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ᴀɢᴇɴᴛ ᴍᴏʙɪᴜs (

timedoor) wrote in

valloic,
@ 2022-03-07 19:06:00

Mobius & Alex

WHAT: Mobius confronts Alex and it's all about boundaries and consequences and SHE DOES NOT WANT TO HEAR IT
WHEN: Tonight
WHERE: L-Corp Penthouse
WARNINGS: Talk of alcoholism
STATUS: Complete

The easier thing would just be to keep his mouth shut but, honestly, fuck that.

This was something of a delicate situation, Mobius was aware of that - he didn’t mean to stick his (crooked, busted) nose in, but he also couldn’t sit around and let things (specifically, Alex’s alcoholism) continue to resemble a fiery locomotive barreling toward a cliff. Rapidly, it was picking up speed, and if it exploded or went over the edge he would only have himself to blame - not to mention he wasn’t the tiptoeing around type anyway; if there was an issue, he confronted it. If there was a problem, he would put whatever pieces together to solve it - or he’d do his best, anyway, and not let the fear that felt like sitting in the passenger seat, hurtling towards a wall and powerless to stop it, take over.

So he thought about it. Considered his options. Considered how he could offer support, how he could intervene - and he decided to just go and pay her a visit and see how it went from there. He didn’t have the gift of foresight - all he knew for certain was that Alex was the first good friend he’d made here in Vallo, and he couldn’t lose her.

He wanted to be around for her - wanted her to be around for him. He wanted more silly double or triple dates and hopping onto whatever timeline it was where Mobius presented a wooden puzzle box to Theo when he was a child, something that would cement their bond the way taking blood for DNA samples had for him and Alex.

Taking the elevator up to her and Lena’s L-Corp penthouse (he’d been many times, he had access) he arrived at her front door and knocked.

Alex certainly wasn’t at her best. She could admit that. Lena’s disappearance and the strain between them - no matter how slight - had put her in a vulnerable place. And she’d snapped. Instead of sucking it up, dealing with it without succumbing like she had been for almost six months (five months, fourteen days, if you wanted to be precise), she’d been weak. She recognized that.

But now that she’d broken down, she was stubborn in her lapse. She continued bringing home beer when she wanted, drinking wine or scotch or whatever she chose when she felt like it, and Lena seemed to have decided she could control herself. Which was good because she could. She hadn’t been falling down drunk since she was in college; she was functioning. She wasn’t drinking heavily, but she was certainly drinking more often.

When she heard a knock at the front door, in fact, she had a beer in her hand and a bowl of popcorn on the couch beside her. She’d called it a day early, but she hadn’t expected company. In fact, she was waiting for Lena to come up after work so they could have dinner together. Lena, obviously, wouldn’t be knocking on their front door.

She set her beer down to open it and her eyes widened in surprise. “Mobius, hey!” She grinned, pleased to see him. She always had a good time with Mobius and didn’t mind him surprising her at all. “Come on in, I’m watching Grey’s Anatomy if you want to join.”

Maybe he was just highly attuned to it by now, but Mobius could smell the beer and he just - his stomach lurched, heading on a wicked curve. He didn’t exactly know how to do this (certainly had never done anything like this before) and he just had to hope that he didn’t fuck it up. He’d told Lena that he didn’t think it was a good idea to drop the ‘so you married your former girlfriend’ talk now, not with Alex beginning to spiral, and he still meant that - things may have turned out happy for her back home, but what mattered in the moment was their relationship and they seemed to be going through something of a rough patch.

He didn’t want to make that worse either.

But he also knew that you didn’t have to be falling-down drunk to have a problem with alcohol - they weren’t always severe alcoholics. They could be functional alcoholics. They had jobs and families and social bonds. They also probably denied that they had a problem.

“I came by to talk to you,” he said. “When you mentioned you’ve been drinking Lena’s scotch and I know you’ve been drinking more since - I’m really worried about you, Alex.” He wasn’t going to needle in too hard, but he also wasn’t going to back down either. He was prepared for pushback from her about the issue too.

That got an automatic sigh out of Alex. She’d known this was coming. She knew Mobius wasn’t happy about her drinking, and she understood, truly. She even appreciated his concern, but she wasn’t ready to hear it. Drinking felt good right now, with everything that had happened and so much tension still lingering.

“I’m really fine,” she told him, taking a seat on the couch and taking a sip from her bottle of beer. She said it like she meant it, too. “I know how to control myself. You don’t have to worry.”

She truly felt that way. This wasn’t new for her. She hadn’t fallen into alcohol for the first time during Lena’s disappearance; it was an old friend at this point, one she hadn’t seen in quite a while. She had been this way for years and gone cold turkey of her own accord when she was ready. Right now, she wasn’t ready. It was still providing her comfort and clarity she felt like she needed.

That was to be expected too - alcoholism wasn’t rational. Mobius couldn’t reason with it. He couldn’t change it, couldn’t change the thing that it was - and what it was happened to be something that could cause a lot of damage. “I’m going to worry - I still am worried,” he said, following suit and sitting near her on the couch. Standing over Alex and towering wasn’t going to do any good - neither was shaming her or placing blame. That would just make her double down more to prove a point.

“And I know you believe you can control yourself - maybe even what I say’s not going to make a difference, maybe it has to come from Lena.” Maybe she had to impose the consequences - and, honestly, telling an alcoholic no was probably the greatest gift someone could give them; if Lena kept enabling Alex, then she was going to keep drinking. Mobius wasn’t some miracle worker.

