Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I may actually kill Kipps this time,” Lockwood says lightly, tossing an empty beer bottle into his rapidly filling trash bag, “That or bill him for the bloody mess his Fittes mates made.”

“You won’t,” Lucy breezes. “Admit it,” she grins at him from her precarious perch atop the banister, scrubbing away sticky champagne splatters, “you love him. He’s like a brother to you.”

Lockwood snorts. “Maybe more of a cousin thrice removed. Or perhaps a particularly crabby old cat.”

“ Lockwood .”

“Oh, alright. But don’t ever tell him I said it, or he’ll puff up so much that we’ll have to poke him with rapiers to get him down.”

“I don’t know,” Lucy smiled. She fiddled with a blue stone, “I think everyone should get to hear that Anthony Lockwood loves them at least once. I think it's worth the risk.”

His eyes softened. "Sometimes, it is."

Chapter Text

They’re laying on the sofa, warmed by the fire, bathed in the glow of the Christmas tree. He reaches a tentative hand to her stomach. Wavers. Lays it there.

“I think,” he swallows, voice a ghost of a whisper, “Luce, I think it’s going to be okay this time ‘round.”

She’s quiet. He thought that last time. Prayed it would be true. Wept when it wasn’t. 

“I hope so.”

She can’t tell him she’s scared.

(Of losing the child, of never having a baby that lives, of how desperate her love is for this one already).

She spies the nativity scene. Another child born to a mother destined for loss.

“Please ,” she whispers in the night. “ Please. ”

Next Christmas, her daughter is six months old.

Chapter Text

I lob a salt bomb over my head and curse loudly. “Lockwood, duck !”

Lockwood swerves in the nick of time to whack the salt bomb with his rapier so that it hits the ghost straight on, dissipating it long enough that George and Holly can bag the source. With the all clear, I flop down and groan.

“Your New Year’s resolution is to never leave the house without triple checking we have the chains ever again .” 

Lockwood flops down on the floor beside me, spent. “Since when do you get to make my resolutions?”

I tug the sapphire out of my jumper and wave it around, “Since you gave me this.”

“Oh, well then, a very good trade indeed.”

Chapter Text

After every excursion to the Other Side, they have a routine: tea, blankets, fire, each other. Sometimes they sit in silence, trading books and secret biscuits back and forth. Others, they whisper back and forth things they’ve never spoken aloud. Others still, they trade jokes and swap stories, content to laugh about any and every thing that exists outside their safe haven.

“I keep thinking,” Lucy says around a biscuit once after a particularly biting excursion, “that we’ll get used to the cold. But we never do.”

“No,” Lockwood agrees. He smiles a bit shyly, “But I like warming up next to you.”

Chapter Text

He’s more snowman than man when Lockwood stomps through the door, tracking half the blizzard in with him.

Lucy’s eyebrows shoot up to her hairline. “What on earth happened to you?”

He shrugs off his coat and shivers. “Once in a lifetime storm. It’s so bad that everyone was leaving work early. I popped by Arif’s on the way home for a few essentials—I don’t want either of us going anywhere until this blows over.”

“I’ll have to call George and the rest, then,” Lucy frowns, “they were set to come over tonight for an early Christmas.”

Lockwood slips out of his shoes and hangs his scarf as he answers, “I called them from the office. Didn’t want any of them to risk anything.”

Lucy nods. “Still, though, it’s a bit sad. I was looking forward to our plans.”

Grinning, Lockwood twines his arms around her, “Oh, Mrs. Lockwood, I think we can find some ways to pass the time.”

Chapter Text

It takes until midnight for Lucy to decide that she’s actually leaving, but when she does, she moves quickly. Shoves her favorite jumpers into her backpack, swipes toiletries from the bathroom, snatches up Norrie’s favorite nail polish from where she’d left it the last time she’d slept over, and has her life condensed into two neat little bags in the hours before dawn. 

Shouldn’t it be harder, she wonders, to leave home? To abandon all your life has been? But, well, she’s never been one to hesitate on the threshold, and this hasn’t been home since she was eight.

(And maybe never at all).

And so Lucy Carlyle slips away in the night, like the ghost she almost was

Chapter Text

With a final retch, I relinquish my claim on that most dishonourable of thrones and collapse onto my husband, who had been so sweetly holding my hair back for me.

“I am never drinking again,” I moan.

“My poor Luce,” he chuckles, “And to think, you only had two glasses of champagne to celebrate Kipps’s promotion at dinner last night.”

“I know,” I whine a protracted groan, “I can’t believe how having kids has killed my tolerance. Usually I only vomit when I’m…oh no .”

“...Luce?”

“Lockwood, can you run down to Arif’s and pick up something for me? I-I don’t think I’m hungover after all.”

