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Her coordination, usually near-fucking-perfect, is her sign to stop drinking. Bile burns her throat, vertigo settling in the space between her ears and a heavy wine smell - a cheap strong Bordeaux - clings to her skin. The winter air of the valley permeates the safehouse and an awful, heavy, nothing weighs on her.
She hears Nathan’s voice distantly. He’s not saying anything in particular, but it’s noise and it’s miserable.
Weaver swipes the bottle from under her nose - and she nearly stands to hit the man when he claims she’s had enough. Her legs wobble too much for her to do anything more than consider it, and even just thinking about it makes her knuckles hurt. A good hurt. She could use a fight. At least back then, when she was fighting, she wasn’t thinking about it.
“Wine?” Weaver offers Grey with a jerk of the bottle. She shakes her head. Maddox - or Raptor One (is there a Raptor Two?) - snores loudly on the couch.
Weaver takes a mouthful for himself and pours the rest down the sink. “Can you walk?”
It’s hard to shake her head with her forehead hung in her hands. She swallows back the urge to vomit, goosebumps raising along her skin. Her brain’s been replaced by a bag of marbles that slosh and slur when she tilts her head and she’s not certain it’s possible to feel this cold. When the worst of her nausea bout passes - why the fuck had she eaten beforehand - she bites out her answer, changing her mind at the last second. “Yes.”
A sigh of disbelief from Weaver, but she doesn’t correct herself. Neither does he press her; they’re not nearly familiar enough for that. She might reconsider socking the bloke if he challenged her, and she was looking for a reason - any at all - to yell, to fight. As if she hadn’t had her fill of it on Terminus.
Everything’s wrong - wonky. The break in violence feels more like an interim than a cessation, and she’s under no impression that it gets any easier; Weaver had made that clear. There’s a long road between them and Richtofen, and Franco’s merely the first step of many.
It was an easy idea to latch onto - that of climbing the blame pyramid, ending anybody who got in her way. Modi, Franco, some quack named Richtofen who’s the brains of it all.
Nathan wouldn’t like that - never had. Schoolyard scuffles sent him to tears, Mum raising her voice at Dad had him drowning the noise out in his room, headphones turned up as loud as they could go, Maya’s deafening metal tapes in his walkman.
He never really grew out of that. Asking after missing migrants, big sister chasing after him to clean up his messes. Not that she’s much of a sister, anymore.
A tangle of limbs, multiple beings knit into one another. Fat, flesh, muscle and blood. Bones, what must’ve been a variety of organs, teeth and hair. She’ll never forget the smell, amplified by the stench of the undead.
She looks up again when everyone - save Peck - has excused themselves from the kitchen. Weaver had muttered something about leaving early in the morning, to not worry if he wasn’t there. Chasing up some old contacts before they moved again - now that they know where Krafft is; an old hoot that, in some capacity, relates to Richtofen.
“Give us a hand,” she groans, her palms planting firmly on the table as she makes to stand. She probably can walk, if a bit unstable, but she’d rather not risk her teeth on the stairs.
Peck can borrow her depth perception and her, his sobriety.
He supports her weight with an arm under hers and wrapped around her back. The fabric of his coat is stiff, sea-salt in its fibres. Lucky him, she scoffs. Her jacket suffered blood and brains before she dumped in the first dustbin she came across.
“Was gonna brain Weaver,” she murmurs as her foot catches on a step. She means to elaborate, that the bastard had taken her wine, but the words don’t come. She blinks and her vision doubles for a second, refocusing after a long moment.
“Be my guest,” he scoffs.
Maya snorts aloud and it hurts.
She hasn’t cried yet. Hadn’t had the time, really, and now that she has the time she hasn’t got the tears. Too much shit to do.
Her knees nearly give out when they make the landing at the top of the stairs and Peck catches her as he curses under his breath. She gets a faceful of his jacket; it’s hard to breathe with her mouth pressed against the fabric, so she lolls her head to the side.
She makes eye contact with him as he stares down to regard her. Her guts churn under her skin.
It doesn’t last more than a moment and she steadies herself, taking more of her weight off of Peck now that the stairs have been dealt with, and stumbles over to the room. She nearly huffs when she eyes the singular bed - two mattresses atop its frame and no sheets. At least there weren’t conspicuous stains painting them, although she isn’t quite sure what she’d been expecting from the safehouse - one vaguely linked to the CIA at that.
Somehow, the ashtray by the bed doesn’t surprise her but the lack of a strong cigarette odour does. Oxymoronic, that.
She sits perched on the edge of the bed with her eyes closed, listening as Peck rustles around the wardrobe and closet for sheets.
Mum’s never going to know, Maya decides already. There isn’t a way to explain what happened to Nathan, not without sounding like she had a few kangaroos loose. When Dad went missing, she and Nathan had shared that burden of knowledge; they’d watered down the tale of his violent death in order to make it more palatable for their mother. Just a little fib to soften the blow. Maya’s not entirely sure she can do it again. Their family of four reduced to just her - and Mum.
And still, the upset hasn’t hit her yet - only the feeling of her temper bristling.
Peck pulls her out of her head, a bag dropping by her feet. Her bag. He runs a bath in the ensuite and she blinks harshly, fighting the sleep that had evaded her on the trip over.
She squints at him, confused when he reappears a moment later.
“Thought you were taking a bath,” she says, and her mouth immediately wets itself, her stomach churning with warning - she’s going to throw up.
He spots her gagging, a muffled sound of annoyance escaping his throat, and he’s quick to help (drag) her to the bathroom, her forearms bracing herself over the sink as her head hangs.
