Between
Creeno


Thanks for the reviews! One more part, and I'm done.


Max shoots and shoots and shoots.
But they just keep coming.


The people they kill, they haunt him in his dreams. They crawl into his bunk, armed with anything and everything. All of them are small, all of them have small hands and when they look at him, they all look like poor, poor Prudence.
It makes waking up a brief heaven.

-

Lucy sends letter after letter.
And he always asks, How's Jude?
She says: He's fine.
She says: He's ok.
She says: He misses you.
Max doesn't think so. He's not seen a drawing or even a stick figure from Jude.

-

"Carrigan!"
Max swallows and stands up, "Yessir?"

"Fetch Johnson for me, son." Private Mitchell doesn't even make eye contact.
It's code for:

another man's killed himself. go make it look good.

He's on his way home, is what Max thinks to himself, even if it's not true.

-

What sends Max home is a piece of shrapnel.
Only, it feels as if God's hand itself descended and flicked him right on his head, sent his world spinning and tilting into nothing but a parade of bloody Prudence's and a faceless Jude who shakes his head and says:

Right mess you've gotten into, mate.

-

Lucy's smile is watery and tired. There's something wrong with her and it takes Max a moment to wade through the Blue (beautiful Blue, made things better, so much better) to see it:
Lucy wasn't Lucy.
This Lucy was made of tired angles and sharp lines. She was loud, so loud now, not the quiet girl with a knowing smirk.

"What happened?" Max rasps. "You ain't, ain't right anymore, Luce."
Her tears flow and the pieces come together.

-

He looks at the ocean and he thinks of a dingy English town. Though Lucy didn't want him to, he saw the room full of Jude's drawings. He saw his friend's own breakdown recorded in lines and color.

-

Max looks to the ocean and wills it to bring Jude back home.
Wherever this home was now, where Prudence was alive and Sadie and Jojo were trying to stitch themselves back together and Lucy was only whole when she was mourning.
But home was home, and he'd be damned if Jude wasn't here to share it with him.


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