Chapter Text
When Max woke up, simultaneously feeling like she’d slept for years and like she hadn’t slept a single second, her head was ringing. Actually, truly, probably audibly ringing. With pain. It was ringing with pain. Pain so bad she didn’t want to open her eyes. In fact, she was pretty sure if she so much as moved an eyelash in any direction, her head would shatter open and her brain would goo out between the cracks of her splintered skull, seeping into the offputtingly squishy and gummy-like pillow beneath her. She couldn’t stop the image from entering her mind, but it wasn’t a great thought to have: it didn’t make her head ring any less, but it did send a hot gush of nausea rushing up her stomach into her esophagus. Was she dying? A cough sent off another flare of sickness. Yep, she was totally, definitely dying. And she needed to get to a bathroom or a bucket or something but fast, or she’d vom all over—
She actually had no idea whose bed she was currently hanging out in. For sure it wasn’t her own. She didn’t even have to open her eyes to know that, because a) her limbs were all semi-comfortably resting on the mattress, which never happened when she woke up in a skinny regulation Prescott Dorm bed, and b) even though her Blackwell bed was a little cramped and hard, at least it didn’t have… latex sheets? Were those latex sheets? She tried to ignore the ways her head was currently screwing her over and pried her eyes open, wincing with the effort.
Chloe. She had to get herself to a decently suitable receptacle pronto or she’d vom all over Chloe. Seeing her best friend made Max a little less nauseous, though. Sure, she was almost certainly dying, but at least she’d have her BFF to hold her hand in the last few moments and stuff. She glanced around as much as she could without moving her poor head. Was this a hotel room? Probably. Well, maybe. It looked a little too spacious; Max didn’t have all that much money and neither did Chloe, obviously. It didn’t matter too much, though. The important part was that she could see a door cracked open and, through the crack, a wall tiled in a baffling bright Pepto-Bismol pink shade. It had to be a bathroom. A weird bathroom, but that was okay. Max could deal with a Barbie’s Dream House vibe as long as she could make it there before losing whatever food she might still have in her system. Ugh, no, do not think of food. She was parched, too: her tongue felt dried out, matted with dehydration. Had she done this to herself? Why had she done this to herself?
She somehow managed to slide off the bed without immediately biting it, clutching her head between her two hands like that could possibly do anything to alleviate the pain. She rushed to the bathroom as quickly as she could, kneeling on the cool, pink porcelain floor as she expelled whatever awful, awful thing was in her stomach: pure poison, most likely, and various colors of bile.
Definitely a hotel, she decided as she gingerly rose to her feet, feeling a little better, maybe, for throwing up. The mirror over the sink was really smudged, but it was flanked by two baskets of assorted hotel-ish things – folded hand towels, tiny soaps still wrapped up in their papers, yes! a little tube of no-brand toothpaste! Pretty fancy for a place with pink walls and rubber sheets. Well, she supposed a hotel room this large probably had to have something fancy going for it. There were no complimentary toothbrushes that Max could see, however, so she picked up the toothpaste and squeezed the whole thing into her mouth, trying not to gag. Her morning breath this particular morning could level buildings. Was it even morning? She should probably investigate. Maybe Chloe knew something Max didn’t. It was often like that, even though Max was supposedly the one with the killer powers.
Even lying on the strange bed – the sheets were definitely latex or PVC or some such; shiny and fuchsia, they made the bed look kind of like the vibrating heart bed in the first Sims game – and even though she had plainly passed out in her clothes, Chloe looked uncharacteristically peaceful as she slept. Her makeup was uncommonly garish and a little smudged and her bullet necklace was tangled up in itself, but her blue hair curled over her cheek like the hair of a mermaid or something. Her hands were relaxed; her jaw wasn’t set with tension for once. Max felt her heart twist with something. Yearning, maybe. Wishing Chloe could feel at peace like this always.
Unfortunately, Max would have to break that peace, because she really, really needed someone to share this predicament with, cry for her as she succumbed to the poison, that kind of thing.
“Chloe,” she hissed. “Chloe!”
Chloe opened just one eye.
