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Lucy is doodling on the Thinking Cloth in the kitchen when Lockwood bursts in. She looks up at him, a quizzical look on her face, but then just shrugs. He’s feeling bored - they aren’t on a case, and he can’t sleep. Apparently Lucy can’t either.
He fills the kettle with water, turns the stove on and leans against the counter, watching her, as he waits for the water to boil. She seems distracted, and he wonders why she’s up, but she seems like she wants to be left alone. The soft light of the kitchen shines through her hair, as she shifts her head, assessing what she’s drawn before she turns back to it.
The kettle goes off, he puts a bag of Pitkins in each of their mugs before heaping sugar into hers, sitting down next to her and gently pushing the mug in front of her.
She’s been closed off all day, and it’s troubling. He’s been trying to piece it together, as he waits for a more legitimate case. The way she’s been more irritable, shut in the basement most of the day practicing with her rapier, but telling him to piss off when he came down to practice with her. He thinks back to George’s awful calendar and no, it’s not that time. So what the hell is it?
“You can stop staring at me, y’know,” Lucy says, not looking at him.
Shit. He was, wasn’t he? He runs through a few responses, I wasn’t, I’m worried, I can’t help it, You’re a part of this company, and I care about you, Luce…
“Luce,” he starts, but really, he’s at a loss. Normally, he’s good at this, knowing what to say to assuage people, because he can compartmentalize with the best of them, but she’s not been having it all day.
She turns to him, a look of anger on her face. “What do you want, Lockwood?”
“I-tea?” He finishes lamely.
“You know if I wanted tea, I can make it myself, right?”
She turns away from him, but he grabs her arm. “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong?” He finally lets the frustration he’s been feeling with her from the day slip into his voice, and as her eyes widen, hurt flashing across them, he backtracks, saying softly, “Lucy, please. Something’s obviously bothering you.”
He hates that he knows she’s going to cave to him right here, and that he feels a little pleased with himself for finally working her over. But she says, “Just a bad day, that’s all.” And okay fine, he deserves that. He’s going to have to try a little harder here.
She pauses whatever she’s been sketching, and he reaches for her wrist, and wraps his fingers around it. She twitches ever so slightly but does not look at him. He waits, now afraid he’ll spook her, because of the type of day she’s clearly been having, but she stills, and he tries to convince himself this is just employer to employee, colleague to colleague, friend to friend, a “Hey you okay, Luce?” type of reassurance from one team member to another. He’s just trying to ease her emotions, except… except, a nagging voice says, his panic attack with her hands on his face, at the base of his neck, and after the adrenaline, after it was all over, and his mind fully processed just all that had happened that night, he found himself thinking what it would feel to have his fingers thread through her hair if circumstances were different, if she thought about him like that, like he sometimes does with her.
She takes a deep breath, looks at him. Steeling himself, he plays it slow, inching his hand across the top of hers, turning her hand over, and tracing his fingers against the lines etched into her palm. He takes her hand into his and grips it tight.
“Luce,” he tries again, “I know I,” he swallows. Bloody hell, he has to get better at this shit, especially if he’s asking her to give him something he’s not willing to give in return. “You know I’m here, okay? If you want, you can talk to me. And I’ll listen.”
“I know,” she says softly.
“And I know,” he begins. It’s important that he tells her this, “I know I’m not very good on returning the favor. In, uh, talking about whatever’s bothering me. Years of repressing, well, that’s a hard habit to break. But know that I’m trying.” He leaves out the last bit. For you. And he remembers their conversation in the attic about Norrie. How he’d accused her of never saying. And she’d shot back, you never asked.
“Luce,” he gives her hand a squeeze. “What’s happened?”
And in that instant, she kind of just caves in on herself, and oh, it feels like his heart is being squeezed tight.
“It’s, uh, it’s the anniversary of when I started at Jacobs,” she says.
And okay, he didn’t know that, but he knows who Jacobs is and what happened to her there. The pieces start falling together. “It wasn’t your fault what happened to your friends,” he says.
