pairings: max hatter x gn!reader
genre: hurt/comfort
warnings: WICKED WONDERLAND SPOILERS! this starts when they arrive at the lumoria tree, includes ‘did you hear about them?’, then replaces the scene afterwards with red & max. reader’s family sucks and that big internal conflict is the plot of this fic so it’s very prevalent. there’s a bit of swearing (bullshit/shit, fuck)
note: i’m so incredibly happy to be back here & writing again, it’s all SO fulfilling!! reader is the younger sibling of chessy, both of which are able to shape shift between cat form & human. the relationship between max & reader is ambiguous so you can read it however you want
you’re the perfect picture of leisure, legs dangling behind you after a lethargic stretch, your torso draped across the strangely textured surfaces of multiple signature wonderland oversized plants, leading up to where your cheek squishes into your forearm, which is haphazardly slung outwards to take up a rather impolite amount of pink’s makeshift tea party ‘table’ space. your free hand is unfurled near the edge of the mushroom table, swatting every so often at the handles of delicate teacups and the rims of engraved saucers, only pausing when pink or chloe catch the porcelain on their tumbles down, and resuming when your heart-painted victims are placed back within your reach.
and everyone is fooled.
no one notices that you’re laid any more unconventionally than you usually are, unaware that you curl awkwardly in at your side, like the petals of a wilting flower; your feline instincts urging at every sign of danger for you to hide your vulnerable stomach from the dangerous outside world. no one knows the difference between a cat playing their favourite game of knock-stuff-off-a-ledge-until-someone-stops-you, to the anxious twitches of your fingers, restless with nothing else to do but try to find some semblance of comfort in the familiar motion of nudging at pink’s drinks, aching to return to the memory-tinted safety of those sunkissed afternoons spent waltzing around the queen’s palace gardens without a care. no one else has as sharp vision in the dark as you do, so they can’t make out the way your gaze frantically skitters from person to person, like looking at any one of your companions for too long might entice them to attack. no one knows that your skin crawls with discomfort, that your stomach churns like a tempest at sea, that you twitch at the most innocent of noises ringing through the cacophony of a woodland you’ve lived in your entire life.
you’re a nervous wreck, and not a single person—not hk nor vk (you’re the worst of both worlds, an outside that neither side finds kinship with)—knows. even amongst your peculiar collection of misfit heroes on a mission, your heart constricts at the certainty that not a single one of them notices, sees, cares.
because you see it, you notice every little detail in them, even when they gloss over you so swiftly that you blur into just a razor-edged grin. the hk’s and vk’s volley jabs and insults back and forth like it’s a team sport, and though you dodge those outright strikes by being untethered from their rigid factions, you are not safe from the little, subtler, pinches. it’s death by a thousand cuts on this journey to save the beloved queen bridget of hearts and her kingdom, side by side with a ‘team’ eating itself alive from the inside out, and you are no stranger to the personalised stabs that started coming right for your heart the moment this turmoil descended upon wonderland.
it’s felix facilier, a classmate, who had once read your fortune outside on the steps while you waited for your teacher to arrive, and grinned when he showed you a card that he explained foretold of adventure, of cunning, of mischief, all of which he’d approved of with a wink. now he only lurks behind his fellow vk’s, no longer revelling in your oddness, your unpredictability, your cheshire charm. not when, in the light of the attack on the queen, all he can see when he looks at you are the branches of your family tree hanging over your head like puppet strings, not now that he imagines watching that duplicitousness of your father spread, a blight rotting the tree all the way down not only to you, but also to your malevolent sister—who he’s now decided you’re inseparable from; just a twig that leads back to the cheshires.
it’s robbie hood, who you saw as the closest thing to a peer at auradon prep, a likeminded grey area in the rigid world of heroes and villains, the same boy you’ve shared knowing smirks with when you’ve passed each other sneaking out of the dorms after hours. now he makes it clear that he aligns with what’s right, and all you know is that, whatever that means to him, siding with the hk’s, denouncing the vk’s, it includes the belief that you’re wrong—a possible spy, a danger to keep around, a problem waiting to worsen; the deep black of a midnight sky with no room for any grey to sneak in, not when the pure white stars burn so bright.
