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They were the only ones left now other than the drones. Everyone else who Navi had taken has been returned to their times, save for Alex who can’t be and Simon who won’t be without Alex. She’s gotten used to it, at this point and honestly Alex doesn’t really even miss the people anymore. While all of them still cared about her, and while Alex still misses them, they couldn’t really understand the woman who’d become a teenager and who had never really come back from it when everyone else did. No one has an explanation for it, least of all Alex herself and she got very tired of trying to find one for other people.

But fewer people means Alex has had more time to think, and a thinking Alex can be a more dangerous Alex at sixteen than she even was at thirty-three. While her friends (and Nic. And Richard. And Simon too probably—definitely—) all considered her not to have a sense of self preservation; her younger self is that on steroids. The normal devil may care nature that Alex Reagan possesses is definitely worsened by the feeling of the indestructibility that comes with youth and living on a space ship. Well, the last thing was different than it’d been when she was teenager the first time, but it doesn’t help now.

As she so often is, Alex is sitting in the back of the observation area on the floor with a coffee. Simon doesn’t like the stars as much as she does, so she always leaves him the hallway so that he can look at her and not out on the expanse of space. She’s made them both coffee, and it’s still the same shade of light that it had been when she’d taken Alex’s place here on the ship. Maybe that should have been the first sign that she wasn’t going back: her coffee tastes never progressed to the black that older her takes in the morning.

But the coffee cup isn’t the only thing that she’s got. There, in the pocket of one of the hoodies that she’s stolen from Simon, Alex has her hands around the little mp3 player that has all the files of the show that had been found on a different planet. Alex had known that it’d been from farther along than any of the three of them had been from; Richard had told her that when he’d tried to get her to listen to them and she’d refused. Dr. Strand had wanted her to listen for his own benefit and Alex hadn’t wanted to listen.

Danny Reagan’s favorite movie had been Back to the Future and in the age old form of Dads of a certain age, that movie had gotten no small amount of play in Alex’s childhood home. She’d always been worried about time travel before in the way that it couldn’t be real so it wasn’t an actual concern, but well, she’d proven that fear to be one that was just as valid as demons and ghosts were. Not wanting to listen before had more to do with her not wanting to do something to mess up the future. At this point, however, Alex is pretty sure that whatever happens here no longer affects the future in the world they left behind.

What the show does matter to, however, is Simon and Alex. While she may not be the trained and season reporter that he’d known before, Alex’s instincts are still present and they’re still good. She knows that big things are in that recording, things that are going to change for them. They have to change for them, because Alex knows that Simon has secrets he needs for her to know before they go much further.

Pulling the player from her pocket, Alex shows it to him. “I’m ready to listen now. You know, unless you want to tell me before I do.”

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It was so quiet now, with only Alex left on the ship. If it weren't for her Simon was at a very real risk of slipping back into being a selective mute. After all, who else would he speak to? Navi spoke psychically, they wouldn't require him to use his voice. Any planets they might stop at didn't necessarily require him to be social, and he'd refuse anyway. There were only a few people Simon was willing to give the time of day, and random alien strangers were not on that list.

Alex was... most of the list.

He knew it was hard on her, at least at first. He could only imagine what it would be like to be told you'd lost an entire life's worth of experience and memory, forced to navigate people that knew you as someone else entirely. Simon tried his best not to look at her as the Alex he knew, not entirely, even if he did still see those admirable qualities she'd grow into as she got older. As well as the less admirable, but still entertaining in his opinion.

Perhaps because he was also just a little too reckless for his own good, as she'll come to understand eventually. They certainly had that in common.

Simon enjoyed the stars well enough, but they weren't sunsets. There was something too distant, too impersonal about the tiny lights of deep space. They didn't anchor him the way a sunset would, or the way Alex did. He missed sunsets.

He was watching her, of course he was watching her, as he often did. The recorder came as no surprise, not really, he knew by now that something was starting to weigh on her. At her question he merely shook his head, sipping his coffee.

"It will make more sense if you hear it the way you did the first time. Do you want me to stay?" He could go, give her privacy to deal with what was coming and decide whether or not she even wanted to see him after what she'd learn. It would be startling, he knew, but somehow he expected her reaction might not be so different from the first time around. Not once she heard his side of things.

