who: Alex Reagan and Open what: May normal stuff, plus mingle stuff and possibly sickness plotting stuff. when: Month of May! where: All over Riverview. warnings: Possible illness stuff, shippy stuff.
[Richard had never been one to pry, not really. It exhausted too much effort and rarely netted any sort of gain on his part. Alex, however, had become different. She asked too many questions and dug too deeply into his life. Like an ant, she'd made tunnels inside of him and because of that he'd grown more interested, more invested in her. In the end, she'd stolen his heart, and now he couldn't help wanting to know as much about the her of now as he could.
When she started typing up something on the network, something that, of course, she would be completely up to date on and incorporated in, he couldn't help leaning over her head to read the post and her reply. Some sort of 'nano-virus with magical capabilities', clearly this was her fault, not his. Her belief in this place, in the reality of magic and demons and all that other nonsense, had created a virus to counter his logic. Between the two of them, this place was ridiculous and counterbalanced.
"You're not getting involved." The words were fact. He wasn't letting her get involved with something as dangerous as that. Even if it was all in their heads, the repercussions of it would, most likely, manifest on their real selves. There was no way he was letting Alex get into something that dangerous. Something that could kill her in reality. Something that could take her from him without his even being able to lift a finger.
Alex hadn't been making any sort of effort to hide what she was doing. One, she wasn't doing anything wrong in her mind, two he had a device of his own and three, it wasn't as if Alex's handle on the network was anything that was hidden even if she didn't tend to make most of her posts as audio. Audio was just easier, especially because of how much time Alex tended to spend talking in her life back home. This was just an extension of that, because Alex wasn't going to spend her time trying to be something that she wasn't here.
After all, Alex was the sort of person who had gotten involved in things like this before, even without the Black Tapes and him, and she'd been the same since she'd been here. So, she was shocked when he told her that she wasn't getting involved, and Alex's brow climbed up towards her hairline before she said one sharp word, because honestly, at first she couldn't think of anything else to say. "What?" It went with the normal twisting up of her face in disbelief.
"Of course I'm getting involved. I can help people figure out what it is and maybe stop it before it gets worse." Getting worse of course meant that someone might die from it, and honestly, right now she was more invested in stopping that then ever. The two of them didn't have any actual good luck when it came to things, and she wasn't expecting that they'd start now. If she could help Tony and Victor, then she would, especially Victor because she trusts him implicitly.
"Richard, you're the one who thinks that this is a shared mass delusion between us. What do you think would happen if I don't try and stop it?" Alex knew without asking that he was blaming her imagination for this. Because honestly, Richard would never come up with a science and magical combination on his own. Of course, she didn't believe in his theory at all, but was hoping that maybe approaching it on his terms might head off a fight that seemed to be brewing.
Back home, in the early days when they had fought, it had never gone well. The two of them would just shout at he one another until he would bring up leaving the podcast, and she would bring up that this wasn't how it worked and the two of them wouldn't speak for a few days before one of them brought coffee or a black tape or a lead to the other and then they acted like it didn't happen. Honestly, Riverview was too small for them to try and do the same sort of thing in and she didn't want that to be what they did.
The first few buttons of Richard's shirt was unbuttoned, and his coat was sitting on one of the chairs. Adding to his hot and cold spells the fact that there was, apparently, a virus that spread quickly had only one conclusion. One that he had just decided not to tell Alex about. He'd sanitize everything later. Spend more time away from her to keep her from getting infected (delusionally infected, that is).
And yet she was running headfirst into the thing. Running right into an infection (delusional infection) that, she had already admitted could get worse. Richard wasn't alright with that. He wasn't okay with the possibility of her getting sick, delusion or not, of possibly losing her.
"And what happens if you're infected?" The counter was natural because it was his worry. It wasn't a trick, and it wasn't what he was hiding this time. His voice was low as he asked it, a slight tinge of the emotion he often hid behind it. He was worried. It wasn't exactly something he was used to being, but he was.
"If I get infected, then maybe I can figure out something that stops it before something bad happens to me. Richard, I mean with things like this you probably don't even need to be around them to get infected. It's not like we have a sterile room or something we can hide in here. If more people help, then things get fixed sooner. The people who are working on it are really good doctors and scientists..."
