Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Charles’ right hand is bleeding, and he’s been rambling nonstop for the past twenty minutes.

It was their third case of the month and the first in which Charles came back with a battle wound.

They’ve only been working cases for about four months now, their agency still relatively unknown to the vast majority of greater London. The few cases they’ve had so far have been easy enough, a few minor curses and spiritual attachments to get their feet wet and ease them into their newfound profession rather than any kind of trial by fire (literal or metaphorical).

Edwin knew it would take some time for their caseload to grow, for word of mouth to travel through the ghostly grapevine and start bringing in new clients, so in the interim, he was just focused on getting their cases solved in a prompt and satisfactory manner while also keeping them both “alive” in the process.

Tonight was the first night things went somewhat sideways, his carefully, meticulously crafted plan effectively going pear-shaped the minute Charles charged the poltergeist they were trying to banish and got himself flipped over a railing in the process.

Edwin had been too busy scrawling the necessary symbols onto the floor in chalk, aligning them in just such a way that they created something of a net when activated, when he heard a crash, followed by a startled “oop!” and then Charles was toppling backwards over the second floor banister and landing in a groaning heap on the ground a few feet away from Edwin.

“Are you alright?” Edwin calls out to him, watching as Charles pushes himself up a second later and ruffles the plaster out of his hair.

“Aces,” Charles replies easily, getting to his feet again and getting a better grip on the handle of his cricket bat. “Casper’s not exactly thrilled having us here, Eds, you almost ready with that ghost net?”

“Two ticks,” Edwin answers distractedly, scribbling a few more symbols onto the floor as he speaks.

“I can give you one and a half,” Charles tells him as he rushes back up the stairs to confront the pesky spirit once again.

There’s a series of crashes overhead, followed by a few muffled curses from Charles, and then a few seconds later, the ground floor is entirely consumed by a flurry of tornadic, poltergeist activity.

Edwin has just enough time to finish the very last symbol, stepping away from the net a split second before the room looks like it's been hit by a hurricane. All the symbols rumble and glow at once, weaving into each other and interlinking together like strands of DNA. There’s a sharp shriek from somewhere in the middle of the net, an outraged wail that’s loud enough to rattle the windows, and then the net collapses in on itself, taking all the energy and the poltergeist with it.

Charles appears at the top of the stairs once again, grinning ear-to-ear and still brandishing his cricket bat in one hand. Aside from the plaster in his hair and the dust on his clothes, he looks no worse for wear, and Edwin feels a knot of tension loosen itself in his chest.

He’s well aware of his new partner’s tendency to rush into situations before he’s thought them out thoroughly, so a good portion of the planning phase of their cases usually involves Edwin working out all the possible ways Charles can injure himself while in the field. The problem with that, however, is that Charles tends to be rather…unpredictable.

Even Edwin’s best laid plans have nothing on Charles Rowland’s reckless abandon, and, as such, Edwin frequently finds himself more concerned with Charles’ safety than the outcome of their case.

He never considers a case well and truly closed until he’s assured himself that the other boy is safe and uninjured; only then will the case be considered complete.

By all accounts, the poltergeist case had been relatively quick and clean, and Edwin is left feeling pretty satisfied with their work that evening and the fact that they made it out unscathed.

That is, until he sees Charles’ hand.

Charles appears completely unaware of the injury at first, still chattering rapidly about his encounter with the poltergeist, the combination of adrenaline and nervous energy leaving him jittery and excited.

And also perfectly oblivious to the fact that his knuckles are ripped open to the bone.

Charles doesn't object or pull away when Edwin drops into the chair beside him and takes his bloodied hands, pulling them into his lap and tutting silently to himself as he carefully pokes and prods at the deep, ragged scrapes with gentle fingers.

He has no idea what caused the injuries (and he doubts Charles knows either), but they look painful. They’re not nearly as deep as Edwin first expected, although it does look like someone took a professional grater to the back of Charles’ knuckles. He doesn’t seem to be having any trouble moving his fingers or his hand, though, which means it will heal much faster with the proper care.

Edwin does not miss the irony of this.

The funny thing about being dead is that it doesn’t prevent them from getting injured; it just prevents the injury from leaving the same mark it would if they were alive. Cuts and scrapes and bruises are still a part of their day-to-day existence (which is why Edwin is hyper concerned with Charles’ safety more often than not), they just don’t carry the same weight as they do for the living.

Charles is still talking when Edwin releases his hands and walks over to the storage closet in their office, tugging open the door and rummaging around through a collection of small bottles, jars, and containers. He plucks a small, metal tin off the third shelf and carries it back over to the desk, taking a seat next to his still rambling partner.

The tin contained a “miracle salve” that was given to them by one of their previous clients, payment for finding a lost wedding ring which had accidentally been buried in the back garden while planting the fall carrots. The woman, Mrs. Stanton, explained that the recipe had been passed down through the women in her family for generations, an ancient recipe that had been lost to time but was now held in memory for centuries.

Mrs. Stanton claimed that a small, thin layer of the salve was enough to heal any minor flesh wound in a matter of hours and that the tin she gave as payment should last several more months, possibly even years, depending on how often they needed it.

Luckily, they haven’t had a reason to test her claims until tonight, and Edwin, never one to turn down an opportunity to test a theory, decides that tending to Charles’ shredded knuckles will be the perfect time to test the “miracle salve” and see if it truly is as effective as their client claimed.

He takes Charles’ hands back into his own, resting them on his knees lightly as he wiggles the lid off the tin. The contents look waxy and thick, more like a balm than a salve, and very herbaceous; he hasn’t been able to smell much of anything for nearly a century, but he can pick up notes of basil and clove if he concentrates hard enough.

He sets the lid down on the desk and scoops out a small amount of the salve onto his fingertips, carefully brushing it over the shredded skin across the back of Charles’ knuckles. Mrs. Stanton had assured them that a thin layer was all they needed, so Edwin follows her advice and keeps the layer as thin as possible.

He’s not sure what kind of sensation it produces, cooling, stinging, burning, he doesn’t know; what he does know, however, is that one minute Charles is still chattering on about their case and the next he’s sucking in a short, sharp breath and letting it out as a long hiss.

“A little warning next time, mate,” Charles mutters a little sullenly, half-heartedly trying to pull his injured hands away and then giving up immediately when Edwin easily pulls them back into his lap.

“Well, maybe next time you’ll reconsider your decision to take a flying leap at a poltergeist,” Edwin counters easily, although he does make an effort to be more gentle when he applies the next layer of salve to his other hand.

“It was not ‘a flying leap’...”

“I saw your feet leave the ground. Both of them.”

Charles goes quiet then, whether sulking slightly or finally calming down after their case, Edwin isn’t sure, but he watches in silent fascination as, true to their client’s word, the salve actually begins to heal the deep, ragged scrapes across Charles’ knuckles right before his eyes.

It wasn’t immediate; the whole process takes roughly half an hour from start to finish, but in that time, Edwin watches as the shredded skin slowly and carefully knits itself back together, the scrapes fading away until the only thing that remains of the fight is Charles’ wounded pride.

And that’s when Edwin first sees them.

Five distinct scars outline the bony point of each knuckle, branching out like tiny starbursts across the back of Charles’ hand. The scar tissue is shallow and thin, the skin about half a shade paler than the rest of Charles’ hand, and Edwin briefly wonders why he’s never noticed them before.

“Where on earth did you get these scars?” he hears himself ask before he can stop himself.

“Oh, those?” Charles asks, holding up the hand in question and scrutinizing it. He brushes the fingers of his other hand over the freshly healed wounds and cautiously opens and closes his hand as if testing out the range of motion. “I punched a wall.”

“You…punched a wall?

“Mhmm.”

“On purpose…?”

Charles smirks and rolls his eyes like the answer is obvious. “Nope, definitely not on purpose. I was actually aiming for this other lad’s nose, but he ducked and I ended up cracking my knuckles against the side of a building instead.”

He flexes his hand again and then wiggles his fingers slightly for emphasis. “Not my proudest moment, admittedly; thought I broke my hand at first, but it healed up after a couple of days.”

Edwin frowns mildly at the answer. “And may I ask why you and this other boy were fighting?”

Charles doesn’t answer right away, his smirk fading ever so slightly, and Edwin immediately worries that the question may have been too intrusive.

From a very young age, Edwin was taught never to ask for anything and never to question anything beyond what appeared on the surface. He was raised in a time when children were to be seen, not heard, and attention in any form was to be earned, not given freely.

Still, that did little to quell his natural curiosity.

Edwin had always been an inquisitive child, one who wanted to understand everything there was to know about the things that interested him. It was more than a little ironic that he was only able to freely question things after he died. He feels there’s something oddly poetic about the mirror image of his fate and the stories from the Bible in which Lucifer was cast out for questioning God’s design; oddly enough, Edwin found he was only ever able to ask questions freely after being trapped in Hell for seventy-odd years.

He does try to keep his questions to a minimum, however, always concerned that he might inadvertently cross a line without realizing it.

Like now.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, gathering the tin and the lid and setting them on the desk. “I didn’t mean to-”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Charles assures him quickly, flashing a bright smile in an effort to allay Edwin’s concerns. “It’s just something I haven’t thought about in a while, it kinda caught me off guard, that’s all,” he continues, sinking into the chair just a bit before letting his shoulders relax against the chair back. He crosses his arms over his chest and props his right ankle on top of his left knee as if settling in for the story.

“There was this kid who came to St. Hilarions one year,” Charles begins, his gaze slightly unfocused as he recalls the details. “Yusuf, if I remember correctly. He wasn’t there very long, only about a year or so; his dad was some kind of foreign diplomat or ambassador or something, never stayed in one place for long, that kind of thing.”

Charles smirks a little at some memory that flashes across his mind. “Great lad, too, wicked funny and smart as anything, he probably could have skipped a couple of years ahead of us, if I’m being honest. Frankly, he was probably the only reason I passed some of my classes that year.”

Edwin smiles faintly as Charles speaks, trying to envision the boy at the center of the story.

“We got on great, and for the most part he fit right in with me and the other lads,” Charles continues, his expression falling ever so slightly. “There was this one boy in our class, though, Nigel, and he went out of his way to find some way to bully Yusuf every single day. Take his school books, tear up his notes, call him out in the middle of lectures… proper twat he was.”

Charles sighs and shrugs. “So one day I’d had enough, told him if he wanted to keep acting like a prick, then we would settle things once and for all. Got into a row behind one of the buildings, and when I took a swing at him, he ducked and I punched the wall instead.”

Edwin frowns and shakes his head slightly. “No good deeds,” he laments with a small sigh. “Unfortunately, bullies hardly ever get their deserved comeuppance.”

“Oh, no, I broke his nose on the second swing,” Charles tells him with a wicked grin. “Wasn’t sure if my hand was broken, but I made sure his nose was.”

Edwin chuckles at the reply. “And did he leave Yusuf alone after that?”

“Well, yes and no,” Charles answers, wobbling his hand from side to side slightly. “Yusuf left St. Hialrions a few months later, and Nigel would never bully him again while I was around, so I made sure to stay close by.”

“He was very fortunate to have a friend like you.”

The slightest hint of a blush appears on Charles’ cheeks, and he shakes his head slightly. “Don’t know about all of that,” he says with a mild shrug. “I just can’t stand bullies, especially ones like Nigel.”

Edwin says nothing for a moment, gaze falling on the scars on Charles’ knuckles again. He wonders if Nigel had been one of the boys to chase Charles into the pond the night he died, if he had harbored that rage and indignation for years, and then finally found an opportunity to act on it. He remembers all too well the night Charles died, the bruises and cuts that seemed to cover him from head to toe… he wonders how many of those wounds were caused by Nigel.

He leaves those thoughts where they sit (that conversation will happen eventually, but not tonight), carefully rotating Charles’ hand to examine the newly healed wounds. He turns it to one side and then the other, and then frowns when he notices two additional scars on the outside of Charles’ wrist, just above the ulnar point. They’re perfectly symmetrical, like two small bands imprinted on his skin, flat and dark compared to the thin, pale scars across the backs of his hands. “And these?”

Charles looks down again, twisting his arm to the side just slightly. “Ah,” he says, catching sight of the marks in question. “Side of the oven. Mum tried to teach me to cook a few times when I was younger, but gave up because I kept burning myself and accidentally setting things on fire. She said I was more likely to burn down the house than boil a pot of water, so she stopped trying.”

Edwin smirks at the comment, keeping Charles’ hands cradled in his own for a few seconds longer. He tells himself it was to ensure that the salve has done its job and healed the scrapes completely (it has), but it’s also because he finds himself staring at those scars, fixated on the difference in color and texture compared to the rest of Charles’ skin.

It also has nothing to do with the fact that he finds he rather enjoys the feeling of holding Charles’ hands and tending to the scrapes on his knuckles was a remarkably effective excuse to hold onto that sensation for just a bit longer.

He also won’t admit that it feels like a physical weight when he eventually does let go.

OOOOO

Edwin doesn’t ask about the scars directly.

Not at first, at least.

It still feels like an intrusion on his part, an insensitive curiosity that places Charles under a microscope. Granted, Charles didn’t seem to mind telling him about the scars on his hands, never giving him the impression that the subject was somehow off limits, but Edwin can’t help but feel like it’s an enormous invasion of privacy by calling attention to them.

He still finds himself grimly fascinated by them, though.

He also marvels at the fact that they don’t carry the scars of their death into the afterlife.

His own death had been quick and violent, and he reasoned that, at best, his body was completely disintegrated in the process of being dragged away to Hell, which left the possibility of any lingering scars practically nonexistent.

Charles’ death, however, had been much slower, his body gradually shutting down over a span of several hours as he inevitably succumbed to his wounds.

If either of them were to bear the scars of their demise, it would undoubtedly be Charles.

Not that Edwin was in any great hurry to see those wounds again or have them as a constant reminder of Charles’ last few hours on earth. He wasn’t sure how much Charles remembered about his actual death, the trauma and injuries he sustained, leaving him weak and somewhat delirious in the damp darkness of that attic. He wondered if he remembered details or if his memories mostly just consisted of snippets of conversation and shivers and pain.

Edwin remembered it, though, in stark, horrible detail.

He remembered the way the bruises on Charles’ face and neck darkened as the night dragged on, the way his skin drained of color as he bled to death internally. He remembered the raspy wheeze of his breathing, the deep, wet cough that settled in after a few hours, the aching, full-body shivers that left Charles gasping and weak.

He remembered the awful silence when the wheezing stopped, the image of Charles' body lying cold and curled in a threadbare sheet in the dusty attic of St. Hilarions.

He’s just as glad Charles doesn’t bear those scars.

He thinks back to the scars on his hands, though, rolling the image around in his mind occasionally. He’s strangely fascinated by them because to him they represent something of a mystery, a piece of Charles he didn’t know about until then. He wonders if there are others, hidden away beneath the sleeves of his jacket or the rolled hems of his jeans.

Of course, he would never ask about them; that would be far too forward and impudent, and he would never do anything that would make Charles feel uncomfortable.

Luckily for him, Charles seems to possess an innate skill of knowing what the other boy is thinking without him saying a word. Which, as it happens, proves particularly useful in helping Edwin circumvent the circumstances of his upbringing and the bounds of propriety that had been drilled into his head from the time he was old enough to understand what the word meant.

Charles had told him early on that he was good at reading people, had a knack for knowing things they didn’t say out loud, which was immensely helpful in their line of work, but also devastatingly mortifying when he used those exact skills on Edwin.

Just such a thing happens one night when they’re returning to the office, clothing torn and filthy from tromping around in a graveyard for half the night. It’s usually easy enough to keep themselves clean seeing as how they aren’t technically corporeal and mud, blood, and other fluids tend to pass right through them with little to no resistance but when it comes to dealing with particularly restless graveyard spirits who seem intent on dragging them down into the earth with them…well, keeping mud off your shoes easily becomes the least of your worries.

The spirit hadn’t been malevolent by any means, bumbling around the graveyard like a muddy, shambling zombie. It appeared as more clay than corpse, its limbs and torso covered in thick, slimy sludge, and in the process of laying it to rest again (a nasty storm had washed out its grave and its remains were scattered into a lower portion of the cemetery), they had become completely covered in thick, viscous mud.

It clung to them in sheets, layers upon layers of cold, sticky soil, and by the time everything was said and done, they resembled the graveyard spirit in more ways than one.

It’s shortly after they arrive back at their office, wet and squelching and eager to spirit the mud away, that Edwin sees it literally.

He allows Charles to pass through the door before him, taking half a second to tap the protective sigil he’d etched onto the inside of their door for an added layer of protection (he’d spent months turning their office into nothing short of a fortress once they got the agency up and running on the off chance a disgruntled entity came searching for them) before stepping in behind him.

The other boy is a few paces ahead, glancing down at the back of his leg with a soft huff of annoyance when he sees a long, jagged tear through the lower portion of his pants. The fabric is split almost straight up the middle up to the back of his knee, and there’s really no way to pinpoint exactly when or how the tear happened.

