and these nights never really got us anywhere {alex/richard}
Title: And These Nights Never Really Got Us Anywhere
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Richard
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,931
Summary: AU, and yet somehow spoilers for Season 5 (minor). He's got reasons to be here. The island's a mess, and people keep showing up and then disappearing, and he doesn't have any clue why or how. So he's looking for someone who does. And then someone cuts him off and the highway and a glance in the rearview mirror ends with him looking for her instead.
Richard’s always had a hard time believing in things like death and finality.
There’s a girl in Washington who cuts him off on the highway, and his eyes flick out the closed window to catch a glimpse of her when he manages to pass her. Brown waves and raspberry lips, dark grey tank top and a tan hand on the steering wheel, and he almost loses his sense of place and time.
Almost.
It’s not exactly a surprise, and it’s certainly not unwelcome.
---
He’s got reasons to be here. The island’s a mess and people keep showing up and disappearing and he’s not sure enough about what’s causing it to even start thinking about how to fix it. But he’s here looking for someone who does.
And then just like that he’s looking for her.
She’s a college student, he sees through rearview mirrors, carefully parked cars, stealth and secrecy things he’s been accustomed to for years, he doesn’t even have to try anymore. She’s got friends and some pretty redhead calls her Alexandra, as in “Alexandra? She works down at the diner,” or “Oh, yeah, Alexandra’s from North Carolina or something; I think she said it was by the ocean.”
He follows her to school, to work, to dance clubs filled with leather and sweat and feet that stumble on the way out. Back to her apartment, a few minutes from the school, and he beats her out of the car, finds her pushing open the driver’s side door, nearly whacking into the neighboring car, a not-so-quiet, “shit” falling from her lips.
There’s the clear of a throat, and blue eyes that turn on him in response.
“Alex.”
---
Once, he woke up in a clearing, a mile outside of the barracks.
“No one will find us here,” she’d whispered, harsh in his ear, before she caught his earlobe between her teeth, tugged just a little, her hands working down his zipper. He pressed her against the trunk of a tree, rough bark underneath the palm of his hand, the one that didn’t have her by the arm, and didn’t bother with the usual arguments. They never worked, and he never wanted them to.
And then there had been morning and sun that warmed his skin, woke him from something he might call leisurely slumber. Bare chested, pants half on, and he blinks three times before he sees her.
“Morning,” he murmurs, watching her pull her right shoe on, fully dressed and looking like he just caught her in the act. The act of what is the problem. Right now it looks a lot like leaving him in the middle of wherever they’d wandered off to. She just gives him this look, a pained mixture of regret and sadness, and he has to ask, “What’s going on?”
She lets out a breath, bends to tie her shoelaces, tells him on a shrug, “Karl keeps asking all these questions about where I am and what I’m doing, and my dad…”
Richard’s on his feet a second later. “They’re always asking questions.”
“Yeah,” she admits, running a hand through unruly curls. She always looks so much older than her years. “Yeah, but maybe I’m just tired of having to make up stories to tell. Maybe I’m just tired of hiding something that doesn’t amount to anything.”
It’s the fact that he’s always been so damn good at self-control that enables him to stop from reaching out and wrapping a hand around her wrist, yanking her to him. Instead he manages to be calm when he asks, “Since when does this amount to nothing?”
“Since I grew up.” She presses full lips together, doesn’t look him in the eye. “Since I grew up and realized this isn’t going anywhere any more than I am.”
She leaves him there, some final look back.
Three days later, he’s back in her bed and Ben is on some top-secret errand of his. No one knows where Karl is.
Holding on is easier than letting go after all.
---
“You need to go,” is the first thing she says. No ‘hi’ or ‘how’d you know where to find me’, certainly no ‘I’m glad to see you’. And then she passes past him on her way towards the apartment building.
This time, he does grab her wrist. His index finger and thumb close around it, and he pulls. She struggles but this would never be a fair fight and they both knew it.
“You need to go,” she repeats again, gaze unwavering. Laying down the law, and he can’t help but wonder how long this demand is going to be enforced, if it’ll die a quick death just like all the other times.
“Why?” He asks, so, so close to her that when he breathes a lock of her hair sways gently.
“Because I need to stay dead, and you need to stay on that damn island.” Her voice never rises beyond a whisper, something hissed between her teeth.
He tries for a laugh. “You really think I’m going to tell your father?”
“He’s not my father,” she reminds him, like sixteen years means nothing in the face of blood relation and betrayal. Maybe it doesn’t. “And this isn’t about him.”
“Then what is this about?”
“Me.”
