more_magic | that's a fine-looking high horse what you've got in the stable

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alex

that's a fine-looking high horse what you've got in the stable

The wards he'd placed on Alex's apartment don't need reinforcing quite yet, but tonight's a full moon, and as Sandow and record after record in the archive at Il Bastone had impressed upon him, magic is always stronger when tied to something meaningful. A date, or a place, or a person. All three, if you can swing it. If they were going to do it, it may as well be tonight.

He'd texted Alex about something else earlier in the day and gotten a terse two words--Can't. Work.--in reply, and while he knows that means she'll be out late slinging drinks and wiping down the counter at whatever bar she's working at, Darlington still resolves to stop by the Bramford anyway. To do it himself, because he knows what he's doing, with or without her assistance...and because Alex deserves to feel safe in the place she calls home.

In a way, it's for the best she's not there. It'll be more effective if he does everything at the apex of the full moon, which isn't until practically the middle of the night; most likely, he'll be there and gone before she's even finished last call. She doesn't even have to know.

Around midnight, Darlington lets himself in with the key she'd given him that first morning, new, stronger magnets and a fresh tub of grave dirt in his bag. He starts by checking everything over, waiting for the start of the apex and fixing a few small things--smudged sigils, a faint crack in the boundary he'd laid on the bathroom window, of all places--in the meantime. When the moon is at its fullest, he begins, going ward by ward and room by room, adding piles of dirt where needed and drawing new, cleaner signs of protection where it feels like his previous ones have grown too thin.

The work itself requires all his focus, especially once he's neared the end of his circuit through the apartment. It's easy for him to miss the sound of a key turning in the front door lock.

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It's been a long night but, at least, a fairly profitable one and Alex is exhausted. All she wants is to shower some of the glitter off and crawl into bed. Her hair is scraped up into a knot on the back of her head and she's just pulled a hoodie and leggings on over the silver bikini that she's been wearing to dance.

And then she opens the door and Darlington is on his knees in her living room.

"...Hi?"

He should have started with this ward, the one that had given him so much trouble when he'd put it up in the first place. As it had that first night, the magic shifts almost beneath his fingers, odd twists in the current of whatever Darrow nexus it's drawing from, and once again he's forced to make changes on the fly to the protections he's drawing up. When he hears her voice behind him, all he does is raise one long finger for a moment--wait--before getting back to work. Part of him knows it's dismissive, perhaps even unkind on top of how off-kilter they've been around one another recently, but it's something distant beneath the stronger pull of his focus.

Finally, the ward holds, and Darlington exhales a long sigh of relief. "I'll be out of your hair in a minute, Stern," he says, putting the lid back on the now-empty tub of dirt and starting to get up. "I just need to check on--" He stops, getting a good look at Alex as he turns around, taking in the mess of her hair and the smudges of glitter he can see on her cheek and beneath the half-unzipped front of her sweatshirt.

"What happened to you?"

She had given him a key, so his presence isn't in and of itself unusual. But he's been scarce since New Year and Alex is still shocked to find him there. The raised finger is typical and it still makes her bristle.

"I'm not sure that that's any of your business."

She goes on some kind of defense almost immediately, a hard flash in her eyes of the type he hadn't seen in months, maybe not even since the first day of their acquaintance. It's late, and they're both tired, and maybe that's all it is; maybe he should just leave her to stew in her own unpleasantness while he takes a cab back across the city to toss and turn in his own bed for the next few hours.

Of course, since knowing Galaxy Stern, he's never been very good at doing what he ought.

"Forgive my curiosity," he says, his own sudden, spiking annoyance leaving little apology in his tone. "The glitter's just an unusual look for you." He doesn't think about the last time he'd seen something like that on her before, nor how Manuscript's influence had transmuted it into the glimmer of starlight. That night is not this one--or any of the others that might have come between.

"Occupational hazard," she says, and then immediately wishes that she hadn't. The bar job lie has been working well because, honestly, she's got no interest in the expression she knows will be on his handsome face the minute he hears the word stripping. She pulls the zipper on her hoodie a little higher, though, which feels ridiculous the second that she does it, because he's seen her topless, hasn't he?

One dark eyebrow goes up at that. "Figured the bombs you'd be dodging were of the Jaeger variety. My mistake."

Alex tugs up her zipper, the motion deliberate enough that something about it catches his notice, makes him look at her a little more closely beneath the disagreeable weight of whatever's settled between them. He catches sight of bare skin, a flash of silver, and maybe if it hadn't been so late he might have thought before he spoke again.

