corvus, jack (corbinian) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-03-15 12:10:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | eric draven, lois lane |
Who: Jack and Max
What: A meetup in the hospital gym and a rather unfortunate revelation about Jack's feelings for Max.
Where: Hospital gym
When: During Amanda's hospital stay
Warnings: None.
Jack went, as promised, to the gym at 3 in the morning sharp to look for Max. He had with him a small pink teddy bear under his arm, and he supposed he made an odd sight meandering through the hospital as he wound his way toward the gym, rough and tired looking, several hours in need of a shave, and carrying a small pink stuffed animal with a magenta bow around its neck.
Everything had been such a mess, lately. He’d found no leads on Mockingbird, and he hadn’t gone out in mask in weeks. He felt useless. Not being out masked, not helping anyone, left him with an itch that he could not scratch. He tried - he did try, but nothing reached it. He’d spent several nights in a row in a battle between himself and himself, determined to go out and just as determined to stay in. And then he felt terrible for even thinking about going out when it would endanger Max, and so he had to inflict punishment for the selfish thought (or was it the selfless one?) and around and around it went. He felt like he was coming unhinged.
But Max had enough problems, and he certainly wasn’t going to bring his to her doorstep. She’d just had a child, after all. A thousand years ago, he had planned to have children, to have a family. Now the very idea seemed impossible and foreign, but entering the hospital had brought the thought back, and the ghost he’d planned on having children with trailed around the edges of his vision like she’d been doing for weeks, like an afterimage left by something so bright it stung.
When he finally did arrive at the gym, he knocked on the open glass door at the entrance. “Max?”
She had been running on the treadmill when she heard him. No lifting weights for another week, and really running was the only thing she could do right now. Still, it made her feel better, and she was already infinitely better than she had been the week before. She was dressed in sweats and a tanktop, and she looked tired and worried, but healthy - and she looked happy to see him.
Happy to see him, that was, until she climbed down from the treadmill and got close enough to see his face, Like Gwen, he looked tired, worn and stressed. Taut around the edges in a way that spoke of caged energy, and she tossed the towel over her shoulder and grabbed a couple of the boxing gloves hanging on the ropes around the sparring ring. She tossed them at him, even as she came close enough to reach for the bear and rub the fur against one cheek. “No one ever thinks to bring a baby girl a gun or something like that,” she said, grinning. “Put the gloves on.”
Seeing her did lift his mood, especially seeing her healthy. He caught the gloves and passed her the teddy bear, smiling a touch. "I don't think most mothers would take it very well if anyone brought an infant a gun, whether they were a boy or a girl."
He put the gloves on, moving toward the ring, resisting the impulse to touch her, check to be sure that she really was here and looking this good. "I'm not very good at sparring," he confessed. "Although I do make an effective punching bag. How are you feeling?"
She grabbed another set of gloves and followed him. “Just aim high and go easy,” she told him. She wasn’t anywhere near one hundred percent, no matter how much she wanted to be, and she didn’t move as lightly as she was accustomed to in a ring, guarding and wincing every so often. That didn’t keep her from throwing a punch at his shoulder almost immediately, though. “Not pregnant,” she said, in response to how she was feeling. “I thought I’d bounce back right away. It’s taking longer than I expected, and we don’t have a whole lot of time on our hands right now, huh?” She threw another punch, this time at his chest. “When are you going back out?” she asked knowingly.
Jack absorbed the blow to his shoulder and punched lightly at her chest. "No one expects you to be back at full speed right away, that would be insane. Don't push yourself too hard." He blocked the punch to his chest, moving back and hesitating before punching again. "I'm not," he said simply.
“Don’t make me get rough with you,” she said when he pulled the punch and didn’t hit again. “Block, and actually throw your arm,” she told him, raising her own arms in a defensive, block movement. “You are,” she added. “I’m back on my feet, and you’re going to go back to doing what you fucking do.”
Jack did as she asked him to, albeit likely not as hard as she would have liked. He had never sparred with anyone. He had either gotten in real fights with real stakes or not fought at all. His training had never been 'training.' "We don't know what Mockingbird is capable of. At the very least she - it - is invisible. I'm not going to risk it, not with how little we know." And that was the end of that, as far as he was concerned. His arms ached, and he threw another punch, harder this time.
That punch caught her in the shoulder, the kick in it enough to make her falter and step back, and she threw one right back before he had a chance to block. She was out of practice, and the punch landed fairly lightly, but soundly against his chest. “Don’t give me shit about this, Corvus,” she said, circling him slowly. “I can defend myself.”
The punch forced him to shift his balance though it wasn't that hard, and he punched back, aiming higher this time. "I know you can," he said, though apparently that had no impact on his decision.
It was a low move, but she swept her leg behind his, and she threw another punch to throw him off balance. The move made her wince and bend over, hands on her knees, but it was worth it. “You can’t give in to threats. And I won’t have you doing it for me. Thomas is still going out there, and the threat is to our kid.”
Jack stopped, leaning in to check her, ignoring what she'd said about Thomas entirely. "Are you alright?" He was worried he'd struck her too hard, treated her too much like she was well. He didn't know what her limits were right now - hell, he barely knew what her limits ordinarily were.
