Dawn's Fine
Chapter 9
Timeline – after "Hypnotic", before "Oracle" and "Vessel"(Smallville), post Chosen (Buffy, the Vampire Slayer), post NFA (Angel)
Beta: Charlotte Dhark
Chapter 9
Milton Fine drove slowly out of the parking lot. He nodded genially to the motel clerk when he passed by the window. He cultivated such small gestures in his attempt to fit better in this human form. For the past ten days he hadn't altered it at all. His cells were beginning to settle in this alien pattern, which made it easier for him to cope with all the other complexities of his strange new life. The nanobots were constantly creating intricate routines to deal with his 'humanity'. Only that morning, he noticed that he needed to shave. He passed his palm over his beard and made a note to go into town on his way back to the hotel to buy a shaving kit.
He smiled looking at his hands on the steering wheel. He was getting a tan. Milton Fine was developing his own type of peripheral nervous system. This was yet another side effect of the prolonged physical separation from the ship. He was not worried, although he could neither stop, nor control the changes. They were becoming more and more complex everyday. The constant data transfer between the main frame and this particular human incarnation was not enough to prevent the parallel evolution.
Less focus on his daily behavior allowed him to pay more attention to his other tasks. The most difficult of which was the issue of the inter-dimensional rift. Still, with all its complexity, this problem was no way near the intensity of his last encounter with Dawn. The sexual intercourse that had followed his "confession" had overloaded his system to the extent of losing contact with the ship for hours. His stubborn exercise in humanity was a precaution against the next time he was going to be with Dawn. Maybe if he didn't have to pay attention to details such as breathing, blinking, speaking English, he would be able to have better control.
Dawn was always present in his mind, since the sliver of himself was still in her system. Her behavior in his absence was assuring him that he had done a very good job of seducing her. The girl was doing nothing more than studying every day. She was showing no interest in any of the males around her, not even when they were displaying obvious signs of attraction to her.
She was on her way to a class when he parked on the north side of the Sunnydale crater. He put on his sunglasses and got out of the car. He opened the trunk and took out and methodically arranged his measuring equipment. He was unable and unwilling to feel frustrated with the slow progress. He had spent a week and a half on what was clearly a sealed inter dimensional rift, and he was no further in understanding how it had appeared or how it had been closed.
The only success he had achieved was that he had managed to create devices that allowed him to isolate specific radiation signatures from the other dimension and track their presence. He decided to test them during his visit in town later that evening.
He had always been confident in his ability to pass for a regular human, but it was getting easier and easier to mimic human behavior. He could trace the steep curve of this progress from the beginning of his interaction with Dawn. He had refined his human personality to ensnare her, and from then on he kept returning to the kind of man he had pretended to be for her, gradually becoming that person.
At lunchtime, he stopped working to eat. He had not gone as far as getting sandwiches, but had opted for concentrated food. He squeezed the tube of red fluid, and swallowed it wondering if he should give it some flavor. It was a less efficient means of gaining energy than using electricity, but he was in no great hurry. The Earth's yellow sun was doing most of the recharging anyway.
The day dragged on just as its predecessors, with meticulous calculations and no revelations. He could have stayed on site day and night, but he had decided to mimic human sleep patterns as well as everything else. At least outwardly. He was spending nights in his motel room working on new devices and theories that would help him understand and use his findings. He had experimented with the equivalent of human sleep only once, but his manufactured neurons had fired randomly during his rest creating something similar to dreams, and that bothered him. Getting a tan was one thing, dreaming was inefficient and maybe even dangerous.
The sun was setting over the grave of Sunnydale, and Milton Fine drove away for the last time from the closed Hellmouth confident he had learned al he could from the site. He set off for the nearest town, in search of a subject on whom to test his gadgets.
~~~~~
Milton Fine walked in the noisy night club as if he owned it. His quiet confidence and his rugged appearance made him the target of several interested gazes. He ignored them all on his way to the bar, carefully scanning the room for the low body temperatures of the mythical 'vampires'. He knew how to spot them, not so much from Dawn, as from the Initiative's records.
He identified three specimens, and he was pleased to notice that they were also presenting the outer-dimensional signature. He finished his drink and followed one of them on the alley behind the club. He watched him feed until he foolishly killed his victim. He instantly accessed his military and literary database to find out the creature's presumed weaknesses. He pierced the creature's heart with his rapidly elongating index finger. The vampire yelped, and as soon as the Kryptonian A.I. changed the molecular composition from metallic to wooden, the creature turned to dust. In the Honduran jungle the Brainiac watched the dust blowing in the wind through the eyes of his human incarnation.
The conversation between the mainframe and its human extension was suddenly interrupted by the unusual data coming from the piece of Kryptonite floating through Dawn's blood. The girl had gone into a party on the second floor of her dorm several minutes earlier. The unsettling information was that she was displaying signs of sexual arousal. She was in the arms of a boy, dancing on the rhythm of a slow love song.
He walked back in the club, and started a new experiment. He was so proficient in reading body language that in this place designed for human interaction, he could see who was interested in him as if the signs were huge neon commercials. He chose a tall, slender young woman with long brown hair, and asked her to dance. The pulsating, primitive rhythm of the song was perfectly adapted to the modern, urban mating ritual.
He was caught between the readings from Dawn's body, and his own reactions to the woman in his arms. It was strange and incomprehensible to him why Dawn's body, hundreds of miles away was draining more and more of his attention.
When the boy led Dawn away from the crowd, all he could do was to duplicate the gesture, and lead his partner into a darker, more intimate corner of the dance floor. The boy's hands were getting more daring, and so was his mouth. He felt the stranger's fingers on Dawn's skin, caressing the small of her back, making their way up to the clasp of her bra while his mouth was covering hers. He could feel Dawn catching fire. He was torn between letting the experiment unfold and the strong, unyielding urge to interfere. He could program the shard of Kryptonite to cause her pain, or provoke hallucinations, or go straight into her brain and turn her into a simple marionette.
He was barely noticing the enthusiastic way the young woman in his arms was responding to his touches. Even with such a small percentage of his capacity focused on her, he was able to touch her exactly as she wanted to be touched. He lowered his head for the kiss he knew she was expecting. Her lips were soft and sweet, and they parted welcoming his tongue. The kiss was technically flawless causing the now familiar stirrings in his body, although the intensity of his reaction was not comparable with what was happening when he was with Dawn. He was beginning to doubt his power over Dawn and was seconds away from intervening when she pushed her partner away.
"I'm sorry. I have to go," she said, and ran away from the room not giving the boy the chance to stop her.
"I'm sorry. I can't do this," he said, pulling away from the kiss.
"Oh, God, why not?" the young woman whispered out of breath, brushing her hand casually over the front of his trousers.
He reacted at the touch, and saw the girl's smile upon noticing it.
"I'm married," he said, and rushed out of the club.
He was still wondering why he had said that, why he had felt obligated to explain himself at all when he heard Dawn's whisper.
"Where are you, Professor?"
She had leaned against her bedroom door and was looking at her bed, the place where less than two weeks earlier the intensity of their interaction had started to corrupt his programming. Before the first tear slid along her cheek, he was running toward Kansas. The supercomputer jammed all the radars along the way, concealing his mad dash.
~~~~~~~~
To be continued…