Work Text:
"Lockwood?"
The evening was quiet when he heard his name, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, but at Portland Row, evening was practically their morning- what with most ghost hunting taking place at night. Lucy was staring at the crack in the kitchen window George had made during the Bone Glass case, a lukewarm cup of tea in her hands that had long since stopped fogging up the pane with steam.
It was his mother's favorite cup, and while he would never tell her as much- the sight of her holding it set his heart ablaze in a way he didn't recall being so enamored with before. He swallowed the dozens of thoughts swirling in his head and hummed to show his interest, pretending for a moment that the entire world didn't revolve around the girl looking out his back garden window at nine thirty at night.
"Yeah, Luce?" He questioned, raising an eyebrow as he waited for her to press on with whatever seemed to be nagging her mind at the time.
"I was just thinking. The Other Side... What do you figure it's like there? For them, obviously, not us."
The question took him off guard. Lockwood wasn't particularly religious- sure, he'd gone to church the odd time as a child, but he hadn't really had the time to form a meaningful connection to it until after his parents died and he found himself praying to Gods he didn't even really know how much he believed in for a hint of a sign- some answer as to why . He'd never gotten one, but he still found himself now and then running his fingers over his mother's cross or staring at the Buddhist prayer beads his father had brought back from India a little too long, still praying in some little part of himself that his Mum and Dad and Jessica were all happy together. When he was younger- in the early days of his work, fresh and reckless in the world of ghost fight, he used to pray to join them swiftly. After meeting George and Lucy, he found himself praying that they all made it home safe.
"I don't know," he admitted. "I don't know if they... Do much over there, but.. I like to believe that our loved ones are together, the same way we are."
He watched Lucy run her fingertips over the rim over her mug thoughtfully before taking a sip and grimacing at its tepid temperature. He came further into the kitchen and gently nudged the stove, reheating the long abandoned and still water filled kettle Lucy had set there.
"Why do you ask?"
"Just thinking." She furrowed her brows, staring at the spot at the table where they used to set the Skull.
"You miss him sometimes, don't you?" Lockwood poured himself a cup when the kettle whistled, adding a teabag and reaching into the cupboard for honey and sugar.
She would never say it out loud- not to anyone, George, Holly, Quill, even Lockwood himself had tried to get her to discuss the loss that had clearly changed her, but Lucy couldn't explain it. Or so she said. And to a certain extent, Lockwood could understand. Some things couldn't be talked about- they just needed to be felt and Lucy's connection to the Skull was something none of the rest of them could ever fathom the feeling part of.
"I just wonder." She shrugged, setting her cup on the counter in silent acquiescence to letting him redo her tea. "I wonder about loads of things."
"What is it George always says?" Lockwood murmured, putting a bag of lemongrass and rosehip tea into the mug with practiced hands, glancing at the clock only momentarily. "Uh, 'the world is a constant enigma full of questions'? I'd say there's plenty to wonder about. No shame in that." He reached for the fridge door to get her cream.
She watched his little movements, his little ticks, and her lips quirked upwards faintly, a spectre of a smile gone before he could look back.
"Does missing them ever get..." She asked, the question hanging in the air. Asking about Lockwood's family was sketchy territory, and she'd cut off the question before it ever bore fruit- but he still answered her.
"Easier?" He finished, stirring honey into his tea and finding his eyes drawn to the hands of the clock, ticking away with their scuffed little edges and the faintest little red stain between five and six from when a tiny Anthony Lockwood had decided he very much did not want spaghetti, and threw a meatball at it. "Not really." He let the minute hand hit fourteen before pouring the cream into Lucy's tea and taking out the bag, setting it on a cat shaped coaster as he handed her the mug. "But you live with it."
There was a pregnant pause as Lucy sipped her tea and Lockwood mulled over his words, staring into the abyss of English Breakfast and honey.
"They're always there," he began quietly, catching her attention with his sudden and solemn statement. "In the corner of your eyes, in the back of your mind- I still pick up my sister's favorite kind of crisps at the shops sometimes, even though no one ever eats them and I end up sending them to Flo. You never stop feeling them, but you learn to live around it. You learn that you're going to buy the crisps, and you're going to pick the flowers your mum likes because your father taught you to be a gentleman, and you're going to pick up razorblades for your dad once in a blue moon because he used to run out of them almost exactly every seven months. You're never going to be totally out of the routine of wanting to call on them, to ask them how they're doing. But you learn to do something else. Count beads, call friends, walk through graveyards in broad daylight and try to stomach the fact that ninety nine percent of people never get closure anymore, and then..." He picked up his cup, setting his spoon aside. "You keep living. You have to. Because they can't ."
Lucy sipped her tea, made to perfection by careful hands that she had studied with everything from a pencil to a rapier clutched in nimble, practiced fingers.
"And the living part." She looked up at him, the quiet kitchen feeling deafening as their eyes met. "Does that part get easier?"
Lockwood kept their eyes perfectly in line as he took a sip of his drink. He could drown in those eyes, and for a moment, he let himself wonder what it would feel like.
"Yes," he replied, a bit breathless, as though coming up from underwater. "In the right company."
Her brows knitted together for the briefest of moments, a flicker of some unknown emotion scrunching up her features as she watched him.
"How do you know you've found..." Her gaze broke from his to catch on his lips, then down at her cup. "The right company?"
The kitchen was quiet, yellow in the evening light from the ever so slightly buzzing ceiling bulb. Two mugs of tea and two kinds of grief hung in the air between them, but as his hand brushed hers on the counter, for a moment the electricity was there on the countertop tile, underneath his fingers where her own lay.
"I suppose it's like anything else in that department," he confessed, "You have to learn to recognize them."
And for a moment... As the clock ticked, and the bulb buzzed, and George's footsteps sounded above them on the stairs- the cluttered residence and curious residents of Number 35 Portland Row was a very easy thing to recognize.