Archive of Our Own ^beta

She kisses George first. Or maybe George kisses her, she isn’t quite sure the way it happens. But they’re at the kitchen table over milky tea (her) and black coffee with four sugars (him) and he says something she can’t remember now but it’s so fucking clever and he looks so proud of himself-

So they kiss. Probably she kisses him, but like she says when she tells it into her tape recorder, she still isn’t sure. What she is sure of is that she can taste the sweet aftertaste of his coffee and that his mouth against hers feels like devotion. 

It’s different than she expected after that because not much changes, which is a blessing and a curse because now a substantial part of her brain is overtaken by the want to kiss him again. She wants to kiss him when he’s scrubbing the oven in that apron he wears. And she wants to kiss him in the archives amongst the smell of paper and burnt coffee. She even wants to kiss him goodnight, when he’s wearing one of his giant shirts and his hair’s all messed up. Except this is a problem because the feeling doesn’t seem to be mutual. 

She retells it to the tape recorder again and again, hoping that maybe one time she’ll tell Norrie and that will be the time she understands it. She’d felt it for a second in their shared breath and the stunned look on his face she was sure was mirrored on her own. It felt like a kiss from one of the cheap paperback romance novels they used to sneak out of the newsagents in their hometown. Like for a second time stopped and there was only them and his hand coming up to her waist and a sort of awareness that the countertop was behind him and she was crowding him into it. 

She knows for sure that he was the one to break the kiss and she had watched as that stunned look shattered and a blush so red it almost looked painful rose up his cheeks, all the way up to the tops of his ears. She’d stepped back as it had happened and the small amount of space that appeared between them was all it took. He’d more or less run from the room, and she was trying, and failing, to not let it hurt her feelings. 

She got the message pretty clear after that so maybe it's for the best that nothing changes. Because maybe the thing that now sits between them is not her kissing him again, instead it’s him never talking to her again and being left in the aftermath like she’s broken a line of filings. Still. She wishes it could be something different because his face the second before the moment broke replays on the back of her eyelids every time she tries to fall asleep. 

It’s like a puzzle where the pieces don’t quite fit back together and she hates that she can’t figure it out. She has to be the one to figure it out because she can’t quite imagine telling bloody Lockwood and holding his hand through his reaction. The thought of telling him actually makes her feel a little sick and she can’t place why, she speaks the feeling softly into the tape, to make sure he can’t hear it if he’s coming up to her door. 

But it isn’t him that comes up to her door. George does, in a buttoned up shirt she’s never seen before and with a picnic basket cradled in his arms. He doesn’t knock, she just turns and he’s there and she finds herself scrambling to put the recorder away. That’s a piece of herself she doesn’t quite want him to have yet, and the indescribable feeling she’s been carrying since the kiss in the kitchen quickly calcifies into anger. 

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you to knock?” He flinches back with her words and that settles the feeling quickly. It isn’t his fault she’s feeling something he isn’t she just wishes he’d look her in the eyes for long enough for her to see the lack of it in his gaze. 

“I’m going to take you on a date.” 

“What are you talking about George?” 

“Well, we kissed-”

“Yea, I know that. And I also know you’ve been pretty much avoiding me for the past four days.” 

“No I-” His voice is loud against the rafters of the loft and he scrubs one of his hands against his face, the picnic basket he’s still holding tipping precariously. “I didn’t mean to do that, I just didn’t do it right that time. Please let me do it right.” 

She doesn’t know what to say in response to the way his voice is shaking and for a few seconds she just looks at him, silence coating the space between them. 

“You kiss someone after a date. Not before. I did it wrong.” There’s a look on his face that she doesn’t recognise but she wants to. She wants to know every expression he can make and every line on his palm. 

“I think you did it perfectly actually.” She does at least recognise relief on his face and that further settles the off centre feeling she’s had for days. “Well you did until you ran off from me.” 

“I really am sorry about that. I realise now that it might have come off a bit…” 

“A bit like you thought you were making a mistake and that you were going to hate me.”

He laughs and it’s a small sound but one she takes a second to appreciate it and the start of a blush it brings with it. “Yea, maybe a bit like that. I’m sorry.” 

It’s then that she makes the decision that she will follow him wherever he leads her. She isn’t sure what it is in that moment that makes her so sure of it but she knows it as certainly as any other fundamental truth. She’s maybe known it for a while now but in the golden afternoon light it settles over her until she knows for sure there was never a chance they would end up any other way. 

She crosses the room until she’s right in front of him and tries not to let a thought of kissing him properly split her attention away. She settles for leaning over the and pressing a fleeting kiss to the bridge of his nose, the edge of the basket pressing uncomfortably into her ribs as she does. He laughs a little more and mumbles something that sounds like impossible under his breath. But she doesn’t kiss him properly, doesn’t want to shake his definition of right from the tracks a second time. She steps back and watches some of the anxiety she can now see he was carrying dissipate until he’s smiling too. 

“So, where are you taking me?” 

It turns out where he’s taking her is a patch of grass that could only be called a park by someone who’s never left London. It’s nice though, far enough from the road that the hum of traffic starts to fade into quiet background noise and shaded by trees heavy with flat, green leaves. He even pulls a tartan blanket out from the top compartment of the basket, spreading it out into a neat island within the grass. He holds out a hand as she sits down, tucking her knees underneath herself. 

She watches as he sits opposite her, with his legs crossed and his back perfectly straight. He moves almost mechanically, every movement has a purpose. She would think maybe that's the way Fittes trains its agents but she’s seen Kipps and his team. They have the same posture but there’s an intent to the way George moves that they seem to lack. 

Now that she thinks it’s allowed she can’t stop looking at him. 

He’s just pretty. Pretty in a way she didn’t think boys could be pretty until she met him and Lockwood. The two of them really are a picture together. Lucy shakes the thought of Lockwood out of her head for now, until all that remains is the wool of the blanket against her shins and George’s knees almost touching her own. 

“Why a picnic?” He startles at the sound of her voice and she wonders what he was thinking of.

“My nan took my grandad on a picnic for their third date. She says that it’s what you should do if you really like someone.” 

“You really like me?” Her voice is quiet amongst the wind and the birdsong. 

“I wasn’t sure what food you would want so I brought maybe too much.” He smiles even as he pulls away from her, just for a second. Then he turns and starts pulling what seems like the kitchen’s entire stock of containers and jars from the depths of the wicker basket along with several sets of cutlery and a stack of paper napkins that look like they were originally bought for a birthday party. There’s even two Thermos’, one with coffee, one with tea. George lays out enough between them that they could probably rebuild the kitchen of Portland Row, all that would be missing would be Lockwood and the smell of burnt toast. 

She can’t help how breathless she sounds as she calculates all the work he must have put in. “You’re amazing.” 

“I wanted to make sure I did it right this time. This seems worth doing the right way.”

“What do you think the wrong way is?” 

A little crease forms in the space between his eyebrows and she sort of wants to reach out and touch it. She doesn’t think that’s quite okay yet so she chooses to tuck her hands under her legs instead, to try and stop them from acting against what she thinks is probably her better judgement. 

“I really am sorry for making you think I was mad at you.”

“I didn’t really know what to think. It was like you were there for a second and then you weren’t. I thought maybe I’d just misunderstood.” It’s her turn to avoid his gaze. Even knowing he’s done all this for her, that clearly he’s been thinking about it too, she’s still nervous that when she says the shape of her worries out loud that he’ll say that they were right. 

To keep her gaze down she picks out a container at random, prying off a plastic lid to discover a handful of small pink cakes. She picks out the Thermos of tea next, pouring it into the little cup and watching the steam rise off of it. When she looks up at him he’s still got a little frown on his face. If he were anyone else she thinks the constant weight of his attention would drive her to frustration. If he were Lockwood it would drive her mad. But she doesn’t feel that with him, she knows he’ll speak when he’s ready and that he doesn’t think anything of her except what she has given him already. And, more than anything, she wants this to work.  Because when she thinks about him her stomach starts to flip in a way that’s equal parts pleasant and terrifying. 

“I’ve never really done anything like that. I think I was nervous to see how you’d react.” 

“George, was I your first kiss?”

It’s his turn to look a little embarrassed and turn to the array of picnic foods. “Well, no.”

She tilts her head hoping he’ll continue.

“Lockwood was, actually.” He looks at her to gauge her reaction, and she tries to keep her face as neutral as possible. She thinks if she pushes too hard about this she’ll never hear about it again. It’s certainly something to think about. She knew when she joined that she was walking into the middle of something between them; but she didn’t expect it to be this. The thing between them must be similar to the way she used to catch Lockwood looking at her, if the tell tale blush creeping up his face is anything to go by. 

“A friend from my old agency was mine,” she says instead. “He was nice. Clever. He thought a lot about The Problem. I think you would have liked him.” 

She kind of hates herself for bringing it up. She doesn’t talk about it ever because it’s all too easy to get lost in the memory of the last night at the mill. But George’s eyes on her make her feel grounded, more tethered to the place they’re sat in and the date that they’re on. Being around him is good like that, he’s reassuringly solid and almost always steady. So she tells him, but she stops short of telling him about Norrie as well. About the way they’d sat on the bed of a room she can never go back to and she sort of wished she’d been kissing Norrie instead. Because those feelings are all dead now, they have to be because she has to keep moving forward. 

And the thing is, moving forward is a far less scary prospect when it looks like George smiling at her and kissing her and maybe even holding her hand.

Lucy’s not sure if she’s ever really been on a date before. There wasn’t time before and there hasn’t been time since coming to London either, especially when she only really knows two people. And before kissing George in the kitchen she wouldn’t have thought that either of them would want to go on a date with her. 

She could get used to dates if they’re all like this, afternoon sun and tea and George right there with her. He makes the very idea of it far more comfortable than the thing she was imagining in her head. He’s always good at that. 

They talk and they eat and she drinks tea that’s been steeped to just the right colour before it was poured into the thermos. He even passes her a little jar of milk so that she can make each little cup perfectly to her liking. It’s like he’s thought of everything. She can see herself believing that he has. 

She isn’t sure when he became this easy to talk to, but he is as they sit together and they eat. He shares about the comics he’s reading and the experiments he has planned. She tells him about her favourite books from back home, probably now gathering dust on their shelf, and the open expanse of the landscape outside of the city. He looks almost disbelieving when she describes it, like he can’t imagine a world outside the built-up walls of the city. Lucy thinks she might like to take him there eventually, when they have the time. To show him how green the grass is and how the sky stretches out for miles without the intrusion of London’s heavy skyline. 

The day melts away in front of them, until the sun is dangerously low in the sky and she’s aware of the press of curfew. At most, only half of the containers he’s brought are empty as she starts to stack them in neat piles for him to pack back into the basket in an unparseable system. 

“Can I ask you something?” He nods but doesn’t speak as she catches his eye. “Can I kiss you now?” 

Before the words are even fully out his hand is on her wrist, the movement so fast that she becomes desperately aware he’s had the best training of any of them. But the thought only lasts a second because then his mouth is on hers and she isn’t thinking of anything at all. They’re at something of an awkward angle and she’s leaning so far forward she should probably be worried that she’s going to fall. But even if she did, it would just be further into his space. There are far worse places to land.  

Even in the slow pass of the last few days she had never considered the kiss in the kitchen to have been doing something wrong, and she can tell George hasn’t either, not in that way. He just has his rules, the tracks he feels he has to keep himself safely on. 

But kissing him this time, she thinks maybe the last time was wrong. Her heart flutters in her chest as he kisses her, and she gets a few more seconds of that time stopping feeling. Only this time, there’s something else underneath it. Something certain and solid. That certainty only fuels her own. But she isn’t thinking of that as she tries to pull him in closer to her. 

