Chapter Text
Part 1: The Dark, and What Comes After
Lockwood and I returned from our walk almost giddily out of breath. We held hands all the way to the front door, stifling our laughter and trying to regain some semblance of normalcy before we entered. It wasn’t that late, and we hadn’t been out for long, but the days were becoming shorter and now the sky was already a fierce, fiery orange although it was only four in the afternoon.
Inside Portland Row we shucked off our jackets, and Lockwood took mine with a small smile which I dodged nervously by staring studiously at my boots. The toe caps were scuffed pretty badly, and the leather around the laces was starting to show signs of cracking. I’d have to replace them soon.
“So,” Lockwood said, drawing closer and taking my hand again. His hair, somewhat overgrown of late, fell rakishly over his forehead and I had an almost painful urge to sweep it away.
“So,” I responded, ever the intellectual.
“Do you think we sho-”
“Oh, there you two are.”
George appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, peering up the steps at us as we hastily stepped back. “We’ve been waiting for you to get back, Lockwood. You’re taller than the rest of us and we need someone to hang the new light in the kitchen.”
Lockwood dropped my hand gently as he turned to George. “Kipps couldn’t do it? I thought we had that ladder he brought.”
George snorted. “Well, we do have the ladder, but you see he’s got that wound in his side, you know, and he’s actually still not allowed to be doing half the work he’s been doing around here lately. Holly put her foot down when it came to balancing on a ladder holding a heavy metal light fixture over his head.”
I laughed. “God, we’re all a mess, aren’t we? Between your injuries, George, and Kipps’ stab, and my cut-”
Lockwood paused halfway down the steps to look at me, his eyes suddenly sharp. “Your wound isn’t bothering you still, is it Luce? You said you were feeling better.”
I could have bitten my own tongue off. Now Lockwood would worry about me. “Well, the stitches are removed, yeah, and everything’s healed over, but I still ache if I stretch the wrong way. It’s not bad, I just have to be careful how I move sometimes. The doctor said that’s normal, it’ll go away as I get range of motion back. I’m okay, Lockwood.”
The truth of the matter was that none of us were actually okay. Not really. After the ordeal at Fittes House, none of us would probably ever really be okay again. Between the trip through the Other Side to get there, and then the battle that followed, we all were showing signs of permanent wear. Lockwood and I still hadn’t managed to shed the silver-gray in our hair from our first journey with the dead, and the streaks had only increased with our second one. Even Holly, as flawlessly put together as she always was, seemed to move with a little more care these days.
I followed Lockwood and George to the kitchen, where Kipps and Holly were organizing things into the cabinets they had finished hanging. It was a sad selection of cans and slightly crushed crisp packets that had survived the raid on Portland Row, and we hadn’t quite yet managed to get out and do a proper shop. We’d been living off of takeaways and a handful of frozen meals that Barnes had delivered to us with the NDA paperwork a few days ago.
“My wife,” he’d said as he handed over a large canvas tote that had been stuffed with neatly labeled casserole dishes and packets of papers that seemed to contain a lot of bold and red text, “is apparently a big fan. She’s made you all several dinners. She also wants the dishes back eventually although I should warn you I am reasonably certain that she’s going to use it as an excuse to have you all over for tea or something one day.”
Lockwood’s smile had shone like the sun. “We’d be honored!”
“Is there any tea on?” I asked, suppressing a shiver. The house was drafty, with some damage to the windows and doorways that we’d yet to repair and seal properly. But then, these days I was always a little more quick to feel the chill. Perhaps we all were.
Holly looked around and smiled. “I was just telling Kipps that we should take a break for some tea. I’ll put the kettle on.”
The table had been shifted against one wall to make space for the ladder George was setting up and I sat in one of the chairs, turning it to face the room. Lockwood was looking over an instruction pamphlet as he shrugged out of his suit jacket and began to roll up his sleeves. I watched the pair of them, bickering about the wiring in the old lamp and admiring the way Lockwood’s arms flexed as he climbed the ladder, a screwdriver tucked into his belt.
“Have a good walk then, did you?” Kipps asked, flopping gently down next to me at the table.
“The weather was lovely today,” I said, refusing to look at him. I could hear something in the tone of his voice that I’m not sure I wanted to address right then.
Kipps, of course, wasn’t having any of that. “Was it? I wouldn’t know. Some of us were here all day, cleaning up and repairing the house instead of gallivanting off for a lovely little fall stroll.”
“I was working today too,” I said defensively. “The spare room’s all painted, and as soon as the new rug comes we’ll build the new bedframe and it’ll be ready to go.”
