galaxy "alex" stern (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
letheian) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
epistolaries2023-01-29 12:24 am
letheian) wrote in epistolaries2023-01-29 12:24 amEntry tags:
letheian) wrote in epistolaries2023-01-29 12:24 am
affectionate physical contact. sometime post-hell bent.
Despite the fact that their golden boy is back, she still did the ritual alone tonight; he’s in some strange cursed limbo with Lethe while the board hems and haws, still needing his position and status reinstated. And it’s that delicate shift in the foundation between them, since she’s no longer trailing along after Darlington’s coattails. It’s different, somehow, and she’s still making up her mind how she feels about it. He’s not exactly her Virgil anymore — he’s her Eurydice, maybe, except she was smart enough not to look back. And she’s capable enough to do this shit on her own now.
Although tonight’s ritual went bad. Not hell hangover bad, not demon trying to kill me bad, but bad in that routine way of an ugly Gray busting through a ward. The shivers are starting to set in from that brush with the other side, a cold chill seeping into her bones and setting her teeth chattering. Alex slumps onto the front doorstep of Il Bastone, and doesn’t even have to fumble for keys; the door swings open for her, and she rests her hand against the jamb in warm gratitude, a hello, a thank-you.
The light’s on in the parlour. Darlington is still awake; probably still researching, still trying to learn whatever he can about demons.
She lingers. There’s a choice in the road here: she could stumble upstairs, maybe take a hot shower, try to wash off the smell of gravedirt and chalk, collapse into the Dante bed.
But she’s so fucking tired and she could do with a little company, so she scuffs her way into the parlour, where Darlington’s taken up one side of the sofa. It’s not as comfortable as the one she’d practically lived in at the Hutch, but it’s good enough. She wordlessly crosses the room, grabs a throw blanket hanging off a nearby armchair, and then collapses into that sofa. Burrowing her way into his side. Taking what warmth and body heat she can, and saying in a loose mumble, “You’re still up.”
Once upon a time, she would’ve been too skittish to be close to him at all. Standoffish. But some things change, after you’ve seen someone buck-ass naked and had their soul in your mouth and your hand’s still on the leash around their metaphorical throat. The physical boundaries between them have crumpled, torn through like tissue paper. She can still practically hear the sound of his soul if she tilts her head and reaches out her senses: steel ringing on steel.
Re: affectionate physical contact. sometime post-hell bent.
He can play the part—cling to the normal and refuse to surrender to the trappings and the suits of woe—but the darkness bides a burn beneath it all. More patient and more ravenous for each new minute held a-bay. Which is where he finds himself again tonight: a play-act in necessity, even in empty-silence of Il Bastone, perhaps all the greater the need for it. To prove he is not a man only when there are others around; that he still belongs within these walls, no prodigal son returned only to rip the flood boards asunder when not kept under lock and key.
As though alone, he must be even more sure, even more silent, even more studious and grateful: penitent to the grace of being pulled back, being accepted (acceptable), for each door the opened, or book that appeared, each time the floor or a wall hummed softly when his skin settled against it. As though that was grace, but a far deeper, darker, desperate clarion call to deserve even the barest brush of one fleeting second having it again.
Darlington wasn't expecting Alex to more than toe a foot or two in the door and give her report, as though they both weren't well aware that, too, was a shadow charade on too many manifold degrees; which made the event that followed unexpected, to say the least—
Left him briefly holding the less than half a finger now of his Lagavulin in one hand and a book in the other, both aloft, as Galaxy Stern suddenly pressed herself like an overly larger pet into his side and against his leg; left him in the middle of a forgotten breath holding very still, eyes not quite deciding whether to settle back on his floating book, the fireplace, or the head of dark hair suddenly right at his peripheral.
One of his brows quirked as he tested lowering his arm with the book back to the arm of the couch. "Good evening, Stern." There was a stiff amusement there; three words to politely chastise the lack of her greeting, the very Alex-ness of her just treading over lines of propriety like they never existed in the first place. (As though Alex hadn't done exactly that. Looked at all the laws of man and beast and god and hell and walk through them the same, if she was bent to it.)
