After Max leaves Eggsy with only the dogs and a gun to protect him, he heads out to start rolling up camp. He's not leaving his things where they can be discovered and stolen, and he also can't count on being allowed back here by the time Eggsy has recovered.
Besides, he has tools here for improving security around the apartment. He has most of it done--a few tools are still at his and Furiosa's place--when he pauses to check on Rey. He can handle the little monsters killing one person, but if the bodies pile up, especially if they're bodies he cares to see survive...
Rey is, perhaps unsurprisingly, entirely fine. She is't disturbed by the feral teenager she had been when really, she was that person when she first arrived here. That part of her is still there, obvious in the way she chose to live in the woods this entire month, in the way she ambushed the Iron Bull because he killed Han. The child she was is who she is and it's not something she'd ever apologize for.
She looks entirely happy at the moment, stretched out in the sand with her eyes closed just enjoying the sun, and she smiles a little when the Force tells her Max is here now.
She sits up at once, smile gone and replaced with the kind of frown that usually comes just before she decides to beat someone half to death with her staff. She promised multiple people that she wouldn't do that anymore, wouldn't go there, but- well, it's hard not to immediately react to that.
Eggsy is her friend, and she doesn't have many of those. More than that, she and Max are so similar they could be separate parts of each other. If Tommy was killed, she wouldn't be out here in the woods.
"By who?" She asks first, because that's the more important question at the moment. "When?"
"He doesn't know," Max steps closer, but doesn't sit. He can't sit, not with Eggsy still recovering. "It was yesterday. Probably yesterday. I came here to pack."
If he had decided to sit, she would have pulled him right back up to his feet. She's up and grabbing for her staff once she knows why he's here, grabs for his arm to pull him with her on their way back to his camp.
"I'll help you. You should be with him, not out here."
He doesn't pull away, and he goes with her willingly enough. She seems to know what to do and she actually understands things about him that most others don't, so he opts to lay out the largest of his hesitations.
"He has people. They know what to do." People who are far, far better at delivering comfort. It's not like Max never knew how to care for someone who was sick, so it's not like he's unaware that his reaction every time Eggsy dies makes him kind of an asshole. So he adds reluctantly, "I don't."
She understands because that's exactly where she's been with Tommy more than once. The ship has trapped them in the Enclosure, turned them both into sobbing messes, and made them walk through hell, and Tommy isn't anything like Eggsy, he keeps his feelings locked up tight, so she knows the struggle of having no idea what to do to fix the things that go wrong.
"I know. It doesn't matter that we don't know, though." She tells him as she looks back at him. "We have to try. He's..." Not soft, that's not right. "He's sweet, he probably just wants you near him."
She thinks of Tommy, who is not sweet and not soft, but needed her all the same.
He thinks that over as he packs a few things, offers her an item he thinks she'll find more use for out here than he will. These are automatic movements, separate from how his mind is really focused on Eggsy and what it might turn into if he doesn't go back.
"How do you shut it out," he glances at her, hazarding a lot by asking. "All the thoughts. What'll happen if they're gone."
She helps him quickly and efficiently, getting things where they need to go and only stopping when he gives her that gift. She holds it in her hands while she watches him, frowning faintly.
"I've never met anyone like Tommy," she says after a moment. "I never even thought about wanting someone, not on Jakku, and I don't know if I will again. But we get deals, don't we? We can get them back, if we lose them. If we're separated from them we can find them again."
This isn't really something she's put much thought into until now, but now that she's saying it some of the unease from her conversation with Lark about what she'll do once she's done here eases. There are still options, if she's a warden. Nothing is impossible, and she doesn't want to build her life around one person but what she feels for Tommy is getting closer and closer to something entirely overwhelming and it doesn't seem like a bad idea to have a contingency plan in place to keep that.
