Max Main ≡ Lois Lane (bylined) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-11-07 14:54:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, lois lane |
Who: Max and Thomas Bat
What: The Bat thinks storming into a hospital in full gear is a good idea, and he intends to find Charlie. Also, these two suck at discussing unprotected sex consequences.
Where: Seattle Grace
When: Immediately after Charlie's nightmare attack. (Say today)
Warnings: None
Max had woken up in her own apartment, the bedsheets damp with sweat and stained with blood, and she knew (even before she reached her hand over her shoulder) that the injuries from the nightmare were real. She was still in a daze, something fugue-like and intended to help keep her mind safe and her wits about her. It was a good thing, the dissociative calm, protective and safe.
She climbed out of bed, and she grabbed a coat without bothering to dress in anything more than the striped pajamas she was wearing. Shoes and a scarf later, she slipped out the door without waking Mason. She didn’t call for anyone to drive her (she knew the wounds weren’t deep enough to kill her), and she wasn’t about to try to deal with them on her own (she knew that most of the recent assault victims did just that). Instead, she hailed a cab in the early morning hours, and she kept her back away from the seat as she rode to the hospital.
The ER called in a police officer, someone inexperienced and new to assaults, and she answered his questions honestly. She knew, however, that this report couldn’t get out, shouldn’t get out, and she planned to get in touch with Kyle after she was sent home. She was still dazed, and she refused therapy or victim’s counseling; she didn’t need either.
She could hear the officer talking to the doctor outside, and as she waited for the doctor, and the stitches that were sure to follow, she picked up the communicator she had tucked into her coat.
“Bat. Isolate a channel.”
It was early dawn, and Thomas had just fallen into bed in the highest corner apartment of Aubade. It had been a long night, but at least it had been productive, and the brawl with the mugging ring’s leader had been worth it even if he felt like someone had been beating him with a baseball bat. Once back in the apartment, he hadn’t done more than check to make sure that Luke was there before dropping on to a fully-made bed. He had set the communicator, however, to reach his phone when it wasn’t in his ear, and it went off only seconds after he had managed the black sleep of exhaustion that always took him when he allowed it so.
He stirred and listened to the request. He rolled over with a groan and got the communicator on and in one ear. He opened an individual channel and it was a mark of his state of mind that he didn’t use codenames. “Max.”
He sounded tired, like she’d woken him, and she was sorry for that; she knew how little he slept. In the background, the telltale sounds of a hospital filtered through, the beeping of machines and the codes being called over the PA. “Sorry to wake you, Bat,” she said, keeping her teasing tone in place, as always, very intentionally. “Feel like doing me a favor?”
The background noise got his attention. Even half-asleep, Thomas knew what a hospital sounded like, and it would take more than exhaustion to get him to miss something like that. “Why are you at a hospital?” Favors, apparently, were granted based on information available.
“I had a run in with our dream assailant, and I’d like some DNA in our hands, as well as Seattle PD’s,” she said, voice just a bit distant. “Seattle Grace,” she added a moment later.
“Did they already take samples?” Rustling; he was moving. His voice took on that inhuman calm he used when he was on a job and suppressing everything else. The ability to turn it off like that was one of the scarier things about him.
“No. The inexperienced police officer on duty is out there talking to the doctor, but he isn’t forensics. They’ll need to stitch soon, though, and we’ll be screwed once that happens. You know doctors; they aren’t going to wait longer than they have to,” she told him, and the voices outside the door raised a little, as if to prove her words right.
“I need your location and an access point.” The rustling stopped--not because he’d stopped moving, but because he was making a concentrated effort to leave the apartment in silence.
“ER, bed three, closest to the OR doors. You can probably get in that way, assuming you want to avoid the main desk?” There was a smile in that question, because only Thomas would worry about access points in the ER.
Slight pause. “I was hoping for a window.” The microphones were good, and there was a faint sound of a door closing as he left Aubade.
