can't quite figure out how or why, and he sometimes wishes that Manticore had figured out how to edit that emotion right out of him. He leaves, again and again, and knows that Max will make her way to Logan's. She won't ever love him, but she'll put her life on the line merely to remain in the other man's presence.

What is she hoping for? Love and romance, marriage, children, a home, happily ever after? Just get him out of your system, Max, he thinks. But Max has had a taste of normalcy, or the closest thing to it that any of them can achieve. She's living a fantasy, has convinced herself that there's more to life that fear. Zack hates Logan for not showing Max the impossibility of her dreams.

Zack has never been fooled into a sense of normalcy. He feels his difference every moment. He constantly monitors his actions, remembers nearly breaking his first lover's ribs with a normal strength her body couldn't handle. It takes concentration to run at something less than normal when in the eyes of others. He remembers to grimace at pain he doesn't feel.

...~*~...

Ten years, and he can still recall what he thought, what he felt, as he crouched bare footed in the snow and faced his brothers and sisters. They are free because of their own strength and determination. He will make sure they stay free.

The outside world hurts, sometimes.

Manticore hurts more.

~end~