Luna. (floukru) wrote in the100, @ 2016-04-17 14:37:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log/thread, alexander graham bell, dela |
WHO Dela & AGB
WHAT Reunion!
WHEN Very, very soon after the mass-arrival.
WHERE Medical.
WARNINGS Mentions of the battle, but nothing too terrible!
Dela vastly preferred to be out in the battlefield, when she could help it, but they were still down some hands in medical so she’d been spending a lot more time in the actual medical area. The goblin battle had been very violent, and that had meant a lot of treatments that needed hands. Dela had luckily spent a lot of the time she’d been grieving the loss of her friends out in the woods, collecting herbs and such, so there was a great store in place.
It’d all ended well, thankfully, and she’d done her job. She was exhausted, but she wasn’t ready to stop working yet. She’d tried not to stop too much here lately, honestly. It hurt too much.
She’d been restocking and reorganizing her area in the medical bay, labeling and taking inventory of what was there. She’d not slept much in the last few days, more preoccupied with work and what went along with it. She did have a cut on her arm that she’d stitched herself -- it was oozing a little blood and needed some care, but it wasn’t a priority just yet. She sat up where she was knelt on the floor, pressing a piece of gauze to her arm and wrapping it with tape.
She sighed, reaching her other hand up to wipe her brow.
“Dela?” A voice with a distinct Scottish accent piped up from the hallway outside. “Dela? Are you down here?”
Alexander Graham Bell had missed the battle entirely, as had about half of the usual residents of Mount Weather. Along with the rest of those taken to Storybrooke, he’d arrived a day later, with an assortment of very strange memories. He had taken a look around and found that Jacob and Ezio were just fine, and they found Miss Frye on their way inside the mountain, but Dela was nowhere to be found. People were talking about a battle, a fight with goblins of all things, and they had all been gone for a full fortnight, so of course he was worried. He was still unsettled by the entire Storybrooke experience, but he could work on dealing with that after he made sure that Dela wasn’t dead or dismembered.
Dela had been in the medical bay for some time, so she’d not heard anything about the returns. She’d have seen if they’d been brought in via the pods, of course, but the arrivals again had been lost on her. She had no reason to expect to be joined by anyone, and especially not—
She froze.
Dela pulled herself to her feet, turning to look towards the sound of the voice and finding Alexander standing there. She froze again, startled at the sight, her brow furrowing. She was quiet, so unsure of what she was seeing and whether or not it was real. “Alexander?”
“Dela!” A mixture of relief and joy hit him full force, and he immediately rushed toward her. He hadn’t missed her for the past two weeks, because he hadn’t remembered her, but as soon as he did she had been the very first person he wanted to see. “Are you all right?” he asked as he reached her. “The guard at the gate said there’d been a battle.”
She was utterly baffled. It’d been two and a half weeks. Two and a half. She was convinced that she’d never see Alexander Graham Bell again. And that, she was sure, was the kinder of the options. The other was that he could arrive again and not know her. That one would have been a pain unlike she could’ve ever imagined. Alexander was back, though, and he knew her name. She was stunned still as he moved quickly to her. “You know me. You know me?”
“Of course I know you!” He took her hands in his, as though the physical contact would somehow prove the words more effectively. “I do now, at least. The last two weeks, we were all gone and didn’t remember any of our real lives. Magic, they’re saying, but--but we’re all back now, and yes, I know you, Dela kom Floukru.”
She didn’t hesitate when he took her hands, and the contact definitely did help — if nothing else, it proved to her that he was actually there in front of her. Her breath caught a little at the gesture. “You are…” she trailed off. It wasn’t necessary to continue, because she pulled her hands away and wrapped them around him instead, embracing him tightly.
Alexander laughed with joy and relief as he hugged her in return. He’d been afraid for a moment that she was about to turn and run the other way. “I’m back,” he said, lowering his voice. “And hopefully not going anywhere else. Jacob and Ezio are here as well.”
At his words, Dela laughed, still clinging to him. “Of course they are. You all come back at once!” she said, shaking her head before finally leaning back in his arms to look at him. “I did not think you would. We were sure you all were gone for good, or that you would… you would come back with no memory,” her expression briefly fell, showing how painful that thought actually was. “But you are here again.” Her hands moved to his face, and she smiled. “I missed you.”
