Work Text:
“Can I ask you something?”
They’re sitting outside his room, on the steeply slanted roof. It’s a routine they’ve gotten into, ever since she drifted out of the basement, leaving the remnants of the party arguing over the rules to an ancient board game Mike dug up, to trail through his house like a ghost. She claimed she was just trying to escape the bickering, but he suspects she wondered where he went, the only one to notice when he slipped away with intentions of wallowing in his quiet room. They both nearly had heart attacks when after a few seconds of confusion at finding the room empty, she noticed him outside, leaning on the window frame.
Max glances at him like she's noticing his presence for the first time, and then shrugs, as if to say, I can’t stop you.
He chews on his words, trying to figure out how to say it in a way that doesn’t sound like what it is. Finally, he just asks, “D’you ever think about dying?”
“Jesus Christ, Mike.” She whirls to look at him, headphones slipping off one ear. She looks angry. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
His mouth opens and closes, but before he can settle on an answer, she snaps, “I don’t wanna kill myself. Jesus.”
“Oh.” Mike blinks, seeing her jaw tremble. He looks away. “Okay. That’s not what I meant, anyway.”
“Oh.” The word sounds like it came reluctantly when she dug it up. “What, you think about dying?” Her voice is scornful. He doesn’t miss the searching tone wavering underneath.
“Sometimes,” he says bluntly.
The tinny sound of drums sputters in the wind. Somehow he doesn’t feel exposed, despite his fused, gnarled ribs suddenly wrenched wide open, gory skin flapping in the cold fall air. Finally, it feels necessary to say, “I don’t want to.”
Her head twitches like she’s going to look at him. She doesn’t.
“But, you know. If I were going to. If something happened.”
“How would you go?” she predicts, like it’s a boring question.
“Would I fight it?” he says quietly. His stomach swoops, though he’s sitting perfectly still.
Her nose twitches, and she purses her lips, finally nodding. He stares over the edge of the roof. It’s not far at all.
He’s not sure why he’s prodding at her like a bruise, heaping weight on her hunched shoulders. Still, he opens his mouth to say something else, but she beats him to it. Her eyes are still fixed on a place far away. “Do you wish something would? Happen?”
He tilts his head. Remembers air rushing up like a physical force as the whine of a guitar rubs against his ear. “I don’t know. Wish isn’t the right word.”
“What is?”
“Not wish.” He swallows.
She turns her head to look at him, then. In his eyes with perpetual purple punched beneath the dull brown irises. Hers are the grey concrete of the driveway below them, and as he holds her gaze, the crawling spider that usually tugs his pupils down with its silky web is weirdly still. Its long skinny legs rustle and quiver as the air between them swells.
His mouth feels very dry.
She breaks it first, and he blinks, three times in quick succession, watching her turn away again. She nods, like he explained something in that strung out silence.
He exhales slowly, staring out at the horizon, and rubs his dripping nose. He turns his head as a cold gust of wind slices past. The sun is white in a dull grey sky. He thinks California is in that direction. West. Far.
Does Max miss it there? Do they have grey skies like this? They must, sometimes.
“You miss her that bad?” Max asks finally. Despite the perpetual flatness in her voice lately, the question sounds careful. It feels as deliberate as her gaze, settled anywhere but him.
He thinks he’s getting better at reading her. At noticing things, at least when he pays attention. Pulls himself out of the dull bubble of his brain. Out of his body, even. Just watching them, curled on a cold roof. It’s what he does. The observing, not the floating. Watching, compiling. He’s got notes stuffed in the drawers in his brain, notes on the people he loves.
Will must have a whole cabinet. After all, he’s been studying him since they were five.
She’s waiting for an answer, though she shows no sign of it. He can feel it, tick-tick-ticking in the air.
He laughs, a dry, flat gust of breath. “Sure.”
Her fingers tap on the side of her Walkman. She seems unsurprised. He’s not sure she’s capable of surprise. For better or for worse, he’s not sure he’s capable of wishing.
