Chapter Text
It was supposed to be a relatively straightforward job. George had had over a week to research and, in an extreme rarity for London, had only found one potential high-risk death, a suicide. There had been scores of other deaths in the building over the years, and hundreds on that particular piece of land before the building had been built, but aside from that one girl, they’d all been peaceful, natural. One or two accidental, which could potentially cause a problem, but the inhabitants of the flat in question, who had three young children, had only reported one visitor, a young woman with long hair.
We’d made it in before dusk by about twenty minutes, leaving us plenty of time to rig up some defenses and share a cup of tea. I had a funny feeling in my gut as the sun went down. As an agent, you had to learn how to ignore these feelings, while also taking them seriously. I decreed that we’d stick together for the duration of this job, and then shoved the remaining wariness away.
George was having dinner with his parents, and the job was straightforward enough that I felt no need to involve Holly or Kipps. So it was just the two of us, a pleasure I enjoyed more than I probably should.
“Ready?” I asked, as the sun slipped down under the horizon.
“‘Course,” Lucy said, with a bit of a half grin. “Let’s get this done. I’d love to go to bed early tonight.”
I pulled out a stick of gum and handed it to her, and then one for myself, and then we were off.
The flat was all situated along one long hallway, with rooms branching off. We started our sweep in the kitchen , though we both knew that we were heading for the bathroom on the far end of the hall. That’s where they’d found her.
Indeed, the temperature held steady as we cleared the kitchen, lounge, and bedrooms. It only started to fall when we hit the laundry room, which we quickly cleared as well.
Which brought us to the far end of the hall, standing outside the closed bathroom door.
There wasn’t anything to See out here. I glanced over at Lucy. Her eyes were shut and her brow was furrowed, the way it always was while she tuned into her Talents.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Lucy sounded distant. “She’s crying. She didn’t think it would hurt this much. She made the first cut, but now she doesn’t know if she can make another.”
“What?”
Lucy opened her eyes and looked at me. “She slit her wrists, remember? I guess she had a harder time with the second wrist, once she knew how much it would hurt.”
“Oh.” Suicide was a but of a touchy subject between us. Lucy certainly accused me of attempting it often enough, and I still remembered that day, back when she’d been new with Lockwood & Co., that she’d admitted she felt that she’d be better off dead. It added another layer of awkward complexity to this job. “Well, we’d best get on with it, then.”
She nodded, and I pushed the door open. It was large, for a bathroom. One of our clients used a wheelchair, so it had probably been renovated with a mind to extra room for maneuverability. There was a sink and toilet in one corner, a large shower in another, and an old stained porcelain clawfoot tub underneath a window. The tub was home to a dazzling death glow so strong I took out my sunglasses and jammed them on my face. I went to point it out to Lucy, but she had her eyes closed, Listening again. I walked a slow circuit of the room, looking for signs of the long haired visitor that our clients’ children had reported. No sign of her. Just the death glow.
I tapped Lucy on the shoulder and waited for her to come back to herself. “No sign of the ghost—”
“Hannah.”
“Sure, well, no sign of Hannah—”
“No, Hannah!” she tugged on my sleeve and pointed over my shoulder. I turned and found a girl staring out at me from the mirror. She had long dark blonde hair hanging over her shoulders, and dark eyes staring out at us.
“I’ll deal with her,” I said, looking back at Lucy. “You find the source.” She nodded. “Probably best to start with the bathtub. That’s where the death glow is.”
Frost was forming around the edges of the mirror now and the ghost, Hannah, apparently, was starting to materialize. Her image was still trapped in the mirror, but ghost fog was starting to spill out around the edges. I drew my rapier with one hand, and palmed a salt bomb with the other. Behind me, Lucy had climbed fully into the tub and was standing on her tiptoes, investigating the top of the window frame.
Hannah wasn’t a very active ghost, acting more through malaise and chill than anything else. I did eventually manage to coax her out of the mirror, but she was hesitant, mainly attempting to reach around me to get to Lucy.
“Making any progress over there?” I called over my shoulder, not taking my eyes off the ghost.
