A Mind that Knows Itself, Max/Alec, PG-13
Title: A Mind that Knows Itself
Author: Impertinence
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Max/Alec
Summary: Post-"Berrisford Agenda". Alec's not alright, duh.
Notes: Title stolen from Sufjan Stevens's "The Mistress Witch".
||
Alec is the shittiest liar Max has ever met.
Well, okay, that’s not true. Plenty of people are worse liars than Alec is. The difference is that the same people who taught Alec how to lie taught Max how to see through it.
So when he grins at her and says that crap about being alright, she doesn’t believe it for a second.
It’s 1700 hours when she heads over to the house to check up on him. She doesn’t find him until 1800, way too late to be going down an alley in Terminal City.
He’s leaning against a wall, hands fisted, body entirely still. She recognizes the pose: he’s refusing to cry.
Max is no psychologist, but she understands enough about Alec to know that offering sympathy right now would just break him, so she coughs and says loudly, “Damn, it smells in here.”
Alec’s smile is wry and humorless. “Shoulda figured you’d track me down.”
“Well, it’s kind of my job.” Her nose wrinkles as she steps around an icky pile of…actually, she really doesn’t want to know. “I’m-“
“Just another freak.” He still hasn’t moved which, quite frankly, is creepy. “That’s all you are, Max. Another Manticore test tube freak.”
The feline DNA lets her move quietly, quickly; before he even registers her movement, she’s got him pinned against the wall. “Yeah,” she snarls furiously, “I’m a freak. So are you. But I’ve been out here longer than you, and I’ve got news for you.”
Her hand unlocks from his throat and she drops him. He’s still coughing and massaging his neck when she turns tail and heads off.
“Hey-Max! Where the fuck are you going?”
She doesn’t reply, just keeps walking quickly enough that only Alec would be able to follow. It’s one of the benefits of being a freak, one that he is going to acknowledge, dammit.
When they reach Alec’s neighborhood, Max stops dead. She ignores Alec bumping into her, instead just pointing to a couple walking down the road.
“What do you think of those two?”
The couple in question are holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, barely even acknowledging the existence of the rest of the world. Alec snorts. “Whatever. They’ll end up breaking up soon.”
“Do you think they love each other?”
Alec blinks at her. “Yeah, sure. They love each other, the whole world’s made of puppies and rainbows, and Manticore is a goddamned daycare center. Are we done here?”
“They love each other,” Max says firmly, “like you loved Rachel.”
She’s been expecting the punch, and when it comes she doesn’t duck.
“Don’t you dare,” Alec hisses.
Max looks him in the eye. “It’s okay that you loved her.”
“I killed her!”
Which yeah, okay, is pretty intense. But…
“You had to. No,” she says firmly when he flinches and opens his mouth, “you did. You know what Manticore would’ve done to you if you failed.”
“They couldn’t possibly-“
“They could have taken your memories,” she snaps. “They could have-God, Alec, they could’ve given you a new designation and sent you on a suicide mission! But you never would’ve remembered Rachel and she’d be dead anyway. Is that what you want?”
“Max.” And now his voice is broken, but she’s said all she came to say.
“I can’t do anything else.” She holds his gaze steady. “When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here.”
She does the whole disappearing into the shadows thing, but she’s not dumb enough to head back to her apartment yet. Instead she climbs the nearest fire escape, crouching a few floors up and watching Alec.
He stands there for a long time, staring at the couple. They’re reading together on a bench, bundled up against the cold. Their book is old, tattered; Max zeroes in on the title. A Tale of Two Cities. Weirdly appropriate, though at least the government hasn’t resorted to beheadings just yet.
When Alec finally turns around and heads back, she swings down from the fire escape and follows him. Alec was trained to go undercover, to hide in plain sight, whereas Max has learned to make herself invisible. Alec doesn’t notice her when they pass through two checkpoints, and he doesn’t give her a second glance when she slips into Joshua’s basement behind him.