He frowns, deep, and raised eyebrows keep asking for an explanation he’s fairly sure she isn’t going to give him without a little prompting, or a lot of force. “What about you?”
“You ever wanted to leave your past behind?” She looks at him like she’s not so much talking about the past as in the island, but more him. Like she wants to leave him behind. The words cut, not just because of that, not only anyway, and she adds with a nod, “Yeah, I bet there’s a lot you want to leave behind. Decades - or is it centuries?”
This isn’t the sixteen year old girl from the island, smart, wiser than her years, but still with a little innocence. The twenty-two year old before him may look the same but that’s where the similarities end. Gone is the innocence, replaced by too many hard edges and a sense of abandonment. A look of survival for vengeance’s sake in her eyes. He’d heard about the others who came back, how they all came back broken and bruised, not just those from 815, but somehow he always imagined she’d be the exception to the rule, all those days of trailing her in his car, watching her, hoping.
Life doesn’t work that way. He’s had enough experience in that department and he really doesn’t have any excuses left about not knowing better.
She does. And he could tell her all of this, tell her how this works, but he doesn’t. There’s other things he wants to say, like, “I needed to see you. You can leave me behind all you want, but I need to see you first.”
“You see me. There. Did you get what you want?” She tries to make it sound more annoyed than it really does, tries to punctuate it by walking off, but she only takes half a step and lingers instead, his fingers still holding onto her wrist, light pressure, and she doesn’t even bother trying to tug it away from him. “Dammit,” she exhales, to no one and to both of them.
Alex is the first one to break her gaze; his eyes never leave her.
---
She lives on the fourth floor, facing opposite the parking lot, instead the street below. Even with a heavy bag in tow she takes the stairs, doesn’t even look twice at the elevators. He isn’t surprised, remembers her as having a fear of being trapped in small places, not claustrophobia so much a fear of losing freedom. Small metal boxes that started and stopped moving, sometimes of their own accord, were guaranteed to keep her away.
He thinks maybe that’s why she’s so close to the water here, away from anything that could be considered land-locked.
Her hand shakes as she fumbles the key in the lock, blindly gropes for the light switch next to the door, getting it after a few seconds, and the messy apartment is bathed in bad incandescent lighting. There are old magazines shoved underneath the end table and no less than three blankets thrown over the back of the couch, messy in that kind of way that just means lived in instead of dirty.
“Are you staying in a hotel?” She asks, quietly. The fight in her from earlier is long gone; now there’s a certain vacancy in her voice. He should feel worse than he does about that, but he knows he’s hardly the first person to send her universe spinning on its axis. This is merely a disconcerting tilt.
“Not as of yet.” The fact that he never had been staying at a hotel in the first place is what keeps it from being entirely true, but those are insignificant details.
Alex nods, takes a deep breath and walks into another room down the hall. A moment later she returns with a pillow and he takes that as unspoken permission and finds his way onto her couch for the night.
They’ll talk in the morning. They’ve got time.
---
He used to dream of long leisurely drives down the highway, some non-descript city in their wake, and she would smile at him while the breeze would pick up, coming in through the rolled-down windows.
He used to dream of taking her away from that island - of getting away.
Then he would wake to the cold side of the bed, or more rarely to her (she wasn’t a peaceful sleeper, all elbows and knees jutting out, and more often than not he’d be awake at three in the morning because she’d either attempted to push him out of the bed or somehow otherwise injure him), and reality would kick in.
She was sixteen, and he could live forever if he so desired. Who the hell were they kidding?
Later: after they get Karl back, it’s him that’s pulling away, instead of her. She gives him wide-eyed looks, eventually asks “why are you doing this?”. He just shakes his head and tells himself it’s really for her own good, that she’ll thank him later, while she calls him a coward, among other things, and acts like somehow this was all so very, very easy for him.
She acts like a child. And that’s the problem.
---
The room smells like coffee, and he awakes to her sitting cross-legged in a chair across the room, a mug in her hand, half staring at him, half pretending to read the textbook in front of her.
“Sleep well,” she asks, with a raised eyebrow, and he sits up, stretches out the kinks in his neck. It’s been awhile since he’s been relegated to one of those crappy understuffed couches.
“Wonderful,” he lies, and she sees right through that, smiles to herself. Better than last night, he decides.
“So what are you here for anyways?” Alex sighs out, after a moment, closing the textbook. Something about art history flashes on the cover, and somehow he isn’t all that surprised; she’d always liked hearing the history of things, where they came from and what things were like before. Curiosity ran in her veins, whether she was really Ben’s daughter or not. He remains mum in response to her question, and she nods to herself, something like disappointment in her face. “Right, you probably can’t tell me that. How about how did you find me?”