For a moment, Alex considers both Simon’s question about staying and the podcast itself. Already, because she is Alex Reagan and thus has a curiosity that’s worse than a cat’s, she knows how long the podcast is. Thirty-six episodes spanning the last three years of her life. Well, that Alex’s life; she doesn’t know how much she claims it in fully anyway, and that’s even before you consider that Alex herself hadn’t come from that third season at all. Or at least, she’d never made it to the end of where they’d come from. It was even past from where Simon himself had come from.

“It’s really long,” she starts quickly as she thumbs through it. Even before Alex had stopped herself from reading what each episode contained, she had looked at the time stamps of them. The part in her head that sounds like her mother knows that Alex should probably do this in some sort of moderation, considering that this would probably take up much of the day listening straight through it, but the part of her that is always herself knows that once she starts this; she’s not going to be able to stop it. Simon knows her, and she’s willing to bet that he knows that too.

“Okay.” She starts again and chews on her lower lip. Alex is nervous about this, and she hates that she is, but she is too aware of how scared that version of her is or was or whatever is the proper state of saying it. “You’re going to watch anyway, right?” It’s a statement and not a question despite the way that Alex’s voice lilts up at the end. Simon always watches, and she knows Simon was worried about this, so it makes sense that he would.

But also because he’s Simon, Alex knows he’s also not going to answer her questions until she has the entire thirty-six episodes under her belt. That would be most of the full truth as there is that they know about, even if they never know what happens after that last one. To the people who it ended up it happening too, because it’s not ever going to be this version of them. There is few things that Alex Reagan has abject certainty about with her life, but that’s one of them.

Finally the temptation turns too great and she just hits play. The sound of her voice being the first thing that comes out isn’t a jump scare exactly, but it’s still uncomfortable. To Alex, that’s not her voice, so hearing herself say “ghosts, poltergeists, spirits and demons.” The scare comes in two forms: the first is her voice. Alex has listened to many of the other versions of her self's posts. Just the public ones because every version of Alex can be an asshole, but there’s no way her teenage self is gonna go around and violate people’s privacy in that way.

“I don’t know,” she says over herself as the narration continues, and goes into a series of on the street interviews. “I sound like I’m in Scooby Doo. But it doesn’t last long until she starts getting into actual dates and numbers and Alex pauses. “I need a notebook and a pen.” And honestly a hell of a lot more coffee.

The fortunate thing about this situation was, with them being on a largely self-maintaining space ship, there wasn't anything else pressing to do. If Alex wanted to binge all the episodes in one go, she could with little consequence. Other than the inevitable loss of sleep, but she had no job to stop her from taking a nap whenever she felt like it.

Simon certainly had a wildly unruly sleep schedule, without the sun his circadian rhythm was completely gone.

He's quiet, for a while, when she asks if he's going to watch anyway. Mulling over his answer, and his decision. "Unless you don't want me to." He'd respect that boundary, fully give her that privacy if she really wanted it. He'd just not initially intended to bring it up, if she didn't. There was enough separation between a podcast and her living it that he expected this wouldn't be as bad as it could be, but he'd still want to keep watch.

Again, from his position near the hallway, Simon watches. It's not a scare for him, he's listened to them all, he's lived it all, but it is nostalgic. The Alex that was, is long gone, who the new Alex will be is yet to be discovered.

"I'll make some coffee."

He'll answer her unspoken request, she can handle the research materials.

Alex is both is and is not Alex, and she doesn’t feel like she needs privacy for this. Honestly, she doesn’t even want privacy for this. There’s too much and it’s too big and Alex knows that she’s going to be wanting to make commentary already and they’re still in the first episode. Just the first episode. God, why is she talking so damned slowly. If she had more familiarity with a podcast, with the controls, she might have put it on double speed so that she could get it done faster.

Man, why couldn’t she be a writer?! Alex can read a lot faster than she can write. By the time Alex has gotten to her room and started digging through her desk, Strand has finally accepted the interview. Really, as she listens to him talk on the show, Alex kind of understands a little why the older version of herself would go along with calling someone who really really really didn’t want to talk to them.

But people tended to want to speak to Alex when it came down to it and she would have been far more annoyed with Strand than her older counterpart was. Older Alex had time to develop patience of a sort to go along with the empathy that is always in her, and younger Alex can hear that in her, but more refined. Ugh maybe her mom was right when it came to patience being a virtue that Alex should cultivate.