"I trust everything went well?"
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But Alex has a tendency to leap before she looks, and she’s already taken the leap, so fuck it, here she is. She wanted the warmth and the guy’s like a walking radiator. Her fingers have curled around the blanket and she tucks the edges around her. New England’s always been too chilly for her California blood. (She wonders, vaguely, if part of that heat burning beneath his skin is thanks to that trip to Hell.)
“There was a breach,” she says after a pause, “but I got it under control. It’s nothing compared to demons, so.”
Their personal scale of what constitutes a Problem has irrevocably shifted over the past year. Grays? They’re child’s play now.
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He studied her head and the side of her face, half-entranced by that before he made himself turn instead to the equation of where to put the arm with his glass now. He could shift a little to make it more comfortable to put his elbow on the back of the couch. Or set it down. Except at this exact second, as though a mummer in a play, he needed even less to set down the cup and free up his hand.
His mind, even on having forced himself to look away, a whisper of hazy, red heat. It would be too easy to let his fingers touch her hair, trace the tissue paper-thin skin of her neck where her pulse fluttered so delicately, drag a too-sharp nail down it until it rose up red. To pull her into his lap and demand, as much as begging ever could be a demand, to tell him what she wanted, that he'd be allowed to do it. To her. It could be anything. He would beg even. On his knees. In every language, he knew. Desperate and dazzled by this hunger for her.
It's such a narrow thing. The tension in the focus of holding on to that glass, in the press of his teeth, stiffness of his jaw, the anguish of self-immolation and anger in his veins that he was putting all his strength into, not the holding himself still, but not looking back at her until there was any larger part of him that deserved to.
She started talking, and Darlington made himself swallow, uncrack his teeth, looking down as though incapable of not. But it's the first of the furrow that creases his brow at her words, not the oil slick all around it, that manages to understand even more why it wasn't the doorway, why she'd done ... this. (The sick, starving part of him crowing that she came for comfort, for him.)
"Tell me." Darlington was relieved when his voice came out the lift of a concerned question, for all its still laconic sparsity. And he does, it doubles down, want to reach out and touch her. Not as the roar triumphs for alignment with any earlier reasons, but to so much as let his fingers curve her shoulder gently. To be able to comfort her any of the trouble it caused.
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“Why?” she asks. “So you can grade me on a curve? Write a report on my performance for the Praetor?”
Alex sounds defensive. She’s always so goddamned defensive; she just doesn’t know how to drop those hackles even when she wants to. It has something to do with the fact that he’s back after so long and she just doesn’t know what to do with it, after having yearned and fought and spit and clawed her way towards this for so long. He was back, and he hadn’t wanted to turn her in as she’d expected. He was back, and she didn’t need his guidance like she once had: they’re both Virgil now, and he’s…
(Different. Disinterested in the work which had once driven him. Disillusioned, maybe, with Lethe and with Black Elm. She can’t blame him. He’s had some of that idealism burned right out of him.)
There’s a beat, before Alex reaches out and takes Darlington’s glass as she’s done before, except now she’s pressing her mouth to the glass where his had been, and stealing a sip of his drink. Liquid heat to warm her up a little.
“It was Manuscript and Wolf’s Head together. Which is new, I know, but considering all the shit they pulled last year, they had to ride Wolf’s Head’s coattails to be allowed this ritual. Just a bacchanal — a bunch of assholes celebrating the end of semester, with magical ecstasy, as far as I could tell. The partying and sex drew Grays from all over; I kept them out with the wards, but one slipped the leash. I banished him myself,”
it was useful as hell, being a Wheelwalker,
“but it’s always a little… I dunno, I can feel it. Lingering. My fingers are cold. Like I plunged my hands into the river.”
Not just any river but the river, as they both knew so well: that liminal space, that boundary between life and death.
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Proper. Respectable. Friendly. (Safe.)