“Mmm.”
George snapped something peevish at Lockwood as the old light fixture was handed down unceremoniously and nearly clocked him over the head. Dust fell in soft clumps from where it had once sat, and Lockwood dodged a spider that dropped out of the wiring box in the ceiling. The new light was handed up, and Lockwood sniped back at George, who was calling instructions about how to attach the new wires to the old ones. Holly appeared at my side with a cup of tea, brewed perfectly, and together the three of us sat, watching the new light getting installed.
“Have you got a new bulb, George?”
“Right here, you blind buffoon. I’ve only been holding it up for you to take for ages.”
“Wonderful. All right then… just about… there. All right, go ahead and flip the switch.” Lockwood hurriedly dropped down the ladder so that he wouldn’t be directly at eye level with the light when it turned on, and George flipped the light switch on the wall. The kitchen was bathed in a warm light not too different from the fading rays of sunset that were beginning to leave the window. Holly, Kipps, and I applauded annoyingly, making overexaggerated noises of appreciation.
Despite living in the same house and spending the next three days continuing to not really leave it much, Lockwood and I didn’t actually see each other except in passing. I signed the papers from DEPRAC - sorry, UPRA, and Lockwood sat through an entire day of meetings with Barnes and his new officers. The new rug for the spare room came, and it added a splash of color; Lockwood had chosen lavender - Jessica’s favorite. The bedframe was a modern design, squarish and boxy with a headboard that had small shelves built into it. It took me a full day to assemble it by myself, refusing the gentle offers of help from George and Kipps’ attempts to goad me into accepting help by teasing me mercilessly. Holly brought me a tray of tea at lunch, made exactly the way I like it. I don’t think I’ll ever get over how Holly manages to somehow predict and prepare tea exactly the way the recipient wants it. It also had a plate of food, which I noticed included a bacon sandwich alongside some apple slices and two chocolate biscuits. Holly and George were at war over our diets again, apparently.
I sat on the floor, surrounded by scraps of styrofoam and cardboard and ate the only form of help Holly knew I would willingly accept. She sat with me, sipping her own cup of tea and keeping me company.
“Lucy,” she said slowly, waiting until I had taken a large bite of my sandwich and couldn’t avoid her questioning glance. “How are you doing? How are you really doing, that is?”
I swallowed my food and took a long sip of tea to give myself extra time to come up with an answer. Holly’s question was loaded, I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. She’d gone with me yesterday for what should have been my final checkup with the doctor post-Fittes. But according to the tense young woman who had examined me and measured me and done that thing with the inflatable cuff on your arm that always somehow hurts worse than whatever you had gone to the doctor for, I was healing rather slowly. More slowly than they’d have expected, even given my recent experiences. They wanted me to come back next week for more tests.
“I’m… okay,” I said slowly. At her expression I hurriedly went on, “I mean it, Hol. I’m just okay. I’m not great, not by a long chalk, but I’m not doing so terrible either. After all, Lockwood is the one who has all the meetings with Barnes,” I chuckled, trying to lighten the mood.
Holly didn’t buy it. “And how is Lockwood?”
I blinked, staring at her. “I imagine he’s much the same as me, if we’re being honest, but it’s not like he really talks to anyone about how he’s doing, does he?”
“He talks to you, Lucy.”
“I think you overestimate how much he talks to me.”
“I think you overestimate how much he talks to everyone else,” she countered. “You know, he was already awake when I got here this morning.”
This actually shocked me. Lockwood, George, and I had been up until nearly 2 am, bickering stupidly about whether or not we should repaper the library walls and if we did, what color we should go with. It had been comfortable, like old times. George had been curled up in his usual chair, a book of wallpaper swatches Kipps had left for us in his lap. Lockwood had started in his chair but had eventually migrated to the sofa with me, where we shared another book of interior design ideas that Holly had taken to leaving around in obvious places. Anyway, the point was, we’d all been up late, and Holly had been in just before eight that morning. “None of us are sleeping well yet,” I said eventually. “I still… it’s hard, sometimes, to get to sleep. The house is… quiet.”
Holly understood. “I know,” she said quietly, looking down at her hands clasped gracefully in her lap. “I put up a bunch of those silly little plastic glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling in my flat. I couldn’t stand staring up at that dark, blank ceiling all night. It was too much like-”
I nodded, knowing what she meant. The Other London had been so similar to ours, and yet so different. And sometimes, late at night when Portland Row was dark and quiet, the two places blended together in my head and made sleep both difficult and restless. I’d taken to sleeping with my curtains open, to let in some of the glare from the ghost lamp in the street below. The morning sun came in directly on my face when I did that and made sleeping in all but impossible, but at least I didn’t spend half the night wondering whether I’d somehow accidentally slipped across to the Other Side without realizing.
