Disclaimer: I don't own these characters, they own me. Special thanks to Toby Whithouse and BBC3 for the playground. Beta assistance from TJ4ev and Whimsyfox enables (most of) my grammar to pass muster for Hal.
Thank you to ilex-ferox who has continued to be an unexpected compass with thoughtful feedback that has guided me onwards. Questions asked may not be answered directly, but they do let me know I'm hitting my mark.
Hal's body was betraying him. The tremors had started lightly, but soon built to a crescendo of shakes. One small consolation to Alex was that her cool touch seemed soothing against his heated skin, his body burning through the fresh blood in his system. Before, Hal had slipped into this slowly, the hunger and the pleading coming and going with declining lucidity. But he'd been unconscious this time, healing. Maggie's assumption had been correct. The withdrawals had come accelerated.
When it happened before, Alex nearly couldn't take it. She was going to leave - give up on finding her body for a bit and haunt her family up North. Hal wasn't going to be able to help her, and Tom had his hands full enough. But when the shakes began and Hal had gone feverish and ill, poor Tom had been beside himself, not knowing what to do. Alex had stepped in, mopped Hal's brow, tried to cool the fever that had nothing to do with a human illness and cleaned up when he was sick. Tom probably thought it was from looking after her little brothers; her mothering skills. Which, in part it was. But truth was, she had been unceremoniously trained in dealing with withdrawal sickness. She had gotten through it with her brother, over heroin.
This was a thousand times worse.
Because she knew that this was only the beginning. Because she knew what was coming. Because she couldn't bear to watch how Hal strained against his bonds, even while under the effects of the Department's drug. Because she loved him.
If the last time were any indication, the man she loved was surely gone. When they detoxed him before, it had only been a few small glassfuls. And that had taken weeks. This time, Hal killed someone. And he would have quite happily continued...
At least her presence wouldn't trigger his hunger anymore, Alex thought with sadness. She'd get them through this, and then she would think about what to do about that. Another quaking shake shuddered through Hal, and he ground his teeth, jaw muscles clenching. This was only the beginning of what the cravings would do to him, but everything was so different now between them. Alex almost couldn't bear to watch, but she would. She would stay and help Hal in any way that she could.
She took his hand, covering his fingers with hers. She placed her other hand on his brow, wishing she had the strength to untie him and hold him still herself. Her focus narrowed down to the tiny spray of blood spattered along Hal's jaw. Eight little spots that meant so much, and ultimately so little. Because, it didn't matter how much he had drank. The darkness had consumed him. He would have consumed her in turn, had she not stopped it. She had saved him, but now they were both lost.
The slender vampire's ungainly slouch betrayed her state, with her head held in one manicured hand. The pint glass sat on the table, emptied with only the barest leg of blood remaining. Eyes hollowed and red-rimmed, her facilities hadn't yet returned. Rook set his file down, and the vampire started, jerking against the handcuffs.
"Do not be alarmed," he stated, and took the seat across from her. The chain between the manacles was just enough for humane movement, but short enough to keep her beyond reach. The clasp on her ankle insured that she remain seated for her interview.
"You're human," she uttered with a surprised glance towards the empty pint glass, then back to him. "Who are you?"
"My name is Dominic Rook, but that is not what you wish to know."
"What is this? Secret Service?" She scoffed shakily, and leaned back in the chair.
"You were about to be a werewolf's dinner. Therefore, you are in our debt," Rook stated bluntly. The vampire merely raised one smooth eyebrow, but didn't look phased. "Why were you in Barry tonight? We weren't expecting you."
The vampire held his gaze with her dark blue eyes. Rook didn't look away. Eventually, she blinked, unsettled.
"That has nothing to do with you, little man," she snarled.
"Oh I beg to disagree. You'll find it is to your benefit to cooperate," Rook said, then opened his suit jacket to retrieve a stake. He placed it on the table, next to her file. She held his gaze, stubbornly silent and without acknowledgment of the threat.
Several moments passed. When he still did not break from their battle of wills, she placed her shackled hands on the table with a dramatic sigh. Then she shrugged one fine-boned shoulder. "I went to collect a debt."
