#laoh

I’m mean and green, and I am BAD!

prologue.

The strangest part about dying and coming back was change. Not just the physical changes—where death had left a strange, bitter aftertaste on Max’s tongue that first day, or how the stitches bisecting his chest disoriented him every morning—but the changes around him. People and their mannerisms. The abandoned farming house he currently lived in, further from civilisation than his own home. Or how the prickle of a hot summer had welcomed him back, as if he’d slept through a horrible winter. 

Max supposed he had—he’d been dead for six months. Alive for less than a week. 

There wasn’t a guide on how one literally made up for lost time, and it was a topic he avoided broaching with Rosa. Six months were nothing to her ten years. 

Still, it was hard to find normalcy when he was essentially under house arrest. No one knew the next step now that he was back, nor when (if) he could return to society. It didn’t help that Max had blown Kyle’s monitoring equipment as soon as his new heart started beating. That Liz had tried bringing her phone the following day, but it sparked and died as she walked the several hundred feet from her parked car to the farm house.

Max was—powerful. More than he ever had been.

Maybe it was a side effect of bringing back Rosa, who had been dead too long; or a side effect of killing Noah, an alien powered by the murder of more than a dozen humans. Maybe alien adults weren’t meant to be left in their pods for months on end. Or, maybe, Liz had overshot on the regeneration part of her regenerative medicine.