Darker London

Although she still technically lived at Victoria Lane, Astrid spent most of her time at Miles house, where her bedroom continued to gain more and more of her own character, more and more items migrating slowly over. Once a week (sometimes more) she slept in Miles' bed, but mostly she stuck to her own. She was still very careful not to be too much in his space, just in case he got too annoyed with her. Astrid didn't want to get kicked out.

She'd brought her guitar over in the hopes that she would start playing it again, but as yet she'd barely been able to touch the strings. She hated that Toby had taken music away from her. It used to bring her such peace, and now all she could remember were those long days when he'd locked her away and she'd sung desperately at the door to try and win his favour back, her throat feeling torn and raw by the end of it, her voice almost gone.

Astrid had thrown a blanket over the guitar so it didn't watch her.

( I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold )

Every now and then, Stephie’s anxious twitchiness made her reflexes sharp as scalpels. She did start to wonder, quietly and underneath the rampant trash talk she was throwing at Jinx, if trauma was giving her an unfair advantage at Mario Cart. But then there were too many times that it went the other way and she ended up reacting too much, spinning off the track and crashing into walls.

So not really an advantage at all.

( ... )

The boredom was a killer and Josie wasn’t sleeping.

Peter was sleeping. Or at least, Peter had gone home for the night and was probably in bed with his wife by now or stressing about the world or still at Thomas’s reading Stephie old journal stories; either way, not here. Josie was also stressing about the world, but she wasn’t in bed, she was on the roof.

It was shitty weather up on the roof. But as much as Josie hated the discomfort of the cold, she wasn’t shivering. Was this, she wondered, a demon thing? Could she even get hyperthermia? Or was her skin and her muscles and her blood too removed from human to succumb to that?

( ... )

Astrid slept terribly, all bad dreams and night-sweats, and she blamed Miles entirely.

He'd literally had Josie drag her out of a top story window just because his family had suddenly showed up. If it was because he was embarrassed of her, then Miles could go fuck himself. If it was because he thought she needed to be protected from them, then he could go fuck himself even more. She wasn't scared of the Kempfs, not after what she'd just been through.

( But nine times outta ten, I know you're trying )

On the one hand, Miles was pissed off. Noon was such a fucking inconvenient time to meet on a Monday. He had class. He had, up until now, perfect attendance. He had hours of work to do and Aleric’s stupid wife had to go and pick noon for whatever clandestine meeting she was arranging.

On the other hand, Miles was scared. He knew the scale of the favour he owed Lily. He’d been raised to fully comprehend the power at work here. Eight lives, he owed her, in return for the faction of slavers that Lily’s men had murdered. One in front of Miles own eyes.

Eight lives, for Astrid’s one.

( ... )

The knock on the door came late one evening. The time on Miles’s laptop said it was ten after ten.

His study was on the ground floor, at the back of the house. The windows looked out over the small garden and the fence that separated his house from Astrid’s. The door to the study looked down the hall, where the front door loomed menacingly. It wasn’t Astrid at the door, because Astrid was upstairs in her terribly wallpapered room. It wasn’t Josie at the door, because why the fuck would Josie knock? Miles frowned in the direction of the front door, and ignored it.

( ... )

If it had been the middle of the day when Astrid stormed out of Victoria Lane she probably would have just kept walking until she calmed down. But night had already fallen and it was dark and Astrid was not dressed for the cold even if she had felt safe in it. She didn't even have her taser. She didn't have anything.

So Astrid kept walking quickly down the street, turning and heading towards Miles' house. It was quicker to jump the fence but movement was good, even if she did feel like someone was going to grab her at every turn.

The front door of Miles' house was locked, but the back door wasn't and she slipped inside, trying to get her own breathing under control. Up the stairs Astrid ran, fists balled tightly, vision feeling hazy, and in her room she slammed the door behind her and ran to the bed, throwing herself down and her face into the pillow.

Then she screamed. She screamed all her fury into the stupid pillow and kicked and punched and generally let herself be a toddler having a tantrum before eventually the anger wore her down and her body, weakened now, grew floppier.

