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The creak of a floorboard has Lucy jerking awake, eyelashes stuck together with grains of salt.  She can taste it on her dry lips too, stray filings on her tongue like she’s bitten it and drawn blood.  Everything tastes and feels gritty and sour, even as she scrabbles beside the bed for her rapier, instinct and disorientation warring across her bruised ribs before she brushes her hair out of her sticky eyes and sees the morning light seeping white and cool between the unfamiliar curtains.  Right.  Right.  The night is over, the job is over, and maybe she should have done more than wash her grimy hands before falling into bed, streaked with the residue of salt bombs and flares.  Lucy uncurls her fingers from the handle of her rapier with care, spills back into the muddled sheets.  She doesn’t know what time it is, but she doesn’t think that she’s been asleep very long – and definitely not long enough.

Slow, slow, achingly slow – emphasis on achingly – Lucy pushes herself out of bed.  The room is tiny, barely room for a strip of chintz carpet beside the bed, so it’s easy to part the equally floral curtains and peek outside.  The sun’s scarcely up, daylight still brittle, a grey haze that settles over the neat garden outside.  This place probably flourishes in summer, there’s trellises on the walls for roses, benches with bowers, a fountain formed of frolicking nymphs with breasts just this side of too large. In November, crisp with frost, the whole place is more Wuthering Heights than Pride & Prejudice . 

(Everyone has to study Wuthering Heights these days, while scholars debate if Cathy is one of the earliest examples of a Type Two, if Heathcliff’s exhumation of her body was him scrambling to find her Source and set her to rest.  Norrie’s opinion was that Emily Bronte had too much time on her hands, had no idea what she was really writing about because if she had, she’d never have made it seem romantic.  Until recently, Lucy was inclined to agree with her.  Of late… well, of late, she’s not sure what she thinks.)

For decades, this minor country mansion looked like it might be the last old house in England without any Visitors of any kind; one without a mad uncle who’d accidentally murdered someone in a guest bedroom, or a secret basement stuffed full of awful experiments or rejected suitors.  It operates as a classy hotel, the kind of place that makes Lockwood look comfortably at home and Lucy pick at her cuticles, and has been doing roaring business by all accounts.  Never a hint of any disturbances, the lavender bushes in the garden and neat iron strips unobtrusively lining the windows and doorways apparently doing their jobs.

It turns out it was, in fact, the stable block – now a conference centre and place for business retreats, whatever the hell those are – where all the grisly happenings occurred.  George had finally returned from the library flush with success and the details of multiple truly unpleasant killings – there’s always something – and so they’d all duly packed up their shit and taken the train here, prepared for anything.

Lucy draws the curtains again, yawns wide enough to crack her jaw.  The Wraiths are gone now, their Sources bound in silver and waiting for DEPRAC to come fetch them.  There were more of them than even George’s research had managed to uncover, some truly ugly shit going on out where no one was looking – “and the evidence was probably fed to the pigs kept behind the stables, pigs’ll eat anything,” he explained, sounding much too cheerful about it – and how the spirits hadn’t caused problems until now, Lucy has no idea.  So many, and so furious, and so awful .

She starts to rub her face, remembers the salt and iron filings still scattered on her skin and forces herself to stop before she accidentally grinds them into her eyes.  Sleep.  Sleep is what she needs, and a shower, and a mountain of bacon sandwiches, and then maybe she’ll be able to face the train back to London.  The nearest station is one of those tiny ones with rare and erratic service, and since it would take most of the night to clear the stable block – the windows will need replacing but they didn’t burn it down, so, really, all’s well that ends well – the hotel owners had grudgingly agreed to let them all stay for some sleep before the afternoon journey home.  They’re on the top floor, in tiny, poky rooms that were probably servants’ quarters once upon a time, and if Lucy thinks their hosts could be maybe a little more grateful, well, she was too sleepy to argue about it by the time they made it back to the main house, dirty and sore and a decent pair of leggings lost to ectoplasm burns.

They were supposed to be shoved into a room full of single beds – “I thought you’d all be lads,” Mr Porter had sighed, looking at Lucy in a way that bordered on the accusatory – but apparently while it’s fine for teenagers to risk their lives, it’s unacceptable for them to share a bedroom afterwards.  Lucy’s crammed in the room next door, queen-sized bed taking up most of the space and barely room for her duffel in the corner.  She’s not ruled out the possibility that the Porters are going to charge them a night’s stay for the use of one more room than they were willing to bestow, though it’s not like they can put proper paying guests up here: it’s much too small, with a damp stain spread across the cracking plaster ceiling.  Still, Lucy’s exhausted enough that she’d probably be okay propped up in a corner of the stable block, broken glass and bone shards and scattered salt and iron be damned.

Before she can crawl back into the warm nest of the covers, there’s that specific creak outside on the landing again.  It’s daytime, so no Visitors can be there, and even if there’s a human creeping about up here Lucy’s door has an old but serviceable bolt on the inside, keeping her secure.  Nothing to worry about.  And yet.  And yet . 

No matter how quick she is about it, the opening of the door isn’t subtle, the crunch of the bolt and screech of the hinges, and Lockwood’s had time to be facing her by the time Lucy peeps out, rapier tucked behind her back because you never do know.

“It was that fucking floorboard, wasn’t it?” he says.

“You’re the one with the fancy fencing feet,” Lucy points out.  “Stepping on it more than once is pretty unforgivable.”

Lockwood smiles, but it’s a tired, wan thing, rueful at the corners.  It’s nothing like his usual glittering grins, full of handsome determination and glory and sunlight, though it does conversely make him look less like a twat than usual.  He barely looks like himself at all really: he’s as messy and knackered as Lucy is, just a too-skinny teenaged boy in an old t-shirt and faded pyjama bottoms, elbows grazed and cheeks flecked with burnt magnesium.  It's a little chilling sometimes, far more chilling than the worse of supernatural encounters, how much of Lucy’s life depends on this boy’s ability to light himself up like a firework, to take a crisp white shirt and a dazzling smile and turn it into a business, a lifeline, a reality.  Right now, in the chill early morning light, limping a little and minus his protective armour of a swishy coat and a rapier, Lockwood looks like what he is: a traumatised teenage boy desperately in need of a few good meals and a proper night off once in a while.

“I think the fancy fencing feet stop working somewhere around five a.m.,” he suggests.

Lucy drops her gaze automatically; he’s barefoot on the thin hallway carpet, toes looking pale and blistered in the half-light.

Somehow it doesn’t feel like this at home, doesn’t feel this desperately vulnerable.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asks, instead of the half-dozen things that spring to mind.  “Does George snore?”

The brief curl of Lockwood’s mouth at least looks more real this time.  “He’s a sleep-talker, actually,” he corrects. “Full sentences, dialogues, the lot.  He’s currently talking to himself in Latin.  Well, I hope it’s Latin, anyway, otherwise he’s speaking in tongues and I really don’t want us to have unearthed yet another extra dangerous artefact.”

“It’s definitely someone else’s turn to be hexed by one, anyway,” Lucy offers.

“Well,” Lockwood says, “quite.”

They’re silent for a long moment, until Lucy can’t help a shiver.  Hopefully there’s heating for the real hotel guests, because there’s bugger all up here.  It’s freezing in the hallway, something she points out.

“I know,” Lockwood agrees, a touch sheepishly.  “I thought I’d pace for a bit, just tire myself out enough to sleep through George’s monologuing, you know?”

It has the ring of truth to it, but Lucy’s pretty sure there’s more to it.  Last night wasn’t easy: they’ve had worse, been hurt worse, but no one ever likes a Raw-Bones.  Lucy’s got used to most of the grisly spirits they face, the mummified corpses, the unnatural movements of twisted ectoplasm – they’re briefly awful and then she can get herself together and focus on the job in hand.  A Raw-Bones is a rare manifestation, a skinless corpse that grins with perfect white teeth and staring eyeballs, dripping with gore, fizzing with its own glee and flayed flesh.  It’s a horrible sight, truly dreadful, and not one you can accustom yourself to.  When she blinks, Lucy is still kind of seeing in swatches of ghastly red, stretching and twanging muscles peeling away from sheer white bones.  She doesn’t have a lot of nightmares anymore, you don’t after a while, but this one might be the exception that proves the rule.

Still, they’re professionals, and Lucy knows they’ll all have shaken off the worst of the disgust by the time they’re halfway back to London; it takes more than a Raw-Bones to turn her stomach.  The worst part of it all was a pair of Limblesses, drifting around like half-finished plasticine figures, perhaps formed by someone who’d never seen a human before but heard one described.  Their appearances are less disturbing than a Raw-Bones, but they more than make up for it with the creeping miasma that comes with them, an invisible cloud of frantic despair that crawls over you, closes around your ribs and wrists and throat and tugs the light out of you.  Agents train to watch out for this, to push the feelings away and focus on what’s important before you’re killed by a Type Two, but it’s still a difficult experience, the sudden onset of that little voice in the back of your head that mostly only makes itself known when you’re alone in bed in the darkness hours, staring at the ceiling and leaking hope like a sieve.

Lucy’s creeping despair is easy and obvious, though not any less potent for being easy to pinpoint: the reminder that if her own mother couldn’t love her, then how could anybody else, and most of all the agonising feeling of Norrie ghostlocked in her arms, Lucy’s world crumbling to pieces in her best friend’s glazed white eyes.  It whispers that Lucy should have been there, with her friends, her team, her first scavenged family, should have died along with them, where she belonged.  The feeling isn’t as sharp as it used to be, maybe lessens every time George bakes, unprompted, the biscuits he knows are Lucy’s favourites; every time Lockwood actually listens to her and changes one of his plans accordingly.  But it’s still there of course, easy to rip to the surface when a Type Two wants her vulnerable.

