you want a revelation, some kind of resolution

[more_magic]

Darlington’s been looking for answers his entire life. It’s the pursuit that matters, the chase that leads up to that satisfying feeling of a goal reached or a door swinging wide and letting him through, admitting him to somewhere he couldn’t have gotten to without all those hours of study and practice and dedication. He’s the person he is because of all of that: because he strove to be better, whether that meant training in the ballroom at Black Elm or spending hours drilling his way through flashcards in Mandarin, Dutch, Latin, Greek; filling the Albemarle Book with query after query in his Dante year, until Michelle finally had a conversation with the house and he’d found himself limited to no more than seven requests a week because you’re going to wind up like Chester Vance if you’re not careful, Darlington. He asks questions of everyone, of everything, always searching for some new bit of information, something that cracks the world open for him a little bit more. He loves it.

All too recently, though, he’s found that there are some questions that come harder than others; some answers he doesn’t know that he wants to find.

It feels like the two of them have been skirting around the topic of his future, Alex’s past, since the first moment he’d been truly himself in Darrow, sipping coffee in her bed the day before Christmas, his head still pounding from the aftereffects of Manuscript’s prank. Then, it had seemed almost like the least shocking thing in a litany of so many others. Compared to the all-too-present reality of having fallen into a pocket universe, to Alex being attacked by some rogue member of Scroll & Key or befriending one of New Haven’s most notorious Grays, to the fact he’d stared at Hiram’s Crucible glowing in the early morning sunlight in the corner of her bedroom, the thought that Sandow sends him on some Lethe-sponsored research trip hardly seemed traumatic enough to compare. Maybe it isn’t; maybe it doesn’t matter. But Darlington knows he hasn’t imagined the walls that go up behind Alex’s eyes when he mentions it, the sudden tension that snaps into her shoulders even when they’re at home and far from the reach of any Grays. There’s more to the story than she’s telling, a layer of answers waiting to be revealed.

He could wait. Possibly, he should. But the closer they grow, their lives entangling in ways both of them had only let themselves think fleetingly about at home, the more important knowing this particular truth becomes. Something happens to make him leave, to abandon Alex halfway through her training and cause her to come to the kind of harm that freezes his blood to think about, even when he can see her here and whole and safe--and nothing about it feels like just an ordinary research trip. It feels, if he thinks about it too long, like a fracturing. Like him having done something unforgivable, shattering whatever equilibrium exists between them and then turning tail and leaving her to deal with the fallout alone.

It’s the choice of a coward, a fool, exactly the kind of person he’s never wanted to be, and if he can fix it here--if he can find a way to never bring it about in the first place--he knows he has to try. Even if getting the answer causes both of them some pain along the way.

Neither of them have anywhere to be tonight, no late night events at the museum that require him to stay and staff the desk, Alex off the schedule at the club tonight and tomorrow. He makes dinner, opens a bottle of wine. It’s perfect, the kind of peace that still seems like such a rare and unexpected thing to have found with one another, and by the time they’re settled on the couch Darlington wonders if he shouldn’t let it continue. He can’t, he knows he can’t. He’s pushed this search for answers back too long and too far as it is.

The show they’d been watching comes to an end, the credits starting to roll, and Darlington reaches for the remote to stop it before the next episode starts to play. She's settled there against him, her head resting against his chest; he looks down at her and takes a breath, hoping the choice he’s about to make is the right one.

“Alex,” he says, and then to his surprise, he finds he can’t say anything else at all.

Comments

[takecourage]

"Hmmm?"

She'd been drifting, half dozing, for the last few minutes of the episode and the way that he says her name startles her awake. She shifts away, slightly, arching her back.

"What's up, babe?"

[more_magic]

He hears that surprised hum of hers as she wakes from her doze, something that feels a little like guilt settling in his chest when she shifts away from him, and he nearly gives up on everything before he's even begun. It'd be so easy to just say nothing, to say I love you, to say so many smaller things that are true but don't approach the topic that seems more and more like a pit that might consume them both if they venture too close. He could, but he can't.

