Chapter Text
DIGESTION
His first safehouse after the manor is a cramped, dim flat in a neglected corner of Blackburn, as close to the other side of the country as he can get – at least without taking the time to set up a new identity as an owner of another small, out-of-the-way property in a bad part of town.
As soon as he walks in the rush of air from the door sends up a small cloud of dust, another rush sent up from where he throws down his bag and quickly begins locking the door behind him. It won’t do a thing against anything or anyone that might be chasing him, but it gives him enough time to look off-guard for anything waiting to make its move, and enough time to listen through the quiet clicks of the mechanism for them to make their mistake.
Nothing moves.
The flat is still, silent and choked with a quite literally awe-inspiring amount of dust for what should’ve been a sealed space as he removes the key. It’s thick enough to come off in thick streaks when his hand grazes the doorknob as he stands back up, clinging to his fingertips as he quickly brushes it off, only to make its unwelcome acquaintance yet again when he flicks the lights on. Ugh. As he makes his way into the main area, he quickly decides that the second task on his list will have to be opening a window: it’s dustier than a cellar that hadn’t been touched since the middle of the Victorian era, and that-
His hand is on the edge of the hallway wall, white-knuckled on the corner where it turns away into the kitchen. The light hums, numbingly artificial. There are no dark corners in the room, and there is nowhere for anything for be hiding.
He listens, hard – closer to reflex than conscious intent – and hears nothing. The flat remains still, and silent, and dusty.
No one is here, besides him.
There are things to do before he can settle, tasks to attend to. Tools to organise. The food supplies need to be checked, the bed made, his bag put somewhere that isn’t the front doorway. The windows need opening, unless he wants to wake up tomorrow morning coughing his lungs out. There is no one else here.
If he listens very, very closely, he can hear the sound of the traffic outside; if he holds his breath, he can hear the faint gurgle of the pipes in the walls. If he were to turn around and walk back outside, he would be able to hear the sounds of a bustling city at the closest thing it gets to rest, a thousand times quieter than any real urban metropolis but still a far cry from the Buckinghamshire countryside. No one else is in the flat, but he is not alone. If he were to leave in a hurry, someone would hear him, someone that could remember that if the police caught up to him.
They won’t, because they’ll be investigating for weeks whether his corpse really is in the charred ruins of DeFoe Manor, but the thought makes a certain feeling in the back of his mind settle into a twitchy, reluctant acceptance.
No one else is in the flat. The thought is barely comforting as he puts the space to rights, but it suffices.
***
GLYCOSIS
Perhaps he holds off on planning any heists for a few weeks: it only makes sense to lay low while all police and media attention dies down, and if a few weeks becomes a few months, then that’s only more sensible. More sensible than he’s been in a long time, even. Simone is still trying to tell anyone who’ll listen that he was in the manor with her and Jim, and as much as he wishes he could reach through the staticky glass of his safehouse’s television and shake her by the shoulders, he knows it’s wiser to let her fizzle out on her own.
And it’s not that he’s been watching the reports on DeFoe Manor, it’s that there’s so little to do while he waits everyone out, and that nearly every channel even slightly interested in current events is updating on the case at least every once in a while – if he wanted to avoid hearing Simone desperately trying to convince someone, anyone of what happened to her, he’d have to spend most of his time sticking his fingers in his ears and staring at the wall. Jim managed to dodge most of the attention by virtue of being a no-name student, but Simone’s taken on the burden of all that would’ve been his.
Trilby doesn’t feel guilty. He’s not the kind of person that feels guilty about leaving someone else to answer for problems he caused: he’d be in a very different line of work if he did.
Still, the slow, empty days are running his patience into the ground, and unless he feels like running through the stock of any and all local bookshops there’s little to do but browse aimlessly. Any attempts to settle without a distraction are pointless, but there are no distractions to be found.
