more_magic | we kept our hearts from view, this time we're problem solving

To say they get back to normal wouldn't be true. There's enough that's changed, that's needed to change, that whatever they'd been before isn't a place they can return to now. Darlington moves his things out of the Bramford and back to their apartment in Dimera, paying the exorbitant repair costs the landlord quoted him for the bedroom door just so he won't have to look at the splintered frame and all it represents. He and Alex talk, sometimes more deeply than he thinks they ever had before, other times about absolutely nothing at all. He still takes Kirby for a run in the morning, and he's still over there for dinner almost every night.

Day by day, over the next few weeks, it starts to feel like something's building out of the ashes.

When they'd first begun, Alex had said it could be like dating, starting fresh in a way they hadn't really taken the chance to do before. So far, it's felt like that; slow, and careful, and a little cautious as they feel out the edges of these new boundaries. Almost normal, when so little in their life--here or at home--had been that way for years.

Darlington brings up the idea, dinner out instead of in, one day when they're just sitting on the couch with Kirby. An actual date, maybe, to mark another step forward in the thing growing between them. He picks one of their favorites, a place downtown that's upscale and intimate, making the reservation for an evening Alex has off of work. That night, he showers and dresses, calling a cab and asking the driver to wait outside the Bramford while he goes to the second floor and knocks on Alex's door.

He still has a key, just as she has one to Dimera, but tonight he wants to do everything right.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

more_magic

They've been relearning each other in so many ways, but contact is one of the easier ones. Still slow, and careful not to push too much too soon, but even the lightest touches are grounding for them both. Darlington smiles when she fusses with his tie, leaning his head a little into the light brush of her fingers against his jaw.

"What a coincidence," he says, laughing a little as he takes her hand again. "So do I."

They enter the restaurant, following the hostess to a small table hidden a little in the back, close and intimate. He hadn't made any special requests when he'd called in the reservation, but for this kind of first date, it strikes Darlington as just about perfect.

From:

takecourage

They're tucked away at the back of the restaurant, a small table, and Alex automatically shifts closer when they sit down, leaning into his space a little. She's never, in her whole life, wanted someone the way she wants him. She's never wanted to fix anything the way she wants to fix things with him.

"I bought cash with me," she says, picking up a menu. "We can split it."

From:

more_magic

She moves close to him almost the moment they're seated, her body leaning in towards his in the same way she always had when they were out like this before. It looks easy, but Darlington knows enough to understand the trust there, how she'd never have done it with anyone--not even him, except on rare occasion--before Darrow. He doesn't want to fail that trust again.

Alex offers to split, and he has to keep himself from his old impulse to reject that, to play the gentleman and insist the night's all on him. That's an argument that belongs to the old Daniel, the one he should have left behind more easily; here, he's learned how important it is for her to have this.

"Sounds good," he says, smiling over at her. The candlelight from the small votive on the table glints off the chains around her neck and paints her skin in flickering light, and once more he's struck by how beautiful she is. He opens up his menu with one hand, his other resting against the tablecloth for her to take if she wishes.

From:

takecourage

Alex starts to flip through the menu and, after a moment, she reaches out and slides her hand over his, threading their fingers together. "We're doing three courses, right?" she asks, glancing at him. "And cocktails?"

From:

more_magic

"Right," he says, smiling a little when he feels her hand slide over his. He scans the menu a moment longer, then looks back up. "I remember we liked the cheese plate before, so that could be a start. Maybe in addition to one of the others?"

The server comes by then to grab their drinks order, and Darlington nods at Alex to go first, ordering a Manhattan for himself once she's finished.

From:

takecourage

"Yeah, that was good," says Alex, who, honestly, had never had more than American cheese (or the vegan shit that Mira liked) in her life before she'd met Daniel Arlington. Alex orders herself a peach Bellini and a soda, feeling really low class but not quite enough to not do it. Once the waiter's stepped away, she shifts her hand so that she can take his properly.

From:

more_magic

Her order is everything he might have guessed, something perfectly Alex. There would have been a time--just last September, maybe, back home and at the start of everything--he'd have rolled his eyes and marked it down as just another signifier; too California, too heathenish, too everything he'd worked so hard not to be. It's none of those things, he knows now, as aware of that as he is the fact she'd have called him a snob at best if she'd ever found out.

And he'd have deserved it.

She moves and takes his hand again, more solidly, and he runs his thumb gently against her skin. "I feel like we should be making first date small talk or something," he says, one side of his mouth going up in a smile. "But I'll be damned if I know exactly how to start."

