though it's been said many times, many ways

[more_magic]

It’s strange to think of where he was a year ago, exactly. Waking up in Alex’s bed, hung over from the shame of the night before and the lingering effects of whatever Manuscript had given him, preparing for his first full day in a city outside of the world he knew and realizing in the process that he’d lost nearly two months in the space of a breath. There were more shocks to come, more alterations in what he thought to be true, but very little had managed to surpass the disorientation of that initial beginning to his tenure in Darrow.

Back then, Darlington had wondered what they might have done at home, if Alex would’ve been on a plane to California at the start of break--or if he might have managed to convince her to stay, to spend Christmas at Black Elm with him. What they got instead was better, that makeshift celebration with hastily-bought gifts and the smell of a half-remembered recipe wafting from Alex’s kitchen; the start of something new, even if neither of them had known the depths of that newness at the time. And now, a year on, through hard work and some kind of miracle, he gets what he’d wondered about after all.

Christmas Day will be just for them, presents and breakfast and relaxing by the fire, but tonight is a chance to celebrate. They decorate the main floor of Black Elm, filling the rooms they’ve already managed to furnish with light and warmth, the tree they’d bought earlier in the month standing by one of the large picture windows in the great room. Alex cooks all of Estrea Stern’s recipes she can think of, adds a few of Bernadette’s that Darlington remembers from his childhood. There’s music low on the stereo, a fire lit in the vast fireplace, the new table and chairs they’d bought for the formal dining room arranged just so beneath the chandelier at the center of the room. Even Kirby gets into the spirit in a new, festive collar, bright red against his black fur.

Above all, they’ve invited the people that matter, the few who have come to mean something--to one or both of them--in the year that’s just passed. It’s the first real party Black Elm has seen in many years, not since Darlington’s grandfather was alive. It feels, once again, like starting something new.

[[tag in, tag around, enjoy the party!]]

Comments

[more_magic]

"Merry Christmas," he echoes, letting Blue enjoy the novelty of looking down at someone for a moment longer before he gets up from his seat on the floor. "It's been great. Both the holidays and tonight, though I think we're both going to enjoy having tomorrow to ourselves."

He looks over as Alex and a few others emerge from the kitchen with platters of food, heading towards the dining room. The smile on Darlington's face at the sight of her is bright and unguarded, just this side of awed. "Alex, especially."

[formicine]

She laughs. "Good! And yeah, I think that seems reasonable." Up until kids are involved, anyway, and she's not going to throw that idea out into the ether for them anytime soon. A Stern-Arlington child sounds like unbridled chaos, and they do enough trying to get themselves killed.

Blue follows his gaze and grins. An avowed hater of romance couldn't avoid smiling at that soft smitten look, and Blue is neither of those things. It suits him, she thinks, that little drop of the dignified persona. "I bet. You're not letting her do all the cooking, are you?" Alex looks like she's enjoying it, and she's pretty sure Alex doesn't do anything she doesn't want to do, but still.

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"Oh, it's not about letting," he laughs. "The most I was entrusted with was choosing the wine and making a salad. I think there might be a couple potatoes in the latkes that I happened to grate instead of her, but..." Picking up his wine glass from the coffee table, he takes a sip. "She likes doing it."

There were reasons for that, ones Darlington's come to understand over the last year. Like her enthusiasm for redecorating Black Elm or filling the Bramford apartment with cozy, soft things, the act of cooking was another way for Alex to claim a space as home, as safe--two things she hadn't had much of before Darrow.

[formicine]

"Ahh, I see how it is." Blue grins. "Yeah, I -- have to admit, as much as I dragged my feet back at home about putting up decorations and commercializing holidays and blah, blah, blah...I've gotten more into it, the whole thing, cooking and putting up decorations as I get older. Half missing home, I think, and half just wanting to start new traditions. Kat's choices are usually a little classier than mine," she adds, smiling into her own drink.

"Were Christmases in this place pretty big when you were a kid, or just -- you and your grandfather?" She can imagine Black Elm hosting a hell of a party, in its day, but she suspects that day was long before Darlington was born.

[more_magic]

"Come now, I think garlanding the orchids and the rest of your plant shelf with tinsel and a string of flashing lights could be very classy, under the right circumstances," he says, grinning, having seen the inside of her place a handful of times now. Their collaboration with the orchid root he needs for the Bullet hasn't been without its drawbacks--all his fault, he knows--but there's a usefulness to it that feels familiar. It isn't Lethe, and it isn't Il Bastone, but it's something.

