Let Me Photograph You In This Light (In Case It Is the Last Time) || Oneshot
She leaves on a whim.
With no gangly, long-limbed teenager to accompany them, she and Taisce fit comfortably in the cab of the borrowed pickup. He seems both excited to be going somewhere and nervous to be going somewhere without their third piece, so he alternately pokes his head out the window with his tail wagging all over the place and lays down on the front seat with his head and front paws in her lap. The ride is smooth and relatively quiet; the radio is on but turned low, a distant hum to accompany the rush of the wind through the open window and her own steady breathing, and there are few others out on the road at this hour. Darcy tries not to think too much about where she’s going or why or much of anything else, really, but the long, empty stretches of road make it hard not to let her thoughts wander.
It’s been a handful of days since the sentencing hearing -- the judge had upped the sentences suggested by the jury to the maximum for each of their offenses out of disgust, both for their actions and for the obvious lack of contrition displayed by the pleas and testimonies they chose to give -- but it still hangs over her. Three young men have just lost their lives, lives they could have devoted to making things better. Making themselves better. Instead they’re serving a combined total of something like 115 years in prison -- she isn’t really sure, she’d been focusing too hard on not crying loudly in the courtroom to really know anything beyond the fact that they’ll never see the light of day again. Because of her.
She almost feels like the privileged white girl who got the three minority boys locked up for life because they scared her. They had actually been wrong though; they’d broken the law, fragrantly and remorselessly, and twelve strangers plus an unbiased judge -- a Black judge -- had punished them for it. So she’s not entirely sure why she feels like she should add three more names to the list of people she’s killed. Sure they’re still breathing. But their lives are effectively over.
Same thing.
It’s around two hours into the drive when her thoughts turn to her friends, and she realizes she hasn’t actually told anyone where she’s going. The note she left for Kasper is where he’ll see it when he gets up, but she texts Tony and tells him she’ll be late to work just for the extra security. She’s surprised but pleased when he tells her to take the rest of the week off; she won’t stay away for that long, but the extra time to just decompress will be nice. A mental note to self serves as a reminder to find a way to thank him.
How she’s gonna do that is completely beyond her, just as she has no idea how she’ll thank Harry and Jane and Natasha for being there for her when they absolutely didn’t have to be, but she’s damn sure going to try. Just their presence had been indispensable to her, Kasper’s too even though he hadn’t attended the trial. She’s grateful for that -- it would’ve torn him apart to see and hear everything that had happened to her. It’d been better for both of him that he stayed home. But Harry and Tony, Jane and Nat... they’d all taken time out of their very, very busy lives to show up for her, and she’s not sure at all why she deserves it or how to show them how grateful she is.
It’s her friends she thinks about the longest: how many of them she’s made since moving to New York and how strange it is to have them. She’s always known and been known by a lot of people -- being the life of the party will do that for you -- but knowing that she’s cared for, that her well-being is important to people who aren’t Eliza and Wes is a bit of a mindfuck. And they’re all so different -- that’s what gets her. CEOs and Nobel Prize winners and lawyers and superheroes and aliens--
It’s about then, the time that thought hits her, that she reaches the ferry.
The timing is a godsend; she wouldn’t have been able to keep driving with the flood of emotions that train of thought brings her welling up in her heart. Calling a few friends with friends of their own had gotten her, her dog, and the truck a ride across the Atlantic despite the hour and, much sooner than she expected to be, Darcy is back home on Block Island.
She thanks the crew for bending (breaking) the rules for her and piles back into the truck with Taisce. She passes the motel and the inn and her own house and only stops when she gets to the bluffs. Taisce recognizes the place: he clamors eagerly to get out of the truck and practically jumps through the window before Darcy can get his door open. He takes off like a rocket as Darcy collects the bag she’s brought with her and locks the truck and only follows after her when she starts on the path towards the bluffs.
Every step towards the cliffs feels lighter and heavier at the same time -- to be in such a comforting place with the wind and the salt and the crash of the waves puts her restless mind at ease, but knowing what she’s there to do...
Her hidden path down the bluff to the niche in the cliff is a bit trickier to navigate when it’s dark like this; she sends a mental thanks to Harry for the flashlight app on her Osberry. Taisce whimpers at bit as she heads down in front of him, but his legs are strong. He manages the climb down with ease.
The small pit is still there, thankfully, so Darcy goes about building a fire. She hasn’t done it in years, not since she and her siblings went camping with their dad, but it’s easy enough to remember how. Taisce lies down and looks out at the sea, and Darcy takes a second to watch him. He seems relaxed too, his breathing deep and even and ears flicking every now and then as they pick up a new sound. Maybe they should come up here more often, pack up and take off for a little time away from the city -- her and Taisce and Kasper. Her little self-made family.
Her puppy seems to sense that her mood is changing because he rises from his spot and makes his way over to her, sitting down beside her with his body pressed close to hers. She kisses the side of his muzzle and scratches behind his ears before she reaches into her bag and pulls out her sketchbook. Opening it up towards the back, she finds the specific portraits she’s drawn on two opposing pages and takes some time to just look them over.
Her throat closes quickly over the lump rising in it as her eyes slowly drift over each drawing. A hot curl of shame twists in her belly -- she curls in on herself to try to tamp it down or stave it off, but it only grows hotter and stronger the more she looks at his face. She questions her relationship with Harry when things are at their worst, and she’d been beginning to do the same with her friendship with Loki before that night at the casino. Maybe we’re just not meant to be friends, she’d thought. Maybe she was meant to save him and he was meant to help her gain back some sense of self worth, and that’s it. He’d made his mistakes, sure, but she’s certainly done wrong by him too.
