Who: Audrey, Thomas and Max What: Awkwardness, misunderstandings and cellphone smuggling Where: OAH When: Say today Warnings: None
It Audrey took two trips through subspace (the first had left her wandering around in an office that looked all wrong until she looked out the window and realized she was one building over from where she needed to be) but she eventually got to Thomas’s office and grabbed his phone from the desk. Though she’d told him that she would wait until morning, she ended up going to get the phone as soon as she hung up on him. She assumed it would be easier to get it when there was no one in the building, and probably safer besides. A few minutes rooting around his desk drawers in a pair of colorful gloves, and she had the phone. She was just grateful she’d figured out how to turn the security off in time. The last thing she needed was to get arrested for picking up Thomas’s cell from the office.
She made it to the hospital that afternoon, after returning home and catching some sleep after the adrenaline rush wore off. The doctors, thankfully, seemed to be expecting her arrival, and they let her through to Thomas’s room. It was only when she was standing outside that she finally began to feel nervous. Thomas had sounded alright on the phone, but how could she really tell? What if it was serious?
Audrey slipped through the door, past the nurse, and hear it shut behind her, clicking closed. She had the phone held in one hand, and she surveyed him on the bed, trying to figure out if he was awake or not. “Thomas?”
Though his eyes were closed, he was awake. He came alive too quickly to have been sleeping, breaking out of a meditation exercise he used sometimes on long stakeouts and even (occasionally) really boring conference calls. They said his vitals were back to normal and he was drinking liquids again, but his vision had not improved. They asked and had him look at tests, but he knew as well as they did there was no change. The doctors were good, though, and he couldn’t detect any abandonment in their voices, so he decided they weren’t absolutely sure. He tried not to resign himself either way, trying to remember some Chinese saying about buying trouble. Lotus on the water.
“Audrey,” he said by way of greeting, turning his head toward the door. They kept it dim, the setting sun easing through the curtains into the room in very minimal fashion. Besides the blurring, he was extremely photosensitive and they were trying to ease him into light. He wasn’t naturally a diurnal creature and he was spending more energy than he should resenting the treatment. “Thanks for coming.” He put a hand behind him and sat up a little straighter. See? One arm in a cast. Not bad.
Some weight gone, the beard... maybe some loss of color and a hoarse voice. But still. Better than yesterday. Not that she’d seen him yesterday. “There’s a chair, if you want to sit.”
He looked sick, and he had a beard, which was strange, but he didn't look beyond help, and he didn't look anywhere near as bad as the image Audrey's imagination had furnished. She grabbed the chair and pulled it over next to the bed, sitting down beside him. "Here," she said, and set the phone down on the bed next to him. "You've turned me into a cat burglar to get that phone. I hope it's important."
Audrey was a little close, and he could approximate vision but not perfect focus. He put a hand out for the phone anyway, a familiar thing of the same make that he always had on him, and turned it over in his hands. He pretended to study it while he turned it on and punched in some numbers. The phone would forward messages from his office and anything high-alert on his scanning equipment. He could just listen, he didn’t need to see it. Something to think about besides the pit and his damned vision. “Thank you. I don’t think it counts as burglary if I gave you the key, so to speak.”
Audrey was watching Thomas, watching for anything that might be wrong, and she noticed that his eyes weren't tracking her the way they should be. He had mentioned problems with his vision, but she hadn't ranked that at the top of the items that might be wrong - now she was suddenly wondering how bad it actually was. "How well can you see?" she asked. "I guess not. It was fun though," she said, smiling. "Don't tell Max I said that, I don't think that's on her approved list of activities for me."
“Fairly well. Don’t worry.” Thomas waved a little dismissively, taking the batteries and stashing them under his mattress while navigating the phone mostly by feel. He kept himself from squinting at it with definite care so Audrey didn’t watch him struggle, and then he turned it over to push it under his pillow. “Like I said, it’s not stealing. I own it.”
Audrey cocked a brow when Thomas stuck the batteries under the mattress and the phone under his pillow. "Hiding from someone?" she asked, with a good guess as to who. "I'm going to anyway, but thanks all the same."
“I’m supposed to be resting. They think I’d stare at the screen all day.” This was obviously not the case. He tried to retain some sense of normality even though he was in the bed and she was in the chair, but it was an uncomfortable way to talk to anyone. “How’s Allen?”
