Darker London

They had boarded up the door, in an attempt to both keep the weather out and give them some semblance of safety. Though clearly if a demon wanted in, they were just going to crash the hell in. They all crowded together then, sleeping in the second lounge on mattresses and hoarded blankets, none of them really wanting to be alone.

It wasn't until the next morning, until Leon and Serenity had slunk into the kitchen in search of coffee and sustenance, that Hope had a chance to address Joss' behaviour during their little invasion. He had begged her to stay in the closet, and said he couldn't watch her die again. It was a sight cause of concern.

"Joss? You awake?" she asked, glancing over at his lump under the covers.

The crash from downstairs had them all looking up, attention snatched away from the board game pieces on the table. Truth be told Joss wasn't paying all that much attention the game anyway, because Hope kept distracting him with her gorgeous intensity, and he'd really rather be doing something else instead of playing with Serenity and the empty chair that Leon had left.

The wind was making a racket around the house but that didn't disguise the crash, and it did absolutely nothing to disguise the scream that ripped through the house afterwards. Joss found himself on his feet, frozen in the middle of the room, his blood sprinting through his veins as he stared at the door that lead downstairs. He hadn't noticed that he'd grabbed Hope's wrist and pulled her to her feet too, not till she spoke.

Leon's mulled wine was coming along beautifully. He'd been working on this new recipe all winter and wasn't too modest to admit that tonight's batch might just be his greatest yet. Half moons of orange floated in a sea of star anise. He was tempted, briefly, to add to the space vibe with a little glitter; he was sure there was some food grade gold flakes left over from their midwinter celebrations.

Leon busied himself with his dinner preparations and next time he turned around, Joss was looking into the cauldron of wine (the cauldron itself a gift from Serenity's mums). "Divining anything good?" Leon asked, and Joss looked up and gave him a half shrug, but a half smile, too. This had been a pretty good winter for Joss; he was still a moody bastard some of the time, but he grinned a whole lot easier.

( ... )

It was that weird, timeless time between Christmas and New Years, Joss was lying awake beside Hope in her bed listening to the rain thrash against the window above his head. He had slept a little, but really only long enough for Hope to fall asleep as well, and she slept so much deeper than he did.

He got up slowly, carefully trying not to wake her, and went to find somewhere in this house he could read somewhere, out of the way. Living in Razvan's house for so long - longer than he'd lived anywhere else in his life - meant the size and grandeur of the Kemp manor wasn't as intimidating as it might have been. Besides it was hard for a house that contained Hope and Liz to be intimidating, and Emma was perfectly nice.

( ... )

Alex couldn't keep still as she waited for Cai and Danny to arrived at the house, she was a mass of nervous energy centered around an uncertain stomach. Liz and Emma had lent her several suitcases and this morning Alex had gone out and killed the time by buying herself a green trench coat with wonderfully deep pockets.

Aesthetically, the coat made her feel like a spy from the 1940s. The rest of it - the suitcases, the waiting, the company, the thought of screaming at her mother - made her feel wild and feral and cut loose. It felt good, knowing that the anger toward her mother was going to have somewhere to go, but it also felt uncomfortable and unpredictable.

When Cai's car came rolling up the drive, Alex climbed down from where she'd been balancing on the railings around the porch and threw open the side doors to the van. No time to waste! The empty suitcases were already inside, the van just needed people. "Hey!" She said, too nervous to be patient. "Let's go!"

"Hold your horses," Cai said, pulling an empty bag out of his own car and locking the boot. Zoe descended the porch stairs to meet them, empty backpack on her own back. "Alright?" he asked Zoe, since last time he'd seen her in person she'd been pretty much wrecked by her vision and last night talking to her online she hadn't sounded much better.

"Yeah, we're good to go," Zoe told him, making her way over to join Alex at the van.

"Hold my horses," Alex repeated, incredulous, to Danny and Zoe. "What does he think I've been doing all morning?"

"Shopping?" Zoe offered, with a nod to the coat, and Alex good-naturedly flipped her off.

Hope was nervous as she climbed out of the Uber and stepped towards Joss' door. Of course nervous on Hope just looked like 'loud'. Joss was the first person she had liked in this way for a long time. After losing Tasha she had lost hope she might ever feel anything like it again, but those fuzzy feelings were starting.

God she had missed them.

Clutching the flowers she had brought for Leon's family in her hand, Hope rang the bell and then stared up at the most impressive house she had ever seen. Sure, Hope lived in a manor, but this place was unbelievable.

Libero wasn't like most homeless shelters, in that it became a true home for young people who had nowhere else to go. Most inhabitants, other than the ones who showed up just to hunker down during the coldest nights, lived there for a few months while the shelter workers helped them get back on their feet. When people left Libero, most of them left with jobs or courses, and places to live, as well as ongoing support.

Hope loved working at the shelter because the people who were living there became like family. Everyone had turns helping to cook and clean, as well as maintain the garden and keep the shelter in good nick. Hope usually helped with cooking and then spent dinner chatting with the inhabitants, before moving on to doing the dishes. That was what she had shown Joss how to do as well.

After a rather large dinner, with a few temporary inhabitants seeking shelter from the rain, the dishes were cleared and heaped up in the industrial kitchen. Hope surveyed them and sighed. "I don't understand why, but curry night always makes extra dishes," she commented to Joss, grinning. "Did you have a nice time tonight?"

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.

( ... )

Helena wasn't doing well.

