Work Text:
When he gets back from the shower, Maxwell's lying flopped across the shitty hotel bed like a kid's doll thrown from the top of a building. Face down. The angles of her arms and legs don't look comfortable, or Euclidean. According to pop culture, basically every woman in the developed world wants to be as long and narrow as Maxwell; except for Maxwell, who apparently wants to be a squished cranefly.
She's already wearing her sleep mask, so he makes a point of clomping on his way over. If she's awake with her eyes covered while someone's there, it usually means she's pretty chilled, but no one really needs to repeat the experience of startling Alana Maxwell up from drowsing. Especially not at close range. Even Kepler, when he can't actually avoid it, goes right to barking her name in that tone that hits the brain stem without passing Go, collecting two hundred dollars, or bothering to achieve consciousness before you're wearing a different shirt on the other side of the room.
Once he can be pretty confident she's oriented to him, he unwraps the towel from his neck and whips the bottoms of her feet with it. She makes a noise like a berserker Pomeranian and completely fails to kick him.
"Heh." The second kick attack doesn't come any nearer to connecting. "Classic."
"Die in a fire, stumpfucker." She contracts in on herself, reflexive, like a poked bug. Jacobi drops down next to her. "Actually, you'd be worryingly into that. Die in a flood. Die in a broken industrial freezer. Die in a Claire's."
"Now, that reminds me. Did I ever tell you about the time I contracted Yersinia pestis from a contaminated piercing gun in Accomac, Virginia?"
Mentos-and-Coke fizz of Maxwell's laughter. "Wow. New Zealand cowboy pirate. Three simultaneous bad accents that don't actually sound anything like him either individually or in aggregate. Four point eight five stars."
"Fuck you and the rhinestone unicorn you rode in on." He jabs her in the ribcage. She barely even squeaks. Must've been braced for it. "So where'd I lose the point fifteen?"
"Town name could have had more syllables. I gave you an extra zero five for scansion."
"Long story short… I wasn't dead yet." He tips an invisible hat and settles back against the headboard. Sleet dashes against the window in monotonous handfuls. One of the cracks in the shitty ceiling looks kind of like the one he skateboarded over and broke two fingers outside the school when he was ten. "Why is everything in this place kind of almost slimy?"
"They're cutting corners on soaps and detergent. It leaves a residue." Maxwell burrows discontentedly into the sheets. "Can you do my back for a minute?"
"I guess, if it'll make up for the residue."
He rests his hand between her shoulderblades. It covers an objectively unnerving percentage of her back. Like touching a hot brick wrapped in washed-to-shreds t-shirt cotton. When he pushes down, she shudders and makes a distressing noise.
"More like up underneath my shoulderblade – other shoulderblade, jackass. My left. Yeah," gasping, when he does the thing like scratching and digging in at once. "Ow, fuck. Positive. Up underneath."
Jacobi's seen the way she sits at her keyboard. He's kind of amazed she still has a back, and that's here and now with strongly recommended gym time and the ten-thousand-dollar chair she dared him to dare her to requisition. That wasn't even what made Kepler bat an eye. God knows what she was like when she was younger.
He changes the angle, up underneath, and her leg on the opposite side genuinely starts twitching. "This is like playing Minesweeper with live charges."
"Like you wouldn't do that. We should do that next year for your birthday."
"Have you thought about seeing a physio? Or, like, an exorcist?" Drags his thumb along the knife-curve of her scapula, probably way too hard, as she's opening her mouth to answer. Something in there releases unceremoniously, and she groans.
"Same thing other side – I thought about it. I chose you."
He corkscrews his thumb down, same thing, other side. Maxwell runs cold, temp-wise, but Jesus you could fry an egg on her back. "Cool. Then you also chose me laughing at you when you turn forty and you're shaped like a question mark."
"It's, like, rilly cute how you think either of us will live to see forty." She twitches, and sighs, and rolls her shoulders till they crack. "Do we have any of those weird chips left?"