audrey main // ramona flowers (dyingatherfeet) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-01-17 00:48:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, lois lane, ramona flowers |
Who: Thomas, Audrey, and later, Max
What: What should be a simple move gets complicated.
Where: Outside Hamartia primarily
When: Recently
Warnings: Considerable swearing, some violence
Audrey had packed up her meagre collection of belongings and was sitting in the middle of her bedroom, waiting for a call from Max. She had two coats on, a heavier, lined leather one over a black blazer, and she would have been wearing them even if she hadn’t been waiting for her sister to arrive. The apartment was freezing, and it was the main reason she’d agreed to the change in plans (and why she’d agreed to move in to an apartment in another building in the first place). She’d put saran wrap over the windows and duct taped it into place, but it kept tearing no matter what she did. It was a little better in the bedroom, but not by much, and she’d spent the last few nights under piles of blankets and afghans.
The boxes were full of the things Audrey had bought in the couple of weeks she’d been in town - a lot of thrift store clothes, bought with her first paycheck, some notebooks and pencils she’d brought with her, some books she’d picked up at a dollar sale. The bedding she’d picked up almost for free at a Goodwill, and she’d been planning on replacing it as the paychecks kept coming in, but then zombies had attacked and her already bare apartment had been left a bare mess with glass on the floor. There were only four boxes, all told - one for clothes, one for bedding, one for her notebooks and one for the other miscellaneous knick knacks she’d brought over in from Musings in her backpack. She’d thought about just sticking everything into subspace through her bag, but then she’d still have to retrieve it, and if she’d carried the boxes through subspace herself she still would have had to make four round trips. This just made more sense, and for all those logical reasons (the cold, the empty apartment, the boxes) she could rationalize to herself that this was the right idea, that agreeing to let her sister pick her up and take her to go live in a luxury apartment with three people she didn’t know and a sibling she’d never gotten along with was acceptable.
It was like a particularly bad season of The Real World. Audrey was going to be clawing out Max’s eyes within the week.
While Audrey waited she got busy sketching out a cartoon version of her sister on a flip notepad, wearing an army helmet and smoking a cigar and brusquely ordering a tiny, inch tall version of herself around, wearing a shirt that said GENERAL, which was childish and made her feel marginally better about the world.
Thomas was worried about Max and finding a doctor he could trust when he didn’t know any doctors in the city worth trusting. He wasn’t stupid enough to leave any armor on, and it had been an easy night with only a handful of disturbances, so a long-sleeved gray shirt and darker gray slacks covered up any minor injuries, and he’d checked to make sure his face was unmarked before showing up. Thomas wasn’t accustomed to visiting Hamartia, and he walked straight in to the right apartment without challenge. The destruction reminded him of derelict buildings, and he thought privately that nobody should be living here. Perhaps some extra money... but much of his money was tied in those charity funds already, and he didn’t want to make Hamartia any more interesting to anyone else than the rest of Seattle.
Thomas knocked twice on the door. His low voice probably was not what anyone might expect to hear when waiting on Max, especially when it said, “Audrey Main?” in a voice that was more authority that tentative inquiry.
Audrey’s head jerked up, and she didn’t move for a long moment. The voice at the door was definitely not her sister’s, unless she’d started taking serious amounts of testosterone in the last 24 hours, and the voice sounded so serious that she started running through the last few days, trying to remember if she’d done anything warranting arrest. But the police had to identify themselves, didn’t they? She got up, putting the drawing pad in her bag and walking to the door.
Audrey looked through the peephole. There was a man outside, who, from the fish eye view she could see of him, looked about the size that his voice implied. He also looked serious, was dressed in nondescript clothing, and now she was trying to figure out if her sister hated her enough to put out a hit. She latched the chain on the door and then opened it an inch, looking out and revealing one dark eye, suspiciously narrowed, bright blue hair, and not much else. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m...” Thomas was not used to people asking who he was. Wherever he went, people knew who he was. In either suit. “...Thomas Brandon.” He didn’t just say ‘Thomas’ or even his last name, and he wasn’t trying to make friends or make a good impression. Max told him to come pick up Audrey, so he was here. His hair, which he’d entirely forgotten about, was flattened against his skull a little strangely, except in the back where he’d mussed it on accident. Like unfortunate hat hair. Helpfully, he added, “Max sent me.”
