good mourning, [clue three]. mav & co

[🌱 kaitlin.]

perhaps hopeless isn't a place / nothing but a state of mind.
they told me once, "don't trust the moon, she's always changing."
the shores bend and break for her / and she begs to be loved.
but nothing here is as it seems

[🌱 kaitlin.]

maverick;

Clara cuts his throat, and Maverick knows he deserves it. Liquor turns his mouth sour, the taste settling on his tongue. Nasty, he half cocks an ugly grin. She’s given him exactly what he wants, given him what he expects, not that Clara is going to give a shit about his nihilistic bullshit. Maverick knows there’s no one else in the world who can self inflict wounds like the two of them; it means she knows it about him too, and when she tells him to shut the fuck up, she’s right for it. So he does, lets his head tip back against the tree and takes another sip of his drink, warm beer making his stomach turn uncomfortably.

If she won't let him use the rest of the world against himself, fine. He can tear himself down from the inside. Just watch. 

I ruin everything.

That’s the first thought that spirals. He latches onto it, fierce, determined, stubborn. The moon rises over the treetops and peeks through the clouds in the sky, then disappears again, hidden, hopeless. She doesn’t want to look upon whatever is happening here. Maverick doesn’t blame her. Collection of idiots, the lot of them together. All they can do is wreak havoc on each other.

“We’re all gonna die here,” he mumbles into the rim of his beer, slugging back another sip. He doesn’t remember pouring hard liquor into it, but the burn of it hits his throat all the same. Somewhere absently he’s glad that he’s never been one with a weak stomach. A shake of his head, "and we're gonna have  fucking earned it."

[🌱 kaitlin.]

maverick;

The thing is this: Maverick will follow Naomi anywhere.

He doesn’t think that she loves this about him, but he does it anyway. He doesn’t even know if he loves it about himself, this compulsion, this urgent need to make sure that she is safe and protected and knows she is loved. It burns in his chest, hot and heart-wrenching—”we need bandages, something to pack the wound” and he doesn’t even blink. This is exactly what he expects out of her, and he's already moving to help. “I’ll check the shed.”

And in a blink, he’s halfway across the bonfire darting after her.

A part of him had known to give her distance when she walked up with Clara, and so he’d done as much. He’d pretended not to let the jealousy usually so good at ravaging his chest take root and just roll his eyes when he noticed the way the Naomi looked at the blonde with a dead twin’s face, sip more of his beer turned bourbon when he wasn’t looking and let it warm him all over. He doesn’t take his eyes off her though, except to study the shadows she left behind.

He’s still waiting for Presley to show up when Grady and Zeke come stumbling towards them, blood on their clothes. The looks in their eyes are enough to know there’s no way in hell Naomi should be wandering off alone, and he’s the last person in the world who’s going to let her.

He catches Zeke with a hand on his shoulder, looks at his roommate hard in the eyes.

“Be right back,” he says, and Zeke gives him a sort of look that makes Maverick think he knows better. He furrows his brows when he pulls away, feeling Zeke slide something into his palm. A fire poker, Maverick jabs the air experimentally as he walks over the grass, slipping into the night after his best friend.

When he gets to the shed he saw Naomi disappear into, he pauses at the door, looking back at the group by the fire. He studies each of them, the way their shapes shift in the dancing light of the now dying bonfire at their feet.

Chest heavy, he turns away and whisper shouts into the dark.

“Nai?”

He’s about to go in after her when she barrels out, body meeting body and nearly taking them both down. He makes an awkward guffawing noise, frantically making sure she hasn’t walked into the weapon Zeke just put in his hands. He pats her face, foolish, pushes hair out of her eyes instead of checking for actual wounds. He'll see it in her eyes if she's hurt. 

"You're so much better than you think you are,” she says after he helps them right themselves. He blinks at her, once, twice, and the beer makes him laugh her off, roll his eyes, swing his arm around her shoulder casually. The tight smile she gives him when she goes on is the fakest thing he’s ever seen, but he lets her have it. "We'll be okay anyway.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, daring himself to meet her eyes. “We’ll be okay.”

