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God Alex is tired. It’s not something new, which anyone who has known her for the last two years, or listened to her show or even just looked at her is aware of. She’s the sort of bone tired most days that caffeine barely touches, but Alex devours it anyway, hoping that she will find the magic in it she once did. Too bad all levels of magic had been tainted by what was happening around her. But maybe the coffee did have something to do with the way that she slept so restlessly for such a little period of time.

It was weird, really, to be back in her bed considering how many nights she’d spent crashing out on Richard’s couch. Despite what Nic Silver may have been pushing her on, (“you can’t keep sleeping at your subject’s house, Alex!”) it has only ever been the couch. Richard had made the guest room an option once she’d gotten back from Turkey but Alex had refused it, because it felt way too premeditated than just falling asleep there. At least that’s what Alex had told herself anyway even when Strand made her breakfast every day and dinner more often than not. But after seeing what she’d had as a nightmare for so long so vividly there on a screen, followed by Richard’s asking if she was okay in such a worried voice meant that she needed to get some time away from both him and the tapes.

Well, as much space from them as she can get nowadays anyway.

Somewhere along the way, with visions of Calvin and the interview with Richard’s professor's ‘colleague. Not friend.’ looming tomorrow, Alex had fallen asleep. Maybe it was just the sheer exhaustion that she always put herself through or god knows what but she does end up falling asleep.

Her dreams aren’t great—they never are and never will be again—and Alex tosses and turns with them. After a little while, Alex settles and then opens her eyes to see the darkness being darker in her bed, and she just gasps loudly, unable to put words to her mouth.

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Sleep, the eternal struggle. No matter how hard she tried Alex just couldn't catch a break on the sleep front, and despite his best efforts Simon could only do so much. Not that Alex knew, he'd never tell her if he could help it. Trying to siphon off just enough of the fear to feed himself before driving the rest away as well as he could. He's spent a lot of nights guarding her sleep, she'd yet to figure it out. With luck, she never would.

Simon, however, isn't always the luckiest individual. He'd made the mistake of also taking a chance at falling asleep. She was tired, he was tired, usually his presence alone was enough to keep the edge just under manageable. And most of all to scare away any would-be intruders or kidnappers. Of course having caved to sleep himself that meant the big dark mass that had curled up on the far edge of her bed didn't have time to disappear before she awoke.

That gasp, however, would wake anyone from a dead sleep. He didn't move, maybe if he didn't move she'd think she was imagining it and he could just disappear when she went to turn on a light. Yeah, that seemed like the best option...

Once...well more than once upon a time, when all of this had first started, the first thing that Alex had done had been to race to turn all of the lights in her apartment on. She'd turn them on, count the shadows, whisper 'apophenia' and try and breathe. It didn't do any good. As much as Alex wanted to feel safe in her own apartment, she didn't especially when she was meant to be sleeping.

When things had gotten so bad for her, Alex had tried sleeping with all of the lights on. It didn't help, because all it did was to make the shadows more vivid around her, shadow folding on itself and expanding in a way that made it impossible to tell whether or not it was what Alex feared so badly. Strand and Nic would tell her that it was her lack of sleep that made it feel so damned real, trauma and the rest of that. Alex is pretty sure that it's a mix of both the theories: yes, some of it is her imagination but some of it also is not.

If anything, the same creepy witch-thing showing up in a tape well before she ever would have seen it only confirmed in her how fucking real it was.

In the end, Alex had come up with a new scenario--a new script for how she behalves in the middle of the night when she's alone. Alex blinks once, while she's drawling in a breath, and she breathes it out in the same way that she reaches out to touch the shadow. Normally, her hand wraps around nothing, her fingers curling in on themselves and she knows that even if there are probably shadows in the room they aren't close enough to hurt her. Well, physically anyway. This time, however, her hand finds something and Alex just whimpers in fear but more importantly, she also refuses to let it go.

That's what he'd been counting on. She'd turn away, turn on lights, verify that the darkness was only that: Shadows and imagination. But she didn't do that. Instead she did the unthinkable and actually reached out and grabbed his arm.

He didn't know what to do. He'd already been holding still and now he was frozen in silent panic. It's not exactly easy to talk like this so very carefully he slips his other arm out from under himself so he could drop a knuckle to the floor and knock twice.

Tap tap.

No, Alex. Let him go.

They definitely were mutually locked in that state of silent panic right then, because the darkness of the thing was actually pretty big. It was pretty big and filled in blackness where others might have been ink or something that wasn't matte. It was big, and now that she's starting to wake up, Alex realizes that what's in her bed is actually adding weight to it. But the thing that solidifies her realization is those two taps.

