Doppelganger

Chapter 4

Alec didn't really know what to do with the kid, so he let his training do his thinking for him. Step One: fix the bullet wound. When he found out she was too weak to walk to the bathroom, he picked her up and carried her there. She tried to do it herself but fell over like a ragdoll before she made it to the door. Must have lost a lot of blood; there was enough of it on his comforter.

He kicked down the toilet seat cover and sat her on it. "You okay?"Her face looked white and pasty in the bright bathroom lights, but she nodded, her mouth set in a straight, pale line. Tough kid.

There was a clean wash cloth on the towel rack, so he snatched it up and ran it under the tap. He enjoyed the luxury of having a water heater thanks to Brian making sure this was the best apartment in the building. When the cloth was drenched in hot water, he turned off the sink and wrung out the cloth in the basin.

Stepping toward the kid, he crouched down beside her. He knew that Manticore had an obsession with clones, but this was too much. His hair, his eyes, his skin...on a girl? He pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind and reached forward to lift the edge of her t-shirt.

"Hold this," he said, and she obediently held up the tail of her shirt so he could get a good look at the wound. While she just sat there stoically staring at the opposite wall, any non-Manticore kid would have gone into shock by now. He glanced up at her dirty face. How old was she, anyway? Six, seven?

He started patting around the half-formed scab with the wash cloth, wiping away the drying blood. She tensed and leaned away from him, but he didn't snap or grab her to force her to stay still like people had done to him when he was her age. He didn't want her to think about the infirmary at Manticore or those bastards with their knives and their test drugs. Instead, he attempted to be gentle.

"So, you got a name?" he asked.

"X8-270," she replied. She fiddled with her jeans above her knees. "I have some others I use, but I don't like them."

"And you like 270?" He looked up at her with raised eyebrows, and she shrugged her thin shoulders.

"It's the one I'm used to."

"Well, I don't like it," Alec said. "You need a real name, not a designation."

"What for?" she asked, shifting her weight back and forth as he prodded the gunshot wound. She probably needed stitches, but he didn't have the instruments for that. He would have to make do with gauze and medical tape; it always worked with his injuries, and she was 87% him...somehow.

"Because..." he said, trying to think of a good reason. When he first got out of Manticore, he hadn't put a high priority on names, hell, he didn't even really care about them, but it was different now. And he didn't exactly want to go around calling her 270 or "the kid." He smirked when he thought of a mediocre, snarky answer. "Because, when Max shows up, she's going to want to name you, and I want to beat her to it."

The kid looked at him. He recognized the blank expression on her face; it was his own when he was trying to distance himself from pain. "What do you want to name me?" she deadpanned.

"You got any ideas?"

"No," she answered shortly, her eyes flashing with stubbornness for a brief second before she returned to staring at wall.

Alec snorted and stood up, tossing the bloody wash cloth into the bath tub. "All right, then, I'll think of one." He opened the drawer in the stand next to his sink and pulled out another wash cloth and a first aid kit. Closing the drawer, he stood up and balanced the first aid kit on the side of the sink while he ran the new wash cloth under the hot water. "I guess we could call you Ally, since you're my clone and everything."