The piano glints softly in the low lights. Alec approaches it while Max watches from the shadows, runs his fingers over the keys and grips the corner of the top thingy that Max doesn’t have a name for.
His hands are shaking, and she has to stop herself from going over and kicking his ass until one or both of them feels better.
He sits down at the piano and places his fingers on the keys, poised in a way that Max knows can only come from years of practice-or days of Manticore conditioning.
Like at the dinner party, the playing is soft at first, scales and arpeggios. Notes trip over one another while she watches. It’s a strange kind of controlled chaos, and for the first time Max understands, a little, why Alec took to this so quickly.
The notes speed up-madness, anger. The look on Alec’s face is starting to scare Max; it’s almost too intense to be human, or even real, except that the reality is…
Staring her in the face.
Shit. She’s been caught.
“I thought you were gonna leave me alone.”
“I never said that.”
“You said, and I quote, that when I need to talk-“
“I’ll be here.” She holds his gaze when she takes a step forward. He doesn’t flinch; she’s not sure if it’s a good sign or not. “And so I’m here,” she says, shrugging.
“You are so fucking casual,” Alec snarls, advancing on her still further. “How can you-when you know what I’ve been through-“
“But I don’t,” Max says quietly. “You’ve never talked about it. I mean, I’ve got some idea, but I don’t know for sure.”
Alec squeezes his eyes shut. She watches the rapid movement behind his closed lids, trying not to worry that Manticore did something to make sure he’d never talk. There really aren’t words for how much it wouldn’t surprise her.
“I can’t tell you,” he says finally. “I just-I can’t, Max.”
She’s used to getting what she wants. It’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. And she’d like to beat the information out of him, to make him tell her so she can try to fix him, but...even if he did spill, he’s not like Logan or any of the old escaped X5s. He’s seen so much more than she has that the idea of her trying to vanquish his demons is pathetic-laughable.
“Okay,” she says quietly, and climbs out the window.
||
For the next two days, Alec practices one of the most vital skills he has: avoidance. It’s not easy, since Max works with him and he thinks he sort of stole a lot of her friends, but for a good 48 hours he doesn’t even have to talk to her.
Of course, it doesn’t last. Max is determined to do the hero-ing thing, and Alec is determined to fit in with her whacky do-gooders (and man, that kind of thing would give Manticore’s psychologists a few lifetimes of issue to dissect), so exactly 48 hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-two seconds after he told Max to fuck off, his dick is shoved up against her ass.
Now granted, his ass is shoved up against the crumbling brick of an old chimney, but there’s something to be said for finding the silver lining.
Alec grins and leans forward. “So,” he whispers, his lips just barely brushing her ear, “how’re we gonna get out of this one?”
He couldn’t see her face, of course, but he could almost feel her scowling. “We wouldn’t be in it in the first place if you weren’t such an incompetent twerp.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “I kind of like what I’m in.” He wiggles his hips for emphasis.
“You’re disgusting,” Max informs him. Alec laughs.
That, of course, alerts the transgenic-hating search party to their presence, which in turn results in them being chased all over the city by a really damn persistent mob.
It keeps him from thinking, which is good, and it keeps Max distracted, which is better. All in all, not a bad day.
||
“They killed me,” Alec says the next day.
Max doesn’t say a word, just sets down her beer and walks out of the club. He gets behind her on her bike and they speed off, Max leaning forward but not protesting when Alec wraps his arms around her waist.
When they’re at the very edges of Seattle they finally stop. Max gets off the motorcycle without even looking at Alec, hopping up on a huge stack of crates.
“Okay,” she says when Alec’s mimicked her action and they’re both comfortable. “Talk.”
“They could stop our hearts,” he says, looking her in the eye, “and they did, for fun. They wanted to see how long we could go without…you know.”
Dying, Max thinks, but for the first time she knows better than to say it aloud.
“I was good at it.” Alec laughs, a choked, desperate sound. “I was good at dying.”
“It’s okay,” Max says, though of course it’s not.
Alec talks some more, and Max listens, but all she can think is that it’s funny how the rain never falls in Seattle like it used to.
||
They taught her algebra when she was six.