"He seems good. I don't think he knows what happened," Audrey admitted. "I didn't tell him. I figured it was better for somebody not to be worrying, at least." She studied his face, wishing there was some indication anywhere on him of what had really happened. If he thought she believed that bullshit about falling down somewhere, he had underestimated her. Max had implied it was some stupid secret agent thing, and if Thomas wasn't going to tell her, she wasn't going to pry. "Have you seen Luke yet? I heard he was really worried about you, but I haven't had a chance to talk to him since you disappeared."
“Yes. He’s not happy with me.” Thomas sighed and some of the ‘everything is fine’ slipped. Wren had come by the evening previous, at some indeterminate time of night, and his sleep in between had been unpredictable, so he hadn’t realized how early it was when he called. The best he could judge was by the light, and he thought it was dusk. He started to say something, but stopped, remembered who he was talking to, and went silent again.
Audrey saw all the things that flitted over his face just then. "Why isn't he happy?" she asked, not sure if she was going to get an answer to that question. "And what were you going to say just now?"
“He’s not happy because I wouldn’t put them in danger to come get me. I’ve had three people try to tell me how wrong I am to care that much.” He was getting angry about it, you could see it behind his gaze even when he wasn’t looking at anything. Wren’s accusation that he would leave them and it would be his fault particularly stung.
Audrey pursed her lips, watching him for a long moment before sitting up straighter, shifting back in the chair, hands running over her thighs. "Look, Thomas - if you didn't call for help because you were worried someone was going to get hurt helping you, I do get where you're coming from. There's obviously a lot of people willing to do whatever it takes to get to you. But better they risk everything than know later on that they were uselessly searching for you while you were dying somewhere, don't you think? Nobody wants that kind of guilt."
“There’s no guilt,” he said, seriously. “It would have been my choice. They don’t seem very interested in my choices.” She was such a strange girl, with her multi-colored hair, that he gave her bright blur a long look and then shook his head. “Nevermind,” he said, quickly. “Don’t worry about it.” He kept saying that.
Audrey smirked. "Everybody isn't you, Thomas. I feel guilty I didn't know where you were and I didn't help any in finding you even though I was looking. He's your son, he probably feels like shit. There's nothing you or anybody else can do about that, that's just how people work."
If she said that was true, then it was true, and he couldn’t do anything about it. He didn’t like it though, he set his teeth and kept silent.
Audrey tilted her head to the side. "That's not what you wanted to hear, I know."
“You’re telling me they’re just going to be guilty and angry. I understand.” He hesitated and turned inward for a moment. He wondered if he had said something to make them feel worse, something he didn’t remember. It was possible, even likely.
"They were worried about you. What did you expect?" Audrey was actually curious to hear the answer. "When something bad happens to somebody, you always feel a little guilty and sad that you couldn't do anything about it. That's why there are vigilantes, I guess. Some people feel just as bad about things happening to total strangers as they do about things happening to the people they care about."
His eyes came up at that, even though he couldn’t see her. Thomas wasn’t a great liar to begin with, but usually he had the control and the passivity to pull of something that had equal chance of being truth or lie. Not right now. It could be the fatigue, but it had something more to do with his eyes. Unfocused, they weren’t watching her--they were open on him. “Yes.” He couldn’t come up with better.
Audrey didn't know really what to say to that. Suddenly she felt guilty - explaining everything away wasn't going to make him feel better, and had likely only made him feel worse. "Sorry," she said. "I should probably be talking about something a little less negative. Uh - so, how long are you in for?"
Thomas tried to smile, but it didn’t work so well. “Maybe you want to try again,” he suggested, gently.
Audrey laughed, softly. "Okay...ah...how 'bout them Yankees?" A pause. "No?"
Blink. “The baseball team?” Blink again. Obviously. She wouldn’t be referring to the historical term.
Audrey laughed, just a little. "It was a joke, Thomas." She rested a hand on his arm. "You've got to get better soon, alright? If you don't, I think Max and I are going to tear each other's heads off, and I need you to back me up during fights."
“Why do you fight so much?” He relaxed so visibly that it almost looked like he was going to sleep right there. It was just contrast. Less control. He was honestly curious about Max’s relationship with her sister.
Audrey hesitated before responding. It would be good to distract Thomas from his concerns about guilt, and it couldn't hurt, really, telling him. "It's kind of a long story," she said. "You probably picked up most of it already. Basically, when we were growing up, Max was the General's favorite. He took her with him where ever he went, months at a time, and he and her would come back for maybe a week before disappearing again. It was like having divorced parents with split custody, except they were still married."
