She's silent, then, drops back enough to butt her head against his leg and steer him up to the spot on deck where the group had brought back their piece of soul. What Alec has trapped in the pack has taken the form of a stack of books and they simultaneously weigh down the contents and provide a boost of energy for whoever's holding it; both of those fade almost immediately as the Barge absorbs itself back unto itself, just like the returning bodies do their own souls.
"You know I will," Riley says at last. Whatever else the harpies have drawn out of them both - and it drives her mad to know she doesn't know, she can't feel Alec at all from here or know what he knows - he has to know that much is true. Whatever else they're saying, the deepest part of Alec won't turn on the deepest part of Lark without very, very good reason. "Take more supplies with you. Is he hurt? Are you?"
"I'm not. I'm okay." Lark has sat down, somehow more exhausted by the loss of the Barge's weight than he thought he'd be. His feet are bleeding, though, which Naki helpfully points out with a sarcastic, Sure you are.
He should have kept his boots after he'd changed, back when he first abandoned the group, but he hadn't. Maybe that part of him had thought he'd just stay a wolf forever.
"He might have a cut, but it's just one that I can think of. I'll take antiseptic for him in case." He has some in his own pack but he isn't going to risk hell's version of gangrene by giving it away. Alec made this pack and he made it for Lark, so Lark is going to be the only one who uses it.
Lark gets to his feet with a small hiss, the only concession he gives to pain. "Where can I get supplies?"
She wants to tell Lark to stop, to stay, to not risk it again; she does want to, but she doesn't do it, can't make herself ask him not to do what he wants to do to bring Alec back to her. What she does instead is bump against Lark when he sits down, drops down across his legs and licks briefly at the cuts while he talks, her tongue rough but numbing, soothing after a moment - for her boy, anyway. The moment Lark tenses to move, she stands and moves out of the way.
"He won't admit to being injured but he won't turn away whatever he needs to do to fix it, either. Not like this," she warns, because it's true that Alec has more medical knowledge than almost anyone on board at this point and he'll use it, he'll maintain himself, but he's even less inclined now to admit to vulnerabilities that others don't know about. "This way."
It's the infirmary that Riley leads Lark to, although she waits for him to open the supply room for her; they don't need keys, because Alec doesn't have them normally, though he can and does ask Tiffany to open whatever he needs and it typically happens. There are boxes and boxes of gauze stacked near the floor in the back, and she pulls them out of the way with one paw, claws briefly at the back of the shelf until it moves. Lark will be able to smell the stash of nonperishable items from there, though they're wrapped in several layers of plastic bags, though the outer one is medical grade. It's not much, but it's more than nothing.
"Antiseptic is behind you. The blue bottle is the most concentrated." She knows what Alec knew before they landed.
Lark shares the same instinct Riley has, so even though her tongue is feline, it's welcome. If Alec only knew how many times Lark fought the urge to lick at a cut or a bruise....
When she's done, he smiles at her, and he might be exhausted but it's a genuinely warm expression. He tucks the bottle of antiseptic away, and secures Alec's extra stash, everything he can carry.
"If he's hurt, I'll know," Lark promises her. "And I'll make sure he takes care of it. Even if I have to pin him down and do it myself."
By the time Lark has found Alec again, he's lost the harpies; now that they both have warning of what to look, listen, smell for, it's not hard to stay off their radar a second time, at least not for the time that they spend out here. Alec doesn't try to evade Lark once he realizes he's being followed again, but neither does he welcome him back beyond a quick query if he made it back alright: it's business as usual, as if he never left, as if this is what they do all day every day.
And Alec is bleeding, the four ragged scratches skipping down one side of his chest from the harpy are still open and oozing his blood, but he's wrapped them by now, and he's confident they're not serious; his body will handle them on its own, shallow enough that he expects them to be closed within a day, gone as if they never happened within three. If he's feeling the other effects they don't show, though he is cool to the touch, though he's not keeping quite the same pace he was when they started.