George doesn’t have a childhood awash with trauma – one of us has to be vaguely adjusted he’s said before, coming back from a brief visit to his parents laden down with Tupperware full of baghali polo and ash reshteh; Lucy would laugh at him but it’s rude to speak with your mouth full – but he mostly shrugs about it when things like growing malaise come up.  I’ve got more than enough neuroses , he usually remarks, going for airy, falling a little short.  And Lockwood – well.  He’s trying to share more, trying to uncurl his fingers from around his secrets, but it doesn’t mean he wants to talk about what it is he sees and hears and feels when a ghost creeps up his spine and yanks open his heart.  He’d hesitated too long, rapier drooping in suddenly limp fingers, and it was only a well-aimed salt bomb from George and a scream from Lucy that got Lockwood moving again, diving away from the Limbless with considerably less grace than usual.

There’s something of that still lingering in his shoulders, in the line of his mouth, in the sleepless glitter of his dark eyes.  They could both pretend that it’s adrenaline that has him wandering the narrow cold hallways, the thrill of a job well done that takes time to wear off, but it’s not. Lucy knows it’s not.

“Oh, come in,” she sighs, managing to sound more annoyed than she is, and maybe that’s what makes Lockwood follow her into her tiny room without comment, without making up an excuse or a complaint.

There really isn’t enough space for two people in here, not for two people and Lucy’s duffel and her rapier propped awkwardly by the door.  It’s a little warmer, though, and she looks at the bed and thinks fuck it , because she’s cold and she’s tired and she’s grimy and when she closes her eyes too long all she can see are lipless bloodied mouths and Norrie’s terrified face.  She needs to sleep, and if she needs to sleep, then Lockwood really, really does.

It's strange, the lines you draw and the lines you blur, and when you decide that they don’t matter.

“You’d better not hog the duvet,” Lucy murmurs, and crawls back into the dent she left; it’s mostly gone cold by now, but there’s a hint of warmth left for her to clutch.

She doesn’t turn to look at Lockwood, doesn’t extend a specific invitation or watch some sort of conflict play itself out in his expression, in the line of his shoulders.  Instead, she lets her sore eyes close, tries to filter some of the tension out of her body, counts her breaths up and down until finally the mattress dips somewhere behind her, the sheets and covers rustling.

“Your feet are freezing,” she mumbles, the words already half-slurred from sleep, and thinks she hears something like a laugh on the air; but she’s already sliding downwards, down and down the rungs of a ladder built of ribcages, no, wait, that’s not right –

Lucy wakes up in the early afternoon to George kicking her door and yelling that there’s bacon sandwiches and no hot water left.  She yells something semi-coherent and mostly rude back, and drags herself upright again.  It takes a few seconds to orient herself again – the stable block, the unfamiliar bedroom, the dirt under her nails and salt matting her hair, crusting around her eyes.  And Lockwood – oh , right, Lockwood.

She’d know by now, but Lucy still looks to her right like she’s expecting to see him in bed beside her.  But there’s nothing there, the blanket cool to the touch, neatly folded like no one was ever here but Lucy – but for the faintest dent in the pillow, a black streak of iron filings on the pillowcase smeared from a cheek onto the cotton.

“Huh,” Lucy says softly, to no one in particular, and decides to think about this once she’s had a vat of tea.  Perhaps two.

-

As the only one of their Agency not currently in need of medical attention, George is the one Barnes elects to haul away for questioning. 

“Oh come on ,” Lucy can hear him complaining.  “This isn’t even our fifth worst shitshow!  We’ve had way bigger shitshows than this!”

“I don’t know what part of that phrase you think is reassuring,” Barnes responds, crisp.  “Come on, the sooner we start, the sooner we get this over with.”

“Will there at least be coffee?” George is asking plaintively, as the doors close behind them.

Lucy’s head is foggy, even if the doctor has established she doesn’t have actual concussion, but she thinks that Barnes sounds about as thrilled to be interrogating George as George is to be being interrogated.  Lockwood insists that Barnes has a soft spot for them, that they’re growing on him – maybe like a fungus , George had offered darkly – but if that is the case, the growth is very, very slow.  They’re still operational, just about, though, so… maybe Lockwood has a point after all.

Lockwood.  Lockwood .

Lucy sucks in a breath between gritted teeth, most of which is for the stitches a nurse is meticulously placing in her calf, having finally rinsed out about half a cemetery’s worth of grave dirt from the injury.  George is right: they have had way worse shitshows, but they’ve also had tidier ends to a job.  Ones where they can go home and fill up the kettle and bicker over the flavours in a multipack of Walkers before bed, get up in the morning for Jammie Dodgers and newspaper reports. Jobs that end in the hospital are less than ideal, really, though at least there was a minimum of property damage and they’re actually going to get paid this time. 

The nurse absently hands Lucy a fresh tissue for her bloody nose – not broken, to go with her not-concussion, though maybe try telling her entire ringing head that – and goes back to focusing on the stitches.  She’s had painkillers, better than the Neurofen they keep at home, not as good as the stuff they gave her that time she leapt out of a burning building, and everything is fuzzing at the edges.  It’s not an awful fuzz, everything sort of smearing and soft, now that Lucy is somewhere safe and George is somewhere safe and Lockwood is- fuck .

“My friend,” she blurts, twitching enough that the nurse clamps a strong hand on Lucy’s knee to keep her leg still.  “My associate.  My employer.  My – uh – Lockwood.  How is he?”

“He’s being treated now,” the nurse explains, snapping off her bloodied gloves and reaching for a fresh pair and an adhesive dressing.  “You’ll have news when there’s news.”

Lucy wants to be angry at her, resentful, but she’s aware enough that this can’t be an easy job: kids being brought in night after night, scared, injured, attacked, ghostlocked, dead. You have to have nerves of iron to last, to help people the way that they need to be helped.  Instead of complaining, of insisting, she sits still and lets the nurse bandage her gashed leg, wipe crusted blood from Lucy’s face and hand her an ice pack for the bruising.

When the ambulance arrived Lucy was sliding in and out of consciousness, propped up against a babbling George, cradling a desiccated human head wrapped in a silver net in her lap.  Her left boot was full of blood and she couldn’t breathe through her nose and everything tasted of copper but they’d contained the Source and that was enough. 

“Come on, Luce,” Lockwood said, trying to tug Lucy upright, and she shook her head and wished she hadn’t, nausea sloshing violently through her.

“‘S for you,” she explained thickly, and it was only then that Lockwood seemed to even notice his hand, long slender fingers swelling and turning dark blue.  Ghost-touched . 

She has a blank patch in her memory there, and then the paramedics were manhandling Lockwood into the ambulance, and he was still desperately calling her name while Lucy stayed where she was, blood-sticky hands clutching the net tight enough that it cut into her palms in one or two places.  It was DEPRAC who eventually wrestled the captured Source from her, and Barnes who drove her and George to the hospital, though he made Lucy sit on a bin liner so she wouldn’t ruin the seats.

Ghost-touched .  It’s the worst thing, the scariest thing, and even if they shot Lockwood full of adrenaline in time – and he’s probably not dead, right, they’d know by now if he was dead – he could still be sick, could lose the hand the plasm brushed against.  Panic and painkillers mingle in Lucy’s mind, smooth her out like dough, scrunch her up again, roll her back out.  Over and over, and she’s more than a little delirious, and surely she’s been here days now, why isn’t George back yet, why doesn’t she know how Lockwood is, why is she always the one left at the end of these things, scrabbling for words and coming up short.

The nurse brings her a cup of hot, sugary tea, and one of those little packets of shortbread biscuits that always seem to turn up at moments like this.  When Lucy looks up at the clock on the wall, she sees she’s been sitting here maybe twenty minutes.  Maybe they did give her the good painkillers after all.  Lucy drinks the tea and eats the biscuits, everything cardboard on her tongue, and when she’s finished the nurse’s expression has softened a little, and she gives a small pleased nod before returning to her other duties.  Lucy stays slumped on the exam bed, drifting from thought to thought, half of them tragic and ominous, half of them fraying at the edges and twirled like candy floss. 

Eventually, the nurse is back. “Your friend is going to be fine,” she says.

Lucy lurches upright, the room swaying into focus around her. “Can I see him?”

It’s important that she sees him – very important.  She has to be sure.  

“He’s resting,” the nurse tells her.

“I’ll be quiet,” Lucy offers, opens her eyes as wide as she can, trying for Disney princess or perhaps cute woodland animal.  It’s not a look she tries often, and her pupils are probably too blown to really carry it off, but the nurse shakes her head and she’s wearing a hint of a smile. 

“We’ll find you a wheelchair,” she says.

Lucy pushes herself upright. “I can walk,” she offers, and hops off the bed.  Well, she tries to; her right leg buckles underneath her and her left leg seems to have been replaced with water when she wasn’t paying attention, and it turns out the exam bed is on wheels because when she tries to grab it to stabilise herself it careens away into a wall with a crash that reverberates through A&E.  The nurse sighs and tuts a little but she props Lucy up on her uninjured side and helps her stagger through the dimly-lit corridors until they reach a small room, the blinds drawn over the windows so Lucy can’t see in. 

“You can have a few minutes,” she’s told, and then she’s limping into the hospital room and being deposited into a hard plastic chair beside the bed.

Lockwood… doesn’t exactly look like Lockwood right now.  His hair is sweaty and matted and his face is unnaturally pale even by his own impressively vampiric standards.  His skin is verging on the translucent, bags under his eyes an ugly purple, veins stark blue like fractures beneath the surface.  He looks delicate, damaged, a livid split lip and a bruise on his temple.  Lucy looks until she can’t bear to, and then reluctantly drags her gaze down to his left arm.  There’s an IV in his elbow, taped in place, but his left hand is neatly bandaged, the effects of the ghost-touch hidden from view.  The swelling looks to have gone down at least, assuming he's still got all his fingers under there.

