Alex and Darlington Reunite WHO: Daniel Arlington and Alex Stern WHAT: A reunion at the DOA and a little walk through Vallo City WHEN: A couple weeks ago WHERE: Vallo City, around and about, with a stop in front of the Library of Alexandria WARNINGS: None
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Alex’s black boots struck the floor with hollow thuds, the sound echoing down the hallway as she hurried through the Department of Defense. Her phone had buzzed only a little while earlier with the news: Darlington was here.
Alex felt like she couldn’t breathe. It had been cruel of fate to separate them after she had fought so hard for his return from hell, but fate was a bitch, and whatever else Vallo was, she hadn’t found evidence that it was an evil dimension. She had licked her wounds and had refused to hope, but that had bore a resemblance to waiting, and waiting felt a lot like hiding, which Alex was getting really fucking tired of.
She drew nearer to the rooms she remembered from her first moments here in Vallo, when she’d been registered. Good. No screaming. She didn’t expect ill behavior from Darlington, even if he was… different now, but Alex wouldn’t claim to fully know him any more. How he might react to being in such an unknown place as this - particularly after he had been trapped in another dimension before.
A man sat at a check-in desk.
“Darlington,” Alex said, stupidly, breathlessly, and a line creased between the man’s eyes.
“I don’t have anyone here by that na--”
“Daniel Tabor Arlington the Fifth,” she snapped. “Is here. I got a message.” God, she hated that she sounded like she was pleading, justifying herself. “He’s from my world.”
“You mean you haven’t managed to make this world yours yet?”
Daniel Tabor Arlington V, or Darlington, was in fact on his way down the hallway, having finished registration and explanation as neatly and efficiently as anyone who ever arrived in Vallo. He’d asked different questions than most, but he’d kept filling out paperwork all the while and got himself quickly free of obligations.
He was smiling as he approached, with that glint in his eye that said there were exciting discoveries to be made. He was dressed like he’d just strolled out of their walk along the Gauntlet, in that same dark coat he’d worn to the Wolf ritual. It was the most himself he’d looked since they’d fetched him out of Hell.
For a split second, she wondered… she’d heard that people who arrived came from all timelines, all possibilities. Could Darlington have been from before…? But no. She felt it in her gut, who he was, what he was, as she took him in with a stare that bordered on hungry. It had nothing to do with wheelwalker crap, either, so much as someone who often wore a mask recognizing a mask on someone else.
She let him come to her, an expression on her face that was clearly torn between relief and unvoiced ‘about fucking time’. With a fake smile at the administrative person, she turned on her heel and marched toward the door.
“As far as dimensions to be trapped in go, you’ve done worse.”
“I appreciate that the only torture here appears to be standard government bureaucracy,” he replied, blithely skimming over their recent near-disasters and the likely disasters looming ahead of them. “How far ahead of me were you this time?”
Because of course Stern would be ahead of him. She always was, when she wasn’t stumbling like a madwoman.
“A couple of weeks.” She pushed open the door, the sunny chill strangely reassuring after all that dull light, and hesitated a second before she kept walking, having chosen her destination. “I tried not to eat anything, but.” She shrugged. “The first bagel was free.”
She eyed him. Or more accurately, she eyed him while he took in his surroundings. It was a lot at first pass - the different people, the shops, the magic. Just… out there in the open. Nothing like how it was secreted away back home.
Darlington didn’t know what to make of it yet. He followed Alex, but his eyes were everywhere. An old woman with delicate butterfly wings coming out of her back passed them on the sidewalk, and no sooner had he made note of her than his gaze was drawn to a busker performing contact juggling with an orb of conjured color-changing light. A father on the other side of the street had a magical tether between himself and his energetic toddler—Darlington couldn’t see it, but he could see the child tugged back in whenever he tried to wander more than a few feet away. Magic was everywhere, and used so casually, with no obvious terrible or disgusting price.
His eyes were caught by a man in Chinese hanfu flying down to the sidewalk balanced on a sword next, but he still had enough of his well-trained composure to give Alex a dry reply. “If Hell had bagel shops instead of pomegranate orchards, you’d still be there. Though given that we didn’t come here by any deliberate action, we probably don’t have much choice in staying, regardless of what we do or don’t eat.”
