Week of the Cat

Saturday, Part One

A/N: Thanks to all the reviewers and thanks for your patience. It means a lot to me! Working on multiple stories and living a real life aren't always conducive to fast updates. I'm actually going to try and break up the last chapters more because I realize that reading 20k words or more in one sitting can be a bit butt-numbing, and waiting on me to write and edit the full chapter would delay posting even more. Hearts!

Alec had left Logan's a little wounded, a little angry. Actually, a lot angry. It had faded as the night air had rushed around him, as he'd made the ride back to Terminal City and his darkened apartment. He hovered in the door only for a moment before turning around and walking back out of the building. He'd needed out, just for a while, and his Bandit had afforded him that freedom, at least for a little while. A seedy bar and a glass of whiskey had softened the blow even further. Now, it was close to two in the morning and while he could survive off far less shut eye than a regular person, he still needed to get some rest. He could have stayed in his apartment... he didn't trust his ability to sleep though, not after this week. So, as dangerous as it probably was, he went to her apartment instead.

It was dumb, sure, and maybe a little creepy, but the pillow smelled like her and he fell asleep, grumpily grumbling, after only a few minutes. So long as Max didn't come home and accuse him of being a stalker and slobbering on her new sheets, the sheets he had very kindly procured for her, there'd be no harm done. Maybe.

It shouldn't have surprised him that it was not Max that woke him up a few hours later, but his cell phone vibrating on the bed next to him. He blinked at it in annoyance for a moment, disoriented, before making a sideways grab to turn it's illuminated face towards his.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Alec dropped the phone and pretended that Logan wasn't seriously trying to call him after all the posturing of yesterday evening. He listened to the phone's vibrations for a few more moments, stubbornly refusing to answer the man that knew all the right buttons to push. The cellphone stopped buzzing as his voicemail took over and Alec thought that maybe that was it, that maybe he'd be able to get a few more hours of sleep before the dawning of yet another strange day in the saga of the Claim. Logan never gave up on anything easily, Alec should have known that by now. It had only been a few minutes, just as Alec thought that maybe he'd be able to fall back asleep after all, when the phone's blue screen lit the darkness of the room once more. The man was clearly in one of his moods and Alec knew he'd get no peace until he gave in to Logan's demands.

"What do you want, Logan?" It was only through careful control that Alec managed to avoid snarling into the phone as he pressed it to his ear. As it was, his body on the mattress was tense, his tone was brusque, something deep and snarling within him wondering what it would take to get this guy to just back off.

"Is Max with you?"

"No."

That one short, terse word was all he was willing to offer Logan before Alec snapped the phone shut in annoyance and let it fall back to the bed.

Last night had shattered the careful truce to pieces, hadn't it? He'd watched Max make herself miserable with the guy for a full year after she'd busted them all out of Manticore. And as if that wasn't enough, Logan had been a royal prick for the short amount of time that he'd thought Alec and Max had been together (and while it would be easy to blame that on Max's lie, Alec felt more like blaming Logan at the moment). The following six months hadn't done much more to endear Alec to the man either, watching Max slowly back away, slowly separate, slowly come back to life, only to keep getting pulled back into him, pulled back into misery. And despite it all, despite all that drama and bullshit that Alec had been forced to watch again and again, last night Logan had the nerve to sit there and lecture him on what a relationship was, what love was? No. Fuck him. Alec didn't feel like playing any more roles in Logan's twisted story, not tonight.

But the phone began ringing again and this time Alec did snarl. "Listen man, she's not with me. And even if she were, she's the one that stood you up, not me. So call her."

"I get it. We don't like each other-"

"And whose fault is that?" Alec snapped back.

Logan ignored him through the phone. "But this disc that you two found?"

"We didn't find it." Alec corrected the man, sitting up and swinging his legs off the bed, realizing that if it was about Eyes Only crap he wasn't going to be able to shake Logan off. "Some guy, one of Chang's workers, handed it to Mole when he showed up to..." He was tempted to say, interrupt us, but while still angry he had enough presence of mind to not let that out. So he amended, albeit grudgingly, to, "Rescue us."

"Well, the disc is a list of contacts, banking transactions, everything. Some of this stuff could put enough suspicion on him to open an inquiry into his business dealings."

"Well, congrats on the big break that we handed to you. Anything else?"

"Yeah." If Logan had recognized the bite in Alec's statement, his only response to it was a similar bite in his own. "There's photos of him on here from when he was less paranoid about camera footage. Before the media coverage on transgenics and the whole Jam Pony thing."

"And?"

"And in the older pictures the man has a barcode, Alec." Logan paused for a moment as if to let that sink in before adding, "He's a transgenic."

Jesus. Alec came to his feet, frowning into the phone. "He can't be. If he were, he should have known who Max was, who we are."

Maybe that did explain how the man had knocked Max out so easily with one bruising blow. But the guy had almost seemed... disgusted by them or something, like he couldn't stand that they were transgenic. Alec would have been more prepared for it if Logan had told him the guy was a Familiar. This just didn't make any sense.

"Well, the photos I have say otherwise."

Alec didn't even stop to think it over before scowling. "So why are you really calling, Logan? You rethinking taking down an arms-dealing, politicking nut case just because he's got some lines on the back of his neck?"

Logan's slight pause was the only affirmative Alec needed, but the man backed it up by saying, "At the very least, I need to talk it over with Max."

"Why?" Alec was well aware that exposing Chang now might not be in their best interest, but he couldn't help himself from goading the other man with pretend nonchalance. "Hand him over to the police. If you know about Ben, you know that not all transgenics are good people."

"And if I do, what then? The public backlash would cripple everything we've worked so hard to build."

Ultimately, Alec knew that whatever path they chose with Chang, he wouldn't be able to make the decision on his own, he'd need Max's input. Still, he was pretty much on a roll, so he added, "So don't mention the transgenic part, people won't even know if he's doing a good job of lasering his barcode."

