I let her steal into my melancholy heart

[sausagefests]

Darkness Loves Light

No matter how the darkness looms around you - how much you've become the darkness - there's one bright spot in your life - a person who makes everything worthwhile. It doesn't really matter how they came to you. What does is that they stay. Whether you admit it or not, you seek comfort from them...and, perhaps, them from you, if you're in the same situation. So, whether you push them away, treat them right, or go so far as to worship them and put them on a pedestal, you don't want them to go now. You crave being with them, or at least being in their presence. Don't ruin this for yourself. After all, what would you do without your little ray of light? You'll do anything to keep them happy and loved. Anything. Respond to the meme with your character, canon, preferences, and, if you'd like, what position you're character will be in. Respond to others.

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[11calls]

Alex just rolled her eyes at the question, and she shook her head. "Nope. Not afraid of the dark. But abandoned plague islands with mental hospitals and burnt bones that keep washing up? Yeah, that sounds like a great place to visit when it's dark. So of course that's when you'd want to be there, Richard." The look that she gave him telegraphed her thoughts easily, and Alex didn't even try to hide the 'of course that's what you'd do' look. And someone was going to be just a little more than furious when she found out that they were going to be spending the night on a place that was only accessible by boat.

If it wasn't demons it was fucking mental hospitals and just once she'd like the thing to be haunted to be a spa. Or a theatre, or at this point a halfway decent restaurant that would feed them before they started in the ghost hunting stuff. If nothing else, it'd be a welcome change of pace. Looking down at her outfit, Alex frowned a bit before she asked: "do I need to change?" She probably didn't, but if she was going to need to be in hiking boots rather than the flats she was wearing, she'd rather know it now before they were stuck on an island that people who were smarter than they were wouldn't set foot on.

[nobasisinfact]

"You're fine." He'd already taken care of the arrangements and was going to take a perverse pleasure in her realization that he'd packed for her. Enough to stay warm, dry and keep from breaking any bones. At least by traditional methods. What they were looking for would never be considered 'safe' by any conventional standards.

Then again, what they were looking for didn't exist. Demons, the bringing about of the Apocalypse, the unnote. None of these had any scientific basis in fact. Eventually, they'd find a logical reason - no matter what his intrepid reporter said.

He slipped the 'PLEASE DON'T CLEAN' sign into the card slot, leaning against the way to watch. Waiting for her to finish getting ready. Absently, he debated with himself on whether she would notice the gesture. If she'd realize the weight of it and what it meant.

[11calls]

It wasn't that she didn't believe that he thought she was fine; it was more like Alex sort of assumed that he thought she would actually be fine. This was, after all a man who had chosen to go hiking to a remote cabin wearing a suit and a tie and a pair of loafers. So flats probably would have been fine for him, but the last thing Alex wanted was to be stuck on a probably possibly haunted island with a twisted ankle and a melodramatic sigh from him.

That said, she was about to protest and go back in and put her boots on, but instead she did see him put the sign over the door handle. After all, Alex was an intrepid reporter, and at the moment Strand was the only subject of her focus that mattered. Her brows went up again in both surprise and a question before she moved to put her arm out to block the hallway. Gesturing to the sign with a jut of her chin, she just looked up at him, her dark eyes searching his own blue ones.

"Tell me," she began with a long, soft and drawn out sigh. (Nic called it 'The Strand Sigh' in the editing bay, because it was exclusive to being around him. Or talking about him, or thinking about him.) "That this doesn't mean what I think it does, Richard."

[nobasisinfact]

He raised a brow, knowing precisely what she thought it meant. It wasn't hard to read an open book after all. Then again, it was possible that she didn't actually have figured out exactly what it meant. Improbable, but possible. Alex was rather brilliant, but also quite nieve.

"That depends." He kept his smirk hidden. Non-existant to the world and her, but internally he was enjoying this far too much. That frustrated sigh a bonus to the rest of what her reaction might be. A sigh that, while he'd never tell her, he relished. After all, there wasn't much in this world that was exclusively for him.

[11calls]

Alex was quite good at silently swearing, after spending eight years on the radio. She could swear like a sailor in traffic or what not, but when it came to the show (and being around Strand tended to count as being on the show) Alex rarely verbalized it. So, her lips moved in a long silent fuck even though the sounds didn't come out. Instead, the hand not blocking the doorway moved to reside against her hip, and she drew herself up to her comparatively smaller full height.

"Tell me," she said quickly, using the 'please don't be such an ass voice' that was also a Strand staple, especially as of late. "That you weren't going to get me onto an island so messed up that they don't let people on it and then tell me we were staying the night." There was a flair of anger in her dark eyes, and Alex didn't bother to try and keep it hidden now. Once, earlier in their working relationship, she might have tried to keep her cool more, but given the last two years and everything else, her guard around him had relaxed substantially.

[nobasisinfact]

That look. That fire behind her eyes that was reserved only for him. He lived for that look, or he didn't live for it. He couldn't, not really. Admitting there was more there, even to himself for longer then an instant would ruin him. There was too much broken within him, too much still alight in her for anything more than this to ever work.

He couldn't take her down with him.

And yet he had, hadn't he? He'd pulled her down this rabbit hole of insanity right along with him. And still, he regretted very little of it. In fact, he was almost relieved to have her there, by his side through all this insanity. It was selfish of him, but no one would ever call him a selfless man. Not even Alex.

A brow raised as he kept his smirk internal. "How else would we conduct a thorough investigation?" The words made it sound like the idea was obvious. Of course they would have to spend the night. It was a whole 12 hours that they would lose if they didn't do it.

[11calls]

Alex definitely wouldn't call him a selfless man, but she also wouldn't call him what the rest of the paranormal investigators of the world would call him, something along the lines of the man without a heart. No, she'd seen it in him too much, and she'd seen it shatter after Coralee had gotten into a van and drove off again. It was one of the reasons that she cared for him so deeply, not that she would ever admit it. Alex Reagan's superpower, for better or worse was empathy, and in her eyes, he'd earned all of it and more.

Of course the more was the thing that would tend to get her into trouble. Half of their listeners were already certain that the two of them had already been hooking up for quite some time, and Alex had no intention of becoming any more of a laughing stock than her sleepnotes had already made her.

Still, it was something that she needed to remind herself of more often than she would have liked, especially when he looked at her like this and she had to struggle against the urge to either kiss him or slap him. Both things would be terrible for their relationship, and Alex was fairly certain that they would send him disappearing again for another three months. It was funny, for someone who knew how terrible it could be for the people who were left behind, Strand sure did it often enough.

Letting out a long sigh that ended with an overly dramatic puff of her hair from her face, Alex's anger faded to resignation. Instead she just rolled her eyes at him, but countered as she so often did with a terrible joke. "Well, if I die, I am going to haunt you through sheer force of will and you can give the million dollars to my heirs." Like she had heirs. Heirs for her were her parents and Nic basically.