She went quiet for a moment; she was thinking. She wasn’t paying the sort of attention when she walked in that she normally would, and it took her a minute to call to mind the walk. “Northeast corner of the ER. There’s a window. Bed three is two rooms down.” She paused again. “No patients in the two adjacent rooms. Clear cross.”
“Eleven to twelve minutes,” he replied after ten seconds’ calculation. “Give me as much information as you can.” He knew she’d have to stop talking if someone interrupted or she could be overheard. Meanwhile he was already on the move, and the slight hint of wind in the microphone could easily paint a picture of how he planned on crossing that distance so quickly. Running steps.
“He said his name is the Night Terror. He said he wanted me to tell you all that he was coming and that no one could stop him.” It was more casual conversation than a military report, and that (in and of itself) was an indication that she was nowhere near the top of her game, regardless of how calm she sounded.
She went quiet a moment later, and she gave the entering doctor a smile and a greeting, more for the benefit of the man in her ear than out of any desire to be friendly. The doctor, audible through the communicator, looked at her back (she was in a hospital robe, the back open), and he told her they’d be drawing some blood before stitching her up and giving her a tetanus shot. He went on to ask if she could be pregnant (standard question with a tetanus shot), and she stammered around the question and didn’t give a verbal answer, her mind turning to counting dates and weeks. In the end, the doctor interrupted the mental mathematics, and he told her not to worry, that they’d send in a nurse and they’d need to give the police department a few more minutes to come in with a DNA swabbing kit.
Thomas nearly fell between two rooftops when they got to the pregnancy question, and he had been doing free-running since before they had a name for it. He slid to a stop on gravel, caught his breath, and said without thinking, “Are you pregnant?” He regretted it as soon as it got out of his mouth, and he stared hard at the lights of the hospital as if he could haul it back before it got to her.
She was trying to remember when she’d last had her period, and she wasn’t having any luck without a calendar or some indicator of date in front of her. “Of course not,” she told him, but there was enough doubt in her voice to drive a semi through. She couldn’t say anything else, though, because the nurse was coming through the door with her needle and vials, and the only sound on her end for the next few minutes was the nurse’s chatter and one sharp intake of breath when the needle slid into her vein. Her pulse was racing, and the nurse sweetly told her to calm down, and Max almost told the woman to fuck off. Almost.
Thomas made an odd noise on his end in response to this, and it sounded as if something had crawled into his throat and stuck there, but he could no more say anything than she could. On his end, more running feet, the impact of boots on little-disturbed rooftops, wind, and finally soft scraping sounds of fabric and kevlar on concrete.
The nurse took her little vials, and she asked Max to lie on her side, which she did, a hospital blanket around her hips and her exposed back toward the door, four gashes crossing diagonally from shoulder to hip. Someone would be in shortly, the nurse told her, to take some samples. And then she was gone and Max was alone counting dates in her head. She had never been particularly regular, and she couldn’t remember ever worrying about being late, even when she’d forgotten protection (which wasn’t often). She closed her eyes, and she tried to force herself to relax. It would be fine; it had always been fine before. She listened to the sounds in her ear, but she didn’t interrupt.
Since she was listening so closely, and he was too full of thoughts to say anything, there was a great deal to hear. More soft scraping of concrete, the slight exhale of breath as he moved down the wall, the steel cord sounds of a supportive zip-line as he dropped the appropriate distance. The sharpest sound was something on glass as he found his way through the window, which wasn’t exactly built to open from the outside. The sounds of the hospital interior were now soft echoes in her ear as he waited for rushing feet. A quick movement must have been him ducking into one of those empty rooms to wait out more nurses. The wait was frustrating the way waits always are. “You’re not because you can’t be,” he said, slightly desperately.
All the movements outside lulled her. They meant safety and strength, both things which meant something after what had just happened, even if she didn’t admit it had bothered her. When the sound of the hospital filtered through the communicator, she inadvertently listened for the doctor, who she knew thought she was insane, as did the police. She didn’t hear those voices, however. And his voice surprised her, because she wasn’t expecting him to speak again before he walked into her room. There were sounds outside the room, someone being rushed by, and she suspected he was being forced to wait it out.