"Theme night? Seems cold for a bikini."

"Are you looking at my tits, Darlington?" she asks, both dark eyebrows raised, folding her arms across her chest and glaring at him. "Because I'm not sure that that's super fitting behaviour for the gentleman of Lethe."

Somehow, the way she spits it, she manages to make it sound like an insult.

He's gotten used to hearing that nickname in a variety of tones, from jokingly mocking to entirely sincere, but never with the kind of venom Alex imbues in it now. It's enough to startle him into silence, and maybe on a different evening it might even have been sufficient to push him towards some kind of apology. Tonight, it only makes annoyance settle further into the line of his jaw and the frame of his posture.

"For Christ's sake," he mutters, glancing over at where he'd left his coat on the arm of the sofa. He should gather it and go, hope that whatever this is will have burned away once the morning dawns, but he stays just as he is. Even now, he can't walk away from her.

He'd already done that back home.

"No, I'm not looking at...no," he says, a faint flush touching just the edges of his cheekbones. "I'm just wondering what the hell kind of bar has you slinging drinks in glitter and a swim top." Looking back on this, he'll wish he'd stopped talking altogether then--but in the moment, all he does is huff out a breath that might have been a laugh on any other night, and try to make a joke.

"You look like a stripper, Stern."

He says it like a joke, like an insult, and Alex feels the snake inside her uncoil and raise its head. The flat beast waking up. Her anger is freezing cold and fierce.

He chin takes on a defiant tilt.

"So?"

The silence stretches out, Alex's eyes going even flatter and harder and almost meaner, and in the split-second before she speaks, Darlington knows. The fact of it isn't as cold or sharp as every hit he's ever taken of the Bullet, but he's reminded of it anyway; that sense of having brushed up against something unpleasant. Her chin goes up, and Darlington's shoulders shift back, just slightly.

"Alex."

"What?" She asks, and she turns away from him, padding into the kitchen and clicking on the kettle. "Go on. You're going to tell me what you think whether I like it or not..."

"Clearly someone ought to." At the back of his mind, he regrets it as soon as it's said, though even that faint twinge of remorse isn't enough to keep him from continuing. "Even though I'm not even sure where to start. You can't be."

When she turns and stalks off, Darlington takes a few steps forward, unthinking and instinctive, before stopping again. "You said you were bartending."

"And you think it's your place?" She says, picking up a mug and turning it over in her hands. "You're not my Virgil here, Darlington. Lethe's not here. I'm not your business."

You've made that perfectly clear.

"Perhaps I'm not your Virgil, but I'm still--" He realizes, suddenly, he doesn't know how to complete that sentence. Friend? Compatriot? Former mentor? None of them fit the complex tangle their lives had become after only a matter of weeks in this place. And if there's another word that comes to mind, tinged with a desperate and stupid hope, he shunts it away again as quickly as it had come.

"We're still the only people either of us have from home. Which ought to mean something."

"Does it?" She snaps. "Mean something?" She yanks down the zipper on her hoodie, revealing the skimpy bikini top. "Why don't you tell me what you really think, Daniel?"

She rips down the zipper and flings open her hoodie, and it feels like bait just as dangerous as all the times Alex tossed out mongrel in reference to herself. He does his best not to rise to it, difficult as it is. "Of course it means something," he snaps, his eyes still fixed on her face, on the smear of glitter high above one cheekbone and the dull and menacing pitch-black of her eyes. "Or rather, I thought it did, and I didn't think I was mistaken."

He doesn't let himself think about the possibility he might have been wrong about that--or her--all along.

"If you truly want to know what I think, Alex? I'm wondering what you possibly imagine you have to gain from doing something like this. What it gives you that literally nothing else would. Because I can't think of a thing."

She's glad that he doesn't just leave it at the first thing that he says, because that might have lead to a conversation that she doesn't want to have - about how lonely it's felt, and how bruised she's been, by the almost indifferent way he's treated her since new year's eve. The way he's been so determined to make sure that everything goes back so exactly to normal. But then he carries on talking, and he fuels the anger inside her and, in the moment, furious as she is, she's also insanely grateful.

"Well, about two hundred dollars tonight," she says. "Give or take. So that's not nothing."

