Fiction Anything To Zipper- Name

Series Title: Anything To Zipper

Chapter Title: Name

Author: Restive Nature

Disclaimer: I do not own Dark Angel. This show belongs to Fox and Cameron/ Eglee. No infringement is intended and this fiction is for reading pleasure only.

Rating: PG-13

Genre: Dark Angel

Type: friendship, minor adventure

Pairing: Max/ Alec

Summary: Someone always notices everything. How true, how apt, how weird that it's NOT Alec.

Spoilers/ Time line: Mid season two.

Feedback: Always welcome.

Distribution: Ask first, please.

A/N: I always wondered where and why the transgenic kids came up with the names that they did. After all, Krit? Jondy? Tinga? Not all that usual. So I had a little fun with this thought.

Name

“So where're we going?” Alec asked as he hopped on behind Max, as she braced her feet to keep her Ninja 650 steady. She whirled slightly, as much as she was able, startled by his sudden appearance. Especially out here in middle of nowhere Oregon.

“Alec! What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded, her tones acidic.

“Mmm, thought you were actin' strange,” he mused, “so I figured I'd tag along. Had to jack a car. Ran out of gas just up the road. Lucky for me you made a pit stop, huh?”

“Well you can just buy a can of gas, run back up the road and toddle home, all right?” her words were fairly benign, her tone anything but.

“Yeah Max,” he drawled. “That'll work so well, because you're certainly not planning another seat of your pants mission for a certain Eyes Only now, are you?”

“What makes you say that?” she hedged.

“Oh jeez, you must think I'm not only blind, but deaf and dumb as well,” Alec scoffed, his arms crossed loosely about his chest as he leaned back slightly.

“I ain't arguing the last one,” she chuckled smugly. And then straightened. “And I don't have time for this. Get the hell off my bike.”

“Nuh uh,” Alec sighed. “Max, whatever the hell it is that Logan's got you doing, you know it's better to have back up. I may not be your favorite person in the world, but hey...”

“It's not... Logan didn't... this isn't about,” she began and Alec rolled his eyes, shaking his head, even knowing that she couldn't' see it.

“Nice denial there Max,” he chided. He braced himself for her ire as he recounted, “there we were, takin' a break from the grind, looking over ads so I could get my own ride and the next thing I know, you're making a beeline for the phone. To talk to who? Oh right, Logan! You stand guard over the phone, biting the hand of anyone and everyone that gets near it. And the moment ol' lover boy calls you back, you're outta Seattle like a bat out of hell. Now that's not suspicious at all, is it?”

“Okay, fine, you caught me,” Max sighed, twisting her head to look at him. “I'm on a job. But it's a one woman gig. Get the hell off.”

“No way,” he enunciated carefully. “Max, I know the crap Logan asks of you. I'm not letting you walk into something alone.”

“Nice sentiment Alec,” she scoffed. “What about all those times I asked for your help and you were full of excuses why your scams and girls were more important.”

“Uh, I don't recall any asking,” he snarked sarcastically. “There was 'Alec you have to come with me now'”, he raised his voice to an unflattering falsetto that had her elbowing him. “And the 'gimme your phone, now' and my favorite, 'let's go pretty boy, while I guilt you excessively for things you were ordered to do by the people that would've killed you if you didn't'.”

“Whatever Alec,” she groaned. “Next time I'll ask. Happy? Good, now scram.”

“Okay, what about this is hard for you to understand,” Alec demanded. “I'm coming with you, even if I have to incapacitate the woman over there and steal her car to chase you down.”

Max sighed again and he could feel the tension radiating off her. From the moment that she had risen from her, at the time relaxed posture back at Jam Pony, he'd been worried. Something had happened in those brief seconds between his showing her that ad for a sweet little Bandit and her heading to the telephone. He had racked his brain to figure it out. When he heard her on the phone with Logan, he'd thought he'd figured it out. But she had never shown the worry over an Eyes Only mission like she was then, unless it had something to do with the transgenics or transhumans. And since Alec was one of them, she usually had no problem roping him into helping. So what was different about the situation here?

And then it came to him. He had seen this before.

“It's about them, isn't it?” he demanded suddenly. “One of your... siblings,” the word was distasteful to him, since thinking of your unit mates in that way was unfamiliar and according to Manticore, which did still hold some sway over his mind, as much as he hated to admit it, unnatural. He knew he was on the right track when she sagged.

“Fine, yeah okay,” she admitted. “Now get off my bike and let me take care of it.”

“Max,” he warned out in a rumble. “Hey,” he gentled his tone. “I'm not that big of a jerk that I'm gonna let you run off into who knows what just because you're goin' after one of them. And the longer it takes for you to tell me, the longer it takes to get there to help whoever it is.”

It took several minutes before she finally gave in. But in that time, she had started up the engine of the Ninja, which Alec figured meant that she'd take him up on his offer. “Remember that ad, above the one you were looking at?” she yelled to be heard as soon as they were on the highway again.