By the time she was seven she’d moved on to differential equations. She doesn’t remember much of it, because the punks with spray-paint are right: in today’s world, math is about as useful as a major in English. But she carried away one lesson.
If you’re solving an equation, you solve it piece by piece, working through each variable. You can’t solve all of them at once, or even try, because if you do then the whole thing falls apart.
That’s the problem with Alec, she thinks. Too many variables. She can’t figure anything out, so for a long time they go nowhere.
But then the snow falls and it’s so cold that when Alec throws an arm over her shoulder she pretends not to care just because she needs the warmth. And then somehow they’re cuddling on Alec’s couch, arguing about old military tactics, and this is okay, maybe.
||
“A’ight, now. What’s going on?”
Max raises her eyebrows at O.C., going for innocent. “What?”
“You look smug,” Original Cindy informs her, “not angelic like I know you wanna. Now spill, already. You been acting crazy for weeks now.”
She thinks about doing the avoidance thing, because whatever this is between her and Alec, it’s…weird. It’s Manticore, and she’s not sure anyone else will get it.
But when she explains, O.C. just tells her to kiss the boy, already.
Max can’t help but feel a little amused at the fact that Manticore gave them so much, but basic social skills are foreign to them both.
||
It’s another cat burglary job and Alec has, predictably, screwed it up.
“Sometimes I think you do this on purpose,” Max says irritably. They’re stuck in a tiny supply closet in a warehouse that smells like fish, and Alec is pressed up against her in a way that’s got Original Cindy’s words reverberate in her ears, making her blush.
“You love it,” Alec says. Max doesn’t bother to contradict him.
They stand in silence for a minute, Alec’s mouth inches from Max’s hair-but then Alec shifts, just a little, and Max decides to jump off the figurative building.
His mouth tastes spicy, like the cinnamon gum she’s pretty sure she saw him steal earlier. His hands wriggle around in the tight space, fighting to touch her, so she scoots up and parts her legs, letting him in closer.
“Max,” he says softly. She makes a low noise in her throat, wanting to get closer, every part of her-human and not-clamoring for more touch, more…everything.
She gets the feeling that he’s going to say something, maybe even something important, but then she grinds against his cock and he groans and gives up, kissing her and nipping at her lips.
By the time the coast is clear they’re both flushed and panting. Max is on the verge of coming and if the bulge in Alec’s jeans is any gauge, then so is he.
“I don’t want to,” she starts to say, but Alec catches one of her hands in his.
“Let’s just go, okay?” he says. “We both need sleep.”
She drops him off at his apartment, and for the first time in awhile, she doesn’t go in.
||
Later, Alec will blame the miniskirt.
It’s his idea. The times where Max has to dress up like a hooker, or get wet-or sometimes both, and that’s a real treat-are his favorite, so he tries to come up with as many sketchy jobs as possible. This one is worst than most, since they’re trying to rob a Mafia-type guy who only lets pretty young girls into his house, and no one out. Alec’s got a gun ready when Max knocks on the door and simpers.
But then he turns on the surveillance (a pin in her hair) and watches her play everyone in the fucking room, and that coupled with the memory of her legs curving down from the tiny black skirt is enough to make him hard right there in the apartment.
By the time the job is done and the man’s house is burned down, he’s debating just jacking off right there. Then Max drops the pin, accidentally or deliberately he can’t tell, and he gets a look up her skirt-and then he’s leaning back in his chair and unzipping his fly.
Max is walking through the door right when he’s about to come.
Before he has a chance to, though, she’s on his lap, pulling his hands back roughly and whispering shit in his ear that he can’t wait to watch her deny later, because fuck Max has a dirty mouth.
“C’mon,” she says, biting his lip, “Let’s go.”
It’s easy work to pull her down and in, and it’s not until she shudders and comes around him just seconds later that he realizes that he’s not the only one who was going crazy during the job.
||
“Max,” Alec says in early spring when she’s about to head off to meet with an X-7 who’s claiming he wants help.
