Song Selection: Killing Me Slowly–Bad Wolves

Chip.

"Well, what the hell do we do now?" Finn asks, his arm wrapped around a shivering Kai pressed against his chest. "Chip? Chip?"

Chip collapses to the pavement outside the apartment, vomiting. He's not having a panic attack as much as his whole body tightening into a knot, every attempt at calm dashed. Max is doing it again, he's doing it again, Chip says to himself. He's gonna take another guy, sweet-talk him, pretend everything's okay, and by the time the boy figures out who Max is, it'll be too late. "Why did you get me out of there?" His whole body is shaking, the violent kind, like shockwaves are rippling out of h He wipes spittle from his mouth, wipes the sick off his face. "I could've saved him, I—"

"Hey, you need to chill out. It's not my fault." It's Finn, his voice gruff and strained. Chip can't look at him through the tangles of blonde hair in his eyes. But the sound of his voice finally makes Chip snap.

"What did I ever do to you? Why the fuck do you always talk to me like this?" He presses his knuckles into the parking lot, gasps coming shakily out of his aching throat. And for the first time since the death of his parents, more than a couple of sentence. "I'm done with you. Who the hell gave you the right to treat me like this! I could've saved him—"

"He would've shot you!" Finn, seething, his teeth clenched and his fists pressed against his sides, growls like an animal. "Just—shut—up!"

Chip wheels to his feet. He swings at Finn, tears streaming down his face. He swings at him with cut up knuckles and clenched fingers. No, he's not thinking straight. Yes, he'll absolutely regret this. But he can't think about that, he can only think about the story about to play on repeat. The story of Max taking on a companion and destroying them the moment it becomes convenient.

"Stop! Stop!" Kai shoves Chip back, the much smaller boy trembling from the exertion of it. His face becomes red and sweat-soaked. "Stop, please!"

Chip looks at Kai. He looks at his own fists. He looks at Finn, Finn's wide green eyes, and he thinks about the horrors, plenty of horrors, behind them. He thinks about how they found him when Max had gotten to him, Finn collapsed on the ground, blood gushing from his head. Chip thinks about this and lets his hands fall limp at his sides.

"I'm sorry," Finn says, rubbing his jaw. "I just, just didn't want you to get hurt." He tries to smile, a kind of twitch on the edges of his mouth that doesn't reach all the way. "I'm an asshole to all my friends, right Kai? It's just, it's just a part of it."

Chip's head hurts. He's hollowed out and hungry. "What are we going to do?" If he squeezes his eyes shut, he can pretend he's somewhere far away, not here. Not in front of this beat-up apartment and in this sea of asphalt. "We have to do something."

"We know where Max is," Kai offers. He's still trembling, and it breaks Chip's heart. "That's something. Maybe we should get a, uh, hotel? Figure this all out tomorrow?"

'No,' he wants to shout it at them. Tonight, before Max flees and he doesn't know where to find him. Tonight, they have to figure something out tonight. But Chip's exhausted, feels like he's been carved up and emptied out, can hardly stand, can hardly keep his burning eyes open. So when Kai grabs him by his sleeve, he lets himself be pulled into the back of the old dented mini-van. He tries not to let the images play on loop in his head, the handsome boy with the white tattoos pulling the gun on him, the boy's hands on Max, holding and healing him.

He collapses in the backseat, Kai pressed up against him. Kai's hands are already in Chip's hair, undoing tangles, brushing warmly against his scalp. He can feel his breath against him, a soft puff. Chip reaches for his guitar, grips the neck tightly in his fist. A hot tear slides down his cheek, but he can't bring his mouth to form the words. Instead, his eyes fall easily shut and he drops like a stone out of consciousness to images of white charred feathers tattooed on smooth skin, and the stupid little smirk on Max's face.

He won't let this be the end. He won't Max win.