it’s red, a fixture of your childhood that you once endeavoured to think of as something next to being a friend. even though she’s a hk, she was always a little off-beat, growing almost parallel to you, in pockets of meeting each other’s eyes across the way when you were the only ones who found funny the things that others gasped at, in the wrap of a blanket of the constant silent knowing that you would each turn a blind eye when you caught the other acting imperfectly. this girl’s presence in the long winding ribbon of your childhood appears with countless little knots for every time you passed each other in the market and traded nods of approval at each other’s outfits. but now, red only frowns at you with soft flashes of alarm every time you turn face to face, like for a moment she didn’t remember you, and all she saw was your sister.
it’s princess pink, who you may not have seen quite so eye to eye with like you did with her sister, but who more often than not would giggle and applaud at your antics when she was younger. even when she grew a twinge less indiscriminately excitable with age, she used to routinely fill your hands with something to do when you’d try to swat at whatever random items dared exist upon a ledge near you, she’d plant a warm teacup in your palm and hum to herself proudly, grinning every time like she’d successfully found the cure to your shenanigans, even if that full teacup always ended up balanced atop a door in the castle waiting patiently for an unsuspecting guard to swing it open and receive an impromptu sugary shower, or emptied with a happy sigh from you (listen, pinks has spent her whole life frolicking towards afternoon teatimes—everyone’s always too surprised at the girl pulling a full steaming teapot from her purse to realise that the actual tea is delicious, but it truly shows in the quality that brewing tea is just about all she’s done her whole life) only to be slid back over to the edge of the table, a grin curling your lips as she met your eyes with something sibling to toothless exasperation, just as it would start tipping over again.
now you watch her out of the corner of your eye as her knuckles twitch at every swipe of your fingers, her hand tightly clenching onto the teacup she usually daintily perches between perfectly positioned manicured fingers—the grip only barely easing for the moments when she brings the cup to her lips. what never relaxes is the scrunch of her nose, which has always been a sure sign of the few times when the rosy plaited ends of her patience has started fraying.
princess chloe beside her is none the wiser; even among her fellow hk’s, they are unbelieving that there lies anything substantial beneath the outer layer of pink’s… pinkness—so they are unable, unwilling, uninterested, in actually looking and finding that her bright lipstick currently hides the way her lips purse and her jaw clenches, that it’s no well-kept secret that nerves are abuzz like livewires ready to ignite, and that her once endlessly forgiving eyes now bore into you like you’re the one who captured her mother.
but you grew up with her. you remember your first day of primary school if only because pink, still two years off attending herself, had tried to convince you to sneak her in so she could stay with her big sister. detention at auradon prep is only so bearable because robbie makes a habit of breaking his friends out of it ‘in protest’, and you always tag along with them for a time afterwards, because when his grandiose plans of swinging into the classroom on a rope hanging from the roof outside fails, the kid who can literally vanish into thin air and pickpocket the door key is always a good backup who earns celebratory cheers and pats on the back for their heroic assistance. hazel once cornered you outside your dorm, brows scrunched and hook looking poised to strike with a tight grip, only to personally thank you (though reluctantly, with averted eye contact and abashed mumbling, trying to play it off as ‘no biggie’ even while she failed to hide the way she excitedly bounced back and forth onto the balls of her feet) for the day before, when you’d spontaneously decided to photocopy and confetti the answers to an upcoming test around campus, forcing the teacher to just skip the test and give everyone a pass—she’d grumbled what sounded like a full pirate crews’ worth of swears between admitting that what you did was “cool—or whatever”, and that she “doesn’t owe you shit… but if you ever need some muscle, just give me a call, or something” only to find out from the smees blabbing to you later, that hazel had been one fail in that class away from being ineligible for taking on sailing as an extracurricular in the coming semester, which clearly meant a lot to her that she was still able to do it now, from the way that even as max steered the twins away from you before they could say anything more, he paused to look at you for a moment, and gave you a small, genuine, smile, a silent appreciation on behalf of his friend, and the only time you’ve ever seen him smile without something wily behind. sure, you may have taunted luis with his lost comb, but even after you’d tossed it across the auradon prep lawn to save yourself from his threat to wrestle you for it, he’d thanked you for finding it (buried under towering piles of tourney supplies) and (eventually) returning it. if it had been anyone else, you may have been put on trial for trying to murder your classmate by dropping a heavy history book from where you’d sat atop the mountainous shelves in the library directly down on their head, but you knew that chloe charming has quick reflexes, and the girl herself forgave you the moment she wiped the dust off the cover to find it was the exact book she’d been scouring the shelves for for hours.