“Will we ever be more than just okay?” Holly asked quietly, nearly a whisper into the silence that had fallen on us as we both slipped into our own thoughts.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But at least we can be just-okay together.”
Holly smiled. “Yeah.”
The fourth day after my walk with Lockwood found me home alone for the first time since before Fittes House. It was eerie, in a way that Portland Row had never been for me before. I made myself tea as noisily as possible in the quiet house, but it wasn’t the same. Before everything, the door of the cabinet over the sink where I kept my favorite tea creaked. The floor in front of the stove had a chip in one of the floorboards, worn smooth into a small indent that groaned when you stood on it. The kettle hadn’t whistled quite right again after George had accidentally dropped it one day and jarred something loose.
Now, though, the cabinet doors were silent on their hinges. The floor was smooth and uniform, refinished and polished cleaner than it had been in probably decades. The kettle was new, and whistled quietly when the water boiled. At least the pipes in the sink still clunked, the one familiar sound left to me in the ritual of tea-making. George had gone out shortly after lunch, muttering something about Flo and not staying up. Kipps had an interview with UPRA for some sort of temporary liaison position that Barnes wanted him for, and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. Holly had taken the day off to visit family. And Lockwood… Lockwood was out in the world somewhere, dashing off to smile charmingly for more interviews or sit in on more meetings to give his opinion and share his knowledge of what could be done about the Problem and its links to the Other Side. Which left me, mug of tea steaming on the coffee table, holding up the book of wallpaper to the wall of the library, pondering if perhaps George wasn’t right when he’d argued so vehemently for the vertical rose stripe pattern. If we replaced the battered old couch with something that looked a bit more antique then our current dated set, it could make the room look rather more elegant than it did now.
I jumped when I heard the front door open out in the hall. No one was expected home for some time yet, and I held my breath, listening to the rustling thumps. It took several seconds before my heart restarted, the fear subsiding as I recognized the sound of someone dropping a rapier in the old umbrella stand and hanging a jacket on the hooks by the door. I peered out of the library door into the entryway and actually squeaked in surprise. “Lockwood?”
He jumped, obviously not expecting anyone to be here either. “Luce? What are you doing home?”
“It’s just me here, today. Everyone else is off doing… whatever.”
We fell silent, staring across the entryway at each other for several seconds before Lockwood seemed to shake himself and smiled at me. It was a warm, small smile, but it didn’t seem to quite reach his eyes. “Well, I suppose now it’s just us here, today. I didn’t interrupt anything, did I?”
“No, I’ve just made some tea and was looking at that wallpaper George liked so much.”
Lockwood stretched, elongating himself with his arms far over his head, releasing the motion with a huff. “Think the kettle is still warm?”
“Yeah, probably. I’ll get it going again if you want to change or something.”
“Sounds lovely, Lucy. I’ll be down in just a minute. We can look at that wallpaper together, maybe we’ll see what George likes so much about it.”
He disappeared up the stairs towards his room, and I went back down to the kitchen to turn the kettle on again. I found his favorite mug, a pale pink fluted thing decorated with the sort of blue roses I associated with grandmas and fine china, and dropped a small spoonful of sugar into it. The water had still been fairly warm, and it didn’t take long for the whistle to start up. I poured the water in, dropped in a tea bag, and carried it back into the library. Lockwood was already there, holding up the book of wall paper in much the same way I had just been doing.
“You know, in the light of day, I suppose this pattern isn’t so bad. We’d have to change the fur-”
“-the furniture!” I said, handing him the mug. “That’s what I was thinking. The stuff in here isn’t too bad, but it’s a bit worn out and dated for the paper.”
Lockwood sipped his tea, humming appreciatively. “Yes, exactly. It does give me an excuse to clean out and replace these bookshelves,” he said looking around.
I sat down on the couch, sipping at my own now lukewarm tea. “Replace them? Why? They’re still solid.”
“Yes, but…” Lockwood looked around again, not quite meeting my eye as he did, “they’re my parents’ shelves.”
