Magnetic
A/N: Finally cross-posting this here. I hadn't written fic in around eight years before this, but as it turns out, I'm incurable Pricefield trash. Feedback is welcome and probably very much needed, so leave a review if you like it! Or if you don't. I'm not picky.
Anyway, here lie spoilers for the first three episodes of the game. Much of this fic overwrites events in episode three, so it's extremely heavy on spoilers there. It's also an AU where the final major time travel event from episode three never happens (because my heart needed a rest), and I've taken some obvious liberties with Chloe and Max's childhood. If any of that bugs you, steer clear. Otherwise, enjoy!
They've already changed into dry PJs, but Max's hair is still damp on her forehead when she perches on the foot of Chloe's bed. Chloe is sprawled behind her, one arm slung over her ribs, toking. The excitement following their little Blackwell raid-and there was a lot of excitement, Chloe high off her cash prize-has given way to a comfortable silence.
It feels like old times, Max thinks. Sneaking up the stairs stifling giggles, borrowing each other's clothes, fond verbal sparring. But it's different too; there's some new charge in the air. It's something Max has only just started to notice, but it's there in the pool and it's there when they remove their chlorine-soaked clothing and it's here, now, watching Chloe watch the ceiling.
She doesn't want to disturb Chloe's introspection, so that's where Max starts comparing and contrasting. She knows those eyes, the way that mouth looks when it's twisted into a shit-eating grin or slack like it is now, some of the little white scars on Chloe's limbs earned from early sessions with a skateboard. She doesn't know the blue hair or the joint dangling between two fingers or the richly coloured ink winding its way up an arm. The same, but not.
Max moves on to the room they're in. Same bed, different sheets. Same stereo, playing different music. Same walls, same furniture, but covered in punk stickers and graffiti. She's pondering the dresser to her right when Max sees it, bright red and white among empty bottles and wrinkled T-shirts. "What's that?" she says, knowing full well that it's a Fisher Price cassette player. They each had one just like it when they were little.
"Huh?" Chloe snaps back into reality, looks at Max and follows her line of sight. "Oh, that. I was just cleaning out my closet. Step-prick thinks I've gotta get 'organized.' Got a deadline and everything." She's trying for dismissive, but she's flushed around the ears, and Max is already up.
There's a stack of cassette tapes next to the player, their labels baring the scribblings of their younger selves, hearts and lightning bolts and bubble letters. Max picks one out of the pile and moves to insert it, only to find a tape already in the deck. So she closes it and presses play. Her own voice from approximately a decade ago is a little staticky but unmistakable. Max grins. Toys left in a closet for five years don't have working batteries, but instead of calling Chloe out, she grabs the player's handle and scoops the rest of the tapes up in her free arm.
Chloe's still red, but she stubs out her joint and offers a sheepish smile, rolling to face Max, who dumps the lot on the bed.
"You're a dork," Max says, lying down. They're facing each other, and for a moment she thinks she wouldn't mind being closer, but there's a tape deck between them.
They fall asleep listening to Max at age eight, telling her best friend Chloe-who had the flu-a story about the zoo.
Max is the first to wake when light starts filtering in through the upside-down flag pinned over the window. Chloe's breathing deep and even across the bed, and looking over at her Max smiles sleepily. Chloe still sleeps like the dead, and for a few minutes Max allows herself to savour the feeling of normalcy. Because she does feel normal, waking up next to her best friend after a sleepover, like she's thirteen again and nobody ever died or moved away.
Eventually wakefulness comes and Max remembers that things aren't normal, or at least that there's a new normal. She sighs and rouses herself, gathering the cassette player and the tapes still scattered among the sheets. She returns the player to its rightful place on the dresser, and is halfway across the room when Chloe murmurs something-about teabags, maybe, whatever that has to do with anything-and Max freezes. But Chloe's just shifting in her sleep, still dreaming while Max stuffs her little pile of cassette tapes into her messenger bag by the door.
Only once she's sure she's not caught and she doesn't have to rewind does Max throw herself back into bed, having brought her camera back with her. She holds it up, aims the lens, and while she wouldn't mind a good selfie in the peaceful red-blue light, she knows a certain someone can't resist a-
"Photobomb!" Chloe justwoke up and her face is still half sparkling eyes and half mischievous smirk.