you’ve been in these people’s lives for years, an unexpected saviour for the little things, a rascal at the absolute worst. and yet you’re nothing to them. your moment of light in their days disappears from their hearts the moment you’re out of view—worse, what does stay with them is the bad things you did, the waving the comb teasingly in luis’ face before you returned it, chloe’s flash of fear as her head snapped up to your grin and a descending tome. but that’s how a cheshire cat is supposed to exist, that’s what you were taught, the only thing you were taught. your father passed down to you and your sister a truth that he lived by: it’s always fun to mess with people, and only fun to help them when they still think they’re being messed with.
you’ve lived your whole life as a cheshire cat first and yourself never. you are lackadaisical, a drifter, a sharp one-liner that fades into the background once the protagonist stops chuckling and turns to look for something they can actually understand, and can therefore trust—which means, this is all you can be, this is what you have to be. you don’t know how to be anything else, cannot be sure that if you were open up your outer shell right now, that everything inside wouldn’t just turn to ash from having never before seen the sun. still, something claws for life inside you, like a caterpillar without a cocoon, vulnerable to the harshness roiling through you injected at birth, and yet, after all these years, it twitches with life.
behind thick walls, through your eyes, it was you as you watched other children your age grow real, standing on the sidelines as their misshapen blobs of parts of their parents swirled and solidified into something unique, brand new people you’d thought of with wonder every night at home, standing in front of the mirror and only ever seeing your father reflected back.
you related to the baby birds you’d watch get shoved out of their nests with a swelling empathy, as you were taught to disappear into thin air or succumb to your family’s ruthless ridicule, to float above treetops if you ever wanted to retrieve your favourite book back from your father up there, to sooner expect to come home to your sister having compelled the kitchen appliances to chase you throughout the house as your father watched with a grin than a homecooked dinner after a lonely day at school—while you were acutely aware that other kids related to each other, that they would not hesitate to join in when they spotted their neighbours playing together, and would end that game with hands clasping theirs as they’d skip away onto a new adventure with their new friends. other kids learned to communicate, to apologise, to be themselves, or simply go off and find new friends if they couldn’t do that with their current ones.
(where do i go to when i can’t be myself with my family? you’d wondered. you learned that there was nowhere else to go but deeper inside yourself.)
so the real kids learned a balance. they are selflessness and self-love, living and learning, being guided by their parents and being themselves, they are equals and opposites and not a single one like the other, and that’s what makes them real.
you are your unburdened father, floating free in a world that can easily be cruised through if only you never once stop to listen to the beating heat in your chest, a tourist in the lives of others while never living his own. you are your sister, the inevitable pernicious flower that was always going to bloom from a childhood raised on apathy in which she thrived while you withered.
so your fingers just keep twitching, each graze of a teacup a sort of lifeless shudder in every half-hearted flick of your wrist, like the final ragged breaths of your ill-fitted skin suit rattling for dear life.
and all everyone sees is the same cheshire they think they’ve always known; rejoicing in the misfortune of others, only entertained by the shatter of a teacup hitting the floor when there’s the upset cry of the owner harmonising along with the crash—because it’s all you’ve ever known how to show, because you’ve never known how to shed your skin and grow into something that isn’t just your sister’s shadow.
but you want to.
you can no longer bear to keep absorbing the full force of disgusted distrust searing from the only person who’s ever gifted you a real birthday present that didn’t explode in your face to the sound of chessy’s cackling—so your gaze drifts until it falls on red and luis, and you know it like a language you fluently understand but cannot speak, their legs angled towards each other with voices low. you are once and forever more locked behind your own eyes as you watch another connection between two people realer than you form with the grace and gentleness of the wind brushing the leaves above you, always horribly aware that you’d manage only to burn the forest down.
