RP:Smoke And Mirrors Made Me Lightning
Part of the Through A Glass, Darkly Arc
Summary: Alvina visits Hudson at The Office after she's approached by a reporter in the Market. They discuss the potential recourse if the story about Hudson's involvement with the Witch Rebellion is published and the role Alvina is expected to assume.
Now tell me I'm wrong again. I was left to my own devices.
Smoke and mirrors made me lightning
I can't stop wanting you and all the things that you do.
You're like an anchor on my soul." *
The Office
After dinner, E.L. suggests taking the girls for a while. Alvina gratefully accepts, they keep a supply of clothes and toys there for this very reason. The girls are excited to ask grandma if she’ll bake them different shaped cookies. Alvina drops Matilda and Bryce off at home before taking their carriage to The Office to find Hudson. He hadn’t told her he’d be here but she doubts he’s roaming the streets personally. Mostly because she imagined he liked giving the orders. The same way they’d walked into the warehouse where Val’s brother was already tied up for him to interrogate. It’ll be like that, she decides, when he’s found. It’s late so the club is pumping loud music and all the stages are full. Joanie catches sight of Alvina from somewhere in the back, letting Hudson know a few minutes before his wife navigates the crowd to find the office again. She hadn’t been there too often and the speakers are blaring loud enough to rattle her chest. Alvina doesn’t bother knocking, though she should have in case BUSINESS was happening. She shuts the door behind her and leans into it with bemusement and concern. “We missed you at dinner,” but her tone isn’t condemning. “The girls are staying with your mom for a little while so we have some time.” To do what exactly? Try to hunt down and murder a journalist? “Are you okay?” Her brow furrows, why did she ask when she knows he isn’t. He looks better than he had at the house though.
Hudson presides over meeting after meeting in his bathrobe, though at some point, one of his minions brings him a pair of sweats so he’s able to change. When his wife arrives, he’s in the office eating take out out of the box. He makes a noise into his chopsticks as she enters without knocking. Hardly compromising, just inelegant. “Hey,” he greets her, with his mouth full. “I know,” he agrees. He should really not be eating while he’s speaking. He puts a hand over his mouth, chews, and swallows. He tilts the box to show Alvina its contents. Something they order often themselves. Creature comforts and all that. “Had to forage for myself and don’t love the food here,” he explains. He gestures that she have herself a seat in front of his desk. “I think I’m OK, I feel better now that I’ve set a gigantic machine to get this guy in motion. Also maybe I was hangry a little.” He puts the takeout box on his desk and reaches for Alvina to give him her hand. “You’re pretty sweet coming to keep me company,” he tells her. “I wanted to join you guys but I just wrapped up and I didn’t want to like, create an Event with my late appearance.” He squeezes her hand. “Is it super crazy out there? Did everyone have a heart attack seeing you?”
Alvina grins somberly as he shows her his dinner. He’d have preferred what his mom made, no doubt. “I thought I’d bring leftovers but I figured you’d already ate. I didn’t know the food here was bad.” She hitches her thumb over her shoulder towards the door before taking a seat. He deems himself ‘formerly hangry’ and it encourages her to actually smile. “Intimidating figure in those sweats.” It’s better than a wet robe. He takes her hand and calls her sweet. It catches her off guard enough that she blushes and breaks eye contact. “Calm down,” She chides him but he knows she loves it. “I’d already be home now,.” He knew the girls would go crazy and stay up too late. Ugh. She sighs at the thought. He asks if it’s crazy out there and she nods. “It’s pretty packed.” She’d moved through slowly, trying to see if the reporter was here, poking his nose around Hudson’s employees but she didn’t see anyone resembling him. “Actually, no one said anything to me.” The bouncer stared at her for longer than necessary when she came through. Everyone must be on high alert. “I thought I saw Joanie but I wasn’t sure, so I didn’t go over or anything.Her free hand pivots at the wrist, dismissing it. “Did you have a heart attack seeing me? It’s weird that I’m here, right?” Her eyes sweep the office before landing back on her husband, imagining a giant machine where each gear is the size of a person and Hudson is seated at the top of them all. Even he, lord and master of those below, was still a vital component to said machine. Offhandedly, she remembers one of them made a remark about her showing up here in just an overcoat. It isn’t the time or place but she’s amused by it nonetheless. Her hand squeezes his back and her smile dims. “I hope it ends soon.” A polite way to say ‘I hope you find and kill that man before he can stir up trouble’. She considers apologizing for this ‘situation’ but knows it isn’t her fault. He’d told her that she’d done a good job. “Thanks for taking care of this. It was really hard to just...let him go.” She’d felt that same prickle of rage when that reporter asked his question - how dare he approach her and sling mud in her face about Hudson. “Did you talk to Uma? How did she take it?”
