Max Main ≡ Lois Lane (bylined) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-01-19 02:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, lois lane, ramona flowers |
Who: Audrey, Thomas and Max
What: First aid, daddy issues & fluff
Where: Aubade
When: Immediately after this.
Warnings: Max curses like a sailor. We know this.
Audrey walked in a few steps in front of Thomas, unsure what she’d be walking into or how bad it would potentially be. She didn’t want to talk to Max again, didn’t want to have to face her, but she didn’t really have a choice in the matter. So she tried not to look overly cautious and kept her hands in her pockets, staying quiet and looking left and right as she came in. She didn’t see Max immediately, which was a bit of a relief.
The living room was modern beyond her personal tastes, all clean, inoffensive decor choices without too much personality. It seemed appropriate for what had originally likely been a bachelor apartment (albeit an absurdly rich one) and Audrey didn’t think for a moment that Thomas had picked everything out himself. He didn’t seem like the type, nor did the place exactly radiate his personality, except for, perhaps, in the clean straightforwardness of it.
Max had only started pacing a few minutes before, so she wasn’t as worked up as she had been the last time she’d seen them. She’d spent a better part of the wait setting out tweezers and bandages and a bowl of clean, hot water. Luke was asleep, and so the living room was quiet, the lights on the end tables the only true source of glow in the space. She’d lost the coat, and she looked thin and tired, but grateful to see them. She held her tongue, and she didn’t chastise, though her expression very much said she wanted to.
After hesitating awkwardly for a moment, Max stepped forward and came just short of both of them, hugging her arms around herself instinctively, a habit Audrey might remember from when they were children. “Take off the coat,” she said, intentionally keeping her voice down. “Let’s see how bad the glass is.” She looked like she wanted to say more, possibly move forward, but she didn’t. Instead, she motioned to one of the couches. “Sit.”
Thomas would have rather gone to bed, but he didn’t like the look on Max’s face. He avoided checking Audrey’s expression and, since he hadn’t put on a coat, sat down on the edge of one of the couches and rolled up his sleeve. He’d done a splendid job grinding his forearm into window glass that wasn’t meant to shatter except under extreme duress, but that meant the chunks were pretty big and several of them fell out from under his sleeve on the table. He didn’t say anything.
Audrey did recognize the hugging, vaguely, but didn't say anything about it. She did, however, appreciate on some level that she was no longer being chastised. She didn't fight Max on the order - Thomas was in a worse way than her anyway, and she sat down on the other side of the couch and shucked her leather jacket. Her arms were bloodied again even though she'd cleaned them for want of a bandage, but there was no glass in them and the cuts were shallow, if numerous. She looked over at Thomas and winced a little. "Man."
Max was accustomed to battle scars and wounds, but Thomas’ injuries always managed to affect her, and her lips went taut with the desire to scream again, but she managed to curb herself at the last minute. She glanced over at Audrey, who at least didn’t seem to have any large pieces of glass in her skin, and it helped calm her slightly. She sat on the edge of the couch, grabbed for a tweezer and began pulling glass out of Thomas’ arm, a sense of deja vu washing over her. “You came back,” she said to Audrey as she worked, finding it easier to talk to her sister while she was busy doing something entirely focused. “Are you staying?”
Thomas shifted one shoulder just slightly to the side to try to obscure Audrey’s line of sight, even if it was just to put his arm in slight shadow. Unfortunately that made it a lot harder to pick out glass splinters, especially since there was blood involved. Thomas would prefer Audrey didn’t see the number of scars he had just on his forearms alone, since if he took a hit on his forearm it meant he was blocking correctly, so the scarring was colorful. He watched impassively as Max worked, but his eyes flicked worriedly to Audrey for her response to the question.
"Yep," Audrey said. She was tense, that was for sure, fingers laced around each other, and she was staring at her nails, which were chipped around the edges from coming down hard on the sidewalk. She glanced over at Thomas again, and got a vague impression of scarring before the blood and watching Max pull a chunk of glass from his arm made her look back at her nails again.