Lucy reaches out, then draws her hand back quickly.  He looks like he could shatter at the slightest touch, and anyway, Lucy thinks this might be her fault.  Some of the fine details of the battle have slipped away from her with the head injury and the painkillers, but she feels like she didn’t get out of the way in time, it was Lockwood flinging out his arm to drag her back that let a tendril of ectoplasm flick across his hand.  She might be wrong; that might be another fight, one that didn’t end like this, Lockwood silent and still, Lucy drowning without moving a muscle.  It might have been to save George, or it was Lockwood’s own fault for not being fast enough, cunning enough.  Maybe it’s no one’s fault, one of those things that happens in the heat of the moment, between the flash-bangs of bombs and the flourish of a rapier.

“ Fuck ,” Lucy whispers, because what else is there to say in this situation, and she slowly tips forward until she can rest her aching forehead against the edge of the mattress.  Everything is swaying gently, like she’s on a boat or had a couple too many of those beers they always seem to have in the fridge, the world skittish when she tries to think too hard about it.  Maybe she drifts, maybe she dozes, maybe she dreams, but time passes and no one comes to fetch her after all.

She finally wavers upright when she hears coughing, watches Lockwood slowly open his eyes with her own vision not exactly steady.  He squints against the dim light, something confused flitting across his face.

“Jess…?” he says softly, the sound barely there, a terrified, hopeful croak.

Lucy says nothing, because she can’t deny it and shatter that hope, but she can’t agree either.  She’s momentarily terrified that if she opens her mouth she’ll burst into tears.  Lockwood blinks slowly, cycling through half a dozen expressions she’s never seen on him before and hopes never to see again.  Finally, he blinks twice, and something seems to slot into place.

“Luce,” he murmurs.  He doesn’t smile, but the corner of his mouth tugs upwards a little.

“Luce,” she agrees.

Lockwood sort of reaches for her with his uninjured right hand, then lets it drop again.  His skin is almost the same colour as the starched bedsheet.

“George?” Lockwood asks next, eyebrows twitching in an attempt at a frown that looks painful.

“With Barnes,” Lucy explains.

“Ah.”  Lockwood starts nodding, then stops immediately.  His next go at a smile has a hint of himself in it: something fringing on the wicked.  “Can’t take us anywhere.”

Lucy laughs even though she doesn’t want to, maybe just wants to crawl under his bed and curl into a ball until tonight is over, until she doesn’t hurt anymore, until the people she cares about are all under one roof, squabbling over McVitie’s.  That’s what she wants, not this sterile hospital room, Lockwood looking like his own Spectre, her thoughts spilling between her fingers like grains of salt, grains of sand.

“You’re okay?” Lockwood checks when they’ve both managed to stop their respective versions of hysterical laughter and the wincing has set in.  “You look less… bloody?”

Lucy does some combination of a nod and a shrug that feels terrible and probably looks worse.  “You look ghost-touched,” she offers.

Lockwood hums ruefully, gaze flicking down to his bandaged hand and back up again.  “My first time,” he says.

“I bet George’ll have a whole list of questions to ask you,” Lucy remarks.  It feels good to focus on the mundane, the normal, the simple. 

“He’ll start experimenting on me next,” Lockwood agrees.

“Well, it’ll give us something to do,” Lucy suggests.  “Since I think we’re off active jobs for the time being.”

Lockwood twists his mouth, then seems to notice his split lip and stops abruptly.  “Shit,” he says, nice and succinct.

Lucy nods, vague.  “Shit,” she agrees.

Lockwood frowns, just a little.  “You sure you’re not concussed?”

“Good painkillers,” she explains.

Lockwood smirks, just a little.  “I think I might be on those too.”

“Good,” Lucy says, because you should be on the good painkillers if you’ve been ghost-touched, and she pats the sheet near his leg like she’s congratulating him for something he’s achieved himself.  “I should…” she trails off.  There are things she should be doing, she’s sure, but she has no idea what any of them are. 

“You won’t go, will you?” Lockwood asks, barely above a whisper.  It’s too much, too vulnerable, but later on they can blame that on anaesthetic and ghost-touch.  Maybe they can both claim to not remember it, or maybe they really won’t remember it.  What a night, huh.

“I don’t think I can go,” Lucy says, which isn’t an answer but might just pass for one.  She’s sure the nurse or someone was supposed to have come to get her by now, taken her to a ward of her own or deposited her in a taxi home, but she’s not exactly complaining that no one has.  Perhaps some other crisis has come up, another group of kids just as stupid as Lockwood & Co. have come in, injured to fuck, and they’re no longer tonight’s designated emergency.

“You can’t stay on that chair all night,” Lockwood decides.  “That’ll make your leg worse.”

“Where else am I going to go?” Lucy asks, and then has to put up with one of Lockwood’s worst expressions, the one he wears when he knows something and is waiting for everyone else to catch up.  “Oh.  Oh .  They don’t make hospital beds for two people, you know.”

“We’ll improvise,” Lockwood says airily, which actually amounts to him lying very still being no use at all while Lucy and her injured leg and her wooziness spend an embarrassing amount of time shuffling onto the bed in a horrible and ungainly way that she hopes they’ll both forget about later.  Finally, though, she’s lying beside him, both of them just about fitting into the narrow bed, Lockwood’s IV still neatly in place and everything.  They’re professionals , after all.

“ Luce ,” Lockwood says softly, face sort of buried in her hair, and Lucy wants to tell him it’s probably got gravedirt and blood in it, but she also doesn’t really want him to move. 

“I feel like there’s a reason we shouldn’t be doing this,” Lucy says, but her limbs are heavy and all sorts of parts of her hurt and the bed might not be soft but it’s also not a plastic chair, and Lockwood is alive , alive and breathing against her neck.

“I’m sure there is,” he agrees.  “We’ll figure it out in the morning.  Ask George.  Get the Thinking Cloth involved.  Lockwood & Co. always cracks the case.”

The fingers of his right hand tangle briefly with Lucy’s, cool and clumsy, and she smiles even if it makes her face hurt.  “We do,” she says quietly, but she can tell from his breathing that Lockwood is already asleep.

-

The boys have a habit of leaving scattered pages of newspaper around the house.  Lucy’s not interested in much outside the stories of successful cases – in every tragedy, she remembers too well what it felt like to see her own name in print, usually accompanied by that damning phrase sole survivor – but she catches glimpses of other things from time to time.  Endless bloody thinkpieces bemoaning the current state of adolescence, usually written by people old enough for their own teenage years to be scarcely memorable.  Children should be children , children shouldn’t have all this authority over us, children should get to go back to being unimportant, quiet, afterthoughts.  How dare a worldwide crisis elevate them in this way.

Lucy hasn’t been a child in longer than she can remember; when she was very young there were always whispers on the edge of her hearing, shadows in the corners of her eye.  Even games with friends in the fields outside the town were tinged with the knowledge of what lurked after dark, with howls of glee that didn’t come from a kid’s throat.  It’s like that for all of the Talented now: awaiting conscription, counting down to the inevitable.  Can we really even call them ‘children’ anymore , demanded one newspaper article, when we rely on them to act as our soldiers in this endless war?  When they protect our businesses, safeguard our homes, take up arms and face the supernatural?  When we ask them to die for us, night after night?  It was quite the article, actually, lots of emotion and adjectives, but there wasn’t much point to it because all of it boils down to the plain and simple truth: there are no other options. 

It's not as though Lucy hasn’t thought about it; not much, because it’s a waste of time, but a little, because it’s human to wonder.  To try to imagine a world without the Problem, the rough sketch outline of that Lucy Carlyle, who that stranger might have been.  There’s enough pre-Problem films and shows that glamorise and rose-tint a world where you could go out at night, where graveyards were places of sadness and reflection, not timebombs, where you didn’t need to line your windows and doorways with iron and lavender.  There’s some modern TV shows like that too, actually, that are set in a weird alternative world where there are no ghosts, no attacks, no Agencies.  Those are mostly popular with older people, the ones who remember a life before, or those within touching distance of that whole other society, the one that wasn’t wracked with paranoia and fear.  The younger generations don’t have room for nostalgia that doesn’t belong to them: they just get on with it.

The Problem had nothing to do with Lucy’s parents’ dislike of each other or disinterest in her, so there’s no point pretending that that would be any different.  She’d have got to stay in school, though, and she’s pretty sure she would still have got to have Norrie: they’d have been a year apart but Lucy has faith that they’d have found each other, that something would have drawn them together.  So that would be her life: her town and her friends, doing homework in the evenings and stuck behind a curfew that, conversely, only applies to kids.  She wouldn’t be in London, that’s for sure: maybe she and Norrie would dream of escaping their dull hometown, but without their Talents, without their worth as commodities, what would be their lynchpin?  No: that Lucy Carlyle’s world is safer, but so much smaller.

It’s easy to imagine George in this alternative world: no Problem for him to obsess over, but his mind would still be sharp and questioning and more than a little weird.  He’d probably be in some special school for geniuses where he could study all those things that have fallen by the wayside in recent years: science, technology, space travel, computers.  Maybe he’d end up an engineer like his siblings, or something else, something complicated and clever.  Lucy’s sure George would be fine, anyway, would probably thrive more in that other, ordinary, world than any of the rest of them would.

Lockwood… well, he’d be Anthony all the time, wouldn’t he, perhaps even a Tony or an Ant.  He’d have his whole family, probably go to a painfully posh school.  They still have those around now, of course, because money can solve most things including not having to sacrifice your kids for the greater good, although they had to move out of the hallowed old buildings where rich kids had been learning for centuries.  Too many bad memories in those halls, clawing out from behind the wood panelling, teeth bared and sharp.  Anyway, there’s Anthony , who’s still fundamentally a wanker at heart, probably off on all kinds of fun research trips with eccentric academic parents in the school holidays, coming back with stories from Africa, Asia, South America.  A perfect golden tan from the sunshine.  Longer hair too, maybe something leaning toward floppy , because it isn’t courting death to fall into his eyes, and he’d actually sleep at night and he wouldn’t need to lose that haunted look because he’d never have had it in the first place.  He’d still have the fencing and maybe some other kind of sport thing, that one the private school kids play with the handheld nets, and hoards of admirers, and his path would never cross with Lucy’s, not ever, and that’s okay because he’d never look at her and she really wouldn’t look at him.

