2020-02-10 - Role Reversal

Isabella? Are you okay? I've gone home; you don't have to go by the hospital.

That was the last of a couple of worried messages that Alexander left on Isabella's phone as he walked home in the snow. It wasn't exactly a great walk, but anything was better than being in the hospital another moment, especially after the bird, and the encounter with Alice. When he got home, he immediately shed the dirty clothes, putting them in the laundry basket, then took a shower and grabbed another outfit before checking on Bennie. He soothes some of her withdrawal with a small use of power, and makes sure she can sleep before he relocates to the living room, checks his phone, and reassures his animals that he exists and loves them. Then he roves into the kitchen, unearthing some canned soup. By the time evening comes on, Alexander is sitting on the couch, with a bowl of a soup and a cat draped around his shoulders, eyeing his phone and trying to figure out whether to start calling Byron and Javier to try and FIND her. His range has expanded, but only to a mile, and he's not sure about reaching out with his head still hurting.

He'd find some relief, at least, when eventually, he would find that his text messages have registered as read - but only very recently.

It's around ten in the evening by the time she arrives. Given his place in the living room, Alexander would spot it - the shine of twin headlights as they slip through the drapes and caress the battered windowsill of the 13 Elm murder house, the familiar engine of Isabella's cherry red Jeep rumbling when it parks on the curb before it shuts down. It takes a few more minutes before heavy, listing bootfalls find the short walk up the front steps of the residence, and then when the latch turns until the lock disengages. The world's outside chill, unforgiving as it is, rushes through the moment the door opens, doing a number on the house's warmer confines.

A gloved hand shuts the door behind her, her clothes soaked from melted snow - her sunkissed complexion has taken on a grayish cast and her eyes are wide and haunted. Fingers set with spasmodic tremors struggle in an attempt to peel the layers of her outerwear off her, but even moving makes her look sick. How she managed to get back in the driver's seat of her vehicle and drive home after the day's excursion if nothing else is a testament to her willpower, or at least the sheer, overwhelming desire to get back to civilization. "Alexander?" Her voice is raw, and hoarse; faint, and frayed at the edges from overuse, and she reaches out to hang her jacket on a hook, but it slips and falls as she turns in an attempt to move out of that narrow corridor. "I'm sorry, I meant to get you but I had a hunch and..."

Her knees feel like they've been transmuted to jelly, but her steps are careful - even after all of it, she's at least determined not to fall on her face.

Alexander rises as soon as the door starts to open, his eyes widening as he takes in Isabella. For a moment. Only a moment, because then he's rushing forward and whether she wants it or not, she's being scooped up in his arms as he kicks the door closed and carries her over to the sofa to lay her down and crouch beside her. Nevermind the grunt he makes at the effort, he kneels beside the couch and reaches out to lay his hand on her forehead. "Isabella. What happened? What did you do? Are you okay?" In addition to asking, his mind is reaching out, assessing any injures for himself.

Whether she wants to or not. She doesn't, all too aware that he's still recovering, but her attempts to resist are feeble enough and before long, her feet finds empty air. The warmth and familiar surroundings are welcome and so is his care despite her quiet insistence that he not strain himself. The couch cushions depress under her weight, and she must be addled because her normally sharp perception is gone - normally any use of the Talent would twig her perpetually hyperaware state almost immediately, but at the moment they do not register. Perhaps it's a good thing, otherwise Isabella would have tried, certainly, to stop him.

She's icy to the touch when his hand finds her forehead and his extrasensory perception would be able to confirm it - as if she had been lying on the snow and muck for hours. He'd find traces of soft earth clinging to one side of her face, and now that she's settled, she's doing her best to get on a sitting position, but otherwise there are no visible injuries - whatever damage had been done, if any, are decidedly not physical. "I just need water," she tells him with her scratchy timbre, the syllables low and careful. "I was..." She swallows. "Doing some follow up research here and there on Jacob and Jill Baxter and..." She nods to her satchel at the corridor, dropped when Alexander had scooped her up. "I was looking up the year the Carousel was set up and after this morning...I went to look around the abandoned sawmill."

