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God Alex is tired. She’d thought, perhaps naively that her sleep would end up getting better when Strand returned from wherever he had fucked off to this time (Charlie. And Alex doesn’t blame him for that truly. His daughter deserved to hear what had happened to and with Coralee in person. It was why when Strand had reached out to get the full file over email—the only time he reached out actually—Alex had sent all of the unedited footage even if there had only been a few more words that were basically a promise for later that didn’t come. She just wished that he had told her where he was going or had answered the call when Trump had been elected. It’s kind of hard thinking you may have started the end of the world and had that happen honestly.) but so far it hasn’t. Alex had spent the last two weeks at Howard’s house going over every Black Tape that he’d never shown her before. In the episode she had said that there were maybe a hundred of them that she’d not seen before and Alex had been wrong. There were 133 of them and each one of them was a fucking nightmare. It was so bad that Alex had ended up just passing out on his couch from sheer exhaustion and making the briefest of pit stops in her apartment for a shower and clothes and so that she didn’t arrive at the same time that Strand did. Nic gave her enough shit already—she doesn’t need anymore.

But given that the episodes were back and that Alex had an early morning interview tomorrow. (Thomas Warren. That should be fun, especially considering how Strand became a sulking child who slumped in his seat and crossed his arms whenever the man was even mentioned!) She actually headed home to her own apartment to try and sleep at least where she wouldn’t end up with a crick in her back. Maybe the shadows in her apartment would be familiar enough that she could actually sleep. Of course Alex isn’t holding her breath, but she does always try to have hope even when it seems fucking impossible to do so.

Ordering in dinner from her favorite pizza place (the one Strand hates because it’s too greasy and unhealthy and Alex Reagan really doesn’t cook) and opening up a bottle of cheap and too sweet wine, she’s got her feet up in the warm and slightly mismatched and cluttered apartment. Her couch is vastly superior to Strand’s and her tv is too even if Alex doesn’t want to admit that she actually does miss his company. The lights of the city are bright behind her curtains and it’s probably too late for dinner, but Alex really doesn’t care. When you don’t sleep like she doesn’t sleep time is an illusion and pizza is amazing.

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Looking around, Alex is fairly certain that Simon is close by, despite the claims that he was in Russia. Granted, he can definitely be two places at the same time, but he's also someone who clearly thinks that this meeting is too important for it to be conducted over the phone if she'd needed to come to Istanbul for it. While the house is small when Alex searches it with her eyes, she can see that there are closed doors that definitely lead to someplace else and it's a someplace else that he could be hiding. Still, she answers him as she stands in front of the table that the speaker is seated on, and with a little bit of a sigh. After he'd been in her apartment, Alex had hoped that they'd be better at the smoke and dagger thing, and the telephone call had lent credence to that theory, at least until she'd talked to him last night.

So, with one of her hands on her side, Alex lets the tiredness and the jetlag and the annoyance slip into her tone when she says: "Yeah well, you didn’t leave me much of a choice." Because while she might have had one before Simon had showed up at her apartment (maybe anyway) she definitely didn't have one after he'd told her that he had come to warn her about how he might have died going after something that had to do with the Horn of Tiamat. They went back and forth for a moment, before Simon said that his appearance would frighten her.

Immediately, she snatched up the recorder and hit the stop button, because she definitely doesn't want this recorded to tape, especially considering how she'd programmed it to automatically upload to the cloud she and Nic shared if something had happened to her here and this was a trap. Not that she'd thought that it was a trap that Simon had laid, but that someone could be using him to lay. "What are you talking about? I literally just saw you and you looked fine. What the hell would frighten me about that?"

He was, in fact, close by, she was quite right on that. But he couldn't say as much over the phone where they were all being followed and listened in on. It was too dangerous. Now it's more dangerous than ever with the Horn involved. And his current... affliction.

Alex had received his usual responses, his insistence they all had a choice. His usual caginess. Until the recorder turned off, an action he could have done himself but he'd much rather Alex choose to do so on her own. The living static on the speaker hinted he was still there listening, but considering his words carefully. Simon's been trying very hard to keep Alex out of traps... it wouldn't do for him to lead her into one.

There was a long, pregnant pause while he still considered. The crackling of the speaker alive with his uncertainty. If it's not on tape, he can perhaps be more frank with her.

