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One time he woke alone:
It was the smell of the smoke he noticed first, shortly followed by the heat. Placed right in the middle of it, tied to a stake as if it were medieval times, Skulduggery could not only feel the heat, he could smell it too. He couldn’t tell what made it most difficult to breathe, if it was the pressure of the heat or the dark smoke rising, obscuring everything from his view.
Maybe it was the fear.
He didn’t want to die. There’d been times after his wife and child died as innocents in the bloody war when he had wished to join them - but he didn’t want to die.
Now he couldn’t breathe, smoke, fear and heat choking the very life out of him, and all he wished for was to live another day, and see another sunrise (and another after that). He knew he wouldn’t, so all he could hope for as he gasped for air that wouldn’t come was that he would suffocate before the flames licking at his feet rose any higher.
As things went dark, Skulduggery shot upright in bed, eyes wide open and staring into nothingness. He pulled his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them and broke into tears, great heaving sobs ripping out of him. It took everything in him to not throw up everything he had eaten since he regained a body - it hadn’t been long, but he knew that throwing up was something he wanted to avoid, even if it had been a century since he last did it.
He thought he would need a shower, and a glass of water wouldn’t hurt, but even the thought of standing up from the bed made his head spin.
Skulduggery had prided himself on being self-reliant, he didn’t need anyone else for anything, but right then he couldn’t help but wish for someone to be there for him. Pull their fingers through his hair, their hand on his back, just something to ground him when century-old memories of smoke woke him up and pulled him under. Valkyrie usually did it, but when Valkyrie was home Skulduggery rarely had any nightmares.
For all that she was an uncontrollable, unstoppable force, she was the sole counteragent to his anxiety and panic attacks, the sheer presence of her in their bed enough to ensure he rarely woke up in the middle of the night, gasping for breath and straining against long-since burnt restraints.
As it was, all he had was a cold, empty bed, and the tear streaming down his face.
One time Ghastly was there:
Ghastly had never been a heavy sleeper, something he was grateful for when he slept over at Skulduggery’s place. Before he regained his body, when the nights were for meditation, Ghastly had woken the moment Skulduggery rose from his meditative state, fit for anything whether it had been one hour or ten.
Now, Skulduggery and Valkyrie sharing a mansion, sharing Gordon’s mansion of all places, had not changed anything. Ghastly still slept in a room close by, despite the sheer vastness of the house and the plethora of free guest rooms - the whole Eastern wing was seemingly guest quarters, but so far none of them had figured out quite which part of the sprawling behemoth of a house was the Eastern wing.
Valkyrie was off on a trip to somewhere she hadn’t specified, but even her palpable worry had been unable to hide the small, mysterious smile lurking around the corners of her mouth.
It had been the day after she left she’d called, ready to beg him to stay at the mansion while she was gone - she’d talked to Skulduggery and something seemed amiss. Had it been slightly less important, she said, she would have ignored the appointment and turned back home, but she couldn’t.
Ghastly didn’t hesitate before he insisted that of course, he’d head right on over, and as he heard the door to their bedroom creak open, he was glad he had.
He shivered as he sat up and swung his legs out of bed, feet unerringly finding his slippers before the cool floor could nip at them. To complete the picture, he drew his plaid dressing gown around him, to cover the pinstripe pyjamas he always wore to bed.
Heading on downstairs, he wasn’t surprised to find Skulduggery hunched over the kitchen table, nose almost in a mug of tea. It did surprise him slightly to see a matching mug on the other side of the table, seemingly doctored to his liking.
“You can’t sleep through someone breathing in the next county over, what would make me think this would be any more difficult?” Skulduggery didn’t have the voice for sounding properly grouchy, too deep and smooth the convey the raspiness required to sound grumpy more than anything else.
“Can I do anything?” Ghastly said mildly, taking a sip of the tea that tasted just like he wanted it to.
