Fic: Homefront (General Hospital TNG, Maxie/Lucky)
Title: Homefront
Author: empressearwig
Pairing/Fandom: Maxie/Lucky (background Elizabeth/Lucky, Elizabeth/Nikolas), General Hospital AU
Spoilers: Hahaha, yeah right. This has absolutely nothing to do with GH as it is now. Nothing.
Rating: R
Word Count: ~ 2337
Disclaimer: I own nothing, this is all for fun. This hasn't happened. Yet. Etc.
Summary: It has been one month since Spencer and Audrey's kidnapping. Maxie reacts.
Author's Notes: I never ever thought I would be here again, but I am because leobrat did a wonderful thing in donating funds to helpthesouth, and so the least I could do was this. I hope so much that this is what you wanted. Really, really I do. Thanks to normative_jean for reassuring me that I could still do this. I appreciate it more than I can say.
One month.
Maxie stands in the doorway of Lucky's office, silently watching him work. The room -- the house, for that matter -- is dark, the only light the glow from Lucky's laptop. Their daughter sleeps in her arms, and Maxie thinks that it feels like so much more than a month has passed. It has to have been more than a month since the party to celebrate Gia's christening had gone so catastrophically wrong, more than a month since Spencer and Audrey were taken from Nikolas and Elizabeth, more than a month since Maxie lost her husband to a search that Maxie isn't sure is ever going to end.
She shakes her head. She won't think that way. She can't think that way. They will find them. They have to find them. She doesn't want to think about what will happen if they don't.
It just won't be tonight.
"Come to bed," Maxie says softly, mindful of the baby. She may not know much about being a mother yet, but she knows better than to wake a sleeping baby if at all possible.
Lucky looks up, blinking in surprise. "Maxie?" he says, and her name sounds like a question. "What --"
She pushs the prick of pain away, and steps into the room. "I got up with the baby. Come to bed, Lucky. You need to sleep, too."
He shakes his head, as if denying the bone-deep exhaustion that wears on every inch of his face. "I need to keep doing this."
"No," she says, more sharply than she meant to. "You're exhausted. You aren't any good to them like this. They need you to be Lucky Spencer. Not some worn out cop that can't even remember his own wife's name."
"Maxie," he says, his face stricken. "I didn't --"
"I know," she sighs, the anger she felt only a moment a moment ago, burning away into her own tiredness. She shifts Gia in her arms. "Come to bed."
He nods. "Just let me finish this."
She doesn't believe him, but she nods and turns to go anyway. "Alright."
"I love you."
She pauses, for just a moment. She doesn't turn around. "I love you, too."
Maxie climbs the stairs to the nursery, settling Gia in her crib. She walks down the hall to their bedroom and climbs into their too tall bed. The air is cold around her, and she pulls the duvet tight up around her throat. She doesn't sleep.
In the morning, Lucky's side of the bed is still empty.
***
"I'm a terrible person," Maxie says.
Robin doesn't even look up from changing Matt's diaper. "You're not."
"I am," Maxie insists, pacing the length of the Drake's living room. "What else would you say about someone who wants her husband to stop spending so much time worrying about his niece and nephew when they've been kidnapped and have been missing for a month? I would say that person is a terrible person."
"Maxie," Robin says, and this time she looks up. "I would say that if the person in question is a first time mother, with an infant, she probably just wants her husband to help her. And I'd say that she's probably worried about him, and how hard that he's working, and maybe she's secretly worried that the same thing could happen to her daughter, too, and that she wants her husband home to protect them. I would say all of those things before I said that the person was a terrible person."
Maxie pauses, mid-pace, and stares at Robin's face, looking for any sign of insincerity. There isn't any to be found. She leans over the back of the couch and hugs Robin's shoulders from behind. "That's why you're a better person than me," she says, her voice muffled by Robin's hair.
Robin laughs, and pats Maxie's hands. "You're not a terrible person, Maxie. You just think you are."
"Even if I'm not, and I disagree with you about that, I'm not a good person either," Maxie says, sinking down into an overstuffed chair. She sees Robin open her mouth to answer, but she holds up a hand to ward off whatever Robin's about to say. "I know myself better than you do. And I'm not predisposed to see the best in people."
"Fine," Robin says. "You're a terrible person. Are you happy now?"
Maxie shakes her head. "No."
"I didn't think so. What can I do to help?"
Maxie shakes her head again. "There's nothing you can do. There's nothing anyone can do, unless they can tell us where Helena's hidden Spencer and Audrey." She springs up from her chair and begins to pace again. "How can one woman stay that well hidden? It shouldn't be possible, not when I can't have a bad hair day without someone tweeting about it."
