Missing Moments -- Together: Rena and Sasha

Disclaimer:  The TV show Dark Angel, all of the characters that appeared on it (Max, Zack, Logan, etc.), and everything else that has to do with the show belong to their respective owners, not to me.  No money is being made off of this fic.  I only own the original characters (Becky/X6-405, etc.).

Notes:  Takes place almost immediately after the previous "Missing Moments" vignette.

Sasha shoved a shirt into a dresser drawer and then closed the drawer shut.  “That’s the last one.”  She gave a sigh of relief before she sat down on the bed that has in the room.  “Thanks again for letting me crash here until I get my girls back.” 

“No problem,” Alec said.  “You’d do the same for me.”  The two of them turned their heads when they heard a knock at the front door.  “Weird.”  He and Sasha got up and walked into the living room and Alec opened the door to see Rena standing on the other side.  “Hey.  What are you doing here?” 

Rena shrugged as she walked inside.  “I just wanted to stop in and make sure that Sasha was getting settled in all right.” 

“I see,” Alec said, raising an eyebrow.  He grabbed his keys from a nearby table and walked outside the apartment.  “I’ll be back in awhile.”  He shut the door behind him.  As he walked down the hall, both twins heard him mumble “Yep, they’re identical.”

“Now I have one more thing to add to the list of reasons that I wish that Ben were alive,” Rena said dryly.

“I bet,” Sasha said.  They stood there uncomfortably for several moments.  “So…how have you been doing these days?”

“I got spotted back in Montana by sheer fucking luck,” Rena replied.  “Gust of wind blew my hair back and revealed my barcode—when I’d gone into town to get the thing removed, no less—and some yahoos spotted it and chased me in their cars with a shotgun.  I pretty much jumped off my bike and let it go off a 200 foot cliff and hid in a snowbank until they left and then I made a clean getaway from there.  I’m still alive, so I don’t really have any reason to complain.”

“Good,” Sasha said.  There was another difficult silence between them.

Rena looked at her long-lost sister.  “Look, Sasha…I just want you to know how sorry I am for inadvertently putting you through all of that crap that you went through back at Manticore.  I swear that I didn’t know that they were going to do that to you.  Hell, I didn’t even knew you existed until I was fifteen.”

“Let me guess,” Sasha said.  “You somehow found out how Corporal Peck was able to recognize you eventually when he spotted you in your foster mom’s home.”  Rena looked mildly surprised and Sasha just shrugged.  “Word would get around my old home quicker than an eight on the assault course, not to mention how the good Corporal would give me dirty looks for years after it had happened until he’d gotten transferred to Wyoming back in ’18.”  She laughed a little.  “Apparently, he’d just gotten promoted to Sergeant but they’d retracted it because he was such a slow ass in recognizing you.”

Rena snickered.  “What a moron.”

“Tell me about it,” Sasha agreed.  They both giggled for a few moments before they grew quiet again and sat down on Alec’s couch.  “Man, this just feels really weird.  Twenty-four hours ago, if someone had asked me what would I do if I’d ever have a face-to-face conversation with you, I would have said that we would have gotten no more than ten words into it before I would have tried to throw a punch.”

“That could have happened if Max and Alec weren’t there when I showed up at Jeff’s place,” Rena said.

“True enough,” Sasha said.  “I guess deep down where it really counted, I never truly hated you.  It was so weird for me, you know?  I swear there were times where I actually felt so close to you, like I know that you would have reacted the same way or felt exactly the way that I did about certain situations.”  She snorted.  “Particularly the really bad ones.”

“Like what?” Rena asked hesitantly.

“The breeding program that I and your sister Brin participated in this past spring?  It wasn’t the first one that Manticore ever made us participate in,” Sasha said.  “When I was about fifteen—it was a great year for us, wasn’t it?—the higher-ups that were in charge of Manticore decided to have us copulate every night with an ordinary soldier.”  She made a disgusted face.  “I got the oh-so-good fortune to be paired up with a masochist.  I guess it was kinda all right in a way because I could take my frustrations out on him and he wouldn’t report my ass.  It lasted for a year and lucky for me, I didn’t get pregnant.  Not many of us did, it’s fairly tough for an ordinary to knock us up.  Your sisters Jace and Tinga got lucky.”

“At fifteen?” Rena echoed, horrified.  “Jesus.”