“It’s a strip club,” offers Hudson by way of explanation about the food. She answers him about the weekend evening crowd and he looks at the door, the thump of music just beyond it. “Great money laundering business,” he tells Alvina. “Oh, Joanie saw you,” he chuckles, “she told me that you were out there getting an eyeful and I might have to come fetch you.” He grins at her and picks his take out container back up, continuing to pick through it. He is avoiding the leafy greens. “Mildly surprised you’re here. But also kinda not, you’re like extra... ‘me wife, me not care at all,’ these days which I rather like.” He bobs his head casually as she expresses her desire for this stressful end to meet an end. He’s eating again when she makes this remark that speaks to her resilience in the face of wolf rage. “You’re my shero. I probably would have killed him in the street,” says Hudson. He pops more meat into his mouth and chews as he considers her question about Uma. “I think she is a little anxious she’ll have to condemn me funding the resistance, and hopes that the situation is ahem cleaned up without any further involvement on her part.” He meets his wife’s gaze and holds it. “It’s tough,” he says at length, looking into his food, “it’s not like I want bad things for Cenril at all... I’m pretty progressive, I care about peace and people having food to eat and healthcare. I just, uh, run some vice businesses. I don’t know why that has to be the headline other than the good stuff we’ve been trying to accomplish for people who live here though.”
Alvina didn’t know about strip club food. Nor did she know Joanie came back to tell Hudson to come rescue her. She eyes his chopsticks, watching him shift the vegetables around. “What is this voice? ‘Me’ what no?” She rolls her eyes and covers a yawn. “You prefer the new and improved wife?” A chuckle punctuates the question. Shero. Where did he come up with this stuff? In the back of her mind, she’s wondering if she should have. If it would have been easier to get HER out of trouble as opposed to finding him. Uma’s being nervous is understandable. Alvina’s nervous too, for parelled reasons. More personal. “The last thing I want is to have us on one side of the field and Josleen and Macon on the other.” Could she tear their army apart? Jos wouldn’t fight. It wasn’t them vs us, toe to toe. They sit in silence, digesting their private thoughts before he breaks it. She looks at him, trying not to let discouragement sink into her features. “Ultimately, people don’t want safety or peace. Not really.” His wife says offhandedly, staring at what remains of his dinner. “There are idiots in this world who would burn it all to the ground, just so they could feel an ounce of control.” She didn’t know the depths to which Hudson’s roots ran, but she knew enough to make jealousy plausible. It didn’t have to be someone that wanted to take his place. Just someone who wanted to watch him fall. Even if this news article didn’t destroy them, it could chip away at Hudson’s position or Uma’s. They could start to make up lies, picking him apart piece by piece until he crumbles. Alvina groans, pressing her right palm against her forehead. If the snowball starts, the propaganda could be as bad as the attacks on witches in Larket. Maybe worse, since Hudson did actually do shady things. “What’s the worst case scenario?”