and the ache overwhelms you more, hurting worse and worse with every time it throbs. of course, it’s always been there, that itch under your skin, that tender beast on a warpath tearing your insides to ribbons—but it finally had something real to feed on when you discovered your sister’s involvement in the attack against not only the queen (a woman you used to daydream of being your mother, all bright smiles and welcoming open arms and everything warm that your cold family only left you to imagine; a secret rose garden in your mind you visited when you were little and laying awake at night, fearful to petrification of rolling over and finding a new prank from your family creeping upon you), but also against the whole of wonderland, the kingdom whose still dirt remembers where you stood as you watched your life approach and trample over and past you, but also whose vast woods held every tree that embraced you when the crisp open air was warmer to nap upon than your own bed, and every stepping stone you’d bounced across imagining you were joined by countless adoring friends beside you (they were shy, and only ever spoke up beneath the sound of the loud splashes of the lake water whenever you slipped and tumbled in, that was why you couldn’t hear them).
more and more, you want to look in the mirror and see yourself. you want others to look at you and see someone opaque, someone they can trust without reservation. you want a friend, even just one would do, one person who looks at you and sees you.
but your outer shell is tough—tougher even now that you only grow weaker as the ache grows stronger—a protective layer that’s engulfed you so expertly that you don’t even have the key to your own gates.
so you bite your tongue, so you trail a couple steps behind the back of the pack as you traverse wonderland so no one gets scared you might pounce on them, so you offer your hand to the others when they fall, and when they refuse it you remind yourself that this is how it’s meant to go, that they can’t see the little voice inside of you screaming to be let free, not behind your muscle memorised cheshire grin, not behind your endless flow of unhelpful quips that stand as soldiers guarding the truth that tries to climb up and jump out of your throat.
so you turn your gaze back up to the girls beside you when the unguarded way luis leans in even closer while talking to red summons a bruising caving in at the centre of your heart, only for that longing to deepen when chloe offers a whispered thank you to pink for refilling her teacup. the hunger inside you grows, the hurt blooming where the fangs of a frightened beast search in vain for anything but your cheshire cold and loneliness to keep it warm.
suddenly overwhelmed with a seasickness upon the vast open ocean of isolation, your arms rush to weakly lift you up, shuffling and wobbling until you’re upright and halfway off your mushroom chaise lounge, when your eyes—that search for anything that doesn’t worsen the ache, any sign of land to moor yourself to—instead snap to hazel hook.
it’s subtle, especially under the glow of the lumoria tree, you’re not even certain it’s not just the glimmer of her leather coat under the moonlight, until you catch the exact moment her eyes shift, and a blade-sharp gaze lunges all the way across the dewy grass, onto luis.
the shimmering, wrapped around her shoulders like a scarf, like a boa constrictor, is gone as quick as she rises from her seat to address luis—and then it’s upon him, like a toxic cloud of gas expanding upon the group.
“chessy!” you gasp, a whisper of a noise lost in the intertwining voices of hazel and luis, and the footsteps of everyone else stepping up to pick sides in the argument growing in front of you, your heart starting to race as you watch the destructive touch of your sister begin to unravel a team that was already hanging on by a thread.
when you hear the slightest clink from the abandoned tea party behind you, you whirl so frantically you almost lose your balance. wide eyes immediately find chessy, the perfect picture of an innocent little kitten simply enjoying pink’s heart-adorned tea cakes with an unhurried lick—but you know more than anyone that the looks of a cheshire are always deceiving, and that your sister is even more dangerous when in her cat form that can as easily step into the centre of chaos as it can slip soundlessly out of what she’s caused before anyone even notices she was here. you’re proved right when all she offers you is a laugh—like she knows your current struggle inside out and finds every last bit of your suffering entertaining, like all your life is nothing more to her than a tv channel she clicks onto when she needs a chuckle and a healthy dose of schadenfreude—and a wink as she leaves behind nothing but the memory of a magical shimmering where your hands grasp at open air as you leap to catch her less than a second too late.
it’s second nature to slip into her shadow, to inhale as a pale shimmering envelops you, and not have yet exhaled before you’re already bounding out of the lumoria tree’s halo, four paws pounding the grass leading further into the forest.
