Chapter Text
At the end of the world, everything is quiet.
Max blinks once, twice, feels herself coming back into her body after a lifetime away. There’s a ticker-tape parade playing out in the space between her forehead and her brain, the blaring of brass trumpets pounding her frontal lobes until she can scarcely think at all, but it’s just her and the end of everything and the dread she’s been carrying like a secret ever since she first stretched out her hand.
Wasn’t it—no, it was, it must have been only a second ago that she was a bystander in her own snuff film, watching oblivion slip out between her best friend’s eyes, a string of red jewels dripping down over her forehead. She can still taste dirt and tears and decay, something that feels too much like regret, the heavy blanket of failure to replace the superhero cape she had to hang up the second she let Chloe fall.
Out of habit she raises her hand but the celebration in her head turns into an Irish funeral and she takes a few heavy, staggering steps forward. There’s an ache in her neck and her fingers dig into the pinprick that bit all the way down to her spine, the teeth of a man that grinned at her from behind the camera and for a split second she isn’t Max but someone else, someone wearing feathered earrings and hair like quicksand who never got the chance to tell her best friend that she loved her, staring death down the barrel of an expensive camera lens.
The last thing she remembers before darkness is a man and a room where dreams go to die. She shudders and wraps her arms around herself, her wrists red and raw from tape she doesn’t remember ripping off, taking another few tentative steps forward into this place where everything looks the same. There must be a floor – or else how would she be standing? She can turn time, not defy gravity – but it’s all just black, stretching out as far as she can see or hear or feel. Max breathes once, slowly, like she’s not balancing the weight of a million unborn generations on her shoulders. Maybe this is what happens to time-travelers, stuck in a place where time doesn’t exist.
And God, if that doesn’t sound like a bad joke.
If she looks closer, looks up – she’s been spending too much time looking back, looking sideways at blue hair and blue eyes and a smile rough like sandpaper – she can see the flicker-flashpoint of a million, million stars streaking in the messy arc of a child’s paintbrush. After all she’s realized this past week, all she’s lost, she wouldn’t be surprised if her powers were a child-god’s mistake as it slipped on the ladder of her DNA, imprinting space-time underneath her fingernails until universes unravelled with just a touch of her hand.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Max nearly jumps out of her skin and whirls so fast she becomes the tornado hurtling towards Arcadia Bay. There are boots in front of her, new and shiny and never worn, connected to long legs in jeans without rips and a crisp plaid shirt. Chloe smiles, all teeth and they’re bleach-bone white in this darkness and Max has to stop her legs from giving out.
“You… you’re here? But you’re—“ she catches the pink pucker running down the front of her throat and this time Max does sit down, the unmistakable taste of iron on her tongue as her past decisions catch up with her. “You.”
“Me,” Other-Chloe responds, lips knotting into a grin that looks too easy for either of them. “For my best friend, I don’t think you could sound less happy to see me.”
“You… I killed you.”
“Yup. Thanks for that, by the way. Being able to walk again is way better than I thought.”
Max puts her hand down to steady herself and stars burst from her palm and now she’s sitting on nothing, looking down through a glass floor into the spiralling dizzy-drop of a thousand galaxies, the arms of their spiral in the exact same pattern as her fingerprints. Maybe she’s the child-god, playing with Fate and Destiny and that bitch called Time.
It’s such an awful thought that she snatches her hands away.
Other-Chloe glances around like this is a normal Thursday evening and moves with the grace that Max has always loved, hard and sharp and careless; she stamps out supernovae and pulls her ankles from black holes and she’s crossed three galaxies to get to Max. When she settles their shoulders touch and her cigarette dangles unlit from her lips – Max touches her fingers to the end and it glows a cherry red and Other-Chloe doesn’t question it, doesn’t spit out a strangled curse like she should have done, just raises her eyebrows and smirks a little in that way that always has Max wanting to crawl out of her skin.
They sit for a few moments and when Other-Chloe breathes out they can see constellations in the smoke.
“You fucked up, huh?”
There’s no judgment in it, no accusation, just a casual observation and another bright flare of her cigarette. Other-Chloe leans back on her elbows and the jut of her hips could cut Max like glass.
