#thanks btw!! im usually a oneshot guy so taking the occasional break from my big stupid multichap to actually Finish something

[whimsicalcotton]

Please.......please spare some amberfield breadcrumbs......🙏🙏🙏

[tossing out fic like i'm spreading seeds for a starving flock of birds] some amberfield for u <3

(mild CW for Rach being a sad drunk bastard with Issues but dw she gets a hug)

---

Max doesn't often find herself grateful for her routine inability to get to sleep at a reasonable hour. 

Quite the contrary, most of the time, it's solely a source of strife and self-directed exasperation. But tonight is a little different. Tonight, she winds up relieved to still be up and about half past 2AM. 

At first, she's sort of startled by the noises emanating from the hallway. The dorm halls are more often than not dead silent at this hour, so the sound of slow, distant shuffling and rushed, muffled conversation comes as an abundantly apprehensive surprise. Most people — especially those as innately anxious as Max — would probably keep their head down and try not to get involved in whatever it is that's causing the unusual late-night ruckus. 

Max opens the door to her room and leans out to sneak a peek at what's happening. 

It becomes quickly apparent that the conversation she'd been hearing is better described as a bout of half-hearted bickering. As her eyes adjust to the switch from the blinding light of her computer to the dark of the corridors, Max is able to recognize the two shadowy shapes shambling closer.

“Can you please hold it together for the five goddamn minutes it'll take me to get you back to your room? Is that something you can do?” Victoria says in a sigh, pausing for a moment to both readjust Rachel's arm around her shoulders and stop her from tipping over. “God, you're such a pain in the ass.”

“Mhm, mhm, pain in the ass, I'm aware,” Rachel replies, murmured and slurred though still playfully roguish. “Can we slow down a sec? Pretty sure the floor shouldn't be spinnin’ that much.”

Max can see it taking all of Victoria's effort to keep her voice down. 

“Bitch, we're literally standing still. How you ever make it back here by yourself is beyond me.”

“Sometimes I don't,” Rachel supplies, rather unhelpfully. She breaks out into a sloppy and far too prideful grin. “One time I tripped in the stairwell and just gave up n’ took a nap there instead.” 

“And people still buy your little miss perfect schtick? I really am surrounded by morons.” 

“Hey, that's no fair. Max doesn't buy it. She's not a moron.”

“Caulfield is dating you,” Victoria huffs, once more attempting to stagger further down the hall. “That makes her a different breed of moron altogether.” 

“Vickyyyy, that's mean,” Rachel says in a magnificently childish whine. “M’not gonna make this easy for you if you're gonna be mean t’my Max.” 

“Don’t you dare. You're making it hard enough as it is, you drunk fucking dunce.”

Instead of answering out loud, Rachel begins to visibly lean more of her weight onto Victoria.

“Nope, no, stop that. Fuck's sake, try to work with me here, would ya? I'm barely any soberer than you.” 

Rachel's devilish little smile grows only wider as she all but deadweights into Victoria's side, so much so she practically drags the girl down to the floor with her. 

“That's so not a word.”

“It so is,” Victoria barks back, at what's probably an instinctively loud volume, before slapping a hand over her mouth and nearly losing grip of Rachel in the process. “Hey, watch it, you'd better not fucking fall. I'll leave you out here and let everyone else find you like that in the morning, don't fucking test me, Amber.”

It's no different in tone or timbre than anything else Victoria's been saying, but Rachel doesn't take it as harmless humor.

“Don't,” she begs, outright; voice suddenly soft and serious. Max watches her mischievous expression melt into one of anxious regret as she scrambles to straighten herself back up. “Please. I'll be good, promise.”

That's when Max finally stumbles out of her doorway to approach them. 

Victoria spots her coming and lets out a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank fuck. Max, get over here and take your pathetic whiny cat before she starts crying on me again.” 

“Are– Are you two okay?” Max asks in a whisper, semi-rhetorical, rushing up to Rachel's other side. 

Rachel wastes not a single second letting go of Victoria to latch onto Max instead.

“Yeah, yeah, we're fine,” Victoria grumbles, despite the concern threatening to show in her features. “Somebody just forgets what a fucking joke is when she gets too shitfaced.” 

“And Vicky’s lying ‘bout that whole crying thing, by the way,” Rachel adds, entirely not an answer to Max's question and muffled in the girl's shirt sleeve as she buries her face in her shoulder. “I don't do that.”

Annoyance returns to Victoria's expression in record time, and she rolls her eyes with near lethal force. “Christ, you're a menace.”

“I'm a delight,” Rachel counters with a haughty little huff, still sounding uncharacteristically unsteady. “Aren't I, Max?”

In any other context, this might fluster her, but right now all it does is make Max's chest tighten with worry. She wraps an arm around Rachel in return, resting a tentative hand on her back. 

“Of course you are,” she answers, equally unsteady and equally genuine. “And thanks, Victoria. For getting her back safe.”

“Sure, whatever,” Victoria shrugs. “She's your problem now, Caulfield. Have fun.”

She stalks off in the direction of her own room, and Max decides it's probably best not to mention how much she's struggling to walk straight even without Rachel hanging off of her. Although, as Max convinces Rachel to let go of her long enough to continue heading down the hall, she finds the act of trying to keep balance for the both of them is indeed quite difficult. They're almost at Rachel's door when she murmurs something that has Max doubling down on the already immense doubt of the idea of leaving her on her own. 

“M’Sorry for bein’ your problem. You still… You still like me, right?” 

For a minute, Max is almost too taken aback to answer. But she recovers quickly enough. 