Audrey sobered, eyes drawing down to the blanket. "I might as well have not even existed. As far as dad was concerned, he had Max. Max was the good kid. She did what he told her to, and she loved all the military shit, and she behaved herself. She locked step and he thought she was the moon and the stars. He'd come home with her, and I'd be standing in the room, and he'd talk to her without even looking at me once. I was the black sheep who wanted to do roller derby and broke things and dated the wrong boys. The only time he would spare me a second glance was when I'd done something wrong." She shrugged. "She thinks I had it good because I stayed home with mom while she ran around with him. I argue that mom didn't like me any better than her, she was just too much of a coward to fight her husband for her daughter."
Thomas was quiet for a little while. Then he said, carefully, as if venturing into uncharted territory, “Why did he want her to be in the military, and not you?”
"He already had her when I was born," Audrey said, and that was the flat, ugly truth of it the way she saw it. Her smile, if he could see it, was rueful and bitter. "Older sister wins. Pretty fucking medieval."
“No... not really. Sometimes it’s the other way around. Historically.” He shifted. Thomas hadn’t been able to find any pattern in better or worse fathers, except those who were abused had a predisposition for abuse, which every profiler off the street knew at this point. “Why did you want his attention if you didn’t like the things Max had to do?”
Audrey shook her head, slowly. "Honestly, I barely know what Max had to do. I just know that growing up, I was invisible. And..." She shrugged again, a quick move. "I preferred him hating me to being invisible." She sighed. "Don't tell her I said that."
“Okay.” He agreed because he wanted her to keep talking about what he shouldn’t do. “So it wasn’t what she did, it was what he didn’t do. He wasn’t there very much, or he just wasn’t there with you when he was there?” He wished he could see her face. He couldn’t even tell when she shook her head, it was just the sound of her jacket collar.
That somehow had the tone of an accusation, and Audrey straightened. "I know how that sounds, but she's the same way," she said. "She hates me because I stayed home with mom and got to do girly things. Highly overrated. At least both her parents gave a shit about her."
"Both," Audrey said. "He was hardly home, and when he was, I was part of the wallpaper. I asked him once when I was a teenager why he didn't just tell my mom to get an abortion when she got pregnant, and he gave me this look, and I realized that her being pregnant probably barely even registered on his goddamn radar when it happened."
Thomas had a hard time imagining a pregnancy that wasn’t relevant to everyone. He tried to think how that might be, and realized why Max had been so quick to tell him he didn’t have to be involved. He shouldn’t have been so angry at her for thinking ill of him. Water under the bridge. “It’s easy to imagine how good it is for everyone else,” Thomas said, in a tone of agreement. Ten years ago he would have thought Audrey’s situation to be vastly superior than his, but now it was just... different. Different and sad.
"I guess," Audrey said. She watched his expression change. "What about you?" she asked. "You don't sound like you've got any idea what I'm talking about, so I'm going to bet you had one of those 'Leave it to Beaver' type families."
“For a little while, I thought I did.” The problem with family was that having one meant he was supposed to discuss it a lot, and Thomas wasn’t good at doing that. In fact he’d made a concentrated effort not to talk about his family for over twenty years, and most people had yielded to his blank refusal. He tried to move away from it. “But no siblings. So you and Max hold a grudge even though it’s not like it was when you grew up?
That was vaguely ominous, and Audrey would have asked about it further had he not nudged the conversation on. "Well...yeah. That's what a grudge is about. And, I don't know if you've noticed, but even without that we can't agree on a damn thing. She wants to boss me around, I want to be my own person. I'm 23 years old. I'm not a great 23, but I am old enough to drink, buy cigarettes, and make my own decisions. I don't think she gets that, still. She still thinks she gets to be dad."
Max had woken to more texts that day, and after phone calls with Jack, Luke and Oracle, she'd finally managed to break free of the monitors and IVs long enough to shower and dress in the same drawstring pants and nurse's shirt from the day before. Her forearms had been freshly bandaged, and though her blood tests weren't perfect, they were better. The cramping in her side had diminished, and the doctors were starting to say she might be home by the end of the week.
The night nurse had told Max a young woman had called her cell before it died, and she knew it had to be Audrey. It surprised her that her sister hadn't shown up there like a blue-haired banshee, and then she reminded herself that they didn't get along. She was thinking about that as she neared Thomas' hospital room, and it made her recognize the voice within more easily than she might have normally done.