“Yeah.” The admission is acid on her tongue. “I can’t keep you alive, no matter what timeline I’m in.”
“It’s okay. I asked to die in mine.”
“And now you’re here. Not much of an improvement.”
“You kidding?” Other-Chloe shifts; her shirt rides up and Max catches the briefest glimpse of her ribs, two hands reaching out from her spine, and wonders if there’s a universe between each one. “Look at this place. It’s the coolest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”
She dips her hand downward, into a nebula speckled with stars, and lets the dust run between her fingers. Other-Chloe takes it and streaks it over her face until she glows, wreathed in purples and blues and reds, runs it through her hair and now she’s dripping comets onto her shirt and they burn little holes in her shoulders.
“See? Now I really am a star-child.”
Max can’t help the snort that bubbles up; her companion grins and leans in and before she knows it Other-Chloe is rubbing her cheek against Max’s face, smearing stardust onto the curve of her jaw – Max squeaks and begs her to stop but putting her hand on Other-Chloe’s collar just leaves a handprint of a galaxy, a permanent mark that screams Max Caulfield was here, and before she can stop it she wonders what it would look like someplace else, someplace she hasn’t seen yet but knows in dreams because the thought comes to visit when she can’t will it away.
Other-Chloe seems to know, she always knows, her mouth twisted into a sly grin and on instinct Max brings her hand up with cheeks flushed to the point of discomfort, her fingers flexing as the threads of time come to her—
The pain that Other-Chloe had dulled explodes in her temples and it’s only her friend’s hands holding her up, her shoulder warm on the bridge of her nose and fingers running through her hair. Max breathes and breathes and though her head throbs until the stars go red her chest is light, free of burden and shackles and the crippling guilt every time she thinks about almost anything at all. It’s a relief and she’s floating, anchored by Other-Chloe’s embrace, the warmth between them something other than the blood that makes black holes under their bodies.
“Sorry,” she mumbles eventually, pulling away, but the hands linger and she lets them, thumbs smoothing over the curl of her cheekbones and the arch of her brows, tracing each and every line like she’ll never know them again. Other-Chloe looks at her like she sees right through her, into whatever it is that gives Max the ability to play God, into the thing that decides who lives and dies.
She’d ask her to take it, but that’s a weight she has to shoulder alone.
“This thing fucked you up hard, Super-Max.”
“Yeah,” Max agrees, and her voice is slick from the blood running down the back of her throat like an oil-spill, “it did.”
“Can you use it at all?”
“I dunno. Maybe? I might kill myself trying.” She glances around, at this room that isn’t a room and the two teenagers suspended inside it. “If I haven’t already.”
“Time is a bitch,” Other-Chloe agrees, flicking a strand of blonde hair from her face and Max notices for the first time how much softer around the edges she is than her Chloe, her eyes not quite like the flint she’s grown to love, “but I don’t think you’re dead. Or… not physically.”
She scratches the back of her neck and the wrinkle between her brows is a cross between adorable and uncomfortably arousing. “I don’t know. I nearly failed out of physics back in ninth grade.”
“You failed out of a lot of things.”
“No I didn’t. That was the other me, with blue hair. She’s the real fuck-up between us.”
“Hey! She’s not a fuck-up.”
But Other-Chloe just gives Max this look and there, that’s the same between them, the same disbelief that twists their mouth up to one side and Max feels like she’s missing a punchline, defending one person from themselves even though they are the same person in the end, the same Chloe that doesn’t let her give up when everything is spinning out of her reach.
Except… they are different, just a little. Just enough that Max notices how this Chloe moves, smooth and slick and unburdened with the anger she hammers into her skin. She smiles a little more often and when she does it’s not quite as hard or as hidden, not like teasing barbed wire apart. What could have been.
(But the stale, mechanic sound of a ventilator haunts her when she sleeps. A Chloe that can’t run and jump and raise hell isn’t a Chloe that wants to exist and Max swallows, doesn’t know if it’s the blood or her should-have-beens going down.)