“You cut me off.” She frowns, and he elaborates. “With your car.” It’s very clear that she doesn’t quite believe him; he almost doesn’t believe it, it’s too coincidental. Still truth. “So technically you found me.”
“And what do you want?”
It’s not something he’s really thought through. He’d been so focused on trying to find her, on picking a time to make his presence known, that he hadn’t really spent a lot of time concerning himself with the why behind it all. “Just to see you.”
She probably doesn’t believe that either. “Yeah, that’s what you said last night.”
“There’s no grand plan here, Alex.”
“There’s always a plan, always an ulterior motive. You’re a lot like my father - a lot like Ben,” she pauses, to correct herself, “Just with more charm and you try harder not to hurt people or play them against each other. But it’s still the same thing.”
He sets his jaw. “You think you know me better than you do.”
“Or maybe it’s the other way around.”
“I just came here to see you,” he repeats, trying to find a way out of an argument that’s quickly becoming repetitive. “Nothing more.”
She does a fairly convincing job of nodding her head along with that, but doesn’t wait very long to tell him, “I don’t believe you, you know.”
“I didn’t think you would,” he replies, and at least he knows she thinks that much is truth.
---
She goes to class, and he leaves her apartment, but not before noting the presence of a spare key.
Richard spends the better part of the day looking up old acquaintances and old enemies, getting the information he was supposed to have been working on acquiring for the past few days. There are a few names thrown his way, people he needs to look up, one in Los Angeles, and logically he knows he should be driving there immediately, but he doesn’t. Instead he’s back at her apartment by nine, only to find it empty, her bags and that book sitting in the same chair she’d occupied earlier that morning.
The key turns in the lock at one in the morning and he’s almost asleep on her couch again. He hears giggling down the hallway, and Alex closes the door behind her without even turning the light on, falling against the door in a pile of clearly inebriated limbs.
He switches the lamp on the end table next to him on, and sits up straight, looking down at her. “Enjoying yourself?”
She takes a deep breath and picks herself up off the ground, asks, “Are you living here now?”
“Just for a few days,” he promises, intends to keep said promise, because he does have places to be, and personal has never gotten in the way of business before and he doesn’t intend to let it start now. She slips into her bedroom, and he can see her slip the sequined top she’s wearing up over her head just as she disappears into her bedroom. He resists the urge to follow her, just listens to her pull drawers out and give a heavy sigh. When she returns, she’s half-dressed, a t-shirt hanging on her loosely, her underwear just visible under the hem of it. If he was one for cracking jokes, this would be his opportunity, but instead he stands, comes closer. “What are you doing?”
“Is this what you’re here for?” She asks, slurring on the first part of it, steadier on the last. When she says it, she looks exactly like that sixteen year old he’d lost years ago.
He reaches out, for what he doesn’t know, and ends up tangling his fingers in her hair. She doesn’t move back, just looks at him, as if to say the balls in your court. It’s the wrong circumstances, he understands without much time spent thinking on it, and he’s not the kind of guy who’s fond of taking advantage of things like that. Not with her.
She’s still so young.
“No,” he says on an exhale, hand slipping down to her cheek, flushed from too-much alcohol, and she drops her eyes, leans in to his touch. He runs the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip, feels her breath warm against him, and then pulls back completely. “You need to sleep.”
“Yeah,” she says, and something in the atmosphere changes drastically. “Yeah, I probably should.”
The door closes and he gets the feeling that she’s probably still waiting for him on the other side of it. He still doesn’t go, just lies back down on the couch and feigns sleep.
---
“You weren’t the first,” she said to him once, after Karl, after he’d pulled away. She isn’t telling him anything he doesn’t know already, but it’s the tone in her voice, the way she trails, that insists some other, less savory, more cutting things. Things like ‘you won’t be the last’ and ‘you can be replaced; there is better, I have to believe there will always be better than you’.
“Firsts don’t mean anything,” he’d countered, and he’d like to thing the response was brought on by something other than injured pride and hurt feelings. “Firsts are usually accidental, a misplaced need for rebellion and discovery.”
She’d glared, but stayed quiet.
---
There’s a boy in the parking lot with her the next afternoon, when Richard’s driving back. She smiles at him, perched on the hood of her car and he stands between her legs, saying something that makes her smile before he dips his head to meet her lips in a kiss he would call chaste.
He takes the next turn and keeps driving.
