Chapter Text
Lockwood had taken the case because of its difficulty, not because it promised to be an easy night. The fact that now that he had these goggles, the team believed in him – he really hadn’t expected to ever feel useful like this again. In some ways, Kipps found it touching – not in a way he’d ever tell the other boy.
They didn’t get many cases. Fittes ate up agencies and cases like they were some sort of hungry hippo, unhinging its jaw and gobbling up anyone else’s livelihood. It kept the budgets tight and their patience thin, but somehow Kipps found himself happier in this situation than even when he’d been at his busiest at Fittes. He didn’t feel like a failure in this group, which was an odd thought with how often they enjoyed razzing him for being old or a loser.
Something in how they did it, gave the impression even if he was any of what they said, they actually, truly liked him for it.
The haunting Lockwood managed to nab for the group had the makings of a cluster. Karim had found a mountain of research over the estate and its appalling history. The fact this structure still stood was nearly mind-boggling, but rich people are a strange bunch who love their haunted artifacts until they die and leave their cesspool of a mansion to family members without the same ideals.
Kipps felt nearly giddy at the prospect of a haunting of this magnitude. The closest experience he’d had since getting Sight back was the entirety of Aldbury Castle, and that felt like ages ago. He craved feeling useful like that again, to really be an agent as he’d once been. He thrummed with more energy than a brand new agent ready to make their mark and get their first paycheck. If he had any dignity left, he would’ve been embarrassed, but such things just no longer had a place in his life.
“Everyone be on the lookout, got it? It might have been a while since we had a case like this, but we won’t lose our heads,” Lockwood announced as the moon took its place squarely in the sky and the temperature began to drop rapidly.
Kipps figured that this was another thing he should be embarrassed about. How could he sit back and let his former rival, who was much younger, boss him around? It didn’t bother him, though. He might pretend to gripe about it, but not being in charge anymore felt like a weight off his shoulders. All his life, he’d had his life path laid out in front of him. He’d be an agent, he’d be a Team Lead, then a supervisor, and then he’d work some higher up position at Fittes. He’d hated all of it.
“Lucy, Holly, and I will take the East Wing. We’ll note our phenomena and then meet back here. George and Kipps, you two go to the West and do the same. No one separates, got it?” Lockwood continued, looking at each of them.
George groaned. “Why am I on grandad duty? I already got my aid the elderly badge, isn’t it someone else’s turn?”
Lockwood looked unamused. “Just do it, George.”
Kipps smirked. “Come on, Karim. I’ll show you the ropes, youngster.”
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“Isn’t it past yours ?”
They continued their bickering as they made their way to the West Wing of the too large estate. Kipps couldn’t fathom having this much space. The property taxes had to be abhorrent. They got their equipment set up, following the Fittes Grid Method that Kipps had known since he was a boy with his first rapier, unknowing what’d happen with his life. How much loss he’d face. The way he’d abandon his career for a ramshackle community. That somehow his morals would win out of a healthy pension and benefits.
George kept up the banter until the temperature plummeted to a point their teeth could only chatter amidst their readings. Kipps assumed if they went back to their earlier spaces, they’d all be freezing at this point. It seemed like the manifestation hadn’t been exaggerated, an equally thrilling and terrifying prospect.
“We should get back,” Kipps said as they checked off the last corner of the room.
George shrugged. “Don’t have to tell me twice to get back to biscuits and some nice warm tea.”
Witty retorts that didn’t cross the line were still new to Kipps in this position, so he simply nodded and made his way down the hallway with George. Something strange settled on his shoulders. He’d spent the majority of his life in a cloud of miasma, but it’d been a good while since he felt something so sinister simmering just below the surface.
“Do…do you feel that, Karim?” He tried to prompt, hoping that the other boy would scoff at him. Maybe he’d insult Kipps for being too jumpy, and Kipps would be relieved by it.
Instead he was met by silence.
“George?” Kipps turned around, but George wasn’t behind him anymore. They’d just been bantering, he hadn’t had time to leave.
Quill started to move back the way he’d come, George’s name sitting on the tip of his tongue when he stopped dead in his tracks. At the end of the hall, a mass of shadows fluttered. For a moment, Kipps thought it’d been the curtain, but these moved without any wind. He knew his goggles were still no comparison to true Sight, and that Lockwood could see things infinitely clearer than he could, which meant this cluster staring him down had to be massive for him to catch it this clearly.
He took a step back inadvertently. Disbelief ran through his veins as much as blood or fear. Saltbombs and his rapier wouldn’t be nearly enough to hold something of this magnitude back. It felt much too early for a manifestation to have this much power, even with the temperature readings they’d been picking up.
“Don’t just stand there, get your arse moving!” George shouted, sprinting past him.
