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George could wish that Lockwood and Lucy were happy together, but that would just feel sad.
Lucy probably wished they were happy together, for the togetherness of it. The lingering stares silently screamed that she wanted to date Lockwood. She pined after him with such a fierceness that the longing was almost brought to life, which was probably why Lockwood couldn’t see it - his Talent for Sight only dealt with the dead and not the living, after all. If Lucy ever stopped loving Lockwood then the corpse of her affections would be so bright that none of Lockwood’s glasses could block it from sight and they would all have to step around where it lay on the floor. But it wasn’t going to die.
Lockwood probably wished they were happy together, for the happiness of it. He’s never had any difficulty being physically close to people, whether they were his best mates or coworkers or clients or strangers, but the joy was harder to come by. It spluttered like an old car’s engine, but something about Lucy hotwired the right cables together for the engine to turn over perfectly. Holding hands, clasping her necklace, brushing fingers as they pass toast between themselves - nothing made Lockwood’s smile truer. Without Lucy to jumpstart him, Lockwood only looked happy.
So, the two who would be in a relationship likely already wish they were in one. George couldn’t pinpoint why they weren’t already dating when it was so obvious that they should. But he also couldn’t wish they were together, because then he would be insinuating himself in their relationship, whatever muddled state it was in, and that was too close to what he actually wanted.
Lockwood and Lucy and him.
Even thinking it, he knew he wasn’t part of the set, that he didn’t quite match, that it didn’t scan if he was included. A playwright would shake their head no, bite their pen, scratch out the last, to see his name in the list of lovers. On a surface level, the alliteration didn’t account for George; he was excluded by syllables. It wouldn’t abide for him to be included. Petty things that made it hurt less if he attributed the blame to them. After all, it was easier to say I can’t date them due to linguistic conventions rather than I can’t date them because I’m me .
It was harder to convince himself that he didn’t belong since the Boneglass incident. Before then, it had been easy to dismiss all chances of connection, let alone romance, when his spiralling thoughts had pulled him into a whirlpool of isolation and doubt. Lockwood had replaced him with a shiny new employee; Lucy despised him for having his own ideas. But after , after he knew what they would do for him. The lengths they would go to for his sake, his protection, his very life, all on the basis of friendship. And if they were friends, then they liked him. That was the dangerous thought, its bright colours of hope the same brightness of a warning sign.
The thought, the hope, the longing at the root of it, would sometimes fix his feet in place when Lockwood was recovering from the bullet wound.
George would walk into Lockwood’s bedroom with a plate of food and a fresh glass of water and a single set of utensils, and Lockwood would talk him in circles until they were sharing the meal, George bringing each morsel to Lockwood’s blanched lips and Lockwood encouraging George to eat it in turn. The only thing they didn’t share were the antibiotics and pain killers. Each time, the opportunity to duck downstairs and grab another snack, cup, or fork, would linger at the doorway and George would find excuses to ignore it, would linger by his friend’s side with the hope that he was liked. He couldn’t leave Lockwood. Lockwood needed the company and care. And maybe, though he was hesitant to admit it, George needed it, too.
“Do you want me to ask Lucy up?” He offered, and his heart panged like a wound. George pressed along the edges of his hope, palpating, to map its shape. There was a certain, nostalgic peace to spending time alone with Lockwood; there was a certain, melancholic ache to the trio not being whole. He wasn’t sure which answer he wanted, just that he wanted. Mentally, George traced a sharpie around the border of his longing so he could monitor its spread.
“Later. I like being with you.” Lockwood shook his head, the movement loose, and only winced a little at the pull.
“We’re not doing anything.”
A sage nod. “That’s the trick of it, Georgie.”
They grinned at each other and Lockwood’s smile was flashbulb bright, George’s heart drifting closer on wings that weren’t feathered, for all the hope perched on his soul, but the wings of a moth. Irresistibly pulled. But there is a moment where something pulled goes from being sweetly stretched to irreversibly snapped, and George, and his moth heart beside, has never known when to back off.
“Still like me more?”
