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“It’s not that I mind being at your house for a while,” Valkyrie said, as her whole being exuded the exact opposite feeling of not minding. Skulduggery had a feeling that, if her aura could be called anything, it would be called Unwant. He kept silent, eyes on the road, knowing that – with her impatience – she’d keep talking after feeling judged enough. She was looking out the side window, resolutely ignoring him not judging her, but during their partnership, he felt he’d grown quite accomplished at speaking silences. “It’s just – it is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?”
He tilted his head a fraction, still not saying anything, still not looking away from the road.
“I’m just saying.” Out of the corner of his eye socket, he saw her shrug, head still turned away from him. He could see her flexing her fingers, only a hint of movement inside the cast, and hoped she couldn’t read him and his I told you so attitude quite as well as she usually could. He wasn’t holding out much hope. “Oh, take your ‘I told you so’ and shove it, would you?”
He was right to not hope too much.
“I didn’t say anything,” he said, signalling his way out of a roundabout and cheerfully ignoring the angry honks of the driver he accidentally on purpose cut off. “If I had said anything, it would not have been ‘I told you so’, but more ‘maybe you shouldn’t jump out of windows as often as you do’.”
“You didn’t have to say it for me to hear it, and I didn’t jump out of the window! I fell.”
“It was a very gracious…” Skulduggery paused, trying to figure out how to come across as doubtful as he was. He finally settled on “…fall.”
“I tripped on a vase, okay, and then there was a not-optimally placed window, through which I fell.”
“I’d say it looked a lot like a swan dive. It would have been perfectly executed, even, if only the pool had been beneath that particular window.” Valkyrie pursed her lips, looking even more determinedly out the window, and he could almost hear her teeth cracking with how hard she was clenching her jaw. “In fact,” he continued, “if someone’s situational awareness and recollection were better, maybe that same someone wouldn’t be on mandatory health leave for three weeks. But I did not say ‘I told you so’.”
“I hate you so much,” Valkyrie said, smiling pleasantly, staring fixedly out the windscreen. It was as he turned the car off in his driveway, however, that she said something that sent chills down his spine.
“Now that I’m off work for three weeks, however, we – that is, you, because I am handicapped and unable to work – can clean up your house, and decorate for the holidays! It’s only ten days until Christmas!”
If Skulduggery had had eyebrows, they would’ve been twitching. He missed having eyebrows, sometimes. They were a supreme way of showing one’s annoyance, whether that was aimed at a suspect or one’s partner was entirely inconsequential.
***
“If you start with your mess in the kitchen, I’ll start looking for a door delivery service for Christmas trees,” Valkyrie said as soon as she’d hung her coat up – by Valkyrie standards, of course, which meant thrown the coat at the coat rack, filled with the hope it would stick on something - already hauling her phone out of her pocket in preparation for the search.
“My mess? My mess?” Skulduggery wasn’t upset, but he was very incredulous. He probably didn’t manage to convey that to his detective partner in crime (solving), but she was rather good at reading his moods, at least when she wanted to be. “I don’t use the kitchen! I’m a skeleton. I don’t eat!”
Valkyrie turned in the doorway of the living room, raising an eyebrow at him. Once again, he rued the lack of them.
“Of course it’s your mess, it’s in your house, isn’t it?” she countered, voice even.
“You said three days ago that the mess in your house was my problem, since I’m the guest, and the host should never have to clean up anyone’s messes?”
“Hello,” Valkyrie sighed, the sigh accompanied by a despairing head shake. “I’m not a guest here, I’m an invaluable colleague convalescing.”
“This is just because you really hate taking care of the dishes, isn’t it?” If Skulduggery had been physically capable of narrowing his eyes into slits so tiny he couldn’t see anything, he would have. As it was, he had to do the deadpan headtilt (and he disliked how Valkyrie’s descriptions of his body language had snuck their way into his actual language) and hope that the message carried loud and clear.
