Sorry for being a day late. It was a reeeeeally long weekend.

Enjoy!

#3: Max's Mom

She was, in general, a patient woman. If being an archeologist hadn't honed that talent to the precision of an Edo samurai's blade, having a rambunctious, world-saving son certainly had.

But that was the trouble.

Because sometimes when her son saved the world, he lost himself.

She never wanted to see him broken as he had been after Toyama again. She never wanted to hear him crying out in his sleep and realize she was powerless to do anything but wake him and offer him comfort – comfort he never fully accepted. Inviting Norman and Virgil to live with them had been less an affirmation and more an act of desperation.

She could not share his trials and his pains, but she could at least ensure that those who did were close at hand to help him deal with them.

She had also, unbeknownst to her son, put in several long phone calls to Doctor Peter Venkman, needing her own counselling in the face of Max's suffering. Doctor Venkman had been sympathetic and insightful, but in the end, he had left her with one inevitable truth:

He's always going to do what he has to do. You can't stop him and you can't protect him from that. What you can do is give him whatever he needs when he comes home and never hold it against him when he goes out to break your heart again. Because he has to go. But if he has to carry guilt for your feelings as well as his own, one day they will be too heavy for him.

So she taught herself to be supportive and understanding rather than giving into fantasies of stealing the Cap and throwing it down the nearest well. She patched up his scrapes and she muttered about stains and she badgered him to clean his room and to keep Norman from leaving the refrigerator door open.

She tried to be his port in the storm, his fixed point of normalcy. His example of taking the world in stride and letting it leave no mark.

But when she was alone with her son off saving the world from who-knew-what, those marks showed.

The first time he had gone out with Virgil and Norman after Toyama, she had compulsively cleaned the attic. The second time, she tore every book off every bookshelf in the house and recatalogued them. The third, she dumped the kitchen's stores and cooked everything she vaguely knew how to make.

This time, she was oiling and dusting every artifact and relic in the house.

She had made it all the way upstairs to the Maasai mask in the hall before she heard the door downstairs open.

"Mom! We're home!"

The scent of sulphur hit her before she even reached the stairs. She stared at her boy for a moment before descending, adopting her slightly-brusque, practical mannerisms at once.

"Max! We've talked about this! Shoes stay on the porch if they're that dirty – and what on earth is all over your clothes?"

"My shoes aren't dirty," he said, shaking his head and dislodging some black soot. "They're burned. And a little melted."

"The smell tells me that, thank you very much," she returned. Then she peered to Virgil and Norman. "And you two are even worse."

"We heartily apologize," Virgil said, but his eyes were communicating something else entirely – that Max was safe and unhurt and had not been troubled by the events of the night. It was a language she didn't know how exactly he had learned, but Virgil spoke the silent tongue of worried and loving parents as fluently as he did everything else. Somehow, she didn't think it had started with her Max, but there was no denying that her son had acquired for himself an additional parent in the ancient Lemurian.

(But not Norman. Whatever else Norman was, and he was too many things to explain sometimes, he was no parent to Max. She often wished he were. Not that it would have made Max any safer, but because there was no denying that she felt a little better with more people willing to tell him 'no' than to follow him loyally into danger.)

(Even if, in the end, there was no way to stop him from going there anyway.)

(Without her. And that would never not tear her soul into strips of pain and fear.)

(But never where he could see.)

Virgil's message was clear tonight – Max was all right. She might have collapsed in relief, but she had to be what Max needed. Her feelings could wait.

"To the backyard, both of you. I don't want to see either one of you in the house until you've hosed off the worst of it." She peered at Norman. "Make that all of it."

Virgil squawked. "Dear lady, I do not hose off."

"You do tonight," she said firmly. She turned her back on them. "Max, give me that shirt before you take one more step. Actually, give me all of it. It's straight into the bath for you and the garbage for the rest of this."

"Aw!" Max wrinkled his nose. "But those jeans were new!"

"And in one night they've lived the hardships of a thousand normal children's days," she returned. "Off. All of it. Bath."

Max sighed and a cloud of ash rose from him. "Sorry, guys. Better do what she says or we'll be scrubbing the house for a week."

"You bet you will."

Norman just nodded and scooped up Virgil, who was still protesting, and headed back out the door to the garden.

Max looked back at his mom. "You didn't worry too much, did you?"

If only you knew, my love, she thought. But instead she made herself smile. "I'm more worried about my carpets now than I was about you with those two out stopping bad guys."

"Good," he said, and he gave her a real smile, the warm one of trust and his own relief. "We had it all under control. Except for the volcano. Nobody has a volcano under control."

"I am certain you could manage if you had to," she told him. Then, to keep him from seeing the building emotion in her eyes, she reached down and yanked his shirt up over his head.

"Gah! Hey!" He squirmed, but he knew mothers insisting on cleanliness cannot be denied by even the most determined child. "I didn't ask for help!"

"You didn't have to," she said. "You're my son and you're filthy. It's my obligation as a mother to help. Bears lick their cubs, birds preen their chicks, and I do this."

"I'd rather have the bear," he grumbled as his head popped out from the shirt.

"Get any more dirt on my floors and you will," she told him. "Now, up to the tub and put the rest of your clothes right in the garbage up there. No arguments."

Max sighed dramatically but obeyed, tiptoeing up the stairs and trying unsuccessfully not to shed soot with every step.

When he was out of sight, she looked at the pool of ash around where he had stood and the small trail that followed him. She traced it with her eyes until it disappeared around the corner. But she could hear the bath water running and Max singing something to himself as he did when he was content and at ease.

She drew the blackened shirt to her chest and buried her face in it.

As her son splashed and sang and now the faint sounds of Virgil bellowing about the cold water of the hose wafted from side of the house, she let a few tears fall where none could see into the ash and soot of her son's shirt.

He was all right. He was not hurt and he was not scarred.

But she knew it was only a matter of time until Toyama happened again, perhaps in a different way, but the pain would be the same.

Then, with the power of the same steel-cored soul her son had inherited, she drew herself up and took a deep breath. Today all was well. She would continue until another day ended differently.

By the time Max emerged from the tub, she was so busy scrubbing the carpet he didn't think anything of the slight trace of soot on her face.