She might have answered differently, if he hadn’t sounded so desperate for the response to be no. But even through her worry, she was worried about him, and she forced a less-than convincing grin into her voice. “Don’t worry, Bat. I’m sure you’re not going to have to worry about little league anytime soon.”
“That’s what you said before. ‘Don’t worry.’ I’m starting to think it didn’t mean what I thought it meant.” He kept himself from pacing out of sheer self-restraint as a veritable river of hospital personnel separated them.
She had no idea what he was talking about. “What?” she asked, and she sounded as confused as she felt right then, drawn tight and tired. “Listen, we had sex twice. I’m sure we’re fine. Married people spend years trying to get pregnant.” She didn’t let herself think about the fact that it only took one time, and that odds said that one time could happen anywhere along the line.
He was staring at the door with his mouth open, which he realized when he had to shut it and his teeth clicked. Hard. Because then he was grinding them. “You’re telling me there wasn’t any protection.” Flatly. Because he was pretty sure that was what she was telling him. And if these people didn’t get out of the way...
When he said it like that, it made her so unexpectedly hurt that she rolled onto her back unthinkingly. The feel of the hospital bed against those blade marks made her hiss, and she rolled forward again before she managed to reply. “It wasn’t intentional,” she said, and she sounded hurt, even through rising anger. “It wasn’t on purpose. I wasn’t thinking. You aren’t-” What? A one-night stand? The first time she’d had sex without planning on never seeing the person again? The first time she hadn’t thought? She didn’t finish the sentence. She could leave it open, she knew. Let him think it wasn’t him and- No. She wasn’t pregnant.
He hadn’t meant to hurt her, of course, but his intentions weren’t doing a whole hell of a lot for either of them at the moment. After a moment he said, gruffly, “I wasn’t thinking either.” What an idiot. No better than a teenager. Worse, as he didn’t have the excuse of age or inexperience. A second later he was his flat, imperious self again. “I can’t get across the hall yet. How badly are you injured?” he demanded.
The gruffness in his voice helped, and her voice was calmer when he spoke the second time. “Four gashes from shoulder to hip,” she told him, and it sounded better than it looked, the gashes wide and diagonal. “Nothing life threatening, nothing stitches won’t handle.” She said it like significant injuries really weren’t a concern, because they weren’t, not really. Not in her line of work, not in his. “If the police take the DNA sample, I can always see if my contact can get it for us. The knives he used, they had blood on them,” she told him. Practical.
He managed to get her with four knives, and on her back, otherwise they most certainly would be life-threatening. That meant she had been running in this dream. He stared darkly out the door and considered doing something drastic to get across that hallway. Like walk in front of people. “How powerful is he? In the dream?” He didn’t know how to ask if she’d managed to defend herself in any way. Witness connection was not his strong point.
“Limitless,” she told him plainly, because there was no good that could come of sugar coating, not if they wanted to catch this man. “He can control the surroundings. I shot him in the head repeatedly, and he stood back up. I ran, and he followed. I locked him out, and he just opened the door.” She didn’t mention that the apartment had been Thomas,’ because she didn’t think he needed to know that. It seemed personal, somehow unimportant to anyone but her.
She started to speak again, but then the sound of the door opening came across the communicator. “Doctor,” she said, sounding surprised that it wasn’t the police. She took one look at the man’s face, and she shut the communicator off and disconnected the call.
Limitless? That wasn’t good. Max had just told him that there was an unknown assailant, likely a Creation, that could attack people in their dreams, with limitless power. Thomas didn’t dream, or if he did, he didn’t remember them, because he was too tired to. He tried to remember his last dream, and could not. How could he protect her--anyone--in a realm he couldn’t reach?
Her greeting of the doctor interrupted these thoughts, and he realized he was disconnected a moment later.
