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"That's it, mate, I'm putting my foot down," Charles declares one night after they've wrapped up their most grueling case since Port Townsend--a gang of five ghostly hooligans wreaking havoc across London who'd responded to no language but that of a good old-fashioned walloping. At least Charles had gotten to take out his new cricket bat for a proper whirl, especially after one of the hooting gits had nearly run Edwin through with an iron knife. "I know you're the brains of this operation, and you're obviously brilliant at it, but would it kill you to buff up a bit?"
"Obviously it wouldn't kill me, Charles," Edwin replies, coolly pedantic as always. "Because we're ghosts--and therefore we also don't 'buff up.'" He turns a page of the giant tome laid out on the desk.
"Right, exactly," Charles says as he moves the relevant case file to the 'solved' portion of the board. "We've got no muscles to build, no cardio to keep up with… as ghosts, we're basically as strong as we want to be, yeah?"
"Your point?"
"That there's less stopping you from brawning it up now than there was when you were alive, mate!"
Edwin finally looks up from his book. "Respectable hypothesis, Charles. But even if I were to take interest in the brutish rituals of physical combat, I can't simply turn a 'brawn it up' dial up to ten."
Charles raises his eyebrows. "And what if taking interest is the dial? I've been hounding you about this for decades, Eds, so don't expect me to let up any time soon. Especially after today."
Edwin considers, sighs, then closes the book with a weighty snap. "I will admit that this particular case demanded far more of you than it did me. I didn't particularly enjoy being… completely useless against those rabid miscreants."
"No, mate, that's not what I--"
Edwin rises and plants his palms decisively on the desk. "I've never truly committed to your many past attempts to whip me into shape, Charles, but I think I'm finally willing to try it. Genuinely."
Charles blinks, and struggles not to look too disbelieving. "Oh, really? … Brilliant."
*
Edwin insists on a proper analytical approach, to which Charles happily concedes, and so their first item of action is to assess the former's current baseline.
They revisit the boxing gloves, where it quickly becomes apparent that even Edwin's most vigorous strikes against Charles' palms are barely stronger than they were last time.
"I thought you said you were all-in on this, mate?" Charles asks, and his honest assumption that Edwin isn't trying his damndest stings far more than it should. He huffs in frustration and drops his stance.
"I am. This is all we've got to work with, I'm afraid."
"Blimey…" Charles straightens as well and runs a hand through his hair. "So, to be clear, you weren't taking the piss last time we tried this?"
Edwin glowers, and Charles holds up his hands while clearly fighting a laugh. "No worries, mate, we'll work on it. Oh!" He snaps his fingers. "Think of something that makes you angry. All those spitting-mad ghosts we've wrangled over the years… they always had that leg up in brawn, yeah?"
"Well you've been the one wrangling them, so I'll take your word for it."
"Right, okay… whoever you'd like to punch in the face, pretend I'm them, yeah?"
Edwin suppresses a reluctant sigh--this was all his own idea, after all--and holds up his encased fists, feeling every bit as foolish as he always does when he attempts anything in the realm of the physical. But better embarrassment than willfully languishing in uselessness; he'd been a liability in Port Townsend, there was no denying that, and if he'd perhaps been just a little more battle-ready, a little more aware…
He imagines Esther Finch in Charles' place, and a bubble of anger swells within him. He strikes as hard as he can, which is surely an improvement from before, and smiles in expectation.
"… Right, so did you try my idea or not?" Charles asks blankly.
*
"It's just a mental block, mate, that's all," Charles says before lunging at Edwin. In a not-too-shabby attempt at a judo-esque throw, Edwin redirects his momentum and sends him toppling. He also loses balance mid-throw and promptly joins Charles on the floor with a faint oof, but small wins are wins nonetheless.
They've put strength training on the backburner and pivoted to basic hand-to-hand, which has seen a bit more success than the former. Charles had reasoned that even if Edwin were never able to build up his strength past his current baseline, he could always try to redirect the strength of others.
Edwin remains on his back where he'd fallen, panting faintly, and Charles sits up and turns to him. For all his insistence that this is mental rather than physical exercise, he must admit that the fact that they can get tired and out of breath is a bit of a spanner in the works.
"That was a good one, mate," Charles says bracingly, patting Edwin's shoulder. "Just plant your feet next time, yeah?"
"I'll try to keep that in mind," Edwin says with just the slightest hint of dryness in his voice.
*
Learning the moves is hardly a challenge, certainly not for Edwin's well-honed, academically-inclined mind. Rather, the difficulty lies in their practice, along with the incessant humiliation of inadequacy.
To make things worse, Crystal happens to barge in on a training session one late evening and, upon sight of them, immediately breaks into an incredulous grin.
