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How long has she been staring at the same stupid divot in this stupid concrete ceiling? Laying on this shitty cot in this godforsaken cell? Long enough for the sun to sink below the horizon, long enough for her mind to glaze over with a dissociative frost, and definitely long enough for this terrible mattress to put more than a few new aches in her back. If–... When they get out of here, the cheap, crummy mattress she and Max have been sleeping on for the past couple of years is going to feel amazing.
Max… God, what the fuck are they even going to do? Forget escaping the jail; how do they escape a werewolf curse inside her boyfriend’s skin?
Her eye slips shut - finally - but she knows she’s not going to get any sleep. A growing catalogue behind her of restless nights tells her that much. It’s aggravating to be so exhausted and yet incapable of remedying the situation but she keeps her complaints locked tightly behind grit teeth. She doubts Max has been sleeping well either, and she’ll be damned if she falls apart in light of what’s happening.
There’s a creak from the other cell and Laura holds her breath, afraid for one dizzy moment that the typhoon of anxieties inside her head had somehow gotten loud enough to wake her incarcerated neighbor. Then she hears the shuffle of sheets and a sigh.
“Laura?” Max calls quietly, breaking the silence of their concrete confinement, and she gets the feeling he hasn’t gotten to sleep either.
She opens her eye to stare at the ceiling again. She hates herself a little for it, but her attention goes straight to the divot. “Yeah?”
A long stretch goes by where he doesn’t respond. Crickets are chirping outside the small barred window and the longer she listens to them, the more she can feel her heartbeat climbing up her throat. She’s about to force herself back into dissociation just to keep herself from going insane when Max speaks up again.
“These beds suck,” he complains.
Unable to help it, she snorts and immediately smothers it just in case she draws their asshole of a captor down on them. “I was thinking the same thing,” she huffs, shifting her hips in an effort to find a spot on the mattress that doesn’t make her tailbone ache. After a moment, she asks– “Do you think they’re any better at camp?”
A breathy chuckle. “No. No, probably not.” More shuffling - it sounds like he rolls over. “I think I’d still rather be there.”
The mirth fades and Laura’s tongue tries to wet her dry lips with minimal success. “Yeah.” She’s painfully aware that she’s out of water; the cup is empty and so was the bottle she’d petulantly thrown at Travis earlier. She won’t get any more until he brings them breakfast, and time passes at a fraction of its speed inside this cement box so it’ll be a while. “Me too.”
Another couple of minutes pass with neither of them talking. Laura doesn’t know what to say; distracting, uplifting, mindless chatter is Max’s thing. She keeps them on track, she keeps them moving forward. He’s always been the one to make sure they aren’t running themselves into the ground. Without him, she thinks she would’ve burnt herself long ago - back when her drive was gasoline and her goals the fateful sparks. Maybe the ‘high school sweetheart’ route doesn’t work for everyone but… it’s working for them.
Well. It was working, until it landed them in prison and wrapped up in something straight out of a horror novel.
“Laura?” Max calls again, pulling her from her drifting thoughts.
God, she’s tired. “Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
Her eye shuts again and she forcibly represses the urge to sigh, knowing it won’t come across well. “What are you sorry for, Max?”
A small, frigid part of her clinically hopes that he drops it so that they can both get some sleep without any more unnecessary baggage. It’s a part that she throttles as soon as it rears its ugly head but it puts a sour taste in her mouth. Her parents had never been the emotional… empathetic type - Max brought warmth into her cold life and she does her best to return it, but sometimes under duress she finds herself slipping back her icy-edged mindset of pointed fingers and expectations. She doesn’t want to do that to him; she tries to keep him as far from the bitter side of her as she can because he doesn’t deserve it, and that’s why she doesn’t want to go through any more apologies. She’s wound tighter than a spring and it’s not going to take much to set her off.
To her dread (and then immediate shame), Max answers. “A lot of things.” There’s more noise and she can picture him sitting up, bracing himself on the bed. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the rejection.” The bedframe creaks and she imagines him setting his feet on the ground. “I’m sorry about your eye, I’m sorry I didn’t insist on just going to the motel–”
“Hey,” she cuts him off a bit sharper than she means to, copying the perceived motions and sitting up. “I was the one who made us go to Hackett’s Quarry. Okay?” She gives him a second but he doesn’t reply. “I didn’t– I lied to you about getting ahold of Chris and told you to go to camp.”
He negates– “I could’ve argued.”
“I could’ve listened .” She swallows. “In the first place. Just–...” Leaning forward, she drags a hand through her hair, cautious not to catch her bandages. It’s an abrupt reminder that this is her life now - even if they manage to untangle themselves from the shit they’ve gotten involved in, she’s going to have a permanent debilitation to remember the worst few months of her life by. “We’re both sorry about a lot of things,” she finishes tiredly. “Can we please call it even for tonight?”
More silence. She’s hated few things in her life more than she hates the solid wall between them. It’d be easier to have this conversation, for one - Max has always been an expressive person and she’s often able to read him much clearer than his words - but it’s more than that. The wall remains a physical barrier that keeps her away from her boyfriend; it keeps her from seeing him, from looking into his eyes, from holding him close and never letting go again. The last time they’d been able to see each other for more than ten seconds consecutively, she’d been trying to console him as he burst out of his skin and it had cost her an eye. It’s been even longer since she’s been able to touch him and the last memory she has of it feels like blood slicked between her fingers.
It’s kind of pathetic how much she would give to hold his hand right now.
“Okay,” Max finally agrees, and it nearly startles her even though it’s soft. His feet audibly drag along the floor of his cell. “Did I wake you up?”
Setting her own feet on the floor but not standing yet, she tries again in vain to find moisture in her mouth, and glares at the vague shape of the cup through the dark. “No, you didn’t. I haven’t been sleeping.”
