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“Alex,” he says, but it sound much more like a growl. He pushes into her space, forcing her to back up, right into the wall behind her.
“Strand,” she says, eyes wide.
Both of his arms come up, palms resting flat on either side of her head, caging her in. His blue eyes are intense--dark and electric, like a lightning storm. He stares down at her, bares his teeth like a predator.
“Richard, c’mon, this isn’t funny.”
He laughs, anyway. It isn’t pleasant. It sounds like the distant rumble of thunder. It sends warning sirens screaming in her head. Danger.
But that cannot be right. Dr. Strand is many things, but he’s never struck Alex as particularly dangerous. He’s her colleague, her friend.
“Seriously,” she says. She wants to duck beneath his arm, but he’s too close. Close, but still not touching any part of her. “We have work to do. Let me go.”
“Make me,” he says.
“The fuck, Richard? What are you, twelve? Move.” Alex pushes at him, angry now, but he doesn’t budge.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” he says. His lips turn up in a mockery of his usual wry smile.
Alex slaps him.
Strand’s cheek is red, when he turns his face back to look at her. There is a clear imprint of her hand against his pale skin. He breathes out through his nose, but he doesn’t look angry. Instead, his smile widens. “Do that--” he says, voice dropped down to a whisper. “Do that again.”
“What the hell? No.”
Something flashes through his stormy eyes. “Do it. Hit me.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex says, desperate. “Why are you being like this? You’ve been weird ever since--”
Alex doesn’t finish her sentence. Not out loud. But Strand had been behaving differently ever since Coralee’s short return and her subsequent exit from his life. Since Alex and Strand had met Thomas Warren. Since Strand had started reading his father’s journal.
It had started with little things. Strand had gone distant, at first. Alex had thought it was his way of processing, of mourning the second loss of his wife. Then, he’d started to lose his temper more often, at the most trifling of things. He’d made an intern cry, one day at the PNWS office, after she’d spilled his tea. He’d apologized, afterward, and Strand had seemed to have gotten better following the incident, if only a little. But he’d become restless in the last week, unable to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time. And he’d stopped eating, once again, no matter what Alex tried to tempt him with.
“You’re scaring me,” Alex says. “Please, Richard. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Do it,” he says. “Hit me. I deserve it.”
She does. She slaps him again, because she can’t think of anything else to do.
Strand doesn’t turn back to her immediately. He sighs, his eyes flitting closed, but not before Alex spots it.
Satisfaction.
Pieces start to slot together.
Strand wants her to hurt him. He’s goading her into doing it. But why?
Alex reaches up, but not to hit Strand again. She places her palm over the bright red mark of her previous slaps. Her thumb brushes his cheekbone and he wrenches his face away from her touch.
“Don’t,” he says.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” she says.
Strand hits the wall on either side of her face with his palms. Alex flinches, but meets his gaze with a steady one of her own. There is barely concealed fury in his eyes, but also desperation.
“I’m not going to punish you,” she continues.
The fury drains from his expression, replaced with pure grief. “Please,” he says. “Please.”
Alex shakes her head and watches as he crumbles to pieces in front of her. His hands slip away from the wall. He sways a little, before falling to his knees. Alex winces for him, knowing that the fall must have hurt, but Strand shows no sign of having felt it.
Alex doesn’t move from her spot against the wall. Except to reach out and cup the back of his head, except to pull him toward her, until his forehead rests against her stomach.
Besides that one point of contact, still he refuses to touch her. Not even when Alex buries both of her hands in his hair, gently brushing through the dark strands.
“Richard,” she says, after a long moment of silence. “Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.”
He shakes his head, causing her shirt to ride up and inch or so.
“Do you want to go to the break room with me? I could make us some tea.”
Another shake of his head. Her shirt rides up another inch. His breath is hot on her exposed skin. It makes her own knees feel suddenly weak.
“Strand,” she breathes, as his hands settle hesitantly on her waist, supporting her. She feels something soft--his lips, she realizes--brush against her bare stomach, just above the rise of her jeans.
She expects...she isn’t quite sure what she expects. Strand to nuzzle her shirt further up her stomach, perhaps. His hands to roam further upward, up underneath the fabric of her shirt, to cup her breasts through the lace of her bra. Or his teeth to catch on the button of her jeans, to yank her zipper down with only his mouth.
He does none of those things. Alex’s breath catches as his presses his face against her, but he takes no further liberties after that.
She isn’t sure whether to be disappointed or not.
“Hey,” she says. “Look at me.”
Strand tenses, but doesn’t otherwise move.
Alex threads her fingers through his hair and pulls--not enough to hurt, exactly, but to sting enough to get his attention.
It does. He lets her manhandle him, making no effort to hide the pleasure he takes in the pain. In being punished.
She soothes over the spot, anyway, massaging the pads of her fingers into his scalp.
“I don’t know what crimes you think you’ve committed,” she says. “But none of this has been your fault.”
If she had thought she’d seen him crumble before, he shatters now. It’s all Alex can do not to break with him.
Her buries his head back in her stomach. His hands move from her waist so that he can circle her with his arms. The words are muffled against her, but Alex feels like she can hear them all the way inside her, ringing heavy in her gut. “My fault. All my fault.”
“Your whole life, you’ve been as much a victim to this as anyone could be. How could any of the blame possibly be on your shoulders?”
He doesn’t have an answer. Or, perhaps, he does--but he doesn’t share it. Alex wonders if he’s somehow narrowed it down, in some kind of twisted logic, to his very existence. As if he believes that if he’d never been born at all, none of this would be happening. No grief. No Black Tapes. No seals destroyed. No apocalypse to broadcast across the globe.
What had Strand read in Howard’s journal?
How could one man destroy his son in such a way, from beyond the grave?
If there is one person Alex would love to slap, it’s Howard Strand. Or perhaps Thomas Warren. Right across his scary, sexy face. Or even Coralee.
But not Richard. Never him. Not even at his most frustrating.
Alex brushes her fingers through his hair once more. “Don’t worry. We can stay here as long as you need to.”
“Thank you,” he says, his words just above a whisper.
“But,” Alex says, “we’re still going to talk about this.”
Strand nods and tightens his embrace.