takecourage | (no subject)

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She avoids him for as long as she can because, honestly, she's in no hurry to see that cold disdain in his eyes when he looks at her. She knows that he disapproves of her choices, that he wants her to better herself, and she can't help that her reaction to that is the same as it's ever been: to throw herself as far and as hard as she can in exactly the opposite direction. Her tattoos coming back on stage the other day is a whole different issue. She's wearing a hoodie zipped up to the neck, pulled down over her hands because that's just another coveration that she doesn't want to have with Darlington today.

But there's stuff at his apartment, a drawer in his dresser with a few t-shirts and her favourite panties and a pair of heels that she really wants to for a scene. She might have more money these days, but that doesn't mean that she wants to waste it. When she gets to Dimera, she knocks the door instead of just using her key.

Maybe she'll get lucky. Maybe he won't be hoe.

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Having showered and changed after his run, Darlington's in his kitchen looking for something to eat when he hears the knock. In a way, it surprises him. He hasn't gotten to know many people yet, though with school starting and his new job at the museum, that's bound to change before too long.

And the one person in Darrow he does know already, perhaps far too well? She wouldn't be stopping by.

Most likely, it's a neighbor, or a delivery person who's been somehow misdirected; huffing a sigh, he closes the cabinet he'd been picking through and goes to the door, undoing the lock. For a moment, he just stares at Alex, wrapped up as tightly in her hoodie as she'd been in that black henley the first day he'd ever met her. Now, as then, there's something flinty in her dark eyes. His jaw tenses a moment as he sees it--and as he swallows back the apology that tries to bubble its way to the surface.

"Alex."

"Hey," she says, shifting her weight slightly in her combat boots. "I...left some things here that I need so I thought I'd swing by and get them." I didn't think you'd be here. I thought you'd have class. A muscle ticks in her jaw. She remembers the look in his eyes when she threw that mug. She'd liked that fucking mug. "Can I come in?"

"Of course," he says, stepping to one side to let her through. As she passes, he can't help watching her, taking in the rigid set of her shoulders and the hard lines of her face. It used to be she only looked like that when they were away from the wards, but he's kept up the ones at his apartment. Of course, it's not Grays she wants to tune out here; just him. He ignores the way that thought makes his stomach drop.

Darlington nudges the door shut once she's inside, taking care not to let it slam this time. "Should all be in the usual place," he says, bobbing his chin towards the bedroom. "But let me know if there's something you don't see."

Her shoulders do relax a fraction when she steps into the apartment, once she's behind his wards. She heads in the direction of his bedroom, to the drawer he'd given her in his dresser. She finds the pairs of panties that she's looking for and shoves them into her bag and then heads to his wardrobe, bending down to rummage for a pair of glitter heels with platform soles.

Alex goes down the hall and into his room, her boots making a scuffing sound against the thin carpet, and Darlington takes a step or two in that direction a moment later before he stops, changing course. He returns to the kitchen instead, taking down a glass from the cabinet--then another, after a moment of debate--filling both with water from the tap. Every so often, he can hear the rattle of drawers or the creak of his closet door, and he can't keep himself from glancing towards each sound.

"Find everything?" he asks, once she reemerges.

"Yeah, I think so," she says, her bag on her shoulder and the shoes dangling from her hands by the straps. She looks at the glasses of water on the counter for a moment. "Is one of those for me?"

His eyes cut quickly to the shoes in her hand, then away again. The sparkle of them strikes him now as something lurid, the height of them somehow obscenely tall. He tries not to picture her in them, writhing on some garish stage, and only partially succeeds.

When she asks the question, he nods. Unless you're going to throw it against the wall again, he thinks, even as he knows it's unpleasant in a way he tries hard not to be--even where Galaxy Stern is concerned.

"If you want it." Darlington picks up his own glass, just for the sake of something to hold. "If you were inclined to stay."

Alex thinks about it for a second. It's hard to look at him without remembering New Year's Eve; the way he'd looked when he was on the verge of coming, or afterwards, when they'd curled up in bed together. She puts down her bag on the table, the shoes and walks closer, reaching for the glass.

The sleeve of her hoodie rides up, revealing leaves, the rim of the wheel. She doesn't catch it in time.

Alex puts down her things, and even that feels like some kind of victory. A step forward, maybe, out of the darkness of their argument, a turning towards some sort of rapport. Maybe it wouldn't be the same as what they'd had, or what they might have had in time, but anything would be better than this. He dares to hope--and then her sleeve pulls up, revealing smudges of ink he'd never expected to see again.