The name was familiar mostly because it connected with the name Max had given him for the father of the baby she had surprised Audrey with carrying into the coffee shop, and not so much to celebrity status. She did, however, vaguely remember hearing something somewhere about a Thomas Brandon, that he was some famous mogul or other. She had some experience with those, and the only ones she’d known had been massive jerks, so her expectations were not high. He’d passed the test of trustworthiness however, so she unlatched the door and opened it. “Sorry. You freaked me out, I was expecting Max.” Blue hair, leather jacket, and combat boots. She watched to see if he had the inevitable reaction of upstanding war hero Max Main’s sister looks like that and backed into the apartment. “It’s only a few boxes. I’ve only been here a couple weeks, so...not a lot of time to gather stuff.”
Thomas gave her an intense look, the same look that he bestowed upon everyone he met at first, taking in the details of her appearance and her face. He particularly looked for something of Max in her, and her youth made Thomas think of his daughter, and for the first time, he wondered what she might look like. None of this was at all visible on his too-sharp features however. He just blinked once.
“Sorry. She was tired. So I came. There’s a car downstairs.” Thomas didn’t want a driver to pick up on any of his patterns, so he changed them and, in situations like this, didn’t use one. It was just... a black Cadillac sitting on the curb. “How many boxes?” He went farther in.
“Four,” Audrey said, turning to look behind her, stopping at the four boxes arranged into a semi-circle on the floor that she’d been sitting in the middle of. There was no paint on the walls, nothing at all to show she had lived there. She’d had big plans - painting and putting up interesting things, but the Reavers had sort of botched that for the moment. Now it was just depressing, empty with broken windows and saran wrap covering the holes. “I can carry two if you can carry two.” She turned around fully. Her resemblance to Max was in small things, like the arch of her brow and the line of her nose in profile, there if you looked for it but not necessarily obvious. The long stare he’d given her had caught her attention, as had his serious, straightforward, truncated sentences. What was he, nervous to meet her? “You okay?” she asked. “Look, I know this place we’re going - it’s yours, right, the apartment? I’m not a permanent house guest, and I’m not going to be underfoot a lot. I promise not to get in the way of your boyfriend-girlfriend bliss.” She stacked the boxes to distribute the weight fairly - one heavy, one light, heavy on the bottom and light on top, and picked up her stack. “There’s no elevator in this dump, so I hope you can handle stairs and boxes at once. Multi-tasking can be rough.”
Oh yes, it was a very good thing that Max’s sister not be in this place. Thomas didn’t want Max coming here. It was cold, for one. He looked at the saran wrap for a moment, and then down at the boxes. “I’m fine.” Ah, two words that one must add to their vocabulary to speak to Thomas in any capacity. “You are welcome at the apartment as long as you want to stay. It will be good if there is someone else watching Max. She doesn’t sleep and I am not there very much.” This was a long speech for Thomas, and he crouched to push at the boxes and find out which one was heavier. He looked up at her when she took the one heavy and one light, but he didn’t say anything. Instead he stacked the one on top of the other, slid easily into standing with the weight on one arm and his palm balancing it, and moved toward the door. “Not a problem.”
Audrey’s relationship with Max aside, she was still a sister. So she was watching Thomas as he talked, trying to figure out what it was exactly that had led her sister to let him fuck her against a bathroom wall. So far, she had no idea. Frankly, the idea that a guy like this was capable of doing such a thing was almost beyond her, until she remembered some of the people she’d been with and what they’d been like outside the bedroom. Still, there had to be more to it than a good lay. She was suddenly struck by his serious, not a smile cracked demeanor and how much it reminded her of the General. Of course, he hadn’t broken out the verbal abuse, so she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the thought brought up a lot of bad memories about her own relationship choices. Not wanting to dwell even for a second on ways in which she and her sister might be more alike than she was comfortable with, she walked out the front door with her boxes. “Just shut it,” she called back. “I’m not worried about locking it, it’s already had the windows broken out, can’t get much worse.”