From:

takecourage

"Don't look at me," says Alex, leaning back in her chair a little and smirking at him, still holding her hand. "I've got no fucking idea how this is supposed to work. Don't tell me that you didn't take small talk lessons or something as a teenager."

From:

more_magic

"As a teenager?" he says, raising one eyebrow in response to her smirk. "Give me some credit, Stern. I was winsome and charming from at least the age of ten."

Darlington thinks for a moment, but what comes out when he speaks again isn't the kind of easy, light inquiry he'd have used with anyone else. Even though they're starting over, trying again, he and Alex had progressed beyond all that a while ago. "What were you like at that age? Not in relation to the Greys or anything else, not like that, I just..." He looks at her face, at the dark spill of her hair and the swirl of her tattoos along her shoulders. "I want to know who you are."

It's always been true, but he means it more deeply now than he ever had before.

From:

takecourage

"I bet you fucking were."

She grazes her thumb along his as she thinks about his answer for a moment. "I was....chubby. And nerdy. And really shy." She raises an eyebrow. "Wouldn't think it to look at me now, right?"

From:

more_magic

"It's not what someone might expect at first glance," he says, trying to envision it the same as he'd always done the few times it had come up before; this different version of Alex, short and pudgy, smart and shy and unable to block out the things no one else could see. All of it, the skin she'd shed like a snake out of a necessity he'd only begun to understand the depths of before everything had gone wrong. "But that doesn't mean I can't see it, a little."

Their waiter comes by with their drinks, and Darlington thanks him, taking his hand away from Alex's to pick up his glass. "Very little about me at that age is that surprising," he says, smiling a little against the rim of his glass before he takes a sip. "Scrawny, obedient, easily fascinated by just about anything. When I wasn't at school, I was in my room or the library reading anything I could get my hands on, or in the study at Black Elm with my tutors."

He sets his drink down, his fingers stroking over the back of her hand. "Guess we were both nerdy in our own ways."

From:

takecourage

Alex raises her glass in a toast to that, taking a sip of her drink, enjoying the tart, sweet combination of prosecco and peach puree.

"I know a lot about what you were like as a teenager. Or, at least, what you were like around girls when you were a teenager," he says. "And it sounds adorable."

From:

more_magic

"I still doubt you'd have said that if you saw me at the time," he says. "But I'll take the compliment."

He could leave it there, keep it something easy and self-deprecating, exactly the kind of thing they both have done for as long as they've been in each other's lives. It wouldn't be out of place even now, on this first date that's something more than that, but Darlington finds himself wanting to delve a little deeper than just the superficial. He wants to try here, just a little bit more.

"It's not like I...pretended to be something I wasn't," he says. "Not consciously, or maybe intentionally's a better way to put it. But especially after my grandfather died, it was all a way of ensuring people didn't look too closely at anything else."

From:

takecourage

"Because you were on your own, right?" says Alex, taking another sip of her drink and putting the glass down, leaning in a little, her chin caught in her free hand. "So you had to stay under the radar. It was different for me. I just...stopped going anywhere anyone would notice me. I didn't got to school or anything like that. I still don't have my GED."

From:

more_magic

"Right," he says. "Easier to be Danny Arlington, who'll be the one to pick you up at your house and drive you to the library or anywhere else you want to go, or who'll stay for dinner and always offer to help with the dishes, then have anybody come to Black Elm and ask how long it'd be until my parents got home." He scoffs, faintly, glancing for a moment at some point in the distance. "I said they worked in the city, which was true and continues to be so, and if anyone assumed they took the Metro-North to and fro every day just like anyone else, I didn't say a word about it."

Neither of his parents would ever do something as pedestrian as ride commuter rail, Darlington knew, which had only made the necessary fiction a little more satisfying.

The waiter stops at their table again, and Darlington orders the cheese plate for their starter along with a small crudité board of summer vegetables. He skims the menu one last time as Alex orders her main, then gets the hanger steak for himself and hands over the menu with an easy smile of thanks.

"So you left," he says once the waiter's gone again. All of it had been in her Lethe file, of course, information on dry, dispassionate sheets of paper that he'd once thought told him all he needed to know. But hearing it from her, now, casts it all in a different light. "School, and Mira, and everything else. Which I understand, I think. Not wanting to pretend everything's still just the same as it ever was."

From:

takecourage

"You make it sound a lot more sensible that it was," says Alex, sipping her drink for a moment. "I fell in with a bad crowd. Mosh was nice to me, because she thought I was spooky and shit, and then Len started paying me attention and, more importantly, supplying, and..." She shrugs. "Down the rabbit hole."

