Chapter Text
Most agents are poor sleepers. That’s why I didn’t question it, when I heard the footsteps downstairs. In fact, it cheered me up a little, as I padded down to the kitchen for a 4 a.m. cup of hot chocolate. Since Lockwood and I had made our trip to the Other Side, I often woke in the small hours of the morning and I found the long wait for dawn wearisome. It would be nice to have some company, I thought. Maybe it would be Lockwood; maybe, in the sleepy stillness before the world was awake, we would drift just a little closer together…
But something tripped an alarm in my head, as I reached the landing. The movements below were stealthy, far more than a polite effort to not wake one’s housemates warranted, and worse still, all the lights were out. I stood frozen, looking at the half-flower of light that spilled onto the floor of the hallway through the fanlight window over the front door. A pause, during which the whole house seemed to hold its breath: then a shadow slipped noiselessly from the foot of the stairs towards the kitchen, moving low and with liquid grace. For a second, I almost thought it was – but no, the silhouette was wrong. Sure, they were tall and thin, whoever they were, but their clothes were bulky and the glow of the streetlight outside had glistened on short, cropped hair, totally unlike Lockwood’s stylishly floppy fringe.
I waited for a count of ten heart beats, until I was sure the intruder was no longer in the hall. Then I was moving, rattling on the handle of Lockwood’s door – which of course, he kept locked, the secretive, standoffish berk. I rapped on the wood, soft and urgent, and kept on going until I heard movement within. The second he opened up, I lunged for him, aiming to press a hand over his mouth, but of course, grabbing a half-asleep Lockwood was never going to be a clever move. He caught my wrist before I could make it anywhere near his face and then my arm was suddenly twisted behind me as he shoved me up against the doorframe.
“Quit it, you moron,” I hissed over my shoulder.
“Luce?” he said groggily. It would have been cute, if I hadn’t been getting splinters in my face.
“Shhh! There’s someone downstairs!”
His hold loosened and he spun me around, his hands coming up to grip my shoulders.
“What? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, no thanks to you,” I said snippily. My wrist was aching. “Stop standing there like a pillock, someone’s broken in.”
His posture shifted, from sleepy confusion to a live wire, poised for action.
“Wake George,” he said quietly. “I’ll grab my rapier.”
Past experiences had taught Lockwood a lesson about keeping weapons close by, even when sleeping. When I emerged from George’s room (no mean feat in itself), Lockwood was waiting in the hall, a jumper thrown over his pyjama top and his sword held ready in his hand. When he saw us, he put a finger to his lips and beckoned us down the stairs, indicating that he would go first, as usual.
We must have made a funny sight, the three of us in our various stages of undress and armament. George was wearing a disgracefully ratty dressing gown over an equally dubious pair of bottoms and brandishing a flare, while my main weapon was my pink and yellow nightie – a lurid hand-me-down that was surely a sight strong enough to turn the most violent Fittes thug’s stomach. I grabbed a spare rapier from the pot by the door as we went down, and felt somewhat better about my exposed knees. Following Lockwood’s silent gestures, we crept towards the source of the shuffling and clinking noises in the kitchen; it seemed our intruder had abandoned his initial stealthiness.
At the threshold, Lockwood gave us a silent countdown from three. As he let his last finger drop, we burst into the room, yelling and slamming on the lights and generally making ourselves as intimidating as possible. The rangy figure that had been rummaging in the cupboards leapt backward, an open packet of biscuits falling from his claw-like hand.
“Stop right – what the hell?” Lockwood’s authoritative roar broke off suddenly, and I could see why. There was a reason that first glimpse of the shadowy shape had reminded me of him, down in the hall. The youth that stood in the kitchen now, blinking in the harsh suddenness of the overhead light, could have been his double. There were some crucial differences, of course. His hair was shorter, as I had noticed, roughly chopped close to his skull, and his face was thinner – much thinner, as though he’d been starved. His clothes were also different from anything I’d ever seen on Lockwood; he wore a baggy, ragged hoodie over faded, dirty jeans and carried a stained backpack, all of which explained the altered silhouette.
There was a long silence, during which the stranger’s eyes jumped around the room, tracking from us to the windows to the basement door. I was about to ask Lockwood whether he had any cousins he’d forgotten to tell us about, when the intruder spoke.
“Lucy,” he said, in a raspy, but undeniably familiar voice. “Is that really you?”