Audrey waited until he was out in the hallway to head for the stairs. “I think there’s a gap between what you think my relationship with Max is like and what it’s actually like. What, did she tell you we’re best buddies who make s’mores and have sleepovers?”
Thomas shifted the boxes effortlessly to one arm and carefully pulled the door shut. He rotated on his heel and moved with the same fluidity down the hallway, most of his attention on Audrey and not their dilapidated surroundings, a decided change from the norm. “No. I got the feeling that you might not feel that way. But she was worried about you, so I presume you would care if she was sick or not feeling well.” This string of logic now delivered in Thomas’ usual cool informative tone, he let her precede him down the stairs. It was odd how he could be so serious and yet not be sarcastic. “You don’t speak?”
“I would care if she was sick,” Audrey said, looking over at him. Her tone was somewhere between unsure and incensed. “Look, she’s my sister. We have to care whether the other lives or dies. But do we want to spend a lot of time together? Or any time together? No. We can’t stand each other. I hadn’t seen Max in seven years before I saw her in the coffee shop the other day. She went off to the military like a good girl and I broke mailboxes and was the black sheep. I don’t know what else to tell you. She didn’t mention any of that?”
“No, we didn’t discuss it that deeply.” He met her eyes calmly . Cool, blank eyes. “But the military was not an... enjoyable experience for Max. You seem to feel it was her alternative to you.” Too bad Thomas’ cool logic didn’t include whatever Max’s reaction might be to him sharing his opinion of her familial relationships. “I am glad that you care about Max. If you did not, I might worry about you being under my roof.” No smile. It was a little unsettling.
Audrey held his gaze maybe for a little longer than she should have, because she almost ended up tripping on the last stair. She caught herself and turned her head forward as she came down the last set of steps. “Not an enjoyable experience? You’re kidding, right? She loved the shit, even when we were kids.” She shook her head. “It wasn’t an alternative to me, trust me. It wasn’t an alternative at all. She was always going to go into the army.”
Audrey looked back in time to catch the serious proclamation about her fitness to be in the apartment, and raised a brow. “If I didn’t give a shit if she lived or died, I doubt she’d have fought so hard to get me to come live in her apartment. Family’s family. You might not like them, hey, you might even hate their guts, but when it comes down to it, blood is blood, and you still try to keep them safe.”
Thomas smiled. It was a very intent smile. Like he had just decided, “and now, there will be a smile,” so he put it on. It wasn’t the best, therefore. “So they tell me.” He walked down the stair after her and across the battered linoleum. “How unfortunate that she didn’t have an option.” Thomas realized that he didn’t know anything about Max’s life in Musings except she’d been trying to get away from it. “Why is that?” The Seattle fog embraced both as they stepped out onto the sidewalk, and Thomas rotated to face where he’d left the car.
Audrey took a moment to catch her breath. The boxes were getting a little heavy by now, and her strength was more in her legs than her arms. She also decided she found Thomas a little unnerving, and between him and Johnny, who tried, in her opinion, sort of hard, she’d take Johnny. Thomas reminded her a little too much of her father. “You kidding? She loved being the General’s only daughter.” Nope, not bitter at all. “Why is what?” she asked, a little distracted as she tried to pick out which car most likely belonged to him. She thought it was either the nice looking but exceedingly normal sedan, the huge truck with flames on it, or the black Cadillac. In fact, she was leaning most strongly toward the last one.
“Why didn’t she have an...” Yes, Thomas was the black Cadillac. The one presently being broken into by two very unsavory looking men who probably didn’t break windows on commission. Thomas stopped, boxes in hand, when they were still a good twenty-five yards away. “I think we should turn around,” he suggested, in the same voice he’d been using the entire night. He thought that Max might be dismayed with him if Audrey was involved in a skirmish outside her apartment. He thought this might also qualify as something that was out of the ordinary and therefore out of bounds in front of her.
Audrey looked between Thomas and the way his gaze had fallen on the car. Just to be sure, she asked, “That your car?”
“Mm,” Thomas said, calmly, “for the moment, anyway.” He didn’t move yet, however, waiting for her to turn.