Alexander brushes his hand over her forehead, his frown growing deeper when he feels the icy cold both on his skin and in his mind. His fingertips gently finding those traces of earth even as she struggles to sit up. He doesn't try to press her into the sofa, although he makes a sound of protest when she tries. "I'll get you water, but you rest." And then he's up, moving jerkily towards the kitchen to pour a glass of water from the tap and return. Ignore that it has the musky taste of Elm tap water. Also ignore the fact that he almost drops the glass when she continues. "You did WHAT?" It's the second closest that he's ever come to shouting at her. "Isabella, that was stupid. Foolish. Dangerous! At least tell me you didn't go alone!"

By the time he's returned with the glass of water in his hand, Isabella has managed to sit up and is busily attempting to peel off her wet leggings, leaving long limbs bare and finding the relief that comes when cold, sodden clothes are removed. She seems to be recovering her bearings, at least, when she busies herself doing these small tasks to prevent her from being a complete burden. She drags the comforter they share over her for additional warmth.

Her fingers curl over the offered glass - and just in time before an accident could occur, prevented by his grip and hers. The shout, however, earns him a long and level look through hooded eyes, heavy head rolling against the back of the couch, but that is evidence enough that she simply doesn't have it in her to nearly shout back at him that it hadn't been all that long ago when their positions had been reversed.

Instead, after letting the silence linger for an interminable moment, what she says is, "It was, I just didn't think so at the time. When what happened did so this morning, I wasn't sure of what we were actually experiencing in the dream. But...my research led me to wonder, so..." She takes a thirsty gulp of her water - and while she makes a face, briefly, nothing stops her from finishing the entire glass. "...I was just going to look around. See if anything was...amiss. I didn't think there was, until I used."

She looks up at him. "Not to read," she adds, hurriedly. "Just to look. For hidden things or...doors. Something to corroborate what we saw in our dreams this morning. It..." Her lips press tightly together. "I think there's a connection. It's...a bad idea at the moment to use, in general, around that area right now."

"Isabella, goddamn it. It's the middle of the winter, and that mill is out in the middle of nowhere. Yes, I understand why you went. I felt the saw blade too. But you could have disappeared forever, or you could have been hurt and not able to get back. Couldn't you have waited one goddamned day??" Alexander's voice is louder than usual and once she has the glass, he actually starts pacing angrily on the other side of the coffee table. The buzz of the phone distracts him for a little bit, but it mostly just means his string of curse words is directed towards the phone rather than her. He has a brief exchange before just tossing the phone to the coffee table, stopping, and staring at her. "What happened?"

She lets another long moment of silence linger, watching him pace angrily around the side of the living room. "I don't think you're qualified to lecture anyone about the risks and follies of running off by oneself to investigate a hunch," Isabella points out quietly, setting the glass aside on the table. "I'll stop doing that if and when you do."

She takes a breath. "The sawmill's been abandoned for years and I went during the day. I only wanted to confirm what I saw and I was concerned because it affected the both of us, and you were recovering. I only wanted to get on top of it before anything else happened. When I used, it...the place must be steeped in Their whims because it drags you back into what we experienced this morning. Over and over again until you manage to wake yourself up."

"It's my job, Isabella!" Alexander gives her a furious look. "And I am not about to gain a terminal degree and have an actual career!" And then she goes on and he gives a teakettle-hiss, his hands fluttering in an almost incoherent distress. He returns to the couch and unless she moves, he sits next to her and throws his arms around her, throwing his arms around her and squeezing with something that's half love and half anger. "You could have been stuck there until your froze to death, Isabella. And you didn't even warn someone you were going."

"Your job is not to throw yourself in front of every train hoping it would spare the rest of us, especially when there are people and creatures waiting for you at home," Isabella tells him softly, hoarsely - and she can't be so far gone due to her harrowing experiences that she doesn't have enough spirit to meet his arguments head on. They're just less heated due to her exhaustion, but that determination to make herself heard remains despite his temper. He can be assured that part of her, at least, will continue to burn until the day she dies.

