For Lucy [ Dated 11/01]

[silverhammer]

He loses count of how many looks he gets on the way back to Oceanview. But it makes sense: his face is smeared with blood, one side of his face is all bruised and swollen and he's limping from where the faceless soldier fucked up his leg. He ignores the few people who manage to ask him if he's okay, mostly because he can't decide whether or not they're real or in his head.

He's not crazy enough to talk to people who aren't even fucking there. He's not.

Max hobbles through the complex to his apartment, leaving a palm-shaped red smear on the door as he pushes it open.

It's like it should be. Like it was that morning he got into his cab for his shift, before the ash. There's no overturned candle on the floor, no bullet holes in the walls from where he should have died.

Maybe he's so goddamned crazy he imagined it. Maybe that copper taste in his mouth and the pain in his leg and side and hand and head... maybe it's not even there at all.

"...fuck," Max breathes, and his voice is shaky and strained, his throat raw.

He walks back to his bedroom and curls up on the bed, the softness of the blanket feeling weirder underneath him than he remembers. He closes his eyes and tries to make the world go away, if only for a little while.

Comments

[radicalize]

After a few days, Lucy doesn't really feel anything close to alright yet, but she's at least pulled herself together enough to act like she is. It helps, at least, to not be entirely on her own here, having Jake, who needs her, and Sybil still so thrown by what happened to her, things Lucy can't quite begin to wrap her head around, though they're far from the strangest thing she's heard about. Mostly, what she gets stuck on is how, after all this time, she should be used to this by now, not so crushed every time she loses someone. It's not like it will ever stop; that's the nature of this place, and the one where she was before this. Even if she could, though, it's different when it's her brother, when she'd only just gotten him back.

She doesn't really want to be going to his building at all. She can't just leave all his shit in his apartment, though, and with Neil a floor up, she figures she might as well stop by and see him first, if only so it feels like there's more purpose to her being here than just taking care of what's left behind of Max's. That changes when, on her way past Max's apartment, she finds the door unexpectedly open. For a moment, she thinks it might be the landlord or something, but she's wary even so, lingering by the door frame, her worry only exacerbated by the unmistakable sight of blood on the door. Whatever's happening here, she doesn't know, but for all that it's unsettling, that's also all the more reason why she can't just walk away.

"Hello?" she calls, taking a couple of steps inside, not yet seeing any other signs of anyone else around. (She shouldn't hope, she shouldn't, she shouldn't. It never ends well.) "Is someone here?"