Chapter Text
Max shut his bedroom door. It didn’t slam, but no one would’ve noticed if it did.
His father was in his workshop, but it was one of those days where the glint in his eye leaned more towards madness than intelligence, and Max knew better than to get in the way of his father when he was like this.
So he did what he always did: hide.
On the Isle, before Hazel brought him into her crew, he had to fend for himself and learn that the Isle of the Lost was completely different from Wonderland. So he got good at hiding, blending in with darker clothes. He learned how to read people’s moods and their body language, and Max also learned that despite being his son, Maddox Hatter would not protect him.
Once, while his father was in a particularly strong bout of madness, Max had tried to ask him to teach him how to play chess…
Max never learned how to play chess from his father. He instead learned what would happen if his father was interrupted when he was fixated on a task.
Years later, when the Hatters were allowed back into Wonderland, Max had naively believed that things could be different, but his father stayed much the same. Driven into madness by whatever he saw when he was young.
So, Max got headphones and blocked out his father’s rants. Turned up the music way too loud, and relished the fact that he could escape to Auradon Prep, despite the scathing glares and remarks constantly thrown his way by the HKs.
But he also found the increase in people, and just the increase in space he was allowed to be in, was overwhelming. So he kept carrying his headphones, only to realize earbuds were much easier and more discreet to get past teachers who would take them (and often not return them for a day or so).
As he got used to the people around him, he used them less and less. Learning how a quick, snappy comeback was more effective towards the other kids than just ignoring them.
And above all else, don’t show weakness. He learned that one the hard way.
Despite being considered an HK, Robbie Hood was still the son of a thief, no matter how reformed or how good the intentions of his father were. He inherited more than just his archery skills. A fact Max had learned on a particularly rough day.
It had been after a weekend Max had been required to go home for. And it was not a good weekend for his father, lost in his mutterings, flinging his tools around his workroom. Max was already tense from a weekend of fading into the background, so when he got back to school, he had his headphones around his neck, and he kept nervously fixing his hat while he made his way back to his dorm room.
But something had happened on the way to his dorm room, as he fought against the flow of all the other students returning from their various homes.
When he got to his dorm room, his headphones were missing, and his earbuds had recently stopped working. So instead of drowning out all the noise with music, Max had to sit with the noise that surrounded him, unable to relax.
Hazel had noticed his tense posture immediately the next day, and had thrown a pair of earplugs at him. To this day, Max still had no idea where she got them.
While the earplugs worked to dampen the sounds of the other students, Max was instead left with his own thoughts, which weren’t too much better when contributing to his mood.
By the time lunch rolled around, it was clear to the VKs that Max was hanging on by a thread. His sarcasm had been replaced with either silence or sharp insults. His smirk had made very few appearances that day, and he wouldn’t stop glaring at anyone who was even marginally too loud.
So when he was walking in the hallway and got rammed into by Luis Madrigal, his thin patience snapped.
“Watch where you’re going, Madrigal,” he sneered. “Is being fed hay not enough? You have to get in everyone’s way like the donkeys your mother herds all day?”
“Awww, is Hatter mad because he’s missing something?” Robbie Hood mocked. Smirking as Max’s rage became known.
Robbie had very little time to react when Max lunged towards him, letting out a guttural scream. Luckily for Robbie, Luis had fast enough reflexes to grab Max’s arm. Ultimately surprised by the amount of strength it actually took to stop the enraged Hatter as he kept lunging towards Robbie.
“Give them back!” Max yelled, “You stupid thief! Buy your own–”
“But where’s the fun in that, Hatter? When taking yours makes you so mad.” Robbie taunted, and Luis finally understood what his friend had done and why Max had been so much more tense than usual (not that he noticed those things…).
“Robbie… this isn’t funny,” he tried to reason.
“Ah, Luis! This is funny. Look at him all worked up! What’s so important about them Hatter? Did your mom get them or something? Oh wait, you don’t know your mom. She was driven off long ago by your father’s insanity, wasn’t she?”
Max went still in Luis’s grip. No longer screaming in anger, but instead quaking in a quiet rage. Right as Hazel and the rest of the VK crew turned the corner in the hallway.
Luis quickly let go of Max’s arm and turned towards Robbie.
“Dude. You’re on your own with this one.”
Later in the day, Max could be seen with his headphones snugly on his head, surrounded by the other VKs as they all sat in the courtyard. And Robbie had scratches on his arms and bruises.
The tension Luis had seen in Max’s stance had mostly dissolved as he lay in the grass, and Luis made note to never touch the headphones. The fury and rage on Max’s face, along with his demeanor previously in the school day, would live in his mind.
Maybe one day he would learn why the headphones were so important to Max, and understand why blocking out the world was so important to him.
But he wouldn’t dare try to take those headphones from Max.
(And if he carried extra pairs of earbuds with him, and they somehow managed to end up where Max sat on the days when his shoulders had been hiking up towards his ears… well, that was nobody’s business.)