“She sort of is,” Other-Chloe drawls, limbs lax and loose as she looks up at the wild stroke of stars, “but it’s okay. I’m pretty sure I’m destined to be in some sort of trouble. You’re just always there to get me out of it.”
“Not this time.”
Her friend rolls, her chest against Max’s knee and she can feel the drum of her heart like it’s always been there and it’s just taken her until now to notice.
“You don’t know that.”
“Neither do you.”
They lapse into silence and Other-Chloe’s cigarette fizzles out; she crushes the embers between her fingers and Max touches the side of her wrist, a healing circle where Chloe had accidentally pressed her joint against her skin and had apologized a thousand times until Max took pity on her and demanded she heal it with a kiss.
She still feels her lips against her wrist when she thinks about it.
“Do you remember when we met?”
“Like the best day of my life,” Max responds automatically, relaxing under the soft spirals Other-Chloe is dragging against her calf, “you punched some kid right in the face for pushing me.”
“He totally deserved it, that little prick.”
“My savior,” she tangles her fingers in Other-Chloe’s hair, rubbing stars into her scalp, “my dragon in front of the tower.”
“I got in so much shit.” Her laugh rumbles and it sends an earthquake through Max’s insides. “But that was fine because you shared your lunch with me.”
“Tuna. I hate tuna.”
“Because you’re a freak.”
Max hums, tilts her head to one side. “This is true.”
Other-Chloe exhales long and measured and she can see her eyes slipping closed in the darkness – a sudden panic rears its head like a bright-hot flame and she knows she’ll be left alone if she goes to sleep, feels it with every fibre of her being, so she runs her nails across her scalp and sees Other-Chloe’s veins pulse with starshine.
“Do you remember that night on the roof?”
“Like a photograph,” Other-Chloe responds, her tongue thick with something other than sleep, “drunk on shitty wine that we snuck out of my house. I can’t believe you threw up.”
“I didn’t throw up, I burped. It was just, um, a little more solid than it should have been.”
“You totally threw up. Not that I blame you. Okay, well, maybe a little.”
“Dick,” Max grumbles, but doesn’t shove her away.
“Shit, we were what, twelve? That feels like a lifetime ago.”
“It sort of was, in a way.”
Before she can go there, deep and dark and contemplative, Other-Chloe rests a palm on her ankle. It feels like a shackle but Max wouldn’t mind being chained here forever, her best friend half-curled around her with the light of a million nebulas making her glow like a prayer, like second chances and redemption that only ever happens in fairytales.
“Hey,” she murmurs, and this time she sounds a little drunk, “do you remember what we said?”
“Yeah,” Max says, but what she really means is I’d never forget, “we said we’d marry each other one day.”
“Had it all figured out. Right down to the colour scheme.”
“Please tell me you still don’t want pink and lime-green.”
“Nah. Now I want blue and lime-green.”
“You’re a heathen.”
“Maybe, but you love me for it.”
“Yeah,” Max sighs, and there’s a hint of resignation, of acceptance, “I do.”
And maybe Max could reverse all the way back, back to when they were full of fizzing bubbles and their heads were stuffed with clouds, but even if she could she wouldn’t change her answer. Despite the world ending around her, what was supposed to be the trickle-down of eternity turning into a tumble, she doesn’t think a world could exist where she wasn’t in love with Chloe Price.
Other-Chloe gets up and she smells like smoke and seasalt, something warm and familiar that she wears like an old jacket. When she crouches her knees nudge Max’s shins and there’s a grin too soft to be an open mouth smirk and that’s when you have to step carefully around her; one day you might find yourself in a grungy old room wearing clothes that aren’t your own, noticing for the very first time how the rising light fractures over her back and how you can pick out a future together from the pieces. Max has tried to capture it, Chloe cut from blues and reds and sunburnt orange, but for the first time in her life the picture didn’t do reality justice.
You can’t keep home static in your pocket. It clings onto your hand and runs through the woods and laughs too loudly, a whirlwind of guitar riffs and black beanies. It demands to live.
Other-Chloe offers her hands and Max takes them, twining their fingers together like Fate wrapping over and over again, standing her up until her head passes through a cloud of meteors.