She thinks she still gets to be dad. Audrey.
It was unexpected, and it hurt in unexpected ways, and Max would have turned to leave, but the duty nurse stepped past her and opened the door; she couldn't very well hide at that point, so she followed the woman in as she moved toward the bed to check Thomas' vitals. "Audrey," she said, but her voice was slightly distant She looked tired, on the pale side, but with nothing in a sling or a splint. If not for the bandages on her forearms and the IV at her wrist, she looked like she always did. She shook her head no at her sister, even as she glanced at Thomas and the bed - not that she expected Audrey to keep her confidences; she didn’t.
Thomas didn’t perceive anything they had said to be especially hurtful, and he had been staring blankly off into space as he thought (not characteristic at all) when he heard the nurse’s voice and the sound of her step. Thomas was alert for someone in a bed for that long, and he still hadn’t figured out why Max wasn’t wearing shoes that made noises like everyone else. The sound of her voice relaxed and pleased him, however, and he turned his face toward her approaching blur. “Back?” he asked, almost smiling, clearly under the impression she was coming from farther away than a couple floors and a room.
Audrey looked up sharply when Max approached from behind her, and the look that crossed her face was distinctly guilty for a multitude of reasons. She hadn't intended for her to hear that. Yeah, they didn't get along, and there were a lot of things she would say to her face, but if that was the case she wanted it to be intentional, not overhearing a private conversation. Plus, even she could admit that another fight looked like the last thing Max could possibly use right about now. The look Max gave her said a lot, and her eyebrows went up as she processed what she was pretty sure Max was telling her. Thomas didn't know she was in the hospital.
Really, she should have gone to see Max first. But then she'd decided maybe it was best not to go to the hospital at all after the mess she'd made of things with the auction, and when she had decided to come it was only because Thomas specifically asked her to. Max had sounded well enough to yell at her on the phone and...yeah, that was a lame excuse. A familiar feeling overtook her, that feeling of self-loathing and frustration that made her want to sink into the floor, to run away and hide somewhere instead of confronting the messy emotions embedded in the situation. "Hey Max," she said, and wished she was anywhere else.
Max wasn’t interested in fighting, and it was painfully obvious in the tight smile she gave Audrey as she walked over to the bed and took one of Thomas’ hands, squeezing it. “Back.” she said. “I sent Luke off to a birthday party, so I figured you’d need company,” she said, glancing over at Audrey when she said it. “But it looks like you already have that covered.” There was a question in the statement, and she left it there for someone to answer. “How you feeling?” she asked, careful not to prod or probe of chastise with Audrey present. For all she knew, Audrey might already be aware of everything that had happened, but she couldn’t be sure, and so she waited for someone to clarify it for her.
“Audrey was worried,” Thomas said, in absolute truth, still with that bizarre lingering smile just visible under the beard. He went to some effort to see her, squinting a little, but quickly gave it up and forced his expression to relax. She had his only good hand and he couldn’t reach her arms when she had it, but he didn’t think to ask, and he hadn’t looked for her pulse again after that first night, at least not blatantly. Max was fine, and Thomas was pleased to see her. “I’m fine,” he said, as if not really hearing the question. “Luke left? That’s good.” He didn’t think to ask whose birthday party it was. It made sense to Thomas that Luke should have normal friends who had normal birthdays and parties, whatever those were like. That pleased him even more, and the smile reached both sides of his mouth.
Audrey eased off the chair. The two of them were talking and holding hands, and she was getting in the way. She also wasn't super interested in standing there and being the lie go between, so she readied to go. "He called me at five in the morning," she said, not upset about it, but needling him a little all the same. "And he wanted his phone, so I got it and brought it in after I got some sleep." There, a legitimate reason for her to be there. Why did she feel so guilty about this?
Max glanced from Audrey to Thomas, and her expression was a combination of surprise and something else, something like hurt. It didn’t surprise her that Thomas wanted to be connected, even though she knew it was a fucking terrible idea. But it did surprise her that he and Audrey had grown close enough that he would call her to get the damn phone for him. It had to involve either going into his study at home or at Thomas, Inc., and she’d always thought his too private to let someone else in his space. And he could have asked her or Luke. They wouldn’t have liked it, but they would have listened. He had the hospital phone, after all, and it was almost the same thing. She crossed her arms over her stomach, and she looked at him. “You called my sister at five in the morning to bring you a phone?” she asked, her tone too calm, way too calm. She was jumping to conclusions (bad conclusions), and that was completely obvious.