Charles lets out a soft groan and glances back over his shoulder at Edwin. “Might need to borrow that magic thread of yours,” he mumbles as he reaches down to brush his fingers over the shredded fabric. It was a large tear, larger than what would normally mend on its own, and sometimes a little bit of spiritual needlework was in order.

Edwin nods in agreement and makes his way to the desk to pull out the spool of thread.

One of the women who worked for his father, a woman named Nora, had taught Edwin how to sew when he was a child. He was about eight at the time, recovering from a nasty summer cold that left him bedbound for about three days, when Nora came into his room with a few pieces of cloth and a spool of thread.

She told him that it would be good for him to learn a few basic stitches in case he ever needed to sew a button or mend a hem, and spent several hours with him that afternoon teaching him how to sew. At the time, Edwin thought it was a completely useless skill, petulantly grumbling to himself that boys didn’t need to know how to sew, but Nora ignored him and popped off another button from the scrap of cloth she’d given him and told him to sew it back on.

Nora was one of the few people in the house who ever bothered to spend any time with him when he was a child, and he bitterly regrets how dismissive he was toward her lessons at first. As repentance, he continued practicing what she taught him, quickly and efficiently becoming quite adept at simple sewing projects over the years.

Which came in handy considering Charles was often the one with ripped or torn clothing that needed mending by the end of a case.

He’s just finished threading the needle, setting the spool to the side so he can take a better look at the torn fabric, when he catches sight of three long scars traveling down the back of Charles’ calf. Each one stretches nearly the entire length of his leg, arching up from his ankle and ending somewhere near the outside of his knee.

These scars are different from the ones on his hands, and Edwin finds himself staring at them intently without realizing it. They’re thick and slightly rippled like they hadn’t healed properly, and the pale discoloration of the scar tissue makes them stand out in sharp contrast to the warm brown of Charles’ skin.

He’s unaware that he’s staring, mind rattling about as he tries to figure out what could have caused such deep lacerations in what was a relatively unusual location, when he hears Charles chuckle softly.

“You know, you can ask about them if you want,” he says with a smirk, catching Edwin’s eye and laughing again when the other boy looks away quickly like he’s been caught doing something scandalous. “Not like it’s some dark secret or anything.”

Edwin feels his cheeks grow warm (quite a feat considering he hasn’t had a working circulatory system in nearly a century) and straightens a bit in embarrassment. “Apologies,” he says earnestly, hands brushing over his own clothing and coming away caked in mud once more. “I didn’t mean to stare-”

“It’s fine, Eds,” Charles assures him with another easy grin. “It’s not like you walked in on me in the buff or anything.”

Again, Edwin feels his cheeks flush as that image rattles around in his mind for a moment before shaking his head once and clearing his throat. “What, erm, what happened to your leg?”

“Wire fence,” Charles replies casually, earning a sharply quirked eyebrow from Edwin in response. Realizing he should probably elaborate, Charles smirks again and turns to face Edwin fully.

“There was this old gravel pit at the end of our street,” Charles begins, leaning against the edge of the desk and crossing his arms over his chest. “Me and the other neighborhood kids used to hang out there a lot when I was growing up. The adults tried to keep us out of there, telling us it wasn’t safe and it was dangerous…you know, all the things that just make kids want to hang out there even more. Eventually, someone put up a fence thinking that would keep us out, but no one was ever there to watch it, so it was pretty easy for us to sneak in and out anytime we wanted.”

“Anyway,” Charles continues with a slight shrug. “Me and some of the lads sneak through the fence one night, and we’re just coming around a corner when these two giant guard dogs come running toward us out of nowhere. Apparently, someone decided that if the fence wasn’t going to keep us away from the pit, then two massive Rottweilers probably would.”

He laughs at the memory and shakes his head. “So obviously we’re all trying to scramble through this one narrow hole in the fence before the dogs get to us and there’s no way we’re all going to get through in time so I figure I’ll just jump over the top of the fence like one of those pole vaulters you see in track and field teams and then we’ll be homefree.”

“Except,” he says, motioning toward the long, deep cuts to the back of his leg. “I didn’t quite make it all the way over, as you can see. I caught my leg on a couple of the metal links on the way down and ripped my calf open in the process. Probably should have gotten stitches to be honest, but then I’d have to tell my mum what happened and get grounded in the process, so I just wrapped them up and let them heal on their own.”

“And I assume the threat of blood poisoning never crossed your mind.”

“I was fourteen.”

“What an alarmingly nonchalant answer.”

Charles smirks faintly and shakes his head. “Calculated risk,” he replies casually, pushing off from the edge of the desk and trying to brush away the muddy streak he leaves behind in his wake. “Trust me, the fallout at home would have been much worse to deal with, so it was easier just to wrap it up and hope for the best.”

Edwin doesn’t respond right away, doing his best to keep his expression carefully neutral as he listens to Charles speak, but there’s something about that last statement, something about the almost imperceptible tightening of Charles’ voice when he talks about his homelife that’s difficult to ignore.

It’s something that’s been needling away at Edwin for months now.

As a child, he had always been gifted at picking up on patterns, his attention drawn to the minute details and similarities that made up the world around him. Patterns gave things structure and stability, and for Edwin, they brought balance into a world that was frequently chaotic and difficult to understand.

With his mother gone and his father barely able to tolerate more than five minutes alone with him at a time, he found himself spending long, contemplative hours wandering the halls of his childhood home and making mental notes of the patterns that existed even in the most mundane of settings.

He was fascinated with the notches in the floorboards, the birdseye markings that seemed to peer up at him each time he stepped over one, the dark creases of the wood where the planks were cut into even lengths. He learned how to tell who was walking down the hall at any given moment just by the sound of their footsteps on those floorboards and the specific shift and tug each board made beneath their feet.

While other boys his age were still learning basic arithmetic, Edwin was learning about Fibonacci sequences, applying the fabled Golden Ratio to everything from the petals of flowers to musical sequences. The aspects of sacred geometry fascinated him because he found that if he could detect the series, see the pattern in the composition of things, then he could make sense of it.

It wasn’t just physical patterns that he picked up on, either; he learned to identify patterns of speech and patterns of behavior just as quickly. He knew his mother was leaving for America two full weeks before she walked out the door, just by her tone of voice. He knew that his father would never come to retrieve him from St. Hilarions by the composed rigidity of his posture when he sent Edwin away and never watched him leave.

Edwin is good at picking up on patterns; it’s a skill he’s mastered and refined from decades of practice, which is why he’s keenly aware of a pattern in Charles’ behavior when it comes to discussing his childhood.

It was small things at first, like the fact that it took him well over a month to mention anything about his family in the aftermath of his death.

Neither of them had much experience in dealing with other ghosts yet (Charles, especially, since he was very recently dead himself), but the few they had encountered always expressed concern for the loved ones they were leaving behind. There were fears, regrets, words left unsaid, and promises that would never be fulfilled; it was only natural, only human, to worry about the ones who had to remain in the aftermath.

Which is why Edwin found it slightly unusual that in the weeks after his death, Charles never mentioned his family. At first, Edwin thought it might have something to do with the fact that Charles hadn’t entirely accepted his death yet, that the reality of his situation was still a deep shadow that lingered in the precipice of his mind and hadn’t managed to engulf him just yet. He figured it would simply be a matter of time, a few more weeks, possibly a month or so, before the finality of it all sank in and he understood, intrinsically, that he was actually dead.

But that assumption changed once Edwin began noticing a pattern in Charles’ behavior whenever the subject of his family came up. It had nothing to do with a delayed acceptance of his own demise and everything to do with the fact that he actively avoided the subject as much as possible. When the topic of his family or his childhood came up in casual conversation, there was always a way for him to change the subject, craftily avoiding any intrusive questions and keeping his responses as casual and objective as possible.

Anyone else may have missed it, chalking up the easy shift in topics to the fact that Charles was a whirlwind of energy and activity at all times and that his bounce from one conversation to the next was just an endearing part of his character.

But Edwin sees right through it.

Spending every single day with the same person tends to make you more observant of their mannerisms, their characteristics, the things that make them who they are, and Edwin has spent more than enough time with Charles by now to know that he’s not just changing the subject, he’s avoiding it altogether.

He has his suspicions, of course, the sharp little needles of realization and understanding that prickle through his mind each time it occurs. But he hasn’t quite figured out how to breach the subject without scaring Charles away entirely. There is a reason Charles avoids the subject of his family, but there is also a reason why he hasn’t told Edwin about it, and that alone is enough to give him pause.

Charles has been an open book since the night they met, willingly and easily telling him anything and everything he wanted to know, so the fact that he keeps that particular subject tucked away, the fact that he doesn’t offer up that information as willingly as the rest, Edwin feels like he owes it to him to keep that part private and to himself.

It was exceptionally rare for Charles to keep much of anything to himself (one of their clients described it as a perpetual case of word vomit which, while a repulsive image, was remarkably apt) so when he did decide to keep some things back, when he did everything he could to change the subject and not discuss his family in any greater detail than he had to, Edwin felt he was really in no position to pry.

The issue still concerns him, though, as do the possible implications behind Charles’ continued avoidance of the topic, but Edwin knows that he just needs to be patient and allow Charles to bring it up on his own if and when he’s ready.

He’s so lost in his thoughts that he hasn’t realized the subject has already switched again, and now Charles is grinning and telling him about how they spent the rest of the summer trying to befriend the dogs (to no avail, unfortunately) and how the gravel pit was eventually leveled out and, ironically, replaced with a dog park.

His enthusiasm is infectious, and within a few moments, Edwin finds himself smiling faintly to himself as he takes the spool of thread from the corner of the desk and drags over a chair for Charles to prop his leg on so Edwin can mend the tear in his pants leg.

He stares at the long, deep scars for a second longer and nearly allows his fingertips to brush over them before he comes to his senses. Swallowing once, he grips the needle between his fingers and begins pulling the torn fabric back together with careful precision.

The scars disappear behind a careful line of stitches, but the image of them lingers in his mind long after.

OOOOO

It becomes an exchange of sorts after that, a trade of information each time a new scar is discovered. Edwin tells himself he’s not actively seeking them out, that he stumbles across them organically and without any kind of forethought, but he can’t deny the swell of curiosity that fills him each time he catches sight of a new scar.

He still hesitates when asking about them, though, worried about crossing the invisible lines of their friendship and overstepping a boundary by mistake, but Charles never seems to mind. He speaks freely and openly about most of them, offering up an explanation behind each scar that inevitably fills in the narrowing gaps in the ever-widening space that Charles takes up in Edwin’s mind.

Most of the time, it happens in the aftermath of a case, when they stumble back into the office with ripped clothing and exposed skin.

It’s in those moments that Edwin sees the telltale scars of skinned knees and scraped elbows, indicative of playground tumbles and tripping on sidewalks. Charles’ left knee is ever so slightly darker than his right, a clear sign that that knee has taken the brunt a little more than the other, the scar tissue melding into something more similar to a callus than an actual scar.

“Battle wounds from the cricket field,” Charles tells him with a grin, tapping the wad of scar tissue on his left knee with one finger. “Couldn’t feel a thing on this knee after a while, it was like the whole thing was just numb.”

“I believe that implies nerve damage…”

“Or, it means one knee is invincible. I’m like a reverse Achilles.”

“Which would, in turn, leave the other 99% of you vulnerable.”

“Killjoy…”

Other scars are the result of childhood misadventures, serving as permanent reminders of the various mishaps and accidents that occur while growing up.

There’s a long, shallow scar that runs up the length of his right shin, parallel to the tibia, from where he fell out of a tree while trying (unsuccessfully) to rescue a neighbor’s cat, as well as three jagged slices across the top and side of his forearm from the aforementioned cat who definitely did not want to be “rescued” that day and protested as much with a swipe of its claws.

There’s also the deep, swooping scar that travels along the meaty part of Charles’ hand just below his left thumb, courtesy of trying to catch a kitchen knife from falling off the counter.

“Why didn’t you just let it fall?” Edwin asks, frowning mildly when Charles tells him about it.

“I thought I could catch it.”

“And I would say that scar proves otherwise.”

“Oh no, forty-three stitches proves otherwise,” Charles counters easily with a smirk. “I caught the knife; the scar is just a reminder. Trust me, taking a butcher knife through the hand taught me more about gravity and physics in thirty seconds than any science textbook ever could.”

Still, some of the scars are the result of nothing more than just straight-up childhood stupidity.

One in particular is a dark, rippled patch of scar tissue at the top of Charles’ left shoulder, a second-degree burn left over from a New Year’s Eve block party when he was seven. Charles doesn’t remember the exact details of what happened, only that at some point in the evening, he and some of the other boys from the neighborhood were chasing each other with Roman Candles and cherry bombs.

The complete lack of adult supervision went without saying.

Again, Charles couldn’t remember exactly what happened, only that one minute he was running and the next the sleeve of his shirt was on fire and he was being tackled into a neighbor’s yard while someone smothered the fire with a damp towel. The fabric had fused itself to his skin in the process, and he ended up spending the rest of the night in the pediatric burn ward of a nearby hospital after being unintentionally branded by a Roman Candle.

True, it wasn’t the most glamorous of backstories, but the scar it left behind made for an interesting anecdote if nothing else.

“Pretty gross, right?” Charles asks as Edwin very carefully brushes his fingers over the corded edges of the scar. “It was just one huge blister for a couple of days, kinda looked like a big water balloon, you know?”

Edwin doesn’t answer right away, carefully tracing the outline of the scar with gentle fingers. It’s pretty significant, the scar stretching out over the rounded curve of Charles’ shoulder and dipping back a little behind his arm. The scar tissue is glossy and smooth beneath his fingertips, the texture almost waxy, and he keeps his movements cautious and slow.

It was the first time he allowed himself to touch one of the scars after seeing it, the first time he’s been bold enough to reach out on his own.

He doesn’t count the scars on the backs of Charles’ hands. He's become familiar with the pale stretches of scar tissue that pull tight over the bony points of his knuckles, the distinctive star-shaped patterns that mark each one. Since Charles tends to be much more “hands-on” when it comes to solving their cases, his hands are what usually take the brunt of the damage, so that’s usually what Edwin ends up patching up in the aftermath of a case.

The scar on his shoulder, though, the remnants of that burn, is the first one Edwin dares to touch on his own. It doesn’t feel as personal as some of the other scars; its location is less intrusive and more accessible in some way. Edwin tries to make sense of that thought process for only a few seconds before he gives up and reaches out to touch it with careful fingers.

“Not at all,” he replies easily in response to Charles’ earlier comment, letting the pad of his thumb drag over the thick, rippled tissue lightly. “It’s nothing more than a collection of fibrous tissue that occurs when an injury is healing; I see no reason to find it ‘gross.’”

“Hmm,” Charles hums mildly in response, shrugging slightly but trying to keep the movement small and smooth since Edwin was still actively examining the scar like he was about to write an essay about it.

He looks down at the long scars on his forearm from his cat misadventure, rotating his arm slightly as he examines them. “Some people just get freaked out by scars, I guess. It creeps them out, makes them think of Frankenstein or something.”

Edwin smiles faintly and shakes his head. “Well, I can assure you that I think nothing of the sort. I just find them…interesting. That’s all.”

Charles just laughs in response. “Whatever makes you happy, Eds.”

The truth is, he’s mildly fascinated with them.

Each scar is like a physical snapshot, a glimpse into the life Charles lived before he was murdered, his place in the world before that night in the attic. They weave together into a complex tapestry, long and yet devastatingly short at the same time, sixteen years' worth of scrapes and scuffs and cuts and breaks that should have been at least sixty years longer.

They represent bravery and failure, reckless abandon and painful consequences, the marks that remain from life lessons that became permanent. They make up everything Charles was before, everything he is today, as intrinsically linked to him as his cricket bat, and because of that, Edwin treats them as if they’re sacred.

The scars may have left a physical mark, but the stories behind them bear physical weight, and with that, Edwin treats his words like gospel.

He commits pieces of Charles to his memory daily, filing them away in his mind carefully. His actions, his thoughts, his words, all of them serve as snippets of the life he led before he died, lost pages filled in from the story of Charles’ life, and every time he speaks, it's like another piece of the puzzle falling into place.

And Edwin…

Edwin is just happy to learn as much as Charles is willing to tell him.

“Hey, you wanna see the big ugly scar on my foot from my Gran’s fruitbowl?”

Surprisingly, Edwin does.

OOOOO

There have only ever been two cases where Edwin strongly considered turning down a client.

Not because the case was complex or outside the realm of their expertise (Edwin likes to think they’re rather adept in dealing with all things supernatural at this point), but out of concern for how they might affect Charles.

He’s come to realize over the years that not all of Charles’ scars are physical; some he harbors deep within his mind, keeping them locked away and out of sight as much as possible.

It’s a collection of little things, really; small mannerisms, subdued reactions, carefully practiced expressions. It’s the way his jaw tightens ever so slightly when specific topics come up, the way his knuckles go white when he grips the handle of his bat, the quiet rattle and jingle of the buttons on his jacket when he bounces his knee with barely suppressed nervous energy.

Charles hides it well, but Edwin has devoted a significant portion of his afterlife to keeping an eye on Charles, so he sees it even if Charles thinks he doesn’t.