They find another piece of the Barge's soul; they also find Nina, and while Alec normally wouldn't bother himself carting a body along anywhere, he still has a faint conviction that the Barge may not leave until all its passengers are as present as they can be, and it's not that much of a hardship. A little awkward for moving quickly and stealthily, but worth the possibility that he's right, or that it will make it that much easier to leave.
By the time they've reached the cave mouth beside Elysium again, by the time Alec has navigated stepping over, around, past a joyous and once more distressed Riley to deposit Nina near her fennec soul, by the time he's retreated a little ways away from where most of the other people are to sit down and give himself over to Riley's insistent pushing, pulling, clawing, licking, and shoving, he knows he's not going out again. Within a few minutes, his soul settling back beneath his skin with Riley's proximity, warmth sinking back into his muscles and his bones where before there was none, he's shivering hard enough that his teeth are chattering faintly and all he can think to do is hook an arm around Riley's neck and hold her close, forehead to forehead, their breathing in time.
The people Lark would go out there for are already here by that point. Some of them are dead, but they're accounted for. He sits near to all the movement and reunions, but makes no move to greet anyone. He would like to blame his reticence on the lingering effects of having lost his soul, but the soul was nothing. It's the truths he left out there, the ones now shared with Alec, that make him consider vanishing for a while.
That's a truth he kept to himself: he knows at least part of why Alec always vanishes when something happens. Lark wants to do the same thing. He has an instinct that pulls him to socialize, yes, but his personality is such that he would rather take a break than try to talk through his problems. The instinct is not the reason he doesn't. He just can't see a way to disappear on the Barge without calling attention to himself.
He sits down and strokes the inside curve of Naki's tail, even allows her to sting him because her venom is like water to him. His attention is fixed on the mouth of the cave, at least according to appearances. Really, he's listening to Alec and Riley.
Naki drops off his hand and scuttles over when she finally loses patience. That gives way to surprise and concern when she sees the bandages. "Are you still bleeding?"
By the time Naki has come over, Riley has wrapped herself as far around Alec as her long but narrow body can, stretched across his lap with her head pressed against his chest. She desperately wants to kick at the scratches. Even if it were more sensible than the bandages - which it isn't - Alec wouldn't let her.
Scorpions don't have any habits like licking when there's a wound. There's nothing Naki can do at all to try to soothe pain. So she just settles for crawling up on Riley's back.
Lark comes over after a minute or two, having decided that if he stays near Steve much longer, T'Pol will try to kill him. "What happened?" He asks, because he smelled blood well before he's reached them.
After the flood where Alec had to answer everything he saw or thought or heard, he took great pleasure in refusing to answer questions, sometimes even those he would have normally, just to exercise the ability. He wants to do that now, wants to ignore Lark because he has no idea what his thoughts and his body are doing, and he's exhausted. He's cold and he can barely feel his fingertips and he just wants to lie down and sleep for three days and how unusual is that for him?
But with their reunion, Riley once more knows everything Alec does, and she doesn't so much as hesitate while Alec lets his eyes fall closed: "Harpies," she hisses, snarls, ineffectually. "It was harpies, and he still wouldn't kill them."
"He wouldn't be here if he had," Lark murmurs, his hands itching to do something about the blood, about the way Alec seems a moment from falling asleep sitting up. At the same time, he wants to turn around and go back to Steve and pretend nothing ever happened with Alec here.
"Whatever happened to being at peace with what you do to keep going?" Naki says to Lark. "Giving up a few words is not the worst thing you've done to survive."
If Naki says it, part of Lark knows it. But it's a part he can't find just now and he doesn't want to start looking here.
Riley knows Lark is right, but she has also been rattled by how much time Alec spent away from her, by feeling the two of them separate three times in the past week, by knowing that if they are going to survive they don't have much time left here together. She doesn't know what to address first. She almost snarls at Naki and that is when Alec reaches up and lays his hand across her eyes.
