Work Text:
When Valkyrie Cain turned up to the Nineteenth Decadal Requiem Ball, she did so three and a half hours late, in full work gear, and totally by accident.
In her defence, fair enough – it was happening in her front hall. And she’d never gotten around to growing abstract life skills like knowing what day of the week or month of the year or whatever it was at any given point. And, as she’d later recall with an air of immense self-congratulation, when she'd walked through the door with her leathers muddied and her bike helmet halfway off her head to find her home overrun by a crush of masked faces and terrific colour, Valkyrie Cain hadn’t taken a single swing. She was just that generous, she reasoned, and wise. And knackered.
And so tired her brain stalled there and kept her staring with one hand gripped on either side of her head in a caricature of speechless horror. A man of aggressive hues wandered by with a glance that implied she was being odd. He was wearing a rhinoceros mask complete with a papier-mâché horn distending a good foot from his head, and he was looking at her as though she was odd. Okay.
Valkyrie deflated and mashed her helmet more firmly into position before lifting an entire tray of nibbles from a rotating waiter. He was too professional to swipe at where she held it above his head for more than a few steps and Valkyrie made a mental note to tip him for that later.
When she moved through the socialising crowd in an unhurried beeline for the staircase, and the crowd made unanimously sure to socialise out of her path. As she started up, Valkyrie thought it wouldn’t take a detective to guess who she was beneath the dirt and Kevlar but was by then too used to the veiled panic with which other mages would skitter out of her way to think much of anything more. And there was a fair chance they could be avoiding the mud. And either way nobody tried to take the food from her, so nobody had to get hurt.
Both helmet and nibbles were set down on the most immediate flat surface in her room and Valkyrie resisted the urge to flop directly onto the bed. She was more mud than human. Beds were for humans. She had already learned this lesson.
Ugh. Ugh, her clothes peeled.
Her dirt-stiffened trousers had tripped her so many times she had resigned herself to army-crawling into the bathroom and carving them off with nail scissors when there was a familiar knock at her door.
"You haven't gone to bed like that, have you?" Dexter checked.
"Goddammit, no," she grunted back, revitalising her struggles. "I'm, like, a foot wider in diameter than I was this morning from pure dirt. Of course I'm not in bed. Honestly– Jesus fucking things – agh! – honestly, what kind of idiot do you think I am?"
She heard him lean against the jam. "The kind that's done that exact thing a dozen times before? And not even always on her own furniture?"
"Yeah." She kicked victoriously out of her pants. They maintained their shape. Ugh. "Not on my own furniture."
"Oh, right."
"I'm not an animal."
“Uh huh." Dexter took a sip of something. "On a related note, there’s a very forlorn-looking owl downstairs lying in wait for you, I thought you should know.”
“Most owls are forlorn-looking.” Valkyrie snorted and stood. “Who came as an owl?”
“Saracen. Do us a favour, alright, and don’t wear heels, because I think the masochist wants a dance.”
“Oi.” He had a point there, though. And at another the bruised toes to prove it. Still. “Do us a favour and stop trying to whore out your husband."
"He is not a whore," Dexter input reflexively. Only then: "And he's not my husba-"
Valkyrie turned on the faucet in what she felt was a very smug, argument-winning manner. Her friend had to sigh like the roar of a fond T-rex and talk as loudly talk to be heard over it. "And I'd bet he's not the only one."
One leg in the tub, she called back, "What? Has someone set up an under the radar pimp-your-boyfriend ring in my home? Because that is the sort of thing friends are supposed to tell each other, Dex. That's something I should know."
"Oh my God," said Dexter. "Oh my God, you are an asshole. You are a cretin. Saracen probably isn't the only one waiting on a dance."
Responses like It's not a convention for the visually impaired, and Line forms somewhere near the coffee maker flipped through Valkyrie's mind before flopping out entirely under a thought that made her pause mid-pour of bubblebath. “It's, uh. It’s not someone in shades and an overcoat, is it? Like, with their face all scribbled up? Probably smells quite strongly of goats and Axe body spray?"
"Um," he replied. "No?"
She loosened. "Thank fuck."
"What?"
She took up soaping a loofah. "Nothing. I have a small and disturbed following among certain mid-to-high-level career occultists, that's all."
"W- no," he cut himself off and Valkyrie could practically hear him raise warding hand. "Nope. I don’t want to know. I have also forgotten what I was saying."