“Can I tell you something?” he asks abruptly, and his heart thuds in the open air. Sign of life.
Max looks at him out of the corner of her eye. “Sure,” she says dully.
And suddenly Mike feels like a hot steaming pile of shit. What does he expect, really? What’s telling Max gonna do? Does he want a pat on the back, to be told it’s okay, what he’s doing to El? Max’s best friend?
Maybe she wouldn’t even care. He stares at her waxy skin, the dark circles under her eyes. She’s easy to talk to because she doesn’t care about a thing in the world anymore.
“Never mind,” he says quietly, hunching his shoulders over his gaping ribs.
Max sighs, tilting her head up and squeezing her eyes shut.
“Mike,” she says to the November sky. “The only reason I tolerate you hanging around is because you don’t try to talk about my shit. Don’t get all weird and guilty on me now.”
And he knows it’s all she can handle, because it’s all he’s been able to handle for the last month, the last year. Last few years, really. Still, he’s breaking their vow of silence, taking, pushing in on the comfortable distance between them. The two grey, scowling islands, already failing their classes, listening to moody music under a heavy sky buckling in on them.
Still, her words make him feel worse, as most things do. He bites his tongue. Chews on it. His spit has that hollow absence of taste. Nauseating. He doesn’t remember eating breakfast. “I care,” he says suddenly.
She glances at him. “What?”
His fingers clench on his knees. “I care,” he says again. “If you do want to talk about stuff.”
He feels her eyes settle on him. Tracing his freckles, his pink nose. Feels the nod more than sees it. “Yeah. I know.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I know.”
“You do.”
Mike tilts his head again, thinking about it. About the crumpled up letters and scribbled journal entries, torn and thrown in the garbage. About the character he started working on last month for their campaign, the knight that ran away from him. Sworn to the mage Eleven, he’ll stay loyal till it kills him. Fight a never-ending battle till he has no more life to give.
Real melodramatic bullshit.
“Sometimes,” he agrees, and it feels like wriggling a hand through the thick grey soil piled over his head.
“Then do it.”
“El’s in love with me.”
She doesn’t seem thrown by the change of subject. Or rather the circle back. “Is she.”
“Apparently.”
“Good for you.”
“Not really.”
Her eyes slide to watch him, and he stares at the freckles standing out on her pale skin, the spots of wind-bitten pink almost bizarre on her cheeks, and his heart races. “I don’t love her back.”
“That’s inconvenient,” she says mildly, after a long, dangling pause.
A laugh huffs out of him, scraping his throat on the way. “Nice understatement.”
She tilts her head. “You loved her when you were dumped. Now that she loves you back, you’re all good, actually?”
“What can I say?” He shrugs, knowing exactly what. The words are sour on his tongue, but he continues, with an air of sardonic grandeur, “I’m an enigma. I contain multitudes.”
“Nah,” she says. “Sounds about as typical as it gets.”
He laughs again, despite the bitter resignation in her words. He can’t help it. “Sure.”
She examines him. He does his best to be an interesting subject, with his gleaming ribs out on display. He thinks he fails, because she shakes her head, eyes rolling scornfully. “So you’re just, what, stringing her along? Playing the part again?” He’s not even slightly fooled by her non-judgmental tone. He can taste her contempt. Still, she’s talking more today than in all the days they’ve been doing this. He likes it.
He looks up at the word again, raising his eyebrows despite his heart lurching.
Her eyes follow his questioning brow. “Whatever bullshit you were doing before she dumped your ass. The Romeo act was convincing for the first few months. It got old.”
“Romeo was a fickle dipshit drooling over Rosaline, and he didn’t even really like her.” Mike scratches his nose idly, but his pulse is racing, gaze darting away from the icy grey of Max’s eyes. “He got his act together for Juliet. She was the real deal.”
Max inhales slowly. Her music stopped a while ago, but she hasn’t noticed yet. The wind whistles in its place. He waits.