“Huh?” she said. She looked over at Max, then down at the bed, and her face crinkled with confusion.
“What’s going on?” Max asked.
“You tell me, Max.” Chloe was still looking at the bed. “Is this latex?” She stroked over it with the flat of her palm, incredulity written all over her still-scrunched-up face.
“Chloe.”
“It’s like sitting on a huge condom. A novelty condom. Spencer’s Gifts stylez.”
“Chloe!”
Chloe looked back at Max, finally. She was clearly not at the same point of possibly-most-likely-dying as Max. Which was good, because Max did not want that awful bed to have to be Chloe’s death bed. Did she have to look so perky, though? Max supposed Chloe’s liver was way more used to this level of liquor than Max’s own. It had to be liquor, right? Even if it felt like actual poison. Of the cyanide kind.
“What’s with your hair?” Chloe asked after a pause. Her hair? Max hadn’t dared to look in the smudgy mirror yet, because she was pretty certain she looked as bad as she felt. She did dare to tentatively touch her hair, though. It felt spiky with something, hard and jagged. After some investigation, Max realized that her hair was holding a ton of clips, clips placed apparently at random, a couple of clips here and there just barely holding on to a few strands of hair. She removed one of them and placed it in the palm of her hand: it was a tiny butterfly clip, transparent pink, one of those things that were huge in the nineties when Max was a kid. Also of note was a ring sitting on one finger. Max wasn’t big on rings, generally. She usually took them off and put them down somewhere and lost them forever, so this was kind of new and weird, all things considered. She didn’t twist it around to check, but considering the nineties theme she apparently had going on, it was probably a mood ring.
“Yeah, I have no idea what’s with my hair,” Max finally said, having ascertained that there were enough clips up there that she probably looked like a weird-ass porcupine.
“I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time?” She looked at Chloe, whose brightly colored eyes looked even more ridiculous now that they were open. “Same as your makeup.”
“My makeup?”
“Must’ve seemed like a good idea at the time, right?”
Unlike Max, Chloe appeared to have no compunction about looking at herself in the mirror. Or the screen, as the case may be. She whipped her phone out of her pocket – at least they hadn’t managed to lose that, which was something – and turned the front cam on.
“Whoa, that is some hella ugly eyeshadow,” Chloe had to agree. Max moved closer and watched over Chloe’s shoulder as she angled her cell so that her eyes were center stage. The cam was kind of laggy; every time Chloe blinked, the Chloe onscreen closed her eyes a full second later. When her eyes were fully closed, you could see the colorful horror of it all: the very electric blue eyeshadow coupled with the thick-lined and very electric blue eyeliner coupled with the very electric blue mascara that had had no problem at all tinting Chloe’s blond eyelashes, well, very blue.
“Interesting. Dunno where we would’ve picked all of that up. But I guess they gotta have drugstores in on the Strip, too.”
“Oh, yeah!” said Max, excited to finally remember something, if somewhat horrified at the actual memory. “We’re in Vegas, aren’t we?”
Chloe shot her an amused look which, coupled with the blue overload around her eyes, made her look a little nuts.
“You mean you didn’t even remember where we are?” she asked, grinning. That grin.
“No, no, of course I remember.” And she did, now that Chloe mentioned it. But prior to that, yeah, there had been some flashes of riding shotgun in the truck, slugging down bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and hiding them whenever they passed a toll booth… Wow, she’d started drinking pretty early. Though even Max wouldn’t get this trashed on Mike’s goddamn Lemonade, surely. Of course she remembered they’d been headed to Vegas. And then the bright lights and stuff. Actually, she recalled, it had been her suggestion that they change their road trip destination. They’d been to Portland so many times and Chloe had been only too happy to change things up, so happy she hadn’t even minded the longer drive. It was all coming back to Max now. Well, the car part of it all was sort of coming back to her. And the part where she wanted Chloe to think she was cool and spontaneous. Which had really been such, such a stupid idea.
“You remember anything else?” Chloe asked.
“Not too much. And I have a killer headache.”
“I’m sorry, dude.” Chloe reached out and gave her a pat on the shoulder. “I can run out and get you some painkillers if you want. Gotta have some at the front desk even in a dump like this.”