There is, however, a cause to be found. He’s on edge, and reasonably so: it isn’t every job that you get trapped in a house for most of a week and forcefully exorcise a violent wraith. The run-in with the Company left him nervous for weeks, even after he was on the other side of the Atlantic, but their attempts to get under his skin (so to speak) were poorly-done and of little use, and certainly had no real consequences. The DeFoe wraith’s attempt, though…
Another issue. He hasn’t been sleeping. There’s little to do besides waste time if he isn’t planning his next move, but he’s found himself… disinclined, somehow, to go out, leaving him little to do but sleep (and idly flick through television channels, but that’s less of an occupation and more akin to pacing a hole into the floorboards).
And yet sleep itself requires more than time, now, because he keeps finding himself lying there, watching the flicker of the streetlamps on the ceiling from between the dusty curtains. Mind and body aching for sleep, yet somehow unable to find it.
Usually he accepts his fate: he gets up and finds something to occupy himself with for another few restless hours until exhaustion drives him to another useless attempt, already knowing it’s doomed to fail from the twitch in his hands, the tension that won’t leave his shoulders. Somehow it’s the nights where he succeeds that are worse, because those are the nights he wakes already on his feet, standing somewhere in the cramped confines of the flat.
There’s something about the chill, on those nights. The stillness of everything in the flat besides him, standing silently in the dark.
It’s infuriating – he’s never had a habit of sleepwalking before. It’d be irritating enough if it were just the nightmares, but whenever he does manage to get any decent amount of sleep, he wakes up halfway across the flat. Never dressed – at least, not any more dressed than he usually is to sleep, he has the sense to anticipate a need for a hasty exit – but it hardly eases his mind any to wake up standing in the middle of the living room.
He has entertained the thought that it might be some lingering effect of the possession, but he’s just as quickly shut it down. After all, if he were somehow being possessed in his sleep, it’d require something to be doing the possessing, and the DeFoe child is gone. More gone than the rest of the dead, even.
And when he decides he’s long since been due a return to his work, it has absolutely nothing to do with waking to find himself standing in his kitchen, staring blankly at the open knife drawer.
***
KETOSIS
December breaks with a bone-deep chill, and the kind of snow that has to be waded through rather than merely trudged through. It doesn’t stop him, though, because of course it doesn’t: snow may present challenges, difficult climbs and brighter nights, but as long as there are riches to steal and people stupid enough to own them, nothing is enough to stop him.
There’ve been problems, over the years, missed handholds and alarms he failed to cut, guards that slipped away and people who woke unexpectedly, but mark of a master thief is his ability to adapt. Someone good enough to make a fortune in his line of working is someone smart enough to accept that things will go wrong, and plan accordingly.
He has the scars to prove it, after all. Old grazes, an electrical burn on the side of his left palm, a cut stretching half the length of his forearm – the latter, grandest souvenir from losing his footing on a wrought-iron fence on a stormy night, slicing his wrist open on the sharp points at its top. Still, if making his escape with his tie wrapped around an open wound couldn’t stop him, DNA evidence be damned, then some snow doesn’t stand a chance.
At least the snow makes it easier to pick out the few noises he does hear in the muffled silence. Something about the cold has always kept him on edge, footsteps echoing like gunshots when the weather turns icy.
(What he’s listening these days for won’t make a sound, and won’t leave footprints in the snow, either, but that’s not enough to make him stop.)
Luckily for him, the weather has driven more than a few aristocrats out of their homes and to warmer weather overseas, leaving their manors unoccupied by anything living, but very occupied with everything they’ve left behind. The one he’s scouted out for tonight’s excursion is barely even guarded, its owners confident that a mere weekend trip couldn’t be enough time for anything to happen.
He’s looking forward to proving them wrong.
The window lock he has his eye on is all but unguarded, just out of sight of the few security cameras at the front, and if he can stay off the ground between it and then fence there’ll be nothing for the (likely distracted by the cold) guards to pick up on before he’s already left. It won’t be for much – the couple who live here aren’t collectors, and the jewellery he’ll be able to steal is the kind his fence won’t have to look far to sell on – but it’s a job, hell, the kind of job that’s almost relaxing by this point.