She repeated the leg sweep when he leaned over, shoving him back when she did it and knocking him to the ground. “I’m not going to let up on this.”
This time there was no chance to dodge, and he hit the ground on his back, climbing back to his feet quickly. "You can keep going," he said. His face was flat, touched a little with guilt, but clearly set with determination. He was not going to give, no matter how many times she knocked him over and how angry she got with him. "This has nothing to do with how good you are at protecting yourself. As far as we know, Mockingbird could have no power to follow through, or all the power in the world. I'm not willing to take that risk."
She rubbed her shoulder, where a bruise was already starting to take shape. “At what fucking cost?” she demanded.
"At any cost," Jack said, sharply. He watched her rubbing at her shoulder, and he began taking his gloves off.
“I don’t want you to do this,” she said. “Doesn’t that fucking matter? That I don’t want it?”
Jack closed the distance between them, tipped her chin up with the hand already free of its glove, and he kissed her. He didn't hold it for longer than a few seconds - he was not going to be the man to force his affections on an uninterested woman, after all - but there was months of longing and not allowing himself to have in that kiss, of not wanting to think about having, of not wanting to think about the thousand ways in which this was never going to go anywhere. It was tender, brief as it was. He pulled back. He fully expected that he had just had his only opportunity to kiss her, in this empty gym with no one around, and he might have just destroyed their friendship, but he needed her to understand why he had to do this, and pretending that it was based in simple camaraderie was going to drive him insane.
"No," he said, and he pulled off the other glove. He looped them together, and threw them over the rail at the edge of the ring, moving to leave it.
She stammered at the kiss, and it was over before she’d even managed to register that he’d pressed his lips to hers. She stared a moment after that, confusion evident on her features, and she wasn’t reaching for his arm to stop him until he’d tossed the gloves over the rail, her own gloves coming off as her hand connected with his sleeve. Sure, Oracle had mentioned thinking something was going on between them, but Max had been honest when she’d said nothing had been. She cursed herself for blindness, and she tugged on his arm to keep him from leaving. “I didn’t know,” she said, and she was shit at emotions, and even worse at emotional conversations, but she managed to get that out.
Jack stopped when she tugged on his arm, and he turned back toward her. His jaw was set, but mostly he just seemed beaten by everything. "You really thought that Mockingbird picked you as my weak spot just because we were friends?" he asked. Then he shook his head. "No, don't answer that. Of course you did." He held her gaze, addressing what she'd said directly. "I didn't want you to know." He didn't want her to feel like this was somehow her fault, like she had anything to feel guilt about. "You're with him, and I have never been under any illusions about that. But you have to understand, when I say I can't risk your safety, I mean that, and you have to let that go."
It didn’t escape Max’s notice that this scenario was fucking similar to what had happened with Johnny, and she wondered why the hell she couldn’t be in love with someone who loved her back. She rubbed her face with her free hand, and then she tugged him forward into an extremely awkward hug. “You’re fucking amazing. You know that?” she said, voice cracking on the words, fingers tangling in his curls for just a second before she pulled back slowly. “But you’re going to go back out there, and you’re going to do what you do, and you’re going to do it whether you like it or not.”
The touch was a tantalizing kind of tease, of the thousand things he didn't get to have. He watched her pull back, and tried without success not to wish she hadn't. "I can't do that," he said. There would be no moving him on this. He had already seen one love die in front of him, and he refused to be the cause of the death of another. He wouldn't even take that gamble. Nothing could make it worth it for him. "I would do just about anything you asked me to, but I can't do that, Max."
“You can’t throw away who you are forever, Jack. Not for me. Not for anyone,” she said, still standing close and using his first name, which she seldom did. “You look fucking miserable. I don’t want to be the cause of that, and keeping you grounded makes you miserable. I saw how you got when the Bat made you stop. I’m not going to be the one doing it this time. And we need to fucking find Mockingbird. We need you for that.”
"I'm looking for her," he said, looking down at her. "I'm just not looking masked." She wasn't wrong. He was miserable, and he felt much the same as he had when he'd been caged by the Bat. There was no doubt that he would be more effective in finding Mockingbird if he was able to hunt for her masked. But how could he take the chance that Max would get hurt because he prioritized being a mask over her safety? He sighed. "I'll think about it," he said, which was as close to a promise as he could get.
“You’ll listen to my fucking ass and do what I say,” she insisted. “Listen, nothing can fucking happen to me while I’m here. Just, go see what you can fucking find, alright?” She touched his cheek, the show of affection as awkward as all her shows of affection were, but there nonetheless. “I didn’t mean to make things hard for you,” she added honestly, no pity in it, just the truth. “I know what it’s like to want something you can’t have; it sucks.”
Really, it should have made Jack feel good that he had managed to successfully hide his feelings for Max from her for this long. It didn't. Her affirming that it was something he couldn't have, even though he knew it, in his head, he did, somehow didn't help either. He held still for a moment, then pulled away at last. "I've never been very lucky in love," he said, humor so black it really wasn't there at all, and he regretted it as soon as the words were out of his mouth, too self-pitying for his taste. He climbed over the rail and walked out. He had wanted to see Amanda, but now no longer really seemed like the time.