She doesn't have a lot of room to get away either when he throws his arms around her, and her own lift to tangle around his shoulders. Her head finds the space where his throat meets them, scenting his shower and closing her eyes. The squeeze she gives him is as tight as her present, bone-deep fatigue could allow, silently hoping that the way he crushes her would eradicate the memory of all of her bones being ground to dust, over and over and over again until she managed to wake herself up. "Tighter," she murmurs, so quietly she can barely be heard in an attempt to smother the plea out of it.

After a moment, she whispers: "You're not the only one who...you can't be the only one, all the time. I have to protect you, too. Especially when you're vulnerable. I want to do my part..." Her face buries further into his shoulder. "And I don't care if you think you can't let me, it's going to happen anyway, and you're just going to have to deal with it. If it needs to change, you and I are going to have to come up with our own Treaty of Tordesillas."

For once, Alexander doesn't protest. He does squeeze tighter, as if he would want to just crush her like the bones in their dreams, although out of affection. He doesn't say anything for a while, but buries his face in her cold hair and takes a deep breath, lets it out, breathes in again. "That doesn't mean you go out and do something stupid just to stop me from doing it. Isabella, you're the most brilliant, beautiful woman I know. Don't...don't wreck that by just jumping without looking into all of this. It's dangerous." He lets out a strangled, frustrated noise. "You could have taken someone else with you. You could have at least left a note with Bennie, or a text, or SOMETHING so that if you didn't come back, we'd know something had gone wrong and could find you."

His more significant strength causes her bones to creak, pulps her against his chest - it hurts, but she savors it. Not because the experience of pain heightens her desire but because he seems so solid, and sure, and certain, muscle and sinew banishing away the cold and putting holes in the ominous visions punched into her head by the repeating, too-vivid nightmare. She makes a soft sound against him, her fingers lifting to tangle into the cluster of midnight-black curls at the back of his head.

"Also the most ridiculous," Isabella manages to tell him after swallowing the hard knot at the back of her throat, put there by the way he buries his face in her hair, as if that aspect of her could explain everything else that's wrong and foolish about her. "And like I said, I'll stop doing it if and when you do. I warned you even before we decided to be difficult together." I don't fight fair. She lifts her head, but only a little so she could watch his eyes. "Not that I believe for a second that you wouldn't know anyway. You're the most brilliant, tenacious man I know."

"Also the most ridiculous," Alexander agrees, without any hesitation. "And no." He shakes her in his arms, once, sharply. "This is not about taking a reasonable risk and having something go south, Isabella. I'd be worried, but I wouldn't object. What you did was not reasonable. That's what I'm trying to impress on you! It was stupid. Don't be stupid." His voice drops to a growl, and he says, "And before you talk about the Pourhouse, I've been there plenty of times, and there was no indication that it would go that badly. I half suspect that the only reason that it did was because Alice wants me in her debt and I didn't know she was there. It was a reasonable risk."

Shaken once and sharply, Isabella's expression is fond, disbelieving and exasperated at once, green-gold gaze fixed on his beloved features. "I'm not even thinking about the Pourhouse," she says, contralto pitched low and thready from her earlier screaming, though it's only partially said out of assurance. "I accept that incident was an unforeseeable consequence of your investigations into Alice Whitehouse's whereabouts. I'm talking about other things, like Peregrine or even the prospect of facing Alice by yourself no matter how many times August pleads for you not to go alone. I don't think it's reasonable, either, to suggest that you're the only one in the entire town that ought to be permitted to make inadvisable maneuvers."

The rest of his words seem to sink in, though, before she furrows her brows at him. "Wait, what do you mean she wants you in her debt? How do you know that?"

"Peregrine was stupid. I accept that. Which should be an object lesson on what not to do," Alexander mutters. "And," a hesitation, "before I checked myself out of the hospital, Alice came to visit me. She confirmed that she saved my life, and wants my help to keep her safe. She believes that They are after her." He frowns. "I said yes, because of Violet, and because she's clearly scared and needs help. But I also think she's dangerous. And she's been watching me. So be careful, all right?"

"It would have been a lesson, indeed, if you hadn't told me in the same fight that you'd probably do it again, and we would repeat that same discussion, so if that's a lesson that you can't take, you can't expect me to follow it," Isabella tells him stubbornly, the delicate line of her jaw taking on that familiar defiant angle At his open hesitation, however, she falls quiet, setting the argument to the side for now, and when he finishes the story, he's left staring into her wide eyes.