"Why do I go to Spain?"

[takecourage]

Anxiety washes over in a wave that's somehow hot and cold at the same time and she feels her spine stiffen. She doesn't want to keep lying to him about this; she doesn't know how to do anything else.

"Why do we do anything at home?" She says. "Sandow said jump."

[more_magic]

She'd pulled away, but not so much that he doesn't feel the way she goes rigid at the question, that thrumming tension running through every part of her. Already, he hates himself for putting it there.

"Sandow saying anything wouldn't make you react like this," he says. "You look like something's hunting you every time I mention it. That's more than Sandow or the Lethe board or whoever just telling me I'm going on a trip. Or telling you, since I apparently didn't." Darlington can sense the way he's started to slide into the kind of lecturing tone he'd taken as her Virgil. It's not going to fit here at all, might even make the situation worse than it's already turning out to be; he makes himself stop, passing a hand over his face as he breathes out a sigh. "Alex," he says, chancing a brush of his fingers against her arm, "I just want to know what I did. Why I...leave you. Or left you. So there's no possibility of me doing it here."

[takecourage]

"You didn't...it wasn't me you left," she says, folding in on herself a little, pulling her knees up and wrapping around them, tugging at the blunt ends of her hair. "It was nothing to do with me."

[more_magic]

Watching her curl in on herself, he feels that same sharp pain as he had on Halloween, the sword in his heart even if there's none in his hand; no defense against whatever might come, just an ache and a sense of loss for something he doesn't even know. "But I leave. In the middle of your training, before the end of the term. I just up and go, and then someone dies, the very thing we're trying to prevent, and I don't even come back."

God, he should take it all back. Can you put an evening into Hiram's Crucible, perform a reversion on time itself? If there's an incantation to do it, Darlington hasn't learned it yet. He wishes, in this moment, that he had.

"And then you come to harm, and I'm not there to stop that, either."

[takecourage]

This is a conversation that she doesn't want to have because she knows where it ends up. She knows what she's going to have to tell him, in the end.

"You didn't go to Spain," she says. "You...didn't have a choice."

[more_magic]

And there it is, at last; some kind of truth. He thought it would make him feel better, but that sword in his heart only makes a sharp quarter-turn as he stares at the bow of her back and the spill of her hair.

"Where, then?"

[takecourage]

He's going to hate her, she thinks. And she'll deserve it. She's just let herself get comfortable and now it's all going to shatter into shards and smears of ash.

"Gone," she says, quietly. "You were just...gone."

[more_magic]

He needs, he thinks, to face her in order to face this. To look her in the eye as the rest of the story, whatever it is, comes out--or is pulled, bit by agonizing bit. But facing her means pulling away, means getting up from the couch or guiding her into turning around, and no matter how gently he might manage either, it feels like something might shatter if he does.

"Start...start from the beginning?" he asks, hating how feeble his voice sounds. There's a note in it he doesn't think he's heard in years; not since he was fifteen, not since all his stubborn triumph over outlasting his parents had warped into the crushing knowledge of how very alone he was. "Please, Alex."

[takecourage]

More than anything, she doesn't want to talk to him about this. She's let herself fall in love with him. She can't bear the thought of losing him now, of knowing that he's in the city but doesn't want to see her. She won't be able to survive it. It'll kill her.

"We went to Rosenfeld Hall," she says, still not looking at him. "St Elmo. They were fucking with the grid again."

[more_magic]

"Siphoning off the excess," he says, focusing on the facts, setting up the most likely scenario. Anything to keep the panic he can already feel in his chest from clawing its way further up. "Before there's another surge, a blackout...whatever. Dawes must've gotten an alert."

How anything pertaining to St. Elmo's could ever lead to harm--for either of them--Darlington doesn't know. They'd been broken ever since their move to the house on Lynwood, the loss of their nexus having left them disconnected and disaffected, rendered essentially toothless and unthreatening for years. There'd been no indication that had changed, none that he'd seen.