[🌱 kaitlin.]

maverick;

The problem is Maverick has always had an over active imagination. So when Naomi goes flitting away from the bonfire into the darkness towards a shed, it was easy to believe something awful was going to happen and he needed to be there. Body after body, Maverick has over and over been introduced to new ways to mutilate those that he cares about; Frankie hung in his bedroom, ruining the sanctity and peace of a place most use to hide; Cleo flayed so badly her parents would rather incinerate her than bury her bones like that, disrespected and in pieces; Naomi, and the voice that had been stolen from her, lips butchered and sewed together; even Scarlet, stumbling upon her left hand behind a rose bush, all these things compound in his brain and put together pictures in his head. Worse, when everything feels like it's starting to fall down around them, it's those images that won't stop screaming at the front of his mind. 

Stumbling through the dark, it’s Naomi’s hand wrapped around his wrist that anchors him to the moment. The pair of them clatter up the back stoop and go into the house though and he looses his grip on her. She charges forward into the house, girl on a mission, and Maverick nearly trips on his heavy boots trying to follow after her.

Half a blink, he sees her with tears streaked down her face again, curled up under the blankets on his bed and looking smaller than she ever had before. The second passes and he's back in the house and she's a shadow and— “Hey,” he says, reaching his hand out to try and catch her’s as she flits away, but he isn’t fast enough. He clutches the air where her hand had been just a second before desperately, fist empty, but following her inside.

The loops on Maverick’s cargo pants gets caught on a door handle not once, not twice, but three times while Naomi is tripping around in the dark. He hears her stub her toe, let out an oompf of pain and he goes barreling towards her every time, spacial awareness in the gutter from the beer clouding his thoughts. She plows through the downstairs quickly though, moving faster than he does, makes it through most of the place before he’s even left the living room, hummingbird girl flying from room to room looking for something to help Grady with his fresh wounds.

“What do Elaina’s parents do anyway?” He asks, but every time he talks and she's in the room she gives him a look that tells him to shut up. She’s always been great at communicating with her eyes, and Maverick has always been good at pretending he didn’t understand. Stubbornly, he wants her to stop walking away from him, stay closer, demand she let him keep her safe, but she’s as graceless about accepting help as he is.

Petulant, he picks up an interesting looking vase by a sculptor his teacher would shame him for not remembering the name of. He turns it over, examining the signature at the bottom, before dropping the thing and letting it shatter on the wooden floor at his feet. Naomi jumps in the dark, and then levels a look at him that tells him she knows he did that shit on purpose.

He gives her a shrug, and a half-hearted “oops.”

She shakes her head at him.

"There's nothing here, we'll have to check upstairs."

He doesn’t follow her gaze when she peers up the stairwell, eyes glued to her face, memorizing the lines of it. He doesn’t expect it when she looks back at him suddenly, says his name like a broken promise.

"Maverick."

A shiver runs down his spine when she puts her arms around his waist. It feels like putting pieces back together when she squeezes him there, something becoming whole again, just to get shattered when she pulls back. He had felt safe for just a second, wrapped up in her hug, but seeing the fear in her eyes burns away the comfort and leaves the pit of his stomach feeling hauntingly empty. He’s going to ruin whoever it is that’s doing this to his friends, even if it kills him. He vows it in the moment, looking at the shattered hope in Naomi’s eyes. He lifts his hand, thumbs brushing away the tears welling at the corners. He lets both palms rest against her cheeks, not smiling down at her, but feeling something warm burn anyway. 

"Be careful. This place might be haunted," Naomi says.

“Don't worry. I’m not afraid of the Keyford’s ghosts.”

[🌱 kaitlin.]

maverick;

The first time Maverick sat down to read a book, he flipped to the back page.

How does it end? he’d ask once he learned how, big wide eyes looking up at his Mom, green eyes made brighter by excitement. He’d be hopeless if she didn’t tell him; his mouth would fall flat and she could see the joy leave in real time. She’d continued to read to him at first, and he wouldn’t listen, would start wringing his hands together, nervous, frustrated, and eventually she learned to give in and tell him where stories would end before starting a new one.

Maverick remembers her running her palm over his head, leaning down to kiss the top of it after playing with his hair. He remembers the way everything used to smell, like lemons and lavender, essential oils clinging to all the linens. He doesn't know hoe long it's been since his home has smelled like that, how long it has been since it felt like he had a soft spot to land. 

