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"No fucking way..."
Alex carefully dropped the stack of vinyl into the New Releases box and glanced over toward the register where Steph was engrossed in her laptop. "Hm? What's up?"
"So... You know that whole big huge thing that happened to my town back in the day, and how I don't really talk about it?"
"Er, yes, insofar as you don't talk about it. As has previously been pointed out." She stepped across to join her behind the counter, gently rubbing her back. "Everything okay?"
"Um, an old friend of mine made it out alive, but then she kinda fell off the map with her... girlfriend? And I guess I sorta just assumed that I'd maybe never see her again. Only she pinged me a few weeks ago and we've been catching up. She's uh... She's on her way out here!"
The blue aura was washing off Steph, but Alex didn't really need it in this instance. Arcadia Bay was a huge, looming issue in the girl's history. She was doing her best to deal with it in a healthy way, and her buddy Mikey helped a lot. But this was bound to be upsetting no matter what. "Y'know... If it's gonna get you all twisted up... there's no shame in telling her she doesn't have to visit. Chloe's your friend, even after all these years, and she'd probably want the best for you!"
Finally she looked away from her laptop back at Alex, and her face immediately softened. "Hey, we talked about this, aura reading is no fair."
"Not necessary. I just know you," she chimed and continued to massage her hand up and down Steph's back. "So what are you thinking?"
"I dunno, it might be nice. To hang out and reminisce. There's kinda some stuff I've been meaning to talk with her about anyway, even if it was just dumb high school drama." She got a fond little smile on her face, staring off at nothing for a moment. "Plus if she really has been wandering around up and down the coast, I'm sure she's got some ridiculous stories to tell."
Oh thank god. Alex breathed a sigh of relief, glad to see that Steph had reached a decision and the clouds lifted a little bit. Again, no aura reading necessary in this instance, but it didn't hurt either. "Are you gonna want privacy for this reunion? I know Ryan is still itching to take me on a 'real hike', though I shudder to think what that means."
She smiled that brilliant Steph smile, chuckling softly. "Are you kidding? You're not going anywhere. I mentioned you to Chloe and now she's all hyped to meet you. Besides..." she muttered, glancing aside and back at her laptop. "...wouldn't turn down the emotional support."
"Hell, that's my specialty."
Alex leaned in to press a kiss to her cheek, but at the last second Steph turned and caught her lips instead. She pressed in a bit closer, and for a moment the two of them got lost in the embrace. The only thing that could shake them out of it was the bell on the door, which seemed to ring out several decibels louder than it normally did. Both girls gasped and turned to see Ryan walking through the door. "I'd feel bad about interrupting, but honestly it's your own fault for being so lewd in public. What if the children were to see?"
Alex scoffed. "Okay, that's a little too close to the way bigots actually sound. “'Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target lest it be mistaken for and contribute to that which it intends to criticize'. Jackass."
Just like that, everything was back to business as usual. Before long, they'd close up for the night, head to the Black Lantern, grab a few drinks, part ways, Steph would spend the night. Life was quiet. Life was good. They could worry about this big, scary visit another day.
'Another day' came faster than Alex had really been prepared for. On Steph's insistence, everyone around town had agreed to tone down the welcome wagon since she couldn't be sure how Chloe would react. So instead it was just the two of them on a bench near the Airbnb Chloe would be renting with Max - who, it had finally been clarified, was in fact her girlfriend. Speaking of girlfriends, her own was currently jittering her leg in place, so rapidly Alex was afraid she might start busting up the concrete of the sidewalk. In an attempt to diffuse her anxiety, Alex searched for whatever thoughts could come to mind. "Huh, this is... Roland's place? Where'd he end up going anyway?"
Steph's leg finally slowed a bit and she pursed her lips thoughtfully for a moment. "Spain? Portugal? Somewhere around there. Him and Marcia are doing some kind of extended European... thing. You know how retirees are, they worked their asses off for like five decades, so now the world is their playground." The sound of a loud, grinding, clunker of a truck caught both their ears and they turned in time to see it rounding a corner. "Shit, that's them." She stood up, brushing herself off a bit, crossing her arms, uncrossing them and jamming her hands in her pockets, then withdrawing them from her pockets and crossing her arms yet again.
It would have been adorable if it wasn't kind of sad too. Alex joined her in standing up, giving a small wave to the approaching truck. She'd seen a few pictures of the two by now, so she was able to identify Chloe as the one behind the wheel - mostly due to the long-ish blonde-ish hair with various colored streaks throughout it. And Max was the one in the passenger seat with the short-cropped hair and the slightest hint of a hipster fringe.
The truck whipped into the driveway and Chloe leaned out the window with a grin. "'Sup loser."
Steph matched the energy with a grin of her own. "Glad to see you haven't changed at all. Make yourselves at home and then we can give you the grand tour."
"The 'grand tour' must not take very long," Chloe said, laughing as she hopped out, revealing she was just as lanky in person as her pictures suggested. "This place is even dinkier than-" Everyone went silent. She cleared her throat awkwardly and hurried to grab up a duffel bag from the bed of the truck. "Anyway, be back in a flash."