"I may have... over extended myself securing the Horn of Tiamat." He confessed, a hint of the exhaustion Simon was so very good at keeping to himself slipping into his tone.

Alex frowns, she can’t help it. She frowns and she just sits down in the chair at the table, looking around the cabin again. He sounds worse than she’d ever heard him, and she’d definitely never had heard him admit to anything close to a weakness. Even with admitting to killing his family and his fondness for sunsets he’d not sounded like this. It hurts and it makes her worried for him—she can’t help it.

“What does that mean, Simon? What happened?” And then because Alex has read Harry Potter, she can’t help but to ask: “did you like splinch yourself? Leave parts of yourself behind somewhere when you were bilocating or something?”

Simon had warned her for a good reason that his mission for the Horn might go sideways. It just went sideways in a manner that was... somewhat unexpected. He should have known, should have predicted that this was how it happened. But he'd been too cocky, too sure of himself that he could hold himself together no matter how far he went. Bitten on the ass by his own hubris.

The splinch comment did earn something of a tired chuckle from Simon. Yeah that... might not be entirely off. "Something like that," And, because he's really too tired to keep up the being full cryptic act he continued: "I brought something back with me." In him, more like.

Alex doesn't like that at all, honestly, because bringing anything back with him definitely cannot be a good thing. There's too many bad things in the story that she's telling, and too few things that Alex Reagan is afraid of. Simon has already been involved in both of those, actually and it couldn't be what she's thinking that it is. Not when Simon had told her that he could hide things from him whoever that 'him' was, be it Warren or a Tall Paul or something else entirely. No, there's just no way that it could be possible. That wasn't how these things worked?

Was it?

Instead, Alex focuses on the questions that work around actually asking Simon if he's more demonic somehow now. The who what where when why and hows are supposed to be things that every basic story has in common. Alex may be combining more of a few of them. "Where did you go, Simon? What happened? How did you manage to bring something back with you? I don't understand." But the fact that Alex is scared for him is there in her voice; she's the sort of person who more often than not got scared or angry for someone else rather than herself and Simon has been dealt a harsher life than nearly anyone she's ever met. Maybe he and Strand would be up in a similar sort of bracket, but at least Richard had a chance to see sunsets and to not be labeled insane.

Definitely not a good thing. Simon is fairly certain Alex can guess at what's happening to him, and honestly he'd rather she not see him like this. This isn't how he wants her to remember him. That darkness had been left on him whether he liked it or not, there was no escaping it no matter how well he could hide.

She already knows the truth. She just doesn't want to accept it.

This is where Simon would normally say something mysterious or change the subject and talk about something entirely unrelated. He could probably lead the conversation back to that, take her mind away from her concerns for him. There isn't anything to be done. "Do you know how I escaped Three Rivers?"

Yeah, at least Richard got sunsets. And Simon was determined to enjoy as many as he still had time to.

Alex is frowning, and she lets out a sigh before she rises from the chair and starts to pace back and forth in the small area of the dining room. Most of the time, when Alex wants to think she's on her feet. Stillness isn't something that ever comes easy to her at all, and even when she's recording, she fidgets her feet against the floor and her hands in her lap. But most often it's doing things like this that make Richard sigh and ask her to sit down again. She expects Simon to do that at some point, but right now it's not a thing that she is going to do.

"I assume you bilocated out somehow. Or like transported out using something similar to bilocation. I mean it would have been easy for you to like bilocate out, turn off the cameras, get the keys, open the door and get yourself out that way." Had Alex spent some time thinking about how he could have done it? Of course she did, she's Alex Reagan and thinking about impossible things and making leaps of logic was something that she'd done the most. Even if she hadn't committed it to tape because she knew how Nic and Strand would have reacted.

"Why? Did you do the same thing with the Horn?"

He won't, not right now. Whatever helps her sort her thoughts she's welcome to do, thinking is what he wants her to do after all. Besides, it's easy not to be bothered by someone's fidgeting when you're hiding in another room and talking through an old speaker. If pacing helps her get where she needs to be, then far be it for him to interfere.

While Simon is rarely in the business of straight or clear answers, much less those regarding what he's capable of, he does have a habit of leaving those leaps in logic un-denied when there's a possibility Alex is on to something. Sometimes it's what he doesn't say that holds the meaning. Keeping this conversation off the record was for the best, for both of them.

"There are some things that are harder to reach. Some places more... protected than others."