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Lucy sat straight up in bed, her heart pounding so hard it almost hurt. It took her a moment to understand where she was, to recognize the white beam of the ghost lamp striping her sloped ceiling and the mound of laundry piled on her unused desk chair. The details of the dream were already tearing away like old frail cobwebs. All she really retained was a sick sense of doom. Someone had died. She was waiting in the living room with Holly for the news, but it was also her old house in Newcastle. Her mother wanted her to take another case with Jacobs and in the dream Lucy had lost it, crying and screaming as loud as she could, can’t you see that I’m grieving?!
It seemed like a needlessly melodramatic scene to her waking mind, but she couldn’t dismiss the sour feeling the nightmare left in its wake. She glanced instinctively at the windowsill, but the skull, finally free from its silver glass prison, was dull and brown as always.
It used to needle her with its thesaurus’-worth of jibes whenever she spluttered awake from another wraith-filled nightmare, until Lucy was too cross to be scared anymore and could roll over onto the cool side of the pillow. She sat, hugging her knees, watching the cavernous sockets for a glint of green, but they just stared out at nothing, as skulls are wont to do. Lucy sighed and yanked the chain on her bed lamp. She wouldn’t be going back to sleep anytime soon. She had a feeling that if she laid down now she would pick up right where she left off. Lockwood’s ghost would drift past her iron chains, Kipps would look down to find his stomach dripping out onto his hands. Lucy needed to do something familiar and tangible to remind her that she was still in the land of the living. Tea and biscuits would do nicely.
She dug her bathrobe out from under its tomb of skirts and cardigans and padded down the stairs. Perhaps the Tibeten spirit wards and gape-mouthed masks lining the walls should have felt sinister there on the dark landing, but somehow they comforted her more than the buttery lamplight or the holes rubbed through her sleeve. She paused a moment outside Lockwood’s bedroom. Lockwood had gotten a nasty concussion last week while out hunting Cold Maidens in Soho. The doctors had given him strict instructions not to engage in any phsycial exersion for at least a month and it was slowly driving their leader mad. He wandered about the house in his silk bathrobe, turbaned in his bandages and pale as a wraith himself. George had already banished Lockwood from the kitchen on multiple occasions because he wouldn’t stop incessantly clicking the pens they kept strewn across the thinking cloth.
Lockwood had the air of a romantic poet slowly dying of tuberculosis and Lucy would have found it funny if she didn’t know how his restlessness pained him, what memories came flooding in to fill the cracks when he didn’t have a case to distract him. It was a kind of curse, being unable to lie still.
The door to Lockwood’s bedroom was slightly ajar but all was blackness beyond so she continued down the stairs. God knew he needed the sleep.
Lucy was right. Tea did help. It was a rare clear night so she navigated the kitchen by the moon shining through the window. She chose her favorite mug with the cartoon ghosts. Lockwood disapproved of it. “That’s like making cartoon … World War 2 soliders! Or caricature plague victims!”
George had looked up from his newspaper, “You can actually buy plushie plague doctors.”
Lucy had scribbled something in her sketchbook, “I know what you’re getting for Christmas then.”
“Ugh you two are terrible.”
The sheet ghosts smiled up at her as the kettle boiled. It felt good to defang, to claim via kitchy collectable, the things that stalked them at night. Lucy plucked out one of their endless sachets of English Breakfast, because she liked the woody flavour and her caffeine tolerance was so thoroughly shot at that point. She stood awhile letting the water burn her hands through the ceramic, watching a night cab speed down their empty street. She felt better, but not quite ready to retire to bed yet. Maybe George had left one of his super hero comics in the living room. That seemed like a good distraction.
She wandered down the hall, still not bothering to switch on the lights, scanning the coffee table for the floppy shape of Green Lantern or Superman: the Space Age. It took her several seconds to notice the figure slumped in the easy chair in the far corner.
Lucy gave a shout and stumbled backwards, slamming her shin against the coffee table and spilling steaming tea all down her forearm. The figure jolted upright. She regonized his movements immediately. It was only Lockwood. He must have recognized her as well from the sound of her enthusiastic cursing.
“Good evening, Luce. Or is it morning already?” He said, attempting to rub a crick out of his neck.