That hadn't been an exaggeration. The two must have only popped into the small house long enough to dump their stuff in the entry hallway before coming back outside, chatting quietly between themselves.
"-have you ever known me to think before speaking?"
"I'm sure it's fine. We're all a little tense..."
Alex glanced over at Steph, and found her face and body language much harder to read this time. Far more concerning was that not even her power could really give her a sense of what was going through her head. It was just a mass of... everything, all at once. So she just held her hand firmly and did her best to smile comfortingly. Okay. Supportive girlfriend time, go.
Max smiled softly as she approached, looking between everyone else. "Well, boring stuff out of the way. Steph, Chloe mentioned you a whole bunch, she's been super excited to see you again." She reached out and took Steph's free hand, shaking it firmly. "And... Alex, right?"
"That'll be me. It's great to meet both of you." She met Max in a handshake, and...
For just a split second, something happened. Some Kind of Thing. It was more than static shock, but not as bad as getting struck by lightning. The universe felt so insanely huge, and yet incredibly small. It was almost like everything made perfect sense. Then, just like that, it all went out of focus and she couldn't remember her own name.
Her eyes met Max's, and somewhere in those wide doe-eyes she saw a sense of recognition and familiarity and terror. But neither of them knew what the hell to say about it, or how to go about asking questions without creating a lot of confusion. Hell, maybe Max just had a lot of intense emotions and they were hitting Alex like a tidal wave. There was just no way to be sure.
"Babe? Everything good?" Chloe asked with a frown.
Max snapped back to reality before Alex did, shaking the cobwebs from her brain. "Yeah, just... tired from the long drive. I think taking a walk around will be good."
While Chloe fawned over her girlfriend for a moment, Steph leaned in close to Alex and looked at her nervously. "Was this one of those things? You need some space?"
"No, nothing like that..." she muttered, trying to find the right words to explain this entirely new sensation. She was afraid of giving away some big secret, despite the fact that she didn't even know what the secret was. "She just reminds me of someone from one of my old foster homes. Kinda gave me a flashback for a second." Alex almost never lied to Steph. She hated lying to her. But she had no clue what else to do in the moment. She needed to know more before she truly freaked out about this.
"Oh my god, Duurgaron! That was that motherfucker's name!"
Alex giggled softly. Pretty much any time any of Steph's nerd stuff came up, it always fascinated her so much. It was the kind of thing she'd never really gotten to grow up with, despite the fact that she enjoyed it so much. Hell, that LARP had been her first, but she'd had so much fun with it. So any time she got to learn more, it was always a joy.
Still... every now and then she'd look across the Black Lantern table at Max, and the two of them would sip their drinks and try to ignore... whatever the hell that had been.
"Y'know, I still play every other week with Mikey on video chat. I've got a whole set-up back at the record store. You could join iiinnnn..." Steph crooned enticingly.
"...can I see it?" Chloe asked, a bit breathless, like they weren't talking about miniatures and maps.
Surprisingly, Steph actually cast a glance at Alex, as if asking for permission. "You kids gonna be okay without us while we go geek out for a few minutes?"
The simple truth of the matter was that she'd been looking for this exact moment. And she knew that Steph had been doing the same, wanting to get some time to talk with Chloe one-on-one. So it seemed pretty much perfect. "Go for it." The two rushed out the door like a pair of kids heading for the tree on Christmas morning.
Once the dust had settled, Alex glanced across the table at Max, who was still idly sipping her beer. "So, Max..."
Her eyebrows went up a little bit as she finally put her mug down. "Y-Yeah?"
"Ugh, okay, I don't know how to ask this in a normal human being kind of way. So I'm just gonna come right out with it. Is there anything like... weird or different about you?"
The girl folded in on herself a bit, reaching up as if to fiddle with her hair before suddenly remembering how short it was. "I mean my girlfriend and I managed to survive a deadly storm, so we've got that whole trauma thing going on."
Alex wasn't sure how long they had to sort this out, and her curiosity was getting the better of her. "I saw the look on your face earlier, you know what I mean. Something... Something special, like a superpower or whatever."
Max glanced around the place, shifting around in her seat a few times. "...can we not talk about it here?"
That was close enough to a yes that Alex was more than happy to take it. She slammed the last of her beer and motioned to the stairs. "I live upstairs. There's a rooftop patio. Private enough?"
The sigh of relief she gave was impressively dramatic. "Yeah, I think that'll do just fine."
Alex fished a pair of cans out of Gabe's old dramatic-reveal cooler. She passed one off to Max, who proceeded to crack it open and drain it in a single long gulp.
"Holy shit..."
She crushed the can and began fiddling with it in her hands as she spoke. "...so. About six years ago now, I discovered... that I could rewind time in short bursts. Further, if I pushed myself really hard. I uh... I saved Chloe's life. A couple different times."
Releasing the breath she'd been holding, Alex finally opened up her own drink and began chugging as well. "Oh thank god."
"Not the reaction I was expecting."
"Maybe, but I'll bet you know exactly why I said it. C'mon, it feels lonely, doesn't it? Even if there's someone around you who cares, you're always... just a little alone. And now. All of a sudden. We're not quite so alone."
