Chapter Text
i. the empty flat
or: the ghosts that live in his house
Note: this chapter postdates events in The Hollow Boy.
BY THEN, Kipps had learned to look that gift horse in the mouth. He’d learned that sometimes rewards from the higher-ups were punishments in disguise. And that a gift from Penelope Fittes was very rarely a sign of favour and goodwill.
Promotion, his eye. They were splitting up the team – splitting up his team. It happened all the time at Fittes, but this felt personal. This felt directed towards him. Towards all of them.
He’d smiled during the promotion ceremony, like he was supposed to: his old confident look at me smile, which came as naturally as breathing. Bowed slightly towards Penelope Fittes to show his gratitude. Stood straight as a soldier as she pinned the little gold pin on his breast. Slammed the door behind him when he returned and felt the tremor run through him and through the house.
And now Quill Kipps stood in the empty hall of 48 Whitecross Road, his mind blank and his knuckles sore from clenching his fists all day. Stood there, he realised, listening for signs of life.
His flat was empty. Why was he disappointed? It was always empty. No one else lived here, which was just as well – there were no disturbances at night, no disruptions during the day, no sounds of dishes being washed, or trivial things being argued over. There was no sound, no movement, no one else here. No one left but him.
It hadn’t always been this way. It hadn’t always been him in his empty flat.
Kipps remembered suddenly what it was like, growing up, before Dad was ghostlocked and Mum was in that traffic accident. The old house was bigger than his flat, big enough to hold a young, animated couple and their three rowdy kids.
You could feel the life in it, even when the house was empty: the crayons on the table, the occasional Lego piece on the ground, the books and toys in or falling out of boxes, the stray sock lying on the rug or over a door handle. The shining wood of a piano regularly dusted. The handwritten notes on the fridge. Dad’s records and Mum’s Austen collection stored carefully out of reach. Colourful math and science posters taped on the walls at a child’s eye level. Even when it was emptied of its inhabitants, his parents’ house always had the slightly rumpled look of well-loved home.
For whatever reason – it so rarely came to him with such clarity – he could see it all again in vivid colour: the shape of the light falling on the floor, and jam stains on the tablecloth, and Dad’s strong arm circling around Mum’s waist, surprising her in the middle of rinsing her hands in the kitchen sink. Yes, that was Dad all over, trying to make Mum giggle like a schoolgirl again. It always worked, too. She would laugh and the sound would ring out like an echoing chime.
Finn was already walking by that time and Saoirse had been small enough that Kipps had protectively carried her around everywhere. He’d been carrying her that day, too. She had her fist in her mouth and was starting to doze off, her plump face pressed into his shoulder.
“Dad,” he’d complained. Mum, her hands still soapy, laughed and leaned her head against Dad’s chest, lost in the sound of his laughter. “Finn’s got his fist in the jam jar and I’m holding the baby.”
But the world had turned upside down all too soon. Suddenly, Dad wasn’t around to make Mum laugh anymore, and Kipps knew he couldn’t even make her smile, because he’d tried afterwards, and it had never worked. She never laughed again after Dad died, not like before. What with rent and trying to feed and herd three growing children, Mum was constantly tired, constantly worried. Her eyes darted from the empty fridge to the full sink to the crying children to the bills on the table. And she never looked at Kipps properly afterwards, at least not the way she used to.
Look at me, Kipps had wanted to say to her, whenever she was hunched over an email or a stack of papers. He’d been young, young enough to want to beg for the love that was too tied up in other things to brim over, but old enough to not want to beg – to have the fragility of his heart exposed in that act.
Look at me. But she never did. And if she did, would she see him? See the frightened little boy holding his little siblings by the hand, looking to his mother for direction, for hope, for some form of love? He’d been a child, too. He’d only been a child.
But his mother was fighting monsters he couldn’t understand. He couldn’t see them, but he knew they were there, and he wanted to help her defeat it.
It was a good thing he’d had exceptionally strong Talent. When he turned seven, he’d applied to Clarke & Bell, the local agency. He’d been so proud of helping Mum pay the rent. The day he’d come home in his new uniform had been one of the rare moments where he’d felt really seen by her. Really seen, the way he’d been when Dad was around.
And then Mum had gotten into that accident, and suddenly Kipps was no longer holding Finn and Saoirse’s hands, because they were too old and didn’t want their hands held. Finn was restless, Saoirse anxious. The sky was falling, and if he wanted raise his hands and hold the world together, something needed to give. He had to do something for them.
Suddenly, he could see the monster his mother had been fighting. But this time, he had a sword in his hand.
Someone had to pay the bills. Someone had to go and work extra hours, hard hours, hours for other teams that no one else wanted, because there were three mouths to feed, and no one to help. Someone had to keep them all afloat. Someone had to keep the house together.
Maybe that was it. Maybe that had driven them all apart in the end: he’d done too much. Maybe it would’ve been better if he’d taken up fewer hours and spent more time at home with his siblings. To help bandage Finn’s hands the first time he’d brawled with another boy, instead of shouting at him for being immature. To hold Saoirse when her first boyfriend left her, instead of telling her that the pain would pass with time. Maybe he’d tried too hard to be his idea of a good brother, without actually thinking about what kind of brother his siblings actually wanted and needed to him to be.
