troubled waters (FierroChase AU)

nineteen

As he observed the watch hands slowly turning and turning, the night with Magnus approaching, Alex felt agitated beyond comprehension. There were so many different, contrasting and conflicting senses flowing from his brain, down through his heart into his stomach, where a soft warmth expanded, sometimes torn apart by sudden outbreaks of cold, of internal hurricanes, and yes, of butterflies, flying around quickly and flustered. He had not moved from the bed since Magnus had left his room, thus creating an enormous contrast to Magnus' different kind of excitement. Alex was seemingly cold, calm, perfectly in control of the situation and everything that might follow. He was just laying on the bed, seeming to take a little break after a fatiguing day, actually a consequence of the lack of a night. But Alex was neither tired, nor calm. The exterior appearance was an illusion, highly contradistinctive to what he was living through on the inside. This was a feeling, not one feeling, a mass of feelings, entirely new to him.

Alex had not yet come to the understanding himself, but in his life, he had never loved anybody. Not his mother that he had barely known before her death, certainly not Loki who had stolen his youth and childhood and almost succeeded in turning him into a person he never wanted to be, shaking the very roots of his identity: gender, morale, art. And not even Adrien, his former best friend, whom Loki had taken away from him, implicitly forcing his parents to leave the country with false identities, doing everything in his power to prevent Alex from ever finding him again. Who knows how their relationship could have evolved, but at this point, Adrien was only an aching memory of better times, the beautiful scar Loki had left on his childhood, the dream of a normal life, never come true. And though this wound could never be healed, and Adrien's friendship never forgotten, Alex tried his best to keep him out of his memories, for he knew that thinking about this time would mean nothing but pain to him. And despite this essential place in the spring of Alex' personality, Adrien had not been loved. He had been a friend, the friend, but he had also quite quickly just become a symbol, a mere substitute of what else there was in the world; an abstraction, an idea, a dream. And Alex had moved on.

What he was now experiencing, though quite unclear to himself, were the soft first touches of something that could become love. This spontaneous affection Alex felt, the smile seeing Magnus put on his face, the irregularly recurring thoughts about him while he was doing something entirely different, the slightly accelerated heartbeat when he greeted him in the mornings, all those were things he barely ever noticed, that yet kept their place, and over time grew stronger. And they had led Alex to the conviction that there must be something special about the boy living in the apartment under her own, in his melancholy look, in that face of innocence, that had experienced so much sadness, anger, desperation, hardened by years on the streets and the ultimate loss; yet with eyes whose wild, lively grey storm, had never ceased to emit this pure, dark, powerful energy Alex could never comprehend, but venerated nonetheless. Something special. It is true, he was not like the boys he had met in Chicago, often of a brutal and cold intelligence, lacking compassion and morale, and who acted in such ways that even their unpredictability became predictable. He was not like the boys in College either, regardless of what faculty; there were certainly sympathetic, interesting people amongst them, but none of them had that something Magnus possessed - this contrast of deep sorrow and light insouciance, of aesthetical knowledge and social clumsiness, that made him who he was.

Alex had thought about Magnus, and about himself, and though entirely unexperienced in all matters regarding social interaction, Alex had that natural lightness of character that made it easy to socialise and be liked, if he so chose. Because there was also a certain gravity of character, forged by the things he had seen and done, that could quickly appear like a general aversion for others, like arrogance, like inconsideration. And his father's principal antipathy for any real kind of interhuman relation, be it friendship or romance, added to his traits of character, resulting in a rather lonely life, even after his father's influence had been broken Alex, with his past, with his fears and memories, was evidently not the person to easily open up to others, and it surprised himself again and again, in what unusual way he was behaving towards Magnus. There clearly was something special about him.

These thoughts of Alex' were what eventually drove him to the state he was in now, minutes from having Magnus knock on his door to take him out for dinner on a Friday night. How had it come this far? Next to all the positive, affectionate, nearly tender emotions the sight and thought of Magnus made erupt in his stomach, there was also something else, still present, though considerably weakened, amongst the variety of emotions. There was the fear of opening up old wounds, the fear of loss and the fear of bond at the same time; and still the fear of his father's shadow darkening his and Magnus' hearts, threatening to suffocate the sun that had barely risen in their life. If it was an irrational fear or not, Alex could not tell at that point. And, finally having prepared for dinner, though not quite as eagerly and nervously as Magnus had at the same time, Alex opened the door with a notion of doubt, next to the smile that Magnus had infected her with, and that now began flowing through the whole of her body, slowly drowning her fears on the way out. And their night began.