It took an actual physical effort not to suck in a breath. I took great care to keep my hand from shaking as I set my tea back down and looked around the library with him, trying to reframe my picture of the room. It was saturated with his parents, with his family. It was mostly their collection, after all. Lockwood had added quite a number of books to the shelves himself over the years, but the bulk of the library’s contents had once belonged to Donald and Celia. This room likely hadn’t changed much from when they had arranged it, all those years ago. I took a deep breath before I responded. “You know, we don’t have to change everything,” I said. “The library managed to survive surprisingly unscathed, all things considered. Barnes’ teams did take a lot of stuff, but a bit of reorganizing and perhaps a heavy-duty rug cleaner and we could probably get the library looking pretty much back the way it was.”
Lockwood wandered slowly over, setting his mug on the table next to mine and settling himself next to me, angled in towards me. It was, I realized, the closest we’d been since we’d returned from our walk several days ago. “We could, but…” Lockwood looked down to his lap, where his hands had reached out to grasp mine. He looked up, and something in the way his eyebrows quirked made me realize he was nervous about what he was about to say.
“But?” I asked gently, letting my thumbs graze gently over his knuckles.
“But I think… I think it’s time that Portland Row perhaps got a bit of a makeover. I’ve kept everything that I could of my parents here, all their weird knickknacks and books and odd throw pillows. I just feel like maybe now, it’s time to finally… let some of that go.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d known that the ransacking of Jessica’s room and subsequent creation of the gate had opened something in Lockwood, but I hadn’t really had the time to understand what it was that had changed. He’d been surprisingly open to the idea of making Jessica’s room into a guest room, but at the time I’d assumed it was because the memories preserved within had already been so thoroughly wrecked. Perhaps I was wrong. The look on his face gradually becoming more and more panicked by the second reminded me that I hadn’t actually responded. “Okay,” I said. “Yeah. Whatever you want, Lockwood.”
Relief washed over his face, replacing the trepidatious eyebrows with a shy smile. A real one this time, that made his eyes shine in that rare way they had. “Well, I mean, I’d rather hoped it could be what you wanted too, Luce. It’s… Portland Row is your home, too. If you want it to be, that is. I know we haven’t really talked about it with everyone, but I know Kipps is looking at that position with UPRA and Holly wants to come on fewer cases and George is still recovering, so we haven’t exactly been working much, and if you wanted to… to go somewhere, where your Talents would get more use, I… I’d understand.”
Lockwood had started in a rush, but by the end he seemed to be struggling to get the words out. I stared. Was he… was he telling me he’d understand if I packed up and scarpered? Now, of all times? A traitorous part of my brain that sounded suspiciously like the Skull whispered, Why not, you’ve done it once already… I could feel my face shifting, away from the blank shock of his words to something more twisted and angry.
“Luce?”
“I’m not gonna bloody leave now, am I, you great soggy plum!” I pulled my hands away from him, crossing them defensively over my chest with a huff. “How dare you even suggest I’d bugger off and leave the lot of you after all this!”
“That’s not what I’m-”
“It is, Lockwood! It is what you’re saying, and how dare you say it!”
“I just meant that-”
“I don’t care what you meant! That’s the problem, Lockwood! You never actually say what you mean! How am I supposed to know what you meant? You just… you bottle everything up and you put on a brave face and you swallow down all the stupid twaddle every day and you never actually let us see what’s going on inside! You never let me see what’s going on inside! Well you know what? I’m not leaving. I’m bloody well staying and I’m going to kick your skinny ass up and down those stairs every day if I have to, if it means you finally just open up and talk to me about something for once in your fucking life!”
Silence fell as I caught my breath. Somewhere in there I had let my arms fall from my chest to grip the hem of my jumper, and I stood, fists balled and shoulders hunched, my sudden anger echoing into the empty house. I stared at him, trying to place the look on his face as he stood as well, and I realized I’d only ever seen this particular expression once before: four days ago, when I had paused at the bottom of the stairs by the door to put on the sapphire necklace while he watched.
Despite the fact that I had been more or less measuring my life now by Days Since Walk, I hadn’t actually thought about that afternoon much. It was all a bit of a blur, to be honest. I had paused at the foot of the stairs as Lockwood watched, fumbling with the delicate clasp of the necklace before finally getting it hooked and then straightening the chain so that the pendant hung front and center, right where he could see it. “Ready?” I had asked, slipping my jacket on.
We had left then, both of us smiling and chatting about nothing much. Lockwood mentioned that Geoge’s mum had sent us three new tea cozies and a hideous orange and magenta afghan. I told him that Holly had helped me dust the rafters of my attic room. We shivered together over the creeping chill in the air as autumn set in. Finally, several blocks away on a street that housed a tailor’s and a few grimy takeaways, I grabbed Lockwood’s sleeve and made him stop with me. He had, without question, and stood there for several seconds while I looked at anything but him before finally I stammered out, “S-so, everlasting… everlasting devotion, huh?”