His smile slips a little when she asks about Christmas at Black Elm before. The memory of those holidays, the lonely ones spent on his own and the brighter ones filled with the hope that this time something would be different, has been creeping around at the edges of his thoughts with increasing frequency the closer they get to the twenty-fifth. "Just the two of us and Bernadette, mostly. Some years, my parents would drive up from the city in the afternoon and stay for dinner."

[formicine]

She grins. He's seen the communal spaces, but he hasn't seen her room, yet; it's basically a big plant shelf, strategically set up higher than the cat can get to. There are, in fact, little fairy lights. "You know it. We got a Christmas cactus, too. Do you know those? They've got these little red flowers, and they bloom in December, so." Blue laughs. "Safer for the animals than poinsettia. And cooler, in my opinion."

Something crosses Darlington's face when she asks, and Blue would have winced if it wouldn't have made things worse. She's never really thought about the fact that he lived with his grandfather; or if she had, it was simply to assume his parents were dead, and while that sucks, it's somehow less shitty than them just not being there. Or being there and not there.

She nods, taking that in and not sure how to keep going from it. "I think one thing about this place," she says carefully after a sip of her drink, "Darrow, I mean, is that whether it's a big party like this or just -- you know, the two of you," she includes Alex in a little nod where she's paused to talk on her way back to the kitchen. "You might miss people, but you do get to hand-pick who you want around of the ones you have, and everyone's going to want company."

"Oh, speaking of ...well, plants, earlier, and friends, I guess. Wiśniewski actually gave me something for you." She nods over at the table where she'd left gifts. There are a couple, a bottle of wine and, wrapped but obviously circular, a little fabric wreath she'd made out of elm leaves cut from various black, white, and black-and-white patterned fabric for the house, but a small brown bag with handles sits apart from them.

[more_magic]

Blue doesn't pry into his response about his parents, and Darlington's grateful for it. The full story is something he's comfortable discussing with precious few people--just Alex, really, and even that had been a long time in happening. It was easier for it not to come up, or to avoid the topic entirely, or shut it down with We're estranged in a flat tone as a last resort. He never wanted sympathy, not even during those bleak years before Lethe; the Layabouts made their choice years before then, and it hadn't been him.

The quick change in topic is still welcome, and he nods, his smile restored to its previous easy brightness. "No, that's true," he says. "We get to share all of this with the people important to us, and that's not nothing." Blue mentions gifts, then, and he quirks a brow in interest--then laughs. "Wiśniewski? Really? I wouldn't have picked him for having an abundance of holiday cheer."

[formicine]

Blue laughs at Darlington's dubiousness. "He doesn't really. I think I saw a menorah?" she hazards. "But this is him getting to show off, a little, too, and I don't think he has kids, so."

She glances back. "Are you guys waiting on doing this all at once, or do you want to see? I uh, there's one from us too. I mean, not just the wine." Now that she's been inside the decorated grandeur that is Black Elm, she's a little afraid her wreath will look maybe too DIY, despite how proud she'd been of it earlier, but it's a little allpurpose: they can always stick it in a pantry or a ...whatever large houses have. Mudroom.

[more_magic]

"We do know he loves to show off." Strange as Wiśniewski is, with his odd quirks and his secretiveness, the strict rules for how and when and to whom he sells his plants, there's a loneliness to him that's noticeable only in the briefest of flashes. It reminds Darlington, strangely, of his grandfather in the moments just after his parents' car turned down the long drive of Black Elm, heading towards the gate. Daniel Tabor Arlington III would never admit to being lonesome, of regretting the rift that formed between him and his son or the one he'd encouraged himself in the next generation, but the older Darlington got, the clearer it became in hindsight.

It doesn't bear thinking about now, and he shakes his head when Blue asks about his and Alex's plans. "No, we're doing ours tomorrow morning, but everything else is fair game."

[formicine]

Blue lifts her eyebrows in a quietly amused way that says that's an understatement. Though, it's a strange sort of showing off: he lives reasonably ascetically, every bit the grumpy, strange hermit until you step into his home and realize it's a veritable conservatory. His plants are his family, but that doesn't -- entirely -- substitute for the real thing, she's come to realize, and with all his grumbling she thinks he quietly values those who have as much interest in his ability to make things grow as he does.

"I'll show you, then," she says, smiling and gesturing with her head toward the little table. It's probably a bad idea, really, to follow Wisniewski, but she picks up the little brown bag first; inside Darlington will discover there's a long vial with a decent cluster of big, aromatic Tahitian vanilla beans, identical to one Blue'd received as well. Apparently, Wisniewski has been carefully cultivating the orchids and, though he doesn't process it into extract ("Do I look like a plantation?" he'd shrugged at her exclamation that he could make solid money that way. "Boil them in milk, that's the way to do it.")-- he'd had a prodigious harvest this year. Beside it, there's a dried vanilla flower on a card, with the latin name of the plant written out in Wisniewski's old-fashioned cursive.