Max's arrangement with Eggsy--and with Furiosa, and with anyone else he'll ever meet--is that it's going to be temporary. But he wants them alive and happier than when he found them, and if he can't guarantee a feeling he can at least make sure they survive.
The truth is he's not sure how many more deaths he can stand to be a part of. Even these fake deaths on the Barge rattle him badly. He doubts he'll be of any use to Eggsy at all right now, but perhaps Rey knows better. And besides, he'd rather be there for protection.
"Come with me. See how he is, see if I missed something."
He looks at her and shrugs. "He might change his mind." Once there's the option of Max's tense, distant affection or the more genuine ease of his friends.
But camp is clean now, and he has a rough idea what he'll do to secure the apartment. "Ready."
She'll help carry what she can, which is a fair amount for someone her size, but for a second she just looks at him. It's only after the start moving that she speaks up again.
"I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to stuff like this. I never even liked people until a few days before I came here, and now I've had to learn how to do that. How to show it."
Not just with Tommy, with everyone. Max is lucky in that he met Rey a few months in to her stay on the Barge when she'd picked up these skills a little more, but she knows she's still not good at these things. Passable, but good? She's a long way off.
"I learned quickly that what I think the people I care about want from me and what I think is the right thing to do aren't the same thing. My instinct is wait until they feel better and then see them, but that doesn't work. People like to be touched, they want you to be there for them. Don't- base what you do on what you think is right. Ask him what he wants. Or just make yourself touch him, hold him."
And then she stops talking because this feels very weird.
"I used to know." Jess never survived anything close to what Eggsy has, was never so sick as this--the worst they ever went through together was her morning sickness and then labor and recovery. As difficult as those were they weren't cause for fear or anger or depression.
"It makes it worse when they're gone. You remember someone needing you. Then you remember why they're dead. I saw those people in hell." Jess's pregnancy and Sprog's birth had certainly not been cause for self-loathing at the time. They are now. And how to explain the guilt he feels at 'moving on' even just while he and Eggsy are here together?
But what Rey is saying seems easy to do; he can do that. If he can't, he can still leave. (But he won't leave, because when Max decides--finally--to do something, he does it.)
"You think they'll ever end up thinking like we do? Tommy, Eggsy? Thinking the best way to help is not to be there at all."
There were no people for Rey in the hell they were taken to. No one to haunt her because she hasn't lost anyone because she's never had anyone to lose. She thinks that's better, after what she had seen coming for the others in her group.
She understands thinking it's safer to be alone, and maybe it is. But now she knows how it feels to not be that, and it's something she thinks is probably better. Probably.
"Eggsy won't." Tommy is another matter entirely, but that's not the issue at hand. "He'll want to be with you if you're hurting, so you have to let him."
Max nods again and he says nothing for a while. And then, maybe practicing, he reaches a hand out and squeezes her shoulder and pulls his hand back again.
"Tommy. He's good to you, mm?" That's another concern that's nagged at him for a while now, but there's never been a chance to bring it up.
She glances back at him with a small smile, half to tell him she appreciates the gesture and half just because she's pleased he's listening to her, but when he brings up Tommy in that context her smile changes, goes softer in a way she'd be embarrassed about a month or so ago.
That's probably enough of an answer, really, but she'll tell him out loud too.
"Yes. I don't think he expected this to happen to him here, but I think he's happy. I'm happy." And that's new for her, long absent for him, and it's something that means so much that it's a little overwhelming at times.
Max still has concerns, but they're things he can't explain to her any better than he could to Furiosa. However, he can't just wash his hands of it like he would have if they were on his world. He does care what happens to her despite himself, and they're together on this voyage.
"Good." He'll take her assessment and believe it. (It helps rather a lot that Tommy really hasn't done anything to validate Max's mistrust. He is less watchful now than he used to be; he's willing to let Tommy stay at his fire, in fact.)
"Happy doesn't happen around here. Not for most people." He's glad that she's happy is what he really means to say.