A huff. “Neither have I,” he admits. Then– “I wish he’d put us in the same cell. But I guess… probably not safe for you to be around me.”
“Only on a full moon,” she tries to joke, and it falls flat. She sobers. “I wish he would too. I hate not being able to look at you.”
“Missing my charm already, are you?”
Her lips screw upward so quickly it hurts. It’s leagues from the usual cadence of his humor but she’ll take it. “You know it.” She tilts her head back and her neck protests the movement. “I’m going to need your magic hands to work out, like, thirty new kinks.”
Max makes a sound of surprise. “Wha– Is that all you’ve been thinking about? How have you thought of so many new–”
“Knots, Max,” she interrupts him to correct, torn between laughing and banging her head against the wall. “Kinks– Knots in my muscles. I need a massage or my shoulders are going to hurt forever,” she draws out.
“Ohh… ” Shuffling across cement again, and then his voice sounds closer to the bars. “Yeah. I don’t think this place had lumbar support in mind when they designed these.”
Like an ingrained instinct, she rises to cross to her bars as well, if only for the illusion of being closer to him. “Probably not. Think we should finally splurge for those nice pillows when we get out?”
“Nice pillows, a scented candle, and frozen pizza,” he agrees, thankfully willing to play into her fantasy. “We’ll have a night in, watch the next terrible rom-com on our list, and forget we ever stepped foot in Hackett’s Quarry.”
She lets out a little laugh but can’t hold it, resting her arms on the cold, metal bars of her prison cell and closing her eye again to lessen the pounding. “Sounds good to me. As long as you don’t fall asleep halfway through like you did with ‘When Harry Met Sally’.”
“It just couldn’t hold a candle to ‘The Princess Bride’, I’m sorry, hon.”
“Oh, please.”
“And also, didn’t you doze off during ‘Love, Actually’?” Max tosses back, and for a second the banter between them feels so natural that she almost expects to see his cute, dumb face grinning at her when her eye cracks back open.
Nope. Still depressing grey rock and metal bars. There’s a sudden burn behind her eye and she thinks that if there’s one good thing about their arrangement, it’s that Max can’t see her cry.
Whether or not he senses her break in composure, he doesn’t seem to have any jokes left in him either. They stand wordlessly - together but not really - and she privately wonders if this is going to be her life from now on. She’d worked her ass off to get to where she is; earning the scholarships, making the grades, and completing the coursework had been hard. In the beginning, she hadn’t wanted Max to give up hope but now… now it’s looking less and less like she’ll ever see the interior of any academic building. Hell, she’d consider herself lucky if she ever set foot outside this building again.
From the other cell, she hears a muted thump. “Laura,” Max mutters, and his tone abruptly has her on edge. “If we… If we manage to get out of here somehow, I’m going to be dangerous.”
Her heart leaps into her throat. “Max–”
“I– I mean, really, I’d basically be, what, a once-a-month, bloodthirsty bomb who can’t wear jewelry?” He goes on. “You saw how far Travis went to lock up that one; chained in the cellar?”
Fingers curling around the bars tight enough for her knuckles to go white, Laura frowns. “You’re different,” she argues fervently, despite knowing how wrong she is. “We’re going to figure this out and I’m going to find a way to cure you.” She tugs the metal lightly, fantasizing about tearing it away and busting them both out with brute strength. “This isn’t forever!”
“Right,” he says, and it doesn’t sound like he believes her at all. “Hypothetically, though, let’s say you can’t.”
Fear and fury both surge in her chest, and she nearly hisses out– “Don’t, Max.”
This time, she can’t deter him, and he continues. “If we do get out, and we can’t fix this… I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if you got hurt again because of me.” He doesn’t give her time to jump in. “So will you please promise that you’ll take whatever chance you have to get away?”
Hackles raise along her spine and Laura pays no mind to the blur of liquid across her vision. “Don’t ask me things like that, Max,” she scolds, voice shaking. “I just told you that we’re going to be fine, and I would never leave you behind.” Her injury throbs. “We’re getting out of here together .”
He waits until she’s done. “I know, honey,” he sighs. “But I need you to promise that just in case we don’t–”
“I won’t–”
“–that you make sure you’re safe,” he finishes softly, and she squeezes the bars until her fingers start to hurt.
As strong as her dedication to Max is, she can’t ignore that it isn’t one-sided. “Fine,” she mumbles reluctantly. “I promise.” Her hands let go and drop. “But it won’t come to that because I will fix this.”
The only answer that earns is the shuffle and creak of a frame as Max crawls back into bed. Laura rests her forehead against the metal and lets a few tears fall silently down her cheek before pushing away with the intention of following his example. She lingers, for a moment, and tries to imagine where she’d be in her life if she’d never fallen for her partner. Nowhere good, she suspects. Why he thinks that would be any different now without him is beyond her.
“I love you,” she calls, throat tight.
His response is immediate– “I love you too, Laura.” –and as honest as always. “Try and get some sleep, okay? Our breakfast of wet bread and mash will be here before you know it.”
She can’t bring herself to laugh at the joke but she does follow the instruction to climb into bed. All of her previous thoughts of annoyance directed toward the mattress resurface as soon as she lays down. Her eye picks out that goddamn divot again. She can still hear those bloody crickets.
Max can make her promise to leave him all he wants. It doesn’t matter if she has to claw them both out of this mess by her fucking fingernails. Screw Travis, screw Hackett’s Quarry, and double-screw any fucking werewolf curse that she’s expected to understand without ever being told anything about it. None of it matters anymore.
One way or another, I’m saving Max and getting us the fuck out of here, she thinks into the night; a silent challenge to the moon itself. And that’s a promise.