But maybe he would. Maybe he had.

[takecourage]

"We went down into the basement and," she sniffs, tilting her head so her hair curtains her for a second. "Jesus, you were giving me all of this shit about not having read the whole of that fucking book even though you told me we only cared about landed societies."

[more_magic]

It is, quite frankly, a small miracle that he manages to sigh at that. "The Life of Lethe is a resource for a reason," he says. "Even when dealing with St. Elmo. Though I take your point." His hand lifts, almost reaching for her, almost brushing his fingers along the curve of her back or tucking that sheath of hair away from her face again--but he can't. He can't, and he wants to, and he can't bring himself to do it yet.

"To the basement, then. I showed you the fusebox and the vane?"

[takecourage]

She nods, numbly.

"Told me to always wear the boots and the gloves," she says. "Like...you knew you weren't going to be there the next time."

[more_magic]

"It doesn't happen that often," he says. "Once or twice a year. Sometimes less." Even though it's true, it still sounds like an excuse; some flimsy explanation that doesn't do anything to relieve the cold, churning fear that's in his gut, hearing the weight with which she says it. You weren't going to be there. Like he'd known something...but what? What could he have learned in the space between Halloween and whenever this had occurred?

And in the end, did it even matter?

Darlington swallows hard, trying to force back the sudden, shameful lump in his throat. "What then?"

[takecourage]

"We were talking about..." The flat beast inside her stirs, flicks its tail, and Alex knows then that she's going to tell him only half of anything. "And you...you realised that someone had been there before us. Opened a portal."

[more_magic]

Alex doesn't complete that sentence, and even though he thinks he can guess--about the work at hand, about whatever Pammie's call had pulled one or both of them away from, possibly even about Alex's stubborn refusal to just sit down and read the things he assigned her--he wonders if he even should. If this, too, doesn't matter in the scope of all that must have come after. Regardless, the impulse is cleared away a moment later as Alex keeps talking.

"Another damn portal?" he asks, his head turning towards the door to the bedroom and his thoughts going back to the story of her arrival; the dead girl, the attack, the shattering of bone so severe Dawes had invoked the power of the crucible. "Scroll and Key again?"

[takecourage]

She nods.

"Yeah," she says. "Another damn portal. But we...we didn't know who set it up." She's not crying, her eyes sore and stinging. She remembers finally breaking down in tears as Dawes cut her t-shirt away. "You were just going to put wards on it and come back and deal with it properly later."

[more_magic]

"There's supplies at the armory," he says, once again taking comfort in the facts, in the few shreds of something familiar in a story that's turning more and more disquieting with every sentence. "Things to shut it down permanently. But warding would hold it for a time." He can picture the signs in his head, hear himself saying the words and pulling from the Locksmith's own incantations to undo their handiwork. Easy stuff, the kind of thing he'd learned in his first year and never had issue with. Not, it seems, until now.

And it had to have been Scroll & Key, even as Alex says we didn't know; who else would have had the power, or the desire to pull from an unused, unguarded nexus to bolster the waning strength of their own?

Darlington's pulled from his thoughts by the rough note in her voice, the sound of it cutting through any resistance he'd once had. "Alex," he says, and finally, he lays a hand at her back.

[takecourage]

"I didn't do anything," she says, and she doesn't pull away from him, but she does curl in on herself just a little bit more. "I didn't...I just..." She ducks her head. "You're going to hate me."

she hates how small her voice comes out.

[more_magic]

"No," he says immediately, instinctively, even though a word that small and simple isn't going to loosen the tight fold of her body or soothe the cracked hurt in her voice. "Whatever happened...you had months of training only. If that, depending...depending when this is. Depending what happened."

Because that's the question that still hangs in the air. He knows the lead up to it now, those details filled in and taking a shape he hadn't anticipated, but the rest of it--well, the rest of it is a vacancy. A lacuna that gapes as wide as whatever portal the two of them had found in the Rosenfeld basement, and all at once he's not sure he wants to step any closer. He swallows hard.