Logan's superior tone made Alec's fingers squeeze around the phone a little tighter than they should have. He heard the plastic protest in his grip and forced himself to relax. Maybe goading Logan hadn't been a good idea after all. Logan was acting as if Alec was actually dense enough to believe all the crap he'd just spouted and Alec was just spun enough to want to tell Logan to go fuck himself.

"It'll get out eventually, Alec. It always does."

What was the point? Logan was only calling him because Max wasn't responding to his pages. What did he think he could get out of this conversation? Alec's voice became biting once more. "Sure, man. You want her to go reason with him, you need to bring that up with her. If you're calling me to try and talk Max into not putting this guy down the way she had to do with Ben, you're barking up the wrong tree."

There was a slight pause before Logan asked in a hard voice, "What?"

"Anything else?" Alec's voice was similarly stoney because he was so over Logan's routine: Woe, you threatened my precarious relationship with Max and I must glare at you steely-eyed, oh wait, I need you to do something for me, I'll pretend like we can work together for the sake of the mission. Yeah, maybe normally Alec could have flipped over so easily, turned the other cheek, but after this week, after her bite, something was pacing at him to get out. When Logan didn't respond, Alec just snorted. "No? Good."

Once more, Alec hung up. And this time, thankfully, Logan didn't call back. Alec stared down at his phone for a moment before, with a deep calming breath, he started punching in Max's number. He supposed some sleep was better than none. Hopefully the few hours he had gotten would help prepare him for seeing her, for having to admit that he may have let the secret of the Claim slip before she had gotten a chance to tell Logan herself.

Her pager had been blowin' up since Friday. Logan was clearly awake and, clearly, pissed. The first glaring beep had come in around nine the previous night, which must have been soon after whomever Carter had sent over with the disc had left. Max had turned off the sound and there'd been a few hours reprieve. Then, sometime before midnight, the vibrations at her belt had become more insistent, more frequent. If she knew Logan, he'd either been drinking himself into a melancholy rage or he had popped the disc into his computer and found something he needed to share with her. If it was the drinking, well... It was unfair of her to not be upfront with him, to send someone else in her place, but she had a job to do and just couldn't afford to feel bad. He needed to stop using alcohol to gather his courage. She'd feel bad (maybe) in the morning, when the nightshift was over. If it was the disc... well... she'd helped him, earned herself a nice little shiner in the process, not to mention a heated memory that a thousand lifetimes could never make her forget, and just couldn't deal with it right now; she had a job to do, a city to run, mouths to feed.

Two X-5's sprinted towards the chainlink fence, muscles gathered, and they leapt, easily scaling the thing, the laden backpacks they were carrying doing nothing to slow them down. Max, high atop a roof, nodded at them as one looked up when they hit the ground on the other side. She turned away, peering over the skyline of the city, ignoring the crackle of the radio as the male transgenic at her side called in the return to Command. They'd been the last two runners of the night to make it back across the fence. Which meant now that she only had to worry about the ones still on patrol inside the fence, the strategically placed groups of transgenics that were on the look out for Familiar incursions. She doubted the Familiars would try to attack anytime soon: They'd been at a stalemate for about a month now.

The Familiars hadn't been as well embedded into the government as they'd hoped they would be by this time. Clearly they weren't, because they had yet to convince the capitol to set this place on fire. If anything, D.C. seemed more interested in covering up the scandal, oh, how'd these genetic super-soldiers get here, tee-hee, than they were in bombing an already uninhabitable zone of a broken down city. A lot of them over there probably knew more about Manticore than their official sounding inquiry boards liked to make it seem. Well, let them keep politicking and throwing accusations at each other, kept 'em out of her hair. The lack of progress on Capitol Hill probably drove the Familiars that were embedded in D.C. absolutely bat-shit, and that brought no end of dark amusement to Max.

The media had started to lay off lately too. Guess when all transgenics really did was sit here and stare back across the fence, nothing exactly nefarious, it made it hard to pull off a sensationalist piece. Once in awhile one of the local channels would dredge up some trash and cause a small stink and there'd be a few more protestors for a while. They'd always wander off in boredom eventually. Mole and Alec would sometimes send the X-6's to throw water balloons off the roofs at any flaming X's that popped up to remind those people that there were a bunch of kids in here, just trying to grow up free. Surprisingly it would usually calm all except the most ignorant and blind amongst them. Mole insisted it was good stress relief too, but she didn't know whether or not he was serious. She just couldn't picture the man lobbing water balloons off a building.

Once in a great while they'd have to chase some teens out, kid who'd thought they could one-up each other by sneaking in and getting a look at a transgenic... it always surprised those teens the most when it wasn't a transhuman that escorted them to the door, but a good looking X-series instead, only a few years older than them to boot. For a while they'd had to deal with one or two kids who'd decided that their escort was, in fact, their teenage soulmate and tried to break in more often. That'd mostly been dealt with by now.

So all in all, not every night was a fight for their lives, and for that Max was incredibly grateful. She was sure that in some parallel universe somewhere, Terminal City was a smoking crater, or a zoo full of unhappy tigers snarling to be let out of their cage. Well, not here. She was glad for the occasional peace that occurred when the Familiars, their only real enemy, were too busy licking their wounds to attack.

She still had no idea what their master plan was. What the big, scary 'Coming' was supposed to be, or what a 'Chosen One' was supposed to do. Still had no idea what Alec meant when he'd called her 'Buffy.' That lack of understanding was one of many things that had finally goaded Joshua into searching for Sandeman. "Need answers." He'd whuffed at her gently. She'd railed at him but really, it was a fight they'd had before, he was a grown ass man and she'd accepted that months ago. So she'd let him go, reluctantly, sadly, but she'd let him go just the same.

