(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

[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.