She'd always been made of glass shards, even before the whole glass cabinet was shattered on the ground around them. The better to protect herself, even when she couldn't defend herself at all. He couldn't entirely forgive himself still that he hadn't puzzled that out before she'd shoved it into his overly judgemental hands. This girl who came into hell and carried his soul, inside herself, out again. She's not mad at him. Nor wary of him. She wouldn't be this close if she were.
(It's a balm of desperate relief.
It's concerningly wrong—now.
He wants to hold on to it too tight. In both ways.)
Proper. Respectable. Friendly. (Safe.)
Except then, of course, she does another of the million things he can't entirely predict from so obvious telegraphing he usually could tell from others so quickly and steals his glass. Her fingers brushed his with careless disregard (that lances through his skin) as she took it as though she could, as though he would have no complaint. How right she was, yet he still steepled an eyebrow as though calling her on a further trespass, somehow higher in the estimation of honor's insult than bodily accosting his side.
Her lips touched just where his lips had been,
and he swallowed reflexively along with her.
Throat dry, but the burn just as present.
Darlington made himself lean back on the couch, head cocked slightly but attentive as she pieced it together, and there was the dismissive, judgemental disregard he'd expected. But it's not as acrid as it used to be either, how it was at the beginning. Her point isn't the complaint about their trespass of her existence and time or the idiocy of their reasons, with which Lethe was not born to weigh, only guard: it was about herself, how it left her.
Rare, quiet confessions. Even in the tones of a beleaguered complaint, rounded first with cursing. It makes the rest almost worst. This was what she brought to him; this was how he betrayed that trust before it even came to words. But it's such a simple thing to answer, to offer repentance and recompense to.
"Here. Give me your hand." It was a careful nuance with which he reached for the one not currently still holding his glass.
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It’s not Lethe itself — fuck Lethe, honestly — but there’s something here, in those buttery-yellow lamps, the stained-glass windows, the old floorboards worn soft from a couple centuries’ passage of feet, the sensation of the building alive around them and that it cared about them. Magic. Actual, real magic, and not the society kind that made her want to be sick.
(Enough to make you start to believe in what Darlington had loved about all this shit.)
So she shifts his glass into her other hand, and she reaches out. Her hands are freezing; her circulation was always terrible, her body starving-thin with so little padding on it, then drawn even tauter from the years she’d kept the hunger and the Grays at bay with drugs. But she reaches out, warily, and she takes his hand.
no subject
Without even needing to tilt her hand, the bones are so apparent. In her fingers, the delicacy of her wrist. Even as he kept himself from stroking the pad of his thumb down the center of her palm at first touch, he waited for it. Not her, but the want. The ease, violence. The thought about how easy it would be to break these bird bones. But nothing comes. No flicker of longing licking at his seams. At least not of that kind.
I will worship you until the end of days, he'd said. An absolution refusing brook even with the predictable. It makes him want to lower himself to that held hand and brush his lips against her knuckles. Fingertips. So fragile, and yet so full of power, too. Promise or abasement? To her, or for himself? He can't tell. His book was set down, second hand joining the first, as he started slowly, gently to knead his thumbs against the thin muscle over the palm of her hand.
He could warm his hands, but it might send his claws into her, too, and the perversity of answering a wound left by the ghosts of frozen dark with another of demonic flame is not lost on him.
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Even at a base level, even before that demonic fire took anchor, his body still ran hot. (She remembers that, from sharing a bed with him at Black Elm.) So his hands cup around hers and his palms warm her chapped, chilled skin and his thumbs dig into the sore muscles and she, involuntarily, makes a helpless little noise of pleasure.
Embarrassed by it, by how she can feel herself practically melting into Darlington’s hands, she finds herself saying something instead. Something to fill up that space between them; some reminder of her own pain to sting her into alertness, like picking at her old scabs.
“I could never afford to get a massage,” Alex confesses. “My mom was big on acupuncture, but I never got it — just sticking your whole body with needles, what the fuck — but I only got a massage the once. Hellie and I stole some of Len’s money and had a whole-body spa day. Like a treatyoself thing. It was great.”