She's not going to mention that Victor Frankenstein told her that if he could bring back people from the dead then he could definitely fix whatever was going on with her and not actually killing her even though it probably should be. And she wasn't going to mention all of the other magical and science-y stuff that she'd learned since she'd been here, because well, they were already having a fight and she didn't want it to degenerate into them arguing about how she believed in this that she couldn't.
"They're good people, and I know that they're going to work together to stop this. If I help, it'll happen sooner. I know you're worried about me, but I'm more worried about you. I don't want something to happen to you." Her voice dropped again, and she reached over and took his hand.
He wanted to pull away, knew it was better if he did, safer, but in the end, he couldn't. This was Alex, and pulling away would make her think that his heart had changed, it hadn't. There was no way that his heart would change in regards to her. She was Alex, his Alex, and nothing would change that.
"Let them work on it." His words were firm his time. This wasn't Turkey where he had no say because she didn't tell him. This wasn't Simon Reese who seemed to have some sort of obsession with Alex, this was something that had no obsession with anyone, and she was already talking about getting infected. "It's pointless, putting yourself at risk."
"Richard." His name was a soft sigh, and she just watched him for a minute, her eyes on his with a frown. "Literally just being here is a risk. I know you don't believe it but there's monsters and everything here, never mind just the simple act of walking outside could end with me falling down the stairs and snapping my neck. I can't not live on the off chance that something could happen to me."
For a moment, Alex just looks down, and she frowns broadly, considering telling him about how concerned Dr. Frankenstein was with her lack of sleep, and how bad that could be, but right now didn't seem the point. There were other things to worry about than what could happen. "I don't know how I could live with myself if there was something that I could have done to help save someone I love and I didn't." Her other hand moved to his face, touching it gently because while there were other people that she cared about here, there was only one that she was pretty sure she couldn't live without.
His frown deepened as she touched his cheek. This wasn't good. This was a potential infection. This was what he was currently arguing against her doing. Yet, it was hard to pull away, especially knowing what she would think it was. Of course, it wasn't the rejection she would think; it was concern.
"You're taking too many risks." It's true. Alex Reagen took so many risks that she could be considered her own natural disaster. At every turn of the investigation of The Black Tapes, she would do something that would cause him worry, something potentially dangerous. Even if he denied the world that they'd been pulled into, he never denied how dangerous it was. "Like when you talked to Warren." It was an example and a sore spot. It was one of the worst times she had been reckless. Now was close, not exact, but close.
"Richard," she dropped her voice softer, and she didn't know how close she sounded to when she asked him not to go to Geneva. "I'm always going to take risks. I wouldn't be me if I didn't. I mean, you wouldn't even have met me if I didn't never mind... Ending up where we are now." She couldn't change who she was anymore than he could, not really. She could try and have him make friends, but she couldn't change what an ass he could be at his core, and she would never want him too. It was just a part of what made him him.
Just like this was a part of what made Alex her.
And of course another thing that made Alex her was the fact that she caught him rather easily when he tripped up on things, and this was a big one and Alex couldn't keep the surprise off of her face when she asked quickly, "You're making it sound like I went to meet with Warren alone." Which frankly, Alex herself thought was pretty dumb, but she also knew that she would only have done it for a good reason. "I went to see Warren alone?"
Shit! It wasn't exactly easy to remember exactly when things had happened, and he had miscalculated that particular poor choice on her part. Now she was asking questions again, and he couldn't think of something to distract her. Instead, she would push forward until he told her, and he wasn't planning on telling her. Which meant there weren't many other choices.
"Any interaction with Warren is dangerous, like with Simon Reese." Simon was a safe topic, mostly. Accepting his phone calls, trying to meet with him, being in contact with him at all was dangerous.
"Meeting with Warren the first time was your idea actually." Alex reminded him quickly. But she refrained from adding even though Coralee told them not to because well, Richard was an adult and he'd made his decision with that and she'd gone along with it. "And the second time, you were there." Even if he had just glared at the man from across the table and left Alex to do the sort of thing that she did best: ask annoying questions that seemed to be digging to nothing and yet somehow always were.
"And I know I apologized for Turkey." Because she remembered doing that. And what she'd actually apologized for was not for going, because she didn't have a choice, but for going without saying anything to him about it until she was already there. Simon had wanted Alex to have seen and touched the Horn of Tiamat and everything inside Alex's gut had told her that she needed to do it and it needed to be her alone.