"Whose?"
"Does it matter?" She asked, then continued to study him. "Who are you?"
"I'm of no consequence, Miss Bellante."
Her eyes widened at his knowledge of her true name, and he tapped the file he had brought. "Born Rosanna Angeloni Bellante in 1796 to a merchant marine. Recruited in 1824 after your husband made a bad bet over a chess match, if my sources are correct. You ended your maker not long after, in revenge for your family's death. The very action however cemented your place in London's underground society. Consort to an Old One in the early 1950's, with a fall into obscurity for a time after, but now a rising power of the Council." The subject in question had gone very still, her eyes honed on the closed file. "Oh yes, we know who you are."
"So," she said with a tone somewhere between unsettled and angry. "What is it that you want?" All the colour had bleached from her words. The question was caustic.
"We have a proposition for you."
He was fire.
He was ash.
Hal Yorke never expected death to feel... soft. He was... in a bed?
His chin was against a woolen weave of blanket, and everything felt unnaturally comfortable. Movement was slow to come, but he felt a heavy pressure on his wrists, which informed him that his hands were manacled. Centuries of experience kicked reflexes, trained against capture, into high gear. Push through the haze, observe. The effort it took to open his eyes was hardly worth it. He was in a concrete box of a room. The only interruption to the grey was a single bulb that shone overhead in a metal cage. He wasn't in a bed, but a hospital trolley. Hal winced his eyes shut.
Hell was... minimalist.
Someone had removed his shoes, but they were still in the room. He could smell the wet leather. Or maybe that was the damp coat he was still wearing. He couldn't be certain, because underneath it all, was ash. And blood.
He should be ash...
There was an absence of something, that at first, his slow consciousness found difficult to place. He was unnaturally comfortable. All of the pain, fatigue and old injuries had faded away. His leg no longer ached. Even his shoulder, from when Tom had dislocated it, no longer felt stiff.
He felt... alive.
He took a breath, and could feel his chest expand against a binding, holding him down. With a sinking sense of doom, Hal crashed into a bleak awareness. He wasn't dead. He had been staked, but he wasn't dead. The sheer impossibility of it was met with another awareness, beating insistently on the back of his forehead, in the pit of his stomach. A terrible truth he couldn't yet face. All of the darkness he had shut out was laughing.
Hal shifted his attention to dredge over what little he knew, which did nothing to enlighten how he had come to be here, undead. He remembered his death - the shock of being hit, the deep dousing of irony in realising what fates had aligned to finally bring his end. An ignition of a scorching agony from the inside out. The world cracking apart into fissures of pain and spirals of memory. An untangling. The desperation in Alex's screams... and... nothing.
Hal moved a finger, which seemed to comply, touching the reality of cool metal. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe this truly was Hell. Because, something else was missing. His groggy head couldn't place it at first.
Alex. He couldn't sense her. Anywhere.
If he had died, shattered apart, then Alex would have lost her anchor. The anguished thought rocked through him. Could she have dispersed? Why couldn't he feel her? Panicked, Hal tried to sit up, straining against his bindings. Everything felt off. He was half drunk.
An apparition of movement, and she was beside him, bold as day. He tried to relay his relief when he said her name, but his voice came out hoarse.
"Shush. Lay back," Alex spoke gently as she pushed his shoulders down. "You've orders to stay put." She offered him water, guiding the edge of a plastic bottle to his lips. He would have refused on the principle alone, except he was terribly thirsty. Gratefully, he drank and the cool water cleared away some of the ash.
Alex was looking on him expectantly, but with sadness. She took the water bottle away, screwing the cap back on and setting it aside. She asked almost hesitantly, "How are you feeling?"
Hal licked his lips and didn't know how to answer her simple question. I'm fine seemed innapropriate given the circumstances that he still couldn't grasp, so instead he asked in turn, "What happened?"
"I saved you," she answered plainly, even though an entire world of something else sat behind the sadness in her eyes.
"How? How in the name of -" he shook his head. "I was dead."
Alex gave a small shrug, as if to mean she didn't really know. "That piece of me in you? I... moved it."