Max’s eyes were watering, and she mentally blamed it on the dim light. She was aware of the scarring, but she thought the blood would obscure enough of it that Audrey wouldn’t notice. And her sister wasn’t stupid; if Audrey didn’t think she and Thomas were covert government agents by this time, well, she would eat her shoe. She pulled out one particularly large, deep piece of glass, and she reached over and dipped a towel in the water and noticed Audrey looking at her nails as she did. She pressed the towel against Thomas’ arm to stop the bleeding, attention on the white fabric as it was stained with blood. “I’m going to start thinking Brandon has better communication skills than I do,” she said awkwardly - something to fill the silence and keep her from bitching, which she wanted to do.
Thomas looked up from his arm into Max’s face. He did a really terrible job of hiding his worry, particularly since Thomas didn’t generally have much in the way of expression so it was glaringly obvious when he did. “We talked,” he said, slightly defensive about his communication skills--and lack thereof. “I can do that. Get Audrey’s cleaned.” He turned a hand over for the towel encouragingly.
Audrey did, in fact, think they were something black ops related, but she knew better than to ask. Just yet, anyway. She could actually smell the blood from where she was sitting, which did nothing but deepen her own guilt, which she kept to herself. "We did," she agreed, mostly because it was something to say. "He was very much the gentleman. Let me open the door for him and everything." She smiled to herself a touch, involuntarily, at the private joke.
Max handed Thomas the towel reluctantly. Concentrating on his injuries was easier than actually interacting with her sister a this point, because she was fairly sure their normal bickering would lead to her running off again. Regardless, she stood and carried the water bowl to the kitchen, returning with a clean one a moment later and taking her place in front of Audrey on the coffee table. The scratches were the stubborn kind that stung and bled, and she tried to clean them as quickly as she could. She was silent for a few awkward minutes. “I don’t have any idea what to fucking say that won’t make you run off,” she finally admitted.
Thomas turned the antiseptic over on some cotton and tried to blend into the scenery. By his standards the cuts weren't that bad, worth disinfecting but little else. The stinging pain was a nuisance and the blood was more embarrassing than anything. He just looked down and appeared to focus on his task.
Audrey watched her clean, and tried not to flinch. The pain wasn't really that bad, but every once in a while the antiseptic sank deep into a cut and stung more than it had getting the cuts in the first place. She just set her jaw and stayed quiet, and when Max finally spoke again she huffed out a brief laugh without thinking, pent up tension plain as day. "I'm not going to run off again," she said, staring at her arm, now, instead of Max. "Once was definitely embarrassing enough."
Max could feel the flinching under her fingers, and she came thisclose to making a comment about the fact that Audrey had brought it upon herself. She reached for the bandages while the antiseptic dried, and she wrapped a thin layer of bandage over each of Audrey’s forearms in silence. She was perfectly aware that Thomas’ presence had both Audrey and herself on their best behavior; she though it might be the longest they’d been in a room together without fighting. The silence was awkward, and it felt it.
Thomas had very little experience with family problems, having no family and few problems that involved talking and hugging. To him it just felt as though neither had anything to say, and it was unfortunate rather than awkward. Thomas habitually inflicted such silences on everyone who knew him. He went off to the kitchen to get a bag for the bloody mess.
Audrey watched him get up and walk away and felt, irrationally, like she was being abandoned. She was also aware that Thomas was the one keeping the peace just be sitting there silently on the other end of the couch, and now he'd fled.
Audrey’s gaze flicked up from her arm as Max bandaged it to her sister, then back down again. "Look - I know you're still pissed off. So you don't have to pretend like you're not. If we have to live in the same apartment together, we're not going to make it through the experience with smiles plastered on, or just not talking. One or the other of us is going to explode and kill everybody if we do that."
That got Max’s attention, and Thomas wasn’t even out of earshot before her head came up and she replied. “I’m not pissed. I’m fucking worried because you won’t admit that what you did was dangerous as hell. You keep defending it, and you could have gotten killed. At least tell me you get it, and I’ll fucking feel better.”
