(no subject)

[radicalize]

A small part of her feels guilty. It's ridiculous, Lucy knows, when it isn't like one or even several fucked up things happening should put everything else on hold. In a place like this, no one would ever do anything that way, and she'd have spent a lot more of her own time effectively motionless. Granted, there's a difference between this and what she usually does. It's one thing to throw herself fully into whatever she can just to keep herself going, so she doesn't fall apart. She's needed that, in the time she hasn't been spending with Max, the weight of the past couple months on her shoulders threatening to crush her. But this is something else, and when so much has gone so wrong recently, it almost doesn't seem right for her to be focusing on something as frivolous as figuring out what to wear and putting on the makeup she next to never uses to go on a date.

She can't just keep hovering at her brother's side, though. Besides, it's been a long time since she really did something for herself, longer still — two and a half years and another universe — since she did so in context like this. She'd just about resigned herself to never doing so again, after the string of failed romances she had on the island. If she's having trouble wrapping her head around what's happened between her and Steve, though, what she so foolishly acted on, she's likewise exhilarated by it, a warmth in her chest that she'd forgotten the feeling of. It's unbelievably surreal, but it is, finally, a turn towards the positive. For that alone, it can't be too terrible.

Standing at her bathroom mirror, an eyeliner pencil in her hand, she just about jumps when she hears her front door open, not having expected it. It leaves her just a little flustered still — she probably would have been anyway — when she heads out to the living room where Max is. "Hey," she says, "what's up?"