"And we both will have to live on knowing you will never be truly understood."
He sighed again. "Shut up, Val. Come down for a bit later, okay?"
"Okay. You probably should do a perimeter check for satellite vans with tinted windows, though."
"Okay. I still have a spare key to your gun closet, right?"
"One of them."
"Okay. I'm leaving a muffin outside your door so I know you'll come out. Mind you don't kick it over."
"Dex, sod off."
"Okay,” said Dex, and sodded off.
Valkyrie truly believed that she had been lying. She'd had almost no intention of inflicting the chatters and whispers of the downstairs gaggle upon herself when she could be, in no particular order, soaking and sleeping and smelling really nice instead.
But Valkyrie had underestimated just how amazing her shower was. And she had showered in it and it was very, very amazing. She’d lost maybe twenty pounds in soil and not-soil down the drain, and now she felt great and smelled even better and goddammit, she resolved, the people deserved to appreciate that.
She stepped out and dried off and stretched, and her body popped like a newly minted pin-ball machine which was a lot more luxurious than it sounded. She moved over to her wardrobe, reached for the first dress-length thing she saw, then stopped.
It was a masquerade, right? Half the fun was supposed to come from having to guess who people were and talking like they were blank, sequin-covered slates that could be anything to you. The other half, she ruminated, came from being the blank slate.
Valkyrie let go of the first black dress and reached for the one with the long, lacily patterned sleeves that would disguise her tattoos. And was also black. She could only be so much unlike herself, even if she wanted to kind of try for a night – and like, it wasn’t as if any amount of camouflage was going to stop her looking fantastic in black.
She even foraged the Colombina mask from a few Halloweens ago from the bottom of her closet and tied snugly around her head. The overall effect was something between a very classy ninja and very sexy cat-burglar, complete with velvet ears that nearly blended with her loose dark hair. Furry Lady Zorro, she thought sagely. Maybe she would hallmark it and go straight.
The girl in the mirror was grinning at herself, and she looked great. The girl only really looked like Valkyrie Cain if you were really looking for it.
She nodded, winked at herself and left. Calmly bent to pick up the muffin on her way and ate it, all with an air of utmost grace and mystery.
The party was in full booze-balanced swing downstairs, and Valkyrie was gratified to see she hadn’t missed the good parts; the alcohol circulation seemed just at that peak point of manic jolliness that came before the chemical epiphanies of how awful everything was arrived in a flood of drunken tears and sloppy brawls by the buffet table. She couldn’t remember the last time she'd had a proper bar fight – or a ballroom buffet table fight, whatever. She could work with it.
For now the main hall was a variety pack of animal faces and loose limbs that mingled and swirled as easily as alarmingly vibrant creamers in a very big mug. It was good. Valkyrie moved amongst the colours instead of through them and that was weirdly good, too, if you were into that sort of thing. The tilts of the masks were happy.
She made it all the way over to the food table before someone made a death threat.
Right at her ear: "I am going to stab Rotund Greysmarch in the eye."
The voice was too warm for its words and Valkyrie arched her eyebrows before she remembered that she, effectively, had none to arch. "I could literally be a cop," she informed him instead, archly. "This is mainly a do for gravel-eating war veterans, and we all know how well they do at adjusting to civilian life, which is hardly at all, so it's actually really likely. I, mysterious sir, could be a maverick homicide detective with great hair and a bloody past."
"Right in the eye," mysterious sir continued. "They keep going on about the spam mail in their cybernet and how it gives them cataracts. I do not care. A very serious question for you, mysterious and unbiased miss: do I look as though I care about their spam or their cataracts?"
Valkyrie squinted. "You look like a mummy if that mummy was invited to the Met Gala."
"I'm the Invisible Man traded up in the world."
"You're always the Invisible Man at these things because you always think you're being ironic and funny."
"It is ironic," he asserted, tilting his bandage-wrapped face jauntily in punctuation, "because I am in actual fact physically very attention-grabbing. I have an aura about me. Socially magnetic, I believe is the term. And I am immensely funny."
"You look like you've been in something everyone will refer to only as The Accident."
The head tilted back. "Yes, well. You look beautiful."
"Ah." Valkyrie crinkled her nose at him and turned to rummage in the drinks cooler. "You're a cheater."
