(no subject)

[takecourage]

She's already takenn it by the time she knows she's fucked up. It isn't the first time that she's injectedd -- she tried a lost everything when she was a teenger didn't she? -- but this drug, dreamed into being, is stronger than she expects and she's taken too much, more than she took when she got fucked up with Rue, and, suddenly, it feels like the whole world is at the end of a long tunnel, and she's falling away.

Her phone is in her hand. She doesn't know how it got there. There's one number than she knows how to dial.

Comments

[more_magic]

It's not what he expected her to say, words that manage to surprise and cause a twist in his heart all at the same time. To tell her No would be as much of a lie as saying Yes, and for a moment he's unable to say anything at all. Absurdly, he thinks of the chaotic end to Darrowfest, of being on that flimsy beam of plywood over a chasm, Alex's dark eyes the only anchor he had to the safety that waited on the other side.

"We don't have to talk about this now," he says. "We should. We need to. Eventually. But we don't have to now."

[takecourage]

Alex bites back the urge to argue with him and nods, turning her face into the pillow.

"Will you...can you...just come and lie with me for a while?"

[more_magic]

In turning her face away, she looks somehow smaller, younger, lost and alone. Darlington knows the sharp edges that still lie between them, the things both of them had said and done and the way all the peace they'd found here had been demolished in one night. But when she curls up like that, her voice the same broken woodwind he'd first heard on Sandow's video, he knows there's only one thing he can do.

"Of course." He stops only long enough to take off his shoes, the linoleum tiles cold beneath his socked feet as he goes to the other side of the bed. Her IV and pulse monitor and everything else are tucked enough out of the way, but he's still careful as he gets into the narrow bed behind her, bending his long body to fit around hers.

I love you is on his lips, another automatic response from an earlier, easier time than this. He can't manage to give it voice quite yet.