"They're back," he says, trying so, so hard to keep his voice as neutral as he can.

She picks up the glass, reflexively pulling down the sleeve of her hoodie when she does, covering the ink back up again.

"Yeah," she says, glancing at him. "Couple of days ago now..."

"I see."

There's any number of reasons why, from the accidental to the intentional, the mundane to the deeply uncanny. Address moths were only meant to be temporary, used to shepherd information from place to place, not to retain the pictorial evidence of one girl's unfortunate choices in perpetuity. Darlington could give her the benefit of the doubt, assume the magic had somehow failed--Darrow's nexuses were different enough from New Haven's, that very well could have been the case--but caught within the teeth of their festering argument, it feels more like a rejection.

He'd done that for her, wiped her arms as clean as he could get them to let her start anew; showed her the beauty magic could bring, rather than the terror she'd known it to be up to that point. But if there's no use for Lethe here, no use for him, why wouldn't she find as many ways as possible to sever that connection?

Of course, if she's looking for as hard and harsh a break as possible after Kagura, Darlington suspects he knows how those tattoos of hers returned. He should wish her every happiness, want better for her even if she doesn't strive for it herself, but something twists low in his chest and when he speaks, it's not to say anything of the sort.

"Not so careful in the throes, then."

She'd been ready to hide, to curl in on herself like Yale Alex would have, to drink her water and make conversation and wait for everything to go back to normal. But then he looks at her the way he does and says what eh does and all she hears is I expect you to better yourself, Stern. And, just like that, the viper inside her uncoils. She sets the water down and unzips her hoodie. Underneath, she's wearing a loose, light t-shirt, the snakeheads at her collarbones clearly visible.

"....Of course that's what you'd assume. Right. Cool."

Once again, she opens up that hoodie of hers, and once again it feels like bait he knows he should be better than to rise to. He sees the dark-inked serpents at her clavicles and remembers the matching pair along her hips, the way they'd looked peeking above the lace of her panties as he went to his knees on that plush hotel room carpet. The memory of that night is something he's gone back to, over and over again, but it's never felt so soured than it does right now.

"Am I mistaken?" he asks, unable to keep the superior chill from his voice, wanting it to feel more like armor than it does in the moment. "Because truly, Alex, if you've somehow found a way to get the address moths here and perfected the incantation to get them to give up the tattoos again, I'd love to know."

"Would you even believe me if I told you you were?" Shoots back Alex, all venom. "Or are you too caught up in this idea of me fucking the first guy I ran into after you?"

"At this point, I'm not sure what to believe," he says, his fingers tightening for a moment along the curve of the glass in his hand. "And I certainly don't expect an honest answer out of you. It's not my place to know, is it?"

He ignores her other question entirely, or tries to. The twist in his gut is nothing but fury, nothing but an irritated concern he shouldn't feel. It doesn't matter.

Alex digs her nails into the palms of her hands so hard that she's sure she just have drawn blood. She remembers the first day she met him, when he'd set the jackals on her and she'd been so tempted to jab her fingers into his throat and make him reject treating her like that.

"You made yourself really clear, Darlington. What? You don't want me but you don't want anyone else to want me either? Is that it?"

She says it--You don't want me--and Darlington wishes she'd just hauled off and slapped him instead. It might have hurt less.

He'd thought he was doing the right thing in the wake of their lapse at Kagura, staying at a cordial distance until they'd regained their footing with one another. Maybe they'd never quite have the warm intimacy of that first week, no more treating one another's apartments as extensions of their own; no easy tangle on the couch as they watched television, Darlington's head pillowed on Alex's lap; no lazy mornings waking up with the delicate curve of Alex's back pressed close to his chest. But they'd have had something.

"That isn't it and you know it," he says, letting his hurt transmute itself into anger, hoping it'll be more purgative than poison. "You're hellbent and reckless, and the choices you're making more than reflect that, but you're not stupid. Please don't demean us both by acting like it."

"Do I?" she asks. "Do I know that? Because all I know is that I sucked your cock and then you dropped me like I was hot and then you really dropped me when you heard what I was doing to earn money." She can't argue with hellbent and reckless, though. "So don't pretend this is something it isn't, Darlington. Let's not pretend that you didn't do what most guys would have done, and take an opportunity to get your dick wet."