"...did you tell her that it doesn't count if she orchestrates the situation to force you to be indebted to her?" she says, her jugular visibly standing out when her blood pressure rises again, fury tightening her expression. There's a flash of teeth, a curl of her lip, and it might very well be that she might not have heard, or doesn't care, that Alice is dangerous when she looks ready to march out the door despite her pantsless state to confront the blonde.

Eventually, she inhales deeply, and forces herself to relax. She gives Alexander another squeeze, before a hand cups his cheek. "I'll do my best to be careful, though I am presently apologetic that the few women in your life have accidentally decided to pick this day to stress you out," she tells him, ruefully. "What made her think They were after her?" She purses her lips. "What exactly did she say to you, Alexander? What...did she bother to explain anything?"

"I can't prove she had anything to do with it, Isabella. I'm not even sure that she did. And if she did, I'm not sure she counts as responsible. The time over there, I think, has not been good for her," Alexander says, ignoring the other part for now, although his jaw tightens at her response. He sighs, and his grip on her gradually relaxes as he slumps back into the seat. His head is throbbing from his sudden movements and anger of earlier, so his eyes half close. "She escaped from the Asylum. She said the new Doctor was...bad. Wrong. May have been responsible for Violet's death. She did sort of admit to releasing other inmates, but there weren't a lot of detailed explanations. She's paranoid and doesn't trust me, yet. So if you see her, be careful, okay? But not hostile. She's clearly deeply hurt."

"I see."

Isabella watches his face, his own exhaustion present there. As he slowly slumps behind and relaxes his grip on her, she shifts until she's lying crosswise on the couch, drawing him gently towards her if he lets her. Situated somewhat higher against the armrest, she positions herself so she is cradling him for a change, gathering him up if he allows and pushing the blanket on top of them both. Her face turns, nose and lips burying into the longer strands on the top of his head and her thumb finding the pressure point at the back of his neck, massaging gently.

"I'll do my best to be careful, provided that you do the same," she says quietly, the words muffled by his hair. "And...I'll....try my best not to antagonize her if I see her, though I'm not particularly fond of her strong-arming you into her graces by causing a fight in which you were grievously injured." A heartbeat or two passes, before, "When I last talked to Doctor Stevenson, she said that the Asylum isn't what people think it is. I think she actually believed that it helped people. But if the directive changed under new management, that might explain..." She closes her own eyes in an attempt to think.

"Do you remember the door we found in Easton's basement?"

The back of Alexander's head and neck are all over bruises, but he doesn't resist being drawn down or being cradled, although he turns a a little so that he can bury his face against her and make a soft sound. "I have been trying to be careful, Isabella. I have." He sighs, long and low. "And I don't know what to think about the Asylum, but most of the good people we know who have been there have not been kind about it. No one has said, do you notice, that they feel they were helped? That they felt safe and protected there?" A pause. "I guess except that guy at the meeting. But really, what do we know about him?"

His answer to her question is just a single sound, but it's affirmative.

"I noticed," Isabella tells Alexander quietly. "Both regarding the former patients, and your recent attempts to be careful. But what testimonials can we really trust over there, Alexander, when the place toys with memories? Even with what Alice says." Her lips press gently against his forehead when he turns his face, murmuring quiet, soothing noises against his skin. For a moment she does nothing but breathe, easing her thumb away so she can stroke his hair instead.

"My memory of the clock..." she begins. "The one that led me to the basement in the first place. The hour hand was pointed 'Upstate' on the ten o'clock mark. I think at the time, that was when we were there, otherwise I wouldn't remember it that way. But there were two other locations on it, one was the Bar Basement at the eight o'clock mark, and the other was The Doctor's Office at the five o'clock mark." She pauses. "If the Doctor is going to be a problem, there might be a way to get to it. It's just a theory but maybe...you think if we opened the door right when the hour hand hits the Doctor's Office that we would be able to access it through the door in Easton's bar basement?"