Lucy set down her half empty tea, and waved her smarting arm about in an attempt to cool it down, her heart pounding ferociously for the second time that night. “Definitely morning. What are you doing here?”
Lockwood shrugged, “Couldn’t sleep. The armchair seems to have done the trick for better or worse. How about you?”
“Ooh…” she shrugged, “The same.” Then felt ridiculously hypocritical for ever wishing that Lockwood would open up to her, “Actually I had a bit of a nightmare.”
He met her eyes for the first time and Lucy felt properly x-rayed.
“You alright?” He asked, softly and very seriously.
Well. That was enough vulnerability for one night.
“Yeah! Yeah.” She crossed the room and flicked on the overhead, wincing at the sudden brightness. “Just needed a cuppa.”
Lockwood stood and stretched, “Maybe we both do.”
Lucy and Lockwood were up at odd hours on a fairly regular basis, but it felt secret and special to putter around the kitchen together while the rest of the house was supposed to be asleep. Lucy chose the cat mug which Kipps had unexpectedly dropped off on Christmas for her replacement brew as a gesture of goodwill. They dug out the shortbread cookies and packets of crisps and a few tangerines for good measure and carried their booty back into the living room.
Lockwood seemed rather wan when they settled back together on the couch and he allowed the silences stretch between their remarks. Lucy didn’t mind exactly, his presence was enough to drive away the last vestiges of her nightmare, but she worried over the deep bags under his eyes, how turned-inward he seemed.
She nudged him. “Do you know if that fireplace works?”
“Hmm? Oh. I think so. My parents lit it once or twice when I was young.”
My parents drifted above their heads like a puff of smoke. Lucy let it float away.
“Why don’t we try it then, since we’re already having a picnic.”
If Lockwood recognized her attempt to cheer him up he didn’t let on. He just frowned, “I suppose you could… Do you know how to light a fire?”
“Of course I do! How hard could it be?”
Moderate to severely difficult as it turned out. Several broken matches and charred crumples of newspaper later, Lockwood condescended to help her. He was good at arranging the logs so that the fire would catch beneath them. But it was difficult to complain when they had a cheery little blaze going. The room filled with the scent of woodsmoke and they returned to the couch stretching their toes out to catch the heat of the flames. Lucy wasn’t sure how successful her ploy had been but Lockwood did have a small, bemused smile on his face so she counted it as a victory.
They sat like that a while, watching the wrecked cavities of the logs pop and glow amber. Lucy’s eyes began to drift closed and she realized she would be more than content to just doze off on the couch, her head resting conveniently close to Lockwood’s shoulder. Paradoxically, that thought made her feel rather more awake.
It was an old, treacly ache. She felt a little silly by now, trying not to give a name to it. Just sitting beside him then felt like holding a lit sparkler, watching the flame slowly fizzle down to her finger tips. She had the awful ambrosia urge to close the little distance between them, thread their fingers together, gently tilt his chin so he had to look at her instead of impassively watching the logs cave in on themselves. It occurred to Lucy, with a swoop of vertigo, that there wasn’t exactly anything stopping her. It was certainly a terrifying thought, to slash through all their long-construed plausible deniability like a rapier through cobwebs. But at the same time it didn’t feel scary at all because it was Lockwood. She had the urge to turn to him in the hopes of getting a second opinion on her conundrum, but of course since the question concerned him that would rather defeat the purpose.
Lockwood interrupted their silence and her thoughts. He sat forward on the couch.
“I’ve been meaning to show you something, Luce.”
That was a rather fraught sentence. Lucy wondered briefly whether he had a dead cousin he kept shut up somewhere in the basement. But he only reached into his pocket and produced a small package wrapped in blue reused Christmas paper. He fiddled with the scotch tape edges, and didn’t handn it over right away.
“Holly’s been showing me some of her scrap- booking projects since I’ve been stuck at Portland Row. Tom has been joining in though of course he’s more of a hindrance than a help.”
Lucy gave him a little incredulous smile, “I’ve never seen you work on a craft project.”
“Yes, well. It’s been mostly confined to my room. I was working on something for you.”
Lucy had nothing to say to that except a soft little “oh.”
“All of the newspaper clippings Holly’s been saving got me thinking it’s a shame we just shove our used thinking-clothes into the cupboard when we fill them all up so I… Well I know it’s not your birthday and Christmas is miles off but I thought I’d burst if I didn’t give this to you.”