“I couldn’t agree more, baby,” says Hudson agreeably. “I don’t want trouble with our friends.” That statement, calling Macon and Josleen their friends, seems to sober everyone. He lifts an eyebrow at her saying that people don’t truly want peace. Some cynical thoughts expressed by his wife here. She’s not wrong. What has bothered him the most about the journalist is his likely affiliations — another crew or worse, their friends. He grunts into the last bite of beef before rising to take the container to the interior door, where someone retrieves it. (He doesn’t want an office smelling like orange beef. His wife likely definitely doesn’t.) “Pretty bad,” he tells Alvina truthfully, not that the words should surprise her. “They publish the expose on her,” won’t say Valrae’s name, “and me and link me to funding the resistance. The article identifies my income as mostly drug and protection money. You and I deny it, Macon and Josleen are our friends, I’m in real estate, blah blah. Uma has to respond by saying that funding terrorism is wrong and likely promise a full investigation, or else she looks too obviously controlled by us. Later on the investigation finds nothing.” He runs his hand along his jaw stubble. “The real bombshell is if the article says she’s our puppet. People might call for her to resign. I feel like it’s an open secret with the other leaders and lieutenants but I don’t know how the people would react. They love her. She’s a really great puppet.”
Alvina flexes her fingers when Hudson mentions the Larketian crown as their friends. Macon could jump off a bridge but Josleen...even though she’d been -beyond- odd since they’d gotten together, still had her love. She isn’t surprised but does look away guiltily when he says they’ll have to deny it. Everyone knows...if people are, as Ethan had said, paying protection money. It might just be enough publicity to cause an outcry against his organization. Right now, it’s a secret everyone knows but doesn’t talk about. She’s jerked out of her guilt when Hudson calls Uma a puppet. She knows it’s true but Uma is also THEIR FRIEND. Or are they just playing friends with people who help them get what they want? “And a good person,” Alvina reminds him pointedly. She thinks about spending time with her and Fitz, wishing that Fitz had survived, if only to spare Uma this stress. The...indecency of being manipulated. Hudson supported peace for Cenril but at grisly prices. Like ‘murdering’ Valrae after she fixed the barrier. Maybe her husband was one of those people; who didn’t want amicable peace but peace bought with fear of his retaliation. “It puts a target on our back,” She sounds out loud with no context. “And no matter how much ‘good’ we do, we aren’t really safe. I mean, that bomb…” She covers her mouth with her hand and shakes her head. Theirs was the time to beat and they couldn’t be the dominating force forever. “That’s why I wanted us to get out of this in the first place.” Now she’s spinning, grasping for a sense of control. Irritated and powerless to stop it. “I don’t want us to constantly worry about being picked out in a crowd because we have power or money or status or we’re wolves. People can -use- that.” Racism is real because mob mentality is real. Destroy the scary thing we don’t understand. She thinks, for a split second, about going to Uma. Apologizing? Why is she up in arms about Uma? She groans into her knuckles, closing her eyes tight and eking out a soft “I’m terrified” before falling silent on her side of the desk.
Hudson widens his eyes at his wife’s tone. “Uma is a good person, so are we,” he says with care. He watches his wife fall into silence and wonders (correctly) if she’s criticizing his part in bringing them here. Weighing the pros of what he’d brought them against the cons. He instinctively feels his patience thin, even though she’s said nothing. This life they have — it’s good, it’s really good. Most of the time. Almost all of the time. It’s just when it’s bad, it’s horrid. She speaks, and he draws a noisy, extended breath. Here it is. How he messed up (and made all her dreams come true). ‘That’s why I wanted us to get out of this in the first place.’ Words that cut like a knife. He bites his tongue but thinks about their beautiful, mostly behaved children, their staff, the well manicured home, his wife’s walk in closet, itself probably the size of a pauper’s apartment. Then she says this thing about lycanthropy and he feels like the bull stuck with a spear. She isn’t acting like she’s on his team. She was, before, but she’s talked herself away from him now. It’s not a consolation that she’s supposedly terrified. His patience is frayed. “Well we can’t just .. reverse our lives, so we have to figure out how to do damage control,” the words coming out of his mouth have a brusque shape. He exhales sharply, steadying himself. “We’ll figure it out.”
