"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?
"Fight about what?" he asks, because as always they're having three and four different conversations at once, as always they're trading off vagaries and damage and trying - instinctively, reflexively, unknowingly - to make it all look like something else, as always it would be impossible for an outside party to keep up with what they're hearing, but unlike always Alec hasn't the energy or the attention for it.
And unlike always he isn't sure he can deal with misunderstanding creeping in between them where so much already is. "What this are we talking about?"
"Goddammit," Lark mutters through his teeth, because he feels like he's stepped out of a funhouse to find the city outside on fire. He twists to face Alec and breathes in deep, yanking all his thoughts back to him so he can start again at the beginning.
"We have a pattern after the Admiral kicks us around." He watches Alec because there's no way he's missed it: Alec taking a week away to think, Lark throwing himself into any project he can get his hands on.
"Only he took choices from us and right now, I feel like he pulled my liver out and handed it to you, and having been with you the past few months I'd bet it was worse on you. But you know what, here's the truth, without them forcing it on us: I do love you." He doesn't love easily but, stubbornly, he makes himself clarify: "I'm in love with you. And you're right. The harpies don't change that. But it does seem like it changes something."
They do have a pattern, and Alec has noticed it; he's noticed other patterns, too, like how if Alec doesn't get his space to think he picks fights, and how it's still a language Lark seems to understand. Like how Alec pushes and Lark pulls and they still close ranks when someone outside tries to do one or the other - even if those ranks don't always do anything.
He thinks it's fitting, in fact, that he was the first one to say it when it was most useful and they had to do something - he who is used to cutting pieces of himself out and throwing them into the fire - and that Lark is the first one to say it when it's just the two of them, when all that's left is making the best out of what's left - he who is used to subverting pieces of himself and turning it to his advantage. They each do the other, of course, but Alec has had so little choice in his life; Lark has had so much.
Alec is always ready to abandon them and leave them behind; Lark always follows after him with the pieces and insists they can try again. Lark doesn't want this weight any more than Alec does. Alec doesn't want Lark any less than Lark wants him. It's all purely logical and yet none of it makes sense. And Alec...
Lark is too worn out to properly fight right now. If Alec had snapped at him he would simply have left to give them space. Because it is true: Lark is the one who holds onto whatever is left, whatever is discarded, and who brings them back again. One of the first activities he suggested was frisbee; perhaps it's the same instinct but gone much deeper that always takes him to Alec.
After all this year has hammered into them, he somehow never expected to see Alec cry. It rattles the hollow spaces inside of him, and without thinking he slides closer, curling around him as if to shield a wound from the outside world.
He does not tell him it's okay. He doesn't whisper soothing things like he would do if this was Scott or Steve, Tiffany or Nina. Alec gets the full, silent brunt of Lark's instincts; Alec gets the side of Lark that would detonate a building if it would help.
It's not okay; in this moment nothing feels like it will ever be okay again, or maybe like it ever was, and it hurts. Alec has been shot, stabbed, bitten, bones broken, every part of him bruised and battered again and again and again, and the only thing that comes close in his memory is being strapped in that chair, staring at that red light and waiting for the laser, to lose another piece of himself or maybe all of it, to feel every second of it happening. He's said goodbye for the last time - or never got the chance - to friends and family alike. None of it hurt like hearing Lark say he loves him even now does, and the part of him that feels nothing at all knows it's mostly the accumulation of the past year, right now it just doesn't make any sense. Right now it just hurts.
He doesn't pull away when Lark moves in; he doesn't stiffen or protest or evade. There are more tears building in his eyes and he closes them against it but they fall anyway, and he can't do anything about that either. None of it is loud - so little of his most honest self is anywhere near as big and bold as the act he puts on daily - but he's just as helpless to control it for quite some time as if it were one of the dramatic, emotional fits that have populated the last few weeks on the Barge from other people.
And in the end, after all of that, after everything, it should be an easy decision to kill this now. To kill them. It's destroying them both in ways they don't know how to fight, and that's before anyone else can even really get hold of it. It does neither of them any favors, they both know it must end, and yet. And yet Alec isn't ready to lose it yet, either. And what is he supposed to do with that?
"I love you too," he admits quietly at last, his voice thick and raw, and he's leaning on both Lark and Riley and Naki right now and he doesn't feel any safer, any more secure, any warmer or stronger. Saying it feels like pulling the knife out, feels like leaving the wound empty and unobstructed to bleed freely. "But I don't know what it changes."
"Then maybe it doesn't." God, Lark hopes it doesn't, hopes this is all lingering paranoia and adrenaline. He actually hopes it's all him, and not some mutual reaction.
Nothing right now is okay. But it would be worse if they cut this off now and turned it from a slow bleed into some arterial spray.
"I know I'm pushing for answers when neither of us even know where we are." He's sorry for it. A little.