"I didn't really feel anything on Jakku," she says quietly while they walk, and this is absolutely something she wouldn't tell anyone else. Tommy may have guessed, as similar as they are, but it's something she's never said point blank like this. "My entire life was on hold because I was waiting for people who never came for me. I didn't realize it then, but it was like I wasn't even alive."
And then BB-8 had beeped his way into her life, and then came Finn and Han and everything that she was swept up in, and then just a few days later she was here, where everything was new, food was abundant, and people were like Finn, wanting to be her friend only because they had big hearts.
"It's hard to adjust to, isn't it?"
Being alive. Feeling things, and learning to be okay with feeling things.
"I don't know how." This is not the confession of a man who is sheepishly
trying and fumbling along. This is the confession of someone who doesn't
speak a language and can't even form the vowels anymore.
"But if this helps I'll do it. I don't want to fit with people. I'm not
like them at home. Don't want to be. Maybe it's how I keep waiting for my
people, my family, that's never coming back. But here...I can be more for
Eggsy. For Furiosa." A pause, an awkward hum that means to include Rey, too.
She glances over at him to see if she's guessed right about that hum and once she's sure she has, her hand moves to touch his. It's nothing that last more than a second, just a brush of her fingers over the back of his hand that says she knows, she feels the same, and that that's okay.
"What made you want to be with Eggsy if you don't want to fit with people?"
"First time he met me I was scavenging. He ran movie nights, helped people
relax. Saw me and gave me something he'd hidden for himself. His favorite.
Just gave it to me, didn't know me."
He still had the wrapper, actually and he shows it to her: a yellow peanut
M&M's wrapper that he's reinforced by laminating it. It holds odds and ends
for him now that the candy is long gone.
"Not a lot of people like him. And they don't talk to me, most of those
people. He did."
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Besides, he has tools here for improving security around the apartment. He has most of it done--a few tools are still at his and Furiosa's place--when he pauses to check on Rey. He can handle the little monsters killing one person, but if the bodies pile up, especially if they're bodies he cares to see survive...
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She looks entirely happy at the moment, stretched out in the sand with her eyes closed just enjoying the sun, and she smiles a little when the Force tells her Max is here now.
"You can come sit down."
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"Eggsy was killed," he says, to explain why he can't now. It probably goes a long way to explaining how gun-shy he looks, too.
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Eggsy is her friend, and she doesn't have many of those. More than that, she and Max are so similar they could be separate parts of each other. If Tommy was killed, she wouldn't be out here in the woods.
"By who?" She asks first, because that's the more important question at the moment. "When?"
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And beyond that he has no idea what he'll do.
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"I'll help you. You should be with him, not out here."
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"He has people. They know what to do." People who are far, far better at delivering comfort. It's not like Max never knew how to care for someone who was sick, so it's not like he's unaware that his reaction every time Eggsy dies makes him kind of an asshole. So he adds reluctantly, "I don't."
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"I know. It doesn't matter that we don't know, though." She tells him as she looks back at him. "We have to try. He's..." Not soft, that's not right. "He's sweet, he probably just wants you near him."
She thinks of Tommy, who is not sweet and not soft, but needed her all the same.
"Just hold him. It helps."
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"How do you shut it out," he glances at her, hazarding a lot by asking. "All the thoughts. What'll happen if they're gone."
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"I've never met anyone like Tommy," she says after a moment. "I never even thought about wanting someone, not on Jakku, and I don't know if I will again. But we get deals, don't we? We can get them back, if we lose them. If we're separated from them we can find them again."
This isn't really something she's put much thought into until now, but now that she's saying it some of the unease from her conversation with Lark about what she'll do once she's done here eases. There are still options, if she's a warden. Nothing is impossible, and she doesn't want to build her life around one person but what she feels for Tommy is getting closer and closer to something entirely overwhelming and it doesn't seem like a bad idea to have a contingency plan in place to keep that.