Still, Alex puts down the nice journal someone had given to her for one of the holiday things, and instead digs until she finds the pile of legal pads that she’d already liberated from the cabins of people who were gone, including Strand himself, but whatever research and notes that he’d taken on his idea of their life hadn’t been on it, not even when Alex had liberally covered the top pages in all of them with pencil lead to see if she could get any notes that way, but there was nothing.

This first messy listen—because Alex knows herself and she knows that it will be just the first listen once she finally gets through it so she can go into depth—needs notes that are less permanent so legal pads and pens and highlighters are collected and shoved into pockets as she also looks around and grabs an old dictionary. Just in case.

(Look, Richard Strand tried to use SAT language when he was talking to this version of her; she doubts it’s going to be any less archaic when she’s older.)

Not wanting to do this in either her room or the observatory, Alex carries her load into the kitchen and sits, as she so often does, on the counter. That hadn’t changed at least. As someone short, she’s always understood the need to be taller, and everyone is always taller than she is. Simon’s probably got a foot on her, and so did Strand. “Okay, so I call him eleven damn times and he kicks me out of his office in two minutes? Just cause I found something that he didn’t want me to?” Alex snorts a bit. “Yeah, that sounds like him.”

Then there’s a beat, and no small measure of amusement in both her face and voice. “I can’t believe how easily I lied to get back into the office. I don’t think that’s something I normally do. Lie I mean, not like. Get into something that I shouldn’t.” No, that part of Alex is wired into her core.

She’s gotten to the part now where Alex and Richard are back in and talking about Crookshanks and mental hospitals and cell towers and EMPs, ghost hunters lying about stuff, and she goes quiet when they get to the video. Alex Reagan is always good at picturing things in her head so she would have been able to picture this so clearly in her head. It’s a skill that the older her has developed and trained, and that’s helpful to that version of Alex.

This version of Alex, however, is half the age and half the life experience of that woman. Not only that but she’s much closer to the time that she doesn’t remember. She doesn’t have as much therapy and adulthood and logic that Alex Reagan of Pacific Northwest Stories does, but what she does have is more of a grasp on the fuzzy memories of herself before she was adopted.

Going a little white as the trailer for the next episode plays within the show itself, Alex pauses and says aloud. “It’s Tall Paul. The name of it is Tall Paul, isn’t it?”

(Look, Richard Strand tried to use SAT language when he was talking to this version of her; she doubts it’s going to be any less archaic when she’s older.)

Going a little white as the trailer for the next episode plays within the show itself, Alex pauses and says aloud. “It’s Tall Paul. The name of it is Tall Paul, isn’t it?”

By the time Alex finished collecting her supplies for notes and the like, the coffee was finished and Simon was waiting for her to join him in the kitchen. The first few episodes weren't particularly concerning. They set up the start of her investigation, and made Strand out to be some elusive expert in his field, but beyond that it wasn't until the Torres family that things became... interesting.

When Alex finally joined him he set a cup of coffee beside her, already prepared the way she liked it. It helped they were both still drinking it very lightened. Simon had not yet adopted Alex's future black coffee habit.

Simon simply snickered at her observation of Strand, that's how he felt about the man as well. As she'd soon discover, she only had a couple more episodes to get to before he was officially introduced. "You knew there was more to the story. You've always known."

His point would be demonstrated not long after, when she correctly named the being that they would soon encounter. Simon's expression was unreadable as he watched her, as was his tone when he finally responded after a very long pause. She always knew, she always had known.

"They have... many names. That is one of them, yes."

‘You knew there was more to the story. You always have known.’ It’s a truth at this point that even her older self would have acknowledged, even with all of the time and the piles of memories that she’d made to force the ones from before she was adopted underneath the rest. Alex herself doesn’t have that, the memories haven’t even left her a decade ago, and that was before she’s spent so much time around Simon and Strand himself.

For a long moment, Alex doesn’t say anything but she does have flashes of memories that reflect on a face that will forever be too open to hide things particularly well. It’s a good thing Alex isn’t a game player cause she’d suck at it. Alex Reagan is three and a half and she hasn’t seen her mommy in a long time. Her friend Paul is curled around her, trying to keep her warm with all of the shadows made of bulk. He promises her help is coming and she believes it is. The social worker comes to the house before the day is over and Alex Reagan won’t remember what her mother looks like. She won’t even remember her voice or her name.

