Chapter Text
It’s still raining when Edwin and Charles make their way back down to the office. It’s been an hour or so since the story telling started, not long enough for her and Niko to break for lunch yet. They’re both on the couch again, having had time to giggle and relax together before the boys rejoined them. Crystal isn’t sure whether she regrets her initial question or not—she does still want to know how they became detectives, after all, and as upsetting as the latest snippet of the story had been, it’s good to know.
And it hasn’t ruined the mood, not fully. Edwin’s a little stiff, when he rejoins them, but Charles is chipper again, even if he keeps throwing glances at Edwin, and it doesn’t seem to be a mask this time. Cuddles with Niko always boost Crystal’s mood—Niko’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive!—and the peace and serenity of the morning isn’t fully gone. (Even if Crystal can’t stop picturing it, the casual way Edwin would reach out and hold onto iron, if he thought it served some purpose. He’d do it tomorrow, she knows, if it finished them a case, if, in some impossible scenario, doing so saved Charles, or her, or Niko. It’s not the same thing as doing it just for the sake of it, but… Well. Problem for another day.)
“The next part of this story better be more cheerful,” she says as they all settle down, a threatening cast to her tone. She can’t help it though—her eyes flicker down to Edwin’s hands, gloveless and whole, clasped lightly in front of him.
“Should be,” Charles confirms, with a look over at Edwin. He’s down on the carpet again, facing the couch, one leg propped up and the other stretched out in front of him. “Mrs. Marple was a right nice old lady.”
Crystal shakes herself a little, squeezing Niko tighter, and refocuses on the story.
Edwin, taking his cue from Charles, rolls his eyes. He’s in front of the desk, up against the edge of it in a way that could be considered sitting or leaning, depending on your perspective. “She was fifty-seven when she died. Hardly old, Charles.”
“Yeah, and she’d been dead for twelve years. Ergo, old.”
“Supernatural age is not the same as the physical age ghosts appear as.”
“’Course not. You’d be positively ancient if that was the case,” Charles says, ribbing.
Edwin’s return look is dry. “You would be nearly Mrs. Marple’s age, then,” he says.
Charles shudders at the thought of being in his fifties. Crystal, trying not to think of Charles as a fifty-three year old man (because he isn’t, even while simultaneously being both sixteen and not-really-sixteen anymore), quickly tries to steer the conversation back to the story at hand. (Somehow, thinking of Edwin as over a hundred is easier. Maybe because people don’t usually live that long, so his age feels more supernatural. Maybe because he’s stuck in his era, on certain things. Maybe because she hasn’t kissed him.)
“You mentioned Mrs. Marple before,” she says. “Something about a necklace?”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re getting there,” Charles agrees, grinning. “Okay, so, I think we’ve covered the background now, yeah: Edwin and I were holed up at St. Hilarion’s for a bit, pouring over detective novels in the evenings so I didn’t get bored out of my skull, until the Iron Incident happened. Now we can get into the meat of the story: the start of our first case!”
“Charles, we have already agreed—”
Charles waves his hand dismissively, grinning. “Yeah, sure, the Case of the Cursed Carousel was the first real case, but what they asked was how we decided to become detectives!”
Edwin rolls his eyes. “It is not a supernatural mystery,” he says as an aside to her and Niko on the couch. “But it did require some detective work, in a manner of speaking.”
Charles turns back to the two of them as well, ignoring Edwin’s aside. “Okay, so, after everything with the iron, I wasn’t really interested in leaving Edwin’s side for a bit,” he finally continues. “Stuck to him like a burr, I did. Which was all well and good for a bit, a few days, maybe, but we didn’t know each other then as well as we do now and it was…” He looks sideways at Edwin.
“I’m afraid I snapped at him,” Edwin offers, contrite.
Charles shakes his head. “Nah. I mean, yeah, but, was just a bit much, yeah? Nothing bad. Didn’t even ask me to go away, just… decided to foist me off on someone else for a bit, didn’t you. Let me rewind a bit…”
“Charles,” Edwin had said, prim and proper and in the same stiff way he’d been since he’d snapped yesterday, “I would like to introduce you to someone.”
