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

[more_magic]

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.

Comments

[more_magic]

"Okay," he says, hearing the effort Alex puts into making it gentle. It's not easy for her, after so many years of walls and barriers and never letting anyone see too far behind them, but he knows she's trying. For him, she's still trying, which is the most astonishing part of all. "You know I had to ask."

As she goes to start the coffee, Darlington gives Kirby one final scratch behind the ears, then turns towards the bedroom. He'd left a pair of sweatpants here, along with a few t-shirts; they're still neatly folded in what he still thinks of as his dresser in the bureau, and he takes them out, putting them on the bed before starting to undress.

[takecourage]

The coffee is brewing and Alex wanders down the hallway towards the bedroom, their bedroom, feeling like she's doing something illicit. She stands in the doorway just in time to watch him shrug out of his shirt. She's seen him shirtless since they've been taking things slower, but that doesn't mean it's not a sight she likes to savour.

"Is this okay?" she asks, finally.

[more_magic]

Saying that she catches him isn't right; makes it sound more sordid than it is, or more than they want it to be right now. He's changed here before, showered after a run or brought his museum blazer and a pair of trousers with him when they're spending the day together before his evening shift at work. It's been as normal as anything else, everything they've done while taking things slow.

But she comes down the hallway now, and stops at the door just as he takes off his shirt, and it feels for a moment like it's the very first time.

"Yeah," he says, looking over at her. "This is okay."

[takecourage]

"Okay, good," says Alex, padding into the room in her bare feet and going to her drawers to grab a t-shirt and a pair of slouchy jersey shorts.

She turns her back on him, more out of consideration for him than anything.

[more_magic]

He watches her go to the bureau and get her own things, soft and comfortable, then turn away after she's shut the drawer again. It's careful, and considerate, and another sign that she's trying just as hard as he is to make sure everything goes right. Darlington stays there, standing half-dressed for another moment longer, looking at the dark line of her back in the dress and the black spill of her hair over her shoulders.

"Do you need help with the zipper, or can you manage?" he asks. Just as he had at the restaurant, with her hand warm on his thigh and the sight of her blissful expression over dessert, Darlington does his best not to think of the question as another kind of prelude.

[takecourage]

"It would actually be really fucking helpful if you unzipped me," she says. "I can do it myself, but... It takes some contorting.

[more_magic]

"Fair point," he says, laughing softly. It only takes a second to cross the brief distance between them, for him to step up behind her, moving her hair gently aside as he finds the tab of the zipper there at the top of the dress. The cut of the dress had left her shoulders bare, and standing behind her like this, he can better see the way it also dips a little low in the back. He can still notice things like that, about her, even now.

He pulls the zipper, revealing the pale skin beneath, the band of her bra, the faint lace edge of her panties once it's down all the way. "There you go," he says, and if his fingers brush the small of her back for a moment before he steps away, it could easily have been an accident.

[takecourage]

Alex rides out the pulse between her thighs the brush of his fingers and steps out of her dress, reaching behind her to unhook her bra and dropping it before she pulls on her T-shirt. She leaves her panties on, reaching for the shorts.

[more_magic]

Darlington finishes changing, swapping his trousers for sweatpants and pulling a t-shirt on over his head. He glances over at Alex once, maybe twice, and brief as they are those glimpses seem more illicit, more furtive, than they ought to.

"So," he says, once they're both changed. "Coffee, and then...we can talk?" If she can't do it tonight--or ever--he'll understand. It's something he should have asked earlier, knowledge that might have staved off the worst of their fight and its aftermath, and there's a possibility his chance had passed with that. But if she talks, he'll listen.

[takecourage]

"We can talk," she says, nodding, as she pads out of the bedroom, pulling her hair back into a knot on top of her head. "Do you want to do it in here or on the couch?"

[more_magic]

"Couch?" he suggests, following her out and down the hallway, Kirby trotting up to sniff at him again when they're back in the living room. The bed would be its own kind of security--but even though he's agreed to stay over, after the odd and sudden charge of their getting changed it feels like a little too far. "Under your beloved throw blanket, both of us...and Kirby."

He'd tried for about a week to keep him off the couch when they'd first adopted him, but that was a battle Darlington had always known he was going to lose.

[takecourage]

"Couch," says Alex, confirming as she walks into the kitchen to fix coffee how they both like it, bringing it back to the coffee table with a treat for Kirby tucked into the pocket of her shorts. Once she's there, she arranges herself under her blanket and waits for the boys to make themselves comfortable.

[more_magic]

While she fixes the coffee, Darlington takes the blanket from where Alex had bundled it up in the armchair by the window, shaking it out and draping it over the arm of the sofa so she can pull it over herself once she's sat down. Kirby whuffs a little, soft, staying close to wherever Darlington is as though he'd missed him. Maybe he had.

Once Alex is comfortable he goes to join her, sitting at the opposite end of the couch and facing her, his half of the blanket pulled over his legs. Kirby follows, nudging and turning until he's curled up between them with his head resting on Alex's thigh.

"So," says Darlington, his voice gentle and his eyes serious. "Whatever you want to tell me about Hellie or the rest of them, about your reasons why..." He looks down at the coffee mug in his hands, then back up. "I'll listen, which is what I should have done that night."

[takecourage]

"Okay, Hellie," says Alex, shifting, cradling her cup between her palms and not looking at him, not at first. "We met her at Venice Beach when Len was in his Scarface phase and being a really fucking asshole and she was just...she was beautiful. She reminded me of Michelle * Pfeiffer* only no..." She makes a vague gesture. "No bangs."

