Disclaimer: None of it's mine. It's all for Cameron, Eglee, and Fox. And a good thing too.
Note: I've been doing this sort of thing on and off for years—never knew there was a whole website devoted to it! The accuracy of the dialogue is limited to what I could remember, as I didn't tape the episode. Anyway, please R&R, it's my first1
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She was still sullen, angry. In fact, she couldn't tell what made her angrier—that he hadn't told her, that he'd gone to a former Manticore employee, or that he'd gone to someone else instead of her. "If you needed another transfusion, all you had to do was ask."
"It's not that simple, Max." He could practically feel the frustration and resentment pouring off of her in hot waves. "My body is rejecting the stem cells. The nerve endings are unraveling almost as fast as they healed. Right now, she's about the only person in the world who can keep me from landing in that chair again." It hurt to say it out loud, even more than he'd thought. Especially to her.
Sympathy tangled with anger in her throat so that she couldn't speak for a moment. Finally, "You could have told me."
Her tone, hurt but not accusatory, softened him. He started towards her. And felt his legs suddenly give out, tumbling him in an undignified heap on his face in front of Max.
"Logan!" She sprang to catch him, out of reflex. He slapped her hands away.
"I can do it!" The fury was white-hot now. Some sardonic corner of his mind reflected that he'd never met a woman who made him feel like less of a man. He knew it was macho male bullshit, but genetically engineered or not, she was still a girl, and it rankled.
He braced his hands underneath himself and pushed, struggling to drag himself towards the chair that loomed behind him. He maintained a stony silence as Max, ignoring his earlier protest, looped her arms under his shoulders and helped him into the chair. Everything about the situation humiliated him: that he had shown so much weakness in front of her, that she couldn't let him prove even some small measure of self-sufficiency, and that under other circumstances he would have welcomed her hands on him. When she started to arrange his body in the chair like he was some sort of invalid, his patience snapped. He pushed her away with a violence that surprised even him and lashed out at her with his voice like a knife: "I've gotta ask you, though: do you need me in this chair?"
The cut was so swift and deep she didn't even know she was bleeding for a second. Then the pain hit her right in the gut. Funny how her Manticore roots made her recover from physical wounds more quickly, and emotional ones more slowly. She had a feeling this one was going to leave a scar. She forced her face into an expressionless mask. If she had been all heat before, she was pure ice now—Logan all but felt the blood freeze in his veins, and was both sorry and viciously pleased to have hurt her. That's one kind of power, anyway, he thought bitterly. "Let's go," she snapped, slinging his coat at him as she stalked out the door.
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The silence in the car and Max's hurt, poking at him like a neglected child, combined to make Logan feel like the lowest slug ever to crawl the earth. He remained silent as long as possible, childishly determined not to break first, but finally he had to choose between speaking and going quietly insane. "I'm sorry," he told her, and meant it.
"It's OK," she replied quietly, meeting his eyes with relief. The thing was, he was right, in a way. After a childhood of being controlled, it did feel good to be in charge. To be the strongest. And while she desperately wanted Logan out of his chair for his sake, she could admit to herself that just the tiniest part of her liked being the ass-kicker of the two of them. Not that she was about to admit it to him. And not that it made his accusation any less painful. Anyway, it was her deal, and she'd handle it. No sense letting him know he'd given her something to think about—God knew what ideas he'd get if she let that slip.
"I didn't want to tell you . . . for all kinds of reasons." It was as close as he could get to an explanation.
She tried to help him, to shrug it off. "I understand."
"I'm not sure you do." He wasn't bitter now, he just didn't think a woman as perfect as she had been engineered to be could understand physical loss like his. "I felt what it was like to function like a regular person again." He lowered his voice slightly, finding it difficult to get the words out. "To be whole and complete."
