(no subject)

[takecourage]

Christmas has always been a weird thing for Alex. She'd been raised at least nominally Jewish (though her grandmother had always cared more about that than Mira, with all of her crystals and her buddhas and her new-age shit), but they'd still had a Christmas tree at home. She'd still gotten gifts. This year is different, though, because this year she's spending it in Darrow, a million miles away from both Van Nuys and New Haven.

And she was spending it with Darlington.

She spends most of the day in her kitchen at Bramford, cooking. She makes a variety of things, traditional and un, stuff that Mira used to make, that her grandmother used to make, things she likes. She'd sent Darlington out the day before to buy wine, since she didn't know the first fucking thing about wine. And there's gifts, and, for the first time in years, Alex feels like she's home.

It's not something she dwells on too long, but it's there.

Comments

[takecourage]

"It was fine. You're fine," she says, stroking her hand against the fabric of the scarf. "It's...I've literally never owned anything this soft in my life. It's...really beautiful."

[more_magic]

"Well, now you do," he says, equally pleased and matter-of-fact. "I am glad you like it so much, I...I thought it'd suit you."

He'd told Alex the truth when he said he'd seen it the day before, but that's not when he'd bought it. That had only happened earlier today, after a night of internal debate and a wish to do this right after all the confusion and strife his arrival had seemed to engender. He's not foolish enough to think that a scarf can solve whatever happens between them in his future and Alex's past, but it's enough of a start for someplace like here.

"If nothing else, it'll keep you from being quite so relentlessly Californian whenever it starts to snow."

[takecourage]

She rolls her eyes at that, unfolding the scarf so that she can drape it around her shoulders like a shawl even though it's warm in the apartment.

"I'm sorry I'm not as hardy as you," she says, rolling her eyes. "I have nearly frozen to death every time I've slept at Black Elm and I'm not apologising for complaining about that."

[more_magic]

Watching her sweep the fabric around her narrow shoulders, the stars catching the light from the lamp on the table by the couch, he's almost distracted enough that he misses what she says--but only almost. What blossoms in his chest is too odd and unformed a feeling to be called hope, but Darlington's not sure of a better word.

"...you've stayed the night at Black Elm?" he asks, faint disbelief running through the question. "More than once?"

[takecourage]

She nods, reaching for her wine glass. "A couple of times. Once after Halloween, because I wasn't going to leave you on your own when I didn't know what the fuck they dosed you with. You wanted to go home, not to il Bastogne or the Hutch, so..." She shrugs. "I took you."

[more_magic]

"That was good of you," he says, pushing back a flicker of shame at the reminder of that night still only days ago to him, no matter what the calendar said now. "Especially as you had to do nearly the same thing all over again. Absent being able to take me home."

He looks at her then, stars around her shoulders; weighs whether to ask the next question that comes to mind, not wanting her to turn her head away and for those walls to go up behind her eyes once again. Not tonight, he decides, doing his best to simply let it go. Another night, just not this one.

"At least the heat's more reliable at the Bramford."

[takecourage]

"I didn't mind either time," she says, a smile flickering at the corner of her mouth for a moment beore she drowns it with a sip of wine. "It's definitely more reliable. I don't know how you lived like that."

[more_magic]

"It builds character," he says with a completely straight face, his expression serious and his voice containing a faint lecturing tone. For a moment, he's every bit the uncompromising Virgil--until it breaks and he grins instead, something wide and amused. He shakes his head, reaching for the wine bottle and pouring a bit more into his glass.

"The furnace is nearly as old as the house," he says. "I'd planned to update it, but then the roof sprung another leak and a family of raccoons moved into a corner of the attic...lots of things. It added up."

[takecourage]

For a moment, he's every inch the man that she'd met when he walked into her dorm room, but then his face blossoms into a broad grin, and Alex finds herself smiling in response, holding out her own glass in a silent request.

"It could have been so beautiful," she says. "Eventually."

[more_magic]

Darlington fills her glass when she holds it out, the rich red of the wine seeming to glow in the low light of the living room. "It was already beautiful," he murmurs, setting the bottle back down--because it's true, because he'd done what work he could to make it so, because he's loyal to Black Elm and always would be. "But you're right. It would have been more so, in time."

When it is, he hopes he's there to see it.

[takecourage]

"Yeah, you're right, it was," she says, curling up around her wine glass. "I'm acting like I didn't spend most of my teens living in an utter shithole. Which I did. Mira's place was nice, but it was kind of...pokey."

[more_magic]

She mentions it obliquely and in passing, that sad and rancid house on Cedros, and Darlington thinks only of the crime scene photos that had turned his stomach the first time he saw them. It hadn't looked like a home, even if he tried to look past the destruction and the gore, those left-handed arcs of blood and brain matter on already-stained and shabby walls. And yet, for all intents, it had been. It had been hers, for good or ill.

Just for a moment, he tries to see it that way instead.

"They were the places you knew," he says, knowing it'll sound inadequate even as he says it. He takes a swallow of wine and tries again, aims for a slight shift in tack. "What was your mother's house like? Other than nice and pokey, colorful descriptors though they are."

[takecourage]

"Apartment," she says. "Small, cluttered. Lots of crystals. Mira really likes bright colours." She smiles, faintly. "When I was fifteen, I felt like it was stifling me but now...sometimes, I kind of miss it."

[more_magic]

"I can understand that," he says, a faint smile of his own on his face for a moment. "Not realizing how much you'd miss something until it's out of reach."