It’s been too long since he took a job that was easy. A part of him is almost excited at the idea of it being simple, for once: it’ll be the first time in much too long that he’s taken it easy on himself. The rest of him knows that challenge is what he thrives on, and that by the end of the week he’ll be scouting out a place for the kind of impossible heists he’s known for.
Knowing what makes you tick can be irritating, he thinks, waiting by the closest side road to the mansion, lights off and a tree the only thing keeping snow from covering the windshield. A little less irritating than being buried in a snowdrift, but its a close call. The next opening in the guard patrol will take a few minutes, if not more, and he plans to spend them getting ready for his approach.
Almost everything is already on, considering no one would find a suit and hat suspicious, but gloves and a mask tend to make even the most accepting of passerbys more than a little suspicious, so it’s routine to only put those on at the last moment. His gloves go on easily, thin enough to block fingerprinting without making him clumsy, but the mask…
It’s been a long few months since he wore a mask. He feels strange without one, but the idea of putting it on again is… offputting, somehow, even if his is only cloth rather than metal and glass. It’s one of the things – one of irritatingly many, now – that even the idea of makes his hands shake until even the idea of picking a lock is all but hopeless. Still, if he misses so much as one working security camera without it he’s as good as caught, so it needs to be done.
After one last, nauseous moment of hesitation the mask goes on, and he is gazing out of the glassy, green lens of the welding mask, breath fogging up what little he can see through a stranger eyes, head heavy, hands white-knuckle tense. And then he is staring at the dashboard, breathing hard, mask little more than a torn scrap of black cloth in his hand. Already, he knows that it’s completely beyond repair.
It’s fine, he decides: the mask was a crutch and nothing more. You wear a mask if you’re expecting to be seen, and he doesn’t get seen. He’s too good to be seen. No one’s so much as caught a glimpse of him after the incident in Chapow City, the photos in the papers little more than police sketches and grainy, indecipherable security footage, all as good as a photo of any idiot on the street outside. Ghosts don’t need masks.
(Except for when they wear them anyway.)
The heist goes off without a hitch, because of course it does – he’s Trilby, and the one good thing about the manor is that it’s left him with a constant urge to check over his shoulder, and that’s the kind of paranoia that keeps him from getting caught. Getting sloppy is how you leave evidence, but getting complacent is how a guard catches you by surprise.
Nothing’s caught him by surprise for a long few months. It’s hard to surprise someone who already knows they’re being followed, after all, and he isn’t stupid. His instincts are sharp; his mind sharper. The same instincts that tell him when a guard is about to turn his way haven’t stopped prickling sine he left the manor, and he knows exactly who would still be following him, hiding in his shadow, lingering in his wake like smoke still clinging to his suit.
When he wakes up later that night, breaths fast, heart pounding, eyes searching the cold-fogged dark of his hideout, he knows he isn’t alone, and he knows who’s waiting beyond the thin slice he can make out.
He knows why he keeps on running, moving between hideouts faster than he ever has before, like the law is a hairsbreadth from cuffing him any second. It’s not the kind of stalker a mask can deter.
And really, it’s for the best to leave the mask behind. He doesn’t need it anymore.
***
WASTAGE
The floorboards don’t creak as he moves over them, muscle memory carrying him in silence, more a wandering breeze than a person in the dim shadows of the manor. There’s a certain thrill to being invisible, once you get used to it. A similar rush to that of wearing a mask, or being somewhere he knows he’s not supposed to: the joy of the illicit, ghosting in and out of a stranger’s house and leaving nothing but the absence of their valuables in his wake.
His target is only down the hall, presence like a siren in the stillness of the house. He can feel them like something caught within his own body, like a bullet caught in the muscle fibres of his shoulder, a foreign sting demanding removal.
Removal to his own possession, namely, but the point still stands.