Alec thought a moment, his photographic memory kicking in and supplying the wording of the strange ad. Someone always notices everything it had read. Like talking philosophy? It was followed by a telephone number, but Alec already knew that the number didn't correspond to any of the numbers of the '09 escapees at all.

“Yeah, what about it?” he yelled back, content at the moment as long as she gave him the information he needed for the mission.

“It was Zane,” she informed him. “That's his last ditch call sign. He's in trouble.”

Alec could see why she called it a last ditch. Who had time when they were bugging out to place an ad in newspapers and he said so. Max was nodding her head though.

“We've all got automated orders in with certain papers,” she explained. “Call the line, activate the ad.”

“And what's the phone number for?” he asked. That would be a simple way of leading Manticore right to a person.

“Simple,” she called back. “The location of the number tells me to go equidistant from central longitude in the opposite direction from the original line.”

“And what if he was south?” he picked the direction out of his head, since she had said longitude.

“Then it would have been a Canadian number,” she called back, sounding exasperated and Alec grimaced. She was right, that was simple.

“So Zane is gonna be in some bum fuck Nowhere town?” he demanded. But she was already shaking her head.

“Probably not,” she called back. “But he'll have left clues where he was heading. It's just a question of catching up now.”

“So is that what Logan was doing?” he wondered. “Tracking down the number?” She nodded. Not bothering yelling back in the positive. And then, other things were making themselves heard in his brain. “So, when the hell did you guys come up with this system?”

“Before we left,” Max called back. “It was one of the things we came up with for when we achieved mission status, if Manticore was compromised and we were separated.” He nodded, musing on that and then he grinned.

“So, you change one letter of your name for these ads? And if that was Zane's distress call, what was yours?”

There was a pause and he felt her sigh before she answered. “Must allow cats. SWF, looking for a tolerant room mate.”

“Yeah, that's pretty innocuous. I've seen lots of those ads,” he decided, having seen a number like them and relieved that he had been able to take over Brain's pad after the X5 had died. Saved him the hassle of roommates or motels. “So, you guys actually had a reason behind your names?”

She nodded. “Sorta. Zack pointed out that everyone in the outside world had names and it would be really weird for us not to be acquainted with that.”

“Again, makes sense,” Alec agreed. “At that age, we were adaptable, but there was still that...”

“Unfamiliarity?” Max noted. “Like with aliases.”

“Exactly,” Alec nodded, even though she couldn't see him. Manticore had tried to avoid giving them individuality partly so that they could better assume other's identities or a phony one whenever the need had risen. But that wasn't the case. Each transgenic, whether named or designated by number had developed a sense of him or herself. In truth, their numbers were their designations, just as names that parents gave their children were. Just out of Manticore, Alec had often looked on that very name Max had given him as a nickname, or pet name, not his true self. But as he'd been able to shed much of his past, he'd shed that feeling as well, morphing himself actually into Alec McDowell. Even as he was thinking of this, he grinned.

“So, question?” he spoke loudly, though still in her ear. He felt more than heard her annoyed sigh. “What does my name stand for? With your guys' little code?”

“It doesn't mean anything,” she snapped back. He lifted an eyebrow, knowing, sensing that she wasn't telling him the truth. Not that she was out right lying, but something didn't feel right. “Not like my unit. You weren't one of them, so...”

“No need to name me in that manner,” he nodded minutely, feeling that this was more to the truth. “So Alec really was just...?”

“Because you're a smart ass through and through,” Max grunted back and Alec had to chuckle. She wasn't wrong, but...

“Takes one to know one Maxie.”

“Don't call me that,” she snapped once more, fidgeting slightly in her seat. Alec had no clue what was bothering her now, aside from the usual, but he figured he would get it out of her eventually. For the moment, he contented himself as he always did with the feel of her fine body between his legs. Maybe not the way he'd like and maybe with her in the driver's seat she maintained her little illusion that she was in charge, but Alec liked it this way. While she kept herself busy with her bike and her thoughts of her brother Zane, he'd keep himself busy thinking of her.

But Max was thinking of anything but Zane at the moment. Alec's off the cuff question, that she had sorta been expecting since the moment she first explained what one aspect of their names meant, had taken her back to that moment, the first that they had met in the Seattle base of Manticore. She had been telling the truth about her other choice of his name being Dick. She just hoped he wouldn't recall that any time soon.

She had been laying in her cell, waiting for the guards to do their nightly check so that she could get back to work on her escape route into the basement and then beyond. But then a body had appeared outside her door. The portal had slipped open and that body stepped in and when she caught the whiff of his scent, that basic male musk that they carried, it had appealed. She could see under the standard Manticore issue fatigues, the outline of musculature that, while lean was also the kind that bespoke of a hidden strength. Big without being grotesquely so.

And while Max would deny in many ways, with words, thought and deed, a depth of femininity in herself, it was still there. And she had been affected by the male presence in her room, as that purely feminine part of herself had whispered...dear God, cute...

And then he had raised his head and she had seen his face.

Killer?

AtZ- Open