“I’m glad my absence didn’t go completely unnoticed, but I’m sorry you had to deal with that,” Alexander said, and leaned down for a kiss. “We were...sent? Brought? To a town called Storybrooke, and none of us remembered who we were or where we were supposed to be. We were different people with different lives, different relationships and jobs and everything, and…” He shook his head. “It was very strange, and I am very glad to be back here and back to myself.”
“Of course not,” she said. “I mourned each morning.” She returned the kiss as it was given, breathing a sigh of relief against his lips. “Magic.” She made a face, shaking her head. “I am just glad that you are back, and that you are yourself again.” She kissed him again, having missed him more than she’d expected. There was a lot more to this, and she’d have to deal with it in the days to come, but she was prepared just to cling to him for now. “Elea is so angry with Jacob.”
Alexander closed his eyes, resting his head against hers. He would have a lot to deal with, as well, but for the moment just being with Dela seemed like the best possible idea.
He chuckled at the mention of Elea’s annoyance. “Well, he’s back now, so she can begin expressing her displeasure with even more horrifying drawings. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it. She’ll just likely have to get in line behind his sister to yell at him.”
Dela felt so comforted by the close contact, enjoying the connection. She’d felt so disconnected in the last two and a half weeks. She’d been focused on work, but that meant that a lot of her personal connections had fallen by the wayside. She’d tried, of course, but she’d been out of sorts. She was starting to feel like herself again.
“Oh, she has many to show. She has some for you too, I must warn you. She care a lot more for you than she was letting on before I think.”
“That’s sweet of her, despite her obsession with anatomy,” Alexander replied with a faint smile. “I’ll polish up my pretending-not-to-be-shocked face.”
It felt good to be here, and with Dela. It felt like being home, even if he didn’t yet call Mount Weather that. The past two weeks felt so foreign, like a very strange dream that he remembered with unusual clarity. He’d tell Dela all about it soon enough, but first he just wanted to enjoy being back where he belonged.
“Good idea. They are very graphic,” she warned, smiling back in response.
Her eyes ran over his face, taking in the sight of him. She pulled their bodies closer, but her expression grew a lot more serious and sad. It was a light sadness, not the same as she’d felt for some time. “I did not think I would ever see you again.”
“I didn’t...I didn’t remember anything, there,” Alexander quietly replied. He hadn’t quite processed what happened to him yet. Magic was still largely foreign to him in and of itself, and the idea of magic that could completely erase people’s memories, give them whole new lives...that was beyond even anything he had witnessed at Mount Weather. As he continued to speak, his confusion at what had transpired was apparent in his voice. “I didn’t remember you, or the Fryes, or my family back in London, my childhood in Edinburgh, or Mount Weather...it was all replaced. I was a different person, with a different life, and I…” His voice trailed off in bafflement. He had been married to someone else, thinking of having a child, and he didn’t even know if it had been real or not. The past few weeks of it felt real, but they also felt like something between a dream and a nightmare, and he didn’t know what to do with it.
Dela’s brow furrowed as he spoke, her head tilting a little. The confusion became a feeling of being very unsettled. In her world, as with his, magic was not something she’d experienced before the mountain and the Podkru. The idea that there was magic powerful enough not only to take people from their home without warning but also to rid them of their memories and their identities… it made her very uncomfortable. It also reminded her, yet again, that all of this was likely temporary. There was a chance that he’d leave — that they’d all leave — at any moment. Her hold on him tightened, but her expression was sad and frustrated and a little distant. “And you?” she asked snapping back to his words, curious.
“I...I had an entirely different history,” Alexander said, still trying to mull over it in his mind. It was true, but it didn’t make sense, and it shouldn’t have been possible. “I was American, and married to a lady named Beth. She was a nurse, I did...something with computers. And I never did anything new in my entire life there. Never moved anywhere, never created anything, just...drifted along on the tide.”
The last part seemed more significant to him than being married did. Marriage was something he saw himself doing someday, though obviously not to a woman he’d never even spoken to. Being so stagnant, though--that was completely against his nature. He hated the thought of it.
Dela found she really didn’t much like the idea of him with another woman, even if it was a version of him who had no memories. She frowned. “This does not sound like you at all,” she said. She didn’t get hung up on the marriage thing beyond that pang of near-jealousy that was quickly brushed away. Instead, she was focusing on those details that were so unlike him. The idea that there was a version of him who was American and idle — they were such different men. It was not the same.
