Post by Emily on Oct 26, 2015 10:42:41 GMT -8
CAST: Beth Lyons (lyonsoffire@aol.com), Tucker North (hesitantlyyours@aol.com)
SUMMARY: The first volume of Thomas Lyons's predictive journals comes home.
TW: mild sexual references
[Beth] Sun up, the morning after. She'd done her duty, so to speak; she'd fed the demon. She'd done more than she had to in letting the man stay, afterward. It had been a quiet night, though, hadn't it? If it felt to Tucker like Beth was a million miles away, it might have been because she was. True, that she was in the same room, physically, but... "I've got my Tamil mid-term, tonight," the linguist offered in the way of small talk, finally. A little black cat with big, blue eyes wound herself up with black lace bootlaces in figure eights as Beth got ready for her first of more classes than she really should have been trying to manage. Meow. "Oi, belt up, won't you, Lucy?" She swatted at the beast. "It's too early for that." Offended look. Chirp. Oh, look, a dust bunny! Bye human! You're boring, now. A thud reverberated across the floor as the heel of her right foot made a shoved touchdown inside her right boot. It was a wonder she hadn't put her shoes on wrong, honestly, for as distracted as she was. Cautious, brown eyes lifted to evaluate the microexpressions on Tucker's face.
[Tucker] It had indeed been like sleeping in another country, though Beth was right at his side the entire time. He'd held her while she slept, but he knew that she would have pulled away if she were conscious. Maybe she pulled away anyway. Now that they were awake, and the sun was shining through curtains, Tucker had resumed the female shape, because well...she'd kinda showed up that way and the femme-flavored clothing wouldn't fit Tucker any other way. So there was a little dark-haired thing perched on the edge of Beth's bed, one knee up to her chest, the other foot down on the floor, both of 'em bare. She was dressed, mostly. The red t-shirt and the jeans were on, the boots and socks and the plaid overshirt still on the floor where she'd left 'em. "Tamil? That sounds damned difficult. But I bet you'll beat that midterm down, if I know you." The smile that she offered up was hopeful and hesitant. When Lucy was promptly dismissed, Tucker cooed, snapped digits, and watched as the feline bounded over to playfully love-nibble her fingers. "Aw, that's a good girl, Lucy." Bright blues rose to Beth again, observing her, the nuances of her movements. This wedge between them was stressing her out, and she was internalizing all of it rather than doing something about it. But talking to the witch about her fee-fees was counterproductive because she tended to just brush it off. It was how she was. But Tucker had one thing that might appeal to her. Maybe. "So, um. Before you go. I wanted to tell you somethin' last night, but you shushed me. It's..." There was a pause while she plucked a hair tie from her pocket, placed it between her teeth, gathered her hair into a ponytail, and tied it up. "It's a book. I don't know how Hannah got her hands on it in the first place, but it's, um...it's our connection. Between Lucas and Lyons."
[Beth] Some people would probably be moderately confused at going to bed with a man and parting ways the next morning with a woman. Some people. Was Beth ever some people? "I suppose it's a little bit of a challenge, yeah." Quick, no- nonsense fingers tied those lace laces up before a sigh that was heavier than it was meant to be lowered tense shoulders. Acid-wash denim clung to slim and petite; pixie-like, if you will, even if she'd grown the pixie cut out months ago, and disappeared somewhere under a mish-mash of navy knit and cream scarf. "It's got a lot of history; second century bee-cee-ee, archeologically speaking. It was the first Indic language to lean toward alphabetization, so there are epigraphs and alphabets to learn in the reading and the writing of it, depending on how fluent a person really wants to be. It's entirely possible I've bitten off more than I can chew without a visit to the dentist." Not everything comes as easily to her as French and fuckery do, which may or may not have come as a surprise to Tucker. Sometimes she worried that he was in for a cruel surprise the day he took her down off of the pedestal he kept her on. Beth rose from the bed and crossed the room to pull a black pea coat out of an adjacent closet. The black pea coat. A wave of dark blonde crashed over her collarbones as she turned her head to lift an eyebrow at the brunette girl playing with evil incarnate. Yes, she'd shushed him, the night before. She knew that just as soon as he'd come, so would the apologies, the attempts to mend things. She wasn't ready for that, yet. "Oh? A book? And Hannah had it?" What on Earth would Hannah Fein be doing with a book tied to the whole Lucas/Lyons fiasco? That girl. That stoic, secretive little beam of firelight. She held such mystery, she did. "I can only assume that she gave it to you, or else you wouldn't have it. Did she say why? Have you opened it?" Curiosity: piqued. Mission: accomplished.