He allowed her to take the little package and Lucy felt the strange instinct to undo the tape carefully, to keep the newspaper from ripping. Inside was a handkerchief and sewn on both sides with careful black stitches were cutouts of Lucy’s sharpie drawings from the thinking cloth, all arranged into a makeshift mosaic. There were sketches of wraiths and hovering indistinct Type Ones as well as surrepticious portraits of Lockwood, George and Holly at the breakfast table. Sketches of teapots and iced buns featured prominently as well as the blooming apple branches which sometimes showed through the kitchen window.
Lucy never paid much attention to her drawings. They were just a nice way to keep her hands busy, to rest her mind on the abstract shapes of the world as opposed to the very real dangers it contained. But now, arranged without the buffer of shopping lists and biscuit crumbs, the little pictures felt like a distillation of her life at Portland Row: The mundanities, the small pleasures and dangers, her most treasured friends bent unknowing over their cereal. She thought of Lockwood holed up in his bedroom, carefully arranging her sketches, tugging the needle and thread away from Tom’s paws. She felt the words more than she thought them, clear and definite like a bell tower in her chest, just the sweet side of ominous: “He loves me, he really does.”
Lockwood was filling her silence with caveats about the amateur nature of his work. She didn’t let him finish, but tipped forward and grasped his lapels for purchase the way she had always wanted to, and pressed their lips together.
Lockwood smelled like lavender soap and Pitkin's Tea and warm skin and Lucy had just a moment to savor and grow overwhelmed by it before she realized that he had frozen unnaturally still beside her.
She drew back, caught the look in his eyes and felt the acid droplets of shame quickly pool in her stomach. Lockwood couldn’t have looked more alarmed than if she had suddenly stood up and poured both their mugs of tea over his head. He scooched back a few inches and Lucy wished they weren’t so far from the Thames so she could fling herself in a second time.
“U-um.”
“Shit. Fucking- Fuck. I am so sorry. That was so unbelievably stupid of me -”
Lockwood’s systems seemed to be slowly coming back on. “I’m sorry. Lucy-”
“No! Lockwood you really really don’t need to apologize!”
He let out a short laugh, “How about neither of us apologize.”
“Okay.”
Lucy pressed her knees together, tugging an old bracelet round and around her wrist. They sat side by side staring at the coffee table.
“I’m really sorry Lockwood-” she began again and moved to stand “I’ll just -”
“No, Luce. Wait.” He spoke the next words all in a rush, “If you leave now we’ll just do that thing where we tiptoe around one another for a week and George will notice and want to know what’s going on and,” He pressed his fingers to his eyes like he wished he could rub more than sleep out of them, “I’d rather not go through with it if it’s all the same to you.”
Lucy sat down heavily, feeling juvenile. Neither of them spoke for a while. The silence was excruciating but she was loath to attempt a third apology. Lockwood tended to take a while to dredge his thoughts up out into the world. The least she could do was wait for him.
“It’s not that I don’t -” he huffed, unable to find the words, “You have to understand if- if- I was going to fancy any girl it would be you, by a mile.”
“Oh.” Lucy was momentarily distracted from her mortification by a New Lockwood Revelation, “You mean you - like boys?”
Lockwood frowned, not in embarrassment, but rather like it had genuinely never occurred to him. “I don’t think so? Liking boys is something you’re supposed to notice, right?”
Lucy smiled, easing a little, “Yeah, that’s generally how it works.”
Lockwood blew out his lips, “Then, I don’t know. I’m just badly wired. Or something.”
He seemed to be aiming for his old nonchalance but landed just left of the mark. It was strange to hear genuine insecurity seeping through his words. Lucy didn’t like it at all. She much preferred his vanity.
“There’s nothing wrong with you Lockwood! You’re just different. We’re all different, it’s what makes us Lockwood and Co.”
That earned her a small smile. “I suppose.” But it quickly evaporated. “I just - don’t want you to think that because I can’t -” He gestured uselessly between them, his cheeks pinkening slightly. “That I don’t love you cause I do.”
As if this evening couldn’t get any more mortifying, Lucy felt tears pricking her eyes. She almost wiped them away with her new handkerchief, but worried that the ink might run and opted for her sleeve instead.
“Oh Lockwood - I know.”