title: new dawn; new hope when: post the tinkerer where: rome trigger warnings: none
The horrors leave him untouched, but he sees the fallout, feels it keenly. Pain and misery have been his companion for months, with brief moments of brightness that he attempts to grasp until he chokes them out. Money is something that he has aplenty, sitting and accumulating over the two years he spent on the Eye’s care, so he does not hesitate to give back to community, having realized that Rome is where he wants to lay out his roots now that the dust settles around them and the world remains changed.
For Max, there are no ghosts in the streets, no memories of what is gone and cannot return. To him, Rome is at the end of a road previously untaken, and he has chosen to take it in hopes of— Not outrunning, not outpacing, but healing from the tears on his chest, the jagged edge of violence on his throat as he thinks of a cooling corpse, of the rotting smell that has entrenched itself into his very soul.
He still smells it, Andrew’s decomposing body, the slow consumption of decay that he had waited to take place before allowing himself to be dragged away from his witch. It awakens him from his nightmares, it follows him through the streets.
It stops, when he enters the Waffle House and sees startling blue eyes.
He doesn’t even know his name, that of the man behind the counter. Endlessly frustrating, endlessly endearing, he sees him and he forgets the ache of his chest.
This stranger is not the only reason he stays, but despite himself— despite the memories he has allowed himself to forget—, he is one of the most weighty.
Lupercal has a new lease on life, now that the Lupo Alpha has chosen to step down, now that the Eye has begun to make amends.
And he cannot help it, Max is hopeful.
It’s all he had wanted, as the laboratories had released him into the wild. Not peace, because he doubts that this is the end of it all. (He knows the story is unfinished, just as he is an author, but the chapter is closed and he refuses to turn the page) But it is a beginning that surpasses his greatest hopes. To see the Eye changing before his very eyes, from the organization haunting his every step breaking apart and blooming under something new.
He volunteers first, for one of the Eye’s rehabilitation programs, willing to see first hand, willing to sacrifice himself if he is wrong. But the tentative hope blooms underneath the Full Moon at the changes he can see. Finally, tearfully, he begins to heal. It’s not enough, it might never be enough in his lifetime, not when the Eye has millennia of horrors to make up for.
But it’s the beginning of something great.
That is all he can ask for.
