Darker London

The call came through when Daria was wrangling a pasta bake into the oven, the voice from her phone on the bench announced Lily calling. "Crap," she said, since Agatha, in her carrier on Daria's front, was also starting to cry. "Alexa, answer that," she said, closing the oven with her hip. Getting something that could answer phone calls without Daria needing to use her hands had been one of the best decisions in her life. And worst, sometimes, because a, Phoebe and Cassandra both knew how to use it and b, the names Alexa, Agatha and Alastair were a fucking mission to keep straight.

"Hi Lily, I'm just making dinner - crap," she said again, realising that the oven itself wasn't on but the stovetop still was. "You're on speaker but no one else is around."

"I need you to come here," Lily sounded distinctly un-Lily-like, that is, audibly upset. "Right now."

( ... )

The thing about being this happy is that Stephie truly wanted to believe nothing could break it. All day she'd been dizzyingly high, the excitement bubbling up in her chest, grinning, joking, not staying still while Lavinia fixed her hair. And all day she'd been aware that something might go wrong - someone might disappear, someone might attack.

But everyone was as safe and protected as Peter could manage and there was certainly nothing else Stephie could do to make it safer. All she could do was hold onto this feeling and cherish every moment of it.

( ... )

Noah hadn't actually told Liz the name of the friend he was bringing with him when they trooped over for dinner, but it hardly mattered to Liz. The more the merrier! She had been pottering around in the kitchen since six in the morning and when Emma had risen and joined her at eight, the other woman had laughed fondly. "Excited about company, Liz?"

"Four kids!" Liz exclaimed as she threw things into the slow-cooker. "I can't wait to squish their little faces!"

"I can't wait to sit on your face," Emma said with a sly grin, just as Hope walked in for her morning coffee. "Well hello, Hope!" Emma said loudly, turning bright red.

"Not the worst thing I've walked in on you two doing," Hope said amused. "I'll just get coffee and go, but yes, Mum, I will be here for dinner, before you ask me for the eleventh time!" Hope filled her mug with coffee and headed back to her room. The second she was gone, both Liz and Emma snorted and grasped each other, laughing delightedly.

That was how the day went on, and the house gradually filled with the delightful smell of Irish Stew. Liz made soda bread from scratch and Emma made up some cold brew tea. By the time Daria and Noah arrived, entourage in tow, the table was set and everything was ready.

Joss woke up bleary, rotten and heavy as a corpse as he heaved himself up in bed. His blankets had twisted and mostly fallen to the floor and there was a smell from the half dozen mostly-empty coffee cups gathered at his bedside. It was his own fault, the cups, the smell, and he could easily do something about it, and yet he didn’t grab any of them as he made his way down to the kitchen for another one.

I’ll clean them all up in one go, he thought. Later. When I do laundry. Something else he hadn’t done in a while.

( ... )

The room Peter found himself in was dim, lit only by flickering candlelight. The chill bit at his skin, his fingers stiff and cold. The walls were carved stone, thick and unrelenting. The air in the cell was stained with damp, making it all the more heavy to breathe. He was sitting on a bed, if it could be called that. It was little more than some wooden slats and a thin mattress made of straw. On the floor in front of him, Thomas was stretched out, topless, his back against the cold concrete. He looked thinner than normal, something which pained Peter to see. Thomas' fingers spidered out across the skin of his chest, as if he was counting his own ribs. Then he pressed the palm of his hand flat against his stomach and groaned-

( Oh god )

Daria woke up slowly, Noah asleep by her side, and guilt waiting for her, perched on the edge of the bed. The latter was a difficult thing to wake up to, and becoming more familiar by the day. She'd heard Noah get up a couple of times in the night to feed the babies, though at the time she'd pretended to be asleep, selfishly clinging on to the hope that she would not have to open her eyes. Yes she had, rather desperately, needed the sleep, but she felt terrible about it now.

And so bad about last night. Noah had told her he was having nightmares about Pat, nightmares about her putting her hands around his neck. And Daria was not at all impressed with how she'd reacted. It had overwhelmed her, and when he'd needed her to comfort him she'd been panickedly grasping for a way to comfort herself, but feeling too guilty over needing comfort to summon any, even for herself.

Bloody hell.

( ... )

Stephie had offered to go round and talk to Noah, despite the fact that, admittedly, she was a little reluctant. No actually, scratch the admittedly; she was not going to admit her reluctance. Well maybe to Thomas, maybe later, but not before she’d actually got up the guts to talk to Noah. She had balanced out her impulse to help him against the weight of the topic of conversation, and if she’d been any less stubborn then the desire not to talk about it probably would have won.

Who wanted to talk about surviving a demon who stole the face – the body – of one of their best friends? And what he’d done to her with it. There was a lump in Stephie’s throat, but she already knew, before she even replied, that she was going to make the offer.

