Chapter 1

Max stared, stunned. She hardly dare say 'what' for fear of the answer she refused to believe being repeated. But she couldn't keep the natural reaction at bay.

"What?"

He said nothing, knowing he didn't need to say it again. She had heard him perfectly clearly the first time. He forced himself to look at her, knowing the anger would soon surface in those brown eyes that would no longer look at him with mildly irritated warmth.

Nobody had forced him to tell her. He could have done the cowardly thing and let her find out from someone else. But he couldn't see her and pretend he had done no wrong. He couldn't hold himself straight knowing he hid such a terrible secret. If nothing else, he owed it to her to tell her himself.

"You…let him?" Max forced out after a silence that stretched beyond the thousand mile hit zone of the Pulse.

Alec glanced away, unable to meet the hurt disbelief in her eyes. But looked back at her moments later. He had set off a chain of events he could not stop and the least he could was stay the course of his chosen actions.

His silence confirmed what she still couldn't bring herself to believe to be true. It was Alec. He wasn't hers…but he was her Alec. Disreputable, charming, ruthless and charismatic. He had failed her on numerous occasions and she had had to bail him out on numerous more. But never had she ever thought him capable of such a catastrophic breach of trust.

"Max, I don't know where to begin apologising," Alec begun before stopping when she seemed to open her mouth to speak. But words appeared lost on her. She didn't look able to string any coherent thoughts together amidst the shock of what he had just told her.

So Alec just stared at her, wondering how to even begin fixing this. His mind was swimming in confusion, incomprehension, questions, theories and apologies. But worst of all, he knew as God awful as he felt now, he didn't nearly feel awful enough.

Max stared into nothing, her mind still attempting to make sense of the blow he had just dealt her. Even her enhanced transgenic brain couldn't work fast enough to process the full implications of what this all meant.

It was more than just the simple act of killing a man. It was who had died. And at the hands of whom that life had been taken. It was the rights which had been stolen. The rights Alec had taken upon himself to delegate to others. Others who had no place committing the acts they had committed. Others who had no place suffering for those acts.

Max turned to look at Alec. His hazel green eyes were so familiar, they resonated with such resemblance to those she had once known. The indefinable tug at the corners of his mouth was not to be found but at one time she would have known exactly what could set it off. Did she still know? Was he the same Alec she had ever known? Had she ever known him at all?

Maybe she had been wrong all along. Maybe even at the worst she thought him, maybe even those belittling thoughts were still too good for him.

"I just," she paused again, still reeling. Her brows were knitted in a frown, her eyes far off and unfocussed on him.

Alec sat. He waited. Whatever she had to say, he knew it would hurt. It would sting like the punches and kicks she was fully capable of. It would sting worse because he had done everything to deserve it. This was all his own doing. All those other times Max took her anger out on him, he tolerated it knowing he was only partly to blame, that there were other factors, that he shared the fault. That some part of him remained innocent. Not so now. This time, it was all him. He had nothing left untouched. Nothing left untainted by an act of his own stupidity. But not an act. An omission.

"I just, don't understand how I could have got it so wrong. To have judged you so wrongly," Max said, almost to herself.

She finally looked him in the eyes, trying to fathom some possibility that he was simply being over heroic, trying to assume more blame than that which lay at his door. Trying to excuse him because she simply couldn't bring herself to believe he was capable of something like this.

Maybe it was a misunderstanding. No, maybe he had done as much as he could but not tried as hard as he could have and was exaggerating his role in it. Maybe he was simply trying to cover up for Joshua.

"It was a mistake Max, a stupid mistake. I didn't think," Alec told her, trying to keep his voice steady, to hide the tearing pain inside the heart he didn't know could hurt so much.

He knew keeping calm, keeping his head on his shoulders and trying to be rational about it would infuriate her. But there was nothing else he could be. If he was anything less than composed, he would crack and break. Crack and break beyond fixing. He would lose the entire mould of himself that he had spent so long building, so tirelessly learning to live in. He would lose grip of the very essence of himself that he could feel slipping through his fingers.

"That only makes it worse, that you valued this friendship so little that it wasn't worth a moment of thought," Max said, not accusingly but the harshness in her voice he expected all along, suddenly finding its way back from the shock.

"I don't, you have no idea how much I value our friendship. I just, didn't think," Alec finished lamely, not knowing what words to use to impress on her the distinction he was trying to make.

It wasn't that he didn't think because the friendship he shared with Max wasn't important to him. It was a momentary lapse attributable and connected to nothing. It was a mistake purely in its own standing.

A/N 2: It started out as a one shot...but I guess I've been reading too much Dazedizzy :)