(no subject)

[takecourage]

They're ready. Moving the crucible out of the Bramford hadn't really felt like an option, so she'd carted the goat milk that was still the base of the ritual up the stairs. Danny's spent the last few months researching and perfecting the ritual and they think they've got it. If everything goes to plan, it should roll back the damage to Nova's system, erase the proof on his skin. It won't be a cure, but it'll be a treatment. They'll have to work out when to schedule the next dose, but it'll give him some time.

It's something. It's enough.

When she hears his knock, she pads to the door, bare foot and dressed in soft black and opens the door.

"Hey," she says, with a soft smile, leaning up to kiss his cheek.

Comments

[maloscuridad]

Today's the day. Nova's tried not to think about it. Like hoping too much will kill his chances. Everything that Alex has suggested seems sound. This magic is just working on his body, treating the symptoms. It should work.

He's so ready to be disappointed. At the same time, he can't help but feel like a kid on the first Christmas morning of his life.

"Hey," Nova says. He bends a little for Alex and then steps through. "This is familiar." Nova still remembers that strange pull, the sense that he had to go downstairs Because. It was how they met.

[more_magic]

Trying to figure it all out had been a challenge, to adapt the baseline ritual he'd read over a handful of times at home back when he still had access to Lethe's library. Alex's memories of Dawes running the reversion had been--understandably--fragmented, colored with the delirium of pain and the upending effect of resurfacing in Darrow, enough that they might be better off starting from as close to nothing as they could.

And, yes, perhaps the thought of making this his own also had a kind of appeal. Creating something that Lethe might not have used but that was vital and necessary for one person's life here. It was scholarship, and magic, and the chance to do something good. It was everything he'd always wanted magic to be.

Hearing Nova's voice coming from the living room, Darlington looks towards the sound, already getting up from where he'd been sitting in their bedroom, going over his notes one last time. With the amount of milk they have and the other ingredients they'll need to blend in, it should be enough to take Nova back to a far less precarious place. God, he hopes this is going to work.

With notes in hand, he goes out to join them, giving Nova a brief, friendly nod of greeting. "A bit, isn't it?" he says, catching the tail end of Nova's observation. "Although I'm vetoing any repeat of my own arrival here a week later."

[takecourage]

"There's some bits I'd be okay with repeating," says Alex, grinning at him. She links her arm through Nova's, drawing him into the room. "Let's go through it first, okay?" She says. "Danny can tell you what to expect and you can ask any questions you've got?"

[maloscuridad]

"I just showed up inside a closed store before it opened like some kind of asshole," Nova says. When he speaks, his voice sounds easy, casual. It's when he tries to laugh that it fails a little. The way he sees it, the Crucible is his only real hope. If it doesn't work, then it's a matter of time before his magic claims his body and life.

"Don't I just get naked and climb in?" Here, a little bit of humor returns and Nova lifts the edge of his shirt teasingly.

[more_magic]

Full of feigned bravado though it is, the question and the joking pantomime that follows it manage to cut the tension already starting to settle over the three of them. "That's pretty much it from your side," Darlington says, breathing out a laugh. "You'll need to be fully submerged, and stay submerged, for the crucible to do its work, so hold your breath for as long as you possibly can once you're in there. Don't push it, but stay down and we'll see where we are once you have to come up again."

He wants to have an answer that's more concrete, something he'd tested and knows the limits on. In truth, he'd half-considered breaking something and trying the reversion on himself; if not for the thought of Alex's reaction, he actually might have.

"For purely physical damage, just the milk would be enough, but since yours involves magical recoil on top of that, I've added additional things to balance that out." He counts them off on his fingers. "Moonflower tincture, dried blazingstar, powdered mirabilis root." They're all night-blooming plants, meant to provide a kind of foil to Nova's light-based magic; all from near enough to the original home of the Golden Bowl to hopefully feel familiar to the vessel; all easy enough to attain again and again for each subsequent time they do this. "That, plus the incantation, should trigger the altered reversion I'm hoping for."

[takecourage]

"He's actively enjoying this," says Alex, rolling her eyes fondly. She squeezes Nova's arm. "If you don't want me to be in the room because, you know...having to get bare-ass naked, I get it. I can wait out here?"

[maloscuridad]

"Like ya'll don't want a look." Nova shoots his gaze at Darlington, expression clear that he knows he's being a shit. His smile gets properly affectionate at Alex, who's been unbearably kind to him about it. It occurs to him now that there's almost no way to avoid them seeing the scars on his back if they don't look away, but suddenly developing a sense of modesty now feels like a tell all its own.

"You've put a lot of thought into this," he adds, looking back to Darlington. "Neither of you had to."