He drifts down the hall, silent and purposeful. The mask clings to his face like a second skin, distorting his vision only slightly – it feels stranger to be without it at this point, like the skin beneath is more a mask than the real thing could ever be. The world feels somehow… correct in moments like these, some unknowable misplaced piece nudged into position for a brief moment.
The door falls open before him, creak silenced like the hush of a dream, and he creeps through in equal quiet. All that breaks the silence is the rasp of his breath under the mask, and the soft snore of the man within.
Nothing stirs as he approaches, from a breeze to the man asleep. He lies there, unknowing, unaware of another presence in the room: like a child, thinking a nightlight is enough to keep the monsters from their room. His riches are on the top of his dresser; his secrets in his safe, a house of cards waiting to topple.
Darkness brings many things. Quiet. Invisibility. Secrecy. It feels right to proceed under its shroud, like its the only thing he’s ever truly known how to do, hands steady, footsteps quiet, a shadow in the night.
His hands are wrapped around the machete so tightly they ache, clumsy and childish, as if he never learnt how to hold anything. Muscle memory plucks idly at the back of his mind like a spider in its web, an insistent thought that he does know how to hold it correctly trying to making itself known before vanishing back into the fog. It doesn’t matter, not when his hands are still steady, his mind still clear.
The man still sleeps soundly in his bed, unaware, helpless. His throat catches the faint scraps of light from the curtains, shifts, glistens, the bob of his pulse almost invisible against his skin. There is no screaming, no panic. Only stillness.
He shifts, stirs on his feet. The machete still hangs heavy in his hand, apron pulled awkwardly over his shoulders, like he can’t quite remember how it’s supposed to go. Improvised armour it may be, but it will hold, and it is unnecessary, now, because there will be no more pain. No more darkness, no more cold, no more. A cold light catches on the machete as he raises it, waiting and ready to drive it down on the sleeping body before him.
That’s why he’s here, after all. The man sleeps, and he stands beside him, waiting, cold, ready. There will be no more darkness, and no more silence, and no more pain, and he has chosen his path.
The machete drives down, sickening white, steel polished to a moonlit shine, and he chose this, he chose-
He wakes with a gasp,
A different – it’s a different safehouse to Blackburn, a multi-level storage facility like the one he had in Chapow. Dark. Labyrinthian. Cold, when he hasn’t gotten the heating working properly yet. His breath fogs up in front of him whenever he breathes out, visible only in the glow of the emergency lights, green and red catching on it like flies in a web.
(father-)
He forces out a breath, seconds at a time. Ignores the ache in his lungs until it becomes too much to bear, and only then does he suck in a breath, just as slow. In, and out. It’s a better use of his time than grinding his teeth down to powder.
(His relationship with his father wasn’t particularly good even before the manor: distant at best, and blowing up into that unpleasantness before he’d made the trip across the Atlantic. But he wasn’t scared of him. Disliked him, was angry at him, thought him a small-minded idiot who needed to be cut off like a lead weight on a sinking ship, but he’d never had cause to fear the man.)
(After DeFoe Manor, he keeps thinking about him. Keeps remembering a child’s dying thoughts, a wordless, helpless, utterly pointless smear of confusion and terror that he can only interpret as father why.)
(His nightmares are only of Phil, and not of DeFoe’s murdered child. The realisation that he was grateful for that left him heaving into the flat’s grimy toilet for half an hour.)
It wasn’t his fault. That’s what he has to keep telling himself, as many times as it takes for it to feel true. As many times as it takes until he hears the echo, a chorus of distorted voices in the dark, and doesn’t feel a prickle of discomfort down his spine.
As many times as it takes for him to look out into the darkness, and not expect to see a green-visored mask staring back.
***
DEATH
The night air is wet with rain as he breathes it in. It had been raining for almost the entirety of the last two weeks, long enough that his window of opportunity was about to come to a close – climbing in the rain might be a bad idea, but it was this or let the riches of the manor slip through his fingers until the next time the owner decided to take an extended holiday abroad. And who knows, the security they’d hire next time might even be competent.