Maybe then, if he’d understood that, if he’d been smarter, kinder, better, they wouldn’t have left so soon. They left him, one after another. First chance they got. They left him to the family home he then had to sell, because there was no point in paying for three rooms when there was only one of him.
They’d gone without looking back. Finn didn’t remember that his older brother had carried him home the day he’d broken his leg. He only remembered the brother who’d roared at him for going out drinking late so many nights, instead of asking him what he wanted to drown out.
Saoirse didn’t remember that her older brother had held her in his clumsy arms after every nightmare until she fell asleep. She only remembered the brother who only returned home after she’d left for school, and who’d forgotten – just like Mum – forgotten how to smile. Forgotten how to let something go, to just laugh at it and move on. Forgotten to really look. To really see.
They’d gone their separate ways. And there was no one left in that empty house. No one but him.
Kipps shook his head to clear it. It didn’t matter anymore. Finn and Saoirse were long gone. Why had he thought of them?
Because the flat was empty now, too. Because there’d been a time in between his siblings’ sudden, aching absence and now, when things had been better. Because his team had once taken up space here, in his little flat, and had made it their second home.
Because – he looked involuntarily – those hooks in the hall were reserved for Bobby’s bomber jacket, Ned’s cap, Kat’s fancy pashmina scarf. His team was the only reason he had a collection of mugs in the cupboard, why he had more than three pieces of cutlery in the drawer. Why he wasn’t the only one with a copy of his house key.
Ned had been buried with his key in his jacket pocket. And Kat and Bobby had mailed back their keys after they’d all been reassigned, as if the reassignment meant the end of – the end of what had been so carefully fostered.
Kipps had mailed the keys right back, of course. Kat and Bobby were always welcome here. It wasn’t like the reassignment had changed anything – but it had, hadn’t it? He didn’t exactly have a right to call them his team, now, did he?
Kipps walked mechanically through 48 Whitecross Road as if pulled by strings, glancing through the flat. The floorboards were cold under his feet. There was a draught coming from somewhere – why else would he feel so cold?
Here on his couch with the blankets and pillows neatly stacked on one end was where Ned sometimes spent the night after a particularly difficult mission, or after a particularly difficult day at home. He was the reason why Kipps had bought extra blankets in the first place. There lay Bobby’s tin of biscuits (a Christmas gift after the annual Fittes Christmas gala), half-eaten, on the counter. And those wooden coasters on the kitchen table had been gifts from Kat (“It pains me to see you put your drinks on the table like that,” she’d sniffed).
There were traces of them everywhere. But now the flat was empty, and he was alone. The party was over. The family had been broken up.
He’d lost the ability to see ghosts a long time ago. But Kipps, standing in his empty house with his silver uniform ironed and golden pin shining on his breast, thought that he could almost see in his periphery the moving lines of people who had once been here with him. He thought that if he strained himself hard enough, he might be able to hear his team chattering and bickering over hot chocolate, and under that, the sound of his siblings laughing, as if none of those threads had ever been severed. As if they still held him, as they held each other, in an unbroken web of connection across time and space.
As if he were trying to imagine a world that was not this.
As if the real world, the truer world, was one where he was not the newly promoted Quill Kipps, valiant knight and top supervisor at Fittes, standing in his one-bedroom flat with gel in his hair and his hand gripping the jewelled pommel of his play-pretend sword – completely and utterly alone.
NOTES:
- This story is very much a blend of book and show canon, since I wanted to present a more harmonious middle ground. The show presents more softening in the characterisation (Kipps’s attitude towards the Iron Trio post-Bickerstaff case, Lucy’s judginess leaning more towards hot-headedness/outspokenness, Flo’s tongue is less caustic and more sleekly sarcastic, etc.), for one thing. I’ve made adjustments to the development of relationships, especially those between the Iron Trio (Portland Row kids) and the Silver Quartet (Kipps and Co) with this in mind.
- As for characterisation, I’m blending book and show interpretations for many of the characters (ex. Kat’s coldness in the books + Kat’s casting and general air of self-assured ease in the show, Kipps’s love for novels and involvement with Fittes higher-ups in the books + Kipps’s sad boy state of mind, quicker-developing friendship with Lucy, and casting in the show).
- On this chapter: I wanted to establish Quill’s sense of duty from the start, and make a brief mention of his family life. I wanted to give him a wake-up call to the emptiness of the system he’s been in for so long and the state of his own mind and heart… his own loneliness. (There are few things lonelier than an empty house that used to be filled with the people you love.)
- Last general note: this story is somewhat book canon-divergent, on account of I can’t keep timelines straight in my head and slotting extracanonical moments between canonical ones is near impossible, considering I first wrote this fic not remembering the events of books 3-5 in the slightest (memory of a goldfish). But I’ve made some attempts to marshall events into some semblance of order, though there is quite a bit that is canon-divergent anyhow. If you’ve read the books and have better memory than I have, the timeline notes may be helpful; if you haven’t (and I recommend you do!), you can ignore them, because they don’t have that much bearing on the story itself (I’ll add explanations as we go just to make plot-relevant points clear, though).
- Such as: this story takes place after The Hollow Boy, because Kipps is promoted to division leader there, and that’s when Kipps’s team meets Holly and Flo (Stroud 410).