DISCLAIMER: All DARK ANGEL characters belong to James Cameron and Charles Eglee (Cameron Eglee Productions) and DARK ANGEL itself belongs to FOX.
ARCHIVE: No
The following scene is based on characters
created for the television series DARK ANGEL,
and is set in the time frame following the Max Allan Collins novel AFTER THE DARK. -- author's note
Flaws
By Valjean
Vignette: A short, usually descriptive literary sketch; A short scene or incident, as from a movie.
*************************************
It always began the same way ... an odd muffled ringing in his ears ... a feeling as if he wasn't quite in reality any more ... the faint discomfort of a headache that lurked behind his eyes but didn't hurt yet ...
Sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night -- the aura invading a dream and turning it into nightmare, his heart racing like a frightened rabbit's -- and he'd reach for his pills. Other times it came at a more inconvenient moment ... in the middle of a run when he'd worked at Jam Pony ... when he'd been about to kiss a buxom blonde good night (or good morning) after a date ... or -- like now -- right when Max was showing him the blueprints of a street gang's den she wanted to invade, the schematic covering the oak table in Terminal City's control room and her expecting him to be giving it his undivided attention.
It was a dread, yet familiar sensation -- out of his control -- the precursor to something awful and humiliating first experienced as a child. His "condition" had supposedly been fixed by his Manticore handlers. After all, X5s were physically perfect ... the epitome of the world's finest geneticists' research and experimentation. His body wasn't allowed any flaws.
But X5-494 had them anyway ... flaws. Manticore's "fix" had been temporary. And now that he was out in the world with no access to the meds they'd fed him all his life, he had to deal with it, just like all his other X5 brothers and sisters.
Seizures. A form of epilepsy caused by a lack of serotonin in their human/feline hybrid brains ... a boo-boo that quality control hadn't caught when their X5 DNA matrix had been constructed in those test tubes ... something unforeseen and overlooked by men like Lydecker until their precious thoroughbred children began to writhe and convulse on the floor at their feet, their eyes rolling back in their heads and their limbs spasming. Sometimes they even frothed at the mouth or bit their tongues ... in the worst cases a few lost bladder and bowel control ... Eventually, left untreated, there was coma followed by death.
The first X5 youngsters to present symptoms had been euthanized -- sacrificed to science -- their bodies autopsied. Those who'd succumbed a bit later -- like himself -- had been medicated in hopes they'd outgrow the malady.
They hadn't. None of them had.
He was -- in that respect -- just like Max: a botched job.
In the outside world of the Ordinaries, without Manticore's doctors and magic medicines, tryptophan was now their salvation -- or the nearest thing to it -- the amino acid an X5 never left home without. Alec fingered the bottle in his jacket pocket, then glanced at the door, wondering if he could get away from Max and her grandiose scheme to steal a big cache of weapons from the Black Russians long enough to down a dose. And then he remembered -- he was running low. He'd stopped off at the infirmary yesterday to get more from Luke, but had been told the cupboard was temporarily bare. The little transhuman stood guard over TC's supply of the meds like a dragon, making certain no one hogged the precious tablets, but that also hopefully no X5 went without. However, their supply of tryptophan was precarious, and sometimes -- even with the best of rationing -- they ran out.
Like now. He'd figured he would be all right ... hoped he wouldn't need it. Sometimes he could go weeks without a real problem. Sometimes ...
Alec knew there were two tablets in the bottle in his pocket. He'd need at least six ... preferably eight ... to stop the seizures he could feel building in his brain. If he didn't get the meds, he'd be sick as a dog within a couple of hours, and by tonight he'd be completely helpless ... useless ... curled up in a corner somewhere with a vicious migraine, bathed in cold sweat, and racked by painful muscle spasms.
"Max," he said abruptly, interrupting her lecture about the Black Russians' sentry shifts.
She glared at him. "What?" she snapped. "You don't like the plan?"
"The plan's fine," Alec said. He glanced around the control room ... at Dix and Luke on the catwalk and the X6s manning the other posts. Then he looked toward the door.
"You got an appointment or something?" she said nastily. "Maybe you're late for a date?"
He found himself clutching the edge of the table, knuckles whitening as the room ... Max's voice ... began to do that weird receding thing. Swallowing hard, he saw her looking at his hand. He didn't want to make a big deal out of this but--
"You don't look so good," she said, her voice as soft and caring now as it had been sarcastic a moment before. Her eyes collided with his, and he knew she knew ... that she'd seen his dilated pupils. Her dark haired head tilted toward the door. "Come on."
Grateful, Alec let out a shuddering breath and touched the tip of his tongue to dry lips. Once outside in the vast garage space, he took the bottle out of his inner coat pocket and shook it, flashing Max a weak but rueful smile, knowing she'd guessed what was wrong.
"How'd you get so low?" she asked, pulling a similar plastic container from her vest.
"Loaned Gem a couple last week," Alec confessed, "and Hampton scored six off of me Sunday."
"Idiot." But there was no rancor in her tone. "So now you're running short, and we can't get re-supplied until Friday when our guy in Little Koreatown receives his shipment." She shook half a dozen white tablets into the palm of her hand.
"I only need four," Alec said.
"Take them all." Max said firmly. "You look like you're gonna cork, and I need you tonight, Alec. You're going through a bad spell, and I'm okay for now. But that's the way it happens, doesn't it?," she added with a small smile, letting him know that it wasn't his fault ... that she wasn't blaming him for anything, least of all for his willingness to help out his brothers and sisters even though it meant he'd run low on his own meds.
"My head's killing me," Alec admitted, downing all eight pills dry with a now trembling hand, then belatedly looking around for some water.
"Go home," Max ordered. "Sleep. I'll stop by and wake you up in time for dinner, then we'll see about this heist."
The X5 nodded. "Thanks, Max," he said quietly.
Flaws ...
THE END
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