#isabel;

It was, objectively speaking, a terrible idea. For a number of reasons that came quickly and didn’t require any great amount of overthinking on Montgomery’s part this time. If it were only Isabel, there wouldn’t be a question, a promised bottle of Patron that he’d offered to bring to her tonight, a long overdue escape that he thought they both might need. Drinking with Selwyn, however, carried a number of complications, even if it was solely for her status within the Magistrate. A string he’d already pulled on a few times, bullets dodged thanks to sympathies she pretended she didn’t have. Which still didn’t make it wise to let go of his firmly held self control, not in front of a telepath or a friend, when there was an expansive list of secrets he carried, both damning and personal. 

There was one reason stacked against it, a side effect of the forced distance between himself and Emil. One he hadn’t anticipated, because it had never been a problem before, not really. He might have had a strained relationship with sleep, a tendency to overthink that kept him up until strange hours of the morning, but he’d learned to function on the bare minimum. It was time alone that was disappointing, sure, but it wasn’t an overwhelming kind, at least it wouldn’t have been before. 

Before the Institute. Before cuffs around his wrist and white walls around him, memories that crept into his thoughts when he was staring up at the ceiling in an empty bed, finding himself stretching his mind out to move the bed, or a book, or anything so long as he could assure some irrational part of his mind that there wouldn’t be a blue flare across the ceiling the second he did. Memories that found those cracks in his unconscious mind, a few confusing moments when he first awoke that he couldn’t remember where he was. A brief second of panic, of his heart pounding as he tried to blink the grit from his eyes and focus on his bedroom. Bed empty, but his, scars on his wrists, but no cuffs.

It was a reassurance that got him through the day, but hadn’t helped the last three nights, and it left him staring at his phone for a moment before he replied.

[ monty → isa 💕 ] be there in twenty, chérie. 

The game was never have I ever, and after the first three shots Montgomery decided it had been chosen with the specific purpose of fucking with him. Enough sins already shared between the two women sitting around the table with him that he suspected most of what they said was either an inside joke, or in Selwyn’s case, a chance to figure out just how much Monty had changed. Because she’d recognized a shift in him as much as he had in her, pinpointing it the first time he’d seen her at the Pit, just by the way he smiled. Even if she didn’t know why he hadn’t before, even if she didn’t know why it hurt to hear himself called a robot. And maybe it was because she’d paid more attention, because Dom had looked up to him, but not at him, and Dev might’ve forced her hobbies on him, but she’d found him boring.

“Never have I ever been arrested.” Isabel’s offering, accompanied by a muted grin in his direction. His response an easy roll of his eyes before he tossed the shot back, aware that there were three empty glasses hitting the table afterwards.

“Why Dr. Monty, I’m shocked.” Selwyn, putting a hand to her chest and looking at him with mock surprise. “Scandalized even.”

“Are you though?” Brow raised in a challenge before he nodded his head to the dark haired woman on his left. “We have the same friend.” A point proven solely by the ease of his posture, back against the chair and Isabel’s feet crossed and resting in his lap. Palm curved around her shin with easy affection he didn’t give most.

Something just as endearing in the way she cursed him afterwards. “Hijo de puta I did that for you.”

“Oh, I know, that’s why it’s funny.” A grin flashed at her that dissolved into a laugh as she kicked at his knee, and a memory of a holding cell that shouldn’t have left him with so much warm fondness sitting on his chest.

It didn’t surprise him when the game started devolving into questions of love and sex and heartbreak, and he lost track of how many he tossed back alongside them. Ignoring that three months ago he wouldn’t have been able to drink to half of them, heartsick before, but never heartbroken, a list of lovers but never in love. Somewhere along the line it drowned out some of his fear, leaving a secret out on the table among empty shot glasses. One he’d kept so long he thought it had become part of him, but there was something liberating about leaving it on the cutting room floor.

"It makes sense,” said Sel. A response that had Monty lifting a brow, a tone far too innocent as she toyed with a shot glass. “No wonder you were so oblivious to my charms.”

It made him laugh, something too relieved in the sound, head resting against the back of the chair. “Obviously. The only reason.” Because some secrets were easier to let go of than others, and he found this one didn’t hurt as much as he’d feared.

He was still grateful when they broke for food, a chance to let the tequila settle, Isa complaining about the poor quality of her weed before she remembered why, and he blamed both the liquor and the smoke hanging thick in the air instead of her for the bluntness that followed. “Tell your boyfriend to stop avoiding me.” 

“We’re too old to pass notes, chérie.” Said as gently as he could, not wanting to sit in the middle even while feeling as though it was a space he firmly occupied.