Audrey did not turn. She set the boxes down, opened her bag, and reached inside for something. The normal response would probably be to pull out mace, or to turn and walk away. It wasn't even her car, after all. But no, instead she pulled a baseball bat out of the bag, which was about a foot in diameter. The effect was comical, but neither of the two men were paying her an iota of attention. She held the baseball bat at her side.
"HEY." Audrey tapped the baseball bat on the concrete. In her experience, guys who broke into cars did not usually carry guns, and were generally speaking punks in training who didn't want a fight. She’d dated some, after all. Sure, these guys might be methheads with knives, but you didn't get by long in a neighborhood like this as a young woman with blue hair unless you stood your ground on certain things and got a reputation. Audrey was a girl who had spent most of her school years getting in fights with boys to prove she was as tough as her sister, and that tendency, unfortunately, had not totally disappeared with age. She lifted the bat, walking toward them.
"I'M A CRAZY BITCH WITH A BASEBALL BAT. STEP AWAY FROM THE CAR."
Thomas had his eyes forward on the assailants, generally a good idea when one was trying to make sure no one got killed. “Audrey you--” Oh, no. This wasn’t right. She had blue hair and combat boots. He should have known that she wouldn’t have just walked away. “It’s just a car,” Thomas said, despairingly, somewhere far behind her, as he put down the box. Then, in a mutter: “it’s not as if they would have had it long.”
Both thugs, one at the driver’s window with his elbow through it and another deactivating the alarm at the hood, turned their shaved heads all the way around with equal expressions of surprise. They froze there a moment, staring at the two of them (Thomas took a moment to glance down at Audrey’s bag with interest, but only a glance), and then both abandoned the car and joined them on the sidewalk.
“You’re a crazy bitch alright,” one said. “Just walk away, right now.” He had a crowbar. His friend had a pair of jumper cables that he seemed to think were an intimidating weapon. Both crowded them closer menacingly.
Audrey held the baseball bat up and over her shoulder. Her stance was decent, but not professional grade, not major leagues. “I will use your head for fucking home run practice if you don’t turn your asses around and walk the fuck away from that car.” There was something possible a little scary about the intensity with which she was approaching this particular encounter, and the lack of fear she appeared to feel in the face of it. She’d been in a bad mood lately, and it was guys like this who fucked things up for everyone, so they made a good target for her vague, undirected fury, coalescing it down to a pinpoint. Plus, if she ever wanted to show her face in this neighborhood again (and she did still plan on moving back eventually) she would rather be known as crazy than an easy target. Better odds that way.
Thomas didn’t want to tie up one of his hands by pulling Audrey back, and he didn’t want to move in front of her because she might end up swinging and he might end up being the baseball. His voice came from behind again, same as ever. “You could take the car and leave?” he suggested, sounding vaguely disapproving about the whole matter. It would be so much easier if he could just use the locater on the car and track it later to reacquire it. It didn’t look like that was in the cards, however. The one with the crowbar made a lunge forward for both of them. To Thomas, it looked like it was in slow motion, and pathetically slow. Like a champion runner watching a five year old toddle across a lawn. He waited to see if Audrey would swing.
Audrey did swing, but her swing went a little wide, and the aim was more for the man’s neck and shoulder than his head. It would still hurt like hell if it connected, but would not cause the sort of damage that a hit to the head would. Honestly, she hadn’t been aiming for his head - she was not, after all, a murderer, and the guy was a jerk, sure, but he didn’t deserve death for jacking a car. She’d take bruising, though. He deserved a good beating for being an asshole.
There was a nice crack when Audrey connected with the man’s elbow, a wide, wide shot that ended up being the proper place. Thomas (almost hidden in the adrenaline and shouting of the moment) made an odd little noise that sounded an awful lot like amusement. He didn’t make any more sounds after that, however, because he was a little busy and there wasn’t a lot of room for it. The guy with the jumper cables made a sort of wailing noise that he must have thought was intimidating, but it got cut off pretty soon since Thomas flattened his hand and struck a hard blow to the man’s throat. He croaked. Then he fell down. Thomas sighed.
The proceedings were interrupted by the sound of car doors opening. Four of them. It appeared that car jackers in this neighborhood ran in packs.