Those two taps were known immediately for what they were: Simon. But that was also impossible because Alex was holding onto the arm, and he hadn't been able to move enough to the edge of the bed that his knocking against her wooden floor with his knuckle. Arms weren't long enough. Human arms weren't anyway. As she tries to both wake up and catch up on her thoughts, Alex hears something in her mind's ear. Cause I’m… I believe my appearance might frighten you.

"Oh no." Alex says the words aloud. "Oh no, tell me you didn't, Simon."

Very big, oddly shaped and he knew the more time she had to adjust the worse it would be. Simon wanted very much to melt into the darkness and disappear but Alex still had him trapped and he wasn't willing to try to wrench away lest he hurt her.

And yes, his arm is indeed way longer than it should be. Long enough to slide like a bent branch off the edge of the bed he wasn't quite close enough to to reach normally.

A long pause... and one more tap. Yes. He did. Not intentionally and he can only hope she understands that.

"Oh Simon." Alex's heart's breaking more than a little bit that he's far more demonic than he is human now. Not only that but she's fairly certain that whatever had happened had happened around the Horn of Tiamat and getting it to Turkey is entirely either her fault, or it was done in her name. Simon was what he'd fought so hard against his entire life and it was her fault. She doesn't know how what else to say at first, but that doesn't mean that she lets him go--Alex is no fool and if she lets him go, he's gone.

"The security at the Vatican, right?" Alex doesn't wait for him to respond, because she's pretty sure that's what happened, and her chest feels tense. There's other questions that she wants to ask, but she's pretty sure that if Simon would have wanted to answer them, he wouldn't be knocking to her. Trauma or something else equally horrible, she doesn't want him to push himself anymore out of his comfort zone.

Still keeping that grip on his arm with one hand, Alex sits up and she reaches up to touch his face. "Oh Simon." But she's not run screaming from the room yet.

Edited 2021-08-23 02:14 (UTC)

Her fault? No. Done to help her? Yes, and he hates that she's going to carry that guilt. It breaks his heart knowing she's going to do it anyway, no matter what he can or can't say on the subject. In his mind it had been worth it. To protect her it was worth it. It had to be.

She's smart, he would absolutely be gone if she let him go.

He doesn't answer the question about the Vatican, she already knew and it wasn't that important anyway. The how was past, irrelevant. There wasn't any going back from where he was now. Lost, but not so lost as to have forgotten himself. Just his face...

Which was definitely the explanation as to why he wasn't speaking. The twisted features, the permanent unsettling "grin" of teeth pulled back in an eternal snarl. He tried to pull away, out of reach so she couldn't know just how bad it was but he was rather stuck with her holding onto him. Still unwilling to risk hurting her even like this.

At least she's not run away yet.

Alex being Alex refuses to believe that there's no going back from this. If there's one thing that Alex is, it's stubborn and she's definitely going to be stubborn to the point of saving Simon. If she has to do it alone, if she doesn't? Alex will figure out a way. When he'd try to pull away, Alex rolled onto her knees, breaking the distance that had been between them in the bed. She knows that Simon isn't going to like it, but that doesn't matter.

Alex needs to know. She needs to know if she's right about him being silenced again. For a while she'd been convinced, or nearly so that part of the reason that Simon was a mute for so long was because whatever part of him that this was had prevented him from speaking about what was happening until it was set far too much in action for him to do anything about it. The timing worked, honestly, Simon had started speaking for the first time before the show was on air--there was of course that time at the coffee shop--and even that was both equally likely to drive her away as to drive her forward at that point. It'd drive her forward, and now here they were.

Reaching up to more firmly press her fingers to his face, Alex was gentle and careful--she's heard the stories and she knows what to possibly expect, but that sure doesn't mean that she's going to stop.

If anyone could do it, it'd be Alex. Simon just doubts there's any way to actually bring him back from this brink. Of course she'd never accept that answer, that just wasn't the kind of person she was. She also apparently wasn't the kind of person to let her own terror stop her from grabbing his demon face just to prove to herself what was going on.

Not exactly how Simon expected this to go down. Maybe the only bright side being that she couldn't see him, but she could probably tell more than enough to get a good picture of what he looked like. And why he wasn't talking anymore. It's hard to talk when you're stuck in a permanently menacing "grin". She's seen them before, in her nightmares, on some of the Black Tapes. The "witches" or "demons" or whatever one wanted to call them. They weren't the same as the ones who wore faces upside down, but they weren't that different either.

All Simon could do was let out a quiet hiss of protest and try to curl his free arm back around himself while still trying pull away... until he gave up once she had her hands on him. Damn it, Alex.

