He laughs by way of answer and sips his water. "I want a bath because if I get into a fight and don't necessarily want to face the wardens with blood all over me, I can soak. Even if I have to siphon water from my kitchen sink through a garden hose. I want one because it's only a matter of time before some inmate panics and destroys the showers again, and sponge- or tongue-bathing only goes so far. I want one because there are things we can do in the bath that I've only been able to do once or twice in my life."
Another sip. "And if I ever decide to start a black market organ harvest, I'll need a lot of ice and a good tub." Okay, yes, this one might just be playfully testing to see how far Alec's read in the book Lark gave him.
The joke is on Lark: Alec already understood that reference before he even knew the lycanthrope he's currently wrinkling his nose at.
"You civvies are so spoiled," he teases, even though he would absolutely spend a lot of time in a bathtub if he had access to one. And: "And I guarantee you anything we did in a bathtub would be a first. You should've told me before the Christmas lists went out. I could've snuck one in under the radar for you."
"I would have if I'd thought of it then." He'd been preoccupied with T'Pol, with his dozen other ideas. "But maybe it's better this way. Chris can ask for one for me. And if he won't, I'll just get creative; it'll give me a chance to see what I can get away with that won't involve risking Zero or whatever they do as punishment this month."
"I could, sure. I went to law school because I love getting splinters and nails driven through my hands," Lark retorts, and then follows Alec's line of sight.
Prissy lawyer facade is gone, and in its place the werewolf who would absolutely scale a sandstone cliff. "No. But I know it won't kill us."
"You lost the right to complain about your delicate hands when you told me you like burning the skin off your paws," he offers back blithely, smirking when he catches sight of Lark's expression from the corner of his eye. He's still casually sipping on the last of his water, drawing it out.
"It would be more effective if they'd actually treat it like solitary," he muses, thoughtful. "Take away the communicators, don't allow visitors. That's the main problem: no one here has the stomach to actually enforce punishment. It's cruel."
"I know." Lark says and sounds resigned until he starts laughing. "And they can't figure out why people keep dying. They call it a phase and put their heads in the sand and hope we learn from their example."
"Yeah, well, the hard cases would just shrug it off anyway and the smart ones would turn it back on them." He is absolutely including both of them in both categories here.
Alec loves heights, but more than that now that Lark has him out here - now that he's already sweaty and dirty, now that he's already committed - he's going to get the most out of it. He tosses the empty bottle onto the ground beside his bike, fetches out a new one for when they reach the top, and raises both eyebrows across at Lark.
"Just this once, I'll take that lead." Like Lark leading them out onto the treacherous ground, Alec knows he can pick a way up the rock face that won't end with one of them with a shattered spine below.
Lark grabs a bottle for himself and nods for Alec to go, no snappy remark about it. This time. He hasn't climbed anything in a long time, and he's focused on following Alec's hand and footholds.
Alec doesn't seem to notice; he's dropping the water bottle into one of the pockets of his cargo pants, and then crouching to rub sand over the palms of his hands, to soak up the sweat and give him grip again. Then he reaches as high up as he can and hauls himself, bodily and easily, up onto the first ledge.
This is what he enjoys, if he is going to enjoy anything, if he can choose to do so: his body will do what he asks of it, and do it well, and there are very few things or people that can even keep up with him let alone stop him when he puts his mind to it. He enjoys the burn of muscles working to do what they're made to do, the pressure of air in his lungs pushing against what he demands of them, the way his pulse and his adrenaline kicks up a notch. This isn't a hard climb, and he's done something similar - window ledges and architectural spurs up the sides of buildings - probably much more recently than Lark, but he still has to pay attention. He still has to adjust his course, zigging and zagging across the sandstone and only glancing back, once, when they're about halfway up to see how Lark is doing.
Alec is grinning, his fist wedged into a fissure, anchoring him so he can let go with the other hand and lean back a bit against the wide-spread footholds to look first up ahead of them, and then back at Lark.
Lark is not as fast as Alec. He's made for other things, for living in the desert and hunting in the city, but not for climbing. But he's doing well, he's doing much better than a human as rusty as he is would be doing.
And he's enjoying it. He grins up at Alec. "Yeah I'm fine. I'm enjoying the view." Because he can't not throw in a sassy flirt when they're out here because Lark likes it out here, and Alec is above him doing one of the things Alec does best.
He flashes another grin, the kind that is quick and thin and shows the expression he hands out the rest of the time for the pleasant lie that it is, the only thing that really can; there's a pulse of something hot and heady and bittersweet on the back of his tongue, the feeling he gets every now and again when he looks at Lark, really looks at him, and knows for a fact that they see each other.