“I want to show you something,” she says, and Max would follow her anywhere so long as she kept holding her hand.
They trek through the dark space between stars and it never seems like they’re moving even though they’ve left their first galaxy behind. Other-Chloe squeezes her hand just once, a reminder that she’s here and okay and thankful, and the invisible weight of her gratitude settles on Max’s shoulders like a well-worn scarf.
Eventually they stop and there are two mirror images in front of Max; Earth spins quietly without them, one by each shoulder, and she has to duck out the way to avoid the moons that zoom past.
When Other-Chloe lets go of her hands there are red strings attached to each of her fingers, leading out so many ways she gets dizzy with it, red and red again and the pulse of a heartbeat that travels through each one. Max shifts and tries to pull, tries to get away, but the strings snap taut and she hears the groan as she pulls the foundation of a universe out from underneath it.
“It’s always been your choice, Super-Max,” Other-Chloe says and she’s much quieter than any Chloe ever should be, “you get to decide what happens.”
If she focuses the heartbeats turn into voices, snippets of lives that she’ll never experience first-hand – a child falls off his bike in one universe but flies down the road in the other. There’s a man who theorizes the possibility of time-travel and in one lifetime he’s laughed at but in the other, applauded. A woman who avoids the car, another who doesn’t.
Max tries to rock backwards but there are strings wrapped around her stomach, binding her legs to the ground, twisting around and around her shoulders until all she can do is move her head.
“I knew time-travelling had a catch,” Max tries to laugh, but spacetime weighs down on her chest and it’s hard to breathe wrapped in a million different dimensions.
There’s a tug on her right hand and she follows the strings down to one Earth, spiralling through the clouds and into the dirt, chasing the sound of a heartbeat she can’t find. In her head she’s standing in the junkyard and the sun is shining bright and warm but her shoe is wet with red water and Chloe’s skin is sallow and loose; her own body is deep underground and one of her hands has stretched out, everything frozen in that one instance until time is so fragile it’s turned to glass.
Max looks at Chloe’s body lying next to Rachel’s and tries not to throw up.
The strings cut deeper into the narrow spread of her hips as she jerks away and a loop tightens around her neck until her head swims with it. Other-Chloe shifts and Max sees how they go right through her like she’s not even there at all.
“I can’t go back there,” Max shakes her head and uproots a few planets from their orbit, “not without you.”
“There’s another way.”
Her left hand isn’t crystal-clear like the other, wrapped in a blanket of gauze and uncertainty and she smells the musty odor of Chloe’s truck, gasoline and stale food and cigarettes, the rumble of the road underneath her. Twin moons gleam in the sky and maybe that’s them, spinning around and around each other like tidal-locked stars. Max sees the threads now, the ones that were always there, binding her to Chloe in a twisting maze of red.
“That one hasn’t gone forward yet,” she hears, “it’s the path you didn’t go down. What was that poem you really liked about choices, or whatever?”
“I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference,” Max murmurs and sees the possibilities of an untouched future unravel before her. It’s new fallen snow and the beach after tide and Chloe without a weeping third eye.
“There you go, hippie.”
“What… what happens when I choose?”
“Who knows? You’re the god, right?”
Max scowls and Other-Chloe takes a step or two forward, running her thumb down the middle of her forehead to iron it out. There’s a finality to it and Max knows what she’s chosen before she even breathes out and blows away a few stars that wink just over her head, before two hands cup her cheeks and the girl in front of her wears a smile that turns into a scar on Max’s heart.
“What about you?”
“Don’t worry about me, you dork,” she chides and lightly slaps Max’s cheeks, “think about yourself for once. You need to stop running.”
She’s always right in the way that all of her Chloes are; Max is stretched on a frozen paper-thin expanse of eternity, so worn she’s almost translucent and god she’s just so tired. Maybe she’s this universe, maybe they sit in her stomach and her body feeds them until there’s nothing left to give and this is the place where things that used to be powerful go to die. Max sighs and rests her forehead on Other-Chloe’s and just breathes, lets a supernova out on her exhale and watches as this Chloe sucks it into her lungs as a souvenir.
“Thanks, Chloe. I mean it.”