"I'm a charmer. Do you think the cybernetics will interfere with the knife when I stab their eyes? Have you ever stabbed a cyborg? I haven't. It sounds dangerous, now that I think about it. There should be a How To Guide."
Valkyrie pulled out a bottle of Sprite and used it to point down the table. "Plastic cutlery is over there," she directed. "Stay safe, babe."
Skulduggery followed her gaze, and now sighed dreamily, "Darling. What would I do without you?"
Valkyrie looked up at his bandaged face and the old-fashioned Aylesbury top hat perched ridiculously above it, popped her eyes wide and said, very tenderly, "You would get electrocuted and die."
Her partner kept his gaze toward the plasticware but realigned himself a little. "I was going to theorise something more along the lines of 'Go looking,' or perhaps the more traditional 'Rather miss you,' but yours has its justifications also."
She started to chuckle into her drink before she realised from the lack of tilt to his skull that that wasn’t what he'd been going for, and kicked him instead. Skulduggery looked down to his abused shin and then up at her before inquiring, "Did I deserve that?"
"I don’t know." Valkyrie made to peer through his covered sockets. "Maybe. You're being kind of weird."
He nodded understandingly. "You mean charming."
"Weird."
He shrugged. "Need I remind you that you're the one who seems to think I'm incapable of expressing my feelings."
"I already know you can express your feelings. You punch people when you don’t like them all the time."
"Verbally. Express them verbally."
"You called Wheezer an artless flap-mouthed little fucktwerp the other day."
"I – have no recollection of that."
"He had tears, like, real tears leaking out of his face–"
"You," he cut in before she could really get going, several shades of exasperated, "verbally express my feelings toward you, you idiot."
"There you go again!" she cheered, then puckered out the grin and batted her eyes behind the mask. "Aw. You have feelings toward me?"
Skulduggery went to say something, and then stopped, and shrugged instead. "Yes?"
"Oh." She frowned. Took a swig of her pop. "You really are cheating me so hard right now. You're being so weird."
"That was honesty."
"That was weird."
"Sorry."
"It's? You're just cheating."
"Dear,” said Skulduggery, “I’m not playing."
Valkyrie blurted, "Oohhhh my God," and jerked one hand to her abruptly cackling mouth before fixing it firmly over his covered one. His teeth under the bindings were hard and tooth-shaped. "Oh my God, shut up. Just stop talking,” she squawked. “You're ridiculous."
Skulduggery said something muffled and indignant.
Valkyrie swiped a thumb under the mask to flick away the mirthful tears and hoped the face below didn’t look as stupidly hot as it felt. "So, what you’re saying – what you're implying here is that you can talk through your emotions, yeah, just as long as you’re dressed as a classic 20th century literary antihero while you do it. Is that right?"
Skulduggery took a moment and then nodded diligently.
Valkyrie gave up right there and had to use both hands to keep her stomach from erupting with glee. Skulduggery held her Sprite and stood by like a mummified butler while she laughed so hard she was silent.
"You say all this as though it's the most obvious cause for psychiatric intervention you've seen me demonstrate," he remarked drily.
Valkyrie convulsed.
Skulduggery put his free hand in his pocket and waited.
"You're ridiculous," was the first thing she repeated when she regained the ability to breathe. "You're bloody ridiculous," she told him, reaching up to brace her hands on his shoulders. "I love you. You're ridiculous."
Skulduggery grumbled something as he handed back her pop and Valkyrie tried to take a sip and almost choked. She thought for a moment to take off her mask and stop her eyes from watering but – didn’t. Didn't want to give anything away, or ruin any games, or whatever, even if her partner had decided to cheat at this one.
Two could play.
She set down the drink and repositioned her hands on either side of his jaw, felt the hollow spaces beneath the cloth and smiled up at him. Skulduggery made a somewhat wary noise and angled his face slightly away. "What?" she nudged, embracing the costume and going for a bit of a purr, "you're not going to say you love me back? After everything we’ve been through to get here? Here, in this huge, ear-equipped crowd of our underlings and co-workers? Really?"
Skulduggery stared eyelessly down at her. "Sometimes," he confided, "you can be truly aggravating."
Valkyrie cuffed him lightly and dropped her arms. "That's what I thought."
"That's what everybody knows–"
"Oh, shut up." She drained her Sprite and deposited it casually on a passing tray. She hiccupped once. "You gonna come dance with me then or what, The Inscrutable Guy?"
