(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]

He's still finding his feet, after only a day or so in this place--fighting the last-minute crowds at the mall, checking out the sparse, almost dorm-like furnishings of his assigned apartment in Dimera, sending an email to the transfer admissions office at Barton asking about enrolling for the spring term. Through it all, he's had Alex and her week's worth of experience; not much, maybe, but enough that he hasn't felt entirely lost.

His Dante, now become an odd kind of Virgil, guiding him through a world almost stranger than the one they'd left behind at Yale.

Alex had given him a rudimentary menu the day before, sending him out for wine and a few of the ingredients she didn't have to hand, and he gamely battled his way through the holiday chaos at one supermarket, then another, until he'd found everything he was looking for. Today, he'd gone out again and back to a store he'd passed a few times before, coming out a few minutes later with a small bag, bright and festive, tissue paper obscuring the contents. As evening falls, he pulls on his new wool peacoat and makes his way to the Bramford, dressed in a soft garnet-colored sweater and his dark jeans from home, a new pair of brown leather oxfords on his feet and the ribbon handles of that small bag looped around his fingers. Going up to the second floor, he fishes the spare key Alex had given him that first morning out of his pocket and unlocks the front door.

"Merry Christmas, Stern," he says, grinning over at her as he sees her still at work in the kitchen. "It smells amazing in here."