“But then why would you…?”

“Well,” I shift nervously, “the same reason as the last five times.”

“ OH. Clearblue, then? Or shall we switch it up with a First Response?”

I roll my eyes. “Surprise me.”

Chapter Text

They laugh their way into the backseat of the car, dodging Lucy’s nephews and nieces’ (and Flo’s) best attempts to pelt them with dried lavender—lest the hair and makeup Holly spent hours on that morning be ruined—and as such hardly realize they’re well and truly alone until they’re already speeding away to the garden where the photographer is to meet them.

“ Lucy ,” Lockwood breathes, his eyes a galaxy, “Lucy, we’ve done it.”

“We have indeed,” she beams back, far too giddy for anything but crystalline sincerity.

He reaches for her, cradles her face in his hands. Kisses her sweetly once, twice. Rests his forehead against hers as her hands come to rest on his face in turn in a transformed mirror of a night so long ago. 

He grins, “Happy wedding day, wife.”

She lets out a breathy little laugh. Wife . She’ll have to get used to that, won’t she? She says as much out loud.

“Don’t worry,” he says, “We have the rest of our lives.”

And that is a very long time indeed.

Chapter Text

The summer they shutter the agency, Kipps and George haul Lockwood away for three weeks to hike the Camino de Santiago.

There’s no discussion, just Kipps barging his way into the back garden while Lockwood is hacking away at some poor azaleas, tossing him a hiking backpack, his ticket to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and the threat of siccing Holly and her concerned eyes and talk of therapists on him if he isn’t ready to go by the date on the paper. He’d grouse to Lucy, but she’s away on a tour for her first book, and won’t be home until after he is.

It’s miserable at first. Kipps is far too chipper, George too fascinated by every church, aqueduct, and ruin they walk past, and he is too surly to enjoy most of their first week, but somewhere around the fourth hostel, Lockwood is shocked to realize he’s feeling better than he has in ages. The sun is warm, the air is clean, and he has nothing to worry about beyond whether Lucy’s gotten his postcards. By the time they’re standing under the Botafumeiro in Compostela, he can't believe how easy it has become to breathe.

Chapter Text

“Bet I can hit the chandelier from here.” 

“If you can, I’ll give you my text turn on the biscuit rotation,” I promise. We’re clearing a house with no history of psychical phenomena before sale, and four hours into the night, we’ve noticed neither a whiff of plasm nor a whisper of malaise. To prevent our early death by boredom, George and I are launching paper planes over the banister from the iron circle we’re sitting in while Lockwood thumbs through a gossip rag. Depressingly, this is our most fun night out in weeks.

“If you can do it without getting it stuck and our having to explain it to the client, I’ll give you mine, too, George,” Lockwood offers, eyes never trailing from the glossy page of his magazine.

“Not a problem,” George snorts. His plane sails over the railing, bangs into the chandelier, and flutters down harmlessly as the fallen petal of a daisy. George cackles and I groan. I’m never seeing another biscuit as long as I live.

Chapter Text

“I’ll give him this,” Lockwood begins, swirling his Sazerac. He’s leaning over the guardrail of the posh rooftop bar we’re visiting to peer out at the London streets below. “Quill knows how to throw a party.” 

“It’s been nice,” I agree. I take a sip of my own drink. Lockwood insisted I try a French 75 and branch out from the lagers and ciders I frequent, and I have to admit the champagne bubbles are pleasant in a golden, effervescent sort of way. “He could have let us throw him a thirtieth, though, couldn’t he?”

Lockwood considers this, “I suppose. But I’m selfish enough to be pleased we didn’t have to plan the thing. We’d be running around as frantic as his event coordinator is, and then I wouldn’t get to stand here and enjoy how lovely my wife looks tonight.”

I move to be closer to him. He gets the idea and puts an arm around my waist, so I’m tucked under his chin. “I see your point,” I sigh happily, “This is a much better way to spend a party.”

Chapter Text

Lucy is surprised how quickly they settle into married life after the wedding. Before the ink on the certificate is dry, they have designated sides of the bed, haggle over bathroom counter space, and broker a treaty over just how many of his shirts she’s allowed to swipe. In some ways, married life has merely been a final merging of their domestic lives. That final barrier has been struck down, yes, but they’ve shared the chores and house for so long that the greatest shift comes in adjusting for the disparity in meal planning now that George has moved into his own flat.

And yet, in other ways, everything is brilliant in its newness. 

Marriage has inspired a blooming tenderness in them both. She feels it in the quiet mornings over tea and toast when he admires her, finally unashamed. Knows it when Lockwood comes home with little things he thinks she’ll enjoy—flowers, bath bombs in her favorite blue, art books to inspire her. Sees it when she finds herself counting down the minutes until he finishes work.

