Maybe he needs this reminder that Max is not a child. Tristan stares with the discomfort of ill-timed enlightenment. It’s easy pretending Max is innocent, that Max is just a kid. The truth is they are more alike than they know: too grown up for their own good and survival hardened. Max is not much younger than Tristan himself, in many ways they were equal. Max possesses a young face and a kind heart and that muddles things, forgoes Tristan’s memory of the other boy’s ability to live in the harshness of this world.
The primal mechanisms in Max that will him to move forward, to live, to do whatever it takes, are the same mechanisms in Tristan that had him plunging a knife through someone’s eye months prior.
They are the same. He can see that now.
Blood drips from the weapon gripped in his hands, chest heaving, lips panting on gray wisps. Max is trembling, just slightly, barely visible under the thick layers keeping him warm. Tristan can do all but naught, stares emptily, his own chest rising heavily on a shaky exhale.
The situation isn’t unusual. The surface was harsh, conditions unforgiving. Survival often comes at the cost of the lives of others, often entails making precarious decisions. The surface itself while amoral gives root to morally uncertain people. Not everything is clear cut, not everything is good and bad and Tristan can see Max standing at that edge staring down. What is unusual-- for Tristan-- is seeing someone so young, or just young looking, someone he sought to protect like one might a younger sibling, do something unthinkable in the name of survival.
He had watched the struggle, watched thick and unmoving and frozen like cement, watched the weapon change hands, watched past his raised gun that he couldn’t bring himself to shoot for fear of hitting his friend as opposed to the assailant; and he’d watched, too, as Max raised the sledgehammer then in his possession as high as he could before striking. In his mind, he thought it would end there. It didn’t. It took more than one strike until the attacker’s form was still and silent as the night.
Now they both stand still on the slate of snow and ice covered ground beneath them. Hot blood is seeping into the snow around the body.
Tristan feels unsteady despite having done nothing, like the solidity beneath him might be torn away at any moment.
“Are you... alright?” He asks cautiously. His tone betrays the sentiment of a worried friend, marred by the overbearing disillusionment of the situation.
“Yeah.” Max answers softly. His voice is steady but Tristan detects a hint of discomfort in him too, something recognizably human at the very least.
Tristan steps nearer, gaze narrowly avoiding the corpse fresh in the snow. His hands extend gentle, careful, grasps the shaft of the sledgehammer to gingerly pry it away from Max. It is not out of fear for himself, but fear for how he sees the younger boy’s hands grip tight around it, knuckles white as if it’s all he knows. It isn’t Tristan knows that. Max is scared. Tristan is uncomfortable but less now with what was done and more with Max’s reaction --- or seeming lack thereof.
“You did what you had to do.” Tristan says after a moment of respite.
Max’s brow furrows, lips twitching before he speaks unused to the sensation and Tristan watches the thought process unfold on his features, “I know that.”
The weapon, now freed from Max’s grasp, is discarded to the ice with an unquiet crunch that reverberates in the space around them, disquieted. Tristan feels mildly disturbed by the sudden realization how quiet it is. There’s such a nothingness spanning between them that a sickly feeling crawls up in his throat as a hard swallow. It’s familiar. Blood on ice is familiar.
There never would be a right time to ask, but Tristan does anyway. “Have you ever... killed anyone before?”
Max is unwavering. He thinks ‘yes’, he had, just not directly. Not the way Tristan means, not intentionally, not outside of the scope of needless blame and guilt for something he has no control over. Really the answer is no but for a split second-- his parents in mind-- Max thinks to say yes. “No.”
Tristan nods. “I didn’t think I’d have to kill anyone up here... but I did. The first time you know --- it still... I still feel it. Inside of me. What I did still gets to me, I mean. But in the moment... saving myself, saving my friend from someone like that, like how he was, more monster than human... I felt relief. I felt good... You did the right thing.”
“To survive. I did the right thing to survive, it’s not the same--”
“It’s the same.” It isn’t, he knows, but he wants to be comforting, wants to relate. He didn’t have people in his life who had felt some of the things he had --- not until now. “You did the right thing. Period. You know it’s --- it’s not easy. It’s fucked. You feel guilty, you feel sick,” Max is shaking his head to Tristan’s words, “you wish you never had to do it, but you did the right thing. He would’ve killed you and me and others... and I know you’re feeling a lot right now but just... trust me on this. You did the right thing.”
“I don’t... feel anything. That’s the problem.”
