"I won't," he says again, promises again, and when she flinches away from him and steps towards the bed there's a flash of hurt somewhere deep within his heart. He doesn't move any closer than he is, despite the pull, the wish, the desire to do so.

With the lights on and his mind cleared of sleep after that abrupt, shocking awakening, Darlington's a little better able to follow Alex's gaze downward, to consider what's just appeared and begin picking apart the mystery of the why and the how. It's a horror, the pale ash of the wood stained and streaked in red, flecked here and there with--yes, that could only be brain matter, and there a chip of bone embedded in the crack just starting to form along the length of the bat.

It's not that he hasn't ever seen it, he realizes after a moment. It's that he's never seen it whole. The fragments they found at that squalid house on Cedros, the ones documented in meticulous detail by LAPD forensics, had barely been large enough to signify what they once had been. But here it is, restored through some perversion of a miracle and laid at Alex's side--and his--while they slept.

"Alex," he says carefully, like he's trying to gentle something skittish and wild. He supposes right now, he is. "I need you to talk to me."