"I know you don't want me asking about the time I'm missing, but I'm sure if I went to see him, it would have been for a good reason. I mean, I don't know if you've noticed, Richard, but he kind of freaks me out." And she'd said as much on the show.
"We didn't know what we do now." They hadn't known just how dangerous Warren was, how tangled into all this they had gotten because of him being at the center. They hadn't known that it all stemmed back to Richard before Alex had gotten in too deep. It was something that he would both always regret and always be thankful for.
He was thankful for her not prying into her future, even when he slipped up the way he had. Even though she was right, and she did see Warren alone, that he was still angry about it, she didn't know that she had done it. "I won't lose you, Alex." The words were quiet, sincere and pleading. He'd already lost so much, he couldn't lose Alex too, especially not now.
They didn't know for sure, but they probably should have known just based on Coralee's warning, but the two of them, both Alex and Strand himself had an arrogance about these sort of things, so they went barging in without thinking about it. And now they knew for sure, or at least he did. Even without knowing what he did about Thomas Warren creating demons, what she did know about him had been enough to finally make her stop calling Warren 'sexy James Bond.'
"Richard." Her voice was soft, and her eyes held his as she cupped his cheek even more tightly and traced her thumb along his cheekbones. "I'm not going anywhere. I promise. You're not going to lose me." And then she gave him a quick smile, her voice a little lighter. "Besides,we both know I'm too annoying to go anywhere." Her hand squeezed his, a promise in it. Alex wasn't Coralee, she would never leave him like his wife had, and even if she wasn't going to stop being herself, she also wasn't going to do something dumb that would make her unable to keep her promises to him.
If Alex had voices her thoughts on Coralee, Richard would have pointed out that his wife hadn't had a choice, at first. She had been taken by Warren and his people; that didn't mean she couldn't have contacted them once she was free. Let them know that she was safe, that she loved them, and that she thought it was for his and Charlie's own good that she not return to them. It would have hurt, but at least they would have known. Instead, he and Charlie had spent decades wondering, worrying and becoming bitter over the unknown. He'd spent decades searching for her only for her to leave again.
"Then leave it to these, scientist, friends of yours." It was a repeat of the thought he'd had before. She couldn't promise that she'd be there if she was putting herself in direct danger of being contaminated. It was bad enough that, right now, he could be contaminating her, and he would rectify that soon. As a professor, he had an office. He could hold up there until the symptoms subsided or they found a cure. And she wouldn't worry because it was normal for a professor to work long hours, she knew that. It was normal for a professor to want to set up their office in a particular way, she'd seen that. Everything would seem normal.
Honestly, that was what Alex meant by her leaving him. The never knowing. The letting his family and hers hate him. Making Charlie poisoned against him. All of the friends and relationships and the person he had been before were gone because Coralee couldn't send him a message that way like she had to the studio. That was what made Alex angriest about the situation, because she had to know what her disappearance was costing him and had cost him.
But she hated that he asked her to leave it alone. "Richard," she sighed his name softly, leaning forward not to kiss him but to rest her forehead against his own. "I can get infected anywhere. I'm not going to go into the hospital or anything, I promise. But I'm not just going to lock myself in here the entire time this thing is going on. It could be months. And I mean come on, do you really want an unwalked seventy pound dog locked in here?"
He let out a long heavy sigh, she was right, but that didn't mean he had to be happy about it. In fact, he wasn't. If he was honest with himself, this was the least dangerous thing she'd done since he'd known her. Even more so if the last few months were all that he counted.
"What do you plan on doing?" He moved back to sit in a chair, carefully watching her. Did she even have a plan? She wasn't a doctor or even a micro-engineer. There wasn't exactly much a reporter could do, no matter how persistent and annoying she could be.
When he gets up, Alex let out a sigh of her own, and she shifted to tuck her legs underneath her propping her chin in her hand as she considered the question. The answer to the question is written in her expression; of course she has a plan. Doesn't she always have a plan even if it sometimes (often) tends to be a bad plan?
