Work Text:
The many-paned windows of Il Bastone transmute the light as it enters, turning it into something weighty and warm. It settles in all shades of gold over her hands and shoulders like a blanket, or like caramel pooling in slow-moving drifts across her notebooks. There’s no fire in the fireplace but there will be, Darlington on his hands and knees to patiently coax little flames into larger ones. Alex has asked and watched him do it every night this month, no protests over the time or the fiddly details of fire-starting. Watched the undersides of the hardwood darken and smolder before the red edges of destruction eat their way up, hypnotic, inevitable.
But for now there’s still sun pouring in, over the couch and floor and far wall. Mercy had been there earlier, empty porcelain teacups and a candy wrapper all that’s left of their study session. The moment she’d left, Darlington had slid from his unobtrusive position at the far corner desk right to the floor, into the largest square of unbroken sunlight. He’s still there, and looks like he’s sleeping: belly-up and arm behind his head, one long finger caught near the end of a book of 19th century poetry stolen from Alex’s workpile.
By the angle of the sun slanting over his closed eyelids, Lethe’s ritual of the night is only an hour or so away. Alex expected Darlington to be their taskmaster, ever the Virgil, but he hasn’t stirred.
He’s been slower lately. Or maybe— more patient. He waits for her. He listens to her. Alex hasn’t really decided how she feels about it. Partly because how she feels about it scares her sometimes.
His eyes slit open immediately as she steps up to his prone body, lazy and sparking gold in the last of the light, and he smiles drowsily in a way that makes her think of the taste of honey and fire, fruit gleaming in the dark boughs of the underworld.
“I’m ready,” Alex asks. She feels an urge to mirror his own former exasperation back at him, but she can’t quite get there. “Are we going?”
“Of course,” he says, and rolls to his feet. There’s a moment where he’s still looking up at her, on his knees with a hand braced just to the side of her dingy sock, that makes something spark in her stomach— just enough heat to catch in her cheeks and make her feel suddenly stupid. Then he stands, and she takes a quick step back, and then keeps going to make it look like she’d been heading for the door all along.
It keeps the blush burning, how aware she is of him keeping deliberately to her heels out of the room, staying there as she pulls on her boots and doesn’t quite manage to tell him to stop from deftly plucking her coat from her fumbling fingers and holding it out for her.
“I don’t need you to hold things for me,” she tries.
“I know,” Darlington says simply as he braces the door. She ducks her head to avoid his eyes and steps out onto the icy stairs, and he follows right behind.
The attentiveness has only grown since November and the long hunt that followed. Dawes barely ever emerges from the library as she works through the metaphysics of what comes next, because the Gauntlet isn’t sealed, not really. But every monstrous thing they’d let spill is dead, thanks to Alex. Thanks to Darlington, unleashed like a vicious hound after slow, pitiful game. She wonders as he holds the gate, too, if he’s always been like this and just likes her more now. She wonders if she or hell or both have broken him irreparably. She wonders what he’d look like in a real collar.
Leaving Il Bastone is like getting woken up from a dream with a slap. Traffic is loud on the street, and second-hand smoke and diesel fumes fill her mouth as they go north. The sky is already bruising towards dusk, none of the rich candied light from inside lingering on the sidewalks and foreboding old houses. She liked the cold when she first got here, liked the crisp feeling of it in her lungs, but it’s not novel any more— now she just hunches down in her scarf, still feeling the phantom brush of Darlington’s fingers over the back of her neck as the coat slid on, and picks up her pace.
With the end of the world lurking near enough to singe them, the Houses of the Veil are keeping up all their secret machinations and petty plotting. They still need Lethe. Lethe still needs to feed itself. Tonight she and Darlington head across the campus green to Manuscript, endure another slow descent through the concentric floors of the tomb to a damp, chilly room she hasn’t seen before. The room is six-sided and so is the altar in the center, made of some kind of rough stone. There are channels cut into the rock as if to drain fluids, and six young women huddled off to one side, barefoot and in very clearly nothing but bathrobes.