Quill hadn’t even seen where he came from, but scrambled to catch up all the same. The movement agitated the Visitor – or Visitors – and suddenly Kipps was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of ghostly phenomena surrounding them. He dodged ghost fog springing up from the floor and tried to not be thrown off entirely by the doors opening and closing. He felt a stitch in his side from lack of excitement in his time supervising and not really needing to be in peak physical condition, but he couldn’t allow himself a single mistake for fear of being ghost touched.
He rounded the corner, not realizing how far he’d come. The ancient banister above their camp came up sooner than Kipps had time to stop. He braced himself, already mentally going over how horribly Lockwood and Co would screw up his headstone. Falling from the second story after running through a banister couldn’t lead to the most inspiring epitaphs. If he survived, however, the jokes would be never ending. He’d have to leave London to escape it. Granted, he didn’t have enough pride anymore to actually do that, he knew he’d take their taunting.
The ground came both sooner and slower than he expected, but it hurt all the same. His head spun, and he could hear others calling out even if the words didn’t connect for him. He blinked to see blurry forms rushing his direction. Their words didn’t seem like a language he spoke, but he figured he’d bumped his head hard enough to make English sound Welsh.
“Are you alright? Are you hurt?” Holly’s voice finally broke through the haze.
Kipps pushed himself up, astonished he’d been able to do so at all. He felt sore and battered with lungs still burning. Somehow his ego felt more bruised from how out of shape he was than his body after a tumble like that. The floor was littered with the wooden banister he’d kareened through, and he patted himself down to ensure none of those bits had stabbed into him. Luckily, he’d escaped without being impaled, without dying, and without being ghost touched. All in all, a pretty good skirmish for that large of a haunting.
“I think…I think I’m fine,” Quill said, looking up at Holly and then Lucy and Lockwood behind her.
Their faces didn’t reflect his sense of triumph. Their eyes widened with horror as they took him in. Not even in a joking sense as if they wanted to pull one over on him, none of them were good enough actors for something like that. He’d believe they’d seen a ghost, but none of them ever would look like that even facing down the Visitor he’d just escaped from.
“Why are you covered in blood?” Lucy asked.
Kipps looked down, having just checked himself over. He hadn’t felt any wounds, hadn’t seen any blood himself. But, when he turned down once more, there it was coating him. It soaked his jumper and dripped down his arms from where he had his sleeves rolled up. His hands probed everywhere the blood was thickest, staining his hands until the paleness became crimson, searching for some wound he’d missed before, but nothing appeared.
“It’s not my blood.”
“We know,” Lockwood said, his expression darkening.
Holly sneered at him. “It’s never your blood, is it?”
“Always someone getting caught in that blackhole you call a life,” Lucy continued.
“No… No! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” He insisted, mind spinning from the abrupt change from the people he’d just begun believing were his friends.
“Did you think this time it’d be different?” Kipps whipped his head around to see George, covered in just as much blood as he was. “Did you somehow think that you wouldn’t curse us too? All that death that followed you at Fittes. Did you really think it was the job and not you ?”
Lucy scoffed. “You doom anyone you dare to get close to. Kat and Bobby got lucky they escaped you – otherwise they would’ve ended up like Ned.”
Lockwood stood, staring him down, towering above where he sat on the floor. “You said everyone leaves me, but that’s not true, is it? Lucy came back. I have friends. My team lives . You wished I was more like you, but the truth is, death loves you more than it ever did me. You’re the plague wiping out all those who dare to trust you.”
“I- I didn’t even realize he was hurt,” Kipps tried to insist, but the words felt weak on his own tongue.
“How many names are there, Kipps?” George asked. “How many kids have died under your watch? Your care? What number will my name be on the list?”
“And mine?”
“Or mine?”
“Then mine?”
Kipps shook his head, in fact, his entire body shook as he tried to back away from the rest of this new team. “None, I swear. There is a list. I know there is. I couldn’t save them. But you all can’t – you can’t – be dying. I wouldn’t want that. I would’ve stopped it!”
Laughter echoed around the room. He didn’t know who it came from, or if it’d come from all of them, or maybe it’d come from none of them. The room grew shadows that joined in the laughter that molded itself into screams and sobs. Echos of what he’d heard at funeral after funeral. They’d come for him here.
“I didn’t mean to,” he choked. “I didn’t.”
The words kept pouring out of his mouth, lost in a sea of sound and blood and the faces of those he meant to protect. He’d always meant to protect. It was the one thing he truly wanted as a Supervisor – for everyone to go home at the end of the day. Kipps had spent years telling himself it was just the job. Only the job.
But it was him. He was the reason his kids were cursed to never come home.
The blood swelled like river rapids trying to soak him in the river of blood he had on his hands. The past, the present, the future – all of it would lead to more death. He’d been surrounded by it for as long as he could remember, always trying to push forward. There was no forward. Only the hands of those he couldn’t save pulling him under an ocean of blood.