#growth....

Mason takes a deep breath and raps on Ajax’s door.

It feels like he has to wait forever before it opens.

“What the fuck do you want?”

Mason wasn’t expecting a warm welcome but there’s always something about Ajax’s outright hostility that rubs him the wrong way. He has to grit the inside of his cheek and tell himself to breathe before he answers.

“Can we talk?”

Ajax’s eyes narrow and his gaze shifts, peering down the hallway as though he expects more company. Mason knows he’s looking for Ethan.

“It’s just me,” he says quietly. He’s already wishing this was over with and it’s barely been thirty seconds. “I just want to talk.”

There’s a long moment of incredulous consideration before Ajax steps back and motions mockingly for Mason to venture in. Mason steps inside, past Ajax’s hard eyes but he lingers by the doorway. Ajax shuffles past him, heading straight for his bunk where he drapes himself comfortably along it, sitting back against the bulkhead with his legs crossed neatly at his ankles. He steeples his fingers in his lap, but not before waving one hand dismissively in Mason’s general direction with an ever present sneer on his face.

“You wanted to talk, Huntsman. So talk.”

Mason hunches his arms across his chest as he stares at the other phoenix. Fuck, was he really going to do this? There’s a lot of ways this can go, and he’s sure 98% of them will end badly.

“I came for a ceasefire,” he finally says when the bristling silence gets too much. He opts to get straight to the point and likens it to ripping off a band aid. He wants this over as quickly as he’s sure Ajax wants him gone from his personal space. “For Benji’s sake. And Marie’s and… well, frankly everyone on this damn frigate.”

Ajax’s expression immediately shutters and Mason senses somehow he’s said exactly the wrong thing. God, why was this kid such a mystery for him to figure out, Mason doesn’t understand it. It’s been like that since the first day he stepped onto P1 and Mason had been trying to squeeze him into a mold that didn’t belong to him ever since.

Find his reason, Marie had told him. Mason didn’t want to admit he had known it all along.

“Look, Aj-,” Mason catches himself. Maybe if he tried thinking of him as more than just his callsign, he might seem more like a person and less like a reflection of his worst, possible failure and his own personal walking hell. “Maddox. I’m not fucking with you here. I mean it. I want to call a truce. Whatever this is-“ he gestures between them. “It’s gotta stop.”

The expression on Maddox’s face is hard to read and Mason can’t begin to guess at what he’s thinking. It burns that he has to be the one to extend the olive branch when he’s so sure it’s just going to end up snapped in pieces, but it burns more to realize how fucking wrong he’s been. About Ethan, about Ben, about Nico and Ajax and all the people in life he cares about the most. All this time he had been existing in some parallel version of reality, one carefully constructed about his psyche in order to rationalize the life he had built around himself.

It had started with Cerberus - Humanity’s Sword - and ended with dragoons and indoctrination and an entire galaxy burning.

There was little he could do about that as just one man, but this.. Maddox... perhaps there was something to salvage there - if only Maddox could deign to meet him halfway.

“For fuck’s sake, Ajax.” Mason tries valiantly to fight down the bile in his throat at what this costs him when there was no guarantee of a win. “Ethan is only on this ship for a few hours before he ships out again, and instead of being dicked down by my boyfriend, I’m here trying to talk to you.”

“Well, don’t do me any fucking favors,” Maddox mutters sarcastically, and maybe its Mason’s imagination, but it doesn’t seem to carry the usual venom.

Mason waits for him to say more, for Maddox to give him something... anything... but the empty space is excruciating. 

And it feels like he’s losing. He scrubs a hand over his face tiredly, regret making his mouth feel like ash. This was pointless. Marie had wanted him to talk, Ben wanted them to coexist, but Mason can’t imagine what a world where that’s possible would even look like.

Mason unpeels himself from the wall and reaches for the door. He needs to get back to Ethan and forget this whole humiliating moment ever happened. But he did what Marie and Ben had wanted. He’d tried.