“Yeah?” she says. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, screwing around with various guns and grapples. His Batman complex just never stops being funny.
He hesitates for an infinitesimal amount of time before saying, “If you get yourself hurt, I will kick your ass.”
X equals something new. Max thinks of algebra, of Ben and of test tubes.
She leaves the doorway to straddle Alec’s lap and kiss him.
“Love you too, asshole,” she says, and means it.
||
Two years ago, Max gave Alec his name.
He celebrates it as a birthday now. Max makes fun of him for it, but hey-a guy’s gotta take any opportunity he can to make people give him shit.
And there are a lot of people now. He’s a leader, him and Maxie both are, which is as gratifying as it is sincerely bizarre. A deluge of cards arrives at their apartment on his birthday, followed up by more presents than Alec thinks any one person should get.
Not that he’s complaining, or anything.
Still, it’s kind of bizarre to be given a cashmere sweater by his girlfriend’s ex.
When he tells Max that, she just laughs at him. “Yeah, well, it’s kinda weird to have a girlfriend, don’t you think?”
Alec thinks of Rachel and of Manticore. “Good point,” he says, and throws a stuffed Happy Birthday bear at Max’s head.
||
Two days later they’re in Washington, D.C., testifying before the Senate about the Manticore project.
Alec’s just finished describing Rachel and they’re both taking a bathroom break when Max pushes Alec up against a soda machine and kisses him, hard and long.
When they break apart Alec smiles at her, clearly bemused.
“Am I allowed to ask why, or will you slice my balls off?”
She laughs and shakes her head. “You’re okay,” she tells him.
Alec flips them around too quickly for a Normal to see, pinning her against the wall. His smile would be dangerous if she didn’t know five different nonlethal ways to get out of this.
“Yep,” he says.
There’s a knife in her boot and a gun in his pocket. Her DNA is too perfect and his is identical to a guy who thought the Virgin Mary had a burning need for dead people’s teeth.
But they can laugh, so Max figures they’ve won.
||
End
||
Author: Impertinence
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Max/Alec
Summary: Post-"Berrisford Agenda". Alec's not alright, duh.
Notes: Title stolen from Sufjan Stevens's "The Mistress Witch".
||
Alec is the shittiest liar Max has ever met.
Well, okay, that’s not true. Plenty of people are worse liars than Alec is. The difference is that the same people who taught Alec how to lie taught Max how to see through it.
So when he grins at her and says that crap about being alright, she doesn’t believe it for a second.
It’s 1700 hours when she heads over to the house to check up on him. She doesn’t find him until 1800, way too late to be going down an alley in Terminal City.
He’s leaning against a wall, hands fisted, body entirely still. She recognizes the pose: he’s refusing to cry.
Max is no psychologist, but she understands enough about Alec to know that offering sympathy right now would just break him, so she coughs and says loudly, “Damn, it smells in here.”
Alec’s smile is wry and humorless. “Shoulda figured you’d track me down.”
“Well, it’s kind of my job.” Her nose wrinkles as she steps around an icky pile of…actually, she really doesn’t want to know. “I’m-“
“Just another freak.” He still hasn’t moved which, quite frankly, is creepy. “That’s all you are, Max. Another Manticore test tube freak.”
The feline DNA lets her move quietly, quickly; before he even registers her movement, she’s got him pinned against the wall. “Yeah,” she snarls furiously, “I’m a freak. So are you. But I’ve been out here longer than you, and I’ve got news for you.”
Her hand unlocks from his throat and she drops him. He’s still coughing and massaging his neck when she turns tail and heads off.
“Hey-Max! Where the fuck are you going?”
She doesn’t reply, just keeps walking quickly enough that only Alec would be able to follow. It’s one of the benefits of being a freak, one that he is going to acknowledge, dammit.
When they reach Alec’s neighborhood, Max stops dead. She ignores Alec bumping into her, instead just pointing to a couple walking down the road.
“What do you think of those two?”
