Chapter Text
Pat is sitting in the drawing room, trying to pick his new morning activity, when Kitty joins him through the closed door.
“Pat?” Kitty isn’t interrupting him — it is, after all, not time for any of the clubs and Alison has not yet turned the TV on for the day — he simply has finished the World Series games and is currently having trouble deciding what he wants to replace this activity with the most.
Of course he has ideas. He has plenty of them as he certainly has spent enough time as a ghost to be very aware of the things he is missing. So his problem is much closer to the opposite in that the list of things he could still feasibly do with Alison’s help is about fifteen to twenty things long even after some attempts to bring it down.
It is nearly exclusively filled with things to watch, for rather obvious reasons, but he hopes he might be able to convince her to do a handful of the activities that he used to do with his scouts. It turns out that he really misses watching people learn how to do things with his help. That had only occurred to him during that camping trip when the woodworm men had been here, but now that he is aware of it, he is nearly painfully so.
“Yes, Kitty?”
Kitty, as always, is very outwardly earnest about how she feels about anything and everything. “Yesterday, I saw Mike wanting to ask Alison something, but she was busy and the Captain, so he moved on. And now he still has not asked her about whatever it was and I want to figure out what it is he was going to ask so we can ask Alison instead.”
“Can I ask you just why, exactly, do you want to do this?”
The dancing he had agreed to that one time had taught him that it is a good idea to ask just what, exactly, he is getting himself into. He hadn’t even known that he could still get that exhausted without a body until that day!
“I don’t know,” Kitty admits openly. “I think I just want to help where I can, and it’s not like I can still do many things to help Allison. Especially when she is busy with the Captain.”
Now, Pat was very aware of what Kitty had actually said, but the words ‘I want to feel useful and wanted’ still made it over to him as clear as day.
And just how is he supposed to do anything but agree at that point?
Kitty lets out a ‘squee’ at his agreement.
“I assume that he is getting ready for work right now, though,” he points out.
Just as Kitty deflates at this, Mary speaks up from behind him.
“I sees him goings upstairs,” she informs them. “It musts be a holidays.”
“Oh! Mary! I did not see you there,” Kitty exclaims gleefully and turns to hug her fellow ghost.
Pat himself merely chuckles. “Neither did I. You may be right with your theory, Mary, or maybe he just took the day off.”
“Or it could be Sunday,” Kitty adds.
He nods. “That’s true! It’s easy to lose track even now with Alison. Shall we head upstairs to see what he is doing then? See if we can figure it out?”
“Yes, we shall!” Kitty says as she begins to skip off.
Mary, however, turns to Pat. “What do we be doing?”
He gestures at Mary to join him as he follows Kitty toward the stairs. “I’ll explain while we catch up.”
Hetty Woodstone had come over to the shed the day before and invited them — that is Jenkins and Baxter himself — over to the mansion for ‘tea’ and Baxter had not exactly had any idea about what he was agreeing to, but this would not have been among his guesses.
“Now, let me be very clear,” Hetty takes great care to look Jenkins directly into his eyes. “I do not care what your reasons were. If you ever so much as think about deliberately interfering with my best friend’s happiness again, I will make sure that, one way or another, you will get looked up in that ghost-proof safe we have discovered downstairs. Have you understood?”
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Baxter had been more or less around for all of Hetty’s life and death, but apparently, he had not been around enough to figure out just how much you did not want to get on her bad side.
“Yes, Lady Woodstone,” Jenkins says after he, too, took a moment to process what he had just been threatened with.
At that, Hetty brightened, “Now that that is done with, we can move on to the actual reason I proposed this little get together.”
“I am still not entirely sure what I am doing here,” Baxter announces, clutching his fife uncomfortably. He after all had not told either of the pair any lies.
“That is interesting to hear,” Hetty responds, “I thought my invitation was almost disturbingly plain in regard to its wording. Would you disagree?”
“Well, no, that is not where my confusion stems from,” Baxter elaborates. “Rather, I am wondering why exactly you chose to do so, especially after the… rather formidable threat you have just issued.”
“In retrospect, I suppose it might have been prudent to separate those two conversations, but alas, it is too late for that now.”