This wasn't a new experience. Helena hadn't been doing well for the last six months, as much as she tried to keep the extent of it under wraps. She knew the main trigger for her slow downward spiraling was the police putting her rape case on 'inactive'. She couldn't find anyone else who would testify in a court or even talk to the police, so the whole thing had become pointless. Her solicitor had made it very clear that it would be near impossible to get a conviction without anyone else coming forward. All the guards had really good reputations, and Helena still could be 100% sure which ones had been her attackers in the first place. Sure, she'd gotten a name from one of the girls who had agreed to talk to her before pulling out, but without her going on a stand it was worthless.

( Babe, there's something broken about this )

Since appearing naked in front of an angel in a hospital room, Yolande had been wringing every moment she could from the extra days she’d been given.

Every day was packed full of activity. So much of it was spent looking after Daria and Noah and their newborn twins, but the help was spread over many friends so there was time to reconnect, and play, with Neil and her other daughters too. And she hooked in anyone else who came to the house, Hayley’s friends, Joss. Once she’d gone clubbing with Allanah.

( ... )

Merry stepped out of Daria’s room, and instantly found that looking at her mother without the distraction of her sister and new niece and nephew became far more difficult. Her gaze dropped to her hands, one of them slowly wringing anxiety out of the other.

“I’ll, uh, get coffees,” Joss said, thinking that this was a mother-daughter conversation and he better get himself out of there for a while. “What do you drink – uh – do you drink?”

( ... )

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.

( ... )

There was a boy in one of Joss’s classes who called himself a witch, not pagan, he said, none of that god stuff, just a good honest witch. They’d smoked a bit of weed together, in the wild back lawn of the Vatican, Joss lying on one of the stolen park benches, Cooper in the empty bathtub, witch-boy high as a kite searching the edges of the garden for – Joss couldn’t remember now, something from Harry Potter – monkshood or some shit. He’d called the spell a recipe for living and that’s the bit that had stuck. A recipe for living. Put the raw ingredients in and life came out. Joss liked the simplicity of that.

Joss wished he was high right now, but he only had enough weed left for maybe one joint and it felt like a dick move not sharing it with Carly.

( ... )

“Can you come get us?” Joss said, in a voice that scared Leon for its fragility. This wasn’t a call asking for a ride, this was a rescue plea.

“What’s happened?” said Leon, already starting to move. “Where are you?”

“We’re walking…” said Joss, then took a little while – Leon could hear him muttering as he must have moved the phone away from his mouth – searching for a location. “Down Crowndale Road, near King’s Cross.”

“I’ll be there,” Leon had promised. “Soon as I can. Joss, what’s happened?”

( ... )

Alexandria had been through many variations of her name as she grew up. From Alexandria to Alex to, last year, Xan. She wanted to be the kind of person who could pull of Xan, it was way more unique than the other variations, short and powerful. But it felt like it took a lot of work maintaining a persona that fit the name Xan, and she’d slowly abandoned it. She was getting older now anyway, she’d turned seventeen recently and wanted her seventeenth year to be one of effortless coolness. Trying too hard to fit into a name like Xan reeked of effort, so Alex rolled her eyes whenever anyone called her Xan now.

She’d thought about going by her last name, Tai, for a while. She liked that too – it was pretty, but it just drew too many ignorant comments from people who assumed she was Thai.

( ... )

When Joss left Leon he ran, not far and not fast because Joss wasn’t a runner. Could probably walk for days but couldn’t hold speed for any great distance. Didn’t need to run far to make it to the tube station near uni, though. Leon wasn’t following him anyone. He didn’t think he would. Leon was good at letting Joss go. Made it easier in the end for Joss to come back.

He plunged underground and took the next train, packing in with so many other people. Joss held onto a pole and closed his eyes, someone’s elbow was pressing into his back, someone else’s arm was pushing into his. He was grateful for it, this press of people around him marking out where his body ended, all these other bodies acting like guards, made him feel a bit like nothing could bust out of his skin and escape because it was too crowded out here. He could almost pretend the arm of the stranger was wrapped around his shoulders. If Leon had been there right now Joss would have attached onto him and hugged him so hard. He wanted a hug and he wanted to be understood. Leon could give him a hug if he asked but Leon could not really understand.

( And there's nobody there to catch us when we fall )

It was always going to be a bad day, Joss hadn’t even considered putting the energy into pretending it could be otherwise. He knew all that shit about self-fulfilling prophecies and he’d done the ‘shitty anniversary coming up’ talk with his therapist and still. He wanted it to be a shitty day. It should be a shitty day. Who was supposed to have a good day on the anniversary of their sisters death? No, Joss had decided he should be suffering and so he was suffering.

He still went to his classes, because life went on. But he started drinking at lunchtime because it didn’t go on for everyone. He ran into Geordie when he was coming out of his afternoon class and Geordie frowned at him (Joss was three pints in by then) and bought him a coffee. Joss let him because he was Geordie, and they drank their coffees without talking about their dead sisters.

( ... )

When Leon looks at his little brother he still sees a boy most days. It’s as if Leon’s memory is stronger than the reality in front of his eyes. Despite the weight that Joss carries on his shoulders, and the constant tired stretched look on his face that makes him seem ancient, Leon still sees the boy underneath.

When Leon looks at himself in the mirror, he sees something in between. Not a boy, not for a while, but not an adult either. He’s thought about this for some time, and figures no one would blame him for blaming his childhood. There weren’t a great deal of adult role models for Leon. A dad who stuck around only until Nora’s next child came along and then bolted, leaving Leon with Nora, who was head over heels in love with her new son Joss and his father.

( ... )

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.

( ... )