“Maybe?” she called back. “I think I see something shiny down here.”
I risked a glance over my shoulder to find Lucy bent forward over the bathtub, one arm shoved between it and the wall up to her armpit.
“Almost!” she cried, straining even further, the side of her face pressed uncomfortably to the wallpaper. The way she was bending forward had left her arse-up in the air, her skirt pulled tight across her hips. I got distracted long enough that Hannah almost wheedled her way around me. I slashed through her with my rapier, which made her angry, finally.
She advanced on me, arms outstretched, hair flying out around her. She drove me backward out of the bathroom, effectively separating the two of us. The door slammed shut behind her, leaving the ghost and I out in the hallway. She was gathering herself for another attack.
“Lucy!” I called, trying to keep my voice even. “You good in there?”
“Yeah!” She called back. “Almost—”
The ghost lunged, chasing me back down the corridor. The front door was propped open; we’d been sure to leave our escape route clear. I took it now, drawing her back out onto the landing. She was a strong type two, if she was able to stray this far from her source.
“Aha!” I heard Lucy call distantly. The ghost girl, Hannah, swept towards me. I raised my rapier and took a step back to fall into my standard fighter’s stance. “Got it!”
I’d misjudged my position, my back foot dropped down onto the top stair, leaving me terribly off balance. Hannah advanced and my arms pinwheeled desperately. I saw her disappear just as I tilted backwards. Lucy must have secured the source.
And then I was sliding backwards down the staircase on my arse. I landed hard on my tailbone at the bottom, flopping backwards and hitting my head for good measure.
I lay there panting for several minutes, and then took a further moment to be grateful that Lucy hadn’t witnessed that particularly graceful moment.
Eventually I scraped myself up off the floor, feeling like one massive bruise, and limped my way back up the stairs to find her. She was still in the bathroom, by the looks of it. The door was still shut and no light was spilling out from under the door. I tried the handle. It was locked.
“Luce?” I called through the door, rattling the knob. “Everything alright in there?”
No response.
I jostled the door harder, and, when there still wasn’t an answer, slammed my shoulder into it, trying to bust through.
It took me several times, ramming my already sore shoulder into the door with all my body weight behind it before it finally gave, flying open with a loud crack.
Lucy was almost exactly where I’d left her, kneeling in the tub with the source, a silver bracelet covered with little bells, hanging from her trembling fingertips. Hannah’s ghost knelt mere inches away, mirroring her position. Both girl and ghost were crying silently.
“Lucy?” I tried softly. “I didn’t want to startle either of them. If one of them flinched they would almost certainly brush up against the other, which could prove fatal for Lucy.
They both turned to look at me. Their mouths moved in unison, but Lucy’s voice was the only one I heard.
“It isn’t working,” she said. The anguish in her voice was palpable. “Why won’t it work!”
I crept forward as slowly as possible, trying to remain inconspicuous. Lucy and Hannah were staring at each other again. With two fingers I drew a spare silver net from my belt and shook it out behind my back.
I doubted either Hannah or Lucy would let me take the source, so instead I reached between them and wrapped Lucy’s whole hand up in it, swaddling her fingers and the bracelet in silver.
Hannah flickered out and disappeared, leaving Lucy on her knees in the tub. She gasped in a shivering breath and slumped forward. My arm was still out in front of her, so I caught her easily, my other arm coming up to wrap around her as well. I pulled her warm bulk toward me, guiding her head down to rest on my shoulder. The wall of the tub was uncomfortable between us, so I awkwardly clambered over the side after a moment, pulling her between my legs to rest against my chest, winding my arms around her shivering frame.
It took Lucy a while, sometimes, to come back to herself after making a psychical connection, particularly one as strong as this. Selfishly, I was grateful. I know it was hard on her, but I relished this opportunity to hold her in my arms. I loved these quiet moments of warmth, liked being the one to take care of her. I liked knowing that she didn’t really trust anyone else to do this. Kipps had successfully talked her out of this state on a couple of occasions, and once George had sat beside her and held her hand until she came back, but Kipps and George weren’t allowed to hold her like this. Only I was.
