more_magic | Entries tagged with alex

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!]]

The calls haven't been coming at a rate Darlington might call constant, but come they have over the last week or so, steady enough to be suspicious. Always the same two numbers, the same two voices--one bright and chipper, the other almost oily in its overconfidence--and the same message, the thing he cannot parse. They call about investment opportunities, about return potential and competitive markets, and the only thing keeping him from passing it all off as an unfortunate run of wrong numbers is the fact that they call him by name, every single time.

There's something in all of it that reminds him of his childhood, the Layabouts and their infrequent visits that grew more urgent the sicker his grandfather got, until they'd become a temporary constant there at the end. His mother's bizarre health foods displacing Bernadette's casseroles in the fridge, his father wandering from room to room downstairs talking about assessing Black Elm like it was a specimen in a lab, a body on a table just waiting for the autopsy. To them, he supposes, it had been. They'd wanted him to sell, demanded it and bullied him the same as they had his grandfather, and their anger when he'd rebuffed them was still as clear now as it had been at fifteen, that day in his room.

This house is worthless, Danny. Worse than worthless. Only the land is valuable.

The profits can be shared. You can come to New York, take advantage of all the opportunities that will open for you there.

Do you really think you'll be some Lord of Black Elm, Daniel? You don't rule this place. It rules you.

There's no way this can be that, but it's on his mind anyway as he lounges on the couch reading, looking over at his phone when it starts to buzz. Seeing one of those now-familiar numbers, his thumb hovers over the Reject icon on the screen before shifting, tapping Accept instead. "Tell me why you keep calling me."

The conversation that follows is short, and unbelievable, and ends with him scribbling down an address on the flyleaf of his book. "You're going to lose this number," he says, just before ending the call. "I will never be interested in any offer you think up." He's out the door a minute later, hailing a cab outside Dimera. He nearly bungles the address; memory taking over for a moment, guiding his tongue to the more familiar cadences of his old one in Westville.

It can't be possible, but he'll never forgive himself if he doesn't check.

Darlington recognizes it from the moment they pull up to the drive; the gravel, the gentle curve, the stone columns flanking either side and the lamps dotting the pathways just beyond. The trees are in full leaf, green rather than the mottled oranges and yellows he remembers, but each of them is as familiar to him as they've ever been before. He pays the driver, his hand already trembling when he pulls the door handle to get out of the car and a hope he doesn't want to acknowledge fizzing in his chest.

It only gets stronger as he walks up the drive, the stones crunching beneath his feet. When the house comes into view--stone and crumbling towers, the solid wood of the door and the dark slate of the steps, each window glinting in the late afternoon light--he stops right where he is and stares. This was his home, his anchor, and the lack of it over the last seven months had been a loss too painful for him to acknowledge. Not until now, with it restored to him at last.

He fumbles his phone out of his pocket, pulling up Alex's number, texting her the address and a photograph he takes with shaking hands. Tell me I'm not hallucinating again, Stern. Get here and tell me this is real.

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.

They keep Alex at the hospital for a few days, as much for observation as for treatment. Darlington stays as much as he can, calling out of work and finding someone to take care of Kirby, making quick trips home to change and shower before he's back again. When they talk, it's stilted and hesitant, inconsequential things that only emphasize the enormity of what they're both avoiding.

It could go on like this. Maybe it'd be better if it did. But Darlington knows neither of them can ignore it forever.

He's there when she's discharged, the removal of all the tubes and wires from her slim frame only serving to emphasize how thin she is, and how unsteady. He hands her the change of clothes he'd brought, loose, comfortable things, going out into the hallway while she dresses. The cab ride from the hospital back to the Bramford is a silent thing, both of them looking out of opposite windows, their hands resting on the seat between them with fingers just barely touching.

Kirby jumps off the couch when they come in, nearly losing his mind with simple canine joy as he snuffles first at Alex, then Darlington, then Alex again, his tail practically a dark blur as it whips back and forth. "Down," he says, but there's no force in it. Alex goes to the couch, Kirby following, and Darlington scrubs a hand through his hair.

"I'll run you a bath," he offers. "If you'd like, and then...I think we should talk. Finally."

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.

That he waits until the end of the week isn't delaying or reluctance--or, frankly, a resistance to the absurdity of taking romantic advice from a high schooler--merely a desire, after having done so much wrong, to finally get one thing right. He knows he's behaved abominably, said things that he never thought himself capable of, and even after Caleb's assurances, Darlington's not sure forgiveness is a thing that Alex will be able to find where he's concerned.

He holds onto the hope of it, along with his memories of that first week he'd spent in Darrow; their easy intimacy, growing close in a way that they'd only begun to manage back in New Haven, and the surprising and utterly wanted course their night had taken up at Kagura. Thinks, too, of the certainty in Caleb's voice as he'd said You make her feel the butterflies. He wants, more than anything, not to be wrong about this.

He'd agreed to work this month's Final Friday evening program at the museum, and by the time he's finished helping the other front-of-house staff clean up and pack everything away, it's already past ten. If Alex is working tonight, it's more than likely that she's gone already, but after a brief stop at his own apartment, Darlington's on his way to the Bramford. He knocks on her door, using his key when there's no answer, finding the apartment empty and dark.