The seconds tick by, and he looks at her curiously, tracking the flat tension in her lips. “What?” he asks. Maybe he’s still got some work to do with reading her.
“If this is you getting your act together, I’m sorry for Juliet,” she says finally.
His eyebrows do a complicated twitch, and he blinks slowly. “Yeah,” he says quietly, mind stuck pathetically over two-thousand miles away. “Don’t worry, I, uh. I don’t think I’ll be… profaning that holy shrine with my unworthy hand any time soon.”
Her eyebrows make a sincere effort to crawl into her hairline. “Right.”
The shingles are cold, ridges digging into his ass. He shifts uncomfortably. He hears a click and then the tinny thrum of her Walkman. It seems she finally noticed the silence.
“What?” he says again, feeling off-kilter. Something shifted since he mentioned Rosaline, and he can’t pinpoint why. “It’s not El’s fault,” he tries. “I mean, it’s not… because of her. She’s amazing. She’s just not…” He blinks hard, lips twitching.
“Juliet?” Max says. It sounds harsh.
“You’re being weird,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Max’s eyes widen incredulously. “I’m being weird? I am?”
“Yes!”
She scoffs, turning away and hunching over her knees. “Fucking Juliet,” she mutters. “If I don’t wanna kill myself now I sure as hell wouldn’t kill myself over you.”
Mike can’t help the baffled expression that twists his face. “I didn’t ask you to, weirdo,” he says, nose wrinkled.
“Whatever.”
What the hell is her issue? Guilt bubbles nostalgically, but he wades through it, resting his chin on a bony knee and pressing his palms flat to the roof so he doesn’t roll headfirst down the slope. The pads of his splayed fingers are almost frog-like from the subtle scar tissue left by chewing at them since he was a kid. He tunes out her music, rattling on louder than before, and runs through the last ten minutes in his brain. Cold grit digs into the thin skin of his palms, and he’s meandered all the way from death wishes to Juliet by the time they begin to go numb.
“Ew!” he says suddenly, turning and shaking the tingling needles from his hands. “What?” He burns as he comes back to life. When he nudges her shoulder, the thick jacket is soft and worn, and, vaguely, he thinks it might be the first time he’s touched her since the day she found him on the roof. He attempted to help her clamber through the window. She pushed his hand away, and he didn’t try again. “Did you think I meant you?”
Max looks up, eyes narrowed.
He attempts to school his face into a less horror-struck grimace. “Jesus, sorry, that came out wrong. Not that you’re… I mean, you’re…”
He gives up. “I definitively was not talking about you,” is what he finally settles on.
She examines him for about five more seconds. “I promise,” he insists, raising his red, pebbled hands.
Her gaze flickers from his wide-eyed face to his lanky fingers twitching in the cold air, and then she nods, and sighs in relief, throwing her head back. “Thank god. That was the most stressful five minutes of my life.”
“Jesus, my fucking bad,” he says, vaguely insulted despite himself. A flush burns hot on his pale face. “I regret even trying to compliment you.”
“Good, it was awful.”
The air relaxes. He listens to the whining vocals of some old band and leans back, lying down and staring at the clouds filling the sky.
He closes his eyes, but he can still feel her gaze flickering back to him every few minutes, like clockwork. Finally, he says, “You can ask.”
There’s a stretched out pause. He finds he meant it. He really did. He waits.
“Who?”
His mouth does a weird, complicated dance, and suddenly he can’t be lying there so exposed. He feels like he’s lying in an open grave, staring up at the living sky. Like any second another shovel’s worth of soil will be heaped over his chest, trickling into the clumsy cavity he’s cracked open.
He sits up.
Those grey-blue eyes scan him up and down, watching as he pulls his knees up, loosely gripping his shins. Blood pounds in his ears. “You know me,” he says, quiet beneath his thunderous pulse. “I’m no Romeo. I don’t believe in… love at first sight.”
