maxen royce | three; fin

To be honest, he doesn't know who to blame.

How could he? His father made his own decisions, sure, but his mother had to have had some say. She could have stopped it just as suddenly as he started it, if she wanted. So, was it his father's fault he died fighting someone else's war? His mother's? Maybe both? He and Harls certainly hadn't said anything; maybe some of the blame was their own. Maybe the reason Harley began to freeze over- a marvelous site, like seeing Hell itself begin to snow- Maybe that's why Maxen fell in love with poison: some weaponized to kill others, but most weaponized to kill himself. Cigarettes and alcohol and a plethora of other things he'd swallow or inhale in attempt to feel better. To feel something.

In the end,
it was always the numbness that sent him on the run.

It was looking at his sister sitting across the table, then at the two empty chairs, and feeling absolutely nothing. It was seeing what people spray painted on his father's headstone firsthand and laughing. Not smiling, laughing. Because maybe he doesn't blame him for where he's at and maybe he does. Maybe he blames himself. Maybe he blames no one.

Maybe he blames everyone.

And he runs and he runs; when the postman comes to deliver them their Sorry for Orphaning the two of you checks, when Harley wakes up swinging and screaming and hissing, when he notices an absence of sound that would have otherwise been filled by his dead father and his forever silent mother, he looks for an escape. When his feet can't carry him fast enough, he lets the chemicals do the dirty work.

One thing he does know: he hates the Belgraves and the Prescotts. Perhaps not to his sister's degree, but there again: who the fuck could else ever harbor as much hate as Harley? He'd thought maybe, at first, you spend so much time in confinement with someone, anyone, even your worst enemy, you're bound to find something in common. But that was never the case. Not with the posh Prescotts walking around with their noses so far in the air they could likely smell the rain even as it is being formed. Not with the boujie Belgraves who act like, because they had trust issues to begin with, it was somehow less their fault than everyone else's. He hates Hugo's need to punch things and Serena's need to analyze them. He hates how quickly Brielle crisd- probably a fuckin Pisces- and how selfish Archie is. There isn't a good one among them, and maybe that is the only thing Max and Harley have in common with them.

But he is content to follow her around when things are easy, to let her find their weak spots and then to help her poke at them, forever along for the ride and never the one to drive. Aimless. Reckless. Stupid. There isn't a day when Maxen Royce doesn't do something that could land him back inside a Detention Center. Not as a child anymore though, oh no. He is all grown up now, a million of the tiniest fuckups stacked together are the only thing holding him up. A charming smile and a pair of sparkling eyes, his father's cruel grin and pointed nose. That's all he has. That, and a sketchpad full of drawings he'd never let anyone see.

He's the sticky feeling when the summer hits. That tender moment when the day is about to turn to night, when things start to quiet down before the creatures of the dark come out to play, so people lock their doors.

He's walking on the edge of a building, shirt unbuttoned and flapping behind him in the wind. One slip of a combat boot, one loose brick, and he's tumbling down to his death. But he keeps taking steps and, somehow, not falling.

He's smoking cigarettes in a wooden building, flicking ashes haphazardly, licking his lips as if in anticipation for what will eventually come. And when it never does, he lights up another and expects a different outcome.

Because it doesn't matter if it's by fire, or falling off a building, or things that come in the night. Everyone will die. And maybe the reason he taunts death so much is because the one thing Maxen is truly afraid of is the day when he forgets to lock the door, the day when he really does fall, the day when he finally smells smoke.

His own death, and what it would or would not mean.

He wants to be so much more than Sebastian Royce's fucked up youngest. But, at the same time, there is a constant fear that maybe, just maybe, that's all there is to him.