Re: log: dylan & max
Did she have bad memories about the two of them? Sure, but those memories weren't sitting there at the bar. She'd left a lot of herself in Dhaka, and she'd left all that stupid hopefulness there, along with the rest. Or so she'd like to think. Regardless, at least her heart wasn't on her sleeve anymore, where it made everyone uncomfortable, and anything she felt about the past was buried in the sand somewhere, along with a lot of blood and the echo of screaming.
"Word to the wise, never waste dinner on a woman who's over thirty-five. You don't need to." She winked conspiratorially, ha, ha, letting him in on the joke, and she worked on her chaser beer as his pint of dark came. "We were over half a decade ago, for both of us," she said, and she took a sip and a drag, and she was getting enough of a buzz cooking that she didn't mind the blunt words about shit she was never blunt about. Seven years, if she was going to be specific about it. Brandon was over a decade earlier. It was all in the rearview, and yet here she was, and that called for a fresh whiskey.
She tapped the bar as he said he didn't hate everything about his jobs after the government. She wasn't sure anyone here was helping the world, but she kept it to herself. She didn't do that much, keep shit to herself, but she found herself wanting him to have something he trusted after all those years of hell he'd just escaped from. If that trust was in some organization, she wasn't going to tear it down. Old her, the her before Dhaka and the lines that etched her face, would've insisted on poking into what he was doing. New her, not so much. It was like Brandon's op in New York; she knew that shit was dirty too, but she'd stopped looking as she got closer to the truth. Maybe old age was making her soft. Maybe she just wanted to have some illusions left.
The fresh whiskey came, and she tipped it back. "To black and white, McKendrick." She'd never been good at grey either. She killed people. There wasn't anything grey about that.