Hal tried to calculate through what she meant, and how that would have saved him, at the same time he studied her. There was something else she wasn't saying. She seemed diminished somehow. Fatigued. And he really couldn't sense her. The thread that had stretched between them like such a physical thing… was gone. He raised his fingers in an attempt to reach her, and she looked down at the movement, but made no motion to answer him.
After a pause, he swallowed and asked, "Where?"
"Your heart. Where it was…" she stopped, seemingly unable to say it. "Then, we…" she looked away and Hal caught a strange hint of an expression. Shame, he realised as she said, "We saved you."
What she left unspoken was all the verification he needed. Regardless of how he had survived being staked, there was little mystery as to why he felt the way he did. With excruciating admittance, he uttered, "I drank blood."
Alex still wouldn't meet his eyes. Her gaze bore into the space over his head, but she nodded. "How much?" he asked her, and she turned her face away entirely. "How much?" He repeated the question, horrified of the answer, but he knew. He didn't need Alex to tell him what he already knew was true. Just by the slackening of his ever-present hunger he knew - he had drained someone. Probably more. And the satisfaction of it had already faded.
Alex brought a hand to her neck, and in a flash, he could taste her. A wave of pleasure shivered through him in memory of the perfection of that neck, just before he tore into it. At the same time, the terrible truth that had rooted in the pit of his stomach swelled and completely overcame him. The darkness he had shut out had won. As it always did.
"No," he shook his head with the whisper, and pulled against his bindings in frustration. "Christ, no." Flashes, imprints and impressions were coming back through a red haze. A swell of hunger, so easily twisted into the justification of rage and revenge. He had let it take him. It would have taken her. He swallowed thickly, closing his eyes against it all with a shudder. "No, not you."
"Shh," Alex soothed his hair. Hal opened his eyes to see her biting her lip. "Hal, shh. It's o'er now."
"No," he turned his face away from her. "God, not again."
The anguish of his heart ran so deep that he may as well have been staked all over again. Alex was brushing her fingers through his hair while she kept a hand on his chest. He could barely feel her. He couldn't fathom what that meant. What surely, he must have done. He knew the fresh blood coursing through him was all that kept him from coming apart. It was blood that numbed emotion and armed his rising defenses.
"It won't be the same. I'll help you get through it," Alex continued, bravado in her voice. She was trying to convince herself as much as he. Hal started to shake his head but she forged ahead. "You can stay here. It's safe, secure. Rook said as long as it takes -"
"Rook," he spat darkly.
She faltered, and paused. "Hal, he didnae mean it. To him, it looked like -"
"I know what it looked like," Hal interjected, staring at the flat, concrete wall. His own walls were rising. "A swift stake to the back because I looked at someone funny," he gave a dark laugh at the irony. "The faith between us is nonexistent. Rook cannot trust me, and nor should he."
"That's not true. You weren't going to -"
"Really? Do you really know that?" He asked harshly, and turned back. Alex's expression was immediately discounting, so Hal drove his point home. "Well, neither do I."
She shook her head. "No."
"Don't you see? It takes so little. It wins - it always does."
Alex furrowed her brow, and he caught the glimmer of tears. She blinked them away. "No, it doesn't. And you know it. You have a choice. You said so yourself."
"I am very good at deluding myself Alex."
Alex huffed an exhale, and lifted her chin like she always does when she is pushing down her emotions. "Well, I must really be taking the mick too." She said it flatly, then held his gaze. "I'm not gonna let you give up. Not that easy," she shook her head. "This is my fault and I promised Tom I'd see it through."
"How could this be your fault? Jesus Alex."
"I got you to drink. I insisted it was the only way."
"Which doesn't make anything I did afterwards your fault. That just makes you foolish."
"Dammit Hal - what'd you expect me to do, huh? Stand by and watch you die? I love you!"
He held her gaze, unflinching. She really was foolish. He knew that she meant it. His undeserving heart had hoped… but now, all he wanted was to sabotage it.
"And therein lies the problem," he answered pointedly. "Love isn't enough." She opened her mouth to rebut him, but then stopped, at a loss with her brow furrowed.