Audrey’s eyes narrowed. Well, that peace had lasted approximately two seconds. "Fine. It was stupid, I already feel fucking bad about it, and you can keep hammering it in as long as you like. Does that make you feel better? I was wrong, you were right, and you're the good witch as always. Call me if you find those ruby slippers I lost."
“That isn’t what I meant,” Max said, almost before Audrey finished her sentence. “I just want your word that you’ll be safer. This isn’t Musings, and the wicked fucking witch reference wasn’t necessary. I already worried about-” she cut herself off there. “I just want you to be fucking safe, okay? That’s the point.”
"Fine. I'll be safe. I'll sit my ass down in a pool full of styrofoam and I'll never go out." Audrey shook her head. "You act like everything in Musings was daisies and butterflies. It was worse there."
“What the hell are you talking about?” Max asked. “You lived in the suburbs in Musings.” There was jealousy in that statement, sharp and tangible.
Audrey stiffened. The jealousy wasn't what she picked up on, it was the words that hit her hard. "Are you actually patronizing me about not going anywhere growing up? Because no one ever asked me to go running around the country. I begged. I begged our father to let me go, and he pretended he didn't hear me until I annoyed him so badly he told mom in front of me that he wasn't taking me anywhere, not for any price. He said that in front of me, like I wasn't even standing there. So don't you patronize me." Her voice went icy, and there was no questioning how furious she was. "You don't know anything about me," she said, leaning toward her. "Nothing. You don't know where I was when you were off being everyone's favorite superspy, you don't know who I was with, you don't know where I lived or who I knew. You do not know me."
Audrey’s arm seemed suitably bandaged, so she stood up. "I'm going to go move into my new room," she said, voice flat and cold as iron.
Max started to interrupt early on, because what the fuck? She hadn’t said anything about Audrey not going anywhere while she was growing up. She’d meant that life in the suburbs wasn’t the same as life in vigilante-filled Seattle, where Reavers and Night Terrors and Mask Killers ran around attacking people at every turn. She would have interrupted, but then Audrey kept going, and Max shook her head, trying to get a word in edgewise. Finally, she stood up before Audrey did, because she just couldn’t take the fact that Audrey thought being a superspy was a good thing.
“It’s not my fault the General didn’t take you places, but let me tell you something, you were the lucky one,” Max said as she stood. “You got to stay home with mom and play with dolls and have tea parties. I was off learning how to kill someone by the time I was fucking thirteen, so don’t you try to pull that shit on me. I might not know anything about your life, but I do know that mom chose you. And if you think the General only insulted you in front of people, well you’re living a dream. That man was a motherfucker to everyone he ever fucking met, and I’m the one who had to live with his expectations day in and day out. You don’t have any idea what being a superspy was like,” she said, finally losing steam as her voice started to shake. “And I’m not going to fucking tell you, either, so just keep thinking whatever the hell it is you think. I just wanted you to be safer,” she said, throwing the towel onto the coffee table and walking to the window, arms hugged tight around herself, back to Audrey.
Thomas reappeared in the doorway. The raised voices had naturally brought him back in the room, which he’d been trying to avoid for the last minute or so. It was his perception that siblings long separated should want to talk to each other, and he didn’t understand whatever dynamic constantly set them at odds. A great many things involving family went over Thomas’ head, however. There was one thing about this conversation that he didn’t like--and it kept coming up. “Both of you sit down,” he said, in a very sharp voice that was (how little he knew it) extremely General-like.
Audrey's gaze flicked over to Thomas. She did not intend on listening to that command, but she wasn't going to let Max's diatribe go without response either. There were admittedly parts of it she found unnerving but wasn't sure she believed - killing at thirteen? Her visions of Max's trips with her father had always been that he was someone else around her because he liked her better. The fact that she might have been wrong was a touch unnerving, but still - he had chosen Max. What she said stung, but that didn't change the things she knew to be true.