He’s the one to break the kiss again. She would be worried if it weren’t for the same stunned look on face, but this time with a grin so bright it’s almost like staring into the sun. She’s still not sure if it’s okay but she lets herself reach out to him, the pads of her fingers brushing against the top of his cheek, relieved to find warm skin there. He leans ever so slightly into her touch and it’s the most certain she’s been that this is real. This is something it’s more than okay for her to want. 

“We should get back to the house.” He sounds breathless and she can feel his face moving against fingertips she can’t yet bear to move away. “Before it gets properly dark.” 

“We should.” 

Before she can pull her hand back he leans into it further, for no more than a second, and presses something like a kiss into her palm. And then he’s standing and she’s still sat with one hand outstretched, a hand he uses to pull her from the picnic blanket in one smooth motion. 

They walk back to Portland Row in easy silence and she lets herself reach for his hand as they do. He takes hers without a word. Later she’ll tell Norrie it’s almost more than she could have hoped for, pieces moving into place with an ease she had always thought was reserved for other people. Not something she could have, not even something she could let herself want. 

They get to the door and there’s a second where she thinks maybe she should ask to do one more lap of the streets surrounding the house before they go in. Just in case whatever they’re feeling can’t survive under a roof or Lockwood’s attention. Because they haven’t talked about that yet, what this thing between them looks like when he’s looking at it. It feels both too early to and years too late to talk about it, all at once.

But she swallows that feeling down, even though the thought of telling him doesn’t feel that different from the thought of jumping into the Thames. 

It’s hard not to ask George if he’s feeling that way too, but she doesn’t. Just presses one last kiss to the corner of his mouth, careful to not let either of them risk getting carried away. Then he unlocks the door and she can’t help but drop his hand as they cross the threshold. They head in the same direction, straight to their rooms, and the still air of the house is punctuated only by the sound of Lockwood practising against the steam of the basement. 

They make their way up the stairs and he looks at her on the landing. “Did I do it right?” 

Lucy thinks maybe it’s her turn to blush. She hates it slightly, not used to what she’s feeling being so clear on her face. 

“Yeah, you did.” 

“Good.” She thinks he’s smiling, but it’s hard to tell as he turns into his room. But she knows she is as she climbs the last stairs into the loft. 

…

“So where were the two of you yesterday afternoon?” Lucy chokes around her toast, spluttering crumbs onto inked notes of the kitchen table. 

Lockwood isn’t stupid, he knows there’s something going on between Lucy and George. Some type of thing that he can’t put his finger on but he knows that has changed in the air. He had gone to find George that afternoon to ask about some case notes that were in particularly unreadable handwriting and hadn’t found any trace of him, just the absolute disaster of dishes that he’d left behind in the kitchen. He wasn’t sure what had tipped him off Lucy was out as well, tape recorder half shoved under a pillow, but the house had felt incalculably empty in their shared absence. 

If he were a better man, he thinks he could be okay with not knowing but instead it’s started to eat at him. An itch he can’t get rid of sitting right behind his eyes. 

“I was at the archives, I can’t say where Lucy was.” George says the words like he means them, but he doesn’t look up from his coffee the entire time. Lockwood knows he’s lying. Lucy must feel similarly because she narrows her eyes at him and from the way George starts backwards he thinks she must have kicked him under the table. 

Lockwood pushes himself back from the table and his chair makes an unpleasant screech against the tiles, all three of them flinching away from it in unison. All of them moving together causes something in his chest to start aching, but he isn’t quite sure what it is. 

“I’ve never seen the kitchen look like that in preparation for a trip to the archives.” He directs his full attention to George, something Lucy’s already done. Like she’s waiting for his answer too. She’s usually harder to get a read on, but they can both identify the mildly pissed off expression on her face, they see it enough. 

“Yeah, well…” George trails off, still looking into his coffee like it’s the most interesting thing in the world. 

“You’re welcome for the clean dishes by the way. I found I had an unexpected amount of free time.” 

That’s enough to break whatever spell Lucy’s under as she forces her gaze off of George and her face into a shape that’s almost a smile. “Well, there’s a first time for everything. I was wondering if we were being haunted by the first ever dishwashing ghost.” 

Even to her it seems like the attempt at a joke falls flat into the air, but it’s easier to pick it up rather than keep his focus on whatever has changed between them that he’s on the outside of. (He’s always on the outside, always being left behind. But he thinks of her face before the auction and doesn’t let himself too far down that path.)

“No ghost. Just me.” He smiles as widely as he thinks he can but it seems to work enough as he watches some of the tension slide off of her shoulders. “I think I’m going to go back down to the basement today to keep practising my sword forms.”

It turns out that being shot in the shoulder has had quite an effect on his ability to wield a rapier, and he’s trying as much as he can to claw his way back to full fitness. At least it isn’t hurting today, like it’s started doing if he overexerts himself or when it’s raining. 

Lucy shoots one more pointed look in George’s direction before she rises to stand with him. “I’ll go with you, one of us should make sure you aren’t opening your stitches.”

“You know they took out the last of the stitches a week ago.” This time when he smiles it feels a little more real, a little more charming, and he can pretend that that’s not because something about her softens, somewhere around her eyes. 

He holds her eye for as long as he can bear it before turning away. He can make himself okay with the fact that there are things the two of them hold that he does not know. He can . Especially when she’s following him to the basement to practise anyway. Something has changed between her and George, but he doesn’t have to let it change anything between them and him. And in the steam and the exertion and the way she holds her rapier he can almost make himself believe that. 

… 

She and Lockwood fall into a rhythm when they practise together now. If she’s being honest with herself, they always have been able to. But with every new practice the speed with which they fall into time decreases, and now they’re pretty much in sync from minute one. Even with his dodgy shoulder affecting his movements, she still knows exactly what he’s going to do the second before he does it. 

It’s normally a good thing. A thing that keeps her alive in long, scary nights. 

But today, when she’s replaying George pretending he wasn’t with her the day before, she wishes practice was just a little bit harder, just hard enough that her straying thoughts wouldn’t be possible. 

She knows Lockwood can see it too. He knows that her head is somewhere outside of this room, and he’s smirking at her like he knows where it is. Which, to be clear, he bloody doesn’t because if George won’t admit to being with her in front of her and Lockwood she doesn’t see why he’d admit it when she isn’t in the room. She doesn’t even know when they would’ve had time to talk, they got back from the park pretty late and then George had headed down into the depths of the pushed together tables and shelves he calls an office. 

She feels like she’s learnt about George Karim in the past few days, and each little part she’s been more or less able to piece together given some time. But this feels different. Maybe it’s just anger that he doesn’t want to admit what he’s feeling or back to the worry that he isn’t even feeling the same thing as her. A sick feeling part of her keeps pressing on the idea that he would be embarrassed for Lockwood to know, or that there’s actually something real between the two of them. That she’s an intruder, or just an obstacle for him to move past while the two of them sort their shit out enough to figure out what they mean to each other. 

She still trusts him though. Trusts him enough that she’s put her life in the way of his own. So she’s trying not to let the anger or the fear stick to her too much. Lockwood’s face is making that difficult though. She doesn’t know how he always manages to look so smug. Even when one of the jets comes shooting down directly on top of him and he yelps in a way that would be funny or endearing, if they weren’t both so aware of what they’re supposed to mean. The slight mask of smugness is back in place as soon as he catches his balance. 

It doesn't help that she also has to keep pulling her attention from the way she knows he looks at her when they really fall into sync with each other. It’s hard to be smug with a moving rapier in your hand, and she isn’t ready to think about the vulnerability he looks at her with sometimes. She’s tried to tell herself that it’s just a byproduct of the trust they have to have in each other, but she doesn’t quite believe it. 

When he looks at her like that she can almost understand why George would lie to him, in favour of keeping the balance of everything the same. Even if it’s for just a little bit longer. She remembers something George said to her, in the beginning, at the start of the job that led them into the wild descent of where they are now. You have to say no to him. Or you’ll make him worse. It feels unfair to think that maybe this is just another thing that George said no to. Another distraction, the thing that shakes him off of the even path. 

She can’t make sense of the way that they are around each other. The two boys together and where that leaves her. Where she fits into the routines and the inside jokes and the way the two of them look at each other, that they think she doesn’t notice. 

She’s shocked back into her head by the thud of Lockwood’s body against her side and she realises she must have fallen out of time, out of the dance they’re doing even in practice. He looks at her and she almost hates that the smugness is gone, replaced with something that looks like concern even though she can hear the word asset ringing in the back of her head. She really hates that, of all the things he’s said to her, that's the one she’s had the hardest time shaking. He’s nearly got her killed multiple times but the thing that still scares her the most is that she might just be a thing to him. Something he can discard when her talent runs dry. 

Once he bounces off her ribs in a way she’s sure is going to leave an unpleasant bruise in the shape of one of his shoulders, hopefully the good one, he just stands in front of her. Waiting. Like he’s expecting her to say something. But her tongue is heavy in her mouth and for the first time that day her head is empty, a feeling far less comforting than she was hoping for. She doesn’t think she has the words for the questions she wants to ask him, even if she did she isn’t sure her mouth could form the words. 

She settles instead for something she’s sure Lockwood will see as cowardice, or he would if she and George weren’t keeping him a little on the outside. 

“I think I’m gonna go upstairs and start on lunch.” 

“Oh.” He narrows his eyes and it’s almost enough for her to spill all of it at his feet. Almost. “I can help if you want?” 

“No, it’s alright.” She speaks the words over her shoulder as she pretty much runs up the stairs. She can’t bring herself to look back at him. Even without seeing him, she’s sure he’s looking at her in the way only he does, teeth worrying at the pretty curve of his lip and none of the usual mask on his face. She thinks if she looks back she’ll be damning them both, though to what she’s not sure. 

…

He doesn’t follow her up the stairs. He doesn’t know why not, but it’s like for a second he’s ghostlocked, all of his muscles freezing into place. He’s spiralling and he knows it, but knowing it has never changed it. 

But she looks at him and then she’s leaving. (Not leaving, never leaving. Going upstairs.) And all he can think about is the catacombs and a pain so big he thought he would never escape the weight of it and then it’s too late and she’s gone. 

…

She finds George still in the kitchen and even though she half expects it, something still twists painfully in her chest. For a second she considers going up to her room, or even out the front door. Walking until her legs give out and she has some sort of answer. 

Lucy is a powerful listener. She has the touch and the sight and she thinks maybe that's why it’s so easy to read the boys. They’re putting all of their feelings into the air, same as any other ghosts. Still, she’s almost knocked back by the force of George’s anxiety as he hears her coming through the door. 

(He thinks she wouldn't want lockwood to know bc he's still so scared that he's just the extra and that would mean joplin was right and he keeps fucking it up and and and-) 

She puts her hand on his shoulder and immediately the wave of it stills. Psychic connection, he called it. At least he did when it happened with Annabel. With their luck she wouldn’t put it past them to be the first cases of it in the living or maybe she just really knows him. Knows the spirals he gets in now. He told her about them a few days after- well, after. 

His instincts are different, he had said. Where they used to be solid before, now they wobble and shake under his interrogation of them. He wants to make sure he spots the gaps before anyone else can. 

When one of them wobbles, all of them do. 

The clench in her chest is still tight and painful, she doesn’t think she’s breathed all the way out yet.  

“I’m not mad at you.” Her words surprise her, but speaking them makes them true. 

He still doesn’t turn around. He’s cooking something she doesn’t know the name of yet, and the whole room smells like spices. There’s probably enough left over from the afternoon before that he doesn’t need to be but she knows this is one of his things. They all have them really, the things they do on the comedown of a bad night or the ache of a bad day or the spike of anxiety in the middle of the morning. 

“I didn’t want to make you upset I just-” 

“I know, Georgie.” And she does, because she knows him. Together all three of them are one unit, a tangled nervous system and a single set of bones. She knows him as well as she knows herself, maybe better even because she loves him. 