He stiffens whenever he smells lavender now.

It’d been about control, at the end of things; Maverick wanted to be in control. Frustrated, his fists are clenched balls at his side as he trails after Naomi upstairs.

“I don’t want to lose you,” he says to her shadow. “Stop.”

She rounds a corner at the top of the stairs, and he stumbles going up, reaches for the banister to try and catch himself. It slows him down, and he can feel his heart beating in his ears as he loses sight of her. A fragment of him gets lost in the moment while his body tries to right itself, committing the image of her to memory. It scratches at the back of his brain, needle in his neck, the thought he might not see her again, the fear that she might be another body next time he finds her. So many bodies. She can't be one of them.

“Naomi,” he hisses to the dark when he finally reaches the second floor landing. She’s gone though when he looks down the small hallway. He digs in his pockets, scrambling in his cargos for a spare lighter. His heart skips when he catches the edges of one buried at the bottom, yanks it out and flicks it, once, twice, anger growing as it sputters out again and again. He lets out a groan before hurling the thing to the ground. It makes a thudding noise, light against the rug on the floor, before clattering quietly against the baseboard.

“Nai, please,” he looks down one way, back the other. “Where did you go?”

Her scream shatters the silence.

[🌱 kaitlin.]

maverick;

The next series of events feel like a blur. Maverick barrels down the staircase, following the sound of Naomi's scream. The attic is dark and musty though, and he has a hard time getting through it quickly, trips over a stray bag of god knows what and eats dust when he falls on his face. Doesn't slow him down, he goes down the ladder to the attic on his ass, shoves the thing closed behind him before listening for Nai on the second floor landing.

There's a clattering across the house, and he's off — metal clinks in the garage, and he tumbles through the side door. He's on his belly again on the floor for a second, peering under the beat up old car his Dad would've been able to teach him how to fix. It’d be easy to let himself get lost in little reveries, awful memories playing out in different ways. He's used to them, has held them close to his chest for as long as he could. Naomi stumbling through the dark, mouth raw and bleeding, muffled sobs, except it’s Zeke’s face and Clara getting her leg shattered.

Maverick's had dreams about stumbling to their rescue, except it’s intentional and he’s a better person than he knows how to be right now.

He swallows, thick, entertains the idea of socking Grady in the jaw and the frequency of his anger at himself when he didn’t. There's something to be said for the way guilt can eat a person from the inside out.

There's no hesitation when he takes the shovel in the greenhouse and sends it through the place where the projector puts on its show.

[🌱 kaitlin.]

maverick;

Somewhere between the greenhouse and the tool shed he remembers blowing off Ally. He wonders if he should turn back, go and see what she knows; there's a chance she could have seen something he didn't, that she'll be able to help him find Naomi, be able to help him get Presley and all of them get the fuck out. Something in his chest ignites, and he lets out a groan of frustration. The tool shed takes the brunt of his anger; he kicks over a bucket in there filled with stray tools, the metallic sound clattering across the floor. Rotting boxes are stacked on top of each other, contents going stale from neglect.

There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

Group of kids, left to rot in all their different ways.

In some ways, it only makes sense for it to end like this.

“NAOMI,” Maverick shouts this time, voice booming across the empty yard. He can't see where he left the others by the bonfire from here, but he hopes that everyone there ran, that they're somewhere else drawing the freak doing this away from the house. He hopes they're making their own beds. Maverick has never been any good at accepting fate though, and if Naomi's is this, here, disappearing tonight—he doesn't accept. “I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF YOUR SICK FUCKING GAME! GIVE HER THE FUCK BACK!”

The shovel doesn't feel like a weapon, and neither does the pathetic fire poker Zeke gave him, but he clutches them as if they are anyway. He can't help but swing them around a little bit wildly, something terrible clutching him by the throat.

He is without grace when he storms back into the house.

When he sees Benji, he doesn't have kindness left. Suspicion grips the pit of his stomach like a vice, cold shards radiating through every one of his bones. It feels like swallowing ice whole when Maverick talks.

“Where is Nai,” voice a barely contained threat, Maverick seethes as he lifts both of his makeshift weapons in front of his face. “You better not have hurt her Benji or I swear to God I'm going to kill you.”