“Oh God,” I croaked. “Throw the bloody flare, George, it’s a Fetch.”
“Can’t be,” said George. “No miasma, no temp drop. And would a Fetch really have gone at the biscuits?”
Sure enough, there was a tell-tale scattering of crumbs on the stranger’s moth-eaten jumper.
“Well then, what the hell is going on?” Lockwood demanded. “And I’ll have no flares thrown in my kitchen, thank you very much.”
“Lucy, it’s me,” the other boy whispered. “Don’t you know me?”
The truth was, I didn’t. His voice was the same, and his features were uncannily similar, down to the little mole on his neck, but there were differences too. Apart from the thinness and the patchy haircut, there were new scars I didn’t recognise — a red slice running from the top of his cheekbone to his ear, as though he’d narrowly dodged a knife strike, and shiny layers of tissue on his knuckles, the kind that comes from making contact with other people’s faces — and above all, his eyes were different. Lockwood’s eyes were always alight, sparkling with warmth when he was happy and glittering coldly when he was angry. This stranger’s eyes were dead and black and sunken in his head. Only when they landed on me did they gain some of their familiar energy, and even then, it was a frightening, manic burning that unsettled me more than it comforted.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t.”
“I think you’d better tell us who you are,” said Lockwood firmly. “And you can start with how you ended up wearing my face.”
“Wearing it better than you,” said his lookalike with a snort.
Lockwood scowled. “On second thoughts, George, maybe the kitchen could do with remodeling after all,” he said. “Keep a hold of that flare.” He looked back to the stranger and motioned with his sword towards a chair. “Sit down and keep your hands where I can see them.”
Slowly, slowly, the other boy complied, his hard, dark eyes flickering from Lockwood to me constantly.
“You mind if I eat?” he said tightly. “It’s been a while.”
Even with the physical differences and the horrible, hollow look, he was close enough to Lockwood for his hunger to cut at my heart.
“Do we have any leftovers?” I asked George quietly.
He shifted uneasily, looking to Lockwood for instructions. “Got some cold beef. I could do him a sandwich.”
Lockwood tilted his head, considering. “Answer some questions and you can eat,” he said finally, and I gave a little cry of protest.
“Don’t be an ass! Look at him, he’s starving.”
“You always were a soft touch, Lucy,” rasped the doppelganger, and for the first time, his blank eyes warmed and he truly did look like the Lockwood I knew. He looked back to the real Lockwood, who was almost thrumming with tension at my side. “Ask your bloody questions then.”
There was a pause as they stared each other down, their hostile expressions so similar that it would have been funny under any other circumstances.
“What’s your name?” said Lockwood eventually.
The gaunt intruder rolled his eyes. “You know my name.”
“Answer or starve,” Lockwood replied. I turned to him urgently, and he stepped lightly on my foot without changing expression, his face an implacable wall of blankness.
The other boy threw up his hands in a painfully familiar gesture of exasperation. “Anthony John Lockwood,” he said. “Brother to one dead sister, Jessica Lockwood, and son of two dead parents, Celia and Donald.”
My Lockwood, the real Lockwood, went white as a sheet at the mention of his family’s names.
“Any idiot could have looked that information up,” he said harshly. “Tell the truth, who sent you?”
“No one sent me,” the other Lockwood snarled. “I got — I got lost.” His eyes turned to me and softened again in that alarming way. “Come on, Lucy, you know it’s me, don’t you? Have I changed that much?”
“What do you mean, lost?” That was George, pausing in the act of pulling the fixings of a beef sandwich out of the fridge.
“Why would Lucy know you?” asked Lockwood at the same time.
“Changed?” I echoed, a beat behind the others. “Changed since when?”
The other Lockwood smiled for the first time since we’d switched on the lights, and it was a shattered shadow of the smile I knew and loved. “Since you died, Lucy.”
My Lockwood got rather ratty with him at this point, and there was a bit of an altercation as he started to move around the table with intent, and the thinner, broken-looking Lockwood stood up and showed every sign of reciprocating. George and I had to intervene sharpish to prevent a brawl. Once I had corralled the real Lockwood in a corner, George stood over the other one with his flare as he wolfed down his beef sandwich.
“What did you mean when you said ‘lost’?” George asked again, when he had finished eating.
The other Lockwood wiped his mouth on his sleeve, eliciting a grunt of disgust from the corner behind me.
“You’re not going to believe me,” he warned.
“Try us,” I said. “You’d be surprised.”