[Tucker] Brilliant blues observed as Beth moved, watching her progress to the closet to pull out...ah, yes, Tucker remembered that coat. Mercer spilled tea on it. Tucker had it dry cleaned. Something had pulled her to the smart-mouthed, pixie-like witch. Was that really less than six months ago? So much had changed. And perhaps this fight was evidence that the metaphorical honeymoon was over. Lucy was scooped up into slim, toned arms, chiming laughter bubbling from full lips as she scritched the black kitty's stomach and got a mouth full of sharp teeth for her effort. "You behave yourself, Miss Lucy, or I'll have Clemens school ya, I will." Clemens would just sit there and lick his own butt and take a nap. It was hard to hide the tiny smile that wanted to form when Beth was suddenly...interested. Okay. Good. Talking about feelings and apologies and offering up too-intense and too-real words of love weren't the way back into Bethy's good graces, but maybe engaging her brain was. "She didn't say why she was givin' it to me. Just was real shifty about it. Nudged it under the table in a tote bag in the Clockwork Cat like it was some kind of drug deal. Told me, in my head mind you 'cause I guess she's got some kind of psychic thing goin' on, that I was not to open it til I was home. So I open it, right, and there's this old, old ring, gorgeous thing, with some kind of family crest. And a book. Old, handwritten." While it was true that a conversation about Tamil and its possible linkage to the spread of Proto-Indo-European, and how it could theoretically model the peopling of Europe and Asia, would have beeen fascinating, that was not going to happen. Some other night they could geek out over the links between their disciplines. There were other links. "So I open it up. First page. There's a woman named Lily Lucas, born Lily Carrington. Bethy...Lily Hall...I think it was named for her, 'cause she's mentioned with Edlington and Veitch and Turner. And the book? Written by T. Lyons. Boom."
[Beth] Maybe engaging her brain was. Maybe it wasn't. "Shifty? That doesn't sound like her." Both eyebrows had risen into her forehead, by then, but oh, her curious expression wasn't anywhere near maxed out. Shifty surprised her more than psychic did -- though in the interest of full narrative disclosure, Hannah is not a telepath. She'd only tapped into Tucker's as-yet under-developed empathic ability and used it to force the feeling that he ought not open that tote bag until he was alone into his head. He'd figure out the difference between the two, some day. Beth pulled the right sleeve of her coat on over her sweater. "Rings and books, hm? Rings and books," she murmured thoughtfully, taking most of the information being exchanged in with a grain of salt, as she did most other things until she could make proper connections between them. "Lucas-born-Carrington?" Bliiink. "What?" Her coat was left hanging off of her shoulder, entirely forgotten in the violent snap of a hundred rubberbands that had been stretched suspended in her head until just that moment. Strangely enough, it was neither the name Lucas nor the name Carrington that had done it. It was the combination of the other five. Veitch, Turner, Edlington; fine, fine. Everyone on campus knew those names and Beth knew all three ghosts personally. She had since childhood. But Lily. Uncle Thomas had never been willing to talk about Lily Hall or the woman for whom it was named. He'd always given her some silly riddle-speech explanation that reduced the matter to springtime and frog-rafts. Did he know Lily Lucas? Her eyes widened considerably. When Tucker noted the book's author, her summer-gold complexion went the palest champagne. "T. T. Lyons. You're sure? Tucker, I... the..." Something had thrown the unflappable intellect off! "The dates. The dates on the... are the pages dated?" This was apparently the most pressing of all of her questions.