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The truth is he's not sure how many more deaths he can stand to be a part of. Even these fake deaths on the Barge rattle him badly. He doubts he'll be of any use to Eggsy at all right now, but perhaps Rey knows better. And besides, he'd rather be there for protection.
"Come with me. See how he is, see if I missed something."
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"He's just going to want you. I'll check on him, but you're going to stay with him. You need to."
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But camp is clean now, and he has a rough idea what he'll do to secure the apartment. "Ready."
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"I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to stuff like this. I never even liked people until a few days before I came here, and now I've had to learn how to do that. How to show it."
Not just with Tommy, with everyone. Max is lucky in that he met Rey a few months in to her stay on the Barge when she'd picked up these skills a little more, but she knows she's still not good at these things. Passable, but good? She's a long way off.
"I learned quickly that what I think the people I care about want from me and what I think is the right thing to do aren't the same thing. My instinct is wait until they feel better and then see them, but that doesn't work. People like to be touched, they want you to be there for them. Don't- base what you do on what you think is right. Ask him what he wants. Or just make yourself touch him, hold him."
And then she stops talking because this feels very weird.
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"It makes it worse when they're gone. You remember someone needing you. Then you remember why they're dead. I saw those people in hell." Jess's pregnancy and Sprog's birth had certainly not been cause for self-loathing at the time. They are now. And how to explain the guilt he feels at 'moving on' even just while he and Eggsy are here together?
But what Rey is saying seems easy to do; he can do that. If he can't, he can still leave. (But he won't leave, because when Max decides--finally--to do something, he does it.)
"You think they'll ever end up thinking like we do? Tommy, Eggsy? Thinking the best way to help is not to be there at all."
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She understands thinking it's safer to be alone, and maybe it is. But now she knows how it feels to not be that, and it's something she thinks is probably better. Probably.
"Eggsy won't." Tommy is another matter entirely, but that's not the issue at hand. "He'll want to be with you if you're hurting, so you have to let him."
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"Tommy. He's good to you, mm?" That's another concern that's nagged at him for a while now, but there's never been a chance to bring it up.
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That's probably enough of an answer, really, but she'll tell him out loud too.
"Yes. I don't think he expected this to happen to him here, but I think he's happy. I'm happy." And that's new for her, long absent for him, and it's something that means so much that it's a little overwhelming at times.
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"Good." He'll take her assessment and believe it. (It helps rather a lot that Tommy really hasn't done anything to validate Max's mistrust. He is less watchful now than he used to be; he's willing to let Tommy stay at his fire, in fact.)
"Happy doesn't happen around here. Not for most people." He's glad that she's happy is what he really means to say.
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And then BB-8 had beeped his way into her life, and then came Finn and Han and everything that she was swept up in, and then just a few days later she was here, where everything was new, food was abundant, and people were like Finn, wanting to be her friend only because they had big hearts.
"It's hard to adjust to, isn't it?"
Being alive. Feeling things, and learning to be okay with feeling things.
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"I don't know how." This is not the confession of a man who is sheepishly trying and fumbling along. This is the confession of someone who doesn't speak a language and can't even form the vowels anymore.
"But if this helps I'll do it. I don't want to fit with people. I'm not like them at home. Don't want to be. Maybe it's how I keep waiting for my people, my family, that's never coming back. But here...I can be more for Eggsy. For Furiosa." A pause, an awkward hum that means to include Rey, too.
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"What made you want to be with Eggsy if you don't want to fit with people?"
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"First time he met me I was scavenging. He ran movie nights, helped people relax. Saw me and gave me something he'd hidden for himself. His favorite. Just gave it to me, didn't know me."
He still had the wrapper, actually and he shows it to her: a yellow peanut M&M's wrapper that he's reinforced by laminating it. It holds odds and ends for him now that the candy is long gone.
"Not a lot of people like him. And they don't talk to me, most of those people. He did."