Well.  Daydreams can be overrated, anyway.

Lucy lets herself into the house, shrugs her jacket off in the hall and listens to the silence that verges on the ominous .  There are times when 35 Portland Row is full of noise and activity, and times when it’s at rest; this is neither of those times but some kind of uneasy in-between, an edge to the quiet.  She stands still for a long moment, considering, and then heads for the kitchen.

George is sitting at the table surrounded by empty mugs, intently studying the photocopies of some very unsettling woodcuts he brought back from the library last week.  It’s for his own research project, thankfully, and not for any upcoming jobs, but they’re still creepy and Lucy would rather he kept them in his room.  He looks up at Lucy and his face splits into an easy grin.

“Good date?” he asks.

“Uh,” Lucy responds, flummoxed.  She probably shouldn’t be, but, well, she thought she’d been admirably discreet.

“You said you were meeting a friend, but you don’t have friends that you don’t live with,” George explains, settling back in his chair like he’s getting ready for his Sherlock Holmes moment.  “You’re wearing an outfit you’ve never worn for a job, which means you like it and don’t want to get plasm burns on it, and why’d you wear that out in the afternoon for no reason?  And you did that flicky thing with your eyeliner.”  His grin gets, impossibly, wider.  “ Date .”

“This is why you were waiting in the kitchen, wasn’t it?” Lucy says crossly.  “So you could sit all smug at the table like this.”

“Doesn’t have the same impact from the sofa,” George agrees.  “We should probably get it reupholstered next time we’re not skirting bankruptcy.  Good kisser, was he?”

Two weeks ago, a quick carpark cleansing they were doing more for the cash than the prestige – Lockwood bitches, but Lucy and George enjoy being able to afford to live on something other than beans on toast – ended up crossing paths with the Grimble Agency.  This was initially annoying, but then was actually handy when the vague shadowy shape people had complained about sensing when picking their cars up shortly before curfew turned out to be a mass grave; mostly Type Ones, but enough of them to be awkward.  Afterwards, when the ground was awash with salt and iron filings, and Lockwood and the Grimble supervisor were haggling over invoicing and profit margins, one of the Grimble boys slid up to Lucy with a phone number scribbled on the back of a bus ticket.  Lucy had been planning on chucking it, but he had hair and eyes the colour of honey and this dimple in his left cheek and a sprinkling of charming freckles, and she’s not dead , after all.

George is looking at Lucy expectantly, and she’s about to spit piss off or something ruder, when she remembers that he’s right: she has no friends she doesn’t live with.  If Norrie hears those tapes Lucy still records her, if her mum doesn’t bin them right away, she can’t reply.  And, okay, Lucy can talk to a skull in a jar, but it’s unbearable enough without her throwing this into the mix.  You really don’t want to go asking a possessed skeleton for dating advice.

She sighs, and drops into one of the other dining chairs.

“Not bad,” she allows.

They’d kissed under the unlit ghost-lamp on the corner, lips cold from the winter afternoon.  It’s what you do, Lucy thinks, what people do when they’ve spent the afternoon drinking overpriced cappuccinos and swapping exorcism stories, treading the line between boasting and flirtation, young and free in the daylight.  She realised partway through that it was the first time she’d ever kissed someone she didn’t really know first, hadn’t risked life and limb alongside again and again and again.  But everyone else Lucy has ever kissed is dead, and, well, that’s not a train of thought to linger on.

George props his chin on his hands, looking like he can’t believe Lucy is letting him get away with this and is going to milk it as long as he can.  “Are you going to see him again?”

Lucy hesitates, just barely.  “No,” she says at last.  “No, I don’t think so.”

George shrugs, and picks up his highlighter pen again.  “Okay.  Fair enough.”

Lucy narrows her eyes.  “Why the sudden lack of curiosity?” she asks suspiciously.

“Maybe I’m respecting your privacy,” George offers, trying for virtuous and falling short.

Lucy has lived in this house for months and no one here respects each other’s privacy at all, Skull included, which is probably why they’ve ended up with this set-up that Barnes has called co-dependent and unhealthy on more than one occasion, once to Lockwood’s actual face while he grinned like a shark and pointed out that it wasn’t breaking any investigative laws, anyway. 

“Really,” Lucy says, flat.

George shrugs a shoulder.  “Okay, well, maybe Flo and I have a bet on,” he explains.

Lucy does not like the prickling feeling between her shoulder blades that this gives her.  “What kind of bet.”

“Just a bet,” George says, almost but not quite airily.  “You know.  Like people have.” 

This conversation is almost definitely not going to get any easier.  “What are the terms?” Lucy asks.

George shakes his head.  “Can’t tell you.  That’s part of it, actually.”

Lucy sighs.  “How will I know if you win, then?”

She really, really doesn’t like the curl of George’s mouth.  “Oh, you’ll know.”

Deciding to give all of this up for lost, Lucy swings her booted feet onto a spare chair.  “Where’s Lockwood, anyway?”

“Well,” George says, “he was training in the basement and has trashed the place, then he was blasting The Smiths on the record player in the library, and now he’s worryingly quiet.”

“And you haven’t checked on him?”

“After two straight hours of Hatful of Hollow ?” George looks incredulous and Lucy nods in agreement, because yeah, no one wants to see the aftermath of all that Morrissey.

She feels a little anxious, a little terrified, a little sick.  “Do we know why he’s acting like this?” she asks.

George screws up his face.  “It’s the seventh,” he says, like that explains everything.  When Lucy just keeps looking at him, he shrugs.  “I don’t know, he acted like this on the seventh last year, I assume that it’s a significant date of some kind.”

Not for the first time, Lucy finds herself wondering if George has haphazard files on his housemates somewhere in his brain too, just like his case files, his record boxes on the Problem.  Someone knows what times of the month to slip mini Mars bars into her duffel bag, anyway, and there’s always a discreet box of Tampax in the communal bathroom that Lucy has never needed to replenish.  She could ask, after all, pop a note on the Thinking Cloth if she couldn’t bring herself to voice it aloud, but she’s decided it might be easier to put it all down to that co-dependency thing again.

“And you still didn’t go check on him?” Lucy demands.  When George gives her a look, she adds: “you could have offered him-”

“-a hug?” George supplies drily.  “An awkward conversation?”

“A Hobnob!” Lucy exclaims.

“Oh.” George looks a little sheepish.  “Okay.  Well, I couldn’t have done that, actually, because I ate all the Hobnobs.”

Most of the time, it’s not weird being the only woman in the house; sometimes, though, Lucy would love to be living with two other people who weren’t such bloody boys about things.  She sighs, and wonders if she’s supposed to be the one to go upstairs and supply some emotional intelligence.  But, well.  Her brain is still a little muddled with freckles and honey-coloured eyes and an unfamiliar mouth on hers, and, as George has established, they are all out of biscuits.

It's tricky to know what to do, to try and work out what Lockwood would want or wouldn’t want.  Lucy has an anniversary of her own to remember, after all, one that sings raw down her nerves the closer it draws, and maybe it’s not right for her to blunder in with the scant pieces of the story that she knows and try to make everything better.  She hesitates outside the library door three times, finds herself wondering the third time if Lockwood is even still in there because there’s no lights on.  In the end, she washes off her carefully winged eyeliner, puts on her comfiest leggings and sweatshirt, picks at George’s latest experimental twist on a lasagne that doesn’t really work, and mentally records half a dozen messages to Norrie that she’ll never commit to cassette.

It's two in the morning when Lucy sits up in bed and murmurs shit to herself, rubs the fringes of sleep from her face and goes downstairs to the library.

Lockwood is a silent creature of glittering eyes and bone white skin, stock still in an armchair with no expression on his face at all.  He’s in a hoodie and old jeans, and if Lucy sometimes thinks that Lockwood looks like a kid playing at being an adult when he’s in one of his suits, it’s worse when he’s dressed like other teenagers: then he looks like a kid playing at being a kid, trying to reclaim something long gone, something he never had to begin with.  He blinks, slowly, dark circles and darker lashes, and after too many moments his gaze settles on Lucy.  She swallows thickly, some fight or flight instinct in her wanting to chuck a flare at him and run, a knee jerk reaction to seeing something that makes her stomach feel this hollow.

Words dry up on her tongue, and Lucy feels she should have intervened hours ago, should never have come here.  There’s a grief here thick enough to wade through, to slide a knife into and watch it stick.  Her old bedroom felt like this: if she ever went back to her mother’s house, Lucy thinks that that room would still feel that way, her loss pinned to the skirting boards like a Shade.  There’s a kind of despair you can’t will away, that locks you as surely as any ghost.

“When did you last sleep?” she stumbles at last, clumsy and more obvious than she meant it to be, but maybe there are no good opening lines at moments like this.

Another one of those slow, brittle blinks.  “Thursday,” Lockwood says, his voice sounding far away, untethered.

Lucy frowns.  “Which Thursday?”

“A Thursday.”  Lockwood tilts his head slightly, a statue coming to slow life.  “We still have those, don’t we?”

Lucy isn’t sure that she’s the person to do this, but George won’t do this and there is no one else.  They have each other, and that’s it.  It might as well be printed under that sign outside: we do what we have to, because someone has to.

“Okay,” she says.  “Get up.  Come on.  Up.”

Something startles in Lockwood’s expression, and maybe that’s what he needs.  Lucy can’t chuck an actual salt bomb in his face, but something has to shatter this awful equilibrium.