"I stayed away because it never should have happened at all!"

His anger, usually, is deep and contained; something he can work through with an afternoon of training at Black Elm or Il Bastone, a thing he can try to outpace with every thud of his sneakers against the pavement on a six-mile run. Other times, the answer is work, or study, or--when nothing else has helped--his grandfather's patented solution of cask-strength scotch and plenty of ice. If he must give voice to his fury, it's always controlled, always measured, always as polite a thing as he can manage.

In the face of what Alex throws at him, the way she twists the situation to fit her own narrative, he's none of that at all.

"We were drunk, and we were stupid, and we gave in to whatever that was on New Year's, and I knew it was only going to last for the night, and I tried to be fine with that, Alex." He can hear the way he's shouting, his voice loud and hard and angrier than he's ever heard it, and he doesn't know that he could stop even if he wanted to. "I tried to stay away, because that's not what this is. That's not what we are. For fuck's sake, I run away to Spain to get away from you back home. Nothing like this was ever supposed to happen."

He sets his glass down on the counter, the base of it rattling on the Formica with the way his hand is shaking. "But it did. And I wanted it. More fool me."

He's shouting, but they've still got the counter between them, so Alex can ignore the impulse she feels to cringe away from him the moment he raises his voice. She lets her anger fuel her, lets herself stay angry because, in that moment, it's better than feeling like she wants to curl up and die. What he says hits her like a blow to her solar plexus, her hands physically tightening on the edge of the counter so that she doesn't reel back a step. She doesn't smash his shit. She just feels every part of her body go cold. She ignores the mention of Spain for now, because that is a yawning chasm, a pit that she doesn't want to fall into. That's a trap, and she's not falling for it.

"You didn't want it to be anything," she snaps. "It could have been, and you didn't want it enough, so you manufactured fucking excuses and here we are."

Her eyes go cold and her knuckles go white, and this deep in his own hurt, Darlington assumes it's motivated by her own sharp-toothed anger instead of seeing the pain there. "Here we are," he spits. "No going back now, is there?"

"Well, nobody bought us here but you, Darlington," she says. "You can look at me like you blame me all you like, but if this is nothing, it's your fault, not mine."

"You don't think I know that?" He can feel the way his chest gets tight, the settling weight of his own regrets and something that feels a little too much like grief for him to look at too directly, at least right now. Not while she's in front of him, feral and vulgar and every inch the handcuffed delinquent he'd seen on the recording from the hospital--and even now, he finds her beautiful.

What a fool he's been.

"But, of course, you've already moved on rather neatly, haven't you?" The sneering question slips out before he can stop himself--though in the moment he's not sure he would have, if he'd even thought to. "Was he enamored with you before you took your clothing off, or did that all come after?"

Alex's dark eyes wider slightly, like he's physically hit her instead of just spitting the words at her. She does manage to get her face under control quickly though.

"You've seen me naked, Darlington," she says. "You tell me."

The look in her eyes, that cringing shock, shouldn't give him any satisfaction at all. He's better than this, or has always striven to be, and the fact that he isn't now is a betrayal of all the work he's put in his entire life; the citizen in the world, the gentleman of Lethe, crumbled to nothing in the face of his own jealousy.

"The first time I found you beautiful had nothing to do with what you were or weren't wearing, Alex," he says. "Maybe that's difficult for you to believe, but it's true."

"You were off your face on merity gas," she says, rolling her eyes at him. "I don't think you get to use that as fucking proof, do you?"

Darlington's eyes flash, that wounded shock back in his expression before he can get his face under control. He almost corrects her, gives up another vital piece of his heart to a girl who'd never deserved any at all. It's a stupid, futile impulse, something that wouldn't do any good; wouldn't repair any of the rift that's formed between them--and maybe, just for a moment, he doesn't want to fix it anyway.

Let her believe Halloween had been the start, that it had been a manufactured revelation thrust upon him by the society he'd always loathed the most. What did it matter now?

"Guess not," he says flatly. "Should've remembered that I always make the worst choices when I'm not entirely sober."

He looks hurt and Alex, weirdly, feels better for a moment. She knows that she ought to leave, that if she stays they're going to keep doing this, keep tearing strips off each other until there's nothing left but bloody smears.

