#mcaobi

Keep up the great work!!

oh my GOSH WHATT?? THANK YOU THIS IS SO SWEET!! 🥹 🥹 You've actually drawn one of my FAVORITE scenes from the entire fic — this is soooo incredible! It's exactly how I envisioned it, their facial expressions are so on point. thank you so much <3333

EVoY: High priority, actively being worked on. I've been working through removing a few redundant scenes, and I've also been re-thinking Nathan and Max's relationship progression—I've decided I wanted a slightly different, slow-burn- and mystery-focused, tighter direction that, I think, more accurately fits their characters and builds to a better conclusion in Act IV. Once the big edits are over, I'm ready to bring this fic to its end! ✨ There's no need to re-read unless you're so inclined, though the characters and writing should overall be more satisfying. (I curse myself for not having a concrete plot written out when I first started one of the most complicated stories I've ever written, like whyyy🤌)

MCaOBI: Also a high priority. It'll be shorter than my other fics, but I can promise a lot, lot, lot of emotional depth, some twists and turns, and (hopefully) satisfying interpersonal development in this one <3 (I will never pick favorites, but sometimesss this one comes close😬)

SaS: May be put on the back burner until I finish the two above 😩 I'm very excited about what I have planned for it next, and I do hate to hit pause on a cliffhanger!— it pains me as much as it pains you to have to put this on unofficial hold ❣️ I only do this to ensure that the writing and plot are as satisfying as possible.

MOoRD: I have a lot of ideas (trust me), but atm it's my lowest priority, for the sake of my other longfics 😔

Nathan's a mess, max is a mess... I'm having wayyy too much fun w this yall

He locked the classroom door, the click of the key echoing in the empty hallway. He stood there for a moment to stare at it.

Another thought clawed its way in, rearing its head an ugly beast.

What if he was just a distraction?

The rebellious burnout. The problem student. The one you joked with, flirted a little with, tested boundaries against because he was exciting and dangerous and didn't belong in your real life. Someone you could indulge for a moment before going back to what actually made sense.

He didn’t want to believe Max would go behind someone's back like that, that she’d play that kind of game. Everything about her screamed the opposite. But regret didn’t come from nowhere, and that look in her eyes when she’d stepped away from him…

It reminded him too much of something he’d sworn never to revisit.

The slow realization that he’d never really been chosen—just used, then discarded.

His lungs suddenly tightened so much that he had to stop walking for a second, palm pressing against his sternum like that might steady all of the chaos burning in him.

“Fuck," he breathed, forcing a deep breath. Then another. Four in, hold for four, six out. Another set, until the panic ebbed just enough.

it's a big one, a long one, a momentous one...

“...I was talking about the show, and I could tell halfway through that they’d already stopped listening.”

“'They'?”

She nodded faintly. “My mom called first,” she said. “Then…” She hesitated, face tightening again. “And... someone else basically told me I should stop getting so emotional over a 'small gallery show'.”

The way she said someone else told him enough to make Warren’s name flare hot in the back of his mind, but he kept his mouth shut.

Max stared down at the desk in front of her. “I know Chase Space isn’t some huge museum,” she said. “I know it’s not a retrospective at the MoMA or whatever. I know I’m not famous, but... it still matters to me.”

“Of course it should,” Nathan said. "Fuck them."

Max’s mouth trembled faintly, like she didn’t know whether to smile or cry again.

“That’s a very measured response.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know.” Her eyes dropped to her lap. “That’s why I called you, I think.”

Something in his chest dropped hearing that— hearing her say it so point blank.

“You... look at my work and you actually see it,” she said softly. “Or at least, you try to. You don’t just... nod, and say something polite. You notice things, and you ask questions I actually want to answer.” Her throat bobbed. “And tonight I just… I really didn’t want another person telling me not to overreact.”

He stared at her, pulse beating hard in his throat now for a completely different reason.

There it was again—that dangerous feeling from the phone call last night, from the darkroom, from every tiny private exchange that made him feel like she was stepping closer to him in some way he couldn’t quite put words to, but...

this one is a very personal chapter to me; I've admittedly written myself and many personal thoughts and discussions I've had into it, and for that, it's near and dear to my heart 🫶

And this was my first iteration with a wildly misinterpreted read of her reaction due to brain sludging on the edge of sleep lmao

I am ever so patiently sitting for more food that is fic ^^

omg what!! Max looks so adorable!! I am a total diehard for Max w the OG LiS1 bangs + bob look (hence why I gave her that in this fic), and you nailed it in the last one! Don’t worry, I love your interpretation! Her facial expression + features are so on point with how I envision the older version of her in MCaOBI, I love it ❣️

I also love the attention to detail of the red versions of the darkroom of her— the facial expressions and hands are so detailed and the color is so on point! The shade really brings me back to those good ol days of my own, printing in the photo cave <3

Warren launched right into the problem set, his tone chipper and patient in that I’m used to dealing with idiots but I’m still gonna smile through it way. He scribbled equations across the whiteboard, talking about refraction indices, angular deviation, and wave interference like any of it made sense. The guy couldn’t have been more than five, maybe six years older than them, but he acted like some ancient physics sage looking down from Olympus on the two idiot undergrads.

What made it all worse was Hayden, who kept asking the same questions — in slightly different wording — like he was stuck in some weed-induced feedback loop.

“So, wait,” Hayden said for the third time, leaning forward with his pen dangling between his fingers, “if light bends when it enters water, does that mean it’s technically, like, slower underwater?”

Warren pinched the bridge of his nose but still smiled. “Yeah, that’s… that’s literally the whole point of refraction. The speed of light changes depending on the medium, but—”

“Right, right, yeah,” Hayden cut in, nodding slowly. “But then, like… why?”

Nathan watched Warren’s polite expression crack for just half a second. The guy looked like he wanted to bang his head against the board. He sighed through his nose, rubbing his temple. “Because— okay, look, remember what I just told you? Remember how I said that the refractive index of the medium determines the phase velocity—"

To hell with the buddy-buddy bullshit. “Jesus Christ, man, you don’t have to talk to him like that,” Nathan snapped.

The image began to bloom in the developer tray, slow and ghostlike.

Nathan leaned in without thinking, breath caught in his throat as the shapes sharpened. A lighthouse blossomed from the bone white paper. A striped pillar, tall and solitary—its beam smeared into long, glowing arcs across the surface of the ocean, light dragged and stretched into a soft saucer shape by the long exposure. The water below looked unreal, shimmering with hints of the lighthouse's light, the horizon line of the sky barely there.

Nathan was hit by a sickening feeling of déjà vu, and then he realized what it was coming from: the lighthouse from Arcadia.

"That looks just like a place from back home,” he said before he could stop himself.

Max glanced over at him, then back down at the tray, her smile softening as she rocked it gently. “Does it?”

“Yeah,” he murmured. “There’s a lighthouse near where I grew up. On a cliff. Woods before you can get up to it. Kinda lonely, just like this.” He swallowed. “This is… really close.”

The resemblance was uncanny. The framing, the isolation, the way the light cut through darkness—it tugged something half-buried yet dreadfully painful up from his memories.

Salt air. Wind. Strawberry blonde hair glimmering by the cliff's edge.

Max gave him a pleased, almost knowing look. “It reminded me of a place from my childhood too,” she said wistfully, eyes still on the print.