But knowing that doesn't make him sleep any easier, or chase away the haunting images, the image of the concern clear on the boy's face while he crouched in front of Max, the image of Max's hand on Chip's face. Ugly pictures that hunt him like night terrors in his sleep

***

Chip wakes up in a twin bed, the one closest to a big blue window. Sunlight slants across his crusty shirt, and he looks down at the sheets drawn up to his waist. Hotel, he's in a hotel. Across from him, Kai's entangled with Finn on the other bed, but it doesn't look romantic. Finn is twitching, his legs kicking, and Kai is lying on top of him horizontal, like he's trying to keep him from rolling off the bed. Chip has vague memories of being roused from the car, vague memories of a smiling man behind a welcome desk, even vaguer memories of collapsing on soft sheets and sinking down into buttery-soft sands.

He looks at the alarm clock on the nightstand, red glowing numbers on a black screen. It's 2:32 in the afternoon.

Chip lets the other boys sleep, falling quickly into a morning routine. Snatches a clean shirt from Finn's bag. Showers and gargles complimentary mouth wash, paces while charging his phone with Finn's charger. Nothing from Percy. He texts her a quick 'hey there, how are u and monet?' but she never answers. He pushes his phone into his back pocket and exits the clean hotel, out into the city.

Starlight City is whack, plain and simple. Miles out, farmlands, miles in, hotels, shops, and apartments pressed together so closely there isn't any room to breathe. The biggest city in the U.S, just a big old crux of dirty city misery. Not that Silver Dollar is any better, all potholes and powerlines. But there, at least, Chip can smell the sea salt in the air, he can run down to the shore after school.

Here? He can only smell burning oil and hot tar. He walks on the sidewalk the hotel leads from, listening to the honk of cars, the screech of bicycle tires, and the endless ocean of voices that flows up and around him is people elbow past. The city is made out of squares, each block bending back around into itself. And even though he's never been here before, he starts to find his way around. The Panda Express is a little left of the back of the police station, the police station is a little right of the big mural of a purple super, and the super points to the small cat cafe. He can hear the meows from blocks away.

So he starts investigating. He pulls up google maps, finds all the nearby apartment complexes, and switches his directions to walking paths. He doesn't bother to call up the boys, because he knows they'll talk him out of this. They'll ask him to think logically; they'll keep him from executing off the emotion that drives him.

Desperation.

***

It's the sixth and last apartment complex Chip finds, the farthest from the posh city-center. 'Posh,' being used loosely in this context, posh like there's a clean hotel in it and it doesn't resemble the dilapidated building before him.

There's this term for an old style of architecture that was designed to scare the fuck out of you. Or more like, it didn't mean to scare the fuck out of you, it didn't care.The term's 'brutalism,' all sharp angles and concrete, as few windows and as much cement as possible. Just cool and cold and uncaring, if the DMV or Federal Work Commission became a style of architecture. Which, you know, they are. Almost all government buildings are built like that: brutalist.

And that's what 'Gideon's' apartment is. Brutalist. A big concrete square with small, building-code sanctioned windows, little rectangles that look like squinted eyes in the concrete. Fire escapes run up and down the sides of the building, thin and twisty. He narrows his eyes to pins and focuses. Second floor, fourth apartment down.

Going in the front way had already failed. His heart slams as he looks at the fire-escapes; it makes sense. Spy on 'em. If there's anything totally illegal going on, he can call the cops. He knows this can end terribly; one look at the thin, rusting railings and he's more than aware. But he navigates the parking lot and creeps up the fire escape anyway, the metal creaking and the whole structure shaking under his weight. With each step he can imagine plummeting down to the concrete below, but he charges forward anyway.

The fire-escape leads to the third apartment. He can hear the hum of a radio through the glass, the drapes shifting softly against the window. In theory, a desperate person could fling open the window from the second apartment and pull them-self up on to the fire escape. Scary, and improbable, and if the city cared would probably demand the fire-escape to be expanded. But he doubted it did.

This is where, were Chip going about this smartly, he'd leave. But he isn't. So help him, he's going to get to that window.

