Chapter Text
I want to see Chloe! she’d begged. Pleaded. Let me call her, at least!
You can’t go back, they’d told her. Can’t contact her. Too dangerous. They know your face.
They this. They that. Never who they were, never why they wanted Max so badly. Why they had to run.
It was almost funny, in a sick sort of way. Always worried, always panicked, eyes wide and ears to the ground, always checking. For them. For the hint that they knew where they were.
One month became two. Two became six. A year.
And then the gunshots.
Home invasion. Not them. Just someone wanting to score. Fired thrice, then ran, courage gone. Her father, dead on the ground. Her mother, dying, blood pooling as she coughed it out and begged Max to run.
Run Max, she’d begged. Run from them.
There’d been three shots, not two. One for mom and one for dad. Max’s chest hurt. Twin hearts beating twice as hard, twice as fast. A birth defect, they’d told her.
Vision swimming. Flickers of gold. Amber fire.
Rebirth.
Sirens.
Run, her mother’s voice reminded her. Don’t talk to the police - it will put them in danger, and you.
Max ran. With nothing to her name but the go bag her parents forced her to keep by their apartment’s front door, she ran, and she didn’t look back, and she tried not to think about how she was alone.
It wasn’t until later, when she remembered that no one would be coming to join her in her family’s agreed upon bolt hole did Max begin to cry. Cried for her parents. Cried for Chloe. Cried for William, and Joyce, and her old life ended. Shaking, blood covered hands raised to brush long blonde hair out of wet eyes.
Blonde?
Max pushed herself to her feet and walked unsteadily toward a grime covered mirror. She wiped it clean best she could before stepping back to stare at her reflection.
Hazel eyes framed by long blond hair stared back, with not a freckle to be seen.
“What…” she whispered, and the reflection matched her movement. She raised her hand to touch her face.
Is this why they were after her? Why it wasn’t safe to go back to Arcadia Bay?
They know your face, her parents had said.
Well they didn’t know this one.