[more_magic]

The slight needling is something Darlington lets pass without comment or surprise, having half-expected it, or worse, from almost the moment they'd started planning for today. It wasn't polite to have assumed Nova would be Nova even now, even in the face of something like this, a magic that could change the way he lived--or bring about the chance for him to keep living at all--but Darlington hadn't been able to help himself from spiting his own better impulses. It's what follows, the acknowledgement of the effort he and Alex had taken, that does give Darlington pause.

"A lot of thought, and a lot of work," he says. "Plenty of late nights. It was a challenge, but it's..." He can't think for a moment of a way to keep it from being cold or clinical. The effort had been the point for him, as much if not more than the beneficiary; he could use his knowledge, dig into a problem and come up with some kind of answer, another door unlocking and swinging wide thanks to his work. The rite was his, the magic something he'd bent and shaped, and Darlington feels that pull of ownership--of conquest, though there's a discomfort in thinking of it that way.

"If it does what we're hoping it will, it'll be worth it. We weren't going to just not try."

[takecourage]

"Of course I want a look," says Alex, nudging him gently, "But that doesn't mean I won't respect your modesty, dude." When he speaks, when Danny answers him, something more serious settles over her. "You're family," she says, with a shrug. "It's what you do, isn't it? For family."

[maloscuridad]

"Modesty, Nova repeats with a laugh. Then he goes properly somber, looking between Darlington and Alex. He thinks she must know, by now, how particularly fragile the word "family" is for someone like him.

"Even if this doesn't work. I, uh. I really appreciate you guys trying. I don't got nine lives, you know?" He looks down at his blackened hands with a shaky breath. "I didn't think I'd get this shot."

[more_magic]

Alex says it all better than he does, just like always, putting the focus where it belongs--on Nova, and not the rite. As charming and skilled as Darlington is, he's never quite been able to master the gentler art of making people feel not just welcome but understood. Accepted. When Nova looks down at his hands, exhaling that shuddering breath, it's an unexpected glimpse at something vulnerable, a side of him Darlington suspects neither of them were really meant to see.

"It means a lot you'd trust us to try," Darlington says. "And if we need to try again, approach it from a different tack, we'll do that too."

[takecourage]

"Exactly," she says, and she can't help but think of the full moon ceremony they were going to try back in New Haven, the one to hopefully bring Darlington back -- how she'd have kept trying forever, if that was what it takes. "This isn'ta one soht deal, Nova. We can keep trying." She drapes her arm around his shoulder and gives him a quick squeeze. "Ready to give it a shot?"

[maloscuridad]

Nova smiles, lets himself be hugged. He won't spit on their kindness but he doesn't know if he can bear more attempts if this doesn't work. So many times now, he's gotten his hopes up, and so many times it's failed.

He admires their determination, is grateful beyond measure, but he's already at the end of his rope and doesn't know if he can take anymore drops.

"I'm ready as I'll ever be." Nova squeezes an arm around Alex's waist in return for the hug and then steps out of it, pulling his shirt up over his back. The scars on his back are vivid, he knows that, and too old to be healed away. He hopes they don't comment but he expects they will.

[more_magic]

Darlington's about to turn away, give Nova his privacy while he and Alex relieve their fridge of what has to be every carton of goat's milk in the city, and maybe if he'd been just a moment faster that's how it would have gone. Instead, he has a full view of Nova's back as his shirt comes off, the scars livid across the wiry lines of his back, undeniably older than the damage blackening his arms. And different in scope, obviously so.

Life with his grandfather had meant the vague threat of the belt whenever Darlington misbehaved, a punishment carried out on a handful of occasions when whatever transgression he'd made seemed to merit it--not that it really ever had, he knows. Trying to weasel out of going to church, accidentally breaking a windowpane in the sunroom at Black Elm, his grandfather catching him in a lie about his grades or how long he'd practiced at piano in a given week; none of it valid reason for an anger that great. But it pales, still, in comparison to whoever had done that to Nova.

The reversion won't take him back far enough to heal it, but Darlington wishes, very suddenly, that it could. He has the grace not to say anything aloud, but his gaze cuts over to Alex just for a moment.

[takecourage]

Darlington's eyes cut to her and Alex has to tear her eyes away from Nova's book, her own eyebrow raised. Alex doesn't have a lot of physical scars - not the kind that anyone can see, and those scars on Nova's back are awful, terrible. Her jaw sets. Something shifts and coils inside her ribs. Angry. Protective. She steps in and presses a kiss against his bare shoulder.

"C'mon," she says. "Danny'll get the milk. I'll take you in."