"How could I hate you for that, Alex?"

[takecourage]

"I didn't even try," she says, her voice tiny. Pitiful. A tear finally rolls down her cheek. "I...froze. And you were...gone. Like you'd never even been there. Just gone."

[more_magic]

She says gone, and it's like the air goes out of the room. His head spins, his eyes stinging, the beat of his heart suddenly louder than the low whisper of her voice. There's been a part of him that's expected this after years alone in the halls of Black Elm, after forgoing friendships and relationships for Lethe's sake, after swallowing draught after draught of poison in the hopes of seeing something wonderful.

Of course this is where it stops for him, and how: vanishing into the dark, swallowed up completely by the one thing he'd had to hold him to the world. Magic had saved him once, but that was all, it seemed, he could ever hope for.

"Into the portal," he says at last, in a voice so flat it barely sounds like his own. "You froze, and I fell, and...the world went on."

[takecourage]

"Sandow said you'd gone to Spain," she says, and she ought to reach for him, she knows she should, but she can't bring her hands to work. Her bones are made of smoke. "And we were going to do a ritual on the full moon to...call you home. He was getting your Virgil in from New York."

[more_magic]

The knowledge should soothe him, the thought of his fate resting in Sandow and Michelle's capable hands. So much of what he'd learned in the past three years had come from them, and if he thought anyone could bring him back, call him out of whatever depths had consumed him, it would be them. And Alex too, he thinks. Alex most of all.

It should soothe him, but whatever comfort it provides is a small thing in the face of the panic still latched in his chest, in the rigid immobility of Alex's body as she curls away from him--and he should move, he should hold her, and he can't, he can't--and the hopelessness he's already trying to keep at bay.

"So Spain was Sandow's excuse," he says. "At first. Until the rite."

Until Alex had made it hers, faced with the returned sight of her Virgil in her living room--but he doesn't know how to say that part without fracturing everything, and so he doesn't.

[takecourage]

"Just a way of keeping it quiet," she says, and then she finally forces herself to look at him. "We didn't want the societies to get hold of it and...run riot. Sandow said you'd probably just...ended up in a pocket universe and it'd be easy enough to pull you home. You probably wouldn't even know you were gone."

[more_magic]

He manages a nod. "Better that they think I'm only a plane ride away, rather than--"

Alex looks at him, her dark eyes bleak and fathomless, and the grief on her face finally cracks through the barrier holding back his own. It feels like being punched, like the compounded weight of every hit he's taken of the Bullet, like something horrible he can't yet name. His eyes fill with tears, and he's not fast enough to blink them away.

"I'm gone," he says, his voice thick and cracking. "Even if we leave here, I'm still...eventually...I'm gone."

[takecourage]

His eyes fill with tears - her stoic, beautiful boy - and something inside Alex breaks. She reaches for him, her fingers curling around his arm.

"I didn't get as far as the ritual," she says. "We were going to get you back."

She believes that, with every bloody minded bit of herself.

She has to.

[more_magic]

Darlington closes his eyes tight, tears running down his cheeks and his hand coming up to cover Alex's when she touches him. The contact is so little, barely enough, but it still feels like a lifeline there in the dark. When she speaks, there's a shaky conviction in her voice, and even if he's imagining it he grabs onto that, too. He'll take any scrap he can get, any sign of hope that suggests that his absence is a temporary thing; that he returns with nothing more to show for it than a gap in his memory of only a few months' duration.

It can't be that simple. Magic never is. But he chooses to believe in it anyway.

[takecourage]

She's never seen him cry before - not like this, anyway, and, for a moment, all that she can do is stare. His hand is warm, his fingers curled over hers and that's what finally breaks whatever has been keeping her curled away from him. She leans in, her nose brushing his cheek.

"I'm sorry I didn't tell you before," she says. "I...I really fucking should have."