“No, it’s okay. Thanks, though.” Awful though the headache was, it was possibly beginning to show some signs of abating. The presence of Chloe usually made her feel happier with life, so who was to say it didn’t have some actual healing properties? Like, who knew?
“How’s your hangover?” Max asked, though she assumed it had to be a little less completely horrifying than her own.
“I’ve had worse. Of course, I still feel like I’ve been kicked in the face over and over.” Chloe looked at her hand, still sitting on Max’s shoulder, then drew it back and turned it over. “No bruises, though, so I’m assuming you’ve only used your powers for good!”
Oh, God, what if she’d used her powers.
“Did I use my powers much?” Max asked, desperately hoping Chloe would be like, no way.
“Max, I don’t remember shit,” Chloe said. “We both must have blacked out. End of. I have no idea what you did with your time-bending ways.”
That sounded ominous. What if they went to a casino and time-traveled them out of tons of money and now there were security guards and loan sharks and stuff after them? She’d read about things like that. Well, minus the time-traveling element.
“Chill,” Chloe said, possibly reading her mind. Max tried very hard to follow her instructions. She looked at something – anything – to try to take her mind off this whole situation.
“Aw, look,” she said, perking up a little. Chloe was still making faces at herself into her phone, clearly not sure whether she hated her new ‘hella ugly’ look or kinda dug it, but on the hand that was not wrapped around the phone, Max spied a ring. A cheapo ring, clearly. Come out of a gumball machine, probably, but as Max finally turned her own ring around, she noticed that they matched. They were little love hearts; rather, they were a love heart broken into two pieces. Chloe had the right piece stuck to her ring, Max’s ring held the left part. “We got friendship rings.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. She put her phone away and looked at her ring a little begrudgingly. It was probably not cool enough to be in the vicinity of her bullet necklace. Max didn’t care. They’d apparently made their friendship official, which was, if utterly pointless and nerdy, at least kind of sweet. And Chloe had better wear the ring.
It was true, though, that even the ring made Max a bit uneasy, sweet or not. What on earth had they been doing for a whole night – the alarm clock currently read 3.36 P.M. but who knew how long they’d been awake before crashing – and why could she remember so little of it? Aside from the obvious answer of ‘alcohol, and too much of it.’
Meanwhile, Chloe had found a top hat. A very small one. The kind you clip to your hair, and the crocodile grip hadn’t gone down without a fight, clearly, ‘cause there was a bunch of bright turquoise strands of hair stuck between its teeth.
“Hey, look!” she called to Max, in better spirits again. “This gotta be mine, right? It is now.” She clipped it into her hair. Max had to admit it made her look pretty dapper. Even with the crazy eye makeup and all.
Still, there was a sinking feeling in Max’s stomach. If there was anything she just wasn’t used to, it was losing time.
“Chloe,” she said. “I’m worried about this.”
“About the top hat? Sorry to say you’re alone there. This is dope as fuck.”
“No! It’s really strange. Have you ever been out of it like this before? Do you think we were drugged?”
But Chloe had become preoccupied again, the top hat bobbing jauntily as she put her phone to the side.
“Cool. Check it out, Max.” Chloe was checking out her arm, where a new tattoo, still slightly raw and red around the edges, had been added on to her sleeve. It was a butterfly, small but highly realistic, though not yet filled in. It was cool, if a little creepy in its detail. But Max was in no mood to appreciate it.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Did I get a tattoo, too?” It wasn’t like she’d never considered getting a tattoo, but she didn’t even want to know what kind of pic she’d get while wasted, never mind where. She frantically started looking herself over, scanning each arm, trying to twist her leg around to get a look at the back of her thigh. If Chloe had talked her into getting inked, surely she would have talked her into getting inked on the butt. That seemed in character. But Chloe was just looking at her, calm and possibly a little amused, as Max hopped around on one foot.
“I know you’re way too much of a square to realize this,” Chloe teased, “but if you’d gotten a tattoo last night, you would totally still be feeling it.