“Dile a ese cabrón, stop being a little bitch.” A curse accompanied by a gesture of the lighter, and he knew he was drunk because he found himself biting back a laugh, even while fully aware it wasn’t funny. That his trust wasn’t the only one left shattered, too many messages in her phone that Monty hadn’t written, and if there was the faint prick of guilt that he might’ve helped ruin something between them, he couldn’t remember how to lie to her, or if he even wanted to.

It left him with a quiet longing, missing the man abruptly when he’d managed to keep himself distracted most of the night. Not for any comfort he wanted to steal, but for the absence of him, the certainty that Emil would fit easily into place around the table with them. A familiar fantasy of their lives intertwining, and after a moment he pulled himself to his feet and reached for his phone.

Monty didn’t regret the decision to call Emil, not while he was on the phone with him. It wasn’t until after, sitting there on Isabel’s fire escape with nothing but the quiet sound of voices and laughter behind him and the distant hum of a car in the distance that it finally set in. Trying to replay a conversation where already the details were slipping away, and he was just left with a growing unease and the ache in his chest, a quiet voice swearing that he’d somehow fucked up. Sinking guilt following when he thought it was for the conversation itself, Emil miles away and trying to balance his life and his family. He didn’t need Montgomery falling apart.

He was slow to untangle himself from his place on the metal grate, vertigo hitting him hard and leaving him with a hand pressing against the side of her building to keep himself steady. A brief laugh following, an instinctive reaction that lacked real humor, and then he was trying to navigate his way back through the window.

It went worse this time, one leg getting caught on the edge, body tilting to compensate for it, and ending with Monty on his back staring up at Isabel’s ceiling with one foot still sticking out into the cold air. He heard laughter somewhere behind him but he didn’t look back, a distant awareness of burning in his eyes and the sensation of something stuck in his throat. Making it harder to breathe, to talk, to think, and he couldn’t tell if it was regret or despair.

Only that it hit in waves, his own voice in his head, am I different?

Do you want to be the same?

The answers slipping in easier now, one after another, when he wasn’t trying to hold onto something more fragile through the thin connection of a phone call. I just don’t want to be weaker. I don’t want to be ruined. I don’t want to feel that powerless ever again. I don’t want nightmares and I don’t want fear and I don’t want to wake up and not remember where I am. I don’t want to wonder if everything good about myself already got destroyed years ago and if Hugo just finished the job.

I want to know who I am.

Monty’s palms pressed against his eyes, self restraint doing a poor job of holding himself together when there was so much tequila stripping it away, so he tried to cling to it with the pressure of his hands and desperate, steadying breaths that got cut off again when it just left room for something worse to slip through. Every memory he’d tried to put aside, to strip whatever useful information he could before discarding them, a month of his life that still clung to him like smoke. A logical dissection of events and an illogical shaking of his frame, trying to hold in the wretched sob that wanted to rip from his chest, because what good is that? 

“Monty?” Isabel’s voice breaking through first before he felt fingers in his hair, a soothing comfort that he flinched away from before settling under her touch. “Hey. What happened? What did he say to you?” 

“No, no, he didn’t do anything wrong.” Words that came quickly and thoughtlessly, escaping somewhere between ragged breaths to stall any anger before it came. Even if it felt like a blatant lie after it was past his lips, because Emil had left one of the deepest scars, that feeling of betrayal, of trust shattering, one he hadn’t given blindly, but with too much hope. And the man had burned it all down, maybe destroyed them both, and it left Monty with too much hurt pressing down on his chest, a brutal crushing ache in both heart and his lungs that wasn’t just for himself, his prison stark and white, Emil’s looking like a rotting mockery of his own bedroom. 

He didn’t know if he could forgive, but he’d wanted to forget, and found it still all too close the second he stopped packing those wounds with something golden and kinder. Reaching out his hand to grasp at her arm, the other dragging across his face again, trying to ignore the warm wetness slipping down his cheeks, a memory of sitting on his couch trying to stem the same flood. “Can you just... hug me?” 

There was no hesitation, just Isabel shifting behind him, pulling his head into her lap and arms curving around his shoulders. A comfort that made the shaking of his frame worse before it got better, fingers tight around her arm and wishing he could explain to either of them why he was crying. But if Emil had told him to talk about it, he couldn’t find the words, just the distant awareness of a wound that hadn’t healed and her voice, telling him “I’m here.” 

His awareness of Selwyn was just as removed, barely aware of her settling down on the carpet next to him. None of the same easy affections given, but after a moment her hand settled on his shoulder, her voice “do you want to see more of memories of you?” and no real chance given to answer before the world faded away.