[more_magic]

He hasn't cried like this in years, not since his grandfather's death--and even then, it had taken a while. Even then, he'd done his best to hide it, ignore it, prevent it, knowing that, as with so many other things, tears were not the Arlington way. He'd kept it back until one long, bleak night when he couldn't any longer, and all of it had come crashing through.

It'd be easy for this night to feel just about that hopeless, and for a moment, it does. For a moment, he's just Danny Arlington, a boy lost and alone, waiting for someone to save him. And then at last, Alex leans in, her nose grazing his damp cheek and the ends of her hair brushing against his arm, her voice low in his ear as she whispers out an apology.

It's not really being saved. But it's enough.

"I wish you had," he says, his voice hollow. "I wish I'd...I couldn't understand how I ever abandoned you, Dawes, Lethe. Any of it." He opens his eyes, and though they're red-rimmed and watery, his gaze is as steady as he can make it. "But I don't blame you, Alex."

[takecourage]

"It wasn't you," she says, combing her free hand through his dark hair, pressing kisses against his tear-damp skin. "I know you'd have never have chosen that, okay? I know you'd have never left me there."

[more_magic]

Darlington nods, letting each kiss and each run of Alex's fingers through his hair guide him out of his sudden, surprising grief and back to whatever passes for equilibrium in the wake of it. "Never," he says, and it sounds like a promise. Maybe here, he'll be able to keep it.

He lets out another slow, shaken breath. "What the hell do we stumble into, Alex?" he asks, already focusing on the how, the why, all the pieces of a puzzle he just might be able to fit together. "Portals, a dead girl, the Bridegroom..."

[takecourage]

Alex half shrugs, staying pressed close to him, breathing in the scent of him, his tousled warmth. "I'd barely stated to find the bottom of it myself," she says. "There was a dead girl. Tara. Town. Murdered. It...felt wrong?"

[more_magic]

"If the societies were involved, it would've been," he says, leaning into her, letting the contact soothe him in a way that feels childish--but that he needs. Right now, he needs as much of it as he can get. "It would've been everything Lethe was created to prevent."

And somehow, they'd failed.

[takecourage]

"I just...Centurion told me to leave it alone, but I couldn't," she says, still combing her fingers through his hair. "I just...the way that they treated her. Threw her away. Like she didn't matter. Like she was shit." She shakes her head. "I couldn't."

[more_magic]

"Of course you couldn't. None of us could."

Even as distracted as he is by his own shock and the questions already taking up space in his head, the why and how that he knows is going to consume him, Darlington thinks he can hear a deeper regret in what Alex says and the way she says it. Something more than this one girl, discarded and abandoned in the aftermath of whatever failed rite had cut her down. But she'd lost a lot of people, some to unfortunate ends--her boyfriend back in Van Nuys, foul as he'd been; that friend of hers whose name he cannot recall now--and so really, the impetus behind it could be anything at all.

"I'd started researching the North-Whitlock murders," he says. Admits, maybe. "Didn't get far, not by Halloween, but I'd started. There was something...I don't even know. It didn't fit."

[takecourage]

"He told me that," she says, nodding. She knows how Darlington feels about her enlisting North's help, but it's not like she'd really had much choice. "That you were looking into it. That you knew something wasn't right..."

[more_magic]

"He knew about it?" The revelation shouldn't surprise him, really, but it does. There was only so much to occupy his time, after all, drifting around New Haven and brooding at the distant edges of the few rites Darlington's seen him drawn to.

"I guess we both forged a connection with him, of a kind, and in our own ways."

[takecourage]

Alex nods, her fingers threading through his dark hair, separating the strands. "Coming at it from different directions." She takes a little breath. "Are you...and we okay?"

[more_magic]

Okay doesn't feel like a thing he can find for himself tonight, maybe not ever again, but the continued pull of Alex's fingers through his hair reminds him that he's here; that at least for now, he hasn't been consumed by whatever waits for him in the Rosenfeld basement. Maybe if he can find the answers he needs to stop it, he never will be.

"We're okay," he says, leaning to kiss her, careful and slow. "You and I, we always will be." He believes that now more than ever.