Alex Reagan’s first foster home is overcrowded and cramped, smelling of tears and stale cigarette smoke. As the newest kid, and the youngest she’s at the bottom of the ranking pile and fair game for all of the kids. Their games turn to fear when the kids who hurt her start having accidents after they do. Shoves, door slamming, bee stings, burns, with each incident the kids become more frightened of her and of Paul and finally Mrs. Laurent calls her social worker and sends Alex on the way.

She’s learned—they’ve learned really—that what Alex needs is the kids on her side in this. While there’s less kids here, she likes it even less. This time when Paul protects her, it’s by bringing her food and taking the wrappers away. Alex shares every single one of them, and even though Tall Paul hides the wrappers, Mrs. Fisher suspected something but it wasn’t until the store and the strawberries that the woman catches them red handed. The next morning when her social worker shows up for her check in, she sees the burn on Alex’s hand and removes her instantly.

There’s houses that Paul doesn’t even let her go inside of, even if Alex never understood why. But finally at five her social worker tells her that Danny and Alice Reagan are interested in adopting her. She promises Alex that these people are different. When they give her a brand new Eeyore stuffed animal with her name embroidered on it, Alex hugs it like she once would have hugged Paul.

She’s not even there for that long before Paul tells her she’s going to be safe and happy and she has to go now.

So Alex as her sixteen year old self just nods slowly and lets the next episode play. It’s the first time she gets a real taste of the show with that intro and she does smile when she hears herself laugh like that. It’s so different than hearing her voice here. She sounds. She sounds happy and not exhausted like she has the weight of the world on her. Given the time frame of simply the release date on the shows, Alex knows that it’s far more than just the season that she’s promising here. How a lot could change in three years.

(Or seven episodes.)

Alex frowns at the stuff about journalism ethics, and she makes a face at the recorder when she says “subterfuge?” Aloud at the same time Nic does. For the first time, Alex makes a note instead of asking the question aloud. Simon can be kind of an asshole and doesn’t answer her far too often for her liking so she’s saving this up in case there’s an answer later on. ‘Was there a case in my past where I got too close to a story before this one?’ Alex Reagan knows herself and she knows that this is exactly the kind of thing she’d be doing if she knows she’s fucked up before. God knows how many times she’s done what she did with Nic with her dad? Too many to count.

She does manage to huff out sharply: “he owes us a million dollars!” Cause clearly they’d already proven this over and over simply by the three of them being the three of them but especially Simon.

Settling back against the cabinets, Alex lets her tell herself the story. She’s always loved stories, it’s why she’s wanted to be a reporter. But that doesn’t mean she’s still not on edge when it comes to all of the things around the Shadow Men. Freshly armed with her memories, Alex knows that Paul had done that with her foster homes, but the Torres family going through it as well drives home the reality of her situation.

Despite knowing that Alex is making them sound like an idiot in order to play the Everyman role of the listener, it still annoys and frustrates her to hear it aloud. Strand has been annoying her since he first showed up in the first episode and she growls a bit. “I swear if the thing about records comes up within six episodes I am breaking out the vodka.”

It’s mostly a bad joke, because this is too important to mess with like that, but it’s still infuriating.

Alex hasn’t suspected that she’d be glad this was in an audio format, but she is as she describes her reaction to the tapes. The skill of her older self is there on display now, as she questions Torres and later Maria. It makes her want to work harder on them. But the feeling of just how much Maria reminds Alex of her mom is a punch to her guts. For the most part, Alex doesn’t think of her family; it hurts too much to know that she herself will never see them again. It’s a price for all of this and Alex is willingly paying it, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt to do so.

Maybe if she hadn’t been missing her mom so much, what Maria says wouldn’t be so much of a blow. “No pictures?! Nothing?” Where she pauses it, Alex can hear the emotion in her older self’s words that she’s trying to contain from the audience. She wonders if anyone else heard it then. But she continues, “Strand has a daughter. How could he not get what a big deal this is? How much that Maria believes it?! I’m don’t understand why he doesn’t seem to get how much of a massive loss this is. My mom and dad would take a million pictures of me with a black blob in them if it meant they had something from the times when I was a baby!”

