Max Main ≡ Lois Lane (bylined) wrote in musingslogs, @ 2011-03-28 02:25:00 |
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Entry tags: | eric draven, lois lane |
Who: Max and Jack
What: Jack is nosy
Where: Bathos
When: Say last evening
Warnings: None
Jack wasn’t thrilled about the fact that they still hadn’t found whoever was responsible for threatening them all and that they had, in the meantime, handed over a new system of communicators to someone the Bat had approved with evidence he himself hadn’t seen. He found it difficult to simply trust the Bat out of hand.
He did want to know why Max was at Bathos, however. Visiting her sister? Taking something back to Aubade? He wasn’t sure. But within an hour after talking to her on the network, he was outside her window, in plain sight, knocking.
Max had gotten the control laptop up and running, and she’d spent the evening alternating between trying to find a way to keep Amanda from crying and figuring out whose comms were turning on and where. She’d left for a short while, only to deliver the laptop to the Bat’s warehouse, along with a note reminding Luke to get in touch with her once they had something concrete to go on.
By the time the familiar shadow showed up at the window, she’d changed into a t-shirt and a pair of gray pajama pants three sizes too large, and she was lying on her side on the bed, the baby asleep in between her and the laptop, the headset she wore muted, so that the comm wouldn’t pick up the occasional baby whimper or sigh.
She looked over her shoulder when she heard the knock, but she didn’t move, not wanting to wake the baby, and she just motioned him inside.
Jack could just see a small foot over the edge of Max's leg, and that gave him pause for a short moment before he quietly slid the window open and slid inside, shutting it again once he was in. He walked up to the bed, looking down at Max and Amanda, and what he was supposed to say was shoved to the back burner. He smiled, faintly. "Sleeping?" he asked, quietly.
“She finally stopped crying,” Max admitted, the baby’s tiny hitched breathing indicating the truth of her words. She nodded toward the laptop. “Some of us can’t just fucking cry ourselves to sleep at present,” she added, carefully sitting up, reaching for the baby’s pacifier when she threatened to stir.
The screen on the laptop showed keystrokes that were clearly being made elsewhere, along with a running tally of which comms were currently on and in use and moving.
The smile on Jack's face didn't fade altogether until he caught her expression, sobering, remembering what he'd come there for. He watched the screen for a moment. "So is that monitoring what happens on the network?" he asked. That would explain why she seemed so sure that they could trust Rescue - it wasn't that he could be trusted, it was that they were watching him.
Amanda started crying, and Max cradled her and stood, pacing while trying to get her to keep the pacifier in her mouth. Max still wasn’t good at this, and it was visibly awkward, especially with the tiny fists and feet punching and kicking the air, and she nodded. She was about to explain about Rescue when a notifier popped up on the screen, and she handed the baby over to him without hesitation, before going to grab the laptop to see what Rescue was up to.
And suddenly, there was a baby in Jack's arms, and he had no idea what to do. She was crying, so he shifted his grip to support her head, which he knew you were supposed to do. He picked up the pacifier from where it had fallen on the bed, and managed to successfully get it in her mouth on the third try. It seemed to calm her down, and he paced toward the window, hoping the movement would soothe her.
She was such a beautiful girl. He could see much of her mother in her, even in the obstinate way she kicked her feet and refused to back down, and the thought made him smile. He'd never had a baby in his arms before, let alone one this new and small and upset, and in that moment it didn't matter that she was fussing - he was thinking about things that could have been and never did, and how much like Max she looked when she furrowed her brow in concentration.
Once Max ascertained that Rescue was only looking up police reports for the evening, she turned back to Jack and smiled. “You did better at that than I do,” she told him, sitting on the edge of the bed and not moving to take Amanda yet, knowing he wasn’t going to do anything to her. “We’re monitoring him, Rescue, to see if he’s Mockingbird, or if he can lead us to Mockingbird,” she explained. “His control laptop is limited. He can’t see where anyone is, and he has no access to isolated channels. Only this machine has those things,” she said. “Rorschach doesn’t fucking trust me, maybe you can help with that.” She paused. “Assuming you do trust me.”
Jack moved back toward Max, bouncing Amanda a little, which she seemed to appreciate. He sat down on the edge of the bed next to her. "I should have just trusted you," he said, looking up at her. She had, admittedly, given the Bat's word instead of her own to vouch for Rescue. Had it been her own, he would have taken it. "I just wanted to be sure." He had also been on the edge of his patience lately, and after telling Max what he'd told her the last time they talked, he wasn't entirely sure how to move forward. For now, he'd decided to go with pretending he hadn't. She was in love with someone else, and that was the end of that.
"I've tried talking to him," he said. "And I do trust you. I absolutely do." He paused, then shifted Amanda back over to her, gently. "Rorschach doesn't trust anyone, except maybe me, and I'm still not sure why he trusts me and no one else. Because we're odd men out amongst the others, I suppose."