[Tucker] Something had triggered Bethy's spidey sense, apparently, and it wasn't the bits that he had thought would register with her. What he had expected was a lightbulb moment of brilliance where the connection between Lucas and Lyons was revealed. A Lily Lucas and a T. Lyons knew one another long ago. Ta-da, that answered the question and they could move on. Except they couldn't. "Yeah. It was a Thomas Lyons, actually...Bethy, are you well?" No, the connection had not been made. Thomas was probably one of those family names that got passed down over centuries, wasn't it? Like how there was a James North somewhere up the line, and Tucker now bore the middle name. The brunette girl rose from the bed to come stand beside her, a hand resting gently on her elbow in case she lost her balance or fainted. "Yeah, actually. There's a date on the first page. 1620, the same year that the L. Lucas tombstone has on it. So that tells me that Lily Lucas is buried under the hall that bears her name, with Marie Edlington. If I had to guess, I'd say Veitch and Turner are buried somewhere 'round here too." But the larger mystery of Shepherd University as a whole was left alone for now. "I couldn't get real far in, the rest of the pages are hard to decipher. But that much, I was able to get. Are you alright? C'mon..." Carefully, she began to lead Beth back to the bed, so that she could sit down while her world reeled.
[Beth] There would be no sitting down. Beth pulled her arm away with more force than was perhaps necessary, suddenly wild-eyed as cogs that had been still for weeks turned, whirred, clicked into place. Her nostrils flared and the pulse in her throat beat against it like a man on the wrong side of a jailhouse telephone conversation trying to break through bulletproof glass. Despite non-verbal cue after non-verbal cue that indicated distress, her voice was quiet and well-controlled as she palmed the side of Tucker's face and just stared at him -- her -- a frantic moment. "I need you to hear me, right now, okay? I need you to listen. Listen. ... I need that book. It's... you're not safe..." Turn, whir, click. Fuck. Here goes... well, almost everything. "You get me that book. You bring it to me, and you don't ever, ever tell anyone you ever had it, do you understand? The first volume of his journals has been missing for centuries." On purpose. There were things in that book that weren't meant for the light. I need to know where it was found. I need to know how it fell into Hannah's hands. I need to know why she gave it to Tucker. Why Tucker? Her thought process flickered through her head like cracks of lightning. "And if anyone tries to talk to you about a Council, about me, about Alice Clare, about Jaycee, you run. Run as fast and as far away as you can, and don't look back for me or anyone else you've met here. Promise me." Her hand curled into either side of Tucker's chin with a firmness it had never touched him with, before. "Promise me, now."
[Tucker] She hadn't expected this. It wasn't the joy she had hoped to bring with the news. She wasn't dropping answers like flowers into Beth's lap and watching her face light up, she was basically watching Beth have some sort of mental breakdown on her. But not without reason. Oh no. Tucker wasn't fool enough to think that her cool, calm little witch would fall into hysterics for anything short of something earth-shattering. Maybe that was why she was so quick to agree, without even asking further questions. "Okay. Okay. I'll bring the book. I can go get it right now, it's in my room. You can come with me if you wanna, so I can get it to you right away. Don't worry. Ain't nobody else seen or heard about it other than you." And Hannah. But where the redhead fit into this equation was so utterly beyond Tucker right now that she wasn't even going to try. The...first volume of his journals was missing for centuries? She blinked, surprise etched on her features. "I...yes, of course, I..." Promise she'd run without Beth. Without Bethy. The thought of it made her heart hurt and her voice cracked when she spoke. "I promise. I won't look back. Not even for you. It'll...it'll kill me, but not even for you." She ran her hands over Beth's arms, then tugged her, tried to pull her close. "It's gonna be okay, Bethy. It is. I don't know what's so dangerous about the book but I know you wouldn't be tellin' me all this if it were a lie. I believe you. So I'll give it back to you and we can pretend I never even saw it, except for, I mean...the part where we know who L. Lucas was." She searched Beth's eyes. The woman was full of secrets. Her forehead nudged against hers. "I wish I understood."