---
He wakes on the third night to her straddling his hips, looking down at him with wide, focused eyes, instead of the glassy ones from the night before. She’s got his wrists pinned to the side with her small hands, and he frowns, asks the obvious, “Are you drunk?”
Her “no” comes out as a breathy whisper and she leans in, pressing her lips to his, her tongue slipping inside a second later to tangle with his. He doesn’t fight it. He does fight her hands though, the way they hold him there, and it’s a fight he wins, overpowering her and somehow he manages to maneuver them both so that he’s sitting up and she’s half in his lap. “What, do you need to be?” she asks, against his mouth, a slight giggle escaping. She leans in again, but he holds her back by the shoulders.
“Stop.”
She looks at him, frowns deep, then tells him, “No.” There’s the kind of force there that leaves little room for argument and Alex has her lips smashed against his a second later, fumbling with his pants, and his need to touch her, to skim his hands over her hips, and feel her shudder against him when he’s inside of her, outweighs his need to do the right thing and not interrupt what semblance of a life she apparently had going on here before he came back. She was just fine, she was finally free, and he’s gone and fucked that up, and he thinks he finally really understands what she meant in the parking lot that night.
Because she knew as soon as she let him in they’d end up right back where they started, intentionally or otherwise, and those days and nights never really got them anywhere, and it’s not like that’s really going to change just because it’s been a few years and they’re in an entirely different world now. Richard’s been around long enough to know it doesn’t work that way.
Richard’s been around long enough that he knows what he has to do.
---
The clock ticks to two-eleven, somehow echoing enough to bring him out of almost slumber. Alex is asleep, half on top of him, half with her back pressed against the couch that just wasn’t built for this sort of thing, and he shifts, testing the waters. She doesn’t make a sound in response.
A sufficient amount of time has passed, he decides. He can do this. It’s okay.
He forces his mind to focus on getting off this couch, and out of this apartment, without her noticing instead of fixating upon things like how he isn’t sure he wants to be the better person here, the one who leaves. He doesn’t want to be, but Richard doesn’t want to be a lot of things that he is, and this might just be the least of those worries.
Irony and bad luck dictate the next few seconds, in which he manages to rise in one fluid motion, as she ends up on her side on the couch, her only reaction a soft moan, and he’s thinking so far so good as he gets his clothes pulled back on and makes it to the door but forgets all about the deadbolt and tries to pull the door open, only succeeding in making racket more than actually opening anything. The sound must trigger something within her, some instinct, because she’s awake and sitting up a moment later.
“What’s going? Did I oversleep?” She asks, bleary-eyed, stretching her arms over her head and yawning. His look betrays guilt he can’t quite cover up quickly enough at this early hour, and something like realization passes over her face. “You’re leaving aren’t you?”
No point in lying. She wouldn’t believe him anyways. “I’m leaving,” he admits, and he can look her in the eye today because it is her best interests he has in mind this time.
“Without saying goodbye,” she says, which at least is better than ‘stop’ or ‘don’t go’, things that will make him second guess himself.
“It’s only fitting,” he replies, bitterness seeping in, before he can stop himself, “You didn’t.”
“Right.” She says, and he already knew he said the wrong thing anyways so it’s not like the look on her face can cut him any further. “Of course.” She stands, bare feet on the cold wooden floor, as she walks across it to him, one of those afghans wrapped tightly around her. “Are you going to go or are you going to stand there?”
He can’t come up with an answer for that anymore than he can direct his feet out the door, feels the need for more closure than this, so he just says, “This is for your own good.”
“Right,” she says again, “you know you really do make a good lackey for Ben; sound just like him.”
Richard grabs her by the shoulders, roughly, wanting to scream and shout at her that he’s never going to be Ben’s lackey, or anyone else’s for that matter, that he’s nothing like Ben, tell her to stop comparing them. But rather than that he’s saying things like, “I missed you. More than you’re ever going to know. More than I’ve missed anyone in a long time.”
There’s a sound like a sharp, shaky inhale, maybe surprise, and she presses her lips together, draining them of their color. He doesn’t know what he expects from her, he just knows her reply isn’t it. “I missed you too.”
She kisses him there, in the living room of her messy apartment, in some city that couldn’t be farther removed from the place she was born in, grew up in. Where he still knew her - who she was and who she could be and maybe even what she wanted.
He doesn’t know these things anymore.
His hand’s on the doorknob the moment she breaks the kiss, and he forces himself out the other side of it without another word.
If he listens hard enough, he can hear her crying all the way down the hall. He doesn’t wait for the elevators; takes the stairs instead.
Funny how each step only feels like running away instead of moving on.