"What's all this?" she asks, though said grin suggests she's already deduced the answer. "Edwin, are you… learning to fight? You?"
"Ease up, Crystal," Charles says, though he's grinning too. "He's trying his best. We've made some good progress, honestly."
"Edwin Payne throwing down… now that I'd pay to see."
He rolls his eyes and drops his glove-encased hands, grateful that he lacks the necessary faculties to blush. "To what do we owe the pleasure at this time of night, Crystal? Or are you simply here to provide unsolicited commentary?"
"I can multitask," she says as she pulls out a truly hideous voodoo doll--lumpy, misshapen, smeared with grime and most likely dried blood--from her shoulder bag. "Found this propped against a gravestone while I was hanging with Emma--"
"Emma?" Charles asks.
"The ghost girl who put us on to Crystal's case," Edwin says promptly. "With the magical squid."
"Oh, right…"
Edwin turns back to Crystal. "Did you get a read on the doll?"
"Not much, really. Just a face--some scruffy girl with a nose piercing."
"… And you barged in on us in the dead of night for that?"
She shoots him a glare. "Did I mention the grave itself was freshly dug-out… from the inside?"
*
A few hours later, Charles and Edwin manage to track down the erstwhile zombie--surprisingly a first in the agency's three decades of operation--and corner him in a deserted alleyway by the docks. Charles keeps him occupied with his cricket bat while Edwin recites a spell of undead slumber from his volume of Liber Noctis. At least that's the intended plan, until the zombie--a lumbering bruiser who moves far too nimbly for his size--happens to snatch up a section of iron pipe laying nearby and begins repeatedly walloping Charles into the alley wall.
"Charles!" Edwin cries out on instinct, cutting off the exceptionally verbose incantation. Rather than resume, he'll now have to restart from the beginning.
"Bloody hell!" Charles swears against the onslaught of smoking, red-hot welts wherever the pipe makes contact. His forearms, raised to protect himself, bear the brunt of them.
Before he can think better of it, Edwin drops the Liber Noctis and charges their adversary; he's batted against the opposite wall like a bothersome insect. The next thing he knows is a corrosive, blazing agony exploding out from his midsection.
He looks down--the zombie has speared him with the pipe and driven it deep into the wall behind him, then promptly scarpered.
Charles rushes forward, still trailing smoke, and starts pulling him free. Edwin keenly feels every searing, excruciating inch of progress; he might be screaming, he isn't sure, but he does manage a thin, strangled, "H--he's getting away--"
"Don't talk, mate. Just one more, yeah?" With a final, massive effort, Charles pulls him from the pipe. Edwin collapses against him, and they both drop to their knees in the filthy alleyway.
*
Ghosts can neither bleed nor suffer bodily injury, and Edwin's 'wound' had closed up accordingly as soon as he'd been freed of its source. But pain… that has a way of lingering in the mind, and Edwin's has always been no less than wholly intact. And in pain's infinite variations, it also tends to ensure that each new occurrence is as fresh and vivid as it could possibly be.
"You sure you're alright, mate?" Charles says back at the office, hovering wide-eyed over Edwin as if the latter were about to implode on the spot. "Something I could get you? Some… spell, maybe? What's a spa day for ghosts look like?"
Edwin's sunken into one of the office armchairs--not a single mark on him, not the slightest evidence of anything having happened. He almost wishes there were. At least then his haunted, shivery agitation would be somewhat justified.
"I'm sorry, Charles," he says quietly without looking up at him. "I should've finished the incantation. Bloody stupid of me to…"
Charles sinks to one knee and grasps Edwin's shoulders. "No, this was my cock-up, Eds. I let that undead wanker get one over me--"
"It's not just that," Edwin says, forcing himself to sit up straighter. "I don't think I'll ever be able to grow stronger, Charles."
"What? Why?"
"Whatever drives you--or anyone--to commit violence, however justified… I don't have it in me. I'm sorry, I wish…"
"Mate, look at me."
Edwin sheepishly meets the eyes that he already knows will convey nothing but warmth and forgiveness. "If kicking arse isn't in your wheelhouse, then that's that. God knows you contribute more than your share as is, yeah?"
Edwin gives him a small, reluctant smile.
"But you shouldn't count yourself out completely, mate."
"Why do you say that?"
"You literally survived seventy years in Hell and escaped it twice, the first time completely on your own. If anyone's got willpower, Eds, it's you."
*
Several days after their scrap at the docks, after all potential leads on the burly zombie have amounted to precisely nil, Charles has a fresh new lead drop right into his lap. Or, more accurately, a young girl with a nose piercing accompanied by that very zombie finds him while he's out on one of his late afternoon strolls.