It doesn’t happen very often, luckily, and Edwin is usually able to gauge whether or not a case will have a negative impact on Charles’ psyche before the night is out. Years of experience have left them both better able to cope with the vast spectrum of spirits and spirit behavior they may encounter on the job, but Edwin hates leaving anything up to chance and resolves to take more stringent matters into his own hands.

He tries to be as thorough in his research as he can when they take on a new client, reading through every single detail multiple times for any hint of something that could affect his partner. Charles would probably tell him to knock it off if he ever found out about it, which is precisely why Edwin doesn’t tell him and instead makes a mental list of things that could potentially be mentally or emotionally harmful to Charles’ well-being.

Some things are more evident than others, and the reaction more understandable. He doesn’t question Charles’ reaction toward bullies, for instance; given his history and the circumstances of his death, his reactions are understandable, even expected in some regards.

One of their earliest cases involved releasing the spirit of a fourteen-year-old boy who fell from the roof of his school. Officially, his death was ruled an accident, but soon there was gossip throughout the school that he’d been chased up to the roof and had either fallen to his death or had been pushed.

For many, that seemed to be the most logical explanation.

The boy had a long history with bullies and countless meetings with parents, meetings with school officials, and threats of suspension, but they never had any effect. There were rumors that he’d been lured to the school by some of his former classmates on the night he died, and when his body was found on the sidewalk the next morning, that gossip spread like wildfire.

A memorial was set up in his honor, and the school promised to crack down on bullying, but it didn’t change the fact that the boy’s spirit continued to haunt the school after that, forced to relive his death over and over each night.

Cyclic hauntings are generally some of the easiest to deal with because they become a fixed point; the haunting occurs at the same time, on the same day, at the exact location over and over, like an image being replayed on a screen. Occasionally, spirits become locked into a specific action, whether that’s reliving their deaths, reliving an argument, or sometimes simply repeating an action they had done time and again when they were still alive.

It makes their job easier in a way because it allows them to locate their target with little effort, but it also makes them bear witness to the tragedy as it happens.

Such as watching a boy plummet to his death night after night.

Charles is unusually quiet that evening as they make their way to the school, Edwin watching him carefully from the corner of his eye as they walk.

Their client, the boy’s grandmother, was the one to approach them with the request to help release his spirit from the school. She claimed she dreamt about him every night, watched as his death played out over and over, and, after her own passing, all she wanted was to ensure her grandson could be at peace as well.

As much as he wanted to help her, though, Edwin strongly considered turning her down as gently as he could.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t sympathetic to the boy’s plight or his grandmother’s pleas, but he was very concerned about how it might affect Charles. It had only been a few years since Charles’ death, a victim of bullying himself, and Edwin worried that the case might be too much for him, that it might be too similar to his own death.

It wasn’t fair to put him in that position, and to be honest, Edwin doesn’t even want to accept the job because of what it might do to Charles, but in the end, he doesn’t need to do anything because Charles accepts the job on behalf of both of them.

Their client was relieved, Charles was determined, and Edwin was worried.

He doesn’t say anything until they reach the school, glancing at the clock tower briefly to check the time. The boy, Matthew, fell from the roof at exactly 10:28 pm, which meant they had just under ten minutes to get everything set up before the cycle began. Edwin has the spell marked already; all he needs to do is sketch the corresponding symbols onto the ground to disrupt the cycle, and Matthew will be released, but he finds himself watching Charles closely as the time draws near.

“Charles,” he says quietly, catching the other boy’s eye as he speaks. “I’ll understand if you would prefer me to do this on my own-”

“It’s fine, Eds,” Charles answers just a little too quickly, offering a short, thin smile in response. “Just make sure everything is ready; I’m going up to the roof and see if I can find Matthew.”

And with that, he turns and walks through the doors of the school, leaving Edwin to take care of the rest.

Edwin busies himself with sketching the proper symbols onto the pavement, lining them up accordingly so the cycle will be broken once and for all. If all goes according to plan, Matthew’s spirit will no longer be tethered to the school and he’ll be able to move on to whatever afterlife awaits him.

He pauses briefly after completing the final symbol, hand hovering a few inches above the pavement as his mind drifts to Charles again. He wonders if the night air felt like this the night he died, if the climb up the stairs reminds him of his labored crawl up into the attic of St. Hilarions.

He wonders if Charles sees himself in Matthew, if releasing him helps release something from his own soul.

Charles had the chance to move on after he died, to go off into his promised afterlife, but he chose to stay instead. Edwin wonders if maybe, deep down, this is Charles’ way of confronting that decision again and wondering whether or not he’d make the same choice.

He hears voices overhead and looks up to see Charles standing on the edge of the roof next to the pale, shimmery image of a boy a little younger than them. He can’t make out the boy’s features that well from where he’s standing, but he can see the anguish in his expression, the streaks of tears down his face, the utter hopelessness literally bleeding off of him.

It hits like a gut punch.

Edwin watches silently as Charles speaks to Matthew, his words too muffled and distant to hear clearly, but in some ways, Edwin gets the feeling that he’s not meant to hear it. Whatever Charles is saying, whatever he’s telling him, maybe it’s just for Matthew to hear.

Maybe it’s just for the two of them.

He doesn’t have much time to dwell on it, though, because the next thing he sees is Charles taking Matthew by the hand and the two of them stepping off the edge of the roof together.

Edwin flinches involuntarily, the air seizing in his lungs for the fraction of time it takes him to remember that they’re both already dead and can’t be injured by the fall, and then they’re landing in the middle of the symbols Edwin had etched onto the concrete. The symbols activate as expected, and there’s a dull ‘whoosh’ that ripples through the air like a shockwave as the cycle is severed.

On the ground, Matthew looks mildly stunned.

He’s thin and lanky with large, round glasses and a mop of curly, reddish hair that pokes out in all directions like he’s just wandered through a windstorm. He glances between Charles and himself and then Edwin, his hands patting at his torso and legs like he’s trying to confirm all of him is in one piece.

“I’m on the ground,” he says quietly, almost in disbelief. “Usually I end up right back up on the roof…”

Edwin smiles softly and tucks his spellbook under one arm. “We were able to break the cycle,” he tells him simply, walking over to stand next to Charles. “You should be able to move on from here.”

“Move on?” Matthew asks, a look of confusion crossing his face. “Move on where? What happens now?”

“Well now,” Charles says, clapping a hand on his shoulder and offering him a bright grin. “You get to go on to your afterlife. It’ll be aces, mate, you’ll never have to think about this place again.”

Edwin hears the clipped edge in Charles’ voice but says nothing. “Death will be arriving shortly; she will escort you to the next world.”

“Death?” Matthew repeats, eyes widening just a little. “You mean, like, ‘Death’ Death?”

Charles laughs and nods. “Same one,” he says, jostling Matthew’s shoulder lightly. “But don’t worry, she’s not like the Grim Reaper carrying a scythe or anything; she’s nice, you’ll like her.”

“I will?” Matthew asks, still looking somewhat horrified at the prospect of meeting Death.

Edwin offers him a reassuring smile. “There is no reason to be afraid; think of her as a guide leading you to your next destination.”

A soft blue glow radiates from the shadows of the hallways inside the school, an indicator that Death would be arriving soon. Edwin shares a brief glance with Charles and takes a step back, nodding for the other boy to follow. In spite of their reassurances to Matthew, they can’t run the risk of being captured by Death; she’ll be compelled to bring them to the Lost Souls Department, and they could be separated forever.

Edwin won’t let that happen.

Charles hesitates for just a moment, watching as the glow grows brighter and closer. He turns and looks back at Matthew, crouching just slightly so he’s in the other boy’s line of sight. “You’re gonna move on from here, alright?” he tells him quietly, and there’s a hint of something in his voice when he speaks. Longing? Regret? Hope? Edwin isn’t sure, but he knows it’s there. “You’re gonna move on and forget all about this place and everything that happened here.”

Matthew nods shakily before throwing his arms around Charles and holding on tight for a few seconds. Charles hugs him back tightly, thumping him on the back lightly before pulling away and running to join Edwin at the edge of the building.

The blue glow grows even brighter, and then, all at once, Death is standing in front of Matthew where Charles had been only a few seconds before. She speaks to him quietly, her dark eyes warm, and then she reaches out one arm, wraps it around Matthew’s shoulders gently, and they both disappear into a cerulean glow.

The walk back to the office is quiet after that, the events of the evening leaving them both lost in their own thoughts. They never find out what happened to Matthew, if he was pushed, if he fell, if he jumped intentionally; in the end it doesn't really matter as long as he's at peace now. There’s nothing more to say that can’t be said later, so for now they walk in silence.

The first bruises appear by the time they reach the end of the block, dark purple splotches forming on the backs of Charles’ hands, his face, his neck. Charles says nothing about them, pulling his sleeves down a little further to conceal them in a gesture that seems just a little too familiar for Edwin’s liking.

The scrapes appear next, mostly along his hands and forearms.

Defensive wounds, Edwin remembers, although he wishes they didn’t have to.

The coughing begins just before they reach their block, a single, hoarse cough ripping its way out of Charles’ throat as they clear the crosswalk leading to their building. It’s low and deep, a wet, rough sound like water and sand settled in his lungs. He coughs again but keeps walking, arms crossed tightly in front of his chest like he’s suddenly freezing.

By the time they make it to their building, Charles is limping, left foot dragging ever so slightly as he walks.

By the time they make it to their door, Edwin has Charles’ arm slung across his shoulders, and he’s practically dragging/carrying him across the threshold.

He guides them over to the couch and carefully deposits Charles onto the well-worn cushions. To be perfectly honest, he has no idea where the piece of furniture even came from, only that it was here in the office when they moved in. It had more than served its purpose though, helpfully stepping in for all post-case patchups.

Edwin steps away just long enough to grab a thick crocheted blanket (payment from one of their clients) from the closet before returning to the couch where Charles is sitting.

It’s not the first time he’s seen Charles experience a Death Echo, but it’s the first time it’s happened in a few years. Back at the beginning, right after he died, Charles had a difficult time maintaining his physical appearance when his emotions got the better of him, and for someone as bright and vibrant as Charles, it tended to happen with relative frequency.

Emotions often play a significant role in spiritual behavior and appearance, and Edwin learned early on that most ghosts will revert back to how they appeared at their time of death when they become angry or upset. It becomes a form of temporal slippage in a way; for some, it's as simple as reverting back to the clothes they were wearing when they died, for others, they appear gaunt and lean, their bodies withered from disease or age.

For Charles, it always mirrors the night he died: bruised, battered, and coughing up pond water.

It took about a year and a half for Charles to get used to his new form and the mechanics of maintaining his appearance from one moment to the next. It took practice and patience, but eventually he was able to keep his physical form without having to actively think about it.

He still struggles with it from time to time, especially when he’s angry, but it’s not something Edwin would ever fault him for. The bruises serve as a Litmus test for knowing when a case or a conversation has become a bit too personal, gradually manifesting themselves as physical reminders of relived wounds.

It hasn't happened in several years, though, so to see the bruises now on full display across Charles’ skin, Edwin knows the case has hit just a little too close to home.

Charles is shivering on the couch by the time he gets back over to him, his skin damp and dark curls dripping with pond water, and Edwin drops to his knees in front of him, draping the blanket across his shoulders and rubbing his hands up and down the other boy’s arms in an effort to drive away a nonexistent chill.

As much as he would like to believe Charles isn’t actually experiencing the same pain and cold and fear he had the night he died, he doesn’t delude himself into thinking that’s the truth. Charles is shivering and coughing, and there are dark, ugly bruises all over his body, and he looks so much like the weak, dying boy Edwin encountered in the attic that night that it makes something in his chest clench.

“I couldn’t let him do it,” Charles blurts suddenly, his teeth chattering so hard the words are difficult to make out.

“Couldn’t let him do what, Charles?” Edwin asks, not really focused on the question so much as he is trying to drive away the chill that’s currently racking his partner’s body. He remembers feeling this helpless in the attic, watching as the other boy grew weaker and faded away hour by hour, while he could do nothing but watch.

He hates that feeling.

“I couldn’t let him fall by himself,” Charles says, smothering a cough behind his hand. It’s a wet, ugly sound, and Edwin flinches slightly at the way it seems to pull its way out of Charles. “He was so scared, Eds, and he was so lost and alone, and I just couldn’t…I couldn’t…” Charles breaks off into another deep coughing fit, hunching over onto his knees and coughing sharply into his hands.

Edwin rubs his back gently, whispering soft words of reassurance until the coughing fit fades. “Shh, it’s alright, you don’t need to explain anything.”

Charles shakes his head weakly. “I told him,” he begins, swallowing back another cough before he can continue. “I told him that when he fell, I would go with him. I told him he didn’t have to do it alone anymore.”

He coughs again, not as deeply this time, but still ragged and hoarse. “He just didn't want to die alone again.”

Again, Edwin feels something tight and sharp settle in his chest. He understands the feeling all too well, the desire to do something, anything, even when there is absolutely nothing that can be done. He remembers feeling the same thing when he came across Charles in the attic, bleeding, cold, dying, and knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it. He remembers the helplessness mixed with frustration and grief that this poor, innocent boy was fading away cold and alone, and forgotten, and no one would even know until it was too late.

He couldn’t do anything for Charles at that time, didn’t even know him to be honest, but he could stay with him until he passed. He could offer some small measure of comfort with his presence, speak to him quietly as the hours passed, as his body grew weaker.

He could make sure he didn’t die alone.

He knows perfectly well how Charles felt tonight on the roof with Matthew.

“You did very well tonight, Charles,” Edwin tells him, squeezing his shoulder gently as he speaks. “Don't doubt that for a moment. What you did for Matthew was very brave, and you helped bring him some comfort in the end; I think that was the best thing you could have done for him. I can only imagine how difficult this case was for you, but you handled it admirably, and Matthew’s spirit was able to move on thanks to you.”

Charles laughs softly and coughs into the crook of his arm once more. The shivering is beginning to lessen slightly, the rapid chatter of his teeth dying down into a small, occasional tremor. The bruises on his face and the backs of his hands are beginning to fade as well, deep blues and purples dissolving into browns and yellows as the minutes tick by.

It takes another ten minutes for all the bruises to fade away entirely, the deeper cuts and scrapes lingering the longest before slowly disappearing and leaving unmarked skin behind. Charles no longer looks as wretched and miserable as he had when they first arrived back at the office, but he does look tired, like the weight of the night has finally crashed down on top of him.

Edwin isn’t surprised, to be honest; between the memories and emotions brought up by their case and then having to work his way through a Death Echo, he’s not at all surprised that Charles looks utterly exhausted by the time the last of the bruises fade.

It’s moments like these where Edwin allows some of Charles’ more tactile tendencies to rub off on him. He’s never really enjoyed being touched; he finds it’s often excessive and unnecessary, but Charles is the complete opposite. Charles is naturally affectionate, and he craves touch and physical closeness like a drowning man craves oxygen, and, despite his initial aversion to it, Edwin finds himself allowing moments of physical contact more and more often because there are times when Charles just needs someone to hang onto.

Like now.

Edwin curls both of Charles’ hands into his own, clasping them tightly as the very last of the shivers ripple through him. The blanket is still draped across his shoulders, the heavy weave slipping just a bit to one side but Edwin is the only one who seems to notice. He knows the blanket isn’t actually doing anything to drive away the cold, but he keeps it wrapped around Charles all the same.

“You think he’s going to be alright?” Charles asks softly after a few minutes have passed, looking up just a bit to meet Edwin’s eyes.

Edwin nods once in response, squeezing Charles’ hands warmly in reassurance.

“I do,” he replies after a minute, resting his lips on their clasped hands for a brief moment. “I think he’s going to be just fine, thanks to you.”

Charles doesn’t say anything in response, but Edwin feels him relax a bit more into the couch as if the answer lifted off a weight neither of them realized he’d been carrying. Edwin keeps his hands wrapped around Charles’ for a while longer, holding onto him as the last of the bruises fade away into nothingness and the memories fade along with them.

OOOOO

The second time it happens is in the latter half of 2016 when they’re called in to aid in yet another spiritual release. Their client, a Mrs. Worsham, appears in their office one morning, her body thin and frail with age. She’d passed away peacefully in her sleep a few days before, but felt she could not move on until she had enlisted their services to help her with a “personal matter.”

“My husband is buried beneath the rose hedge in front of my house,” she tells them simply, her expression never wavering even as both Charles and Edwin stare at her in shock. She looks like the quintessential grandmother, her short white hair floating like a cloud on top of her head while her thin, bony hands sit folded neatly in her lap. She straightens a crease in her skirt absently and looks back up at them with a neutral expression.

“He was a brute of a man,” she continues calmly, the slightest hint of a frown tugging at her mouth when she speaks. “Always yelling and cursing and breaking things around the house. I tried to leave him several times, but he always found me, always managed to drag me back home.”

She sighs and shakes her head slowly. “I burned the coffee one morning,” she says, her gaze going a little distant like she’s lost in thought. “Too many things happening at once, trying to get the children ready for school, trying to get breakfast ready for him, I wasn’t paying attention…”

Mrs. Worsham straightens slightly, her posture tightening. “He beat me half to death in that kitchen that morning, tried to drown me in the kitchen sink where I was washing dishes. The children were hiding under the table, and I worried he might go after them once he got through with me, so I grabbed the closest thing I could and swung it at him.”

