~ A good thing ~

Max stepped up to Logan's bedside after the doctor left and looked down at his still form.  It was the second time she'd seen him lying in a hospital bed this close to death. The first time she hadn't really cared what happened to him. Got involved in his business against her will somehow. She wasn't even sure what had driven her to rescue him from the second attempt on his life by the hitman. Guess he'd awakened a conscience she hadn't known she had.

This time, though, she felt helpless. She kept looking around for some bad guys to beat up, but there weren't any here. So she resorted to inwardly shaking her fist at heaven as she stood watching him.

Logan took one shallow breath, and didn't take another for a long time. Max felt a rising sense of panic as she thought he was gone, and wrestled it down, remembering that it was the effect of the morphine that the nurse had just given him. His broad chest rose slightly under the sheet then, and fell again.

She couldn't let him die like this, she thought, holding her own breath as she waited for his next one. If he stopped breathing she'd bag him herself.

No, she decided. She wouldn't let him go like this.

Hooking up some tubing into a rudimentary transfusion set, she inserted the needle into her vein. She couldn't find anything to tourniquet her arm with, but his blood pressure was probably low enough for the blood to keep flowing in the right direction.

As she watched her blood slowly displace the saline in the tubing and flow into Logan's vein, Max found herself asking what it was about him that made him so important to her. As if in response, words that he'd said to her seemingly so long ago floated to the surface of her memories.

"You did a good thing, Max."

He was always saying that to her. To her: rogue, cat burglar and bad-assed biker chick. To her, he said that.

"You did a good thing, Max," he'd said, the time that she had rescued Maria from that creep pedophile. Max was still berating herself for having left Lucy behind all those years ago, but his words were balm to melt away the guilt from the past.

He'd said those words to her, who'd never done anything right in her life.

"It's still a good thing," he'd said when she'd wondered why she had saved Lydecker's life and thrown away her chance to be rid of her nemesis forever.

When Logan spoke those words, Max felt as though she were receiving a medal of commendation.

"Do you think we did the right thing, Logan?" she'd asked him of Zack's and her decision to let Lydecker take Brin back to Manticore.

And he again had the right words to say to take away the guilt, if not the pain.

"Do you think we did the right thing?" she would ask him, as if his were the morals that she should judge herself by. As if he were her teacher or her priest or something.

And he would look at her, his eyes piercing to her core—those eyes that represented the truth and justice that he fought for every day, those burning blue eyes boring into her soul.

Her soul. Heh. Before she met Logan, Max used to wonder if she had one.

So, he would look at her, in her, through her, almost as if he knew the effect that one word from his lips could have on her.

And then his lips would part and she would hold her breath, her heart pounding as she waited for his reply.

He would speak, his voice always gentle, barely above a whisper. Yet the words he said were like a hurricane, tearing down walls, buildings, devastating entire cities of doubt and darkness.

"You did a good thing, Max."

Because of who he was, those words were the highest praise. And because of what he was to her, she was starting to believe them.

Max looked at those lips now, lips that she had kissed only a few hours ago. They'd been pale even then, she realized, and she was an idiot for not knowing that something was wrong. They were almost white now, white and unmoving in his drawn face. She tried to calculate how much blood he'd lost and how much of her blood she could afford to give him. He'd need at least two pints, maybe three…

Heck. If she could, she'd give him all of it.

She was dead anyway. The hospital had security cameras in every corner; it wouldn't be long before someone identified her and they came and took her away. Her blood could do more good by flowing through his veins than it would ever do measured out in test tubes at some Manticore lab.

She didn't mind dying right there, if only he'd wake up and say those words again, tell her that she'd done the right thing.

Yeah, right. Like that was going to happen.

If Logan woke up now he'd probably give her hell for coming back into the city and putting herself in danger, for signing her own death warrant.

But she didn't mind, if he woke up and scolded her before she died. Or before they came and took her away, which really was the same thing.

Because for once, Max didn't need Logan to tell her.

She knew she was doing a good thing.

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