[Beth] Everything that Tucker said before 'I wish I understood' was received and catalogued with executive secretary-like efficiency, but that last sentence filled her doe eyes up with grief she'd been hiding from him for days. Had it been a week since Alice Clare had blown the lid off of the Great and Powerful Headmaster's identity? More? "I can only tell you so much," the stricken witch whispered, wrapping an arm around Tucker's neck so completely that it was probably some kind of mixed martial arts foul in another arena. Ah. Finally. There you go, Tucker; there's the emotion you wanted. Front and center. "There will always, always be things I can't tell you. I need you to know that, now, before this gets... any worse..." It wasn't often that she had trouble communicating via word, whether spoken or written, but she was floundering around trying to find the right ones, just then. "I need you to be okay with that, or... or I can't see you anymore." Or I can't marry you at all. Ever. Beth swallowed hard and released, damn near pushed Tucker toward his shoes while pulling the rest of her coat on at the same time. "Go, hurry; go get the book, bring it back here," she choked, trembling hands pulling her cell phone out of her coat pocket and fumbling at getting a numerical pad to come up on its screen. "Don't tell anyone what you're doing. I... I have to call my uncle."
[Tucker] Her arms around her. Tucker sighed in a sort of shaky contentment she hadn't felt since the night Beth stormed out of Joe's. She held her, her little witch, held her tight about the waist and made a hushed sound as she buried her face against her neck in return. "Just tell me everything you can," she whispered, after a moment. "Keep the secrets you have to. I trust you, Bethy, I do." Tucker may have been shoved away, but Beth wasn't getting away without one last gesture. The kiss she placed on her mouth was fierce and fond at the same time, and then she wrenched away. "I'm gettin' it," she insisted. "I'm gettin' it. Wait here. You call your uncle, I'll...yeah." And lady-Tucker was off in a flash. Without her shoes, in fact. She just took off barefoot into the chill, though she at least thought to grab her overshirt and toss that on. It wasn't like she had to leave Turner Hall or anything anyway.
SUMMARY: The first volume of Thomas Lyons's predictive journals comes home.
TW: mild sexual references
[Beth] Sun up, the morning after. She'd done her duty, so to speak; she'd fed the demon. She'd done more than she had to in letting the man stay, afterward. It had been a quiet night, though, hadn't it? If it felt to Tucker like Beth was a million miles away, it might have been because she was. True, that she was in the same room, physically, but... "I've got my Tamil mid-term, tonight," the linguist offered in the way of small talk, finally. A little black cat with big, blue eyes wound herself up with black lace bootlaces in figure eights as Beth got ready for her first of more classes than she really should have been trying to manage. Meow. "Oi, belt up, won't you, Lucy?" She swatted at the beast. "It's too early for that." Offended look. Chirp. Oh, look, a dust bunny! Bye human! You're boring, now. A thud reverberated across the floor as the heel of her right foot made a shoved touchdown inside her right boot. It was a wonder she hadn't put her shoes on wrong, honestly, for as distracted as she was. Cautious, brown eyes lifted to evaluate the microexpressions on Tucker's face.
[Tucker] It had indeed been like sleeping in another country, though Beth was right at his side the entire time. He'd held her while she slept, but he knew that she would have pulled away if she were conscious. Maybe she pulled away anyway. Now that they were awake, and the sun was shining through curtains, Tucker had resumed the female shape, because well...she'd kinda showed up that way and the femme-flavored clothing wouldn't fit Tucker any other way. So there was a little dark-haired thing perched on the edge of Beth's bed, one knee up to her chest, the other foot down on the floor, both of 'em bare. She was dressed, mostly. The red t-shirt and the jeans were on, the boots and socks and the plaid overshirt still on the floor where she'd left 'em. "Tamil? That sounds damned difficult. But I bet you'll beat that midterm down, if I know you." The smile that she offered up was hopeful and hesitant. When Lucy was promptly dismissed, Tucker cooed, snapped digits, and watched as the feline bounded over to playfully love-nibble her fingers. "Aw, that's a good girl, Lucy." Bright blues rose to Beth again, observing her, the nuances of her movements. This wedge between them was stressing her out, and she was internalizing all of it rather than doing something about it. But talking to the witch about her fee-fees was counterproductive because she tended to just brush it off. It was how she was. But Tucker had one thing that might appeal to her. Maybe. "So, um. Before you go. I wanted to tell you somethin' last night, but you shushed me. It's..." There was a pause while she plucked a hair tie from her pocket, placed it between her teeth, gathered her hair into a ponytail, and tied it up. "It's a book. I don't know how Hannah got her hands on it in the first place, but it's, um...it's our connection. Between Lucas and Lyons."