Thomas was surprised that she took her hand back but since he wasn’t used to a great deal of contact, he didn’t interpret it as rejection. He used the hand to push more pillows behind his back so he could sit upright better. There was some bruises on his ribs along the bad side where they collided with the cement right after his arm, so it took some doing and he tried to be dignified about it and avoid wiggling. “I didn’t know it was that early,” he said, embarrassed enough to keep his tone low and his expression intentionally blank. “She can get to places easier than anyone else.” He looked toward the window, where the light would be dying about now.
Audrey's eyebrows shot up to her hairline at Max's tone. Was she missing something here? "He tried to hang up on me four times when I told him what time it was," she said. "The place had security, and I could get in and out with no trouble." She was starting to feel like maybe she should make a break for it if Max kept looking at her like that.
Max wanted to ask if the phone was just a phone, or if it was tied to the comms, but she couldn’t, not without being obvious about it. And she looked from one of them to the other, then back again at Thomas. She felt like she’d interrupted something, she realized, and it made her normal awkwardness even more pronounced. “She has a useful ability,” Max agreed, because that was noncommittal and harmless, and she couldn’t even ask what Audrey thought had happened to him, or what he was thinking. It left her unsure of what to say at all, and she just touched his bearded cheek and smiled. “Want me to hunt you up a razor?” she asked, following it up with a grin that was more the norm. “I kind of like the scruffy look.”
The beard itched, but Thomas wouldn’t have complained about it. He lifted his fingers to his face and made a soft thoughtful noise. “Perhaps just scissors.” He couldn’t shave without a mirror, he was sure, and he wasn’t going to submit to someone else doing it. Trimming he could do by feel. “You didn’t have any problems with security, did you Audrey?” He frowned at the thought of it, blank dark eyes turning.
Audrey felt equally as awkward as Max, if not more so. "Nope, none at all. I turned the thing off, grabbed the phone, and got out of there. It was pretty quick, I don't think anyone was even in the building yet."
Audrey shifted a little, glancing out the window, then at the clock. "Look, I should probably go. Work, and everything." Lie, lie, lie, but she felt like she was intruding even though she'd been there first, and she knew she should have gone to see Max, and now Max had given her that look - she knew that look. She'd seen it on the face of another girl, once, when she accused Audrey of stealing her boyfriend. She didn't want to be on the receiving end of that look ever again, if she could help it. "I'll come back tomorrow," she said, helplessly, feeling like she ought to assure that. "See you guys later." She moved toward the door, attempting to do so quickly enough to get out of there but not so fast that it looked like she was fleeing the scene of a crime.
If Max wasn’t already sure she’d interrupted something, now she was sure. “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said, before Audrey had a chance to get to the door. She let her hand fall to her side. “I’ll go get some scissors,” she said, moving away from the bed and past Audrey. “I’ll be back in a few minutes,” she assured them, closing the door behind herself and leaning against it once she was in the hall.
Thomas, who besides being half-blind, didn’t understand family tension in general anything beyond the abstract, didn’t know what he’d gone wrong, and he couldn’t see the expressions to figure it out. “Nobody has to go,” he said, with a disturbed look from one blur to the other that provided absolutely no detail. The blurs combined and then both were either gone, or standing close together, and Thomas was left completely confused.
Now Audrey had no idea what to do. When the door shut, she sighed. "Well, that was awkward," she said quietly. She turned her attention back to Thomas, who she couldn't help but feel badly for. He looked like he had no idea what was going on. "What did I tell you? We're pretty good at scaring each other off."
“Because we were talking about your father?” Thomas suggested. He wasn’t stupid, but never in a million years would he have been able to infer that he was the cause of the awkwardness, especially not without the sharp eyes to show him where Max was looking. He was dismayed that Max was going to get scissors now, because he wasn’t absolutely sure he’d be able to do anything with them alone and he didn’t want any help.
Audrey smiled faintly, which Thomas couldn’t see. “Don’t worry about it, Thomas.” It didn’t seem worth it, trying to explain it to him. “She’s right, though, you are looking pretty shaggy.”
Thomas automatically lifted a hand to his chin again. They were right. He mushed his hand into his cheek and then sighed. He looked tired and confused, and he knew it. He didn’t like it one bit and he was doing his best not to inflict it on the people around him.
Max took her time pushing away from the door, and she took her time walking to the nurse’s station and asking for scissors and a mirror for Thomas. Even if his sight wasn’t back, the fact that he could make out shapes might make him appreciate the mirror and, admittedly, she was stalling for fucking time.