The sound of more car doors opening was not good. Audrey was about to compliment Thomas on somehow disabling the other guy while she wasn't looking with his bare hands when she saw men piling out of another car. She was fairly sure, even from a distance, that the things they were holding in their hands were not crowbars. "Fuck."
Thomas flicked one glance sideways and then he dove sideways and flattened Audrey onto the ground as bullets speckled the wall of Hamartia above their heads. “It was just a car,” Thomas said severely, rolling off his bad shoulder with a wince (why did it seem like one of his shoulders was always bad?). “Stay down.” Now here he was in a gunfight without any armor, with Max’s very vulnerable blue-haired sister, and he was supposed to be innocent and office-going.
They were still shooting, but fortunately, the guys that were down stayed down. Thomas moved down the gritty sidewalk, finding himself mildly annoyed at being shot at for something as foolish as a car, and got into the Cadillac. The engine roared and, now wincing at new glass in his skin (the armor spoiled him) Thomas shifted into reverse and skidded backwards, scattering car jackers in all directions.
Audrey stayed down. Guys with crowbars she could handle. Guys with guns were officially out of her league. She shouted something along the lines of, “SINCE WHEN DO CARJACKERS HAVE FRIENDS WITH GUNS,” and then Thomas was, to her horror, running for the car. What the hell was he doing?
Audrey watched him jump into the car like a pro and then rev it backwards into men with guns and found herself, even in the chaos, wondering if maybe she hadn’t totally misjudged Thomas. Or not judged him strongly enough. Military, she’d just now decided. It would explain a lot.
Well, now Thomas had some options. He could go for Audrey, and try to drag her in the vehicle, and then try to get away in a hail of gunfire. Or he could stay here and disarm and disable. There were pros and cons. It took Thomas a little longer than normal to decide on them, but he decided that a whole Audrey was better than a clueless Audrey, so... he went for option two.
Thomas caught one man with the driver’s side door as he opened it, knocking him back out of the way under the wheel well as the car skidded to a stop. He disarmed a second man with an arm movement that was too fast to see, kicked him in an unfortunate place, and threw him into a third man, who landed with a painful crunch on his leg. “Get in the car,” he told Audrey, with some actual emotion in it. He sounded annoyed and even a little worried.
Audrey was up and moving very fast, and slid into the car as quickly as she could, slamming the door shut and sinking down low. She was visibly shaken, even if she was trying not to be, and feeling very stupid just at that moment. “That escalated quickly,” she mumbled, mostly to herself, and thought briefly about the loss of her things. They were all replaceable, though. Everything really important was in her bag, which she had managed to keep on her shoulder. She had turned a few interesting shades of pale and pink, and stayed down until they were clear of the mess.
Thomas cruised to a slow stop in a quieter, empty district, since he didn’t want to drive into Aubade with a bullet-ridden car. He turned in the driver’s seat, hugging the passenger seat so he could rotate all the way around and look at her. “Are you hurt?” he asked urgently.
Audrey checked herself. “Yeah,” she said. There were a few cuts from errant glass shards lightly oozing blood, but nothing approaching serious. It was a miracle, really, and she slumped lower in the seat, searching for words. “I’m fine. I’m - look, I’m sorry I...got you into that. We probably should have just walked away. Like you said.” Her sheepishness, guilt, and leftover terror which was now asserting itself post-adrenaline rush washed over her all at once. She paused. “Carjackers seriously carry guns in this town.” It was a statement, not a question. “And there’s zombies. Good times.” She took a deep breath. “That was some crazy stuff you pulled back there. Are you military?”
“They’re not just carjackers. It’s a local gang. Probably an initiation. Next time just let them take whatever they want. It’s not worth it. You’re sure you’re alright?” He pushed open the now battered driver’s side door, and slid out onto the pavement of a low-ceiling parking garage where he kept alternate means of transportation. He was fairly well unscathed except for some glass ground into one arm where he’d shoved his arm against the door. He opened the back door to give Audrey a worried look. “I was supposed to get you home. It wasn’t supposed to be complicated. Max will be upset.”
“Maybe we don’t tell Max?” Audrey offered. In hindsight, the thing she’d just done was looking more and more stupid. The last thing she needed was a lecture from her sister.
