Witnessing a rather cold and angry Maxie Jones berate the newest waiter as she sat at a table alone in Kelly's, Damian Spinelli prepared himself mentally as he quickly took a seat opposite her. He shuffled with his scarf, his eyes lowereing, "Is the Wounded Blonde One in an especially bitter mood today?"
Maxie never lifted her eyes toward him, as she steadily stirred her soup, "Don't you know by now that this is how I always am?"
Scoffing, he gestured wildly with his hands, "I would have to disagree with you, my partner in crime. It isn't. Though you may at times be quite hostile and guarded, our entertaining field trip in the sewage system of the Port Charles Dumps has...enlightened me to the softer side of the blonde Jones sister."
She froze in her movements, careful and emotionless, daring to lock her thickly mascared lashes toward him, "You don't know me, Spinelli. You may think you do, but I can guarantee that you have no idea."
Unaffected by her cold eyes and dead tone, he continued on in a way that only he could, casual, "On the contrary, I think I may have a pretty encompassing ideology of all that is Maxie Jones."
Disregarding her food, she dropped the spoon against the bowl, and quickly crossed her arms over her chest, a single eyebrow arching in a curious challenge, "Really? And who is that? Who am I?"
Silence echoed against stone cold walls; the seriousness of her tone and the sincerity in her eyes rendered him utterly speechless.
A full minute passed before Maxie tore her eyes away, shook her head in disappoinment, and retrieved her purse off the tabletop. She barely whispered, "Yeah, I didn't think so", before she stood to her feet and brushed past him hurridly and out into the brisk air outside Kelly's doors.
Stunned for a only a fraction of a moment, Spinelli leapt to his feet, stumbling out of Kelly's, and bumping directly into Maxie outside the doors. She turned to look at him, defeated and uncaring.
But his eyes searched hers in a way they'd never had before.
And then, like someone had turned the volume back on inside of him, he in a mere whisper informed her that he defined the one and only Maxie Jones as a misguided, misunderstood, stunningly beautiful, young woman who often in a self-destructing manner makes the irrevocably worst choices to hide deep issues of abandonment, fear, and lonliness.
Maxie's only response was to run in the opposite direction.
2 hours later
"What are you doing here?"
Disregarding the harshness of her tone, Spinelli treaded lightly across the wet grass of St. Sebastian's Cemetary, toward the bench in which Maxie sat, staring straight ahead, a single tear streaming from the corner of her eye to the corner of her lip.
A brief but sincere smile overcame his face.
"It's my Fair Friend's birthday."
He paused, hesitated, afraid to take another step or say another word. But when she didn't object, he did exactly both, "And I estimated that you might be here."
She kept her eyes straight, staring somewhere between nothing and the granite tombstone a few mere feet away, "And why are you looking for me?"
Finding courage within he never knew he possesed, he bit down hard on the inside of his lip and as carefully sat down beside her on the cold, wooden bench.
Minutes passed and they continued to sit in silence.
But silence and Spinelli never did sit well together.
He swallowed hard, his head falling down against his chest, as his eyes stared at the hands that continously fidgeted together. A shaky sigh escaped his throat as he opened his mouth to speak, "Despite what our previous history entails, or what common logic might result in, The Jackal can only hope that Wounded Blonde One has come to understand that I can be the sounding board to one's frustrations and woes if that is at all something that one might need to prevail upon."
Maxie didn't show one ounce of emotion as she stung back, "Sorry. But I left my Spinelli-translation-device at home."
Like a slap to the face, Spinelli winced, and then repeated, "The Jackal is your friend."
To gone to be touched or moved, Maxie told herself not to feel, not to care, and not to take much more of this, "You don't get it. You never will, Spinelli." She glanced at him briefly, a slight tremble overtaking her senses, a break in her voice.
"It should be me."
Confronting the weight of her words, Spinelli's eyes snapped over toward her, shaking his head in complete disbelief and refusal.
But Maxie waged forward, obviously needing to get the world off her chest, as she stood to her feet, her eyes never really leaving her sister's grave, "It's the truth. Diego was after me and Georgie just happened to get in the way. She died, she's gone, and I'm left here." She paused, sniffing. "Maybe that's my punishment for all the rotten things I've done. These tombstones, these graves...I've watched everyone I love around me leave me. And now, I'm stuck here. For what, I'll never understand."
She was crying now, and Spinelli was on his feet.
"The Wounded Blonde One thinks...thinks she doesn't deserve her own life?"
She turned to him, in a rage, the same way she'd looked at him that day in Kelly's as she broke all the fragile pieces around her.
"Look what I've made of my life, Spinelli. I'll never be as smart as Georgie. Or as innocent as BJ. Kind like Jesse or as brave as Coop was. I'm me. The dysfunctional, troublemaking, homewrecking, little girl who ruins any chance of happiness that she ever gets. Tha'ts me. In a nutshell. And I'm here. I get to breathe and smile and laugh and love. Love, Spinelli. I get to love and every time I do, it ends. It ends here."
Taking a step forward, he reached his hand out to her, "The Jackal does not see you in that way."
But she'd built up a wall to high and wide for him to cross, "And that's where your naivete comes into play."
Refuting her statements yet again, he began a protect and rebuttal, "The Jackal does not believe himself to be at all naive to the ways of the world..."
She quickly interrupted, "The Jackal is wrong."
He physically jumped back out of clumsy instinct when she came closer to him, placing both of her cold palms rounded against his cheeks, holding his face a breath away from hers.
He'd never seen eyes as magnificent as hers.
"I'm a tornado, Damian."
His name passing her lips was nearly too much too handle.
"And if you're half as smart as I think you are, you'll stay as far away from me as you can. Or I'll wind up destroying you too."
And in the blink of an eye, her hands were gone, those eyes had vanished, and she disappeared out of the graveyard, and away from his sight, leaving him alone among the gone and not forgotten to pray for the most beautiful kind of disaster he'd ever been witness to.