Max has been (anything1) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2014-02-23 20:56:00 |
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Entry tags: | rose red |
Who: Max
What: Narrative
Where: L.V.
When: Just after Corvus' poisoning
Warnings/Rating: Talk of death
Max was done.
She'd ridden in the back of the ambulance to the small, private hospital that Rawlings had sent them to, and she'd watched as the EMTs fought to keep Corvus alive the entire way.
She was a woman that had seen death from the age of five, when the General had first taken her hand and led her into an Army morgue. It had been a lesson in reality, in what war did, in what happened to everyone eventually. She'd cried after, but she'd eventually gotten used to those recurring morgue visits. She'd become immune to heads blown off, and she'd become immune to how death looked on the faces of men and women who'd outlived their usefulness to their country. By second grade, she could walk by a corpse without blinking, and she never dreamed of ghosts. She'd never been whimsical enough for spirits and the undead, though she'd tried to believe in princesses and faraway castles. But she'd read all those fairy tales beneath a thick blanket, the light from her flashlight hidden by fabric, and she'd always known the stories weren't true. Truth was a freezer drawer and a toe tag. She knew that.
But that didn't make it any easier to sit in the back of that ambulance helplessly; she'd never been any good at helplessness. Damsels annoyed her, and they always had. Maybe if someone had saved her young, it would have all been different. But no one had. She'd lost her last bit of humanity with a duckling that had starved in her lap, and she hadn't managed to thaw until Amanda.
And now, most days, she wished she'd never thawed. It just made things harder, and the little girl with the dark hair and gray eyes was across the country, and it wasn't safe for Max to go anywhere near her.
Max was sick and tired of the safehouse. She was tired of time with nothing to do but think. She wasn't good at stillness, and she wasn't good at introspection. She acted, and she'd spent weeks doing nothing. Even before the ambulance ride, it was getting to her. She'd made some quiet inquiries about freelance, and she just wanted a purpose again.
The irony wasn't lost on her; she'd spent her entire life wanting to drop the gun in her hands, only to learn that it was so much a part of her that she couldn't.
And the hotel hadn't helped. The recurring comments about being her father's daughter, and the guilt over feeling the loss of that father, they didn't help. She loved the monster, and she always had. She would still lie down and die for the man, and she'd only recently come to realize that loving him made her just as guilty as him in most people's eyes. But she didn't know how to not love the man whose affection she'd spent a lifetime trying to earn. She'd given him everything. Everything save those months spent on Brandon, and everyone knew how that had turned out.
And she was done, before she'd even climbed into that ambulance, before Corvus drank whatever stupid concoction the hotel had put in his path. And she suspected he drank it for the same reason she'd called about the freelance jobs. He was tired, and she could see that on the faces of everyone she currently shared a roof with. Alright, not with Dailey or West - they were new, and they weren't trapped. And Davis had Reece, but the rest of them? The rest of them were as dead as those corpses in the freezer drawers, and they knew it.
When the ambulance arrived at the hospital, she'd climbed out, and she'd watched the EMTs rush Corvus inside. She'd taken one step forward, heels of her hands digging against her eyes and salt staining her cheeks. One more step, and then she'd stopped. What good was she going to do in there? The kid would be there, and he was better at handholding than she was. She wasn't any good at waiting for bad news, and she thought she might go insane pacing those bleach white halls, waiting for a heart to stop beating.
She'd pulled her cell from her pocket, and she'd dialed the most recent number in her call history.
"Alright, tell me more about the target. I'll need everything you have proving the murder, anything you have, including all court transcripts, and I'll give you an ETA and final price once I verify how hard he's going to be to get to. I need half of the money up-front."
Freelance.