The decor she describes isn't familiar to him, not with the way he'd grown up amid something vaster and more eccentric than mere clutter, but he can almost picture something like it: sun filtering through a prism at the window, casting a fragmented rainbow against the floor; a vivid coat of paint on the walls; plants and knickknacks on shelves or scattered across a coffee table. The Alex he'd first met, that dark Undine of the Vanderbilt common room, would have been an inkblot amid so much color. Not entirely so, the version of her sitting across from him now.

"You could probably find something like that here," he says. "Some decorations for the apartment. It wouldn't be quite the same as home, but maybe near enough."

[takecourage]

"That's Mira's place, not mine," she says, dark eyebrow raised slightly. "I do want to make it cosier though - cushions, blankets, that kind of thing." She blushes faintly. "A nest."

[more_magic]

It's the mildest of rebukes, but as Alex raises that eyebrow at him Darlington nods, brief and contrite. "A nest, then," he says. "Sounds wonderful to me."

Already, some corner of his mind is working, thinking over possibilities and generating ideas; things he might buy, assistance he could give, anything to help turn the simple apartment she'd been assigned into more of a home.

[takecourage]

"We need to sort your apartment out, too," she says. "I mean...I..kind of really like you being here, but..." She shrugs. "You've got your own place."

[more_magic]

Alex says it so casually--I like you being here--and Darlington tries to hear it with as much nonchalance, even as another bright, warm ember kindles itself inside him at the thought. Again, it's not quite hope, but something close to it nevertheless. "I like being here too," he says, burying his smile a bit in the act of taking another swallow of wine.

"You're not wrong, though," he continues. "I've bought a few things already, but it's still mostly the few bits and pieces the apartment came with. I'll need to put the work in." He leans his head a little to the side, and corrects himself. "We will."

[takecourage]

He looks something uncharacteristic for a moment, almost bashful, and Alex can't help but think about how scared she'd been of him when she'd first met him, floating around on a cloud of physical perfection in his nice coat. Now she knows that this boy would never knowingly capsize her. When he effortlessly includes her in getting his apartment like that, she finds herself smiling.

"Wouldn't hurt to have warded places at either end of the city," she says. "Even if we are going to spend most of our time in one of them, not the other."

[more_magic]

"I was thinking the same thing," he says, struck for a moment by the way her expression opens when she smiles like that. As with her wide-eyed wonder that first day of their acquaintance, watching the address moths darken and her tattoos fade, Darlington almost thinks he sees the girl she might have been under kinder circumstances.

Maybe here, she actually could be.

"Not the same as Il Bastone and the Hutch," he continues, a twist of near-homesickness in his chest as he thinks of them, "but good enough for our purposes."

[takecourage]

She sees the shadow flicker across his face and doesn't stifle the impulse to reach out to him, squeezing his denim-clad knee gently. "I'm sorry," she says. "I know...you never wanted to leave New Haven. I feel guilty for being so glad to have you here."

She catches herself at the last moment. She almost says that she's glad to have him back.

[more_magic]

He'd confessed it to few people--fewer, even, than he'd introduced to Black Elm. Darlington knew what Lethe expected out of their golden boy, the easy and shining path from grad school to scattered research trips around the globe to some position in the New York office. He didn't want any of it, but for a moment he wonders if his mysterious trip to Spain is some kind of start; the first crack in a resolve he hadn't ever thought would crumble.

He's pulled out of his brief reverie by the touch of Alex's hand on his knee and the fluttering pressure of her fingers. He looks down, covering her hand with his own. "Don't be sorry, Alex," he says, one fingertip gently brushing against the narrow bones of her wrist. "I didn't want to leave, never thought I would, but..."

Darlington trails off, a quiet half-smile flickering on his face. But I did, he thinks. But I will. "But at least I'm not alone."

[takecourage]

His skin is warm against hers and the light touch of his fingertip against her wrist makes her breath shiver in a way that it hasn't before. She clears her throat, trying to cover it, but she doesn't pull her hand away.

"At least we're not alone," she echoes, raising her wine glass to him. "For better or worse. Sorry I'm not better company. I know I'm not..I know you'd probably have chosen someone else."

[more_magic]

"Better or worse," he repeats, clinking the rim of his glass against hers.

For all that he wants to refute the rest of what she says, Darlington knows Alex would hear the polite lie in it. He had wanted the choice, sitting for hours on the floor at Black Elm with stacks and stacks of application files winnowing the options down--until the call from Sandow and the abrupt, unceremonious removal of the thing he'd thought for three years would be his right. Gift or no gift, there'd been a time he wouldn't have chosen anything about Galaxy Stern at all. He's not so sure that's true now.

"No matter who I'd have chosen," he says at last, trying to pick his words with both honesty and care, "no one is my Dante but you, and no one but you is here. And I'm alright with that."

[takecourage]

Alex realises that she'd been holding herself rigid, expecting him to say something to hurt her, and then he doesn't, and she smiles, something fluttering in her chest for a moment. Sometimes, Alex worries about how soft she can feel herself becoming - her body is the same (rangy, weak) - but she can feel her insides, the pulp of her, warming up. Hellie had told her there was a flat beast inside her. And she'd liked that, for a long time. So much that she'd got four snakes tattooed on her skin, at hips and collarbones.

But somehow she finds herself wanting to be a different kind of animal around him.