She chuckles quietly, but the sound is thin and humorless. “One thing they never told us housewives is that a cast-iron skillet makes a decent enough weapon in a pinch. He was dead before he ever hit the ground.”

A heavy silence settles in the room as the gravity of her words sinks in. Of all the various cases and clients they’ve dealt with over the past several years, there were still moments that managed to surprise them, and this happened to be one of them.

“The children were so young at the time,” Mrs. Worsham continues after a moment. “Eleanor was only five, and Jack had just turned three, so I don’t know how much they remember of the ‘accident.’ My sister wanted to take me to the hospital, but I made her take the children instead; after she left, she sent my brother-in-law and a few of his friends to help me…dispose of everything, as it were. The skillet, the bloody towels, Harold, all of it went into the flowerbed.”

She smiles sadly at them before continuing. “I wish to be clear: I do not regret my actions, nor do I regret the outcome; I’m sure I will face judgment by a higher power for what I have done, but I am certain that he would have killed me and my children that day if I hadn’t stopped him. My brother-in-law made me swear to never tell anyone about the flowerbed and to begin living the lie that Harold had simply walked out one day and never returned.”

She smiles again and refolds her hands in her lap. “Life was much quieter after he was gone.”

“If I may ask, Mrs. Worsham,” Edwin says after a moment, once he manages to think clearly again. “What exactly do you need from us?”

It’s a question he’s been grappling with since the moment she told them about her husband; if he was already dead and gone, then why would she need to hire two detectives? He doubts she came all this way just to issue her confession, but if that wasn’t it, then what was the purpose of her visit?

“I want you to release his spirit from the house,” she tells them, sitting back in the chair and leveling her gaze at them. “The house was purchased by a rental company based out of Watford; I’m sure they’ll renovate it and turn it into a starter home for a young couple or a few university students. I am not concerned that they will find his remains; the roses are healthy and well-established, so there will be no need to dig up the flowerbeds. I do, however, want his spirit released so he doesn’t frighten a new tenant.”

She tells them about how she knew his spirit was still attached to the house because he continued terrorizing her even in death. Slamming doors, broken light bulbs, shadows on the wall; he made sure she was aware of his presence right up until the day she was forced to move into a nursing home. She knew he was still there, though, and she was sure that he would continue his reign of terror with any new occupant unless he was forcefully removed.

“Where he will go from there is none of my concern, either,” she continues, her expression becoming slightly more resolved. “He will face judgment for his actions just as I must.”

Edwin says nothing for a moment, trying to find the best way to (politely yet firmly) turn her down and reject the case altogether. He’d been watching Charles from the corner of his eye while Mrs. Worsham spoke and noted the tightening of his jaw and the way the knuckles on the back of his hand went white as he gripped the back of the chair.

Over the years, he’d begun developing something of a theory regarding Charles’ guarded reactions toward discussing his family and his upbringing. He has no way of confirming this theory, of course (that would require asking Charles directly, and since that’s never been a topic he enjoys discussing, a theory is all it remains), but it’s one he’s more or less settled on when it comes to explaining some of the more veiled and obscure aspects of Charles’ past.

Based on the bits and pieces he’s managed to gather from their time together, he suspects that Charles’ father had been quite violent toward his mother, with young Charles being the unfortunate witness to all of the physical, mental, and verbal abuse that was directed at her. It would explain why he shies away from discussing his childhood, why he flinches involuntarily when doors are slammed, why he goes stiff and still occasionally when male voices are raised.

Charles never discusses it, not in any way that confirms or denies Edwin’s theories, and for the most part, Edwin is content to let it be; Charles’ business regarding his family relationships is his own, and regardless of their closeness, Edwin is not going to pry into something that personal without Charles’ permission.

It does become an issue, however, in moments like this, where he knows the case will be difficult and its impact on Charles will be profound, so the notion of accepting it at all is not even worth considering.

The trouble is, he doesn’t know how to turn the case down without calling attention to his concern for his partner’s mental well-being.

“We’ll be happy to help, ma’am,” Charles tells her with a smile just as Edwin opens his mouth to tell her no. He shoots a look at Charles, and if the other boy sees it, he very casually ignores it. “We’ll get him sent on his way before the new paint is even dry.”

Mrs. Worsham beams at him and allows Charles to help her up and guide her to the door, all while Edwin is still grappling with how to recant their offer to help and reject the case with extreme prejudice. Neither of them seems to notice Edwin working his way through an ethical crisis behind them, however, and Charles assures their newly acquired client that they’ll handle everything as quickly and professionally as possible.

She thanks him again, Charles closes the door, and then Edwin spends the next six hours trying to talk him out of working the case.

He tries telling him that they have too many other jobs lined up (which was not true, this was the first case they’ve had in about two weeks), he tries arguing that the case might require a spiritual specialist (again, not true especially considering a “spiritual specialist” is an occupation Edwin made up on the fly), before finally insisting that if they were going to take on the case then Edwin was going to do it by himself and Charles was to go nowhere near that house or it’s resident ghost (a suggestion which Charles promptly laughed at and ignored).

Edwin is right in the middle of working on another long, long list of reasons why they should not have taken on this particular case, when Charles grabs him by the shoulders, holds him in place, looks him straight in the eye, and says, “Eds, listen to me, I’m fine. The case will be fine. The releasing spell will be fine. Everything will be fine.”

“I am not concerned about the logistics of the case, Charles,” Edwin tells him simply, meeting the other boy’s gaze with as much earnestness as he can. “I’m concerned about you.”

For a very brief moment, it looks like Charles might try to brush away Edwin’s concerns, to wave them off with a smile and a joke and glide through the rest of the conversation like everything is fine.

But he doesn’t do that; instead, he takes a slow breath and nods before squeezing Edwin’s shoulders gently.

“I know, mate,” he says quietly, straightening his shoulders just a little like he’s trying to physically push away some of his own memories. “And I appreciate your concern, I do, but…” he sighs and shakes his head slowly. “We can’t go around turning down cases just for my sake.”

Edwin sees no problem with that (he’d happily turn down one hundred cases if it meant keeping Charles safe), but he also understands his point. If they started becoming selective with their cases and turning down clients (even if it was for a good reason), word would get around, and the agency would suffer as a result. They’d built up quite a reputation for themselves over the years, and to have it all come crashing down was something neither of them really wanted to think about.

He also wonders if this case was similar to Matthew’s in that it allowed Charles to confront long-buried trauma from a detached, somewhat objective standpoint. It wouldn’t heal his own wounds, Edwin knew that much, but maybe it could help them fade just slightly, ease the sting, and quiet the ache.

Maybe Charles needed this case even if he wouldn’t tell Edwin why.

Edwin still doesn’t like it (hates it, in fact), but he finally relents.

“Fine,” he says reluctantly, every atom in his body screaming at him to say no instead. “But we don’t spend a second longer in that house than necessary, and we leave when I say we leave, understand?”

Charles smiles then, only slightly triumphant, and nods. “Understood.”

Edwin doesn’t argue further after that, but he can’t ignore the pulling pit in his stomach as they begin their preparations for the case.

They reach the house a little after 8:30 that evening, the street dark and mostly deserted. Much of the street had been purchased by the rental company, and many of the houses were slated for renovations and then new tenants in a few months. It was a nice residential area, close to a few schools and some nearby shops, and for a young couple or family, it would be a charming place to settle down.

The address Mrs. Worsham had given them led to a small, plain brick house with several lush rose hedges lining the walkway. Just as Mrs. Worsham had said, the roses look healthy and vibrant, and it’s clear that someone has been taking care of the small front yard and the sidewalk. All together it looks exactly like something that could be found in a home decor magazine with tips and ideas on how to create that perfect cottage feel without breaking the bank.

They walk straight through the front door and end up in a narrow hallway that branches out into a small living room to the left and a small dining room to the right. The kitchen is attached to the dining room through a sliding door, and another door opens up on the other side of the kitchen, which then leads back into the hallway.

There are still a few bits and pieces of furniture laid out around the house, a welcome mat just on the inside of the door, and a small table set up in the kitchen. Mrs. Worsham had told them her children had already gone through the house and taken the personal belongings they wanted to keep, but left the rest to be donated to local resale shops after their mother’s passing.

It’s unclear if the rental company that purchased the home was leaving it somewhat staged for property photos or if they just hadn’t gotten around to removing the remaining furniture and belongings yet, but either way, the lingering furniture gave the house an eerie feeling, like they had just stepped into a time capsule, a snapshot of someone’s life frozen in time. The air is heavy and still, and it's clear the house has been empty for quite a while now. Aside from the soft whir of a ceiling fan in the living room, the house is completely silent.

At least it was until Harold decided to make an appearance.

They find him in the kitchen, hovering near the sink. He’s still dressed in the clothes he died in, shirt and slacks drenched in blood from the massive, gaping wound on the left side of his head. Apparently, when Mrs. Worsham struck him with the skillet, she essentially split his skull open like a melon, and the fractured pieces of his skull eventually collapsed into the wound, giving him the appearance of a wax figure whose head was slowly but surely melting off the rest of its body.

Harold scowls at them when they walk in, the expression pulling at his face gruesomely. “The hell are you doing in my house?” he asks venomously, his words slurred and thick from what was more than likely a few facial fractures and broken jaw courtesy of his wife’s cast-iron skillet.

“We’re here to release you, Mr. Worsham,” Edwin tells him crisply, doing his best to keep the conversation to a minimum. Despite his assurances, Edwin could feel the tension radiating off of Charles in waves as they made their way across town to the house; now that they’re here, he can feel it practically boiling. “This house is no longer yours.”

The man, Harold, laughs then, a wet, choking sound, and shakes his head. “What, you come to kick me out, is that it? Well, good luck with that,” he says, laughing again like the whole thing is some kind of joke. “That old bitch couldn’t get rid of me, and I doubt you two little shits are gonna be able to do it either.”

“That ‘old bitch’ is who hired us to release you,” Charles shoots back, his voice taking on a sharp edge as he speaks. “She wanted you to be able to move on; personally, I think you should rot.”

Harold glares at him dangerously. “Is that right?” he asks, spitting out a piece of a tooth that’s been rattling around in his mouth like an after-dinner mint. “Did she mention the fact that she’s the reason I’m in the ground in the first place?”

He shakes his head and sneers again, but not necessarily at them this time. “Miserable cow could never do anything right. Leave it to her to fuck up a murder and have to call in for some outside help to fix her mistakes.”

“If you ask me, she did the world a favor by-” Charles fires back viciously, but Edwin takes a small step in front of him to cut off however he was planning on finishing that sentence.

“We are well aware of the history between you and your wife, Mr. Worsham,” Edwin tells him, surreptitiously reaching back to touch the back of Charles’ hand lightly. It’s a brief tap, little more than a brush of fingertips, but it’s a silent reassurance for the moment. “We are not here to judge or lay blame; we are here strictly as professionals. Once our job is complete, we will be on our way, as will you, to whatever your afterlife holds.”

Harold turns his attention to Edwin then, glaring at him with a half-avulsed eyeball. “Yeah? And what if I don’t feel like going, huh? What if I feel like hanging around here for a while longer?”

“Then I would say you don’t have much of a choice,” Edwin tells him breezily, pulling out his notebook and flipping to the correct page. “We were hired to complete a job for a client, and we will not be leaving until that job is finished.”

“Listen here, you little-” Harold begins, taking a menacing step toward Edwin, but finding his words cut off quickly when he suddenly finds himself staring down the length of a cricket bat.

“Back up,” Charles warns, his voice cold and deadly, his eyes never leaving Harold’s. “Take one more step toward him,” he continues, positioning himself in front of Edwin and using as much of his body as he can to create a barrier between them. “And I’ll cave in the other side of your head.”

Harold snarls and spits out another tooth. “You think you can come into my house and threaten me, boy?” He laughs, deep and wet and ugly, and then shakes his head. “Think again.”

All at once, the house seems to explode all around them.

All the lightbulbs in the kitchen burst at the same time, the cabinet doors fly open, and butcher knives and cutlery shoot out in every direction like shrapnel. Kitchen chairs get catapulted through the air, and the kitchen table splits down the center, long, sharp splinters raining down onto the floor. The window above the sink and the one near the kitchen table both shatter and shower the inside of the kitchen with broken glass.

Harold lunges toward Edwin, but Charles blocks him easily, swinging his bat at the man’s legs and catching him in the side of the knee with a punishing crack. Harold staggers and begins to fall, but manages to grab a handful of Charles’ jacket in the process, dragging them both down onto the floor in a tumbled heap.

Edwin scrambles to get the symbols laid out for the releasing spell, scribbling the markings onto the floor hastily. Usually, he tries to be more concerned with trying to line them up appropriately, the accuracy and effectiveness of the spell relying on at least a little bit of geometry in order to work correctly, but he doesn’t have time for that now; the spell is going to have to be fast and messy if they hope to rid themselves of Harold quickly.

He’s just getting the final symbol sketched out when he hears a grunt of pain and looks up just in time to see Charles get thrown through the remains of the kitchen window.

“Charles!” Edwin shouts in alarm, jumping to his feet to go help his partner, only to be tackled to the ground a split second later by Harold. They topple over the edge of a kitchen chair and fall through the oven, landing in a tangled heap on the glass-covered kitchen floor.

Edwin manages to grab a heavy griddle plate that had been thrown out of one of the cabinets and swings it at Harold’s head, catching him in the shoulder and knocking him to the side with an enraged snarl. He lunges back at Edwin but never gets close enough, a pair of arms suddenly wrapping themselves around his torso and jerking him backwards.

“Get off of him!” Charles growls furiously, literally throwing Harold across the room to get him as far away from Edwin as possible. He glances back at Edwin briefly before tightening his grip on his cricket bat again. “I’ll hold him off, you finish the spell.”

“Charles-”

“Do it!” Charles snaps back at him before taking a running swing at Harold.

Edwin is on his feet a second later, grabbing his notebook and reading out the first several lines of the releasing spell. The symbols on the floor begin to hum and glow as he speaks, the floor rumbling lightly beneath his feet like some great energy is being drawn up from the foundation of the house itself.

He’s about halfway through the spell when he hears Charles cry out sharply in pain from the dining room, his thoughts and the completion of the spell immediately going by the wayside as he rushes into the other room to help his partner.

The scene is chaotic and messy, and Charles clearly does not have the upperhand.

Harold has him pinned to the ground and is beating him viciously over the head with something that looks remarkably like an old cuckoo clock. Charles’ bat has been knocked out of his hand and is clear across the room, way out of his reach, and he tries to shield himself from blow after punishing blow. Harold is looming over him, broken clock in one hand and a fistful of Charles’ jacket in the other as he mashes him into the ground with a painful amount of force.

It very much looks like Harold is trying to kill Charles with the broken pieces of the clock, and, had Charles not been dead already, it’s pretty likely that Harold might have succeeded.

“Harold!” Edwin shouts, his voice loud enough to rattle the broken glass still hanging from the window frames. He takes a slow, deliberate step into the dining room, his eyes never leaving Harold’s. “Touch him again, and it will be the last thing you do.”

Harold scoffs at him, blood and broken teeth landing on the floorboards beneath him. “Oh, another threat, eh?” he says, laughing wetly and grinning at him with jagged, broken teeth. “You’re up next, Nancy boy,” he continues, tightening his grip on the splintered cuckoo clock again. “Right after I finish with-” he says, raising his arm high in preparation to bring it down hard onto the side of Charles’ head again.

Except that never happens.

Edwin makes a quick, precise motion with his hand and stomps one foot onto the floorboards with a reverberating thud.

“It was a threat fifteen seconds ago,” Edwin tells him coldly, eyes still leveled with Harold. “Now it’s a guarantee.”

Harold tries to lunge at him, throw a punch, throw a piece of the broken clock; the list of things he tries to do is endless, the list of things he can do is very, very limited. He’s frozen in place, hand still raised to strike Charles with the broken clock again, and the harder he struggles, the less he can move. He growls and tries to jerk to the side, struggles against his own body fruitlessly, and then turns his glare toward Edwin.

Not his head, not his face, just his eyes… it’s the only thing he can move.

“What…did you do to me…?” he grits out between clenched teeth, still struggling against whatever has him frozen in place.

Edwin doesn’t answer; he simply walks over to where Charles is gingerly pulling himself up off the ground and catches him by the elbow, carefully pulling him the rest of the way up without a word. Charles is battered and bruised from his melee with Harold, nose bleeding and blood at his hairline, but, much to Edwin’s immense relief, he doesn’t appear seriously injured.

“Go back to the office,” Edwin tells him quietly, nodding toward a small, decorative mirror hanging in the hall.

Charles glances at the mirror and then shakes his head. “No, I’m not leaving you-” he starts, but Edwin levels him with a look.

“Charles,” he says softly, but his voice carries a razor’s edge. “This is not up for discussion. Go back to the office; I will finish the job here.”

