Narrative Who: Max What: Aging down (for now) Where: Marvel → Peregrine's When: Nowish Warnings/Rating: None
Gus and Lia had been dropped off, and Amanda was with them. It was a good way to ensure Brandon didn't act up, and Luke could always bring Amanda home after if Brandon was busy being worried about his undead ninja - or maybe the ninja weren't undead; she could never tell. And while concerns about ninja seemed to be foremost in Brandon's mind, Max's concerns were more mainstream - at least for Marvel.
Three incidents with Hydra in the past month had Max antsy, and Max didn't get antsy often. But between Carter's proposed murder in the flower shop, Ella's need for an emergency extraction from SHIELD, and this newest conversation with Carter and Rogers? Max was starting to think this Hydra situation was going to blow up in everyone's faces. Global threats weren't her favorite thing, not when she couldn't do a thing to prepare, and not when she was hopelessly out of the loop. She had a kid to protect, and she had a lifetime in the government that had taught her that smoke most certainly equaled fire. On top of that, Carter was handling this on her own, and moving dozens of people from an organization with hope of not being noticed, and even in a comic book world that seemed too impossible for someone as rooted in the outside world's reality as Max was.
It was almost as bad as JFK being a mutant.
Max wasn't one to door travel, but she was looking for alternatives to Marvel. She knew Ocean's Eleven existed as a modern-world option, but she would prefer something with medical treatments more aligned with current day. Gotham was out of the question, but she reasoned there had to be other modern-day doors out there. And as she had a few hours on her hands, she decided to go looking.
Bad idea.
The door looked normal enough at first; too outdated for her needs, but any ex-government operative would find the era of interest. Max didn't care much for history books, but she liked reading about wars. The great wars, those had been the General's idea of storytelling, and even that happened sparingly. But she was interested enough to stay and see the museum that was purportedly present, as indicated by the faded sign.
How she ended up in the old house with the strange bird after that, well, she didn't actually remember.
Childhood hadn't been a good time for Max. Her teen years had been even worse. Awkward, deadpan and too prone to quote John Hughes rom-coms, she wasn't popular. Even if the General hadn't moved from base to base to base, she wouldn't have been popular. Moving around and starting a new school a few times a year, that just made her even less popular. Never the cute new girl; always the new ugly girl. No, Max wouldn't want her high school years back. She avoided reunions; she avoided thinking about braces and Aqua Net and being called Maxi Pad in gym.
But this was different. For one, she knew she was a little older than high school, though she didn't have an actual age to go with her renewed interest in mixtapes. But she had just joined the Army, and she hated it. The strange bird in the old house said she didn't need to go back to it, and really that eclipsed absolutely everything for Max.
She lost track of time; it wasn't deliberate.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd lost track of time. Surely not recently, with the shop and three kids and a life so dull that she wondered why she bothered getting up in the mornings. But all of that was some weird memory, and it wasn't as immediate as the macaroni and cheese she'd had for lunch at the mess hall, or the fact that the General expected her home at 6 pm sharp. Regardless, neither of those things were worth going back to. So, she stayed a few days.