He fights to obey her, staggering upright, but after a minute he’s upright and swaying a little, an unsteady effigy of insomnia and trauma looking at her like she’s a lifeline.  Maybe she is.  Maybe she has to be.  In any case, Lockwood doesn’t fight Lucy grabbing a handful of his sleeve and towing him to his room, pulling back the messy covers and pointing at the bed until he acquiesces and folds himself into it, jeans and all.  He’d probably be more comfortable in pyjamas, but Lucy is learning to fight the battles she stands a chance of winning.

Lockwood lies in his bed like he’s lying in his coffin, and Lucy sighs as she flicks on a bedside lamp, turns off the big light and closes the door.  She props up a pillow against the raffia headboard and sits down beside him on the bed, trying for confident, sure of herself.  The silence in the room is a sucking, creeping thing, running nails down her spine and making Lockwood look more like a waxwork with every moment that passes.  She needs to say something, anything , even a stupid platitude or an inanity, anything to stop this stalemate.

“My mum doesn’t love me,” she says instead, and surprises herself with it, the words falling solid and brutal into the empty space.  “My dad… was apathetic, I think, maybe agnostic about me at best, but my mum… oh, she’s never liked me.  Never even tried to.”

Lockwood is quiet for a long time, long enough for Lucy to second and third-guess herself and her godawful opening conversational gambit. At last, rusty, he says: “I think I thought your parents were dead.”  The like mine is unspoken, but present.

“My dad is,” Lucy confirms.  “My mum…” She sighs, picks at a chip in her nail varnish.  “They rang her, you know?  After the fire, when I was in hospital.  She didn’t know I’d run off to London, and for one awful moment I thought maybe she’d come down here, drag me back home, but… she hadn’t even asked where I was.  If I was okay.  And I didn’t want to leave London, and I didn’t want her to come, but the fact that she didn’t even try…” The disappointment and relief have gone cold over time, and at least it means the break between her past and her present is clean, complete, absolute.  “I was always just an asset to her,” Lucy murmurs at last, and doesn’t look at Lockwood to see if he’s looking at her while she speaks.  “A way to make money.  I suppose in the end she realised it was cheaper in the long run just to let me be gone.”

“I didn’t know,” Lockwood says quietly.  “I suppose that this is one of those things I should have asked.”

“No,” Lucy corrects him.  “No, because it doesn’t matter, not like Norrie and the others.  That was important.  This is just… background information.  Trivia.  Those random little notes George puts in the margins of briefings that you don’t bother to read.”

“I read them sometimes,” Lockwood protests, and there’s a hint of something there in amongst the monotone, not quite indignant, but almost, if you tilted your head and squinted.

“Not often enough,” Lucy replies, and tips her head back to look at the bland ceiling.  “Anyway, I worked it out in the end, that no amount of hard work or earnings or Talent would ever make her love me.  I think, by the end, I’d almost stopped wanting her to.  So I think I knew she wasn’t going to come storming down to London to demand I go home, because that would need something that just wasn’t there, but-”

“The chance would be a fine thing?” Lockwood suggests.  The way he says it, the wry twist to his mouth, implies he’s making some kind of joke at his expense that only he understands, but maybe anything is better than him lying silent and staring.  Maybe.

“Something like that,” Lucy agrees, poking at a cuticle until it stings.  “I’m not trying to compare childhoods,” she adds quickly.  “I’m not… whipping out a measuring tape for parental misery or anything.”

“Then what are you saying, Lucy?” Lockwood asks, rolling his head on the pillow to actually look at her.  It’s too much to be caught in his gaze when he’s like this.

“I’m saying that there’s love in this house,” she blurts.  “That it’s old and it’s there and you can feel it.”

“With your Talent?” Lockwood suggests, a flick of acid in his voice now, and maybe Lucy shouldn’t have tried to get him to talk after all.  

“No,” Lucy allows, “but-”

“Because you know what I see in this house, with my Talent ?” Lockwood’s tone is a whip crack, a target in sight.  “I see death.  I see Jack Carver in our fucking hallway getting trampled on every day.  I see Jessica-”. But his voice breaks and he can’t carry on for a breathless moment.  “Death glows fade if they’re not tethered to a Visitor,” he continues at last, voice barely above a whisper.  “But they last a long time.  I used to sit with her, just to-” He breaks off again, and this time he doesn’t continue.

Lucy closes her eyes and takes a raw breath until she’s sure she’s not about to cry tears that don’t belong to her, digs her nails into the palms of her hands.

“We eradicate the dead with fire and metal and salt,” she says raggedly.  “Because we have to.  But sometimes there are things left behind that don’t need to be erased for our own protection, and that you don’t need a Talent to sense.  Some of them are here, in your home.  And that might hurt, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”

Lockwood is quiet again, face turned away from her, and the silence lasts so long that Lucy thinks she’s really fucked it up this time, it’ll be awkward snapping and passive-aggressive notes on a tablecloth for days if he doesn’t outright fire her for sticking her emotions where they aren’t wanted.  What could Lucy possibly know about any of this.

“Our home,” he murmurs at last.

She could point out that yes, it is, but Lockwood’s family are his, and she can respect them and tiptoe around his loss but none of this can ever be hers; but he knows it as well as she does and it’s not the moment for pedantry.

“Yeah,” she agrees instead.

After a minute, Lockwood rolls onto his side, fully facing away from her, pulling the duvet up over his shoulder.  “You should go to bed, it’s late.”  His tone is casual, matter of fact.

“I will,” Lucy tells him, “but I’ll wait until you fall asleep.”  She leans over carefully, snaps off the lamp, leaves the room in darkness but for the occasional pale sweep of the ghost-lamp seeping through the curtains.

“I won’t,” Lockwood says.

“You might,” Lucy replies.

It’s been a long day, a strange one, full of more emotions than Lucy thinks she intended to pull out and examine.  All she was really trying to achieve was one of those normal teenager moments the newspapers bang on about, like they should all be out snogging on street corners instead of trying to save lives.  There’s the possibility, of course, of having both – but Lucy doesn’t know if she’s there yet, suspects there’s a few more layers of guilt and grief to wade through before she can really consider that option.  It barely comes as a surprise.

“Luce?” Lockwood’s voice comes in the dark at last, sounding small and young and lost.

“Still here,” she assures him, hears him swallow in response.

“Okay.”

Lucy stays there, propped against the headboard, and listens to his breathing, counts the lengthening spaces between his breaths until she thinks he might have made it to unconsciousness after all.  She should go, she knows, slip out on light feet and go back to her own room; and she will.  She will. She’ll just give it another five minutes.  Just in case.

-

It starts with a tapping on the edge of Lucy’s hearing, barely noticeable and innocuous, until something in her remembers I’m not tapping and a room flooding with blood.  It’s one scary experience in a life full of them, so she takes two careful breaths and closes her eyes and when she opens them again she isn’t thinking about The Red Room anymore.  It happened, but they survived it.  This tapping is different, a little dulled, and while Portland Row has seen its share of death, the disparate spirits have almost definitely not banded together into a gory Changer while they were all too busy bickering over biscuits to notice.  Lucy’s at least fifty percent sure about that.

The tapping turns out to be a steady dripping from the ceiling; it’s a wet week, one of those ones that makes all of London gritty and shitty and grey .  Most jobs have taken place indoors, but getting to them has still been enough to get soaked, George wrapping salt bombs and flares in plastic bags before they leave to stop them getting soggy and useless.  Lucy’s boots are waterproof but have developed a sort of permanent dampness from not getting time to dry out properly, leaving her with permanently cold toes.  Basically: it’s grim.

Lucy looks up at the leak in the roof, looks down at the growing dark patch on the rug, puts her hands on her hips, and yells: “Lockwood!”

Two weeks later, and the most sensationalist of tabloids are claiming that the appalling weather is somehow Problem-based.  It has not stopped raining, miserable downpours turning to bitter storms.  Everything is sodden all of the time: the house fills up with clothes in varying stages of drying, muddy boots and broken umbrellas.  George turns up for a graveyard job one night in a pair of red wellies, and while Lucy and Lockwood have their share of fun at his expense, by the time they stagger home at four in the morning the only one still grinning is George, since he’s the only one whose footwear isn’t squelching .  In the end, they have to draw up a rota for who gets first shower when they get in from jobs: yes, Lucy has her own bathroom, but the plumbing at Portland Row hasn’t been updated in several decades and it isn’t up for more than one lot of hot water at a time.  Lucy and George nearly come to blows one awful Thursday pre-dawn morning after a night tracking a couple of Screaming Spirits across Tooting Common; Lucy is soaked to the skin, literally, the rain’s even made it through to her knickers, and she’s on the point of yelling this in George’s face, or possibly bursting into tears, or possibly thumping him: a rota is really the only way of calming things down.  Well, that and the hot toddies Lockwood makes while waiting for his own turn in the shower, shirt turned translucent from the storm, pretending he isn’t shivering even a little bit.  The ratio of water to whisky seems to be about fifty-fifty, judging from the way it burns when Lucy takes her first sip, but when she collapses into bed later she can’t deny that it’s warmed her right up.

The leak in the roof thuds inexorably into a plastic bucket; Lucy relies on exhaustion to tune it out most of the time, and on the nights they don’t have jobs she uses earplugs and has oddly rhythmic dreams.  She empties the bucket a couple of times a day and circles roofers in the Yellow Pages; it seems half of London is trying to hire someone, based on the waiting times Lucy gets quoted.  Lockwood offers to take a look at the damage – I fixed your tap okay, didn’t I? – but Lucy refuses, partly because she’s pretty sure he’ll make it worse, partly because going on a tiled roof in a torrential downpour isn’t even reckless, it’s just plain idiotic. Lockwood may claim to no longer have a death wish these days, but he’s got into the habit of a certain pattern of self-destructive behaviour, and frankly it’s a full-time job for George and Lucy to head these things off at the pass. 