“It’s the Invisible Man,” said Skulduggery, in a sulk of the highest dignity, “and you bloody well know it.”
“I bloody well do,” she admitted, and smiled into the expressionless wrapping for a moment. She could make out the marked cut of his cheekbones through the material and reached whimsically up to fix the top hat to a more precise angle of dishevelment.
Skulduggery slackened all at once, reaching out in turn to tuck a wild lock of hair carefully behind one of her cat ears and Valkyrie laughed again, and repeated, “Dance with me.”
His head tipped, gently. "Of course, dear."
She held out her hand and he took it. The leather of his glove was smooth and familiar on her fingers.
-
Nobody tried to cut in, that either of them noticed, so nobody had to get hurt.
-
It was a good night. Overall. In general. Unbiasedly. The nibbles were French-named and they were bountiful, the music classy without being boring. It had a good ambience or whatever. There had been no less than four bleary-eyed brawls interspaced manageably throughout the evening so far.
And, okay, if she and Skulduggery had used their novel anonymity to dance and talk with what essentially amounted to no one but one another for kind of the whole thing, whatever. Whatever. They gave good talk. Sometimes they sang along under the music, if it was especially good or if Valkyrie was otherwise having issues keeping the dumb rhythm of the slower dances. Sometimes they just moved. It was good.
Eventually they ended up arguing very audibly through their respective disguises about whether or not becoming the princess of Monaco was a good life move for Grace Kelly and absently, off-kilter waltzing around a clean-up team that made very, very sure to clean up out of their path.
"I'm just saying, Man," Valkyrie put in near his shoulder as they narrowly avoided stepping on a girl who was trying to bodily haul her woozy friend away, "at the end of the day, you know? Literal royalty. Palace. Daily hors d'oeuvres."
"Prince Rainer was by many sources unfaithful and unappreciative. He cheated," Skulduggery snorted, emphasising his disgust by spinning his partner out and back in, "on Grace Kelly. Clearly the man was deficient."
“Didn’t she cheat on him too?”
If there had been a face under the mask it would have looked affronted. “She was Grace Kelly.”
“Right.” Valkyrie left that one alone and closed her eyes glibly. "Anyway. Cash money.”
Skulduggery sighed and she smiled and tipped herself back until she was nearly parallel with the floor. She could feel his hands pressing under her lower back, holding her suspended, and something about that made her eyes snap open like elastic cords snapped taut.
She regarded him down the length of her body. “Do you remember the time you pulled up her wedding photos on the internet and just hummed over how pretty she was like a freakishly proud mother-of-the-bride?”
“No,” Skulduggery responded, his tone fond and bemused and at odds with the tightly controlled hold he was exerting on them both, the rivet-still focus of his gaze behind the gauze. His non-face, Valkyrie considered, was perilously close to her very real chest. His head cocked. “I’d forgotten about that.”
“Mmm. You had been thrown out of more windows than usual that day,” Valkyrie granted, a little sleepily. She lolled.
"At the very least," he chattered after a few beats of her hanging there, content and quite impressed by the fanciness of her own ceiling, “she deserved someone who could function with basic cognition, is all I'm saying. Basic tact. I'm just throwing it out there, but, well, that Pleasant fellow, for example, being-"
"Yeah, yeah," Valkyrie sighed, and flicked back up. She skimmed her nose along his hidden jawbone in a way that could feasibly have been an accident of momentum. "He’s a charmer."
"I'm– ah..." Skulduggery stalled. The hand returning to her waistline fumbled a little and Valkyrie grinned where he couldn’t see. "Well. Yes. That I’ve heard."
"Mm hm."
“Indeed.”
“Hey.”
“Yes?”
“You know the band packed up a few minutes ago, right?”
“Yes.” He withdrew his arms almost as quickly as he was nodding. “Yes. Of course. I was waiting for you to mention that.”
“Right.”
“I didn’t want to embarrass you.”
She stepped back, folding her arms indulgently. “Right.”
He smoothed his jacket collar. “Because I am, after all, a gentleman.”
“That has been the absolute sum total of my experience with you, sir,” she nodded with mock-seriousness and tapped her chin. “You know, my favourite thing about gentlemen is how you can always rely on them to help clean up your house after strangers’ve trashed it and thrown up in all the corners.”