The couple in question are holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes, barely even acknowledging the existence of the rest of the world. Alec snorts. “Whatever. They’ll end up breaking up soon.”
“Do you think they love each other?”
Alec blinks at her. “Yeah, sure. They love each other, the whole world’s made of puppies and rainbows, and Manticore is a goddamned daycare center. Are we done here?”
“They love each other,” Max says firmly, “like you loved Rachel.”
She’s been expecting the punch, and when it comes she doesn’t duck.
“Don’t you dare,” Alec hisses.
Max looks him in the eye. “It’s okay that you loved her.”
“I killed her!”
Which yeah, okay, is pretty intense. But…
“You had to. No,” she says firmly when he flinches and opens his mouth, “you did. You know what Manticore would’ve done to you if you failed.”
“They couldn’t possibly-“
“They could have taken your memories,” she snaps. “They could have-God, Alec, they could’ve given you a new designation and sent you on a suicide mission! But you never would’ve remembered Rachel and she’d be dead anyway. Is that what you want?”
“Max.” And now his voice is broken, but she’s said all she came to say.
“I can’t do anything else.” She holds his gaze steady. “When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be here.”
She does the whole disappearing into the shadows thing, but she’s not dumb enough to head back to her apartment yet. Instead she climbs the nearest fire escape, crouching a few floors up and watching Alec.
He stands there for a long time, staring at the couple. They’re reading together on a bench, bundled up against the cold. Their book is old, tattered; Max zeroes in on the title. A Tale of Two Cities. Weirdly appropriate, though at least the government hasn’t resorted to beheadings just yet.
When Alec finally turns around and heads back, she swings down from the fire escape and follows him. Alec was trained to go undercover, to hide in plain sight, whereas Max has learned to make herself invisible. Alec doesn’t notice her when they pass through two checkpoints, and he doesn’t give her a second glance when she slips into Joshua’s basement behind him.
The piano glints softly in the low lights. Alec approaches it while Max watches from the shadows, runs his fingers over the keys and grips the corner of the top thingy that Max doesn’t have a name for.
His hands are shaking, and she has to stop herself from going over and kicking his ass until one or both of them feels better.
He sits down at the piano and places his fingers on the keys, poised in a way that Max knows can only come from years of practice-or days of Manticore conditioning.
Like at the dinner party, the playing is soft at first, scales and arpeggios. Notes trip over one another while she watches. It’s a strange kind of controlled chaos, and for the first time Max understands, a little, why Alec took to this so quickly.
The notes speed up-madness, anger. The look on Alec’s face is starting to scare Max; it’s almost too intense to be human, or even real, except that the reality is…
Staring her in the face.
Shit. She’s been caught.
“I thought you were gonna leave me alone.”
“I never said that.”
“You said, and I quote, that when I need to talk-“
“I’ll be here.” She holds his gaze when she takes a step forward. He doesn’t flinch; she’s not sure if it’s a good sign or not. “And so I’m here,” she says, shrugging.
“You are so fucking casual,” Alec snarls, advancing on her still further. “How can you-when you know what I’ve been through-“
“But I don’t,” Max says quietly. “You’ve never talked about it. I mean, I’ve got some idea, but I don’t know for sure.”
Alec squeezes his eyes shut. She watches the rapid movement behind his closed lids, trying not to worry that Manticore did something to make sure he’d never talk. There really aren’t words for how much it wouldn’t surprise her.
“I can’t tell you,” he says finally. “I just-I can’t, Max.”
She’s used to getting what she wants. It’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. And she’d like to beat the information out of him, to make him tell her so she can try to fix him, but...even if he did spill, he’s not like Logan or any of the old escaped X5s. He’s seen so much more than she has that the idea of her trying to vanquish his demons is pathetic-laughable.
“Okay,” she says quietly, and climbs out the window.
||
For the next two days, Alec practices one of the most vital skills he has: avoidance. It’s not easy, since Max works with him and he thinks he sort of stole a lot of her friends, but for a good 48 hours he doesn’t even have to talk to her.
