Title: Dear Jude (Part 2/3)
Pairing:Max/Jude
Disclaimer: I don't even really own my car, how can I claim to own these boys, let alone the Beatles…
Summary:Max writes home from Nam throughout his tour but something is wrong back in the world... Authors Note: Thank You all so much for your reviews! I really appreciate knowing someone is enjoying this piece. Chapter 3 soon to follow.

It had been two days, maybe three, the night seemed to stretch into weeks and the sun was always blotted out in the rainy hours of daylight where they felt foolishly just a little bit less terrified. Max didn't know, didn't really care, there was only his next letter to the man who never wrote back, the soft promises of tomorrow echoing from pages from Lucy, this terrifying existence of pain and hunger was nothing, another day down out of his two year life sentence. They were still days away from their target and every day the jungle grew denser around them, forcing them through leech water that literally sucked what little life they had out of them, through little holdouts which they massacred and then bombed.

Max was adjusting his helmet, throwing his awkwardly long blond hair behind his ear, he hated seeing it, another target for the enemy to see, a constant reminder of those pictures he had sent home, how young he looked, how lost and scared. It was another reminder of the world which he would never see again. He never saw a thing, never shot a round, he wouldn't have known where to aim anyway, he heard it though, the quick snapping of gunfire. He meant to hit the ground, but instead he was falling backwards, splayed out like he was making a snow angel in the muck. The sun had come out, everything was a blinding white light that washed out this hellish jungle, he couldn't see guns or men or the enemy, and for one glorious second he was at home, Lucy and Jude holding him tight and promising to never let go. But like all rays of sunshine in Nam the white light was gone in a second and in its wake there was pain, confusion and blood.

There was more snapping, more gun fire, over and over, the sound filling the air, screaming of wounded and fighting melding and turning into a roar that pounded against his ears. He couldn't move, couldn't shield himself, but maybe that blanket of red would do it for him, it covered him completely, seeping into his eyes and turning the sky as red as he was. He wanted to go back home-back to Jude and Lucy- he wanted to hold onto that dream- he wished the pounding in his head would stop long enough for him to focus, the stabbing across his side to ease.

"Carrigan!" The gun fire had stopped but the screaming only got louder, a man was bending over him, adding to the roar in his head. "Carrigan!" Max blinked, what else could he do? Did this man know that he was so covered in blood that his teeth and eyes were stained with it? Thick fingers stabbed into his neck and retreated, waves of pain rolled over him, Max was going to be sick, but only if he didn't pass out first.

"He is alive! Get him out of here!" And then…there was nothing.

There were flashes of sound and places, the whir of a helicopter, sterile white rooms as alien as the jungle and finally a blur of everything, people, rooms, cars, doctors, they spoke and prodded and stabbed and in a flash they were gone. Gone like Jude and Lucy were gone.

The first time Max realized that he had been injured was sitting in a hospital bed stateside, the TV flickering soundlessly in front of himself and the mindless drones of his fellow patents. He was alive. He was alive but when he asked for mail the nurse had nothing to give to him, he was alive without a purpose, without a home, there would be no next letter to Jude.

Time passed the same way here as it did in Nam, the days were dark and without hope, only slightly less terrifying than the nights which lasted for weeks. Max counted the days here just the same as he had there, one less day of his two year sentence, how many days had he missed in the blur?

When seven days had passed, seven days closer to his freedom which would never come, Lucy arrived. He was in New York, he didn't know places like this existed in New York; it had been so vibrant once. Lucy sat by his side, holding his hand, begging him to talk to her. But didn't she understand that he wasn't the Max she loved? He had died in a field of muck in Nam like an angel, trying to get home to her. This Max knew that home was in that vision, the vision which he should have ended his life with. Lucy and New York weren't home unless there was Jude, Jude who read every letter he wrote, who waited with bated breath and cried for him and his lost innocents, Jude who never existed in the first place.

It was another three days towards freedom, hiding in this hospital that felt like war with Lucy at his side, that she dropped a letter into his lap when she kissed him goodbye, telling him that it was from Jude. Max watched her leave out of the corner of his eye, then looked down at the paper he held, the heavy scratching lines undoubtedly Jude's hand writing, the return address in Liverpool. Max took a breath and it felt like life.

The letter was unopened, addressed only to their address, no name, as hastily written as the letter inside it. 'I'm coming home'.

The next day Max heard Lucy when she spoke, he heard that Jude had been deported the same week he had shipped out, he heard that they had been afraid to tell him of all the bad things happening at home. Max smiled while Lucy spoke of all the bad things, they weren't bad, they were life, they meant that Jude, his Jude who would cry for him and write to him and love him was real and was coming home to him.

The days passed by like lifetimes as they always had and nights stretched for eternities but every one that passed Max knew was a day closer not to the end of his servitude but a day closer to the home he thought he lost. He listened and even talked a little to make Lucy smile, he tried to smile himself but it felt unnatural on his face, forced and alien, so he just watched Lucy. He walked himself around, waking atrophied muscles, ate the rations they passed as food because it was a precursor to the life he wanted back. He nodded at all the right places when the doctors and nurses asked him questions, yes he knew where he was, who he was, and finally yes, he knew how to take care of himself, take care of his injuries on his own.

Walking out of the hospital that day felt like seeing the sun for the first time. Lucy brought the car but Max refused, he wanted to see it, the life, the color, he needed to see how life went on without him, that the world was still the world he had left. When he walked the stairs to their flat and all his friends poured out, holding him, smiling, talking a roar of joyous sounds he knew that the world was just as he had left it and the only part left to recover was his own.

No one stopped Max as he walked into the room that had always been dominated by Jude no matter who shared it with him. The paintings on the walls were already fading to a color Jude had never seen in them and the old sheets and cloths that lay on the bed smelled of nothing but stale life, no matter how hard he tried to find Jude. Yet the room comforted him, he could see the splattering of dozens of different paints on the floor, even flecking onto the walls where Jude had been too engrossed to wipe it off. The old coat that lay untouched on the dresser reminded him of the first cold days in Princeton that they had met, the easy bond they shared, how Max had loved the way Jude looked in his coat and told him to keep it.

It was two days until Max found the home he had longed for since the moment he left it. He waited for three hours on the cold hood of the taxi he drove, numb to everything, paralyzed by fear now that the moment was so close at hand that something would go wrong. It was waiting with bated breath to see who would fall, where the next gush of red would pour from to wait to see if this boat of cold metal held his life within it.

The sun was a blinding white light, smearing the details of the people coming forward until the very end, when a horde of people disappeared and all that was left was Jude.

"JUDE JUDE JUDEY JUDEY JUDEY!" His vocal chords protested in agony as he spoke more in an instant than he had in the past month and all the frozen tense muscles in his body leapt and he was finally home. They ran, their bodies collided, and Max wrapped himself around him, pressed his face into hair and neck, mewling the name over and over "Jude Judey Judey", being held so tight he thought he could never escape, would never want to.

God. They spoke. They laughed, they touched. Max lived more in those first five minutes with Jude than the accumulation of his entire life until now. He was free, this was the moment he had been waiting for his whole life, he wasn't lost, wasn't broken, he was finally fucking home.