“It could have been worse, I guess,” Sasha said.  “But I came though it on the other side unscathed and I’m completely grateful for that.”  She smiled a little.  “That was definitely a time when I thought about you and how much I wanted to make my own break.  I would catch myself, of course.  I would refer to it as ‘going into ‘09er territory.’  God only knew if my unit mates other than Alec and 511 had a clue as to what was going on inside of my head.  They sure loved to make my life miserable.”

“How so?” Rena asked.  “Were they stupid or just plain old assholes.”

“Both and more in my opinion,” Sasha said.  “I remember when Alec and I got out of Psy Ops the September after you bailed from Wyoming, not one of them outside of 511 did so much as stand up for me.  Some of them only failed to make eye contact for at least a few months, but a few of them were just flat out nasty to us and didn’t miss an opportunity to put us down for what you and Ben did if their lives depended on it.  I mean, those guys hadn’t been the most pleasant in the world before you guys escaped, and that is putting it a little mildly, but after you guys left, it seemed like everybody became at least slightly more unhinged than normal.”  Sasha shrugged.  “Including myself.  I’m not about to lie.  Most of the other X5s were kind of either-or in the beginning after Alec and I were sprung loose from Psy Ops, you know what I mean?  And then most of them got over it after awhile.  There were a few stubborn pricks outside of dear old Unit 3, but you gotta figure on that.  But the looks on their faces as we would pass by those first few months…it really got to me at first until I made myself ignore them and tune them out and then I was fine and then they were okay, too.”  She sighed.  “Do you know just how lucky you are to have grown up with such a close family?  That’s so rare in Manticore.  There are a few units that are as close as you guys were, Jeff’s family is one and from what I saw the last few months Manticore was standing so was Becky’s and one or two others that I know of, but for the most part the units are friendly to each other at least some of the time at best, mainly indifferent towards each other, and some of them are getting towards what my unit was.  For the first fourteen years of my life, 511 and Alec were the only friends that I had.  Then I formally met 849 and 228, they were in Unit 4, and the three of us became friends with those two and it wasn’t so bad then, but I still had moments where I wished for the kind of closeness that your unit had.”

“Yeah,” Rena said.  “Sasha, I meant what I said back at the safehouse.  If we had known about you and Alec way back when we decided to give Manticore the slip, we would have found a way to get the two of you along with us.  There wouldn’t have been any doubt about it.”

“I know,” Sasha said.  “It does mean a lot to me.”  They briefly smiled at each other.  “So, what have you been doing while I was back at Manticore here in Seattle?”

“I was in Virginia with Zane almost immediately after the escape,” Rena recalled.  She saw Sasha’s slightly confused look and clarified it for her.  “205.  Anyway, we were there for awhile until we moved up to New Jersey and we had barely been there when Zack found us and split us.”  She winced.  “Then I was a bit of—okay, a huge pain in Zack’s ass.  I just got into trouble a lot over the next few months before he moved me to Texas and set me up with a story to get into their foster care system clean.”  She continued to tell Sasha what had happened.  “…I stayed somewhere in the Midwest ever since, at least until Zack moved me to Montana.  I continued the underground motorcycle racing thing pretty much wherever I went.  Made plenty of cash from that and the occasional heist.  Gotta keep at least some of what skills I do have sharp.”  She winced.  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like that much of a bitch.  I guess I am still a little bit ticked off from earlier.”

“I don’t blame you,” Sasha said.  “I’d be annoyed at me, too.  Let’s be honest here.  It’ll probably take me at least a little while before I’m completely over the whole ‘09er thing.  More than eleven years of the same crap being rammed down your throat doesn’t go away all that easily.”

“I can imagine,” Rena said.

Sasha smiled at her sister.  “In a way, I’ve got to thank you for how I did back at Manticore.  If you and your ‘09er status hadn’t been there breathing down my neck at every turn, I don’t know if I would have pushed myself quite as hard as I did.  I mean, I know I would have worked my ass off regardless of if you had left or not, but still.  Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Rena said.  “Somehow, I don’t think most of the other guys you grew up with would come running up to shake my hand for that…”

“I wonder what could have given you that idea,” Sasha teased.  They grinned at each other.  “Like I said, our issues with each other or at least mine with you, won’t completely disappear overnight but I think that we’ve made a damn good start with them.”

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