Thomas seriously considered it. He offered a hand for either Audrey or her bag, it wasn’t clear which. “No. I don’t think that’s a good idea. She might find out, and then she’ll be even more upset. I’m trying to avoid making her upset. We could... we could leave out some details. The number of assailants, perhaps?” he suggested, hopefully. After she was out he covered the car with a custom cover and turned around to beep to life another car--that looked exactly like the first. He got his phone out and sent a text to Max, who was probably pacing by now. His phone rang a second later, and he gave Audrey a helpless look (it wasn’t an expression that suited him) before putting the phone to his ear. As he spoke he ushered Audrey into the second car.
Audrey took his hand with her own after a moment’s hesitation, stepping out of the car and heading for the second, her gait slowing as she walked toward it. “...you’re pretty faithful to Cadillac,” she said, uncertain, fairly sure now that something exceedingly weird was going on with Max and her new boyfriend. Sleeper cell? Black ops military? She had no idea. Whatever was going on, this guy was no trust fund brat, and she slid into the passenger seat, bag held tightly in her lap. It was sort of funny to see someone she’d just seen take down a bunch of guys with guns look apprehensive at the prospect of a call from her sister. She didn’t blame him. This was not going to be fun to explain.
Some hints as to Thomas’ and Max’s relationship resulted from the rest of the phone call, which sounded a lot like an interrogation in which Thomas was trying to make the interrogator feel better about a situation she knew nothing about. It also proved that Thomas’ reticence with speech wasn’t exclusive to people he’d just met. The proceedings took them all the way to Aubade, which was fortunate, and a polite valet took away the new car, leaving Thomas and Audrey in a marble lobby waiting for the axe to fall. “One unarmed, and two armed,” Thomas muttered out of the side of his mouth, to clarify their story. He pulled at the sleeve of his left arm, which had rolled up and resulted in the glass scrapes, and now looked decidedly wrinkled and spotted.
Max, true to the sounds on the phone call, had left the apartment midway through the conversation and by the time they entered the lobby, she was impatiently riding down to said lobby in the elevator. She’d slipped on a coat, but she hadn’t bothered with shoes, and there was little doubt as to the state of her nerves when the elevator doors opened. She was wearing a pair of loose track pants and one of Thomas’ undershirts beneath the coat, but it was the worry on her face that drew attention, that and the circles under her eyes from too many nights without rest. Her arms were crossed when the elevator door opened, but as soon as they slid partway (revealing Thomas and Audrey), she slipped past them and rushed forward. It was painfully obvious that her first instinct was to wrap her arms around Thomas’ neck thankfully, but she stopped short of doing so awkwardly, wrapping her arms tighter around herself again.
They both had glass on them, specks of blood, too, and Max’s gaze went right to Thomas’ damaged sleeve, before glancing over the scratches on Audrey. Glass. She could smell the gunpowder, too, a telltale scent for someone used to being around it, that clung to their hair when you stood this close. A moment of silence followed as she assessed the situation. The windows on the car had broken - that explained the glass. They had been shot at - that explained the gunpowder. Thomas’ arm was either shot or cut up under that sleeve - which meant someone had gotten too fucking close, and Audrey looked like she’d just gotten up off the floor, which meant body cover, given the state of the rest of Thomas clothes. “Who,” she began, sounding frighteningly calm, “decided not to just give them the fucking car?”
Audrey watched Max come rocketing out of the elevator and knew that this was not going to be an easy conversation. She checked her own arms again while Max’s eyes did the sweep. The cuts were still oozing a little blood, but were shallow. They ought to be cleaned, but they’d heal. She looked up, jaw set. “I did.”
Thomas’ mind wandered. It often did when people were speaking to him, as he had learned that most people didn’t have much to say with their voice that wasn’t corroborated by their appearance. He’d spoken to Max about getting more rest, but he had not been around as much as he should have, and he wasn’t there to find out how much she was actually getting. He also had not visited a doctor with her in person, and that too bothered him. It was getting to the point where he was going to have to make some hard choices with his time. He tried to estimate how much less he could sleep and still be functional.
“Let’s continue this conversation in private,” Thomas suggested, looking pained and taking a tentative step toward the elevator to avoid a confrontation in the lobby.
