October 11, 2013

"Are you nervous? What am I saying? Of course you're nervous. It's the Max Caulfield default state of being!"

Chloe flashed Max her usual needling grin; the one that said, 'I tease, but I love.' Max, as usual, didn't notice. In white plaid flannel pajama pants and a t-shirt dotted with rolling cartoon chickens, Max studied the book in her hands by the light of the moon. Glossy black and white moments of desperation stared back. She shuddered and closed the book, lifting her eyes to meet Chloe's.

"I've never done anything like this before!", she said, offering the doe-eyed look that always made Chloe feel she should rush forward.

"I know."

"I don't wanna start a forest fire."

Chloe smirked. It was Friday night in Seattle and not surprisingly, the air in the Caulfields' back yard hung damp and heavy. It had only just stopped raining about two hours before. The patio had dried out, and the fire pit, but all around them the grass was still wet. It had taken her some searching to find a reasonably dry spot to set up the tent. To accidentally set fire to all this would be quite an act of pyromancy. "Well, luckily, you have me to guide you."

"Where would I be without you, Chloe Price?"

Chloe shrugged, "Somehow you got by without me over the last five years. Well, not really five years I guess. What was the longest we were apart?"

"Nine months," answered Max, immediately. "Between your birthday and Christmas 2010."

"Whoa, you counted?"

Max paused a moment, calculating if she should be embarrassed at that admission, and then nodded.

"I counted too," confessed Chloe. They both grinned stupidly at each other and then looked away. To escape the ensuing awkward silence, Chloe knelt down and began rolling strips of newspaper and laying them across the bed of the fire pit. "You know, if you really wanted an expert, you should have asked Rachel. This is much more her area!"

"Well, that just makes me more nervous!"

"I just mean she's a bit of a firebug. I'd bet the only reason she even agreed to play tonight is because Steph rolled her a character that could burn things. Here, hand me that kindling. Are you still sure you want to do this?"

"I do."

"'Cause from what you told me, you could still sell that on eBay for like $500, right?"

"No. Burn it."

"I thought you were all about this Jefferson guy. What happened?" asked Chloe as she arranged the kindling over the bed of rolled newspaper.

"Remember when I was looking at art schools with good photography programs for my senior year?"

"Yeah, last spring. Blackwell didn't quite make the cut." Looking down at the grey, loose-fitting University of Washington shirt that would serve as her pajamas for the night, Chloe added, "Which is good, honestly. It would have been hella ironic if you'd gone back to Arcadia Bay the same year I came up here to get my U-Dub on."

"Like rai-ee-ain on our wedding day."

"Still illegal in Oregon. For now."

"We're not in Oregon any more," corrected Max.

Chloe clasped Max's hand and pointed in the direction of the city, "You're right! Quick! To the registrar of deeds!"

Max blushed. That wasn't what she meant and Chloe knew it. She jerked her hand back with a smirk and continued, "Anyway, the best one I could find was at this school called Northfield, which is way over in Massachusetts, and you put me in touch with that girl from Blackwell who transferred there?"

"Victoria Chase," nodded Chloe with a grin, "What'd you think of her?" She returned to her kneeling position and continued prepping the fire pit.

"She seemed nice," shrugged Max. "She told me about the program over there. Sounds like she was loving it, but my folks can't afford to send me. Still, we got to chatting a lot about photography, and I brought up Mark Jefferson."

"Victoria Chase seemed nice? Is this the real world or did we wake up in some kind of crazy alternate reality?"

"What? She did! When she comes back for Turkey Day we're going to meet up and tour a couple galleries! Anyway, I knew Mark Jefferson had gone to jail for drugging and kidnapping a model, I just didn't... I don't know. I didn't really think about it. It was just words, you know? But Victoria... her family runs the Chase Space gallery here in Seattle."

"Sure," nodded Chloe. Victoria always made sure everybody knew that.

"So Victoria actually knew the model through her parents. Hearing the victim's account, even second-hand. Holy shit! This guy is fucked up, Chloe! I'm glad he's in prison! I still have nightmares sometimes where I'm the one tied up in his studio, and that's just from hearing about it. I can't believe I liked his work! I can't believe I made excuses for him!" Max clenched her jaw and glared at the cover of the once-prized photobook. The Dark Corner, a photo novella by Mark Jefferson. Photo novella. Pretentious fuck! Once, Max had admired the stark lighting, the challenging composition, the broken-down poses of the models. But now, the thought that one or more of them actually had been broken in the course of shooting made her stomach turn. She didn't want to own this any more. She didn't even want to touch it. She tossed it angrily to the ground, scuffing the cover on the patio stones.

Scooping the book up, Chloe replied, "Well, in that case it will be my distinct pleasure to help you set him on fire vicariously. I mean, even more so than usual." With relish, she broke the spine and splayed it prostate and spread-eagle over the wedge of an upturned piece of firewood.