[maloscuridad]

Nova still isn't used to being handled gently. Life has never allowed boys like him to be fragile. The tender kiss to his shoulder, the way the air changes, all of it settles strangely in his stomach. The feeling isn't bad but it's definitely unfamiliar. It makes him feel seen the way he did back in Los Lagos, when Alex Mortiz had asked all those sharp, smart questions.

"Yeah, a'ight," he says. There's a punched-out breathlessness in his voice that fails to hide the emotions stuck in his throat.

[more_magic]

He could have used the help, but Darlington lets Alex escort Nova away instead, understanding the importance of it, the bond the two of them share that he's on the outside of. He'll just have to make a few more trips.

Getting the first few gallons of milk from the kitchen, he takes them into the bedroom and dumps them into the crucible, then does the same with the next. And the next after that. The additives follow, speckling the surface of the liquid until he stirs them in fully, murmuring the first incantation as he swirls a rod of purifying quartz in a complex pattern. Distantly, he's aware of Alex helping Nova to change, offering him the sheet they'd set aside for the sake of his modesty until he climbs into the crucible and sinks under the surface.

The crucible hums, its tone pure and waiting, a sense of readiness seeming to emanate from it to fill the room at large. Darlington lets out a breath, looking towards where Alex and Nova are standing. "Stay submerged as long as you think you can," he says. "As the reversion starts, the milk should clarify. That's how we'll know it's working."

[takecourage]

"We'll be right here," says Alex, squeezing Nova's bare bicep, leaning into him for a moment. She'd barely been conscious when she went into the crucible; at least Nova will climb into it under his own power. She can't help but remember when Danny had gone in, after everything that happened with that cult. The thought of it still makes her feel like she's filled with a cauldron of impotent rage. "I'm here, okay?"

[maloscuridad]

Watching Darlington fill the bowl with milk and ingredients is easily the most familiar part. There's an order and a method to these things, no matter what a person's practice and magic is. It's as true for cantos, spells, and his grandmother's pan dulce.

Darlington also doesn't look twice at the way Alex moves into Nova's space, handling him with care. There's a faith there between them that Nova can see and it makes him love Alex and trust Darlington more. He thinks back to that day at Darrow Pride when Alex had been hurting and wanting and he's so relieved he had the good sense not to do anything that would fuck with what those two have now.

"All the way in? Gotta hold my breath?" If that's a requirement, then he'll do it, but if Nova doesn't have to feign drowning, he'd prefer not to.

[more_magic]

"All the way in," he says, a trace of apology in his tone as he catches the hesitancy in Nova's. "Hold your breath as long as you can tolerate, to give the reversion time to initiate. It's a kind of portal magic, taking someone back this far, and you don't want to leave anything on the other side of the doorway. As it were."

Darlington stops, thinking, remembering how unwilling Alex had been at first to let him sink after East Hallow, recalling her own half-lucid memory of Turner trying to hold her up until Dawes had demanded he let go. It's enough to give him an idea. "It shouldn't harm anything if Alex keeps her hand on your shoulder while you're under," he says. "If the contact would help."

[takecourage]

It had been starkly terrifying, letting Danny's head slip under the surface, but keeping her hand on his bare shoulder under the water had helped -- the warmth of his skin, the faint whisper of his pulse.

"If it helps," she says, aware of how raw her voice sounds in that moment. "It's not as bad as you think it's going to be. Being...under? Sort of bends time a little. Hold your breath until it starts to hurt and then come up. It'll be longer for us." She squeezes his shoulder. "If the thought of me holding on helps, I'm here."

[maloscuridad]

"I can handle–" Nova pauses and looks between them. He doesn't have to handle it, does he? Not alone. "Actually, yeah. I think it's a good idea." He's not alone. That thought powers through him in a nearly visceral way.

The way the bowl hums with magic is almost a siren song to Nova, but not in the saccharine way of magical false promises. It just seems ready and that makes Nova feel more ready too.

"Let's do it." He puts his hands on the edge of the bowl, swinging one leg over.

[more_magic]

Darlington holds a hand out to help Nova in, one eye on the surface of the milk as the other man's foot splashes down--followed by his leg, and so on. The energy of the room holds steady as Nova settles, and once he's in up to the shoulders Darlington looks over at Alex. "Here we go."

[takecourage]

Alex nods, a muscle ticking in her jaw. She can feel the weight of this on her shoulders -- it means so much to Nova. She leans against the edge of the crucible, resting one hand on Nova's shoulder and dropping a kiss against the top of his head. "In your own time, corazón."

[maloscuridad]

In their own ways, both of them are giving Nova support. It shouldn't be mind blowing. It's not like he hasn't had help before, even if it's mostly only in the last handful of years. He steps one foot in and then the other and tries not to look too startled when his skin breaks out in goosebumps. Of course it's cold.

"No time like the present, right?" he asks, stretching out his long legs.