God, she was a mess. He had no idea where to start, how to make sense out of the riddle she provided him with. And still, he tried. He picked apart the words–focused on ‘he’ and started to listen for any details he could pick out on who this man was and what he’d actually done to Max, to make her appear this way. Of course, it might have just been the alcohol. Bryce’s personal bias against the substance started to bleed into his ability to take this seriously. He wondered if anything had actually even happened to Max at all or if she’d just been spooked, gone loopy from the drink. He didn’t want to discount her but he sighed as she let go of him and leaned against the wall, her eyes squeezing shut with tears.

“Max,” Bryce started, stopped, then sighed rather raggedly. He stood up straighter and opened his mouth to tell her to get back inside, go lay down and rest, but she started to go on again and her words started to make sense. Sort of.

Kaz. 

It was still an unfamiliar name to him, just a coincidentally arranged series of letters on a report sheet, a single syllable on an underling’s tongue. It had gained new significance since the mansion, one he hadn’t thought about in some time, but the memories were flooding back since Bryce realized what Max was starting to suggest.

He wouldn’t let me go home, Bryce. Broke me. Kennels. Hurt me.

Time seemed to stand still as he digested it all. The reason for her tears, maybe her drinking, this scattered thinking and the story she’d given him.

“You’re saying he’s here. You’ve seen him.” Questions that didn’t sound like questions. Bryce’s emotions felt like they were on ice; he didn’t even know what he was going to do when that feeling wore off. He scanned her face quickly, still just taking in information, feeling something else bubble and rise in his chest. “Kaz Turner.”

The thief nods slowly, her hands running through her hair for perhaps the hundredth time, the long strands falling this way and that. “Ain’ sayin’ it, cher. Tellin’ you. He’s ‘ere.” Here and in the flesh, real as night and day. She half wished they were back at the mansion, back within the walls that made nightmares feel like life. Something she could blame this feeling on, something other than the cold, hard fact that Kaz is here. 

“Followed me when I was sneakin’ ou’ a week after we got ‘ere. Acted like... like nothin’s changed. Wanted a deal an’ I... I made it.” 

With good reason, mind. Whether Kaz had anything to back up his threads, Max believed them all the same. He wasn’t one to doubt, the line between his bluffs and the truth often blurred. She knew him better than anyone and if Kaz ever decided to focus on taking out those she loved... It wouldn’t be long before he did. 

No job left unfinished. That’d been the rule, after all.

“I had to. He knows you’re ‘ere. Knows abou’ Nate an’ Ellie. I couldn’... couldn’ risk it. I’m goin’ t’ handle it, mais, I can’-- I can’ face him by myself again,” she chokes. Max looks to Bryce, stands up straighter and puts her hands on his shoulders. “I can’ keep an eye on everyone I care abou’ an’ he-- ”

For the first time in a long time, seems to be going well. Bryce had reunited with his brother and secured something like peace of mind as a result, finally able to rule out most of the suspicions he had about the group they’d come to stay with. Satisfied that leaving his people out of his sight wouldn’t result in death or betrayal, Bryce was able to relax and devote himself to doing his part to keep their temporary sanctuary well-cared for. He left the gate to look over the wall itself, check for holes and weakpoints with the confidence that everything would be alright when he returned. Only, when he did return, rifle on his back and notepad in hand, what he saw nearly drew a line in all the progress he’d made.

Max, halfway out the gates, looking very visibly upset. She didn’t get that bad that way easily. Bryce quickened his step until he was standing right before her, nose already wrinkling at the bridge from the smell of alcohol that drenched her. It was not how he’d prefer to talk. In fact, he struggled to stifle the part of him that wanted to squirm at the premise of being forced to talk to her completely inebriated, but he stood his ground for her sake as he looked her over, wondering for a second if…this had anything to do with the conversation they’d had the other night. 

If she was trying to leave. Without him or Nate or anyone. Because of that monolith. He couldn’t say he blamed her but he couldn’t understand either, how she thought she could have stood a better chance out there on her own.

