Max Main ≡ Lois Lane (bylined) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2010-12-28 05:00:00 |
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Entry tags: | batman, lois lane |
Who: Max and Thomas
What: Discussing Jack
Where: Aubade
When: Twenty-three minutes after this.
Warnings: None
Max hadn’t been expecting him to agree to come home. She’d been expecting him to tell her he needed to wait for Jack, or that there was work that needed to be done. She expected pretty much anything other than what she got - an estimated arrival time.
She’d gotten home from Bathos late that night, bringing over clean clothes for the week. It was bitterly cold outside, even before all the mess with Jack and the communicators, and it was freezing now. By the time she’d managed to close her eyes, it was well past midnight. She hoped Luke had managed to get to sleep; she’d heard him talking in his room earlier, and she’d finally heard Allen go quiet in the guest room about an hour before.
She had been in bed when her cellphone notified her of Jack’s most recent comment to her, and she didn’t get out when Thomas agreed to come home. She just turned on the TV, some old black and white movie on, and muted the volume as she waited. The largest of Mason’s baby gifts was by the door, her laundry basket beside it, and she was sitting against the headboard in one of her pajama pants and Thomas’ undershirts in the glow of the room.
Thomas’ approaches hadn’t gotten any better now that Aubade was occupied almost twenty-four-seven. He still appeared in silence, and he made a very deliberate, soft sound in the vaguest interpretation of her name at the doorway so she wouldn’t be too startled when he showed up. He wasn’t wearing anything special, a black peacoat, uninteresting slacks, and a strangely dull expression. Thomas was usually sharp and observant in expression and gaze, but tonight he slid into the flickering dim light without his usual well-honed intensity.
He looked her over, but mildly, in comparison to his usual gaze. “How are you?” It was an earnest question, Thomas didn’t make small talk. His eyes moved unthinkingly up toward Luke’s room, but of course he couldn’t see through walls.
“I think he finally went to sleep,” she said, following his gaze and pushing the bedsheets aside. She climbed out of bed on socked feet, and she walked up to him. He looked as tired as she felt, and she suspected Luke felt much the same way. Oracle too, and she wondered if it wouldn’t have been better not to have said anything at all, rather than turn everything upside down like this.
She stopped in front of him, close enough to feel the chill on his clothes and skin, and she pushed the peacoat off his shoulders. “I’m tired, just like you,” she said, because he might not admit it, but she had no doubt that he was. “I’m sorry I gave you shit,” she told him. “But I’m not a kid.” She touched a warm hand to his cold cheek. “You’re freezing,” she said unnecessarily, before cautiously wrapping her arms around him.
He looked over his shoulder and caught the coat on his elbows, turning out of it and away from her to discard it to one side. Definitely someone used to maids, but also someone who knew the value of a good coat and made note of where he’d dropped it. “Children,” he said, quietly, “do not keep as many secrets as you do.” There wasn’t any anger in the comment, but it certainly wasn’t warm. He sat heavily down on the edge of the bed, elbows on wide knees, facing her. “It worries me.” If he was cold, he wasn’t showing it. He just sat there and looked at her.
She picked up the discarded coat, because she certainly wasn’t used to maids, and she draped it over the back of a chair. She watched him sit heavily on bed, and she hesitated before joining him. She sat down beside him, and she looked over at him and then down at his hands between his wide-spread knees. “Most people think I run my mouth too much to you, I think,” she told him. “Telling me something, they don’t think it’s the same thing as telling you something.” Pause. “How many secrets do you keep from me?” she asked, because she knew they wouldn’t fit in the apartment, were he to pile them up. “I just found out about Corvus before the holidays,” she said finally. “I didn’t keep it from you intentionally.”
He turned his chin to one shoulder and looked at her a moment. “I guess you didn’t,” he said, and not as if he thought she lied, or doubted her word. “You just don’t see it as I do.” He turned his eyes away and let them unfocus. “No one seems to.” Thomas made an effort to stay in the room and keep his mind at hand. “You were a soldier. Life is cheap?” It was a serious question.
“I wrote an article, not knowing it was him, about how atrocious I thought the crime was. That doesn’t change because it was committed by a friend. I just know the good in him, too. And I want, so fucking badly, for him to be able to change. With the men we go after, as a group, I don’t know their good sides. They never sung Freebird with all of us on the communicators, and they never saved my life, and they never climbed in my window when I was feeling particularly miserable and made me smile. It doesn’t make what he did any more reprehensible, and it doesn’t make him any less responsible for it, but it makes me want it to end differently for him.” It was said quietly, no fight, only her own truth in the words.
His question about life being cheap surprised her enough that she looked down at her hands. “Life- I don’t know? Maybe. I can kill and not think about it, and I’ve watched friends killed in front of me without batting an eyelash. I wouldn’t say I think life is cheap; I would say I was conditioned to think it was as common as a cold. People died every day in what we did. You couldn’t let it stop you, or you’d lose focus and die too.” She sounded sorry to have to say it, sorry to have ever felt it, and she hugged her stomach and looked back at him. “It’s not the same now,” she said, hoping he would believe her. “I couldn’t walk away here and let someone I cared about die, not like I could then.”