"I'm not going to do anything dumb," she said quickly, an almost promise. Not quite, because the two of them had highly varied definitions of 'dumb' especially where the other one was concerned. "Don't worry, Richard, I'm not going to be out volunteering for random injections or being a nurse or anything like that. I'm going to do what I do best: research, both on stuff that the people who come through the portal may have brought in, or stuff that that the natives had. Dr. Frankenstein," the name carries a weight of familiarity with it, and she gestured towards her device, "seems to be implying that it was released rather than something that happened naturally. Maybe I can ask around about that. After all, people are more likely to talk to plucky reporters rather than perimeter guards."
Alex not doing something dumb for a change would be a minor miracle, and Richard didn't believe in miracles. So he simply let the promise, one she couldn't possibly keep, roll over him. He wouldn't keep her to it, but he'd most certainly lecture her about it once she'd done it. So long as it wasn't as bad as meeting Warren alone just to bait him or going to Turkey alone to meet a confessed murderer and escaped mental patient.
Her explanation of what she would do made completely no sense. A reporter was the last person someone would want to talk to. "People aren't going to want to talk to a reporter. I speak from experience." It had taken her eleven calls to get him to even think about calling her back (partially because he was sick of getting the messages), and he had been being nice.
"You do know, Richard," Alex begins with a smirk and her brow up towards her hair again. "Most people do talk to me. I can only think of a handful or so people who have been put off by me to require eleven calls. Even then, they normally come around." Cops, medical professionals, politicians, they all seemed to talk to Alex. When she wasn't being an idiot, she was actually good at her job. And there was the added point that while Nic was her producer on The Black Tapes, she was his on Tanis, so she did all the things that he did too.
The outliers for her were Strand himself, Warren, the Torres family after Sebastian was returned (and who could blame them for that?!) and a handful of other shady people who had their own things going on. Most people didn't, and Alex was likable and easy to talk to, so she thought she'd be able to get somewhere. But while she's talking to him, her phone pings and Alex just frowns at it when her eyes cast downward. Alex wouldn't be Alex if she's not multitasking.
He couldn't help the smirk at her mentioning of the eleven calls that it had taken before he even thought of contacting her back. It had been their way at first. She pushed, he pulled back and then returned with some type of apology tape. But there was a slight mistake in both their calculations. "Twenty-three times, if you count both occasions." Not that the second time had anything to do with her in particular. He would have ignored anyone's attempts at contact at the time.
Then she was looking down at her phone with that look of her. The one that always appeared when some particularly disturbing piece of information was discovered. Seeing as they were discussing an illness that had become an epidemic, the frown was more worrying than usual. "What is it?"
"You're forgetting the calls to your publisher and the department chairs at the university, actually. I lost count of how many I made then." She's trying to keep the mood light, both in that and not mentioning how many times she'd called him when he'd disappeared, and with the other information. He was definitely going to blame her for a virus that had magic involved with it in any way.
But Alex doesn't lie to him, and she's being better about avoiding the truth so she just frowns and shows him the conversation she's having with Victor. "Infection might be a moot point, considering everything. And I mean, I'm around people often enough that I could have come into contact with someone who had it and didn't know it. Maybe we should be quarentining you somewhere or something." As if they hadn't been together for hours already.
He takes the phone from her, looking over the conversation with Victor (clearly one of hers). It's, concerning, especially as it seems to confirm what he'd already heavily suspected. It also meant that it was pointless to go living in his office. He could have infected her already, and neither of them would know. That, changed things, especially when she commented about putting him in quarantine.
He let out a heavy sigh, one that often came with news he either didn't want to share or when he was caught in a lie. "It's probably too late for that." Really, with her talking about trying to keep him safe from the virus (which was ridiculous, he didn't need protecting) it seemed like idiocy to keep the facts hidden from her now.
Alex knows that tone of voice. She knows it. She knows it and she instantly is putting two and two together and coming up with: Strand is sick. "Richard." The word is instant and soft and worried. Moving closer to him on the bed by wiggling her knees, Alex leans over and presses the back of her hand to his forehead, and then moves it to touch behind his ears, because her mother has always said that was the best way of telling if someone had a fever.
"How long?" It's concern in her tone to match her frown as she moves her hand to his chin in order to look into his eyes and see if there's any sign of a fever in them. She wishes that she'd had a first aid kit or something, but beyond the small one with bandaids in her purse (just in case) she didn't have a thermometer or anything like that. She had advil, but that was it, and she didn't know if it would treat what it was that he'd had.