Charles stared at the other boy. He’d been anxious ever since it was clear he was irritating his new friend, but Edwin hadn’t asked him to leave yet, and it didn’t seem like he was doing so now. Then, he caught up to the actual words Edwin had said. “Introduce me to someone?” He glanced around the stacks of the library, as if wondering who on the campus there was for him to be introduced to.
“Another ghost,” Edwin clarified. “She lives in the neighborhood just across from campus. I believe you will find her company pleasurable.”
“’Course,” Charles says in the present. “I realized eventually he had been trying to get rid of me, if only for a bit, but right then I was just excited about the prospect of meeting another ghost.” He looks over at Edwin. “Asked a ton of questions, didn’t I, on the way over? Imagine you were fairly sick of me by then.”
Edwin looks fondly amused even as he inclines his head in agreement. “It was… a lot, after, after so long alone.”
“Right.” Charles beams up at them on the couch again. “So, he leads me off campus and straight to this nearby park, where this old lady”—said rather pointedly, though Edwin only huffs and doesn’t say anything—“is sat there, just watching the birds…”
The woman looked up at their approach, eyes flickering between Edwin and Charles. She stood and offered a small smile as they neared.
“Mrs. Marple,” Edwin said primly with a nod, by way of a greeting, hands tucked behind his back, posture as straight as ever.
“Oh, Mr. Payne, lovely to see you again, boy. Who’s your friend?”
“This is Charles Rowland,” Edwin said, stepping aside to gesture to him. “He has died only recently and has questions about being a ghost. Given that you have been one for longer than I, I thought you might be able to help him.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that Mr. Payne,” Mrs. Marple said easily, smiling at the two of them. “I mostly just sit here and watch the birds. But I’m happy enough for the company, if you’d like to join me?”
“He would,” Edwin said, before Charles could even start to answer. He nodded again at them. “Charles. Mrs. Marple. Good day to you both.”
It took Charles a moment to realize that Edwin was leaving him with the other ghost. He startled as Edwin started to walk away.
“Hold up!”
Edwin turned, one eyebrow raised inquisitively.
“You’re not staying?”
“I have no need for a conversation on the mechanics of being a ghost,” Edwin deferred. “I shall be in the library when you are finished, Charles.” He walked off without another word.
In the present day, Edwin is looking a little embarrassed. “I suppose I could have explained my intentions better. You did look rather…”
“Heartbroken?” Charles asks. He looks amused now, in hindsight, but Crystal can picture Charles ‘my dad made me feel like I was never good enough’ Rowland thirty-seven years ago, desperately wondering what he’d done wrong to make Edwin abandon him—however temporarily.
Edwin looks even more sheepish at that. “Charles…”
“Nah,” Charles waves off. “Just joking, aren’t I? I knew I’d been right irritating.”
Edwin looks despairing—but he doesn’t say anything immediately, which means Charles is right. “It is as I said,” he eventually manages, “I was not used to—it was not anything you did, it was merely—”
“Okay,” Crystal says loudly, before they venture too firmly into Hell territory. God damn rose-colored glasses: everything Edwin and Charles did back then was apparently covered in fifty goddamn layers of trauma, no matter how favorably they look back at the early days now. “Thought we were going to keep things cheerful?”
Normally she’s all for Charles stripping away the forced optimism and actually confronting his feelings, but after the Iron Incident—and, yeah, sure, she’ll capitalize that in her mind the way Charles seems to say it—a break is needed. As Edwin would say, it’s been enough heavy emotions for one morning.
“Right!” Charles agrees, perking up. “So: Mrs. Marple.”
“Come, sit,” Mrs. Marple encouraged Charles, as Edwin strode away from them. She took her own seat on the bench again, patting next to her all friendly-like.
Charles sat. Hard not to listen to nice old ladies when they talked to you like that, even if the urge to call out after Edwin was strong. Edwin would be waiting in the library when he was done here, he’d promised that, and it would be rude to keep Mrs. Marple waiting.