Fandom: Lost
Characters/Pairings: Alex/Richard
Rating: R
Word Count: 3,931
Summary: AU, and yet somehow spoilers for Season 5 (minor). He's got reasons to be here. The island's a mess, and people keep showing up and then disappearing, and he doesn't have any clue why or how. So he's looking for someone who does. And then someone cuts him off and the highway and a glance in the rearview mirror ends with him looking for her instead.
Richard’s always had a hard time believing in things like death and finality.
There’s a girl in Washington who cuts him off on the highway, and his eyes flick out the closed window to catch a glimpse of her when he manages to pass her. Brown waves and raspberry lips, dark grey tank top and a tan hand on the steering wheel, and he almost loses his sense of place and time.
Almost.
It’s not exactly a surprise, and it’s certainly not unwelcome.
---
He’s got reasons to be here. The island’s a mess and people keep showing up and disappearing and he’s not sure enough about what’s causing it to even start thinking about how to fix it. But he’s here looking for someone who does.
And then just like that he’s looking for her.
She’s a college student, he sees through rearview mirrors, carefully parked cars, stealth and secrecy things he’s been accustomed to for years, he doesn’t even have to try anymore. She’s got friends and some pretty redhead calls her Alexandra, as in “Alexandra? She works down at the diner,” or “Oh, yeah, Alexandra’s from North Carolina or something; I think she said it was by the ocean.”
He follows her to school, to work, to dance clubs filled with leather and sweat and feet that stumble on the way out. Back to her apartment, a few minutes from the school, and he beats her out of the car, finds her pushing open the driver’s side door, nearly whacking into the neighboring car, a not-so-quiet, “shit” falling from her lips.
There’s the clear of a throat, and blue eyes that turn on him in response.
“Alex.”
---
Once, he woke up in a clearing, a mile outside of the barracks.
“No one will find us here,” she’d whispered, harsh in his ear, before she caught his earlobe between her teeth, tugged just a little, her hands working down his zipper. He pressed her against the trunk of a tree, rough bark underneath the palm of his hand, the one that didn’t have her by the arm, and didn’t bother with the usual arguments. They never worked, and he never wanted them to.
And then there had been morning and sun that warmed his skin, woke him from something he might call leisurely slumber. Bare chested, pants half on, and he blinks three times before he sees her.
“Morning,” he murmurs, watching her pull her right shoe on, fully dressed and looking like he just caught her in the act. The act of what is the problem. Right now it looks a lot like leaving him in the middle of wherever they’d wandered off to. She just gives him this look, a pained mixture of regret and sadness, and he has to ask, “What’s going on?”
She lets out a breath, bends to tie her shoelaces, tells him on a shrug, “Karl keeps asking all these questions about where I am and what I’m doing, and my dad…”
Richard’s on his feet a second later. “They’re always asking questions.”
“Yeah,” she admits, running a hand through unruly curls. She always looks so much older than her years. “Yeah, but maybe I’m just tired of having to make up stories to tell. Maybe I’m just tired of hiding something that doesn’t amount to anything.”
It’s the fact that he’s always been so damn good at self-control that enables him to stop from reaching out and wrapping a hand around her wrist, yanking her to him. Instead he manages to be calm when he asks, “Since when does this amount to nothing?”
“Since I grew up.” She presses full lips together, doesn’t look him in the eye. “Since I grew up and realized this isn’t going anywhere any more than I am.”
She leaves him there, some final look back.
Three days later, he’s back in her bed and Ben is on some top-secret errand of his. No one knows where Karl is.
Holding on is easier than letting go after all.
---
“You need to go,” is the first thing she says. No ‘hi’ or ‘how’d you know where to find me’, certainly no ‘I’m glad to see you’. And then she passes past him on her way towards the apartment building.
This time, he does grab her wrist. His index finger and thumb close around it, and he pulls. She struggles but this would never be a fair fight and they both knew it.
“You need to go,” she repeats again, gaze unwavering. Laying down the law, and he can’t help but wonder how long this demand is going to be enforced, if it’ll die a quick death just like all the other times.
“Why?” He asks, so, so close to her that when he breathes a lock of her hair sways gently.
“Because I need to stay dead, and you need to stay on that damn island.” Her voice never rises beyond a whisper, something hissed between her teeth.
He tries for a laugh. “You really think I’m going to tell your father?”
“He’s not my father,” she reminds him, like sixteen years means nothing in the face of blood relation and betrayal. Maybe it doesn’t. “And this isn’t about him.”
“Then what is this about?”
“Me.”