He's warm, hot even. Richard is sick, and his eyes are a little glassy, but he seems to be holding his own against it. Richard Strand didn't let illness get to him. There was too much to do to get sick, and for years the only one he had to take care of him was himself.
Reaching up, he took her hand, squeezing it tight for a moment. His hands are warm too, which is probably better than when he felt like he was freezing. "I only recently put everything together. I'll be fine."
He believed that, that he'd be fine and recover. Warren wouldn't want him to die, just make him uncomfortable, maybe make it seem as if he were possibly going to die. Anything to get what he wanted out of him. "That doesn't mean I want you at risk."
"You better be fine. You don't get to show up and catch a weird plague and then die on me after I lugged all my stuff up here." Alex making typical bad jokes to lighten the mood, but it can't lighten the concern in her eyes as she watched his face and felt the warmth of his hands like this. Still, she makes an effort at a smile, before she brushes some of his hair away from his forehead again.
"Do you want some tea or something? I can grab you a glass of water and some advil in case it's a fever. I mean, it feels like a fever..." Alex for all of her mother henning doesn't exactly do this for anyone else often. Sure, she's propped up drunk people on their side with a bucket and water and advil, and she's made day and nyquil runs, but when she's sick Alex's idea is to just take nyquil and put on netflix and become a zombie.
"I'm fine." There's a large part of him that didn't know how to be taken care of. Maybe he knew how twenty years ago, when Coralee was there, but not since. Not since Charlie and everyone left his life. No, not since Coralee had been kidnapped and never came back. Not since his world crashed down around him.
Honestly, if he could just rest against her. Lean against her and breath in the comforting scent that was Alex; he might feel a bit better. The thought sounded, sappy, but it was there, collecting inside his mind even though he knew that sort of comfort would do nothing for the actual illness. Besides, it would further risk her getting infected, and he refused to put her at that sort of risk, even if they didn't know if she was or not already. "It, comes and goes."
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When she started typing up something on the network, something that, of course, she would be completely up to date on and incorporated in, he couldn't help leaning over her head to read the post and her reply. Some sort of 'nano-virus with magical capabilities', clearly this was her fault, not his. Her belief in this place, in the reality of magic and demons and all that other nonsense, had created a virus to counter his logic. Between the two of them, this place was ridiculous and counterbalanced.
"You're not getting involved." The words were fact. He wasn't letting her get involved with something as dangerous as that. Even if it was all in their heads, the repercussions of it would, most likely, manifest on their real selves. There was no way he was letting Alex get into something that dangerous. Something that could kill her in reality. Something that could take her from him without his even being able to lift a finger.
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After all, Alex was the sort of person who had gotten involved in things like this before, even without the Black Tapes and him, and she'd been the same since she'd been here. So, she was shocked when he told her that she wasn't getting involved, and Alex's brow climbed up towards her hairline before she said one sharp word, because honestly, at first she couldn't think of anything else to say. "What?" It went with the normal twisting up of her face in disbelief.
"Of course I'm getting involved. I can help people figure out what it is and maybe stop it before it gets worse." Getting worse of course meant that someone might die from it, and honestly, right now she was more invested in stopping that then ever. The two of them didn't have any actual good luck when it came to things, and she wasn't expecting that they'd start now. If she could help Tony and Victor, then she would, especially Victor because she trusts him implicitly.
"Richard, you're the one who thinks that this is a shared mass delusion between us. What do you think would happen if I don't try and stop it?" Alex knew without asking that he was blaming her imagination for this. Because honestly, Richard would never come up with a science and magical combination on his own. Of course, she didn't believe in his theory at all, but was hoping that maybe approaching it on his terms might head off a fight that seemed to be brewing.
Back home, in the early days when they had fought, it had never gone well. The two of them would just shout at he one another until he would bring up leaving the podcast, and she would bring up that this wasn't how it worked and the two of them wouldn't speak for a few days before one of them brought coffee or a black tape or a lead to the other and then they acted like it didn't happen. Honestly, Riverview was too small for them to try and do the same sort of thing in and she didn't want that to be what they did.
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And yet she was running headfirst into the thing. Running right into an infection (delusional infection) that, she had already admitted could get worse. Richard wasn't alright with that. He wasn't okay with the possibility of her getting sick, delusion or not, of possibly losing her.