Then she said it. Help. Bryce frowned deep, instincts throwing a look behind her as if he expected to see a firing line or the silence of an ambush. Nothing, just people going about their business, same as usual. Bryce reached out, closed his hand above her elbow and guided her to the side, to the wall, sliding his rifle strap higher on his shoulder as he looked down on her and spoke, hushed.

“What’s wrong with you? What’s happening?”

Max allows herself to be moved, if only out of the fear if she didn’t, the path ahead would be made free and the impulse to run would take lead. She wobbles as she walks, mostly because her line of sight falls behind her, looking to the shadows, looking to the places she knew he liked to hide. 

Because it’d be typical of him to be watching now, perhaps smirking to himself at something so entertaining, a victory well won. 

The thief lets go of Bryce, pressing her palms against her eyes, an attempt to sober up somewhat and find a better excuse, a better reason for... this. And yet, she knows pride would consume her again, or perhaps that need to be the one standing in between her loved ones and the evil the lurks and whatever help she so desperately needed would easily get brushed aside. And perhaps, if the situation happened to be different, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing, not when she had wings to fall back on if all else failed.

And it’s an option still, but not one she so easily looks to when her hunter looms over her, not when she’d all but brought this on herself.

“Thought... wanted t’ handle it by myself, mais, he ain’ even done nothin’ yet an’ I can’ do it. His word don’ mean shit, not ‘ere. Been talkin’ to him, been makin’ sure he knows he ain’ got nothin’ ‘ere. An’ you’d t’ink I’d know better by now, righ’? Non, non, I don’.” 

Max looks up, pressing her back against the wall for some support. Unable to keep still, her hands shift from her hair to her knives, to the zip on her jacket. Anxious and all the more terrified.

“Why’d if have to be him, Bryce? Ou’ o’ everyone I wanted t’ see again, everyone tha’ coulda surived this far, why’d it have to be him?”

Perhaps it made sense in the end, for history to repeat itself as it so often did when it came to Kaz. How many times now had he left her like this, heavy with the weight of her short comings and every failure she’d ever made. He’d take her hand and show her where the blood of lost loves lived, take her heart and crush it in his palm all over again. The years hadn’t broken the cycle.

Kaz would always win in the end.

And try as she might to make it go away, the whiskey he’d left with her only scratched the surface. The last half of the bottle and his glass simply would never be enough and though Max could thank God over and over for such a weak tolerance for the hard stuff, she wished more for the cold in her chest to spread, for the flames to consume and leave her nothing more than an empty shell.

At some point, the thief left the safety of her rooftop and out of Nate’s line of sight, making her way down to the ground floor. She leaves the building in haze, cheeks still flushed, evidence of tears still clinging to her skin. The main gate had never looked so inviting before and the closer she got to it, the more eager she became to simply run and never look back. 

Because it’d be safer in the end, wouldn’t it? Perhaps Kaz would follow and leave her family alone, lose interest and seek her out instead and she’s so sure he’d follow if he saw her now and the way he’d gotten to her so deeply in such a small space of time.

But it’s not Kaz she runs into as she makes an attempt to slip by the gate.  It’s Bryce. A reminder that this time could be different. That this time she didn’t have to be alone in the fight against the devil himself and though she itched to move around him, to make a run for it with the goal to never return... He’d been right. She’s no runner, is she?

‘I’ve got you now.’

“I--” the thief starts, stepping forward to grasp the front of his jacket, ignoring the disgust and disappointment of her state as her eyes begin to burn with tears.

Bryce’s silence is normal, Max’s is unusual. The meet each other together and Bryce takes it for what it is, a sign she wasn’t satisfied. He feels frustration for a moment, confusion, something like a child whose best efforts came away unappreciated. She doesn’t say anything about it and perhaps it’s their only saving grace. But Bryce can only shrug at the state of things here, because he can’t pretend to be something he isn’t. He can’t force something that isn’t there. And if he tells her what he believes and she doesn’t believe him, he knows he can’t bend over backwards to make her see. 

