audrey main // ramona flowers (dyingatherfeet) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-03-24 23:36:00 |
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Entry tags: | lois lane, ramona flowers |
Who: Audrey and Max
What: Discussing the unfortunate Max and Thomas 'he love's me - he loves me not' conversation.
Where: Bathos
When: After this.
Warnings: None.
Max considered going to the warehouse; she considered it, and she discounted it almost as quickly. It didn’t have heat, and she didn’t want to spend any time in the space she was about to give up in favor of security. Numbly, she drove to Bathos, to what she now considered as Audrey’s apartment, despite the fact that she was paying more than half of the rent. She had stopped thinking she would go back there a few months earlier, she realized, and it just blurred her eyes more with tears.
The drive wasn’t long, and in no time Max found herself outside the building. She could have knocked on the door, could have let herself in, but she didn’t feel like she could, not anymore, and not after the fight she and Audrey had in the hospital. She climbed the fire escape to Mason’s old window, to the room she knew Audrey wasn’t using, and she climbed into the warm dark and sat against the door, barring it with her body.
The sound of crying was unmistakable, and no matter how quiet Max tried to keep it, it only got louder.
Audrey was in the kitchen making soup on the stove. She hadn't cooked in a long while, but she'd been feeling restless and unsure of what to do. She'd spent the entire day out talking to the caterer and decorator for Orin's party and picking up a few things for Will, and she'd come home tired but still keyed up. She hadn't talked to Luke yet, though that was high on her priorities list, and every time she thought of the way Max had shouted at her she felt a spike of both anger and guilt. Separated from the situation, she could see that Max was worried about what would happen to her, but the intimation that she was just playing pretend at wanting to help made her furious.
It wasn't until a few minutes after Max had snuck in that Audrey heard the sobbing. The hair on the back of her neck stood straight up. It sounded like Max - Was she here? Had she been here since Audrey had gotten home, and she hadn't noticed? She turned the heat down on the soup and crept toward the door to the other room, pausing outside the door. She touched the door opposite, turning it into a subspace portal in case she needed to quickly run. "...Max?"
“I need the room for a few hours,” Max said through the door, all muffled tears. “And I get if you want to tell me to fuck off, just- wait a little while.” Pause. “Please.”
Audrey leaned against the door, relieved it was Max, but still nervous. "...I'm not going to tell you to fuck off," she said. "Anyway, this is technically your apartment, I don't think I could do that anyway. Max, what happened? Why are you here? ...Where's Thomas?" She suddenly expected the worst, that something had happened to him and she needed a place to stay that wasn't Aubade, and her eyes widened.
“Aubade,” Max said, interpreting the sound of concern in Audrey’s voice, even through the haze of her own misery. “He’s fine,” she assured Audrey, and then she gave a small, helpless sort of shrug that was entirely ache and loss, audible only as movement against the. “He doesn’t want me anymore,” she said, her voice cracking around the words. “I’m moving into the guest room there. I just- I need to get a grip- I just need some time alone.”
The words settled in heavily. It wasn't as if Max had never suggested before that Thomas wasn't in love with her, but somehow Audrey had never wanted to believe that was true. But this, Max in tears and running from Aubade, moving into the guest room, this was something different altogether. Her big sister, the military badass, collapsing into tears - if she'd wanted to doubt what she said, that made it irrefutable, and left her unsure of what to do. This wasn't supposed to happen. She bit her lip. Breaking up just sucked. "Are you sure you're going to be okay living there if you guys aren't together?" she asked. "You could always move back here, Max." Audrey couldn't think of a worse fate than being forced to live in an apartment with her ex.
“I love him,” was Max’s reply. Just that.
Audrey sighed. "All the more reason for you to not be in the same apartment as him," she said. She wasn't going to press it hard, but she felt it ought to be said. She wondered if Max had been in many relationships before this one, if she'd ever been in love before. "Exes should be as far away from you as you can get until you're completely over them. I skipped a world away to get away from mine."
“I don’t know if he’s an ex, really,” Max said sounding uncertain through the door. She hesitated, unsure of how honest to be with her sister. She always held back with Oracle, knowing Oracle’s loyalty was to the Bat in the end, but this was Audrey, and she knew Audrey had feelings for Thomas.