"And what happens if you're infected?" The counter was natural because it was his worry. It wasn't a trick, and it wasn't what he was hiding this time. His voice was low as he asked it, a slight tinge of the emotion he often hid behind it. He was worried. It wasn't exactly something he was used to being, but he was.
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She's not going to mention that Victor Frankenstein told her that if he could bring back people from the dead then he could definitely fix whatever was going on with her and not actually killing her even though it probably should be. And she wasn't going to mention all of the other magical and science-y stuff that she'd learned since she'd been here, because well, they were already having a fight and she didn't want it to degenerate into them arguing about how she believed in this that she couldn't.
"They're good people, and I know that they're going to work together to stop this. If I help, it'll happen sooner. I know you're worried about me, but I'm more worried about you. I don't want something to happen to you." Her voice dropped again, and she reached over and took his hand.
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"Let them work on it." His words were firm his time. This wasn't Turkey where he had no say because she didn't tell him. This wasn't Simon Reese who seemed to have some sort of obsession with Alex, this was something that had no obsession with anyone, and she was already talking about getting infected. "It's pointless, putting yourself at risk."
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For a moment, Alex just looks down, and she frowns broadly, considering telling him about how concerned Dr. Frankenstein was with her lack of sleep, and how bad that could be, but right now didn't seem the point. There were other things to worry about than what could happen. "I don't know how I could live with myself if there was something that I could have done to help save someone I love and I didn't." Her other hand moved to his face, touching it gently because while there were other people that she cared about here, there was only one that she was pretty sure she couldn't live without.
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"You're taking too many risks." It's true. Alex Reagen took so many risks that she could be considered her own natural disaster. At every turn of the investigation of The Black Tapes, she would do something that would cause him worry, something potentially dangerous. Even if he denied the world that they'd been pulled into, he never denied how dangerous it was. "Like when you talked to Warren." It was an example and a sore spot. It was one of the worst times she had been reckless. Now was close, not exact, but close.
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Just like this was a part of what made Alex her.
And of course another thing that made Alex her was the fact that she caught him rather easily when he tripped up on things, and this was a big one and Alex couldn't keep the surprise off of her face when she asked quickly, "You're making it sound like I went to meet with Warren alone." Which frankly, Alex herself thought was pretty dumb, but she also knew that she would only have done it for a good reason. "I went to see Warren alone?"
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"Any interaction with Warren is dangerous, like with Simon Reese." Simon was a safe topic, mostly. Accepting his phone calls, trying to meet with him, being in contact with him at all was dangerous.
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"And I know I apologized for Turkey." Because she remembered doing that. And what she'd actually apologized for was not for going, because she didn't have a choice, but for going without saying anything to him about it until she was already there. Simon had wanted Alex to have seen and touched the Horn of Tiamat and everything inside Alex's gut had told her that she needed to do it and it needed to be her alone.
"I know you don't want me asking about the time I'm missing, but I'm sure if I went to see him, it would have been for a good reason. I mean, I don't know if you've noticed, Richard, but he kind of freaks me out." And she'd said as much on the show.
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He was thankful for her not prying into her future, even when he slipped up the way he had. Even though she was right, and she did see Warren alone, that he was still angry about it, she didn't know that she had done it. "I won't lose you, Alex." The words were quiet, sincere and pleading. He'd already lost so much, he couldn't lose Alex too, especially not now.
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"Richard." Her voice was soft, and her eyes held his as she cupped his cheek even more tightly and traced her thumb along his cheekbones. "I'm not going anywhere. I promise. You're not going to lose me." And then she gave him a quick smile, her voice a little lighter. "Besides,we both know I'm too annoying to go anywhere." Her hand squeezed his, a promise in it. Alex wasn't Coralee, she would never leave him like his wife had, and even if she wasn't going to stop being herself, she also wasn't going to do something dumb that would make her unable to keep her promises to him.
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"Then leave it to these, scientist, friends of yours." It was a repeat of the thought he'd had before. She couldn't promise that she'd be there if she was putting herself in direct danger of being contaminated. It was bad enough that, right now, he could be contaminating her, and he would rectify that soon. As a professor, he had an office. He could hold up there until the symptoms subsided or they found a cure. And she wouldn't worry because it was normal for a professor to work long hours, she knew that. It was normal for a professor to want to set up their office in a particular way, she'd seen that. Everything would seem normal.