"Not your choice," He'd pointed out to her and she'd only been able to nod in unhappiness. She wasn't sure if she was unhappy because she was scared for him, out there on his own so soon after the Jam Pony incident, or if she was just gonna miss one of her friends when her life was already so upside down. It'd probably been a mixture of both. Even Alec had been reluctant to send the large man off... but Joshua had wanted it that way. "Stay with little fella, stay out of trouble." Alec had smiled easily enough but she knew it'd been hard for him to see the big guy go. It was funny that he'd been the one that'd gotten Joshua to go on runs for him so long ago. So many months later, Max was beyond glad that Joshua hadn't allowed Alec to come with him: She wasn't entirely sure how she'd run T.C. without him, or how she'd have survived, sanity intact, cooped up in here without him to talk to. While there was no denying that she and Alec had come into a wary friendship, a kind of respectful understanding, before the flag raising ceremony of so long ago, Max sometimes wondered if Joshua leaving was the catapult that had launched them out of a respectful distance and into best friend territory. With Josh gone, their Jam Pony friends on the other side of the fence, Max in and out of relationships with Logan, well, really all they'd had was each other.

It seemed strange to sometimes step back from her life and see how far all of their relationships had come.

The familiar buzz of her pager tickled her hip and she sighed. Well. Most of their relationships, anyway. She turned its face up and blinked in surprise at the number there. It was not Logan at all, though she did have the customary amount of missed pages from him as well. It was the clinic.

"Take over," She called to the X with the radio, Peta's right hand man. "Jeri needs something. I'll meet up with you later." She swung over the ledge of the building, sliding down the length of a rickety old access ladder and into a darkened alleyway. She hoped this wasn't about Peta.

It wasn't, and for the first time in years, Max was faced with a situation that should have made her smile.

"I'm so glad you got here so fast. I thought I would have to wait till morning to get a hold of you. You have no idea how many cups of coffee I've had. You won't believe this, but her blood, Max. It's perfect."

Max just blinked in the face of Jeri's excited rambling. Coffee? Blood? What the hell was she talking about. "Jeri, slow down. What do you mean?"

"What do you mean, what do I mean?" Jericho asked, her thin face doing its best to contain her excitement and failing pretty spectacularly. "I mean, the girl that you brought back yesterday afternoon? She's a Perfect Donor."

She was? Max struggled to remember what the 6 they'd brought in had looked like. "But she looked so... normal." The only perfect donor Max had ever met had been a wreck, a self-serving megalomanic that had black veins covering the surface of much of his skin. He'd fancied himself part vampire, part cult leader, at least before Max had disabused him of the notion. There'd been nothing even remotely off, black vein or even self serving wise, about the shy, fair skinned X-6 they'd swooped in and plucked from the hands of two Familiars.

"She's just a kid, Max. And a newer model at that. They don't get really souped up till they're older. Manticore had something to do with that, kept working on them, molding them. Without the Docs guiding her, she's just a girl with a really powerful immune system. And that's saying something for a transgenic." Jericho was fairly humming with giddy energy, only in part due to the entire pot of coffee she'd downed in the last few hours.

"And?" Max gestured impatiently for Jeri to spell it out.

"And? Think big picture here." Jeri leveled her with a look. When Max just crossed her arms, Jeri gestured impatiently towards her cluttered work bench. "Just take a look in the microscope."

Max did, sinking into the chair that Jeri fairly bolted out of, and stared hard in surprise.

"It's her blood sample, mixed into one of your new ones." Jeri explained, hovering next to her. "It's probably helping that the virus has mutated because her T-cells are having a field day with them."

It'd been just as she thought just a few short days ago. A Perfect Donor was just what she'd needed. And then, miraculously, one had appeared as if to prove her theory all too true. As soon as Jericho had realized what the girl was she'd gotten to work on Max's blood samples. She could have waited until morning to call Max, but she'd been up all night as it was, testing and retesting in glee before she could contain it no longer and just had to page their Fearless Leader.

Max backed away from the microscope, from the image of a white blood cell slowly dissolving one of her virus cells, turning to look at Jericho. "What does this mean?"

Jeri shifted from one foot to the other, smiling. "It means that if I can talk the girl into a transfusion, within a week I could potentially give you a virus free existence for up to three, maybe four months."

She should be happy about this, some part of Max recognized that. But... Three months? Maybe four? That's what Jericho was so excited about? That seemed like it was as nebulous a cure as a two-year waiting period for her own immune system to catch up. "Okay. And then what?"

"And then," Jeri's excitement was starting to fade as she realized that Max wasn't jumping on the joyous bandwagon. She frowned, like, why was Max even asking about this? Wasn't Darth Vader supposed to be all about gettin' in good with the Evil Emperor? "And then the transfusion will run its course and the virus will start repopulating. Probably. Maybe." Jeri threw up her hands in exasperation. "Ah hell, Max, I don't know for sure. I just know that the girl's cells are doing a really good job of taking your Anti-Logan agent down to non-lethal levels."

Max digested this carefully. And wondered at the strange lack of joy. Why did she feel so stressed? She had a feeling she knew. Her eyes seemed to refuse to rest on Jeri, zipping around the room at a mile a minute, the same speed as most of her thoughts. "So, I could think everything is fine for a few months and then one day, accidentally touch Logan and watch him drop dead."

"What do you mean, accidentally touch Logan?" Jeri asked, her light brown eyes incredulous. "What's up with you, Max? I thought you would be happy about this. Weren't you the one begging me to help you find a cure six months ago, even if it was only a temporary one? Weren't you the one saying that you just wanted a normal life, a normal romance, with him?"

When Max didn't say anything, Jeri attempted to assuage the other woman's assumed misgivings. "Look, if you're worried about the guy croaking in the middle of sex, don't. We'll play it by ear. We'll keep the routine the same. Weekly checks up and everything. First hint of lethal levels of virus and it's back to rubber gloves and romantic tragedy hour extraordinaire."

Romantic tragedy hour? That's what her life really was to everyone, Max realized in dismay. To Alec, to Peta, to Jeri, even to herself. "I'm not going to ask some kid to give up her blood for me just so I can selfishly-"

"What does it hurt to ask?" Jeri demanded. "You did just save her butt yesterday. She's probably grateful enough to make the attempt, if nothing else."