And through it all Simon watches. He's not unlike those shadow beings in that way. Too lanky, too angular, always looming. He doesn't quite blink often enough, if at all, and watches far too intently for most people's comfort. Now he was doing the very same. Watching Alex as she struggled with her memories, watched as she took her notes and her brow furrowed in that way when she was trying to piece something together that she wasn't quite ready to ask.

She knew Simon was selective with his answers, especially if he felt it was the wrong question. Now would be no different, in fact now he might just be at his worst.

Her outburst of 'he owes us a million dollars!' earned a quietly huffed laugh over his coffee mug. Strand wasn't going to pay up, and Strand already knew he owed them. He just wasn't ready to admit it, not this early in the investigation.

The vodka comment, however, earns a raised eyebrow. "And risk missing a detail?" He knew she wouldn't want that. Not that Simon was going to begrudge her, he's hardly going to pick up the mantle of being the responsible one in the room. This was also his way of confirming that yes, back-masking is going to make an appearance.

But then they're on to the Torres family, plagued by their own tall man to the point that touching memories couldn't be recorded for fear of what else they'd capture. Simon continued to watch her, expression hard to read but for once he might have almost looked saddened. "Sometimes I wonder how he hasn't been punched more often."

Far be it for Simon to play Richard's advocate. He could make the defensive claim that Richard uses this 'ignore it and it'll go away' method as his primary defense against these things, but Alex will figure it out and it's a cop-out anyway.

Alex snorts softly, “he doesn’t get punched because of me and we both know it. You can see it already with Robert Torres,” she takes the time to pause and write down: ‘a sabbatical?’ On the notepad before she hits play once more. The way that Alex is so close to her memories of the time before her adoption means that all of the parallels with Sebastian Torres’ Tall Paul and her own means it doesn’t hit her as hard as it will hit her older self later on. It’s less of a betrayal for her than it is for the Alex on the show whose voice she knows is going to change.

“So if I was talking about you and me here like I am Sebastian then we’d definitely count as creepy kids, right?” But she listens and wonders if there were smudges in her photos that she’s somehow missed within Alex’s investigation of her own life.

Her nose wrinkles up when Strand and Alex fight, and yeah, that’s the Strand that she’d met before. “He is such an asshole! How the hell do I get from here to whatever is going on?” Her eyes go even wider when she hears about his wife. “Seriously I’m so stupid I ignore the giant red flags here?! The call back isn’t that good. What the hell?”

Alex doesn’t wait for Simon to respond as she thumbs over to the next episode. When she hears the familiar opening notes, Alex fast forwards without mercy until she hears something new on the recorder. While Nic and Alex’s conversation plays out in the background, there's astonished annoyance in her tone that she says, “Is he bringing me a black tape like flowers or is he bringing me a black tape like a cat drops a dead mouse on your pillow?”

But she listens to herself discussing this with Strand, and Alex stays quiet with a contemplative look on her face. To her ear, Strand sounds both like he’s lying but he’s telling the truth as well. It’s an odd feeling.

Alex Reagan loves people’s stories, and she always has. She always will, that’s something that she knows too. That’s the reasoning behind her wanting to be a journalist and it’s vastly easier to listen to a story that doesn’t feel like it has to do with you. Oh, Alex knows if it’s important enough to be on the show that it will be important in the show later, but it still helps with the experience. Sitting up a bit, Alex reaches up into the cabinet to grab the equivalent of smart food and peanut m&ms and dumps them together in a bowl before she sets it between herself and Simon and keeps listening. While she knows that demons are still one of the few things that Alex is always frightened of, but the very concept of the Unsound is effectively defanged by the certain knowledge that everyone (or everyone important to the narrative anyway) survives well past a year of hearing it.

The sound itself isn’t something that Alex ever would have considered fast forwarding through, and though she listened, Alex doesn’t feel any need to rewind. Listening to herself and Michael Pullman, Alex just grins a little bit. “Oh, they’re cute. I do have chemistry with people who aren’t assholes, good to know.” Alex gives Simon a giant grin before she throws a piece of popcorn at him. It’s easy to ignore the idiot talking about demons for the moment; besides Alex already knows that they recap certain events for the audience again if they’re important!

