What are you doing New Year's Eve?

[takecourage]

They step off the tram and walk up to the lodge together and Alex...really hadn't been prepared for how beautiful it all is. She's glad she went with the fancier dress now, velvet, off the shoulder, cut below the knee and paired with spike black heels with straps that wrap around her ankles. She'd have felt underdresssed in anything else.

She blows out a breath and, for a moment, she almost shrinks behind Darlington, trusting him to protect her from the unknown.

"I...don't think I'm going to fit in here," she says.

Comments

[takecourage]

Alex nods, her ink dark eyes wide and watchful for a long moment before she smiles. She's not sure that anyone has ever looked at her in the particular way that Darlington does; she's not sure that she always likes feeling so seen.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I know this...isn't how you planned New Year's going."

[more_magic]

"Don't apologize, Alex," he says, shaking his head faintly to underscore the words. "A night like this, a party like the one downstairs...it's everything we both know they love." They'd done their best with what they had, brought supplies and tried to stay on alert; though they'd needed to make a hastier retreat than Darlington, at least, had assumed, he doesn't see it as a defeat in any terms.

"Besides," he adds, "we can still manage a few of the things we'd planned, even in here. That dance I'd promised you, for one, and--" There's a knock at the door, and he stops talking for a moment, looking towards the sound. His smile brightens into something closer to a grin.

"And champagne, for another."

[takecourage]

"I'd like that," she says, talking about the dancing, the champagne, all of it. He looks handsome in his dark suit and she just leans back against the mound of white pillows, watching as he moves to the door, opening it and tipping the guy who bought it like it's the most natural thing in the world.

"You look like you were made for a place like this."

[more_magic]

There's a faintly nervous-looking bellhop on the other side of the door, and Darlington has to swallow back an odd mixture of guilt and amusement. If he had to guess, he'd say Arnold had forewarned his colleague.

He takes the ice bucket and pair of flutes from the kid, handing him a folded twenty in exchange--along with a hastily-sealed envelope from the hotel stationery in the desk drawer, containing a pair of fifties and Arnold's name scrawled on the front. "Can you make sure he gets this?" he asks, nodding his thanks as the bellhop turns away. "Happy New Year." Nudging the door shut with his heel, Darlington picks up the champagne and threads the thin stems of the glasses through his fingers, carrying them over to Alex.

"I don't know that I can dispute that, entirely," he admits, handing Alex one of the flutes and setting the other down on the bedside table before starting to unwrap the foil from the top of the champagne bottle. "Even if I thought you'd believe me if I did." At times, the ease he projects feels as much like something he's learned as piano and Mandarin and boxing had when he was younger; a thing to practice at until he'd understood it as thoroughly as he can. He doesn't know how to explain that to someone like Alex, for whom challenge must have always held a different and darker meaning entirely. It's not the same.

The cork gives with an audible pop, and Darlington fills Alex's glass and then his own, before settling on the edge of the bed.

[takecourage]

Her pours her a glass of champagne and then all but perches on the side of the bed. Alex shifts, stretching out her leg so that she can nudge him with stocking clad toes.

"Please tell me you're going to get more comfortable than that?"

[more_magic]

Somehow, maybe at some point in the stretch of time that separates them both, Alex has learned how to bring him out of the pensive whirl his thoughts can become with just the touch of her hand. Or in this case, her foot. He looks over, down at the line of it in those sheer stockings, the delicate knobble of her ankle bone and the slight chips in the nail polish on her toes. He thinks about reaching out, taking hold of her, but all he does is nod.

"I was just taking a moment, Stern." It only strikes him as an odd thing to say once it's out.

Darlington looks away, standing back up to take off his jacket and lay it at the foot of the bed. Maybe it's just because Alex had already kicked off her heels, but he toes out of his dress shoes as well, leaving them at the side of the bed before he comes back to sit next to Alex, his back against the carved wood headboard and his long legs stretched out atop the sheets. "Does this meet with your exacting approval?"

[takecourage]

She takes a moment to study him, mostly pretending, but actually letting herself linger for a moment - on his profile, the swoop of dark hair across his forehead, the crisp lines of him under his shirt and dress pants. She wishes Caleb hadn't said anything, about butterflies, about any of it but, now he has, she can't stop noticing it.

