There's a tug at her arm that keeps her from veering too far off-course. "It's called October in Vermont, young Maxhopper. Doubt it'll stick, though. Climate change and shit."

Safi. That's Safi's voice, and her arm that loops through Max's to ensure that she stays by her side. Max exhales slowly, thoughts murky yet far-wandering. Long seconds pass, and Safi clears her throat.

"Surely you're not so drunk you forgot snow exists in New England. You've been around these parts, haven't you, world traveler? Wasn't that last show you did in fuckin', uh… Boston?"

"I know snow," Max says defensively. "It's just… I dunno… weird when it's early. Too early. Back home…" She trails off, chest starting to feel as heavy as her head. "But this is normal," she says, quiet and firm. "'Cause Vermont."

"Yeah… sure."

It's obvious even to Max's ears, simultaneously full of cotton and like she's listening to the world through a long, reverberant tunnel, that Safi's not convinced. Well… too bad. Even in this state, there's no way in hell Max is about to elaborate. She searches for something else, another topic… "I'm older than you. Don't think you get to call me 'young' like that, as if you're some… wise old person."

Safi snorts softly. "Whatever. Young at heart, then — better?" She shrugs, her arm shifting against Max's shoulder. "Hey, remember when you conveniently forgot to tell us it was your birthday?"

Max's brows furrow. "No… I-I mean, yes, but I didn't forget."

"Yeah, that was me giving you the much-undeserved benefit of the doubt. You never explained what was up with that."

"We're not kids, Safi," Max says with a huff. It's hard to tell if they've gotten any closer to Hellerton House. Did they go the right way? Safi probably has that handled. "Birthdays aren't that special."

She gets tugged to the right and nearly stumbles into Safi's side — oh, there's the house. No shit; it's exactly where it always is.

"It's not about a fucking birthday," Safi says, but it's muttered under her breath, giving Max reason enough to pretend she didn't hear anything. She adjusts her hat in an attempt to do something with her free hand, but it refuses to stay in place (or her hand refuses to act as instructed) until Max groans and takes it off entirely.

"I don't think hats like this are really my style…"

Safi grins at her. "Aw, but you make such a good Mad Hatter to go with my Queen of Hearts. Vinh will never admit it, but we absolutely showed him up at his own party. And isn't that the real win of the night?"

Max laughs. "Yeah. Yeah! Totally worth the itchy shirt."

"Maybe don't thrift your costume next time?"

"What? No," Max says, shaking her head and quickly regretting it. "Paychecks are for film and food, definitely not Halloween costumes I'll probably never wear again."

"Well, shit, guess we'll have to come up with something else next year."

"C'mon, it was fun to brainstorm, admit it."

"It was," Safi says. "But I'm enforcing a deadline next time. Maybe I'll sneak a few reminders onto your phone when you're not looking."

"Hey, I was ready a whole three days early," Max mumbles. "That's good in my book. Time just kinda… gets away from me. Sometimes."

"And that's why you're the Hatter and not me."

They draw up to the front door of Hellerton House, and Max waits expectantly for it to open, her hands occupied. It slips her mind that she's the one with the keys until Safi rolls her eyes and starts going through Max's pockets.

"Wh—Safi!"

"Relax, you're not coordinated enough to stick the key in anyway."

Max groans and rests her forehead against the door frame, waiting for Safi to find the keys. She'd rather not admit that she forgot where she put them, nor that she feels about as unsteady as the tourist group whose canoeing lesson she watched a few weeks ago from the Turtle's back patio. Actually, falling into the lake sounds pretty good right about now… she was cold a moment ago, but the alcohol has other plans.

"There's the bitch," Safi mutters, the jingling sound confirming her words. "Scooch."

Max leans back to get out of the way, heart skipping a beat when she goes too far and stumbles backwards. Safi's arm, quickly extended to catch her by the waist, stops her from falling.

"God damn, Max, when was the last time you were this drunk? Ever?"

Watching the key turn in the lock, Max shrugs. "Um. Maybe a year ago… or two…" She squints at nothing in particular, trying to recall through the haze. "Some gallery afterparty somewhere. Buncha total dicks throwing money around to make their fancy houses special with art they couldn't understand if it got up and talked."

Safi gives a low whistle as she guides Max inside. "Alright, tell me how you really feel."

"I did," Max says, idly confused. "'Total dicks.' I just kept thinking about how… how much she would've hated them. That's what she would've called them, plus — plus other stuff, I dunno, she's better with talking words."

"A mystery woman? Hm," Safi says, intrigued. Max feels her jacket come off, but can't quite determine whether Safi's helping or she's doing it herself on autopilot.

When she blinks and focuses — poorly, fuzzily — on Safi leaning against the wall and looking intently at something in her hand, she figures out it's the latter and hangs the jacket up. And there goes the hat, dropped on the floor next to the boots Max also apparently took off without noticing. "She's not the mystery," Max insists, ignoring her own clumsiness, "she's the… everything else."

Safi looks up from whatever she's studying, a brow raised. "Compelling start. The meter leaves something to be desired, but you're drunk off your whole ass so I won't judge. Tell me more."

Max shakes her head, finding her arms coiling around her body. Wind rushes in her ears, improbable but familiar. It echoes louder as it meets the drunken fog creeping through her mind, and it becomes hard to breathe through the tightness in her throat. The sharp curiosity in Safi's waiting look begrudgingly dials down as she turns away to put something in Max's hanging coat pocket.

