Friday, November 23rd, 2018--Luton, England, United Kingdom
London Luton Airport
You could only stomach sitting down for as long as was strictly necessary, and it had taken every ounce of the self-restraint that you were usually on Max's case about failing to show to force yourself into a seat for the time it takes for the jet to taxi to the runway and take off but not for a second more than that.
Luckily, beyond letting you know when it was safe for you to get up and walk around the cabin, the flight's skeleton crew– a single pilot and a lone stewardess– kept largely to themselves and left you to your own devices, a fact about which you were deeply grateful for because to be frank, all you were cut out for at present was pacing back and forth, walking the same invisible line up and down the length of the jet without reprieve, while getting so deeply lost in mire of thoughts crowding your head that reality fades away into the background.
It was far easier to fold in on yourself, to look inward for solace, than it was to let yourself acknowledge Daniel's presence in the corner farthest from the pilot's cockpit, because the weight of his gaze on your face, the earnestness of the emotion held in those eyes teetered dangerously close to spilling over– his concern for you and what await the both of you in Monaco wasn't a comfort, it was all but fucking unbearable.
So, feeling like the coward you so often accused Max of being, you hid from your friend, ignoring him for the sake of your own wellbeing, because you could barely stomach your own roiling emotions and all those passing glances his attention as it brushed over you as it was... but even the briefest glints of Daniel's guilt that you unintentional caught glimpses of out of the corner of your eye was enough keep you staring at the ground.
Because while you knew in truth, what had happened tonight hadn't occurred as a direct consequence of his absence or his actions which had left Max and Kaia behind at home on their own, you weren't naive enough to think that there was anything at all that you could say that would convince him to absolve himself of the personal responsibility he now felt for the series of events that had put a little girl who called him her uncle in a hospital bed.
Better to leave him to his own thoughts as you yourself wanted to be than to overstep your bounds and unintentionally inflict any further pain to his already weakened and damaged defenses.
There wasn't much either one of you could offer the other at present without running the risk of doing more harm good and that was just the lay of the land, the hand that you'd been dealt, the way the stars were aligned. There was no changing any of it and you both knew that instinctively, with the same certainty you understood that there was solace and support to be found in the shared experience that stretched unspoken between the two of you that otherwise neither of you could spare the other if the silence was shattered.
So, with Daniel beyond your reach, the only thing outside yourself that kept you tether to the world that still existed around you was your cell phone, which in spite of having been tucked away, out of your line of sight since you'd boarded the plane, felt like it was burning a hole in your pocket, almost as though it was conscious of how far from grace and the usual place of importance it had fallen.
Despite your efforts to the contrary, its presence was impossible to just completely ignore when the temptation to pull your phone out and switch it back on, just for long enough to find out if you had service on the private jet or not, to find out if you had any open messages waiting for you-
No, you were determined not to fall under the spell of the siren's song being sung to you by the unknown, tempting you to give in, to just see if it was still nothing but radio silence from Max, but you knew a slippery slope when you saw one.
Because while you might have a less than stellar track record for stupid fucking decision making where he was concerned, and that was under even the best of circumstances, at least you were capable of owning up to that.
And sure, maybe it was unfair of you to harbor such acrimonious little grudges against him at a time like this, what when all things considered, Max was just trying to get through what had to be one of the worst nights of his life, it would take more than your conscious to get you to forget how you'd felt when the line had gone dead and he'd left you with only unanswered questions to keep you company.
The fact of the matter was that after the nearly three months you'd spent learning first hand why Max was want to pull the bullshit that he did, you'd become rather adept at assessing the damage and identifying what the motivating factors were for the decisions that had had been made but even you, forged in the flames of the trial by fire that had been your first few weeks on the job, were limited by what you understood about the cause and your ability identify all its corresponding effects.
In short, it was a bunk science that relied on proving your theory with cherry picked data points instead of properly testing the hypothesis, and it was about as reliable. If only you'd been more realistic with yourself about all of this, if you'd been smart enough to remain objective when it came to Max and the working arrangement, you'd found yourself ensnared in then perhaps none of this would have hit as hard and there wouldn't be that sharp pain twisting in your chest, threatening to consume you-
"Enough!" Daniel's voice is rough as the command rumbles out of him, the rich cadence of it superseding the humiliating squeak of surprise you let out as he pulls you clean off your feet and neatly into his lap before you can do a thing to stop him, "you're driving me up the fucking wall."
"What are you- Let go of me!" You demand, trying to extricate yourself from his grasp but it's of no use, his arms only tighten around you as he simply shakes his head, the gesture filled with such frustration and exhaustion that you're momentarily disarmed, your body going temporarily slack in his grasp.
"You clearly had no plans to stop pacing back and forth until we landed so I had to take matters into my own hands," Daniel explains with a shrug of his shoulders as if to say that much should have been obvious.
"You could have said something," you point out rather unhelpfully.
"And you wouldn't have listened," he's right but you're going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that so you admit nothing, "so, fucking stop moving and just let me have this– this one thing, would you?"
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There was something in your touch that invariably made complicated, lurid things happen in his chest, things which he neither knew the name of, nor fully understood.
And not because the answers were beyond him or because the twisted knot of whatever the fuck it was that roared to life every goddamned time you so much as brushed up against him as you slipped past him in the crowded paddock or your fingers grazed his while you walked at his side, was some great unknowable mystery destined to haunt the ages.
No, it was nothing so grand or interesting as that.
Rather, quite simply put, Daniel did not know what to call the whole host of complicated shit that went down in his chest at the slightest provocation because he didn't want to know, he'd never wanted to know, so he'd never asked.
Better to remain in the dark, obstinate in his unawareness, wholly able to maintain the facade of his own blissful ignorance by sheer force of will then to take that final step forward, to trade the inky black of night for the golden light of day and be made to face what waited for him in the sunshine— the unadulterated truth of it all– a burden which he did not wish to bear.