“Hey, you set me free. I’m just returning the favour.”
Her grin comes back and everything feels a little more normal, a little more manageable, even though she has fourteen billion lives tied onto her hands.
“Besides, I’ll be okay. I have company.”
Over her right shoulder Max can see the vaguest shadow in the form of a deeper darkness; feather earrings and honey-blonde hair and a smile she’s seen on a hundred flyers around town. Max laughs just a little and a nebula spirals inwards to create new stars.
“Horndog.”
“What can I say? It’s just part of my charm.”
Other-Chloe holds her as Max curls her right fist, pulls gravity out from its place and tugs the moon out of alignment. There are things wrong in the left universe; Warren’s face is a purple bruise and Victoria is being carried into the dark with eyes glassed-out and empty and if Max listens she can hear Nathan sobbing, alone, but these are prices she’s willing to pay. There are many things in this world she doesn't want to do but they all turn into footnotes, things reserved for a different Max who doesn’t love as fiercely as this one does.
So she takes back oblivion, yanking on the strings until her own timeline crumbles and she can hear the screaming of seven billion people as they crash crash burn. Blood runs from her nose and the funeral march in her head has turned to a riot but she shoulders each and every one of their gravestones in a way that only a god can manage and Other-Chloe is there, holding tight under her arms, not letting her collapse and take everyone with her.
“Come on, Super-Max. Don’t give out on me yet. Other-Me hasn’t gotten her head out of her ass to tell you.”
“Tell me what?” Her voice is thick and tired and she might be slurring but that’s okay, because this Chloe props her up and lets Max reach out and finish, the dust of a million planets settling about their feet. Max will be tracking stardust on the bottom of her shoes for weeks but it doesn’t matter when this Chloe reaches and rubs the Milky Way into the curve of Max’s jaw and brings her closer, closer, spiralling in like the gravity she just took away.
Other-Chloe kisses her like this is the last time and maybe it is, maybe this is it for them and she’ll never see blonde hair and blue eyes again; Max takes her freed hand and cups the back of her neck and they’re trading blood between them, but there’s salt that’s too thin to be red and she doesn’t know who’s crying anymore. Her left shoulder is being pulled from its socket and when she breaks there are two Chloe’s standing there, super-imposed like a bad photograph, and they wipe their mouth and reach out when Max starts to fall.
“That we love you, you dweeb. Now go save the world.”
Max tumbles forever and hits every single branch on the way down – she can’t think anymore, it’s just lights and explosions and screaming that’s both hers and not, the galaxy given a voice and Jesus Christ does it shriek, accusing and relieved and everything in between. It’s only her ribs holding her lungs open when the air is ripped from them; when she stops it’s hitting a concrete wall at a thousand miles per hour and she swears her head ripples open like a fist unclenching.
She’s sitting now and she doesn’t dare open her eyes but Max feels the shudder of an engine coming to a halt. There’s someone touching her, running their hands along her arms and her face and she smells copper – oh wait, no, she tastes it, her nose is an ocean and with every breath she inhales saltwater – thick and dark in the small space.
“Max? Oh shit, okay, fuck, can you just—“
Max forces herself to crack her eyes open just enough to see a sliver of blue hair – the relief that washes through her is better than any drug Chloe’s ever done and her body shudders with a sob, wet with the amount of blood in her throat.
The next time Chloe leans over she manages to catch her hands, weakly threading their fingers together. She’s near-panic and the front of her shirt is wet with Max’s blood and maybe it’s leaking from her ears this time but Max doesn’t care, just tugs her hand to her heart and smiles.
“What are you—“
“It’s okay,” Max says, and she means it, “just… stay.”
Maybe this is her own oblivion. Maybe she’s not actually alive at all, maybe she fell into a space where time isn’t what it’s supposed to be and this is what would never be given to her, what was never possible. But Chloe picks her up and manages to shift into the back seat and she’s resting her head over her heart that’s still beating in the dark, the smell of cigarettes and body-spray and leather, and finds she doesn’t care.
She’ll make a home in this new universe.
“I’m not going anywhere, Mad Max. Not while you’re here.”
(She already has.)