And somewhere in the span of those days, “I” becomes “we”, and there is a Lockwood family at Portland Row again.

Chapter Text

George, it must be said, while an above average flatmate, is a terrible, abominable, atrocious room mate. He snores, he scratches, and he leaves more socks than I knew one person was capable of owning everywhere but the cheap plastic laundry basket Holly brought over as a temporary hamper. 

This is not a problem when George is sequestered to his own room, but we’re all sleeping draped over any vaguely horizontal surfaces in the tidied remains of the library while we set Portland Row to rights. After the initial exhaustion passes, and we are able to feel things like “irritation” and “murderous contempt” again, Lockwood and I make a solemn agreement to plaster and paint his room first . 

Once we’ve hauled all the junk out of George’s room, tossed anything that can’t be saved, and set him to work sorting through things to keep and donate under Holly’s watchful eye, Lockwood and I make quick work of patching up, sanding, and priming the walls for the rich green George has selected. We don’t talk much. Mostly, we listen to the wireless and paint. There’s something almost soothing about putting the house back together like this. When we’re done, we stand there a while to admire our work. We call in the others, and they make the appropriate “oohs” and “ahhs” over our efforts, bringing with them pizza and cold beverages, and we make a little indoor picnic on a drop cloth, and soon we’re all chatting and laughing. Someone snaps a picture, and when we get it developed, I have them make a few copies. And if that photo ends up on the wall of each of our respective houses someday, well, then that’s a bit of Portland Row that can go just about anywhere.

Chapter Text

After the diagnosis, every doctor appointment is a loaded gun. 

Lockwood holds her hand through the blood tests and appointments, Holly through the (embarrassing, painful, terrible) ultrasounds. So many end with the same response. 

“We’re sorry, Miss Carlyle,” they say, “There’s nothing we can do.”

Oh, there’s drugs she could take to manage her weight if she starts retaining any. Some have suggested hormonal contraceptives, but one of her sisters ended up half suicidal when she tried them to manage it, and Lucy isn’t willing to risk it. 

(And she saw the look on Lockwood’s face when she told him that. The too-pale stillness. The bare brokenness. She won’t do that, not to him.)

So she takes dubious vitamins and supplements. She sucks back spearmint tea and lets George and Holly ply her with protein. Takes up new workouts and lets her doctor try new things and sits quietly in the back of St. James’s with Quill, neither speaking, neither needing to. She tries not to think about how she should probably let Lockwood go so he still has time to find someone who can give him the family he deserves, and she curses every inch of the body that insists on being such a bloody failure to her that sometimes, on her blackest nights, she wonders if perhaps this is the penance she deserves for those too-fleeting years of joy that she stole away.

Chapter Text

“It snowed !” I cry, dropping my kit in the vestibule of the old country house we’d been hired to clear and race outside. “Lockwood! George! Kipps! Look! It snowed!”

I don’t wait for the boys to answer me, and dive into the powder.

“Lucy,” Lockwood stares at me owlishly, “what on—?”

“Come on ,” I insist. “We’ve already settled up with the client, and Holly’s said she’ll be heading straight to sleep after she takes the Source to the furnaces, so it’s not like anyone is waiting for us. Let’s just…spend a few minutes here, yeah? Make a snow angel with me? They’re really easy.” I flop my arms around a bit to demonstrate. That gets a laugh from him, a real one, not something for a client or a reporter, and so he plops down next to me and wiggles out a snow angel of his own, coaxing the others into joining us. 

By the time we’re warm at the inn, we leave a dozen snow angels and snowmen likenesses of the agency behind us, a sign of life in a dead world. 

Chapter Text

“Question 1: How long have you known your future spouse?”

“‘Since she waltzed in my front door and stole all my biscuits’ doesn’t sound like what they’re looking for, so just put the number of years or something.”

“I’m taking your next one from the rotation for that.”

“You wound me.”

“Mmhm. Alright, here’s number 2: ‘how long have you been engaged’?”

“That’s easy. A month. Only seven more if they let us have the date we want.”

“I hope so, otherwise it’ll be murder trying to get in in June.”

“I’m willing to do anything short of domestic terrorism to ensure we don’t get stuck with some weekday in August.”

“Even elope?”

“...if that’s really what you want…”

“Don’t worry, you know it isn’t.”

“Is that a question on here? ‘How many questions on flower arrangements are you willing to field before you run to Gretna Green?’”

“You know, we sat down with the specific goal of getting through these questions before we have to meet with the priest tomorrow, and if we chat through all of them we’ll be here all night.”

“Not the deterrent you think it is, Luce.”

“ Lockwood .”