A moment passes; she thinks she’s in the clear.
Wrong. She gags again and spews, the vomit burning more than she feels it should. It happens again after she catches her breath, an uncomfortable spasm in her stomach as she vomits once more.
“Agh.” Peck takes a disgusted step back, but doesn’t leave the room, hesitant.
She runs the tap when the feeling passes, and cups her hands to rinse her mouth, repeating the motion until the sour taste disappears before swallowing mouthfuls of water. She splashes water on her face, too.
“Bath was for me?” Maya croaks with a dip of her head.
Peck grunts. “Still is.”
Smart arse.
“You’re not- you’re not so fresh yourself,” she quips. Her gaze remains forward on the foggy mirror as she slips off her shirt. The steam of the room seems to have done her a bit of good, and she doesn’t feel as terrible now that she’s vomited.
What goes around comes around, her mother had always said. Always says (she’s still alive, Maya). It applies now, Maya supposes with a bit of bitterness; she’d helped Peck at his most pathetic all those months back, now he gets to return the favour.
Once seated in the bath, she scrubs herself hard. She scours her skin until her undertone blushes a bright pink, until her skin feels raw. She goes after her hair next, rubbing the salt from her strands. It’s as if stress bleeds from her, and with each painful pass that strips away dirt and sweat she feels a bit lighter. Like there’s a little more room in her body for that heavy expanse of anger that lives in her mind.
She thinks about it, back when she and Peck had first released Weaver and the others, he’d tried to distract her from her goal. He’d announced the focus of their presence to be his warheads - and escaping the island. She’d thought he was being selfish then. That he’d merely promised her with information on Nathan to coax her to the island. But it wasn’t like that, was it? He’d been the only one to offer his condolences, too, after she- after Nathan died.
“You didn’t want me to find Nathan.”
Peck’s seated on the floor of the bathroom with his back against a wall, his eye closed. At some point, he must’ve shed his coat - his bare arms of little muscle tone bared for her to see. He breathes in deeply when she speaks.
“No,” he agrees. “I suspected his fate.”
She thinks about her decision not to tell Mum - and that Peck is like herself, in a way. Not that she’d ever admit it. But Maya isn’t like her mother. She isn’t like her brother. She isn’t soft in that regard, she doesn’t need to be protected like that.
“Franco’s dead,” she promises lowly instead of chewing Peck out like she wants to. She never had been good at that, making friends and keeping them, and it isn’t that she hasn’t got the anger for it - to yell at him - but rather she can’t gather enough of it. He’s helped her too much, maybe, or perhaps she’s just too fucking rattled to act normal anymore.
Zombies, she huffs, what the fuck? Dad’d get a kick out of that one.
She washes her hair twice and scrubs her body once more for good measure. She needs that island, and all memory of it, gone.
“I had a brother, too,” Peck regales with a bit of boredom. She doesn’t respond, or make any sort of noise indicating she heard other than a brief pause. “Last I’d heard he became a school principal. That was about a decade back, of course. Never much liked me.”
Maya snorts when she imagines Peck surrounded by brats, a heavy scowl on his face, brows furrowed deeply with a ruler in hand. It makes incredible sense to her that, if they’re a fraction as intelligent as him, Peck’s family would be involved in academia.
Maybe if she weren’t as close to Nathan he wouldn’t have joined her in Dad’s footsteps and gotten caught up in all that. Or maybe if he were less soft and never asked after those missing migrants. Or maybe if they had more money to send him off to uni. Or maybe if -
Her hands fist the hair by her temples, water runs down her knuckles from between her fingers. She lets go, forcibly, and brings her knees up toward her chest.
“Your defection the nail in the coffin?” Maya asks, opting to think about anything else.
“Exactly,” Peck confirms.
She hums, nodding absently before gripping the sides of the tub.
“Water’s getting cold,” she says with more energy than she has, an attempt at levity. She slurs on the word water, pronouncing it as if it were spelt war-ah. She feels a bit more coherent, to some degree - emotionally perhaps, but oxymoronically she feels exhausted too, eyes slipping closed. Drowsy. Her coordination hasn’t yet made its reprisal.
He helps her out, not averting his gaze, strictly, and she doesn’t feel as if she’s being ogled.
Grey borrowed her pyjamas, she means to tell Peck, and that she’d have to sleep in her underwear. Only, when she looks up at him, his breath on her forehead, she doesn’t say anything at all. Only studies the burnt scar on the side of his face, how his facial hair only starts to stubble on the smooth, healthy skin on the other side. His eye half-closed as he gazes down to make eye contact. His hand, under her bicep from helping her up, large and warm.
He turns suddenly and reaches for a towel, wrapping it around her shoulders before practically kicking her out of the bathroom. She’d have fallen on her arse were the bed any further from the door. A sheet thrown over the mattresses, tucked neatly in on the sides.
She hears the water drain from the tub, shaking her head as she puts on her underwear and a singlet - shivering as the cold air hits her damp skin. She hardly thinks about it at all when she pulls his jacket on, a bit of his body heat having lingered, and she leans back on the stiff bed - far better than the surfaces she usually finds herself sleeping atop.
She’s sure she falls asleep briefly, her eyes peeling open a crack when he finishes up in the bathroom, towel around his waist as the light shines through the doorway reducing him to a featureless silhouette.
Her eyes slip closed again, her awareness only returning to her as she feels a dip in the mattress next to her - and she doesn’t afford him any space; she’s far too cold for that. Too tipsy to care.
She slumbers with her head against his heart, and arm wrapped around her shoulders.