Alvina wonders if they are good people, if they are manipulating others to support their lavish lifestyle. This is a battle she fights within herself whenever things go wrong. When they are happy there’s no need to question it. She can put it out of her mind, tuck it back, tell herself it’s okay. She wasn’t pointing a finger so much as venting. It wasn’t HUDSON HOW DARE YOU but she knew as soon as she said it that he’d take it that way. He always took her criticism as a personal attack. A flogging, as he’d said before. The same way he’d felt about her bringing up Valrae, he must feel now. She sighs, purposefully ignoring all the frustrated sounds and expressions that shadow his face. He speaks harshly and she holds her tongue, feeling her skin prickle with the need to fight back. She’s standing straight up, the back of her knees knocking into the chair. “Don’t you think I know that?!” Her terse tone lights up the office. They’re both silent then - staring each other down and daring the other to act. It’s Alvina who breaks, her body just as rigid as before. “I don’t get to do damage control. I don’t get to figure it out.” She sibilates, maintaining hard eye contact. “I have to run to you to solve everything.” An important role in this instance but usually she stayed out of his workplace affairs. He didn’t want to put her in harm’s way and she didn’t want to like it. “So don’t tell me that’s what -we- do. That’s what -you- do. What am -I- supposed to do? If we’re a team?” Alvina feels the presence of their individual wolves, Hudson’s posture and stare are wordless warnings to back down. She waits a beat but then does, with a reluctant snarl. “I’m so sick of feeling powerless when these things happen to our family. I thought being a wolf would make it better but it’s only made it worse. I’m angrier, I want to break things and claw people to shreds but I can’t. This political stuff, I’m not a part of that game. And I don’t know what to do with this feeling. I don’t feel safer, I feel stupefied and directionless. I need you to tell me what to do.” Her shoulders finally slack, chest caving in to release a tremulous exhale. “Please, just tell me what to do.”
Quite suddenly his wife is unloading on him. He grits his teeth and reminds himself that she’s stressed by the possibility of public embarrassment a la being a high profile woman whose husband cheated... with a convicted terrorist. And on top of that she’s a wolf too. Still. It feels like more anger toward him than she should be allowed under the circumstances. She ‘has’ to run to him? As if his sweet wife could live with herself after getting her hands dirty the way he does. She’d be like Lady Macbeth! He is conscious of the creature inside of him wanting to sort his mate out. He knows that the look he’s giving her is along those lines, that his mouth has curled into a snarl. His wife is still unloading. He’s about to say something he’ll regret later, to tell her to sit down and shut up because now’s game time and her head’s just not in it, but she suddenly hits a wall and pleads for guidance. He kills the comment about her sitting on the bench though continues to glare at her. “Be on my team,” he tells her in a controlled growl. “Don’t sit here wondering out loud whether I made your life hard. Do you see me asking the same about you? No, right?” He takes a breath through his teeth, steadying himself. “I know you’re stressed about this story. I know that, Alvina.” He holds her gaze. “I know it, I promise. I know it’s humiliating. I am doing everything I can to make it go away, OK? But it still might not go away... I disagree about politics not being you. You legitimize this whole thing.“ It’s a kinder way of calling her complicit. “What I need from you is for you to be a rock if it all blows up. I need you to stand next to me and smile and look at me like you’d never believe I’d do any of it. Because that’s what we are going to say. Those are the talking points. You can hate me a little but I need you, Alvina.”