"I've killed everyone I've ever loved," he continued acerbically, stating the facts. "Everyone. I can't win. I can't beat this."
"But you can't kill me Hal. I'm already dead," her rationalisation came out in a whisper.
"We both know that isn't true. I already did."
She gave a small gasp, her eyes flashing in anger and disbelief, but the creak of a door and footsteps interrupted the rebuttal she was trying to formulate.
A nearby and unknown voice raised in protest, "I'm sorry sir, but -"
Tom's assertive tone interrupted. "I've gotta go in there. No point stopping me."
"But, I must insist that -" the guard protested, even as the lock turned. The heavy door swung open to reveal Tom's silhouette. Hal lifted his shoulders off the trolley as best he could to see his friend stride unharmed into the room. He was wearing a matching set of loose grey cotton trousers and vest. A hospital uniform.
Alex leapt up, turning away from Hal and caught Tom in a fierce hug. He hugged her back heartily, and Hal wondered what else had happened to them last night. Their guard, a sleepy looking young man in a rumpled Departmental-grey suit, stood in the doorway with an armed crossbow at his side.
Ignoring the lingering guard, Tom looked over Alex's shoulder. His relief was written all over his soiled face. "You did it - you saved 'im!"
Alex took a step back. "Where's Allison?" she asked in an attempt to steady herself.
"Cross the way. She's not awake yet." Tom answered simply, then took a good look at Alex, his eyes narrowing, "S'wot's wrong now?"
"Nothing," she said far too quickly, then sighed. "Hal is being maudlin," Alex switched tactics with a barbed huff.
"I most certainly am not." Hal muttered to the ceiling. He was relieved that Tom and Allison were both alright, but the timing of this little reunion couldn't have been more awkward.
"Nope. Definitely being Eeyore," Alex razzed flatly, then crossed her arms over her chest.
"Who?" Hal could tell from her tone that this was one of those cultural references he should know, which only increased his irritation.
"Hal, mate - you survived being staked. Be happy for once?" Tom said it sardonically, but then he smiled again. "How are you doing? Healed, yeah? I ain't seen nothin like it before." Tom stepped closer and he brought the overwhelming scent of stale wolf with him. "I mean - you was cracking. Gone, for sure. But Alex stopped it! We'll just have to detox it outta ya again," Tom said decisively. "No food, no drink," he instructed with a backwards glance to the guard in the doorway. "It's safe in here, yeah?
"Unless someone comes barging in," the guard barbed grumpily, then moved out of the doorway.
Hal sighed and rolled his eyes. Then looked to Alex. "Can you at least allow me the decency of sitting up if we're going to discuss this?" Alex pursed her lips, then dropped her arms. She took a step towards the trolley.
"That would not be advisable," Rook's voice preceded him. Even with Alex's brief explanation, the sight of the man in the doorway still caused Hal a flash of rage. She must have guessed because she took a few steps backwards to stand alongside the trolley. "I need to ask you a few questions, Mr. Yorke. Tom, good morning. If you'll please excuse us? There are facilities at the end of the corridor, if you care to refresh."
Apparently, even Rook could smell the wolf on Tom. However, it still wasn't sufficient to mask the human's scent in the room. But if Rook insisted on speaking with him, Tom's presence could help. "No," Hal negated with a shake of his head. "Tom stays."
Tom looked between Rook and Hal, then stuck his bottom lip out pensively as he came to realise why Hal wanted him to stay. Then he shrugged. "Yeah, I think I'll stay."
"Tom?" Allison's called from the corridor, and Rook gave an exasperated sigh. She came up in the doorway, hair frizzed, her glasses missing and wearing the same grey uniform as Tom. The Department must have left the garments for his werewolf friends to find upon waking, Hal mused. Allison peered into the room, her eyes trying to focus. "Everyone alright?"
Tom beamed a wide grin and made to step towards her as Rook shook his head irritably. "Yes Miss Larkin. All are accounted for. Now," he tried to resume his control over the room as Allison joined them. Thankfully, her scent was nearly as as strong as Tom's. The addition to the cacophony of heartbeats wasn't helping however. Hal lowered his head and slowed his breathing. Idly, he wondered how much longer he really had. Mentally he started counting the hours.