In response to the hiss of protest and the movement before her fingers, Alex just simply says: "Simon." There's a lot curled into the way that she says his name, folding over itself and together until it was almost like a chain that she was attempting to connect between them. It's very like Alex herself in that way: the care for him, the worry for him, the fear of what this means, the guilt in her that she hadn't figured this out fast enough that she could have stopped this from happening to him, the hate she has for his parents for opening the door for him and so may other kids.

But perhaps most of all what's there is resolve. She's persistent to a fault, and Alex Reagan had chased the very idea of Richard Strand half way across the country (twice) for answers. Yes, later there was a more personal stake in why she was doing it in addition to the professional one but at first there wasn't. Even when she'd just gone to try and convince him to talk to her, and talked to his publisher, Alex hadn't given up. Eleven calls for a show, and this is something that's much more important that the show.

Simon Reese deserved a better life. He deserved better than a murder rap and needing to live in shadows and he definitely deserved better than this. She hates that this happened to him in order to try and stop it, and she's still trying it. The thread of the story has twisted into knots and barbs that Alex hadn't expected it to and this happening to Simon feels like every barb has slipped below her skin and twisted. They'd taken so much from him already, those people who had hurt him, and now Alex had taken away his voice. This is hurt fault.

"Oh Simon," her voice is soft as her fingers find the corner of the grin that she knows is going to be there. Alex follows the line of the mouth to the teeth, her brain filling in the rest of it. She can feel the jagged sharpness of the reason why he can't speak. "There has to be something that I can do to fix it."

He stops his struggling at the word, resignedly settling in to let her do this. She won't hurt him, she knows he won't hurt her. If there's one thing that might come out of this, Alex may find a way to be less afraid of these horrors stalking her knowing that at least one of them has her back. Even like this he's still looking after her. The downside was the guilt, this wasn't hers to carry but of course she was going to do it anyway. With or without her Simon had already been involved in this. In the end she may have saved him from losing himself entirely.

Not that he could tell her as much anymore.

He wished he could say something to those two little words that carried so much weight. But he was stuck with only yes and no and however he could work that into making sense in a conversation. Having curled in on himself with her refusing to let him go Simon had drawn his arm away from the floor... but he still had his claws. So he clicked two together in that still familiar manner: No.

There wasn't any turning back. At least, he didn't think so.

Alex had learned early on in this that this story wasn't one that had any big overarching senses of justice or fairness--in many ways the decks were stacked against them starting with Strand and moving the whole way on down to Robbie Hochman. In so many ways it felt like Alex really wasn't doing enough quickly enough and now because of that, here was Simon who has been trying to help her for longer than Alex wants to think about now and she couldn't save him. At least she hadn't saved him from this fate--but she's not giving up yet.

Instead, Alex just shakes her head and lets out a little bit of a sniffle. "There has to be some way to fix it, Simon. I refuse to believe otherwise." The thickness of tears crawls up over her vocal cords, and the hand that had been touching the grin moves to cup against his cheek instead. "This didn't happen overnight. You could talk to me in Turkey," there's something pleading almost about it. "It hasn't been that long for it..."

But Alex sniffs again and she shakes her head. "We're going to fix it. I am going to fix it, Simon. We'll find one of Warren's machines or a copy of the one Duris had based on his journal. Strand's going to be going to Geneva but I can head out to New York and see..."

There was no fairness to be had, no fabled heroes to the story, and the only justice was that which they themselves could extract. Or, in Simon's case, what he could extract with blood and violence. But as he'd told Alex before, it wasn't really about revenge. It was balance. It had always been about balance...

And now he'd lost the war of balance within himself by skirting that edge too far. In the end he hoped it would be worth it. That his faith in Alex would bear fruit and even if the sun was lost to him it wouldn't be lost to the world entirely. That's what he clung to.

Simon didn't want to break her heart more by continuing to repeat his no's in response to her statements. It wouldn't do to crush her spirit when she was so close to that final step that would either doom them all, or save them. He had to stay the course, and so did she. As such, when she suggested not going to Geneva with Richard he clicked his claws sharply:

Tap tap!

A quick, urgent denial of her suggestion. For any of this to work, for it to matter, she needed to stick with Strand. Alex's intuition was her saving grace, and Richard was completely useless without it. She couldn't be wasting her time chasing shadows anymore.

The urgency in the taps makes Alex frown, and she shifts a bit so that she's sitting cross-legged on her bed. While she's not let go of the restraining hand on his arm, Alex does take her hand off his face just so that it's more comfortable for her to go into thinking mode. Simon was rarely urgent with her, not in the same way and the last time that he had been was for her to come to Turkey in order to touch the Horn of Tiamat. Well, the information from it too, but instinctively Alex knows that it was about more than just the image; it was laying hands against it and the weird energy that it had.

