silverhammer | [Dated Late August]

Most of the time, it's Lucy coming around to see him, instead of the other way around. She says she's not checking up on him or anything, but he's known his sister too long to believe that. After all, she was the one who visited him in the hospital more than anyone else, even when he was almost about to get out and insisted she didn't have to.

Either way, this is a momentous occasion, a day that needs to be commemorated. Because Max has just been by the taxi stand, he's got the night off, and he's holding in his hands his very first paycheck. He's finally not under the thumb of their own personal Daddy Warbucks, and if that's not something worth celebrating, Max isn't too sure what is.

"Hey Luce," Max calls, knocking on the door to her apartment, "Come on, open up, I know you're home."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

radicalize

Exhaustion is nothing new for Lucy. She goes until she can't anymore, throws herself into something (or many things) because it's easier that way, single-minded focus keeping her from getting too caught up in her own head. This time, she isn't nearly as frazzled as she could be, mostly because she's lived with and taken care of a small child before, but it's different now. Whereas Sam knew her already, Jake doesn't, and she needs to find her footing with him, needs him to know that she isn't going anywhere. Juggling that with the classes she wants to take and the jobs she's thought about applying to has left her barely able to stop for a moment. She doesn't mind it that way, but it's still true, no matter how self-imposed.

Even so, despite knowing it's been with good reason that she's been busy, she still feels a stab of guilt when she hears Max's voice from the other side of the door. For days now she's been meaning to stop by, and she just hasn't gotten to, and that doesn't feel right, not when she's still just so goddamn grateful to have him here. For now, at least, it's just as well. She can tell him about everything that's happened just as easily from her apartment as his.

Pushing her hair back from her face as she pulls the door open, she smiles at the sight of him, warm and genuine. "How did you know I was home?" she asks, more teasing than accusatory, even as she stands aside to let him in. "What would you have done if I wasn't? My neighbors would probably have thought you were crazy."

From:

silverhammer

"They were bound to figure it out sooner or later," Max replies, walking past Lucy and into the apartment, where he plants himself on her couch, sprawling out and propping his feet on the armrest all at once. It's the kind of thing his parents used to always give him shit for when he was a kid.

"So where've you been hiding? I can't get rid of you for weeks, then all of a sudden you go missing. What gives?" Max got what the deal was, and as much as he'd insisted to Lucy that he was okay and didn't need her around, he kinda missed it.

From:

radicalize

"Yeah, it's... kind of a long story," Lucy says as she turns to follow him, all but laughing when she takes a chair near the couch. The last thing she wants is to be foreboding or to make it seem like something's happened, but then, she can't really just spring all of this on him without warning, either. She should have said something sooner. Now that he's here, though, it's time to fix that. "I've been meaning to come by, actually. There's nothing bad, just, some things have happened."

From:

silverhammer

"How about you fill me in over dinner? My treat," Max says, and he sits up so he can reach into his pocket and pull out his paycheck to show her. There's a crease down the middle from where he had to fold it so it'd fit in his pocket, but other than that, it's pristine.

"I'm rich. And you can't tell me this isn't better than that creepy money that comes from nobody."

From:

radicalize

Lucy can't help grinning at that, nodding in easy agreement. She'd been planning on making something, but dinner out with her brother isn't something she can turn down, still surreal in a way that makes her appreciate it even more than she did back home. He was gone for a long time, then, but it's nothing compared to the time she went without him before he turned up here, more time than they'd spent apart in her entire life.

"Look at you, you're like a real, paid member of society now or something," she teases. "Yeah, that sounds great."

From:

silverhammer

"Yeah, I'm a regular sell out," Max replies, folding the check again and putting it back in his pocket. He's so fucking paranoid that he's gonna lose it or something. His boss mentioned something about having just put into his bank account through electronics, but he's really had it with all that at this point. Max doesn't know what's wrong with people just taking their money to the bank themselves.

He pops up from the couch, already ready to go.

"I'm thinking Chinese, what about you?"

From:

radicalize

"Chinese works for me," Lucy agrees, still grinning as she gets to her feet again in turn. Truthfully, she doesn't much care where they go to eat, but that being said, even after a few months, she finds things that once would have been normal, like having access to Chinese food, to be unexpected. A lot of the time, she thinks instinctively that she wouldn't really want to get used to it again. With Max here with her, though, she can't imagine wanting to be anywhere else. "You want to go now, then?"

From:

silverhammer

"Yeah sure, why not?" Max asks, because now that he's got the idea in his head, he's ready to go already. Yesterday was maybe not so good— he didn't sleep much, and the afternoon was pretty shitty as far as not being a headcase was concerned— but he's already bounced back.

"Unless you've already got plans or something. You don't have another brother you haven't told me about, do you?"

From:

radicalize

"No, of course not," Lucy says, shooting him a grin, equal parts genuine and teasing. "It's just you." Granted, he's not actually too far off on that front, but that's the sort of thing she figures she shouldn't just spring on him. She'll work up to it, has time to do so. Now, when they haven't even left her apartment yet, doesn't seem like the moment to let him know that she's taken in a five year old. "Don't worry, I don't have plans."

From:

silverhammer

"Okay cool," Max replies, "Shoes, then Chinese. And I can tell you about the lady I almost hit with my cab."

The only reason he's eager to tell Luce that story is because he hadn't actually hit her. They'd joked once about her having to bail him out of jail, and it might've come down to that.

From:

radicalize

"You almost hit someone?" Lucy asks, brow raising, though she manages not to let herself sound too alarmed. Almost, she thinks, has got to be the operative word in that sentence; anything else, and this would be a much different conversation they were having. They certainly wouldn't have been planning on celebrating. "Please tell me she just ran in front of you or something."

