Title: catching sunlight
Rating: R for language
Canon: Elysium
Characters: Max, Julio
Wordcount ~1200
Warnings: spoilers for...stuff covered in the trailer.
Notes: I didn't look up the actual symptoms of radiation poisoning, but that's actually kind of meta. If you look at the little Chavez girl, yeah, she...isn't a victim of compound fractures, which *by definition* break through the skin. So, yeah, I'm just following Blomkamp's lead here. :P

 

Dying. I’m fucking dying.

Max kept saying it to himself, but it still seemed unreal, even as he could feel--he swore it--the radiation tearing through him, like it was bursting his blood cells with every passing minute.  He could feel his body dying, like his energy was bleeding out through some invisible wound, onto the ground, but part of his mind didn’t believe it, didn’t want to believe it.

He lay on the floor of the bathroom, one arm hooked over the toilet seat, but he was pretty sure by this point he had nothing left in his stomach to throw up. Small consolation: his mouth still stung from it, acid and bile, a yellow caustic taste that the tepid water Julio had brought him had done nothing to wash away.

Julio. Julio. Where was he?  He’d been here, right? No, yeah, he’d been here.  He’d made Max take the Miporol, hands steady enough to open the childproof cap, when Max’s own had shaken so much he could barely mash the pill into his face with a shaking palm. And Max had heard him bustle outside, in Max’s room, the slosh of water, the scrape of furniture, as he’d cleaned up Max’s vomit.

Where was he now?  Max shifted, cautiously, letting his shoulder fall from the bowl, his body rolling onto his back, hand falling limp on his chest, on the sweat-wet of his coveralls.  He could see the late-afternoon sunlight filtering in the narrow alley, the light looking tired and tarnished.  He raised a hand, watching it shake, holding it to the light, like a kind of wonder, turning it over in the brassy light as trying to catch hold of the thin golden light. He was dying, and the number of sunsets he’d see was already too few.  

“Julio,” he said, his voice a creaky sound, like linoleum cracking underfoot.  No answer, no sound of movement at all, just the distant buzz of the favela outside: the distant thump of someone’s bass, a child crying somewhere about some problem that Max, right now, wished he could have. He’d put up with being a little hungry, a little hot, a little tired...if it meant he had all that infant’s days ahead of him. Half of them. A fuckin’ quarter.

It hit him, memory crawling through the nausea: Julio had gone to make arrangements, so they could see Spider. So he could see Spider, and find some way to convince his old boss to give him a ticket. For what? Old time’s sake?  Right. Have to come up with something better than that.  Spider wasn't sentimental about anything but money, and when he saw Max, all he'd probably see was all the money he'd lost. 

Have to look strong; not weak, not pathetic.You owe me, Spider, he thought, trying it out in his head. You owe me. Not...me begging.

He rolled again, testing his belly, his head. The room swam, but only for a minute, and his hand caught around the raised lip of the tiny bathroom’s shower, the little square tiles hard and cold under his heated fingertips.  

Max pulled, hauling himself closer, and closer, then finally over the small lip, into the stall. He stopped, for a long time. It felt like forever that he hunched there, feeling his pulse pound thinly in his body, weakness feeling like a blanket pulled over him, but the square of sunlight barely moved up, as he gathered himself, like an animal, using his feet to scoot himself into the corner, his workboots skidding on the tiles because he couldn’t put enough force into the push to get them to grip.  

Right. Right. Wait. It’ll pass. It’ll pass.

One day it won’t pass, he thought grimly. One day, soon, in a couple of days, you’ll wish that all you had was this kind of swimmy, fevery nausea.  Organ failure, the droid had said.  Brain. Kidneys. Lungs.  Probably shit yourself, too, die in a puddle of shit and diarrhea.

Not a great thought. But it motivated him to surge upward, one foot braced in the far corner of the shower, slapping blindly with his hand for the shower’s controls.  It'll pass, because you're gonna go to Spider, get to Elysium, get healed. Maybe...maybe never even come back. 

The water came on, after a few spitting bursts, pattering on his skin like rain.  He tipped his face into it, feeling it on his cheeks, slipping between his lips, over his scalp.  He was going to see Spider. He was dying. He had to pull himself together.

His hands fumbled with his coveralls, too unsteady to grab the zipper tab, so he grabbed the two sides of his lapels, pulling them apart, the zipper juddering down, letting the warm water sluice under it, to his undershirt. He could smell himself, this way, that rank scent of fear, and the antiseptic from the extraction droid, medicinal and sour. Smelled worse than prison, where all he'd smelled like was a guy who didn't shower often enough, musky and sharp.

Weak scents. Bad scents.  He wasn’t afraid, he wasn't allowed to be. He was dying but he couldn’t show it.  Spider fed on weakness.

The whole fuckin’ world fed on weakness.  

Max twisted his way out of the coverall top, the sleeves sticking wetly to his arms, stopping to rest his head in the corner, nearly panting with exhaustion.  Fuck, Max, he berated himself. You can’t even take a damn shower. How the fuck are you going to deal with Spider?

“Max? Max.”  Julio’s voice, filtering in over the falling water. Max lifted his head, water sluicing into his eyes, to see Julio’s head peek around the doorframe. “Jesus, Max.” 

“Need to. Julio. Spider.”  He could barely get those words out: talking was way more effort than it was worth: words burning his throat, stumbling past his lips, refusing to string together, like the magnets at the plant, if you faced them the wrong way.  

“Yeah, yeah,” Julio said, dropping a bag by the door, stepping in and dropping to one knee, holding out a hand. “Let me help.”  

What choice did he have? Let Julio help? If Julio hadn't, Max would have floundered in the bottom of the shower till dark.  

It was embarrassing, needing someone’s help to get undressed, needing to lean his whole weight onto Julio’s shoulders to stand, as Julio shucked his coveralls off his trembling legs.  It was humiliating, but Julio’s hands were careful, his eyes carefully averted, as though he knew without being told how this was one bruise more than Max could take.  

But the shower, or the Miporol, or just the fact that it had to be done, slowly galvanized him, so by the time Julio reached to turn off the sputtering tap, Max could stand, water dripping off his naked body, only bracing himself with his good hand against the wall, woozily, as Julio stepped out to bring him the only clean clothes he had: another set of Armadyne coveralls.

Like he wanted to be wearing those, like he wanted to brand himself with that place right now, the company that had ruined him, in all the dozens of ways they ground every worker down, disrespect, distrust, and then this.  

But what choice did he have? They'd killed him, he killed himself: it was all a big muddle his head was too thick with sickness to sort out. All he knew, the thing that held him upright, limned by the rays of the dying day, the thought he forced into his mind, trying to shove the fear and doubt and nausea and everything aside, was that he wanted to live.