Alex manages to focus once more as she’s interviewing Keith Dabic. Making another note on the pad, she scribbles, ‘who was the guy who brought Keith drinks? Someone turned him onto it, right?’

The pen is in her mouth as she listens to herself and Strand. “Oh,” she says, as they reach the end conversation. “I think I get them more now. He does like me. Like really. I wondered if Strand really did.” She doesn’t mention how her older self likes him there; Simon already knows, just like she thinks he knows that she herself definitely does not like Strand like that at all.

Alex repeats the skipping the closing and the trailer and the beginning of the next episode. As soon as she hears it, her eyes go round and she just stares at him behind her glasses. ‘He’s not who you think he is.’ Oh, she knows whose voice that is! Without stopping it, Alex allows the conversation to play out on the recorder until the commercial break then she pauses it. “That was you, wasn’t it Simon? You were the one who left me that message.”

"Before he had you to save him," Simon clarified. There was that one incident with a psychic, Simon was simply astonished it didn't happen more often. Perhaps the people whom Strand annoyed the most were simply too polite to shut him up? Well, Simon knew that was exactly the case, but sometimes he wished it wasn't. Just a little bit.

Her question earned a faintly amused smirk. "Yeah, we're the creepy kids." Simon especially, as she'll learn very soon. She was getting close, it wasn't too far in before she'd finally get to the truth. It was interesting watching her learn all of this prior to her having forgotten her own past. Being closer to when she was a child it was clear she was able to accept the truth of the story before her. While Alex was always more receptive, certainly more so than Strand, her distant memories had made her significantly more skeptical. Alex's further questions only earn a faint shrug from Simon. Who could say what adult Alex sees in Richard Strand? Simon certainly didn't get it.

For the remainder of her listen Simon settled in to silently sip his coffee and watch her furiously scribble notes. Whatever thoughts he might have had, he seemed content to keep to himself. Sometimes he just got quiet, soon she'd learn exactly why that was.

The chemistry comment did earn something of that typical faint smirk of his, Simon choosing to feign that he wasn't absolutely an asshole too. She can't expect a guy who spent most of his developmental years mute to be especially charismatic, not that she'd know about that yet. A couple more episodes, that's all she needed. The popcorn shenanigans did earn a quiet chuckle, him catching it barely before it made it to the floor to munch on.

It was strange listening to this again and watching it be so new to her, while it felt so long ago now. He was still at the hospital, still waiting to see if Idaho decided to re-litigate his trial.

Finally Alex reached the part where Strand began to show something other than contempt. "In his way," He agreed, if reluctantly. Simon didn't exactly want to give Strand any points, but he also wasn't going to mislead Alex by trying to convince her otherwise. The two liked each other clearly, it just took some time for Richard to warm up enough to express it.

Ah, and there it was. By now he'd almost forgotten he'd left that message, from back when he'd tried to stop her. She hadn't listened, of course, but he'd had hope at the time he could turn her away from the inevitable. "You know," After a few moments of silence, him only staring back at her staring at her. "I still don't know if you ever figured it out later." She never brought it up, honestly it only came up in the next episode and never again.

He'd tried, she couldn't say he didn't try to save her.

For a long moment, Alex herself is silent in response, and she chews on her thumb, her brow furrowed. But it’s more than just the question of whether or not her older self ever figured out what Simon had done. She’s also mulling over the conversation (conversations?) that were on the show. She doesn’t turn the podcast back on though, and Alex goes so far as to set it down next to her on the counter.

Alex Reagan at sixteen is nowhere near as good at putting together puzzles and patterns as the Alex that Simon had known here. Hell, even that Alex would have had a problem attempting to piece together three almost identical puzzles that were just slightly different in perspectives that her teenage self is working on! But still Alex tries because finding patterns and connections is who she is at her core.

“I think I knew,” Alex says at last, with a frown. “Even if it’s just deep down, quiet in the middle of the night sort of way. She’s heard your voice over electronics and tape way more than I have, and I knew it. Plus I could edit audio. There’s no way that I didn’t cut that bit out and play it over and over.” Alex doesn’t know how that whole podcast thing works, but she knows how to make a mixtape and burn cds; that’s just what she would do without the experience that a professional would.