Noah was sweet, and tall and soft and earnest and funny and flinching because some dickhead ghost had forced his girlfriend to try and kill him. Pat had almost killed him, too. Stephie remembered the long nights spent at the hospital with Daria as Daria waited for Noah to wake up, as Stephie waited for Tasha. That had been a pretty firm fucking bonding experience, right there.

So she did it, she jumped the fence and tried not to sink too much into the mud of the back lawn (Marie and Cassandra had been having a field day earlier, there were tyre tracks from a tricycle and gashes of fist sized mud missing from the lawn that had ended up in the bottom of Thomas’s washing machine.) The kid stuff made Stephie feel all the more determined. If she could do something about one of the twins’ parents feeling flinch about the other, then great, good, that was worth ripping up old wounds for.

Stephie touched the phoenix necklace at her throat to remind herself where she was, now, and rapped on the door.

The first time Yolande died, Daria had been seventeen. She’d dealt with her grief by not dealing with it, spending all night out of the house without a word to Neil where she was, getting so, so high with Adam, disappearing from school with Art. She spent as little time around her dying mother as she possibly could, and as little time around her family. It had been terrible, and damaging, and as a result Daria had always tried to confront her feelings head on. Shine a fucking maglight onto them and just – cope. Link arm and arm with the rest of her family, with her friends, and don’t hide. Never hide.

Now, Yolande was curled up on the couch in Daria’s living room, shaking and sweating and pale as a ghost, and all Daria wanted to do was lock herself in her closet and press her hands over her ears till it was over.

( ... )

“Dammit,” Daria hissed, as several shards of shell from the egg she’d cracked fell into the bowl with the egg. She took a moment to suck in air through her nose but this did nothing to calm her, and she dug into the eggy slime with a frustrated finger, trying to hook the shell back up the lip of the bowl.

“I can do this,” Yolande said cheerfully, reaching to take the bowl away from Daria.

“I can make my own daughter’s birthday cake!” Daria snapped, gripping the bowl close to her. “Fucks sake.”

( ... )

“Daria Persephone,” said her mother’s voice, and Daria looked up blearily from where she was staring at the padded corner of the coffee table. There was nothing particularly interesting about it, it had simply been where her eyes had fallen and refused to get up. Dragging her gaze away from the table was an effort incomparable to anything else she’d been through.

Yolande was wearing one of Daria’s Ethereal Façade shirts to sleep in and looked like she’d stepped out of another time. “You should be asleep.”

( ... )

“Dad’s coming in after dinner with my girls,” Daria whispered to her mother, reading off the phone that Noah was holding, since both her hands were occupied with a breastfeeding Alastair. “And Merry again, and Hayley,” she watched her mother’s face as Yolande covered her mouth with her hands to keep the joy from bursting out. Daria felt the same, but with extra layers of tired, and extra layers of sore. She’d always been active, loved the gym, athletic sex, and finding new ways to push her body, but right now there were muscles aching she’d never thought about before. Her whole body felt like it had fallen out of a tree.

She had fallen out of a tree once too. She’d been getting high with Adam in after school and leaned back too far, hit another branch on the way down and was lucky not to break anything. It hadn’t been a very tall tree, but she was discovering new bruises for days.

“Neil and Merry and Hayley,” Yolande echoed, voice creeping out through her fingers. “Cassandra and Phoebe and Neil and Merry and Hayley.”

“I think we should tell Cass and Bee that you’re an Auntie, or something – I don’t want them telling their preschool they got two new siblings and a granny back from the dead,” Daria said, picturing it. Or rather – she didn’t want other adults telling Phoebe and Cassandra that they were making up stories when they weren’t. “That should work, right?” she looked over at Noah.

Merry had been struggling through the last few months in a way she was very reluctant to describe as struggling. She had support from her family and a nice place to live and a cat with more personality than ears – it wasn’t like she was homeless or suffering abuse or living in a war zone or anything. She even had proper medical support and a doctor who understood the reality of all the things that had happened to her. She was so fucking lucky.

Life was just... gruelling, and from where she was standing at the moment it was hard to see any progress and harder still to see how things could improve. Today, for example, progress was not feeling like progress at all: She’d started talking in group therapy and afterward she felt wretched.

She’d gone with Joss a few times before now. Joss, who also didn’t talk much but seemed less like he was suffocating under the weight of not-talking than she did. It had taken her weeks and weeks to first identify where this suffocating feeling was coming from and then longer to come to terms with the idea that talking about it might not destroy her as much as she’d once been convinced it would.

( ... )

Daria had done pain before. When Pat cut her left arm open using her right, when he’d stabbed her hand, her throat, cracked her ribs while she was still healing from her c-section. She’d done pain, and while none of that was pain like this, the ghosts of the old pain crowded into the hospital room with her. The threat of being overpowered, incapacitated. Made it hard to think straight.