This was the longest period of time Max had ever seen Thomas with a woman. Sure, he’d said he thought Audrey was young, but she was only three years younger, and that wasn’t a very big difference. As she stood there, waiting for the nurse to come back, she ticked off imagined crimes in her mind. She’d interrupted something when she’d walked into the hospital room, Thomas had called Audrey multiple times since he’d been hospitalized, her sister had put him up for auction and tried to win him herself. And then there was the night with the carjackers, so many missing hours without any calls or word, and the way Audrey insisted on going after him when he was missing. And Audrey had come to see him in the hospital, bypassing her completely. Hell, Audrey even knew things she didn’t know - like that Luke was Thomas’ biological kid.
The smile Max gave the nurse when she returned was a shallow one. She’d always known Thomas was keeping her close because she was pregnant, and she’d always doubted it was anything more than that, and she couldn’t help but think this had confirmed all that. The nurse asked about the baby, about due dates and names, and Max answered by rote. Thomas had never told her he loved her, she reminded herself. He’d never asked her for anything after the baby was born. She knew that; she fucking knew that. She was just letting the hormones get to her, the fact that she’d almost fucking lost him.
By the time Max made it to the hospital door again, she had paced the hall three times. This time, she knocked.
Only the doctors and the nurses knocked, and even then they barged right in seconds later, so after an expectant look at the door that bore no fruit, Thomas said, frowning, “Who’s at the door?” He thought perhaps Audrey might be able to see better through the window.
Audrey turned to look, and there was Max again. She couldn’t help but feel relieved to see her, which was maybe a little strange, but she wanted to get out of there before she somehow made things even worse. She pulled the door open to let Max in, noting the scissors and the mirror. “I didn’t know you could cut hair,” she said, a desperate little comment meant to cover for the fact that she had nothing to say.
Audrey was always so sarcastically sharp that being uncomfortable was a beacon almost brighter than her hair, and Max couldn’t help but chuckle. “Calm the hell down, Aud,” she said, crossing to the bed and putting the scissors and mirror on the nightstand, close enough for Thomas tor reach later if he wanted. “You want to take his phone back where it came from?” she asked, looking from Thomas to her sister. “He sucks at disconnecting, and he’s only going to try to work if he has it.” Work didn’t mean office work, because Max suspected he had that thing set to give him police reports. She still sounded tense, tight in a way she hadn’t around Thomas in months. “How’s Bathos?”
Thomas scowled. It made it through the beard. “There’s nothing to do in this room. I’m not going to strain anything, I can work it by feel. Leave it alone.” He appeared to be under the impression he could give orders with the same effectiveness from a hospital bed as over the comm. He made up his mind to get out of here as soon as possible. He could see well enough to navigate a street, for example. It would be enough.
Audrey felt distinctly relieved when Max laughed, even if it didn't remove all the tension. She glanced from Max to Thomas. "That's a good point," she said, considering puling the phone from under the pillow. "Bathos is good," she said. "I'm still working on it. It needs more...color." She didn't like to live in a boring space, and had set about collecting items from thrift stores as soon as she moved in.
In the end, Audrey moved over to the bed again, digging the phone out from under the pillow before Thomas could protest. "You want something fun to do, I'll bring you some music. You shouldn't be working from bed."
That didn’t make Max feel particularly soothed, because it implied additional visits in private, but she was glad the phone had made an appearance and would be leaving. She held a hand out for it, palm up and fingers open, waiting for Audrey to give it to her. It contradicted what she’d said a few minutes earlier about Audrey taking it back to Thomas’ office, but she worried about what the thing might notify Audrey of in transit.
Thomas didn’t get a read on the movement as being threatening (to his sanity) until the last minute, so while he could have trapped her arm and made a fuss, he didn’t for the sake of his dignity. “I don’t want ‘fun’ things to do.” Thomas didn’t know how to have fun, actually, and it sounded unproductive. “There are things that can’t wait. Give it back.” He held out his hand too.
Audrey handed the phone over to her sister, even as Thomas sought it. "Sorry, man, doctor's orders. And of course they can wait, you're in the hospital." She felt she owed Max one, and Thomas would be better off anyway without it if all he was going to do was work. "You should try doing something fun for once, instead of just working. If I thought all you'd use it for was to play Angry Birds I'd let you keep it."
