Chapter Text
Eliza tries not to look so helpless—for both of their sakes.
Alexander is teetering on the thin edge of consciousness. Eliza can feel it in the way he slides a clumsy hand around her torso, fingers curling into the front of her waistcoat as he tries to fight her squirming. Her breathing is strained under his hand, chest laboring beneath it, but from her cloud of fatigue, Eliza finds the strength to writhe against him, refusing to be still.
He has never, ever put his hands on her like this, without permission and so openly. Heat spikes, impossible to ignore even in delirium, and Eliza scrapes sense off of the edges of her mind to recalibrate. She needs him to let go.
She–
She needs–
“Need to walk,” comes her voice, faint and tight into Alexander’s shoulder. Nevermind that it’s a lie; she can hardly do anything. She shoves a hand low into the right side of his chest and pushes into his ribs, weakly but insistently. She feels him wheezing into her hair. “I can walk.”
Eliza supposes she should be grateful to God that she still has the desire to fight Alexander over something as inconsequential as accepting his help, but she’s too tired to summon anything that even resembles gratitude.
They’re far enough from the pub that its gas-lit glow turns into an orange blot against the sky. Or at least she feels they’re far enough away. She doesn’t… she can’t remember. It’s as though they've been walking for ages, and the buildings are all beginning to look the same. Perhaps they haven’t made it very far at all. She risks a look around, just briefly, nearly sending them into wet cobblestone.
“Eliza,” Alexander murmurs, voice strained. He flattens a palm over her abdomen and presses her body closer into his chest. “Stop–Stop. You’re not listening–"
His words bleed together, muddled and frantic in her mind. She can't focus anymore, and can no longer untangle him from the strange hum building in her head.
“For your sake, stop fighting me.”
Wet hair clings to the back of her prickling neck. She blinks up at him, disoriented and certainly displeased but mostly curious at the unusual edge in his tone. In the tight space between them, her gaze floats over him. His cheeks and nose are flushed pink, like the creeping dawn that spreads across the windows of the agency early in the morning. On his warm breath is alcohol and something else. Something acrid and wrong. She smells it on herself too.
At long last, panic grabs her by the shoulders and gives her a shake.
“Okay,” she breathes. “Okay.” She does not pull away and lets him limp them across a foggy and narrow street corner.
Eliza imagines a specter of a man, blending with the shadows of this place she can’t quite recognize anymore, his bloodthirsty eyes roaming over her, and forces herself to keep pace. She would very much like to be home and out of the dark.
Alexander is taking on all of her weight now, leaning precariously to the left. They turn the corner and pass blindly through the fog that drifts from the surface of the Thames.
Eight working women had washed up on its foreshore, young and blonde-haired with limbs missing. The pattern would complicate things. She realized this early, bristling at Ivy’s hyper-vigilance and Clarence’s anxiety and the infernal whispering around the Yard. Though, that prickly feeling had abandoned her the day Alexander started watching her like she might disappear. Finally, she'd had enough.
It will not stop, she had told him one evening, tone firm despite her shaking hands. It will not end until we end it, and for so long he had said nothing, searching her eyes for some other way, knowing there was none.
And so they had bent, desperately, for the whiff of a lead.
She had set eyes on the ghost-of-a-man almost immediately. It was as if no one else could see him, that odd shadow leaning on the slick brick of the pub.
The man had spotted her too, watching her, not far from where she sat, his eyes wide and feverish and his lips parted. As if he’d been waiting for her. It had been easy enough to play the nervous girl on a lonely street corner. And then he called into the fog.
This is no place for a girl to be alone at this hour.
It was just as Alexander had predicted: the man they sought wouldn't be able to help himself to the opportunity, especially one handed to him in darkness.
She had recoiled into herself as the man spoke, breathing unsteadily through the sensation of being chosen, then hooked her fingers in the failure-shaped wound inside of her and unfurled herself. The sounds around her seemed to grow quieter, the streetlights dimming until it was just him and her and the blinding clarity that they were now after each other.
Pub’s open. I’ll stay with you.