“I have all of your tools with me,” she said suddenly. “Some here… they start to redistribute supplies, but we get to hold onto those things that do not need to go to someone else. I have some clothes too.” She gestured to her upper arm, where one of his neckties was wrapped. “Some are not so much in the same shape as before. I’m sorry.”
Alexander listened, let that information wash over him, and a smile dawned slowly on his face.
She had kept his tools. She hadn’t thought she was likely to ever see him again, had thought that even if he did come back he would have no memory of her, but she had held on to his tools. If he had ever wondered before if Dela really understood what was important to him, that settled the matter. They were from completely different worlds with completely different customs and cultures, but they got each other, and that was absolutely brilliant.
And she had his bow-tie fastened on as an arm cuff, which was possibly the sweetest thing he had ever seen.
“I think it looks better on you,” he said. “You should keep it.”
It had been instinctive, keeping his tools. Dela had been hopeful, at first, that he’d return with full memory. As the days had gone on and that hope had dwindled, she’d clung to those pieces of him for selfish reasons primarily. Beyond that, though, she knew that if he came back, he’d need them. There had been tasks through the course of the battle that could’ve used his mind, and she hated the idea that he wasn’t there to provide it. By keeping those pieces of him and having them at the ready for him, she felt she could have given him means to be his brilliant self if he returned, memories or not.
“It was practical first. I ruined another,” she said, reaching to pull it a little to show a healing line of stitching. “It help to keep the blood from dripping down my arm into patients.” Ah, romance. “But also, it reminds me of you. Even if you came back with no memory, it was something to say that you were here and that you knew me once.” She shrugged a little, then smiled. “I keep it anyway, regardless of what you say. But I’m glad you agree.”
Alexander, being the person he was, rather appreciated the practical application. One did what one must to get things done, after all, and you couldn’t let a little blood get in the way of an important project. He liked that she wanted to remember him, too, and even that she was going to keep it whether he offered or not. Dela had spirit, and he had enjoyed that about her from the moment they met.
He was instantly concerned about the stitches, though. “How did that happen?” he asked, his hand brushing gingerly by the spot where his old tie covered the stitches. Those so recently returned from Storybrooke hadn’t heard about the goblin siege yet, and all the trouble the mountain had faced in their absence.
And Dela, being who she was, knew enough to know that he wouldn’t mind her having used his clothing for those practical uses. It was one of the many unspoken similarities between them, one that came despite their vast differences.
She lifted her eyebrows a bit at the question. “I am not actually sure, not so specifically,” she said. “We face many attacks while you all were away. Goblins, they make our lives hell. Medical was short on hands so we adjust. I may have brush against something, or it was Goblin blade.” She shrugged. “It is just deep enough for the stitches. Not so bad, though.” Experience usually was the reason why Dela didn’t think as much of her own injuries, as she had a great many scars from battles, but there were also some parts of her body that had been touched just enough by the dragon’s fire that she’d not completely gotten all of her sensation back. She really wasn’t sure how she’d injured her arm — it was one of a few stitched areas on her body at present, after all. “It is healing well, though. No infection, and I am very good at stitching myself.”
“Goblins?” Alexander’s eyes went a bit wide. He’d seen all manner of beasts of legend in the battle with the White Witch, but that sort of thing still wasn’t normal to him by any stretch of the imagination. Thank god Dela was good at looking after herself, and other people - a lot better at it than he was, Alexander thought. He was especially grateful for that at the moment, because despite how his life had been shaken like a snow-globe and his entire conception of reality messed about, Dela was a very reassuring presence. She was the kind of person who made people feel safe and grounded even when the world was a mess.
Alexander smiled faintly. “It’s very nice stitching,” he agreed. “I...when are you done here for the day?”
“Many,” she said, her expression sour. “Nasty things. We needed the help, but I am also glad you were not here. Very dangerous.” She shook her head. She was glad he was here now, and the battle with the Goblins had passed. The mountain was still theirs, and they had been triumphant even with their small numbers.
“I am only here to pass the time. I can leave whenever,” she said, smiling. “We leave now?”
Alexander looked relieved at her answer. The more he thought about Storybrooke, the more tired he felt.
“I’d like that,” he said. “I could use a bit of a lie-down, I think. And just...to feel like myself again. Spending some time with you would be good for that.”
“I have slept very little in the last two weeks. I think it would be good for us to sleep, yes,” she agreed, nodding. She separated her body from his to reach and take his hand. “Come on.”