Audrey slid down to the floor, sitting outside the door and talking to it. "If...he told you he doesn't feel the same way you do, and you're not sleeping in the same room anymore, that sounds like a breakup to me," Audrey said. She didn't want to make Max start crying again, but sugar coating it was not going to help. Audrey admittedly had a thing for Thomas, but she had never had any illusions that he might feel the same way about her, and now she was doubting those feelings. The way Max was crying made her wonder how hard he'd let her down.
“Thomas doesn’t talk much,” Max said, and there was smile in it, even through the tears. “I- I got mostly naked, and I asked him to show me if he wanted me, because he couldn’t say it, and he didn’t look,” she told her. “And so I asked again, if he wanted me, and he said no, not like the first time. I just- he wants me to stay, and he says he values me, and he wants me there, but if he doesn’t want to sleep with me, and he doesn’t love me, then- I asked him just to tell me I was special somehow, just that, and he-” She banged her head back against the door. “I sound so fucking pathetic. I just want him to look at me like-” She sighed jaggedly, and she didn’t continue.
Audrey listened with mounting desperation for her to say he had done anything right. Admittedly, one person's side of a fight was usually missing something, but assuming Max was telling the truth that...sounded brutal. "That sounds...pretty bad," she told her. "It's not actually pathetic to want someone to pay you any mind at all, or to look at you like they actually want you around without you needing to do something drastic to get your attention." Anger flared, briefly, and then she reined it in. Sam wasn't Thomas. "You shouldn't stay there. Or stay there for a little while, until Amanda is stronger and doing better, and then leave and bring her here, or get an apartment somewhere close. You two should not be in the same space."
“You don’t get it,” Max said. “He thinks that’s all he has to give. I know him- he thinks- I don’t think he understands, and I don’t know how to fucking explain it to him,” she said. “And I can’t take his daughter, and he goes from saying he doesn’t feel anything to begging me not to go. He wouldn’t beg if he didn’t care, right?” she asked, desperation in the asking.
Audrey sighed, quietly. Everything Max was saying made her feel more and more hopeless. She didn't want to have to be honest with her about the way she made things sound, but it would be a great deal shittier if she wasn't. "He said he didn't feel anything for you and then begged you not to leave?" she asked, to clarify. "If he doesn't feel anything for you, why does he want you to stay? For Amanda?"
“I don’t know. He can never answer that,” Max said. “Because he’d miss me, because Amanda would miss me, because he wants me there.” Her voice softened a little. “He said he didn’t want me to go. He just doesn’t want me or love me,” she added, sounding confused and hurt.
"That's fucked up," Audrey said, without thinking.
Like always when someone criticized Thomas, Max was quick to jump to his defense. “He isn’t doing it on fucking purpose, Audrey.”
"I know, I know," she said quickly, holding up her hands even though Max couldn't see that. "But...you know, be that as it may..." She trailed off. When she went on, her tone had lowered, and her speech slowed.
"I spent a year with someone who didn't love me. I spent about eight months in an apartment with him. If we weren't having sex...I might as well have been a piece of the furniture. And that feeling?" She shook her head. "I wouldn't wish that on anybody. Thomas isn't like him, but it's pretty fucking close, what you just described. Living with someone you love who doesn't love you back, just seeing their face is a reminder every day of the thing they can't or won't give you that you want more then anything. The only way you get over that is getting away from that person. I don't think I'm all the way to over it yet, but I'm better now than I was the day I left, and that's because I got out. It's poison. It makes you feel like you aren't worth anything. It's not worth it."
The anger was gone from Max’s voice when she replied. “But he might realize it some day,” she said, piteously hopeful. “He might just not know it now.”
Well, that was heartbreaking. "Max," Audrey said, then stopped. She felt almost like she was picking on her. It was horrible. "Do you really think that's going to happen?"
“I think he cares about me,” Max said, “and until today, I thought- I thought he wanted me. Maybe it’s the baby, the hormones and the weight, and maybe it’ll change when I can go back to being who I was before.”
Audrey rested her forehead against the door. This was like pulling teeth. "You're not that different than who you used to be," she said. "Did he love you before? Did he say he loved you? Did he say he wanted you?"