Max tucked the phone into the back pocket of the drawstring pants, and she looked at Thomas’ face in the dim light of the hospital room. He still looked drawn, tired - no, exhausted - too thin by far, and they hadn’t even gotten him on real food yet. “Once you’re sitting up and eating, you can have it back,” she said, fully aware that she hadn’t ever directly denied Thomas anything before. She didn’t think she was going to be very fucking good at it, either.
Thomas could see well enough to track some movement, and the dark gaze moved from Audrey to Max. His brow furrowed unhappily, but he didn’t argue. Arguing, Thomas found, implied cooperation with what was happening, and he didn’t like it when people told him what he could and couldn’t do. He never had. People tended not to do that anymore, actually. “I’d be eating now, if anyone would listen.” He tried to make it commentary. He made a mental note to find out what Angry Birds was.
Audrey slid her hands into her pockets. "They’re doctors. I think their job is not to listen." She reshouldered her bag, shifting on her feet. "Alright, seriously though, I gotta go. Don't wear yourself out," she said, not wanting to promise to come back or say anything that could be misconstrued as untoward or too familiar, not after the look on Max's face. "I'll see you guys later." Then she ducked out the door.
“I’ll call you,” Max said to Audrey, and she didn’t say anything else until the door had closed behind her. She was near the bed, but not near enough to touch, and she looked back at Thomas once she heard the door latch. “You fucking hate it here, don’t you?” she asked - a given - and then she moved slightly closer. “What did you want to hear on the phone? And what did you tell her?”
Missing the slight change in distance, Thomas put a hand out for Max but only met air, and drew back with a flicker of surprise and that empty feeling that happens when you were sure something was there, but then you find out it’s not. Like missing a step on the staircase, or losing your keys. “It’s not pleasant. I’m capable of taking care of myself, at this point.” He seemed very certain about that, at least. “Messages from work, transcripts of emails, news, things on the forum. The computer recites it to me.” He wanted it back.
Even with his unfocused gaze, the surprise on his face at reaching out and finding nothing was unmistakable, and Max moved forward almost without thinking, an instinctive answer to that reach and look. Her hip pressed against the side of his mattress, letting him feel how close she had actually come, and her gaze was drawn to a pair of women’s shoes beside the nightstand (not hers). She looked back at him, and her expression was confused. “Been busy with visitors, huh?” she asked. “Once you’re eating,” she said, about being capable of taking care of himself, because that was her new marker with him, and she hoped she got out before he did. She’d just begun to think about the truck, parked outside the ER, blood all over the cab along with photos and his parents rings.
She reached a hand out and tentatively touched his shaggy cheek. “You’ll just hear all sorts of shit you can’t do anything about,” she told him about the phone. “My phone and comm are dead too.”
He couldn’t see the expression, but he could hear the confusion in her voice. He hadn’t any idea what caused it. “Yes. Most of you want to talk about Luke.” He smiled. He put his hand out again, more tentatively this time, not wanting to meet emptiness again. But he found her shoulder, and slid light fingers behind her elbow. “I always hear things I can’t do anything about,” he said gravely. “Always. Now is no different.”
The comment about Luke surprised her, but she moved forward once his hand found her arm and slid down to her shoulder, propping her hip beside him on the bed and looking down at him, expression soft since she knew he couldn’t make it out. Even the graveness in his voice didn’t banish the softness, and she leaned down and pressed a slow kiss to the corner of his mouth, the touch a lingering one. “Who wanted to talk about Luke?” she asked, knowing his latter statement was true, here or out there.
Pleased, he curled his good arm around her so he could put a palm on her stomach, which he liked to do whenever she was close and still. “His friend. Little Bird. The one that he invited to his dinner. Wren.” He leaned his head onto her shoulder, not necessarily intentionally but because he wanted to reach and he was tired of sitting up.
Max felt stupidly embarrassed, which she was glad he couldn’t see on her face, because she’d been sure the shoes had been Audrey’s. She touched her fingers to his temple when he leaned his head on her shoulder, and then she slid them through his hair, which needed a trim, and she rested her cheek where her fingers had just been. She thought about it once, twice, and then she leaned against the pillow beside him, the fit a tight one with her stomach, but not uncomfortably so, her bare feet against his shin. “Did she want to tell you he had a hard time with you being gone?” she asked, because that made sense. She remembered how he looked at the warehouse, Luke, and she suspected he shared more things about his feelings with his friends after the fact.