"You'll do for now, I guess," she says, sipping her champagne.

[more_magic]

He'd been flip in asking the question, but in the wake of it Alex looks him over with something unreadable in her eyes, and Darlington can't shake the sense he's being somehow assessed. Nor the sense, a moment later, that he wants so badly to measure up. He could say something, but doesn't, once again left at a slight and unexplainable loss for words; a feeling he's coming to find so familiar where Alex is concerned.

Whatever that look is, whatever odd tension settles between them, it's put aside as Alex looks away once more and murmurs her assessment--one just as dismissive and dry as the query it's responding to. That's how they are with each other, after all.

"Generous of you," he says in return, reaching for his own glass.

[takecourage]

"What can I say?" says Alex, smirking now, squirming around a little to her herself more comfortable on the bed. "You bring it out in me."

[more_magic]

Darlington breathes out a laugh, watching her burrow and settle further next to him, the pillows plush and white at both of their backs. "I am meant to be a good influence on you, Dante," he says, tapping his glass against hers in a toast. "Glad to see it's finally had an effect."

There's voices in the corridor outside then, laughing and drunkenly boisterous; curious, Darlington looks at his watch. "Half an hour to midnight," he says. "We've almost made it."

[takecourage]

"You make it sound like it's something to be got through," she says, raising her dark eyebrows. "This isn't Manuscript, Darlington. You can relax."

[more_magic]

"I know it's not Manuscript," he says, a faint flush touching his cheeks at the reminder of that night. What he could recall of it, more accurately, the bits of reality and fantasy and desire all still too knotted together for him to pick apart cleanly. He'd wanted her then--and there, and here, his world dividing that night without his awareness--in a way he'd never desired anything, something so sudden and strong he barely had words for it even now. "Thank god for that."

He takes another swallow of champagne. "I wasn't thinking of it as something to be got through, either," he admits. "More like a..." He exhales, making a vague gesture with his free hand. "The closing of one book, maybe, and approaching the start of something new."

[takecourage]

"That sounds better, at least," says Alex, draining the rest of her champagne and teaching forward to refill her glass. "I have literally never been I'm a place this nice. Other than Il Bastogne. Remind me to take a bath or something before I leave."

[more_magic]

"It is lovely," he agrees. "Not in the same way, of course, but...beautiful for what it is."

Alex leans forward, over him a little as she reaches for the bottle, her dress making a soft sound against the sheets as she moves. Maybe it's because it had just been on his mind, but for a moment Darlington has a flash of his vision from before, of kneeling at her feet as that dark silk dress slid from her body. This isn't that, as they'd already established; tonight's a night as different as it could ever be from the havoc Manuscript played with him on Halloween. Still, he thinks of it anyway.

He blinks, trying to make the action seem as natural as he can, taking the bottle from her and topping up his own glass once she's finished and sitting back once more.

"And I doubt you'll forget, Stern," he says, a faint smile on his lips as he raises his glass to take a drink. "Even if it can't be as nice as that tub at Il Bastone."

[takecourage]

"I remember thinking," she says, her dark eyes sparkling with barely repressed laughter as she sips her champagne, "that I couldn't imagine you sinking into a bubble bath to relax."

And, just like that, she's picturing him, suds and all that bare skin, and she takes another swig of champagne.

[more_magic]

Darlington laughs at that, unguarded and entirely without pretense, even as his face warms a couple degrees in a way he doubts he can blame on the champagne. Why she'd be imagining it in the first place, he couldn't say. Likely, it had been something from early on, maybe during the tour he'd given her that first day; a thought tinted with that hard-edged scorn she'd had for him up until only a few months ago. "Not very broadminded of you," he murmurs after a moment. "I'm disappointed."

He turns to look at her, taking in the shine of her dark eyes and the curl of her fingers around the stem of her glass, the line of her throat as she tips her head back to take another drink. Some sudden impulse makes him turn, setting his glass back down on the side table before leaning to pick up his jacket from the foot of the bed. His phone is in the inner pocket, and he pulls it out, calling up the music app.

"I realize I owe you a dance, Stern," he says, getting off the bed and holding his other hand out to her. "If you'd still care to collect."

[takecourage]

"I think I just couldn't imagine you relaxing."