On the bed Astrid forced herself to roll slowly onto her back, her limbs weighed down horribly. She focused on each breath as it came, letting herself feel her lungs fill all the way up and then empty completely. She was still angry, but now at least she was a little more tired.

Astrid put her taser into her handbag and left the house, keeping a wary eye on the cars that passed her by on the street. Only once outside did she realise that she wasn't quite sure how to get to Miles' (apparent) new house. Its backyard pressed against her own meant it must have been on the other side of the block, presumably, but the streets around her were curving and wobbly and so she would just have to walk until she found it.

Around the block she could see the back of Victoria Lane appear and disappear between houses and trees and from there she could work out the yard it must be. So she went up the path and rang the bell, sighing to herself as she waited.

Stephie stretched her arms up toward the evening sky, hearing her shoulders pop gratifyingly. Her muscles ached from a long workout at the hospital gym and a long run in the park afterwards with Icarus and Josie - Josie hadn't been doing any of the running.

It wasn't a bad evening. Spring was setting in but the back yard was still more mud than it was lawn, which was how both Icarus and Marie preferred it. Stephie had learned pretty much as soon as Marie could walk that there was absolutely no point in bathing her till they'd let Icarus out to piss after dinner because if Marie was let out too, she'd find something gross to roll in.

( ... )

Astrid had been home for two and a half weeks, but it felt both longer and shorter than that to her. If she had been granted by the Great Spirit one question to be answered it would have been this: how did one slip back into a life that didn't fit them anymore?

Everyone was so glad that she was okay. Everyone loved her so much. Everyone was so grateful and they hugged her and they cooked for her and they stroked her hair and they told her stories when she asked for them, but in some ways all of that only made Astrid feel worse over the whole thing.

( ... )

At the hospital in Walsall, the doctors had to re-break Astrid's wrist so that they could set it properly, and it had hurt but they'd given her morphine and that had made everything a little better. So many people and so many things after such seclusion felt a little overwhelming.

To begin with Astrid told them her name was Jenna, because she had forgotten and it was hard to really remember anything properly. They asked her things but she could give them no answers. She said, please, let me sleep and please make it all stop. They stopped asking her things and she slept in a hospital bed as Jenna and it was okay, even though her dreams were dark and blood and horrible.

When she woke up the next day and a nurse called her Jenna she balked at the name. "I'm Astrid," she said, saying her own name for what felt like the first time in years. "My name is Astrid Kensington and I was kidnapped."

The police were called but before they arrived Astrid asked them to call Peter Kemp at the Robert Macgavillary Memorial Hospital in London. "Please," she said. "He'll tell my friends I'm okay."

They brought her the phone after it was dialled and in her hospital bed in Walsall Astrid listened to hold music while Katia put her through to Peter.

The car was as big and as hulking as the men inside it, though if Miles was going to be drawing comparisons between men and vehicles, he would have said he was less afraid of being hit by the car. There was absolutely no question that he was going to climb into the back when it pulled up beside him on his way to his own car, after his meeting with his supervisor. The door swung open and Miles took one look at the man in the back, waiting for him, and got in without fuss.

“Afternoon gentlemen,” he said. “Thanks for the lift. My car is in student parking B.”

( ... )

Miles wasn’t joking when he told Zoe he was going to find someone more competent to help find Astrid. At least, he desperately hoped that it wouldn’t turn into a joke. The possibility was always there. Asking for help from his family was always going to be a risk, always going to feel like stretching his neck across a chopping block and hoping no one would swing a sword.

Little Moscow was a last ditch effort, he knew, but he’d run out of ditches. He was tired, worn, badly scarred, and desperate. All of this showed, he was sure, despite his efforts to cover it all up. All of it showed. These people were career criminals; they were fluent in body language. Aleric knew he was desperate the moment he walked into his office, and relished in his crisis.

But there was nothing Miles could offer that Aleric wanted, and he was not about use his resources searching for a girl when he couldn’t see anything worth getting in return.