as you scramble for any sound, track, scent, a single trace of your sister’s trail, the already fractured group crumbles under the weight of more than just chessy’s calculated intervention, patience snaps and confidence shatters to the tune of the boisterous words of a group of teenage atlases too downtrodden by their own trials to recognise the worlds weighing low upon every other person they stare down from either side.
while you’re still circling around the bioluminescent outskirts of the tree, you can hear the edges of everyone’s voices, a fight of the strongest that just sounds like a scramble for respect once it reaches the dark out. your nose twitches, head jolting back and forth like an electrocuted bobblehead as you try to discern even just the cake icing left over on your sister’s breath amongst the potent scents of wonderland; blooming flowers and the damp ground that smells sweet like nothing in auradon taking up all the space in your nostrils. boasts inflate near to popping back by the tree, an exaggerated he-said-she-said firing back and forth, scrambling for the upper hand just as desperately as your padded feet sprinting so fast the world spins like a globe beneath them.
the competition gets physical. your lungs shudder with every breath. a boot planted atop a chest, a foe bested in the scuffle. a cry of your sister’s name gasps out before you can stop it, a desperate plea for mercy. an exhale, a moment where kids are kids, patting each other’s backs, smiling openly, a split second where they almost forget that they must be the best or nothing. a sob, a whine, a howl, a yelp, please help me, please fix me, please tear the parts of you out of me and leave behind the rest, i don’t even care if that leaves nothing anymore as long as i’m free of you.
a silent forest, a lone cat, even the creatures of the tulgey wood know an uncanny monster to avoid when they see it, holding their breath, waiting for you to leave.
chessy makes herself at home upon pink’s shoulders, and within seconds the reverie is snuffed, a scatter of people retreating back to their safe, contained cocoons of friends, fleeing the dark unknown of new connections and back into the light of the familiar.
you almost pass for a real person, as you listen intently to the singing soreness in your legs to try to tune out your failure. your tail hangs low, dragging like lost dreams behind you.
and you do look true, palpable, if only for a moment, a living being unmasked in the moonlight—lonely, distraught, shattered, but at least all the little shards scattered behind on the forest floor are yours, not your dad’s, not chessy’s.
but, just as harshly as you fell apart, you stall where exists the inhale before the near inaudible whistle of wind between trees, and take a deep breath.
and putting the scant pieces of yourself back behind the lock and key of just another cheshire cat feels like a punch to the gut, but you don’t know how else to keep yourself together, standing upright, moving forward even if it is just further beyond help. so you march on.
by the time you’re preparing yourself to slip back into the fold of fighters and failures and nothing in between, you’re nothing more than a fog of yourself, an unforgiving cold that bites anything that gets too close because the incorporeal doesn’t know how to grow hands for holding, how to ask will you accept me? in a voice that isn’t a rumbling of bad omens.
but even with grief for eyes, you couldn’t miss him if you tried. and you try—when do you not try? to exist without the constant reminder that you’re being watched, to act like you don’t care; like this isn’t all a performance, that you stop existing if they look away, that if you drop the act there’s nothing behind the mask.
so you wish you didn’t see him, wish you didn’t have to keep existing, wish you could turn tail back into the forest and evaporate into something even less here than a cheshire cat’s magic trick and never have to be anything again—wish you didn’t want to stay, having caught him here, hunched over in the dark, the dim outline of something that scares you with a jolt of warm understanding.
is it still called lurking when you’re so pathetic, so powerless? no, you linger, like a bad dream, like the last person holding onto a conversation that already ended, you tuck yourself behind the large leaves of a verdant bush, and hesitate—eyes wide, breaths shallow, your mind enveloped by a thick unbreachable atmosphere where the thrum of a storm brewing shouts in your ears that you can only pretend this never happened and run away as fast as you can, or stay deathly still here forever until you turn to stone and your inability to connect with anyone, anything, tangible is immortalised.
but somewhere in the irrational part of your brain that thinks being yourself and being accepted could be more important than the safety of doing what you’ve always done, an impulse bypasses the harsh voices of your family urging you that you can only ever do what you’ve always done, and drives you out into the little clearing where the faint glow of the lumoria tree dusts down like moonlight.
max sees you, his head hung low, the feline cautiously padding out into the open—seemingly only just confirming you’re not your sister before he looks away, saying nothing.
