Chapter Text
Skull watched Lockwood and Co as they sat around the kitchen table. Their cups of tea were untouched, eyes glazed over with whatever the Changer had shown them. He wasn’t privy to what any of them faced, even Lucy refused to tell him. She wouldn’t divulge anything, but Skull knew her terrified glances at her friends and her own hands to make guesses of his own. It probably wasn’t completely correct, but he had to imagine whatever crept into her mind at that mansion shook her.
The entire team had hardly moved since getting back to Portland Row and collapsing into their chairs. They looked more haunted than the house they’d just been in. Skull thought they looked closer to ghosts than he did, and that seemed impossible given they were alive.
He’d known something was wrong the moment they’d stepped into the mansion. The souls that still haunted the halls had been stronger than Skull had felt in a while. He hadn’t felt that much power from a single haunting since Bickerstaff, and even that felt like child’s play compared to the evil lurking in the very foundation. It had felt closer to when he’d been near the spirit gate, and that was a horrifying thought if he sat on it for more than a moment or two.
And whatever it had been possessing the home, possessed the members of Lockwood and Co before he could stop it.
Time was difficult when dead, but Skull had been learning how to grasp something so elusive while living with Lucy over the winter. When he’d been the only person she interacted with regularly, he tried learning how to make sure he’d be there for her. By this estimate, he thought the members of Lockwood and Co had only been Ghost Locked for about ten minutes, but when a ghost was involved, ten minutes could be a lifetime. As his eyes flitted between Lucy and her motley crew of misfits, he thought more time passed to rip their minds to pieces.
They’d split off in their two teams, reconvening in time to say how much phenomena they found. Then, like dominoes toppling, Skull watched each person succumb to the Ghost Lock, the miasma swirling like another element making up the air. Before anyone could pull the other free, they’d all been held captive by the spirits.
Skull had shouted for Lucy to wake up. He’d insulted her for not being smart enough to have the conversation inside their iron chains. He changed tactics to insulting everything he knew she hated being insulted about. If he could just make her mad, he could get her to break free.
As the fog stalked closer to the edges of their group, Skull found himself only able to shout Lucy’s name again and again. He didn’t have arms to grab her and shake her back into her mind. He couldn’t wake her up. He had looked at the Visitor, making its way to them like a spider with bugs twitching in its web. It knew a feast when it saw one, and Skull was going to have to watch it.
He was going to watch each member of Lockwood and Co die, join the beast in front of them.
There were many moments throughout his time with this bunch that he would’ve welcomed an untimely demise. Several of those moments included the bizarre experiments Karim inflicted, but something shifted. When he and Lucy had been on their own, he’d found himself as melancholy as she was. It was true he couldn’t communicate with the rest of the team, not like he could with Lucy, but having the rest of them around had given more excitement to his (after) life.
It had been a long time since he’d felt part of something. In fact, he didn’t know if he’d ever truly felt like he’d belonged anywhere. He’d been a ghost when alive, but with Lucy and the others he’d felt like he’d had another life. No more dust shelves. He’d been brought everywhere, he’d listened to their banter, including his own through Lucy or in making faces. It wasn’t the traditional friendship of novels and telly programs, but no one in that ramshackle agency was made up of traditions or normalcy. It was why he fit for the first time in his life.
Skull didn’t know how he’d carry on, how he could stand being stuck between worlds any longer, if he lost every single person who’d made the between feel like a place worth staying.
He shouted for all he was worth. Skull knew that volume had the ability to physically pain Lucy, he’d done it before, but a moment of pain would be worth her staying alive. There was no other option than to breakthrough to her. He couldn’t afford to entertain any other option.
She’d broken through just in time to pitch a salt bomb at the Visitor. The broken connection woke up the rest of the crew, and a flurry of salt bombs later, they left the home, opting to take their chances outside the home, away from the Visitor until dawn. Not even Lockwood mentioned the lost funds. The entire group seemed wholly captured in their own broken worlds. Skull almost wished he could’ve had his own encounter just to understand that kind of pain again.
The thing about pain so horrible and all-encompassing that it could make a person feel dead inside, was that it meant ultimately, they were still alive. Pain existed on a platform that was untouchable to those long gone like Skull. He could stare at all the living and breathing people sitting around the thinking cloth, and he knew they’d come back to themselves. They’d be irrevocably changed, but they’d come back regardless. They’d get the chance to continue living.
One day, they’d look at one another, maybe share that dark secret they’d hidden inside them so that part of them could heal. Dead wounds don’t heal. Even if the dead find peace, they’re still left in pieces. Only the living got the comfort of moving forward.
In this moment, one could turn to the other and say, “I’m alive, I’m just not well.” And that would be the truth. They weren’t well, as often happened during life, but they were alive.
Even looking at their positively wrecked states, Skull had never felt such envy for the living. They’d move forward. They’d go on more cases. They’d make amends with themselves and each other. They’d continue to live and feel and grow and change.
And Skull would just be there, watching.