There's a moment where he thinks about waiting, about being there once more when she gets home just like he had been the night he'd come to work on the wards. It is, he knows, some kind of a coward's choice; the easy way out of a situation that he should have been strong enough to face up to well before now. Breathing out a long sigh, he leaves the bag he'd brought by the side of her couch and heads back into the cold, hailing a cab and giving the driver an address that gains him a winking look in the rearview mirror that he tries to ignore.

Only a week ago, he'd sworn he'd never go back, that there was no place for him here even if Alex was hellbent on making it hers. Even now, he'd rather be anywhere else. But there's no other place Darlington knows he should be tonight if he's going to make some attempt at fixing even a fraction of what he alone had broken.

They pull up outside the club on Paper, and after paying the driver and going through the ritual of cover and ID with the bouncer at the door, Darlington goes inside. The music is just as loud and grinding as before, the crowds around the stage just as vulgar, the drinks from the bar just as watered down; once again, it fills him with displeasure and unease and has him glancing towards the exit. He stays instead, choosing a table that's neither fully lit by the stage nor completely hidden in the shadows and setting down his drink.

This may only break things further between them, bring about an assumption or an argument that will sever the thin threads that still remain of their tie to one another. Darlington can only hope, with the kind of surrendering faith that he's reserved for few other things in his life--and once before for Alex, on a Halloween that turned into nothing he could have anticipated--that it'll be something altogether different.

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.

“I just want to know if Jodie Foster is here,” said Alex, and Darlington didn’t bother trying to suppress the flicker of irritation that bubbled up within him. They’d seen wonders tonight; the Arcadian peace of that vast forest, the glories of a Parrish painting come to life, reckless sacreligious hedonism in a flower-filled cathedral. And yet all she wanted was to celebrity-watch. Typical.

The fireflies lighting the room swarmed around them, the green-gold flash of their light almost pulsing with the beat of his heart. “For all you know,” he said, the words coming out thick and sluggish. His head reeled; he blinked hard, once, twice. “For all you know, that was Jodie Foster.” The room shimmered, the air suddenly heavy and cloying. They should keep going, finish their journey down; do the job they’d been set to at the start of the night. Before he could say anything, do anything, chivvy Alex along and out of the suffocation of the fifth level of Manuscript’s tomb, Lan Caihe turned back to face them, that enigmatic smile still on her face and the vast mirror of power churning behind her.

Descend.

He shouldn’t have heard her, not from this distance, but the word was as loud as if she’d been standing by his side.

Descend.

It passed through him like a shudder, and the world gave way along with it. He fell--he descended--landing on his feet in the middle of a cavern, the walls slick with moisture and the scent of tilled soil in the air. Someone was humming, something was humming, the sound reverberating straight to the center of him like it was the only thing that mattered. Darlington looked around for the source, his head taking an age to turn from one side to the other, until--

The mirror, that vault of power. It was here, bolted to the wall of the cave, the magic contained within swirling in eddies and whorls for a moment before slowly parting. Something was wrong here, gravely wrong, and he had to look away. But why would he? He’d wanted these glimpses of the uncanny, chased them and dreamed them and craved them, driven by his need to know everything he could about a world he’d only ever been given small tastes of. He could drink his fill now, granted this glorious opportunity by a goddess in celadon robes, and so he stared as the mist parted and the mirror cleared.

It was the room he’d just left, the banquet table still laden, the guests still crowded around the feast now rotted and spoiled, flies swarming around the goblets and maggots squirming in the cheese; everyone there aged and frail, using the last of their strength to lift a cup to their lips or bite into the desiccated husk of what might once have been a peach. Above them all stood Caihe, still youthful, lit by fire and glowing with power, her face changing with every breath: high priestess, hermit, hierophant, king and empress and fool. Darlington stared, shaking, at the face of his grandfather until the next exhalation whisked the sight away. His upper lip was wet; he lifted fingers to his face and saw them come away bloody.

“Darlington?” Someone was saying his name, a voice he knew, one he’d thought of as a broken woodwind when in fact it was the richest tone he’d ever heard, a symphony contained in the three syllables of his name. No, not his name. Not his name, any more than Alex was hers; they’d both christened themselves something new. He looked away from the crimson smear on his fingertips and back to the mirror. Like Caihe, she was unchanged, that Queen Mab crown still on her head and starlight still spangling her skin, her dress a dark flow of fabric along the lines of her body--but no, now she was Mab, a true Queen of the Night, beautiful and breathtaking, the points of a wheel or a crown seeming to turn behind her. Her mouth was lush and red, constellations he didn’t recognize reflected in the pooling blackness of her eyes, so much power coursing through her that it ought to be terrifying.

“What are you?” he heard himself ask, his voice soft with awe. No answer came, but that didn’t matter; he knelt anyway, putting himself at her feet and in her hands. He could see himself in the mirror, not as he was but as he wished to be: a knight with sword in hand, his fealty pledged to the creature before him if only she would choose to accept it. There was an ache in his chest from the wanting of it, another sword plunged into his back, piercing his heart; he felt the tears spill down his cheeks, mingling with the blood, the taste of copper and salt in his mouth.

“An acolyte at heart,” said Caihe, and Darlington knew she spoke truth. Choose me, he thought, he begged, staring up at Alex. She was not what she had seemed, nothing like what he’d assumed her to be, this girl who’d done nothing to earn the gift she’d been granted. She was his queen, and he would serve her until the end of his days, if only she would…

“Darlington,” she said again, one slim hand reaching for him, fingertips brushing the side of his face, cupping his chin. He closed his eyes, and dared to hope.