They’re all so busy waiting for the ceiling to fall in that it’s a complete surprise, the night the fierce winds tear a bough off one of the smaller trees in the square and bring it crashing through the attic windows.  Lucy wakes up to breaking glass and driving rain, her room suddenly flooded with silver from the ghost-lamps outside working overtime.  She barely has time to register what’s going on when the boys come clattering up the stairs, rapiers and chains and torches and, mercifully in George’s case, actual pyjama bottoms this time.  But it’s not a supernatural manifestation tonight: just the bloody British weather.  Lockwood brings Lucy a pair of boots to shove her feet into so she can leave her bed without hurting herself on the shattered glass all over the floor, and then he and George dig a tarpaulin out of the basement and wrestle it into place over the broken windows while Lucy gets her notebooks and photographs out of the room before they’re ruined, returns to ferry the last vestiges of her dry clothing out too.  Eventually, after a lot of duct tape has been utilised in a way Lucy thinks they’re all going to regret in daylight, the tarpaulin is mostly keeping at least some of the rain out, and they all trudge downstairs to stick the kettle on.

“I could call my dad,” George offers at last, chin glumly propped on one hand.

“…can he repair a window?” Lucy asks.

“Nah,” George says.  “But this feels like one of those situations where you need an actual adult.”

Mostly, Lucy likes this life where she isn’t really answerable to any adults: not that her mum much cared where she was or what she was doing, but there was at least the sense that she was under some kind of supervision, and of course she was living in her mum’s house and handing over her wages every month.  None of that at Portland Row, and most of the time they remember to pay their bills, to buy the kind of food that helps them stave off getting scurvy, and then they can do what they like.  It’s freedom, and it’s great – except when your attic is caving in from the relentless storms and all of a sudden it would be nice to hand all this over to a grown-up for a couple of hours.

“We’ll find someone who can start repairs in the morning,” Lockwood says steadily.  “It’ll be fine.”

It truly is an impressive skill, the way that he can say these things and make them sound plausible; really, he should go into politics when he’s older, just smile that overconfident smile at people and they’d do whatever he wanted.  He’s a shoo-in for some kind of political figure.  Or a cult leader, actually, but that’s a thought for another day, another time, when Lucy is less tired and she isn’t still fizzing with the last of the panic from such a brutal awakening.

“Where’s she going to sleep tonight?” George is asking.

“ She can sleep on the sofa,” Lucy cuts in.

George makes a face and, yeah, okay, neither of their sofas are really big enough for sleeping on.  Sprawling on, sure, perching on while interviewing clients, but not sleeping on.  Lucy thinks she’s probably too young to put her back out, curled up on a two-seater, but maybe it’ll turn out she isn’t.

“I could sleep in the bath,” she offers, because that’s a thing people do, right?  Grab a duvet, hope the showerhead doesn’t drip too.

“That’s worse,” George says.

“Then I’ll kip on the floor somewhere,” Lucy snaps, throwing up her hands.  “It’s one night, it won’t kill me.”

“You can’t sleep on the floor ,” Lockwood cuts in, looking appalled.  Maybe he’s remembered that he’s technically her landlord – just another title on that ludicrously long list of roles he occupies in Lucy’s life – and that he’s currently doing a pretty shonky job of it.  Maybe Lucy will point that out to him, that she’s probably got some kind of tenant’s rights here, see if she can make his temples tighten in that way they do when he’s pretending he’s not stressing about something.

“Then someone think of something,” Lucy says tetchily.  “You’re geniuses and improvisors, it’s two in the morning, I’m knackered, we have a job tonight, and I got woken up by a chunk of tree crashing through the fucking window frame.  I’ve done my bit.”

Lockwood looks at George.  “She could take your room.”

“No!” Lucy and George say in horrified unison.  They don’t frequently agree on a lot of things, annoying one another is one of the core tenets of their friendship, but George is never going to want to give up his room, and Lucy is never going to want to take it – to just pick one reason out of the ether, because George is frequently in there, on all the surfaces, without trousers on.  Nope.  She’d rather take the bathtub.

“If the two of you have finished passing me back and forth like an unwanted parcel-” Lucy begins, still tired, still grumpy, starting to get cold now.

“Bloody hell, just go and share Lockwood’s room again,” George sighs, slumping in his chair and putting his mug down on the table decisively.

The silence is so sudden and so absolute that even the storm seems to have quietened, like the rain is too scared to lash the windows and the wind has fled.  Lucy sees her knuckles go white around her tea, and she can’t make herself look at Lockwood.

“I’m distractible, not unobservant,” George says at last.  “I’m not being weird about it, I’m just pointing out there’s a really obvious solution.”  He smirks a little.  “If you’re worried, you can always sleep with a rapier in the middle of the bed.”

Lucy frowns, finally raises her eyes to see her confusion mirrored on Lockwood’s face.  “What?”

“God,” George sighs, “it’s so boring being the only person in this house who reads .”  He raps his knuckles twice on the table and stands up.  “Right, I’m off to bed, you two can sort this out amongst yourselves.  If you’re both still sitting here when I get up, I’ll make us all adasi for breakfast.”

He shuts the kitchen door behind him; there’s the clumping of his boots on the stairs, the creaking of the floorboards, and then just the oppressive silence he’s left behind.

“Sorry, Luce,” Lockwood says; his voice is soft, his eyes tired.  For the first time tonight, Lucy remembers that she sleeps in Lockwood’s childhood bedroom: he’s probably more attached to the faded eighties curtains than she ever was, the dusty rugs and faded stacks of books.  God, but everything’s a minefield these days.

Lucy rests her elbows on the kitchen table, lets her face drop into her hands.  “Literally nothing to be sorry for.”

She hears him swallow.  “Anyway, I can take the sofa, or the bath, or the floor, or… wherever else got suggested,” he says.

“I notice you didn’t mention George’s room.”

“Well, no.”  He huffs out a sound that might be a laugh.  “He’s got some weird shit in there.”

“Some very weird shit,” Lucy agrees, rubbing her eyes and raising her head again.  Gently taking the piss out of your friend: it’s a worn but valid way of artificially breaking tension.

“And I think it’s normal that it always kind of smells of jam,” Lockwood adds, “but in all honesty I’m too scared to ask.”

Lucy grins but lets it fade after a moment. “He’s not wrong, you know,” she says.

Lockwood’s mouth twists a little.  “No, he’s not wrong,” he agrees, voice oddly heavy for a conversation that really isn’t that serious, if you think about it objectively.  It would be nice if Lucy could think about this objectively.  “It’s just a bit different when no one’s…”

“Physically or emotionally compromised?”  Lucy offers.

“Yeah,” Lockwood says, wry, and briefly bites his lower lip.  “Yeah, something like that.”

They climb the stairs, making them creak in familiar unison, and then Lockwood is walking into his bedroom and Lucy is following him.

The stakes feel weird, much too high, for two people sharing a bed that is actually designed for two people.  She and Norrie shared a single bed on so many occasions, elbows in each other’s stomachs and hair caught in each other’s mouths, and that was normal, childhood sleepovers, sharing secrets that amounted to not much at all in the darkness in the same way that they braided one another’s hair and tested one another with flash cards on the different types of Visitors and the best way to destroy each one.  There were other times when it was less happy, when a job had been draining or just plain frightening , but it was easy, with Norrie, to hook an arm around her best friend, to fall asleep with their legs tangled together, listening to one another breathe as proof that they were still alive. 

Some of those early months after Lucy moved to London involved finally finding out where Norrie ended and where she began.  The pain of discovering that you could lose a limb and keep on going and then, one day, discover that you were growing the limb back again, independently.  Differently.  Surviving the unsurvivable.  Maybe every day is like that for Lockwood, too.

“You okay?” Lockwood asks, and Lucy shakes her head slightly to clear it, grabs her half of the crumpled duvet so they can shake it out over the whole bed.  “I can still go and-”

“No,” she says, “no, no, I was just remembering something.  It’s fine.”

It is, too.  Healing, however slow it is, is a beautiful and awful process.  She could mention something like that to Lockwood, and maybe he’d understand and maybe he wouldn’t, but they’ve already had one fraught conversation about loss in this bed; they really don’t need to toss another one into the mix.  Not for a while, anyway.  Definitely not tonight.

The sheets are cold, and rain lashes at the windows.  Lucy lies and tracks shadows across the ceiling with her eyes and thinks about the terrible makeshift tarpaulin upstairs; maybe they’ll wake up and half the house will be flooded and that will be the end of Lockwood & Co: not in a blaze of glory, but in a miserable mess of boring financial ruin.  She shivers a little, unable to help it.

“Luce?”  Lockwood sounds very alert and awake, much too awake, and Lucy has an immediate and extremely short terror spiral of falling asleep next to a wakeful Lockwood who will be right there if she mumbles or snores or drools or any number of other horrible embarrassing things that she could be doing, unconscious, unable to do anything to fix it.  Then she remembers that Lockwood has seen her bloody and soggy and burned and possessed and dirty and unconscious and slouching around the house in faded pyjamas, and one: they’re both still here , aren’t they, and two: it’s much too late to start making up any ground now.

“I’m fine,” she says, and almost surprises herself by meaning it.  She snuggles a little further into the covers, lets her eyes drift closed.  “Goodnight, Lockwood.”

She hears him exhale, long and slow, and the mattress shifts a little as he does.  But he sounds softer, a little less tense, when he says: “goodnight, Lucy.”

-

By the time they’ve limped back to their client’s house, there are already three DEPRAC vans outside, uniformed personnel filling the street.  It saves them going back inside or tracking down a phone box, Lucy supposes, although there also seem to be a couple of photographers on the corner, smoking roll-ups and checking their cameras.  Lockwood clocks them a moment later, and his favourite grin leaps across his face.

“Ah, press,” he says happily, “already notified of a job well done, I imagine.”

“I think you’ve got an overactive imagination,” George says grimly.