(Something doesn’t feel right – a tension in the air, a chill down his spine, a feeling of being watched – but it slips past him like a bad dream. Half-remembered, slipping into the night like so much fog.)
Climbing the wall proves unexpectedly easy, enough handholds and shadows to stay stable and hidden both, and he drops into the garden without so much as a sound. The window he’d known would be open to let in the night breeze is open, the route up to it is clear, the climb is only made a little harder by the rainwater clinging to every surface like a slimy second skin, the window doesn’t even creak as he crawls through it to the barely-used office: it’s easy. Too easy, he’d have said, but the urgency of the night doesn’t leave room to look gift horses in the mouth.
It’s something about the damp chill of the air, the quiet, looming presence he can feel following him. Something that has his hands twitching with the urge to do something, his mind looking for something, anything to occupy itself, everything in him pulled tight with tension and yet a thousand miles away from itself.
He hasn’t been sleeping enough lately.
Maybe that’s why the feeling of eyes on him fails to register – maybe he’s just looking for something to blame when he finishes picking open the library door, and pushes it open a little too quickly.
The light hits like a solid force, almost as solid as the truncheon smashing into his ribcage a moment later. For a moment, the pain doesn’t even hit, just freezes somewhere between his probably-broken ribs and his brain, leaving him with only the awareness of its presence, hollow, numb, like-
The second truncheon hits his head, and he hits the ground before he can finish the thought. A third and a fourth follow shortly after, then a fifth, a sixth, before they all blur into a single sensation that can be roughly summarised as ‘ow’ and more creatively summarised with a long string of curses, all of which fly through his mind as he lies there in the fetal position, hands curled over his skull in the vain hope of protecting it.
It’d be strange how detached he feels from it all, if he’d been much attached to anything in the oast two years. He’s fucked up, but he’s already fucked up worse than this could ever be. What’s a cell to the Manor? What’s a cell to the DeFoe child? What’s a cell to- his hand spasms, crunches audibly as something smashes into the back of it. Gloves don’t provide much protection against broken bones.
Distantly, the sound and sensation register as unpleasant, a shock of pain radiating from the tips of his fingers down to his elbow, pulsing with every minute twitch. Still, it could be worse: it’s only his right hand. He’s always preferred his left.
The world feels a thousand miles away, whatever frustration and disappointment he feels about his capture as far away as the pain, the fear, leaving only the faint, confusing relief of the shoe finally dropping. He’s afraid, but he isn’t afraid. It hurts, but it doesn’t hurt. Everything slips past like so much fog, like he’s watching from behind a screen, every truncheon blow and punch feeling like something happening to a stranger.
Maybe that should worry him. All he really wants to do is close his eyes and let it happen, and with the strikes he’s taken to the head, perhaps that should worry him too.
Eventually, the beating comes to a stop. It had to at some point: they can’t just keep hitting a limp body forever, as much as they probably wanted to turn the infamous Trilby into a red stain on the hardwood, and one of them grabs his arm by the wrist, presumably to handcuff him.
Unluckily for him, however, the one they grab is his right. The shock of it is what finally breaches whatever place in his mind he’s sealed himself away in – white hot, electric, a burning, icy itch somewhere under the skin, the reflexive spasm of his fingers forcing a yelp out of his mouth and tears to his eyes; then the heat turns cold, pins and needles shooting along the length of the limb, whatever sensation had returned to him leaving as quickly as it came in a dizzying headrush.
The hand on his wrist squeezes tighter as the sound of a metallic click rings out, a death knell in miniature. A vague nausea rises in response, the dizzy tilt of the overbright world only getting worse, darkness flickering in the corners of his vision. It doesn’t hurt anymore, the wrist nothing more than pins and needles from palm to shoulder. If he twitches his fingers, he can almost feel them.
He should’ve known this heist was a bad idea. The thought flickers briefly through his mind as the shadows in his vision grow, then it all goes mercifully black.