Lockwood’s head lolled this way and that, movements slowed by the painkillers, chin listing across his chest like a ship caught in a storm, and George only belatedly realised the danger lingering in those clouds. Lockwood shook his head no. “I don’t. I can’t pi-”
He still wasn’t sure which answer he wanted, whether he wanted Lockwood to chose him or chose him and Lucy both. But the creeping spread of his longing, the dusty wings of his heart, both shrunk back at the answer, because it didn’t include him. They were friends, but Lockwood didn’t like George, not like that.
“Right.” George curled in on himself and turned to the doorway, the excuses to leave that still lingered there. He shouldn’t have asked. Not when he knew Lockwood liked the way Lucy looked at him. Not when he knew Lockwood had missed the same glances from himself. He tried to pitch his voice into a question or a joke, but it collapsed on itself. “Guess you’re settling for me.”
“It isn’t - I’m not settling for you, Georgie.”
“No,” he pushed himself to stand and found he didn’t wobble as much as he’d expected. George was practiced in disappointment. “No, I guess no one would. I’ll ask Lucy up for you.”
And he left, and he did, even if the request was reluctant and dragged out by his conscience and left clawmarks along his throat for his troubles. He sent Lucy up to Lockwood because anything else would feel sad.
He shut his door against their laughter.
Many fruitless hours of research brought George into the dark heart of night, his patience worn thin, his tact having long since evaporated. He grumbled out of his room, picked the stairs with more care than he picked his arguments, and went to get his next biscuit in the rotation. A not uncommon occurrence, were it not for the figure in the kitchen.
Lucy sat at the table with two mugs of cold tea, one of which George recognised as Lockwood’s. She looked tired. Her sleep shirt looked like it had seen better days, and better nights besides. Her hair was a right mess, and George wondered if she’d let him brush it for her. He wondered if he was allowed to want that as her friend. The thoughts didn’t entirely soften his mood, but it rounded the corners of it some.
“I’ll replace the thinking cloth in the morning,” she promised, and George’s attention finally expanded beyond Lucy to notice that the table was bare. A thousand questions crowded the tip of his tongue - what happened to the thinking cloth, where did it go, what did you write on it, are you hiding it from Lockwood, was Lockwood downstairs, did Lockwood see, why not me - but George had worked his patience to the bone and lost sight of his tact entirely, and so he didn’t try to control the question that slipped out.
“Why aren’t you dating Lockwood?”
He was thankful for the smoothed edges of his mood then, that the words hadn’t cut him when spoken or landed, barbed and bristling, in Lucy’s hands.
“Sorry?”
He knew what the question actually was: a challenge to either repeat himself or claw the question back and pretend it was never spoken. The truth of it was spelled out in the incredulous raise of her eyebrows, the long then short-short-short blinks that followed, the flare of her nostrils. He’d studied her enough to know her fierceness by waning moonlight. It was stubbornness, not ignorance, then, that guided his next words. “Why aren’t you -”
“I heard,” she said. Her mouth twitched to the side like it was arguing with itself over the next words. George’s gaze lingered, and he was rewarded with catching the slight tilt of her face downward. “He - he likes someone else.”
“Oh.” Something crumbled in his chest at that, the very foundation of all he’d built up in his head suddenly turning to sand.
It wasn’t that he was upset at being wrong about Lockwood and Lucy. George knew that learning involved being wrong more often than you were right, that the greatest scientific strides came from trying to prove your own ideas wrong. He didn’t mind that he’d been proven wrong. He’d just hoped, in a tear-stained sort of way, that if they didn’t love him they at least loved each other.
There was a lump in his throat. He thought it might be his heart. “I’m sorry. Any idiot would be lucky to date you.”
“Yes, well, things would be easier if I liked idiots, wouldn’t it?”
“It’d give me one more thing to tease you about at least,” George said. “I like you.”
The words shocked George as much as they did Lucy. Her eyes snapped to him, wide beneath her fringe. There was that twitch in her lips again before they parted around words that didn’t come. Words that weren’t supposed to come from George, not when he could see how obviously Lockwood and Lucy pined for each other, but then, maybe they didn’t.