Something about it puts her back up immediately, their nervous eyes, the men in business suits lurking in the darker corners. Or it might be the Manuscript representatives stepping forward with the same bright televangelist smiles as their predecessors. She doesn’t trust the new versions any more than the old. Hyper aware of Darlington at her side, she also doesn’t think she’s imagining him pressing slightly closer as she exchanges the bare minimum amount of words for them to get through to the work.
The circle is quick work, no tricky corners and easy grounding in the hexagon’s internal 720 degree span. Darlington is at her elbow and only needs to point out a missed step once, when Alex is too close to the girls in their robes and sees they’re shivering. When the two of them step back and the ritual begins, Alex isn’t surprised the girls are told to drop the robes and climb onto the hard slab, feet facing the center. One of them starts actively sobbing as the ever-helpful Manuscript staff come up to take the robes away. Alex twitches in that direction, already stopping herself short in anticipation of Darlington doing the same, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t say anything. When she looks over her shoulder, he’s looking steadily back.
Would he stop the ritual, take these girls away if she asked? She thinks she knows the answer, and she just swallows and faces forward.
The chanting starts, odd and fractured on the ear just like the mirror-bright visual chaos of the ritual itself cascading into the air around them. She understands, barely, that it’s some kind of fame spell— something to supposedly give this group of poor girls a head-start as pop stars. But she doesn’t recognize the bulky device being pushed towards the altar by figures in heavy protective gloves, a dazzling glow spilling out from around a closed lid until the lid comes off and the first chanting Manuscript steps forward to dip a long-handled ladle into the shining silver.
They have to pour it into the girls’ mouths. She naively thinks that will be the worst of it, watching them spasm and lose fingernails on the stone and piss themselves while trying to scream around molten metal, but that’s just until one of the girls loses her nerve and tries to jerk away as the ladle reaches her. The silver glow cuts into her skin like a hot knife and sinks deep into her abdomen with a roil of smoke and a roasting smell, flesh blackening around it. Unlike the girls before her, nothing prevents her shriek from shattering the air, the spinning ritual turning it into the dissonant wail of a storm siren.
Alex is already starting forward when the girl rolls off the slab and lands crouched on the floor, a spatter of the still-liquid silver landing on the stone under her. She’s still alive, moaning in that inhuman register. A Manuscript representative kneels down to speak in low, soothing tones; Alex has her boots up to the edge of the circle when the representative suddenly falls back with an arc of blood through the air, glowing silver erupting in long spikes from his chest from the hand the girl flings out.
When Alex turns to look at Darlington, he’s still watching her with eyes gone hellspawn gold.
“Are you going to do something about this?” she asks over the rising noise, the rest of the girls still twitching and writhing on the stone, the remaining Manuscript chanters growing more frantic on each syllable. The flashing, jagged shards of the ritual, the dissonant jangle of the girl’s screams as they rise to a roar are building pressure in the back of Alex’s eyes, even outside the salt circle.
“Oh, shall I?”
She sighs. “I just want to get this over with.”
“As you wish,” is all he says in response, and then he moves. Very shortly after, the scream comes to a rending, gurgling stop.
“The Princess Bride is a little lowbrow for you, isn’t it?” she asks when they’re finally back on the street. She has a bottle of cheap pink moscato clutched to her chest, more for the comforting familiarity of Darlington’s curled lip than any true desire to drink it.
But Hellie had liked the brand, the sweetness, and even though he’d said, “I think the treasury will bear a little more ambition, Stern,” Darlington had still gotten it for Alex when they’d stopped for a couple water bottles with no chance of Merity contamination at the minimart on Audubon Street.
