Welcome to Our Life -- Chapter 41: Eva (X5-766)

Disclaimer:  The TV show Dark Angel, all of the characters that appeared on it (Max, Zack, Jondy, 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 (Elle/X5-164, etc.).

About two months later...

I just managed to jump out of the way of another X-series as I made my way through the halls on my way back to my cell. I swear, sometimes it seems so busy in here I feel like I’m in the middle of Grand Central Station out in New York City. It’s kind of nice, though. Something about the sound of only one or two pairs of footsteps echoing in an empty hallway creeps me out.

“If it isn’t our favorite blonde sister.” I looked over to see Rena and Ben standing at an intersection of two hallways, both of them waving cheerfully at me. I grinned and went over to them.

“Don’t let Syl hear you say that one,” I teased Rena. “She’ll take any excuse to kick your ass.”

“Actually, it’s try to kick my ass,” Rena said. She shrugged. “If she wants to bring it on, she knows where to find me.” The three of us started to walk off in the direction of our block. “I’m happy that I’ve got a chunk of free time before lunch. I really want to go over some things for that computer session that I’ve got after we eat. I hate computers, but I do have to keep in practice.”

“I feel your pain,” I said. “That’s how I feel about hand-to-hand combat. There are few things that I look forward to less than getting thrown around like a rag doll by Zack or Zane for the eighty billionth time.” I rolled my eyes. “It gets even more fun when we get that trainer who not only yells at us constantly just like all of the other but is also a chauvinist and thinks that we can’t do squat just because we have two X chromosomes.”

“Those are usually the days when Max has a great day in that class and beats everybody, including Zack,” Ben observed.

“Oh yeah,” Rena said. “I remember that the last time that we had Captain Swine for Martial Arts here at this place, he was being especially condescending and Max finally lost it and mouthed off to him a little and he decided to try to punish her by making her participate in a three-on-one against Zane, Jack, and Reese.” She snickered. “I don’t quite think that he was expecting Max to win, but that’s our Maxie for you.”

“Tell us something that we don’t know,” Ben quipped. I laughed and Rena punched Ben in the shoulder. “Speaking of things that we don’t know, I had a pretty interesting talk with Biggs the other day. He was doing some reading, one of those psych books or journals again, and he came across an article on identical twins and how one twin is the dominating one or some psycho-babble like that. He was cool enough to spare me the psych talk and translate it.”

“That sounds interesting,” I said. “What do you mean, dominating twin?”

“One twin is stronger than the other,” Ben said, shrugging. “Not necessarily physically, though I guess that could happen as well. I mean mentally stronger, maybe does a little bit better than the other in school, that kind of thing. Biggs was talking about his observations of Alec, me, Rena, and Sasha and he thinks that between Alec and me, Alec’s the dominant twin.”

“How did he come up with that one?” Rena asked. “By your ranks?”

“Maybe a little bit,” Ben said. “But also other things, subtle things that somebody like Biggs would pick up on. You’ll get a kick out of this one, Rena. He also told me that between yourself and Sasha, he believes that you are the dominant twin.”

“Well, I’ll be dipped,” Rena said. “He must have been a psychiatrist in a previous life.” She smirked. “Couldn’t have been Freud because he doesn’t have an unhealthy fixation with test tubes that we know of.”

I laughed. “That would be something else. I wonder what Tinga would think if that were the case.”

“Tinga either wouldn’t care or she’d be really patient about it,” Ben said. “You know how she is.” We exited the building to the central courtyard and started to cross it to get back to C Wing. “That reminds me. Have either of you heard anything about when Alec’s getting back from that mission of his?”

“No,” I said. “The best that I can tell you is to ask Biggs or Sasha because if anybody knows or will be told anything about that mission, it’ll be the two of them. It’s only been just over a month since Alec left.”

“I know that,” Ben said. “But you remember what he told us when he’d been given that assignment. It could run a week or it could run for a year. The timetable was listed as open-ended when he got his specs.” He sighed. “I miss having him around.”

“A good bunch of us aren’t around,” Rena said, shaking her head. “Zack’s not scheduled to return from France until right before New Year’s. Becky’s out somewhere in the middle of freezing cold Russia and Jeff’s away in Bulgaria. Kenny’s down in Texas, Reese is out in Louisiana, Elle is deployed in Halifax, Jace is away in Pennsylvania, Parker is somewhere in the Amazon, and even Suzanne, Brent, Layla, Xavier, and Sandy are away on a mission in Nevada.” She laughed. “And since both Becky and Jeff aren’t here, that means that Kevin and Wes are in charge of their unit until Jeff gets finished in Bulgaria since he’s scheduled to be finished with his mission before Becky’s done with her’s.”

“That’s not good,” I remarked.

