Author: m.jules
Rating: R
Summary: In which everybody loves everybody and nobody remembers to care about what's "acceptable."
Disclaimer: If I could marry a movie and have its babies, it would so be this movie. The universe owes Julie Taymor & Co. for that piece of brilliance, not me.
Author's Notes: If I hadn't loved Lucy so much, I might have been tempted to make this purely Max/Jude, but Lucy deserved to be here, in exactly the place she is. This is dedicated to fireun, and to fairydusted27, to both of whom I promised fic.
Here you go.
Thought I'd been in love before,
But in my heart I wanted more
Seems like all I really was doing was waiting for you
No need to be alone, no need to be alone
It's real love, it's real love, it's real love...
Jude wondered sometimes if he would have been as interested in Lucy if she hadn't been Max's sister. Sure, he would have noticed her; would have known how pretty she was without having to think about it for two seconds, but would he have wanted her with such single-minded intensity? He didn't know. He only knew that he'd fallen in love with Max almost before he'd met him properly (if there ever had been a proper meeting, that is) and had been so glad, so shamefully fucking glad that he had a sister. A sister who looked just a little like him, broke out of the mold just like him, and was a girl.
Jude forgot that relief for a half-second the morning he woke up with Lucy in his arms and a pissed, betrayed Max standing in the door, glaring down at them. Guilt, hot and panicked and slimy-cold, slid down his spine before he remembered that this was the proper way to do things. He would have had much more cause to be guilty had it been Lucy standing in the doorway, Max in his arms. He wondered why that idea didn't sound as bad as it should have and kissed the back of Lucy's shoulder, apologizing. She was amazing and he was lucky to have her, and he was just guilty because he'd slept with his best friend's little sister.
That was all.
There were moments, in Vietnam, when Max wasn't sure how things had happened. Sometimes he remembered walking in and seeing his sister in Jude's arms, and sometimes he remembered waking up and looking at his sister staring down at him in Jude's arms.
Sometimes he remembered standing outside their door, listening to the sounds inside that room that were muffled by the party outside, by the bright colors and the liquor and the drugs and the music, always, always, the music. Sometimes he remembered getting tired of standing outside, opening the door, and walking right in.
Sometimes he remembered Jude giving him a guilty look and a stiff hug goodbye, a wish for good luck, before he walked out the door to his appointment with Uncle Sam. Sometimes he remembered Jude saying, "Kiss me, you mad bugger," fingers digging into his shoulders.
"I might never come back," he sometimes remembered himself saying, as an excuse, a warning.
"Right, and what if you never come back, and y' never kissed me?" he sometimes remembered Jude answering, cocky and insecure all at once.
Sometimes he remembered trying not to cry as he left the flat he'd been sharing with a patchwork family he'd put together with scraps of fate and all the fucking love in his heart, and sometimes he remembered crawling into bed between the two of them and not going to war at all.
That was when he knew which memories were real.
Lucy hated the way Max's eyes were so blank now. She'd finally gotten him back after all this time, but he wasn't really there. She hated feeling like she was being punished by God -- if there was one -- or the universe or fate or whatever for loving her brother too much, for sleeping with his best friend, for pushing Jude away while she worked with radical, bomb-making activists in spite of all the dangers, blinded by her need to have her brother back from Vietnam, to have him safe and whole and in her arms.
They sat together on broken concrete, looking out over the harbor, and Lucy looked over her shoulder at the faded sketch on the boarded up building, the charcoal image of herself that Jude had begun that day a lifetime ago. She was sure he'd loved her; she had loved him, too, after a fashion. But she knew there was someone else they both loved in secrecy and silence.
"I love the bugger," she remembered Jude saying.
"So do I," she'd almost told him, but hadn't been brave enough.
The sketch on the building only had one eye. The other was as blank as Max's, but the one Jude had finished was whole and lovely, and almost looked as if it could see. I'd give you mine if I could, little blackbird, she thought, watching the way Max's shoulders slumped as he looked out over the harbor, unseeing.
She wondered if things would ever be right again.
It was embarrassing how Sadie had to be the one to point it out to them, and how Prudence had to be the one to tell them it was okay.
"Have you ever lived up to your name?" Max asked the pretty Asian girl in surprise. Lucy smacked him for the rudeness, but Prudence just giggled and shook her head.
"See," Max said to Lucy, catching her hand in his and clutching it to his chest. "She likes me. It's okay."
"She's not the only one," Jude added, smiling shyly just an arm's distance away. Lucy tucked her head into Max's shoulder and Max turned just a little pink. Sadie and Prudence left the room with knowing smiles and headed down to the cafe for some of Sadie's finest whiskey and Jojo's finest guitar.
It was nerve-wracking at first, the way the atmosphere felt frozen and too heavy to breathe, but then Max took a deep breath and said, "Dammit, somebody kiss me quick before I wake up and some fucking nurse tells me it's time for my shots again," and they all laughed a little nervously and ignored all the memories of war and wounds and madness and pain.
Lucy leaned up and kissed him first, on his cheek, closer to his mouth, and he turned toward her in surprise, head tilted down, perfect invitation for another kiss, the kind she'd been wanting to give him for years. Her cheeks and the bridge of her nose went as bright as the strawberry on Sadie's record label but she kissed him anyway, clumsy and fumbling, like she was a middle-school virgin and not a woman grown and a lover.
Jude moaned quietly, biting his lower lip, and the sound made Max reach out for him, though he never moved his mouth from Lucy's. Jude took his hand and Max pulled him in. Awkward and nervous, Jude put one trembling hand on Max's hip, the other low on Lucy's back. It should have been familiar -- he'd touched both of them before, many times, in many ways -- but this time was different.
"God," Lucy said with a laugh when Max broke from their kiss. She slid her arms around Jude, around Max, and snuggled in between them, breathing deep. "I'm so nervous, it's like..."
"Like three virgins?" Jude laughed breathlessly, stroking her long blonde hair and looking over her head at Max.
"Shit," Max joked, grinning. "And here I was hoping one of you two would be able to tell me how things worked. I don't think I ever got the hang of it..."
"You're so fulla shit," Jude said with the biggest smile he'd ever smiled, hauling Max in for a rough kiss. Lucy squeaked where she was caught between them, but they both noticed that she wasn't exactly trying to escape either.
When Jojo, Sadie, and Prudence stumbled back in later, drunk and high on music and other things, they peeked in through open door and smiled to see two tousled blonde heads and a mass of tumbled brown curls vying for a spot on one tiny pillow and three sets of limbs tossed and tangled over each other.
"It's like the sun coming out after a long, cold winter," Prudence said with a smile, and Sadie ruffled her hair affectionately.
"C'mon," Sadie said. "We'll congratulate them tomorrow. For now, let's let 'em dream their sweet dreams."
The trio moved away from the door, but Prudence couldn't help whispering over her shoulder, "Dream one for me."
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to
The love you make.
The End