The Bat shoved open the door into the fully illuminated hallway. Two nurses had just rounded the corner, and the camera scanned just out of sight, and he walked the few yards to the appropriate door and walked in with only the cape caught on film--by chance, not by design.
When the door opened, she was sitting up, and the doctor was standing at her bedside. He wasn’t looking at the marks on her back at all. No, he was just talking, her chart folded against his stomach.
They both looked over as soon as there was movement, and Max didn’t even come close to stifling her groan. No wonder he wanted a window. Dear fucking god. She took a shuddering breath, even as the doctor moved between the bed and the door protectively. “It’s alright,” she told him, and she knew they had maybe two minutes to get the Bat out once the doctor left the room. “Could you leave us alone a moment... please?” she asked the doctor, and oh, this was bad. This was worse than- no, that was bad too. But this was worse.
Oh, he was blocking the door. He was big enough to do so, and since he looked like a human-shaped tank, he was effective at it. “Stay.” It was a grim, dark sound. “Miss Main has insisted on making a target of herself with this column of hers.” The hard gray eyes flicked from the doctor to Max and back. He was satisfied that this explained his presence. “Diagnosis.” Another metallic flick of gaze, this time clearly at the wounds visible.
The doctor looked torn between responding and maintaining patient confidentiality, but in the end, he seemed to decide that a crime was an acceptable topic of conversation, as long as no one was being injured. Max looked livid, and that didn’t change as the doctor worked his way through an explanation of depth of injuries, potential ways this could have been worse, healing time, concerns and more information than could possibly be necessary. He didn’t, however, go into anything that wouldn’t make the police report, and Max was grateful for that.
When the doctor explained that he would have to allow the police in, Max shook her head. “No. There is no way the police are coming in here. No fucking way.” She would have pulled a gun on the doctor then, if she had it. There was the APB to worry about, and this was the stupidest fucking thing that could possibly be happening. She looked over at the Bat. “You’re leaving,” she insisted. “Before they arrest you.”
The doctor did a very good job of standing there and reciting as he was meant to with the Bat staring at him, unblinking, examining and weighing every single word, and then clearly storing it somewhere that didn’t require note-taking. He didn’t look at Max except to look for the injuries being described, and that made the short conversation much easier for him. After the doctor (a brave, brave man) heralded the imminent arrival of the police, then he looked Max in the face. “What happens when you sleep again?”
“I’m not falling asleep now,” she assured him, her voice clearly saying they were not having this conversation now. Later, once she was out. But not now. “Take a sample and go.” She stared back at him, at those gray eyes and hidden expression. There was something in her own eyes that spoke to something beyond what was being discussed right then, but she wasn’t going to talk about that either, not now.
There was a tense pause, and then the iron eyes went back to the doctor and he moved toward him, away from the door. “Thank you for your time, doctor.” He knew the man was going to go straight to security, but he was untroubled by it. Moving like water through the air thanks to that cape of his, he came up next to her on the bed and gave her an unreadable look. “You’re going to have to sleep eventually.” He removed some swabs with built-in plastic caps for the blood samples. His voice was measured.
The doctor was, of course, out the door before the cape had even stopped moving. “We can talk about that later,” she said, and she wanted to tell him to wear fucking Armani to the hospital the next time, but she didn’t want to risk it. She knew perfectly well hospital rooms sometimes had visual security, and she didn’t want to give anything away. “Go,” she repeated, looking toward the door the doctor had vanished through.
Outside, security was being paged, along with a code number she didn’t recognize.
For someone who had the police department interested in who he was and what he was doing, he certainly was in no hurry. He took eight swabs, two from each of her wounds, high and mid-way down her back. The little plastic cases clicked over the stained cotton and each went into little plastic evidence bags that had numbers and letters already on them, so all he had to do was memorize each one. He gave her a hard look from within the shadows of the mask. “Later,” he said, and it was something between a promise and an order.