“No,’ Max said, and the quiet was long and still, “but he touched me like he did.”
"Oh, Max," Audrey said. She didn't even know where to start. "Max, if he wants you, and you leave, he'll come after you because he cares about you, and not just because you're the mother of his child, and there is only one way to find that out."
“He’ll think I abandoned him, that I left because I don’t want to be there. He won’t understand, Audrey. And I can’t take Amanda from him, I can’t,” Max said, voice going a little hysterical as she replied.
"If he led you on this long, maybe he needs to think about why you would leave," Audrey said. That hurt to say out loud. She liked Thomas. She thought he was a good man. But the evidence seemed to be mounting that he was also a lot more emotionally broken than she thought, enough that he really shouldn't be seeing anyone. "If he doesn't get it right now, the only way he's going to get it if he's forced to spend some real time thinking on it. Let him see the baby as much as he wants, but don't live in the same space as him. It's not good for you. Are you listening to the things you're saying? You sound fucking miserable, Max, I don't want to think about you being over there and fucking miserable because you feel obligated so he won't be upset. And all that aside, you know as well as I do that bringing a kid up in a house with two parents who don't even fucking talk to each other is a recipe for fucking disaster."
“I don’t feel obligated,” Max said, but there wasn’t any heat in the denial. “I love him. I want to stay because I fucking love him. I have since the first time we slept together, and you just don’t- when he’s not worried about what I expect from him, he can be the most tender, amazing fucking man I’ve ever been with. He makes me feel like he cares, even if he doesn’t say it,” she said, realizing it for the first time. “I just don’t know if he cares about me romantically, and I don’t think he fucking knows either. I mentioned mom, how she cried all the fucking time when we were little, but I don’t think he understood.”
"Then get out while he figures it out, and move back if he makes up his mind," Audrey said, standing a little firmer on her position. "If you love him and he doesn't love you, he can care about you all he likes, but you two are not going to be good parents in the same house, and it's going to be a thousand times harder for you to get over him. He can care about you as much as he fucking likes from one apartment over. I don't know about you, but I think it would suck if you ended up turning into mom and my niece ended up like you or me. Thomas isn't the General, so it wouldn't be as bad as that, but would it still be bad? Yeah, it would."
“If I go back there, I’ll stay,” Max said, perfectly aware of how weak that sounded. “And I want him to understand that it isn’t that I don’t love him. I need him to understand that what he gives me is enough, that I’m not asking for more, I’m not- I just-” she went quiet, expect for the soft sound of hitched breathing. “I just want him to want me there for me, because of me.”
"I'll go," Audrey said, even as her stomach dropped and then felt as if it had disappeared altogether. "I can get Amanda and bring her back here, and get anything else you want." Audrey pressed her lips together. "I know we don't always get along, Max, but if I have to watch you go do what I did...I couldn't watch you make the mistake, sticking around too long for something that was never going to change."
“He cares about me,” Max said with certainty, voice rising, countering the comment about something that would never change.
"I know he does," Audrey said. "But if he still isn't in love with you after nine months and change..."
“If you go to get her, you’re going to tell him to fucking stay away, aren’t you?” Max asked sharply, realizing (finally) that there was something of Audrey’s own situation in the advice she was giving her. “He isn’t your ex, Audrey. He’s- he doesn’t know how,” she said, her voice rising in defense again. “It’s different.”
"I'm not going to tell him to stay away," Audrey said. "I'm going to tell him to come see the baby whenever, but that you need space. And I'll tell him what you said - that you're not asking for more from him, but if he doesn't want you there for you, you can't stay."
“I don’t need space,” Max argued, but she was already sounding defeated.
"Then I won't tell him that," Audrey said. She felt exhausted, like they would be going around in circles about this forever. "Do you want me to go?"
Max was quiet for a moment, and she finally leaned forward, opening the door. “Get the phone,” she said.
Audrey got up and went to get the phone. On her way, she turned the heat beneath the soup off all the way. She paused in the kitchen, letting the conversation she'd just had sink in fully. She felt guilty, like she'd been picking on Max, but the truth was painful. Whatever she decided to do now was entirely up to her.