Charles still looks like he wants to argue, but the look in Edwin’s eye gives him pause. There’s a dark glint in his gaze and the promise of something very bad to come, and Charles knows better than to argue with Edwin at this point. It’s not often that he sees that look in his eyes, but when it does happen, Charles is reminded, quite viscerally, that Edwin spent the better part of seven decades in Hell and knows more about punishment than probably anyone on this plane.

He takes a hesitant step toward the mirror, glancing back over his shoulder at Edwin just once before he slips through the mirror and back into the safety of their office.

Now alone, Edwin turns his attention back to Harold.

“This really would have been much easier if you had simply let us do our job,” Edwin tells him casually as if discussing the possibility of an afternoon thunderstorm.

“Why… can’t I move…?” Harold demands, his words wet with blood and spittle as he grits them out between his teeth.

“Because I have placed a suppression curse on you, Mr. Worsham,” Edwin replies easily, walking across the room to retrieve Charles’ discarded cricket bat and tucking it under his arm carefully. “One which locks down your energy, your presence, your spiritual signature,” he continues, slowly shifting his gaze to where Harold is still frozen in place on the floor. “Even your ability to move.”

“Why…?” Harold groans out, his words coming out strained and hoarse like he’s trying to speak past a jaw that’s been wired shut.

“Because you endangered my partner,” Edwin says, turning to face him and dropping down into a crouch just in front of Harold so they’re eye-level. “I can tolerate a great many things in this world, Mr. Worsham, but a threat to my partner’s safety is not one of them.”

He plucks a bloody spring from the corner of the cuckoo clock and rolls it between his fingers absently. “And as you do not appear to have fully grasped the gravity of the situation you now find yourself in, allow me to explain it to you in no uncertain terms.”

He offers a small, humorless smile as Harold’s eyes narrow at him. “You are stuck here, Harold Worsham. Not in the rose hedge outside, not in this house, you are stuck here,” he says, pointing to the floor where Harold is currently still frozen. “You will not be able to move, you will not be able to speak, you will not be able make your presence in this house known to the new tenants or the ones who come after or even the ones who come after that; to the best of my knowledge, this spell has a half-life of 200 years so I hope you become very comfortable with where you are now.”

He smiles again, a darker smile this time, one forged from sulfur and blood and baby doll teeth.

A smile forged in Hell.

“Damnatio memoriae, Harold,” he says quietly, the words rolling out like a curse of their own. “No one will ever see you, ever hear you, ever suffer your presence ever again. In fact, from this moment on, no one will even remember your name.”

The curse is not one Edwin would ever use under normal circumstances; its origins are far too close to darker, blood magic for his liking. It’s an old, ancient thing, trickled down through the ages for so long there’s no way of knowing where it originated or even who used it last. It’s a personal prison in more ways than one; the afflicted are basically locked into their own body for centuries with no way of breaking the curse themselves.

A true Hell of their own making.

Again, a curse this severe is not something Edwin would typically ever consider, but… well, he hurt Charles, and that was simply unacceptable.

He straightens carefully, brushing dust and bits of broken glass off his pants as he does so. “I will tell your good wife that you were released without incident so she can move on and be at peace; what happens to you from here is no longer my concern.”

He turns to leave, making his way toward the decorative mirror in the hallway, when he hears Harold’s voice once more.

“Wait…” Harold grinds out, the words becoming harder and harder to say. “You can’t…leave me…here…”

Edwin smiles again. “I think you’ll find I can,” he says as he steps through the mirror and ends up back in the familiar sprawl of their office.

Charles is in front of him a split second later.

“Eds, hey, you alright? Did you get him? Is he gone?”

Edwin nods once in confirmation. “Yes, he has been dealt with; Harold Worsham will not terrorize anyone at that property ever again.”

He opts not to tell him that Harold is still very much trapped in that house, rooted to the floor and locked down like he’s been encased in lead and concrete, because… well, because there are just some things Charles is just better off not knowing.

Charles seems marginally satisfied with the answer, but then his expression turns to concern. “You’re not hurt, are you? He didn’t get any more cheap shots in, right? Because if he did, I swear I’ll-”

Charles…”

“Right, sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were okay because I never even saw that clock until he bashed me over the head with it, and I was worried that he might get the upper hand over you and you wouldn’t be able to complete the spell and-”

“Charles…”

“I know, sorry, sorry, it’s just we haven’t gone up against someone that bad in a long time, and I know you can hold your own in a fight and all, but if he managed to overpower you and I wasn’t there, I’d never forgive-”

Charles,” Edwin says firmly, reaching out and grabbing his partner by the shoulders to hold him still. Charles is rambling and jittery, a combination that usually occurs after a difficult case when his thoughts, words, and body can’t seem to keep up with one another. He’ll ramble for another twenty minutes if Edwin lets him, which is why he decides to put a stop to it before it gets to that point.

“I’m fine. Really,” he tells him, squeezing his shoulders lightly in reassurance. It feels oddly reminiscent of their conversation earlier in the day, only with teir roles reversed now. “More importantly, are you alright?”

In the light of their office, he can see the extent of Charles’ injuries more clearly, but luckily, none of them appear severe.

Well… not severe for someone who’s been dead for over twenty years.

There’s a painful split across the bridge of his nose, a deep cut through his lower lip, and enough cuts and scrapes and bruises covering his face to create a gruesome patchwork. A deep laceration slices through his hairline on the right side of his head, probably from where Harold struck him with the clock the first time, but the wound appears to be healing quickly, streaks of blood now tacky and fading.

Charles nods and tries to dismiss Edwin’s concerns with a wave of his hand. “I’m fine, he just got in a few lucky shots, that’s all.”

“Mhm,” Edwin hums, clearly not accepting Charles’ indifference toward his own injuries. “I’ll be the judge of that,” he says, nodding over to the chair sitting beside their desk. “Have a seat.”

For one very brief moment, Charles looks as though he’s about to protest, to insist he’s fine and that there’s no need to make such a fuss, but he knows it will be a losing battle. They’ve gone through this song and dance before on numerous occasions, and he always ends up in that chair before it’s all said and done, so he figures he might as well make it easier for both of them and just obey the request.

Once Charles is seated, Edwin goes through the familiar routine of gathering the various balms and tinctures they keep in stock, laying a few of them out on the desk for easy access. He doesn’t need much since most of the wounds are well on their way to healing and will be gone entirely within the next hour or so, but the cut on Charles’ head and a few of the deeper wounds on his face could use a little help.

He takes his place next to Charles and carefully inspects the wound along his hairline. It’s the deepest one and the one that will take the longest to heal on its own, so he starts with that one first.

They’ve nearly exhausted their limited supply of the “miracle balm,” but even the meager amount still left in the tin is more than enough to get the job done. He dabs a thin layer over the cut with careful, gentle fingers, apologizing quietly when he hears the other boy’s soft grunts and hisses of pain. Once he’s satisfied the cut has been sufficiently covered, he moves on to the more minor cuts and scrapes that still cover much of Charles’ face.

The quiet stillness of their office seems to fold down on top of them, effectively dulling the chaos from earlier in the evening, and in that stillness, Charles has gone quiet. He’s not as tense and rigid as he had been earlier; his posture is slightly hunched, and his shoulders are curled like he’s very slowly collapsing in on himself now that all the adrenaline has worn off. Usually, he’s much more talkative, much more animated in the aftermath of a case, but not tonight.

Tonight, he looks tired and worn and haunted.

Edwin doesn’t say anything at first, carefully putting away the tins and bottles he’d been using so they can’t serve as a distraction when he finally works up the nerve to sit down to ask Charles about some of the more personal topics he tends to avoid. He doesn’t want to pry or press to the point where Charles shuts down completely, but tonight had been bad, and it was clearly affecting him in more ways than one.

However, as had become the norm as of late, Charles somehow manages to beat him to it.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, the words barely above a whisper.

Edwin frowns and turns back to face him, one hand still hovering over a small glass jar. “Whatever are you sorry for, Charles?”

“For not listening,” Charles continues, slumping back into the chair with a sigh. “For being stubborn and headstrong and insisting we would take the case when we definitely shouldn’t have.”

He sighs again, shaking his head slowly. “I should have listened to you.”

He laughs faintly, but it’s a flat, hollow sound. “And then, after I forced us to take the case, I go and screw everything up. I let my emotions get the better of me and let him get under my skin, and then you had to clean everything up, and I just…” he fades off, gaze dropping to the floor. “I’m sorry, Eds.”

Edwin frowns again and turns to face him fully. “You have nothing to apologize for, Charles,” he tells him earnestly, moving his hand to lay it on his shoulder comfortingly. “And you certainly didn’t ‘screw up’ anything in this case; your actions were entirely justified against someone as deplorable as Harold Worsham.”

“But that’s just it,” Charles says, worrying at his lower lip where one of the cuts had just recently healed. “I knew this case was going to be bad. I knew before we ever got there, but I thought I could get through it and…well, I couldn’t.”

He sighs and pushes a hand through his hair, wincing slightly when it pulls over the still-healing wound along his hairline. “People like that never change,” he says after a moment, glaring to the side of the room as he speaks. “They stay violent and awful and cruel, and they go out of their way to make everyone as miserable as they are, and they never get better, no matter how many times they swear they will.”

Charles lets out a shaky breath and drags a hand down his face; Edwin pretends not to notice the way he’s trying to blink back tears. “Mrs. Worsham, she uh…” he clears his throat roughly, his voice wavering just slightly as he speaks. “She reminded me of my mum,” he says finally, a small, sad smile tugging at the corner of his mouth when he says it. “She needed our help, and I just… I couldn’t tell her no.”

He swipes at his eyes again, leather sleeve dragging over skin. “I dunno,” he says after a moment, staring back down at the floor. “Maybe I was trying to prove something to myself, maybe I thought if we were able to help her, then maybe I could have…”

He breaks off again, the words dying in his throat behind a hitched breath, but Edwin already knows what he was going to say.

Maybe I could have helped my mum.

Charles doesn’t say anything else after that, his shoulders trembling ever so slightly as he tries to suppress the tears that are now streaming down his face. He wipes at them with the back of his hand, sometimes bitterly, and lets out a shuddering breath.

“Sorry,” he murmurs to Edwin with a small, flat smile. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m crying-”

He shakes his head miserably one more time and tips forward just slightly until his forehead is resting just at the center of Edwin’s chest.

For a moment, Edwin doesn’t move; the room and time seem to freeze around them like an image captured on film. After a second, however, he carefully pulls Charles into him a bit more, draping his arms across his back comfortingly. It’s a slightly awkward position, him standing and Charles sitting, but the height difference allows him to wrap his arms around Charles’ back and hold him close without feeling like he’s trapped.

He feels Charles’ hands tangle into the fabric of his vest, gripping him tightly as if he’s afraid to let go. Tears, warm and wet, seep into his shirt from where Charles’ face is buried against his sternum, and he can feel the deep tremors of suppressed sobs rippling through him from where his arms are wrapped around his back and shoulders.

Edwin doesn’t talk about the case anymore after that, and he doesn’t ask any other questions about Charles’ mother or his childhood or anything else for that matter. There will be time for that later, but for tonight, he stands there, still and stoic as Charles cries into his chest and clings to him like a lifeline.

He stands there and holds Charles for a very long time.

OOOOO

He begins to suspect that his theories regarding the possibility of domestic abuse against Charles’ mother may not be entirely accurate in March of 2018.

He also begins to realize that the truth is so much worse than he could have imagined.

There are only a handful of scars that Charles doesn’t talk about at all, the ones that are hidden behind layers of clothing and deflection and denial. They’re not visible to the naked eye, always appearing in a place that could be covered easily and explained away if necessary.

The kind that leaves Edwin with the sickening, gut-wrenching realization that this was likely by design.

These scars don’t have humorous backstories or colorful anecdotes to lessen their mark; instead, they’re the kind that leave deep, rending gouges just below the surface, shapeless claws of trauma and anguish that hover right at the edge of consciousness.

They’re the scars Edwin sees but never asks about, the ones that are too painful, too raw to speak about out loud, even in the quiet safety of their office.

The first time he comes across one such scar is in the aftermath of a case involving sludge slugs of all things. Of all the cases they’d solved, of all the ghosts and ghouls and creatures they’ve encountered over the years, Edwin thinks he hates sludge slugs the most. Not because he’s afraid of them or has any kind of personal vendetta against them; no, he hates them because of the sheer, putrid mess they leave behind in their wake.

Sludge slugs, much like regular slugs, inch and squirm their way across walls and sidewalks, but, unlike regular slugs, they have a tendency to leave behind long, nauseating trails of black slime, their wiggly little bodies secreting a thick, tar-like mucus on every surface they scrunch across and leaving rooms smelling like rot and decay in their wake.

In all his years of research, Edwin has never been able to determine where they actually came from; he’s beginning to think they just spring up out of the ground like slime-encrusted daisies and then squiggle away to make the world a worse place.

The only thing he’s been able to determine definitively is that they are primarily drawn to places that dealt with death: morgues, mausoleums, tombs, anywhere that death was more prevalent than life. The slugs seemed to appear out of nowhere in those places, oozing out of cracks, creeping up through floorboards, making themselves at home wherever they saw fit.

They weren’t supernatural or unearthly or even dangerous in the traditional sense; they resembled common garden slugs and could be dealt with just as easily in modest numbers.

No, what really caused problems was the sludge they left behind; it was toxic as hell, and even limited amounts of exposure were enough to drive those who came in contact with it violently insane.

They had worked the occasional outbreak here and there, and each time they worked a case involving the slugs, they always heard the same kind of story.

‘I don’t know what happened, he just snapped one day.’

‘Poor dear, I heard they might be taking her to a mental health hospital by the end of the week.’

‘The night crew always seemed so kind, I don’t know why they suddenly decided to start setting cars on fire in the parking lot.’

‘Did you hear Barbra was chasing Geoffrey with a strimmer?’

The slugs were always to blame, but no one ever blamed the slugs; instead, they blamed the person’s sudden and dramatic plunge into madness on things like a gas leak or mold in the vents, or leaded wall paint. The building or home would then inevitably go through an intensive decontamination process: the walls would be stripped, pipes would be inspected, vents and ducts would be sterilized, and throughout all of it, the slugs would remain.

Luckily, they were not more difficult to kill than regular garden slugs; a handful of table salt proved just as effective at getting rid of the slimy little creatures as any spell or hex, so Edwin had taken to keeping a few large salt canisters in their office for just such an occasion.

He hasn’t had a chance to test his theories on rock salt yet, but he feels the same principles apply.

They had been made aware of a possible slug infestation in a slaughterhouse a few blocks from their office. Newspaper articles pointed out several instances of the worker’s increasingly bizarre behavior, everything from belting out operatic arias in the middle of production, jousting in the parking lot with cattle prods, and even wearing the skins and hides of the animals that were butchered onsite.

It all came to a head a few days ago when a massive brawl broke out in the middle of the factory, men and animals battling amongst themselves on the killing room floor.

Fearing some kind of contamination or gas leak as the cause of their madness, the facility was immediately closed while the health department ran a battery of tests on everything from the equipment to the animals themselves in an effort to figure out what caused the melee. The workers were taken to local hospitals for treatment and evaluation, and, within a few days of being removed from the slug-infested environment, their mental health began to stabilize, and many were expected to be released within a few days.

Again, no one ever suspected the slugs.

Clearing the building would not be difficult, but trying to stay clean in the process would be much more of a challenge.

The only otherworldly thing about the slugs, aside from their toxic mucus, was the fact that they tended to explode when they were exposed to salt. Whatever surface was not covered in the slimy black mucus usually became saturated in the aftermath of an extermination, their bodies turning into tiny tar bombs that slung the noxious mucus everywhere within a foot radius. Granted, it was not the cleanest, nor was it the most ideal extermination method, but it was fast, easy, and did not require much effort on their part beyond obtaining several cans of table salt before they made their way to the slaughterhouse.

Luckily for them, the slug’s toxic slime only seemed to affect the living, so when the night ended and they trudged back to the office, both of them covered head-to-toe in thick, sticky black mucus, the only concern they had was getting it off their clothes.

Edwin silently wishes he’d remembered to put down a newspaper or something to cover the floors when they get back to the office later that night, because while the slime had little effect on them, it played hell with the hardwood, and it would take hours to break down the stains it left behind. He decides that’s not an issue he’s going to bother with tonight, however, and sets about removing his slime-crusted jacket and laying it across the back of the desk chair.

He has a talisman tucked away in one of the desk drawers that works wonders in cleaning away the dirt, mud, blood, slime, and other various viscous fluids they often find themselves covered in, but he would prefer if it wasn’t covered in slime as well before they use it.

“Little help?” Charles calls out from the corner, and Edwin looks to the side to see him hopelessly tangled in his slime-covered jacket, slime-covered shirt, and slime-covered pants. He’s managed to get one arm trapped in his jacket, the other held up slightly like he was mid-way through stripping off his shirt, but got stuck doing that as well.

Edwin chuckles quietly and makes his way over to his struggling partner, carefully disentangling his arm and helping him tug his jacket off, laying it across the back of the chair as well. His undershirt isn’t nearly as bad, most of it protected by his jacket, but he has thick, streaky layers of slime all over his face, hair, and hands, and the more he tries to wipe it away, the worse it gets.