Alex had come to the same conclusion, even if she hated it. She may have had a tight leash back at Yale, but it was a tight leash she’s agreed to, dammit. She didn’t know the rules here. And until she did, she was going to slink rather than stroll.
“Magic bookstore,” she said as they passed one by. “That place sells armor. Down there you can buy potions or tea. Another bookstore. Also magic. Sells smut though.”
She was heading to a specific place: The Library of Alexandria. Call her selfish, but she wanted to see Darlington’s face as he took it in. “It’s not all alternate universes. Some people come from places that are a lot like our world.”
“And no one has discovered any clear purpose in bringing them here?” Darlington asked. He’d paid enough attention during the chipper little video explanation to have the basics, but taking it all in was still like trying to drink from a fire hose. Even as he tried to pay attention to Alex, he was looking at the bookshop that sold magical smut. Or maybe the magical bookshop that sold mundane smut? Darlington had to force himself to keep looking around and not get caught in the question where the purveyor of smut’s modifiers ought to land.
“I think the magic wing of the Outlander Department studies it, but…” Alex hadn’t met the higher ups of the DOA, much less the magical wing. She wasn’t eager to do so. In some aspects, it still felt as if she was an outsider to the world of magic, that it wasn’t something she wanted to own by herself. Pammie’s capable hands, and Darlington’s, sure. They might be trusted.
But she’d known too many secret society assholes to be entirely certain of the department here. Yet.
“But I think they know as much as the rest of us,” she concluded. “They don’t know shit.”
“Despite the fact that this has been happening for years now,” Darlington flatly replied. He’d see what he could find out about the magic wing of the Outlander Department and get more of an idea of what research had been done and what more could be done. But in the meantime…
“The people who get pulled here from the multiverse—they just live and work and attempt a normal life on this magical island? That’s what’s expected of us?”
“I even heard of some god that’s pretty much just a fisherman now.” Before Darlington could comment, Alex continued: “Yeah, god. Gods. Satan’s even here, and he’s got a daughter.” She exhaled, took a right on the sidewalk. “But no one’s coming for us. No one’s really even watching us.”
Which meant, naturally, that she was three times as paranoid as usual. Some habits were hard to shake.
She pulled up to the outside of the Library of Alexandria, didn’t comment on it. Just waited for him to react to the sign, however long it’d take him to do so.
Darlington did not shriek in academic glee. He did not get an attack of the vapors and require a lie-down on his chaise. He did, however, stop in his tracks and stare at it.
The Great Library of Alexandria.
The Library of Alexandria, just sitting there in all its third century BCE glory. It wasn’t a replica; Darlington could tell that from the perfect Ptolemaic architecture and the traditional Egyptian materials. This was the real thing, plucked up from history just like all the rest of them.
“You know,” he said, his tone very deliberately even, “it’s not actually the fire that was the tragedy of the Great Library. By the time it burned, it was long past its glory days, and most of the texts were copied in other collections. The tragedy was the decline of interest in the library, the purging of the intellectuals from Alexandria, and the fact that by the time it burned there wasn’t much left to save.”
Alex hadn’t known any of that. Nor, frankly, had she ever cared. She wasn’t immune from adoring the mystery of the world of academia, no, but the burning of the Library of Alexandria largely left her wondering why anyone so far-removed would ever care. If they burned libraries, they’d do worse to people. Particularly people that didn’t matter.
She’d been a member of that caste too long to shed any tears or poetry over a lost library.
But Darlington’s face. His face. The joy that he was trying so hard to downplay. It almost made her forget the last year of their estrangement.
“Don’t play poker,” she advised, and smiled.
“I’ve always done well at poker, thank you,” Darlington archly replied. “To anyone but you or Pammie, that reaction could have passed for no more than polite interest.”
Somewhere inside him, a twelve-year-old Danny Arlington was still shrieking with unbridled glee at seeing the actual honest-to-goodness Library of Alexandria in real life. Even in the outward-facing present day, Darlington was already wondering if the Great Library had any openings for undergraduates who missed their last round of exams and graduation for magical reasons.