Lockwood took my hand in his, turning now and shuffling so that the two of us stood facing each other on the rapidly emptying late afternoon street.
“It’s not nearly-,” he started, then shook his head, restarted, “I asked you, once, not to give up on me.”
I nodded, remembering the conversation. It had been the first time I’d ever actually felt like I was seeing Anthony, and not just Lockwood. “And I didn’t,” I whispered.
He smiled, squeezing my hand. “I asked you then not just because you were angry at me. And you were right to be - I won’t argue with you about it. But I asked because I had realized, even back then, that… I would never give up on you. You were it. And I wasn’t ever going to be able to give up on you. Even if you crushed me, in that moment, even if you did give up. And then you didn’t. And you kept not giving up on me, even when I was unbearable. So, yes, Lucy.”
He lifted my hand to his lips, kissed the backs of my knuckles with such gentle tenderness, it was a wonder I even felt it. “Yes,” he continued, my hand still held there, “everlasting devotion. If you’ll have me.”
My brain was scrabbling to pick up the pieces Lockwood had just scattered around, and like a utter pillock I said, “Well, it’s a bit late to give the necklace back, isn’t it?”
Lockwood stared, his face frozen. I could tell that I hadn’t made any sense to him, which was fair as I hadn’t made any sense to myself either. “What I mean is, you told me what it was before I put it on. I… knew what I was doing. More or less.”
“More or less?” Now there was confusion in his voice and on his face.
I studiously avoided his eyes, despite his attempts to catch mine again. “Yeah, well, it’s not like I’ve ever dated anyone before, have I? And don’t even get me started on everlasting devotion. I don’t exactly know what I’m doing here, but-”
“But?”
Finally, I brought my eyes around to meet his, and I took a small step closer. “But I think I’d really like to figure it out. Y’know, with you.”
Lockwood laughed, quiet huffs that were mostly just shocked air. “I don’t believe it. Lucy Carlyle you are the most amazing woman on the planet. Have you seriously never dated anyone before?”
“No!” I said, suddenly defensive. “Why? I suppose you’ve been out with loads of girls, posh charmer like you-”
“Never.”
We both fell silent. “Never?” I echoed.
Lockwood shook his head. “Not one. Didn’t really seem to be a point, before you. So tell me, Miss Carlyle, if you’ve never been on a date before, have you ever… been kissed?”
My breath caught as his eyes combed every inch of my face, flicking back and forth constantly between my wide eyes and lips. “Not yet,” I whispered.
“Yet?” He whispered back.
I felt like we were being drawn together by some kind of slow magnet. Our faces kept getting closer and closer and I wasn’t sure how either of us was moving, the world felt frozen as I murmured just millimeters from his lips, “Well, you could change that…”
The expression on Lockwood’s face when we had parted from that first kiss was the same expression he wore now, staring me down after I’d just shouted at him for being a jerk. Boys in love, I thought, rationality coming back to me, are just as infuriatingly weird as girls are.
“Luce…”
“I’m still mad!” I said, but I let him reach out and take my arms and pull me slowly toward him anyway. I was still mad, shaking with it even, but as Lockwood pulled me into his arms and wrapped himself around me I realized there was fear there too. Fear that Lockwood might distance himself from me again, might think that I wanted something that he couldn’t give me and that I’d leave to go find it. That subtle separation had already wrecked me once, I wasn’t sure I could stand it again. Not after… everything.
“I’m still mad,” I said again, my voice muffled by his dress shirt.
“I’m sorry, Luce. I am. I’m trying, with you and George and Holly and god, even with Kipps. But I don’t… I don’t always like who I am,” he whispered into my hair, tightening his arms around me. “And I don’t always understand how you possibly could.”
I was definitely still mad, and definitely not crying, so the noise I made as I burrowed my head further into his shoulder was definitely not a sniff. “Well, you’ll just have to trust me when I say that I do. I really, really do.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I’ll… I’ll try and remember, to be better. And if I don’t,” he said, pulling back so that he could look me in the eye, “you can kick my ass up and down the stairs as many times as you like.”
I laughed wetly, but it was cut off when he leaned down for a kiss. It was only our second, what with our lives somehow being as mismatched as they were, and I found myself looking forward to the possibility of many, many more.