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Olethra shifts her weight, tries to hide it. With great pain she tries to prevent Maxwell from noticing her awkwardness, because she’s already been waiting forty five seconds for him to finally dredge up whatever it is he wants to say to her, whatever that was so important that he had to insist that they spoke privately. After their hot exit he had cleaned up, power napped, and all stuffily said to her, I’ve been meaning to talk to you.
She had blithely agreed, wandered far out on the ship’s bow with him, expecting more than anything else to hear some wild rumor. Wealwell was already standing there in a manner one might describe as reposed, so twenty of those forty five seconds were spent watching Maxwell telling him to go somewhere else! Go anywhere else! and then bodily turning him away from the direction he had tried to go, which was right towards Pappy. Like a child’s pet hamster marching towards its sick and gruesome death.
In front of Olethra now Maxwell opens his mouth, closes it. His expression looks recalcitrant and pinched, which honestly means nothing, because it seems that that’s what his resting face looks like. And just sort of what his overall resting attitude is, really. Has Olethra ever even seen him really smile? Maybe, she thinks, a strong and dubious maybe—in the fighting pit, even half hidden and quite a distance away, she could tell his teeth were fully bared when he got lost in the pleasure of his own swings, before Barney yielded thickly around the blood in his mouth. It could have been a wild and snarling smile, but it just as well could have been an animal’s savage grimace. Perhaps both.
None of The Max lingers on him now, despite Van’s swiftly declared preference in tone. The only thing that proves it exists at all is his knuckles, still ungloved, bruised so purple that they shine black. He presses his fingers into them occasionally. Olethra has started to wonder if he, too, secretly likes The Max far more than he likes Maxwell. Wonders which one of them is the alter ego. Why would I want to be anyone other than myself? he had said before the fight, convincing but for the fact that his words were pulled through gritted teeth.
“I am under the impression,” having found his words, Maxwell begins delicately, only to restart again. And again. “Or, I have come into some information — or, not really — I have made inferences — not necessarily an inference, considering I know it to be true, and of course the rest of the crew knows it to be true, just according to timing and the overall logic of the situation — and, I mean, if Codswallop knew then surely it’s not really something that’s hidden enough to be inferred —”
“Whoa,” Olethra says, her hands held up like she’s calming a guinea fowl. “Are you, um, okay?”
“…I’m great.” He closes his eyes briefly but tightly. “What I mean to say concerns the…switcheroo, one might call it. And your undergoing of it. Yes.”
“What? The switcheroo? I have not been switcheroo’d, Maxwell,” says Olethra, at once utterly confused, and doubly so when Maxwell looks confused at her confusion. “I think I would notice if my brain was a chimp or something. I’d hope you guys would notice, actually.”
“What are you…no, no, not that! Obviously not the Zood one! I mean, more of a, a…” A lengthy pause. Maxwell exhales hard through his nostrils. “A…Gath switcheroo.”
Olethra blinks, at length. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Olethra.” Maxwell clenches his jaw very hard and, already supremely frustrated with her for no reason she can determine, gives up on metaphor. “Once you were Professor MacLeod’s grandson. Now you are her granddaughter.”
“Oh, you mean…oh! Oh!” Her palm hits her own forehead. How was she ever meant to gather that that’s what he was talking about? She may not have succinct words for the concept herself, but switcheroo would not have been her first thought, though it does make her grin. “Well, yes. But you knew that, right?”
“I’ve been aware.”
“…Uh, you don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
Like he does with many things, Maxwell takes immediate offense to this perceived slight against his character. “Of course I don’t!”
“Okay, okay! I didn’t really think so, I just, uh. Don’t really know why you’re bringing it up.” Maybe he’s just curious? She grins again, lopsided, trying for easy and casual. “There’s not much else to really say about it.”
Maxwell takes a deep breath and wipes his palms off on his pants. Under his breath, he mutters to himself, this is so stupid. Then, louder and halting, he says with the solemn air of a confession: “I may also have. Some experience. With the nature of this switcheroo.”
Olethra’s eyebrows jump to her hairline, and Maxwell steadfastly looks at a point past her instead of directly at her face. Oh, oh, oh duh, obviously, of course, that’s why he’s found her alone and spoke to her like he didn’t know how to shape the words that were coming out of his own mouth: he’s like her. Maxwell is like her.
She reaches to put her hand on Max’s shoulder. “I am so proud of you,” she says seriously. She’s been rehearsing for a moment like this, just in case it ever happens to someone else. She always wanted to be the professor in someone else’s journey. “For being brave enough to tell me your truth. Do you have a name I can call you?”
Maxwell does not seem touched by this gesture. He just looks at her strangely. “Yes? It’s Maxwell?”
Oh, this wayward soul whom she must guide. She squeezes his arm. “You don't have to change it, if you don’t want to. But I’ll just tell you — I was afraid to change mine at first even though I actually really, really wanted to. I was just a little scared to try because I didn’t think I, y’know, looked the part yet. But it’s worth it, it really is.”
“What are you — do you think —” Maxwell’s expression does a series of complicated flips before it lands squarely and clearly on flattered and insulted. “Olethra, damnit, I’m not a woman!”
“Oh. Ummmmm.” Olethra scratches the back of her neck. “Right…?”