"Shhh," he soothes her, rubbing the center of her head with the tip of his thumb, breathing out for them both.
"The difference," he tells the scorpion, "Is being at peace with what you choose to do to keep going. This wasn't choice."
They decided never to speak of it aloud. One more thing taken from the both of them, and it still rings against a part of Alec that feels very brittle and weak.
Naki is more than ready to argue the point, but Lark reaches out and grabs her, and tucks her under the shirt he rummaged.
Part of joining with Naki again means he feels the old familiar pull toward pack. It's a dozen times stronger now that he has been without it, and it's a hundred times stronger toward Alec. And that's exactly why he never would have let himself get close to the girls, never would have taken one as a lover, even if the mental bond issues didn't exist.
He feels hollow and sluggish sitting here beside the person he cares for--loves, if the harpies get that word then he can use it in his own damned head--and to feel a gulf widening steadily between them. Because Alec is right, too: there was no choice. He chose what secrets to share, but that one was always going to come up because there are only a half dozen or so that are greater.
"Tell me what you need," he finally says, just within transgenic hearing. He could mean a bottle of water, or he could mean something much larger, something that treads close to the thing they aren't going to talk about.
And Alec, in his turn, would be lying if he said he didn't feel just a little safer with Lark settled beside him, even if there's some deeply ingrained, reflexive part of him that thinks he's not safe at all now. That they never will be. It's out in the open, and the one thing that can't be proven is intent as long as it's never stated, but now it's stated.
His thoughts keep chasing each other in circles. Riley's tail switches back and forth, her breathing in time with Alec's.
"I don't know," he answers, finally, tired and numb and honest.
"Neither do I." And he's not sure what to do when neither of them has an idea to go off of. What it means is that his best option is the one he doesn't like right now: honest talking.
"The last thing I want to do is make people think you're a target if they want to get to me. Just because you could handle them doesn't mean you should have to." It's a possibility that Lark does something to bring people down on them, over and over and over. He's trying to be on good behavior for the sake of getting out, but he's got ideas nagging that could delay graduation a good long while.
Since it's out there, "I wouldn't be okay if something happened to you because of something I did." Which is a civilized way of putting how he'd react.
This is why Alec doesn't have a good answer for Lark: every time he sets his feet on the path of logical process, every time he starts to think everything through, he doesn't know where the next step is. The past few months have been an avalanche of the kind of trauma Alec deals with worst, from forced honesty at all to recovered memories of people he loved and betrayed and killed to being unable to control his own emotions except to lock them down, and now this. Alec has safeguards in his own behavior to fight back against doing things against his own will, and they are burnt out and depleted and he is tired.
There is the memory of being out there, where nothing but logic and pragmatism mattered, and in some small part of him he wants to return there long enough to work this out without the fog of pain and fear and fatigue that currently keeps him mired in one place. This - more than comfort, though both of them accept it readily from one another, indeed from themselves - is why Riley lays and leans and anchors him as much as she can just now.
"I don't know what to tell you," he replies after several moments of trying, even of trying to remember what he'd decided the moment the harpies fell upon them. "People do what they're going to do, regardless. Things happen anyway. We can't control any of it."
Lark is pretty good at managing what happens when things go sour. He may have made a mistake with Baron but he knows now what the mistake was, and he can get ahead of it in the future. "There's no such thing as control. That's not what I mean. In a few weeks the dust is going to settle and whatever's still standing is what we have."
And he isn't sure what that will be. Alec is the one who shuts himself away to regroup when things turn. Lark hasn't wanted or needed solitude since the war began, and he wants it even less now. It's the fear of losing this thing with Alec that has him torn between staying firm and backing off like he always has before, because at the end he's always been welcomed back.
"Until then we just carry on as usual, or we don't."
I don't know what that means, Alec almost admits, but he stops himself from saying it a third time. Some habits die hard enough that they refuse to go at all, and this is one of them for him.
