Chapter Text
Not a day went by when Holly didn’t curse the name Lucy Carlyle.
It wasn’t anything personal. The other girl was clearly a damned good agent with an exceedingly rare amount of Talent. And, after the incident with the poltergeist, Holly had thought Lucy was finally starting to warm up to her.
But then Lucy had left, and everything had fallen apart. The house was quiet. George was glum. Lockwood was, frankly, borderline suicidal. No one ever said it out loud, but Holly knew both boys blamed her a little for Lucy’s departure. The two of them had never gotten along together and Holly knew that, if they’d been given the choice, George and Lockwood would have chosen to keep Lucy over her in a heartbeat.
But Lucy hadn’t given them a choice. She had just announced, calmly and firmly, that she was done at Lockwood and Co. No matter how much the rest of them protested, she just kept repeating, in that same infuriatingly calm tone, that she would be leaving the agency.
So now everyday when Holly arrived at Portland Row at ten am exactly, she got out only three mugs when she set the kettle boiling and started on the never ending pile of dishes. Then she headed upstairs to knock on the boys’ doors, but skipped heading up to the attic to poke her head over the railing and call out to a girl who no longer slept there.
And when she’d taken her tea to the basement, gotten the laundry running, and started going through the messages on the voicemail, there was no irritatingly irate northerner stabbing the hanging straw dummies in the corner. There was, however, Lockwood. While Holly scribbled down notes in the logbook, sorted the mail, and made return calls, he would usually slump down into the basement, rarely even bothering to grunt out a greeting, and turn on the steam-jet system. He would spend the next two hours or so working his rapier, glowering furiously the whole time, before disappearing again.
She and George would have a quiet lunch in the kitchen, often punctuated by Lockwood rattling around in the cabinets and glaring at them whenever they dared to so much as chuckle.
And so on and so forth.
George was withdrawn, Lockwood was bitter and sullen, and Holly found herself trying to fill in a Lucy-shaped gap, and not doing a particularly good job of it.
She joined them more often for cases now, too. They really needed another operative at full agent status, but Holly didn’t dare mention that. She worried it would make Lockwood finally lose grip of whatever shred of sanity he was still holding on to.
So she swallowed her fear, and spent her nights in frosty haunted houses, rather than safely wrapped up in Naomi’s arms.
It was after one such job, while Holly was waiting for her night cab to arrive at Portland Row, that she noticed the red light flashing on the voicemail machine. That was odd, she thought. There’d been no messages when they’d left Portland Row around nine that evening, and it was now well after midnight. Who would have called that late? The only reason she could come up with was that perhaps someone was suffering an urgent psychical dilemma and needed help right away.
It was selfish, and awful, but Holly was so, so tired, and if it truly was urgent then whoever it was would have called another agency and gotten help when Lockwood and Co. didn’t pick up the phone. Anything else that it could have been could wait till morning, so she pulled her coat on and left, leaving that little red light flashing in the hallway behind her.
It was 10:37 the next morning when she finally sank down into her desk chair, tea in hand, and clicked the play button on the tape.
“This is an urgent message for Mr. A.J. Lockwood,” a tinny voice with a thick accent said. “Sir, I’m calling from the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Gateshead to inform you that one of your operatives, a Ms. … Lucy Carlyle, was brought in to A&E in serious condition around half ten tonight. She has not as of yet regained consciousness and is being assessed…”
The voice kept speaking, but Holly couldn’t hear it, sitting frozen with her tea halfway to her lips. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The thought of Lucy, alone and dying, all the way up in Gateshead, for some godforsaken reason, sent shivers down her spine.
And then, even more bone chillingly, she realized that she was going to have to be the one to tell Lockwood. Disturbing him had become a risky business at the best of times. And this was most certainly not the best of times. So Holly took a deep fortifying breath before knocking on his door.
“Not now!” he called through it. Holly screwed up her eyes and leaned her forehead against the door, steeling herself.
“Lockwood,” she tried. “Can you come to the door? It’s urgent.”
“What is it?” he shouted, irate.
“Please, can you open the door?” She took another deep breath. “It’s about Lucy.”
***
“Tell me again.” He said, eyes carved out over ever-deeper circles. They were sitting across from each other on the train, George at his elbow. Upon hearing that Lucy was in hospital, he had shoved past Holly and clattered down the steps, tie undone and hair a mess. When she’d caught up with him out on the kerb, a bewildered George trailing behind them, he’d been in the middle of hailing a cab.
“Where are you going?” she demanded, slightly out of breath.
“The hospital.”
“Hospital?” George had echoed in alarm. “What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s Lucy,” Holly whispered, and then turned to face Lockwood. “You don’t even know what hospital she’s at! Lockwood!” He’d succeeded at flagging down a cabbie, and was standing in the street. “She’s not even in London!”
He’d gotten into the cab anyway, practically ordering her to get them where they needed to go.
Which was how they’d gotten here, halfway through a three hour train ride, which Lockwood had spent alternately glowering out the window and interrogating Holly.
“She came in through accident and emergency last night, along with some others in the team she was assisting. Apparently she still has a Lockwood identification tag in her wallet, because we were her emergency contact. She was, apparently, in serious condition.”
“Serious condition. What’s that mean?”
“I don’t know, Lockwood. They said she was still unconscious, but that was hours ago.”
