No spoilers for The Madness Underneath.

Stephen/Rory

Asphodel: Victorian flower used to in flower language to mean "my regrets follow you to the grave"

Stephen Dene is not a man who pines. Pining was almost as bad as the word fuck in his book (not that he was completely celibate, as Boo often whispered loudly to people when she thought that Stephen wasn't listening; he just had more class than to assign something so delicate and intimate such an ugly word) and he just doesn't do it. Slams his metaphorical foot down when presented with the option because pining is Not Something Stephen Does. It's childish and petty and only a few precious steps away from stalking. So, no. Stephen Dene is not a man who pines for anything.

Not even a girl with dark hair and laughing eyes and an accent to die for. He doesn't.

American. Southern. An accent swelling with both homeliness and aristocracy, speaking of somewhere warm with rain in the cloudless air and a land half covered in water, half in backwoods roads. Her hair is dark and her eyes are bright, if confused.

She gives her description and there is something off about it, off enough, and that's all it is, he swears, swears on his soul, his life (not that hefty of a bet in his book, but the figure of speech was weighty enough) that makes him hand her his card. His personal card, Boo would say pointedly with a look at him later. The look is met with a glare that slams shut the door to that avenue of conversation, for a time.

"There's something wrong with me."

Stephen looks behind him and sees her, Aurora Deveaux, and he wants to say the word that pining is almost as bad as, but for his credit he doesn't, because she looks lost enough to pity, standing there with her dark eyes open wide as he watches her converse with the girl supposed to be her roommate. He follows Boo's instructions even though the thought of her at his place doesn't bother him as much as he would like it to, and her arm is warm in his as he helps her to the car. Warm like an open flame, the heat clings to his hand even after he is driving. It burns against the steering wheel, and then Stephen thinks what he has been wanting to say to himself.

Fuck.

When they were at the flat, Stephen offered her his hand, now cooled, to help her out of the car, and she rejects it, eyes off in a different world. Unbidden, surprising himself, he thinks it again, in a darker, almost injured tone, if such a thing was possible (and it's not, it's not, he promises himself):

Fuck.

Rule one of Stephen is that He Does Not Pine. Rule two is He Likes To Think.

Thinking was cheap. It was something to be done by oneself, wherever, whenever. And God knows that people on Earth could do with a little more thinking in their daily lives.

And so Stephen thinks. He thinks aloud, on papers, makes conjectures and ideas until he's ready to tell others, which is exactly what he did as he, Boo, Callum, and Rory walked out of the Tube, away from the jumper. He's telling Rory some of his theories about ghosts, mindlessly, making noise at her, until she speaks, accent cutting through him. About the Ripper's clothes not being Victorian, an observation Stephen had not expected her to retain.

He watches her, assesses her for half a moment. Still just a girl. Still American, with dark hair and eyes that weren't as bland as he originally thought. They had a bit of stars in them.

But better yet, she could think.

"He walked away," she said, her accent dead and flat. Stephen barely knows what he's doing before the sirens are on and he's blasting through the streets, because the Ripper walked away. He might be behind them, dead ghost eyes locked on the one girl lucky (or was it unlucky) to brush past him not once, but twice.

At Goodwin's Court he handles the essentials because he is Stephen Dene and he Does Not Fuck Around when it comes to his team, but Rory is there in her sports bra and zombie makeup looking like a hurricane was about to burst out of her chest.

She demanded things of him that he could not let her do. Go to the hospital. Call her roommate. There were more things to be done and a better time for this, and so he sat across from her on the couch and demanded a story.

She was shaken, pale. He did not expect much from her, truth be told. But then that hurricane of teary rain and sobbing winds became something else as she gathered herself together. The storm became a wildfire as she told him, from the beginning (his brief interruption burned to a crisp the second it leaves his mouth) everything that happened. Events swirled together, ashes born on her fire and glowing like stars in her eyes.

A small bit of the inferno picks up in his chest as he watches her, elbows on his knees, an arm's length away as she burns bright, like a star.