[Beth] Some people would probably be moderately confused at going to bed with a man and parting ways the next morning with a woman. Some people. Was Beth ever some people? "I suppose it's a little bit of a challenge, yeah." Quick, no- nonsense fingers tied those lace laces up before a sigh that was heavier than it was meant to be lowered tense shoulders. Acid-wash denim clung to slim and petite; pixie-like, if you will, even if she'd grown the pixie cut out months ago, and disappeared somewhere under a mish-mash of navy knit and cream scarf. "It's got a lot of history; second century bee-cee-ee, archeologically speaking. It was the first Indic language to lean toward alphabetization, so there are epigraphs and alphabets to learn in the reading and the writing of it, depending on how fluent a person really wants to be. It's entirely possible I've bitten off more than I can chew without a visit to the dentist." Not everything comes as easily to her as French and fuckery do, which may or may not have come as a surprise to Tucker. Sometimes she worried that he was in for a cruel surprise the day he took her down off of the pedestal he kept her on. Beth rose from the bed and crossed the room to pull a black pea coat out of an adjacent closet. The black pea coat. A wave of dark blonde crashed over her collarbones as she turned her head to lift an eyebrow at the brunette girl playing with evil incarnate. Yes, she'd shushed him, the night before. She knew that just as soon as he'd come, so would the apologies, the attempts to mend things. She wasn't ready for that, yet. "Oh? A book? And Hannah had it?" What on Earth would Hannah Fein be doing with a book tied to the whole Lucas/Lyons fiasco? That girl. That stoic, secretive little beam of firelight. She held such mystery, she did. "I can only assume that she gave it to you, or else you wouldn't have it. Did she say why? Have you opened it?" Curiosity: piqued. Mission: accomplished.
[Tucker] Brilliant blues observed as Beth moved, watching her progress to the closet to pull out...ah, yes, Tucker remembered that coat. Mercer spilled tea on it. Tucker had it dry cleaned. Something had pulled her to the smart-mouthed, pixie-like witch. Was that really less than six months ago? So much had changed. And perhaps this fight was evidence that the metaphorical honeymoon was over. Lucy was scooped up into slim, toned arms, chiming laughter bubbling from full lips as she scritched the black kitty's stomach and got a mouth full of sharp teeth for her effort. "You behave yourself, Miss Lucy, or I'll have Clemens school ya, I will." Clemens would just sit there and lick his own butt and take a nap. It was hard to hide the tiny smile that wanted to form when Beth was suddenly...interested. Okay. Good. Talking about feelings and apologies and offering up too-intense and too-real words of love weren't the way back into Bethy's good graces, but maybe engaging her brain was. "She didn't say why she was givin' it to me. Just was real shifty about it. Nudged it under the table in a tote bag in the Clockwork Cat like it was some kind of drug deal. Told me, in my head mind you 'cause I guess she's got some kind of psychic thing goin' on, that I was not to open it til I was home. So I open it, right, and there's this old, old ring, gorgeous thing, with some kind of family crest. And a book. Old, handwritten." While it was true that a conversation about Tamil and its possible linkage to the spread of Proto-Indo-European, and how it could theoretically model the peopling of Europe and Asia, would have beeen fascinating, that was not going to happen. Some other night they could geek out over the links between their disciplines. There were other links. "So I open it up. First page. There's a woman named Lily Lucas, born Lily Carrington. Bethy...Lily Hall...I think it was named for her, 'cause she's mentioned with Edlington and Veitch and Turner. And the book? Written by T. Lyons. Boom."