"Sober enough to get it up," she points out. "Can't have been that wasted, can you?" She shoves her hands through her hair and turns her back on him for a moment. "You don't even care, do you? You've built this story up in your head that my tattoos came back because some fucking...john drooled all over my tits because I'm a fucking slut and now that's all the narrative that you're interested in. Fuck you, Darlington."

"Charmingly put as always, Stern."

She turns away, and Darlington hopes she'll pick up the things she'd come for and go--and, at the same time, that she'll stay. Even now, after all they've said that they can never take back, he's not going to show her to the door.

"Does it matter to you if I care or not? Because you've made it more than clear what my place ought to be."

He doesn't argue with what she calls herself. That hurts more than it ought to.

"You're acting like I'm the one that went cold on this, Darlington. And I'm not, okay? You're the one who got distant and then got all worked up at the thought of me fucking someone else."

"No, you didn't go cold," he says, each word catching a little at the back of his throat. "Lying to me was easier, wasn't it? And God forbid you ever make a choice that's hard."

His anger is ebbing out of him, bit by slow and painful bit, leaving only exhaustion behind. Looking down, he exhales a long, slow breath out his nose, his jaw tensing.

"Oh, Jesus Christ," she snaps. "You wonder why I lied to you, when you react like this? It's stripping, Darlington. It's taking my clothes off for money. It's not murder." Her eyes narrow. "Are you jealous?"

Alex doubles down, that vulgar mouth of hers almost biting off the end of each unpleasant word, and even as he knows he shouldn't give in to it, something about it reignites his own anger. "Oh, of course, it's just stripping," he says, looking up again, catching her dark and furious eyes with his cold blue ones. "Just taking your clothing off for money, just letting yourself be ogled like it's the only thing you think yourself capable of, just...what, going into the back room with whoever's got the money to ask you for a personal show?"

He hears himself say it, and it shocks him. He should take it back, and he should do it immediately--but he doesn't.

"There's nothing to be jealous about there."

Whore. He doesn't say it, but she hears it anyway, loud and clear as she had that day that Len had spat it at her in Ground Zero. She'd expected it from Len. She never, ever would have expected it from Daniel Arlington.

"Oh, I get it," she says, as bland and Van Nuys as she can possibly make it. "So it's okay when I'm a slut for you, Danny. Okay when it's your dick in my throat. But you don't like the idea of me being a slut for anyone. Check."

"Alex." He wants to refute it. He wants to undo every step in the path that led them from Kagura to that week of distance, the unpleasant shock of that late night not long at all ago and the ways in which he'd so easily thrown out his veneer of cordiality today. He wants to scream at her, or maybe just sob. He can't do any of it, and knows it wouldn't matter, even if he did.

"If that's what you believe, I don't think you get it at all. And maybe I'm all the more convinced now that what happened at Kagura never should have been allowed to pass."

"You're the one who basically implied I'm fucking guys for money," she says. "So if that offends your sensibilities, maybe you'd better examine that, asshole." She snatches up her shoes and her bag from the table. "It would have been okay, you know? If you did it once and decided you didn't want to it again. That would have been okay." She's suddenly absurdly close to tears, which just serves to make her even more furious. "So why don't you tell me what the fuck I don't get."

There is, maybe, a liquid brightness in her eyes. A hitch to her voice, just for a second. Darlington doesn't think he's imagining it. He's still so, so angry, the feeling of it roiling deep in the pit of his stomach, but the fact of those things--her fury, her sadness, all that they've entrusted each other with already--keeps it from spilling forth once more.

He's made so many mistakes. Failed her, again, and this time there's not even Lethe to share the blame.

"I wanted to do it again," he says, his own voice coming out faintly hoarse. He swallows once, hard. "And I knew I couldn't, because that's not...it wasn't going to happen again. There's no Lethe here, no need for Virgil or Dante, and I thought maybe in the absence of that? Maybe we could be friends. And we almost were. And now I don't know what to be to you."

Slowly, he goes past her, keeping far enough away that there's no possibility of either of them touching the other. He doesn't know, exactly, why he does it. Flipping the lock on the front door, he pulls it open. "But it seems now that the answer is nothing at all."

Alex lets out a breath that feels like she's deflating, and shakes her head. When he opens the door, her stomach gives a sick lurch; of course he's throwing her out of his apartment. Why wouldn't he be?

"I wanted it to happen again too, you fucking asshole," she says, and then she turns on her heel and leaves before he sees her cry.

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