[more_magic]

"Lead on," he says, picking up his drink from the coffee table before he follows Blue the few steps to where the small collection of gifts are laid out. For all his awareness of hospitality, of manners, it still surprised and touched him that any of the people they'd invited chose to bring anything at all. He takes the bag when she holds it out, opening it carefully and extracting the long vial and card within.

"God, they're beautiful," he says, holding the vial up, the beans inside rattling slightly against the glass as he turns it. "Not what I was expecting from him at all."

[formicine]

"Right?" Blue says, grinning softly at his fascinated appreciation. "Smell, they're -- ugh. Amazing. Like walking into a kitchen full of cookies." Only mellower and butterier than any vanilla she'd ever smelled growing up. "I mean -- I wasn't expecting anything, really, maybe being investigated on how my babies are doing," she laughs.

"I don't know if you know much about flavoring things with vanilla," she says, "but he says you scrape the seeds out, first, to use, and then you can boil the pods in milk to infuse things too, if you want." She can remember, rarely, Calla making vanilla ice cream with the real, less rare versions of these. Blue adds, "You can plant the seeds themselves, but they take 3 years to flower, so. It's kind of a wait. A promise," she adds with a small smile.

[more_magic]

Dutifully, he uncorks the vial, holding it under his nose. Just the first whiff has him closing his eyes, a smile breaking across his face. "God, that's wonderful," he agrees. "Exactly like wandering into the kitchen when Bernadette was baking, but...richer. More complex." There's a depth to the aroma that almost makes him think of the library at Il Bastone, too, the compounded smell of all those old books--but that could simply be nostalgia of a different kind.

Darlington nods along as Blue explains how to make use of the pods, all of it things he'd learned or at least read before. "I might save one to plant," he says. "Use the rest, and...see what happens."

[formicine]

She smiles at his unfettered grin, nodding in an unsaid right?; maybe she never had a housekeeper, or whatever exactly Bernadette's role was, but the scent experience takes them to similar enough places that she can relate.

"I like it," she says with a smile. There's never any promise to Darrow, no guarantee that anyone's going to be here for one year, much less three, but she has, at least. You can either live like there's no future here or pretend there's going to be one, and she likes that Darlington's not counting the days until he and Alex get back to New Haven. Even if vanilla might be a hell of a way to mark it. "A little ambitious to jump into vanilla cultivation, mind you," she deadpans, grinning, "but I mean." She gestures at Darlington with a little what should we expect exactly flourish.

"If this place has a sunroom, you know, a -- conservatory or something, you could start your Darrow collection." She hadn't really thought about whether or not the house might have a conservatory until the very moment she says it, when it seems obvious that a mansion of this size and, specifically, age, would. Blue finds herself feeling a little, absurdly, jealous of the totally hypothetical space to let a jungle of warm-weather plants flourish.

"Um. Do you want to see what I brought?" Blue ruffles her hair. "It's not much to follow this up with, but to be fair, I didn't know what he was planning until I picked it up," she adds with a grin.

[more_magic]

"Not sure if I should be flattered or insulted by that, Sargent," he says when she gestures at him, equally deadpan for a moment before he smiles. "And of course there's a sunroom." He gestures behind them, towards the hallway that leads past the staircase and further into the first floor. "You'll have to come by when it's actually daylight out."

To her question, he nods. "Please."

[formicine]

"Both, probably," she answers, frankly, and laughs at his of course. Well, it's not like she wasn't thinking it; he just said the quiet part out loud. "I will have to do that."

She lifts the big fabric wreath, wrapped in a silver-on-silver not-especially-denominational winter wrapping paper with a bevy of little angles taped down because it's a circle and circles don't wrap. "We're a little late for housewarming, but it's...something for the house. Or maybe inspired by the house. A little bit of both." She shuts up, letting him have at.

[more_magic]

"Too cruel," he says on a laugh, nodding when she accepts the invitation. The sunroom was still mostly empty, long and vast and stretching the length of the first floor, but no less impressive for all that. With the vanilla orchid--and maybe a few others, in time--to add a bit of greenery and life to the place, it could really turn into something better than it once had been.

Darlington reaches out to help her as she hefts the gift up, curious at both the size and shape of it, the careful way it's wrapped. "Never too late for a housewarming gift," he says, carefully starting to tear the wrapping paper to reveal the gift within. It's utterly charming, the fabric leaves instantly recognizable, and he looks back up at Blue with another bright, unguarded smile. "This is wonderful. Thank you."