[Beth] Maybe engaging her brain was. Maybe it wasn't. "Shifty? That doesn't sound like her." Both eyebrows had risen into her forehead, by then, but oh, her curious expression wasn't anywhere near maxed out. Shifty surprised her more than psychic did -- though in the interest of full narrative disclosure, Hannah is not a telepath. She'd only tapped into Tucker's as-yet under-developed empathic ability and used it to force the feeling that he ought not open that tote bag until he was alone into his head. He'd figure out the difference between the two, some day. Beth pulled the right sleeve of her coat on over her sweater. "Rings and books, hm? Rings and books," she murmured thoughtfully, taking most of the information being exchanged in with a grain of salt, as she did most other things until she could make proper connections between them. "Lucas-born-Carrington?" Bliiink. "What?" Her coat was left hanging off of her shoulder, entirely forgotten in the violent snap of a hundred rubberbands that had been stretched suspended in her head until just that moment. Strangely enough, it was neither the name Lucas nor the name Carrington that had done it. It was the combination of the other five. Veitch, Turner, Edlington; fine, fine. Everyone on campus knew those names and Beth knew all three ghosts personally. She had since childhood. But Lily. Uncle Thomas had never been willing to talk about Lily Hall or the woman for whom it was named. He'd always given her some silly riddle-speech explanation that reduced the matter to springtime and frog-rafts. Did he know Lily Lucas? Her eyes widened considerably. When Tucker noted the book's author, her summer-gold complexion went the palest champagne. "T. T. Lyons. You're sure? Tucker, I... the..." Something had thrown the unflappable intellect off! "The dates. The dates on the... are the pages dated?" This was apparently the most pressing of all of her questions.
[Tucker] Something had triggered Bethy's spidey sense, apparently, and it wasn't the bits that he had thought would register with her. What he had expected was a lightbulb moment of brilliance where the connection between Lucas and Lyons was revealed. A Lily Lucas and a T. Lyons knew one another long ago. Ta-da, that answered the question and they could move on. Except they couldn't. "Yeah. It was a Thomas Lyons, actually...Bethy, are you well?" No, the connection had not been made. Thomas was probably one of those family names that got passed down over centuries, wasn't it? Like how there was a James North somewhere up the line, and Tucker now bore the middle name. The brunette girl rose from the bed to come stand beside her, a hand resting gently on her elbow in case she lost her balance or fainted. "Yeah, actually. There's a date on the first page. 1620, the same year that the L. Lucas tombstone has on it. So that tells me that Lily Lucas is buried under the hall that bears her name, with Marie Edlington. If I had to guess, I'd say Veitch and Turner are buried somewhere 'round here too." But the larger mystery of Shepherd University as a whole was left alone for now. "I couldn't get real far in, the rest of the pages are hard to decipher. But that much, I was able to get. Are you alright? C'mon..." Carefully, she began to lead Beth back to the bed, so that she could sit down while her world reeled.
[Beth] There would be no sitting down. Beth pulled her arm away with more force than was perhaps necessary, suddenly wild-eyed as cogs that had been still for weeks turned, whirred, clicked into place. Her nostrils flared and the pulse in her throat beat against it like a man on the wrong side of a jailhouse telephone conversation trying to break through bulletproof glass. Despite non-verbal cue after non-verbal cue that indicated distress, her voice was quiet and well-controlled as she palmed the side of Tucker's face and just stared at him -- her -- a frantic moment. "I need you to hear me, right now, okay? I need you to listen. Listen. ... I need that book. It's... you're not safe..." Turn, whir, click. Fuck. Here goes... well, almost everything. "You get me that book. You bring it to me, and you don't ever, ever tell anyone you ever had it, do you understand? The first volume of his journals has been missing for centuries." On purpose. There were things in that book that weren't meant for the light. I need to know where it was found. I need to know how it fell into Hannah's hands. I need to know why she gave it to Tucker. Why Tucker? Her thought process flickered through her head like cracks of lightning. "And if anyone tries to talk to you about a Council, about me, about Alice Clare, about Jaycee, you run. Run as fast and as far away as you can, and don't look back for me or anyone else you've met here. Promise me." Her hand curled into either side of Tucker's chin with a firmness it had never touched him with, before. "Promise me, now."
