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It’s a dark, rainy Wednesday, and honestly, Skulduggery feels like he should’ve expected everything. Because Wednesdays have always been strange. If something weird is going to happen, it’s going to happen on a Wednesday. You can be sure of that.
First of all, there’s a knock on the door, which is strange in and of itself.
Skulduggery talks to about exactly five people nowadays, all of whom he sees exclusively at the Sanctuary, and none of whom are the knocking type.
So he looks up from the case files he’s got spread on the floor, wondering if he’d imagined it. He sits crosslegged on the floor, with his back to the couch, and it’s dark. This particular living room is lit only by the tall lamp over his head, and his body casts strange shadows on the carpet beneath him. He listens, reads the air briefly, but gets nothing but the walls and the couch and the sound of rain.
What time is it anyway? Too late for knocking, that’s for sure. Too late for anything, really. He ought to go to bed, or whatever it is he does now. Meditation has been…difficult lately. His mind feels calloused; full of spots that are sore, empty, that won’t quiet when he wants them to.
So, he works, at least that’s one thing he still trusts himself to do well.
He’s already distracted himself and returns to the files when the knock comes again, more insistent this time. He sits up, regarding the entryway with suspicion. For the briefest of moments he entertains the impossible, but squashes the thought, quick and well-practiced. He’s spent a lot of nights waiting. He’s good at this now. He knows better.
Skulduggery stands and crosses out of the room to the entryway as the knocking starts again. He taps his collarbones and feels the cold façade wash over his skull. He’s ready to turn away a pizza delivery boy with the wrong address, or to shut the door in the face of a salesperson.
He’s not ready for her.
Her. There. In the rain.
Dark hair wet and dripping. Dark eyes looking darker than he remembers. There’s a duffel bag over her shoulder, and her clothes are nondescript, practical.
He feels his façade disappearing just as quickly as it came. He doesn’t have the focus for it anymore. He doesn’t have focus for anything but her. Nothing but—
“Valkyrie,” he says.
The rain fills the silence between them. Her eyes meet the spaces where his should be cautiously.
“Can I come in?”
“I don’t know,” he muses at her, and he’s a little surprised at himself. Does he dare to test the water so quickly?
“Skulduggery for fuck’s sake I’m soaking.”
“Exactly. I just had new carpet put in.”
Could it be this easy?
“Like hell you did.”
“You’ll ruin it.”
Could it be this easy?
“Skul…”
And then he knows.
The last five years hit him in that one word. Her voice is tired, older. Perhaps everything else about her appears the same, but that voice betrays her. So he steps aside, opening the door wide enough for Valkyrie to enter. Neither of them says a word, and the rain rushes in the silence.
She slips past him, dumps her bag in the hall, and takes off her boots. Skulduggery shuts the door, then turns to help her with her coat, which is big and sturdy, but well-worn. She flicks the hood down and his hands go to her shoulders—
And she flinches away so violently he might as well have shocked her.
They both freeze for a moment. Skulduggery imagines all those words they haven’t spoken filling the foot of space between them. He steps back.
“Sorry,” she says, almost a whisper.
“No,” Skulduggery starts, but doesn’t finish. He isn’t sure where he was going with it anyway.
No, it’s my fault. No, it’s fine. No, don’t apologize.
She shrugs the raincoat off, leaves it dripping on a hook by the door. Skulduggery watches her cross through the living room and down the hallway to the bathroom. She steps inside and then shuts the door behind her with a definitive thunk.
He sees the light come on under the door, hears the shower start, and imagines a deep sigh leaving the lungs he doesn’t have.
When she’s ready, she’ll be ready.
But in the meantime, Valkyrie Cain is taking a shower, and Skulduggery Pleasant has files to review. So he sits back down on the floor and listens to the sound of the plumbing in the walls, the rain, and something inside him breaking apart in the best and worst way possible.
When the door opens again Skulduggery is still staring at the same goddamn report. He tries to trick himself into focusing back on the work, but instead he’s listening to her footsteps down the hall. They’re too quiet for any other ears, but he knows that gait, he knows the way those feet sound in this house.
They come down the hall and part of him is amazed she’s still here. She’s real and tall and she steps into the living room, just off from the pool of light cast by the lamp. She must’ve found her old room, because she’s dressed in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that he’d kept there.
She doesn’t mention it, he doesn’t bring it up, but he knows that she knows how long those clothes have been here. They don’t look right on her anymore, for some reason.
The pile of damp clothes in her arms is dripping onto the floor, as is her long, dark hair, which she’s left loose down her back. Skulduggery has half a mind to scold her; he has half a mind to do a lot of things. But he stays quiet, just watches.
“I take it you still don’t have a washer and dryer?” She asks, looking at Skulduggery with the faintest of smiles. But it fades slowly as he stays silent.
“What?” She demands.
“What?” He responds.
“You’re being weird.”
He tilts his head. “How so?”
“You’re…quiet,” she says, making a face. “You’re never quiet. I don’t like it.” She goes back to the entryway, returns with her rain jacket added to her soggy pile, and stands at the opposite end of the living room, regarding him with a tight expression.
“I guess I just don’t have much to say,” he says at last.
“Oh?” Valkyrie balks, laughing in a way that clearly shows she isn’t amused. “After five years? Five years I’ve been gone and you don’t have much to say?”
“Valkyrie—”
“No welcome back?” She prompts. “No lecture? No angry tirade? Ask me where I’ve been? You’re just gonna let me in like some stray dog off the street?”
“I did say you were going to ruin the carpet.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“You were also the one who invited yourself into my shower.”
