“Neither isThe Little Mermaid.”Temple smiled, turning his head to look at me. “There’s no doubt in my mind your abilities will match your already incredible inner strength.”
Whenever he smiled at me, either my stomach or my heart did something funny. This time, it was both.
“What about dragons?” I wondered, neatly ignoring his easy admiration and my reactions.
“Dragons are very strong, but all beings have weaknesses.”
I kicked the air with a grimace. "God, that’s depressing."
"Or comforting. Nobody is required to be strong all the time."
"Then how do you protect yourself?"
"You do as much as you can and surround yourself with people who do the rest.”Like me,he seemed to suggest. “People who will have your back when you falter.”
“That’s tricky. I’ve always been better at…” Doing something, taking matters into my own hands. Even something foolish or dangerous was better than sitting around waiting for the inevitable doom. We were always helpless in the basement, but I onlyfelthelpless if there was nothing to do. “Remember when I told you the basement wasn’t so bad?”
Temple nodded, not calling BS to what still sounded hard to believe.
"I guess itwasbad but that wasn’t a lie. After a while it really doesn’tseemas bad. You get used to it.” This wasn’t exactly funny, but a laugh still escaped from my throat. “Of course I’m a total fucking wreck out here because I wasn’t in there. Some of us were able to adjust.”
Telling this story to my hands was much easier, so I did that as my legs swung under me.
“Iwas able to adjust. We kinda had rules, us Especially Doomed. If you can tolerate the asshole guards better, you look out for those who can’t. If you’re bigger and stronger, you look out for the ones who are smaller. If you have it pretty easy, you do what you can for those who have it harder. We all did our parts to make it suck the least amount possible."
"What was your job?" he asked.
"I was there longest.” Somehow I found myself looking up and explaining to him directly. And once I started looking at him, I couldn’t look away. “I understood the place and knew all the assholes the most. So my job was watching out for all the other doomed souls.” Whether that meant showing the new people how to survive or mouthing off and keeping the focus off someone else. “I looked out for them all."
"Ah." He nodded, breaking our eye contact.
"That’s all?"
"I’m not surprised.” Though quiet, his voice was full of warmth as grey eyes peeked at me from under his lashes. “I had a feeling you were about to say something incredibly heroic and self-sacrificing."
"No, it wasn’t heroic. I was stupid.” How did I explain? “The amnesia was only the beginning. It started a few insults about me losing my mind, butthisis why the guards really thought I was insane. None of us liked attracting the guard’s attention. You learn fast how to keep your head down, even to take a few hits and get it over with quick. Except for me."
My legs stilled under me, like I needed to save my energy to say the words.
“The guards pissed me off anyway. So if they hit me, I hit back. What’s the point of picking on people who can’t defend themselves? They did just because theycouldand I hated that. I hated them and I used that to pick fights I had no chance of winning. I was always going to get my ass kicked, but I didn’t have to make it easy for them, even if it made things harder for me.”
“And if they’re busy trying to teach you a lesson you just won’t learn, they aren’t hassling the others?”
"Well, I knew I could take it. Some of the others couldn’t. So it wasn’t heroic, it was logical. Sort of. I ran my mouth and ran interference. Even when already beat, even when there were more of them… I just fought anyway. That’s why they called me a madman and a lunatic. That’s how I earned those nicknames."
And the names that followed, Max and Larry.
Now maybe he’d stop looking at me with stupid damn pride. He’d know how reckless and angry I was, he’d see I wasn’t what he thought. I was screwed up. A lunatic. A madman. But I couldn’t look at him and find out. I stubbornly stared at the blank wall ahead of me.
"And you wondered why the other captives called you Max even at their own expense. Of course they’d do that for you. You were their protector."
"No."
"Max and Larry,” Temple said, not surprising at all he remembered the names I suggested before. “They sounded like terrible suggestions at first. Ugly reminders of how the guards used petty nicknames to tease you when you forgot your real name because of the Broker’s own doing.”
Yeah, exactly why I’d been hesitant to adopt the names again.
“I get it now,” Temple said. “Why Mad Max fit."