“The same," he returned, "goes for hostesses.”
“You’re not wrong, my utterly innominate pal. Wow. Jeeze. Someone should go find her, h–”
“Val!” called Tanith from behind them.
“Hell,” said Valkyrie, and didn’t turn around. She refocused on Skulduggery. “That’s her distressed voice, isn’t it? That’s her in distress.”
“She does look distinctly stressed, yes.”
Valkyrie nodded. “I need to avoid her.”
Skulduggery nodded back. “She is coming this way.”
“I’m too tired to be relied on. I've just remembered. I’m a liability.”
“She’s power-walking, really.”
“Hell.”
“Val,” said Tanith from behind her and Valkyrie sighed and turned around and Tanith said, “Wow, you look hot,” in a cursory sort of way before launching into something that vaguely resembled an explanation and involved Dexter, Children of the Consecrated Crepuscular Coadunate of Chroniclers International, an unaccounted for tray of nibbles and the butt-end – and she meant, it was only the butt-end, forjesussake – of a stun gun. She closed up after a time with, “and you’re the only one left who can legally mediate this and is sober enough to do it.”
“Right,” Valkyrie responded when she was done. “No I’m not.”
Tanith scrubbed a hand down her glittery face. “You’re not what?”
"I’m not sober.”
“You don’t drink.”
“I’m not Val.”
“You’re a weirdo, is what you are,” is what Tanith probably tried to say before she was interrupted by the truly impressive thunder of something expensive and heavy falling on something that countered with some significantly less impressive yowling, and she swore instead.
Valkyrie blinked at it and Tanith then turned back to her and she blinked at Tanith too.
Tanith slumped. “They bought colour swatches for your wedding. Actual, literal colour swatches.”
“I’ve seen them. The dusky rose was pretty classy, I thought.”
“They said it’s between that and the seashell blush.”
“Nice.”
She shuddered. “It’s so disturbing.”
“Yeah.” Valkyrie worked a hand under the mask to rub at her eye and then took it off altogether so she could release the full force of her puppy-dog stare on her friend. “Tanith.”
Tanith murmured, “No, that’s cheating.”
“Please, Tanith. Please cover me. I’ve been awake too long to deal with this. Please.”
“What," the other woman pulled up, snorted, "you mean you came here straight from the Serbian case? Seriously?”
“It’s, um, it’s happening in my house. And I was trying to beat jet-lag.”
“Val, it’s three AM.”
“I was trying really hard.”
Tanith’s face flattened in appraisal. “Sure you weren’t.” She squinted a meaningful squint at the tall silent figure behind a Valkyrie who was in equal parts wishing the mask back on to hide her face and glad said face was turned away from said tall silent figure. Tanith grinned in surprised delight at her normally unflappable friend’s reaction. “Oh, yeah, I saw the two of you, mingling. Consorting the night away. All whispery and moon-eyed and twirly and shit. I see you.”
“Tanith.” Valkyrie put a hand slowly over her face. The tall silent figure behind her remained very much so. “Please shut up.”
“Some of those dips were outright indecent, can I just say–”
“No.”
“Ah, okay, alright,” she acquiesced from sheer tiredness, raising her irritating yet perpetually magnificent arms. “Alright. Fine. You go up to your nice soft bed. We’ll just lock the crazed occultist stalkers in your basement till your eyes have brightened and your tail has – bushied, or whatever.”
“Thank,” Valkyrie popped her eyes, “you.”
Tanith beamed generously, then flicked a look pointedly between the two of them and winked. “And, like, by bed I mean sleep. Just saying, you look like you need the cl–”
Valkyrie chucked the mask at Tanith’s head and left it to spin across the marble when she darted laughingly away, hands up. “I meant it totally supportively!” she called as she backed off and Valkyrie went to remove a shoe and throw that at her as well and then noticed she hadn’t thought to put any on, because she had been awake for a really long time and it had been a good night, goddammit.
“Hey,” came Tanith's voice from the far door and Valkyrie looked up frowning. Her feet hurt. “Have either of you seen Skulduggery?”
At her shoulder, Skulduggery said, “No.”
Valkyrie shrugged.
Tanith grumbled about that being just typical before shooting one last ‘get in there my son’ look deafeningly across the hall in farewell.
Valkyrie didn’t turn around. She resisted the urge to put her hands over her cheeks.