Max wasn't sure what to say. It made her a little uncomfortable to see so much self-doubt from Logan "Eyes Only All-Knowing All-Seeing" Cale. Though at least he was being honest with her now. Still, she would cheerfully have taken on a handful of Manticore's finest rather than face the naked uncertainty in his eyes. Flesh-and-blood battles were so much cleaner. Don't be such a coward, Max, she chided herself roughly, and plunged in with the straight-up truth. "You've never not been that to me," she told him quietly, trying to make the simple words into an arrow that might penetrate his defenses.
From a tactical standpoint, she had to admit her attack wasn't exactly everything she'd hoped for. Logan only smiled a little, a slight quirk of his lips that was more ironic than genuine. Nice of her to try, he thought, but they both knew the truth. He remembered the night he'd stood up in front of her for the first time since the shooting, remembered how he could almost feel her heart pounding, breath catching, the way she'd stared at him like she couldn't look away. He hadn't had that kind of effect on her since that night she'd broken in and he'd played her to catch a glimpse of her barcode. A dirty trick, in retrospect, he admitted to himself, but at least he'd been capable of playing it. Max had certainly never swooned over her wheelchair-bound chess buddy. And that was just a symptom of a much larger disease. Being in the chair the first time, he'd let himself drift, and forget the man he used to be. Now the contrast was too strong, and he couldn't face it. He kept his eyes fixed on the road. "Staying out of that wheelchair means more than anything in my life--anything." Even you, Max, he added silently. "And if I wind up back in it . . . let's just say I'm not gonna live my life like that."
He didn't know if she understood his full meaning or not. Not, he guessed, as she remained silent, and couldn't tell whether he was disappointed or pleased. Didn't matter, he told himself firmly, and tried to believe it.
Neither one of them said another word, their eyes staring out into the darkness ahead.
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The sight of the ambulance in front of Logan's building turned Max's dread into panic, shooting through her blood like hot mercury. For once, she only spared a cursory thought for the comfort of her beloved Ninja, locking it against the building more out of reflex than any real concern for its welfare. She took the stairs inside five at a time. On the way up, she hauled a pin out of her pocket to pick the lock, just in case.
It didn't turn out to be necessary. The door hung open. She couldn't see any sign of paramedics—had she somehow missed them? She rushed into the apartment, shouting desperately. "Logan? Logan!" She could feel blood pounding behind her eyeballs as she moved from room to room, blurring even her genetically enhanced vision. She couldn't see him, why couldn't she see him? Empty—empty—empty—and then suddenly she stopped, stunned into immobility. Her frantic eyes took in his desk, his computer . . . and the icy gleam of the gun resting on the smooth, pale wood. Her stomach dropped, but she forced herself to keep going, running out of the room, away from the gun and the possibilities. Maybe it's not too late…
The sight of Logan, alive and whole in front of her as she came around the corner, quite simply hamstrung her. Her legs gave out from under her and she collapsed to her knees in front of his chair, throwing her arms around him, wild with relief. "I didn't know what to think," she babbled, hardly aware of what she was saying. "The ambulance . . ." She was startled to feel tears in her eyes. What was it about this man that always got her so emotional? Oh, quit thinking so much, Max, she admonished herself, and simply closed her eyes and hung on.
Logan, for his part, was more than a little surprised—and more than a little pleased—to find a near-hysterical Max clinging to him. What happened to all that cool self-possession? he wondered. Then, with hesitant cockiness… Did I do that? After a moment of motionless shock, he returned her embrace just as fiercely, his cheek pressed to the top of her head, his hand buried in her soft hair. His face hardened with the effort to control his own emotion as he realized what he had been on the verge of doing. He remembered what his neighbor had told him as she lay on the floor, head bloodied, despairing: "You're young. You can do anything you want. You have everything to live for."
And, as cliché as it seemed, she was right. Maybe he'd been right, too—maybe, as long as he was in the wheelchair, he'd never feel whole again. But he had friends, he had a life, he had an important mission—in his self-pity, he'd forgotten how important—and he had Max. Sitting there, with this beautiful, infuriating, headstrong, stubborn, and incredibly precious woman in his arms, he held her even closer as he realized how monumentally stupid it would have been to leave her.