Baxter, indeed, would have prepared not to learn of the threat issued — or even to have the luxury of learning about it from Jenkins’s later complaints — that, undoubtedly, he would have to listen to later in any case.
“Is that not obvious? With Isaac and Nigel having taken up their walks again after the previous… issues, let us say, I thought it would be rather prudent of us to get to know each other as well.”
Jenkins opens his mouth as if to protest, but closes it again when Hetty turns to look at him.
“... I think I might enjoy that,” Baxter says, causing Hetty to smile at him.
Before their conversation can proceed any further, however, Thorfinn, the viking, Flower, the ‘hippie’ woman — if Baxter is recalling the term correctly — and the body of Crash enter through a wall.
How undignified of them, to just ignore the existence of doors, just because they no longer matter to them.
“Have you seen head of Crash?!” Thorfinn shouts just as much as he asks.
Baxter takes a moment to realize that the question had been directed at him.
“Um. No, can’t say I have. At least not recently.”
Hetty pauses. “Now that I think about it, it has been a while since I last saw that part of him around.”
“Oh, yeah.” Flower — it was both, rather hard not to learn a name of a fellow ghost and rather rude not to use the name someone called themselves, even if it was one like this — smiled rather enthusiastically. “We noticed that none of us have seen Crash’s head in months, so we’re looking for it.”
Jenkins, rather uncharacteristically, rises from his seat. “We shall help you!”
At that, Hetty and Baxter exchange a look.
“I suppose we might as well get to know each other over a shared activity.”
“Just the four of us today then?” Fanny is still hesitating at the door as she asks.
Thomas responds from his place on the sofa. “That does seem to be the case. I assume that The Captain is still busy with whatever it is he requested of Alison the day before, but I confess that I do not know what Kitty and the others are doing.”
“Aw, who cares,” Julian says with his usual intonation as he moves toward the remote. “All that means is that we have less people to consider in our choice about what we are going to watch.”
Robin nods. “Is Kitty’s turn and Kitty not here.”
Going by Fanny’s face, however, that is exactly what she had feared. And if Thomas himself is entirely honest…
“I’m sure that I don’t fancy watching the overwhelmingly vast majority of the things you must be thinking about, Julian.”
Robin, by contrast, announces something that Thomas himself makes a valiant effort not to understand after the first few words, as it only takes that long to become clear that Robin has no problems watching the vile and unseemly things that Julian seemed drawn to.
“Ah, don’t get your knickers in a twist,” Julian says confidently. “I think I found something that might interest all of us to some degree.”
At that, Fanny raises her eyebrow. “I am fairly certain that I do not have that much trust in regard to your ideas about my preferences.”
Thomas himself of course has never been shy to make his opinions, likes, and dislikes clear to all those who will listen, so he cannot say the same thing. But the thing that he still has doubts about is Julien’s willingness to accommodate them.
“I mean it!” Julien protests. “I saw an ad a few days ago and I even went and asked Alison about the show. The name is Big Brother and it’s apparently been on the air for almost as long as I’ve been dead, so surely the show has to be at least somewhat entertaining. Apparently, a group of people actually sign up to be locked in a house and watched by cameras 24-7 — yes, I know, I know, I don’t get why anyone would sign up for that either,” Julian interrupts himself at the doubtful glances he gets from the other ghosts.
Excepting the cameras — one of the modern inventions Thomas can most confidently name thanks to the multiple movie productions that have at least partly happened in Button House since Alison has moved in — that sounds like a little close to their present situation, after all.
… and of course also excepting that the people in this show are still alive.
“But there’s apparently a lot of drama between the people in the house, which is one of the main reasons people watch this show and I figure that might be interesting for you two,” Julian gestures to Fanny and Thomas himself as he says that. “If for very different reasons. There’s also some scenes of people getting frisky for me, and honestly Robin, I figured that you would be interested in just watching people act as people.”
“...Julian not wrong,” Robin admits after a beat or two.
Fanny had moved to sit down with the rest of them at some point during Julian’s explanation and had thus clearly indicated her interest.
“We may as well try it, I suppose,” Thomas declares. After all, if Julian had talked to Alison — a woman of taste — beforehand, this show cannot possibly be that unentertaining.
… especially in comparison to the vast majority of his afterlife.