Not that Lucy ever wants to be photographed by the press, but none of them look particularly camera-ready right now.  George’s glasses are bent and his jeans are more mud than denim, curls full of stray leaves and flower petals.  Lockwood is doing a pretty good job of making a bloodied nose look rakish, but his tie disappeared a while back and his shirt collar is half torn off.  Lucy herself looks like she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards; which is fair, because that’s exactly what happened.  All three of them are grazed and dirty and a little singed at the edges.  Triumphant, of course, but battered.

Before Lockwood can make a beeline for the journalists, Inspector Barnes steps out of the greyish dawning light, arms folded over his leather jacketed chest.  His eyes are hard, his mouth a thin line.

“Good morning, Inspector!” Lockwood says, “fancy seeing you here.”

“You three,” Barnes says, in a tone that implies he’d like to be using stronger language right now but is trying to restrain himself.  He jerks his head at the nearest vehicle.  “Get in the van.”

“Are we being arrested, Inspector?” Lockwood demands, the brightness dropping out of his voice.  “You have absolutely no right to-”

“I was called out here at arse o’clock in the morning by a bunch of furious OAPs because you lot have been trashing their gardens,” Barnes interrupts.  “That means I can do whatever the hell I like.  Get in the van.”

He herds them into the back of the van and glares until they obediently sit on the narrow bench inside.  Lucy doesn’t mind too much actually; it’s quite nice to be sitting down after the night of running they’ve had.  Any time any of them try to say something, Barnes holds up a furious hand, and they have to subside again.  After a few minutes, Wade knocks on the door and hands over three paper cups of tea, which Barnes distributes.  It’s stewed bitter, too much UHT milk and not enough sugar, and it wasn’t Pitkin’s finest to begin with, but it’s hot and wet and it turns out that that’s all Lucy really needs right now.

George gulps down half his tea in one go and says: “you know, Inspector, I think you’d be much happier if you tried getting some more sleep.”

Barnes’ glower doesn’t lessen any.

“Thanks, Karim,” he says, his voice roughly the consistency of that gravel path Lucy ripped her palms and knees open on earlier in the night.  “Maybe I will, when Agents aren’t running around Zone 5 setting people’s sheds on fire.”

“Okay, that was the Poltergeist,” Lockwood protests.  “And that shed was falling down anyway.”

“You really need to stop causing this much property damage,” Barnes says wearily.

“It was one shed!”

Barnes pulls a small notebook out of his jacket pocket.  “You also destroyed an ornamental fountain.”

“An ugly one,” George murmurs into his cup.

“Then there’s the topiary that was apparently hacked apart by rapier blades,” Barnes continues.  “Two washing lines downed, three broken fences, several scorched and/or salted lawns, and…” he turns the page.  “You incinerated a prize-winning rosebush.”

Lucy winces; that one’s on her.  She’d flung it at the Dark Spectre she’d been chasing and it had shrunk at the last second; it had still been blown apart, but the blast radius had ended up encapsulating much of the surrounding garden, the air suddenly full of burning petals.

“What the homeowners need to remember is that we eliminated a number of dangerous Type Twos from their back gardens,” Lockwood says, clearly attempting to get the conversation to a place where they’re in the right and no one’s garden gnomes got trampled underfoot.  George had said that wasn’t on them anyway: most people have swapped to iron garden ornaments by now, and those would’ve broken way less easily.

“They didn’t have dangerous Type Twos in their back gardens until you chased them in there,” Barnes says, a man whose patience is hanging by a thread.

“They would’ve done,” George pipes up.  “Our client’s house was built directly above a ward of the Georgian hospital that once stood there, but the hospital extended to much of the surrounding area.  It’s why so many of the Visitors could travel so far from their original sources.”  He sniffs, tries and fails to adjust his wonky glasses.  “We didn’t realise it extended so far, but the old blueprints and street maps were all written to different scales.”

That’s how their initially quite simple job of securing a home mostly haunted by Type Ones – a couple of Cold Maidens, a Glimmer and two Bone Men, and a surprise Lurker in the attic – uncovered both the Poltergeist and the Dark Spectre.  They’d hoped the Type Twos were more constrained than they actually turned out to be, and that’s how the hours before dawn were spent chasing them through a series of immaculate gardens that, well, are decidedly no longer immaculate.

Barnes sighs heavily and leans back against the wall off the van.  Lucy gets the feeling he’d like an office to put them all in, a desk between them, so he can pace and lecture them properly.  There’s not really space in the small van for proper intimidating.

“Look,” he says finally, tucking the notebook back into his coat, “none of you are bad at this, and much as I hate to admit it, your Agency has potential, somewhere in amongst the-”

“Daring rescues and dazzling charisma?” Lockwood suggests.

“I was going to say ‘idiocy’ and ‘delusions of grandeur’, actually,” Barnes correctly him mildly.  Lucy thinks George laughs, but he does quite a good job of smothering it in a cough.  Barnes folds his arms again, scowl falling into place again like he has to immediately mitigate the back-handed compliment.  “You should hire a few more Agents, though – any of the big outfits would’ve split up your little team months ago, you two especially.”  He nods toward Lucy and Lockwood.  “It’s a disaster waiting to happen.”

Lucy puffs up, immediately indignant, but Lockwood gets there first.  “If you think we need adult supervision, you’re welcome to join us,” he offers, his voice faux-sweet and so very, very irritating.  “We’re out of rooms of course, but we have a very comfy sofa.”

“Where are we keeping that then?” George asks.

Barnes looks like he’s regretting attempting this impromptu meeting, or maybe is regretting ever meeting any of them at all in the first place. 

“Listen,” he says, “I am telling you that you have to stop pulling this kind of shit.  You get results, but you cause so much collateral damage that it doesn’t look like results, and the public don’t like that.  You piss off someone higher up the ladder than me, and DEPRAC will tie you up in so much red tape you’ll never be able to operate again.  And while I won’t miss this-” He waves a hand that manages to encompass the current fruitless conversation, the early morning phone calls he presumably received, and the wrecked gardens of the surrounding area, several of them still gently smoking, “-or the betting pools in the office about what trainwreck you’ll cause next-”

“Wait,” Lucy says, “what?”

“-I do know that you can be very good, and you could do a lot of good if you just got out of your own way once in a while.”

Lucy can see Lockwood’s leg is jiggling, just slightly, in a way that signals he’s annoyed, while George has a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Can we get in on the betting pools?” he asks.  “What kind of stakes are we talking?”

Barnes straightens up again, probably because he’s been reminded that appealing to them not to do anything stupid has never worked before and will almost definitely not work now.

“I am trying to save your lives and jobs here,” he snaps.  “So, tell me, what’s it going to take?  Do I need to make Lockwood & Co some kind of reward chart, give you a sticky gold star for every day that you don’t cause chaos and property damage?”

There’s a long moment of silence.

“That would be more of a calendar than a reward chart, wouldn’t it?” says George.  “Sir?”

Ten minutes later they’re in a DEPRAC car and being driven back to Portland Row.  All three of them are that weird mix of exhausted and energised, desperately in need of some sleep but also fizzing with the night’s events.  Lucy has to keep dragging her nails away from the ladders in her tights, big annoying rents streaking up her thighs, the skin underneath smeared with mud and blood.  Her muscles are starting to complain at her from hours of running in the dark, of scrambling over fences and diving for cover, of running into lawn furniture and stumbling into gravel.  She’s probably bruised to all hell, but, well.  She’s had worse.

It's about six by the time they make it back to the house, and there’s some kind of silent mutual agreement that the DEPRAC tea, godawful as it was, will be enough for now.  Everyone takes a first aid kit and retreats to their bedrooms to patch themselves up and get some rest.

Lucy washes the dirt off her face and picks random leaves and twigs from her hair before she rinses the grit from her raw palms, sloshes burning antiseptic over the scrapes on the heels of her hands.  Most of her tights can be ripped off in chunks without her having to take off her cropped jumpsuit yet, but the fabric stuck to her wounded knees needs soaking before it’ll peel off.  Then she has to clean out the grazes themselves, wincing and flinching and keeping her lower lip between her teeth to stop herself from letting out pained little whimpers as she does so.  Finally, they’re cleaned up enough that she can stick some big dressings over them: not pretty, but effective enough. 

She can go to bed now, roll into pyjamas and pass out or at least lie there in the dim light and let her eyes drift shut.  The attic still smells faintly damp in the corners, but it actually dried up and repaired okay, and she has new blackout curtains at the new windows that will enable her to sleep until mid-afternoon, should she wish to.  Lucy’s shoulders make an unsettling crackling noise when she stretches a little so, yeah: maybe she’ll wish to.  But she’s still a little too keyed-up, stale adrenaline from the chase and its aftermath, and she ends up sitting on the edge of the bed, bare toes curling against the rug, taking slow breaths and letting her gaze rove over the pictures she’s tacked to the walls, the photos and sketches and newspaper cuttings.  Thinking of everything; thinking of nothing.  At one point she thinks she hears a thump downstairs, but she listens as hard as she can, and then Listens as hard as she can, and gets nothing.

Finally, there’s a soft tap at the door, a whisper of: “Luce?”

“Here,” she replies.

Lockwood walks slowly up the stairs that lead into the attic, pauses with a hand on the banister at the top.  He’s washed the rust-coloured crust from his upper lip and mouth and changed his damaged shirt, but there’s not much that can be done for the dark shadows around his eyes. 

“I saw your light was still on,” he offers, looking a little awkward.  “I just wanted to check you were okay, I suppose.”

“I’m okay,” Lucy replies, her voice sounding thin in the quiet room.  She is , after all.

“Yeah.”  Lockwood smiles, a little wry.  “I tried to check on George too and he told me to stop mother-henning him.”  Lucy looks incredulous and Lockwood laughs.  “Well, okay, he told me to fuck off and threw one of his Promethea books at me.”

