Darker London

"Thomas!" Stephie called from the kitchen, where she'd been making coffee and messaging Deirdre. At first it had been good - Deirdre was going to come over and Stephie was going to tell her all about Spectre and if Deirdre was on her side, Spectre didn't stand a chance, and also, Stephie wanted a Deirdre hug, irregardless of anything to do with Spectre. And then Jinx had called him a cunt and something about Jinx standing up for her made her ache with the very strong need to hug him, too.

And then Deirdre had suggested with wasn't Spectre and breathing became an issue. "Thomas, where are you!?"

The scene smelled of spilled petrol and Stephie clutched Marie tighter, gagging not from the smell itself but the sense memory of the Templar splashing Thomas with petrol. She pressed her face against Marie’s hair, and clung. Marie was wailing and clinging too, Stephie could feel her tears hot on her neck in heartbreaking contrast to the icy shock as they were both soaked completely in the rain.

( ... )

Stephie woke up gently in the morning and gave herself a few minutes of lying there, watching Thomas sleep, before she thought about moving. She'd slept so deeply and so well - if not for all that long- and everything felt warm and soft and good.

Yesterday, she'd planned to set an alarm to wake herself up but Thomas had been far too distracting last night, so that went out the window, but luckily she'd woken up anyway. Thanks, universe she thought, genuinely meaning it. There had been rough patches lately but sometimes the world was really good to her. She gave the arm stretched across her a light kiss and carefully shifted out from underneath it so she could get up and gather some clothes, then a shower. The coffee was brewing in the kitchen when Marie poked her head around the door.

( ... )

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.

( ... )

After the awful run-in with Rolf the previous day, and now the awful experience with Stephie's parents in the afternoon, there was one person Thomas wanted to see. Lavinia. His mother was just so wonderful and loving and calming and Thomas could think of no one better to cheer Stephie up, as well as soothing both of them. He also really wanted to remind the kids they had a grandmother who thought they walked on water, regardless of how Lillian and Phil had treated them.

He had texted Lavinia while still in the park, and her 'of course you can come over for dinner' had come back almost immediately. After a stop at home for homework and cleaning up, they headed out and arrived at Lavinia and Mad Dog's place in a loud collective. Marie insisted on ringing the bell, and Lavinia answered in a puff of lilac and love.

"My darlings!" she said, spreading her arms wide to hug the kids first.

Work had been undramatic, which had been its own kind of irritating, as there'd been a part of her that was itching for some kind of confrontation with Rolf. she wasn't sure what. Her imagination gave her plenty of scenarios, ranging from simply yelling at him to full on attacking him and causing him to attack back, made her see worse things than he'd made her see already, and then turn on the rest of the hospital, torturing everyone in it and ultimately leaving them exposed to the Templar, and Lyon, and letting Amaris out, and -

Stephie made herself stop thinking about it, before she imagined herself into a panic attack. She knew she should have stopped earlier but the lack of sleep weakened her defences against masochistic thinking. So she stomped into Peter's office after fiddling with the engine of her teal helicopter for a couple of hours (or rather, after sitting surrounded in engine parts imagining they were the bodies of dead friends) and sulked at him. And the thing that made the whole work day worthwhile was that Peter sulked back at her, just as hard.

Because they would leave the hospital vulnerable if they lost Rolf, it was just, he was such a dick.

Stephie felt kinda bad leaving work early because she was leaving Peter to deal with that on his own. Not bad enough to stay, because she loved Peter, but she wasn't going to give up an afternoon with Thomas and the kids for him, therapeutic as talking to him had been.

No time for naps she texted Thomas as she made her way back down to her car. I had an extended bitch session with Peter. Pick you up on the way to school?

The evening was distracting enough, after the ordeal Rolf had put both Stephie and Thomas through. They had picked the kids up from school and swung by the park on the way home. Then it was snacks and homework and dinner and free time and more snacks. While the kids were getting ready for bed, however, Thomas seemed to realise that soon there wouldn't be much to distract them from the events of the afternoon.

Fire.

Burning.

So much pain.

Thomas excused himself from teeth brushing and he made his way into his room, just expecting to take a breather. He sat on his bed, his hand curled unto a fist, twisted into his shirt over his heart. No one would be expected to just return to normal life after being tortured, so why then were they trying to do so after feeling like they had been tortured. They may have no lasting physical effects, but the experience had been real enough for them. It was harrowing.

Thomas didn't hear Katya enter the room behind him, but when she crawled up onto the bed with him he wasn't surprised. "Hey, sweetheart. I'm alright, I'll be right with you, okay?"

"You're not alright," Katya said, crawling into his lap and hugging him tightly. Slowly, silently, Thomas wrapped his arms around her and he hugged her back.

One of these days, Stephie thought as she looked over at Marie’s homework, she was going to have to reteach herself some basic maths.