Robin laughs again, and picks Matt up off the coffee table. "I think that might be a part of your job description," she points out, without any pity for Maxie's plight. "Doesn't that come with the big time fashion editor territory?"
"I hate when you do that," Maxie mutters. "It's not fair."
"Sorry. I am who I am," Robin says, and Maxie can tell she's not sorry at all.
"If you weren't holding a baby I would throw a pillow at you," Maxie said. "In fact, I still might."
"I love you, Maxie," Robin says, serious again. She holds out a hand. "Whatever you need, I'm here. You know that."
Maxie reachs out to take Robin's hand. "I do know that. I wouldn't be able to make it through this if I didn't know that."
"You would so," Robin says, squeezing her fingers. "But you'll never have to find out as long as I'm here."
When she goes home to her empty house, Maxie tries to remember Robin's words. She doesn't entirely succeed.
***
Lucky doesn't come home that night. He doesn't come home the next night either, or the one after that.
He calls and tells her over a broken connection that he's on his way to Ukraine, following up on a lead on Helena's whereabouts. He calls again and tells her that the lead didn't pan out and that he's on his way home.
Maxie assumes that he means on his way to their home. When another night passes and he's still not there, she remembers why she doesn't make assumptions anymore. That stupid, trite saying that Mac was so fond of quoting at her when she was a teenager echoes through her brain, and something in her snaps.
Kidnapped children or not, Lucky is done making an ass of her.
She matters. Their daughter matters. It's time Lucky remembered that they exist.
She takes the launch to Wyndemere, where she is certain that he is.
(Where he wanted you to be too, the traitorous, fair part of her brain reminds her. Where you wouldn't go.)
She doesn't wait for the butler to let her in the way that she knows that she should, and she doesn't wait for him to tell her where her husband is either. She knows without asking where she will find him, and she heads to the solarium without a second thought.
Maxie knows what she will find there. She's not prepared for what she sees.
She stops short in the doorway, her breath catching in her chest. Because she's right, Lucky is there, and Elizabeth is there too, just like Maxie knew that she would be, and he's holding Elizabeth in his arms, and Maxie's heart breaks just a little to see it. He's murmuring words against her hair, and Maxie strains to hear them, not ashamed in the slightest to be eavesdropping, not when it's her husband and the woman that he loved first.
Not when it's always been Maxie's biggest fear that Elizabeth is still the woman that he'll love last.
"--bring them home--" is the only thing Maxie can hear clearly, and she shrinks away from the door.
She thinks she's never felt smaller than when she's back in the launch, watching Wyndemere fade into the horizon. She hopes she never feels this way again.
***
Of course that's the night that Lucky comes home.
It's late, and she's in bed, half asleep, but she feels the bed shift under his weight, and his arms go around her. He kisses her shoulder, and she stiffens in his arms.
"Maxie?" he says, and she hears the unspoken question. His arms tighten around her, and she feels like she can't breathe.
She wants to push his arms away, to gasp for air, but she stays perfectly still where she is. She deserves this, she thinks. To feel this way. It's the least she deserves for her doubts.
"I missed you," she says, and instantly regrets the words. They're too needy, too demanding. She tries again, and these words aren't any better. "I was worried about you."
He kisses the side of her neck, and he takes her hand in his, his thumb tracing over her wedding ring. "I missed you," he says, repeating her words back to her. "I was worried about you."
She shakes her head, her eyes closed tight against the tears that want to come. She won't let them fall. "You shouldn't be," she manages to say, but her voice breaks, and Lucky turns her in his arms so that he can see her face. He tilts her chin up, and he traces his fingers over her cheek. She doesn't open her eyes. She can't.
"Hey," he says, and the concern in his voice makes everything worse. "Are you okay?"
She shakes her head again, but she kisses him before he can think about what that means. She kisses him with all her pent up emotion of the last month, and when he kisses her back the same way, she shudders with relief.
Here, at least, nothing between them has changed.
They make slow, unhurried love, and Maxie tries to show him with every touch, every kiss, just how much she loves him. How much she needs him. He touches her the same way, and for the moment at least, she lets herself believe that he means what she means. She doesn't have it in her to do anything else.
After, he holds her in his arms, and she falls asleep with her head on his chest. In the morning, when she wakes, Lucky's still there, still holding on to her like she's a port in a storm.
She holds onto him the same way, and hopes that he understands.
***
Lucky finds her in the kitchen an hour later. She is standing at the stove, waiting for Gia's bottle to be ready, and she doesn't see him coming. His hands slide over her hips with the easy familiarity that she misses so much, and he kisses her cheek.