“Here, hold still,” Edwin tells him after a second, stepping away to grab a small hand towel from the closet. Along with the couch, a few things had been left behind in the office when they took over: an old office chair, a few dusty books, and a collection of threadbare hand towels left in the closet. Edwin never expected they would actually use them, but they had come in handy more times than not.

He grabs a few of them and makes his way back over to Charles, carefully wiping away the slime and mucus from his face. It covers the towels quickly, dark streaks staining the tattered fabric, and he tosses each used one onto the chair with their slime-covered clothes to be cleaned when they’re done.

The unfortunate thing about the cleansing talisman is that it only works on fabric, so anything that got on their bodies would need to be cleaned separately.

Charles has managed to get most of the slime off his hands and arms with another towel, scrubbing the last few streaks of mucus off his skin with a little bit of effort. Again, the slug’s mucus doesn’t have any effect on them, but it leaves their skin smelling like warmed-over death, and since neither of them is interested in smelling like a fresh corpse, they focus on getting as much of the slime off as possible.

Edwin tosses another slime-soaked towel onto the chair and catches sight of a large chunk of slug sticking out of Charles’ hair. There are a few pieces, actually, courtesy of the slugs exploding all over them when they were being exterminated, and their remains prove just as sticky and disgusting as their mucus.

Charles doesn’t even seem to notice the pieces of slug stuck in his hair, still focused on getting rid of the last bits of slime on his hands. Edwin grabs another towel from the stack and begins carefully plucking out the pulverized pieces of slug from his hair, dropping each one into the towel in his hand.

The problem he runs into is that the combination of the slug’s mucus and Charles’ curls creates a matted mess in his hair, and it becomes a challenge to dislodge some of the smaller pieces of slug from his tangled curls. The slugs are black, just like Charles’ hair, so it takes several very long, careful minutes to locate and remove all of them.

He’s almost managed to work out the last few pieces, carefully separating Charles’ hair from the slug with small, gentle tugs, when he feels it.

His fingertips brush across something slightly raised and rigid along Charles’ scalp, roughly two and a half to three centimeters in length. He knows it’s another scar, but the location is unusual, and he finds himself frowning slightly as he tries to carefully separate Charles’ hair a bit more to get a better look.

“Ah, don’t worry about that one,” Charles says casually, batting Edwin’s hand away gently before he can get a closer look. He doesn’t appear upset or angry, but there’s a very slight tightness in his voice when he speaks, nearly undetectable to the untrained ear. He’s still smiling, expression mostly relaxed, but there is definitely an undercurrent in his words that Edwin can’t make sense of at first.

“What happened?” Edwin asks, carefully pulling his hand away and then turning to discard the piece of the slug into a nearby waste basket before dropping the towel on top of the others. He’s made it a rule not to touch any of the scars unless he has Charles’ express permission, and the one on his scalp definitely seems off limits in more ways than one.

“Nothing,” Charles replies with a slight shrug. “Ran into the corner of a dresser.”

“A dresser?”

“Yep,” Charles says with a quick smirk that seems just the slightest bit forced. “Happened a lot when I was a kid, dressers seemed to just come out of nowhere sometimes.”

“I didn’t realize they were sentient…”

“Neither did I,” Charles says with another shrug. “But that was the easiest thing to tell people.”

“But it wasn’t the truth.”

It wasn’t a question.

It didn’t need to be.

There’s something about the way Charles says it, a rehearsed, reflexive kind of answer that has been reiterated enough times that it’s nearly a believable fact. A dresser is a convenient enough excuse for the occasional childhood bumps and bruises, but the force it would take to receive a lasting scar from a dresser was something else entirely.

Charles smiles again, but this time it’s bitter and thin, a grimace more than an actual smile. His expression is tight and measured, like he’s holding something back, and a muscle in his jaw twitches just slightly, like he’s trying not to clench his teeth.

“The truth isn’t always easy to digest, Eds,” he says simply, fixing the other boy with a look that indicates he doesn’t want to go into the issue any further. “Sometimes it’s just easier to say that it was from a dresser.”

Edwin would love for him to elaborate on that, but he also understands the meaning behind Charles’ unspoken request to drop the subject. It’s clearly something Charles doesn’t want to talk about, and Edwin isn’t going to push it any further, not when it’s clear he would rather floss with a piece of broken glass than continue discussing the scar.

Before he can dwell on it any further, though, Charles is swiping at his face with the pad of his thumb, wiping away a thick streak of mucus from his cheek. “You’ve got slime on you,” he says by way of explanation, and Edwin has to physically bat him away as Charles keeps trying to rub the slime off his face with exaggerated vigor.

They don’t talk about the scar again after that, but, like all the others, Edwin commits it to memory. He thinks he might try asking about it again one day, but only if and when Charles is ready to talk about it.

Until then, he’ll accept the outlandish story of dressers popping out of the shadows like Jack the Ripper and leave it at that.

OOOOO

The next one he comes across, he knows damn good and well did not come from a dresser.

The case had gone from fine to fucked in a matter of minutes, the wraith they were hunting easily twice as strong and much, much more aggressive than they anticipated. The construction site became a veritable gauntlet before it was all said and done, and more than once, they’d been forced to retreat behind the large pieces of equipment sitting around the area.

Edwin is currently rattling his brain for the best counterspell to deflect the wraith’s attacks, but the only thing he can think of is a purge stone.

The only problem with that is that one of them would have to get close enough to the wraith to bind it to the stone, and that…was much easier said than done.

Wraiths tended to be much harder to get rid of than typical ghosts and spirits, their angry, violent energy turning them into literal whirlwinds of destruction. This one, though, was next level, like trying to escape a tsunami by hiding behind a birch tree. The power and strength it exuded caused the air to crackle around them with electricity, and they hadn’t been able to get within five feet of it all evening before they were forced to retreat again.

A purge stone would work and would banish the spirit almost instantly, but there’s still the matter of getting close enough to it.

Edwin slips a small, glossy stone out of his pocket and mutters the necessary incantation over it, watching as a series of symbols scrolls across the surface like filigree. He doubts they’ll have more than one opportunity to cast it, though, so whatever opening they can get needs to count.

Charles drops to a crouch beside him, glancing at the stone in his hand with a slight nod. “Purge stone, nice,” he says approvingly, looking back across the construction site to where the wraith is currently hurling bricks at rats. “We gotta touch it for it to work though, right? Like, full contact?”

Edwin nods once in agreement. “Correct,” he says, sealing the enchantment with one last phrase before clutching the stone in his hand tightly. “The stone will banish the wraith but only if it is physically bound to it. If we can create a big enough distraction, I should be able to-”

“Say less,” Charles says, and before Edwin can stop him, the other boy has already leapt from their concealed position and is sprinting across the construction site, cricket bat clutched in his hands tightly.

“Charles, no!” Edwin shouts after him, breaking into a dead run only a few seconds after him.

Those few seconds are all the wraith needs, though, and before Edwin can even open his mouth to shout a warning, the wraith sends something lashing through the air directly at Charles.

Edwin hears him cry out in agony and has just enough time to see a long, thick iron chain wrapped tightly around Charles’ left leg. The contact with the iron is enough to hobble him instantly, and he crashes into the dirt with a sharp hiss of pain, curling in on himself as if trying to protect his injured leg from further damage.

The wraith jerks the chain forward, dragging Charles along the ground with another sharp yelp of pain, and Edwin sees nothing but red.

He surges forward, deftly clearing his wounded partner, and launches himself bodily at the wraith. The sudden action seems to catch the spirit off guard enough that Edwin is able to drive them both into the dirt in a messy tackle.

He doesn’t hesitate, he doesn’t think, he slams the purge stone into the hollow cavity of the wraith’s face and then shoves it backwards as it shrieks and hisses and howls as it gets sucked into the stone. There’s a horrible squelching sound, like thick mud being sucked down a drain, before the wraith quite literally implodes and disappears into the stone.

Edwin kicks it across the construction site, watching as it gets wedged under the tread of one of the bulldozers. It’ll be crushed in the morning, the wraith disappearing with it, but he isn’t worried about that.

His only concern is Charles.

The other boy is still curled tightly on the ground when Edwin reaches him and quickly untangles the iron chain from his leg. He can hear his own skin crackling slightly as it comes in contact with the iron, a gruesome hiss coming from his palms like a steam burn, but he doesn’t feel it.

Decades in Hell had left him practically immune to moderate contact with iron, but unfortunately, Charles isn’t so lucky, and the wound on his leg is probably nothing short of agonizing.

“Can you stand?” Edwin asks him, taking a moment to brush away a few dusty curls that have plastered themselves to Charles’ forehead. He highly doubts it (trying to stand, let alone walk, on his leg right now is going to be like trying to run a marathon with a compound fracture), but he wants to give Charles the opportunity to make that decision for himself.

Charles shakes his head with a grimace. “Don’t know,” he says through gritted teeth, wincing as he pushes himself up further. He cringes sharply as the movement jostles his leg, but accepts the hand Edwin offers him. “Let’s see…”

It takes a minute, much longer than it should, but eventually he’s able to stand and, while leaning very heavily on Edwin, put some pressure on his leg.

Edwin holds him steady, one arm looped around his waist tightly while the other grips his arm, holding him upright. Charles clings to him in return, swallowing past a groan as he takes a small step forward as if testing the strength of his leg. It’s not much, a deep hobble more than anything, but he is able to stay upright, which is progress.

Their office isn’t that far away, only a few blocks at the most, but the iron has left Charles semi-solid for at least the next half hour, so mirror travel was out of the question. Edwin considers carrying him, just scooping Charles up onto one shoulder and taking off down the sidewalk, but he knows the other boy’s pride would never allow that (Edwin thinks he would feel the same way if their positions were reversed so he can’t say he blames him) so he settles with just walking along beside him, taking one small, painful step after the other.

Charles can hardly put any weight on his left leg for the first couple of blocks, but Edwin expects as much and helps compensate by taking more of Charles’ weight onto his shoulder as they walk. By the time they reach their street, Charles is able to put a little bit of weight on his left foot and shuffles along beside Edwin as they slowly and carefully climb their way up the stairs.

“I’m afraid there is no less vulgar way to say this,” Edwin mumbles when they finally reach their office, carefully depositing Charles onto the well-worn couch in their office. “But I will need you to remove your pants.”

Charles grimaces again, his expression pinched tight with pain as he cautiously shimmies out of his pants. The wound across the top of his thigh is bright red and smoldering from the contact with the iron, the outer edges blackened slightly as if his leg has been seared. It’s an ugly wound and undoubtedly very, very painful, but luckily it will heal now that the iron has been removed.

Edwin busies himself gathering supplies and does his best to tune out each painful groan Charles tries to suppress behind him. He’s angry at himself for underestimating the wraith, but he’s also angry that Charles got hurt.

Their partnership had naturally developed into a Brains and Brawn dynamic over the years and while Charles was more than happy to be the de facto muscle of their little organization, that by no means meant Edwin was happy with watching him put himself in harm’s way and the tight, twisting feeling in his gut never disappeared when Charles inevitably caught a few blows in return.

He gathers an armful of different balms and salves, each designed to help mitigate the effects of iron and whatever other nasty curses and hexes the wraith may have been carrying with it. He dumps them out onto the small table butted up against the edge of the couch and begins sifting through them to find the best one to use.

Charles is still gritting his teeth and biting back a slew of curses by the time Edwin drops down onto the couch beside him, but the wound has stopped smoldering for the moment, which is promising. It’s still bright red and inflamed like a flash burn, though, and will likely be very painful for the next few hours until it heals completely.

He finds a heavy salve that will be quick and effective in helping the wound heal and scoops out a glob of the thick, sticky paste, gently spreading it across the worst of the injury. He apologizes quietly and profusely when Charles hisses in pain and grips the side of the couch so tightly his knuckles go white.

“I know,” Edwin tells him quietly as he adds another layer of the salve to the wound, spreading it out evenly across the expanse of Charles’ skin so he could be sure the wound was completely covered. “I’m sorry. I’m almost done.”

“Might need to pad up before our next case,” Charles mumbles, letting out a breathy, painful laugh as he speaks.

Edwin wants to tell him that that will be quite unnecessary, as he has absolutely no intention of ever letting Charles come into contact with iron again if he can help it, but he stays quiet instead and focuses on the task at hand.

They can review proper case safety protocols later when Charles’ leg doesn’t look like it’s been branded with a white-hot fire poker.

Edwin turns his leg as carefully as possible, rotating his knee side-to-side gently to make sure the entire stretch of the wound has been covered with the salve, and that’s when he sees it.

A thick, ropey scar stretches from the underside of Charles’ thigh and curves sharply upwards to end at the dip just to the outside of his knee. The scar tissue is thick and almost leathery, a clear sign that the wound had been relatively deep and hadn’t healed properly, the outer edges raised in some places and then sunken in and puckered in others. It’s much darker too, with a sharp delineation between the scar tissue and the undamaged skin around it.

Edwin feels himself freeze, his hands going very still a few centimeters away from the scar. He doesn’t touch it; something tells him this scar is different, this one was hidden for a reason.

He opens his mouth to say something (although he’s not entirely sure what), but Charles cuts him off before he has the chance.

“Don’t,” he says tersely, his voice sharp and quick in that one word.

Edwin looks up just in time to see a myriad of expressions ripple across Charles’ face. Anger, pain, fear, disgust…the list of emotions that dart across Charles’ expression in that split second period is so numerous that Edwin thinks it would take nearly half an hour to list them all if he tried.

“Not that one,” Charles continues quietly, a look of shame and disgust flickering through his eyes as he speaks. “Don’t ask about that one.”

Edwin nods once in understanding and pulls his hands away to give the other boy plenty of space. “I won’t,” he promises, willing to do just about anything Charles asks of him in that moment if it washed away that awful expression on his face.

Charles lets out a short huff a moment later and shakes his head quickly, rubbing at his eyes fiercely for a moment.

Edwin pretends not to see the tears.

“Sorry,” Charles says, trying to laugh it off in a way that just makes the whole situation that much worse. “Just been a rough night, you know?” he offers up a quick, watery grin that doesn’t reach his eyes and then carefully and painfully pushes himself up off the couch.

Edwin reaches out to help him, but Charles is already standing and pulling his pants back on, hiding the grimace that tugs at his expression when the rough fabric scrapes over the raw, inflamed wound. He takes a few staggering steps toward the office door, putting a bit more weight on his leg with each careful step. He looks back as if wanting to say something, but then shakes his head slightly and points up to the ceiling. “I’m gonna go up to the roof for a while, mate, clear my head a little bit, yeah?”

Edwin feels his head bob slightly in a nod. “Yes, of course, Charles. Take all the time you need.”

Charles offers him another watery smile and then phases through the door, leaving Edwin alone in the quiet stillness of their office.

He’s not sure how much time passes, how long he sits there, staring at the door and trying to figure out what, if anything, he can do to help. Whatever caused that scar, whatever dark, ugly memories were tied to it, it was clear that Charles had tried to keep it hidden away for as long as possible, both physically and mentally. Acknowledging the scar, bringing attention to it in any way meant admitting to something he didn’t want to talk about, and Edwin is beginning to understand what that might entail.

He respected Charles’ privacy immensely and never pressed for details anytime he changed the subject when the topic of his family came up, but that pattern of behavior, combined with his palpable aversion toward the scar on his leg, led Edwin to some pretty damning conclusions.

He wanted to be wrong, God, he wanted so badly to be wrong, but he’d studied the principle of Occam’s Razor enough to know that his own theories, horrific as they may be, were likely true. The likelihood of that scar coming from an outside source grew smaller by the day, and if Edwin had any other doubts as to why Charles reacted the way he did in certain situations, those doubts were erased with brutal efficiency tonight.

He is keenly aware of the precarious nature of that conversation, though, and understands that it might be something Charles never wishes to discuss. As much as Edwin wants to ask him, as much as he wants to help in whatever way he possibly can, that might be the metaphorical line in the sand, the one and only warning flag Charles has ever put up.

However, much like the subject of his family, Edwin will never push him to talk about it if he doesn’t want to, allowing him the privacy and dignity to keep that information to himself if he so chooses. If there comes a time when he does want to discuss it, in however much or little detail he is willing to provide, Edwin will be more than happy to listen to his every word.

But that time must come on Charles’ terms, not Edwin’s, and until that occurs (if ever), Edwin is inclined to leave the subject alone entirely if that’s what is needed.

It still doesn’t change the fact that the image of that scar, ragged and brutal as it was, is now seared into his mind and leaves a hollow, sinking feeling in his chest whenever he thinks about it.

Charles decides to talk about it a little over a week later.

It doesn’t happen in great detail, and it doesn’t happen with much emotion, but when it does happen, Edwin listens very carefully.

They’re getting ready for a new case, a simple entity attachment that shouldn’t take more than an hour or so to dispel, and Edwin is just about to reach the door when Charles catches him by the wrist, pulling him back ever so slightly.

Edwin stops and turns to face him, concern prickling in his chest when he sees the look on Charles’ face.