He only has time to register the weird, out-of-place old amulet around her neck--intricate silver with a sinister, glowing emerald--before his entire being is forcefully compressed into a stream of disembodied ether and sucked straight into the gemstone.
For what could be minutes or days, Charles only knows a haze of vague, muffled sounds and the impression of swaying movement, all filtered through a vivid, icy green tint. Then, once restored to his regular form, he finds himself flat on his back and bound in place, incapable of even twitching his little toe.
His eyes, the only part of him unfrozen, sweep left and right and just barely discern chalk outlines of some sort of pentagram, wherein he lies smack-dab in the middle, in what looks like an abandoned warehouse. Streaks of fading daylight punch a few holes through the roof and walls.
Charles' captor, AKA the amateur necromancer with an excess of raw talent and a severe deficit of empathy and/or sense, whispers into the amulet he'd been recently crammed into while her zombie subordinate stands by. The emerald glows, the chalk lines binding him light up in the exact same shade of green, and a sudden pain like he's never known before chases all else from his mind.
He's being sloughed away layer by layer, an unholy combination of getting boiled alive and being dragged across a giant cheese grater. His screams are deafening even to his own ears, and in no time at all he'll be stripped away to nothing--
Edwin and Crystal burst in, disrupting the necromancer's focus, and the pain lessens by several degrees. Charles finds the strength to turn his head, and even manages to meet Edwin's wide, horrified eyes.
"What are you doing to him?" he demands of the girl. "Let him go, now!" He's more furious than Charles has ever seen him.
The necromancer only nods at her zombie sidekick, who grunts in assent and lurches forward. Dread and shame fill Charles' chest--he's supposed to be defending Edwin and Crystal, not lying about like some useless damsel, not being the reason they're in danger to begin with…
The zombie makes for Edwin first. He reaches out, intending to grab the latter's throat… and Edwin throws him to the ground so hard the entire warehouse rattles on its foundations.
For several seconds, Charles completely forgets about the pain--he's too busy taking in the impossible sight of Edwin unleashing tremendous strikes against an opponent who can do little but moan and stumble backwards with each blow. His form is good, just like they'd practiced, and coupled with the sudden strength upgrade…
Charles jumps when Crystal is suddenly right beside him and dragging her shoe across the pentagram border, breaking both the seal and the spell.
He sags in relief and rolls laboriously onto his side. Edwin has stepped away from the thoroughly-humbled zombie and approached its wide-eyed, cowering master. He smartly rips the amulet from her neck, tucks it into his coat pocket, and rushes over to Crystal and Charles.
"Charles, can you hear me?" Edwin's shaking, anxious voice is oddly distant, despite those… wonderful green eyes dominating most of his field of vision.
"That was brills, mate…" he mumbles, before he topples into whatever form of unconsciousness ghosts are capable of.
*
Charles awakens to find himself back at the office, sprawled across the sofa with an inexplicable blanket over him. He casts it off, which immediately brings Edwin to his side.
"Don't move too much," Edwin says, sinking to one knee so that they're less than a foot apart. He's so concerned, so tender, and Charles' nonexistent heart may be about to explode. "We don't yet know if that spell inflicted any permanent damage."
"Right… what was all that, mate?"
"From what I can gather, the amulet I liberated from our young necromancer is a sort of cage for spiritual energy. But combined with the right rituals, it becomes an energy converter. Ghosts are stripped for fuel, empowering the magic-user far beyond reasonable limits."
"Like Esther's torture machine?"
Edwin's lips thin slightly. "Of a sort. Though in that case she was generating power from my pain, potentially in perpetuity. The amulet would have simply… consumed you."
Charles reaches forward to cup Edwin's cheek--it happens too fast for him to second-guess himself. "You and Crystal, you all right?"
Edwin gently takes Charles' wrist and sets it down. "We're fine. After I restored the undead man to his eternal slumber, I assigned Crystal to escort our juvenile necromancer back to her parents--accompanied by a stern word or two, of course. In return, she demanded that I call her the moment you regained consciousness."
Charles' mouth quirks. "Call her? On what?"
"A mobile telephone, I assume."
He raises his eyebrows. Edwin relents. "All right, I may have neglected to mention that I didn't own one. But you'll reassure her in person soon enough."
Charles grins. "You've got to tell me how you did that, mate."
Edwin blinks innocently. "Did what?"
"Oi, you know bloody well what! Your one-sided takedown of that zombie… where the hell did that come from?" Charles sits up, ignoring a brief surge of vertigo, and stares expectantly at Edwin.