“How can you not know?” he was leaning forwards, his dark eyes furious.
“Lockwood,” George said, warningly. “It’s not Holly’s fault. She’s just repeating what the hospital said in the voicemail.”
“It damn well is her fault!” Lockwood snapped, rounding on George. “That phone call came in twelve hours ago! We should have been headed out to Newcastle the moment we got back from that job last night!”
“That’s not fair,” Holly said, trying to keep her voice even. “I’ll let it slide, because I know how worried you are, but none of this is my fault!”
He opened his mouth to respond, but George elbowed him and they all fell back into a stony silence.
It was midafternoon by the time they disembarked in Newcastle and then they had to take a cab across the river and up the hill to the QE.
Lockwood marched through the hospital until he found a poor, easily intimidated student nurse, who he growled at until she led them through the maze of hallways, scurrying nervously, and deposited them in front of a nurses’ station in paediatrics. Time was, he would have flirted and coaxed that information out of the nurse. Holly hadn’t seen him flirt in ages. Well, in four months and twelve days, give or take.
He was wandering down the hall, now, poking his head in and out of the bays, searching for Lucy. Things only got worse when they rounded the corner and came face to face with Quill Kipps.
“Ah, Tony,” he said, with a cocky grin. “Finally made it, I see.”
“Kipps,” Lockwood growled. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“I brought her in, didn’t I?” Kipps said. “Ms. Carlyle has been contracting with Fittes, lately. Think she’ll sign a contract with us before the year’s out, to be honest.”
“Oh, so you’re the one who got her hurt, then,” George said. “Nice going.”
Lockwood was seconds away from drawing his rapier. “Where. Is. She.”
“Don’t worry, Tony, she’s got me looking out for her now.” Kipps said with a smirk.
Lockwood released the hilt of his rapier and opted instead to grab Kipps by the collar and slam him into the wall. “Oh, so it’s your fault she’s in here, then.”
Holly decided to leave them to it, going through the door Kipps had just come out of. The bay was dark with four beds divided by curtains. The two closest to the doors were empty, a third held a boy Holly vaguely recognized as Ned Shaw’s replacement on Kipps’ team, and the fourth held Lucy, looking small and breakable swaddled in light blue hospital cotton.
She was covered in scratches and bruises, and the circles under her eyes looked positively chronic. There was an IV taped into one hand, and bandages wrapped around the other, not quite hiding the swelling that was typical of ghost touch.
There was an empty hard plastic chair next to the bedside, and Holly sank into it. She could hear Lockwood and Kipps shouting at each other in the hallway, still. She felt wrong sitting here. It shouldn’t have been her. It should have been George, or Lockwood. Everyone knew Holly was the reason Lucy had left to begin with, no matter how much she denied it.
She stared at Lucy’s pale unmoving face for a few minutes, and then cast around for something to do. Lucy’s chart was hooked over the end of the bed, and though she knew it was a massive violation of privacy, Holly grabbed it and flipped it open to the first page. Ghost touch, various bruises and lacerations, a few cracked ribs from a fall. There had been some consideration of amputation of the left hand, but a decision had been reached to watch and see for a further twenty four hours, and signs were positive that it wouldn’t be needed.
Lucy didn’t look good, even without taking all that into consideration. She looked drawn, exhausted, even in sleep. Her teeth worried at her lip, and she trembled under the thin blankets. Holly couldn’t help but reach out and sweep some of the tangled hair out of her face.
Her skin was warm, despite her shivers, and she was covered in a thin sheen of sweat. Lockwood and Kipps were getting progressively louder in the hall, but she knew that he’d been in sooner or later. Lucy would hate being seen like this, especially by Lockwood.
She was already halfway to the sink before she’d even made up her mind. She wet a wad of paper towels and returned to the bedside, gently wiping the sweat and grime from Lucy’s face, careful of her split lip. She did the same for her chapped and cracked hands. Her hair was more or less a lost cause, full of rats' nests and clumped together with dried blood, but Holly smoothed it down, and tucked the worst of it under her head.
She hid the chart under Lucy’s pillow as well. Reading it would only upset Lockwood further. Then she tucked Lucy’s bandaged hand under the blankets, laying it across her stomach where it would be more or less hidden. She doubted Lockwood would go fishing around under the blankets, but then she had an image of him just crawling straight into the bed with Lucy, and thought that maybe all of her efforts had been for naught.
She was considering pulling out her makeup bag and seeing what else she could fix up when a sudden silence registered, and she turned to see Lockwood standing stricken in the doorway.
It was probably just as well. The products Holly had that would have done the most good: the color correctors, foundations, and concealers, where all in her own skin tone anyway, she had nothing even remotely pale enough for Lucy’s northern complexion. Besides, Lucy would probably take being made up in her sleep by Holly of all people as the highest of invasions.
She stood, walked to the doorway, and steered Lockwood by the shoulders to sit in the hard plastic chair she’d just been in.
“She’ll be okay,” she murmured. “She hasn’t woken up yet, she’s sedated still, but they’re planning to let her go tomorrow or the next day. “
Lockwood was shaking almost as bad as Lucy was.
Holly sighed and left them to it, heading off to look for George. He’d probably located the hospital cafeteria by now, and Holly would die for a cup of tea, even the weak hospital stuff.