“…this is only because I hate taking care of the dishes,” she finally admitted, before she turned on her heel and headed into the living room. He felt that the hair flip was a touch too dramatic, but he’d give her points for not using her cast as a reason to avoid doing dishes in a house missing a dishwasher. Considering he knew her as well as he did, he could do a qualified guess that she hadn’t figured out she could use the cast as an excuse just yet.
***
Skulduggery had figured out, after about three plates and one teacup, that if he meditated while doing the dishes, time passed much quicker, and he didn’t have to feel the sensation of the soap clinging to his finger joints. It was a slippery and supremely uncomfortable feeling.
The dishes amounted to a medium-sized mountain, and he wasn’t entirely sure how she could have amassed that many dirty dishes, considering she very rarely visited him, and even more rarely used his kitchen.
When he came out of his trance and found that he’d dried the dishes as well, he started to worry.
If it had been calm enough for him to do the washing up in as much peace as a successful meditation required, something had to have happened.
Skulduggery wasn’t normally a worrier, but he had a strange feeling that Valkyrie had keeled over the instant she set foot in his living room. Valkyrie was, much like mosquitos and children, the kind of being that it was only time to worry when she was quiet.
If he hurried his steps slightly, so as to reach the living room a bit quicker, well, there wasn’t anyone around to see him.
The first thing he saw once he entered the living room was the tree. It was very green, very full of needles – and he could just imagine how they’d feel once they got into his toe joints – and thankfully still in its white netting bag.
The second thing he noticed was that Valkyrie wasn’t dead, only sleeping in a very unflattering position – in one hand she held her phone, her head had tipped back to rest on the back of the sofa, mouth open and emitting a truly rattling snore. He really regretted not having a phone capable of image and video capturing right then.
“What is that?” he said, loudly, and Valkyrie startled awake with a horrendous snort.
“Whu-?” she replied blearily, eyes crossing and head swinging wildly. “Let me at them!”
“I would maybe consider it an enemy – of my joints, if nothing else – but no.” He manfully ignored her various weird noises, all while knowing that had he had the right technology, he would have had blackmail material for the rest of forever just from those three minutes. “The tree. Why is it here?”
“What?” Valkyrie asked, still not entirely awake, before she swung her head around to look at what he pointed to. “That’s a tree!”
“Yes. I can see that. What is the tree doing here?”
“It’s… a Christmas tree?” she said, and while he didn’t look at her – too busy watching the tree to make sure it didn’t advance and attack – he knew exactly which incredulous look she was wearing. Going by Valkyrie’s naming convention, he would call it her ‘Incredulous #3 – my partner is an idiot’ look. “It’s soon Christmas, and I refuse to not have a tree.”
He slowly dragged his eyes from the tree to look at her. She was utterly unrepentant as she shrugged and grinned at him.
“I don’t like trees.”
“Pity! His name is Hubert and he’s here to stay! I ordered him online, they delivered to the door – and once I showed my cast, they even delivered into the room,” she replied, not a single ounce of sympathy in her body, before she got up on her feet to stand in front of the tree christened Hubert. “Come on, help me get the sock off!”
“The… sock?” Skulduggery asked, with the tone of someone wondering who they’d wronged to deserve this kind of living hell.
“The netting thing? We need to get it off, I want to look at Hubert properly!”
He resigned himself to the fact that he’d be spending Christmas with Valkyrie and a tree named Hubert, and headed over to stand next to her.
“I think it looks big. Are you sure it’ll fit in this room?”
“This is where the couch is, we have no choice but to fit it in this room.” He could fairly hear her rolling her eyes at him and his inane questions. “Cut the sock now!”
He cut the sock, and Hubert exploded with the kind of power of expansion usually only seen in a vacuum-packed mattress.
Skulduggery looked at where Hubert was not just brushing the ceiling but had instead bent a good bit down the trunk due to its sheer height. When Hubert was freed from its packaging it had also expanded width-wise, something that had resulted in the couch being shoved a few feet backwards.
From within the mass of pine needles, upturned furniture and displaced books, Skulduggery heard his partner’s voice.
“Hey Skulduggery? I think you ordered a too-big Christmas tree…”