After a few moments the wall-dulled cacophony of emotional versus physical pains and what sounded like the destruction of one cabinet or another took back up a few rooms down, and the two of them listened until even the volume of Dexter’s expletives had faded out.
Something that could’ve been a clearing throat but wasn’t came from behind her.
Valkyrie turned with a big smile and her hands clasped behind her head like a girl surrendering to arrest. “My fans,” she offered cheerily, “they’re a dedicated lot. They can't be fully blamed. I forgive them when they're not being smacked around.”
Skulduggery was adjusting his tie. “I think I saw one going through your bins earlier. It was peculiar enough that I assumed he had a good reason and left him to it.”
“Dedicated.”
“He was singing the absolute poorest rendition of Once Upon a Dream I have ever heard.”
“Bless.”
“Quite,” he agreed. He undid his tie altogether, rolled it into an economically tight cylinder and placed it in a suit pocket. “You do seem to attract an odd sort, Miss Cain.”
Valkyrie huffed. “Hah. You should meet my partner, ba dum tisss. Hah…” she trailed off, and whined vaguely before letting her arms and neck droop. “Oh my God, I forgot how tired I was. I am so tired. Oh my God.”
“I’m gathering that,” he said, tenderly not drawing attention to her terrible joke. “I should let you rest.”
She blinked forcibly. “I’ll walk you out, then. Being the reliable hostess I turned out to be and all.”
Skulduggery inclined his head and took the arm she proffered to him with an air of propriety that bordered on daintiness and Valkyrie scoffed and looped them properly. The walk to her front hall involved one third of a dancefloor and a corner. They got there and she looked back the way they’d come and then glanced proudly at her partner.
“You did a fantastic job,” he told her.
She nodded in agreement.
He stepped out and was swapped for a wash of cold night air that stole inside and soothed in a way that made Valkyrie aware of just how sore she was. She leant her head against the doorframe and groaned.
Skulduggery paused to examine her. “Are you going to make it up to bed alright?”
Valkyrie peeled open an eye and heaved up a brow. “Are you offering a directorial, Mister Man? Because I was lead to believe you were a gentleman, and am aptly scandalised.”
“Is that so?”
She yawned. “Scandalised.”
He preened. "Very good. I had an enjoyable evening also.”
Valkyrie pushed upright and stretched with a chuckle. “Yeah,” she said. “Hey. Hey, you should come again some time.”
Skulduggery said nothing, but the masked head tilted at her and she could tell he was smiling. She smiled back. They stood there, smiling.
He broke off with a neat little half-bow. “Until then, Miss Cain.”
“Oh, Valkyrie, please.” She’d picked up an English accent at some point apropos of nothing but sleep deprivation, and the same explanation could and would be given her part in what happened next.
And first of all, she curtsied.
Again Skulduggery paused before taking a step. “Was that a curtsey?”
She said, “No.”
“That was a curtsey.”
“It wasn’t.”
“You curtsied to me.”
“I didn’t.”
Skulduggery laughed. “That was terrible. Dear God, it was like an inexplicably well-dressed orangutan being shot with a tranquiliser but remaining valiantly on its feet.”
“Did… you just call me a chimp…”
Skulduggery stopped laughing and said very quickly, “No. No, I don't believe so. And in any world that you were, you would be a valiant and extremely well-dressed one. The absolute most beautiful chimp.”
“That’s… really not a compliment.”
“It is,” he insisted. “I promise.”
Valkyrie raised her chin. “It better be. Because, Man, at this present moment I am a lady.”
“You are.”
“A beautiful and valiant and well-dressed lady, goddammit.”
“You are.”
“And you are still on my porch.”
“I – am.” He glanced around himself. “Yes. Sorry.”
Valkyrie’s head lowered and she looked at him covertly from under her lashes. “Do you want to try that again?”
“Very much so.” He gave the effect of clearing his throat once more, motioning as though a high-end theatre audience was gathered in the empty hall behind her and dipping grandly into a full and shameless bow. “Miss Cain,” he professed, “it has been a pleasure.”
“You’re damn straight,” is what Valkyrie was about to say, before she didn’t because Skulduggery moved in close and ducked his head and kissed her on the hand.