It’s so hard, trying to know what’s right for her to do, think, and feel, and what’s not. The thing is, she understands. In an intellectual, objective way, she gets why Loki hates Harry -- she doesn’t have any idea why Harry detests the trickster god, but it’s clear to her that there’s a reason. There would have to be; Harry wouldn’t kill without reason, no matter what condition he’s in. But subjectively... subjectively, she could never look at Loki and not see Harry broken and shaken, having trouble eating and breathing. Just as she would blink while looking at him and see him bloodied and beaten with a spear shoved through his chest. The number of nights she’s spent lying in bed trying to figure out if she’s holding onto her anger at him because she still genuinely feels it or because she knows feeling it is the only way she can still be close to Harry is astronomical. Fleetingly she wonders if explaining to Harry why Loki had attacked him would change anything about the situation, but she decided long ago that it wouldn’t truly matter. The fact is that Harry killed Loki. So Loki attacked Harry. And while one could say the beating at Loki’s hands was Harry’s punishment, Loki’s gone unpunished.
You’re trying to pick a side without picking a side.
He’d been right, so right. And that indecision, that tension inside of her had ruined their friendship. Or at least, strained the bonds of it, made it impossible to really even call it a friendship anymore. So he’d walked away -- out of frustration, maybe, but more to save himself. That’s the part that hurts the most, she thinks. That being friends with her, trying to do right by her had been hurting him. Making him hate himself. Her eyes squeeze closed and her teeth clamp down on her bottom lip to stave off the cry building in her chest, but it’s of little use. The one-two patter of tears hitting paper makes her open her eyes in time to see the two small droplets over the lines delineating Loki’s chin soak into the page. It’s okay though. Getting wet isn’t the worst that’ll happen to this drawing tonight.
Of course, thinking about Loki brings thoughts of Fandral to the forefront, and she swipes at the rising stream of tears sliding down her cheeks. His face is so handsome, and he’d had all the charm and sexuality to match it. Her finger traces over the bridge of his nose as she turns her attention to the page opposite Loki’s portrait. How many people had seen the soft smile she’d drawn? The gentle look of concern and understanding in his eyes? How many had felt the tenderness in his kiss or the draw of the backs of his fingers along their cheek? He was obviously no stranger to seeking out life’s pleasures, but she likes to think what had happened between the three of them had been more than just a game to him. It certainly had been to her. The two of them had made room for her, done right by her. They could’ve told her to tuck her tail between her legs and run along home to people who care. They could’ve used her as a tool for obtaining their own pleasure, but instead they took care of her. They asked her what she wanted and came through when she responded. It’s the gesture more than the sex itself that still takes her breath away though when she’d left their bed hours later, her knees still shook with aftershocks.
Maybe she’s making too much of it. Maybe it had just been a night like any other to them, but to her it was... the repair of a crumbling fortress. The shoring up of a weakened and vulnerable wall. She felt strengthened after leaving them, convinced that she still had some value. That someone could still want her. And Fandral hadn’t had to join them. He hadn’t had to agree to let it happen at all. Loki had already denied her; he could’ve let it be. But he hadn’t. She never got to thank him for that, not in the way she wanted to. Not the way she needs to now. And she can’t. Because he’s gone.
The pain is compounded by the fact that in losing Loki, she’s lost her only connection to him. There’s no one else she can talk to about him or what he helped do for her -- nobody else would listen without some sort of judgement. There’s no one else she’ll be able to reminisce or to mourn with.
So that’s what she’s doing now.
Mourning.
Saying goodbye.
With more precision than is required for what she’s about to do, Darcy tears each portrait from her sketchbook. She tucks it away in her bag before turning back to each smiling face and gives herself a minute, one single minute, to steel herself.
The first drawing -- the one of Loki -- she drops directly into the fire. They say fire cleanses, and she hopes maybe it’ll be prove to be true here. Maybe with distance and time, things will change. They may never be friends again, but maybe the hurt and the hate he feels will diminish, and maybe the anger and the shame she feels will too. Darcy sits and watches the flames until the last bit of paper curls up and blackens before disintegrating into ash, and that’s when she turns to Fandral.
She thinks this drawing is much like the one she’d done of Harry’s hands holding hers -- Guy or anyone else would be able to look at it and tell exactly how she feels about the subject of it. There’s a lot of gratitude and fondness in the strokes of her pencil, she thinks. That’s how she’d felt drawing it. There’s a sadness in it too, one that comes from her inability to tell him all he’d done for her while he was still alive. But she shouldn’t mourn him -- she knows Asgardian culture, so she knows he’ll be venerated for the rest of time for dying in battle while saving the world. But for her, the small, powerless little earthling, it’s just unfair.
She’d been unable to say the words, so this portrait serves as her goodbye. Carefully, precisely, she folds and tears and folds and tears until the drawing is a small pile of confetti in her hands. She slides on her butt to the edge of the cliff, Taisce whining behind her in concern, and lets her legs dangle off the end of the rock. Maybe the wind knows or maybe the sea does, but something kicks the breeze up just then, making it easy for her to do what she’s come to do.
Finger by finger she uncurls her fist, and the wind picks up the small pieces of her drawing and scatters them into the air. Some float out and fall to the water but most of the twirl and loop across the sky. Her eyes follow the pieces up and up and up until she can’t see them anymore, and still she stays and looks.
Her arms wrap around the legs she’s pulled tightly to her chest, allowing her a place to rest her chin as she cries and watches the edge of the sky. Maybe if there’s something out there... maybe if she’s lucky... those small pieces, maybe just one will make it up past the sky and into the stars. Maybe they’ll reach him wherever he is, Heaven or Valhalla or sprinkled into a constellation in the vast dark of space. Maybe her thank-you-and-goodbye will reach him.