“Mr. Rowland, he called you, did he?”
Charles suppressed a shudder. “Just Charles is fine, ma’am.”
“Well then there’s no need for the ma’am’s either,” Mrs. Marple said easily in return. “You can call me Elizabeth.”
Charles very well couldn’t. This lady was his grandma’s age. He wasn’t about to go calling her by her first name. But he nodded politely, a little lost.
“She was right friendly,” he says now, in the present. “Don’t remember everything we talked about, but she got me to relax eventually. Like, like…” he frowns in thought. “Well, ‘suppose the most relevant thing we talked about was unfinished business. That’s what really got everything started, in the end.”
“Most ghosts stay because of unfinished business,” Mrs. Marple had told Charles, all motherly and soft, patting his arm in a comforting way. “Of course, there are exceptions. Sometimes for you young ones the unfinished business is just living, isn’t it?”
Charles supposed that was true enough for him. He certainly wasn’t ready to be done with life, and if that meant he had to stick around as a ghost, so be it. He was an adaptable sort, wasn’t he? He could handle it.
“What’s your unfinished business, then?” he asked, before realizing it might have been too forward of a question. “You don’t have to answer.”
Mrs. Marple only smiled kindly at him. “It’s rather silly I’m afraid. I lost a necklace a few days before I died that really should have gone to my daughter, and I never did manage to find it. I’m certain it’s somewhere in this park, but…” She trailed off, still with that soft smile on her face, a little nostalgic and tinged with sorrow.
“I’ll help you look for it!” Charles volunteered almost immediately.
Mrs. Marple’s smile didn’t change as she reached over and grabbed his hand, squeezing a little. “Oh, that’s very nice of you dearie, only, it’s been over a decade by now. I can’t imagine you’ll have much luck.”
The comment struck Charles as incredibly sad. Here Mrs. Marple was, telling him her unfinished business, and in the very next sentence all but admitting she never expected to complete it. She hadn’t moved on yet, but some part of her had given up.
Crystal can see where this is going. Judging from Niko’s soft “Oh,” she can too. It’s not anything like their usual cases for sure—she can see why Edwin won’t call it a proper case, nothing supernatural about it, no real mystery—but she can also see how it would have gotten two sixteen-year-old boys on the path to being proper detectives.
Charles grins up at the two of them, and his smile is a little nostalgic and tinged with sorrow too, just like he’d described Mrs. Marple. “Yeah,” he agrees.
“So you found the necklace, then?”
“Not that day,” Charles says. “But yeah. Roped Edwin into it, eventually, told him it’d be just like the books we kept reading. Got us both off that campus too.” He casts Edwin a fond look. “What was it you ended up mapping out? Altitude and rainfall and whatnot?”
“I do not actually remember the details,” Edwin admits, “but I do believe it had to do with calculating mudflows.”
Which means he remembers the details more than Charles does.
“A bunch happened in the meantime,” Charles continues. “Mrs. Marple introduced us to a bunch of other ghosts, and we learned about cats and cat scratches, and I figured out how to be a proper ghost and all that—mirror travel and outfit changes and all. But yeah, we found the necklace and solved our first case.” He looks up at Crystal. “Not quite the beginning of the Dead Boy Detectives, but it scratched an itch.”
Crystal finds she’s grinning widely. Charles was right. Maybe all the other bits weren’t necessary, and maybe everything Edwin and Charles went through back then had decades of horror running in the background, but the case itself? A friendly favor for a woman who hadn’t asked it of them in the first place, a good deed for a stranger, nothing but legwork and determination?
Yeah, okay. It’s a good story, however short.
“I wouldn’t call that being a detective,” she says despite all that, still grinning.
“Well, we were proper metal detectors, weren’t we?” Charles’ grin is beyond cheeky. The laughter bursts out of her and Niko; Edwin’s smiling as he rolls his eyes fondly, an affected motion.
“You’ve been sitting on that one, haven’t you?”