It's the kind of thought that could easily turn into love if he let it; he doesn't, but he could. He sees how he very easily could, and if Lark were close enough he'd probably risk shoving at him even this high up. The fall wouldn't kill either of them at this point unless they landed very badly, but that's part of it, too. That's part of love.
A few feet later they're high enough that the shadow from the opposing rock wall is left behind them and they're out into direct sunlight, the sandstone beneath Alec's hands hot with it, scalding if he lingers too long. Anticipating it, he takes them up a slightly steeper but ultimately shorter path, leaning far out to catch hold of the final edge, arms shaking as he pulls himself up over the lip and rolls onto the top.
Despite his obsession with observing all the things he wants and then systematically holding them back, Lark has not let himself look too closely at what he feels around Alec. He doesn't give it a name, and it's too complicated to be sorted into 'positive' and 'negative'. It's too complicated to even pick apart pieces that could be labeled positive or negative. It's both. It's both and it's more, all the time, swirling constantly together.
Lark growls a little as he hauls himself up that last bit, and he sprawls on his back to catch his breath when he's there. The sky overhead is dizzying in how vast and how close it seems.
"This is a good perch," he decides, with a lazy grin.
Alec is doing the same beside him, their legs touching where they both rolled to a stop; the rock under his shoulders and spine feels good against his muscles and he has his eyes closed against the light and the sky. He won't last long up here but for now, he can't stop grinning as he catches his breath, lets the uneasy feeling that lives in his gut sink beneath the easy, simple pleasure of satisfaction.
"Up is easy," he replies, voice bright. "Down is harder without the abrupt stop at the end."
Lark chuckles, kicks his heel against the stone gently. "I want to avoid the quick way down, take the scenic route, anyway. The one that doesn't end in the infirmary."
He squints up at the utterly cloudless sky. "We should have come up here at night."
"Oh sure, now he wants something that won't bake our brains out," he tells the sky plaintively, but he's still too glutted on exertion to make a real go of bitching about it.
Alec squints an eye open so he can look right back at him, smug and self satisfied as you please.
Very clearly, loud but not shouting: "Hey Enclosure: let's have a night scene instead."
It takes a moment, but then the sun goes out like someone found the light switch, and the blinding cloud less stretch of sky is replaced by indigo black and a shockwave of clear, bright stars. The heat lingers yet, but Alec stretches with a loud such if relief.
If Lark was built for living in the desert, Alec was made for living in the dark; he'd be able to see perfectly well with considerably less light than the stars reflect, and he feels safe in a way he can't explain and can't replicate otherwise. Humans are afraid of the dark. It holds no threat to him, however.
He raises his head enough to glance down at where their knees bump together as they both settle more comfortably, remembering for a moment that they're both filthy, that they're lying on their backs in the dirt and on otherwise solid rock, that there are fresh scrapes and cuts on his hands from climbing. And he breathes out.
"If I'm wrong, and I never graduate - there are worse places to spend a life until you disappear."
Lark nods, although he isn't sure Alec can see the movement. But it's a thought he has as well, one that he's been trying to examine and trying to kill, because if he gets comfortable, if he's happy then what is there to go home for? But at the same time he's struggling to do as Alec said and just live moment by moment, and honestly, a lot of his moments here are good.
Especially these. And that's what scares him.
"I'm willing to stick it out if I have to," Lark says, playfully adding a note of long-suffering. His knee knocks against Alec's; there are much worse places to be right now. "You know, there are other places I could show you sometime. And they're indoors."
Living moment by moment, being happy in them, is exactly what Alec had both advised and what that particular strategy is designed to do; it's for people, one of which Alec has always been, who have no choice in how to proceed, who have no future and no guarantees at all. It's a way not to go mad waiting for a sliver of an opportunity, and it is working.
Eventually, Alec will get restless, will get impatient, will get bored. That is not now, however.
"Yeah? Like what?" he asks, instead of pointing out that much more easily than actually going to those places, the Enclosure can take them anywhere in any world.
"Oh, like Rodeo Drive where I buy my best costumes. You have to see the rich and famous there to get the full effect. I'd love to see the way those people respond to you, versus the way they react to me." That's the thing about the Barge: most people here are either so used to weird, or so damaged, that they don't notice how wrong it is to be around Lark. Their instincts would be crying out to fight, if they were as safely sheltered their whole lives as most people are.
"And the Smithsonian, which is obviously not in my neighborhood. But there are things there that I want you to see." (Why does it matter if Alec sees them? He could call it a cultural excursion, but it's not. He knows it's not.)
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Another sip. "And if I ever decide to start a black market organ harvest, I'll need a lot of ice and a good tub." Okay, yes, this one might just be playfully testing to see how far Alec's read in the book Lark gave him.