He clears his throat, fighting a shy smile. "Well, you'd theorized that it was a matter of the mind, of willpower…" He briefly lifts an eyebrow. "I suppose in that moment, I found my… motivation."
Charles blinks. "What'd you mean?"
"Whatever the spectral version of mortal danger is, specifically when it's you. I'll admit, it's good to know I won't be entirely useless should you find yourself in another predicament like today."
It might be the high that Charles is running off of after facing the ghost equivalent of a near-death experience. It might be the fact that he's just witnessed Edwin Payne--bookish, fastidious Edwin Payne--wallop a zombie straight back into the afterlife for him. But Charles himself knows only a deep, aching, consuming need as he surges forward to kiss the person he loves most in the world.
For a moment, it's pure bliss--a realization that's a very long time coming, one that simply feels right. But the moment passes, and Charles can tell that something's wrong. Edwin's as still as a statue, and not in a pleasantly-surprised way. Though Charles only feels a light, neutral pressure against his lips, Edwin himself seems to radiate a distinct… coldness.
Charles pulls back, alarmed. "Mate, what's--"
Edwin springs to his feet and strides stiffly to the far end of the office by the desk. Only then does he whip back around. "I'm not some needy dog, Charles."
Charles gapes. "I--I never said--"
"I don't need constant affirmation or… or little treats or tidbits. This whole time you've been inexplicably driven to heap undeserved praise on my inadequacy, and I'm telling you to stop. Right now. It's gone too far."
Charles' mouth is still open. He'll freely admit he isn't always the sharpest knife in the chandelier, but he'd bet even an Einstein-sized brain would have a bit of trouble wrapping its mind around whatever the hell his best mate is on about.
"Hold up… wait a tick…" Charles slowly gets to his feet. "You think I kissed you just now as a… what… reward? For finally brawning it up?"
Edwin's pressing his closed fists together, his trademark tell. "And for becoming less of a liability, yes."
"Th--that was never my reasoning, mate! Self-defense, yeah? That's all I've ever cared about: keeping you safe!"
Edwin's forcefully placid expression cracks a little. "Port Townsend wasn't that long ago, Charles. My lapse with the Cat King got us trapped there, and Niko… she'd still be alive if Esther hadn't come after me, or if I'd--"
"She got me too, mate! Disembodied balls of ghost essence in a glass cage, remember?" Charles crosses over to Edwin. "If you're responsible for what happened, then so am I."
"You're doing it again," he says in a smaller voice. "Like I said, I don't need you to--"
Charles takes Edwin's face in his hands. "Listen to me, Eds. Have you ever known me to bullshit about literally anything? Aren't I always blurting out exactly what's on my mind, for better or worse?"
Edwin finally makes eye contact. "I… suppose so."
"Right. I'm an open book, mate. I have been genuinely impressed with your progress these past weeks, and thirty seconds ago when I kissed you…"
Edwin's mouth parts in a silent gasp. There's finally some hope in his eyes--terrified, unbearably fragile, and it clings for dear life to Charles' every word. He can't afford to muck it up, and he doesn't plan to.
"… it was because I wanted to kiss you. I'd never wanted anything more in my life."
Edwin swallows. "Why?" he asks in a strangled whisper. "In Hell, you said--"
"I know what I said, and at the time it was the absolute truth. I'd just take one thing back if I could."
"What?"
Charles grins crookedly. "Well, turns out I needed far less time than forever to figure out the rest."
They melt into each other hungrily, ravenously. Whatever part of the experience they may be missing out on doesn't even register; it's Edwin, and that's all that matters. Charles presses into him against the desk, one hand at his jaw, another at his back. Edwin's faint sighs and gasps, the sheer closeness of him, is lightning injected straight into Charles' nonexistent veins.
Then Edwin grabs fistfuls of Charles' coat lapels and he's pushed backwards, hard. Upon the realization that Edwin Payne is manhandling him, Charles' entire brain short-circuits.
Apparently, Edwin's 'motivation' isn't as clear-cut as they might have previously assumed.
Charles is slammed against the wall hard enough to make an audible crack, though of course it doesn't hurt. It's all he can do to simply hang on, borne helplessly along by a massive, overpowering wave he feels no desire to escape, while trying his damndest not to pass out again (though for entirely different reasons).
He could definitely get used to this.
They finally break apart to catch their breath, which technically isn't necessary. But it allows for Charles to meet Edwin's eyes--now bright, hungry, and brimming with incredulous joy.
"Sorry about the wait, Eds," Charles breathes, cupping a trembling hand to Edwin's face. "Let's make it worth your while, yeah?"
Edwin's smile is pure, open, and the most wonderful thing he's ever seen.