Max looked down at the baby, distracted a moment, and then she looked back at Jack. “Odd men out, huh?” she asked. “Why is that?” She kept her voice quiet enough that it indicated there was someone else in the apartment that she was trying not to wake. “I think we’re all odd men out, Corvus, in different ways. Rorschach doesn’t trust me because I’m not a Mask.” She chuckled, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes, and much like her tone it was dull somehow, unhappy. “I might just put on some fucking latex one day to shut him up about it.”
“Because we’ve killed,” he said simply. “We have a different idea of justice than the rest.” He ran his thumb over Amanda’s soft, downy hair. “It’s not just you,” he said. “Don’t let it affect you. As I said, he doesn’t trust anyone. You can’t let yourself feel any less worthy because he doesn’t trust you, or everyone on the network would have to feel equally slighted.” He didn’t like her tone, or that look, and he almost touched her. His hand lifted from Amanda to rest on her shoulder but then didn’t, running through his hair instead. “Are you going to tell me why you’re here and not in Aubade?” He hadn’t asked because he assumed she would say something about it herself, and he didn’t want to pry if it was something she had no interest in talking about. But if the Bat had done something to drive her out, he wanted to know about it, as if he needed more reasons to dislike him.
“Having killed doesn’t make you any different. I did plenty of that myself back in the day,” she said, watching his thumb on the baby’s hair. “And there are things I worry that I’d kill for now,” she added honestly. “I’d try to fucking stop myself, but I get the desire to,” she added, looking at Amanda as she spoke. When he asked about her being in Bathos, she looked up. “Did you love your wife?” she asked, the question somehow related.
“It does to the Bat,” he said, glancing up at her. “It was different for you. You were in the military - you were killing for country, and that was your job. Killing in that sphere is sanctioned. Outside of that...” he shrugged. “Many people get the desire to. It’s when one follows through in that unsanctioned sphere of regular life that the separation happens.”
He looked back at her, unsure of where the question had come from, his throat closing up when she asked it. It left him, strangely, speechless - because he had, but he didn’t know how to explain the thousand ways in which he had, in which he still did. So instead, he reached into his shirt and pulled out the chain beneath it. It hung long, a scrap of tarnished silver he’d found in an abandoned house, and on it hung a pair of rings. They didn’t match, one a thin band of gold and silver carved into whorls, the other a plain silver band.
She reached for the tarnished chain, shifting the baby to her other arm to reach, and her fingers slid down to the rings. She rubbed them between her forefinger and thumb, and they clinked against one another quietly in the dark of the room. “She loved you back?” she asked, even quieter than the sound the rings made, the baby’s breathing louder than her voice as she asked the question.
He nodded. "She did," he said, quietly. He believed that, unquestioningly, and he would until the day he died, whenever and if ever that day came. His lighter eye caught the dim light in the room, the darker one even darker for it.
“Do you remember not loving her? Before you did?” she asked, tipping her head down as she asked the question, her hair falling over her cheek and within reach of the baby’s chubby, tiny fingers, and she laughed a little as she freed the locks and looked back at him.
"I remember what it was like before I met her," he offered, smiling faintly, because he knew how love at first sight would sound to someone like Max. He watched her hair fall from behind her ear and the baby swipe at it, and his smile widened a little. She was so beautiful in that moment. He hoped Thomas appreciated what he had. "She is going to get into just as much trouble as her mother, I can already tell."
“Oh, God, don’t fucking say that,” she replied, tucking the strand of hair behind her ear and smiling at him sadly. “You always loved her, then? From the moment you saw her?” she asked, and she did sound disbelieving - not that she didn’t believe he’d felt that, only that she wasn’t sure she believed it worked that way for anyone else. She looked down again. “Did you always want her?”
"I did," he said, and he smiled a little in return. For a moment, he saw her behind Max, long dark hair trailing down her back, dressed in white, and then she was gone again. He hadn't been seeing her as often lately, and he wasn't sure whether to take that as a sign that whatever was organically wrong with him that had been wrong since he'd had his skull cracked open was mending itself in slow motion, or that she was simply tired of him. "I was playing at a party, and she was in the crowd. I saw her and I was in love with her. It didn't matter that she was my best friend's ex-girlfriend, or that I hardly knew her. That was it. I was ruined, after that. And I never stopped being in love with her, or wanting her. She just stopped being alive." He stopped. And as if that wasn't morbid enough, he corrected, "Was stopped from." He held her gaze. "Why do you ask?" she had to be going somewhere with this, and he hoped for her sake that it wasn't related to the Bat.