"Morning," he says, kissing her again. "Is there coffee?"
She nods, and tries to keep things easy between them. She can do this, be this person. She has been this person so many times before. Before, it was never this hard.
"It's fresh," she manages. "I just made it."
If he notices how inane, how stupid she sounds, he gives no indication. He just releases her from his grasp and crosses behind her for the cabinet with the coffee mugs. She watches him pour, the unrelenting black into the pristine white, and she doesn't hear what he's saying to her, until he says her name.
She blinks his face into focus. "What?"
"Are you okay?" he asks, worry evident on his face and in his voice.
She makes herself smile and nod. "I'm just tired," she says. It's not entirely a lie, after all.
"Let me do that," he says, taking her place at the stove, finishing preparing the bottle with an ease that she's yet to match. "I should be doing this more, not leaving you alone."
"We're fine," she says. "They need you more than we do right now."
She turns to pour her own coffee, but he catches her chin in her hand. "Hey," he says. "They might need me, but I need you. You know that, right? If I didn't have you and Gia here, waiting for me, safe, I don't know what I'd do."
"I know," she says, and she lies to him with her eyes, holding his gaze with a certainty that she doesn't feel.
"I love you, Maxie," he says.
"I love you, too," she answers.
He lets her go, and she pours her coffee. He feeds their daughter, and she watches, and she wishes it could always be this simple.
She knows it never will be.
***
They find them on a Tuesday, and Maxie hears the news, she cries with relief. When Lucky calls an hour later, she's still crying and he says that it's over, again and again, but nothing makes the tears stop.
The kidnapping might be over, but Maxie knows that the worst part has really just begun.
***
Maxie's waiting when Lucky walks through the front door, and when the door opens and he steps through it, it's hard to know who moves first. Her arms are around him and his are around her, and he's kissing every inch of her face, and she's crying again, and saying that she loves him over and over.
She barely notices when he picks her up and moves them to the couch, when he cradles her in his lap. He wipes her tear-stained cheek with gentle hands, and she tries to steady her breathing, pressing her forehead against his.
When she's calm, when she's not gasping for every other breath, Lucky speaks. "Tell me," he says.
She does. She spills out all of it at his feet, the hurt and the jealousy, and the worry and the pain. She tells him everything, and when she's done, she just looks at him.
"What happens next?" she asks.
He doesn't answer, but he holds her. For now, it is enough.
Author: empressearwig
Pairing/Fandom: Maxie/Lucky (background Elizabeth/Lucky, Elizabeth/Nikolas), General Hospital AU
Spoilers: Hahaha, yeah right. This has absolutely nothing to do with GH as it is now. Nothing.
Rating: R
Word Count: ~ 2337
Disclaimer: I own nothing, this is all for fun. This hasn't happened. Yet. Etc.
Summary: It has been one month since Spencer and Audrey's kidnapping. Maxie reacts.
Author's Notes: I never ever thought I would be here again, but I am because leobrat did a wonderful thing in donating funds to helpthesouth, and so the least I could do was this. I hope so much that this is what you wanted. Really, really I do. Thanks to normative_jean for reassuring me that I could still do this. I appreciate it more than I can say.
One month.
Maxie stands in the doorway of Lucky's office, silently watching him work. The room -- the house, for that matter -- is dark, the only light the glow from Lucky's laptop. Their daughter sleeps in her arms, and Maxie thinks that it feels like so much more than a month has passed. It has to have been more than a month since the party to celebrate Gia's christening had gone so catastrophically wrong, more than a month since Spencer and Audrey were taken from Nikolas and Elizabeth, more than a month since Maxie lost her husband to a search that Maxie isn't sure is ever going to end.
She shakes her head. She won't think that way. She can't think that way. They will find them. They have to find them. She doesn't want to think about what will happen if they don't.
It just won't be tonight.
"Come to bed," Maxie says softly, mindful of the baby. She may not know much about being a mother yet, but she knows better than to wake a sleeping baby if at all possible.
Lucky looks up, blinking in surprise. "Maxie?" he says, and her name sounds like a question. "What --"
She pushs the prick of pain away, and steps into the room. "I got up with the baby. Come to bed, Lucky. You need to sleep, too."
He shakes his head, as if denying the bone-deep exhaustion that wears on every inch of his face. "I need to keep doing this."
"No," she says, more sharply than she meant to. "You're exhausted. You aren't any good to them like this. They need you to be Lucky Spencer. Not some worn out cop that can't even remember his own wife's name."
"Maxie," he says, his face stricken. "I didn't --"
"I know," she sighs, the anger she felt only a moment a moment ago, burning away into her own tiredness. She shifts Gia in her arms. "Come to bed."