"She didn't pick me," Audrey muttered under her breath. "I was just left behind, where she didn't have to do any work to get me." No one, in Audrey's experience, ever picked her. Really only the people she'd had relationships with had picked her, and that was a dubious distinction at best. She leaned in the opening of the hallway, eying Thomas.
Max didn’t move from her spot at the window, not because she was trying to be intentionally difficult, but because it was easier to hide her hurt with her back turned to the room and he arms wound tight around herself. “Bullshit,” she said quietly, regarding her mother. She was three years older than Audrey; she remembered what she remembered.
Thomas didn’t want another call in the middle of the night to reunite these two just so they could fight again, and he felt as if this was going over and over. He moved over to the window first, and he took Max’s arm (gently) to pull her toward the couch. He got her there and then moved toward Audrey in a way he didn’t mean to be threatening but was definitely absolute. “Why are you talking about these people as if they command your lives now?”
"You're saying to let bygones be bygones," Audrey said, flatly. She held her ground physically, arms crossed over her chest. "I hate to break it to you man, but they still do."
Max didn’t like the idea of anyone from back in Musings controlling her, the General, her mother, anyone. “No, they don’t,” she said surely, because this wasn’t about them, it was about the past, which no one could change, and well Max knew it.
Thomas turned his head sharply to narrow his eyes at Max. He was angry, but not at her, and not at Audrey. It was palpable, however, visible in his muscles even when he wasn’t moving. “You still call him a General. Like you’re his army. Do you realize that?”
"She was his army, not me, and he was always the General, and yes, they do." Audrey turned back to Max. "You can't think back thirty seconds to all the things you just said and tell me it's not like they aren't still here." She pushed away from the doorframe, walking toward the kitchen. She felt even more tired now than she had before. "That's part of why I left. I had to get away from it."
“Fine. I was his army. Fine. They don’t control shit anymore,” Max said, sounding even more tired than she did angry. “It doesn’t mean we aren’t still affected by our experiences with them, because we are, but it’s the not the same as them calling the shots. If the General was still calling the shots, I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be in the fucking field somewhere, using the fact that I was knocked up to everyone’s advantage. It isn’t the same thing. You can’t run away from your past. I fucking tried; it doesn’t work.”
“Then he’s not the general. He’s your father.” Thomas felt that the difference was vital, from the sound of his voice, and suddenly there was a very large, very serious man between Audrey and a full retreat to the kitchen. She was staying. “Sit,” he said, quieter.
Audrey stopped in front of Thomas stared at him for a moment, and then sighed, turning back around and walking toward an arm chair, stopping to stand behind it. "Do we really need to have this conversation right now? I don't know about you two, but I'm exhausted. I don't think right now is the best time to try to patch up twenty years of sibling rivalry. And trust me, Max, you can run from the past. I have a PhD in it."
“You can try, but you can’t run from who you are, and going through a portal doesn’t change that,” Max said, and she turned her attention to Thomas. “He was always the General. He was never anything else,” she said, as exhausted as she was sure. “And, Audrey,” she added, “all I was trying to say was that this place is more dangerous than anything Musings had to offer, whether you think it’s true or not.” She didn’t add that the last time she’d seen Audrey’s face was in a dream, while her back was being sliced open. She didn’t think that was necessary information.
Thomas stepped back. His bid for sanity obviously didn’t have any effect, and he had no better ideas. He didn’t understand what the two of them had going on, and perhaps he was wrong to interfere. “You’re letting them hurt you,” he said, to both of them. He didn’t hear either of them doing anything about it, but he felt like he had to say it. It made him angry, but it was a pointless anger, and he could tell it was true. He stepped back again and shook his head.
"I never got shot at in Musings, so you're at least right about that." Audrey was staring at the seat of the chair now, as Thomas accused her of letting her father hurt her still. "Yeah," Audrey mumbled. "That's my plan." She sighed again. "That isn't how it works. Trust me, if I could erase it all from my brain with a laser, I'd do it in a heartbeat." She walked around the chair. If she wasn't going to be allowed to go into the kitchen to get a glass of water, as had been her intention, she saw no point in prolonging the misery.