Not that she was going to think about that very much, actually. There's already far too much going on in the here and now for her to think back that far.

"You want me to go to Geneva with Strand." It's not a question, not at all--Alex is just stating the facts of it. But there's all of the other things that happen to be swirling around Geneva, not the least of which is that Alex is fairly certain that Thomas Warren is behind Strand's speaking engagement there. "But he's on the right track with Calvin and the Reformation and me talking to his colleague tomorrow." It's very clear that the 'he' in question is Strand, because who else would it be.

"God, I wish you could tell me why I was dreaming of the Helvetian two years ago before I'd seen that tape of his." As if she realizes what she'd just said, Alex touches his face again. "I fucking hate that they've stolen your voice again."

Even if she hasn't let go of him she did release him enough to move, so Simon also shifted to sit up. An even more looming shadow in the darkness, hunched and bent like an old broken tree. That would at least give him enough freedom to use his claws to communicate more easily. Usually Simon wasn't urgent, so he knew Alex would take it seriously when he was. Even in clicks, he could still get the point across.

You want me to go to Geneva with Strand.

Tap. Yes.

But he's on the right track with Calvin and the Reformation and me talking to his colleague tomorrow.

Tap. Yes. Again the affirmative. Much as they had "spoken" the night Alex caught Simon on tape telling her to go the fuck to sleep, only this time she could hear him.

God, I wish you could tell me why I was dreaming of the Helvetian two years ago before I'd seen that tape of his.

Quieter... tap tap. No. He can't tell her, even now. Not with his voice gone.

And yet... I fucking hate that they've stolen your voice again.

The final somber tap of agreement, if a tap could be somber Simon sure seemed to be able to make it so. He hates it too. Only just had his voice back for a short time and now it was gone. True he could probably still throw it through electronic devices but that would take a lot of effort and energy he didn't have right now.

He'll record a message for her to find later.

Without thinking about it, Alex just wraps her arms around him and hugs him. Later, she'll remember that Simon is wrapped up in a demonic body that has terrorized her for three years, and she'll also remember that Alex probably wouldn't have touched him even if he was human, because Simon was a touch me not and well...it's not like she would have been any position to before when he was in the hospital and Alex was supposed to have journalistic integrity. Journalistic integrity was right out the window now with everything else. The world was ending, Simon was a demon and it was her fault, and everything is a heavy weight resting on her heart like a tumor comprised of guilt and fear.

But whatever her fear of things is, Alex is still hugging Simon in a demon body because she cares, because she hates that he's trapped like this without his being able to talk. She cares that out of all of the places in the world that he could be (literally) where he is is here in her bedroom and in her bed. Even without knowing what Simon might be saying, Alex knows that he's here to protect her and keep her safe from whatever is coming next, and what's coming next is Geneva and everything that Thomas Warren is doing there. Thomas Warren has a lot to answer for and Alex is going to make him pay for it in any way that she can. She doesn't care, because all the rules and everything else go right out the window when the devil is in town and if there's one thing that Warren is, it's the devil in their story.

"I'm going to get your voice back. I'm going to stop whatever it is that Warren wants Strand to do there." Alex clearly thinks that's why it's so important that she goes rather than any other reason. Strand needs someone to remind him and to tie him too the Earth rather than to Tiamat and the Stars and she's pretty sure that Alex is his anchor and his tether. Too bad she doesn't think that either one of those roles is coming through this unscathed.

Edited 2021-09-02 01:00 (UTC)

Alex you can't just go around hugging demons! Simon stiffens at first, partly out of confusion and partly because he knows that later if Alex ruminates on this too much she's going to be even more upset. Really, he's more worried about her than himself, which is probably how he got himself into this mess to begin with. Simon's not used to being hugged so it takes him some time to react but eventually he does lean into her just barely, a returned hug without the arms because she doesn't need that imagery to haunt her nightmares with.

If there is going to be any saving him Geneva might be their only chance. Geneva, and Thomas Warren's machines. Simon still didn't want her to go. Too much was at stake if she did. If things went south, if Richard fucked it up and fell right into Warren's trap as he's very liable to do then it's all over. At the same time... they have to do something. Because hiding and denying the reality wasn't going to work anymore.

Again he taps his claws together twice, quietly. He'd rather she not go, but the quiet protest wasn't particularly insistent anymore. Seems Simon has accepted that his protest is going to be ignored and there isn't much point in arguing with her about it. He just can't voice anything more than a yes or no, which really made holding a nuanced conversation difficult.

He knows she's going. He's just going to have to up his game in keeping her safe.

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