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When he hangs up the phone he just sits there, for a while, in the overly hot front seat of the Bentley. He hadn’t known it was Sunday until she’d told him. Out the closed window he can see mortals walking casually on the footpath; idly, he imagines how casual they’d be if he started driving at them. He reaches for the gearstick but it jams in his hand.
Skulduggery Pleasant sighs. “I’m not actually going to do it.”
After a moment the stick loosens and allows him to slide into drive. He turns the car out onto the road more carefully than he normally would. The drive is silent; nobody is sulking to his left, or making clever quips or … doing anything, at all. If she was here he’d have been forced to open the window and allow the breeze in, or at most turn the air conditioning on. He doesn’t actually have anywhere to go, is happy to waste the time aimlessly, and then the left-hand indicator blinks without him touching it. He goes to click it off but it flicks back after a moment, light flashing, sound intruding. Skulduggery clicks his tongue – or, he makes the noise that would be made if he had a tongue still. But he turns left.
Down a suburban street like any other – it is not, yet, familiar, but he wouldn’t be sent here without reason. Past an oak tree bright with new growth, a house painted yellow. To do anything but continue would be folly – there is usually good reason for her to order him where to go. He passes several blocks and then the indicator comes on again, and he follows that too, and now he knows where they are going.
“Really?” He asks, and he tilts his head at the hoarseness of his own voice.
His affection for his car is easily masked as the idiosyncratic sentiment of an almost broken being. He’s never cared to explain to anyone what this is. But there is a reason deeper than self-indulgence for why he chose to spend so much money and time and patience fixing her up. For one thing, it would be incredibly rude not to. For another, she’s been the one being over the last fifty years that has always had his back.
Even so, it just seems cruel of her to take him here.
The alleyway outside what had once been Ghastly’s shop has not improved with age. There is rubbish, and filthy puddles, and surely if he opens the window the car will reek of liquids unmentionable in under five minutes. Skulduggery does not know how Ghastly’s shop looks now. The car urges him to park, so he does. But he sits, gaze turned inward.
“Are you rubbing it in my face?” He asks at last.
Of course she doesn’t answer; he was not expecting her to. A car that spoke would be simply absurd. The stillness should be something he’s used to, but he’s become accustomed to his space being filled again. Even with Valkyrie across the ocean, it’s a gap he expects to be occupied.
Skulduggery Pleasant isn’t completely oblivious; this is far as she – the car, not Valkyrie – will go to get him to talk. He does not wish to; he will not. How can he explain that tiny sliver of relief within the grief; that Ghastly passed away before he found out all of Skulduggery’s crimes – including the most pertinent, the murder of his mother? How can he face the shame of his own loneliness, his wish for his best friend to return, despite all the harm he caused her? What can he say that will verbalise his current state; the way he stands despite the wreckage and death in his shadow? It’s overwhelming, it’s nothing he or anyone could face alone.
Skulduggery remembers being young and human. Back then, before the war (though premonitions of it were dogging their steps), he had had this arrogant self-certainty that he was on the right path, on the right track, doing what he had to do and doing it well. At the time he had friends mostly unscathed by the malignant desires of the growing enemy, a wife who loved him and who he adored, money enough and people he could rely on. Back then, he is sure, Erskine was unphased by visions of power or righteousness, Hopeless unshattered by the manifestations of their power, a Ghastly who struggled but did not break under the judgement of a thousand different pairs of eyes. His wife was alive; at the time no other option has seemed possible. Ghastly’s mother was giving Skulduggery gentle, stern advice. Then, the baby wasn't even a possibility in anyone's mind.
The car moves forward an inch, despite being in park.
Skulduggery remembers a moment centuries old. It’s something he hasn’t thought about since the trap, since his wife and child’s murder, since his burning. It’s a flash, a bright instant of time. It had been before the war, before their marriage, though by then they’d all known something awful was coming. They had had a dance, the Dublin set, in some mortal hall that Corrival had managed to access. The musical set had been scraped together – other sorcerers who’d known how to sing or play the flute or drums or anything. Skulduggery had danced with Augustus – his wife – while Erskine played the violin on the stage, and Hopeless and Ghastly danced together too. Maybe China had been there, he couldn’t remember now. He’d swung Augustus in the air and she’d done the same to him, and when the dance had finished, people standing still, she’d grabbed his hand. Back then he’d had a face, and so she must have seen the tension seeping off him.
“We’ll work this out,” she’d said quietly, just to him, standing beautiful in her green dress with hands stained from agreements she'd been drafting, “don’t worry, darling, we’ll get through.”
Ghastly had seen the two, the way they were standing, and walked over simply to clap a hand on his back. He’d smiled, gentle, and then criticised Skulduggery’s terrible dancing. Two weeks later, war was officially declared. Augustus, steadfast Augustus who could convince anyone of anything, had worked with Corrival and the rest making strategies; looking after the baby, too. Skulduggery had gone out to the front line. They had both accepted this separation with only some distress - they went where they were needed, where they could help the most. And both of them - their child, too - had died for it. In some selfishness, even now, Skulduggery does not dare think his child's name.
In the car, in Dublin, centuries later, it has started drably to rain. Skulduggery sits, silent, alone, and Valkyrie Cain – or Ghastly Bespoke, were he alive – would have had a hard time making out what he was feeling. It's harder to cry, when you have no tearducts or skin.