She huffs dryly, the closest thing to a laugh he’s heard in months.
He can’t help but remember the first day of kindergarten. He might not believe in love at first sight, but he felt something that day, feels it still, running like a current through all the years. A little whisper saying, Hey. I know you. A tug, pulling him to the boy on the swings. On pain of death, he doesn’t think he could pinpoint the moment it went from being strangers to being in love. He doesn’t even think he could really name a time they were strangers.
So, quietly, he amends, “I mean, not really.” It’s the most credence he’ll give to destiny for now. “And we, uh… we don’t exactly have a surplus of friends. So…”
He waits.
He sees it the moment she understands. Her eyes tighten for a split second before a soft breath escapes and her whole face relaxes. “Oh,” she says, so quietly he barely hears it.
“Yeah,” he tries to say. It comes out as the snapping of dry lips parting and a tiny exhale. He presses his lips together firmly, the corners of his stupid wide mouth twitching regardless. He attempts a little shrug, like he doesn’t care at all.
Max takes a deep, shaky breath. “Okay,” she says.
His fingers tighten on his shins, fingerprints rubbing against the grain of the denim. “Okay?” His voice cracks, badly, and he winces.
He hears a soft exhale and sees the flicker of a smile leaving her face. “You’re laughing at me,” he accuses, no venom behind it.
“Yeah, a little.”
“I like it.”
Max gives him a slow, bobbing nod. “So… you’re…” Her eyes search him, the blue soft despite the sunken purple bruises below.
“Yeah.” It feels like saying it, even though they’re dancing around the word. He feels something easing, a tentative settle into place by the bony claws that began gripping tightly around his heart ever since Will and El left, or, really, since some point on that slow slide between the Snow Ball and the summer, the mysterious and fateful point he started tearing off pieces of himself and shoving them out of sight, locked away in the gradually fusing cage of his ribs.
“You don’t…”
“No.” His lips quiver, and then curl in a strange smile. He couldn’t explain why, exactly, but he says, again, “No, I don’t. Not at all.” The smile widens, and he shakes his head with a shuddering exhale.
Max politely ignores the shine in his eyes, for which he’s deeply grateful. In turn, he tames the smile into a shaky frown, and suspects she is grateful for that.
“When did you…”
“The day they left.”
“Jesus, Wheeler.” It’s a soft hiss. She shakes her head. “Now I feel bad for thinking you were just being a dick.”
“No, I, uh…” He swallows hard, gives her half-hearted shrug — half his heart in his chest, half in his throat. “Don’t worry, I’m definitely still a dick. Like I said, I contain multitudes.”
“Yeah. What are you gonna do about it? You need to dump her, obviously. She deserves—”
“I know.” His voice is harsh, and he says, quieter, “I know she deserves better. I’m figuring it out. Maybe if she comes for Christmas.” He bites his lip. “And then… I dunno. Nothing, I guess.” It feels like a half truth. Someone knows now. That’s something, right? Something he’d have thrown in the garbage as wishful thinking even a week ago. His ribs quietly remember how it feels to be a protector, not a warden or a bloody gaping gate.
“Jesus,” she says again. “You really know how to bring down the mood, huh?”
And he’s not sure if she means now, or at Christmas, but it doesn’t really matter. It stirs at the swamp of guilt, until she nudges him and says, “I’m screwing with you.”
He huffs out a laugh. Nods. “Hey, you told me to talk.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t what I expected.” She pauses, finger scratching at a seam on her Walkman. “I think I always sort of imagined the inside of your head like that desert from Star Wars.”
“Tatooine,” he says automatically. Then blinks. “Rude.”
“You’re full of surprises.” It’s not quite a smile, but it’s something, when she says, “Multitudes.”
“Yeah. Multitudes.” He hesitates, then says, “Maybe next time you can…”
“Yeah.” She tilts her head. “Maybe.”
Two songs he can’t make out play before he finally says, quietly, “Thanks.”
Her eyes meet his, and she nods.