"And so you decided to run out to one of the more dangerous places in Gray Harbor without any backup or even notification because, what, you thought I'd become boring and a good slice of unhappiness was what I needed at the moment?" No, Alexander isn't over it, yet, judging by his grumpy tone, and the furrowed brow that her lips find. Not even the mystery of the clock entirely diverts him, although he (somewhat grudgingly) admits, "It's not a bad theory, and easily testable, if ten pm was when we were there. We'd have to get Easton to close down the bar for a night, though. God only knows what might come through if we're wrong. Or if we're right."

His grumpiness doesn't get any return heat - it isn't just because she's tired, but because they've done this similar dance before when their roles were reversed. "I ran out because I didn't think anything severe would happen if I just poked and prodded at the physical remains of the place during the day, when most of the deadly incidents associated with it occurred at night and supposedly in the after hours of its operation," Isabella tells him as her eyes find the ceiling. "And even if I did find a thin point or a door, I didn't intend to go through it, either. All I wanted to know on that end was if there was one and maybe something used it to send us those dreams. And if I did find any strange objects, I was going to take them with me and not do anything else with them until people more powerful than me could take a look at them. I didn't visit the site for the purposes of hunting whatever caused this, I wanted to see if I was right about what we experienced in the dream so we could get ahead of it, if we could." She glances down at his face. "I'll take your unhappiness as my due, however, if it means that you now understand just why I was upset with you and flew off the handle the way I did the first time we had this discussion."

She squeezes him once, there, and she sighs. "More complicated by the fact that Time moves differently there, I think. But there are finite hours during the day - it can be tested. We'll definitely need Easton's blessing, at the very least."

Alexander just grumbles, muttering something under his breath that doesn't even seem entirely like words, although "stubborn" can be made out several times. He might actually try to restart the argument, except the phone keeps going off, so he reaches over for it with a groan and peers at it. "...fuck." He doesn't respond immediately, but says, "Gohl's grave is completely empty. Erased, even." The goddamn it is implied in his expression.

"Easton wants to be involved with the bar thing, so I think his blessing won't be hard."

His quiet grumbling and muttering over her stubbornness has her turning those soft lips back to his brow. Then, she shifts a little when he reaches over her for the coffee table, to yank his phone back to find that text from August. Isabella's own device is vibrating as they speak, so she fumbles for her wet leggings and finds the pocket there, to take a look at it. She furrows her brows at the next text from the Combat Botanist, before she shows the screen to him - apparently, she doesn't care if he sees her incoming texts. Before them is an empty plot devoid of the casket and headstone that ought to be there. No signs of a burial whatsoever.

"It's his bar and he has a connection with the Asylum." She pauses. "If Alice is right though, the Doctor could be dangerous but if she rightly believes They're after her and that the Doctor killed Violet, she could have released those people to help them. But from what we heard from Steve, she was helping an agent of Theirs do it, so...I don't know." Her eyes find his. "You talked to her, do you think she was lying?"

"Hey!" It's weakly protesting, and he makes a swipe at the phone, wrestling it back from her - although not before she has a chance to see that text. He makes a face and turns into her body to give her a playfully grumpy bite before he texts back to August. "Maybe I should text Patrick. Not that he'll tell me anything. Maybe Anne will have heard something? Since she's staying there?" An arched eyebrow towards Isabella.

At the last of her questions, though, he can only shrug and sigh. "I don't believe she thought she was, but she definitely wasn't telling me everything. And I don't know how reliable she can be considered, Isabella. I don't think her time there was kind."

She does try to hold the phone away from him for just a moment, because he's still recovering and needs rest, and while August's text lingers on his screen, Isabella doesn't read it - she is in fact keeping her head angled so she doesn't even see it. He does eventually wrestle it back away from her, and now it's her turn to be grumpy. "You really should be resting," she complains. "Not carrying me, or reading things, or yelling at me for things you yourself have done before." It's all without heat, though a small, surprised sound does escape her when his teeth find her shoulder, unable to suppress a smile that tempers only slightly at the corners when he starts texting. "Text Patrick because Margaret might've heard?" she wonders in an attempt to follow his line of thinking.

At the arched eyebrow, she nods. "I'll text Anne." Her head bobs at his words about Alice. "This would be simpler if that place wasn't built with the sole purpose of making you question reality," she mutters.