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But she hated that he asked her to leave it alone. "Richard," she sighed his name softly, leaning forward not to kiss him but to rest her forehead against his own. "I can get infected anywhere. I'm not going to go into the hospital or anything, I promise. But I'm not just going to lock myself in here the entire time this thing is going on. It could be months. And I mean come on, do you really want an unwalked seventy pound dog locked in here?"
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"What do you plan on doing?" He moved back to sit in a chair, carefully watching her. Did she even have a plan? She wasn't a doctor or even a micro-engineer. There wasn't exactly much a reporter could do, no matter how persistent and annoying she could be.
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"I'm not going to do anything dumb," she said quickly, an almost promise. Not quite, because the two of them had highly varied definitions of 'dumb' especially where the other one was concerned. "Don't worry, Richard, I'm not going to be out volunteering for random injections or being a nurse or anything like that. I'm going to do what I do best: research, both on stuff that the people who come through the portal may have brought in, or stuff that that the natives had. Dr. Frankenstein," the name carries a weight of familiarity with it, and she gestured towards her device, "seems to be implying that it was released rather than something that happened naturally. Maybe I can ask around about that. After all, people are more likely to talk to plucky reporters rather than perimeter guards."
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Her explanation of what she would do made completely no sense. A reporter was the last person someone would want to talk to. "People aren't going to want to talk to a reporter. I speak from experience." It had taken her eleven calls to get him to even think about calling her back (partially because he was sick of getting the messages), and he had been being nice.
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The outliers for her were Strand himself, Warren, the Torres family after Sebastian was returned (and who could blame them for that?!) and a handful of other shady people who had their own things going on. Most people didn't, and Alex was likable and easy to talk to, so she thought she'd be able to get somewhere. But while she's talking to him, her phone pings and Alex just frowns at it when her eyes cast downward. Alex wouldn't be Alex if she's not multitasking.
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Then she was looking down at her phone with that look of her. The one that always appeared when some particularly disturbing piece of information was discovered. Seeing as they were discussing an illness that had become an epidemic, the frown was more worrying than usual. "What is it?"
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But Alex doesn't lie to him, and she's being better about avoiding the truth so she just frowns and shows him the conversation she's having with Victor. "Infection might be a moot point, considering everything. And I mean, I'm around people often enough that I could have come into contact with someone who had it and didn't know it. Maybe we should be quarentining you somewhere or something." As if they hadn't been together for hours already.
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He let out a heavy sigh, one that often came with news he either didn't want to share or when he was caught in a lie. "It's probably too late for that." Really, with her talking about trying to keep him safe from the virus (which was ridiculous, he didn't need protecting) it seemed like idiocy to keep the facts hidden from her now.
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"How long?" It's concern in her tone to match her frown as she moves her hand to his chin in order to look into his eyes and see if there's any sign of a fever in them. She wishes that she'd had a first aid kit or something, but beyond the small one with bandaids in her purse (just in case) she didn't have a thermometer or anything like that. She had advil, but that was it, and she didn't know if it would treat what it was that he'd had.
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Reaching up, he took her hand, squeezing it tight for a moment. His hands are warm too, which is probably better than when he felt like he was freezing. "I only recently put everything together. I'll be fine."
He believed that, that he'd be fine and recover. Warren wouldn't want him to die, just make him uncomfortable, maybe make it seem as if he were possibly going to die. Anything to get what he wanted out of him. "That doesn't mean I want you at risk."
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"Do you want some tea or something? I can grab you a glass of water and some advil in case it's a fever. I mean, it feels like a fever..." Alex for all of her mother henning doesn't exactly do this for anyone else often. Sure, she's propped up drunk people on their side with a bucket and water and advil, and she's made day and nyquil runs, but when she's sick Alex's idea is to just take nyquil and put on netflix and become a zombie.
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Honestly, if he could just rest against her. Lean against her and breath in the comforting scent that was Alex; he might feel a bit better. The thought sounded, sappy, but it was there, collecting inside his mind even though he knew that sort of comfort would do nothing for the actual illness. Besides, it would further risk her getting infected, and he refused to put her at that sort of risk, even if they didn't know if she was or not already. "It, comes and goes."
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