He frowns, deep, and raised eyebrows keep asking for an explanation he’s fairly sure she isn’t going to give him without a little prompting, or a lot of force. “What about you?”
“You ever wanted to leave your past behind?” She looks at him like she’s not so much talking about the past as in the island, but more him. Like she wants to leave him behind. The words cut, not just because of that, not only anyway, and she adds with a nod, “Yeah, I bet there’s a lot you want to leave behind. Decades - or is it centuries?”
This isn’t the sixteen year old girl from the island, smart, wiser than her years, but still with a little innocence. The twenty-two year old before him may look the same but that’s where the similarities end. Gone is the innocence, replaced by too many hard edges and a sense of abandonment. A look of survival for vengeance’s sake in her eyes. He’d heard about the others who came back, how they all came back broken and bruised, not just those from 815, but somehow he always imagined she’d be the exception to the rule, all those days of trailing her in his car, watching her, hoping.
Life doesn’t work that way. He’s had enough experience in that department and he really doesn’t have any excuses left about not knowing better.
She does. And he could tell her all of this, tell her how this works, but he doesn’t. There’s other things he wants to say, like, “I needed to see you. You can leave me behind all you want, but I need to see you first.”
“You see me. There. Did you get what you want?” She tries to make it sound more annoyed than it really does, tries to punctuate it by walking off, but she only takes half a step and lingers instead, his fingers still holding onto her wrist, light pressure, and she doesn’t even bother trying to tug it away from him. “Dammit,” she exhales, to no one and to both of them.
Alex is the first one to break her gaze; his eyes never leave her.
---
She lives on the fourth floor, facing opposite the parking lot, instead the street below. Even with a heavy bag in tow she takes the stairs, doesn’t even look twice at the elevators. He isn’t surprised, remembers her as having a fear of being trapped in small places, not claustrophobia so much a fear of losing freedom. Small metal boxes that started and stopped moving, sometimes of their own accord, were guaranteed to keep her away.
He thinks maybe that’s why she’s so close to the water here, away from anything that could be considered land-locked.
Her hand shakes as she fumbles the key in the lock, blindly gropes for the light switch next to the door, getting it after a few seconds, and the messy apartment is bathed in bad incandescent lighting. There are old magazines shoved underneath the end table and no less than three blankets thrown over the back of the couch, messy in that kind of way that just means lived in instead of dirty.
“Are you staying in a hotel?” She asks, quietly. The fight in her from earlier is long gone; now there’s a certain vacancy in her voice. He should feel worse than he does about that, but he knows he’s hardly the first person to send her universe spinning on its axis. This is merely a disconcerting tilt.
“Not as of yet.” The fact that he never had been staying at a hotel in the first place is what keeps it from being entirely true, but those are insignificant details.
Alex nods, takes a deep breath and walks into another room down the hall. A moment later she returns with a pillow and he takes that as unspoken permission and finds his way onto her couch for the night.
They’ll talk in the morning. They’ve got time.
---
He used to dream of long leisurely drives down the highway, some non-descript city in their wake, and she would smile at him while the breeze would pick up, coming in through the rolled-down windows.
He used to dream of taking her away from that island - of getting away.
Then he would wake to the cold side of the bed, or more rarely to her (she wasn’t a peaceful sleeper, all elbows and knees jutting out, and more often than not he’d be awake at three in the morning because she’d either attempted to push him out of the bed or somehow otherwise injure him), and reality would kick in.
She was sixteen, and he could live forever if he so desired. Who the hell were they kidding?
Later: after they get Karl back, it’s him that’s pulling away, instead of her. She gives him wide-eyed looks, eventually asks “why are you doing this?”. He just shakes his head and tells himself it’s really for her own good, that she’ll thank him later, while she calls him a coward, among other things, and acts like somehow this was all so very, very easy for him.
She acts like a child. And that’s the problem.
---
The room smells like coffee, and he awakes to her sitting cross-legged in a chair across the room, a mug in her hand, half staring at him, half pretending to read the textbook in front of her.
“Sleep well,” she asks, with a raised eyebrow, and he sits up, stretches out the kinks in his neck. It’s been awhile since he’s been relegated to one of those crappy understuffed couches.
“Wonderful,” he lies, and she sees right through that, smiles to herself. Better than last night, he decides.
“So what are you here for anyways?” Alex sighs out, after a moment, closing the textbook. Something about art history flashes on the cover, and somehow he isn’t all that surprised; she’d always liked hearing the history of things, where they came from and what things were like before. Curiosity ran in her veins, whether she was really Ben’s daughter or not. He remains mum in response to her question, and she nods to herself, something like disappointment in her face. “Right, you probably can’t tell me that. How about how did you find me?”