“No,” Skulduggery replied simply, shrugging his shoulders in a fluid movement. Had Ghastly been slightly more gullible, or slightly more unfamiliar with Skulduggery, he thought it might even have worked - the only visible sign of his lack of proper sleep was the tightness at the corner of his eyes. Ghastly didn’t deign to offer a verbal answer, just raised an eyebrow and waited. It didn’t take Skulduggery long to buckle. “Fine. I have - nightmares. It’s not turning out optimal for my sleep schedule.”
“Nightmares? Are they… new?”
“It’s the war, it’s my death, it’s mostly all memories I have lived with for so long that living with them for the rest of my life won’t pose too much of a challenge.” Skulduggery sounded almost glib as he spoke, but not once did he lift his gaze from the mug of tea in front of him.
“Did you have them when you were meditating?” Ghastly thought it might be best to not start unravelling the biggest knot first - if you can, always start on the outside and work inwards his father said about knots (and cakes, but Ghastly thought that might be too much of a nonsequitur for the current heavy topic).
“I could… steer my thoughts away from it, or I would force myself to wake from the meditative sessions, so I never had to - experience them, as such.” Skulduggery hesitated for a moment before throwing a glance at Ghastly and continuing. “When Valkyrie’s here, things are… better, for me. She grounds me, somehow.”
“Do you want to talk about it? Troubles shared are troubles halved,” he offered, not expecting Skulduggery to even bother with a reply, but all he got was a long, searching look before Skulduggery started talking.
One time Valkyrie woke him up:
She had never loved being away from home, even when she was a child. In later years, home had switched from being a place to being a person, and when she had to leave her home, her person, her base mood was annoyance and irritation.
In this particular situation, she had had to leave him at the mansion, but she still couldn’t help but heave a sigh of relief when she saw him in the bed. The relief lasted until she noticed how tensely he held himself, the rapid breathing truly telling her how bad off he was.
Valkyrie dropped her bag on the floor right beside the door, shedding jacket and clothes on her way to the bed, and crawled into bed right beside Skulduggery the instant she could. Plastering herself to his back, arms as tight around him as she could manage, he somehow managed to impossibly tense up even more before her presence truly registered. As he relaxed, she could feel what felt like several weeks of pent-up tenseness pour off of him.
“Hey,” she murmured, hooking her chin over his shoulder, mouth right by his ear. It was still unusual, to see ears and eyes and hands, but not in an unpleasant way. She had loved Skulduggery long before he got a body back, and she expected to keep loving him forever. “How are you doing?”
“Much better now that you’re here, “ Skulduggery said back, neatly sidestepping the question in a move Valkyrie decided to remember - both for her own use and to figure out the proper way to prod the question more. He turned over and as he enveloped Valkyrie in his arms, that was the moment she was home .
“Don’t you evade the question, I want to know - are you having nightmares?” She pulled back enough that she could see his face, but he wouldn’t quite meet her eyes.
“I - yes, they have been rather bad for a little while now,” he ruefully admitted, a rough catch to his voice she wasn’t used to hearing. He leaned his forehead down to rest against hers, eyes closed as if it made it easier to talk. “I am speaking to Ghastly about it, but I think I’ll find myself sleeping much better again now.”
“Hey, don’t sound like that - nightmares are nothing to be ashamed about, and we can probably count ourselves lucky we’re able to sleep at all considering our lives,” she replied, voice as gentle as she could ever be, carding the fingers of one hand through his hair. “Is there anything I can do?”
“This,” he replied instantly, hand reaching out to grab hers. “As long as you’re here, the nightmares aren’t as tough to bear, if I even have them. As long as I have got you in my arms, I can rest easy.”
“I do hope you mean the both of us,” Valkyrie said, trailing her hand down from his hair to cup his cheek. The adoration shining out of her eyes could have made a lesser man buckle, but Skulduggery would bear it joyfully.
“The… both of you?” he replied, the words not computing. When she used the hand clasped in his to pull his hand down to cup her stomach, he felt like he was waking from a nightmare all over again.
“Congratulations, Skul, we’re having a baby.” Valkyrie decided to never let anyone else know of the way his eyes rolled back into his head when the words registered, but just the same she would never let him live it down privately either.