Is in love with him? She doesn’t have time to think about that, not when his shoulders are still set and there’s an already cooling pan of something else on the back burner of the stove. 

Touch is hard for him, she knows. Something he only told them once, and they both had to pretty much drag it out of him when he was coming down from a job where there was no death glow and the ghost was creepingly silent behind them the whole night. They’d both been fine, but he’d started flinching for three days straight from the feeling of ice cold fingers stabbing into his chest and dragging themselves down his spine. 

So she asks before she moves, her voice as gentle as she can make it. “Can I hug you now?”  

He nods silently, but doesn’t move so she makes her away across the kitchen, wordlessly slotting herself into the space behind him. Her arms come up around his waist and she feels him relax into her, just the smallest amount. Just enough that she feels the pattern of his heartbeat fall into time with her own. 

She takes a second in his space, as much as she thinks she can, before pressing a kiss to the space under his ear and stepping away. Still a little worried about overstaying her welcome, contributing to the overstimulated buzzing of his skin. She shouldn’t be worried if the noise he makes in the back of his throat is anything to go by, like he already misses her absence. That thought feels almost golden in her fingertips. 

When he speaks it’s still into the stove, but it lacks the taut nervousness she felt on entering the room. “I’ve been a bit of a dickhead, haven’t I?” 

“Maybe a little, but I think I can forgive you.” A smile creeps into her words and that’s enough for him to start turning towards her. 

“Oh you think you can, huh?” 

“Probably. We’ll see.” 

“We’ll see? You’re a menace, you know.” It’s like he slips back into himself and his smile is back and she thinks maybe it’s going to be okay. She’d cross the world to see him smile like that. 

They’re facing each other now and she takes a chance to look at him properly. They all spend a lot of time looking at each other, cataloguing emotions and injuries in equal measure. Even more so since the mirror and a light so bright she thinks it’s permanently burnt into the inside of her eyelids. They have to be able to know what the others are thinking so it, it being whatever big horrible thing is just round the corner, can’t touch them next time. None of them are sure they could survive something like that again, though they would if they had to. For each other. 

He looks okay. A little rougher than she would prefer, maybe. His eyes a little more red than she thinks is good for him. Lucy has never seen him cry but she wonders if that’s the cause. If part of the cooking thing, and the onions that come with it, is an excuse to hide that away from them. 

“So is there anything I can do to reach your forgiveness?” 

Despite all that it’s easy to meet him where he’s at, his smile unfaltering. “Shove over. I’m gonna help you with lunch.” 

“You are?”

“I am.” 

“And that’ll help.” 

“It will.” 

“Hands first.” He gestures her towards the sink and the pink soap he keeps there. It’s mostly for her and Lockwood, she can’t imagine his hands not being clean. 

As she makes her way over she’s surprised by him knocking his hip into hers and in the second she’s caught off guard he plants a small kiss against her face. Somewhere in the space of her cheek, a little too close to her eye. Messy like the gesture surprised him, too. 

By the time she’s processed it, he’s back at the stove, pulling a chopping board onto the countertop next to him and arranging vegetables around it for her in silent instruction. The kitchen is his room, so how can she do anything but fall in line beside him. 

They move together and she wants to press a little bit. To ask him what he wants. But it doesn’t feel like quite the right time. So, despite the worry the right time may never come, she lets herself revel in the ease of working alongside him instead. Until the food is ready and they hear the tell tale hiss of the steam pipes in the basement shutting down. 

Lockwood bounds up the steps in easy footsteps and deposits himself at the table sweat soaked and shining. His shirt unbuttoned past his collar bones revealing an old Fittes undershirt she thinks was probably George’s and his sleeves rolled up past his elbows revealing the pale skin of his forearms. 

She vaguely hears George’s protests. Lockwood’s knocked the table edge and he hasn’t washed his hands. But for a second she’s so caught up in the look of him that George’s voice doesn’t reach her all the way. 

She decides that that’s another thing that she’s not going to think about today. 

The things she isn’t thinking about are starting to add up, but they're consumed by a sudden wave of sentimentality as she looks at the two of them bickering. This is her home. She’s made a home in the shape of their smiles and the clash of rapiers and the kitchen smell of ink and coffee. The feeling almost chokes her and she thinks she must make some noise of alarm because in an instant they’re both at her side, her name warm coming from their mouths. 

Lockwood’s hands are heavy on her shoulders and she thinks for a second he might shake her, forcibly try and knock her out of her thoughts. Then he catches himself and takes his hands back, settling for picking at the edge of one of his nails. 

“Are you okay?” George says.

“I think I’ve never been better.” 

Lockwood smacks at her, now his nerves are settled. “Don’t scare us like that.” 

She swipes back at him. She’s careful to hit his uninjured side but the back of her hand connecting with his side still makes a heavy thud and he yelps, pulling a face that can only be described as pouting. They all know he just likes the opportunity to pout, and he does it well. Which is to say he does it and to his left George immediately starts to giggle behind his hand.  

The practice they’ve been doing is worth it because when he ducks down to charge at her she’s already moving, carried by the sound of George’s laughter. She takes the opportunity to duck behind him instead, hands light enough on his waist that he could pull away from her easily if he needed to. He doesn’t, she can feel his laugh in her fingertips, through the thin fabric of his t-shirt.  

George is still protesting slightly, even with his head tipped back and his smile almost splitting his face. Something about how they shouldn’t be scrapping in the kitchen, it’s dangerous. 

Then Lockwood’s lunging at them both and he shrieks. 

At the last second he feints away, leaving George’s back hitting her and hers hitting the counter. She would be laughing, if the air hadn’t been knocked slightly out of her. But once she catches herself it’s easy enough and she disintegrates with it, face pressed into the place where his neck meets his shoulder. Lockwood’s laughing too and there’s a second where they wait with held breath before George joins them again. 

Lucy thinks the sound of their laughs echoing off of the walls of the kitchen is, quite possibly, one of the best sounds in the entire world.  

Eventually they compose themselves enough to sit down to eat and she sets the places on the new thinking cloth. (They burnt the old one. Lockwood had said it was getting full anyway.)

She can’t help but keep looking at Lockwood, he’s sweaty and smiling but she thinks she has to double and triple check his movements. His stitches have only been out a week and she discovered, or more accurately George told her, that Anthony J Lockwood recovers from injury like a cat. He stopped taking his pain killers as soon as he could bear it, instead managing his pain mostly through hiding from them. Or, alternately, acting like nothing had happened at all except for the fact that he was now glued to their sides.

She and George have taken to spending all their free time in the same rooms, so he could keep an eye on both of them at the same time, rather than pacing between rooms wincing the whole way round. 

There’s no trace of that version of him at the table today. He’s just- Golden. In a way that she doesn’t think that she’s seen before. 

When she looks away from him she finds that George is looking at her and she ducks her face towards her bowl as it starts to warm. She thinks maybe she should be more concerned that George caught her looking at Lockwood, but he doesn’t look bothered. And she knows from her first weeks that he doesn’t hide jealousy well. He’s just smiling at her as Lockwood goes on about some adjustment he thinks should be made to the steam system to better replicate the movement of Visitors. 

She thinks the two of them might be making her golden too. 

They don’t have a job at the moment so the house is quietly calm. And when lunch is eaten and the dishes are cleared they all make their way to the library to waste an afternoon in front of the fire, with romance novels (her), comics (George), and luring them all into hands of Texas hold em using a jar of buttons he found in a cupboard as chips or otherwise being a mild nuisance (Lockwood). 

Days like this are her favourite, when they don’t have anywhere to be and she doesn’t have to wake up in the morning with the curdled feeling of knowing she might have to put the people she- put her friends in danger. They’ve had enough danger for a lifetime, but that hasn’t stopped Lockwood putting new ads in the paper. So she’ll take the day to breathe while she can, and hope that the next job runs smoothly like she always does. Sometimes she thinks the force of her and George’s combined hoping is the only thing holding this place together. Hoping the bills will be paid and tea will stay stocked and they’ll all walk back in the door and make it to their beds at the end of the night. 

But when she looks at the two of them she knows that that isn’t all that she’s hoping for, even if she can’t put a name to the thing in the air between them. 

Day melts into night and the room is warm and her book is good and all thoughts of the earlier whatever it was with George melt away. That is until he clears his throat and puts down his comic, one she recognises that he reads and rereads when he’s thinking. 

“I didn’t go to the archives yesterday.” His voice is loud over the crackle of the fire and the hum of static from the radio they can never get tuned quite right. 

She just looks at him. He offers her a weak smile, like he’s about to make a sacrifice she doesn’t quite understand yet, but he thinks he’s doing it for her. Lockwood doesn’t speak either, but he starts tapping his fingers on the magazine he was pretending to read, nervous tic he isn’t quite hiding. 

“I- Lucy and I- I took-”

“We went on a date. A picnic.” She steals the words he’s looking for and it’s worth it for the look on his face when he hears the word date coming from her mouth. Like he still wasn’t sure if he could believe it. 

It’s weird how well Lockwood takes it. His face doesn’t falter, not even for a second. And that more than anything sets of alarms in her head. Nothing good can come of it when he shutters off that much of himself. And she knows both she and George miss him when he does. 

Then he smiles at them with that smile of his. The one that could end wars. Or start them. And that’s when she knows that they’re really in trouble. That’s not how he looks at them now, that’s the mask for everybody else. 

“Well.” He flicks his eyebrows upwards. She wants to hold his face in her hands until it looks like his face again. “Thank you for telling me. I suppose.” 

“You’re not mad?” George’s eyes are fixed pointedly downwards again and she hates the physical distance between them all. All of them confined to separate seats and walled in by books and paper. 

“Of course I’m not mad. I’m ha- I’m not mad.” 

“Good.” Her voice is stretched thin. This feels like the thing she was worried about. That this would alter the balance in some ways. Tip the scales. 

“Good.” George’s voice is quiet now.

“Good.” Lockwood just sounds like himself, the boy acting as a man she met on the very first day. Someone who thinks in publicity and assets and chess game precision. 

“I think I’m going to turn in for the day.” George carefully stacks the books around him. Puts the caps back on his pens, one black and one red like always. They buy cheap biros by the bucket then lose them just as quickly. He does a little lap of the library before he leaves, passing her chair and squeezing her shoulder before doing the same to Lockwood. 

They smile at each other when he’s next to her, but she thinks both their smiles turn out watery. He pauses for an extra beat when he gets to Lockwood and she thinks she can see a flash like a static charge pass through the air between them. Tipping scales and broken lines of iron filings play in her mind and it’s all she can do to curl deeper into her seat. Then he’s moving again, out the door in a flash. It’s just her and Lockwood in a quiet room. 

He picks his magazine back up, she thinks it’s the same one he was reading on her very first night. Which is part of how she knows he’s only been pretending to read it. There’s no point in looking at articles about events that happened months ago now, at least not when they’re without a job that would give him reason to dig them back up. 

She waits a little before she thinks about going to bed, to see if there’s anything else he has to say. Any chip in the armour he donned between one blink and the next. But he’s eerily silent and the night is closing in around them so finally she stands to leave. 

Lockwood’s hand shoots out to wrap around her wrist. Their chairs are sort of close, but he still has to stretch to reach her, to close an almost impossible distance. Bony fingers digging in just a little bit, his pulse heavy against hers. He does this sometimes, on the bad nights. 

She would stay without him asking but he does it anyway, looking up at her with shining eyes. “Stay, please.” 

Lucy sinks back into the armchair without a word. She wishes George were still in the room, she knows it settles something in him when they’re both there. And that way she could leave for just long enough to put the kettle on and change into pyjamas without the fear that he would be melting when she came back. 