“You tried to save me from all of this terrible stuff, and I knew even then it was important enough to document it. Like even putting it in the first part of the episode important! You tried, and I know I eventually knew that, probably right after I met you. But by then I probably felt like it was already too late.”

Frowning tightly, Alex drags her knees to her chest again and hugs them. “I’m pretty sure I realized it was too late even before I made the first of those eleven calls to Richard Strand. I mean it’s so weird I did it that they even put it in the theme song that I hope to god they don’t use for all three seasons of the show cause it sucks!”

It's a lot to put together, but Simon knows she'll get there in the end. She has all the pieces she needs, it will just take some time to put them together. Right now time is something they have in abundance, after all, so she might as well make use of it.

"I don't doubt it," Simon agrees. They never spoke on it, that didn't mean she didn't realize it later. By the time she would have really understood it would have been far too late anyway. Still, he'd tried, even if he doubted she'd listen to him. Alex wasn't one to take mysterious static-filled videos seriously at this juncture in her investigation, no matter how creepy.

"Or you didn't want to stop." He offered, watching her over the rim of his mug. Alex was no damsel in all this, she was a driving force just as much as any of them. Even if she didn't know what they were driving towards, the hunt was enough to keep her going. The story was just too big to give up on, no matter how crazy it got in the end.

Her last comment earned another faint snicker. "It stays." He confirms, ruining her night further. "Do you need a break?" She wasn't quite to the parts he needed her to know yet, but it was a lot to take in all at once.

Alex can’t help but to laugh when Simon, as ever, calls her out on her bull. He wouldn’t be Simon if he didn’t and both of them know it. “Okay okay yeah, I probably didn’t want to stop, you got me there.” She forces herself to unwind some and then her own response is to hit play on the episode because of course there’s no way in hell that she’s going to be taking a break before they get to Simon.

That is the point to all of this after all.

Still, it’s easier for Alex to just listen and take notes when the story is focused more outside of herself, Strand and any sort of demonic abilities. There’s questions that she has of course, because every single thing about Alex Reagan is questions when it comes down to it. So it’s things about who hired Strand, why this town, why now, a rudimentary scribbling of an upside down face and then of course the episode ends with Strand and Alex’s eyebrows in her hairline. She understands the mystery to Strand more now but is also placing a rather firm amount on her older self too.

But other than that she doesn’t comment on the episode. That said she barely lasts through the introduction beyond Simon’s message because yeah, exorcism has been mentioned more than once but she doesn’t expect her adult self talking about a movie that she’s hated for almost her whole life apparently.

There’s not anything joking about Alex as she listens to herself talk about the monster that’s always been under her bed. She’s still herself, so she does laugh at Freud Flintstone; it’d be more worrying for her if she didn’t. But while she’s still gripping the pen tightly, she’s not taking any more notes. Instead, she’s just tapping the pen against the pad, and goes more pale when they get to the boy.

Fourteen feels both like a long way away and like it was yesterday. This time when Alex curls up it’s a much more slow motion process that becomes interrupted when her older self and Strand flirt, which makes her roll her eyes so hard Strand probably feels it somewhere. But then it stops entirely as Alex changes gears on the show, and mentions Simon’s message and the others.

Listening to herself and Strand talk, for the first time he does or says something that actually does succeed in making Alex feel genuinely sorry for him. ‘Because they thought it was me.’ She’d done the same too, but she doesn’t believe that if Strand could genuinely hurt the Alex Reagan he knows, then he’d still be alive.

But then all her thoughts are on the exorcism and it’s so much worse hearing herself react to something terrible that Alex knows she’s so afraid of because she knows how Alex wants to act right now and run.

She doesn’t.

She doesn’t even get off the counter until the Alex in voice-over says ‘Those sounds, I’ve never heard anything like it.’ Shutting off the recording, Alex gets off the counter and frowns, pacing. “She’s lying, Simon. Or she’s blocking the memory or something, but she’s not telling the truth. Okay, she probably doesn’t know she’s lying, but I’ve heard it before so she has too.”

And then Alex sighs in frustration. “It’s not her fault she’s blocking it out. She doesn’t remember Tall Paul, and that was the last time I saw him. It was the only time my parents allowed me to go camping without them or my grandfather. But I went with a church camp when I was eight and that night a girl screamed like that. They said she got bit by a snake! But she didn’t did she? It would be too much of a coincidence.”

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