All he can do is what he does–he stoops a bit, leans in so she can press her kiss to him more securely. He accepts it, with a nod of the head and a hand rubbing over that cheek afterwards. It’s generic, kind words she’s offering but they’re as distant as before, as the locker room he’s just told her didn’t matter. 

Maybe Bryce has to take his own advice. Be good with what he’s given, and not read into it. Maybe he just has to accept how things are, and Max’s unhappiness, and not take it personally. He does his best.

To a point. Max walks away and he opens his mouth to respond, say goodbye. His voice doesn’t air. So she walks away in silence again, and Bryce is left wondering why. If it was just pride, a part of him holding out and refusing to play catch up at her heels, or something more. Worse. Uncertain and beyond over the speculation, Bryce sighs and turns back to the railing. He’ll go inside, in time. But for now, the cold air is as it always was to him. A stabilizer, reminding him who he is and that not everything has to feel good to be right.

Kaz opens his mouth to tell her fighting was at least something they could both work with but Max doesn’t give him much of a chance. She starts telling him how she deserved better than everything she got with him, how leaving him alone had come to be the best thing she’d ever done.

A man’s gotta wonder if she’s just trying to hurt him now, being spiteful to get to him. It’s unfortunate if she’s trying to test him now when they’re literally sat on the edge of a roof top. Kaz’s temper’s the most unforgiving thing about him.

So it surprises him all the more when his immediate response isn’t to get angry but to actually just listen to her instead, because there’s some vague awareness he never did much of it before. 

Kaz drinks his drink, taking it down with a few gulps and then he refills his glass and then hers. They were going to need this, weren’t they? 

“…. Was it all bad?” Kaz asks. “Because you and me, we made a good team and we even got somethin’ good out of it. We got–” Kaz can’t bring himself to say it, so he drinks instead. “It wasn’t all that bad, was it?”

Even he can’t admit it their relationship had been perfect and he knows damn well why, but he still likes to think they’d been good, that they’d managed to do more than anyone else ever could. 

“Annie… I don’t know what to say.”

‘We got--’

“Don’. Don’ you bring her into it.” The words leave her in a sharp snarl, a glare filled with scorn shot from the corner of her eye. Kaz needn’t say anything more to know exactly where he’d planned on taking that sentence. And, try as she might to disagree, it didn’t give him the right to speak of her, to pretend he even acknowledged her existence. That girl had been hers and hers alone. 

Her refilled glass soon finds itself empty again when Max knocks the contents back in one. She reaches over to take the bottle from his grasp, the last quarter now hers indefinitely. If this is the kind of conversation he truly seeks, she’d need it and more by the end of it, all the more so when the ground below looked far more inviting than sitting here with limited patience.

Still, she doesn’t answer his question, unwilling to admit that no, it hadn’t all been bad, that there were times where forever with him didn’t seem like such a terrible idea in the end. But she wouldn’t, couldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing that and as she unscrews the top to the whiskey bottle, she hopes her silence and stone cold expression is telling enough.

The question has him sobering almost immediately. Was someone giving her a problem? The thought had him frowning, wanting to find out who it was and give them a stern talking to. He could be very persuasive when he wanted to be. 

“They’ve been alright, I guess. Someone giving you trouble?” 

“Non... Not yet, anyway.” It’s only a matter of time, of course. Somewhere down the line, the word she’d been promise would come to mean jack and the real problems would arise. Which concerns her all the more when it comes to the man standing before her and whatever internal debate inside her about how much to share with him finally comes to an agreement.

“Course I did. I put blood, sweat and tears into that thing.” She could of asked him about absolutely anything and it’s the table she picks. A makeshift dining table they’d made together one weekend during what he remembered to be the worst summer he’d experienced yet. They’d been sweaty and sticky but the damn girl next to him decided she didn’t like any of the tables in the stores. She wants the perfect one.