Or what amounted to it, anyway; the fingers that had taken hers were thin and rigid as a door handle where her loose knuckles curled around them, begging just enough pressure to hold her against his mouth – or what amounted to that. The bone was impersonally unyielding where his teeth pressed into the soft skin on the back of her palm and the pressure remained oddly steady because Skulduggery appeared to have remembered himself somewhere along the way and completely frozen.
The material strips of his costume didn’t chafe or anything, Valkyrie noted, and thought dimly that they must have a weirdly high threadcount and wondered if Skulduggery splashed out for designer medical supplies and concluded that, probably. Her free hand had come up to rest randomly on her own face and in a clinical sort of way she also thought that simple teeth would feel better on her warm skin, but.
Whatever.
Skulduggery seemed to have gone into some state of shock. He remained bowed over like someone paying tribute, or perhaps trying to convince themselves that their situation would be resolved on its own if they just remained very still. Valkyrie wiggled the fingers he held in his.
He came up at once and her eyes met his two layers of not-face.
She tilted her head.
“I’m sorry,” he told her, unstilted momentarily from force of reflex. “I’m sorry. I – forgot myself, I–”
“Ah, chill,” Valkyrie cut in a little drowsily, flipping her right hand over and dropping her left to catch his before he could retract it so that she held his hand thoughtlessly in both of hers. “Look,” she shrugged. “Look, it’s fine–”
And without thinking she brought the gloved hand to her mouth and kissed it. She could feel the bones under the leather on her lips, sharply jointed and hard spaced and really perfectly alright. It was a little sweeter than she’d meant it to be, though – she’d meant to make one of those loud mmmwww-wahcking sounds but had forgotten halfway. She made up for it by returning her hands to her sides with a jaunty slap. “It’s fine,” she shrugged again.
For a few moments Skulduggery’s arm remained suspended in the space between them. It took a while before he lowered it. Then it was manoeuvred as though he wasn’t quite sure it was still attached to the rest of him.
Only then did he remembere to nod. It took another while before his head stopped bobbing, and he was left staring.
Valkyrie arched her eyebrows bemusedly and Skulduggery started as though woken from a doze. The cloth around his jaw tautened and then slackened as he made to speak but didn’t. Tautened and slackened again. Remained slack.
He made a vague motion towards the car, as if asking permission. Valkyrie nodded helpfully.
Skulduggery took the first step down unsurely but hastened from every one after that and didn’t look back all the way. When he was almost to the car, Valkyrie saw his left hand come up to press haltingly on the lower half of his skull.
He opened the driver’s side door left-handed and got in.
He hadn’t so much as fastened his seatbelt before Valkyrie was hopping into the passenger side.
She made herself comfortable and he watched her do it, almost trapped his fingers in the belt catch. “And what,” he asked carefully, “are we doing now?”
She strapped herself in. “Escaping.”
He nodded. “Escaping what?”
“Clean-up duty. And occultists, I guess? There are so many corners in that house, like for real.” Her mouth skewed quizzically before relaxing. Her bare feet went to the dash. “You’re rescuing me anyway. Cheers.”
“You are most welcome,” he said automatically. “Am I?”
“Welcome? Sure.”
“Rescuing you. Aiding, abetting and accompanying you in your daring bid for freedom.”
“Oh,” Valkyrie interrupted brightly, “oh, there’s a word for that – uh–”
Skulduggery supplied, “Eloping.”
“That’s the one." She snapped her fingers, and turned with renewed laziness to look at him.
Skulduggery looked away from her and cleared that throat he didn’t have. Valkyrie was so cat-like she may well have kept the mask.
“So,” continued the prolific detective after pulling out of her expansive driveway was done consuming absolutely all of his attention, “that’s it, is it? I really do feel as though a person should be consulted before clichés suchlike spiriting women off from their houses and earthly responsibilities in the dead of night following a whirlwind evening of romance are sprung upon them.”
Valkyrie gave him an exaggeratedly unimpressed up-and-down glance, settling back. “Is that what you call it?”
Skulduggery bristled and then tried to pretend he hadn’t.
“The Invisible Man,” he informed her emphatically, “isn’t an expert on the finer points of social practice. And acts involving whirls of any kind are off-limits for the moment anyway, as you, Miss Cain, are under strict instruction to rest.”
“But nobody specified where. And will you take off those bandages, Mister Pleasant?” she managed, though a distinctly un-kitten-like yawn. Her eyes had already closed and her head had come to rest on the Bentley’s window. “I want to go home.”