“Okay, okay. Question three…”

Chapter Text

It’s a long, early winter, the year she loses her baby.

She thinks she would have liked being pregnant in the winter. The baby was due in the middle of March, and would have let her stick to sweaters and other big things that would keep strangers from asking too many impertinent questions about something so special. No one asks questions, now.

No one asks her any questions when she slips into the cemetery, either. Graveyards have opened again, so she’s not sneaking in anymore, but few have returned to them, so she has to brush off a xylophone of icicles from the top of the gate with her umbrella before she can enter. 

From there, it’s not far to the Lockwood plot. She uses her glove to brush snow from the stones. Her husband got special permission to bury the baby here, instead of with the other lost babies, next to her aunt. Lucy lays the bundle of snowdrops and crocuses, first fruits for the firstborn, at the base of the wee stone engraved with a lily and a lamb and brings her fingers to her lips, then presses them to the stone.

“Happy due date, Lily.”

Chapter Text

“I’m surprised there aren’t more ghosts on the Tube,” I ponder, dragging the chains back into the kit bags, “You know, what with all the accidents over the years and all the people who died in stations during the war.” 

“They salted most of the ground during the first wave of the Problem,” George offers, “Didn’t want all those business types getting ghost touched on the morning commute. Every now and then, though, they poke into something they shouldn’t and rile up a few Visitors.”

“Well, I’m glad they did,” Lockwood adds. “A job like this will be good publicity for the agency. Plus, I talked to the conductor, and we get free fare for the next year.”

“Now none of us will have an excuse to not run errands on our days off,” I joke.

“Oh,” George breezes, “I’m sure Lockwood will still think of something.”

“Hey!”

Chapter Text

“I know you may not believe me, but I am quite proud of you for this.”

It’s quiet in the church, but Quill heard him coming all the same, a benefit of old stone and echoing ceilings. He crosses himself, pockets his rosary, and turns. “Glad to see you still know your way here.”

“Hey,” Lockwood protests, “I’m a regular on Sundays, now. Have been for quite some time, if you please.”

“You know we are open all week.”

“And here I was coming to wish you well before tomorrow, only to come here and be castigated.”

“Thought you’d be used to getting reprimanded by me by now.”

“Yes, well, I had thought it would end when I reached my mid twenties,” Lockwood laughs, before sobering, “But truly, I came to see how you are.”

Quill raises an eyebrow, “Come to give me one last out?”

“No,” Lockwood swears, brow furrowed, “No, I know this will make you happy. I guess I just wanted to make sure someone congratulated you. I know your folks aren’t keen.”

“They aren’t,” he agrees. His father is furious at him for becoming a priest. His mother wept. 

“But, well…you know you have us, right? We’ll all be here. Lucy, me, the kids, George, Flo, Holly. We’ll be right up front. I swear.” 

“I know you will,” Quill says, and he finds he means it.

“And we still expect you to come ‘round. Having you around has gotten to be a habit, and I’ve been told I have trouble with change, so…want to grab a pint on your last night of freedom?”

“Only if you’re buying.”

“Only the best for you, Father Kipps.”

Chapter Text

Their third child is a rough pregnancy, and Lucy can barely keep anything down for the duration. Her doctor has her hooked up to a PICC line to make sure she’s getting enough fluids to keep her and the baby from spending the nine months in a hospital, and she’s so, so good at keeping their girls from panicking. They’re five and three, so needles are to them what poltergeists were to their parents.

Lucy tells them she’s getting chocolate cake, ice cream, and all sorts of things through the tubes. While this enchants Kit, Eleanor has had two more years to learn how to worry than her sister, and clings to her mother like she thinks Lucy will vanish like a ghost with an immolated Source if she lets go, and Lockwood is earning new greys to go with the silver of his youth. He’s praying for a miracle, for anything, when George stops over with a tureen of something golden and smelling of ginger.

It’s soup, George explains, and one of his sisters swore by it while she was pregnant, and it doesn’t fix everything, might not even be the reason that day goes so well. And yet, when Lucy keeps it down, and the nausea medication with it, at least for that day, the shadows recede. A miracle indeed.

Chapter Text

She finds him as she does a whisper in the dark: by listening to what no one else can hear. 

He’s the still point at the center of the tornado that is his sister’s room. DEPRAC left mere hours ago, taking with them the last specters of haunting, but there will always be ghosts in this room.

All things considered, she muses, he’s brilliantly alright. Lockwood is not weeping, nor is he hiding in stony, crumbling silence. Instead, he sits. Sits, looking through what remains, tossing things in piles a fraction neater than the cataclysm that is the room (the house, the world ).

She shuffles in, quilt around her shoulders. Drops next to him, arm outstretched to offer refuge against the deluge. He takes it, and accepts her head on his shoulder in turn.