"Did you find a human at the park?" Allison asked, her question insistent.
"Aside from ourselves, Miss Larkin?"
Allison continued, ignoring the obviousness of Rook's statement. "Near me, there was a man. A human man. Five foot nine, brown hair?"
"Everyone from the park was relocated. The only ones left human-shaped were some half chewed vampires." Rook answered. Hal caught that Alex blanched at Rook's bluntness.
"I saw someone. Right before I transformed. It was Vinicius!" Allison had the excited quality to her voice that came on when she was sleuthing something out. Hal raised his head again.
"The anthropologist?" Rook asked the same question on Hal's mind, in surprised disbelief. "His ghost was here?"
"No, that's the thing. I saw a ghost walk out of him, and then he dropped to the ground. How is that even possible?" Allison asked, wondering, but Rook had gone very still. If anything, he seemed paler than usual.
"What exactly did you see, Allison?" Hal asked. A foreboding sense, worse than he felt already, was dropping through his stomach.
"Just like I said. Right before I turned, I saw Vinicius. And then he wasn't Vinicius anymore. I blacked out after that," she concluded, then turned back to Rook. "But you really didn't find him?"
"Not a human, no. Nave is still finishing the report as we speak, but it was only werewolves that were accounted for before we relocated everyone. I would have been alerted otherwise."
"I believe you will find a very confused, but living anthropologist wandering the woods this morning," Hal uttered.
"You think he faked his death?" Alex asked.
"No, I would wager that he has zero recollection of where he's been or how he arrived here." At Hal's statement, Rook met his eyes.
Allison looked to Hal, then Alex. "Can a ghost possess a person? I didn't think that was real."
Alex shrugged. "Don't look at me."
"Some… do," Rook admitted with hesitation.
"We done got to go to the woods - to the wolves. We got to tell them something," Tom interrupted.
"You don't have to tell them a thing, Mr. McNair," Rook replied, but there was relief in his tone for the turn of conversation.
"Course I do," Tom looked to Hal as if he was seeking back up to his argument.
"They will already be finding out the truth, as we speak."
"The truth?" Tom spoke the same question as Hal.
"That the vampires led the chase, and relocated them," Rook answered plainly.
"Excuse me?" Hal knew he had been incapacitated, but he hadn't thought he had missed that much.
"It was a pair of our own that left the trail, but still. Conclusions will be drawn."
Tom's eyebrows raised in understanding. "So they'll be waking up and smelling vampires in the woods and think -"
"Exactly. The vampires do not wish for their secrets getting out, so…"
Hal shook his head. "Just how long have you people been playing us against each other?"
"Long enough to keep word of your kind embedded as superstition of the dark ages," Rook barbed.
"Except… Irving. And Christa. They know the real actual truth. There weren't a way around it," Tom admitted, looking down to his bare feet, then back to Rook. "And I sorta told Irving he could fill in Gwedore."
Rook stared back at Tom, his blue gaze turned to ice. "And do you think that he will?"
Tom sheepishly shrugged. "I've got no reason to think he won't. Cept maybe to wait for me and Allison."
Rook's silence emphasized that he was clearly furious. Hal elected that moment to steer the conversation back to a potentially more threatening issue. "This ghost," he aimed the question to Allison. "Was he familiar?"
Allison shook her head. "No. I've never seen him before."
"I think you have landed on the missing piece of the puzzle," Hal uttered, vindicated. "Your boy was working with a ghost, Rook."
"How you figure?" Alex asked.
"Castle declared he was working for himself. Milo clearly was working with him, but what of their motivations? How could they manage - even between the two of them, to detonate bombs across the country and rally a Route?" Hal lowered his head and continued, staring up into the concrete ceiling. "Castle had access to lists of known werewolves, and Milo could have been made privy to the Old Ones' holdings enough to strategise, but how could they possibly have executed it all? Castle had assignments here during that timeframe. Milo's whereabouts were unknown, but I doubt he could have passed through all of those guarded locations without raising suspicion after Snow's death."