A sigh is wretched from Tristan’s lips, hand sliding down his face. There’s a long pause of silence less comforting than respite but not uncomfortable enough to be like seeing your friend compact someone’s skull. “Is it a lack of feeling or an inability to identify what you’re feeling? I think sometimes you mistake the two...”
Max says nothing. Tristan watches as the other moves to the body, crouches down to rifle through pockets, a bag, tugging free possessions useful to him that are then slipped into a bag of Max’s own.
“We should go.” Max says, still crouched and gazing at the stillness of the body sprawled out on the ice.
There was something morbidly calm about death. Tristan recalls the unknown assailant’s form in a frenzy of limbs and swings, grotesque grunts freed from his tongue as he attacked outward. Now he’s unrecognizable, like a fire fizzled out but the memory of what it once was-- roaring and massive-- still there in a heap of ash and scorch marks.
Everything on the surface is unpredictable and hectic... death is predictable, death always looks the same.
// what’s up guys ! last time i was over here i was engaged, 19, living in kentucky. a month later i am married, 20 years old, and settled in to my new home in new mexico! wild. definitely going to pick back up with interactions here now that i have more time !! :)
we’ve lived in this tiny ass town where everyone knows everyone because no one leaves and when we were young we would sit up at night on your roof and i’d listen to you talk about how you were actually going to do it one day and you did but you never knew i’ve had a crush on you ever since back then so when you send me postcards from all these different cities with bright lights it makes my heart hurt and here we are several years later and i’m finally starting to move on but oh wait you’re back and my heart’s beating like crazy well fuck au
She’s in a hurry, as she tends to be, when the nearby kid’s bag decides to betray him. She’s been there, too many times, usually with grocery bags, so even in her haste, she stops and swoops in to help.
“ Damn bags. Always givin’ out when you need them the most. ” She reaches for the things he hasn’t yet fit into his grasp and starts to bundle them into a neat pile. “ Ah yes, dastardly pens. ” Reaching into her jacket pocket, she produces a hair band and loops it around the little group of utensils a couple times to hold them together. “ There we go. ” There’s a soft smile when she faces him, hoping it will offset the clear discomfort he feels.
Gaze darts upward to her before HASTILY moving back down and Max finds himself wiping furtively at tears before fixing a small APPRECIATIVE smile across lips. “That’s pretty useful.” He regards, pointing momentarily to the hairband with a nod, he’s busy shuffling papers into some half-assed semblance of a neat pile ( not near as neat as he’d like and the yearn for ORGANIZATION in him is somewhere between offended & mortified ).
He’s lucky there’s duct tape in his bag but it’s no coincidence. In fact, with little regard for her statement he’s unrolling a strip, biting it off with his teeth and placing it to the bottom of his bag, repeats the process a few times over, then sticks more on the inside over the neatly patched hole before gathering his things. NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL. However, the embarrassment is lingering as a sickness in his stomach. Hand extends outward to her to take back his pens. “Thanks.”
“you built it..!” mateo sounds astonished— impressed— and he steps forward to kneel down next to the tool, running his fingertips gently over the smooth wood. perhaps he’d have had the time to build something like this if he hadn’t found himself so busy, and now that he’s seen it, he thinks they could really benefit from something like it. his eyes lift at max’s offer and a smile tugs at his lips. “would you mind? i can help you.”
He doesn’t quite FLINCH away as the other moves forward but there’s a slight STEP BACK Max takes that puts a narrow distance between the two. He had trust to spare, but it still felt tedious. He’s cautious. The other seemed harmless enough, however. Max falls quiet a long moment in contemplation of how to PROCEED. “I live pretty close. Not far.” He says. “If you can help me unload once there, it’s all yours.”
"Max?" Marlow reached out and touched his arm. It was the dead of night, and pitch black. "I was scared you weren't there anymore."
He feels FROZEN and for once in his life it isn’t the cold but the touch at his arm, a thick, hot feeling rising in his throat as if it’s the first time he’s ever been touched ( really, for the first time in years, it is ). Words want to form but don’t. “I’m here.” Indelicate. The words are clunky and lack the EMOTION he thinks they ought portray. He just lies there a while before fingers move with a little more tact to curl around hers. “Are you okay?”
LIKE FOR A LYRIC / SONG BASED STARTER; i got like 1k songs on my itunes & im gonna shuffle that shit and pick lines out of the songs or based on the Vibe and use them as starters, will mostly be MODERN VERSE based but if you’re more interested in main, lmk. a link to the song used will also be included.