They had moved on from that night as if nothing had happened, as if Edwin’s sighting of the scar had been nothing more than a harmless mistake, and for the moment, that was the best Edwin could do for him.

He didn’t ask about it, he didn’t bring it up, he went on as if nothing had ever happened because he assumed that’s what Charles wanted. The scar obviously carried a harrowing memory, and Edwin wasn’t going to do anything to call attention to it if it made Charles uncomfortable. They had known each other for decades now, and the last thing, the very last thing Edwin ever wanted to do was make Charles uncomfortable.

But there was still that shared knowledge between them, the knowledge that Edwin had seen the scar, committed it to memory just like he had all the others, and that, perhaps, is the reason Charles decides to speak on it.

“Eds, listen,” he says quietly, not quite able to meet Edwin’s eye as he speaks. He looks at the floor, looks at the wall, looks everywhere but Edwin, and that’s the part that bothers Edwin the most: it’s not the fact that Charles won’t look at him, it’s the fact that he looks ashamed.

“About the other night-”

Edwin shakes his head slowly and reaches down to squeeze Charles’ hand. “Charles, it’s alright, you don’t need to explain-”

“No, I do,” Charles cuts him off gently, squeezing his hand back in return. “It’s just… my childhood wasn’t exactly a fairytale, and that scar on my leg…it’s just kind of a reminder of that.”

Edwin swallows once before he speaks. “And the one on your scalp?”

Charles doesn’t meet his eyes.

Instead, he squeezes his hand again and interlaces their fingers for a few moments before letting go. “My father wasn’t an easy man to live with, Eds, let’s just leave it at that.”

Edwin nods slowly in understanding, but that sickening, sinking feeling in his chest amplifies tenfold in a matter of seconds. His suspicions were confirmed, but that did nothing to alleviate the problem or even offer up a solution. It felt like standing on the shoreline, watching a drowning man struggle to stay afloat and doing nothing other than acknowledge the fact that he was drowning.

“I see,” Edwin says quietly, his voice sounding a little wooden as he speaks. “If you ever wish to talk about it-”

“I don’t,” Charles replies quickly, a little too quickly, but Edwin doesn’t press him on it. “Not right now. Not yet.”

He smiles loosely a second later, the usual sparkle in his eye masking the shame that had been there only a few seconds before. “But thanks.”

Edwin offers a small smile in return. “Of course, Charles.”

He doesn’t bring it up again after that, even though he still sees that scar every time he closes his eyes.

OOOOO

He tries not to let it bother him when Charles begins spending more and more time with Crysta, the longer they stay in Port Townsend.

He tells himself it’s all part of the job, understandable considering they were each working on ancillary cases: Edwin trying to count every damn cat in the city so he could be free of the blasted bracelet the Cat King had trapped him with, and Charles being insistent on helping Crystal regain her memories and free herself completely from David the Demon.

In any other case, Charles’ involvement with Crystal wouldn’t have bothered him at all; she was technically still their client, and the fact that her memories hadn’t returned yet meant that they were still under her employment, so it was only natural that Charles had gotten closer to her over the past several weeks.

No, what bothered him (correction, he was not bothered) was the fact that lately Charles seemed to prefer spending time with Crystal rather than him, bringing her in more often, seeking her advice and opinion more than Edwin’s, and overall just genuinely enjoying her company more than his. They have private conversations, inside jokes, shared looks that are more profound and effective than verbal communication, and Edwin would be lying if he said it didn’t sting just a little.

In the beginning, he tried to convince himself that Charles’ behavior was completely normal; he had always been upbeat and inviting, warm, brown eyes and a genuine smile, and at first there was absolutely no reason to believe that he was being anything more than welcoming and understanding to Crystal’s plight when they first met her.

Charles always boasted that he was aces with other people, and for a while, it was easy to attribute his treatment of Crystal to his natural, often unshakeable affability.

But Edwin doesn’t delude himself into pretending he doesn’t see the lingering glances, the flirtatious banter, the brush of fingertips that lasts just a little too long. The nature of courtship has changed significantly in the decades since he died, but he’s not so blind or out of touch that he doesn’t see what’s happening.

Charles appeared completely infatuated with Crystal, and Edwin suddenly found himself at a loss in how to approach that.

The biggest issue he’s been grappling with, the one that looms larger than much of anything else in the situation, is that he doesn’t know how to bring it up to Charles without the entire conversation sounding juvenile and petulant. He’s never been one for petty jealousy, and he’s certainly never been the kind of person who vies to be the center of attention, but he can’t deny that the situation they have found themselves in since leaving London has left him feeling more than a little insecure.

In all the years they’ve known each other, in every case they’ve ever worked, Edwin has never been forced to share Charles with anyone for an extended period of time, and a small, selfish part of him doesn’t like the fact that he’s having to do that now.

He doesn’t know how to tell him that he isn’t very fond of their new dynamic, how their duo suddenly became a trio with little to no warning.

He doesn’t know how to tell him that he wants things to go back to the way they were before, when it was just the two of them solving cases from their London office.

He doesn’t know how to tell him that he doesn’t care if he socializes and engages with other people, he just…

He just wishes it wasn’t with Crystal.

Because Crystal is who Charles wants to spend time with now, and Edwin…Edwin isn’t used to being an afterthought when it comes to Charles’ attention.

And he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t jealous of Crystal.

He’s jealous of the way she has Charles hanging on her every word, and he’s jealous of the fact that she dropped into their lives with all the grace and elegance of a meteor and has proceeded to thoroughly shake up the dynamic they had carefully cultivated over the years.

He reminds himself, however, that said jealousy does not translate into dislike because, truth be told, he actually does like Crystal in a hesitant, cautious sort of way.

Crystal might be brash and headstrong and stubborn, but she’s more than proven herself in the various cases they’ve worked around Port Townsend. She’s smart and brave and fearless, willing to put herself in danger if it means protecting her friends, and Edwin can’t deny that her psychic abilities have certainly given them an advantage in some instances. Granted, Edwin would never tell her any of this; he does have something of a reputation to uphold after all, regardless of how flimsy it might be, but the truth is, he does like Crystal.

So no, his jealousy doesn’t stem from Crystal herself but from what she represents, what she can offer in his place.

Crystal is a reminder of the life Charles could have had, the one he should have had, and in some ways, it seems like Charles is trying to regain what he lost.

Charles often questioned how his life might have turned out had it not been cut short so cruelly. They had spoken about it at length over the years, each contemplating their different futures and the paths their lives may have taken had their fates turned out differently.

For Edwin, it was a mental exercise more than anything, a challenge to see beyond where his life ended and grapple with the disappointment of being perpetually sixteen.

For Charles, it was pure, unspoken longing.

He would never get to experience the milestones of youth, the highs and lows that made up the very fabric of human existence. He would never get married, never have children of his own, never feel the slow grind of his body as he aged.

He would never age.

He would remain sixteen and suffering for as long as he decided to stay on this plane, and Edwin knows that some days that thought digs at him like a dull blade.

Charles had told him once that the thing he thought he would miss the most about being alive was kissing. At first, Edwin thought it was a slightly silly response (he’d only known the boy for less than an hour at this point, and he was more concerned with kissing rather than the fact that he was caught in the throes of hypothermic organ failure coupled with internal bleeding), but he began to understand it more as time went on.

Charles wasn’t just lamenting the fact that he died; he was trying to cope with what he would miss out on, all the things he would never get to experience again. Sure, he tried to bury those emotions whenever the subject came up, trying to dismiss them easily with a grin and a joke, but it didn’t erase the pain in his eyes, the flicker of grief and longing and regret that hid just behind his smiles.

When he was with Crystal, however, it was like he was catching a glimpse of the life he could have had, a life that didn’t seem that far removed. She was much closer to Charles’ age, their lifetimes only separated by about twenty years rather than multiple decades, and she seemed to understand him in a similar but altogether different way than Edwin did. Perhaps it was because of their proximity in age or just the fact that Crystal was new and wholly different, but there was no denying the instant chemistry between them and the fact that Charles was drawn to her like a metaphorical moth.

She offers him safety and warmth, a look into both the past and the future, a life he could have had and still could in some regards.

A life Edwin could never offer him.

He wasn’t exactly sure when the nature of his feelings toward Charles started to change, but he thinks it had probably been staring him in the face for years before he ever put a name to it. It was a gradual process, a slow, growing warmth that began swelling in his chest like a flame-kissed ember and grew brighter with each passing day.

Sometimes he thinks he could have nurtured that flame for several more decades without ever drawing attention to it, letting it smolder and glow in secret and keeping it hidden away until he was ready to address it by name.

But then they came to Port Townsend, and he found he was having to face these changing feelings rather abruptly, and it left him feeling…lost.

He doubts he’ll ever say anything, knowing full well it would be an exercise in futility. He knows that no matter how gentle and understanding Charles might be, he would never reciprocate, so there was really no point in broaching the subject.

He’s worked diligently at convincing himself that it’s alright, that their relationship is perfectly fine the way it is, and that saying anything would do nothing but add unnecessary drama and complications to their already dramatic and complicated situation, but a very small, devastatingly hopeful part of him wishes that he could say something without bracing for the bitter burn of rejection.

He wishes he could tell him that he’s been in love with him for years and that Charles’ presence was the only thing that made his afterlife bearable.

He wishes that one day Charles might look at him the same way he looks at Crystal, that he would see him in that same light, feel the same longing in his soul as he does when he’s with Crystal.

He wishes there was something, anything he could offer him that would make him want to stay.

But it seems that the longer they spend in this town, the more they’re forced to confront the horrors of their past, the more Charles is left struggling to make sense of everything and his decision to forego his promised afterlife.

Port Townsend had opened some deep, ugly wounds for all of them, but Charles seemed to have taken the brunt of it. The aftermath of the Devlin house and their encounter with the Night Nurse had left him distraught and angry and raw and when he lashed out at Edwin that night on the cliffside, when he told him he hated being dead and his words, sharp and bitter and acidic with rage and unabashed grief, rang out over the dark buffs, Edwin did nothing to soften the blow.

Charles carried the weight of the world like Atlas, smiling through his despair, laughing alongside his trauma, joking past his heartache, but when his foundation was shaken, when the reminders of his father’s abuse and the memories of his murder came flooding back without warning, he found himself crumbling under the weight of it all.

Edwin comforted him as best he could, reassuring him that he was nothing like his father, along with the undeniable fact that Charles was easily the best person Edwin had ever known, but grief still lingered in his eyes when he smiled, and pain still tugged at his expression like an invisible force.

The trauma that Port Townsend had forced him to relive would not be forgotten anytime soon, and even though he still feels a sharp twinge of envy when Charles disappears behind Crystal’s door that evening, he doesn’t stop him. He needed some time and space and stability, and as much as it might sting, Edwin knows he could only get that with Crystal.

So he busies himself in their office, stacking and restacking books, looking over their potential case files again, reviewing the number of cats he’s tallied up over the past few weeks, turning back to his books once again to see if there was anything he may have missed in terms of breaking the damnable binding spell attached to this stupid bracelet around his wrist.

He’s still poring over the book when he hears Charles enter the room, glancing up briefly to see the other boy breeze into the room and drop down into the chair across from Edwin. He doesn’t say anything for a moment, his expression unreadable in the shadows of the overhead fluorescents, but then he chuckles softly and nods toward the book in Edwin’s hands.

“Don’t know how much more info you’re gonna squeeze out of that book, mate,” he says quietly, hunching forward just a bit to rest his elbows on his knees. “Pretty sure you’ve read that one cover to cover. Several times.”

“It doesn’t hurt to be thorough,” Edwin replies, marking the page carefully before setting the book down on the corner of the desk. “I thought you might still be with Crystal,” he continues, hating how petulant the comment sounds when it comes out.

Charles smiles again, small and thin, and shakes his head. “Yeah, well, most normal people are asleep this time of night.”

Edwin glances up at the clock on the wall, squinting just slightly to see the hands hovering at roughly 3:38 in the morning. He hadn’t realized it was that late either, but considering they don’t need to sleep like humans do, the issue of fatigue never really came up.

“Yes, I suppose that is true,” he allows, pointedly straightening a few papers in an effort to appear both busy and relaxed at the same time. A long pause drags out between them, not uncomfortable but palpable in a way, and it feels like time is hovering rather than ticking forward.

“Think we’ll see the old bird again?” Charles asks after a few moments of silence have passed, not quite meeting Edwin’s gaze when the other boy looks up.

“Who?” Edwin asks, a little perplexed by the vagueness of the question.

Charles nods toward the whiteboard pressed up against the back wall, a list of potential cases still scrawled across the slick surface. “The Night Nurse,” he says, inclining his head just slightly to indicate a small, squared-off section at the bottom of the board with a label that said ‘Threats and Obstacles’ in bold letters above it.

It had been Edwin’s idea to include it at the bottom of the board once he realized they might be stuck in Port Townsend for longer than initially expected. They were well aware of the various threats and obstacles to avoid in London and the surrounding areas, places with dark histories, graveyards with clingy, talkative ghosts, areas laden with deep, ancient curses that went so far back no one was entirely certain where they came from.

But Port Townsend was different because it was unfamiliar and therefore much more dangerous as far as Edwin was concerned. He kept a running list of the various foes and adversaries they’d encountered while in Port Townsend and was working on drawing up a quick guide on how to avoid them while they were stuck here.

So far, the list only includes two declared threats, although there had been various attempts to expand the list from sundry members of their party. Charles’s suggestion to add “Bird Brain” along with a crudely drawn picture of a crow was quickly erased by Edwin as he didn’t consider Monty an immediate threat, while Crystal’s submission of “Edwin’s emotional constipation” was erased by Niko because she thought it was mean.

At the top of the list, however, was Esther Finch; she was by far the biggest and most dangerous immediate threat to them, and it had only been sheer luck that their few encounters with her thus far had worked in their favor. She was vicious and relentless, and they knew there would be no second chances if they ever let their guard down around her.

So for obvious reasons, she remained at the very top of the list.

Second on the list, again for obvious reasons, was the Night Nurse. She was just as relentless as Esther Finch, but in an altogether different way. Her threat had nothing to do with witchcraft and child murder, but for them, that’s what made her so dangerous: her threat was separation. She had already made it clear that she intended to drag them back with her and then force them on their way to their promised afterlife, and that was something they simply could not allow.

Not because Edwin knew what his “promised afterlife” would entail; he knew he had several more decades being torn apart in Hell to look forward to should the Night Nurse ever make good on her promise.

No, he wouldn’t allow it because the idea of being separated from Charles, of having him ripped away from him, was utterly unbearable. The mere thought of it leaves him shaky and tense, and there have been several times over the past few days when he thought he might need to upgrade her status and put her on the same level as Esther.

But her fall over the cliff had bought them a little time, and with any luck, they might be able to avoid her long enough to make it back to their office in London, where Edwin has more runes and sigils carved into the walls than the support beams holding them up.

He shakes his head slowly in response to Charles’ question and crosses his arms over his chest. “Hard to say, really,” he begins quietly, still gazing at her name on the white board like it might cause her to materialize out of thin air. “I doubt the fall over the cliff did anything more than delay her temporarily, and the likelihood of her having to file multiple accident reports before being allowed to return is rather high considering the nature of her department, so I’d say our chances of seeing her again anytime soon are low at the moment.”

“Good,” Charles says simply, leaning forward just a little to rest his elbows across the tops of his knees. “Can’t say I’m looking forward to another conversation with her anytime soon, you know?”

Edwin nods once in understanding.

He doesn’t press the issue; he knows Charles is still a bit too raw to discuss it any further, and he won’t force him to talk about it until he’s ready. That had been his mindset for years once he learned the truth behind some of Charles’ scars: the discussion had to be on his terms, when he was ready, and in as much or as little detail as he was comfortable providing.

“I don’t think you’ll need to worry about that,” Edwin tells him with a reassuring smile, earning a small, hesitant smile from Charles in return.

The other boy goes quiet then, eyes downcast and hands rubbing back and forth absently from where his elbows are still perched on his knees. He looks like he wants to say something, but is trying to figure out the best way to say it.

Finally, he sighs, leans back a bit, and drags a hand up through his hair, mussing his curls and sending them in wild directions. “It was a belt,” he says after a minute, the words a bit hollow when they come out.

Edwin frowns and stares at him. “What?”

“That scar on my leg,” Charles says, motioning toward the deep, jagged scar Edwin had seen all those years ago after the wraith attack.

The one scar Charles told him not to ask about.

“It was from a belt,” he continues, swallowing thickly like the words are coated in syrup. “My father’s belt. Don’t even remember what set him off that day…I just know he tore my leg open with the buckle.”

Edwin is quietly horrified by the explanation, but he does his best to keep his expression as neutral as possible. “Charles,” he says, clearing his throat just a bit to take away the creaky quality of it when he speaks. He hasn’t needed a drink of water in over a century, but he suddenly finds his mouth is parched like sun-bleached bone in the desert. “You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to. I know this is a tremendously difficult subject for you, and I don’t want you to feel like-”

“No,” Charles says, cutting him off gently but effectively. He rubs his hands down the front of his pants nervously and chews the corner of his lip for a minute. “I want to tell you about it, that’s the thing. I just…I dunno, I didn’t know how to bring it up at first.”