Marie was pretty happy concentrating (out loud) on her homework sheet, which she’d spread out on the little green table in her room. Stephie was sitting with her, cross legged on the floor because the table really was that little, being a soundboard for Marie as she worked things out. Tonight she’d been given a series of numbers and had to indicate which one was bigger, which was made a little more complicated because the numbers themselves were different sizes. “They are very sneaky teachers,” Marie said, circling a small eight and scribbling out a fat three. “Very very sneaky.”

( ... )

It had taken a really, really long time for Stephie to fall asleep last night; she was too excited, her mind racing too fast. Luckily there were plenty of things to do with Thomas other than sleeping, and it was well into the small hours of the morning before she was tired enough to curl into him and, after talking sleepily for at least another hour, finally fall asleep wrapped up in his arms. She even dreamed happy, and though she didn't sleep for very long she didn't wake up tired. She woke up thrilled and cosy and honestly - still in a little bit of disbelief.

Maybe quite a lot of disbelief. Like maybe she'd dreamed the whole thing? That thought landed with a splash of confused disappointment, though, and she ran over their whole conversation again in her memory just to reassure herself it had actually happened.

( ... )

Marie had decorated the house using the box of decorations from the kids previous parties and it was wildly overdone. “Taking inspiration from the way Thomas decorates, are you?” Stephie grinned, wrapping a streamer round her neck like a scarf.

“Stephie,” Marie said seriously, giving Stephie’s streamer the eye. “That one’s supposed to go over the door.”

“This one exactly or any one?” Stephie twirled the end of the streamer toward Marie’s face.

“That one exactly,” said Marie, who had a very clear plan and wasn’t going to let any adult silliness get in the way, and who was Stephie to argue with Marie’s artistic vision? She climbed up on a chair and pinned the streamer where it was supposed to go, then found another one.

( ... )

Stephie was dead asleep when Marie crawled into her bed that morning. It had been a very long week, filled with little Kemps and terrible thoughts about Peter, enormous blanket forts and barely any time to herself. Getting back to Vic Lane this time had been a bit of a relief, personal space-wise, but at the same time, going to sleep without Thomas sucked. Icarus’s head was a nice weight on her stomach, but it was hardly the same.

The slight dip of her bed under Marie’s weight roused her a little, but two cold, wet hands splashed her out of sleep very effectively. Marie’s favourite answer to the question ‘have you washed your hands?’ was to prove it by putting her hands somewhere on Stephie’s bare skin. It was a habit Stephie hoped she’d drop by winter, but in mid-August, mid-heatwave, it wasn’t hideous.

( ... )

Stephie’s interaction with the outside world was limited, these days. The three places she spent the most time were Thomas’s, the hospital for work (and Tasha, and lately Tal), and Vic Lane. None of these places really required her to be anything but herself.

Even back when she used to work at Apocalypse Records and have normal-people customer interaction, there was still Jinx and Mr A and Flick who were all in the know and there wasn’t a whole lot of pretending-to-be-normal she had to do. But since dropping that so she could really concentrate on flying (and Marie) she didn’t even have the fake-it-for-the-customers stuff anymore. Which did mean that doing normal things like picking Marie up from school felt really weird, because school was the outlier.

School was the outlier because it made Stephie feel like the outlier. School always had; but it wasn’t just a hangover from her own school experience, where she’d only ever fit in with Josie. No, Stephie did not know how to naturally be part of this community because everyone else was so normal. It made her feel a bit like her shithead teen self to think it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Stephie didn’t know if she had it in her to make friends with new not in-the-know people, but it was going to have to happen at some point.

( ... )

Thomas hurried over to Victoria Lane, a spring in his step. There was potentially an uncomfortable conversation coming up, but before that happened he would get to see Stephie and that always cheered him up. He had seen her yesterday, but it was like these days he couldn't get enough. When they weren't together he was thinking about her constantly.

To that end, when he arrived at Vic Lane and saw her, he grinned from ear to ear and stooped to give her a kiss. "You look radiant," he informed her. "So beautiful."

Their last morning in Spain was a rowdy one, and Stephie spent the morning running around the house after Marie shouting things like “Why did I never get you tagged!?” while Marie hid both herself and her bag in nooks and crannies of the house Stephie swore she must have been scoping out since their arrival. “Sneaky little ginger ninja,” she said, seeing the strap of Marie’s bag poking out from under the couch where Thomas had originally hid the pictures of Brian – Stephie congratulated herself on her own foresight about moving them. “Can’t hide it if I’m wearing it!” Stephie called, putting on the little backpack and grinning at Marie.

But Marie screamed “NO!” and stamped her foot down on the ground, then picked up Gabriel’s bag and bolted, thundering through the kitchen where Thomas and Deirdre were cleaning up after breakfast then legging it into the bedroom all the kids had been sharing.

“Marie’s taken Gabe’s bag hostage,” Stephie told the other adults, following quickly through the kitchen. “I’ll negotiate for its release.” Jokes aside, she was starting to get the feeling she’d badly misread the situation and Marie was not actually playing.

( ... )