“I was thinking,” he murmurs. Brushes a thumb over her knuckles. He doesn’t ask her what he wants to, not yet. There’s a necklace and a plan and a time less swallowed up by grief for that. Still, he wants her close. The light of her warms the cold of him. “I was thinking,” he repeats, “that this might be a nice guest room.”

She tucks in closer. Slips an arm around his. “I like that idea,” she says, a soft roundness to her words, promises, “I’ll help you paint.”

Chapter Text

A last few notes of music squeak out behind them as they slip from the restaurant, and then it’s her hand in his, strolling in a glowing cashmere snow. He offers to twirl her, she laughs, lets him try anyway. They slip, right each other, laugh louder. 

He makes a joke about someone shaking up the snow globe they’re in. Watches the fairy lights, all strung up for Christmas, make the sapphire sparkle like something magical, like she is something magical. It’s then that he knows, then that he pulls a box from his coat, then that he kneels in the snow. 

This time, when he twirls her, neither of them fall.

Chapter Text

“For someone who has worked for himself out of his home for his entire career, you have entirely too much stuff , Lockwood,” I huff. He and I have been hauling boxes into his new office at the diocese for an hour and a half, and, as we deposit the last one, I plop with an unceremonious thud onto his newly built desk chair.

“I’ll have you know this is all highly necessary for the important work I’ll be doing,” Lockwood waves the screwdriver he’s using to build a set of shelves around to punctuate his thoughts.

“Even this box marked,” I squint to make out his handwriting, “‘miscellaneous bits and bobs’?”

“ Especially that one.”

“Mhmm…” I draw out, “And what about the box marked ‘important’? Is that all rubbish, then?”

“Not in the slightest,” he insists, “Open it and see.”

I do, only to find a picture of myself staring back at me. I blink.

Lockwood comes up behind me, takes it from my hands, and places it pride of place on his new desk. He kisses me on the cheek. “See?” he teases, “I told you I had my priorities straight.”

Chapter Text

“Godfather.”

“Godchild.”

“You have to tell Daddy he’s being insane.”

Quill leans back in his chair. It’s not often he takes calls in his office, especially not when he’s preparing to try as grueling of a case as is on the docket, but Eleanor Lockwood is one of the few people who have the special privilege to phone him whenever she wants. “As often as I relish in doing exactly that, I’d like to know why you think so, darling.”

He can almost see her furious dark curls bouncing with that most acute rage exclusive to thirteen-year-old girls. Eleanor’s voice is coated with ill-repressed annoyance. “He thinks it would be too dangerous for me to take ice skating lessons because he’s read all sorts of horror stories about girls doing drugs for performance, but when he and Mum were my age they were flinging themselves in front of ghosts and I wouldn’t even know where to buy drugs if I wanted to!”

Never has years of practice keeping a poker face in court come in so handy. “And what does your mum say about this?”

“She’s being reasonable, but she says Daddy has final say.” Oh, the eye roll is audible.

“Tell you what,” he says from behind a smile, “You get high marks on your end of term exams, and I’ll see what I can do. I’ll remind your dad of a few things from when he was your age, and I’ll buy the skates. He’d like thinking he’s getting some money out of me.”

He’s fairly certain he goes half deaf from the squeal that erupts from Eleanor. “Thank you, Uncle Quill! Thank you so much! I’m going to study right now! I love you! See you at dinner on Saturday!”

Quill chuckles, “See you then, El.” 

Chapter Text

Kit Lockwood has an imaginary friend. 

He lives in a corner of the basement behind the rusty old rapiers and molding boxes advertising magnesium flares, and she’s not allowed to touch him, but they play wonderful games. He teaches her things, too—things about Mummy and Daddy and her aunts and uncles, and about what the world was like before Kit was born. Her friend says she would have been a great Talent, then. The boy is a few years older than her, but those stories he tells are so silly he must be little, because Kit’s little brother tells made up things like that, and Mummy says it’s because he’s too small to know the difference between real and not real.

Mummy also says to be kind to people, even if they’re strange, and the boy is very strange . For one, he’s always wearing the same clothes. She offers to get him something of Daddy’s, but he makes a face at that. Maybe he doesn’t mind because he can’t see what he looks like. Kit’s friend, after all, only comes out at night. But that’s okay. 

She Sees him fine in the dark. 

Chapter Text

Babies, Lucy thinks, are one of the best smells in creation.

There is a newness to them, a dipped-in-heaven freshness that sits firm even in the face of spit up, soiled nappies, and slobber, and she soaks it up like a sponge trying to contain the Thames. She holds onto this freshness as her babies grow, catches wisps of it in the toddler, the preschooler, the gangly youth. Age is nothing to a mother, and when she looks at her children, she finds traces of those fresh, perfect babies in every face they earn with time. 