“You wouldn’t be you,” Max said, standing and looking at Audrey. “If it had happened differently, you’d be someone completely fucking different, and I doubt you’d want to be anyone other than who you are,” she said, walking up to Thomas a moment later and rubbing his upper arm as she passed him. “You, too. We’re not to only ones affected by our past, you are, everyone is,” she said as gently as she could manage. “Audrey thinks I had it good, and I think she had it good, and nothing is going to change that, at least not right away.” It was the calmest she’d been all night, and she rubbed her lower back with the heel of her palm as she said it.
“At least,” Thomas said, after a slow moment, “you both had ‘it.’ Whatever that is.” He didn’t move away from Max, but he didn’t move toward her either, avoiding her eyes but checking what he could see of her physical appearance.
Audrey laughed, low and dry. "No we didn't," she said, looking over her shoulder at him. "She's right. And I'm going to try to get some sleep." She looked between at the pair of them. "You guys should probably do the same thing." She didn't give them enough time to interpret it as a sign of affection, walking up the stairs to find a room with a bed instead.
Max understood where Thomas was coming from in a way Audrey didn’t, couldn’t. and she touched his cheek with tentatively soft fingers. “I know what you meant,” she said, keeping her voice quiet and low. She wasn’t sure it was better, but he seemed sure it was, and it was something she would never understand, losing a parent, because she’d never experienced it. Sure, her mother had left, but she’d still been alive somewhere. “Sorry about tonight,” she said, watching the empty stairs Audrey had climbed.
Thomas covered his reaction to Audrey’s laugh, well enough, at least, by turning to face the other direction, his back to her. Max got a clear view of a flicker of loss that was absolutely unmistakable. “I was trying to help.” Badly, it seemed. “You should go to bed. Like she said.” He covered it up as best he could and tried to back up again, indicating the stairs with his hand.
The flicker of loss broke Max’s heart in a way she didn’t think possible, and she actually had to struggle to keep her eyes from watering. She stretched up and kissed his cheek, closing her eyes as she leaned against his side. “You helped. She’s here, and she went to sleep without yelling, and we both have something to think about,” she said, reassuring. “All I managed to do was run her into some magic door.” It was true, and she ran her fingers through the hair at his temple. “The sun’s almost up. Come lie down with me?”
He didn’t want her to see him like this, and he shook his head. “Not... now. Later. Go.” He brushed his fingers over her arm toward the stairs again. He hadn’t meant to bring it up, or bring it into her problems, but the problem was that whenever he thought about parenthood he couldn’t help but think about his parents. He thought it negatively affected his judgment. It certainly had in the past.
Max knew he was upset, and she knew what it was like to want to be alone and not let anyone see the hurt. Normally, she would have done what he asked, retreated, but she tentatively shook her head against the crook of his neck. “I don’t want you to be alone,” she said. “Come to bed?” It was an unsure request, but it was heartfelt, and her hand slipped into his, and she tugged.
“Fine.” He didn’t like it, but she didn’t seem angry at him yet, so he gave in. She could be angry at him later. It wouldn’t be much different from now. “If you’re sure.” It wasn’t a question, and he moved with her, perhaps blindly, but resigned.
Max didn’t like that resignation, and she stepped in front of him and looked up into his gray eyes. “You don’t have to,” she said, no anger in any of the words. “Only if you want to, Thomas.”
It wasn’t that kind of resignation. He met her eyes. “I shouldn’t have said anything about your father. I’m sorry.” He meant it. Thomas didn’t apologize at people unless he really, really meant it.
The eye contact made Max feel better, more certain in discussing this, even though the topic was a hard one for her. She cupped his cheeks, fingers calloused by years of shooting guns, and she steadied herself emotionally before speaking. “Don’t apologize. You’re a good man, Thomas. He isn’t, and I never talk about it, so you had no way of knowing. But you were right, he does still-” she paused. “I still think about how disappointed he would be every day. You were right,” she admitted, something she hadn’t wanted to do in front of Audrey. “Audrey thinks he was wonderful. He wasn’t.” She went quiet a moment. “Were they good to you, your parents?”
