He could not go home, because there would no longer be a home.

Lex is not a slow person, and he suffers no inhibitions to critical thinking, only a weak filter and a strong urge to be counted among the noticed. He has made it through life that way, putting himself in the limelight and soaking up the praise, the adoration, the worship. Lex drinks daily from the cup of a boosted ego, but has found it recently thinning - a watered down wine. He sits in the ruins of the town, pistol sitting in his lap, eyes both staring out to the shoreline and keeping watch for anything that moved, trigger finger itchy. His limelight had been turned off, when he first arrived, and he fought hard to get back into it, he adapted to what he saw and it became a Lex he did not know, or enjoy company with. The new Lex had done things that night, corrupted a weathered love.

A fledgling dove with a broken wing to match its neck.

Rusted, she’d called him. Dulled and stagnant. Compassion faded to apathy, like he has been led to believe it was supposed to. Ambition wilted and became necessity, kindness to professionalism. A mild enjoyment of alcohol to near-nightly consumption. Ami was right about him, she was always right, the ever high and lofty priestess judging the peasants below. He loved and hated her for that, resentment bundled with affection in the most peculiar of offerings. Her rod of iron blessed and scolded him both.

And he’d rejected it.

Scorned and exhausted with the burden of what could be called by an outsider as unrequited love, the old Lex gave up that night and let the new guide him, like the recurring nightmares of himself, the Green Knight, and the Horseman. (It would have been schizophrenia, but Lex knew these personas were not real - he did not speak with them as if they were people. They were only facets, potential Alexeis.) This Lex led him down the easy road, the path that every man and woman could follow - right into the bed of another, and he’d nearly ******** her.

May the Lord have mercy on Maebe Grace, for she kept him from the gates of Hell this night.

He wanted the rod and staff once more, but he knew - God, he knew. He knew she would never take him back, when he told her. Lex had to tell her. She would find out - she always did. Lex would never figure out how, but sometimes he wondered if the petite tornado didn’t belong in Death. His life would be shattered, maybe even his bones, but he had to be the man he wanted to be. He couldn’t be the coyote any longer, slinking through the night and stirring discord. No more plucking at barbed wire to get to disinterested chickens. Lex had to confess his sins to the priestess, and once again meet the rod of scolding.

But where would he go, when all was said and done? Ami would not give even an ounce of forgiveness, he already knew. Adam had already ******** that up for them all, and Medea and her drones had sealed the deal. For so long now, Lex had tried to be ointment for the wounds on her heart. It was hard, God it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Fighting giant monstrosities of marble with Evan and fog beasts with Jack and Abbi had nothing on the slow and sometimes unresponsive process of tending to Ami’s wounded soul. There would be none of that, after this. A burden lifted from his shoulders, yes - but he already missed that burden.

Lex grew furious with himself the more he thought, the pistol still laying silently in his lap. Regal refused to speak to him, intent on letting Lex work through this himself. A pauper who did not work through his own problems would be a no small disaster of a prince. He called Ami’s problems a burden, living with her and becoming entangled in her a chore. Lex knew, when he agreed to steadiness with Ami, that her issues and cracks would be his. When he proposed, Lex was more than aware he would marry the fissures the decorated her back and her spirit. But he did not marry them, they were not his.

Yet that was no excuse. What he had become and what Lex had done were inexcusable, but only one could be changed, and the other would remain forever as a tainted hole in his own soul. Lex could hear Marcus roaring at him now, the white hot anger filling his hands and choking the air from the Lifer’s throat.

It was less than Lex deserved. Lex had earned himself a slew of storms, fistfulls of hurricanes. He would go to face them, as a good man should - yet fear would always nag him, keep him hesitant. He was Life, he knew what the human body - even augmented - was no match for a rumbling sea.

Ami was the goddamned Atlantic.

It was past midnight, and Lex would not be going home.