And he is trying desperately hard to shut himself away, to wrap himself up in all the parts of him that are rigid and unyielding and tenacious and vicious, all the parts that don't need anyone else to hold them up, and it isn't as if they should be difficult to find. He is mostly composed of independent pieces.
Lark makes it hard to think. This place makes it hard to think. It's Riley who asks, quietly, her voice velvet: "Tell us what you need."
"Honestly, Riley, I have no idea." He closes his eyes, just listening to the world rather than having to track movements. "Part of me wants to stay as close as possible."
He doesn't sound all that invested in the idea. He nearly always has that urge after a flood or a breach or a port, and he always pushes it away in favor of the isolation that Alec always asks for.
Alec, of course, would argue that the only thing that matters is need; this is why he tries not to need anything, why he keeps his few absolute necessities very close to the vest as it were. There are only two or three things he can't do without and that keeps him light, keeps him mobile, keeps him unattached.
He'd let it drop there, let them separate, if he were alone. It's Riley again who asks: "Then what do you want?" She doesn't lift her head away from Alec's chest, doesn't bring her ears forward from where they're turned back, but she does slit one golden eye open to see him from over Alec's arm.
It's a philosophy that Lark agrees with in theory. He's just begun to think it's time to put it in practice, which leaves the broad question of what he needs at all.
"I'll tell if you will," Lark murmurs, and Naki stings him for it to prod him into canning the games. "I want to know that whatever happened in there didn't torch something I don't want to go without yet."
'Yet' because he and Alec know how temporary things are, especially good things, and because there's an expiration date on it: thirty seconds after they both graduate.
Alec makes a soft hitching sound that was probably a laugh before the faint shiver of his teeth got to it; before Riley's low growl can stop him, he says, "It can't."
But Riley's right: he needs to think before he speaks, not because it will give him time to come up with a better lie, but because it will make him more honest. He's taught himself to reflexively lie, to bluff and distance and evade, so that it's first nature. If he wants to be honest he has to stop, process, and choose to do so.
"It can't," he says again, more firmly, and this time Riley doesn't impede him. "Love isn't food or water or air, not something that can be taken away from me by anyone without the ability to reach into me and scoop it out." Such people exist, he knows, but now he also knows how viciously he'll fight to keep it happening. "You are, though."
"We've always known that." It shouldn't change things now, but it's been a building fear for Lark for the past month. "I've known for a long time, and I learned to live with it. But maybe I was doing it the wrong way."
"No, you've always known that. I've already had it taken from me before I even knew what it was." The freedom to love - to be secure, if he so chooses, in that love - is a new prospect for Alec, one that terrifies him in the way that all unknowns terrify everyone, at least the ones that have the ability to do considerable damage. And if it costs him something vital to admit that in fact Rachel was taken from him rather than he chose to give her up, well. Why not one more vital thing after the past couple of months?
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"You know I will," Riley says at last. Whatever else the harpies have drawn out of them both - and it drives her mad to know she doesn't know, she can't feel Alec at all from here or know what he knows - he has to know that much is true. Whatever else they're saying, the deepest part of Alec won't turn on the deepest part of Lark without very, very good reason. "Take more supplies with you. Is he hurt? Are you?"
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He should have kept his boots after he'd changed, back when he first abandoned the group, but he hadn't. Maybe that part of him had thought he'd just stay a wolf forever.
"He might have a cut, but it's just one that I can think of. I'll take antiseptic for him in case." He has some in his own pack but he isn't going to risk hell's version of gangrene by giving it away. Alec made this pack and he made it for Lark, so Lark is going to be the only one who uses it.
Lark gets to his feet with a small hiss, the only concession he gives to pain. "Where can I get supplies?"
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"He won't admit to being injured but he won't turn away whatever he needs to do to fix it, either. Not like this," she warns, because it's true that Alec has more medical knowledge than almost anyone on board at this point and he'll use it, he'll maintain himself, but he's even less inclined now to admit to vulnerabilities that others don't know about. "This way."