He didn’t protest, concentrating for a little while on the movement under his hand, and then, after a short, silent marveling, returned to the conversation. “She said I would leave him and the money wouldn’t be enough.” He said it just as gravely as he’d said the comment about the phone. “She said I didn’t understand that.” He shut his eyes, since his chin was down and there wasn’t anything to see.
She curled closer when he closed his eyes, feeling less awkward doing it, her stomach a constant flurry of soft movement against his side. “She’s just thinking about her friend,” she said. “She doesn’t understand that you did the stupid, stubborn, fucking maddening thing you did to keep us safe,” she said, because she did understand that. It still drove her fucking insane, but she understood it. She took a breath, and when she spoke again it was in a rush of letters tumbling onto one another. “Who’s his mother?”
Lifting his head. “Whose?”
“Luke’s.”
Blink. “I don’t know. He never told me. Why?”
“But I thought-” And her cheeks burned red, which she was glad he couldn’t see, making the freckles she’d hated all her life annoyingly visible. “I thought he was yours?”
Annoyingly visible to someone who couldn’t see well? Not so much. “No.” Honestly confused. “And yes. What do you mean?”
More red, which he (thankfully) couldn’t see. “I thought he was yours. Biologically.”
Curiously. “Why would you think that?”
“Audrey talked to Luke...” Max said, letting the sentence trail. “He isn’t?”
Thomas’ mouth twitched. “No.”
Oh. That made Max wonder what else she’d gotten wrong. “Are you interested in her?” she asked after a moment, the question a quiet one, exceptionally quiet for Max who’s speech patterns were never quiet.
“Luke’s mother? No, I didn’t think it was any of my business.” Vaguely. How was he supposed to keep up this kind of conversation? None of it made any sense. Maybe it had something to do with mothers in general. Hormones.
“No, Audrey.”
Thomas frowned. “She gets really upset about you and your father. You should talk to her about it. Without yelling.” By which he meant to say he was interested--in Audrey’s feelings.
Max made a frustrated sound, because the conversation was a hard one, and the baby kicked harder with her fidgeting against his side. “I meant as a woman.”
Surprised sound in the back of his throat. “She’s a girl.”
“She’s almost the same age as I am,” Max reminded him, tipping her head back and watching his face.
She’d brought that fact up before, taken him aback with it, and now it was very visible. A flicker of surprise, denial, then discomfort. “You don’t seem that young.”
She closed her eyes. “Answer the question, Thomas,” she said, pleading in the statement.
“No. What did I do to make you think that?”
Her relief was evident when he pronounced the letter N in the word no, an exhale and a release of tension. “I just assumed,” she said, because it had been nothing but assumptions, and she didn’t think he’d understand if she spelled it out for him. She touched his cheek, her palm cool and flat against it, and she sat up with some awkward movement to get upright, her bare toes touching the hospital room floor. She thought a moment, and then she pulled the cellphone out of her back pocket and put it on the nightstand for him.
“Why did you assume?” He wasn’t going to just leave it like that. He wasn’t stupid enough and he wasn’t sick enough. He heard the sound of the phone on the bedstand and put a hand out to see what she’d put there, simultaneously opening his arm as she slid away.
She didn’t move away from the bed, she only turned so she was facing him. “I interrupted something,” she began, knowing she was going to feel like an idiot by the time she finished talking. “And she put you up for auction and then tried to win you, and she came to see you instead of me, and the night of the carjacking, you were missing for hours, and you called her, and she spent days looking for you, just like we did...” She trailed off, her shoulders lifting in a helpless sort of shrug. “Me and Audrey, I think we have the same type,” she said, not wanting to go so far as to say she’d bet her truck that Audrey had a crush on him.
He stuck the phone back under his pillow carefully, a fast, easy move before he settled back so it was protected. “I’m sure she was trying to help. She means well, Max.” As if Max would have difficulty believing this, and therefore needed reassuring. Interpreting her retreat as final, he settled back in the pillows.
She hadn’t taken even one step away, but his tone and the way he settled back into the pillows had a finality to it. She glanced toward the pillow, toward where he tugged the phone, and she gave a jerk of her head that was an almost nod. “I’ll let you rest,” she said, as the nurse opened the door behind her. She gave him one more smile, awkward one he couldn’t see, and she reached out to touch his arm, but she stopped just shy of the contact, unsure he’d welcome it. The nurse chattered about the baby and due dates, and Max glanced toward the bed as she replied, and then she slipped out, leaving the nurse to her work.