The Name of the Star is What You Fear.

When the shitstorm of new information had faded to a more manageable-but still horrendous and surprising-level, thrashing around him as he stood still in the apartment, Stephen comes to his senses and offers her some of his old things, some of the few clean things he has lying around his room. A polo. A pair of sweats. He handed them over and then raked through the tangle of his mind as she changed.

All he managed to catch was a single glimpse as she turned to shut off the bathroom light and settle her Halloween costume onto a single clear section on the floor of the living room, next to Callum's favorite armchair, and then he suddenly can't do anything but stare at the kettle because she was wearing his clothing.

It's not like the clothing was in any way flattering or revealing (quite the opposite, in fact, as she appeared to be drowning in his old Eton sweats that he liked to wear to bed on cold nights) but it was the simple fact that in some dark corner of Stephen's mind, she was wearing his clothes correlated with she removed her clothes in his apartment which in turn was the first part of the definition of the word that pining was almost as bad as.

That observation continued to pound at the forefront of Stephen's brain, even as he tried to keep a grip on his emotions, because he was (against most people's, read: Boo and Callum's (and in a deep pit of his stomach, he also counted Rory) assumptions of him) quite capable of that particular train of thought, thank you very much, he just didn't think of advertising it as something to do in polite company.

But, God. She was wearing his clothes. That thought kept jumping out at him from the strangest corners of conversation, like an itch at the forefront of his brain. An irregular heartbeat of she was wearing his clothes, she was wearing his clothes, she was wearing his clothes.

He manages to make it through a conversation with her without any unnecessary dramatics on his part. Rory had begun to pry at him a bit, peeling away the layers in a way that he found not wholly uncomfortable, but then Callum was home and the light inside him flickered out.

He decides to check in on her.

And that's all it is, he insists, no matter how loudly Callum kept coughing STALKER at him and trying to make it look accidental. Because stalking is only a few precious steps away from pining, and neither are something Stephen does, ever. Not even for a girl with fire in her lungs and stars in her eyes.

Never.

Especially when said girl seems happy enough kissing a boy with curly hair from her school, a deep and intimate (if quick; Stephen dwells on the speed with which she detaches from him when he meets her eyes). He looks away because he is outside of that circle, that intimacy, and he has no right to barge in on it.

But still.

She pulled away.

He doesn't know what to do.

Stephen has had close to no positive interactions with ghosts, but Boo just loved to cultivate friends everywhere, from everyone, their current living status nonwithstanding. Stephen didn't do well with ghosts; almost as badly as he did with the living. How was he supposed to tell Jo what had happened, with her able to do nothing in turn to help?

Rory stepped up.

Her voice was iron that stuck a line down Stephen's back, making him want to stand taller, straighter, because she could do what he could not and it was rare for him to find that in someone.

"I'll do it," she said, and he watched after her.

"I'll wait right here," I'll wait.

He doesn't know for what he will wait; and he pointedly does not explore the topic, because he knows exactly where that road leads; straight to hell. Good intentions. Warm feelings. Fire in his hands.

As Rory speaks to the ghost woman, Stephen slams his foot down.

Because pining is surely not something he does. Ever.

Stephen is rather proud of how he manages to not-pine over Rory for the few days between meeting her and seeing her again, ordering in some takeout from the Chinese restaurant a few blocks over, one that always answered him with a sighed, "Oh. Mr. Dene. The usual?" in a way that clearly displayed how the owner of the shop was disappointed that Such A Nice Young Man didn't have a girlfriend (or a boyfriend, since it was made very clear that she and her wife were no one to judge) to bring into the shop or order something else. Stephen always managed to misread the familiar sigh not as Why Don't You Have A Girlfriend?, but as Why Don't You Just Make The Cashew Chicken Yourself? And he's strangely okay with that.

Who needs the option of heartbreak when there are dead killers on the loose? Not Stephen. Not at all.