It's the infirmary that Riley leads Lark to, although she waits for him to open the supply room for her; they don't need keys, because Alec doesn't have them normally, though he can and does ask Tiffany to open whatever he needs and it typically happens. There are boxes and boxes of gauze stacked near the floor in the back, and she pulls them out of the way with one paw, claws briefly at the back of the shelf until it moves. Lark will be able to smell the stash of nonperishable items from there, though they're wrapped in several layers of plastic bags, though the outer one is medical grade. It's not much, but it's more than nothing.
"Antiseptic is behind you. The blue bottle is the most concentrated." She knows what Alec knew before they landed.
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When she's done, he smiles at her, and he might be exhausted but it's a genuinely warm expression. He tucks the bottle of antiseptic away, and secures Alec's extra stash, everything he can carry.
"If he's hurt, I'll know," Lark promises her. "And I'll make sure he takes care of it. Even if I have to pin him down and do it myself."
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"Be careful. The point is all of us leaving."
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And Alec is bleeding, the four ragged scratches skipping down one side of his chest from the harpy are still open and oozing his blood, but he's wrapped them by now, and he's confident they're not serious; his body will handle them on its own, shallow enough that he expects them to be closed within a day, gone as if they never happened within three. If he's feeling the other effects they don't show, though he is cool to the touch, though he's not keeping quite the same pace he was when they started.
They find another piece of the Barge's soul; they also find Nina, and while Alec normally wouldn't bother himself carting a body along anywhere, he still has a faint conviction that the Barge may not leave until all its passengers are as present as they can be, and it's not that much of a hardship. A little awkward for moving quickly and stealthily, but worth the possibility that he's right, or that it will make it that much easier to leave.
By the time they've reached the cave mouth beside Elysium again, by the time Alec has navigated stepping over, around, past a joyous and once more distressed Riley to deposit Nina near her fennec soul, by the time he's retreated a little ways away from where most of the other people are to sit down and give himself over to Riley's insistent pushing, pulling, clawing, licking, and shoving, he knows he's not going out again. Within a few minutes, his soul settling back beneath his skin with Riley's proximity, warmth sinking back into his muscles and his bones where before there was none, he's shivering hard enough that his teeth are chattering faintly and all he can think to do is hook an arm around Riley's neck and hold her close, forehead to forehead, their breathing in time.
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That's a truth he kept to himself: he knows at least part of why Alec always vanishes when something happens. Lark wants to do the same thing. He has an instinct that pulls him to socialize, yes, but his personality is such that he would rather take a break than try to talk through his problems. The instinct is not the reason he doesn't. He just can't see a way to disappear on the Barge without calling attention to himself.
He sits down and strokes the inside curve of Naki's tail, even allows her to sting him because her venom is like water to him. His attention is fixed on the mouth of the cave, at least according to appearances. Really, he's listening to Alec and Riley.
Naki drops off his hand and scuttles over when she finally loses patience. That gives way to surprise and concern when she sees the bandages. "Are you still bleeding?"
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"Yes," she answers before Alec can. "Yes, he is."
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Lark comes over after a minute or two, having decided that if he stays near Steve much longer, T'Pol will try to kill him. "What happened?" He asks, because he smelled blood well before he's reached them.
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But with their reunion, Riley once more knows everything Alec does, and she doesn't so much as hesitate while Alec lets his eyes fall closed: "Harpies," she hisses, snarls, ineffectually. "It was harpies, and he still wouldn't kill them."
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"Whatever happened to being at peace with what you do to keep going?" Naki says to Lark. "Giving up a few words is not the worst thing you've done to survive."
If Naki says it, part of Lark knows it. But it's a part he can't find just now and he doesn't want to start looking here.
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"Shhh," he soothes her, rubbing the center of her head with the tip of his thumb, breathing out for them both.
"The difference," he tells the scorpion, "Is being at peace with what you choose to do to keep going. This wasn't choice."
They decided never to speak of it aloud. One more thing taken from the both of them, and it still rings against a part of Alec that feels very brittle and weak.