Alvina is genuinely surprised that Hudson feels like she’s blaming him. No, not...really. That isn’t how she’d meant it. But how else could she mean it? It’s one and the same but she’s blaming the job first. Everything else clusters in the second slot. “I -am- on your team,” She whines, wounded that it wasn’t painfully obvious that she wanted to help him. “I don’t think you’ve made my life hard, this situation makes it hard -” A little white lie she likes telling herself. That’s comfortable, safe. He cuts her off by saying he doesn’t ask the same about her, though the hardships she’d brought into their bed are different. Mostly. Pointing that out is just copper and silvering, it doesn’t change the fact they’ve both had moments. This thing just happens to be the one they are still involved in, turning a blind eye to the questionable nature of it. She’s waiting on the edge of her seat, then. Wide eyed and pleading for a functional purpose so she can feel less lost. Less dependent. So when he tells her that her job is to basically...stand there and look pretty. To lie through her teeth and to not lose her mind if it all goes to hell. That’s..asking more than he likely knew. She had tells, she had argued that Hudson and Josleen were good people doing good things when confronted with why she’d stayed beside them all this time. Was she a bad person by default now? For supporting them? She looks at the floor, gritting her teeth and feeling her vision blur. He’s coaching her now, walking her through her role as deponent, when the time comes. And if it’s not this time, it might be another. A never ending loop of times she’ll have to rush to defend him by lying. She wasn’t a child with black and white absolute concepts of right and wrong. They were partners; had been, would always be but in this moment she felt less like his wife and more like an alibi or accessory. ‘I can’t be a bad guy, I have a family and a wife that knows everything about me who says I’m not a bad guy. Look at how pretty and genuine she is. She’d never lie.’ He was using her good reputation and good word. But they’d been ‘using’ his money (other people’s money) to build them a gilded life. It was all twisted and tangled. She didn’t know who was wrong or right anymore. “I’m a shield…” She exhales, her tone prophesying tears. A pretty, noble face to check accusations and rumors. “I’m just a shield.” She covers her face to cry, remembering that she, too, was a gear in the machine.
Hudson knows that what he’s saying must ring true to Alvina, deep down, but right now she doesn’t look like she’d thought their situation through to its natural conclusion. Right now, she looks like she’s just hearing the unpleasant news for the first time. She looks pinched, fragile, and when she speaks her voice shakes. He instantly runs through what he’d said to her, and though he tells himself there’d been no particular roughness in his tone, he’s filled with self loathing anyway. She covers her face with her hands, and he gets out of his chair to go stand in front of her. “Alvina,” he sighs at her, but she’s still hiding her face. He gently takes her by the wrists, pulling her arms around him. She seems to mold herself against him, like a magnet, and he drapes an arm around her. “I’m sorry everyone’s in this position,” he says, glancing between them at her face, which she continues to conceal. “Hopefully it doesn’t get to that point, where we both have to lie all the time about this stuff that’s nobody’s business ..” He strokes her hair and frowns. “But .. I guess if you want you can go away immediately, like on a trip with Emily or something. Joanie can create a stunt double disguise, probably. I’ll do the annoying public appearances with her until people lose interest. I don’t know, I’m just spitballing. We’ll manage it so it’s less horrible, somehow.”