With this is a great awfulness. Lucy knows death just as well as she knows life, has felt its sticky, cloying breath on the hairs of her neck. Has danced with it on the edges of rooftops, in nights so void of stars she could almost swear there’d never been light. She knows it hunts everyone, knows she would dash her own body against the rocks to snatch her children from its touch.

And so, when Lucy spies the green glow of Other Light coming from the basement, knows Kit is down there, knows Kit is alone , she flies down the stairs as though gravity is a mere inconvenience. She hurls open the door to the high security storage room, tosses Kit behind her, and is praying an apology because this house is going to hold another haunting when—

“Lucy Carlyle, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me.”

Chapter Text

She’s thought about what would happen if the Skull ever came back. Played it like a movie in her head a thousand times. Switched the reels. Played them back.

When she was younger, it seemed inevitable. He’d seemed inevitable. Oh, she knew there was something twisted about their relationship, knew that any therapist worth their salt would have words to say about the inherent isolation, but she also knew that they’d needed each other, and that losing him had been a lot more terrible than she’d let on. But…time had passed. She’d seen the end of the Problem, fallen ever more in love with Lockwood, married and had children with him. If the Skull had ended up in the storage room because the charred, broken memory of him cut her ever-wounded heart into sanguine ribbons, then that had to outweigh any guilt that tore at her for leaving him there. 

Seeing him again extinguished any remorse burning in her throat.

She yelled, screamed, raged at him. Spat at him for endangering Kit, cursed him for terrifying her, almost torched his Source herself for coming back. If he could come back, how many others might?

He called her an idiot for this—called her an idiot for a lot of things. No one else could come back over, he said, because no one else wanted to. Haunting instead of moving on was unbearable for most, and he was only back because he needed a favor.

He couldn’t move on, he explained, without her. For years, he’d tried, but couldn’t manage to make it out of that endless blackness which was Dark London. She asked what was holding him back. Here, he paused. 

Oh. She was. 

“What can I do?” she begged. 

He told her.

And Lucy switched the reels.

Chapter Text

It was Holly, in the end, who had the solution. 

They were all gathered around the Thinking Cloth, mugs of tea in hand and biscuits on rotation, as though no time had passed at all between the destruction of Fittes and now. Of course, time had passed. The older children could be heard from their domain in the living room where Kipps’s wife was keeping dutiful watch, and Lucy had a three-month-old in her arms whose attention she was trying to direct away from her shaky-gazed fascination with the Skull. All of them looked older, felt the years like ice crunching underfoot. That Lucy could understand Skull at all was credit only to their sojourns to the Other Side—trips where, apparently, they’d missed one very important ghost indeed. Hence, the meeting.

It was after an annoying number of false starts and solutions—including, but not limited to, “possible unfinished business,” (Kipps), “has the hots for Lucy and won’t give it up,” (Flo), “should have incinerated the bastard years ago,” (Lockwood)—that Holly offered up a solution that would lend both the Skull and all of them a bit of closure. A memorial.  

The Skull, she pointed out, had died terribly, haunted miserably, and floated around the Other Side glumly. Maybe, a proper memorial would be what he needed to move on.

Lucy looked to the Skull. He paused a moment, his plasm turning solemn. With uncharacteristic thoughtfulness, he told Lucy that, yes, that seemed like a decent idea at the least.

And so the preparations were underway. Lockwood got on the phone to his bosses to pull some favors and see about getting him buried and a priest to say some prayers, George and Flo hunted across the city for the finest receptacle to inter the Skull in, Holly confirmed details and made schedules and ordered lunches, Kipps and his wife entertained the children and came back with shiny cardboard pamphlets promising Masses for his soul. And Lucy? Lucy sat with him. Sat, wept, laughed, prayed. Asked him details of all the parts of his life he’d held back from them all, recorded them, kept them close to her heart like a promise. He told her about the Other Side, the things she wouldn’t have seen. Told her how empty it was, how he just wanted to move on, how he’d spent the last year watching over the denizens of Portland Row, old and new. Told her something long forgotten, wonderfully and finally remembered.

The day of the funeral, Lucy dresses her children in black. It is not their first funeral, and it will not be their last, but it is one that will always stand out to them. Lockwood is the one to place the Skull in his box. It’s free of iron, just in case this doesn’t work, but when Lucy watches the charred bone settle into the gilt Victorian case Flo and George chose, she knows in her (clenched, aching) heart that it will. They’d stayed up until dawn, speaking their last. He wasn’t afraid this time, he explained, because there was no longer anything to be afraid of. 