Security was coming up the stairs as he left the room. There was shouting in the hallway, but only running feet and no sounds of scuffle.
She climbed off the bed and went to the door, but the policeman was there to block her way, and she could only listen and trust that he would get out fine. Now that he was gone, she let herself look as scared as she felt - about him almost getting caught, about the man in the dreams, about the conversation with the doctor before he’d interrupted.
She didn’t leave the hospital until afternoon. Between the extra consultations, the stitches and the repeated police interviews (which spent more time focusing on the Bat than on what had happened) minutes had turned into hours of “Who is the Bat?” and “How do you know the Bat?” She repeated the same lies over and over, and they weren’t going to get anything out of her, not with her training. But it was still exhausting, and she would have loved to take the police escort that was offered and go straight home, but she wasn’t going wait for them to release her. She knew better, knew about being trailed and tracked. It took another four hours of roundabout cab rides and ins-and-outs of back alleys, along with disposal of every thing she had on her but the communicator and essentials, clothing swapped along the way, for her to get to the front door of Bathos and lose the media circus outside Seattle Grace.
Mason, thankfully, was at work when she entered the apartment, and she kicked her shoes off as she walked into the bedroom and closed the door.
Thomas was there, of course. He was in gray, clothes he wore “at home” when he wasn’t being watched, and the shoes indicated that he had traveled and arrived in them. He had dropped off the samples to a contact, and he had strongly considered going back to the hospital, but he knew he couldn’t do that in a mask or out of one, so he was left with listening to the communicators. There was a lot of work that still needed to be done, but Thomas hadn’t been out in sunlight for seventy-two hours and the exhaustion hit him hard as soon as the adrenaline left him. He managed to start a preliminary search on the known victims that Max had given him weeks ago, but he added what he knew about the injuries and started an automatic search for additional victims that might not have admitted to dreaming about being attacked.
He thought her apartment the most likely place that Max would go to rest, as opposed to work, so that’s where he went. He waited for hours, and he couldn’t remember when he’d gone to sleep, back against the wall, but that was what he’d been doing the second before she closed the door. He was up in a crouch before he even realized he was awake, and when he recognized her he blinked hard and said, “Did they release you or did you insist on leaving?”
She wasn’t surprised to see him there, but she was surprised at the level of exhaustion on his face. It was worse than she’d ever seen it, she thought, and she locked her bedroom door and pulled off the light jacket she wore over a new shirt and well-bandaged back. “I left,” she admitted, walking to the dresser and slipping off the jeans and replacing them with comfortable pajama pants before turning to look at him. “They spent more time questioning me about you than doing anything else,” she said truthfully, and she walked to the bed and sat down on the edge.
She looked at him, at all that gray and exhaustion, and she patted the space beside her on the bed. “Sit your ass down, Brandon,” she said, sounding as tired as he looked. “So I can finish telling this without you falling over.”
He didn’t argue with that order, he just stood up, stretched in the way he had been taught, from head to toe a muscle at a time, and sat down next to her. “You should lie down,” he suggested, without making a move to touch her. “I’m sorry about the suit. I couldn’t make up a connection without a mask, and the more connection that hospital has with me the more dangerous it is for everyone.” He did honestly look apologetic, which for Thomas meant slight creases above his brow and faint changes in how he held his mouth.
She watched the slow roll of power and muscle, and she didn’t lie down as he suggested, but she did let her head rest against his shoulder when he made the recommendation. If she’d felt anywhere near her normal self, she wouldn’t have initiated the closeness, but she wasn’t feeling quite herself. “It’s fine,” she told him. “I’m a reporter, and I defended the vigilantes publicly to all of Seattle last week. They don’t see any personal connection. They see a journalist with an in, like Copeland with Sentinel.” It was true, and it was the one thing she was thankful of, because they wouldn’t be looking to see who she spent time with. They’d be looking for masks, not men.