“Okay, but I want to hear about all the other cases,” Niko says, nearly bouncing in her seat. “The Loch Ness monster and the urn and the first real case!”
“Well, the Loch Ness monster came first—”
“Charles, as I’ve tried to say—”
“Oi!” Charles waves his hands Edwin’s general direction, then glances over at Niko on the couch. “What is it you say sometimes? Spoilers?”
Niko giggles. Edwin rolls his eyes again. “Then you can tell the story,” he says.
“Wait,” Crystal cuts in. “Finish the first one first! What happened to Mrs. Marple?”
“Moved on, didn’t she?”
“No, tell it properly!” Niko curls into Crystal further, grinning broad as she can be, as if it’s her way of voicing her agreement with Crystal’s interruption from the Lock Ness monster story.
Charles rolls his eyes fondly.
“There is nothing really much to tell,” Edwin says, before Charles can speak. “We gave her the necklace, she was entirely too grateful by far, and then we did not see her again. Presumably she passed it onto her daughter—”
Charles’ elbow in Edwin’s side stopped him in his tracks. “’Presumably,’” Charles mocks. “Like we didn’t make sure the job was done ourselves.”
“And by ‘too grateful by far’,” Crystal adds, “you mean she tried to hug you.”
Charles laughs. “Got it in one.” He frowns thoughtfully. “Alright, so, suppose this is sorta relevant to your original question. Not really a case, though…”
Despite the months Charles and Edwin had spent talking to Mrs. Marple, they had not once actually met or even seen the woman’s daughter. As such, they realized only after the fact, three days after they had passed the necklace along, that they had no way of knowing if Mrs. Marple had been able to pass it along in turn.
“She has moved on, Charles,” Edwin said irritably. “There is nothing further we can do.”
Present-day Edwin quickly cuts in. “That is not what I said at all, Charles. I was merely—”
Charles bumps into Edwin, laughing, cutting the other boy off before he can finish. “You tell it then,” he says. “Probably your turn anyway.”
“Very well.” Edwin straightens primly, looking the couch head on. “The story continued in the library…”
“I’ve been stopping by the park every day,” Charles told Edwin as they perused the shelves in front of them for their next detective novel.
(“Hold on!” Charles protests in the present. “It wasn’t every day. It was just the once!”
Edwin rolls his eyes. “If you insist, Charles,” he says in a moderately skeptical tone.)
“I stopped by the park today,” Charles told Edwin as they perused the shelves for their next detective novel. (“That’s better.” “Charles.” “Right, sorry.”)
“Do be careful, Charles. You know Death was there recently.”
“We don’t actually know that she’s moved on,” Charles countered.
Edwin hid a sigh. (“Uh, if that’s what you call hiding a sigh, mate.” Edwin pauses to look Charles dead on. Charles backs off, grinning as he holds up his hands.) “She made clear her intent to do so.”
“Yeah, but what if she hasn’t found her daughter?”
“Do not be ridiculous, Charles.”
“Yeah, but what if—”
Edwin threw his hands up in the air. “If you are that concerned with the matter, why do you simply not check up on the woman yourself!”
Sheepishly, Charles shuffled his feet a little, not meeting Edwin’s gaze.
Edwin blinked at him. “Charles,” he said, tone carefully even.
“Yeah, Edwin?” Charles asked, almost absentmindedly, as if the matter was of no importance any more and they were simply having an idle chat.
“You do know how to locate Mrs. Marple’s daughter, do you not?”
Charles grimaced.
“Charles—”
“It never came up, okay! We mostly just hung out in the park and watched the birds, you know? Wasn’t exactly about to ask if I could come spy on her daughter with her! You don’t know where she lives either, do you?”
Edwin tossed a skeptical look over his shoulder. “And when would I have found the time to ask?” he asked.
“No, no, you’ve gotta throw a descriptor in there,” Charles interrupts with a grin. “Like: ‘asked rudely’.”
“Derisively?” Crystal suggests, also grinning.
“Logically?” Niko chimes in.
“Thank you, Niko,” Edwin says haughtily.