She’d got down to a contraction every three minutes but around four in the afternoon they’d dropped back to eight minutes apart and after the second eight minute wait she’d thrashed her pillow with her fist in frustration. Then another hit, just before the five minute mark, and the peak of it was so bad she held her breath, fists gripping the blankets while she waited for it to pass. “Breathe, Daria,” Neil reminded her.

( ... )

Daria had decided a long time ago that anyone who ever described children’s footsteps as a ‘pitter patter’ had never met her children, who were currently sprinting through the house like a herd of wild elephants. “Stop! Running! Inside!” she called after them as Phoebe chased Cassandra through the living room. Cassandra shouted something that translated to ‘I mustn’t, mother, for she will catch up with me and the world will end’ but came out like high pitched screaming.

“Phoebe!” Daria shouted, heaving herself up onto her elbows. She wasn't fast enough to chase and stop them at the moment, she could barely pry herself up off the couch. “Come here right now!”

( ... )

There were reasons why Daria had never read a mystery novel where the main character was eight months pregnant with twins. She thought this, bitterly, as she tried to heave herself toward Lily's hospital and figure out exactly what had happened. There was a reason women got downgraded to backup characters when they got this big.

Daria had been real fucking tempted to downgrade herself and stay in bed. Her hips ached so bad today, and the Braxton Hicks contractions kept coming (making her panic, every time, but never turning into actual labour.) She’d slept about three hours before Phoebe had wandered into her room, woke her up to tell her she’d thrown up, but it was okay it was in the toilet and she felt better now so Mummy could go back to sleep.

( ... )

Daria dropped her go bag onto a chair just inside the door of Lily’s room, and Aloysha sat firmly on a similar chair just outside the door. The room itself was closer to a hotel room than a hospital one with all the furnishings, although the scrubbed clean air of the place carried a distinctly hospital smell. There were an enormous bunch of lillies on the table beside Lily’s bed.

A whole waterfall of pillows was piled up behind her, and she sat with a book closed in her lap but with her thumb holding a place; she’d been reading it some time ago and was planning to get back to it, soon, when her thoughts stopped rushing her. Technically she hadn’t been alone, as Aleric had left her with several of his most trusted guards, and there’d been the hourly checks by the nurses, but when Daria barged into the room she realised just how much it meant that someone was here that wasn’t being paid.

( ... )

Stephie made a mean cinnamon toast. It was an easy enough dish but she was pretty proud of it, it was comfort food, it was sugar, it was hot sweet carbs. Pancakes was, of course, the other excellent breakfast staple, but she could never get them as good as Thomas could, although flipping them was the most fun you could have cooking breakfast.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen, stressing about food, trying to think of anything other than cinnamon toast. They’d already had breakfast, and several cups of coffee, and right now Stephie’s body felt like it was running on nothing but caffeine and sugar and stress. She should eat a vegetable. Something rooted in the earth. She’d volunteered to cook something for lunch while Thomas showered and it was going to be great. Wholesome. At least borderline healthy.

She was so good at cinnamon toast though.

( ... )

Leon knew it was Daria at the door, because half an hour ago he’d received a message on his phone that said “I’M COMING TO SEE YOU. THIS IS YOUR TEN MINUTE PANTS WARNING.”

Months ago, he’d run into Daria in the hall. Under the (very false) assumption that no one else was home, he’d been writing songs naked in the blasphemy font, and now he’d stopped writing songs but was still very naked. Daria, who was definitely on the very high end of the ‘comfortable with nudity’ spectrum, had put on a dramatic performance of someone at the opposite end and pretended to faint into his naked wet arms.

( ... )

Daria hosted brunches.

Every weekend, on Saturday or Sunday, she opened up the house and extended out their long table, piled up with food and orange juice and iced mint water and - most of the time - had a bottle of bubbles for mimosas.

As a general rule, you didn't need to be invited; everyone was welcome, but the Brunchers (a noun coined by herself) did change, and Daria tried to keep everyone generally up to date with who was showing up that week. She was part of so many social groups and there were some combinations of people that were just... unwise. If Lily was attending, Daria would suggest gently that perhaps Allanah skip this week. "Ah yes," Allanah had said after the first time, rolling her eyes. "Mustn't cross the streams."

Daria powerfully adored Allanah.

( ... )

Daria woke to silence, which filled her with panic.

She hadn’t meant to go to sleep, only to sit down on the couch for a moment. She’d cut up some bananas for the girls and set them up watching telly on the couch beside her. Lulled off by the sounds of Peppa Pig, Daria had only meant to close her eyes for a second.

She sat up straight. The DVD had finished and the screen was flashing its screen saver. For a moment she sat, trying not to even breathe loudly, listening for any sign of which way the girls had gone. They couldn’t get upstairs, the gate at the bottom was still closed. They wouldn’t be in the kitchen, not silently. And then her eyes fell on the glass sliding door that led out to the back lawn and the gate to Thomas and Spectre’s house. The sliding door was open, just a child’s amount but it was open.

( ... )