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This locker room felt neatly sterile compared to what they’d experienced, including their short stay in Vault 4. It was strange, in a way, alien now even if it hadn’t been six months ago. Everything was clean, aside from a very light layer dust, but something about it still felt… foreboding.
The holotag’s low, atomic green glow brought her attention to Maximus, or more specifically, Maximus’s chest. It was broad and defined, a slight swell of toned pectoral muscles, strong shoulders and a slight sheen with the water still dewy on his skin.
“Oh, sorry-,” Lucy spun around, looking at the locker in front of her. There were clean clothes placed there, linen pants and top in a natural straw color. She was excited for clean underwear, though, keeping her back turned to her companion. “-I wasn’t looking.”
To Lucy, it felt like a lie.
“No, it’s okay.” He felt warmth pooling in his gut, like a pot over a low flame. It was only the second time that he’d felt this sensation and the last time was when he was enjoying a glass of moet and sucking caviar off of his fingers while asking her if she wanted to make his cock explode. “…you can look.”
Maximus scooted over on the wooden bench, giving her a small gesture to say it was okay for her to sit, too. She did after a short moment of contemplation. She kept her towel pinned to her body tightly. His was around his waist, exposing everything from the waist up and the shin down.
“I’ve never seen you like this.” Lucy said, in an almost playful tone.
“…I wasn’t expecting you...to see me this way.” Maximus replied, quieter. He’d tried very hard to hide most of his skin, and especially from this gorgeous girl that he’d met. She wasn’t just gorgeous, she had a heart of gold, and she was… perfect. Better than any fantasy he could’ve ever dreamed up because she was real.
He was not perfect, the Brotherhood had made him doubt he was even good. He was scarred. Broken. Pieced together again. Scars littered his skin, some raised and some flat, all of varying age. A lot of old injuries had healed, considering his last beating was just outside of Filly before the Brotherhood burned it down, but some were still fresh enough to be scabbed over.
“Why not?” Lucy frowned, her shoulders straightening as she sat up.
“Luce, I’m… covered in scars.” He said, plainly, like it wasn’t the first thing that his mind went to in a reflection. “Don’t you see ‘em?”
Lucy frowned, taking a second look at him. This time, she saw the large T that the real Titus had burned into him and she couldn’t help but gasp. It was bigger than her entire fist. She hadn’t noticed any of these, like she hadn’t noticed the one just under his lip until he told her about what happened at Shady Sands.
In a sick way, though, it was the wound that they shared due to the cruelty of her Dad – or, whoever he was working with.
“Oh my gosh, Max…” Her heart ached for him. She hadn’t been able to begin to understand what it was like to spend your entire adulthood here, and it seemed… difficult.
He busied himself with pulling on the socks they had provided and so he didn’t want to He was vaguely aware of her shuffling beside him and almost couldn’t believe it when she pressed her still chapped lips to the T shaped brand on his back, easily the worst of his scars.
“You’re not broken, and broken things can be fixed… what happened, Max?” Her brow was furrowed.
“Titus happened. The Brotherhood of Steel happened.” He said, like there was a bitter taste in the back of his throat. His voice quivered more by the end of the statement.
“The Knight that you were squired to?”
“Yeah. For a whole, what, two hours?” Max left out a sound that could have been a laugh if it hadn’t died out in his throat before it began. He’d really soured on the whole Brotherhood of Steel thing, and quick. “And then I let him die.”
He swallowed hard and turned his head just slightly to look at her from the corner of his eye. Like if he might look at her dead on, it would be like staring into the surface of the sun.
“Yeah.” He tensed when she leaned down to kiss his scar.
First, it was the brand, the textured skin that had blistered and then scabbed, leaving divots and channels behind in the skin in the shape of a giant letter T. Then she dropped down to one of his shoulders, kissing a trail across a gash that he’d received from a fight between him and Thaddeus had gotten too heated and the smaller boy had scraped him up real good on his back. He’d had three, though the two smaller ones had seemed to fade with time and left the big one as a nice little souvenir. Lucy just brushed the
The scar from the rotted tooth that he took in the arm was more of an uneven circle and she was even more tender with this one. She kissed it again, thinking briefly back to when he used his body as a shield to protect her from the fiends. How she’d been so naïve to think that people wouldn’t try to rape, rob, kill, eat her?
Even the Ghoul, after all of those weeks that stretched into months, had just traded her away like she was nothing. But Max… Max wasn’t like that. Max was sweet and kind, and soft. God, he knew how to be soft.
And Lucy missed soft.
The tip of her decaying finger traced from his shoulder to his collar bone, then up to the scars on his face in a featherlight stroke. There was one on his temple, probably from where he’d laid bleeding after she’d just… left, with the Ghoul.
Oof, okay.
She held his jawbone gently in her hand as she turned his face away from her. It gave her easier access to the scar on his temple, and she noticed it was smaller than she’d thought before, though it had a jagged edge that likely was the reason why.
She closed her eyes, pressing her uneven lips against Max’s deeper skin tone. She pulled away after a moment, running her tongue over her bottom lip before kissing Maxmius. He seemed to be caught off-guard, at least partially, but he relaxed a few seconds into it. He put his hand, heavy with callouses on his palms, on the curve of her waist and he looked up at her and smiled.
And Lucy thought that he had the most beautiful smile she’d ever seen. But, to keep that thought to herself, she slipped the B.O.S holotag off of him and put it around her own neck, ‘borrowing it’ for the foreseeable future.
“That looks good on you, Lucy.”