“Not good how?” Ben wondered.

I smiled sweetly. “It would be the equivalent of like having Zane and Krit in charge of us for whatever reason. Or Krit and Wayne. Or yourself and Kenny. Pick whichever combo you like.”

“My, my, my,” Ben drawled. “Somebody’s awfully bitchy today.”

“You bring it out in me, Ben,” I informed him. “Every single time.”

“That’s enough, Eva,” Rena said. “I just wish that I could get sent out on a mission somewhere. It seems like forever since the last time that I was deployed.”

Ben nodded in agreement. “I hear ya, Rena. I haven’t been sent out in months. We both should be due to be tacked onto the next or one of the next assignments that they cook up.” He stretched his arms. “I’m hoping that my next mission is going to be something that’s straight military. I’m getting bored with infiltration assignments. I know that I’m good at them, but I need some variety.”

“And variety is the spice of life,” I said. Rena and Ben both laughed.

“If variety is the spice of life, then we must be the equivalent of a five-alarm chili,” Rena remarked. We laughed again as we turned the corner and to our block. We paused near Zack’s cell. “I hope that I didn’t just jinx us for lunch.”

“Why would you think that?” Ben teased. “The only way I think you possibly could have jinxed us for lunch is if Alec had been forced to make that chili that he told me that he had made when he was sixteen and since he’s away, that’s impossible.”

“Oh?” Rena raised an eyebrow. “What about the possibility of Brin cooking?”

I winced. “I don’t think that they would want to kill all of us.”

“Hey, if getting through those swamp training exercises with Unit 1 six or so years ago didn’t kill us, then I’d say that the chances of Brin’s cooking taking us out are pretty damn low,” Ben said cheerfully. “I don’t know about either of you, but I’m kind of surprised that none of us murdered that annoying chatterbox 699 while he slept in his tent. Sandy might talk and ask questions all of the time, but he was smart enough to learn how not to be annoying. 699 deserved those lizards that our brothers minus Zack and plus me found and slipped into his sleeping bag. I can’t believe that he didn’t realize that they were there until right as he was about to drift off.” He smiled happily at the memory. “That was a heck of a good time.”

“I don’t think that 699 would be of the same opinion of the incident as you and the others share,” I teased.

“Maybe,” Ben conceded. “What about—“ He stopped talking when the three of us heard several pairs of footsteps, none of which sounded like any of our friends or family members, heading towards us. The three guards appeared in front of us a few moments later and we straightened to attention. “Can we help you, sirs?”

“Yes,” one of the guards said. “You are to come with us immediately, X5-493.”

Ben frowned. “Permission to speak, sir?”

“Denied,” the guard snapped. The two guards behind him held out tasers and I had to work hard to suppress a gasp. “Come with us immediately, 493. No resistance or we’ll have to do this the hard way.” Ben reluctantly nodded and barely managed to restrain a yell of surprise when the other two guards grabbed him roughly and dragged him away. One of the guards even slapped Ben hard even though Ben wasn’t putting up any resistance at all.

“Sir, may I inquire what is going on?” Rena asked. Her face, just like mine, appeared to be perfectly blank, but I could read her eyes and they were even more troubled than mine.

“No, you may not,” the guard said coldly. Without another word, he turned around and marched off in the direction that the two other guards had taken Ben in. Rena and I watched silently for several moments until we were pretty sure that we were out of even Ben’s hearing range. Rena began to shake and tried to take a deep breath to calm herself down.

“What’s going on, Eva?” she asked. “What the hell was that about? Ben hasn’t done anything! He might have played a few jokes in the last couple of weeks, but nothing that should have gotten around to the guards hearing about it and he damn well hasn’t done anything that warrants the treatment that he just got! What the flying fuck is going on?”

I took a deep breath of my own, reached up, and put my hands on Rena’s shoulders to make her face me. “We’re going to take things one at a time. The first thing that we’re going to do is find Max because she’d be the most likely person who’d know or be able to find out about the reason behind Ben being taken like that. If Max doesn’t know, then we’ll have to figure out something. Calm down, Rena. Don’t worry.” I put a smile on my face for both of our sakes. “If there’s anybody that can find out anything, it’s Maxie. We’re definitely going to get to the bottom of this one way or another. You can count on it.”

“Good point,” Rena admitted. She straightened her shoulders. “Come on. Let’s go find Max.” We walked back in the direction that the two of us and Ben had come from earlier. We had information to uncover.

Notes:  There really is such a thing as a dominant twin within a set of identical twins. I was reading an article in a copy (I forget the exact date of the issue) of Reader’s Digest that my parents had left lying around the house and it mentioned this and the idea got stuck in my head for awhile. It seemed like pretty good food for thought. :)