She reached a hand to smooth one of those creases on his brow, but her fingers only made it as far as his cheek before she hesitated. “He isn’t going to come after me unless he has something else he wants heard,” she told him, sliding into the subject of the man in the dreams with no warning, exhaustion sapping her of the strength for segues. “He said a bloodbath was about to begin. That he can’t be killed, and he can’t be injured, and he can’t be stopped. He said to spread the word.” She paused. “I don’t know whether to do what he wants and write it... or not.” And that was a telltale confession. Writing it would be a measure to keep herself safe, and it was tantamount to giving into journalistic blackmail. “He knows me. Awake, I mean. From the masquerade.”
For a moment, her tactic worked, and the lines smoothed for a little while, but they reappeared again as she continued to speak. “As Cipher, as yourself, or both?” He wasn’t sure yet about the article, either. His gut instinct was to refuse, because it would only make the dreams of the city more colorful and like to feature him. He recognized the fear she was keeping back, though, and he didn’t want to worsen it.
She shook her head against his shoulder. “Not Cipher. He has no way of knowing about that, and I’m not telling him. Giving him the main paper gives him every child in Seattle,” she said a moment later, thoughtfully quiet. “He gets his power from fear. He needs people to be afraid. To give him a name - I’d only give him more power if I did what he wanted.” She was lost in her words, and she didn’t even notice when she reached for his hand and clutched it between her fingers. “He kills outside the dreams too,” she told him. “The kids in that dream, they were real. They didn’t die in their sleep, either, not them,” she said, and she closed her eyes and rattled off a half dozen injuries she remembered on the children behind the man in the dream. Approximate age, description, horrible injuries. A litany.
He committed the list to memory, and it wasn’t difficult, because some of them were names he was familiar with already, and he kept his breathing steady with a meditation exercise to keep himself from sighing or holding his breath and anger in. He devoutly hoped that he would not have a child, with monsters like these he could not protect it from.
Thomas wasn’t good at comforting. He usually left by the time there was leisure to consider comfort. Someone else did the comforting. “Then we’ll get him awake,” he reassured, leaving his hand where it was and not moving away. Comforting.
“And I don’t print it,” she said, and it wasn’t a question. “Or I print and downplay, and see if it takes some of his power away.” She was thinking aloud, and it wasn’t a question. She nodded, and then she looked up at him.
“You haven’t asked, Brandon.” She wasn’t talking about the dream anymore. There was no doubt about that.
He was thinking about the names and possibilities to prevent there from being more. Perhaps something to create dreams--some narcotic, perhaps, or hallucinogen. Would that work with his increased metabolism? It took him some time to detach from those, but once he did it felt an awful lot like falling. “It doesn’t seem like a good time.”
It doesn’t seem like a good time. She didn’t respond, but she came to her own conclusions from that statement. Mainly, that he didn’t want to know. Alright. Okay. Okay. She rubbed a hand over her face, and she moved back to the subject he did want to discuss, as if neither of them had said anything about it at all.
“If we’re lucky, we’ll get something off the DNA. Those blades he uses, it’s a glove of some sort. It isn’t like he’s inhuman. I spent most of the masquerade talking to him; I wish I could just remember what he looked like or what he sounded like there.” She didn’t believe it would necessarily translate to how he looked or sounded in dreams.
She looked over her shoulder. “I’ll be on light duty for the next seven to ten days,” she told him, and she hadn’t said anything about fear or trauma during the entire conversation. That didn’t matter, not in this discussion. “Think you can keep from doing anything stupid for that long, Brandon?” she asked, looking over at him in an attempt to find her comfort zone again in banter.
That time he did sigh. “You’re not ‘on duty,’ Max. Remember?” He met her eyes, but he didn’t reply with her determined lightness even though he understood the point of the comment. A lot of people dealt with stress that way, a distinctly military tactic that he saw in many of his friends on the police force. Roger came to mind. “And I think there were a few years where I got along fine without you.” There wasn’t meant to be a sting in that reply, and he smiled a little bit.