“Yeah,” she breathes out. “I know. I was thinking more about my mum.”
And this, well this is new to him. She rarely mentions her parents. Guess that’s another thing they have in common then. Except, she says “mum” differently than he would - there’s not just sadness, but anger, resignation. “You don’t have to talk about it, if you don’t want,” he offers.
She sighs deeply, and he watches her chest rise and fall with it. “No, it’s okay,” she shifts her chair, and fully turns towards him, “I think it’ll maybe help.”
“Okay. You can stop whenever you want though.”
“Yeah. So my mum. She was a right old cunt.”
And he can’t help it, he lets out a surprised laugh. Lucy never lets him forget she’s from the North, and as she’d say, “not quite as posh as he is.” He covers his mouth with the hand not holding hers, but her eyes are light and amused.
“No, it’s okay, you can laugh. Though, I mean back then it was no laughing matter. Look, I was different when I was younger, not like I am here. Not brave.”
“Can’t imagine that.”
“Well it’s true! I don’t know how early you started seeing death glows, but I could hear them since I was a baby. It took me years to learn what my own thoughts were and how to shut off the sound of all the visitors in my head, whispering. School really helped, I loved my art classes.”
And she smiles at that, and he finds himself transfixed, unable to look away, desperately trying not to fixate on her mouth and lips.
“Well, of course, the minute I was of age, my mum trots me off to Jacobs, yanks me out of school, and makes sure I don’t see a penny of the money I was making. And y’know, I tried to like, smuggle some of the tips from clients, but she’d call and somehow find out, and then, she uh…” She trails off. He shifts his chair, so he’s facing her directly, but doesn’t let go of her hand. She’s looking down, and before he’s even aware of what he’s doing, he reaches out and tucks her hair behind her ear. She looks up at him, surprised. He feels as bewildered as she looks, and then he realizes that his hand is still there, and resting against her cheek, and his eyes lock with hers, and he quickly drops his hand and clears his throat, a buzzing feeling in his ears. “She’d uh, she’d hit me.”
He blinks at her, unable to comprehend. And then her words, she’d hit me, crash into him and knock the breath out of him. “Luce,” he chokes.
“So, I ran away and now here I am,” she says looking up at him. Her eyes are clear, fierce, and her jaw is set. She shifts, and he can see what she’s been sketching. It’s a damn good drawing of both him and George. He stares at it, feels desperately unmoored, mind racing with images of Lucy getting hit by some woman he imagines to look like an abominable hag, thoughts of his own mum hugging him tight, Jessica holding his hand after they found out about their parents, how he had cried himself to sleep for what felt like weeks after Jessica died, how he’d wrap his arms around himself just to not feel alone. And then Lucy, had her mum ever held her? Could he have been the luckier one, after all? He feels sick with shame.
“Lockwood?”
“Lockwood?” He looks up at her, barely registering the first time she called his name.
Without thinking, he stands up, yanks her up, and wraps his arms around her. And then his hands are on her back, with her head up against his chest, and he can smell the lavender of her shampoo in his nose. And now she has her arms resting against his shoulders, her hands touching the back of his neck, fingers twisting slightly into his hair. In all their time together, they’ve never hugged, which suddenly, he feels awful for.
He hears her inhale, and he’s thankful that he’s showered recently. He can feel and hear every breath she takes, and his hands are moving across her back, and he whispers in her ear, “Luce, I am so sorry.”
She makes this humming sound that he feels more than hears. It feels like the entirety of her is pressed into the entirety of him, the rise and fall of her chest against his, her stomach pressed into his, his hips against hers, and her fingers toying with his hair and the skin of his neck. His body feels desperately hot, like he's going to break into a sweat.
“Luce, I’m really sorry,” he whispers again.
“It was a long time ago,” she says. “I’m here now.”
He wants to say, yeah, and I’m here now too. I can hug you now. But he knows she would roll her eyes at that, push him away, and trudge up to her room. So instead, he doesn’t say anything, just keeps holding her, realizing all of a sudden that he needs this too.