Audrey’s response that it had been her doing, well it didn’t fly with Max. Audrey, in her mind, was still a child, and Thomas had experience with criminals that should have trumped any foolish attempts her sister made. “And you let her?!” she asked Thomas, voice rising, even after Thomas had made the comment about continuing the conversation in private. It had been a long, downward spiral to get to this point for her, starting with a decided lack of sleep since the Night Terror incident and only escalating as time went on. This, this panicked fear for these two people, was the straw that broke the camel’s back, it seemed.
"Let me?" Audrey asked, brows shooting up, incensed. She did not move toward the elevator. "There were two guys breaking into his car. You don't let people get away with things like that, Max, not unless you want to put a giant kick me sign on your back that says you're an easy target! I made a decision. Me. Not your boyfriend here, who took out four guys like a goddamn ninja." Oh, wait. There were supposed to only be three guys. Whatever, it wasn't that big of a deal (and there had been six altogether, so it was still an improvement).
Thomas groaned, but said nothing.
Max looked at Audrey when she she spoke, but as soon as her sister finished, she looked back at Thomas. “SIX MEN?” she asked, because she heard four and two and added correctly. “You took on SIX MEN to get back a car that you can buy a thousand fucking times over?” This, clearly, was Thomas’ doing, not Audrey’s. Audrey was a child, a civilian child. “She GARDENS,” she said, pointing at Audrey, as if this made all the difference in the world.
"I DO NOT GARDEN," Audrey shouted, every inch of her suddenly positively vibrating with anger, the words exploding out of her. She'd been muscled into an apartment she didn't want to live in with the sister she hated and shot at and apparently that still wasn't enough, no, Max had to belittle her further. Forget the fact that the statement wasn't necessarily true, because she had gardened with her mother, and she did still, a little, but that did not make her a child incapable of defending herself or the hyper-feminine damsel in distress that her sister apparently saw her as. Like she was weak, like she was less, not tough enough, not good enough, the same way their father had.
"I WALKED UP TO THEM WITH A BASEBALL BAT. I CHALLENGED THEM. NOT HIM."
“Please keep your voices down,” Thomas said, in a low voice one might equate to people in witness protection. He stopped trying to usher both forward with his presence and stood there as the guards pretended politely not to hear. (They were paid a good deal to do this.) “Audrey made a decision in the spur of the moment that was possibly... too hasty. I’m sure she didn’t mean any harm.” Except to the car jackers. “Let’s go in.”
It was as if Thomas hadn’t even spoken. “YOU WALKED UP TO SIX CAR JACKERS WITH A BASEBALL BAT?” Max yelled, color starting to climb up her neck with sheer anger and panic at what could have happened to them. “You could have fucking DIED. WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?” she continued, reaching for Thomas’ sleeve with shaking fingers. “Gunshot or glass?” she demanded, even as she looked at Audrey again. “He covered you?” she demanded, her voice getting louder and shakier the more she spoke.
“THEY DIDN’T HAVE GUNS, AND THERE WERE TWO OF THEM.” Let's get our facts straight, here. Audrey's expression at that moment was really not so far from the one that had been on her face when she'd pulled out the aforementioned baseball bat. "THE OTHER FOUR SHOWED UP IN A CAR. HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THE STUPID CARJACKERS WOULD HAVE A SECOND STRING?"
“Audrey,” Thomas said, in a stern but ultimately pointless attempt to hold back that particular truth. Oh well. At least he didn’t have to lie to Max. He didn’t like doing it and he tried to avoid it wherever possible. He couldn’t think of a time where he had recently. For some reason he thought of racquetball, and suppressed a little mouth twitch just in time. “It’s only glass,” he said softly, brushing at Max’s worried fingers. “We’re both fine.”
Max, who was blindly pushing up Thomas’ sleeve, stopped the moment Audrey mentioned an unexpected second string. “This isn’t a GAME, Audrey, and you aren’t a cop or a soldier or a mask. Someone tries to steal something, you fucking HAND IT OVER. This place is fucking dangerous, and you don’t know how to defend yourself.” She looked up at Thomas’ face when he said they were fine, as if that reminded her that there were injuries to be tended to, and she let go of his sleeve and moved back. “In the elevator. Both of you,” she said, clearly trying to get it together.