Max didn't say anything.

"Is this because of Alec?" Jericho asked in suspicion.

Max glanced up, surprised. "What?"

"Are you worried about what Alec might think if you go through with it?" Jeri asked, her arms folding across her chest.

"No," Max scoffed in response. "This has nothing to do with him."

"Sure." Jeri rolled her eyes. "It has nothing to do with the fact that you laid teeth on him and you're an instinctual wreck right now. Let's face it, Max. Kitty cat knows that if you go through with it, even if it's only for a few months, you'll have to let Alec go."

"That's not it." Max pushed away from Jeri's workspace, coming to her feet, her hand fisting at her side. "I do want to be cured, Jeri. Believe me. I don't want the power of life and death over anyone. But I want a real cure. Not a three, maybe four, month possibility. And I don't want to have to steal blood from a kid to make it work. I'd be happier waiting the two years and knowing that it was gone for good."

"Are you kidding?" Jeri demanded, wondering if this was some kind of sick joke. This was so not how she'd thought this conversation would play out. "How is this any different from pumping Logan full of transgenic blood every time he gets all hands-on and accidentally touches you?"

"It's completely different, because that's to save his life."

"So is this!" Jeri exploded. "Jesus, Max, sometimes it's like you don't want to be happy!"

It'd only been two days ago that Jericho had accidentally walked into a hallway and overheard Logan guilt tripping an obviously browbeaten Max into keeping a date night. Well, Jeri had just found the answer to Max's weariness and she wasn't going to take it? Was this thing with Alec really that serious? Not that she was complaining, but what the hell was up with the universe lately?

Max turned on her heel. "I can't talk about this right now. I need to think about it."

"Fine, come back when your cat's not in control." Jeri shouted after her, clearly sore that her discovery hadn't brought Max the rapturous, if short-sighted, joy that she'd thought it would. Jeri liked Alec as much as the next gal, but hadn't Max always said that curing herself was her number one priority? This is exactly why Jeri wasn't with anyone, why she spent so much time in her lab: Claims, hell, relationships in general, made you stupid.

Max took off down the hallway, Jericho's words hounding her steps. Her cat? Was that what this was about? Was she really trying to circumvent a temporary cure because of what it would do to her temporary claim? She was going to release Alec, tomorrow their week would be up and she'd said she'd let him go. And temporary cure or no, that hadn't changed any of her dark musings of the last few days; she was just so damn tired. For a moment, she wished Alec were around so that she could talk to him about this before she remembered that this was the last sort of thing she'd want to talk to him about right now. Old habits are hard to kill. But who else was there?

Cindy would be asleep this early in the morning, and as much as Max loved O.C., the woman didn't always get how much things had changed in the last few months. Maybe, Max realized in embarrassment, it was because of how much Max kept her out of the loop, so unwilling to admit to the disintegration of her relationship with Logan. Alright, so fine then. If she couldn't talk to Cindy, or to Alec, she'd talk to the next best thing. Mini-Alec. Not that Peta would be able to do as much talking back as she normally did.

Actually, wait, that might be a bonus.

Soon as night shift was over, she resolved herself. Her pager buzzed before she could leave the clinic and she paused in her steps, looking down with a sighed, "Dammit, Logan."

Only it wasn't Logan. It was Alec. And since it was Alec, something was probably up. He never paged her for personal reasons; when he wanted to see her he just kind of showed up wherever she was at. She could have gone back down the hallway and borrowed Jeri's phone but the insurgence of her cat during their conversation made Max a little embarrassed, a little unwilling to face the woman so soon after stalking out.

Jeri was right, of course she was right, Max was realizing as she was calming down. She'd have to cure herself, if only temporarily, and only if the girl they'd brought in was willing to give it a go. Even if a cure didn't fix her problems with Logan, she wasn't willing to walk around as the guy's death trap waiting to happen. Especially since Logan kept ignoring her orders to spend less time in T.C., kept putting himself at risk by putting himself near her. She just needed some time for the cat stressing in her ear to calm down, to assure it that a cure didn't mean she was going to sleep with someone that was Not-Alec. And hopefully, once it did calm down, she could assure it, assure herself, that her genetics were blowing this way out of proportion; that not only was she not going to sleep with Logan, she wasn't going to sleep with Alec either.

Something in her subconscious, something all too human, snorted at that. Max ignored it, making her way out of the clinic's glass doors and into the night air, heading back down the street towards Command. If Alec was looking for her, rather than hunting him down, it'd be easier to just plant herself next to the coffee maker and wait for him to inevitably show up. Which he did, as he always did, stepping into the room, eyes from all corners turning to take in his presence, the same way they had for her, as he scanned the area. His gaze settled on her fairly quickly and he crossed the room as the night crew returned to what they were doing.

He took one look at the cup already full of coffee that she proffered him and took it gratefully. "We got problems."

"We always got problems." She reminded him.

He stared blandly at her over the rim of the cup as he took a sip of the hot liquid. He wondered how she'd timed her pour so perfectly to his arrival and wondered why it tasted better somehow knowing that she'd made it for him.

"We got Logan problems." He added, lowering the cup from his lips.

She opened her mouth to say 'we always got Logan problems,' before she realized it was a trap, that he was teasing her despite how weird stuff was between them, and she snapped it back shut.

His eyes gleamed as he corrected. "Well, I guess I should say we have Eyes Only problems."

So that's why Logan had been paging her so incessantly. She should have known. The disc that Mole had handed off to them as they'd been leaving the docks must have contained something that was sure to screw up her Saturday. There were too many ears here, though. Too many people were half paying attention to their conversation, Mole included. She supposed she couldn't blame them. She and Alec were the prime source of entertainment for T.C. at the moment. She could blame Mole though, because she half suspected that he was furthering rumors about her and Alec for his own twisted amusement.