"Photo-hog," Max counters, but she can't hide the affection in her voice as she sets her camera down next to the bed. Relaxed, Chloe is beautiful; excited, she's infectious.
She's also halfway through a rant about just how awesome everything had been the previous night by the time Max is upright again. "-and you didn't even have to rewind to fake Lieutenant Limp-dick out! Wait," Chloe says, and her open grin falters a little. "You didn't have to rewind, did you?"
Max leans in, rams her shoulder playfully into Chloe's, either ignores the catch in her breath when they're suddenly sharing a much tighter space or passes it off as taking offense. "How dare! I was shittin' kittens, but it was still all me."
Chloe's face lights up again and she shoves her back. "Pft, yeah. Powers? Super-Max don't need no stinkin' powers!"
"But I do need breakfast," Max says. Chloe's face is right there, and she needs-she needs-Max isn't sure what she needs, but she's pretty sure it includes a little breathing room, so she gets up and makes to retrieve her clothes. Her nose wrinkles smelling the chlorine still clinging to the fabric.
Chloe notices and directs Max to her "fashion hole," pointing out that she still has some of Rachel Amber's clothes and that they're Max's size.
Max hesitates, finding herself at once eager to emulate some of Rachel's near-legendary effortless cool, and yet unsure how she feels about just how eager Chloe is, so she just says, "But not quite my style."
And then Chloe is babbling about how she needs to take chances and let her inner punk rock girl come out and she's stumbling over words and daring Max to kiss her and Max is so glad that she isn't already dressed in Rachel Amber's clothes because suddenly she's already feeling like she has big shoes to fill. And suddenly she's not feeling so hesitant. She plants one hand on Chloe's shoulder and brings the other one up to her jaw, she goes for it, there's the barest brush of her soft lips against Chloe's chapped ones and then…
Chloe's pulling away. She says something about being hardcore, about Warren being in the friend zone, about having to wake and bake.
Max calls her a dork again, but once she's dressed and has her messenger bag over her shoulder and she's heading for breakfast, she all but floats down the stairs.
After she drops Max off at Blackwell that evening, Chloe just sits for a while, eyes wet, face red. She's got a feeling that she's told Max too much. She doesn't like to let anyone know how bad it gets if she can help it, but it's hard not to lose control when she's forced into thinking about things.
Things like Rachel's voice in Frank's ear or her body writhing under him or her face pressing into dirty blond hair where there should only be synthetic blue. Things like putting her father in the ground, feeling like she's scattering chunks of her heart along with soil on the casket. Things like every best friend she's ever had leaving her and never, never with a proper goodbye.
And maybe, Chloe thinks, she trusts Max a little too much.
She's not the Max that Chloe knew, not quite, but she's close, and it's hard not to trust somebody when every day you come home to memories of them. Who they were and what they were to you, etched forever in magnetic tape.
Chloe doesn't turn the radio on for the drive home. It's just silence and sniffling and looking forward to going home to those memories, which are safe and familiar and not angry with her.
The problem is that when she gets into her room and shuts the door hard behind her, she approaches her dresser, and the bright plastic cassette player is there, but the tapes are gone.
First there's panic, then fury. She starts tearing through her room, lifting up empty cans and dirty underwear and loose CDs, tossing them aside without care for where they land. She searches her closet and rifles through her drawers.
Finally, when she feels the tears start to come again, she grabs her fucking Fisher Price tape deck and throws it at the bed so hard the mechanism springs open.
And there's a tape in there.
Chloe stops. Hell, maybe time stops for a second-she'd believe anything after the last couple of days. She sniffs, wipes at her face with her forearm, and as she approaches the bed she realizes who it was that must've taken them. Why they must've taken them. How they were the only other person who might take any comfort in those memories, in reliving them over and over without need for time-bending superpowers. She sinks down on the mattress on her knees, closes the tape deck, and presses play.
"... anyway, I know you're sick, but I just thought you'd still wanna hear about the lions. I hope you feel better. I love you, Chloe."
And maybe, Chloe thinks around a watery smile, that's all she needed to hear.