She keeps smelling smoke, on and off. She’ll be pissed if it's her hair, but she suspects it’s Darlington, parts of his long peacoat burned through and edged in hard drips of silver. “Nothing they but dust can show, or bones that hasten to be so,” she tells the hollow-eyed Gray lurking at the turn-off onto Lincoln, and it fades with barely a ripple.
“Brushing up on our Greeks,” Darlington says approvingly. “And, well. One has to stay vaguely connected to the times.” He frowns down at his arm and reaches over to adjust the fabric to cover one particularly large rip in the sleeve. Fastidious to the end.
“The times? Pretty sure that movie was made in the 80s.”
“I said vaguely.”
“You should try this,” she says, holding up her moscato just to see that pained and painfully human look cross his face again. “It’s good, if you give it a chance.”
“I seriously doubt that,” he says, and she twists open the screw top in the street as they walk and takes a huge swig. She spills it on her chin, collar, coughs and it is so sweet, like the electric snap of static shock in her mouth. It’s a little like honey, a little like fire. She holds it out by the neck to Darlington.
“I want you to drink,” she says, and she knows what she’s doing and doesn’t have the faintest idea. She knows it’s dangerous, and she’s sure there will be consequences. Hot satisfaction twists through her when he takes the bottle without hesitation this time, though he still winces when he swallows.
At one point he offers an arm to her over a patch of particularly badly-plowed cobbles and she takes it. Stays there, pretending their arms aren’t linked so she can keep her hand on his arm, the solid line of him against her side, ready to catch her against the ice and crumbling snowpack. They argue about wine, Alex determinedly pushing the moscato back at Darlington until most of the bottle is gone, until they reach the gate. The spectral hounds come out to whuff at their open palms before circling back to sleep, and the door is already easing open as she reaches for the knob.
It’s only one bottle of terrible wine, shared; she can’t blame it when she lets Darlington take her coat off without protest and hang it in precisely regular folds on Il Bastone’s antique wooden hangers.
He waits until she’s peeled off her boots before he speaks again. “Shall we turn in for the night, then?”
He’s still fully dressed, like he has every intention of settling out back to Black Elm and leaving her here despite the darkness and how late it is. She thinks of him on the floor of the study, Ganymede at the riverbank, his hand on the carpet at her feet— trusting her. It felt like a trap. It still does.
It felt like a trap, but—
“Don’t go,” she says.
Darlington’s eyes are on hers. Always on hers.
“I don’t want you to go,” she says. “Stay.”
“Stern,” he starts, and when she steps closer, “Alex. You don’t know what you’re asking for.”
“It seems pretty simple to me,” she says, reaching out. His scarf is Burberry or something like it, she’s sure, and feels like butter under her fingers as it slides off his neck. “I’m asking you not to leave. So don’t.”
“That is… a stupendously bad idea,” Darlington says, low and slow, almost a growl.
“You can say no,” Alex offers, though she doesn’t want to mean it in the slightest. “But I want you to stay.”
“Should I sleep on the formal sofa, then?” he asks skeptically. “Virgil’s dusty bare mattress? I want a bed.”
“Mine’s a double,” she says. “We fit before.”
She takes a chance, then, and walks past him into the foyer proper, towards the stairs.
“Alex,” he says behind her, like it hurts, like she’s impossible. She’s just put her hand on the banister when she hears him start to mutter curses, the rustle of cloth and something dropping to the floor, and she smiles.
He’s there when she walks into her room and looks over her shoulder, a shadow with burning coals for eyes. He doesn’t scare her. Not anymore.
“Come here,” she says, not stopping, and pushes down her jeans on the way to the bed. The back of her legs hit the mattress as Darlington walks into her outstretched arms, and the noise he makes into her mouth is nothing but pure relief.
Late, late into the night, she wakes up to a red flicker against her closed eyes, opens them to see Darlington building a fire exactly like she thought he might. He’s naked in front of the room’s smaller fireplace, each line of him gilded. Each line marked by her hands.
“Cold,” she complains, and opens her arms. He abandons the fire immediately.