She touched his cheek softly, an oddly affectionate gesture for her. “I’m sorry,” she said, more feeling in the words than they actually conveyed. “I would have liked to know you then.” she said, and it was the truth. She wondered what he was like without his demons, without the facepaint and the revenge, what he’d been like. “Before all the fucked up shit, when you were happy.” She slipped her hand away, then, back to push a key on the laptop, distracted for a moment, because it was easier to make admissions when she was pretending they didn’t bother her. “Not everyone feels as sure about things as you did then,” she said.
He resisted the urge to take that touch for more than it was meant. "I was a very different man," he said, doing his best to shrug the idea off. "More fun to be around, at the very least, with better jokes." He'd had happiness, and since then he'd had no luck in finding it, where ever it had gone to.
"You don't feel sure?" he asked, fully expecting to be corrected. He could see where this was going, and he didn't like it.
She didn’t answer his question, not directly, anyway. Instead, she looked down at Amanda and smiled a little. “If your wife had cared about you and wanted you to stay with her, but she didn’t love you, and she didn’t want you, would you have done it?” she asked, looking up after she was done asking the question. “If you loved her, would her wanting you there would have been enough?”
He watched her closely, and tried to settle on the most honest answer he could think of, well knowing he would likely be shooting himself in the foot. "I have a hard time believing she would have done something so selfish as to ask me to stay with her if she didn't love me and she knew I loved her," he said. "...but if I loved her in the same way that I did, and she asked me to, I expect it wouldn't matter how selfish it seemed. I would do it. But it would be a terrible thing to live with someone I loved who didn't love me in return."
She smiled at him. “I knew you would fucking answer that way,” she told him, and she had. If there was something she had no doubt about, it was that Jack Corvus had adored his wife. “He asked me to stay,” she said. “I’ve always been shit at feelings, and romance has never been my thing. You had to be able to compartmentalize and turn shit off to get through the day in my line of work, and emotions made that really fucking impossible.” She shook her head, the bit of hair that she’d tucked behind her ear falling forward again. “But I never had any fucking doubt about my appearance, at least until now.” She shoved at his shoulder. “And don’t you fucking start with the compliments, Corvus, or I’ll kick you out the window - don’t think I won’t.”
He hardly knew what to say, even after she'd shoved him. "What did he say to you?" he asked. Max made it sound as if Thomas had said enough to her to make her feel undesirable and unwanted, and it was all he could do to keep the tension out of his shoulders. How could he possibly take her so much for granted? It maddened him. "You have nothing to doubt," he said, and tried to keep his tone light. "And you can't give me too much shit for that, it is a statement of truth, not just a compliment."
“There’s a gun under my pillow. Don’t think I won’t use it,” she joked, a reference to the number of times she’d shot him thus far. “And it doesn’t matter what he said,” she told him. “You asked why I was here. I’m giving him a week to think it over. Audrey, my sister, convinced me not to go home right away,” she clarified, with a motion to the door and the apartment beyond. “It’s not his fault, so don’t get pissy with him, Corvus. He can’t make himself feel something for me he doesn’t, but he does care. I just want to make sure it’s enough.”
To say it was almost physically painful to hear her say that didn’t go far enough. "I'm glad your sister was there," he said. The things he actually wanted to say would not be things Max wanted to hear about Thomas, he knew, so he kept them to himself. He shifted his tack, instead. "I know you aren't asking for my advice, but stay here," he said. "You deserve to have someone love you, Max, not to live with someone who cares for you 'just enough.'"
Max touched his cheek again, her palm flat against stubble and the curve of his jaw. “You would have stayed with your wife,” she reminded him gently.
He touched the back of her hand. She was going to be the death of him. "That doesn't make it right," he said, infinitely frustrated - to have his words turned back against him and at the prospect of Thomas taking her back and then ignoring her, trapping her close to him forever with some false hope that things would ever work out between them. Even though Max didn't and, Jack fully realized, was never going to love him, she deserved someone who she could love who could love her back. That man was not Thomas. No one who made her this miserable on a consistent basis, who implied that what happened to her was her own fault, and flat out told her he didn't love her but still tried to get her to stay with him ought to have someone like her. It was all so wrong, and there wasn't a thing he could do about it.
She turned her hand squeezed his fingers, and then she rested her head against his shoulder. “Just shut up and sit there for a minute,” she said, and though there was a smile in it, it wasn’t a happy sentence. “I need to quit being hormonal and go back to being me, but right now, I just want to fucking sit here and imagine everything might be alright some day,” she said, bouncing the baby a little when she fussed. “And if I believe it, maybe it’ll fucking happen. Isn’t that how this shit is supposed to work?” she asked.
He wondered where the sudden physical affection had come from, and why now, of any time for it to happen. He turned his head toward her when she settled hers on his shoulder. He didn't speak until he was sure his tone would be normal. "I hope so," he said, with a faint smile.