“Besides,” she went on as Max tried not to glare at her, “if you were really that drunk, like on-the-verge-of-blacking-out drunk, they wouldn’t have taken your money, anyway. That’s kind of in the rules.”
“Yeah, but this is Vegas,” Max argued, only partially mollified. “I hear anything goes in Vegas.”
“Probably not stuff that would get them disbarred from their guild or whatever.”
Max had a second thought.
“But they did go ahead with you.” She shot Chloe an accusatory look, standing back on both feet finally. “You remember this? You were lucid? What did we do? Chloe!”
“Relax, Caulfield. I remember this.” Chloe flexed her arm, the muscle beneath the skin making the butterfly jump. “I vaguely remember you wanting a tattoo–”
“What? What kind of tattoo?” Max interrupted.
“I don’t know, dude, probably a deer, let’s be real. I do remember you were wasted, and I was well on my way to getting wasted, and then…” Chloe spread her arms with a flourish that seemed unnecessarily sardonic. “Then we were wasted. The end.”
“Yeah, but clearly not the end.” Max looked at the ring sitting on her finger, the skin beneath already stained a cheerful green from the cheap metal. “Like, the rings, the weird clips in my hair, your tacky eyeshadow, the fact that I probably have alcohol poisoning… Chloe, what did we do?”
“Well, first of all, I’m pretty sure we weren’t drugged. To answer your earlier question. This is just what the morning after getting black-out smashed feels like.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not a very good feeling.” Max’s headache may be getting a little better, but she still felt considerably grumpy. “What if we did something stupid? What if we killed someone?
“And look at this room!” She gestured around her, ignoring the way it made her head throb. “It’s gigantic. It has sofas and stuff. I think it has another room, too.” She gestured some more, this time towards a door neither of them had opened, but which didn’t look like a wardrobe and definitely wasn’t a door to someone else’s hotel room.
“We must have done something messed up so we could pay for this,” she concluded, looking around at everything the room held. The decorations might be tacky and the cleaning standards might be questionable, but they would’ve had to pay some serious cash for it. “Oh my God, Chloe, maybe we robbed a bank or mugged someone or something,” she said, plaintive bordering on panicking. She didn’t look good in orange. Chloe probably did.
At that, Chloe just laughed. It was a highly incredulous laugh, though she was also clearly a little pleased that Max thought she might be able to mug someone for a ton of money if she wanted to. Which – messed up, Chloe. Jeez.
“Stop spiraling, Caulfield,” Chloe said, when she managed to stop laughing. “If you’re so worried about what we did, why don’t you just roll back time with your Golly-Gee-Mister superpowers?”
Like she hadn’t tried already. But of course she’d been blocked by the fact that she’d slept or passed out or whatever. That always seemed to be the way of it.
“No dice,” Max said. “It doesn’t work that far back.”
“Oh well.” Chloe was obviously not as concerned with any of this as Max, but then, Max supposed, she’d been through something like it before. She had definitely never been through it wielding super powers, though. That’s what mostly worried Max – what if she’d fucked someone or something over immensely and never even found out about it?
“I wish we could just go back,” Max groaned. “Like, I wish we’d made a list of all the places we were going to go to or something. At least then we would have had something like a clue, even if we would probably have strayed from it a lot.”
Chloe looked amused.
“Making a list of places you want to go before you get your drink on?” she said. “I was going to say nobody would ever do that, but it does seem like a pretty Max thing to do.”
“Oh, haha. Yes. I’m so boring.” Max was used to Chloe affectionately calling her lame and stuff, but c’mon, she’d suggested going to Vegas, hadn’t she? She tried not to frown or roll her eyes. Why couldn’t Chloe think she was at least a little cool? She kind of was, sometimes.
“Nah,” Chloe said, punching her in the arm just lightly. “I wouldn’t be BFFs with someone boring. You’re just highly organized and efficient. I bet keep an itemized list of every squirrel you’ve ever taken a picture of in your scrapbook.”
“Do not.” Keeping a record wasn’t the same as keeping an itemized list. “And you’re into it, anyway.” So was Max: squirrels were great. But this whole situation was not, and she couldn’t stop thinking about that fact, squirrels or no squirrels. She sighed.