Alvina tries to crumple away but Hudson’s there, holding fast and drawing her back into his orbit. She doesn’t want him to look at her, doesn’t want him to see how this business and her role coincide. She was part of it, had always been. Her avoidance and personal little white lies didn’t stop it from unraveling behind closed doors. She was his buffer - if news of his scandal broke and she stood firm and denounced it, it couldn’t be true. Any woman worth her salt would march right out on a cheater. Even a woman as gracious in public appearances as Alvina. She feels ashamed for wanting his consolation. His fingers displace her curls and she sighs, cheek pressed against the fabric of his sweatshirt. His voice rumbles through his chest, comforting but authoritative. She's silent through his offered solution, speaking up only once he's stumbling back from the idea. She was too proud to let another woman masquerade as her. Even if it meant to be a buffer. Which is the greater lie? “If I leave, I'm still lying.” Joanie will use her face and name to play the role designed his wife. Joanie didn’t turn a blind eye to Hudson’s business. She couldn’t, she managed too much of it to be stressed by the truth. Is it more noble to lie as herself? To be on his team instead of running away? “I'm sorry too.” That they're here having these discussions, making these double edged decisions. After a moment, she tilts her chin up to look at him. Her tear stained face looks splintered and brittle, waiting for him to offer any other idea but he doesn’t. “Let’s not...think about it now.” She resigns, not ready to surrender herself to the idea that she’d be corroborating his innocence. She’d told people about the affair! They wouldn’t be able to lie about that piece, but if they didn’t it was even MORE likely that Hudson would help the resistance. Josleen, of all people, knew bits and pieces. Alvina groans, fingers gathering his shirt against his back. She buries her face again, wishing she could dissolve in the darkness behind her eyes. Was she really upset about the moral standpoint? Or was it only the embarrassment of having to discuss their private business on a stage for all to see? “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Things have been good. They can stay good. We don’t even know what’ll happen...” She pants, on the verge of tears again. “It isn’t their business…”
Hudson cups Alvina’s face and kisses the crown of her head, inhaling the scent of her hair. It’s comforting to him. She is apologizing into his chest and he knows now they are on fragile territory but past the dangerous argument that had been looming. He releases her and she looks up at him. Her face is wet, and she looks tired. “Yeah? Alright,” he agrees to her proposal to punt on the matter. Hopefully the story wouldn’t run tomorrow, after all. He knows it’s not like his wife to put it out of mind altogether. She’d think about it and let him know when she’d come to a view. She buries her face against him again and he drapes his arms around her once more. “Things will be good. It’s nobody’s business,” he agrees, and a silence hangs all around them like a weighted curtain. It doesn’t go uninterrupted: the interior door opens and Joanie waits, letting the noise from the club get their attention and for them to break apart. She braces herself against the frame to call in, “I’m supposed to remind you to get your children from your mother’s.” She punctuates the reminder with a brisk smile that acknowledges the stress of the situation, then she leaves them. Hudson sighs, laying a hand on the small of Alvina’s back. “Right.“ The word’s got fifty pounds to it. Time to act like nothing’s wrong in front of tiny people. It feels like too much right now but somehow they always found energy for it. Maybe the bedtime routine will settle them too, though. Watching his wife wipe her cheeks, Hudson feels an acute longing for this evening to have been normal, he would have liked to have had family dinner at his mum’s. He reaches for Alvina’s coat in the nearby chair and unfurls it, holding it out for her. “I love you, and I’m sorry,” he says as she threads her arms through the sleeves. He reaches for his own and considers her. “Ready?”
Alvina piles all her hope on that roulette space. Hudson’s repetition bolsters the bet. They can think about it when the time comes. No sense in stressing out if it resolves on it’s own. She’s had enough fighting over the subject of their mutual embarrassment regarding secret romances and spoiled trust. They were in a better place now, as long as Alvina didn’t have to become the face of his good reputation. As long as she could imagine they weren’t in danger. Music pumps into the room, Alvina can feel eyes against her back before Joanie’s voice drifts in. How had she known? Joanie was smart, she could put the pieces together. Hudson sighs what Alvina’s thinking, the weight shared in her chest. How did they manage to deceive their children? The same way she deceives herself, probably. They untangle and she drags the palms of her hands across her face. She hadn’t been crying long and it was chilly tonight. She’d be safe from her eyes swelling. Her coat hangs behind her and she eases in with deliberate slowness, feeling it’s snugness hug her body like a security blanket. Time to be Mom™. Only after her coat is buttoned does she turn to face him, eyes glazed with remnants of her tears. “I love you too.” She whispers, adding that weight to all the fear and uncertainty of the future. It wasn’t a question of how they would face it; it would always be together. He was her husband, father of her children, her mate. If it came down to the wire, where besmudging her reputation was the only option, she’d have to do it. Not because he asked her or even told her. He’d do it for her, in a heartbeat. He asks her if she’s ready and the youthful panic of the unknown creeps along the back of her tongue, unsung. “Ready when you are.”
Tender, Smoke *