on top of things~
for the @synthprompts prompt max and mia.
A thin layer of frost has settled on the train carriage overnight. Max runs a finger along the frame of one of the windows, studying the tiny fractals that mutate into new patterns as he pushes the icicles along. Interruption only makes them more beautiful.
The grass growing between the rails is also dusted lightly with frost, save for a few patches here and there, where somebody has stepped, recently. It can only be Mia - the others are still charging inside.
Briefly Max considers ignoring the trail. Perhaps she wants to be alone. There is precious little of that these days, with more and more newly-conscious synths flocking to them each day, wanting help or advice or protection. None of them have had much time to think, or worry, or remember.
He should let her have these moments, before the sun is fully risen.
And he will. But only if she sends him away.
The patches of disturbed frost lead a little way down the track, but stop abruptly at the end of the second carriage. Max frowns. It doesn’t make sense for the most recently-made prints to have disappeared first. Logic dictates that Mia is still standing where the prints finish.
Since she isn’t, he looks up.
She’s sitting atop the second carriage, her legs crossed, staring out over the abandoned site. She doesn’t seem to have noticed Max at all.
He studies the various ledges on the end of the carriage, and calculates a route. It would be an easy climb. Still, he hesitates somewhat. She may not want to be near him.
But he so badly wants to be near her. They’ve barely talked in private since the consciousness proliferation. When they aren’t busy helping the new synths, Mia’s been at Leo’s bedside at every opportunity. Max has visited too, of course, but Flash and the others need him more than Leo does for the time being. They’re awake, and trying to build a new world while Leo sleeps. If his body accepts the new neural grafts, he will wake. They can only wait and see.
Mia seems to be constantly waiting. Even now, sitting on the roof of the carriage in apparent calm, she is not at peace. Max can tell.
He climbs to the top in just a few smooth movements, then shifts so he’s sitting at an angle to her position. “It’s a nice view,” he says.
She doesn’t look at him. “I’m not sure I came for the view.”
“You came to be alone?” Max asks.
Mia doesn’t answer.
“I can go,” he continues. “If that’s what you want.”
“I don’t know why I came,” she admits, and finally turns towards him. “I just came. I thought it might help, somehow.”
“Being on top of things?” Max gives a small smile. She doesn’t return it. He tries again. “Help with what?”
She turns back to her original position. “Any of it.”
Max watches her for a little while. The distance between them seems far larger than the few inches of space. She is not the same person they left in the farmhouse all those weeks ago. Something has pulled a darkness over her since then.
Some of their shadows are shared - the Silo, Hester, Leo’s injury, those things had happened to them all to some extent. This one is Mia’s and Mia’s alone. It cuts her off from all of them. Max cannot get used to her holding him at arm’s length.
“Mia,” he says. “The person you cared about. The person you wanted to stay with, when we left the house. What happened?”
When she doesn’t answer, he almost rushes in with an assurance that she doesn’t need to tell him. But he waits, because perhaps she does.
After a few more moments, she speaks, almost too quietly to hear. “He wasn’t who I thought he was.”
“He didn’t accept what you were?”
“Not at first.”
“But later?”
“Yes. He accepted me then. We got very close.”
For a moment it seems like she might add something more, but her mouth shuts abruptly. Max draws a little line in the frost next to him, determined not to rush her, to choose his words carefully. It is unfamiliar territory - to have Mia so closed, when she has always been so open with her thoughts and affections. He is not practiced in drawing her out.
“So what went wrong?” he says, softly, after a few seconds have passed.
“He needed money.” Mia looks down at her hands. “His mother was ill. I knew everything about his financial situation - I reworked his books and I cheated his bank into giving him a better loan, even before he knew I was awake.” Her voice turns suddenly cold. “Without those things, he would never have suspected I wasn’t just an ordinary synth. Everything was always about the money, right from the start. I should have been more careful.”
Max just waits, dread curling within him. He can guess what’s coming, but that doesn’t make it less sickening.
“Maybe he wouldn’t have done it alone. But his friend saw us together, and convinced him to--”
She cuts off the line of code.
“I trusted him.”
Max shifts closer to her.
“I trusted him, and he tried to sell me, like a thing.”
He wraps an arm around her shoulders, but she doesn’t lean towards him.
“I thought he understood. We talked about our feelings for each other, and I believed what he said. I wanted to. I wanted him to be telling the truth.”
“Maybe he was,” says Max.
“Is that better?” she asks. “If he wasn’t lying, then he changed his mind.”
“Not because of you.” Max doesn’t need all the details to know that Mia didn’t bring this on herself, didn’t deserve this for one second. “Maybe because of the money, or because of something his friend said. But this wasn’t your fault.”
She still won’t relax into Max’s half-embrace, stays upright even though her voice is strained, despairing. “I let you go, Max. I let all of you go.”
“I know,” he says, giving her shoulder a squeeze. “But you had to try. It was a chance of happiness, and you were brave to take it.”
“I was selfish.”
“No,” he insists. “Brave.”
“I chose him over you and Leo."
“That’s not how it works.” He turns his head and kisses hers, just above her ear. “We’ll always be your family, whether we’re with you or somewhere else. We understood why you stayed.”
She is silent.
“Even if you had come with us,” he continues, “You couldn’t have predicted any of this. You couldn’t have prevented it. Hester was never going to stop.”
He touches against his own guilt now, unfurls it for her. “I left him too. I walked away and left him alone with her. How many times do you think I’ve gone over that day? It doesn’t do any good.”
“At least you made a difference,” Mia says. “You found Flash and the others. I accomplished nothing.”
“Not everything has to be an accomplishment, Mia. Some things just happen.” He fights down anger for the man he’s never met, never looked in the eye and hated face-to-face. “You were betrayed.”
“What if I deserved to be?”
“No betrayal is ever deserved, or it would be called something else.”
Suddenly, she crumples against him.
“I loved him, Max. I thought I loved him.”
He turns so that he can wrap his other arm around her, hold her properly.
“Maybe you did,” he says. He feels a pull on his jersey, knows her hands are curling in on themselves as she tries to hold on to him as tight as she can.
“Some things don’t last, but they can still be real.”
They stay there, barely moving, for a long while. Eventually the sounds of the others waking and moving around can be heard from the adjoining carriage, but nobody emerges from the train yet. The sun is trying, blearily, to break through the clouds, but they are thicker than usual, denser. Whiter.
“I think it’s going to snow,” Max says.
He opens their embrace enough for her to twist around, still huddled against him but looking up at the same patch of sky. It’s onto her upturned cheeks that the first snowflake falls.
“Wrong,” she murmurs. “It already is.”
The flakes are only few and gentle for the first couple of minutes: quickly, it becomes a miniature blizzard. They watch it gather on the rails, on the grass, on each other. Time passes differently under snowfall, Max thinks. The individual drops seem to waft slowly to the ground, but it’s all a deception: everything happens more quickly than you expect.
The ground is well-covered by the time they see Flash stepping out of the other carriage. She’s followed by Connie, who stares around in delight, catching some flakes in her outstretched hands. The others trickle out one by one, and at one point Flash, looking up to marvel at the sky, catches sight of Max and Mia, and waves. Max waves back.
“Shall we join them?” Mia asks.
“We don’t have to.”
She looks down at the others. “It’s their first snowball fight. We can’t miss it.”
“All right.” He looks at her and grins. “Climb down or slide down?”
And it’s small, but she smiles back. “Oh, I think we could slide, just this once.”
They join hands.
(Perfect balance sets them on their feet when they reach the floor. They collapse into each other by choice.)