you don’t need to know exactly what was said to know that chessy sowed seeds of doubt like sprinkles over the group, that no matter who she targeted first, it had cascaded through the group swiftly until the killing blow clearly hit the boy who fled into the forest.
you stare. max hatter, shoulders sagged, weighed down by tense melancholy so heavy they don’t even lift when he breathes. you’ve always believed that there is certainty within him, the son of a villain so wicked that the benevolent queen of hearts had no choice but to banish him, the bearer of a legacy that fits so neatly within the binary of hero or villain, who was welcomed with open arms into the ranks of his vk peers. you’ve envied him, how easy it should be to just be mad, rather than pretending to—because you thought it ran in the family, that he carried the same rambling-and-raving-about-time-travel gene as the infamous maddox hatter, that he was born with a lust for spreading misfortune and the insatiable instinct to cause trouble; that he’d never had to try, to be forced into acting like something he’s not.
but that’s also what people think about you. now nothing about him seems as certain as you once saw him.
since the moment you all leapt down the rabbit hole, max has been too… genuine. he’s thrown his arms open wide and goaded the world to descend its claws into his unguarded flesh, he all but rolls on his back and displays his stomach in the air like a plead for the sky to descend and rip him apart until nothing is left but a pool of his father’s blood. he’s made it no secret that he’s desperate to prove himself not another monstrous, villainous, mad hatter, and he’s only suffered for it.
you want to think of max as a cautionary tale—look, this is what happens when you try to break your family’s mould, the world doesn’t love you anymore when your armour’s shed, now it can just attack the real, soft, bits of you that hurt the most—but he’s still here, still standing, still trying. even now, curled in on himself with slow steadying breaths, ignoring your presence as you stand just within reach; he could lash out if he wanted. if he’d given up on being his own person he could lunge at you right now, slip on his father’s skin and prove you right with every punch.
you wish he would. you wish his persistence in being good wasn’t like oxygen to the tiniest flame of hope within you that threatens to burn you down. you’re too scared of choking on the smoke as the flames roar, too scared there’s no real part of you left in there that would be strong enough to survive the cleansing.
you shudder, the eternal sticky warmth of wonderland’s forests feeling oppressive rather than the usual comforting.
too afraid, too meek, never brave enough.
too certain that if you don’t lash out you don’t exist, that these paws aren’t steady enough for holding.
“what, not even a hello?” a wave of nausea rolls through you at the absence of a tremble in your voice, like the thing that moves your lips, this entire body that is perceived by others, truly is wholly disconnected from the captive prisoner of your quavering heart hidden within, “cat got your tongue?”
the walls of the world are closing in, the sky’s ceiling drooping, like max was set as a trap for you and its waiting for you to give in, like you’re forced to lift to keep it up twice as hard because he isn’t even trying to help you survive the suffocation.
your voice is a blade threatening bare skin, a sardonic lilt that hurts just as much for you to spout as it does for others to swallow down.
“geez, max! is it my unbirthday? what did i do to deserve you being so friendly to me!”
you laugh mockingly, like coughing up blood.
you stare impatiently, like you’re on stage and your scene partner has forgotten his lines, like he’s turning his back to you as he refuses to recall them, walking safely to the wings as the crowd clamours and jeers and rushes forth a swarm to swallow you whole.
you’re used to outbursts, to scowls shot back, to even just quiet seething, but max throws you no bone, only sits there, as if he can’t even hear you.
everything you spit out just deflects back to you, his blankness in the face of your assault so smooth it reflects harshly like looking in a mirror, and, for once, instead of seeing something feline and acidic, you see a single ball of flame, repeatedly flickering outwards only to retreat back inside—weak, but just strong enough at its centre that it never fully goes out. you’re not sure which of you that is.
you silence with restless shuffles side to side, no longer strong enough to unseal your lips even if you could think of a single effective plea to shout as your head dips below the sea’s surface.
the distant voices of the others back in the embrace of the tree brushes by your ears like the strands of grass against your furry legs in the softest breath of wind, like the faintest sound of fabric shifting as max finally raises his head just slightly enough to glance up to find you’re still sat before him, and lowers it once more with a frigid scoff.