“Wow,” Lucy says, “you annoyed George so much that he desecrated Alan Moore.”

“I’m just that good a boss,” Lockwood says drily, steps into the attic properly.  Lucy mutely shuffles sideways a little; there’s plenty of room, but she doesn’t know if he’ll sit down without some sort of specific invitation.  He hesitates for a second, but then does join her on the bed, leaving a small but measured distance between them.

“Something you want to say, boss ?” Lucy asks, putting careful emphasis on the word because she’s learning how to tease conversation out of Lockwood, which cues to pick up on and reach for.  She’s a Listener, after all; this is just a different kind of listening.

She sees his mouth curl a little, though he’s looking down at his fingers, twisting them together.  “I may be thinking about something Barnes said,” he allows.

“Wow,” Lucy says, “we should call him up right now.  He’ll be delighted to hear he’s finally getting through.”  When all Lockwood does is huff something like a laugh, she adds: “was it the sticker thing?  Because I can pop to Smith’s and pick some up.”

“No,” Lockwood replies, “no, it wasn’t the sticker thing.”  He lets out a breath.  “I suppose it was the reminder of what you could be doing if you were part of another Agency.”

That makes something wrench in Lucy’s stomach, tight and panicked.  “If you’re about to fire me because I’m too much of an asset-”

“What if we never use that word again?” Lockwood suggests, and shakes his head.  “And no, of course not, Luce.  I want you here .  I – we – need you here.”  He swallows with a click. “You’re going to do great things, and I suppose I remembered that, well, other Agencies would have better resources to enable you to do that.”

Lucy considers this.  “They wouldn’t give me a Type Three in a jar I can carry about in a rucksack,” she points out.  “They’d want to do all these contained experiments with their Artefacts, they wouldn’t just let me sit in the kitchen chatting to the Skull while it insults my haircut and I eat toast and marmalade.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your hair,” Lockwood says absently, which makes Lucy abruptly wonder if he’s been exaggerating how good his Sight is. 

“I’m sure we could all get jobs with Fittes if we asked nicely,” Lucy reminds him.  “But George would still keep trying to go into high security places he’s not supposed to be, and you’d be horrible at following orders, and I’m not sure I want to go back to going on missions in a uniform again.”  She pauses a moment, but something Barnes said has been sticking in her mind too.  “And apparently they wouldn’t let us all be on the same team,” she adds carefully.

“No,” Lockwood agrees quietly.  “They probably wouldn’t.”

There’s a heaviness in Lockwood’s voice, and there’s something significant that she’s missing here, Lucy’s sure of it.

“I don’t get it,” she admits.  “We work great as a team.  Okay, we sometimes leave a bit of carnage behind us, but we get the job done, and we’ve done things no other teams or Agencies have managed.  Isn’t that a good thing?”

“We’re too good,” Lockwood says, and Lucy sees a spark of pride in his eyes as he says it.  “The big Agencies, they want teams that work well together, who complement each other, but they don’t want them too attached.  You try to save your teammates, of course, but you know when to cut your losses.  When to put the mission first.”  He smiles, but there’s something pained in it.  “I’d die for you or George,” he says, the simplicity of the way he just says it enough to drag the breath from Lucy’s lungs.  “Maybe you two feel the same and maybe you don’t, but the supervisors don’t want that.  DEPRAC don’t want that.  They want us to work hard and to toe the line and to know when to leave an Agent behind and to try not to make too much mess if we die in the line of duty.”

He sounds bitter, a little shaky.  He’s still twisting his fingers together; Lucy reaches over impulsively to stop him, takes one of his hands.  He lets her, his touch cool, a bit shaky; or maybe that’s just her.

“You know we’d all die for each other,” she says.  “It’s why what we do works .”  Lockwood’s hand tightens on hers a little.  Lucy hesitates, and then reflects that she’s come this far: it’s nearly seven o’clock in the morning, they’re both sleep-deprived and bruised, both smelling of burned roses.  If she doesn’t ask now, she knows she never will.  “But why did Barnes say they’d split us up?”

Lockwood turns his head to look at her so quick she hears his neck crack.  His expression isn’t what Lucy was expecting: he looks hunted, trapped, almost frightened.  It’s an awful look on him, and Lucy never wants to see it again.

“I don’t understand,” Lucy says, when he doesn’t speak. 

“ Luce .”  The nickname comes out more of a groan than a word; Lockwood shifts a little, pulling further away from her, although he hasn’t let go of her hand.  The silence stretches, so thick Lucy can almost feel it tickling on her bare legs like a Visitor’s miasma.  “Lucy,” he says at last, “Lucy, you have to know .”

The words drop into the air, heavy as iron chains, and Lucy isn’t sure if she could speak now even if she had anything to say.

“I’ve already told you they discourage close friendships between teammates,” Lockwood says at last, face turned away from her, speaking like every word is being wrenched out of him.  “So they really discourage any other kind of… attachment between Agents.  They’ve fired people for forming attachments with anyone else in their Agency, just in case teams have to work together.  It’s not something they let slip to the general public, but it’s how they operate.”

Lucy’s lungs might well be made of lead; her head is ringing.  “Barnes thinks we’re… attached?”

Lockwood laughs humourlessly.  “I think everyone thinks we’re attached,” he says.  “I’m told it’s something about how I look at you.”

Lucy wonders vaguely if her hands are sweating, if Lockwood can feel it.  “And how do you look at me?”

“Like you’re amazing?” Lockwood suggests.  “Like… like I’ve never met anyone like you, ever.  Like you walked in the door for your interview and I was completely unprepared for you, and you changed everything and I… I didn’t even mind.  Like you blow my mind, and not because of your Talent, and not because you slotted into this house and this Agency like you were made for it, but because you’re you.  I look at you like you’re Lucy Carlyle, and I can’t hide it and I wouldn’t even know how to try.”

She swallows; something in her wants to burst into tears, wants to burst out laughing, wants to tell him to keep talking and to never talk again.

“Lockwood,” she says slowly, her voice sounding a little strangled, “is this your incredibly pretentious way of asking me out?”

Lockwood does laugh, something wild and ragged but maybe a little relieved.  “Is that what I’m doing?”

“Well,” Lucy says, “after all that, I think you’d better be.”

Lockwood smiles at her, helpless and sweet, and right now he doesn’t look like Anthony J. Lockwood, Agency leader, reckless and debonair and good but God does he know it; he looks like a teenage boy, a little shy, a little nervous, a little awestruck.  It makes Lucy’s heart flutter in a way she didn’t know it could; in a way that’s bright and overwhelming but nothing to do with terror.  Not the bad kind, anyway.

He makes a startled noise when Lucy kisses him; it’s almost enough to make her pull away, start apologising, say that maybe something’s been misinterpreted but you can’t just make a little speech like that at someone and not expect to be kissed afterwards, but then his free hand comes up to clutch at her shoulder, her jumper, the back of her neck.  Lockwood’s mouth is warm even if his cheeks are cold, and he kisses her back fiercely, hopefully, frantically.  Their noses bump together and he winces, but tilts his head a little and the new angle is better, less likely to aggravate last night’s injuries.  They’re still holding hands, Lucy realises dimly, and that lights something warm and sure in her stomach, because this is different, yes, but maybe some of it’s just an extension of what they’ve been doing all along.  Maybe that explains a lot.

It’s Lucy who flinches next, when their knees bump together and she has to pull back in spite of herself, hissing at the sudden burst of pain.  Lockwood gently tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, touch soft and apologetic, and something flips in Lucy’s stomach and she wants to kiss him again, is definitely going to kiss him again, when he lets out a jaw-cracking yawn.  As is inevitable, Lucy mirrors him a moment later.

“Okay,” he says, laughter in his voice, “okay, we might need to continue this when we’ve had some sleep.”

Lucy lets herself tip sideways, press her forehead against one of his prominent collarbones.  She can feel his heartbeat from here, the thundering of his pulse.  “You may have a point,” she agrees, drowsy and safe.  She’ll probably freak out about this later, when she isn’t bone-weary and full of stale adrenaline, but that’s a problem for a later Lucy to deal with.  For now, in the soft cocoon of the lamplight, this makes something like perfect sense.

“Um,” Lockwood begins after a long moment.  “On the subject of sleeping-”

“You’re about to tell me you can’t get back down the stairs, aren’t you,” Lucy says.

“I did jump over a lot of fences in a fashion I’m not sure my body was designed for,” he admits.  “It felt very heroic at the time, but it’s possible I’ve dislocated my pelvis.”

Lucy does a terrible job of hiding her amusement as she sits up, gently untangles them.  “Yeah, yeah, Errol Flynn,” she says, “try and get comfy, I’ll get the lights.”

Lockwood’s joints do make a number of interesting cracking noises behind her as Lucy turns off the lamps, uses the scant fringes of grey daylight peeking around the curtains to make her way back to the bed.  Later on, she’ll probably regret not getting into pyjamas, but right now she’s too tired to wrestle in and out of clothing, and it won’t be the first time she’s slept fully dressed.  At least she’s taken her shoes off.

Lucy gets into bed, which feels incredible to her aching muscles, tucks the blankets around herself.  She can feel her mind buzzing, wanting to sort through the events of the last few hours, wanting to desperately replay everything that’s happened in the last twenty minutes, examine it from all possible angles.  But she pushes that aside, tries to focus on the giddy, volcanic feeling in her chest like it’s something she can hold in cupped hands and keep for later, untarnished and unaltered.

“Sleep well, Luce,” Lockwood says quietly, his voice already slurring around the edges, and light fingers brush down her arm.

“Sleep well, Lockwood,” she responds, and thinks about panicking, about overanalysing this moment and every single other one that has led them here but, well.  She’s knackered and she’s sore and they won tonight like they win every night, and even if it’s only for this morning, this minute, this slow inhale: Lucy knows that she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be.  That’s probably enough for one day.