“Because you care,” he said. “Imagine if for every person there was someone like you, that cared when a life was lost. No singing, no windows, no lives to save, not ever again. It could be small things. A cupcake when it wasn’t a birthday...” He cleared his throat. “Small things are always lost, no matter how terrible the person. Potential is lost. Caring is lost. You only value the lives you know, but there is always someone... who knows.” He fell silent, and lifted one shoulder, dismissing it. “It is okay.” That she didn’t understand, that no one did. And it was. No one ever really had.
“You mean the men he killed,” she said, and when he lifted his shoulder she unwound one arm from her belly and touched her fingers to the hair at his temple, the caress a thoughtless one, which was strange for her. “Their families, their loved ones, their children?” It was a question, one asked quietly so as not to break the spell that had him talking. Thomas rarely talked like this, at least not to her, and she ducked her head a little to try to see his eyes.
He avoided hers. It was easier to talk if he wasn’t talking at anyone, but just... talking. To himself. Which he did more often than he liked to admit. “I mean any man, or woman. Even if they don’t have anyone like that; they may have before, or might later.”
If Max knew one thing about the men and women in this movement, they all had a reason. Luke was the exception, but she knew this man was not an exception. The memory, his memory flashed behind her eyes, and lifted her gaze when he didn’t meet it. She’d always assumed his family had been good, killed by the type of men they hunted; maybe she’d been wrong. “And in killing the men, Corvus hurt those other people,” she said, simple but probing. “I don’t think I’ve ever thought about the family of the people I killed in the military,” she admitted, going guilt-quiet as she thought about it.
“That is because it is easier to think of them as bad. They are; many people are bad. Many people are... are just not good. Regardless, no one can be replaced. To kill in the memory of someone gone is...” He tried to find the right adjective, failed, and tossed his knuckles in the air in an abrupt movement meant to fill in his emotion there.
“I don’t think he killed them in her memory,” she said. “If he had only killed them, maybe, but what he did, it wasn’t about that. Torture is about inflicting pain; it’s about something different,” she said, and she said it with the voice of someone who knew pretty much everything there was to know about torture. “It’s about power,” she finally said, fingers moving from his temple to his neck. “Do you think their crimes coming out would be easier for those families and loved ones? A trial and finding out the atrocities they committed?” It was an honest question, curious, and there was no criticism in her voice.
“No,” he agreed. “He did it to make himself feel effective, as he didn’t then.” He sounded vaguely distressed, disgusted--but he gained control quickly. “What’s easy? Truth? Truth is hard. Truth is never easy. But death... no one can understand death.”
“Did you ever want to kill them?” she asked, and she didn’t clarify who. She just let her hand slip down to his knee, within reach of his, if he wanted it.
No change. “Always.” He glanced quickly at her. “That doesn’t scare you?”
She shook her head. “I’d be worried if you said no. That would scare me,” she said honestly. She took his hand, and she tugged it over and put it on her stomach. There was fluttering now, not quite kicking, but movement. “It doesn’t scare either of us.” She paused. “Why does it scare you?”
His mind made a detour from the circles it had traveled so many times, and he concentrated on the life under his hand in a way that took everything he had. Her question sank in eventually, and he slid his fingers a little higher to feel more. “I kept waiting for it to stop, but it never did. It is not something I want to pass on.” Another flick of his eyes to Luke’s location on the ceiling somewhere.
She didn’t need to look up this time, and she moved his hand to where the movement was strongest. “He’s different,” she said. “He doesn’t have a reason for what he does,” she said, pride for the boy upstairs in her voice. “He’s compassionate, Thomas, in a way neither you or I are. He feels anger. It was there, in that warehouse, I saw it. I recognized it. But it won’t get the best of him.” She looked at him. “It doesn’t get the best of you either. Feeling it, that’s normal, even now, all these years later.”
He didn’t know what to make of that statement, and he didn’t know if he wanted to know how much she knew, and the expression said it clearly. “It’s cold,” he said, instead. “You should go to sleep.” He turned his head and glanced at the end of the bed, frowning at the lack of more blankets in general. He wasn’t keeping secrets, but that didn’t mean he liked talking about things better kept buried.
She followed his glance, and she stood and pulled on his hands, tugged. “Change, and lie down with me,” she said, and there was the normal uncertainty there at requesting something like that, but it wasn’t so loud as it normally was in her voice. “Just for a few hours,” she added, before he could argue with her about it. “I let Corvus know there wouldn’t be cops there, and he won’t be there until tomorrow.”
He didn’t say that the alarms would alert him should anyone come near, he just nodded and stood up as requested. “Not for long,” he said, more to himself than her, and he discarded the shirt in the same way he’d discarded the coat. He looked relatively good these days, but the gunshot from Luke’s rescue was still a fascinating riot of color. He sat back down, clearly with the intent of sleeping in the slacks and not bothering to change any further.
She stood there a second, clearly trying to decide whether to push the matter of the slacks or not. In the end, she walked over to the dresser, and she pulled out a pair of nondescript gray pajama pants and tossed them onto his lap, even as she climbed onto the bed and onto the other side. She settled on her side, and her hand slid up along his spine to that splash of color that made her heart catch every time she saw it. “I don’t know if I’d be able to be as strong as you,” she said in the dark. “If something happened to you.”
Thomas pushed the pajama pants aside, deeming them to be too much trouble, and put out the light. His breathing was already slowing obediently as he ordered himself to rest, but he heard and felt her behind him. He reached back, careful with his elbow, and took her hand, pulling it over his chest as he let out a breath and dropped his head. “You would. You have someone else to think about.”