“if you’re just here to make fun of me like everyone else, you can fuck off,” he says your name like you’ve forgotten it and he’s reminding you, his voice surprisingly weak of any real venom, “i’m not interested in being told that i’m evil like my father, or that we should be locked back up on the isle, right now.”
a hand clasps yours before the flood washes you away.
your body stills, and the thing that reeks of hope within you has come alive at the call of its name, like it’s been asleep all this time and has only been waiting for someone to beckon it back, like a jog to your memory that you exist outside of afternoons spent skipping class in the hallways of auradon prep as a teacher shouts get back here cheshire!
“i believe you,” you whisper, like it’s contraband you have to slip past your lips quickly before they notice it’s there and lock shut.
he recoils, slightly, and scoffs, raw.
“i believe you,” you repeat, like it hurts to even try to form any other words.
he shifts uncomfortably, refusing to look your way as he tries to pretend your words have no effect on him, but the hitch in his voice gives him away, like he’s gritting back a cry of pain, like you’re literally kicking him while he’s down, “i— you— just… fuck off, seriously, just go—”
“you say you’re not your dad, you… you behave like you’re not, too,” you insist to his disbelief, to his sureness that this is just another cruel joke you’re setting in his hands only to soon detonate it in his face, a set up with a punchline where he’s nothing more than maddox’s henchman, “i believe it.”
he chokes on your sincerity, hesitating before finally looking up, only to find a cloud of dull shimmering settling into the ground as you now stand before him a human, your face overcome by a flash of surprise with two singular pearls of tears sprouting in the corners of your eyes.
he watches your features devolve into a sniffling disarray when you panic over your failure to hide your raw expressions, and does admittedly feel a pitying guilt furrow his eyebrows and curl through his chest like a plume of smoke, but not enough to look away, not when he feels he’s owed a moment to interrogate the person who up until now has existed in his life as little more than a shallow puddle of sarcastic comebacks—especially when he sees none of that one dimensional sharpness in your shattered expression now, no matter how hard he searches.
the legs that he’s watched stretch out and trip people over now wobble back and forth like they’re not sure if they’re allowed to stand flat on the ground. you’ve always been either statuesque as you watch your next victims from afar, or a blur as you vanish from the scene of the crime, never this… limbo, this in between, body buzzing like you’re trapped and for the first time you can’t find the way out. a cheshire cat does not get caught, so who squirms before him?
you look mousy, without your usual stance of one hand on your hips and the other dangling casually, and it’s disarming how he almost feels bad for each of your individual fingers with the way they seem to flee into your palms with terror, only poking their heads out to pick at your skin with destructive anxiety. anyone else less enthralled would have surely laughed at the sight of the schoolyard menace’s shoulders bunched up to your ears as if you’re freezing in the snow of arendelle, instead of being surrounded the towering tropical flora in the belly of the tulgey wood (he doesn’t even think it’s too farfetched to have once assumed your shoulders had been fused to always have one slightly raised like a judging eyebrow, when he’d never before caught sight of you without that appearance of casual confidence). and it is almost comical, how you jolt every time his eyes sweep from one little observation to the next, as if his gaze were a physical touch that startles you with a static shock with every caress—but even your seemingly absurd reactions only serve to sober him deeper, as he draws nearer and nearer to the realisation that you are horrifyingly fearful of him, of anyone, perceiving you so thoroughly like this.
when his gaze eventually rises to your face, he’s surprised by how well he recognises you. your lips are parted like you’re out of breath where they used to only ever smirk meanly, your eyebrows are furrowed so deep they must be trying to burrow away into your skull instead of the expected one raised lazily as your peers fall for your deceptions. he’s never seen more than the sharp watchful slit you let peak through your eyelids, but now he sees every little shift and shimmer, the untold galaxies in turmoil that swirl in your skull drawing him in like the gravity of a starving black hole.
and yet with you standing before him like you never have before, there’s something there, something familiar, something flickering bright in the centre.