She gave a slightly wry smile and gestured to Alex. "How about you? What's your damage?"
That right there was how Alex knew that Max really understood. She didn't ask her what her superpower was, or what she can do. 'What's your damage' really summed it up. "Hyper-empathy. I can tell exactly what people are feeling, even what they're thinking... I get... memories off certain objects. If someone feels something strong enough, I soak it up and go through it myself." She glanced down at her hands and thought about bloody knuckles, a monster in the depths, a shattered sculpture, and the pure joy of a kiss. "Hm. Show me yours, I'll show you mine?"
The other girl cocked an eyebrow and smirked. "Really? Huh... okay. Sure." She stood up and shook out her limbs. "Haven't done this in a while... I want you to think up something completely random, totally private, whatever. Something that I have no way of guessing, that I couldn't have learned from Steph."
Of course, Alex could probably have just come up with a random string of numbers or whatever. But she was speedrunning the process of connecting with another special human being. So she decided to go straight into the deep end. Granted, she'd told Steph a lot of stories from her childhood, and from all the centers and foster homes. But not everything. "Okay... now what?"
"I'm going to ask you for the answer, then pop back and tell you before I've even asked." Her head started to hurt a bit, and she suddenly felt a great deal of pity for Max. Getting very very angry from time to time was nothing compared to determinism and causality. There was a beat, and then suddenly Max gave a firm little nod of her head. "Wow. Um." She sat back down, rubbing her arm self-consciously. "I almost don't feel right repeating it."
"It's okay," Alex said, still unable to believe she was even having this conversation. "I told you in one... timeline, or whatever. So I can probably trust you in this one too."
"...any time you hear the song White Flag, you get this terrible feeling in the pit of your stomach, and you start crying. Because... that was the last song you heard before... Before your dad left." She cleared her throat softly and hastily reached for another beer. "Jesus... Guess that... means it's your turn?"
"Well, if it's any consolation, this is probably going to hurt just as bad. I can really only do this if you're feeling something extreme, so... You kinda have to dig deep." She gave an apologetic shrug.
"There's just so much to choose from!" Max said with mock-cheer. "I mean... there's really only one. One thing that matters, more than any other. So... here goes." She closed her eyes, and almost instantly the grief and anguish started rolling off her like a waterfall.
Alex reached out-
"This is my storm. I caused this... I caused all of this. I changed fate and destiny so much that... I actually did alter the course of everything. And all I really created was just death and destruction!"
"Fuck all of that, okay? You were given a power. You didn't ask for it... and you saved me. Which had to happen, all of this did... except for what happened to Rachel. But without your power, we wouldn't have found her! Okay, so you're not the goddamn Time Master, but you're Maxine Caulfield... and you're amazing."
She withdrew her hand, like she'd touched the burner on a stove. "...Arcadia Bay... You blame yourself. You carry it with you, everywhere you go. For six years now. Fuck, Max..."
Without a word, she lifted her eyebrows and smiled, as if to say 'see? told you' before opening her next beer and taking a massive sip.
"But, I mean, you know that's bullshit, right? Y-You were a high schooler! And you don't even know if any of that chaos theory shit is true anyway!"
Max just shook her head and leaned back in her seat, staring off at the mountains in the distance and sighing deeply. "Yeah. I mean I know it, like... up here..." She tapped herself on the temple. Then she dipped her hand down and patted herself a few times on the chest. "But it never quite sinks in where it matters. What happened there... it's whatever the numerical inverse of decimation is. A town of nearly 5000, and maybe 500 survived. And I'll never know for sure if I did it or not. Some part of me will always assume, though..."
Alex's brow furrowed. "Wasn't there also like... a whole serial killer thing?"
"Yup. A serious double-whammy."
"Christ. All I did was put a serious dent in a worldwide capitalist institution by uncovering a major conspiracy to hide evidence. Feels like I got off light. Well, I did almost die, I guess..."
The two of them drank in silence for a while. From down below on the street, they could hear Chloe and Steph making their way back toward the Black Lantern. It seemed as though 'loud' was a word that could be applied to Chloe pretty reliably. "I can't believe you LARP now, ya fucking nerd! How was I foolish enough to hope you'd get less lame over time? Ohhh, I'm Steph Gingrich, I work in a record store and run a local radio station and I LARP because I'm a complete dweeb."
The door to the bar shut beneath them, momentarily silencing Chloe's ribbing. There was another moment of silence, and suddenly Alex and Max broke out in simultaneous bright laughter. This continued even as the door behind them opened and they were joined by their respective girlfriends. Steph came up from behind Alex, wrapping arms around her upper chest and kissing her on the forehead. "What's so funny?"
"Oh, we're just bonding over how lame our girlfriends are..." Alex mused, feeling oddly cheered up despite what the two of them had just been talking about. She glanced back to her side, watching as Chloe planted herself in the lap of a very uncomfortable Max. "Y'know, bonding over stuff we have in common."
"Aww, was kinda hoping the two of you were hopelessly awkward without us around," Steph said with a playful pout. "Alas, you are just too charming."
"Yeah. It's my superpower."