"My office," She gestured towards the back, turning and walking away from him, down an ill-lit hallway. She didn't need to check to see if he followed, she could feel him fall in behind her. As the door shut behind him and he flipped on the light, she turned, her arms folding across her chest as she leaned back against her desk.

"How bad is it?"

Alec shrugged, sinking into the worn green of the couch next to her door. "He's a run of the mill scumbag politician. There's about a million of them out there, what with the Pulse wiping out a lot of the regulations that forced people to play nice and civilized with each other."

She recognized the stall for what it was. "Just give it to me straight, Alec. I think I can handle it."

He kept his voice light but his eyes were hard as he told her, "Logan thinks the guy's a transgenic."

Her arms uncrossed and she stood in surprise. "What?"

Alec put down his coffee cup, resigning himself to the fact that it would be cold when he finally got back to it. "He says there's photos on there from before the whole transgenic mania was unleashed, before T.C. became a hotbed of super-soldier activity. And in them, the guy has a barcode."

"That can't be right." Max shook her head in denial. "Alec, you should have seen his face before he hit me. He looked like he hated me, like I disgusted him or something. It'd make more sense if this guy was a Familiar."

"That's what I thought too." Alec paused for a moment before grudgingly adding, "We need to look at that disc. If Logan is right, we can't let him move ahead with his exposé. Even if he painted Chang as an Ordinary, someway, somehow, if the man was indicted, the information would get out and the press would have a field day."

"Familiars would probably figure it out and leak it. I'd rather not go back to the days of protestors throwing molotov cocktails." Max replied, troubled, as way of agreement.

Alec was eyeing her strangely for a moment and she didn't know what to make of that look. Finally, he said, "You didn't go to Logan's last night."

"Running a city here, remember? With Peta out, I needed to stick around and give the sharks work to do." She crossed the concrete floor quickly, sinking into the green material next to him. He leaned backwards into the corner of the couch, his knees just turning towards her. She wondered at the bland expression, wondered how she knew he felt guilty about something.

"Max-" He started.

"Oh god," Max realized, correctly interpreting the strange air around him. "Carter sent you, didn't he? That's how you know about the disc."

His silence was an affirmation and Max could only ask in growing dread, "What did you say?"

"More than I should have." Alec admitted slowly. Watching the dismay on her face he attempted to defend himself, "I'm sorry, okay? He just made me mad. And I didn't spell it out for the guy. More hinted than anything else."

Alec let Logan get the better of him? That was so unlike him, Max was almost floored more by that than anything else. Really, in the months since they'd become friends, she wondered at the impeccable calm of his. Logan could even turn her waspish from time to time so she really didn't get how Alec handled it so easily.

"You said you were going to tell the guy anyway. Honesty and true love and blah, blah, blah." Alec was still talking in guilty tones and Max scowled at him.

True love? She had never said anything about true love. She'd said she needed to be honest with Logan, and she did. About everything. "Yeah. I was going to tell him Alec. I was trying to leave you out of it as much as possible." Because whatever problems with Logan she had, they didn't all amount to the mark on Alec's neck.

"Why?" He sat up straight. "If anything this is my fault, I'm the one that stupidly asked you to Claim me."

Oh, the Claim was stupid, was it? Of course it was, but she couldn't help that the anger was rising like a viper, its toxin sharp and biting. "Well, I was the one stupid enough to do it."

Alec didn't look angry, though. He looked surprised, like she was revealing things he never would have expected. "You really were going to break up with him." He said it as if it was just occurring to him or something.

"That's what I've been saying all week." Max snapped. "Where the hell have you been?"

Where had he been? Somewhere where he clearly hadn't been paying enough attention. Now, sitting next to her, Alec was slowly coming to the realization that he might just actually be the biggest fucking idiot on the planet. Yesterday, he really should have accepted her offer, should have just gone home with her and bolted the door shut behind him. Maybe barricaded it with her furniture for good measure. Anything to have her alone, to himself, with none of the usual intrusions to break things up just as they were getting heated and interesting. But he'd been too blind to recognize it. He'd seen the Max and Logan song and dance play out so many times, he thought she was just stuck on repeat, thought'd it only be a few weeks before she went running back to press play on her dysfunctional love song. Well, maybe she wasn't the one stuck in the past, maybe it was him.

Watching the surprise on his face, Max wondered if this was the first time all week that he was actually hearing what she was saying to him. Well, that didn't change what he'd said to her when he'd been cramming his foot into his mouth. Love is only forever in fairy tales. And Max wasn't about to forget or forgive that. She was a forever kind of girl and the memory of Marcy and Janna, the two women he'd been sleeping with not very long ago, was all she needed to remind herself that this whole bite mark thing wasn't real. Not really.

Watching her troubled expression right back, he could kind of guess at her thoughts. She was probably back in that alleyway, listening to him turn her down like a, you guessed it, big fucking idiot. He had a rare talent for saying just the right thing to spin her. He'd have to find a way to make it up to her, he realized. But first, he had to get the rest of it in the open. Letting the cat out of the bag to Logan, so to speak, about the Claim wasn't the only thing he was feeling guilty about.

It seemed like it came out of nowhere when Alec asked her, "Max, you tell Logan everything right?"

"Eventually." She frowned. "I guess." Her eyes darted away, and it halfway confirmed his suspicion.

He never should have let Logan get to him. It'd been bothering him ever since he'd hung up the phone and calmed down enough to realize. Logan's voice, when Alec had dropped the dig about Ben, had not just been hard. It'd been stoic, crisp. Alec knew how to read people and the statement had clearly shocked the man. And as Alec had replayed the last two conversations over and over again, he realized he may have made a grave mistake.

"Great." He said it aloofly. Maybe a little too aloofly, because she was suddenly wary, all of her attention focused on him. "So you told him about Ben, right?"

The unhappiness was suddenly and overwhelmingly apparent in every line of her body. From the morose expression and the firm set of her mouth to the tense lines of her shoulders and the rigid straightening of her spine. "What about Ben? He knows that... well, he knows that Ben killed people." Her eyes turned inward, lost in some memory of hers that he could not access. Maybe she was back in the woods that day, Ben's life in her hands. Or maybe she was even further back than that, sitting with his clone in the dormitories, the backdrop of Manticore's cold environs a sharp contrast to a boy's warm smile.