“You cut me off.” She frowns, and he elaborates. “With your car.” It’s very clear that she doesn’t quite believe him; he almost doesn’t believe it, it’s too coincidental. Still truth. “So technically you found me.”
“And what do you want?”
It’s not something he’s really thought through. He’d been so focused on trying to find her, on picking a time to make his presence known, that he hadn’t really spent a lot of time concerning himself with the why behind it all. “Just to see you.”
She probably doesn’t believe that either. “Yeah, that’s what you said last night.”
“There’s no grand plan here, Alex.”
“There’s always a plan, always an ulterior motive. You’re a lot like my father - a lot like Ben,” she pauses, to correct herself, “Just with more charm and you try harder not to hurt people or play them against each other. But it’s still the same thing.”
He sets his jaw. “You think you know me better than you do.”
“Or maybe it’s the other way around.”
“I just came here to see you,” he repeats, trying to find a way out of an argument that’s quickly becoming repetitive. “Nothing more.”
She does a fairly convincing job of nodding her head along with that, but doesn’t wait very long to tell him, “I don’t believe you, you know.”
“I didn’t think you would,” he replies, and at least he knows she thinks that much is truth.
---
She goes to class, and he leaves her apartment, but not before noting the presence of a spare key.
Richard spends the better part of the day looking up old acquaintances and old enemies, getting the information he was supposed to have been working on acquiring for the past few days. There are a few names thrown his way, people he needs to look up, one in Los Angeles, and logically he knows he should be driving there immediately, but he doesn’t. Instead he’s back at her apartment by nine, only to find it empty, her bags and that book sitting in the same chair she’d occupied earlier that morning.
The key turns in the lock at one in the morning and he’s almost asleep on her couch again. He hears giggling down the hallway, and Alex closes the door behind her without even turning the light on, falling against the door in a pile of clearly inebriated limbs.
He switches the lamp on the end table next to him on, and sits up straight, looking down at her. “Enjoying yourself?”
She takes a deep breath and picks herself up off the ground, asks, “Are you living here now?”
“Just for a few days,” he promises, intends to keep said promise, because he does have places to be, and personal has never gotten in the way of business before and he doesn’t intend to let it start now. She slips into her bedroom, and he can see her slip the sequined top she’s wearing up over her head just as she disappears into her bedroom. He resists the urge to follow her, just listens to her pull drawers out and give a heavy sigh. When she returns, she’s half-dressed, a t-shirt hanging on her loosely, her underwear just visible under the hem of it. If he was one for cracking jokes, this would be his opportunity, but instead he stands, comes closer. “What are you doing?”
“Is this what you’re here for?” She asks, slurring on the first part of it, steadier on the last. When she says it, she looks exactly like that sixteen year old he’d lost years ago.
He reaches out, for what he doesn’t know, and ends up tangling his fingers in her hair. She doesn’t move back, just looks at him, as if to say the balls in your court. It’s the wrong circumstances, he understands without much time spent thinking on it, and he’s not the kind of guy who’s fond of taking advantage of things like that. Not with her.
She’s still so young.
“No,” he says on an exhale, hand slipping down to her cheek, flushed from too-much alcohol, and she drops her eyes, leans in to his touch. He runs the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip, feels her breath warm against him, and then pulls back completely. “You need to sleep.”
“Yeah,” she says, and something in the atmosphere changes drastically. “Yeah, I probably should.”
The door closes and he gets the feeling that she’s probably still waiting for him on the other side of it. He still doesn’t go, just lies back down on the couch and feigns sleep.
---
“You weren’t the first,” she said to him once, after Karl, after he’d pulled away. She isn’t telling him anything he doesn’t know already, but it’s the tone in her voice, the way she trails, that insists some other, less savory, more cutting things. Things like ‘you won’t be the last’ and ‘you can be replaced; there is better, I have to believe there will always be better than you’.
“Firsts don’t mean anything,” he’d countered, and he’d like to thing the response was brought on by something other than injured pride and hurt feelings. “Firsts are usually accidental, a misplaced need for rebellion and discovery.”
She’d glared, but stayed quiet.
---
There’s a boy in the parking lot with her the next afternoon, when Richard’s driving back. She smiles at him, perched on the hood of her car and he stands between her legs, saying something that makes her smile before he dips his head to meet her lips in a kiss he would call chaste.
He takes the next turn and keeps driving.