[Tucker] She hadn't expected this. It wasn't the joy she had hoped to bring with the news. She wasn't dropping answers like flowers into Beth's lap and watching her face light up, she was basically watching Beth have some sort of mental breakdown on her. But not without reason. Oh no. Tucker wasn't fool enough to think that her cool, calm little witch would fall into hysterics for anything short of something earth-shattering. Maybe that was why she was so quick to agree, without even asking further questions. "Okay. Okay. I'll bring the book. I can go get it right now, it's in my room. You can come with me if you wanna, so I can get it to you right away. Don't worry. Ain't nobody else seen or heard about it other than you." And Hannah. But where the redhead fit into this equation was so utterly beyond Tucker right now that she wasn't even going to try. The...first volume of his journals was missing for centuries? She blinked, surprise etched on her features. "I...yes, of course, I..." Promise she'd run without Beth. Without Bethy. The thought of it made her heart hurt and her voice cracked when she spoke. "I promise. I won't look back. Not even for you. It'll...it'll kill me, but not even for you." She ran her hands over Beth's arms, then tugged her, tried to pull her close. "It's gonna be okay, Bethy. It is. I don't know what's so dangerous about the book but I know you wouldn't be tellin' me all this if it were a lie. I believe you. So I'll give it back to you and we can pretend I never even saw it, except for, I mean...the part where we know who L. Lucas was." She searched Beth's eyes. The woman was full of secrets. Her forehead nudged against hers. "I wish I understood."
[Beth] Everything that Tucker said before 'I wish I understood' was received and catalogued with executive secretary-like efficiency, but that last sentence filled her doe eyes up with grief she'd been hiding from him for days. Had it been a week since Alice Clare had blown the lid off of the Great and Powerful Headmaster's identity? More? "I can only tell you so much," the stricken witch whispered, wrapping an arm around Tucker's neck so completely that it was probably some kind of mixed martial arts foul in another arena. Ah. Finally. There you go, Tucker; there's the emotion you wanted. Front and center. "There will always, always be things I can't tell you. I need you to know that, now, before this gets... any worse..." It wasn't often that she had trouble communicating via word, whether spoken or written, but she was floundering around trying to find the right ones, just then. "I need you to be okay with that, or... or I can't see you anymore." Or I can't marry you at all. Ever. Beth swallowed hard and released, damn near pushed Tucker toward his shoes while pulling the rest of her coat on at the same time. "Go, hurry; go get the book, bring it back here," she choked, trembling hands pulling her cell phone out of her coat pocket and fumbling at getting a numerical pad to come up on its screen. "Don't tell anyone what you're doing. I... I have to call my uncle."
[Tucker] Her arms around her. Tucker sighed in a sort of shaky contentment she hadn't felt since the night Beth stormed out of Joe's. She held her, her little witch, held her tight about the waist and made a hushed sound as she buried her face against her neck in return. "Just tell me everything you can," she whispered, after a moment. "Keep the secrets you have to. I trust you, Bethy, I do." Tucker may have been shoved away, but Beth wasn't getting away without one last gesture. The kiss she placed on her mouth was fierce and fond at the same time, and then she wrenched away. "I'm gettin' it," she insisted. "I'm gettin' it. Wait here. You call your uncle, I'll...yeah." And lady-Tucker was off in a flash. Without her shoes, in fact. She just took off barefoot into the chill, though she at least thought to grab her overshirt and toss that on. It wasn't like she had to leave Turner Hall or anything anyway.