QUAHOGS
"See you at the beach," Max mumbles, and then she's gone.
He'd been watching her out of the corner of his eye for the last hour, debating whether or not to say something. What eventually did made him speak up wasn't even necessarily the introspective yell-muttering she'd been doing; it was the expression on her face, some new cocktail of fear, anger, and profound sorrow that he's never seen color her features before.
"What was that about?" Iggy calls to Fang, looking puzzled.
Nudge swoops a bit closer to him, clipping the very tips of his wings with her own on her downstroke. "Is she okay?"
Fang says nothing, stays impassive. That's his job: to be the constant in a group with five variables. Iggy might blow his temper, Nudge might wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and Max's anxiety might live at an eleven out of ten, but Fang is always calm. Always cool. Always collected.
"She's fine," he says finally. He considers adding more but then decides against it.
"The Voice was annoying her, I think," Angel chips in. "I don't know what it was saying, but she was upset."
"Is Max going crazy?" Gazzy asks loudly from the back of their formation, managing to sound concerned despite the crass nature of the question.
"No," Fang answers tightly.
"She probably just needs a minute," Iggy says to the group, but the almost-eye contact he makes with Fang heavily implies that he thinks there might be more to it.
Fang, admittedly, isn't entirely convinced this is a big deal. Sure, she's been under a lot of stress lately - and sure, the emotions and hormones have been flying around like fossil fuels - but Max is, well, Max. Maybe she's not calm, cool, and collected, but she's got her shit together. She juggles twenty balls in the air with precision on a daily basis, including mothering the kids, figuring out a plan, keeping them all moving. She's the heart of their family.
As he starts to think about it that way, he finds himself frowning deeply. She's their heart, all right, and she wears her own heart proudly on her sleeve. And Fang knows her better than she knows herself. He's seen her frustrated, seen her annoyed, seen her upset; these are not new emotions for her.
That look she had on her face is new, though, and the streaking off alone with tears in her eyes is new, too.
His stomach churns.
In the fifteen minutes it takes them to get within eyeshot of her, Fang's made a one-eighty from indifferent to invested. He's subconsciously picked up his speed by at least ten miles per hour, but if the flock has noticed, they haven't said anything. A quick glance at the kids' faces implies nothing is amiss, but Iggy still looks nervous.
They start angling down, cutting through a patch of thin cloud cover, and the wide expanse of the beach opens up in front of their eyes. They're still five minutes from landing, but their eyesight is sharp enough that Fang can make out figures on the ground. He scans the shore quickly, finding her at the very tip of the beach, a far distance from any other passerby, kneeling in the sand. Surrounded by shattered quahog shells and -
"Uh, Fang?" Gazzy says. His voice is two sizes too small, thin and nervous. "Is that blood?"
He doesn't answer Gazzy. His insides have turned to ice in that moment because it is blood. It is a lot of fucking blood. She's holding what looks like a jagged shell in her right hand and sawing away at her left wrist like a violinist might use a bow on the strings, a crimson puddle forming at her knees.
She's trying to kill herself.
Without thinking, he is flying, really flying, so fast that he can't see her anymore. He's at the beach in less than a minute, skidding to a halt and almost tripping face first on the sand, before flat-out sprinting the rest of the way.
He knows she hears him coming, but she doesn't stop, and that's when he knows how far gone she is. When he reaches her, he grabs her hand roughly and smacks the shell out. The sea air is thick with blood; she's hit a vessel of some sort for sure, and for a half second he almost thinks himself into a panic, imagining her exsanguinating right here, right now.
"What the hell are you doing?" he snaps, shocked into staring at the gaping hole she's sawed into her own arm. His heart is going a million miles a minute, threatening to pop right out of his chest. "Are you crazy?"
The implication of this very moment falls on him like a thousand bricks. This is some real shit, even for them. Mad scientists? Sure. Human/wolf hybrids trying to kill them? Okay. But Max attempting suicide?
He tries to cram the panic back into its box, but some of it has leaked out, crawling through his veins like poison. The sand is getting redder beneath him. Twenty feet behind him, the flock lands and advances on them with urgency.
Max, of all things, glares up at him, but when she speaks, her voice is on its last legs.
"Want the chip out," she half-gasps, half-moans.
The chip. He'd forgotten about the chip. It doesn't fix the situation, but it's something to grasp onto. At least now there's context for her self-injurious behavior, even though they both know there's far more to it than that.
Fang's still holding her bleeding arm uselessly. The crazed part of his brain gives way to the calculating part; robotically, he drops her arm, whips off his backpack, and rifles through the zippered pocket.
He finds the antiseptic, tears off the cap, and simply dumps the whole bottle over her arm. Nudge slowly kneels to flank him, her brown eyes huge, her hands shaking.
"Max, what were you doing?"
Gazzy and Angel aren't far behind her, looking scared and confused, but Nudge is old enough to understand the full magnitude of what Max has done.
Fang isn't entirely sure Max understands the full magnitude of what Max has done, but when she speaks this time, it's a bit more defensive than before.
"I wanted to get the chip out," she whispers.
"Well, forget it! The chip stays in!" He wads up some gauze over the gash, adds an abdominal pad for good measure, and wraps it as tight as he can with a compression dressing. Max's chest is heaving in a totally unfamiliar way, but instead of worrying him further, it only makes him furious.
"You don't get off that easy!" he adds, to make it abundantly clear that he knows this is about so much more than just a tracking chip, and that he wants to kill her for that fact. "You die when we die!"
Max flinches as the words thunder out over the ocean. He hears nothing but fear in his voice when it bounces back to him. A quick survey of the flock tells him what he already knows: Iggy is devastated. Nudge is crying silently at his side. And Gazzy and Angel hear his words and seem to start to understand.
Finally, Max stares up at him. He meets her eyes for a fraction of a second, watches as she reads his face like the wide open book he's sure it is. Then he looks away because it's too much, it's all too much, and if he thinks about it for even a second longer he will become the biggest variable out of the six of them.
Turning his back to her, he starts systematically cramming some of the first aid supplies back into his bag, trying and failing to get his central nervous system in check.
"I'm sorry," Max says, sounding so unlike herself that he turns to make sure it's really her talking. Her eyes are terrified, shining like full moons in her sheet-white face. The trembling in her hands has made its way up her arms and to her core. The heaving in her chest gets deeper and faster and she makes the sort of noise a wounded animal might, pressing her palms to her face and hunching in agony over the bloody sand and quahog shells around her.
And then she cries.
part 1 of 2
this one is a special one to me; I'd love nothing more than for you to review