hearthwarming | reverie 🦋 inbox

[ suffer ]

Three? Alec... Three others?

I know. I know. If I could have been there to stop him, I would have.

[ Well, he was there but certainly long after the violence and without the ability to care about the destruction Henry sowed in his name. ]

He tortured some kid from Tsuchigumo, broke Sprezzatura's arm and left her to burn to death in her own mind. By the time he got around to the guy who actually took my heart, all he could do was toss him around for a bit before he finally passed out.

[ It bothers her enough that Henry tortured a kid, but his second victim... ]

No, Sprezzatura...

[ The hand of hers that isn't beneath Alec's at the moment lifts, and covers her face. Suddenly she feels very much like she was lucky to have only come away from their encounter with a dislocated arm, vivid hallucinations of dead loved ones, and a clear recollection of how his voice sounded while mentally threatening her. ]

I... I have to go check on her, then. [ a deep breath. ] Please don't put this on yourself, Alec. But... For both your sake and Henry's, I hope nothing like this happens again.

[ ... ]

If it does, I don't know if I'll be able to keep myself from fighting back harder.

She's next on my list to visit.

[ And he can only imagine how that encounter will go, since when last he and Sprezzatura parted ways, she was screaming at him. ]

If I have anything to say about it, nothing like that is gonna happen again. But I've talked to Henry, and it's my honest hope that if it does, he won't just burn everything [ and everyone ] around him.

He warned me... that if something were to ever happen to me, it would destroy him. I didn't realize to what extent.

[ She is silent for a long, contemplative while as she turns his words over in her head. Aren't there people, too, for whom Ori would find herself wanting to burn down the world if they were turned into husks of themselves, like Alec had been? Wouldn't it break her heart so utterly to see someone she loved like that? Without any light or love in their eyes?

But still... ]

I don't know if anyone could have realized that, no matter how close you two are, but... If he can hold himself back for your sake from now on... I suppose I'll have to be thankful that he has someone like you at his side.

[ Even after all this, he's not sure if his sake is going to be enough. Maybe it will matter less once they're free of this place, and the people Henry might hurt are strangers instead of friends. He doesn't know. ]

You make me sound like some great force for good. I'm really not.

[ Did she...? ]

Hmm... Did I?

[ l-lol ]

I don't know if I really know much about Henry, even after all this time, but if nothing else, I'm glad if he was able to care deeply enough about someone to have this kind of reaction. It has nothing to do with being a great force for good or not...

Though the fact that you reached out to check on me says much more about you than you might think it does.

[ It's good she makes the clarification, because where Henry Creel is concerned, Alec isn't entirely sure just what he's a force for. Something, surely. Not wholly good but not wholly bad, either. ]

You've done a lot for me. Even I realize that means something.

[ Even before she helped him with his Shadow. ]

Just what do you know? About Henry, I mean.

... He likes spiders?

[ She sighs. No, she knows more than that. ]

I walked into a dream of his, once. I saw... an old, dilapidated home. I think he'd said... It was his family's home. I know that he was trapped, banished to another plane - or dimension...

[ But she sure does not know why he was banished. ]

[ Alec can't quite help but breathe out a little laugh at that first bit. Of all the things to know about Henry, it's the spiders. Of course it's a spiders.

That moment of mirth is there and gone again, his expression sobering when she mentions the dream and the old house. ]

I guess the biggest thing to know about Henry — and this isn't me trying to justify what he did to you, but I think after all of that you deserve some kind of insight — the thing to know about Henry is that in his world, people with powers aren't commonplace like they are in yours or mine. So he's always felt like he's never belonged anywhere, and when he was a kid, the government scooped him up and locked him in a lab.

[ With each word she hears, her brows only knit together more, her frown pulling more deeply. ]

A lab? Gods... And as a child...

[ She can't help but think about her sister, and what happened when she began to exhibit her proclivity towards magic at such a young age... ]

He was there for like two decades, until he ended up in that other dimension. But he essentially went from one prison to another. He was stuck there for seven years.

Then he wound up here.

[ So stuck in another prison yet again. ]

I offered to let him come home with me. He deserves his own life, you know? So I think at first, that's what I was to him. Freedom. And then it became so much more.

...

[ She's silent for a long, long time, until she reaches out and gives him, like, the weakest, playful little punch on his shoulder. ]

So much more? I can't believe you didn't tell me any of this...

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