burning daylight | MAX [modern future au]

[Oxford Emerson]

maeve's house
summer

He'd been waiting forever. Ox had already fired off a text to Nari but she was probably with Fin and not responding. Mara said she was busy writing, and Rosie — well, she might answer right away or two weeks later or not at all. Everyone was busy and he was already extremely bored.

What was taking that girl so long?

Not one to sit still and suffer in silence Ox hopped up from where he stretched out along the couch and rapped impatiently on the door.

"Bugs." Another knock. "Buggers." Knocked again. "What are you doing in there? I'm coming in."

Figuring his best friend wouldn't care too much about the intrusion of privacy after all the years they'd been friends, he pushed through her bedroom door.

"The movie's in like, twenty minutes."

[Maeve Rafferty]

"More like fifty, Ox." Maeve grinned, twirling around in her chair to face him. "Check this."

She held out her current project: a teddy-bear sized toy clown that had definitely seen better days. The desk behind her was covered in tools, evidence of the work she'd been doing while she was supposed to be getting dressed.

"I found him in the back of my closet while i was looking for shoes - he's gotta be from when I was, like, five. He has a voicebox but it's broken. I'm trying to fix it, and I thought I got it, but-"

She squeezed the clown, and it let out a low pitched robotic wail. Her grin widened.

"You reckon five year old me had a toy clown that just screams or I broke him even more?"

[Oxford Emerson]

Fifty? Ox frowned at his watch, then up again at the ghastly little clown which belonged more aptly in a landfill. "What," he said flatly, "is that?"

The aspiring tinker enthused about her project. Ox wandered over to pick up one of her tools, spinning the unfamiliar thing in his fingers while listening more attentively than he pretended. This is why they were gonna be late to being early enough for the trailers?

A wail even more disturbing than the monster's appearance startled the obscenely tiny screwdriver out of the boy's grip where it thunked back onto the table.

"I wouldn't put it past five year old Maeve to have only had screaming toys. It's how you got so rattled in the head." He beamed cheekily at her. "Should we go throw that thing at some kid and scare the daylight out of 'im?"