Kaz went out to find recycled wood the very next day and he brought it back to their work in progress home. By some luck of the fucking irish, Kaz and Max made it work. Even better, they’d made it fit. Max painted it with wood varnish so it looked old and oaky. Kaz picked splinters out of his fingers. 

The underneath side of the top part of the table had their initials carved into it. It’s a stupid table but it had come to matter the most to them. They’d laughed the entire weekend, probably felt what true happiness felt like and it’d weirdly brought them closer as a couple.

Kaz didn’t keep it for too long though. Eventually he’d done with it what he did with all of Max’s things.

Kaz turned it into firewood and burned it along with her clothes, her books, even her keyboard. He tossed everything.

“You should of just come back.”

Unsurprisingly, Max can not find it within herself to believe him. She knew all too well how Kaz preferred to leave a wreckage at the scene of something that displeased him, sentiment a stranger to the man with blood on his hands. Kaz focused more on the future and the investments he may find within it, caring little for much else.

“An’ then wha’? We go back to beatin’ each ot’er senseless?” Max snorts, her head bowed to stare somewhere other than the man beside her. “It weren’ no way to live, Kaz. We deserved better than tha’.” A pause, for consideration, a small and weary reach for the words she’d longed to believe since leaving him, words that seemed more believable now a place had been given to her among the group she’d come to care for.

“I deserved better.”

It’d taken Mikey saving her from the streets, easing the taint in her veins away with patience and soft words that promised her she’d always have a home with him. It’d taken months upon months of therapy, of detoxing and self care to learn she didn’t deserve the scars he’d left, that perhaps the events that unfolded between them weren’t entirely her fault, if at all. That, somehow, despite all she’d done, she hadn’t deserved any of it. 

And it’d taken Nate and this group to understand what it truly meant to believe she might have some worth after all.

With how long it takes for Max to answer him, Kaz is half convinced she’s not going to answer at all. He wouldn’t exactly be surprised if she didn’t either. She probably felt like she owed him nothing and in a way, she didn’t. He deserved to know though. He knows he’s to blame. Their last fight went beyond anything they’d ever done before. The night he came home, she’d already gone. No note, no goodbye. She’d just left. She’d finally done what she spent most of her time threatening to do. He never believed she would though.

Kaz looks to Max when she does answer, genuinely surprised to hear she’d gone back to New Orleans. He remembered how her parents told her not to go back. Her mother had been furious at her. His fault. He’d made it so, working hard to make sure Max being gone wouldn’t be unusual so he could put her to work in peace. Max always missed home anyway. Kaz refused to accept it.

Kaz takes another but much longer drink from his glass. “I kept the apartment. Just in case you came back,” Kaz tells her, like it’s some sort of proof he was better than her parents and home was with him.

“I moved out eventually but it was yours.”

‘But it was yours.’

“Non, it wasn’.” It was theirs. She remembered the day they bought it, how the wallpaper had been peeling, patches wet with damp, the carpet frayed and old. But it’d been theirs. They’d spent the summer fixing it up, painting the walls white because neither could decide on what colour to pick. Kaz spent days tearing up the floors to put in new whilst she worked hard on the smaller details, both young and in love with a whole life growing in their heads.

Neither of them could of predicted it falling apart so quickly and so violently.

Tilting her head back, Max downs the rest of her drink, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She couldn’t pretend that she’d ever thought about returning and if the idea had ever crossed her mind, it’s only because of the sudden fear that had come with it, the worry that if she didn’t return, he’d find her anyway and all she’d worked to build for herself would face his wrath. A wrath quite like her own, she notes, her temper just as rotten as his.