Of course, it doesn’t last. Max is determined to do the hero-ing thing, and Alec is determined to fit in with her whacky do-gooders (and man, that kind of thing would give Manticore’s psychologists a few lifetimes of issue to dissect), so exactly 48 hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-two seconds after he told Max to fuck off, his dick is shoved up against her ass.
Now granted, his ass is shoved up against the crumbling brick of an old chimney, but there’s something to be said for finding the silver lining.
Alec grins and leans forward. “So,” he whispers, his lips just barely brushing her ear, “how’re we gonna get out of this one?”
He couldn’t see her face, of course, but he could almost feel her scowling. “We wouldn’t be in it in the first place if you weren’t such an incompetent twerp.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “I kind of like what I’m in.” He wiggles his hips for emphasis.
“You’re disgusting,” Max informs him. Alec laughs.
That, of course, alerts the transgenic-hating search party to their presence, which in turn results in them being chased all over the city by a really damn persistent mob.
It keeps him from thinking, which is good, and it keeps Max distracted, which is better. All in all, not a bad day.
||
“They killed me,” Alec says the next day.
Max doesn’t say a word, just sets down her beer and walks out of the club. He gets behind her on her bike and they speed off, Max leaning forward but not protesting when Alec wraps his arms around her waist.
When they’re at the very edges of Seattle they finally stop. Max gets off the motorcycle without even looking at Alec, hopping up on a huge stack of crates.
“Okay,” she says when Alec’s mimicked her action and they’re both comfortable. “Talk.”
“They could stop our hearts,” he says, looking her in the eye, “and they did, for fun. They wanted to see how long we could go without…you know.”
Dying, Max thinks, but for the first time she knows better than to say it aloud.
“I was good at it.” Alec laughs, a choked, desperate sound. “I was good at dying.”
“It’s okay,” Max says, though of course it’s not.
Alec talks some more, and Max listens, but all she can think is that it’s funny how the rain never falls in Seattle like it used to.
||
They taught her algebra when she was six.
By the time she was seven she’d moved on to differential equations. She doesn’t remember much of it, because the punks with spray-paint are right: in today’s world, math is about as useful as a major in English. But she carried away one lesson.
If you’re solving an equation, you solve it piece by piece, working through each variable. You can’t solve all of them at once, or even try, because if you do then the whole thing falls apart.
That’s the problem with Alec, she thinks. Too many variables. She can’t figure anything out, so for a long time they go nowhere.
But then the snow falls and it’s so cold that when Alec throws an arm over her shoulder she pretends not to care just because she needs the warmth. And then somehow they’re cuddling on Alec’s couch, arguing about old military tactics, and this is okay, maybe.
||
“A’ight, now. What’s going on?”
Max raises her eyebrows at O.C., going for innocent. “What?”
“You look smug,” Original Cindy informs her, “not angelic like I know you wanna. Now spill, already. You been acting crazy for weeks now.”
She thinks about doing the avoidance thing, because whatever this is between her and Alec, it’s…weird. It’s Manticore, and she’s not sure anyone else will get it.
But when she explains, O.C. just tells her to kiss the boy, already.
Max can’t help but feel a little amused at the fact that Manticore gave them so much, but basic social skills are foreign to them both.
||
It’s another cat burglary job and Alec has, predictably, screwed it up.
“Sometimes I think you do this on purpose,” Max says irritably. They’re stuck in a tiny supply closet in a warehouse that smells like fish, and Alec is pressed up against her in a way that’s got Original Cindy’s words reverberate in her ears, making her blush.
“You love it,” Alec says. Max doesn’t bother to contradict him.
They stand in silence for a minute, Alec’s mouth inches from Max’s hair-but then Alec shifts, just a little, and Max decides to jump off the figurative building.
His mouth tastes spicy, like the cinnamon gum she’s pretty sure she saw him steal earlier. His hands wriggle around in the tight space, fighting to touch her, so she scoots up and parts her legs, letting him in closer.