Alex didn’t quite scoff, but she didn’t have to: he knew nearly every twitch of her eyebrow by now and what they meant. She didn’t read his mind - she couldn’t - but her change of subject was coincidental anyhow: “You’ll need a job.”
She was back to taking classes. It was one-hundred percent Alex putting off trying to find a job for as long as she could; her skills didn’t translate well to wholesome things.
“Junior gardener at the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?” Darlington suggested. “Or maybe the Dawntreader needs crew. Unless of course the Unseen University has a work-study program?”
He didn’t know exactly what bits of fantasy and history had landed in Vallo, but it seemed clear that nearly anything or anyone could find its way here. Ancient wonders and Lewis and Pratchett all seemed equally likely.
But of course he was going to see if the Great Library was hiring. What kind of scholar could walk away from an opportunity like that? He just wasn’t going to admit to Stern that she knew him that well.
Alex rolled her eyes, having caught-- some of that. Not all. She knew the Dawntreader reference, at least, because she was a woman of taste and had been a kid when Ben Barnes was baby Prince Caspian. “Professional student. At the boring college. There’s a magic one, though.” She’d poked her head in, felt her imposter syndrome kick up, and ducked out before anyone could take too much notice of her. She figured Darlington wouldn’t have that problem. Even when he’d been fully human he’d had no shame about his hunger to learn about the arcane.
“A college devoted entirely to magic. And everybody knows about it.” Darlington couldn’t keep all the marvel out of his voice. They came from a world where magic was a closely guarded secret, hoarded by the wealthy and powerful. The idea that magic was a free resource for all here, flowing freely as the wind, was stunning. So of course…
“It seems too good to be true, doesn’t it? Free magic, we’ve been scooped up and dropped far away from all our troubles, and we might run into Gandalf the Grey at any moment.”
“Of course it’s too good to be true,” Alex answered with her usual terseness. “You get a fancy apartment and magic school, sure, and you can be friends with Spider Man. You also lose whatever you have at home with no way back. And it’s not all nice magic, either. There’s a lot of…” Alex tried to figure out the proper words for ‘murder turkeys’ and ‘guess you’re a cat now’, and finally settled on: “...stupid shit too.”
“On a scale of ‘the potion tastes bad’ to ‘it’s your entrails now, Darlington,’ how not-nice is it?” Darlington asked. Most of the magic he’d witnessed was not nice. He wanted to know what to be prepared for.
“Runs the gamut,” she answered. “Minor illusions, check. Targeted violence, also check. Everything from people losing their memories and acting out a Hallmark movie to typing in Wingdings.” Her lips thinned. “Hence the need for an active military.”
Darlington wasn’t too concerned about minor illusions. Typing in Wingdings sounded irritating but not horrifying. The rest, though…
“Did the Hallmark movie people get their memories back?” he asked, focusing on the most bizarre first. “And what do you mean targeted violence? Targeted at whom?”
“They did,” Alex allowed. “And the violence… it depends. There was apparently some sort of murder house some rich guy created that’s pulled people in twice. Maleficent showed up to party. There were dinosaurs. People who hated magic.” She chewed her lower lip. “A little of everything to keep you from being too comfortable, I guess.”
“Well, that helps with the “too good to be true” feeling, I suppose,” Darlington dryly replied. “Who knew that dinosaur attacks could be comforting? Not I.”
“Life finds a way.” Alex observed him for a moment. There was a lot being unsaid here. Alex, never one who enjoyed talking about trauma, was out of her depth. Finally, she said: “Do you want to see the apartments, or grab a bagel? They’re free for new arrivals.” She knew he could still eat; she’d seen him savor Dawes’s soup. Alex paused, and sweetened the deal: “A minotaur owns the bagel cart.”
There was a pause while Darlington took that in. A minotaur. With a bagel cart. There was a minotaur here, and that minotaur was a fine, upstanding local business owner, selling bagels and even offering a free taste for accidental refugees. Darlington allowed that to settle, then nodded to Alex like a normal person who was not having his entire worldview shattered and remade every ten minutes.
“I could do with breakfast. Lead me to the bagel cart.”