"Right, but you eventually told him about how Ben died, didn't you?"

Max snapped out of her reverie and looked at him, really looked at him. "Alec, I never told anyone about that."

That wasn't entirely true. She'd told Alec, bitter tears falling down her face. It had been clawing to get out of her, begging for release after she'd busted him out of that police station. She supposed she had started to tell him bits of the story after he'd asked, in part, as a way to explain to him why she was so hard on him, why she'd been so willing to abandon him to the police. Then, the whole of the story had poured out, like it'd been kept in for too long, like she was tired of holding it in. Like, even then, just at the start of their friendship, she had recognized that he was the one person who would understand, who would just listen. And he had listened, watching her in grim understanding. He'd been exactly what she hadn't known she needed. Someone who understood the horror of Manticore and didn't try to explain it away, but just kissed the top of her head and let her cry.

Besides Alec, she'd only ever told one other person: Father Destry, the man Ben had hunted, the man she'd saved. She'd told the priest in gasping, wracking sobs in the soft light of a confessional when her iron facade had broken down and she leaned into the counter and let all that terrible loss pour out just a few short days after Ben's death. Everything tied to her memory of Ben was like that; painful, almost unbearably so. She was guilty, guilty that she hadn't been able to save him, not only from the snipers hunting for them in the woods, but from himself. So no, if he was asking if she'd told Logan, the answer was no. It hurt too much. As broken as Ben had been, part of him was still cherished and she had yet to forgive herself for ending him. She didn't know if she would have been able to handle Logan's inevitable attempt to make it better; to tell her she'd done the right thing, that Ben had deserved it. Because she hadn't killed Ben because he'd deserved it, or because he was twisted. She'd done it because she'd loved him and he'd asked it of her, because he was her brother and he would rather die than become the true 'Nomlie in the basement. Ben hadn't deserved that, he hadn't deserved to be cracked by Manticore, and listening to platitudes about it wouldn't have helped anyone in that situation, least of all her.

"Did you say something to Logan about Ben?" She asked in soft alarm. Why would they have even been talking about her brother in the first place?

"When we were talking last night, he said something that made me think he knew." Alec admitted. "Max, I'm sorry, if I'd known you hadn't told him, I wouldn't have said anything."

Like he'd told Logan, they were all broken in their own way. Who they chose to share that brokenness with was their own business. If he had let something slip that Max had been keeping to herself, than he needed to own up to it and apologize regardless of what the fall out might be.

"You're not as angry as I'd thought you'd be." He said, when she didn't say anything, just continued to stare at him in the same horrified dismay.

"I just... I just can't believe you told him." Max was surprised to find that she wasn't upset that Logan knew. She was upset that Alec had told him, that he'd broken that moment they'd shared so many months ago and let someone else in on her drama. Alec seemed to be making missteps all over the place. Was it the Claim, messing him up like this? A year ago she would have called him a screw up and thrown him out of her office in righteous indignation. Now, she didn't know what to think. Didn't even rightly know how upset she should be.

"Max, you're weirding me out. I kind of expected you to be really pissed about this."

Max didn't know what to feel. This was just another in a long list of issues she was going to have to deal with with Logan when she finally got a chance to talk to him. What was one more thing piled onto the mountain of other problems? The same mounting weariness that she'd been feeling these last few days when she considered their doomed relationship sat heavy upon her. That didn't mean she was going to let Alec off easy. "Don't get me wrong jackass, you're in so much trouble right now it's not even funny."

He forgave her the name calling because he'd fucked up, and he knew it.

"I am really sorry." He said solemnly.

"And that's the only reason I'm not kicking your ass right now, believe me." She replied, distracted and moody.

"Any way I can make it up to you?" He asked.

"You can make this Councilman Chang thing disappear." She sighed, unwilling to talk about it anymore, leaning back into the couch. "With everything else going on, he's the last thing I need."

"We need to get that disc back from Logan." Alec pointed out, glad for the change of subject. "Chang's a little older than us, right? Logan's official bio says the guy is thirty, but he probably aged himself up in his documents in order to meet the minimum age requirement for Seattle's council. If he is transgenic, he's most likely an X-4. Maybe even a 3, not that there are many of them around. We need to run all his data by some of the other 4's and see if anyone recognizes his barcode in any of those pictures."

After a moment, he added. "You should probably be the one to get it back from Logan."

What was with that expression on his face, Max wondered, all dark and cagey. God, what had happened between the two men last night? They'd talked about Ben, Chang, the Claim; what the hell else had come up in conversation? She opened her mouth to ask him but thought better of it. She almost didn't want to know. Alec was dealing with just as much weird animal instinct as she was and she was worried that any more revelations would crack her.

They lapsed into moody silence, neither of them giving Jimmy Chang as much thought as he probably deserved. More, they were both considering the end of the week, how things had changed in these few short days, and what life would be like on the other side of the Claim.

There was also of course, the really real observation that they were alone in her office, sitting next to each other, knees practically touching. Even as black as her mood was becoming, Max was keenly aware of the warmth of his body, so close to hers. The cat was hissing in her ear, telling her how easy it would be to rest her hand on his chest, to push him back into the cushions and straddle his lap. She ignored the cat because as difficult as it had been, she had offered herself up to him once just as a girl, just as herself. She wasn't going to do it again.

Alec's own moody thoughts had taken a similar turn as silence had lapsed between them. He should be thinking about Chang. Or Peta. Or Familiars. Or a number of other important issues. That he was mentally wincing that they couldn't do anything in her office because of the likely interruptions from the sheer amount of people in and out of Command, that this craving for her heat was just a fucked up animal dream, that he was an idiot who had turned her down; it was all just so ridiculous. They stewed in the tension for a few long, silent minutes, Alec wondering heavily if he should just give in, pull her in, Max wondering if she should just give in, push him down, when someone knocked very carefully at the door.