“To me, they were.” He tried to smile, but it didn’t work, so he stopped. “I think,” he said, with painful sincerity, “your father should be proud. You have done more than survive here, and that is an accomplishment." His hand naturally rested on her hip, comforting, though he didn’t know it was so.
The fact that he couldn’t remember if they were good to him, it made Max’s eyes water the way they’d been threatening to for the entire conversation, and she wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned into him, warm and soft and comforting. “They’d be so proud of you,” she said, but her voice was cracking, so she didn’t say anything else, hoping he’d understand.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” The embrace helped, so he let her do it, and he dropped his head down over hers for a moment. “It’s not important. I didn’t mean to make it important.” He touched her hair. “Bed,” he reminded, helpfully. He moved away just enough to pull, awkward enough to prefer privacy to the hallway if they want to continue the conversation.
“It’s important,” Max assured him, her voice fiercely protective. There was some of the old worship there, the worship she’d had when talking about the Bat, even before she knew who he was. But there was something more, too, not put into words. When he pulled, she moved in front of him, tugging on his fingers toward the master bedroom. It was getting light out, the sun visible through the windows, and she was exhausted, but somehow getting him into bed and out of his bloodstained, glass-torn clothes was more important than anything else just then, getting him somewhere safe.
Thomas just wanted to rest. When he didn’t rest, his judgment took another dive, and there had to be reasons why he made mistakes. There had to be. He felt better as the door shut behind them, and he dropped his shirt where he always dropped his shirt. The glass scrapes were just a memory now, and he dropped onto his back. “You’re right. It’s important.” The darkness made him feel better.
Max was still dressed in one of his shirts and a pair of pajama pants, and she waited for him to crawl into bed before joining him, turning onto her side and looking at him in the dark, his profile, trying to make out the expression on his face. She was tired enough that her eyes drifted closed within seconds, and she took his hand and put it on her stomach, where there was fluttering and kicking. “What was your mother’s name?” she asked, voice already starting to go thick with sleep.
He was too tired to sleep yet, and he concentrated on the fluttering with absolute intensity, the palm of his hand focused, and a very strange smile invisible in the dark. “Amanda. Her name was Amanda.” A second later, urgent because he knew she was going to sleep: “How can you rest if she’s always kicking?”
The question made Max open her eyes, because he generally didn’t ask about the pregnancy, just like he normally didn’t touch her very often. “I don’t get much sleep,” she admitted. “She only started moving around this month,” she added, covering his hand with hers and moving it to where the strongest kicking was, which was strong. “We need to go to the doctor,” she added, voice going softer again. “Amanda’s a pretty name.” Snippets of sentences, all said without thought.
“We need to go to the doctor,” he repeated, thickly. “Immediately.” He shifted toward her on the bed, but for once, his ‘immediately’ didn’t mean ‘right this very second. “My father used to call her ‘Manda.’” He didn’t move. “I thought it meant ‘mother’ right up until I was four or five, I think.” He sighed and pulled in a pillow to try to get his eyes shut.
Max just made a sound of agreement when he repeated her comment about the doctor, her fingers moving to lazily thread through his hair, stilling entirely when he started talking again, not wanting to make him stop with the movement. She smiled, and it was a sad smile. “Manda,” she repeated, and it was obvious she was imagining him when he was little. “I bet you were adorable,” she said, the smile in her voice going fond-warm, even as she moved closer, using his good shoulder as a pillow, tired enough not to be self-conscious of stealing his space. “Do you want to name her that?” she asked, the end of the question almost disappearing into a yawn.
“It means good things for me,” he said, not agreeing or disagreeing. “We’ll think about it.” His voice slowed too as he let everything shut down enough to rest. It was a conscious process. “...And I was adorable, yes.” He smiled, put an arm around her even though it would put his arm to sleep in an hour, and closed his eyes again.