Max felt nothing watching Chloe mangle the once-precious pages. Fuck you, Mark Jefferson. "Do it, Chloe!"

Chloe flicked the firelighter into life and touched it to the corners of the newspaper base. The fire crept in eagerly from the edges, licking the kindling and the pages of Mark Jefferson's lone published work. As the book itself started to smolder, Chloe sat on the rolled up sleeping bag and warmed her hands on the growing flame. She looked up at Max, who stood with a determined expression undermined only somewhat by the cuteness of her pajamas. Chloe had never quite understood Max's obsession with Mark Jefferson's work. In fact, the photobook and its place of honor in Max's room had always made Chloe a little uncomfortable during her visits. To think that Victoria Chase, of all people, would be the one to get through to her! But then, it wasn't the first time Victoria had seen something other people missed.

"You know it was Victoria Chase who first clued me in about how I felt about you? Just something she said. I didn't even get it at the time, but once I figured it out... that's when I knew. So, if you do see her over Thanksgiving, tell her I said she was right, and thanks!" Chloe mused to the fire.

Max sat next to Chloe, "Wait, didn't you just tell me that trip with your Dad was when you knew?"

Chloe paused. She had just said that, during the drive over here, but in their own way, both statements were true. "Well," she countered, "maybe being with Max Caulfield is falling in love over and over and over again!"

"Over and over and... over... again...", parroted Max, her eyes glazing over. She had the strangest sense of deja vu. Hadn't she just said that? No, Jane said it! No, she had said it to Jane. Wait, who the hell was Jane? She stared into the fire blankly, her mind elsewhere entirely, momentarily assaulted by memories of a history that no longer was; a drive-by from a dying reality. The Bay. The dorm. The van. The bus. The barn. The bunker. The lighthouse, inside and out and over and under. Photographs and wheelchairs and syringes. Faces she didn't know, but yet somehow suddenly had names for. Kate. Warren. Frank. David. Alyssa.

Jane.

"Did I ever tell you about the time Rachel and Victoria ... Max, you okay? You spacing out on me again... or...?"

"I must have fallen asleep for a second. I had this weird dream... or vision. Just... little flashes...disconnected... like images being worn away," Max responded. Her eyes looked past Chloe. Her hands pawed at the air. "I saw myself going to Blackwell. You had short, blue hair and tattoos. There was a funeral, and a hospital. We were on the train tracks, at the diner... the cliffs... There was this huge storm. Massive! And Rachel was there, somehow. And Steph! And there was another version of me... sometimes, she was older, and she was chasing after me with a knife!"

"Wow! Intense! What happened? Who won?" Chloe put her arm around Max and pulled her closer. She took Max's hand and squeezed it. A short distance away, Mark Jefferson's work caught fire and burned.

"I don't know," Max replied, shaking her head, "Even as I'm describing it, I'm having trouble remembering it. I can't recall... if there any sort of order to things or... just a series of flashes. Photos, being torn and discarded. Like it's going away, now. Evaporating! Like it's ... like it's over."

"I love that you even dream in photos. How'd I look with blue hair?"

Max pondered. The memory of the dream was slipping from her mind. There was an odd finality to it. Somehow she knew these were things that were done and gone, challenges she would never have to confront. It felt like simultaneously more than a dream and less than nothing. The lighthouse. The storm. The other Max. The names she had suddenly known were now blinking out of her head again, one by one, forgotten. Just like the Dark Corner, they were gone now, flitting away into ash on the breeze. The final fleeting image was of the other Chloe's face, ringed in cerulean hair, cut in a ragged bob, a smirk masking a pain Max couldn't fathom. And then that, too, was gone, swirling away in a puff of smoke. She was left with nothing but a feeling. A warmth in her heart.

Max squeezed Chloe's hand and smiled at her.

"It suited you."

A/N: Into the Rebootverse

I debated a long time whether or not to do an epilogue. I felt, and this is going to sound self-indulgent so just bare with me, I felt that the greatest favor I could do these two characters was to hit the reset button and then just let them be. Like here's a whole new world minus all the bad stuff, and you're free to do whatever.

However, I kept coming up with little stories that would fit into the post Here at the End of All Things reality, and I'd like to tell at least two of them. None of them will be quite like this fic. The whole point of this fic is that there can't be anything afterward that's like this fic. Don't expect Jane's revenge. They will be decidedly fluffier. In fact one of them is arguably the fluffiest fluff that ever fluffed a fluff. I started fleshing out two of these stories and they both got a little too long to work as an epilogue, but the intersection between them is the scene you've just read. It didn't really fit into either of the other two stories, and it was short, so I decided it would make an apt epilogue. An aptilogue. I hope those of you who wanted an epilogue are satisfied with it.

If you are interested in seeing more the post-reboot-ending world, please feel free to follow, and thanks to everybody for the comments and reviews thus far!