Niko beams at him. Crystal elbows her. “Teacher’s pet,” she mutters fondly under her breath. Niko giggles.
Charles is elbowing Edwin too, grinning fondly himself. Edwin huffs and pushes back at him. “So, basically,” Charles tells them, “neither of us had any clue where Mrs. Marple’s daughter actually lived.”
“Ooh, another mystery!” Niko says excitedly.
“Of a styling,” Edwin agrees with a small nod of his head, a tiny smile on his face.
Crystal’s grinning again too, the distress from earlier nearly forgotten.
“The rest of it’s rather boring though,” even Charles admits. “Just legwork and searching a few databases until we found her address.”
They all knew what that was like by now. A fair amount of detective work involved going to the library or archives—or just searching through Edwin and Charles’ library.
“Did she get the necklace, though?” Niko asks with interest, clearly ready for a happy ending.
Charles grins at her. “’Course she did. You’re not doubting our skills, are you, Niko?”
“Never,” Niko vows.
“Okay,” Crystal says. “Now you can tell us about the Loch Ness Monster.” She directs her words pointedly at Edwin, who keeps getting interrupted every time he tries to argue with Charles about that being a case. She’s not sure if that means it isn’t a case in Edwin’s narrow mindset of that definition, or if there is no Loch Ness Monster. It doesn’t really matter. It wasn’t the question she originally asked, but she’s interested now.
Edwin responds by rolling his eyes at her.
“Right.” Charles seems to settle himself in his seat again, prepared for the telling. There’s a wide grin on his face and Crystal hopes—believes—that this story’ll be happier than the last one. They’ll be somewhere other than the campus they died on, at least, so that’s something.
“So,” Charles continues. “It’s a little sideways, how we got there. I’ll skim over the details. But it took us, what,” he glances over at Edwin, “two months to find Mrs. Marple’s necklace?”
“Approximately seven weeks,” Edwin relays.
“Right, that.” Charles flashes a cheeky grin at the sofa again, her and Niko this time, and rolls his eyes. (Crystal doesn’t know who he thinks he’s fooling. He loves it when Edwin’s exact like that—he’s practically bouncing where he sits right now.)
“Subtle,” Edwin deadpans.
Charles laughs. “So, like I said, we finally got out and about during that time. Left campus, started exploring. Made ourselves a temporary little hideout and whatnot. Got scratched by a cat for the first time. And only then did Edwin up and admit magic was real!”
“Wait, magic is real?!” Charles had asked, surprised at the casual way Edwin had dropped the topic into the conversation.
Edwin had stared at him. “Charles, you are a ghost.”
“Well, yeah, but that doesn't mean everything else is real! What about like, vampires? Werewolves? The Loch Ness Monster?”
Edwin's eyebrows skyrocketed. “What, on Earth,” he said, slow and disdainful, “is the Loch Ness Monster?”
“Oh!” Niko says in the present, bouncing in her seat.
Crystal gives Edwin a look. “You hadn’t heard of the Loch Ness Monster?” That’s, like, the one monster everyone knows about after vampire and werewolves and Frankenstein. She’d figured that would especially be the case in England.
“The first sightings weren’t until the 1930s!” The words burst out of Niko as if she can barely hold them back, pure energy and delight.
“Niko is correct, as usual. There were fanciful stories in my day, but none about lake monsters in Loch Ness.”
“Edwin didn’t even know what a dinosaur was,” Charles faux whispers.
“That,” Edwin counters, “is patently untrue. They were not perhaps the phenomena they are now, but the study of them was well under way when I was alive.”
Charles just grins, cheeky. “Anyway,” he tells her and Niko, “that conversation was before we found the necklace. Afterward, we’d kinda mostly forgotten about it until we started talking about traveling a bit.”
“You've never been to Scotland?” Charles asked, a little astonished. Edwin had been to Hell. He was really smart—knew a lot things. Charles had just pictured... well, it would have just kind of made sense for him to be well-traveled. He forgot sometimes that Edwin died at sixteen and hadn’t really spent any more time on Earth than he had.