[more_magic]

Alex doesn't look at him, and Darlington doesn't ask her to. Wouldn't, not tonight. He listens, his fingers running along the coarse hair of Kirby's back and flank. He'd always missed the Yale Social's yearly showing of Scarface--sheer lack of interest, combined with too many things to do on Thursday nights--but had absorbed enough from classmates, roommates, acquaintances to vaguely understand what she means by the description.

It's a better picture of Hellie than the one he'd had up to now, bright and vivid rather than the starkness of the coroner's photographs he'd seen in Alex's file.

"Sure," he says. "I think I know what you mean."

[takecourage]

"She was... Really beautiful," says Alex, blowing over the surface of her coffee. "We used to spend all of the cash we had on like...glittery things and cheap earrings. Dressing up." She smiles, her eyes gone faraway for a moment. "Except she had these really ugly feet? But...God, I loved her. I was in love with her, I think."

[more_magic]

"That doesn't surprise me at all," he says, taking a sip of his coffee. Darlington watches her eyes go distant, her expression getting softer and sadder and more purely in love, and his heart aches for the sake of this thing she'd lost. And the girl she'd lost, along with it. "Any of it, but especially that you loved her."

There's no jealousy to it, no envy, just an awareness that it's what he should have said to her before.

"She was...younger than you, right? Or, only by a little." Knowing now how young Alex had been when everything started, everything between her and Len, his stomach twists at the thought of some kind of reprise of that--even if everyone involved had been a few years further down the line.

[takecourage]

"Just a little bit," she says, nodding. "So, like...I tried to keep her safe. Did everything that I could to keep her safe. We slept in the same bed, most of the time." She takes a sip of her coffee. "Len was trying to move up a letter, trying to get this guy Eitan to give him more weight. He mostly dealt weed, but the kids at the fancy private schools wanted other shit. Adderall, Molly, oxy, ket. And Eitan didn't trust Len as far as he could fucking kick him. Never let him deal more than dime bags of green."

[more_magic]

Eitan isn't a name he knows, someone with enough distance or luck to have avoided showing up in the police reports, but from the way Alex says his name and the description that follows Darlington can guess at his general nature. He nods. "Only the smallest of the small time, then. No real surprise there."

[takecourage]

"Yeah. He just thought he was a big fucking deal," says Alex, shaking her head and looking down at her hands again. "That night...the...last night...Ariel came into town. He was Eltain's cousin and he always made me really fucking...nervous. He felt like...a coiled spring or something, like he was about the explode, and everyone just wanted to impress him and keep him entertained. Like everyone needed permission from him. They were all waiting for it."

[more_magic]

She doesn't even have to say it for Darlington to be aware. Even now, with him dead--spine broken in three places, he would've gone down like a sack of lead and she made sure he never got up again, a cold voice in his head reminds him--and Alex a world away from even the reach of his ghost, if it made it past the Veil at all, there's a tension that settles in every line of her body at almost the thought of Ariel Harel's name.

He ignores that cold voice from before, and moves to rest just the tips of his fingers along the curve of her knee.

"And Len thought this was...some kind of chance," he says, hazarding a guess from what he knows and the things she's said.

[takecourage]

"And he was...laughing at us. He was always laughing at us." She takes one hand off her cup and touches the back of Darlington's, threading their fingers together. "Other girls used to like...warn me about him. That he liked it...not just rough. He liked it ugly." She's aware of what Darlington's into, but so much of it is built on trust and love and her knowing him better than anyone. "He liked to humiliate girls and see them grovel." She worries her lip with her teeth. "He was coming over and Len...told me and Hellie to tidy up, right? Make the place look nice. He...slapped me around and we...bailed the minute he left."

[more_magic]

"Jesus Christ." His stomach gives a sick lurch, a twist, just at the things she says about Ariel. The thought of Alex being warned, of trying to avoid him for her sake as much as Hellie's, of the way it linked in to all the things he'd already come to know about her life in California, and all the things he'd barely let himself extrapolate. And, mostly, because of the way none of it surprises him very much at all.

His jaw tenses further when she gets to Len slapping her, how she says it like something offhand and throwaway, and even the measured sip he takes of his coffee does little to hide it. His other hand stays tight in hers.

[takecourage]

"It's okay," she says, squeezing his hand reflexively, turning his head to take in the tightness of his jaw when he sips his coffee like that. "I got it but Hellie never did. How we were supposed to be part of the fun for Ariel. How they sent all the...good girls away and kept us because we were just trash from the Valley." She's never told Darlington this next bit, and now it's her jaw that tightens. "I was fifteen the first time that I blew someone because Len was trying to suck up to them. He told me that I didn't look fifteen, and I remember thinking..." She huffs out a laugh, though nothing's funny. "I remember thinking what the fuck does fifteen look like, asshole?"

[more_magic]

Darlington hates so much right then, hearing all of that, knowing that there hadn't been anyone but Hellie even remotely on her side. And not even her, when Alex was fifteen and made to perform like that to advance some sick desire of Leonard Beacon's. When she laughs, low and mirthless, it sinks like a knife into his chest.

"Alex," he says, pushing all the care he can into the sound of her name, hoping she'll believe even a percentage of it. "That never should have...I can say that it shouldn't, but it did, and I'm sorry for it." He looks down at the link of their hands against the soft wool of the blanket. "And you're not trash. Not to me."