1 for Nux/Capable please!
I think I’ve got one more left in me tonight… Also holy crap, I didn’t mean for it to turn out so sad but um, oops? I wrote the first four paragraphs without knowing where the hell this was going and it suddenly became this?
“Come over here and make me.”
She says the words with everything in her, hands planted firmly on her hips, eyes not daring to leave his, her face screwed up in the most vexed expression she can manage. “Come over here and make me.”
Nux simply gawks at her in disbelief. This woman cannot possibly be real. She has to be a part of his imagination.
This is not the first time he’s had this thought either. There’s no way that someone like her - as beautiful as her, as strong as her, as so very…capable as her - could possibly be interested in him. He’s barely ever been shown interest before, most of the time ignored for his stronger, better-looking, more outgoing friends, but this girl doesn’t seem to care anything about that.
“Capable…” he manages to get out in a whine. He almost winces at that voice. How pathetic must he sound to her? Surely this will be when she realizes that he’s not good enough for her, that she is the sun and he’s just the dirt under her shoes. He’s never been good enough, not for his foster father, not for the parents that left him behind, not for anyone. And this girl is magic.
Instead, she juts her chin, somehow looking even more regal, which is ridiculous. She’s as much as a street rat as him in the end, but it never seems like that. “I’m not leaving you,” she says, “so either you deal with it or you come over here and make me leave.”
Nux lets out a sigh and falls back against the pillows of the bed. He doesn’t want her to see him like this. He always feel so weak after the chemo treatments, but even weaker when it comes to fighting against her. She never gives up, even when the odds are against her, and he’s almost certain that she could defy any odds. He never tells her, but he feels like he too might defeat whatever is against him when she’s with him.
“I thought not.” Her words are final, a hint of anger still in them, but her face softens into the most beautiful thing and she walks to the side of his bed, taking his hand in hers. “I just want to be here for you, Nux. You mean the world to me. You must know that, right?”
His breath hitches in his throat. He means the world to her? She’s got to have it backwards. A part of him didn’t think life was worth living until he met her. He was such a reckless fool back then, driving his car way over the speed limit, drinking excessively with his friends, not caring if he crashed or hit anything. Any time one of his friends dared him to do something stupid to the point of dangerous he always did it. He was always the first one to leap headfirst into something idiotic.
And then he met her. It hadn’t happened immediately. He resented her at first, her positive nature, her hopefulness, something he never once understood before. But slowly she opened up a world to him, a world he didn’t think possible. She showed him possibilities in the palm of her hands, in her honest smiles, the way she’d brush dirt from his shoulder and tell him how handsome he looked when he smiled.
Could she possibly know how much life she had breathed into him even before he’d found out that he was facing a possible death sentence?
“I…I’m embarrassed, is all,” Nux finally admits, looking down at their hands interlocked, “and scared. I don’t like you seeing me like this.”
“Oh, Nux,” Capable says, and the way she says his name makes him hate it a little less. She says his name like it’s the most treasured thing in the world to her. She pushes him slightly, so he moves and she carefully climbs into the hospital bed with him, curling up next to him. She’s so warm, so full of hope. With her against him, it’s like he can feel her life pooling into him. “Promise me you won’t leave me.”
He’s scared. The treatments are working, or so the doctors say, but he’s still scared. Back when he’d been so careless of the life he thought he’d always have, he hadn’t cared if he’d lived or died. Now that it’s truly hanging in the balance thanks to some mutated cancerous cells, well, things have changed. He can’t see the danger anymore and it’s so very real.
But he knows one thing: he doesn’t want to leave Capable, doesn’t ever want to see her frown or cry, and for that reason alone, he can fight this thing.
“I’ll never leave you,” Nux tells her. “I promise.”
Come over here and make me, he thinks viciously to the cancer. Make me.