There's a ledge that sticks out from the window, no larger than an inch. He swallows, grips the banister of the fire-escape, and stretches his leg over to touch the ledge. His foot hardly fits. He puts his other foot onto the ledge beside it. He's shaking, searching for a place to put his hands, stretched out over the alley beneath him.

Chip lets go, grips the window casing a second before falling. His phone vibrates against his hip, but he can't grab it. He holds on to the window for dear life, his breath coming out of him in one big uneasy gasp. The voices in the apartment are muffled; he has to press his ear to the glass.

"Huh? What do you mean? Max?"

"Don't make me hurt you. We can get through this."

"What do you mean!"

"I'm a bad guy. I guess you were gonna figure that out. But we can still have a good life together. Everything you want, I can give it to you."

Max is insane. Not in the actual sense, more in the quote-sense, insanity being doing something over and over and expecting different results. He'd done this with Chip, with Percy, with Monet. And he's doing it again, with this Gideon. To what end? To having Gideon reject him and get kidnapped or punched in the fucking face?

This is police worthy. Chip's heart is in his mouth. If he calls the police, will that scare him away? Will history repeat, this time, with no Monet to save them? But if he doesn't call the police, Max has a better chance of getting away with his plan, whatever it is. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't have any superpowers, he can't take Max on.

"I-I—the kids who came to rescue me. Max? What they said, about you. Is that true?"

There's a second of silence. "No. No, they' were power-harvesters, bad ones. I would never hurt you the way they would."

Chip slams his shoulder against the window. He can't listen to this. He can't let Gideon think that, not even for a moment. Desperation spurs him, a painful thing. "Hey! Hey!"

Silence, aside from a strangled, feline sound.

"Max, it's me! Shut the fuck up!"

The window slides open. Chip grabs for his phone just as a 'thud' rings out through the apartment, one hand gripped on the window casing, the other, pressed to his phone's power buttons, thumbing them to trigger the emergency call function. But he never makes it all the way. Max swipes the phone easily out of his hand. It shatters on the wall.

"Well, well, well," Max says. His eyes are wild.

Shit.

The police, he should've called the police first, but it's too late. Max holds him upside down by the ankle, floating a foot up into the air. Fucked, yeah. That's what Chip is. But he's not exactly scared. Not like Gideon, pressed against the wall, shaking. Not like the stranger strewn across the floor, his big blue eyes the size of quarters in his pale face.

No. Max thinks he's playing 4-D chess. He thinks he's a genius, this powerful super-villain, and a philosopher to boot. He thinks he's so many steps ahead of everyone else, he thinks he knows what they're about to do before they do. And to some degree, he's right. Max loves mind games, has been playing them the moment he got those stupid powers, powers that have kept Chip from being able to pounce on him and destroy him the way Max had for almost a year until Monet rescued him from Max's clutches and his life of imprisonment.

But, an unwilling listener, forced to observe every damned thing, listen to every twisted plan, Chip is the only person who could ever understand Max. He's the only person who'd ever be able to play the mind games with an understanding of the rules—bless Monet, she'd come at Max fists swinging. But Chip can offer something different.

"You got me." Blood rushes to his skull. Hanging upside down has the capacity to do that, turns out. "But are you going to kill me, Max? Are you gonna cross that line? Or are you not a monster?"

Max drops him, that stupid smirk ripped off his face. Chip has a second to protect his head before he hits the floor, but it's still a victory and Chip can't help the stupid smile that crosses his face. "What? Did I strike a nerve?"

The guy who let Max be his voice has had enough it. And when he uses the same speaking cadence of Max, the same snarky rhetorical questions, it comes out of Chip smooth and powerful in his silky singer's voice. Max opens his mouth, silent.

Chip stands up. This time he doesn't need a superhero to save him.

But, looking at the stranger lying on the floor and Gideon standing there shocked against the wall, Chip figures that maybe having a superhero around might be helpful.