From:

more_magic

"God, do I want to know how young you were when it started?" he says, thinking back with loathing on everything he'd ever learned about Len, whether from Alex or as a component of her file. "I know telling you I'm sorry doesn't help, but...I am."

From:

takecourage

"What? Me and Len? I was fourteen." She shrugs. "I walked to the Baskin Robbins where he was working and it was so far my sneakers rubbed my feet bloody. So he put them in a tub of bubblegum ice-cream and then we..." She makes a vague gesture with one hand. "We'd fooled around a bit before that. He was totally old enough to know better."

From:

more_magic

"I'd meant the drugs, but..." He shakes his head. "I can see how the answer to that isn't likely to be much better. Or even different."

There's a resignation to the way she talks about it, something that suggests a protective cover he wants to tell her she doesn't need; not with him, not if they're trying to make this work. But he also knows that being open is different from flaying oneself raw, leaving no blank spaces hidden from another's view, and pushing at this isn't something he wants to do. Not if they're trying to make this work.

"More than old enough to know better," he says, suddenly glad he's never had much taste for bubblegum ice cream. "I read the death certificate, and I can do math."

From:

takecourage

"No different," she says. "Weed at first, then...a lot of other things. Crack. Heroin." She shrugs. "Anything to get me out of my head." She glances up at him. "Does it make you think less of me? A little? That I was that person? That he was that much older than me?"

From:

more_magic

Darlington nods at the first, the list of substances he knows isn't even half-complete, taking it all on. Trying to understand the necessity of it, and not just because it blocked out the Greys when she'd had no other alternatives to do so. Lethe hadn't come to her in time--or hadn't stepped in, not until they had a need she could fulfill and no other options--and despite the loyalty he'll never manage to shake, Darlington doesn't think he'll forgive them for that.

Alex looks at him, asking those questions, and for the first time in a while Darlington doesn't see as many of her usual walls up within the darkness of her eyes. It feels like progress, and a request for some corresponding honesty in return. He has to wait a moment before he answers, wanting to say everything in a way that neither condescends nor hurts.

"It used to," he says at last, his fingers still laced with hers and his eyes still focused on her face. "Before I knew you as anything more than your Lethe file. And for a little while after. Never because of the age difference between you and Len, lots of other things about Len, sure, but not that. But the rest, the drugs, the fact you were a dropout, everything about the squat on Cedros..."

The waiter comes by with their first course, the cheese and vegetables along with all their accompanying dips and spreads; Darlington orders another drink, only picking their conversation back up once the other man is out of earshot.

"The day we met," he says, looking over at her with a regretful smile. "When I asked why the hell you were in long sleeves despite it being eighty-five degrees, and you said it was track marks? I asked you to show me, and right up until you did, I believed you." His expression turns serious. "I regret a lot of things, Alex, but that's one of the biggest."

From:

takecourage

"You can't help that I didn't fit into your world right then," she says, squeezing his hand before she takes hers away so that she can start picking over the starters and loading things onto her plate. She drains the last of her cocktail, glad that she thought to order another one when Darlington ordered his.

"At least it's different now, I guess."

From:

more_magic

"It is," he says, believing that more firmly than he has so many other, lesser things. Whatever his world is, or was, or could be, Darlington knows Alex has to have a place in it. It doesn't work any other way. "We're making sure of it."

He adds some things to his plate, laughing gently the few times he and Alex reach for the same thing at the same time, their fingers bumping against one another. It's easy, and light, something neither of them have had in a long time.

From:

takecourage

"What are your parents' like?" she asks, popping a piece of cheese into her mouth and chewing. "I mean, other than assholes who abandoned you, I mean? I get that your grandfather pretty much raised you, but...I want to know about them? About where you come from."

From:

more_magic

"Other than that," Darlington says, not realizing how bitter it sounded until it's out in the air. He layers a bit of blue cheese onto a cracker, drizzling it with honey before taking a bite; enjoying it, but giving himself just a minute or two to think of what to say.

"I never figured out what my father did for a living," he says. "Something financial, hedge funds or investing, something like that. Never very well, as far as I could determine. But my mother's an art history professor, specializing in the Renaissance." He looks over at Alex, a wry half-smile on his face. "And before you ask, her name actually isn't Eileen. It's Harper."

What they do isn't who they are--no matter how often people, including the Layabouts, tended to conflate the two--and Darlington pauses, considering what else to say. "My grandfather always said they liked the idea of being parents more than the reality, and I think that was true," he says. "They'd come to Black Elm fairly regularly when I was younger, up from the city for a weekend or over Christmas, but it was always to get more money. Seeing me was usually incidental."