He also had never been an alcoholic himself, so it was difficult to relate. However - his stubborn ass wouldn’t give up. “But I’m still going to try,” he added. “And be here for when you decide you may need some help. I can even go to meetings with you - I know you were going to them before.”

Alex knew Mobius didn’t mean to talk down to her. He was a good guy, and she knew it was never his intention to make her feel badly. But nothing he was saying was making her feel anything but small and a little annoyed, too. She grabbed the bottle for another swig of beer, nothing short of defiant before she set it back down on the coaster where it had been resting.

“I get it,” she replied, her voice forcibly even. “And if I need you, I know where to find you. I’ve been dealing with this for a long time, okay? And you may thing I only believe I can control myself, but I’m telling you I can. I know my limits, I know when it’s appropriate and when it isn’t. I can handle this, and I don’t need you or Lena stepping in and trying to pull an intervention on me. I just need time.”

“You don’t know your limits, that’s the problem. You don’t know how to cope without drinking,” Mobius protested. “And you getting snappy with me about it is a giant red flag that tells me the same thing.” That’s what alcoholics did - they got angry when confronted about their drinking. Or made excuses, excuses that stacked up like an unsteady Jenga tower - and then one brick was pulled, and the whole foundation crumbled.

He sighed - both Alex and Lena treated this as a touchy subject, a live wire that they were apparently dancing around, and Mobius had seen anger about it from the both of them (a lot of I can handle it, you don’t know what you’re talking about vibes) but he didn’t give a shit. “I’m not in this friendship for you to be nice to me all the time, Alex, especially when things are hard - if you want to get pissed at me because I’m here telling you that I’m worried, then fine. Get mad at me. My feelings can take it.”

Not like he was made of glass or anything - he was only concerned about her; this wasn’t about him.

“I’m not pissed at you for being worried about me,” Alex snapped in response. Figured he would call her on being snappy and she would get even snappier. She hated being told what her problems were and that she didn’t know how to control herself. She hated it even more because, as much as she said otherwise, she knew deep down that he was right.

She was angry - she wouldn’t deny that, couldn’t at this point. But she didn’t want to let it out. Mobius was a good friend, but he didn’t deserve the brunt of her anger. No one did. When she got angry, it wasn’t pretty, and the only one who could stand to be around her was Kara. Kara would take everything she said, everything she did, without so much as flinching. She would stand there and love her through it all, and honestly, Alex wasn’t even sure Lena could take it when she got like that. She needed her sister, and she didn’t have her here anymore.

“Look, if you came here to pick a fight and hope it would get me to AA, I’m not doing it tonight, Mobius. So, you can stay and drop it, or you can go.”

She goddamn knew he was right - Alex wasn’t stupid. But she also wasn’t ready to go back to seeking help, and he couldn’t force her to do that. Mobius wouldn’t try. “Then what are you mad about?” he asked. “I didn’t come here to pick a fight with you. I’m not fighting.” He wasn’t that type anyway - he was an interrogator, sure, he knew how to turn the screws when he needed to pull information from a troublesome variant. He could be cruel and harsh, and fuck knew he had been with Loki when he first tumbled into the TVA - the TVA had broken him apart, and Mobius wasn’t proud of how he’d contributed to that wreckage. Because overall he wasn’t cruel.

He was more like a spider’s web, steel encased in silk - and he wouldn’t break; his tensile strength might even surprise you, given that he was just a normal human. No magic at his fingertips or lasers to shoot from his palms - just a regular man. Who would no doubt outlive all of his loved ones, and the last thing he wanted was for them to get an early start on letting him figure out what it would be like to live without them.

“When I said I’m here for when you decide you want to seek help, I meant it. When you’re ready. But in the meantime, I can’t be around you.” It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t ‘if you don’t stop drinking, our friendship is over.’ It was a boundary. A consequence.

People said that a person had to want to change for it to happen but that wasn’t entirely true. If no one imposed any consequences, there was no reason to change. And he couldn’t control whether or not she stopped drinking, but he could decide what behavior he’d accept in his life.

Wow. Alex fought the urge to childishly roll her eyes. She told him to drop it or go and now he couldn’t be around her. Seemed like he was just twisting things to fit his narrative, but she didn’t call him on it. If that was how he wanted to be, he was entitled to it, and she certainly wasn’t going to change her tune on a dime because he decided not to be around her. That was fine. She was used to wallowing in misery alone.

Maybe it was better, actually - Lena, at least, knew when to leave well enough alone. She knew Alex had to handle her own shit on her own time and nagging her about it wasn’t going to change that.

“Then I guess we’re onto ‘you better go’,” she replied quietly, reaching for her beer again. She settled back into the couch, gesturing toward the front door with the hand wrapped around the bottle’s neck. “I’m sure you can find the door.”

Well, that didn’t answer the question of what Alex was mad about - but maybe Mobius didn’t need her to answer it. She was mad because he was right and she didn’t want to face that either - there was a whoooooole lot of denial going on here in this penthouse. “I guess we are onto that,” he said smoothly, rising from the couch and heading for the door.

He didn’t regret what he said to her, didn’t regret coming here and actually being someone who cared enough to highlight the fact that this shit couldn’t continue - even if it meant taking a hit to the feelings. Fine. Maybe it would give her something to think about, maybe it wouldn’t - but he could at least say that he did the right thing. That wasn’t always easy to do.

The easier thing would just be to keep his mouth shut but, honestly, fuck that.

“And I hope you know that I love you,” he added. It was true. He did. Not like how Lena loved her, obviously, but you should always tell your friends how much they meant to you - she was more than a friend though, really. She was family. “See you around, Alex.”

Which meant that sometimes you wanted to throttle your family, but welcome to life. They’d get through this somehow.

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