“Max,” he says softly. She makes a low noise in her throat, wanting to get closer, every part of her-human and not-clamoring for more touch, more…everything.
She gets the feeling that he’s going to say something, maybe even something important, but then she grinds against his cock and he groans and gives up, kissing her and nipping at her lips.
By the time the coast is clear they’re both flushed and panting. Max is on the verge of coming and if the bulge in Alec’s jeans is any gauge, then so is he.
“I don’t want to,” she starts to say, but Alec catches one of her hands in his.
“Let’s just go, okay?” he says. “We both need sleep.”
She drops him off at his apartment, and for the first time in awhile, she doesn’t go in.
||
Later, Alec will blame the miniskirt.
It’s his idea. The times where Max has to dress up like a hooker, or get wet-or sometimes both, and that’s a real treat-are his favorite, so he tries to come up with as many sketchy jobs as possible. This one is worst than most, since they’re trying to rob a Mafia-type guy who only lets pretty young girls into his house, and no one out. Alec’s got a gun ready when Max knocks on the door and simpers.
But then he turns on the surveillance (a pin in her hair) and watches her play everyone in the fucking room, and that coupled with the memory of her legs curving down from the tiny black skirt is enough to make him hard right there in the apartment.
By the time the job is done and the man’s house is burned down, he’s debating just jacking off right there. Then Max drops the pin, accidentally or deliberately he can’t tell, and he gets a look up her skirt-and then he’s leaning back in his chair and unzipping his fly.
Max is walking through the door right when he’s about to come.
Before he has a chance to, though, she’s on his lap, pulling his hands back roughly and whispering shit in his ear that he can’t wait to watch her deny later, because fuck Max has a dirty mouth.
“C’mon,” she says, biting his lip, “Let’s go.”
It’s easy work to pull her down and in, and it’s not until she shudders and comes around him just seconds later that he realizes that he’s not the only one who was going crazy during the job.
||
“Max,” Alec says in early spring when she’s about to head off to meet with an X-7 who’s claiming he wants help.
“Yeah?” she says. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, screwing around with various guns and grapples. His Batman complex just never stops being funny.
He hesitates for an infinitesimal amount of time before saying, “If you get yourself hurt, I will kick your ass.”
X equals something new. Max thinks of algebra, of Ben and of test tubes.
She leaves the doorway to straddle Alec’s lap and kiss him.
“Love you too, asshole,” she says, and means it.
||
Two years ago, Max gave Alec his name.
He celebrates it as a birthday now. Max makes fun of him for it, but hey-a guy’s gotta take any opportunity he can to make people give him shit.
And there are a lot of people now. He’s a leader, him and Maxie both are, which is as gratifying as it is sincerely bizarre. A deluge of cards arrives at their apartment on his birthday, followed up by more presents than Alec thinks any one person should get.
Not that he’s complaining, or anything.
Still, it’s kind of bizarre to be given a cashmere sweater by his girlfriend’s ex.
When he tells Max that, she just laughs at him. “Yeah, well, it’s kinda weird to have a girlfriend, don’t you think?”
Alec thinks of Rachel and of Manticore. “Good point,” he says, and throws a stuffed Happy Birthday bear at Max’s head.
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Two days later they’re in Washington, D.C., testifying before the Senate about the Manticore project.
Alec’s just finished describing Rachel and they’re both taking a bathroom break when Max pushes Alec up against a soda machine and kisses him, hard and long.
When they break apart Alec smiles at her, clearly bemused.
“Am I allowed to ask why, or will you slice my balls off?”
She laughs and shakes her head. “You’re okay,” she tells him.
Alec flips them around too quickly for a Normal to see, pinning her against the wall. His smile would be dangerous if she didn’t know five different nonlethal ways to get out of this.
“Yep,” he says.
There’s a knife in her boot and a gun in his pocket. Her DNA is too perfect and his is identical to a guy who thought the Virgin Mary had a burning need for dead people’s teeth.
But they can laugh, so Max figures they’ve won.
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End
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