Prompt: Last Lines, Alec/Max, "He could live with that."
He's never been one for deep thoughts or heavy ruminations. He likes to live in the moment – he plans for the future only as far as he needs to get to his next meal, the next heist, the next girl. Logan's all about the big picture; he sees everything in terms of how it fits into the whole, tiny pieces in some messed up jigsaw puzzle, trying to cobble together a better world. Alec's never seen the point in wishing for something you'll never have.
She's usually gone when he wakes up in the morning. That's okay with him – shark DNA can be a harsh mistress, and if he has to share her mornings with paperwork or rowdy X6s or whatever home-brewed catastrophe is happening today, at least her nights are all his. They fill them with midnight rendezvous outside of seedy mob clubs, drag races across town just ahead of the bad guys, heart pounding and his blood pumping in his ears so hard he thinks he might go deaf, but he can still hear Max's laughter ringing through the air next to him. They usually get away clean, X5 agility more than a match for whatever the city throws at them, but he loves it even when something goes wrong, and they have to scrape and move and runrunrun, pulling off some daring hijinks that he'll tell Dalton about later just to see how wide the kid's eyes can get before Max pops him one. He shouldn't look forward to her hitting him as much as he does, but hey, it's a screwed up world out there, and he'll take her hands on him however he can get them. Not that he's hard up for that or anything – the best part of their arrangement, as far as he's concerned, is that when the fighting and the running and the bragging is over, he gets to go back to their crappy little one room hole-in-the-wall apartment with her in his arms. When she kisses him he can feel the adrenaline start to spike, his heart rate skyrocketing like it always does when he's about to do something stupidly dangerous, and he grins against her lips because it doesn't get much better than this.
Whenever Max ends up leaving TC (and it's happening a lot more these days, people finally learning that there are worse things out there than some messed up kids with bar codes on their necks) he very carefully goes about his normal routine, grabs some lunch, flirts with the cute new X5 on cafeteria duty, squashes whatever crisis is currently brewing down in Command before heading back to his office to go over the latest set of blueprints his fence on the outside has dropped off. He doesn't ask where she goes. She always comes to find him when she gets back, and he tells himself that that's what matters.
They've never said I love you, but he knows her better than anyone, knows how hard she throws herself into everything, how much she gives. He likes where they are now, wouldn't trade it for anything – not misty dreams of "maybe someday," insubstantial as the Seattle fog, or fevered memories from his first taste of freedom, where he had a different girl (or two) every night. Things might not be perfect, but they're real, and solid, and he finds himself believing in it more with every passing day.
He likes to live in the moment, and if this moment is all they have, well...
He could live with that.