Work Text:
Lucy didn't want the responsibility of figuring out what would happen to the video store, but who else was it going to fall on? Certainly not the two part-time teenagers on night shift she called her coworkers.
Max was missing, as far as anyone else knew. She'd done her due diligence by reporting it when he didn't show up at the store for three days, and she should've walked away after that. But, with a rare bit of selfishness fueling her, she wanted to make arrangements to ensure that she (and the teenagers) would get one last paycheck.
All she was going to do was dig through the office to find the business license and turn it over to… somebody. The city, or bank, or a lawyer, or something. Get them to pay her and the kids, then never think about Video Max again.
Goodbye, Molly Ringwald cutout. It was nice while it lasted.
Max's office was tidy. She knew that already from when they'd done her paperwork. From when he'd flashed a nervous smile and adjusted his dorky glasses with a pen, and she hadn't thought a thing about it other than how lucky she was to have stumbled into a job so easily. She blinked the thought away and looked around.
Judging from the type of man he was, anything important was probably locked away in the safe behind his desk. And, also judging from the type of man he was, there was probably an unassuming notebook tucked away in said desk with the code scribbled down inside.
She wondered, as she opened a drawer and pushed aside crisply folded stacks of old bills, just how much life Max had lived, and how much he had to show for it.
It felt as if she'd left half of her life back in Phoenix in their hasty getaway, sacrificing things she'd once loved so dearly so that Michael's bike and Sam's figurines could fit in the U-Haul.
How much had Max left behind over the years?
The whole vampire thing was still, well, ridiculous and hard to wrap her head around, and she preferred not thinking about it at all. Yet, a morbidly fascinated part of her imagined what his house must look like, with decades of existence to collect and put on display. Sam and his friends theorized, without much proof, that he must have been at least half a millennium old. To think of all the things he could've accumulated in that much time.
But, Max's office was neat and sparse. Lucy suspected his home was about the same.
Her hand brushed something cold and she pulled a small ring of keys out from one of the drawers. An extra copy for the front doors, one for the padlock on the sliding gate, one that might've been a spare house key (maybe she would— no, definitely not), and one more. Little, silver, and round.
She glanced back at the safe. It was a dial code, but was sitting on top of a small filing cabinet with— lucky Lucy— a little silver keyhole on the top drawer. Lucy slid the desk chair over to the cabinet and unlocked it.
A small wave of frustration and disappointment washed over her as she realized it was just more tapes, identical to the rows along the walls out front. They were probably old and unsellable for one reason or another. She'd halfway closed the drawer before something else caught her eye.
Under a stack of tapes, the corner of a picture poked out. An old Polaroid, face down when she slid it out. 1981 was written on the back corner in small, tidy print.
Lucy flipped it over, and was greeted by a shock of blond hair that she wouldn't soon forget.
Wouldn't forget it splayed out on her kitchen floor, tinted at the edges by something dark and viscous. Wouldn't forget the strands of it she found on Michael's sweater when she was doing laundry. Wouldn't forget the gentle, shockingly gentle, way Max's fingers brushed through it.
Her eyebrows knit together as she studied it.
It looked like he (what was his name again?) didn't realize a picture was being taken. It was hazy, like he'd started moving in the middle of it. He was silhouetted by colored lights, probably from the boardwalk. Though it was clearly taken from a dozen or so feet away, he was the focus, with a crowd of people blurred together behind him.
Lucy swallowed and set the picture back into the drawer. She would not be taking that home to Michael or Star. Still, curiosity got the better of her and she selected one of the tapes, with a label on the side reading 8.16.86.
Sliding it into the office TV, the screen came to life with flashing lights and blaring music. She fumbled for the buttons to turn it down. It was the boy and Star, and three others that she only recognized from Sam and the Frogs graphic descriptions of their deaths. Star had one arm thrown around the blond boys neck, and he had an arm around her waist. She looked more energized than Lucy knew her to be, eyes lively and ablaze. They were singing into the same microphone, practically into each other's mouths. Star leaned in and nipped at the air in front of him, and he smiled.
Then, after about forty-five seconds of an intense rock duet, the boys eyes flicked to the side and he looked straight down the camera. In an instant, the mischievous spark he'd been sharing with Star vanished, and he almost snarled. His eyes went cold, his posture straightened, and the video stopped short.
She ejected the tape and, before she could stop herself, put another one in. 4.9.84. It was a closeup on the blond, but she could hear the music from the rest of the band. They sounded more acoustic than in the first video. No Star in sight. He sang low and slow, eyes sweeping back and forth across the audience, looking bored. The recording played for an entire song, then the boy began to turn his head in the direction of the camera, and the video stopped in advance.
Boys their age, Max said to her, aimless, angry, lost.
David, she remembered suddenly. That was his name.
It should've been burned into her memory already.
David tried to take Michael away from her. David left Star jumping at her own shadow, with dark eyes and hollow cheeks. David gave Sam nightmares and the Frogs endless conspiracy material. David caused Max to reveal his true nature. She would not forget David.
She ejected the second tape and returned it to the drawer, closing and locking it again. It felt inappropriate to have seen those. Though, inappropriate seemed to be the theme of her and Max's brief courtship.
David. Max's own lost, angry, aimless boy. His face lingered in her mind even after the TV was turned off, half alive and shining under the lights of the stage; half dead and motionless on the wooden floorboards of her childhood home.
It was hard to believe that two monsters, ancient and dangerous as they were, could feel so familiar.
She thought of herself filming Michael's baseball games his freshman and sophomore year, and him begging her to never show anyone. She thought of those tapes collecting dust, just like these, on their shelves back in Phoenix because she'd completely forgotten to scan their VHS collection for anything she may have wanted to bring.
All of those memories sealed up and hidden away, waiting to be relived by someone who was never coming back.
Lucy left the store with none of the paperwork she'd gone looking for and a dozen new questions that she'd never have answers to.
How much had Max left behind over the years? How many boys in his wake, too angry and too lost to be recovered? How many tapes were wrecked and discarded because their subjects were long gone?
What had he done to this boy— to David— to lose him so severely?
And just how close had she come to losing Michael, too?