Literally nobody has ever asked her to dance and, for a moment, Alex isn't sure what to say. She knocks back the rest of her champagne, feeling her head give a dizzy little flicker and then she sets down the glasses and she takes his hand.

"I'd love to."

[more_magic]

He's seen surprise on her face before, and wonder, but each time it happens he's struck anew by the way something about her seems to open; some secret and vulnerable heart revealed beneath the armor she carries so close. If he thought she'd tolerate it, he might even have said it was beautiful.

Alex's silence in the wake of his question stretches on a beat longer than he expected, and he nearly moves to sit back on the bed, content to dismiss the ridiculous impulse that had made him get up in the first place. But then she's gulping back her champagne, the motion just on the edge of reckless, and her hand is in his, and Darlington's glad once more that he'd heeded whatever had spurred him to this moment. He cues up a song, something slow that requires little thought to move along with, turning up the volume on his phone as he sets it down on the side table. Their ill-gotten room is large enough that there's plenty of open space, a makeshift dance floor of sorts between the bed and the wide window along one wall.

One hand still in hers, his other goes to her back, the velvet of her dress soft beneath his palm. "You were right, by the way," he says, his mouth ticking up in a smile. "I did take lessons. Now we'll see how much I remember."

He pauses a moment, listening for the beat, then starts to move them in a careful, easy box step.

[takecourage]

When he'd asked her to dance, Alex hadn't been expecting the fucking waltz and, at the same time, she has no idea why she's surprised. Because of course they're dancing like this. Because it's him. Automatically, she goes up onto her tiptoes, letting him lead her in the dance, her fingers threading with his after a moment. She's intensely aware of the weight of his hand on her back.

"How old were you?" she asks. "When you took the lessons?"

[more_magic]

With Alex no longer in her heels, the difference in height between them is more pronounced, more noticeable--but not at all awkward, even so. Feeling her weight shift as she goes up on her tiptoes, he adjusts his hold slightly to compensate, to support her a little more as they keep moving. He only lets himself think for a minute about how well she fits in his arms.

"Thirteen," he says when she asks, breathing out a small, quiet laugh. "I thought it'd make sense to learn before I got to high school. For homecoming, or prom." He'd also simply wanted to learn, to practice and perfect another skill as he had so many others; to be the citizen of the world his grandfather had tried to make him. There was little else to do within the vast and empty halls of Black Elm, after all.

"Not that there was dancing quite like this when prom actually came to pass, of course."

[takecourage]

"Yeah, we were very different kinds of thirteen year olds," she says, letting out a huff of a laugh through her nose. She's distracted by the way his fingers splay against her back. "That's...almost unbearably cute, Darlington."

[more_magic]

Darlington grins, ducking his head a little, something warm blossoming in his chest at the near-compliment. "I doubt you'd have said that if you'd seen me at the time," he says. "But thank you, regardless."

The mention of it only serves to remind him how close he and Alex are in age. How they really had been thirteen at almost the same time, leading such different lives at opposite ends of the country--and how only a few years later, something fundamental would change for them both. He's not so naive as to think knowing her then might have saved her from what was to come. He could barely save himself. None of that stops him, just for a moment, from trying to picture the two of them as the children they'd been before their worlds had shifted.

Still keeping up those easy, smooth steps of the dance as the music plays on, Darlington raises their linked hands, coaxing Alex into a spin.

[takecourage]

Her skirt and the blunt ends of her hair flares as he spins her and Alex feels giddy in a way she can't remember ever feeling before. She's laughing when she comes back to him and, this time, she presses closer, her tits brushing against his chest as she curls her arm around his neck. It's a movement that feels entirely natural.

[more_magic]

The breath he lets out as she presses herself against him contains just the barest hint of a shiver, something so easily missed but that he's all too aware of even so. He looks down at her, bright and laughing, safe within this space he's made for her--for them both--and knows, without form or thought or question, that he wants to see her exactly like this again. As often as he can, and as often as she'll let him.

The song ends, fading into a brief silence before switching to another track, but Darlington doesn't pull away to stop it.

[takecourage]

"How close are we to midnight?" She asks, and realizes that that makes her sound like Cinderella or something - like this spell could somehow end, and everything could shatter into something more mundane.

She's so close to him now that it's the easiest thing in the world to rest her head against his shoulder as they dance.