Knocking? That was a nice change.

"Pine-Sol, you two still in there?" Mole's gruff voice was muffled through the door. Max and Alec exchanged a glance, Max's face coloring slightly as Mole added, "I hope you still have your pants on, because Logan just walked in the building."

"I'm going to kill him." Max said calmly into the silence as the transhuman's heavy footsteps faded down the hallway.

"Who, Mole? At least he knocked. I was beginning to think nobody in this place had any manners." Alec quipped. Her eyes bore into his and his mouth quirked slightly: Joking. Just Joking.

But Max's face remained solemn as she looked away because she hadn't been talking about Mole. How many times did she have to tell Logan to stop rushing into Terminal City every time something got stuck in his craw? She'd put those rules in place to shield him from the very real threat of the toxic chemicals still seeped in the sewer below this place, in the burnt out factory only a few streets over. Why was it so hard for him to realize that she was trying to protect him? It didn't occur to Max, but the answer was obvious enough to outsiders: Logan was a grown ass man and he didn't want her protection. He just wanted her, even with all of the dangers that she posed to him, as a virus-laden girlfriend, as a leader in a toxic city, as a woman that'd been made in a lab, as a girl that had refused to help him so many years ago and had been instrumental in his paralysis. And sadly, it was a mixture of all of those things that made her want to protect him more. Protection and responsibility are not the same things as love, though, and one day she would have to remember that Logan was an adult and could take care of himself.

"You want to break up with him, I can make it happen really fast." Alec offered. "You know, as your friend or whatever. Could take one for the team and make out with you for like the two seconds it's going to take Logan to walk down the hallway."

"You're not funny." Max told him blandly, standing and walking back to her desk, willing the heavy atmosphere away. She wished he'd stop pretending like things were normal, like he could get away with saying stuff like that. Nothing was normal anymore and maybe even revoking the Claim wouldn't fix that.

"You helped me out in my time of need," He shrugged. "It's the least I could do."

Like she needed another reminder of Marcy and Janna. Max didn't stop at her desk, continuing past it to the wall where she pushed up the one rickety window and stuck one leg over the windowsill.

"Uh, Max, what the hell are you doing?"

"I've got stuff to finish with the night shift. Need to check on the patrols and the supplies." Max explained, glancing at him over her shoulder. "And I have to talk to Peta about something. I can't really wrap my hands around this issue with Chang until night time is over and Carter comes in. The thing with Logan, I'm sorry, but you've got to take care of it until I'm finished with my rounds. I shouldn't have spent this much time here with you as it is."

Someone knocked at the door, undoubtedly Logan, and Max offered him one small, apologetic smile before lowering herself out the window, into darkness. She'd timed it perfectly, slipping into the night just as Logan was entering.

Logan glanced around, sure that he'd just heard Max's voice. "Alec?" He asked, his voice hard as his gaze scanned the emptiness of the room but only found Alec, sitting in the couch by the door, his face still a little shocked.

"Logan." Alec nodded, calming his expression (he couldn't believe she had seriously just lowered herself out of a window to get away from the man, why had he never considered that?) before slowly coming to his feet, pausing only slightly to pick up a cold cup of coffee from the ground.

"I thought I heard Max."

Alec nodded pointedly at the one open window behind Max's large desk. Logan looked over at it in surprise.

"You're kidding."

Alec shrugged. "I wish I was." He took a sip of room temp liquid. Funny, but even cold it tasted better than if he'd had to make it himself. He peered at Logan with hard green eyes. "Alright, Cale, let's go look at this disc of yours."

She didn't feel as bad about abandoning to Alec to Logan as she should have. Things were weird and messy right now between the two men, but he still owed her, and whatever weirdness was going on between Alec and Logan couldn't compare to the weirdness that was Max and Logan right now. Or Max and Alec either, for that matter. To be honest, she was still reeling that he'd told Logan about both Ben and the bite. Why the hell had they been talking about her brother, anyway? Why had the Claim even come up? In her mind's eye, Alec and Logan were sitting at the dinner table, blithely discussing all the crushing aspects of her life over the romantic dinner that Logan had undoubtably made for her; their topics ranging from her failing romance, to the Claim, all the way to her brother, all backlit by candles and pasta and seriously creepy romantic music. She knew that the disturbing mental image was probably pretty far from reality, but that didn't stop the feelings of betrayal that were welling.

She should have kicked his ass all the way into Sunday. Instead she'd changed the subject and gotten the hell out of there the first chance she got. Because she didn't know what to make of his admission. She and Alec were supposed to be able to talk about anything. Everything. And all in confidence. That he had let any of that slip, even accidentally, what was she supposed to feel about that? Had she been wrong to trust him with so much of her life?

Maybe, a hissing part of her mind argued, maybe he'd just told Logan all the things she was too much of a coward to tell him herself. Maybe that's why it'd been so easy to blow Logan off and shimmy out the window: Easier to climb down the face of a building than face all the recriminations in the eyes of the man she needed to break up with. She wished the whole Alpha thing made it easier to deal with nebulous emotions like guilt and responsibility, but no, even if she could get people to back down from her stare she was still just as much a coward when it came to relationships as ever.

Hey, she wasn't a coward, Max told herself firmly. She just needed the right time.

The right time, sure. With her, the right time had a habit of never showing up.

If she were going to be honest though, she hadn't ducked out of that window just to get away from Logan. She needed to get away from Alec, too. Needed to digest everything that had happened. Plus, she actually really did need to get back to work. She had more responsibility on her plate than just dealing with cracked out relationships. She hunted down Peta's second, the X series that was traipsing across rooftops with radio in hand and nodded at him as she climbed up a fire escape. He called to her in greeting, letting her know that very little had changed in the soft darkness of morning as she made her way across the rooftop.

"What'd Jeri want?" He asked as she fell in next to him and they made their way to the next checkpoint. "Anything important?"