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"You civvies are so spoiled," he teases, even though he would absolutely spend a lot of time in a bathtub if he had access to one. And: "And I guarantee you anything we did in a bathtub would be a first. You should've told me before the Christmas lists went out. I could've snuck one in under the radar for you."
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"You can just build one, you know," he offers idly. Then: "Have you ever landed in Zero?"
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Prissy lawyer facade is gone, and in its place the werewolf who would absolutely scale a sandstone cliff. "No. But I know it won't kill us."
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"You lost the right to complain about your delicate hands when you told me you like burning the skin off your paws," he offers back blithely, smirking when he catches sight of Lark's expression from the corner of his eye. He's still casually sipping on the last of his water, drawing it out.
"It would be more effective if they'd actually treat it like solitary," he muses, thoughtful. "Take away the communicators, don't allow visitors. That's the main problem: no one here has the stomach to actually enforce punishment. It's cruel."
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"Yeah, well, the hard cases would just shrug it off anyway and the smart ones would turn it back on them." He is absolutely including both of them in both categories here.
"How well do you climb?"
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"Want to go up first?"
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"Just this once, I'll take that lead." Like Lark leading them out onto the treacherous ground, Alec knows he can pick a way up the rock face that won't end with one of them with a shattered spine below.
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This is what he enjoys, if he is going to enjoy anything, if he can choose to do so: his body will do what he asks of it, and do it well, and there are very few things or people that can even keep up with him let alone stop him when he puts his mind to it. He enjoys the burn of muscles working to do what they're made to do, the pressure of air in his lungs pushing against what he demands of them, the way his pulse and his adrenaline kicks up a notch. This isn't a hard climb, and he's done something similar - window ledges and architectural spurs up the sides of buildings - probably much more recently than Lark, but he still has to pay attention. He still has to adjust his course, zigging and zagging across the sandstone and only glancing back, once, when they're about halfway up to see how Lark is doing.
Alec is grinning, his fist wedged into a fissure, anchoring him so he can let go with the other hand and lean back a bit against the wide-spread footholds to look first up ahead of them, and then back at Lark.
"Okay?"
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And he's enjoying it. He grins up at Alec. "Yeah I'm fine. I'm enjoying the view." Because he can't not throw in a sassy flirt when they're out here because Lark likes it out here, and Alec is above him doing one of the things Alec does best.
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It's the kind of thought that could easily turn into love if he let it; he doesn't, but he could. He sees how he very easily could, and if Lark were close enough he'd probably risk shoving at him even this high up. The fall wouldn't kill either of them at this point unless they landed very badly, but that's part of it, too. That's part of love.
A few feet later they're high enough that the shadow from the opposing rock wall is left behind them and they're out into direct sunlight, the sandstone beneath Alec's hands hot with it, scalding if he lingers too long. Anticipating it, he takes them up a slightly steeper but ultimately shorter path, leaning far out to catch hold of the final edge, arms shaking as he pulls himself up over the lip and rolls onto the top.
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Lark growls a little as he hauls himself up that last bit, and he sprawls on his back to catch his breath when he's there. The sky overhead is dizzying in how vast and how close it seems.
"This is a good perch," he decides, with a lazy grin.
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"Up is easy," he replies, voice bright. "Down is harder without the abrupt stop at the end."
He doesn't hate it out here.
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He squints up at the utterly cloudless sky. "We should have come up here at night."
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Instead: "Want to see a neat trick?"
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"Yeah, let's see it."
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Very clearly, loud but not shouting: "Hey Enclosure: let's have a night scene instead."
It takes a moment, but then the sun goes out like someone found the light switch, and the blinding cloud less stretch of sky is replaced by indigo black and a shockwave of clear, bright stars. The heat lingers yet, but Alec stretches with a loud such if relief.
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The stars overhead, even if they aren't real, are absolutely mindblowing.
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He raises his head enough to glance down at where their knees bump together as they both settle more comfortably, remembering for a moment that they're both filthy, that they're lying on their backs in the dirt and on otherwise solid rock, that there are fresh scrapes and cuts on his hands from climbing. And he breathes out.
"If I'm wrong, and I never graduate - there are worse places to spend a life until you disappear."
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Especially these. And that's what scares him.
"I'm willing to stick it out if I have to," Lark says, playfully adding a note of long-suffering. His knee knocks against Alec's; there are much worse places to be right now. "You know, there are other places I could show you sometime. And they're indoors."
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Eventually, Alec will get restless, will get impatient, will get bored. That is not now, however.
"Yeah? Like what?" he asks, instead of pointing out that much more easily than actually going to those places, the Enclosure can take them anywhere in any world.
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"And the Smithsonian, which is obviously not in my neighborhood. But there are things there that I want you to see." (Why does it matter if Alec sees them? He could call it a cultural excursion, but it's not. He knows it's not.)
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