“You're not a problem, Rachel,” she assures in a mumble of her own, mind instantaneously made up as she slowly veers them over towards her room instead; thankfully not far. “And yes, I still like you. It's gonna take a lot more than that to change my mind, silly.” 

There's a stretch of silence as they finally shuffle their way into Max's dorm. She hopes the shaky attempt at lightening the mood at least served its purpose.

“Really?” Rachel asks in earnest, apparently not even registering the fact that Max is trying to get her to sit down. She wraps the girl up in another simultaneously languid and overzealous hug, unwittingly leaning most of her weight against her as she nuzzles into her hair. “Mm, that's so nice. How come you're so nice t’me?”

Max can't help but frown at that. 

“Why shouldn't I be?” she muses as she manages to detangle herself from Rachel's grasp and set her down on the edge of the bed, not expecting an actual answer.

But Rachel does, in fact, have an answer to such a question. 

“I’m nothin’ but a fraud,” she says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, blinking up at Max with all the heart-wrenchingly pitiable shame of a kitten caught playing with something they aren't supposed to. “One day, you n’ Chloe are gonna wake up n’ come to your senses. And when you walk away, I'll smile for you ‘cause I know it'll be all my fault you're leaving. I'd leave me, too.”

Max finds herself stunned into silence for a second time in one night. Rachel offers only a wavering smile as she continues.

“S’Why I like to leave first, see? But I–”

Her voice hitches, and she makes no attempt to hide her face even as tears well up and start dripping down her reddened cheeks. 

“I think I like you guys too much, ‘cause I never wanna leave,” she admits, her smile crumbling under its own weight as she adds in a small, wilted whisper; “I don't want you to go, either.” 

Before she can run herself any farther down the endlessly winding paths of worst case outcomes, Max takes the girl's face in her hands, tucking some stray hair aside and running a thumb along Rachel's cheekbone. 

“Hey, hey, nobody's leaving anybody, okay? And here I thought I was the one with the catastrophizing problem.”

Rachel refuses to meet her gaze. 

“I'm not catrasto– catastrophying– catastrophing–” She heaves a harsh, watery sigh. “I'm just… planning ahead. S’Good to be prepared.”

Max gives her a somber smile, trying to brush away some of her tears. “Y’know, that sounds like something I’d say when you're telling me I'm overthinking things.”

Rachel pulls back, petulant and pensive expression quickly hidden in her sleeves as she rubs at her eyes. Max moves to sit beside her instead, inching close enough their shoulders almost touch. Almost. 

“... Is that why you drank so much tonight? Too much planning ahead?”

“No,” Rachel insists, in spite of how she sounds like a lost child. “Maybe. Would– Would you be mad at me?”

It's sort of fascinating, in a morbid, viscerally upsetting kind of way. To see Rachel so uncertain of something, to see her lost in the whirlwind of hopelessly intertwined honesty and fear; all the while knowing full well she wouldn't dare say any of this out loud if she weren't absolutely goddamn plastered. And as bad as it sounds, the fact that she didn't immediately deny being as wasted as she is just adds another layer of uncanny concern to the whole situation.

Equal parts melancholic and honeyed, Max says, “I'm not mad at you. I'm just worried.” 

“Promise? I know you're a better liar than Chloe is.” 

Max tries not to feel too wounded by that. She's always thought Rachel's silver tongue must have its limits.

She lays the barest hint of her hand over Rachel's beside her. “I promise, baby.”

Rachel goes quiet again for a minute or two before eventually leaning in to rest her head on Max's shoulder with a half-hearted whine. “Sometimes I think I don't deserve how nice you are, Max.” 

“I think you're just too hard on yourself,” Max tells her, small but weighted. “Chloe would say the same thing if she were here.”

“Nuh-uh.” Rachel turns further into Max's side, one hand reaching to idly toy with the hem of her pajama shirt. “She'd say I'm being a dumbass.”

“Exactly.” Max shifts around a bit so she can wrap an arm around Rachel and keep her close. “That's her way of telling you you're too hard on yourself.” 

“... Yeah,” Rachel finally agrees, sounding an awful lot like she's crying again. “I know.” 

Max lets her stay like that for a while, but there comes a point where she has to bite the bullet and call attention to it. She tries to be gentle, at least. 

“We should probably get you to bed soon, huh?” she asks in a hesitant whisper. “I bet you're tired. You should have some water first, though. You're gonna have such a headache in the morni–”

Before Max can finish the thought, she's pushed back onto the bed and held down with all the speed and cunning of a cat trapping a mouse beneath its paws. Rachel cements her new position overtop of Max by curling up and wrapping her arms around the girl's waist, burying her face in her shirt. 

“Don’t need any,” she says, no doubt far more weak and timid than she intends. “Won’t get a headache.”

“Rachel.” Max calls her name in a murmur both ashen and sugared. She tries to wriggle her way out from underneath the girl so she can sit back up, and fails miserably. “Rach, c'mon, let me grab you some–” 

“No.”

If Max didn't know any better, she'd call that a whimper. 

“Just– Stay. Please?” 

Despite her reluctance, it's not much of a dilemma. Not if Rachel is asking like that. 

“Okay, okay,” Max secedes with a soft sigh, frowning when Rachel only curls up tighter. She reaches down to card her fingers through the girl's hair. “Hey, it's alright. I'm here. You've got me.” 

“All night?” Rachel asks, laden with unwilling drowsiness and more pitiful than Max has ever heard her. “You'll– You'll still be here when I wake up, right? You're not gonna run away like I do?”

Max wonders if Rachel will even remember any of this in the morning.

It wouldn't change her answer. 

“All night,” she echoes, steadfast and strong even as she whispers it into the sullen dark. “I'll be right here. Promise.”