"And what does all that have to do with a geek-snatching ghost?" Alex quipped, impatient for him to get to the point.
"Vinicius - a man reported dead after exploring a little too close to Lobisomem territory - appears here in the thick of everything at the final hour. Logic dictates Allison's Brazilian acquaintance has become what he sought, only he did not arrive in Wales of his own volition. The choice of Vinicius as a host is too much of a coincidence to be unconnected. Therefore, this ghost is deeply involved."
"Yes but who is he? And, more importantly, why?" Rook asked.
"You have to find Vinicius. If it isn't already too late," Hal concluded. "Possession isn't something lightly, or easily achieved," he answered the curiosity in Alex's demeanour. "This is likely an old ghost we are dealing with."
The hurried approach of clipped footfalls carrying a rapidly beating heart signaled the arrival of yet another human to the cramped room. Hal closed his mouth and his breath against the increasingly irritated itch of his hunger. The white-haired gentleman Rook had introduced Hal and Alex to darkened the doorway. The Archivist.
"May I request a word, sir?" Arthur was abrupt, glancing around the room with open discomfort.
"Now?" Rook seemed surprised by his Archivist's intrusion. This was apparently something unprecedented. "What is it?"
Arthur wrung his hands, giving another glance to Tom, Allison and the shackled trolley before he launched resolutely into what he needed to tell Rook. "The light was on in sector nine, sir." The elder man paused and Rook narrowed his eyes. This hardly seemed information worthy of such an expression, but the Archivist continued. "I've turned that light off for thirty-seven years…"
"Go on," Rook encouraged, but with a tone that suggested he was already guessing at news he did not wish to hear.
"Now, I only took a cursory inventory before I came to inform you. Nowhere near thorough, mind you. Not without days of cross referencing could one really be certain," Arthur mused.
"Yes, Arthur?" Rook's question had grown urgent.
"Erm… well. The access log shows it was Jonathan Castle who came in last night, not long after the full moon. But everyone knows he was in the field."
"Easy enough for his access card to have been compromised. What else Arthur?" Rook seemed accustomed to this roundabout way of getting to the point, but Hal was growing irritated. His back had begun to itch profusely from healing, just under the shoulder blade where the bolt had gone through. He yearned to have his hands free to reach it. That and the errant bits of gravel he could feel in his hair. And he was hungry, but he tried not to think about that.
"I long since have thought if evidence were to be taken, what it would be. And…" Arthur paused with a sad sigh. "It appears to have been taken, sir."
Hal couldn't help but notice that Rook's heartbeat jolted an increase. "The Formation?" he asked, eyes widened.
"Yes, exactly. Those files appear to be misplaced, and some of the specimens. Someone has infiltrated the Archive."
Rook's face fell and he immediately pushed past Arthur to address the guard. "I need you to check the holding cell."
"Mr. Turner, sir?" The guard questioned with confusion.
"Just go! Radio back what you see," Rook barked the order and the guard departed without further question, launching into a run.
"What has Richard got to do with this?" Tom asked, his face befuddled.
"Let us hope nothing. If he is indeed still with us," Rook answered, darkly. "Arthur, you were correct to bring this to my attention straight away. Resume your analysis, please. I will send along assistance as soon as possible."
"Thank you sir," Arthur replied, then departed just as quickly as he had arrived.
"I don't understand - what do you think was taken, exactly?" Allison interjected.
The static of a radio cut in, and Rook retrieved the device from the inside pocket of his jacket without answering her.
"Um… sir?" the tinny voice on the other end broadcast hesitantly.
"Copy," Rook answered, his blue eyes piercingly distant while they all listened acutely to the static on the radio.
"Turner is missing, sir."
With a flash of blinding clarity, it all fell into place as Rook's face crumpled. Hal had been right, without knowing the reasoning. They all were distracted from the truth in exactly the way the culprit had wished, and Rook had been played a fool.
Hal had told Rook days ago that he couldn't fathom why the wolves would go to all this trouble. Why Barry? he had asked. But it hadn't been Barry or a fight with the vampires they were after at all.
It was the Archive.