“I just wish there was something we could do.” She felt pretty helpless. It wasn’t at all a great feeling.
“Okay, then,” Chloe continued, apparently picking up on what Max was feeling and scrambling for a suggestion, “how about you check your satchel and stuff for photos? Like, you’ve never met a situation you didn’t want to commemorate with a selfie. Pretty sure being trashed wouldn’t stop you. That’s something.”
“I don’t know, is it? I mean, yeah, we can make an album of Chloe and Max’s Wacky Vegas Adventures, I guess.”
“No, you dork. I mean we can just look at the photos and figure out what we were doing. There’ll be a sign or something in one of the pictures. We could backtrack. Retrace our steps. Whatever.”
“That’s not actually a bad idea,” Max said, thinking. “Maybe someone will recognize us and say…” She trailed off.
“Say we told them all about our grand plan to loot a Walgreens for blue makeup?” Chloe supplied. “Say we were wielding a gun we, I guess, plucked out of thin air and said we were going to go end some poor fuck?”
“Yeah, right. If there’s one thing I know about you, Chloe Price, it’s that you could absolutely produce a gun out of thin air.”
“That’s because I’m a modern day pirate! Packing heat everywhere I go.” Chloe grinned. “Just view this as an adventure. It’ll be fun. Maybe. Yay.”
“All right. Adventure ahoy.” Max was still a little discomfited by this whole thing, but it wasn’t like she had a better idea, and sitting around moping wouldn’t help matters. “Let’s go look for photos.”
---
In a way, it was easier said than done. The satchel was no help; the pictures seemed to be everywhere except inside the satchel. Like, had they just gotten back in the small hours of the morning and started throwing them around? Photos under the bed; a couple in the shower which both Chloe and Max really, really needed to brave, but which neither of them had, thus far, dared; photos jammed into one bedside table drawer but not the other; a photo half-hidden by a heart-shaped cushion in a grimy armchair. There was even one hanging precariously from a velveteen curtain courtesy of one of Max’s butterfly clips.
“I hope we didn’t drop them all over the hallway, as well,” Max groaned, but when she opened the door and scanned the corridor, she saw no photos anywhere. She did see something else.
“Someone brought us breakfast,” Max called over her shoulder. “I guess.”
“Oh?” Chloe wasn’t usually one to turn down free food, but she was staring pretty hard at a paper she’d apparently found somewhere, so Max just went back inside their room and set the tray down on the chest of drawers by the door.
It was kind of a weird breakfast, she discovered upon unwrapping glassware and checking out containers. There was a bottle of sparkling wine that even the most unscrupulous of sommeliers wouldn’t have had the temerity to call champagne, because it was bright, bright pink, kind of like the bathroom tiles. That was weird. There were two completely normal, as far as Max could tell, champagne flutes. They were just plain glass and nice enough. Somehow, that made them seem even weirder. There was a bowl of deflated-looking, warm strawberries. That was at least sort of weird and definitely off-putting. Finally, there was a handwritten note, and that was weirdest of all, because it was addressed to Chloe Price and Max Caulfield, and what it said was that the proprietor of the illustrious Great Northern Hotel extended his hopes and wishes that the happy couple had had a wonderful night in their wonderful complimentary honeymoon suite. So weird. So messed up. Even if they’d somehow managed to talk some poor sap into believing they were on a honeymoon in order to get a free room, though, at least it could have been worse. No bank robbing.
“Chloe,” Max said, twisting around to face her. “I think we scammed our way into a honeymoon suite. Look at this note.”
“No, Max.” A strange expression had come over Chloe’s face. “Look at this note.”
Max squinted at the paper Chloe was holding. It had their names on it plus some signatures. It looked kind of official, if that made sense. It looked like – but it couldn’t be.
“We didn’t scam our way into shit. Max. This is what we did last night. Last night, we got married.”
Max looked at Chloe, whose expression she still couldn’t read. She looked down at her cheapo ring. Then she took three long strides from the door over to the creepy bed and collapsed on top of it, trying not to freak out.