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Part of joining with Naki again means he feels the old familiar pull toward pack. It's a dozen times stronger now that he has been without it, and it's a hundred times stronger toward Alec. And that's exactly why he never would have let himself get close to the girls, never would have taken one as a lover, even if the mental bond issues didn't exist.
He feels hollow and sluggish sitting here beside the person he cares for--loves, if the harpies get that word then he can use it in his own damned head--and to feel a gulf widening steadily between them. Because Alec is right, too: there was no choice. He chose what secrets to share, but that one was always going to come up because there are only a half dozen or so that are greater.
"Tell me what you need," he finally says, just within transgenic hearing. He could mean a bottle of water, or he could mean something much larger, something that treads close to the thing they aren't going to talk about.
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His thoughts keep chasing each other in circles. Riley's tail switches back and forth, her breathing in time with Alec's.
"I don't know," he answers, finally, tired and numb and honest.
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"The last thing I want to do is make people think you're a target if they want to get to me. Just because you could handle them doesn't mean you should have to." It's a possibility that Lark does something to bring people down on them, over and over and over. He's trying to be on good behavior for the sake of getting out, but he's got ideas nagging that could delay graduation a good long while.
Since it's out there, "I wouldn't be okay if something happened to you because of something I did." Which is a civilized way of putting how he'd react.
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There is the memory of being out there, where nothing but logic and pragmatism mattered, and in some small part of him he wants to return there long enough to work this out without the fog of pain and fear and fatigue that currently keeps him mired in one place. This - more than comfort, though both of them accept it readily from one another, indeed from themselves - is why Riley lays and leans and anchors him as much as she can just now.
"I don't know what to tell you," he replies after several moments of trying, even of trying to remember what he'd decided the moment the harpies fell upon them. "People do what they're going to do, regardless. Things happen anyway. We can't control any of it."
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And he isn't sure what that will be. Alec is the one who shuts himself away to regroup when things turn. Lark hasn't wanted or needed solitude since the war began, and he wants it even less now. It's the fear of losing this thing with Alec that has him torn between staying firm and backing off like he always has before, because at the end he's always been welcomed back.
"Until then we just carry on as usual, or we don't."
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And he is trying desperately hard to shut himself away, to wrap himself up in all the parts of him that are rigid and unyielding and tenacious and vicious, all the parts that don't need anyone else to hold them up, and it isn't as if they should be difficult to find. He is mostly composed of independent pieces.
Lark makes it hard to think. This place makes it hard to think. It's Riley who asks, quietly, her voice velvet: "Tell us what you need."
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He doesn't sound all that invested in the idea. He nearly always has that urge after a flood or a breach or a port, and he always pushes it away in favor of the isolation that Alec always asks for.
"I don't know. Maybe it's too soon for needs."
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He'd let it drop there, let them separate, if he were alone. It's Riley again who asks: "Then what do you want?" She doesn't lift her head away from Alec's chest, doesn't bring her ears forward from where they're turned back, but she does slit one golden eye open to see him from over Alec's arm.
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"I'll tell if you will," Lark murmurs, and Naki stings him for it to prod him into canning the games. "I want to know that whatever happened in there didn't torch something I don't want to go without yet."
'Yet' because he and Alec know how temporary things are, especially good things, and because there's an expiration date on it: thirty seconds after they both graduate.
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But Riley's right: he needs to think before he speaks, not because it will give him time to come up with a better lie, but because it will make him more honest. He's taught himself to reflexively lie, to bluff and distance and evade, so that it's first nature. If he wants to be honest he has to stop, process, and choose to do so.
"It can't," he says again, more firmly, and this time Riley doesn't impede him. "Love isn't food or water or air, not something that can be taken away from me by anyone without the ability to reach into me and scoop it out." Such people exist, he knows, but now he also knows how viciously he'll fight to keep it happening. "You are, though."
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"But go on. Tell me what that means now."
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