He nods. "Just let me finish this."
She doesn't believe him, but she nods and turns to go anyway. "Alright."
"I love you."
She pauses, for just a moment. She doesn't turn around. "I love you, too."
Maxie climbs the stairs to the nursery, settling Gia in her crib. She walks down the hall to their bedroom and climbs into their too tall bed. The air is cold around her, and she pulls the duvet tight up around her throat. She doesn't sleep.
In the morning, Lucky's side of the bed is still empty.
***
"I'm a terrible person," Maxie says.
Robin doesn't even look up from changing Matt's diaper. "You're not."
"I am," Maxie insists, pacing the length of the Drake's living room. "What else would you say about someone who wants her husband to stop spending so much time worrying about his niece and nephew when they've been kidnapped and have been missing for a month? I would say that person is a terrible person."
"Maxie," Robin says, and this time she looks up. "I would say that if the person in question is a first time mother, with an infant, she probably just wants her husband to help her. And I'd say that she's probably worried about him, and how hard that he's working, and maybe she's secretly worried that the same thing could happen to her daughter, too, and that she wants her husband home to protect them. I would say all of those things before I said that the person was a terrible person."
Maxie pauses, mid-pace, and stares at Robin's face, looking for any sign of insincerity. There isn't any to be found. She leans over the back of the couch and hugs Robin's shoulders from behind. "That's why you're a better person than me," she says, her voice muffled by Robin's hair.
Robin laughs, and pats Maxie's hands. "You're not a terrible person, Maxie. You just think you are."
"Even if I'm not, and I disagree with you about that, I'm not a good person either," Maxie says, sinking down into an overstuffed chair. She sees Robin open her mouth to answer, but she holds up a hand to ward off whatever Robin's about to say. "I know myself better than you do. And I'm not predisposed to see the best in people."
"Fine," Robin says. "You're a terrible person. Are you happy now?"
Maxie shakes her head. "No."
"I didn't think so. What can I do to help?"
Maxie shakes her head again. "There's nothing you can do. There's nothing anyone can do, unless they can tell us where Helena's hidden Spencer and Audrey." She springs up from her chair and begins to pace again. "How can one woman stay that well hidden? It shouldn't be possible, not when I can't have a bad hair day without someone tweeting about it."
Robin laughs again, and picks Matt up off the coffee table. "I think that might be a part of your job description," she points out, without any pity for Maxie's plight. "Doesn't that come with the big time fashion editor territory?"
"I hate when you do that," Maxie mutters. "It's not fair."
"Sorry. I am who I am," Robin says, and Maxie can tell she's not sorry at all.
"If you weren't holding a baby I would throw a pillow at you," Maxie said. "In fact, I still might."
"I love you, Maxie," Robin says, serious again. She holds out a hand. "Whatever you need, I'm here. You know that."
Maxie reachs out to take Robin's hand. "I do know that. I wouldn't be able to make it through this if I didn't know that."
"You would so," Robin says, squeezing her fingers. "But you'll never have to find out as long as I'm here."
When she goes home to her empty house, Maxie tries to remember Robin's words. She doesn't entirely succeed.
***
Lucky doesn't come home that night. He doesn't come home the next night either, or the one after that.
He calls and tells her over a broken connection that he's on his way to Ukraine, following up on a lead on Helena's whereabouts. He calls again and tells her that the lead didn't pan out and that he's on his way home.
Maxie assumes that he means on his way to their home. When another night passes and he's still not there, she remembers why she doesn't make assumptions anymore. That stupid, trite saying that Mac was so fond of quoting at her when she was a teenager echoes through her brain, and something in her snaps.
Kidnapped children or not, Lucky is done making an ass of her.
She matters. Their daughter matters. It's time Lucky remembered that they exist.
She takes the launch to Wyndemere, where she is certain that he is.
(Where he wanted you to be too, the traitorous, fair part of her brain reminds her. Where you wouldn't go.)
She doesn't wait for the butler to let her in the way that she knows that she should, and she doesn't wait for him to tell her where her husband is either. She knows without asking where she will find him, and she heads to the solarium without a second thought.
Maxie knows what she will find there. She's not prepared for what she sees.
She stops short in the doorway, her breath catching in her chest. Because she's right, Lucky is there, and Elizabeth is there too, just like Maxie knew that she would be, and he's holding Elizabeth in his arms, and Maxie's heart breaks just a little to see it. He's murmuring words against her hair, and Maxie strains to hear them, not ashamed in the slightest to be eavesdropping, not when it's her husband and the woman that he loved first.