When Max — still distrusting of her ability to speak — gives her a questioning look with stinging, on-the-verge eyes, Safi responds with a disarming smile.

"Dropped your wallet," she says, stepping close to put her arm around Max's shoulders and guide her to the stairs, "but you have nothing to fear; your identity, and more importantly your credit, is safe. Another win for the buddy system."

That makes sense. Safi hates hearing it for some reason, but she really is very nice. It's something Max attempts to express, but her gratitude comes out less like a thank-you and more like a pained hiccup.

"Come on, you're not wasting the best mattress the arts can buy on my watch," Safi says. As put-together as she seems, the stairs quickly reveal that Max isn't the only one here who couldn't pass a sobriety test. Lucky for both, the railing keeps them upright.

Max considers insisting on the couch. Couches are perfectly fine. She has slept on so many couches, and the ones here aren't up a bunch of stairs. They're also less lonely. Beds have so much… empty space. The words, weak though she knows deep-down they'd be, don't make it out before they reach the loft — at which point the specter of that emptiness has grown teeth and closed its jaws around Max's chest.

She closes her eyes rather than glimpse the photos that always greet her at the top, leaning into Safi's guidance.

Safi leads her to sit at the edge of the bed, says something that fails to cut through the squall (Max nods placidly anyway), and then she's gone. Max finds herself staring listlessly at her dresser, feeling like what's behind her might as well be a vast, barren ocean. Every attempt at a deep breath gets choked by saltwater and grief.

A lighthouse beacon flashes towards her and Max flinches back, arm raised to block it out. Of course, she must have passed out, this is one of her nightmares and—

"Whoa, Max. It's just me. Not an axe murderer, unless you're into that outside of those insanely niche art-horror films."

Max slowly lowers her arm just in time to see Safi holding her phone, its bright beacon-like flashlight illuminating a glass of water; she crosses in front of her to set it on the nightstand. Then she turns the light off and leans back against Max's dresser, looking off towards the stairs.

"I'm not sure there's enough water in all of Vermont to save you, but that's a start. I should get out of here before the snow—"

"No," Max says, her voice breaking. She tries to rub a stray tear from her face with the heel of her palm, but discovers that her cheeks are completely wet. Fuck. How long has she been crying? Safi meets her gaze and her eyes widen, lips parted, uncharacteristically off-guard.

"Shit," she mutters after a moment. Her fingers tap on the dresser as she gives the ground floor another quick, searching glance; Max leans forward, clumsily reaching for Safi's arm and catching her wrist.

"Don't leave me," Max says quietly, voice strained under the weight of the sea. "I-I can't do it again."

"Max," Safi says, softer around the edges than usual, "I don't—" She loses her train of thought when she looks at Max again, and it's with a put-upon sigh that she slips out of reach to take her jacket off. There's a brief look around and a shrug before she tosses it to the end of the bed. "You and your fucking… fine. I can hang here for a minute. Not like I've got plans."

She sits next to Max, who abandons restraint to wrap her arms around her. Safi opens up to the embrace and rests a hand on Max's arm.

"What's got you so fucked up, anyway?" she asks. Max shakes her head against her shoulder, the voice in her head telling her that she's messing up Safi's shirt a distant and unimportant noise. "There's no way all that vodka spontaneously manifested this. Talk to me."

"I can't," Max says, emphatic and pushing through a chest-crushing sob. "Just… stay. Please."

Long silence follows — or maybe it's a very short silence, and Max has time in a selfish vice grip just to put off being left alone forever. Right now, she couldn't give two shits whether she's causing another horrible disaster if it means a few extra seconds of shelter beside a heartbeat.

The guilt chasing that thought punches through whatever thin barrier remained; Max shudders through her next shallow breath, and the next.

She's not sure when it happens, but at some point Safi murmurs something she can't understand (yet sounds like comfort, not her usual knife's-edge wit) and pulls Max along to lie with her in this bed she's still getting used to. All Max knows is that she ends up entirely in Safi's arms, curled in close and held in one piece through each crash of the waves upon the cliff.

No, wait — she also knows that she has the front of Safi's shirt desperately, tightly in the grasp of both hands. It's something, someone to hold on to, and if she lets go she feels like she might drown.

"Max," Safi says, her voice finally, barely intelligible. The fact that it interrupts Max's trembling whispers begging her to stay, not to go, is what alerts her to even doing such a thing in the first place. So Max answers by quieting, though she can't stop the wracking tremors no matter how hard she tries. And she tries. "I'm not going anywhere."

Max sniffs, manages a shaky, "You swear?"

"Oh, you're making me promise shit now?" Safi asks, a hint of that perpetual faint amusement towards the world writ large returning to her tone. "I see how it is. You're lucky you're cute."

"Mmh?"

"You know I don't get in bed with just anyone." None of it sounds like an answer to her question; Max grabs Safi harder, brows furrowed, and feels the relenting exhale kite across her hair. "Okay, okay. You need me to pinky swear, I'll do it, but that means you're stuck with me. That's a warning."

Max wants to press her, ask why? or even say something more playful, but there's no room for words left between breaths, gasps, choked-off sobs. All that matters is that Safi's here. It doesn't fix everything… but it keeps the broken bits from getting too lost.

Her consciousness starts to waver, engaged in conflict with her fear of dreaming. When a light touch brushes hair from her face and rests protectively at the back of her head, though, Max finds herself settling into the dark. Somewhere else in her mind, she sits back against the lighthouse and faces the calm northern shores while the rest rages behind her.