The service is quick, and yet it lasts for centuries. Incense makes the baby sneeze, Kit wails through the whole thing, and George and Flo’s youngest tries to drink from the baptismal font, then screams when her mother hoists her into her arms. Lockwood, devoid of his usual ease, stumbles through his reading. There are cloying lilies and disgraceful daffodils, and Lucy makes herself laugh a little by thinking about how he’d make fun of such proceedings. And yet, when they arrive at the burial, she finds herself unable to think of anything funny at all.

Her most selfish instincts want her to beg him to come back, but to hold back the friend who was with her during some of her darkest days, who sacrificed so much for her, from possible peace and chain him to a miserable half existence made her shrivel in shame. So, she held back, gripping Lockwood like it was the two of them, once again under a spirit cape in the land of the dead. He stays silent, strokes her back with the same tender touch that holds their children, holds her in her brokenness, and in her haze begs God to take them at the same time, ancient and happy, so neither of them has to bury the other. 

It’s Kit who breaks her out of it. Kit, who, in a time not so far gone, would have been snatched up in the bloody claws of Fittes or Rotwell to fight in a demonic, artificial war, but who instead gets to grow up safe, grow up happy, grow up loved. Kit, who gets to grow up . She burrows into Lucy and Lockwood, begs her father to pick her up with wide, sad eyes, a copy of Lucy’s own. Lucy releases him so that he might oblige (because he will, of course he will, even if Kit is seven and getting too grown for him to carry easily). 

“He’s alright now, isn’t he, Daddy? He was always so sad and angry here.”

Lockwood is murmuring assurances to her when it hits Lucy that this might be the first time the Skull has experienced anything close to real happiness in close to two hundred years. Not stolen moments at others’ expense, not nasty jokes, but happiness. Joy . These prayers, this service, the burial, they were his greatest shot at peace. When he closed his spectral eyes at dawn, did he open them to that bright, shining majesty which all hope awaits them? Was he with the beloved dead telling Jessica, Donald, and Celia, telling Lily about everyone left behind? 

Had they helped him to find what Bickerstaff and his minions of hell never could?

In an instant, Lucy’s tears dried. Hope bubbled like fireworks at the thought of him restored, renewed. The grave which they placed him into was no tomb, but a golden chariot which bore him home. Now, the rose petals ripped off the flower were not a wretched metaphor for the youth cut down in a sewer, but the confetti of a welcome home party. The funeral was something dead for them—and they would mourn—but for him, it was as a birthday.

And on the stone which marked his resting place? At last, that final secret revealed, an identity restored!

Chapter Text

As the months tick, tick, tick themselves away, Lucy allows herself something resembling hope. 

The baby grows, this time. Last time, Lily had been a barely-there shadow when fourteen weeks proved to be the only fourteen she’d spend on earth. She’d held her in her hands when she lost her. Marveled at the tiny, perfect limbs. The doctor said it was a chromosomal abnormality, that nothing Lucy had done would have changed the outcome. It made the loss no easier, the terror months later at lining up test after test on the bathroom counter, all marked “positive”, no less acute. 

Lily’s little sister is healthy. Lucy knows this by how she grows. There’s first a crescent, then a half moon, then what seems to be a full celestial body curled just under her skin. Little feathery whispers lead to healthy knocks to the ribs. She does somersaults at the sound of her father’s voice (to his endless delight), hiccups when she’s startled, and instills in Lucy a desperate craving for anything with garlic or citrus. Lucy had thought loving her would feel like a betrayal. Instead, it’s like discovering spring after the longest winter. There is life again, and she is strong.

So strong, in fact, that she comes out screaming, ready to swing at whatever dared rip her from a place so nice and warm. They place her on Lucy’s chest, and she’s so red and furious that Lucy’s love for her triples in an instant.

“There, my girl,” she soothes, her voice a watery grin, “It’s alright, Eleanor. I know it’s scary out here, but I’ve got you. It’ll be an adjustment, but we’ve got all the time in the world.”

Chapter Text

Wordless hands pass the mug of tea across the Thinking Cloth. Lockwood blinks wide in the dusty light of morning.
“What’s this?” the gravely gruffness of his tone surprises him. He must have slept even worse than he thought.
“Tea,” Lucy says, as though she suspects him of having some secret concussion. She takes a sip of her own, scoops a bit of oatmeal onto her spoon. “I heard you, last night. Knew you didn’t sleep well, so…”
He takes a tepid sip. Perfect. He tells her as much with a peck on the cheek.
Lucy flushes. It’s still new to her (to both of them really), this closeness—but a very good kind of new, like the first flower of spring or the first snow of a new year. “You like it, then? I know…well, I know you always make mine for me, so I thought…anyway, I hope you’re able to get some more sleep. We’ve no cases today.”
He hums a bit. “I thought about going out into the garden today, actually. It’s probably the last of the good weather, and I want to enjoy it before winter robs us of any chance to see the sun. Care to join me?”
She smiles bright enough that he almost remands his previous statement, because surely that light is enough to see him through ten winters.
“Of course.”
She says it as though it’s the most natural thing in the world. He’s beginning to think it just might be.