Alexander had entered soon after. She’d gained a little ground inside; her replies had carried just the right amount of honey and unease. The smell of alcohol had lingered thickly in the air and lewd chatter settled just underneath, baiting her to press further.
The man nudged a drink her way, his gaze crawling over her neck, lingering in her hair. Selecting. Imagining. It seemed there was a new price for conversation. Wisps of dread squeezed their way into her chest, and then she drank, looking at Alexander over the rim. The man had sighed, low and content. Ready to eat.
The man followed her gaze. He beckoned to the brooding man staring so curiously at the girl before him.
Come over here, sir. Come drink with me and you can look at her up close.
The man slid another glass this time towards Alexander. His hand hovered, deciding, then raised it like he’d meant to toast, and sipped. It wasn’t long after that.
Alexander had caught the flush on her neck and the lag in her speech before he’d even begun to feel delirium himself. Fear had come like jab, quick and nefarious, the world tilting underneath her as Alexander had seized her by the arm and pulled her out into the street.
As Eliza sinks to her knees, she squeezes her fist tight, the last of her strength bleeding out with each breath. She’d like to lay out on the ground. Her knees are wet. Whatever it is she is holding onto, she mustn't let it go.
She’s being carried. She thinks. Her feet don’t touch the ground anymore but her face pressed roughly against something, hard and warm. She doesn’t know what– she doesn’t know–
Alexander, she reminds herself.
Alexander.
She lets out a rasping breath against him, fear drawing out a sob when she realizes she can’t do it right.
A roll of thunder trails after them, the low hum settling into her chest and then her vision flickers. It’ll be like sleeping, she justifies. Just like it.
In the distance, the glow of the front windows of her agency blurs before her eyes like a reflection in glossy pavement. She’s not sure how much longer she has.
______
The world sways and its rhythm is hypnotic. Around them, the gloomy sky and alleyways blur into meaningless swathes of gray until they reach the blinding storefront of the agency. Alexander pulls Eliza closer, shielding her from rain, half-propping her against her own door frame.
She mumbles something low and slurred around a mouth full of hair and rain.
“That’s it,” he breathes, pressing a wet hand on her cheek. “Good girl, stay with me.”
Alexander scans the street, tired eyes searching for lingering shadows, and finds none. He shoves a hand into Eliza's waistcoat pockets, fingers brushing over cold buttons and her rattling chest, looking for her keys. Heart hammering, he fumbles with them once, twice, and unlocks the door, letting the rain and night air in after them. He hauls Eliza upright, palms pressed to her sides and half-drags her up the stairs.
There is no resistance from Eliza this time. When Alexander looks down at her, takes in her flushed pink face and closed eyes, he realizes that he is all alone.
By the time he reaches her front door, he can no longer see straight, can’t fully close his fingers around the keys and drops them to the floor below. Panic flares at the edges of his mind. There is no time.
He grunts, leaning the entirety of his body into the door over and over and over until finally, it gives. They fall with it, bodies lurching forward into the darkness of the main room. Alexander reaches for her too late, too slowly, and her shoulder strikes wood with a thud. He toes the door shut from where he lays, and wraps himself around her.
In the quiet of her main room, there is nothing else but the press of her against him. He lays there with her and he listens. And waits. There are no following footsteps, no faces hovering above them in the dark. Alexander braces his arms around her, dragging their bodies across the floor until he is crowding her against the base of her desk. He keeps his back to the door.
“Eliza?”
She can’t hear him, not anymore. There’s no place for his voice to catch. He presses a palm over the back of her head and draws her face closer to his. She’s shivering.
“Eliza, please.”
She is so pale and–and cold. He guides Eliza's nose into the hollow of his neck, her lips brushing over the base of it. Her breathing comes in and out of her, quick, like gasps. Her heart beats hummingbird fast. He tightens his arms around her and she shudders into his chest like she’s freezing. Delirious and afraid, he clings to the unfounded thought that perhaps, Eliza is dying in his arms.
Not her. Please, not her. Not again.
“You’re alright, it’s alright.” Keep her warm. Keep her warm, keep her warm.
Ivy on a trellis, he clings to her, dutifully shielding her, drugs stealing from his mind until his consciousness is drowned out by the rain.