I don’t know how long we lay scrunched up uncomfortably in the tub together, but she started to come back to herself, eventually. She made a funny little moaning sound, which I most certainly did not file away for…private use.
“Luce?” I asked, shifting her a bit in my arms, one of which had gone numb.
“Sorry,” she said, her head lolling back into the space connecting my shoulder and neck. “That was intense.”
“No problem,” I said, enjoying her warmth and weight for just a little longer. “We’re done here, we can go home whenever you want.”
There was a pause, an extension of the peace that had overtaken the bathroom in the ghost’s absence. Then she let out a long breath and sighed. “Yeah, let’s go home.”
Her hand was still swathed in the silver net, which clinked softly against the porcelain of the bathtub as she hauled herself up. I made sure she was steady on her feet as she stepped out over the lip, and then clambered out after her. There were two ways Lucy reacted after coming out of a state like that. Sometimes, the story bubbled up out of her, the ghost’s imprints needing to be told. Other times she sank into herself, clamming up. It seemed to me, whenever she did the latter, that she was trying to categorize these new memories. Packing them up into a box and labeling them with the relevant ghost’s name, filing them away to keep these new experiences from all the memories that made her her.
It became evident, as we packed up our kit and I locked the client’s front door behind us, that this would be one of the second kind. That was practically standard for the more traumatic ones. I think she was extra keen to wall those ones off, keep them from infiltrating her psyche. Understandable, that.
The cab ride home was mostly silent. She reached out to grab my hand at some point, holding tight to it like a lifeline. Hand-holding had been a thing we’d done on the regular, once upon a time. Before Lucy had left Lockwood & Co. It hadn’t really picked up again, once she’d rejoined. I was too terrified to do something that might scare her off somehow, worried that muddying professional boundaries would make her uncomfortable enough to consider leaving me — us — no, me again.
But in the dark backseat, where I’d sat as close to her as was possible while still pretending that she was just another employee to me, she grabbed my hand tight and held it in her lap. We had to let go, of course, when we got home. I paid the cab driver and headed up the steps. Lucy had already gotten the door unlocked and was standing in the front hall by the time I caught up to her. She stared up the staircase as if she dreaded having to climb it.
“Come on,” I said, clasping her by the shoulder and leading her back to the kitchen instead. “I’ll make us a cuppa.”
I sent her off to bed sometime later, when the color had started coming back to her cheeks. I walked her up to her attic room, partially to make sure she didn’t just curl up on the stairs and go to sleep halfway up, and partially because I could guide her with a hand on her lower back, and in her exhausted stupor she would lean into it, wanting the comfort of touch that she so rarely allowed herself when she was more awake.
Holly was letting herself in as I came back down; she hadn’t been on a case last night.
“Morning, Lockwood!” she said with a bright smile, depositing her umbrella in the stand alongside mine and Lucy’s rapiers. “How did your job go last night?”
“More or less straightforward. No property damage, at least, this time.” I tried to smile at my joke, but with Lucy all squared away now, my own exhaustion was making itself known. “It was a hard one on Lucy, though. I only just got her to bed, and we’ve been back for a few hours now.”
She looked at me, appraisingly. “Have you slept yet?”
“No, I’m about to,” I yawned. “Lucy and I were having tea, I’m just gonna go clean up the dishes first.”
“I’ve got the dishes,: she said, hanging up her coat. “You go to bed.”
“Oh, thank you, but it’s fine. I’ve got—”
“Bed,” she cut me off, sternly pointing back up the stairs.
“Okay, you got me boss,” I said, raising my hands and rolling my eyes. Thank god for Holly Munro. I was halfway back up when her voice stopped me again.
“Lockwood?”
“Yeah?”
“You know,” she spoke slowly, as if she were carefully choosing each word as she went. “You can’t take care of Lucy unless you take care of yourself first.”
That was too much for me to process just then, so I offered her a smile that probably looked more like a grimace, and went to bed.