( ... )

She’d spoken to Liz and Peter about this, but in the end she decided she had to go in by herself. Zoe didn’t want to look scared and she didn’t want to look young, and facing down Miles with her mother and her uncle holding her hand would make her look both.

Zoe really wished she was taking her metal ruler in to visit Miles, which made her feel guilty for thinking it, but not guilty enough to stop missing it. A metal ruler or the box cutter she’d gripped during the lock down. A metal ruler or a box cutter or anything sharp and threatening.

( ... )

A proper medical crew met them at the hospital, and Stephie sat in the van near his head, trying to keep out of the way as they moved him. Lucas was waiting when she finally emerged, and gave her his hand to help her jump down. She looked pale – not Miles pale, but pale.

“Ruined your hoodie,” she said, wiping a bloody hand on the bloody hoodie. One sticky clot fell to the ground from where it was clinging to the centre pocket. Stephie made a face.

“Gross,” said Lucas.

( ... )

The sunlight had woken Stephie, as it had woken Miles and Astrid. This meant when Stephie was fighting to keep her burgers down as they rattled out of Cambridge in the Melon, Josie was fighting to pull tranquiliser darts out of herself. Stephie had thought that no one could feel worse than she did this morning, but she was quite frankly wrong.

Wearing a pair of sunglasses she’d found in the glove box, she talked with Lucas on the drive back, both of them sharing stories about fuckups of the past, of juvie in particular, remembering why Misha had called them the male and female versions of each other, way back when they first met in 2008. They talked about how various members of their social group, themselves included, had relied too often on arson as a solution to their problems, and Lucas even told her that fire kind of freaked him out, now.

Stephie said maybe she was going to chuck out her lighters when she got home in case the need to burn shit arose again. Lucas applauded her mental health decisions.

( ... )

New Year's Eve had been exhausting for Astrid and she was still hurt by the revelations of what Stephie had said to her. She'd slept worse than she had in a long time, waking a few times with memories of her past mixed up with things that never happened but felt true by night time hours. Miles woke a few times beside her and she'd apologised, curling back up against him, almost as part of him, trying to find sleep again in the confusion and fear of night terrors.

But then morning came around and sunlight cracked through his curtains and Astrid found she was properly awake. Lying in bed, she watched Miles for a while, resisting reaching out to follow the planes of his face with her finger.

There were better places she could have gone for New Years, wiser places. Which would have been good if Stephie wanted better, if she wanted wise. She didn’t, she yearned for that full body rush of adrenaline, wanted defiance and alcohol, sex and power. She kept thinking you wouldn’t survive it, you wouldn’t survive it and how, well… how he wouldn’t survive what she’d been through, how he’d crumble and break apart even if he said he wasn’t the type to lay down and die. But she’d survived. She’d survived and her back and hands were strong, and her heart was strong.

It was. It was. Her heart was strong (she told herself.)

( ... )

When Jude got off the phone with Josie she had to remove herself from the house. Outside their two-storey home in Cambridge, Parker safely inside watching TV, Jude quite firmly punched a tree. Too firmly. She had to quietly make her way to the bathroom to wash it under the tap before Parker noticed. She was trying to overcome bad habits.

Well, she was trying to overcome them when Parker could see. Other than that, all habits remained intact. Like the habit of not taking kindly to the trashbag boys Stephie constantly slept with. Ry? Ugh. Jocelin? Complete Ugh. Scott? Fine, sure, but not good enough for her by any stretch. And now Miles.

( ADULTS. )

Josie opened the door to Stephie on her doorstep, raised an eyebrow. “You here for me or for Miles?”

“Don’t, okay?” Stephie said, her hands tucked up under her arms. “Can we just hang out today, I’m…” she wasn’t sure what she was. She felt like if someone tapped her on her chest she’d be hollow. Was it dreams she couldn’t remember? Who fucking knew. She’d spent the morning with Marie, at Thomas’s, but she didn’t feel right, so straight after lunch she’d come here.

( ... )