Audrey was not getting into the elevator. She didn't want to hear anything else about how stupid and incapable and unskilled she was. Everything was hitting her at once, from the place where it had waited until she let her guard down - the realization that she really could have probably died back there, the anger, the hurt. She turned on heel and walked toward the front door, quickly enough to evade pursuit. She was ten feet from it when it wasn't a normal door anymore. It had been made of glass, and now it was white wood with a metal star embedded into the center of it. She yanked it open, revealing a glimpse of a vast, dark expanse beyond, walked through, and slammed it behind her. As soon as she did, the door was gone like it had never been, plain glass again, and there was no following after.
“Max,” Thomas said, in a voice slightly surprised at the tone of this scolding, since he’d never heard her talk to someone like that before. Thomas noticed Audrey’s direction a half-second too late, and while he didn’t know her that well and he’d chosen to allow her to continue her attack with the baseball bat (he was regretting it) he wasn’t going to just let her walk out onto the streets with nowhere to go. “Audrey, wait--” he made a lunge for her arm as she moved through the black door, but she was already gone.
“We can’t just let her go out there,” Max was already saying, even before Thomas moved, her panic increasing. She knew she’d been harsh, and she had a tendency to sound like her father at times, but it was fear that motivated it. They could have died - both of them, and the hour of pacing and fear, combined with the reality of six assailants was enough to make her not measure her words. “I need shoes,” she said, which was stupid at a time like this, so she just shook off the comment a moment later. “We can split up.” She had her keys in the pocket of her coat, and she dug them out. “She might go to Hamartia or somewhere near by.” She was talking a mile a minute, no breaks between words.
At least it was sports season. The guards were fixed intently on one of their screens that was most certainly not a security camera feed. Thomas turned around and caught Max before she pelted out the door. “I’ll go back to Hamartia. It’s not safe for you to be there. Try to contact her on the forums. Don’t yell.” There was something in his tone that was disapproving.
The disapproval, on top of everything else, was just too much for Max, and she shoved hard at his chest. “Don’t-” she said, hands shaking in earnest now. She looked down at his arm and up at his face. “Just don’t.” She wanted to go back inside and bandage him up, but it wasn’t an option, and the sooner they found Audrey the better. “She isn’t going to fucking talk to me. Just, go, and I’ll grab the truck and go to the other places she goes that I know of,” she said, already turning to go into the elevator, tense and angry and emotional.
“Max, just stay here.” He wasn’t running out the door after Audrey, he was trailing her and talking fast and quiet. “Tell me where these places are. You are running yourself ragged and it’s going to get worse if you keep working yourself up like this. I’m sure she’s fine.”
Max pushed the button that held the elevator doors open, and she looked at him. “She probably went to Hamartia,” she said, sounding tired. “Just, please, go. I’ll be at the warehouse, so she doesn’t have to deal with me once she gets here. If you can’t find her there, she goes to Reliquary and the Chinese place near the library.”
“No, you’re staying here,” Thomas said, in a voice that he didn’t use that often, a hard, severe voice. He hadn’t been truly angry with either of them, and he’d let Max vent her concern, but right now he was drawing a line. “You are staying here, where it is warm and where you could theoretically sleep, and where I know you are safe. I will go find Audrey, and you try to contact her by phone or forum. Stay here.”
“Don’t you get it? She isn’t going to come if I’m here,” Max said, “and I don’t want her out there.” It was that simple, and she took her fingers off the button holding the door open, feeling the sting of his anger. “Go.”
The elevator tried to close on Thomas’ shoulder with no success. It pinged unhappily. “Then we’ll set her up somewhere else. This is my place and you will be there. I will go get her and bring her here if possible, but you are not staying in that warehouse. You are staying here.”
Max nodded, a jerky nod that said she was close to tears. “I’ll take care of your arm once you get back,” she said, nudging at his chest where she’d shoved earlier. “And I know it’s not your fault. I was just so fucking scared.” The admission cost her, and she looked down when she said it and nudged again. “Go.”
“It’s not bad,” he reassured her, finally stepping back out of the elevator. “It’s just glass. I’ll find her.” The doors shut on his expression, which was no longer angry but resigned.