Isabel’s living room was made black, soft and encompassing, like dreamless sleep, a darkness that Montgomery felt himself sinking into. Warmer for the comforting contrast to stark white, muscles untensing and going liquid as he stretched out onto the carpet. Wondering if he didn’t fall asleep in the brief moment before nothingness and the sudden emergence of memories, cast in bright technicolor even if his own were black and white. An intense projection of thought, of someone else’s life, none of the images belonging to him, and he didn’t know if it was comforting to see it all again, but he thought it was meant to be.

Because there was a version of himself in Selwyn’s memory, the version she saw, of someone calm and composed even as a child. Always the babysitter when he was older than the rest, always the one taping up wounds and skinned knees, and there was a flicker of his own memory in the back of his head, putting them on his own scrapes and scars too, but alone in the bathroom. A version of himself he’d thought was so dissonant from who he was now, but there was too much familiar, beyond the simple physicality of the boy in her memory. The starkest difference in the eyes, because they looked impossibly vacant, and part of him wondered distantly how she hadn’t seen it, how no one had seen it, why no one could hear him silently screaming when he’d still been young and new. It was a feeling that was all too familiar, like it had echoed through the years until history repeated itself, taking new form; how did no one notice I was gone?

The tug on curled locks distracted him, tipping his head back to see a smile so much brighter on Isabel’s lips as she watched the images around them, invited in by the woman who controlled them. “Look how young you were. Look at your hair,” she said. A different echo this time, like family, like a mother sharing stories about her only son, the warm smell of coffee and old books. And those were present too, an image of a lanky, teenage version of himself, still curled in a chair with a book in his lap before he was interrupted. He closed his eyes briefly to hold onto it, to hold onto Isabel, letting the world shift on its axis beneath his spine, the kind of vertigo that made him wonder if he wasn’t in danger of spilling off the earth altogether. A distant, nostalgic ache that always came with missing a home that he’d never had. 

And he knew when it faded, light pressing against his eyelids before she was prodding him gently. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He stayed quiet for a moment, blinking away the darkness and left staring up at the ceiling that was too bright in comparison, but he reached out, floating the bottle of tequila off the table. Thoughtless and casual and his, no flicker of blue, no yawning emptiness greeting him in place of his gift. He wasn’t trapped, not in a cell, not in his own home, not by anything but chains of his own making, and if he’d changed, if he was different, it wasn’t the first time. A painful echo of empty eyes looking back at him, and he finally nodded his head. Tilting it back to look up at her, a grateful squeeze of her arm. 

“No,” he said. “But I feel a little better.” Sitting up slowly, hand reaching out for the bottle as it drifted into his grasp, a swig straight from it before he turned and passed it to Selwyn like quieter gratitude. Letting the taste of something sharp and sweet ease the dull and distant ache in his chest when he couldn’t quite name its form. If it was for what he’d lost or never had, if it was for who he’d never become and who he wished he was, for a moment all he had was another memory, her voice somewhere in the back of his head, and he didn’t know if it held hope or just another hurt. Although, who knew you would change so much, after all these years, making jokes and all. No longer quite the robot.

Despite his assurances, Monty didn’t feel better, not right away. Tequila that was compromising his faculties, but kept him hovering on that line between bleak despair and a reckless, boundless happiness that he’d wanted to hold onto. A quieter thought that he’d wanted to share that with Emil more than anything, a version of himself that didn’t carry cuffs around his wrists or the scars from it, but he’d warned the man about delusion and he should’ve known better. There was more comfort from simply passing the bottle around like he was back in college again, the first time he hadn’t felt like an outsider staring in from behind two way glass. 

“I want ice cream.” Decided abruptly, unsure if it was true until he was saying it.

And that was how Montgomery Lacroix ended up in the Circle K sometime after midnight, a mess of snacks and ice cream scattered across the counter, and Sel plopping down a slushie next to it. “It’s not a Slurpee,” she said. “But it’ll do.” 

This time the nostalgia made him laugh, something easy and simple from his childhood that didn’t demand anything more complex, a joy so small it hadn’t been worth stripping away from him, and he nodded his head at her once it settled into an easy grin. “Get me one too, yeah? The blue flavor.” Turning afterward to the poor kid working behind the counter, a little wide eyed as he stared at the three of them. Finding himself unconcerned for now about whatever rumors spread tomorrow, the kind of thing he’d always avoided and always feared, never letting anyone see a single crack in the man he’d made himself into.