He sighs again and leans back in the chair, letting his arms fall into his lap bonelessly. “I told Crystal about it earlier; I thought it might help to get her opinion on it,” he admits, glancing up at Edwin as if trying to gauge his response.

Edwin actively tamps down the biting sting of that response, the knowledge that Charles felt more comfortable sharing such intimate details with a girl he’s known for only a few weeks rather than his partner, whom he’s worked with for over thirty years, and concentrates on keeping his voice level when he speaks again. “And what was her opinion?”

Charles smirks humorlessly and shrugs his shoulders. “That I should have told you about it years ago and that I’m an idiot for trying to hide it from you.”

He crosses his arms over his chest and slouches further back against the chair. “She said if I didn’t talk to you, then she was going to hijack me and force me to tell you myself, and you know, I think she could actually do it. She’s a bit scary sometimes.”

Edwin is still somewhat at a loss, both from the knowledge that Crystal was actually taking his side in the matter and all but threatening Charles with surprise possession, but also the fact that Charles was still hesitant to talk to him in the first place.

It didn’t make sense, and Edwin didn’t like it when things didn’t make sense.

“May I ask why you felt more comfortable talking to Crystal?” he asks quietly, still trying to keep his tone as calm and level as he could. He couldn’t ignore the tightness in his chest, the aching burn that sent a jolt up the length of his spine. He won’t deny that it hurts, the knowledge that Charles trusted Crystal more with this information, that he went to her first and bypassed Edwin completely, but he also needs to know why.

He swallows carefully and clears his throat. “Charles, if there’s something I’ve done to make you feel as though you couldn’t talk to me-”

“No, no, it’s not that,” Charles cuts him off again, a bit more forcefully this time, as if trying to physically shut down that avenue of thought. He goes quiet for a minute, as if working out the details of the conversation in his head. “It was just…easier that way. Like a trial run or something, I guess,” he says quietly after a few seconds, glancing up at Edwin briefly but not holding his gaze for longer than a second or two. “It wasn’t as intimidating talking to her.”

“Intimidating?” Edwin asks, unable to hide the confusion in his voice or his expression.

“Yeah,” Charles replies, scrubbing a hand over his face again. “I didn’t want to tell you about it because…well…I was afraid that you-” the last part of the sentence fades off into a muffled mumble, and despite the fact that they’re only sitting a few feet away from each other, Edwin can’t make out any of what Charles just said.

“You were afraid of what?” he asks, eyebrows knit together in confusion as he tries to make sense of the conversation.

“I was afraid that once you knew about the scars, once you knew about my dad, that you would…” Charles sighs heavily, his shoulders slumping with the movement. “I was afraid that you would think differently of me.”

Edwin sits back in stunned silence, any thoughts of jealousy or insecurity fading away in an instant. He replays Charles’ words in his head a few times, repeating them over and over in an effort to get them to make sense, but they never really do.

“Charles, I would never think-”

“I know, I know,” Charles says, shaking his head slowly. “Crystal said the same thing. It’s just… you’re like the strongest person I’ve ever met, Eds. I mean, you survived Hell and dragged yourself out on your own, and here I am, whining about my scars and what a prick my dad was, and I just thought… I dunno, I just didn’t want you to think I was weak.”

He shoves a hand through his hair again and stares down at the floor. “It’s stupid, I know.”

Edwin says nothing, standing slowly and making his way around the desk to drop to a knee next to Charles’ chair. He takes the other boy’s hands in his own, the pad of his thumb brushing over the starburst scars across Charles’ knuckles, and dips down until he’s in Charles’ line of sight.

“Charles, I want you to listen to me,” he says slowly, calmly, keeping his eyes locked on Charles’ when he speaks. “There is nothing in this world that could ever make me think less of you. Absolutely nothing. You are brave and brilliant and stronger than you ever give yourself credit for, and there is nothing about you that I would ever consider weak.”

He shakes his head once, slowly, and then meets Charles’ gaze. “What your father did to you was unforgivable,” he says simply, adding as much emphasis as he can into that short sentence. “But his abuse does not lessen you in any way, not to me, not ever; there is nothing you could say or do to ever make me think that.”

He lifts Charles’ hand carefully, retracing the scars on his knuckles with his fingertips. “You asked me once why I was so interested in your scars, why I asked about them, and wanted to know where they came from. The reason I ask is because each scar is a part of you, and because of that, they’re important. You may not see them that way, in fact, I wouldn’t expect you to, but each one represents an event in your life, a physical marker in time, and I want to know about them because I want to know about you.”

He squeezes Charles’ hand gently, covering it with his own as if trying to physically shield him from the world. “I’ve only ever known you in death, Charles; even the night we met, you were more dead than alive, so my knowledge of you is confined to your afterlife, nothing before. These scars, your scars, help fill in those blanks; they provide a more complete picture of who Charles Rowland was and the life he had before I met him in death.”

Edwin sits back on his knees and carefully rests Charles’ hand back in his lap, still keeping it covered with his own. “I understand how difficult it is for you to talk about some of them, how much it pains you to remember, but please know that whether you decide to tell me about them or not, they will never change my opinion of you. I do not find them repulsive or unsightly, and I certainly don’t see weakness in any of them. The only thing I see in your scars, Charles, is you, that’s all I care about.”

Charles smiles softly, the first genuine smile Edwin has seen in days, and squeezes his hand in return. He sniffles quietly and swipes a hand over his eyes quickly before letting out a soft laugh. “You know, if this whole detective thing doesn’t work out, you could take a crack at being a writer for one of those corny Christmas movies they play each year.”

Edwin chuckles quietly and shakes his head. “Sincerity over saccharine, Charles, that’s the goal.”

“Well, whatever it is, thanks,” Charles says earnestly, pulling Edwin’s hand up and pressing his lips to his knuckles. “I mean it.”

“Of course, Charles,” Edwin replies, tamping down the nervous flutter in his chest at the brush of Charles’ lips across his skin. He’s silently glad he doesn’t have a working circulatory system any longer because there was a high likelihood he would be blushing all the way to the tips of his ears if he did.

He pulls away from him then, carefully rocking back on his heels and then slowly standing to his full height. He tells himself it's because he doesn’t want Charles to feel crowded with him staying so close, but it’s also because if he stays that close, he might be tempted to keep talking, that he might accidentally confess his innermost feelings, and then be left to face the fallout.

He can’t do that, not now, so he pulls away instead.

“I’m finishing up for the evening,” he says in an effort to move the subject in a slightly different direction. “We can go up to the roof for a while if you would like.”

Charles nods, his expression and posture just slightly more open now after their talk. He’s still dealing with some pretty raw and painful emotions, but he doesn’t appear as closed off as he had been before, which feels like a step in the right direction. “Sounds good, I’ll meet you up there, alright?” he says, flashing Edwin a warm smile before he turns and makes his way to the door and phases out into the hallway.

Edwin freezes for a moment in the sudden stillness of their office, breath catching in his throat just slightly.

He could have sworn for the very briefest of moments that there was a look in Charles’ eyes before he walked through the door. It wasn’t the same look he gave Crystal, not the same intensity, but it was warm and familiar, and it felt like it was reserved only for him.

It wasn’t The Look, but it was A Look, nonetheless.

Maybe he could work up the nerve to tell him how he felt, to test the waters and see how things progressed.

Maybe there was a chance Charles felt the same way.

He presses a hand to his chest, directly over his heart, which he knows stopped beating over a century ago, and takes a slow, steadying breath.

Tomorrow.

He’ll find a time to tell him tomorrow.

He straightens the books on the corner of the desk, movements slightly jittery from nerves, and then walks out of their office and up to the roof to join Charles.

OOOOO

They’ve been back in London for a little over two months now, the familiarity of their office surrounding them like it was welcoming them back home.

Leaving Port Townsend had been a bittersweet affair, their success in killing Esther Finch nearly costing them Niko in return. It was a miracle she survived, only a few centimeters to the left, and Esther’s blade would have pierced her heart, but the five weeks she spent in the hospital, two of which were in a medically induced coma, made it clear that her recovery would be a very long, slow process.

Crystal stayed behind to help Niko’s mother pack up what little remained from their destroyed apartment and assist her in arranging transportation back home. The gravity of Niko’s injuries was such that she would likely never regain her full health, and the months of physical therapy she had to look forward to would be easier back home with her mother.

It was painful to leave her behind, to go back to London knowing Niko wouldn’t be coming with them, but they enlisted Crystal’s help in propping up a mirror in her hospital room so they could stop in and check in on her from time to time. It helped ease some of the pains of goodbye, but not all of them; there would still be a Niko-sized hole in their lives, and it would take a while for that sting to fade.

Crystal found a flat a street down from them, a barebones loft similar to what they’d had back in Port Townsend, only with an abandoned cupcake shop on the ground floor rather than a butcher shop.

Jenny, who had been hassled relentlessly into moving to London with Crystal, immediately balked at the rainbow-painted walls and bright pink, glittery floors. She expressly stated that it looked like a unicorn took a shit in a Barbie dream home before begrudgingly signing the lease and going out to buy as much black and grey paint as she could find.

The walls were repainted by that afternoon.

Their return to London also brought them face-to-face with the Night Nurse again, but thanks to some rather pointed instruction from the upper echelons of her department, she found herself in a role more akin to an associate than an adversary. Granted, their alliance was still uneasy and tense in the best of times and the Night Nurse still looked like she wanted to spit every time she was reminded of that fact, but she had become marginally less antagonistic toward them and was instead focusing on how to overhaul their office and the agency because “efficiency is everything boys, do try to remember that.”

Edwin thinks that at some point, their conflicting ideas regarding the trajectory of the agency might clash, but for now, he’s happy to leave her to her own devices if it means keeping her occupied with something other than constantly hovering over them. A little bit of peace and quiet and privacy was what they really wanted at the moment, not a discussion about their 5-year plan on how to move the Dead Boy Detective Agency forward.

Luckily for them, peace and quiet and privacy are exactly what they got that afternoon. Crystal and Jenny are still working to get their new apartment/butcher shop set up, and the Night Nurse is off doing something else entirely (neither of them was sure what, but they certainly weren’t going to ask).

There’s a stack of files and letters on the desk, months' worth of new cases and requests, but they all go ignored for the time being. There will be plenty of time to go through them later, but for right now, they’re taking a much-needed break.

Edwin is settled into one corner of the couch, a book in one hand and the fingers of his other hand slowly carding their way through Charles’ hair. The other boy is stretched out across the length of the couch, his head nestled in Edwin’s lap and his eyes closed in the late afternoon shadows like a cat caught in the throes of a sunbeam.

They don’t need to sleep anymore; the concept of being dead kind of renders that process pointless, but Edwin has never had the heart to tell Charles that; his partner tends to nap all over their office when there’s nothing else to do, and Edwin is happy enough to let him since it’s something Charles enjoys.

He glances down at the other boy, smiling softly at the relaxed expression and long, dark eyelashes. It makes Charles look younger, more childlike than sixteen, and the dull afternoon glow makes the faint dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose and forehead stand out a little more. The sunlight catches the charm on his earring ever so slightly, casting a tiny shine on the couch cushion like a star poking through a midnight dark sky.

“You’re staring again,” Charles mumbles drowsily, and Edwin feels himself straighten just slightly in the realization he’s been caught.

“I’m not staring,” he replies, resuming the slow drag of his fingers through Charles’ hair. “I was… admiring.”

Charles smirks and blinks up at him with warm, dark eyes. “Careful, Eds, you keep saying things like that and I might start thinking you’re in love with me.”

Edwin chuckles softly and shakes his head. “Well, we can’t have that, now can we?”

“Nope,” Charles says, catching Edwin’s hand and pressing his lips to his palm softly. “Probably goes against all sorts of rules the Night Nurse is setting up for us, but,” he says, pushing himself up on his elbows and turning to where he’s nose-to-nose with Edwin. “Lucky for us, I’ve never been a huge fan of rules.”

Edwin smiles and sets down his book, allowing his newly freed hand to cup Charles’ face and brush his thumb over his cheekbone. “Of that,” he says, tipping forward just the slightest bit to where their noses are touching. “I am very much aware.”

“Where’s the fun in following rules, anyway?” Charles continues with a smirk, shifting just slightly to catch the other boy’s lips in a soft kiss. He drags his hand up the length of Edwin’s arm, cups the back of his neck, and leans into him further, and Edwin lets him.

This thing between them was still tentative and careful, like they were still exploring the boundaries of their new relationship, but it also felt like the most natural thing in the world. There was no more guessing, no more fears of rejection or disapproval, no more wondering what if; it felt the same and wholly different at the same time, exhilarating and familiar all at once.

Granted, they were both still a bit awkward and clumsy at times, clacking their teeth together when a kiss was a little too sudden or figuring out appropriate levels of PDA while working a case (Charles, in particular, seemed very fond of holding Edwin’s hand anytime he wasn’t actively using both of them) but overall it felt like such a natural progression of their relationship that it was honestly shocking how long it had taken for them to reach this point.

Charles does make an effort to ease into things, keeping all of his movements slow and predictable due to Edwin’s tendency to drop through the floor when he gets too flustered (remaining solid takes at least a marginal amount of concentration which, for Edwin, goes straight out the metaphorical window when Charles is kissing him) but his efforts are beginning to pay off.

Edwin has slowly and steadily become more confident with his affection, no longer holding back for fear of rejection or humiliation. He’d spent decades burying that part of himself as deeply as he could, hoping that maybe if he left it silent and hidden, he’d never again have to face the cruelty he experienced in life, but there was no reason to hide it anymore.

Charles loved him, really and truly loved him, and the world never seemed brighter.

When Charles pulls away after a moment, scanning Edwin’s face briefly as if gauging his reaction (ie, whether or not he was about to fall through the floor), Edwin reaches up to cup his face again, this time allowing his thumb to drag over two tiny, u-shaped scars beneath his eyebrow.

They’re small, only about an eighth of a millimeter across, and they could almost be mistaken for fingernail indentations at the right angle. Charles told him they were from his father throwing a coffee mug at him one day, the cup shattering against the wall and sending shards of ceramic shrapnel through the air. A few pieces had caught him just below the eyebrow, sparing his eye by only a few centimeters but leaving him with the scars to remember.

There’s a matching set right at his hairline, courtesy of the same mug, but those scars are a bit deeper, more noticeable. They’re hidden enough by Charles’ hair (Edwin silently wonders if he grew his hair out a bit longer for the express purpose of hiding them), but Edwin still knows they’re there.

Those are the last ones he counts.

There are twenty-six scars on Charles’ body.

Edwin has counted and cataloged every single one of them, from feather-stroke scrapes to deep, rippling lacerations; he’s committed each of them to memory, the size, the shape, the depth, the way it feels beneath his fingertips. He studies them the way he studies runes and symbols, methodical and precise, perhaps bordering on obsessive, even though he tells himself it's curiosity over scrutiny.

He knows where all of Charles’ scars are, like a well-memorized roadmap in his mind, and each one of them traces a route directly back to Charles.

“Still find them interesting?” Charles asks, leaning into Edwin’s palm just slightly.

“Of course I do,” Edwin tells him earnestly, passing his thumb over the scars one more time. “I find everything about you completely,” he says, leaning up to press his lips to Charles’ eyebrow softly. “Utterly,” he continues, moving up to do the same to the scars near his hairline. “And endlessly fascinating.”

Charles chuckles and squirms a bit against him. “Is that right?”

“Without question,” Edwin says, meeting his gaze earnestly. “I could never be bored with you, Charles Rowland.”

The other boy smirks in response and lets out a theatrical sigh. “Well then, it’s a good thing I plan on sticking around for a while, innit?”

“A very good thing, I would say,” Edwin tells him with a grin, pulling him down again to catch him in another kiss. One hand passes up through Charles’ hair, fingertips brushing over the scar on his scalp, and the other drags a long, slow line up the length of his spine.

His lips graze over a small scar at the corner of Charles’ lower lip, a very thin slice right at the corner of his mouth. It had been a parting shot from his father right before he left for St. Hilarions the last time, one last blow before he disappeared from his life for good.

Charles couldn’t remember exactly what caused the wound, possibly a ring or a watch, but it was the last time his father ever laid a hand on him, the last scar he ever left on his body. It was a mark of liberation of sorts, even if that liberation came at the cost of his own life in the end.

Edwin feels the minute difference in texture of the scar against his lips, the very faint increase in rigidity, and he nips it gently with his teeth. And if he enjoys the quiet moan Charles lets out against his mouth, he keeps it to himself for the moment.

He knows he’ll never be able to erase the memories that some of the scars hold, the lingering trauma that’s literally buried skin deep, but that also doesn’t mean he can’t try to rewrite some of those memories with his lips and teeth as he makes it a personal mission to map out every single scar with his tongue and memorize the feeling of each of them against his lips.

He may not like where some of the scars came from (in fact, he absolutely loathes where some of them came from and wrestles with himself frequently on whether or not to engage in violent poltergeist activity against Charles’ father as a response), but they’re a part of Charles, and he wouldn’t change that for the world.