“Have you?” Edwin asked, biting, in a way that said the answer was no—and that he was rather miffed about it.
“Sorry,” Charles said, raising his hands. “Didn't mean nothing by it. And...” They'd gone on holiday a few times when he was a kid, but that was just to the beach and whatnot. He wasn’t sure exactly where, but... “No,” he said. “Don't think I've been either. We should definitely go then!”
“Whatever for?”
Edwin, Charles knew, would be perfectly fine staying in London, even if he’d finally gotten the other boy to leave St. Hilarion’s behind them. “Not like we've got anything else to do, is there?” he asked.
Edwin looked around at the empty stacks of the current library they were holed up in—their third one that month, as each subsequently failed to stand up to Edwin’s expectations after a time.
“You didn’t like the libraries?” Niko interrupts to ask, a little crestfallen but in a gentle, amused kind of way.
Fourth favorite public building, Crystal remembers fondly.
Edwin sniffs. “It was not the libraries themselves so much as it was—”
“The people,” she cuts in, grinning, before he can say it himself.
“Yep. All well and good when they were closed, but after the fifth time someone sits in you while you’re trying to read it’s time to move on.”
“No one sat in us, Charles,” Edwin counters. “They were simply—” He cuts himself off with a huff.
Crystal can imagine what he was going to say: too loud, too annoying, too rowdy, too present. She laughs.
“Anyway,” Charles says, grinning, “it took all I had to get Edwin to leave.” He started up the story again.
“Books'll still be here when we get back, mate.” (“That was hardly all your effort, Charles,” Edwin mutters pointedly under his breath.) “And hey, maybe we can go see if the Loch Ness monster is actually real!”
Edwin scoffed. “All the evidence points to a hoax, Charles.”
“Yeah, sure, maybe,” Charles agreed. “But all those blokes would probably say we were a hoax too, wouldn’t they?”
“So we went to Scotland,” he says in the present. “Though not without a lot of complaining, am I right?”
Edwin merely rolls his eyes.
“Can we take a trip to Scotland?” Niko asks eagerly.
“Edinburgh might be fun,” Crystal agrees. She isn’t much interested in wandering the Highlands though. She likes the ground beneath her feet to be flat and paved, thank you very much.
“Ooh, and the cows!” Niko says. “The cute ones with all the fur!”
“Highland cattle.” Charles nods, looking pleased. “Yeah, maybe we can take a trip soon.” But he looks to Edwin, as if seeking his permission.
Edwin’s lips are thin. “We have to maintain our quota for the Lost and Found Department or—”
“C’mon, Nursie loves us! We’re allowed a holiday here and there!”
Crystal doesn’t think the concept of a vacation exists in the Lost & Found Department. But Charles isn’t entirely wrong either. “Maybe we just take a case or two up in Scotland,” she offers as a compromise. And then, before anyone can start arguing about it (though they all know Charles will get Edwin to agree), “Anyway, what about your first trip to Scotland?”
“Well,” Charles says, grinning.
Edwin’s already rolling his eyes.
“Thing is, we were both still pretty new at mirror travel, right?” Charles asks.
“Don’t tell me you wound up in, I don’t know, Iceland instead or something.”
“Nah, nothing like that. Edwin hit Scotland just fine. Only, we didn’t know that much about the lake then, yeah—no internet or nothing to look up detailed maps. So we ended up in Inverness.”
There is very little that sounds exciting or laughable at that. Crystal quirks an eyebrow at Charles.
He laughs. “We took a bus from there.”
Crystal continues to stare for a moment—and then she pictures Edwin on a bus.
“But you hate public transportation!” Niko is already saying with a faint giggle.
“I do not hate it,” Edwin lies staunchly. “And in any case, Charles could not be persuaded to return to London, nor we were about to walk to the lake.”
“He complained the whole time,” Charles says in another faux aside, loud enough for everyone to hear.
Crystal and Niko laugh. Edwin rolls his eyes again.
Grinning, Charles settles in to tell the story of what happened in Scotland.