Sometimes Stephen wonders how rotten his luck is, that everything is converging on Rory. The Ripper. The clues. The threats. He wonders what sin he had committed in a previous life to have his current one on his shoulders from where he had picked it up from the floor of the boat shed at Eton, because everything is Rory. It's written in the stars in her eyes, in the news, in the folders and the motivations, it's spread across his pillow (no matter how few times his head had touched it since the mystery began). Her name is in the air, in his lungs and his chest, as he looks at her, dressed in Callum's squad uniform with her face so brave, so ready.

He does not feel ready.

Callum and Rory keep insisting that she is necessary (she's not) and they are dancing around his attempts to make them see reason, that she isn't necessary (she's not, she's not) but there is no way around it. The stars in her eyes were burning and the fire had begun again, a hurricane of unstoppable force, so unstoppable, even though she is just a girl with too bright eyes.

Stephen wants to beat it all away, grapple with it, make it feel the burning beneath his skin, but unfortunately for him emotions and foolishness are not physical objects.

His steering wheel is. His hands beat against it, rage against it for a minute before he hits the gas and the sirens.

There's not going to be much time left, Stephen knows. There's a dark knowledgeable premonition in his mind, and it tells him that he will never be able to look back on this night from the future with anything similar to clarity. There were too many pieces. Too many stars. So much fire, crowding at his chest, and he needs to somehow make her understand. How to make her understand?

He pulls his hands into fists against the steering wheel and doesn't look at her as he crowds all the thoughts out of his head, telling her the hard, honest truth, and bracing for the pain that was sure to come, that had always come hand in hand when you admit to someone that you tried to kill yourself and then was admitted to a mental hospital as schizophrenic. He waited for the inevitable turn of the knife that would shut out any positive opinions she might have formed of him.

But instead she does something very, very stupid.

She disagrees.

"You don't sound crazy to me."

It's like a cool breeze on a hot day, lifting up the weight of the sky just enough to let him take in a deep breath of air. The entire night sky, clean and clear, floods into his lungs and a rational voice in the back of his mind begins to cry out that he is Stephen Dene and he is a lifetime too old to be harboring crushes on high school students. The voice is quietly and calmly snuffed, and he allows himself, for a frightfully long moment, to breathe in the stars.

It would be a lie to say that it was anything less than incredible.

He hates admitting it, but he is angry.

He is angry at her for being so brave, so foolish, and if he could move his mouth he would be shouting at her, screaming at her, you can't do this to me, you can't die like this, you told me I was sane, you can't leave after saying that-

No words come and heat floods his veins, angry heat, the heat of a fire setting in his chest as he watches her in the dimness, facing the ghost of the killer, the ripper, the seer, the doctor, but the heat moves against the wall of ice that is moving from the puncture point in his neck and is pushed down, down, into darkness more complete than the emptiness of the abandoned tube station.

Stephen follows it under.

He wakes up with a bitter taste in his mouth and a machine hooked up to his arm. Rory's name is on his lips.

He watched as her face contorted and tears began to flow over her cheeks along with huge body-wracking sobs, like he and never heard before, and he struggled, mouth crowding full of dangerous words like brave and beautiful and somewhere floating around on the tip of his tongue is the image of her dark eyes looking up at him and the way his sweats drooped around her legs. The words push and crowd at his teeth and he savagely bites them down because he is Stephen Dene and he is not a man who pines away helplessly for a stupid, reckless, brave, intelligent, and downright beautiful girl. He isn't.

He is a responsible man and he handles the situation like he should—at arms distance, but it'll be a very cold day in hell indeed if he ever tells someone how desperately he wanted to take Rory into his arms and promise her that everything would be alright, somehow. He takes that urge to hold her hand, let his arms encircle her, invite her to cry into his shoulder where he can bury his face in her long dark hair—and he locks it all away.

He is released from the hospital the next day.

Time moves on.

So, no. Stephen Dene is not a man who pines. He does something far, far worse.

But he'll be damned if falling in love with Rory Deveaux wasn't utterly fantastic.

The End. Review, please?