“i believe you too,” and, truly, he doesn’t know you well enough as your own person to actually be sure, but he’s looked in the mirror and seen less that he feels such a deep connection to than he does meeting your watery eyes right now, “i don’t think you’re your father. or your sister.”
you feel stripped bare, wearing far too few layers to keep the cold at bay, the harsh elements of the world ravaging your insides as your ribcage lays open for free attack, the precariousness of having nothing to hide behind striking you with the unrelenting intensity of a snowstorm. you shiver for every second longer that max’s dark eyes continue to hold your gaze. your fingers twitch, like searching for last signs of life in your frostbitten limbs—your legs tense, too, muscle giving a spasm, urging you to transform, to slip into the small body of a cat that can easily retreat into foliage and never be seen so utterly and unrelentingly like this ever again.
the instinct to withdraw has never been so overwhelming, and yet so frail.
mercifully, max’s gaze slowly drifts away, as a self-pitiful sort of half smile hugs his murmur, “if only anyone else understood.”
and yet without the thick outer layers fending off the cold, there is also now nothing to stop the warmth that bathes across your skin in generous brushstrokes, pouring in unabashedly where it used to barely worm through the cracks. you’ve been nothing more than a seed of yourself, preserved deep in the ice, but only now that it’s thawed can you feel the love of the sun and grow.
your words quiver now, because they’re yours, and so do they blossom new growth out of your mouth, vibrant and spry like you’ve never sprouted before, “we just- we have to keep trying.”
your legs are eerily steady now, because they’re yours, and they’ve always known, where they ached to go, so they do—slowly, at first, inching closer until you all but loom over max. and closer, still, sidestepping when he doesn’t protest, and lowering down beside him—just politely far enough that you dangle a little off the edge of the mushroom, and just close enough that when you rest your hand atop it beside your leg, you can both pretend that it’s accidental when his hand starts shifting towards yours breath by breath.
“if we don’t keep trying, we prove everyone else right about us… and…” you almost feel a rush of adrenaline, trembling through a deep breath—and for the first time, you may just be starting to believe your next words, “they’re not right.”
max sighs, half hopelessness, half certainty that he cannot, will not, give up no matter how hopeless it gets, “they can’t be.”
starting with one pinky atop the other, the small pinprick of your connection to each other spreads with every in-tune breath. his ring finger secures yours when your hand shakes with a new, unfiltered outlet of your constant anxiety that you’re not used to your body permitting. when you lean closer, shifting his hold on your hand another knuckle over, it feels like the slow unstoppable flow of a dream melting into reality, the rustle of leaves and caress of moonlight and the featherlight flutter of bread and butterflies passing by, potent with the answers to all your problems and faded at the edges so you can’t quite make out more than a warm blur when you look at it directly.
you don’t know who whispers that you both should return to the others, but now with his palm radiating warmth over yours, it feels like dressing each other in the morning. you don’t squeeze yourself into an inherited suit of armour with the curtains snatched shut anymore, now there’s someone who offers you his belt so your pants will fit better, there’s a smile and a please and you’re already passing him a shirt you wore last week. there’s the first curls of daylight’s smile painting the floor a glow that runs up your legs as he buttons your shirt, leaving the top notch open, and when your hands itch to latch it closed so no one knows that there’s a person beneath the fabric, he meets your eyes with an understanding that embraces you as warm as a hug, and he leaves his top button undone too.
no one gets up first, no one steps forward to take the brunt of the struggle, you’re half lifting half being lifted, he’s half easing you up from your seat half being beckoned forward by your hand wrapping around his.
once you’re on your feet, you stand together for a few seconds longer, letting the moment free an exhale that has long been restrained, as unwilling to let go of each other’s hands yet as you are to admit such a feeling.
“you ready to face them again?” your whisper comes out a sort of airy laugh, like it’s an inside joke.
speaking for the both of you when max shakes his head, he scoffs, “no,” but this time it fills you with a warmth, that doubles when he gives your hand in his a squeeze (and no matter whether he was comforting himself using your steadying hands as a stress ball, or trying to reassure you, it’s a reminder that you’re not alone), and with a gentle tug forward before balmy palms finally part, he slowly leads the way back to the others.
and when you hesitate one last time, troubled mind slowly kicking back into gear as you prepare to re-enter the group, all it takes is max glancing over his shoulder, his brows still furrowed and eyebags prominent with exhaustion, but a shy hint of a smile playing at his lips—if we have no choice but to keep trying, it says, hopefully it will be easier together. you agree, the back of your hand jittering like it’s been sparked back to life as it brushes against his when you fall into step beside him.