“I have no idea how you managed, Brandon,” she teased, a little more of her normal banter making it into the words. “Go home and rest,” she told him, and it was an order (not a request). She had a lot to think about, including the things he didn’t want to think about, and she was willing to fall asleep for a little while if she could. She knew the Night Terror wouldn’t come after her until she retaliated in the papers. It was too soon, and he was probably certain that she’d do as he’d told her to do, at least at this point. She could get some sleep today and figure out how the hell things were going to change once she woke up. Even if he didn’t want to know or ask, she didn’t have that luxury. “You look like shit,” she told him, the grin on her lips fond and the hand she pressed to his cheek soft.
He hesitated for a brief moment, and then turned his head and gave her a closed, careful kiss before sliding away from her and off the bed. “You look worse. Rest.” He needed to put these new names into the search and spread the data out. It was time he made more contact with those on the police force, because he needed more than records, he needed first-hand knowledge, and that came from the men and women in uniform. He just had to find some that would talk to him.
“Such a romantic,” she said, even as she kissed him back. She didn’t try to hold him, keep him, and she didn’t talk to him about whatever was lingering behind her eyes. She’d write her article once she woke up, and she’d reach out to Kyle then, too. “Sleep, Brandon. Not work. Don’t make me call Luke to make sure you manage to get to bed.” She risked once glance at the TV, dark and quiet in the corner. “There’s going to be something on that, about the hospital, just so you know. Advance warning. They had media all over the damn place when I left.”
“Unavoidable,” he said. It could have been about romance, work, Luke or the media. Probably all of it. He looked vague, like a mirage, in all that gray and in such uncharacteristic bright light. He hesitated at the window. “Max. About--about the protection.” He meant to come up with a more pointed question, but sometimes your skills just failed you.
“I get it, Brandon. It’s not a good time,” she replied vaguely, no emotion whatsoever reaching her eyes. “Nothing for you to worry about.”
That had some impact, but there was no visible sign as to what. “I’m worrying,” he said, firmly. “We’ll talk when it is a good time.” This leaving no doubt that at one point, there would be, and meanwhile, he was going to fret about children until they got this Night Terror.
She considered telling him that something like this didn’t run on their timetable, but that would have opened an entire discussion about priorities that she wasn’t ready to have. Hell, she wasn’t even sure what her thoughts on the subject were, not beyond a vague sense of things changing, and so she kept quiet and just watched him. “Let me know what you find, and I’ll let you know what I find,” she said, because she wasn’t just going to spend the next week waiting for stitches to heal, and they both knew it. She stood up and looked from the window to the bedroom door. “Exit choice?”
His gaze shifted to the door, then back to her. “Do you think it’s a good idea for me to be seen leaving this apartment?” It was a toneless but honest question, as if she had a violent objection either way, he would give in. His first impulse was to avoid connection, and in that... “Your colleague Copeland might be right about that.”
“I don’t trust my roommate as far as I can spit,” she said honestly, and she glanced toward the window. “That’s been doubling as my front door recently.” The mention of Johnny got her attention, dragged it away from thoughts of protection and change. “Johnny wrote a shit article just to get his job back, and he dragged a whole bunch of good people through the mud in the process.” This was a familiar argument, and it was obvious in the tone of her voice. “Sentinel thinks vigilantes can’t have connections. I get that; it’s a generally accepted concept, I think, in the business. But I still think it’s bullshit. People are stronger together, even I know that.”
Thomas had some strong feelings about collateral damage, but he really didn’t want to get into an argument with Max about it right now. She looked ready to drop, he didn’t feel much better, and it sounded like she and “Johnny” had talked about this a great deal already. After a moment he just nodded, dropping his eyes away and glancing out the window for prying eyes. There was a handy fire escape that might as well have been a staircase, and a moment later, he was out of sight.
She moved to the window when he exited, and she leaned heavily on the frame and closed her eyes to the cold, winter air. Life had just gotten really fucking complicated. Sleep, and then there was work to do.