“But in the sense that — I had to —” His jaw is set and his face colors the slightest bit red. “I was the seventh child. Not always the seventh son. Do you understand?”
And, finally, Olethra does, which she could have earlier if Maxwell wasn’t so uncharacteristically set on talking around the point. But she doesn’t begrudge him for it, of course, just smiles wide and bright and half wondrous. He’s still like her.
No longer burdened with the responsibility of being the gender professor of Maxwell’s life, the first thing she can think to say aloud is, “Wow!” The second thing is, “Is that why you take your shirt off a lot?”
“I don’t take it off ‘a lot,’” he says quickly, with finger quotes. “It’s proper gentleman’s form!” Then, “And I don’t want to get it dirty!” Then, a little flustered, “And fine, I spent a lot of money on it — well, my father did, and you wouldn’t even be able to tell that there’s been an incision, right?”
“I never had a clue,” she tells him honestly. It’s not like Olethra could really get any good views of him with his shirt off anyway, considering he’s always in motion punching someone’s skull in, or doing fantastic leaps, or covered in blood, all the while with that weird air of quiet and calm dignity that borders always on exasperation. As if shattering a knee or leaping to a plane is a chore. “That’s awesome, Max, really. Am I the — does anyone else know?”
Maxwell quits subtly preening to scuff the ground with his shoe. “My family, obviously. Some of the Gotch crew. You.”
Olethra feels a little touched, like something fragile and special has been placed into her palm. “Thanks for telling me,” she tells him. Maxwell shrugs in response. “Did you, um…want to tell anyone? Do you want, like, advice or something?”
“Advice? I’m older than you, I don’t need advice.” His nose wrinkles to detail what he thinks of that suggestion. Sue her. “And I don’t need to prance around divulging irrelevant details about my life to everyone, either.”
“If it matters to you, it’s not irrelevant.”
“Tell me what the point would be of that. Literally what would be the point of that? Should I say, hello everyone, I know we’re in the great lost and fabled continent, but while all this is happening do you want to gather around to hear some fun facts about me?”
“That’s what you’re doing with me right now, isn’t it?”
“Because it’s you!” Frustration creeps back up on him again, but the kind that’s mostly embarrassment. He hadn’t wanted to say it in so many words, maybe. “I just wanted — to tell you.”
“Oh.” And she gets that feeling again, that gentle warmth that suggests she has been given something vulnerable to look after. The feeling of her grandmother secretly palming a candy into her hand and saying shh. “Just me.”
“Just you,” Maxwell repeats. He runs a hand through his hair, sighs hard. “Because I thought, I don’t know. It might just be nice. To have…a mutual understanding. And I’ve never met anybody else who, you know…”
“The Gath switcheroo?” Olethra supplies, lip curling close to a smirk.
“If that’s what we’re calling it,” says Maxwell magnanimously, as if it wasn’t his idea.
“I haven’t either. Met anyone like us, I mean.” Her mouth smooths to an honest smile. “And you’re right, it is nice. It’s really really nice.”
“Hm.” He crosses his arms and shrugs again, but he doesn’t bother to hide how pleased he looks. “I’m typically right.”
“Alright, Gotch, don’t get too big for your britches.”
“My britches are tailored perfectly,” he says haughtily. “Yes, well. If that’s all, I…yes. I’ll inevitably be seeing you later.”
And Maxwell turns to leave, but this precious little pocket of time that Maxwell has been a little less Gotch and a little more Max — before he’s gone and it’s over, Olethra reaches and catches his wrist. He turns, his arm seizing — Olethra realizes that she should not startle Maxwell, that he might reflexively flip her over like a soldier surprised from behind — but he only fastidiously extracts his hand from her fingers. She lets it go.
“Everyone really did like The Max,” she says, soft and serious. “It’s cool when you’re good at fighting, and stuff.”
“I’m not a fighter, Olethra,” though in the throes of the chaos earlier he had called it what it is, fighting, and his refutation now sounds more than a little perfunctory. “I’m an athlete.”
And of course Olethra recognizes what it looks like when someone, sometimes, needs something they know isn’t true to be true, because when it isn’t they’re left with something about themselves that they might not know what to do with. He’s so stubbornly blunt and headstrong all the time that it’s easy to miss where the real reclusiveness lies, the kind that it seems he only has about himself, about what himself is supposed to look like.
Maxwell’s thumb presses against the bruise on his index knuckle, leaves an imprint. He’s gone out of his way to share one private thing with her and was a little rankled about it the whole time; she won’t push her luck with picking at something that looks far more sensitive than that, so Olethra says “Right, uh-huh.”
And, because she can’t help herself, and because maybe Maxwell will understand what she’s saying underneath, she adds: “You know, you don’t have to put your gloves back on.”
Maxwell examines his hands, flexes them. For just a moment he looks deeply tired.
“No,” he murmurs idly, turning his hands so he’s staring now at his palms. “I think I do.”
Just like that he straightens, closes himself off like one might button a well worn suit, the motion neat and quick and practiced.
With a nod he bids Olethra a polite goodbye. When she sees him next his gloves are indeed pulled tightly back over both hands.
But she still smiles at him, at first broadly, and then when he catches her eye properly it gets a little small, secretive. He raises an eyebrow and gives a quiet hmph that one could dare say borders on camaraderie. It may not be a smile, but for him, Olethra reckons, it’s pretty damn close.