A shit show wasn’t wrong but it wasn’t completely right either. His business did have a lot of trouble involved. The illegal kind, not the problematic kind, even though it was just as much that as anything else. He’d made the effort to keep it running smoothly and his pockets were full because of it. The best part of it was probably the fact if it fell apart, it wouldn’t fall on him. He’d made sure Marcus got all credit and the handful of people who knew anything about Kaz were paid enough to keep silent. He chooses to not answer her though since their opinions differed so much. Arguing now wouldn’t get either of them into a good place.

Max sits down and Kaz hands her the drink he’d poured for her. It’s cold enough that they didn’t need ice but he did miss the fanciness of it. He missed a lot of the formal looking stuff.

Blowing out smoke between his teeth, Kaz sips on his drink again, ignoring the burn that followed. “Good to know.” So there’s a chance he’d get a bullet to the back along with a knife then. 

Kaz lets a silence fall between them for a second, sipping on drinks, smoking away with the cold air biting at their skin. He pretended for a second that nothing had changed, they were still a real team. Partners in more ways than one.

“Where did you go?” Kaz quietly asks, “when you left.” Kaz didn’t need to ask why.

The thief accepts the drink without complaint now, bringing the glass to her lips with a small amount of excitement for the honey coloured liquid swirling around within it, a nice filler whilst she waited for Ellie to finish their little project. It’s thrilling, keeping a secret like that one, all the more so when she shared it with only one other person. The moonshine had become their own little thing and she’d fight to keep it that way for as long as she could, sure most of the group would oppose it with any chance they were given. She and Ellie were both alike in the fact they needed something exciting to keep them occupied, the threat of losing their minds without it always looming in the background. 

But if anything, it’s nice to have a friend again.

And she’s happy to continue sitting upon the ledge in silence, working her way through the glass and then perhaps the bottle of whiskey. Kaz’s company when he’s quiet isn’t entirely bad. It’s strange to think there’s still some sort of comfortableness in that, perhaps even a minuscule amount of trust that, if all else failed, he’d still have her back.

That she’d have his.

And it’s a thought that makes her ashamed to admit to as much.

What surprises her now, however, is how small his voice is when he speaks again. Quiet, soft and so unlike the monster she remembered. This reminds her more of the man in the comfort of their shared apartment, the one she’d somehow fallen for in such a short space of time.

This was Cassius, not Kaz.

Max does pretty much what he always expects her to whenever they were up somewhere high. She hops onto a ledge as if there wasn’t a massive drop beneath her and calmly looks around. It’s probably a habit of some sort, since it’s the sorta thing she’d do when casing a place for him. 

It’s a little bit nostalgia inducing honestly.

“Wouldn’t you be after losing something like New York? We built a fuckin’ empire beneath it.” Kaz sets the glasses down on the roof’s edge and sits himself down next to the thief testing her luck, his feet dangling over the edge. He’s just as comfortable as she is, missing the fear that’s supposed to come with the height and all. 

Kaz unscrews the top of the whiskey and pours a decent amount into each glass and just to prove that it was safe, he drinks from his glass first. After his sip, he gets himself a cigarette.

“So…” Kaz starts in between lighting his cigarette. “Where’d you get the gun? Can you shoot?”

“Non, we didn’, Kaz. We built a shit show an’ nothin’ more.” Although one might argue that’s exactly what an empire is, whatever she and Kaz had managed to achieve during their time together was nothing so great. It’d been a business, the kind that shouldn’t of existed in the first place. They’d both played the game well and, though she could admit it’d been fun for the most part, the pain that came with it far outweighed the good.

A smirk pulls at her lips as Kaz sits beside her, making the task of bringing him into a good, clear shot all the easier. Truthfully, she hopes it wouldn’t come to that, but it’s a comfort to know that should things go upside down that it wouldn’t last, that it’d be over before it truly started. 

The whiskey is poured and without her asking, Kaz drinks first. It’s enough proof for her that her drink is fine and, with some reluctance, she sits down, her feet hanging over the edge too. As much as she’d like to, she couldn’t deny the drink because God knows she needed it and it might be the only thing that makes whatever this is all the more bearable.