“We both know I’m the only one who’s ever used it!”
“Still…”
She makes a frustrated noise and strides back down the hall. Skulduggery hears the door to her old room open; a door he hasn’t touched in five years. He fights the strangest sense that he’s fallen asleep and woken to find he missed half of the film he was watching.
What happened? How did we get here? Who are you?
She comes back through the living room without the clothes, brutally ignores his arrangement of files, and enters the kitchen. The lone light above the kitchen table clicks on and Skulduggery hears the fridge open.
“How old is this pizza?”
“Old enough.”
The fridge shuts and the microwave beeps. Skulduggery debates for a moment, before abandoning his file on the floor and going to the wall that divides the living room from the kitchen. He leans against it and watches her with folded arms as she takes a plate from one of the cupboards.
“What do you want me to say?” He asks. His tone isn't accusatory; it's an honest question.
“Maybe that you missed me, for starters,” she says, opening a drawer and pointedly not turning to look at him.
“Of course I missed you.”
“That doesn’t count!” She snaps, shutting the drawer with a bang.
The two of them stand in the loud silence that follows, Valkyrie braced on the kitchen counter and Skulduggery leaning on the wall. He hears her sniff, sees her hand come to her face and scrub. When she turns around it might just be the light, but her eyes are shining.
“I’m sorry,” she says, laughing weakly. She wipes at her eyes again before looking at him. “I had this idea about how this would go. Had it all planned out, you know, with a speech everything.”
“You can do it now, if you want,” Skulduggery offers.
Valkyrie shakes her head, looks away.
“I’m sure it was great,” he says.
She makes a noise that could be a laugh, or a sob. “It was pretty shit, really.”
“Can I,” he starts and she glances at him again. Her eyes makes something inside him trip, so he starts again. “Can I give you a hug?”
She nods.
So he does. He discovers that the space between them is not, in fact, the large body of water he imagined it to be, and crosses it with ease. But the closer he gets the more and more Valkyrie seems like a wild animal trapped up against the bars of its cage, so he stops. She looks at him, her expression somewhere between a question mark and a glare.
“Valkyrie,” he says quietly, “If you’re not comfortable I—”
But he’s cut off by her embrace, sudden, violent, and determined. She crashes into him, a swimmer taking their first dive into cold, deep water. Arms encompass ribcage, hands fist in shirt, head buries into sternum. For a moment Skulduggery’s own arms seem to forget what to do, suspended by his sides until slowly they find their way around her.
And at first she’s all held breath and tensed shoulders, but somewhere in the middle she softens. She’s heavy and warm against his cold frame. And now Skulduggery can be sure. She’s alive. She’s real.
“Are you mad at me?” She asks as the microwave whirrs in the background. Her words are muffled by the fabric of his shirt.
“No,” Skulduggery says.
How could I be?
“Okay,” she says, and then, after a moment, “You know, I really didn’t expect you to still be here.”
“Where else did you think I’d go?”
The microwave dings.
“Dunno. Roarhaven?”
“I prefer not to live in active construction zones,” he responds, and she gives a small laugh. He wonders if she can hear the words he didn’t say.
Of course I’m still here. Where else could I go? What if you came back? What if you came here tonight and I was gone? What if I missed you? I couldn’t afford to miss you.
“Is this getting weird?” She asks.
“Probably,” he says.
“My pizza’s done.”
“That it is.”
“You can let go now.”
He leaves her to her pizza and goes back to the living room and his nest of papers. When she comes in she has two slices of pizza, one in her hand, on her way to her mouth, the other on a plate. She leans against the wall that divides the kitchen from the living room, regarding Skulduggery placidly. He regards her right back and she’s the first one to look away.
She steps gingerly through the maze of files this time, coming to sit on the couch behind Skulduggery. She watches over his shoulder, her hair dripping, and he twists to look back at her. He tilts his head.
“You’re still wet, you know,” he says.
“I know.”
“You’re ruining the couch.”
“It’s seen worse.”
Another long pause. There seems to be so many of them, so Skulduggery forces himself to fill this one.
“Do you…want me to ask you where you’ve been?”
Valkyrie seems to contemplate this for a moment, taking another bite of her pizza. “Not really,” she answers.
“A lecture, then?”
“God, no.”
“Good, I don’t have anything prepared.”
She smirks. “Oh I’m sure you’d think of something.”
Skulduggery hums thoughtfully in response and turns away again. There’s rustling behind him and he suddenly feels a weight on his head, compressing his spine, soft and warm.
“Are you—?”
“Resting my chin on your head? Yes.”
“Ah.”
“What’ve you got here?”
“Purple flesh-eating fungus occupying a few flats in downtown Dublin,” Skulduggery says, passing a photograph up to his partner, resting oh-so casually above him. “Might be faeries.”
“Seriously?”
Skulduggery nods, feels her head move along with him.
“Can I see the report?”
He passes that up to her, too, and soon the words flow more easily, time starts passing in normal intervals. She stays perched behind him on the couch and Skulduggery feels like the boy from the myth. Orpheus. Orpheus and Eurydice, that's the one. He can’t look back, or else the girl he went to save will disappear back into the hell he tried so desperately to free her from.
She hangs upside down off the couch, drums her fingertips restlessly on the back of his skull, and goes back into the kitchen for more pizza, but he only watches out of the corner of his eye.
When she’s ready, he reminds himself. She’ll be ready. Because he knows that nothing is better. He knows that those five years are still there in the space between them. Someday they’ll introduce themselves to each other again, but not tonight.
Tonight is for pretending.
And they do it so very well.