From:

silverhammer

"The important word there is 'almost'," Max says, just to be sure that Lucy doesn't think he actually hit someone with his cab, "This chick is just wandering in the street, not even paying attention. I think somebody else would've hit her if I hadn't stopped. She was kind of a fox too, so it's probably good she didn't die."

From:

radicalize

"Yes, because that's the real reason to be glad someone didn't die," Lucy says with a shake of her head, making a face at him. Honestly, she can't really say hearing that surprises her, but that doesn't mean she's just going to let him get away with it, either. "Well, as long as the almost accident wasn't your fault, I think it's okay."

From:

silverhammer

"Hey, it doesn't hurt," he replies, waggling his eyebrows at her. He wouldn't have just left her there if she hadn't been a foxy blonde, though; Max just thought it was worth mentioning that she was.

"Karen or Kara or something. Turned out she was new. Just showed up and immediately got dragged to the hospital or something. It was wild. I think maybe they drugged her."

From:

radicalize

"Jesus," Lucy says, eyes going wide. She's heard of people showing up at inopportune times — hell, she did herself, back on the island, the way she nearly knocked a guy out not something she's liable to forget any time soon — but that seems like a whole different brand of difficult, enough that she wonders if it was just that showing up here was disorienting or if there was something more to it than that. "Is she okay now?"

From:

silverhammer

"So far as I could tell," Max says, but he's not exactly a doctor. Mostly he just took her home for free and had been done with it. He'd caught hell once his boss had realized he'd been giving free rides, but it wasn't as if he could have just left her there.

"Hey, wasn't I supposed to be telling you this story over Chinese?"

From:

radicalize

"You were," Lucy says, biting back a laugh, as she heads back over to the door and pulls it open. With a story like the one he's been telling, it's entirely too easy to get distracted, but there's no sense in just hanging around here needlessly. "And you were going to be buying, too."

From:

silverhammer

"I don't think I remember that part," Max jokes, and he's right behind her out the door, a grin on his face.

"Where do you think money comes from? Do you think it grows on trees?"

From:

radicalize

"You sound like Dad," Lucy says with a short laugh, shaking her head at him. "I never thought I'd see the day." Grabbing the keys out of her purse to lock the door behind them, she looks back over her shoulder at him, grinning in turn. "Your paycheck. You know, from your job?"

From:

silverhammer

"Apply yourself, Max! What are you going to do with your life? Stop making that face, or it'll stick that way!" Max replies, doing his best impersonation of their father. He hasn't seen either of their parents in... shit, over a year now, but that doesn't mean he's gotten rusty when it comes to mimicking their Dear Old Dad.

Edited Date: 2012-10-08 07:27 am (UTC)

From:

radicalize

"See, and what he didn't know is that's just the way your face is," Lucy quips, shooting him a too-sweet smile. It's all but impossible to not burst out laughing when he's got a pretty damn uncanny impression of their father. It might have been years — longer than she usually chooses to think about — since she's been home and saw the rest of her family, but some things are just unforgettable. "That's good, by the way. I'm sure he'd be really pleased to know how well all those lectures sunk in."

From:

silverhammer

"Real funny. You should take the act on the road," Max replies, reaching over to muss her hair in retaliation.

"Besides, it's not that none of it stuck, it's just that I choose to ignore all the bullshit." It's never been that he doesn't care about their parents or anything, but their dad has never really gotten it. It was always his way or nothing, at least as far as Max was concerned.

From:

radicalize

"Hey!" Lucy protests, letting out a short laugh, though she doesn't bother trying to duck away. It's too comfortingly familiar, being around him like this, and it's not like it really matters if her hair tangles a little. "I know. It's all you really can do, with him."

That she misses him and their mom and Julia isn't something she wants to admit to, though, at least not right now. For a long time, it didn't bother her, but it's been so fucking long now since she's seen them that it's impossible not to. Julia should be getting ready for college, maybe gone already, and God only knows how their parents are.

From:

silverhammer

"You say that like you didn't have it easy," Max replies as they walk, and he tries idly to remember just where the Chinese place is. He's passed it about a million times in his cab, but going on foot's another thing entirely.

"Do you know what would've happened to me if I tried to go to New York the summer before college? I'm guessing a long, long lecture on how getting a summer job builds character."

From:

radicalize

If she wanted, Lucy thinks, she could easily protest to that. The circumstances of her leaving were entirely different, when Daniel had just died and her only real alternative would have been going off to Europe with their parents, and even then, it hadn't been quite as easy as all that to get them to agree. Even so, she knows he's right. Up until she decided to forgo college and stay in New York, she did have it easy, at least comparatively so.

"Oh, but it does," she says, as sincerely as she can, though the effort it takes to keep from laughing is visible in the look on her face. "Don't knock it 'till you've tried it, Max. I'm sure all those dishes Dad washed to put himself through college really taught him a lot about life."

Edited Date: 2012-10-25 10:36 pm (UTC)

From:

silverhammer

"Yeah, and stuck-on meatloaf and yellow rubber gloves," Max says, "I think I'm glad I passed on that one."

And he thinks that both of their parents would argue that driving a cab's not much better. Frankly, it's kind of a double standard and pretty unfair. He's learning plenty about life from the driver's seat; a hell of a lot more than he was learning in Princeton lecture halls, that's for sure.

From:

radicalize

"Yeah, you should be," Lucy says, nose wrinkling as she nods. She's never done it herself, but she saw enough of it working in a diner in New York that she knows it's really not an ideal job to take on. "Driving a cab is definitely better. Less messy, too, as long as you keep only almost hitting people."