"Truly, a pity there's no other way to earn money in this town." He can hear the sneer in his voice, the almost petulant edge, and hates himself for it--but not enough to stop. As unpleasant a sound as it is, it covers the way his heart seizes in his chest at the thought of how Alex earned that two hundred dollars, the things she'd done--been obligated, maybe, to do--and the harm she might have come to in the midst of it all.

But none of that is his place, it seems, no portion of that heart-twisting worry any concern of hers. She's made that more than clear.

"I don't know that a wad of crumpled, liquor-soaked singles cadged from desperate men is the resounding argument you think it is, Alex." The words fly from his lips, hard and impolite, and he hates that too. But not enough to stop.

"Stop being so dramatic, for fuck's sake," ays Alex, rolling her eyes at him and putting the mug down a little too hard on the counter. "Two shifts a week. That's all I need to do. You're the one that's so keen on me going to school. You want me to do that and work six days a week for minimum when I can clear $400 a week without trying?"

"It doesn't--" He cuts himself off just as Alex slams the mug down on the counter, and while neither of them is the cause of the other, in the wake of it they're just left glaring at each other with the silence stretched taut between them. He knows what he was going to say, the expression of concern still lumped at the back of his throat and waiting for release, but he swallows it back. It's too dramatic a thing, evidently, for her to bear.

Beneath his irritation--with her, with the lateness of the hour, with himself--Darlington knows she has a point. He'd done just as she describes, working shifts at Clark's or the Lyric after school and on the weekends, losing each day to work and study and the perpetual struggle of keeping Black Elm afloat, and it had made him older and more weary than he should have been at seventeen. More open to the idea of an escape, when he could take it, and that had nearly killed him. He shouldn't want that for Alex, any more than he should have asked it of himself.

But he'd done it, for god's sake, and had turned out better for it. That counted for something too, and maybe that's what fuels the thing he says next. "What I want is for you to better yourself, Alex. Even if Lethe's not here to shore you up as you attempt it." For a moment, he hears his grandfather in that, and the thought doesn't fill him with the pride he might have expected it to.

"What the fuck?" She's startled by how loud her own voice is, bouncing off the tiled walls and surfaces in the kitchen. She's not really aware of doing it but one moment the mug is back in her hand and, the next, it's exposing into shards a couple of feet away from his head. "I'm sorry I'm not good enough for you, Darlington. I'm sorry I've consistently been such a fucking disappointment."

It's not the first time he's seen her throw something in fury--hell, they both had, that drunken night at Il Bastone--but in all the times before it's never been directed at him. The mug sails wide and shatters on the wall behind him, and Darlington's head whips around at the sound of it. He doesn't think of it as a flinch, exactly.

"Evidently I'm not the only one of us who has the monopoly on drama, Alex," he says, and when he turns back to look at her, the blue of his eyes is as icy as his voice. "But please, forgive me for believing you're capable of something better than...this." He can't say it more clearly than that, the words sticking somewhere within him, held back by concern he doesn't have the right to feel and anger he should have tried harder to keep at bay. "For wanting you to be happy here." He almost says with me, but catches himself at the last second. That's not his place here, either.

He goes to the couch, picking up his coat. "Since there's going to be no reasoning with you, I may as well go."

She probably ought to be ashamed of herself, but she's pleased at what his face does when the mug breaks. Because, in that moment, it's gratifying.

She watches him go to pick his coat up and her lip curls in a sneer.

"Go on then. Make yourself scarce. You're good at that."

She knows what she's doing, saying that, the words pointed enough to slip beneath the rigid anger he knows he's using to protect himself. For a second, it all slips, and there's nothing in his eyes but a sudden, shocked woundedness. Tonight aside, the last few minutes aside, he hadn't thought he'd behaved badly over the last few days. What had happened at Kagura had been a fluke, a lapse, something they succumbed to for the space of a night; it was ludicrous to imagine Alex would want anything beyond that, and staying away from her had ensured he didn't do anything so stupid as to ask for more.

He focuses on that, on the sharp edges of that hurt, because a different one comes to mind not long after; one he hasn't experienced for himself, but knows is lurking somewhere in his future. One way or another, Darlington finds a way to escape her, and maybe something like this is the catalyst for it there, too. It won't do him any good to ask--and even if it did, he fears the answer.

He blinks, that tense and furious control finding its way back into his face as he pulls on his coat. In silence, he goes to her front door, and it's only then that he speaks. "We all have our talents, Stern."

Stepping out into the hall, he pulls the door shut, not caring when the jerk of his arm makes it slam.

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that's a fine-looking high horse what you've got in the stable

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