They’re all a little scared of the way he feels about himself. Somewhere along the way he decided he wanted to live. That he wanted to stay with him. But he’s still learning, they all are. It’s almost impossibly hard to stop running when you start. So she tucks her knees up to her chest in the armchair and leaves her hand on the arm, so he can keep it in his grip until his skin’s a little warmer and his pulse isn’t a wild beast of a thing.  

The least she can do is stay. Even if it's the only thing he ever asks of her, she'll stay. Always.

…

The fact that Lucy and George are dating does unfortunately make him sick to his stomach. (Are they dating? They said they had been on one date and he wouldn’t think George would lie to him, but he did this morning when he whispered into his coffee.) He knows, dear god he knows, that he should be happy for them. He should. He’s trying to be. It’s not working. He doesn’t even know why this feeling has hit him this way, not that differently from the tearing flesh feeling of a gunshot and the free fall that comes with it. 

He spends a lot of time not feeling good about himself, but less now. It has to be less now that Lucy and George are there for him, patient and waiting and hoping, always hoping, he’ll come home safely. But this is the worst he’s felt in a while. Like every wound he’s got in the field could open itself up, all at once. His whole body, tearing itself apart. All they’d find would be a pool of his blood on the carpet. 

It’s the worst he’s felt in a while because it’s so fucking selfish. Because George and Lucy are always there for him and he can’t even dredge up enough from the pulpy mass of his chest to be happy for them when they find something for themselves. (Something without his hand pushing it towards disaster.) If they were any other people he thinks maybe at least he could take pride in having set them up, pushing them towards happiness. But god, he wishes that that happiness could include him. 

Maybe he should have seen it coming. Maybe he never should have introduced them. Maybe when Lucy turned up on their doorstep without an appointment he should have turned her away and kept living life with George in a bubble of time of their own making. He doesn’t mean any of these things. The thought of a life without Lucy clings to the back of his throat like bile, though a lot of things do these days. 

He’s shaken out of the spiral by Lucy’s voice. That’s something else he finds happening more and more these days. One second he’ll be in his head and then he’ll be back in Portland Row with her asking him something. George does it too, though less often. One day when it was particularly bad he had snapped to with George’s hand on the side of his face and he had braced for a slap. Like Lucy does when one of them’s passed out and she's panicking. That had been the wrong move, and one he knew George had seen because not for the first time he had seen something like heartbreak reflected back at him in the deep brown of his eyes. 

“Lockwood, I don’t want to go anywhere but I do want to change. Maybe make some tea. But you can come with?” He nods wordless and she slips her arm through his grip until her hand meets his and she tangles their fingers together. When she stands, he has to too, to keep the link of their bodies. She leads him wordlessly through the house and up the stairs to the room he used to sleep in. 

She sits him on his- her- bed, pulling a blanket around his knees. For a second he’s so acutely aware of the missing space his parents have left in his life that he can’t breathe around it. But he’s brought back to earth by her eyes on him, and the way that her hand stills on his knee for just a second, branding warmth into his skin through all the layers between them, before she steps behind him to change. 

Because he’s an utter bastard, the thought of her bare skin behind him makes his own skin flushed, like it’s suddenly too small to contain his bones and his nervous system. Lucy isn’t his girl, he knows that, but there’s a difference between that and her being George’s that he doesn't quite know how to process. He rests his hands on his blanketed knees, one of them right over where hers just was, and digs his nails in as hard as he can, staring at the wall above the stairs and a little triangle of sickly green light coming in from where she hasn’t quite closed the curtains all the way. 

He wishes it’s as easy as she thinks it is for him to turn his feelings off. Like a tap, she said. He knows why. He knows how he comes across to her. To George. Like an arse, mostly. But even when he tries to turn the tap all the way off, the drip of it never stops. Even as he clenches his hands so tightly he’s worried he’s going to tear holes in the blanket with his nails, he can’t stop thinking of the two of them. 

The two of them without him. Building something stable without him there growing roots in their foundations. 

Then she’s back in his space, hands twisting in front of her. Distantly, he thinks she’s wearing one of George’s shirts, the front tucked up into the waistband of black shorts. 

“You’re still in- do you want to be in something more comfortable than that?” He remembers changing into sweatpants some time in the afternoon, and he’s thankful for that, but he’s still wearing a shirt with buttons and cuffs that feel like shackles around his wrists. He hadn’t thought about how much like choking the shirt felt until she brought it up. 

He reaches to the first button with numb hands. It takes him a second to do it but the relief is immediate as the collar relaxes from around his neck. He hears her tut and then her hands are on his chest, undoing each button in quick succession. She drags the shirt from his shoulders, off of his uncooperative body. Then his undershirt next, her hands warm where they meet his newly bared skin. Her fingers catch on the scar on his shoulder and he holds his breath as they do. He knows that the scar is an ugly thing, red and knotted, and if there’s anything he can be grateful for tonight it’s that she doesn’t mention it. 

“Arms up.” Maybe he should be embarrassed that she’s having to lead him like this but he can’t find the space for it. So he just follows her instruction and she pulls another of George’s shirts over his head. This one still smells like him, cheap aftershave and fruity shampoo and the slight metallic hint of iron. 

“Tea next, Lockwood. George just got more chamomile.” 

“I hate chamomile.” 

She smiles at him like he’s just told her something big, rather than a childish admission in the middle of the night. “I know, but George will have our heads if we have caffeine right now.” 

“He’d never have to know.” 

“He would though. You know he would. It’s like he has a sixth sense for it.” She’s leaning in conspiratorially. Her and George. Dating. One of her hands still on his arm from where she helped him into George’s shirt. Thumb stroking against the fabric, just by the edge of the scar. 

And god he can’t help himself because when she looks at him like that, like he’s someone worth confiding in, with the quirk of a smile at the edge of her mouth. He can’t help but smile back. He wants to reach out and touch her face, to feel her skin against his hands just to check she’s real. Because how could Lucy Carlyle be anything but a joint imagination between him and George? And how could she be anything but viscerally real in the dark of the night, when her face is so close to his the ends of her hair tickle at his neck.

She’s a fucking miracle made flesh and he thinks he’s probably just lucky to get to be near her. After all the shit he’s put her through. (All the shit he’s still putting her through.) 

How could he do anything but follow her to the kitchen. Watch as she fills the kettle and clicks it on. Watch as she pulls two mugs from the cupboard, the one he’s started to think of as hers and one of George’s. And that’s another twisting feeling in his stomach as he leans against the counter. Because it’s not just any of George’s mugs, it’s the one he always steals when the world presses in a little too close. 

It’s just nice to have a piece of him sometimes, when it all feels a little dark. A piece of both of them. Any piece that Lockwood can keep his hands on.

Before Lucy arrived, sometimes he would wake George up on nights like these and fall asleep curled up on the end of his bed like a treasured pet. He wonders if she’d let him do the same. If she’d be willing to pet her fingers through his hair and help him blink away nightmares. If George still would even. Or if that’s something lost to him now, the two of them standing in a circle of iron and him more like a Visitor than anything else. 

The kettle wails. He keeps watching her. She pours it into the mugs, each with its own hated chamomile tea bag. In the still kitchen the echo of socked feet on the landing stops them both until George arrives in the kitchen doorway, all slightly sleep mussed hair and pale legs. He stops for a second and looks at them both, eyes fuzzy without his glasses. 

“Are you both wearing my shirts?” He rubs at his eyes and a little frown forms on his face, one that’s all warmth and no heat. “You’re both awful, you know.”

“Of course we are. Tea?” She’s moving back to the mug cupboard before the words are even out of her mouth. Lockwood thinks, in the whole time he’s known George, he’s never seen him turn away the opportunity for more tea. 

“You were going to have tea without me?” 

“We thought you were asleep.” His words are sharp and he hates them. Lucy shoots him one of her looks. 

“Lockwood wasn’t feeling right.”

“Snitch.” He’s only half joking but the word comes out of his mouth in a smile. 

George’s don’t. “No secrets, mate.”

From the look George gives him and the way his hands flex, just for a second, Lockwood thinks George might be thinking of the same type of night he was. End of the bed, promising to share the same dreams. Even if he is thinking about it, it leaves Lockwood no closer to finding out whether it would be okay now. 

(Maybe if they share a bed they’ll still let him sleep at the bottom. Or in an armchair across the room. He thinks if he can see them on nights like this he’ll be okay.)

Something like anger bubbles quietly under his skin as Lucy makes a third cup of tea. “It wasn’t a secret. I was just- You didn’t need to know. I’m fine.”

“Clearly.” George looks right into him and it doesn’t help the feeling. 

“You know what Luce, I think I’ll take my tea to my room. Thanks.” 

“Lockwood, don’t-” 

“Sorry, do I need your permission to go or something?”

“Lockwood.” He thinks they say his name in unison but his vision’s going a little blurry around the edges and he’s not sure if it's exhaustion or panic. He needs to get out of this room. 

He picks up one of the mugs, trying to hold it steady in hands that have started to shake again. “Good night.” 

Thankfully his voice sounds steady in his ears. Thankfully George moves out of his way as he heads out of the kitchen. (Thankfully tears don’t bead up in his eyes until he’s already in his room and no one’s looking at him.) He doesn’t slam his door, though he thinks about it. It isn’t until the doors closed that he realises he’s picked up her bloody mug, but he can’t bring himself to turn around and switch them out. The thought that they might still be in the kitchen talking about him is almost too much to bear. So he just settles under his duvet and turns out the light, hateful cup of chamomile tea left rapidly cooling on his desk. 

…

Neither of them speak until they hear the click of his door closing and even then there’s a second where she waits. In case he comes back. She sort of hopes he’ll come back, 

“So that was-”

“Not good.” He finishes her sentence. 

She wants to smile at him but she’s still seeing Lockwood, wordless on the edge of her bed and rushing out of the kitchen like afterimages from a camera flash. “Do you think we should-”

“Should what? You know what he’s like.” From anyone else she thinks that would sound like an insult, but coming from George it just sounds sad. And the thing is, she does know what he’s like, brilliant and stubborn and beautiful. But quick to anger too, like he’s scared of things being too good so he has to be the one to walk out first.  

She takes a sip of too hot chamomile tea from the mug she got out for him, and passes the other over to George. He accepts it gratefully, taking a second to stare at his mug in her hands. 

…

The days move forward and something changes in the walls of Portland Row. Lockwood thinks he might be watching his best friends fall in love with each other (fall more in love with each other) and it’s ripping him apart. He watches George kiss Lucy on top of her head when she’s sitting at the table and he’s making tea. He watches them sit with legs tangled together on the sofa or hold hands under the desk when they think he isn’t looking. Slowly first, but happening more and more often, like a dam has broken and now that they can be in contact with each other it’s all they want to do. 

It’s new and it’s horrible. (Or maybe he’s horrible.) 

He tries to pretend it’s just the jobs they’re on. They can’t leave George alone with his books, not now, maybe not ever again, so one of them is always there. And he thinks maybe he should duck out of the role but somehow the balance of it stays the same. Almost like a coin flip of when he’s deep in his books whose shoulder will George fall asleep on. And that’s something too because the thought of not being someone George can fall asleep on anymore itches at the edge of his senses, like the way Lucy described the hum of bone glass. 

He’s just the name on the door but when it came down to it they were the ones to end the fight and so in these newly formed versions of themselves he just has to do whatever he can not to get in their way. 

Which he thinks is maybe easier said than done when they’re always around him. Not just them but the things that make them up. Half drunk mugs of tea left in the library and George’s socks on a clothesline in the kitchen and Lucy’s scribbled grocery lists left on a desk in the basement. Even when he can’t see them they’re there. They make up a part of Portland Row, of his home, that he’s never seen before. That he didn’t think was possible before. 

Some part of him wonders if they’d notice if he scrubbed himself out of the house, left in the night and did something else. Night watch, maybe. It’s an ugly thought, but not an unfamiliar one, though it lacks all the comfort it used to bring him. Before, the idea of being able to become anyone but Anthony Lockwood had seemed like a good thing, like a way out. But, despite all of it, they seem to like Anthony Lockwood and he likes being himself when they’re the ones looking at him. 