Chapter Text

There is to be a package delivered eighty years from now.

It will be delivered to newspapers domestic and international, to senators and members of parliament and kings and kingmakers, and it will be sent from them to the world, and those kings and newspapermen and the janitors that clean up after them, and the mother who raises them, and all the children who may or may not get the chance to be them will all know what Lucy Carlyle wanted to tell them.

The truth, revealed in black and white.

It will take eighty years because Lucy Carlyle has no desire to hand any more of her life to those who stole it in the first place, and the ironclad ( ha —she knows more about the strength of iron than any of those lawyers in their suits might dream) NDA she signed promised punishments both swift and severe if she speaks out in her lifetime. So, Lucy will have to plan ahead. 

She also has a life to live. Lucy Carlyle will become Lucy Lockwood at twenty-three, will becomes a celebrated children’s book author and illustrator and see her books published in thirty languages, will raise nine children to adulthood who will go on to accomplish multitudes of their own. She, together with the other former members of Lockwood and Co., will lobby for the protection of former agents, lose some battles, but win the ultimate war. With one particular member, she will see parts of the world she never dared hope would be hers to see, and will live to see her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. When she dies, it will be holding the hand of her husband of seventy years. She will not leave a ghost.

And so when Lucy Carlyle dies, a chain of events shall be set in motion. The funeral, of course, which she will share with her husband, and an empty grave filled with two. There will be no reading of a will, for the assets of Anthony and Lucy Lockwood will already have been transferred to their children in anticipation of what is next.

It will be George Karim, at first, who encourages her one dusty day not long after the Problem’s end. He will tell her to write it all down in anticipation of “someday”, will, with Quill Kipps, make secret contracts and hash out legal documents. George, who will predecease her by a year (peacefully, in his sleep, on an archaeological dig), who will despise leaving Flo, but be comforted by the knowledge that their gaggle of feral grandchildren will run her too ragged to isolate. Kipps, who will be the first parting among them in his eighties, surrounded by his wife and children, no longer the supervisor of dead children, will be thrilled to strike back at a system which he has found no legal means to challenge.

A press release will be issued from the high-powered PR firm of Munro & Associates verifying the work as Lucy Carlyle’s, and affirming that she was in her right mind upon writing. It will take no other position until the death of the firm’s founder a few years later, upon which a video message from Holly Munro herself will be leaked to the press. Holly, a cherished philanthropist and grande dame of British society, will confirm everything Lucy will say with unabashed glee.

It will be the last series of Lucy Carlyle, split into five volumes, and it will sell out on its first day in stores. Legacies will be challenged by it, monuments torn down. Audits will be conducted, speeches in parliament will be made, and the thousands of children lost to the Problem will know vindication. The books themselves will be dedicated to a Norrie White, which future editions will explain through forward was a friend of Lucy Carlye’s who died of complications from ghost-lock days before her eighteenth birthday, forever a child. They will also be dedicated to Anthony Lockwood, Lucy’s husband. Lockwood will live a full life with her at his side, working for the diocese of Westminster doing what he has always done best: hunting that which goes bump in the night. He will get to be an old man with bad hearing and creaking knees, and will be remembered by his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as a loving, steady, biscuit-sneaking presence. He and Lucy will go on walks together until their last, and will walk through those hallowed gates hand in hand, and they will be at home.

Yes, Lucy Carlyle will write a series of books which will reveal the truth of it all, and they will disrupt the world after she departs it, proving her greater than Marissa Fittes after all, indeed, but tonight, she is young, and she is sitting in the attic of 35 Portland Row, and she is writing in her journal while she waits for dinner. She has finally decided on how to begin.
“Of the first few hauntings I investigated with Lockwood and Co., I intend to say little…”

Chapter Text

Hours past midnight, Lockwood and I are the only ones awake, and so we dance.
There’s something soft on the wireless, and our movements are sweet and languid. Limbs dragging, arms holding.
“Happy new year, again,” I mumble into his shoulder, my mouth molasses.
“You too, Luce,” he slurs. By rights, we should be in bed, too. Houseguests and children will be waking us before long. Still, we stay a little longer. “Any dreams for the new year?”
“Hmm…” I hum, “more of this?”
“Oh yes,” he nods, “more of this, indeed.”
“How’s about a lifetime?”
A grin. “Sounds perfect.”