"I need time," he replies after a moment, tipping his face against Riley, using her fur to wipe away the evidence even though he barely felt the tears start, and he hasn't felt them stop, and he doesn't know what that means either.
"I know how that sounds, but..." And he is sorry for it a lot but that doesn't change the necessity. "I shouldn't want any of this. I should want to get as far from you as I can, I should want to stop this right now or half a hundred times before, and I can. I can, I've done it before, I can drop everything and walk away and I can act like I'm fine until it's not a lie anymore, and then never think of any of this again. I should want to do that now. I do."
He desperately wants to shut this all down again and block it off somewhere he never has to look at it. "But I can't do that without leaving all of it. And I don't want to do that, but I have to figure out what to do."
First, Lark's stomach drops because it still hurts to know, and he can feel it in a sudden tension of his muscles no matter how he fights it. He sits back and that's when he feels relief that Alec has asked. At least it's familiar.
But it's followed by another surge of panic when Alec explains. He wants to argue, to convince, to shake this off, but he doesn't. For one thing it wouldn't help. For another, "Yeah. No, me, too."
He's never needed time before. But this all feels like standing with his toes curled over the edge of a cliff, and all he has to do is decide if he wants to fall. He isn't sure any more than Alec is.
Alec can't answer that. He's not good with reassurances, he still balks inherently at thinking of the future, of promising anything about what he's going to do next. It isn't that he's concerned about breaking his word because he's not, or at least not with most people. It's not even that he doesn't want to lie to Lark. He just knows how quickly false hope can kill, and he is a little afraid of that.
Riley breathes out, and answers for him: "Have you ever known us to give up at all?"
" This is different." That's what scares him enough to ask for reassurance
even though he doesn't believe in it. Even though he knows Alec won't give
it. That's the sort of small, irrational desperation he feels now and he
doesn't know how long that's been there.
"You need time and I can give that. But...I want to stay until it's time
for take off. Okay?"
"It's not different," Alec grates back, firm, and he means it as much as he meant what he said earlier about not getting a choice. It's not different. He doesn't give up. If he and Lark are done, it will be because they decided it; if he forgets him, it will be because he chose to move on after all of this. A promise not to give up is not a promise that everything will work out as they both want it to in this moment - it is not a promise that what they want won't change as soon as the dust settles - but it is that much.
As for the rest, he doesn't answer verbally, but the moment that Lark presents the possibility of him leaving - in the form of having to ask at all, but the thought is still there - Alec responds by reaching out to hold onto Lark instead, his cold-numb fingers curling somewhat clumsily into Lark's shirt or closing around his arm.
"Stay," he does finally say, Riley's tongue licking nervously over her muzzle again and again.
Lark holds on tighter, careful to avoid pressing on the wounds he knows Alec has but utterly unwilling to let anyone see them and think there's an opening for outside conversation.
"You smell good," he murmurs, which is a bit nonsense, Alec smells of sweat and blood and salt right now. But there's still that astringent tang to him, and that smell is the one that reminds him of nights spent sleeping safely, and long games, and the way Alec gleams when he's doing something he loves.
Which means this is also the smell that could gut him clean, over and over and over, if this ends and they're both still on the Barge.
The thing is, Alec never minds pain - not the kind that burns through his flesh and ignites his bones, anyway, not the kind he can now soothe with medical knowledge without having to avail anyone else of its severity or existence. He doesn't like it and he complains about it freely now, but in the grand scheme of things, he doesn't actually care. Lark presses closer and this time Alec doesn't complain at all.
He does laugh a little, letting the ball of warm bodies and daemons absorb the sound of it. It's not for anyone else anyway.
"I smell like I need at least three showers," he replies, because maybe Lark has the sharper nose, but Alec's is plenty sharp enough for that. "You just haven't noticed because the same can be said for you."
The harpy stench is the worst of it; he can smell their blood and all the places where their feathers touched him, can smell the dirt under their talons sunk into the jagged tears in his jacket. If only he could have kept it on.
"Bastard," Lark snorts, but like always there's a note of playfulness in it, sometimes even of delight. "You might need one. I could change shapes, give myself a once over like Riley does, and you'd never know I hadn't scrubbed myself with your shampoo."
He gives Riley a conspiratorial smile and a nod, one tongue-bather to another potential tongue-bather.
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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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"This is why I asked you what you want. This is exactly why. You want to fight about this? Is that what you need?"
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And unlike always he isn't sure he can deal with misunderstanding creeping in between them where so much already is. "What this are we talking about?"
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"We have a pattern after the Admiral kicks us around." He watches Alec because there's no way he's missed it: Alec taking a week away to think, Lark throwing himself into any project he can get his hands on.
"Only he took choices from us and right now, I feel like he pulled my liver out and handed it to you, and having been with you the past few months I'd bet it was worse on you. But you know what, here's the truth, without them forcing it on us: I do love you." He doesn't love easily but, stubbornly, he makes himself clarify: "I'm in love with you. And you're right. The harpies don't change that. But it does seem like it changes something."