So he has to stay and he has to work. And part of that work is trying to be okay with whatever is growing between the two of them. Even when he dreams of George holding onto him after a nightmare and Lucy with his hand in hers leading him into the kitchen. 

They’re on one of the shit jobs he thinks they should start turning down. One that ends up with too much time in the Archives and too much work and not enough pay for them to all be on this edge. They think someone is moving the source is the problem, and a team from a different agency has already been sent in. Most of them had come out okay, but one of them had come out ghostlocked. He knows that’s eating at Lucy, he can see it in the way she paces round the kitchen table rather than sitting down to note take with them, leaving him to act as George’s scribe in his chicken scratch handwriting. 

(George doesn’t like to write on the thinking cloth anymore. He doesn’t trust his hands.) 

It’s Flo that breaks the case for them. She knows the area better than anyone else ever could. They come home from the Archive to her eating their biscuits, a pleased look on her face that could be from seeing them or it could just be that she knows something that they don’t. George smiles when he sees her and for a second he thinks he and Lucy are both stuck back in the auction with George on the river. In places where they can’t see him. Lucy clenches her jaw in the way she always does when she’s thinking about that night. 

Flo briefs them and then leaves with a grin. Like she’s winning a competition that none of them signed up for but George at least seems to relax for the first time in days, starts doodling birds on the tablecloth in between the stacks of paper they’ve accumulated. 

And together they start to plan. (What does together mean for them now? Is he still part of it?) Flo thinks the person moving the source is an ex agent. Their original plan was to get back at Fittes, but Fittes wasn’t hired for the job. They weren’t even considered for something as small as Type Two in an empty house on the edge of zone three. It would make him laugh, the arrogance of it, if a kid wasn’t as good as dead with them next on the chopping block. 

He sets off for the job at four thirty on the dot. He takes his spare kit bag, the one he keeps under his bed, and the note Flo left with the address when he goes. He doesn’t tell George or Lucy that he’s leaving. He’s at his desk and she’s prepping the kit in the basement so he doesn’t think they’ll hear him go. They aren’t set to be at the house until six, so he thinks it’ll be at least a half hour before they notice he’s gone and by then he’ll probably have it under control. 

Or he’ll be on his way to dead but then that’s not a problem for him to worry about. 

Instead, Lucy meets him at the door of the house with a face like pure thunder. “I told George to wait at home, he doesn’t need to be dealing with you when you’re like this.” 

“I had it under control.” 

She doesn’t bother to dignify him with a response and he thinks that might be just as well, because seeing her has made his voice shaky around the edges so the less he has to say for himself the better. The house is smaller than some they’ve worked, a Georgian terrace not that different in shape from 35 Portland Row, and he can feel the chill in the air right away. There’s no death glow, but then again, they didn’t expect one. This source isn’t from this house. They suspect that’s part of what's making what should otherwise be a relatively harmless type of Type Two so dangerous. 

They make their way through the house in silence, with only the beeping of their monitor announcing their movements. He thinks it might be stupid to miss her when she’s standing across the room from him, but he’s not sure if there’s any other word for it. Some part of him wants to beg her to speak to him, to reinstate the ease with which they normally move against each other. That part loses to what he would call his pride and what she would probably call sheer bloody stubbornness. 

If he were to guess how he missed the Visitor moving straight towards him, Lockwood would probably say he was checking something important. Some scrap of history he’d carried in from George or a loose baseboard that could be a hidden cabinet. Something that if he died for it would make sense. He would never admit to any of them, himself least of all, that he missed it because he was trying to fall into rhythm with her. 

But one second they’re walking on the landing, him following her and then the next he thinks she’s screaming his name but all he can feel is a locking numbness in his fingertips. 

He blinks and they’re on the floor and something hurts. The ghost rushes above their heads, narrowly missing them, but he can’t think to be scared. From the pain radiating across his side she must have tackled him. Which has left her body on top of his, warm and alive. All he can think about is her heartbeat which he can feel in every one of his nerves and under every inch of his skin. And all he can think of are his hands which have come up to rest against her back, almost touching skin where her sweater has crumpled in the fall. 

She’s horribly, mercifully , alive against him. She doesn’t talk to him as she stands rubbing the shoulder he assumes was just forced into his stomach. It’s only once the source is contained that she looks at him again. He recognises a rarely seen level of fury in her eyes. 

“What is your problem, Lockwood?” She’s advancing on him like she means it, one hand resting on her rapier with a relaxed bend to her wrist that he knows she practises in the  mirror. 

“I don’t know what you mean, Luce.” 

“Bullshit you don’t. Are you punishing me, or George, or both?” And that’s the thing about it, isn’t it. Who’s he punishing because he’s just that much of an arse. He doesn’t think it would go well with her if he said with the sick certainty that he’s starting to feel that the real answer is himself. 

He knows he can only have them in pieces. He does . But god he wishes he could have more. Lockwood’s never thought of himself as greedy, but he wants to take everything they will give him. More than whatever they would offer him. He swallows that down though, selfish heart heavy in his chest. There are some things it would be unfair to make them carry, he’s always believed that. 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“No, of course you don’t. You’ve just happened to be in a pissy mood for a week now. Just happened to head off to the job without us.” 

“You followed after me.” He hates how petulant he sounds. 

“So you don’t get yourself killed,” she shouts, he flinches. “I don’t want you dead and alone, but we don’t do jobs in twos anymore. And we definitely don’t do them alone. We promised.” 

Her eyes are shining slightly. He hates that he’s making her cry. “You promised.”

He can’t look at her anymore so he looks at the dusty moulding of the no longer haunted house they’re standing in. “I’m sorry, Luce.” 

“I don’t want you to be sorry, Lockwood. I want you to be better.” She wipes at her face with the back of the hand not on her sword, sniffling echoing off the walls. “We’re meant to be getting better together.” 

He can’t help but think of the riverbank, sopping wet and freezing cold and how much he thought she must’ve hated him for that. And even that was before his inattention nearly got George killed. 

No secrets. No lies. Just the pieces of himself that rattle round the shell of his chest. “It was just me and him for a full year. If you and George are, well, you know, then where does that leave me?”

She looks at him and the honesty of what he’s saying feels like cold water running down his spine. Like the second before ghostly fingers making contact, when he’s desperately praying for someone else to stop them. Usually for her to stop them, with enough reliability that it’s starting to feel like a habit. 

And then she laughs and for a second he hates her. Not truly, but the feeling that churns up in his gut like silt in the river is close enough to hate that he can believe it for a second. “The same place it always has you daft git. Right there with us.” 

Her face softens. Her hand drops off of the hilt of her rapier. And she’s back in front of him, the vision of her that’s there when he can’t sleep. 

…

Watching Lockwood try to talk his way out of why he stormed off into a visiting alone, Lucy thinks she sees a part of him, maybe for the first time. More accurately, a part of the way he feels for George. One that explains all his moodiness and the way he can’t quite seem to look either of them in the eyes. She thinks of George, blush high on his cheeks, telling her that Lockwood was his first kiss. It seems likely, from what she knows about them both, that George was his first as well, and it’s been hanging over the both of them like a guillotine's blade ever since. 

Stupid boys. 

Stupid self sacrificing idiot boys. 

It’s a strange feeling to work this out, something she doesn't think he or George would know how to put into words. But they like each other. The same way her and George like each other. The way she thought she might like him before George kissed her in the kitchen and her world shifted on its axis.

The thing they have is good. So good she barely has the words to describe it. Despite that she thinks maybe there’s still a space between them formed in Lockwood’s shape. Some unspoken feeling for him so tightly knotted that she can’t tell if it comes from her or George.  The idea of the two of them together feels something like right. A little unfamiliar and she’s sure George will have something to say about it when she tells him. But it doesn’t twist her stomach up like she thought it might. 

Instead the twisting in her stomach is currently reserved for the fact he ran off without them again . She thought maybe they could be past this. That they were more solid now. But clearly she can’t read him as well as she thought she could. She wonders how long this has been eating at him. How long she missed it for. 

“We should get home. George is probably climbing the walls.” His shoulders settle when she says the word home. Like he was doubting that she would think of it that way. And that’s cause for another twist in her stomach too, that he would choose a path for her, even in his own head, that would take her away from Portland Row. 

He looks at her in that way of his, the one saved exclusively for when he knows she sees him. Sees the way that he treats his life like it’s something meaningless and not something as critical to her as her own heartbeat. “I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.” 

She sets off walking before he can see the way tears have stuck her eyelashes together and rubs at her shoulder that’s still sore from knocking him out of the path of the visitor. “Let’s just talk about this in the morning. I think I’m done for today.” 

As predicted, George is still awake when they get back. She finds him with his head in a cabinet where he’s scrubbing each of the shelves and the inside of the door in his oversized gloves. She knows there are at least three steps between him turning round and getting the gloves off enough for any other task, so on instinct she puts the kettle on.

He turns around when it clicks on, sad smile breaking when he sees them both. Dusty and a little bruised but alive. 

… 

In the end it’s George’s smile that gets him. There’s too much of the night of the bone glass in it. George smiles and it doesn’t reach his eyes, barely reaches past the edges of his mouth and it’s all too much. Too heavy and pressing in on him. For a second he can’t breathe at all. 

Then they’re there in front of him. Both of them. George’s hand on his face and Lucy’s hand on his shoulder. And for a second he’s utterly weightless, both of them taking so much of him that he doesn’t even have to hold the weight of his own body. 

They lead him to his room and this time it’s two sets of hands undoing the stiff buttons of his shirt, and god, this is definitely the point where it should cross into embarrassment. Or at least something other than a dull choke of anger and a wrenching feeling that things might be okay. 

Lockwood knows he should be the one comforting them. He ran off alone and yet here they both are by his side again , and there’s something awful and selfish in the comfort that brings him. That they still want this part of him, when they could have a cleaner life without it. Without him. 

A mug of tea is pressed into his hands, thankfully not chamomile, and it’s in the mug he didn’t take a few nights ago. There’s a little chip, on the underside of the handle, and he rubs his fingertips against it, using the edge of the porcelain to remind himself that he’s in his body. And that being in his body means he gets tea, and he gets pieces of them, of Lucy and George, and if that’s all he ever gets then he has to start learning how to be okay with it. 

They prop him up against the headboard and tuck his legs under a blanket, one he thinks his mother must have bought for him a decade ago. He wonders if she’d like them. If she’d be happy with the shape his life has taken. 

Thoughts of her are stilled, though, as Lucy tucks herself into his left side and George follows her, tucking himself into his right. All he can think about is the feeling of his blood racing under his skin and the places where their hair is brushing against his neck. He thinks they might be talking even, trying to talk him down but at this point it’s somewhere past unnecessary because he can’t hear them over the roaring in his ears. 

They’re just so warm. 

He struggles to speak around his tongue, he thinks he's trying to say he loves them but it just comes out as mumbled noises, falling into his tea. 

"We'll talk in the morning Lockwood, I would really like to go to sleep right now though." 

And who is he to deny her, so he just sinks deeper into the space between their bodies and lets the warm dark take him over. 

…

Talking about it in the morning mostly looks like Lockwood apologising, again . And George telling him that it’s okay, even though all of them know it’s not. It’s like they’re all holding their breath for the day he runs off alone and they don’t spot it in time. For the day she can’t meet him at the door of another haunted house. For the day that he becomes just another visitor in their lives, their time with him only able to last until the day their talents fade. 