"You're in my bed," Alexander points out. "I can't rest unless you rest." The look he shoots her at that bit of unassailable logic is absolutely smug. He even sticks his tongue out, because really, in his heart of hearts, Alexander is twelve. "No," he says, dryly, "text Patrick because I'm pretty damned sure Margaret's responsible for it. This whole thing has Addington meddling written all over it. August suggested the dream was a Baxter thing, and now Gohl's bones are gone, and we dreamed of bones being crunched, sawed, and obliterated. What timber family really hates Baxters and has wanted to destroy the bones for a while?"

He waves his hand, like there you go, the prosecution rests. "And a lot of things would be simpler in that case, Isabella."

She playfully narrows her eyes at him, fingers of her hand extending in an attempt to trap his tongue between her index and thumb. "I was resting just fine until you started moving around again," Isabella groans. "Don't you give me that face, you can't take credit for something that you instigated." She falls quiet at the rest, her brows furrowing. "Alright, but if the bones were destroyed...why would it affect all of us now when it had just been you before?" Her eyes slip past him towards the window, her expression more than just a little bit discomfited. "What changed out there?" she murmurs softly, her fingers and arms unconsciously tightening around him.

Alexander's tongue is trapped! Woe! Consternation! He moves his head forward to try and nip at the fingers holding his tongue, and then smiles. He twists around a little but snuggles up close. "It's a small sofa, Isabella. You're gonna have to get used to me squirming on you." He waits for her to release his tongue before he answers, though. And even then, he's silent for a while. "I don't know that this is...something in this town erases Baxters, Isabella. No graves, and when we're not dying in disasters, we don't publicly exist. What if it's not something, but someone. Someones. In my dream, it felt like I was being extinguished. What if the bones - or someone's bones - were being fed to that sawmill for...some purpose? Maybe some deal the Addingtons struck, since it was their mill? Maybe we felt it because we're Baxters, and we're all grist for the mill, eventually."

She does release his tongue once he's nipped her, Isabella's smile growing visibly. "I'm only play-acting," she tells him with a sniff. "I wasn't about to admit to you that I like you squirming on me and you might have something there regarding small sleeping spaces after all." Her arms shift, to make room for him as he snuggles up close, the two of them burrowing further into the comforter draped over the couch. She falls silent after that, turning over his words in her mind - contemplations are what they are, especially hers, the gauges and tumblers of the Escheresque landscape deep within the ruins of her own mind recalibrating around his observations.

Her fingers stroke up and down his spine and it's a very long moment until she speaks. "1911 was a very busy year in Gray Harbor," she tells him quietly. "Apparently after the Gohl murders, the people running this city..." Addingtons. "Were very interested in its revitalization. There was a lot of money going through here, building things, attempting to make it more family friendly after the Gohl murders. The same year the carousel was set up in the Park? The Addingtons were doing some major work on the abandoned sawmill. That was one of the reasons why I went there today - I probably wouldn't have thought about saws in the dream and its correlation to the mill if I hadn't been looking into it already, and if I hadn't seen Anne nearly get ground up by one recently. And the deaths..."

There's a glance at her satchel. "I have my notes in the bag. The story was they were trying to address the rash of deaths that occurred between 1898 to 1900. Eighteen separate incidents, nearly twenty deaths." She pauses. "Come to think of it...the Pond. Anne told me that when they were building it, they were inundated by plenty of worker deaths also, and within a two year period."

"I don't know. If you didn't like me squirming on you occasionally, then I'm not sure this relationship is gonna work." Alexander waggles his eyebrows at her. "Or is it only when edible underwear is involved? Because it can be arranged. Although fruit slices are better. For a lot of reasons." His body arches as she strokes his spine, and then he just sort of collapses in place with a pleased sound. Not even the talk of deadly history can rouse him. "Bet you Baxters died in those. Things are always bad when Baxters are around. Or Baxters are always there when things are bad." But his words are turning into more mumbles, and with the swiftness of the recently concussed (let's admit it, STILL concussed), Alexander drifts away into unconsciousness with a surprising swiftness.

Only good thing about head trauma: Alexander actually gets sleep.