Not when it's always been Maxie's biggest fear that Elizabeth is still the woman that he'll love last.
"--bring them home--" is the only thing Maxie can hear clearly, and she shrinks away from the door.
She thinks she's never felt smaller than when she's back in the launch, watching Wyndemere fade into the horizon. She hopes she never feels this way again.
***
Of course that's the night that Lucky comes home.
It's late, and she's in bed, half asleep, but she feels the bed shift under his weight, and his arms go around her. He kisses her shoulder, and she stiffens in his arms.
"Maxie?" he says, and she hears the unspoken question. His arms tighten around her, and she feels like she can't breathe.
She wants to push his arms away, to gasp for air, but she stays perfectly still where she is. She deserves this, she thinks. To feel this way. It's the least she deserves for her doubts.
"I missed you," she says, and instantly regrets the words. They're too needy, too demanding. She tries again, and these words aren't any better. "I was worried about you."
He kisses the side of her neck, and he takes her hand in his, his thumb tracing over her wedding ring. "I missed you," he says, repeating her words back to her. "I was worried about you."
She shakes her head, her eyes closed tight against the tears that want to come. She won't let them fall. "You shouldn't be," she manages to say, but her voice breaks, and Lucky turns her in his arms so that he can see her face. He tilts her chin up, and he traces his fingers over her cheek. She doesn't open her eyes. She can't.
"Hey," he says, and the concern in his voice makes everything worse. "Are you okay?"
She shakes her head again, but she kisses him before he can think about what that means. She kisses him with all her pent up emotion of the last month, and when he kisses her back the same way, she shudders with relief.
Here, at least, nothing between them has changed.
They make slow, unhurried love, and Maxie tries to show him with every touch, every kiss, just how much she loves him. How much she needs him. He touches her the same way, and for the moment at least, she lets herself believe that he means what she means. She doesn't have it in her to do anything else.
After, he holds her in his arms, and she falls asleep with her head on his chest. In the morning, when she wakes, Lucky's still there, still holding on to her like she's a port in a storm.
She holds onto him the same way, and hopes that he understands.
***
Lucky finds her in the kitchen an hour later. She is standing at the stove, waiting for Gia's bottle to be ready, and she doesn't see him coming. His hands slide over her hips with the easy familiarity that she misses so much, and he kisses her cheek.
"Morning," he says, kissing her again. "Is there coffee?"
She nods, and tries to keep things easy between them. She can do this, be this person. She has been this person so many times before. Before, it was never this hard.
"It's fresh," she manages. "I just made it."
If he notices how inane, how stupid she sounds, he gives no indication. He just releases her from his grasp and crosses behind her for the cabinet with the coffee mugs. She watches him pour, the unrelenting black into the pristine white, and she doesn't hear what he's saying to her, until he says her name.
She blinks his face into focus. "What?"
"Are you okay?" he asks, worry evident on his face and in his voice.
She makes herself smile and nod. "I'm just tired," she says. It's not entirely a lie, after all.
"Let me do that," he says, taking her place at the stove, finishing preparing the bottle with an ease that she's yet to match. "I should be doing this more, not leaving you alone."
"We're fine," she says. "They need you more than we do right now."
She turns to pour her own coffee, but he catches her chin in her hand. "Hey," he says. "They might need me, but I need you. You know that, right? If I didn't have you and Gia here, waiting for me, safe, I don't know what I'd do."
"I know," she says, and she lies to him with her eyes, holding his gaze with a certainty that she doesn't feel.
"I love you, Maxie," he says.
"I love you, too," she answers.
He lets her go, and she pours her coffee. He feeds their daughter, and she watches, and she wishes it could always be this simple.
She knows it never will be.
***
They find them on a Tuesday, and Maxie hears the news, she cries with relief. When Lucky calls an hour later, she's still crying and he says that it's over, again and again, but nothing makes the tears stop.
The kidnapping might be over, but Maxie knows that the worst part has really just begun.
***
Maxie's waiting when Lucky walks through the front door, and when the door opens and he steps through it, it's hard to know who moves first. Her arms are around him and his are around her, and he's kissing every inch of her face, and she's crying again, and saying that she loves him over and over.
She barely notices when he picks her up and moves them to the couch, when he cradles her in his lap. He wipes her tear-stained cheek with gentle hands, and she tries to steady her breathing, pressing her forehead against his.
When she's calm, when she's not gasping for every other breath, Lucky speaks. "Tell me," he says.
She does. She spills out all of it at his feet, the hurt and the jealousy, and the worry and the pain. She tells him everything, and when she's done, she just looks at him.
"What happens next?" she asks.
He doesn't answer, but he holds her. For now, it is enough.