He promises not to do it again . George reminds him no secrets. When he says that Lockwood looks like he’s trying to swallow his own tongue and Lucy wonders if he’s figured it out yet. The thing that they have been missing that sits between them. She just sits and eats breakfast that was put in front of her, and drinks coffee that someone else has made just to her liking. She wasn’t paying attention to who. She’s run out of words anyway, Lockwood knows they want him alive. They know he’s trying his best. What more is there to say than that anyway, when anything else will just end with one of them crying? 

She’s definitely not thinking about the way it felt for all of them to fall asleep in Lockwood’s bed, all still in their day clothes. Lockwood still safe in the middle when they woke up, her face pressed into his chest and George’s arm thrown over both of them. The world had stopped for a bit and all she could think was that there was nowhere else that could ever feel as much like home. She hasn’t changed yet out of the thankfully unbloody clothes they went out to hunt in. She doesn’t want to, when her sweater smells like the feeling of the three of them breathing together. 

Still they all leave the kitchen together, which is progress after a week of splitting apart. She can be thankful for that, even if she doesn’t know what she’s going to do with the rest of it. If there’s anything she can do.

She and George are sitting on her bed a few days later when she decides to bring it up. They’re both supposed to be reading for the case they’re on. He’s given her some dry history of some abbey or another but she has no hope of holding the words in her head, not least because he’s leant his head against her leg and all she really wants to do is run her fingers through his hair. 

“So what’s going on with you and Lockwood?” She asks the question even though she’s not sure she wants the answer. Like if she was asked the same she’d be able to give an answer. She’s never been good at leaving things alone. 

George swallows around it and she thinks maybe this is another set of tipping scales. “He likes you better.” 

“That’s not what I meant.” It’s her turn to pause, for a second her vision is full of the way he looks at her when no one else is in the room, both of them bundled into George’s t-shirts. She’s glad her voice doesn’t shake when she speaks. “And I don’t think that’s true.” 

George just looks at her, and she thinks she’s in this far so she may as well keep going, pull at the thread until it’s all the way unravelled. “I always thought maybe there was something with the two of you.” 

He shifts so that he’s sat up beside her, making a sound he makes isn’t quite a laugh. “I thought that too until you arrived.” 

She rests her head on his shoulder. She doesn’t think there’s something she could say that would cover the expanse of that feeling. For a second she’s lost to the echo of the catacombs and him pleading with Joplin but she just presses further into his side, verging on the point where she knows he’ll start to squirm away. 

“So do you like him?” 

“Maybe. I don’t know. I know I like you.” 

The conversation stalls there. They move on to some movie she saw a poster for, or one of his experiments but she keeps turning it over in her head. The thought that George might like Lockwood as well as liking her doesn’t make her stomach flip in the way that she had thought it would. She trusts him entirely. She wants him more than anything to be happy. For all of them to be happy. 

And she can’t say she hasn’t thought of kissing Lockwood sometimes. Which seems to be what George thinks is going on, but she knows that that isn’t right. It isn’t the way things can shake out. Because if Lockwood wanted to kiss her, he had the chance. He had more than one in fact. And she can’t explain to herself now why she didn’t close the distance between them herself, but she’s glad she didn’t when it’s led her here. To George, warm by her side, and the knowledge that if they can’t work things out for themselves then she can work them out for them. The unravelling of it has become almost compulsive, she thinks she’ll sleep better once she’s able to tidy it all away. 

The next time Lucy brings it up she’s painting his nails. She thinks maybe the forced contact will help and he won’t be able to disappear from her if she hits a nerve. Which she’s pretty sure is becoming inevitable, there’s something at her that has to keep picking this apart. She wants to know them both, know all the pieces of them. Even the messy parts that can’t be neatly explained and the parts that they try and close away, to keep out of her sight. 

The nail painting is another new ritual. They were sitting at the basement desks and he was just talking through his ideas, but he wanted one of them to be there. So they were both there. And she’d been painting her nails. She knows she isn’t very good but she never used to do her own. She would paint Norrie’s a rainbow of colours, sunshine yellows and grass greens and bright reds, and Norrie would paint hers the same dark blue every time. They did it every week, like clockwork. She still hasn’t adjusted to how new rituals keep being built from the bones of the old ones. 

She’d been painting her nails and then when the final coat was applied, Lockwood’s hand had appeared next to hers. Fingers outstretched and still. Once she’d done his, she had to do George’s. For balance. Lockwood regretted it immediately, said he hated that he could feel the extra weight at the edges of his hands. But George had liked it, so now once a week she paints her own nails, in the same dark blue, then his too. His hands are warmer than Norrie’s ever were and they never seem to shake like hers did. But she likes that she gets to do this for him, like has been done for her hundreds of times. 

She’s holding his hand in her own. “Promise you won’t get mad at me if I tell you something.” 

“Lucy?” There’s a flash of worry on his face, she strokes her thumb against the bone of his wrist. 

“Promise me?” 

“I can’t promise if I don’t know what I’m promising.” 

“You could.” 

“Okay then I’m choosing not to.” George’s tone sharpens just slightly, and normally she would push back but this time it doesn’t feel fair to. 

“Please.”

“Luce, please spit it out. You're starting to worry me.” He breathes in and she can see the movement in every muscle of his chest. “It’s fine if you broke one of the mugs in the kitchen Lockwood-” 

“Lockwood likes you.” 

The sentence stops him in his tracks, she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him this still. Even after the bone glass he had a sort of nervous movement. She doesn’t know what still means. Maybe she should have never said anything at all, but she thinks the shadow of it hanging over them would have inevitably crashed down on them all. And she thinks that would have to be more painful, but when he’s still and silent she isn’t sure. 

“George, please say something.” She whispers the words down to the hand she’s still holding, and even though they’re quiet they seem to startle him. 

“Why would you say that?” She sort of expected him to be angry at her. She thinks that would be a fair response. What she isn’t expecting is for how miserable the words are as they fall from his mouth, like he can’t bear to say them. 

“Because, it’s true and because the two of you are never going to admit it otherwise.” She hates how her voice is rising but she can’t find it in herself to keep a level of calm.  

She can see the second where he tries to slip back into reason. Switches off the part of his heart that loves them both, she’s certain he loves them both, and replaces it with the coldest logic he can. 

“Look if you don’t like me it’s fine but I’d rather you just say that rather than making up-” 

“Oh fuck off. No lies George, and I wouldn’t lie about this. Why would you rather assume I’m making this up?” The next part comes out by accident but it’s the part that stings the insides of her ribs the most. Her next words come out quiet. “And why do you never believe me?” 

She stares down at his hand, surprised he hasn’t taken it back yet. She normally tries not to look at the scars that run across his knuckles but right now it feels easier than looking him in the eyes. 

His voice is stretched thin. “I don’t think you’re lying I just think you-” 

“Think what, that I don’t know the two of you. Or that I’m saying something to hurt just you. Because neither of those are good options.” She takes a breath, trying to shake off the way her chest still feels like it’s shrinking inwards. “Please just believe me.” 

“You really mean it don’t you?” 

“I really bloody mean it.” 

“Oh. Well that’s-” He stumbles over his words. Like what she’s saying is only now hitting him, meaning spreading through him like ink in water.  

“You don’t have to do anything but I think you should do something.” 

“And you’d be okay with it?” 

And that’s the question isn’t it. Would she be okay with it? She thinks she has to be. It makes sense she could only keep a single part of his heart, when Lockwood had it first. Had it for longer. She’s still holding his hand and some selfish part of her never wants to let it go. Wants to keep him for herself. The way he looks at her and the way he kisses her, even the thought of the picnic basket and the gingham blanket that came with it. But more than any of that she wants them all to be happy, and the two of them will make each other happy and she will be okay with it. 

“Yea, I think I am.” 

He smiles, properly smiles and she knows she’s making the right choice from the way the tops of his ears are starting to turn pink.  

…

George appears in the door to his room like a spectre and Lockwood is glad his secondary kit has been removed from under his bed, (Lucy said he had to earn it back) because otherwise he isn’t sure what he might have thrown at him. Instead he’s taken by how pale George looks but he’s present too. There’s something sharp and inquisitive in his eyes that’s different to the bone glass blankness. Still he’s just standing there, and it’s unsettling. 

“Are you alright mate?” 

“I’m- Yeah- Actually-” The words come out in a cascade and slightly strangled as he scrubs at his face with one hand. “Well.” 

“Do you want to come in or are you just going to stay in my doorway?” 

He steps in wordlessly and sits himself on the end of his bed, cross legged and nervously picking at a loose thread on his jeans. Lockwood’s heart is starting to hammer against his ribs. George without words is rare and it’s bad and he just wants him to be okay. Really okay. 

“George are you-”

“Lucy said we should kiss.” 

There is nothing in the world that could have prepared him for those words coming from George’s mouth. His heart stops and his hands are heavy and he thinks for a sinking second that this might be what dying feels like. Heartbeat failing in the space of seconds and then just nothing. Except he’s not dying, he can feel the ground where his feet are pressing against it and he can feel his knuckles turning white around the pen he’s holding. 

He tries to pull all of the pieces of himself together tightly enough that George can’t see how he’s just forced all the cracks he’s made up of just a little more open. 

“I mean if that’s what she wants, I’m flattered mate, I am-”

“I mean that’s not quite what she said but I think it's what she-”

“Why would she say-” 

“She made me promise I’d listen to her.” 

The jumble of words he’s contributing to isn’t quite reaching him. All he can think about is kissing George for the third and hopefully not last time. They’ve kissed twice before. Once after they recovered a source and George had yelled in celebration and he was just so much, stood there in the moonlight. They blamed that time on the adrenaline. Once at a Fittes party, the first they were ever invited to and the only time he’s seen George in a shirt that needed to be ironed. They blamed that time on the complimentary champagne. 

Both times George had laughed it off and Lockwood had thought about it for weeks. Because they were (they are) just friends and the agency needed them to be solid and because George likes Lucy. (Lucy who sent him to his room like some sort of divine punishment.) He doesn’t know what to make of the sound of their voices, both just a little loud, or the fact they’re both blushing when he’s spent a year telling himself he’s nothing more to George than a friend. 

He’s promised himself he can be okay with being best friends. And really he is, George is the best friend of his life. He’s more than lucky to have him. 

Which is why when George leans forward and kisses him, a kiss sweetened with honey and a year of something he still doesn’t think he understands, he hates himself a little. Just for a second, for not being what he thinks they need from him. But then George reaches forward, tangling his hand in the buttons of his shirt to pull him closer and he doesn’t think he could ever dislike himself, when it makes him worthy of a kiss like this. Slow and warm and, most importantly, with George. 

He thinks maybe he owes Lucy flowers or some greater indescribable thing because George is kissing him and god, it’s more than he could have ever imagined. Kissing George when he’s not running at a million miles per hour and they’re in their home and things are finally starting to look good for him. Like he has a future and maybe this could be a part of it. 

But then they pull apart and he’s still thinking of Lucy and his cheeks start to burn in a different way. He can’t do this to her. He can’t be that selfish. He has to think he is capable of being a better man than kissing his best friend, when his best friend is also his best friend’s boyfriend. 

If he weren’t still so caught up on the feeling of George’s mouth on his, he could maybe think about the way his feelings for them both are a single entity. A thing he can’t separate out into discrete pieces. But he’s lost in the burning feeling behind his eyes and the fact that he knows his face must already be going splotchy, like it always does when he’s about to cry. 

George, for all his many talents, has never been good at knowing what to do when he cries. And it happens rarely enough that he just muddles through it on his own, like he did for ten years before he had George. But George sees the tears coming up and first lets go of his shirt, then flaps his hands for a second, like he can wave away what’s about to happen. Then looks to the door like someone will come bursting in to help him. 

“Oh- No I didn’t mean- Do you want tea? I’m sorry I shouldn’t have done that. Please don’t be mad at me. Do you want me to get Lucy?” Lockwood lets out an almost sob and that’s enough for George to stop talking. Not that he wants George to stop talking, there’s something grounding in his voice even when he’s panicking, but he can’t imagine Lucy seeing him like this. At least George has stopped looking at the door like he’s about to take off running but Lockwood can’t get any of his words out around the hiccuping in his chest. 