---
He wakes on the third night to her straddling his hips, looking down at him with wide, focused eyes, instead of the glassy ones from the night before. She’s got his wrists pinned to the side with her small hands, and he frowns, asks the obvious, “Are you drunk?”
Her “no” comes out as a breathy whisper and she leans in, pressing her lips to his, her tongue slipping inside a second later to tangle with his. He doesn’t fight it. He does fight her hands though, the way they hold him there, and it’s a fight he wins, overpowering her and somehow he manages to maneuver them both so that he’s sitting up and she’s half in his lap. “What, do you need to be?” she asks, against his mouth, a slight giggle escaping. She leans in again, but he holds her back by the shoulders.
“Stop.”
She looks at him, frowns deep, then tells him, “No.” There’s the kind of force there that leaves little room for argument and Alex has her lips smashed against his a second later, fumbling with his pants, and his need to touch her, to skim his hands over her hips, and feel her shudder against him when he’s inside of her, outweighs his need to do the right thing and not interrupt what semblance of a life she apparently had going on here before he came back. She was just fine, she was finally free, and he’s gone and fucked that up, and he thinks he finally really understands what she meant in the parking lot that night.
Because she knew as soon as she let him in they’d end up right back where they started, intentionally or otherwise, and those days and nights never really got them anywhere, and it’s not like that’s really going to change just because it’s been a few years and they’re in an entirely different world now. Richard’s been around long enough to know it doesn’t work that way.
Richard’s been around long enough that he knows what he has to do.
---
The clock ticks to two-eleven, somehow echoing enough to bring him out of almost slumber. Alex is asleep, half on top of him, half with her back pressed against the couch that just wasn’t built for this sort of thing, and he shifts, testing the waters. She doesn’t make a sound in response.
A sufficient amount of time has passed, he decides. He can do this. It’s okay.
He forces his mind to focus on getting off this couch, and out of this apartment, without her noticing instead of fixating upon things like how he isn’t sure he wants to be the better person here, the one who leaves. He doesn’t want to be, but Richard doesn’t want to be a lot of things that he is, and this might just be the least of those worries.
Irony and bad luck dictate the next few seconds, in which he manages to rise in one fluid motion, as she ends up on her side on the couch, her only reaction a soft moan, and he’s thinking so far so good as he gets his clothes pulled back on and makes it to the door but forgets all about the deadbolt and tries to pull the door open, only succeeding in making racket more than actually opening anything. The sound must trigger something within her, some instinct, because she’s awake and sitting up a moment later.
“What’s going? Did I oversleep?” She asks, bleary-eyed, stretching her arms over her head and yawning. His look betrays guilt he can’t quite cover up quickly enough at this early hour, and something like realization passes over her face. “You’re leaving aren’t you?”
No point in lying. She wouldn’t believe him anyways. “I’m leaving,” he admits, and he can look her in the eye today because it is her best interests he has in mind this time.
“Without saying goodbye,” she says, which at least is better than ‘stop’ or ‘don’t go’, things that will make him second guess himself.
“It’s only fitting,” he replies, bitterness seeping in, before he can stop himself, “You didn’t.”
“Right.” She says, and he already knew he said the wrong thing anyways so it’s not like the look on her face can cut him any further. “Of course.” She stands, bare feet on the cold wooden floor, as she walks across it to him, one of those afghans wrapped tightly around her. “Are you going to go or are you going to stand there?”
He can’t come up with an answer for that anymore than he can direct his feet out the door, feels the need for more closure than this, so he just says, “This is for your own good.”
“Right,” she says again, “you know you really do make a good lackey for Ben; sound just like him.”
Richard grabs her by the shoulders, roughly, wanting to scream and shout at her that he’s never going to be Ben’s lackey, or anyone else’s for that matter, that he’s nothing like Ben, tell her to stop comparing them. But rather than that he’s saying things like, “I missed you. More than you’re ever going to know. More than I’ve missed anyone in a long time.”
There’s a sound like a sharp, shaky inhale, maybe surprise, and she presses her lips together, draining them of their color. He doesn’t know what he expects from her, he just knows her reply isn’t it. “I missed you too.”
She kisses him there, in the living room of her messy apartment, in some city that couldn’t be farther removed from the place she was born in, grew up in. Where he still knew her - who she was and who she could be and maybe even what she wanted.
He doesn’t know these things anymore.
His hand’s on the doorknob the moment she breaks the kiss, and he forces himself out the other side of it without another word.
If he listens hard enough, he can hear her crying all the way down the hall. He doesn’t wait for the elevators; takes the stairs instead.
Funny how each step only feels like running away instead of moving on.