There were so many transgenics in T.C. now, Max didn't know nearly enough of them as well as she should have. She had seen this guy around before once or twice, usually with Peta, drawing up plans for the night shift, but she didn't know much about him beyond his name; Kris. So she wasn't about to delve into the twisted details of her life with him. He was probably just worried that it'd been about his night shift commander.

"Everything's fine with Peta," Max assured him. "Jeri just had something personal she needed to go over with me."

He sighed in something that was like relief and Max let her eyes glance across him. He was handsome enough, in the way of transgenics, with blonde hair and blue eyes and chiseled features to match. Handsome enough, but not her type, which lately was not so much of the blonde man variety. To be honest, Max was surprised that Kris, as Peta's back-up, was a guy. Peta was usually such a horn dog, Max was surprised she hadn't assigned a girl to wander around with her at night. Still, Max wondered a bit at his relaxation, at his slight guilty expression. "Were you there when Jay and Peta got into it?"

"No," He said into darkness, glancing at her. Somewhere in the distance, a mongrel was barking. "But I should have been. I warned her that taking Jay in was a bad idea, but she just wouldn't listen." He sighed.

So that was it. It was strange realizing that Max wasn't the only one who felt a little bit responsible for what had gone down between Peta and her ex's boyfriend.

After a moment, he added. "I can't believe I left her alone with him. I knew she was spun about Clara, but I just hoped for the best and shut my eyes to what was going on, to how messed up she really was."

Kris wasn't the only one feeling bad about that, either. In another part of her mind though, Max was attempting to connect the parallels. If Carter had laid it out correctly... if Peta was similar to Alec, it Marcy equated to Sara, as the one that actually wanted the girl, even if Peta wasn't as much into her as she rightly should have been, and if Max equalled Clara, the one that Peta actually wanted but didn't know how to fight for beyond taking swipes at her ex's boyfriend... good lord, did that make Logan Jay in this fractured fairy tale? Had she made a huge mistake by leaving them alone? Surely Alec would never start anything with Logan.

Alec wouldn't, but maybe his cat would, she realized in alarm. Was that why Alec kept letting out all these gory details to Logan? As a way to get him to back off? Would this all end in some messed up fist fight, as it had with Peta and Jay?

"What's with your face?" Kris asked.

"I just realized that I may have made a huge mistake." She responded, chagrined. "Can you call back to Command and make sure Alec and Logan are still there?" She couldn't have him make sure over the radio that the two weren't arguing so instead she added, "Ask if they found anything important on that CD."

He shrugged, not really knowing what the hell she was talking about, but he turned from her and made the call just the same.

After a moment, a voice that she didn't recognize crackled back over the radio. "Alec and Logan? Yeah, they're here. They're over talking to Dix and Mole at one of the computers. You want me to get one of them on?"

Kris turned to look at Max. She shook her head. As the blonde relayed the sentiment to Command, Max forced herself to relax. She supposed it was stupid to think of Alec and Logan getting into it. Logan wasn't a transgenic, didn't have a half-crazy cat yowling for dominance in the back of his mind. Wouldn't feel the need to try and assert dominance over the younger man. Right?

Only, Logan had been trying to assert dominance over Alec, almost from the beginning. Whether it be from playing a game of pool, to helping her find her way through a sewer, or even from making a snide remark about saving Alec from a Familiar. It seemed like Logan was always doing his best to remind her that he was better than the younger man. She knew some of that stemmed from the lie she had told him so long along, the lie that she had since come correct about, but maybe there was more to it. Had he always been threatened by Alec, and if so, why hadn't she ever noticed it before? Had she just been so blind to Alec herself that anyone, Logan included, thinking that anything even remotely romantic could ever happen between them was too implausible to even consider?

And with that realization, Max wondered how she was going to be honest with Logan now. If she told Logan before she broke the Claim with Alec, he'd probably try to confront the younger man. If she broke the Claim with Alec before she told Logan, Alec's cat would think it was because she was going back to the older man and the instinct to confront Logan would tear at him, whether or not that instinct was actually based in reality.

"You're making that face again." Kris said. "That, 'oh shit, my life might be over,' face."

"I think I maybe need to go talk to Peta, check up on her." Max covered, her face settling back into neutrality. "You think you'll need anymore help here tonight?"

"Nah," He shrugged. "Slow night. And the shift is almost over. Dawn will be coming soon, I can feel it in the air. Don't worry, I'll call back to Command and let 'em know where you're going."

Max nodded and fell back, letting him move on without her. Luckily, the building they were currently on top of was only a few blocks away from the entrance to the underground garage where she kept her bike. Better yet, when she gunned her Ninja and slipped out of one of the secret entrances that another transgenic opened up for her, the other side of the fence was completely still, the outside world quiet in the pre-dawn hours.

She didn't go straight to the hospital. She meandered her way through the city a bit, even heading to the outskirts where there was enough open road to pick up some speed, hoping the ride might free her mind of the turmoil of the week. The wind rushing past her face didn't really help anything. She was just as torn up as ever. A dark car pulled up behind her, going almost as fast as she was and Max sighed, switching lanes to let it pass. It was awful early for someone else to also be takin' a joy ride.

Only the car didn't pass, switching lanes to remain behind her. Max glanced backwards and the car flipped on its brights, making her squint, blinding her to the darkened silhouette of the driver within. She had only a moment to register that this was bad, very bad, before the motor of the black BMW revved as the driver of the car gunned it, crashing into her back tire and sending her bike skidding out from under her. Her body crashed into pavement, rolling to a stop a few feet away, every bone screaming in protest and agony.

Disoriented, pained, Max lifted her head to blearily watch the BMW roll to a stop, to watch its back door open and polished black shoes step over some of the scattered remains of her bike's left mirror. Cold fear gripped at her as those black shoes kept coming closer, but she couldn't keep her eyes open for all the world, couldn't keep her gaze focused, and her head collapsed back down to the pavement as unconsciousness claimed her.