“I like you,” he repeated, testing the three words, finding that they held weight, “In the way that Lockwood doesn’t like me. And I know I’m a poor substitute, but I’d kick myself if I didn’t at least offer.”
She shook her head. If George hadn’t spent so much time watching her expression, accounting for his own hopeful bias in the interpretation of her expressions, he’d think -
“No, you’re not.” She shot back, too quick for him to think. He had to rely on heuristics, mental shortcuts, assumptions, to give his own reply.
“I am offering. Lucy, if Lockwood won’t date you because he likes someone else -”
“He likes you. ” Lucy snapped, her hand hitting the table in accusation. The cups rattled from the impact. “George, he likes you.”
There was a moment where the kitchen was perfectly silent but for the bugs trilling outside the window. He wasn’t dressed appropriately for this conversation. He didn’t quite know how they’d gotten here. He hadn’t prepared at all.
“Lockwood loves you . That’s - that’s why we’re not dating. Why we can’t.” Her attention had drifted down to the cold mug in her hands, the tea that had sloshed into the saucer. George almost wanted to peer in as well, take a guess at what the remaining tea could possibly mean, since he suddenly had more faith in tea readings than his own grasp on this conversation. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it, at their combined misfortune, at the heartbreaking boy one flight of stairs away, but, well. That would just feel sad .
She looked unbearably tired when she looked up, the moon carving craters into her expression. “So why aren’t you two dating?”
“Sorry?” George asked, mirroring Lucy in some tired attempt to be her equal, and she simply leveled him with a stare until he relented. “Fine. Why aren’t we dating?”
He held her gaze. Lucy really did have the most beautiful eyes, hidden as they were by her bangs and her eyelashes and her exhaustion. George followed her attention as it slipped back to the teacup and saucer, to the hands that slowly pushed the porcelain into the middle of the table, to the fingers that picked at chipped nail polish. It was captivating. She was captivating.
As with Lockwood, George wasn’t sure what answer he wanted from Lucy, just that he wanted. Even the silence was precious for being shared with her, more precious still as she sighed life into it.
“...Christ, I wonder if things are this complicated at Fittes. ”
“You don’t know the half of it,” George said, scrubbing his palm over his eyes. “The thinking cloth wouldn’t be big enough to draw out that map of feelings.”
“Just as well I went independent, then, isn’t it?” Something in her voice, the crinkled lilt to it, slipped a finger under George’s chin and brought his attention back to Lucy’s face. She was smiling. Still tired, still shadowed, still beautiful, and smiling. It looked a bit like hope. “You like us both? Me and Lockwood?”
The question didn’t leave him any room to squirm. There were no strange twists of language he could hide behind, no social cues he could feign ignorance on, no compounding queries he could answer instead to deflect the true nature of the question. It was his sort of question; it was blunt and asked by someone who wanted the real answer.
Besides, hadn’t they all promised no more secrets?
“Yes.” There could be no other answer. “And you like -?”
“Both of you, Georgie. Lockwood and you.”
Oh. Oh, there it was again - the longing in his chest spreading far beyond the borders he had drawn earlier in the day, red streaks quickly seeking out his heart and his hands and in equal measure, whatever he could hold Lucy and Lockwood with. The moth wings fluttering in his chest to get closer to the light, to Lockwood’s flashbulb smile and Lucy’s perpetual fire, heedless of the threat of being burned. The teacups on the table that he gathers with his own two hands, shaking for all the joy rushing beneath his skin, and sets by the sink next to his own mug, completing the set.
Lucy liked him. From the crumbled ruins of his perspective on Lockwood and Lucy and himself, hope pushed through the topsoil, verdure in both colour and novelty, and quickly began to grow.
“How about we replace the thinking cloth now? We have a map to draw.”
It wasn’t so much a map as three points connected by lines. George’s penmanship looked shakier in the morning light than it had when inscribed under the moon’s curious attention, and Lucy muttered anxious critiques about the little portraits and hearts she’d drawn by each point. Lockwood’s throat bobbed and his lips parted and his shoulder must have twinged, but he added his own lines to the map the way a weary traveler plots a course home, and pulled George and Lucy both in for a kiss.
George felt nothing but happy.