Instead he just lets himself collapse forward, George’s arms coming up to meet him. The shirt George is wearing is soft from being washed a hundred times, so soft he thinks it must be one of the ones George got from his older brothers that he doesn’t let them steal. He’s sure he’s making a wet spot on it that means the fabric will stick to George in a way he knows will be uncomfortable. But he can’t bring himself to turn from where his face is pressed up into George’s chest, when the feeling is something like safety until he can get his breath back for long enough to reconstruct himself. 

He thinks it could be years before he’s ready to pull away, and George is right there with him, petting the hair at the nape of his neck with one hand and keeping the other round his middle, grounding him in place. They stay like that until he gets his breath back, and then for a minute more while he lets a sudden wash of embarrassment overtake him. 

When he manages to force himself back to upright, George offers him a damp smile. “I didn’t think I was that bad a kisser.” 

A sound that wants to be a laugh falls from him even though he can feel the betrayal of more tears forming in the corners of his eyes. 

“Please don’t cry again.” This time he’s closer to a laugh, even if it’s still waterlogged and heavy, for the way George’s smile lights up just a little. “I really do think tea might help. Biscuits even.” 

“I agree, if you give me a minute I can join you down in the-” 

“I can bring it back here, if you’d like?” 

He sighs and with it breathes out the worst of the crying, falling into something that George clearly recognises as a smile. “I think that would be nice.” 

There’s a second where he thinks George might say something else. He doesn’t want him to apologise again, he knows that much, but he doesn’t really know any other better plan. Save that maybe he should be apologising for whatever situation he’s gotten them into. But George doesn’t say anything else, just darts forward and presses a kiss to his cheek before darting out of the room. 

(And he wants to think it means something so much it fills the entire expanse of his chest. But he isn’t sure even on his worse days he could do something like this to Lucy.)

He busies himself while he hears the hum of the kettle. Moving the papers he was halfway through ignoring from his bed into slightly neater piles on his desk and finding a sweater for the chill that’s settled into him. The first one he finds can only be Lucy’s, it’s sky blue in wavy knitted lines and it’s a little too short in the body for him. He isn’t sure how it ended up mixed in with his laundry but it’s thankfully warm and he thinks he gets a faint hint of her soap from it. 

George returns a few minutes later, balancing two mugs, a plate of biscuits on the tray and a napkin that has “fair share of biscuits for Lucy” scribbled on it in her hand. Lockwood’s already standing, so he takes the tray from George, settling it in the middle of his bed and preemptively separating out the first biscuit for her. He follows by settling up at his headboard, legs stretched in front of him and crossed at the ankles. George takes up the same place at the end of his bed and the distance is a physical ache, but he thinks maybe it’s for the best. 

Both of them wait for a moment, expecting the other to speak first and when he does it feels like one of the bravest things he’s ever done. 

“So what’s going on with you and Lucy?” 

Clearly that’s not the question he expected because for a second his face is pure confusion.”We’re good? Is there a reason we shouldn’t be?”

“Because you just kissed me.”

“Which, again, was her idea.”  

“Then please tell me what the fuck is going on and why you did it.” Suddenly he’s just overcome with tiredness. He just wants to know why (and if it means the thing he wants or the wretched things he deserves.) He tips his head back and his skull makes an unpleasant type of contact with the wall. 

He doesn’t know how to deserve what George might be offering him. 

For a second George just looks at him the way he does a particularly complicated sequence of translation. Like if he just looks carefully enough he might figure out the secrets of the universe. (It’s a look they’ve seen less since the bone glass, whatever secrets he found had taken that from him.) 

“Why do you think I did it?” He can hear frustration around the edges of the words, but he can’t bring himself to look at George to check. 

“George, if I knew that I wouldn’t be asking.” 

“God. You’re so thick sometimes.” The comment stings a little, he knows he isn’t as smart as George, neither of them are. But this feels different like it’s aimed at something other than his ability to move through an archive.  

It’s enough to get him to look down from where his eyes are fixed on the ceiling. George’s eyes are fixed on him, even as his hands pick apart the edges of a napkin. “Why are you annoyed at me?” 

“Because I like you, Lockwood. And Lucy made me think you might actually like me but I think I’ve just cocked this up massively.” 

He knows that he can play the rake if George will let him, but he can’t see George letting him wriggle away from the genuine feeling of his hammering heart. And he doesn’t think he can hide the way George’s words have left him speechless in time anyway. 

The idea that he likes George is at once completely new and something he has known the whole time. When the words hit him they force their way into his chest and remake him, just slightly, into something someone like George could want. He thinks of his churning stomach when he found out they were dating and, at least for a second, it makes sense. 

He likes George. (Loves George maybe, but there’s not time for that yet.) Because of course he likes George, in the archives and rapier in hand and sleep-worn holding a mug of tea. He likes George and he likes kissing George, and he hopes he gets the chance to do it again. If the claw of anxiety climbing up his throat in the immediate aftermath hasn’t done enough to send him scrambling away. 

“Oh.”

“Look we can just forget-”

“NO.” His voice comes out far louder than he means it to and still a little rough around the edges. “I mean- I don’t want to forget it. I think maybe I’m just still catching up.” 

“Of course.” George reaches forward for his mug, napkin thoroughly taken apart, and picks it up so tightly his knuckles go pale. “You know I don’t think you’re stupid, right?” 

“I know, mate. Heat of the moment and all that.” 

There’s a few more beats of silence while they both sip their tea. George smiles at him over his mug. And, like always, it’s George’s smile that does him in. He thinks George could get him to do pretty much anything if he knew he’d get to see him smile afterwards. He’s lucky to see George in any way, but when he smiles at Lockwood like he’s the only person in the world that matters, he knows he never had a chance of fighting whatever feeling it is that’s currently racing through his nervous system. 

“I think Lucy was right.” 

“Anthony Lockwood, admitting someone else was right, big day of firsts.” George’s tone is teasing and his smile gets stronger and Lockwood can’t find it in himself to pout. 

“And you’re sure she’s okay with us-” He gestures between them with a hand but holds the next words close for a second, until he’s sure his nerve won’t give out halfway through. “With us dating?” 

“Pretty sure.” 

“Good.” 

“Good.” 

Something in his chest settles, maybe his heartbeat becomes a little more steady. He smiles at George who continues to smile back. And he thinks something he thinks more often recently, that he’s going to be okay. More than that even. He and George and Lucy are going to be fucking incredible.

…

It’s just another shift in the air of Portland Row, the two boys together at last. It’s not until she knows that, that she also knows something else, something she doesn’t like because she thinks it’s rotting in her chest. She thinks she still might want to kiss Lockwood and maybe she’s been ignoring it but she doesn’t think she can ignore it anymore. Not when he kisses George on the cheek, or on the backs of his mirror scarred knuckles and George turns pink. He looks at George like he’s a miracle, and she hates that she sort of wants him to look at her in the same way. 

It makes her feel weird and a little sad and she doesn’t quite know where to put the feeling. How to lock it away now that she knows what it is. She tells it to the tape recorder the same as she does everything else and she hopes that somewhere across the country, Norrie is listening. 

Because Lockwood doesn’t like her. Not the way he likes George and she’s chosen to believe that’s something she can be alright with. She already has so much more of a home than she ever thought she could have. Some days it feels like so much she can barely cope with it, the golden light of the kitchen and notes on the thinking cloth and constant noise. The hum of the living rather than the scratching silence of the dead outside of the walls. 

She tells it and retells it, just like she did her and George’s first kiss in the hope that this will work out the same way. That if she looks at her feelings closely enough, alongside George’s hand in hers and the new routine of all three of them sharing one bed when the nights get too dark and the nightmares too loud, that it will all make sense again. She hasn’t been successful but she thinks maybe if she keeps trying she’ll figure out a way. 

… 

He thinks something is going on with Lucy and he can’t tell what it is. (Maybe he just isn’t paying enough attention. Again.) She seems a little colder, a little sharper around the edges. More distant maybe, but in a way that suggests she’s moving to a place that he can’t reach. It seems like George can still reach her. It’s just him out in the cold. 

Jobs have been easier since, well, since the last time he went storming off on his own. But he can feel their combined attention more closely as well. They’re both set on watching him, from pretty much the minute a new client leaves up to and inclusive of the moment the three of them finally contain the source. Maybe it should make him feel like a child, like they don’t trust him. (It does. A little.) But strangely enough it mostly just makes him feel known, a kind of warm feeling that settles over his bones like a quilt. (Cared for maybe.) 

The job they’re on should be easy. Actually easy. Which he thinks is a relief, even if it doesn’t pay as well and that’s a new feeling too. The idea that he doesn’t have to be chasing the next biggest and brightest thing. He can save big and bright for the fact that beyond doubt he works with the most talented people in the city. He believes probably in the country, but Lucy rolls her eyes, scrunches her nose in that way she does when he says it. He still says it sometimes anyway for the way it makes both of them blush, but he doesn’t say it in front of clients anymore. They don’t need to know. 

He’s on research duty with George for this job but thankfully it’s not eventful enough for them to stay in the Archives. Instead they’re posted up on the library sofa, George with six different books open and him with his feet tucked under George’s legs and a society magazine in hand. The text of George’s books had been too small for him, too slippy, so now he’s mostly acting as a trusty companion and sounding board while George checks the information out. 

The door’s open and Lucy appears in it, tea tray in hand and for a second something in his heart clenches. 

“I was just going down to the basement to pack the kit, but I thought I’d do a round of tea first.” 

He doesn’t think before he speaks. “God, I could kiss you, you’re an angel.” 

The room suddenly becomes very still and he becomes very, horribly, aware of two sets of eyes on him. Looking at him in a way that they normally do not. “I just meant-”

“I think we know what you meant.” George doesn’t smile when he speaks, but the corner of his mouth twists upwards just enough for Lockwood to know that George has opinions about what he just said. 

“Yeah, completely know what you meant.” Lucy’s voice comes out high, and he thinks she’s gripping the tray so tightly she might snap off a handle. “If you just-”

She offers the tray out to George, pointedly not looking at him, and George passes him his tea. He doesn’t trust what might come out of his mouth again if he speaks so he instinctively takes a sip, wincing as the too hot liquid sears his throat. 

It’s only now he knows his feelings for George he can start to extricate something like feelings for her as well. He sort of hasn’t thought about her like that since the bone glass. He hasn’t let himself, when George had been right when he’d said he was distracted. But things are different now, he hopes. They’re all different now and the circumstances have changed. Still the thought of it makes his blood feel like it’s moving more slowly, because he doesn’t know if he can stay the person they all need him to be. (If he’s changed enough and for the better.) 

Lucy kisses George on the cheek before she goes but none of them speak. He and George are quiet as they listen to her footsteps on the stairs. It’s only once they can’t hear her movements anymore George turns to him, face splitting into a grin. “So what was that?” 

“Is it awful if I like Lucy too?” 

His smile softens at the edges. “Why would it be awful?” 

“Because I like you both. And because I think you were right before, when she joined.” He looks down into his tea. She’s used one of his mugs this time, like he always does in the daytime. It’s one he remembers his mum drinking her coffee from, one of the few memories of her he’s managed to keep.

George stills a little and he knows they’re both thinking of uncovering Bickerstaff and the unsettling quiet of the house after they had all fought. “I was right at the time. And I like both of you, do you think I'm awful?”  

“Of course I don’t think you’re awful.” He thinks George is wonderful and he hopes every day that he knows that. 

“Then you should talk to her about it.” 

“Maybe.”

There’s a flash of something unrecognisable on George’s face but he shakes it away just as fast. George settles instead for placing a hand on his knee, leaving it there while he finishes the chapter he’s reading before they set off. 