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He thinks it's fitting, in fact, that he was the first one to say it when it was most useful and they had to do something - he who is used to cutting pieces of himself out and throwing them into the fire - and that Lark is the first one to say it when it's just the two of them, when all that's left is making the best out of what's left - he who is used to subverting pieces of himself and turning it to his advantage. They each do the other, of course, but Alec has had so little choice in his life; Lark has had so much.
Alec is always ready to abandon them and leave them behind; Lark always follows after him with the pieces and insists they can try again. Lark doesn't want this weight any more than Alec does. Alec doesn't want Lark any less than Lark wants him. It's all purely logical and yet none of it makes sense. And Alec...
Alec doesn't know why he's crying.
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After all this year has hammered into them, he somehow never expected to see Alec cry. It rattles the hollow spaces inside of him, and without thinking he slides closer, curling around him as if to shield a wound from the outside world.
He does not tell him it's okay. He doesn't whisper soothing things like he would do if this was Scott or Steve, Tiffany or Nina. Alec gets the full, silent brunt of Lark's instincts; Alec gets the side of Lark that would detonate a building if it would help.
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He doesn't pull away when Lark moves in; he doesn't stiffen or protest or evade. There are more tears building in his eyes and he closes them against it but they fall anyway, and he can't do anything about that either. None of it is loud - so little of his most honest self is anywhere near as big and bold as the act he puts on daily - but he's just as helpless to control it for quite some time as if it were one of the dramatic, emotional fits that have populated the last few weeks on the Barge from other people.
And in the end, after all of that, after everything, it should be an easy decision to kill this now. To kill them. It's destroying them both in ways they don't know how to fight, and that's before anyone else can even really get hold of it. It does neither of them any favors, they both know it must end, and yet. And yet Alec isn't ready to lose it yet, either. And what is he supposed to do with that?
"I love you too," he admits quietly at last, his voice thick and raw, and he's leaning on both Lark and Riley and Naki right now and he doesn't feel any safer, any more secure, any warmer or stronger. Saying it feels like pulling the knife out, feels like leaving the wound empty and unobstructed to bleed freely. "But I don't know what it changes."
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Nothing right now is okay. But it would be worse if they cut this off now and turned it from a slow bleed into some arterial spray.
"I know I'm pushing for answers when neither of us even know where we are." He's sorry for it. A little.
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"I know how that sounds, but..." And he is sorry for it a lot but that doesn't change the necessity. "I shouldn't want any of this. I should want to get as far from you as I can, I should want to stop this right now or half a hundred times before, and I can. I can, I've done it before, I can drop everything and walk away and I can act like I'm fine until it's not a lie anymore, and then never think of any of this again. I should want to do that now. I do."
He desperately wants to shut this all down again and block it off somewhere he never has to look at it. "But I can't do that without leaving all of it. And I don't want to do that, but I have to figure out what to do."
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But it's followed by another surge of panic when Alec explains. He wants to argue, to convince, to shake this off, but he doesn't. For one thing it wouldn't help. For another, "Yeah. No, me, too."
He's never needed time before. But this all feels like standing with his toes curled over the edge of a cliff, and all he has to do is decide if he wants to fall. He isn't sure any more than Alec is.
"Just- don't give up on me easily."
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Riley breathes out, and answers for him: "Have you ever known us to give up at all?"
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" This is different." That's what scares him enough to ask for reassurance even though he doesn't believe in it. Even though he knows Alec won't give it. That's the sort of small, irrational desperation he feels now and he doesn't know how long that's been there.
"You need time and I can give that. But...I want to stay until it's time for take off. Okay?"
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As for the rest, he doesn't answer verbally, but the moment that Lark presents the possibility of him leaving - in the form of having to ask at all, but the thought is still there - Alec responds by reaching out to hold onto Lark instead, his cold-numb fingers curling somewhat clumsily into Lark's shirt or closing around his arm.
"Stay," he does finally say, Riley's tongue licking nervously over her muzzle again and again.
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"You smell good," he murmurs, which is a bit nonsense, Alec smells of sweat and blood and salt right now. But there's still that astringent tang to him, and that smell is the one that reminds him of nights spent sleeping safely, and long games, and the way Alec gleams when he's doing something he loves.
Which means this is also the smell that could gut him clean, over and over and over, if this ends and they're both still on the Barge.
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He does laugh a little, letting the ball of warm bodies and daemons absorb the sound of it. It's not for anyone else anyway.
"I smell like I need at least three showers," he replies, because maybe Lark has the sharper nose, but Alec's is plenty sharp enough for that. "You just haven't noticed because the same can be said for you."
The harpy stench is the worst of it; he can smell their blood and all the places where their feathers touched him, can smell the dirt under their talons sunk into the jagged tears in his jacket. If only he could have kept it on.
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He gives Riley a conspiratorial smile and a nod, one tongue-bather to another potential tongue-bather.
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