They’re completely prepared for the job. They’ve read what they need to, they’ve looked at the plans, their bags are properly stocked. What they’re not prepared for, what he would never think to prepare for, is some low ranking Fittes team to come barreling in just after them. The client probably double booked the contract. Which would be fine, but Fittes haven’t even sent Kipps and his lot, just a team of unnamed agents acting like they have something to prove and throwing flares and salt bombs around like they have a never ending supply. Working at Fittes, they probably do. 

They manage to dodge the first three missed shots in time, even if the second one sets his ears off ringing so loudly Lockwood thinks he’ll be shouting for a week. The fourth however gets thrown and he watches it land horribly close to Lucy’s feet, on the other side of the room to where he and George are standing. Her name wrenches its way from his throat and he hears George make a strangled noise next to him as he sets off racing across the room to her. 

And then it goes off.  

For a second his world is very still and very bright. Then he’s moving again, by her side in an instant where she’s been pushed back across the floor. He can hear the sounds of George yelling at the team behind him over the ringing in his ears, but he can’t think of anything except the dazed look on her face. He might be saying something, a prayer or just her name over and over again as he uses his shaking hands to grab at one of hers. 

“Lockwood. Lockwood, I’m okay.” She uses the hand he isn’t holding to push herself upwards into sitting, only wincing slightly as she does. 

“If you’re hurt I’m going to-” 

“You’re what? Going to fence some idiot fourteen year olds?” That’s enough to force a small smile from him. 

“I’d do it. And I’d win.” This gets him one of her smiles in return, even if she still looks a little pale. 

He finally hears the rhythm of George’s footsteps and he drops to the ground on her other side, the room finally quieting behind them. 

“We got the source, it’s all sorted now.” Then, more quietly. “Luce, you’re bleeding.” 

Lockwood looks at her hand where it’s still trapped in his. Her palm is grazed and sticky with blood and the sleeve of her jumper has fared much the same fate, little circles of red growing against the fabric. 

“So I am.” She swallows hard and for a second he genuinely considers trying to fight whichever so called agent is leading that Fittes team. 

“It’s probably some combination of salt from inside the bomb and friction from the force of the fall. It doesn’t look serious.” He thinks George is trying to sound reassuring, but his voice sounds like it’s sticking to the inside of his throat. (He doesn’t think his voice would be any more solid, but he wishes it could be. For her and for George.) 

Lockwood takes a second to breathe, closing his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at where the bloody sleeve is sticking to her. “In the morning, I am going to file an official complaint about them and something is going to be done. But for now let’s get you home.”

… 

He leads her to the kitchen and a first aid kit under the sink while George wanders deeper into the house mumbling something about drawing up a bath for her. 

“Do you want to?” He mimes pulling a sweater over his head and she copies his movement, wincing at the way it stretches the scrapes dotted over her arm. She’s glad she nicked one of Lockwood’s rarely worn sweatshirts for this job because the sleeve is unfortunately close to shredded. She really is fine, now she’s walked the worst of the dizziness off, but her arm stings unpleasantly.

“If you just- Right here.” He moves her to the edge of the table with his hands on her hips, and she follows along sitting on the edge of it in a way she knows will drive George mad if sees. Lockwood doesn’t sit with her, instead he takes a step into her space and it’s her turn to feel a little mad with the sudden force of how much she wants him. 

He works methodically and silently, from the top of her shoulder to the bones of her wrist. Cleaning each cut with a sharp smelling antiseptic, drying it carefully and then applying a plaster. With each step he drags his fingers over her skin and it sort of feels like she’s losing her mind, in the place past the normal joking jabs they make at each other while they do this. However bad she’s feeling, from the look on his face she opened her eyes to, he must be feeling worse. 

Lockwood is applying the last plaster to her arm, all of them forming a little constellation, and she can’t breathe for a second as his hands trace over her skin. He pulls his fingers away, not all the way, and they hang in the air while he flexes his hand like he does when he’s thinking. She doesn’t let herself wonder what he’s thinking about. 

The air feels heavier in the space between them, it always does when the world is quiet and they’re together. 

“Be more careful next time, okay?” 

She wants to laugh, tell him it wasn’t her call and that he’s one to talk about careful but she can barely think of more than the curve of his lip as he talks. 

She wants to kiss him so badly she thinks the feeling must be growing roots in her, taking over her entire nervous system. It’s not at all helped by the fact he’s still standing so close to her she can smell the silly orangey cologne he wears, under the tang of metal and dirt they all smell like after a case. She feels a little ridiculous, for how obvious her feelings must be to him even though they aren’t returned. 

She’s saved from her wanting by George walking into the kitchen. Straight to the kettle and the biscuits like always. Lockwood jumps away from her like he’s been hit by an electric shock and says something to excuse himself that she doesn’t quite catch before he’s all the way out the room. 

She supposes, in a distant sort of way, that she should have been expecting for the other shoe to drop, like it always does. She thinks there’s some new type of distance stretching between her and Lockwood and she can’t quite figure out why. She helped him. And even if sometimes her stomach twists with the thought that she’s the only one on the outside, then that’s not his fault. If he liked her, the way they both like George and she likes him, then there’s no reason for him not to have said something by now. When they’re all tangled on the library sofa or on one of their beds, warding off nightmares through the combined force of care they have for each other. Or even while he’s bandaging her up like it’s the only thing in the world he can imagine doing. 

Still, she doesn’t expect George to be the one to bring it up. 

“Luce,” He says her name like a prayer in the quiet kitchen. “You and Lockwood should talk.” Her stomach drops out and for a second all she can hold onto is the rush of blood in her ears. But she settles herself. She knows she will always be the one to settle herself. 

“Lockwood can come talk to me himself, pretty much anytime.” 

“Yeah, but you know what he’s like.” George sighs like he has the hardest job in the world and she wants to be annoyed by it but she can’t find it in herself. 

“And I know that whatever it is he can come talk to me himself.” She folds her arms in a gesture she knows is stubborn, verging on childish, but that’s the tendency Lockwood brings out in her. She thinks it’s part of what makes the three of them such a good team, her boys, brilliant as they are, need someone to push back against them. And she’s happy enough to do that. Because sometimes it leads to George kissing her in the kitchen, or the sappy look that Lockwood gets now. Like he finally thinks he’s allowed to see George. 

“Look the two of you-”

“Are fine George. It’s fine that we aren’t together, you don’t need to try and fix this.”

His eyes widen. “I didn’t say anything about that.” 

“I didn’t mean it like- Look. It’s fine. I’m fine that he doesn’t fancy me, okay?”

“Of course. I didn’t want to start anything, Luce. I just wanted to check that you’re okay.” 

Whatever anger had flooded into her system recedes just as fast with the soft way he’s looking at her. Eyes caught between her face and the plastered over grazes on her arm. His worry hits her like a physical force and for a second she forgets all about Lockwood and what George does or doesn’t think about him. 

She pushes off the table and crosses enough distance to reach for his hand. “It’s not as bad as it looks, I promise.” 

His face relaxes and she knows whatever moment they were in has passed and they’re back to being themselves. Still, she thinks about the conversation for days. 

In the end, they fall together like a flood, tons of water on an inevitable path. All rushing forwards in the same direction. Volume and noise and force, so much force, leading them on. 

They’re in the kitchen eating breakfast when it happens, because of course they are. Something has settled in the passing of days after the most recent job, or maybe George and Lockwood are just tiptoeing around her, trying to keep her from picking at the edges of the plasters they keep applying to her like clockwork. She can almost forget the way she felt about Lockwood in the green kitchen light when they’re all smiling and laughing like it’s not just the most important room in the house, but in the whole world. 

They have doughnuts and strong, milky tea and she has them and, complicated feelings aside, she thinks when she records a new message for Norrie later she’ll tell her how lucky she feels. 

She’s telling Lockwood about the picnic in the park and he turns to her, grinning. One of his smiles doesn't seem to have a mask in front of it, leaving it so bright as to be almost blinding.  “Luce, do you want to know how George asked me out?” 

She hasn’t asked yet, though she has pieces of it from George. She hasn’t wanted to think about it in case it feeds the waves of jealousy that occasionally rip through her.  “Of course.”

“He came into my room, pale as a visitor, and said to me, ‘Lucy says I should kiss you’.” 

She’s laughing before she can stop herself, even as George throws his face into his hands next to her. “Did he actually?”

“I swear, hand to god, he did.” Lockwood’s giggling now and George is collapsing against her, blushing so hotly she can feel it through her shirt.  

“You know that’s not what I said.” Lockwood raises an eyebrow, mug of tea forgotten halfway to his mouth.

George makes a noise like he’s dying against her arm. “I’m sure you said something like that.” 

“Georgie, that was all you.” She’s turning towards him and manages to catch him just as the look in his eye changes from embarrassment to something else. Still warm, still relaxed, but almost mischievous. 

“At least I said something to both of you.” 

He’s smiling and at ease, takes another sip of his tea and a bite of toast. Which is nice for him because for her it feels like all the air has gone out of the room. She would turn to glare at him but that would mean taking her eyes off of Lockwood and the way he’s opening and closing his mouth like he’s considering a hundred different sentences, none of them ever making it all the way into the world. 

At once her heart is somewhere between entirely stopped and impossibly fast. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Lockwood finally finds his voice but he uses it to hiss out a curse rather than saying anything that could help her figure out what’s happening. Peaceful breakfast they were sharing converted into an ambush. 

“It means I’m tired of walking into rooms to find the two of you looking at each other in that way you do and doing nothing about it.” 

It’s her turn to curse slightly, not helped by the way Lockwood is looking at her. Like he does the moment right before he spots a source or is the first one to notice the behaviour of a visitor. Like he’s unlocking a mystery right in front of her eyes. His voice is low and heavy. “Luce, do you know what he’s talking about?” 

“Its- He’s just-” She hides her face in her hands, hoping when she looks back up things will have returned to normal and the conversation will have moved on. She’s lucky, but she’s never been that lucky. When she looks up they’re still both looking at her. George with solid certainty and Lockwood like he’s just been hit in the gut.  

“Luce, I-”

“See this is exactly what I mean, but neither of you can see it and it’s maddening. ” 

George doesn’t look too concerned about interrupting Lockwood as his voice trails off, but she almost wishes he hadn’t. She wants to hear what he has to say if he actually finds the right words. 

He speaks again. “Look if it helps, I’m saying I’m okay with this. I think you two could be good together.” 

She snaps to look at him. “Well that’s all well and good, George, but he doesn’t like me like that.” 

“I do.” She almost doesn’t hear him at first, over the crumpled expression on George’s face and her own racing pulse. “I do like you, I just thought- It doesn’t matter now, I guess. I like you Lucy.” 

He’s smiling by the time he’s finished speaking, George definitely is. She can feel herself falling towards a smile as well, as she thinks she finally sees the full puzzle that they’ve made of each other, with all the pieces locked neatly into place. 

“Oh. Well. I hope you know I’m still going to get you Georgie, for springing this on us over breakfast. But Lockwood I think, maybe, I would like to try, if you would. Being together I mean.” 

“I would like that too, if you’re sure.” 

“She is. You both are.” They turn to glare at George in unison, in a gesture that only serves to bring the smile back to his face. 

The rest of breakfast passes the way it always does, with them talking and doodling and teasing each other. Waiting for the doorbell to ring with a new client. Except about halfway through her hand resting on the table is close to Lockwood’s and he takes it without comment, like it’s the most natural thing in the world . It sort of feels like it might be, Lockwood holding her hand and leaning back into George when she laughs. 

And she looks at them and for not the first time she knows that this is what love is. What home is. A feeling so big that she has to smile, sitting between them in the golden light of the kitchen. She looks at them and she is certain when she speaks. “Right. I think it's time to plan another picnic.”