smoke gets in your eyes

by sidelined

Summary:

Suffice it to say, Thomas did not like Mike. At all. On occasion his emotions had reached a fever pitch and he had attempted to confront the man directly by bursting into their bedchamber, but after the second time Alison had threatened a ban on the record player, and Thomas didn’t feel that he loved his outrage more than he loved the Cure.

Alison and Mike move into Button House and, completely unintentionally and totally by accident, teach the ghosts valuable lessons about life and love.

Chapter 1

Summary:

In which Alison worries about a first date, Robin and Julian discuss marriage, Thomas accidentally humbles himself, Kitty discovers that romance can live everywhere, and the Captain ponders his loneliness.

As the waiter showed her to the table, it occurred to Alison that she had completely forgotten how to behave on a first date.

She’d been tamping down her nerves all day — all week, really, ever since she and Mike had agreed on Saturday evening — but now, right as she sat down in her seat, she was seized by a full-body panic.

Perfect. Perfect timing. Just what she needed. Alison tugged awkwardly at the hem of her shirt, suddenly very aware of herself and her surroundings. It was a lovely restaurant, tastefully decorated, the kind that Kevin never would have taken her to, even in the early stages of their relationship.

Ugh. Fantastic. Now she was thinking about Kevin, too. Being dumped by him had been bad enough, but now he was even ruining her thoughts. Maybe she shouldn’t have agreed to this after all. Her roommate had made some valid points as to why she should wait before seeing anyone again. The breakup was still awfully recent, and now she was going to muck this date up, this date with a guy who seemed perfectly sweet, who didn’t deserve to have his time wasted like this, whose smile when she said “yes” had made her heart flutter rather embarrassingly in her chest —

Her rapidly spiraling internal monologue was interrupted by a commotion at the door. She looked up to see Mike coming in, apologizing profusely to the staff at the door and looking bedraggled in what had clearly been a very nice outfit that was now covered in mud stains. Everyone else in the restaurant all cast him vaguely disturbed-slash-confused looks as he strode through the restaurant and sat down opposite her, and now she could see that his shirt was nearly soaked through, too.

“Hi,” he said, nonchalant. “Sorry I’m late.”

Alison couldn’t help it. She laughed.

To his eternal credit, Mike sat there and took it good-naturedly, smiling back bashfully at her all the while. Just like that, the nerves twisting at Alison’s insides disappeared.

“Oh my god,” she said finally, when she was able to put words together again. “You’ve got to fill me in on the story behind…” She made a hand gesture. “... this.”

“Ah, it’s not particularly interesting,” Mike said with a shrug, looking rather relieved that she wasn’t upset with him. “Got chased by a goose on my way here and fell in a pond.”

Alison laughed again.

“Are you joking? That’s too interesting of a story, if anything. Almost sounds like you’re making it up.”

“No, believe me, I wish I was making it up,” Mike said, smiling all the while. “In fact, look — ”

He reached into his pocket and produced a crumpled bulrush that looked the worse for wear.

“It got caught on my trousers and I only realized when I got to the restaurant,” he said. “I hope that’s proof enough for you.”

Alison grinned and plucked the bulrush from his hand.

“I believe you,” she said, and stuck it behind her ear. “How do I look?”

She’d done it with the intention of showing she could also make fun of herself and hopefully making him feel a little better about the circumstances, but she wasn’t prepared for the way he looked at her then, with a sudden, sharp fondness that seemed to surprise even himself.

By the time he walked her home, his shirt still stained but his mood no less diminished for it, Alison’s earlier fears seemed very far away. He didn’t kiss her at the door, but she wasn’t disappointed. She was quite certain already that she was going to know him for a long time.

Her roommate, who was sitting in the living room, tutted at her when she came back inside.

“How was the rebound date?”

But Alison hadn’t heard. She was humming quietly to herself, a small smile on her face, as she went straight into her bedroom and put the crumpled bulrush in the flower vase on her dresser.

 

Robin had seen many kinds of people in his death. He had watched this land be host to villages and towns and manors. All came and went. Sometimes he looked around at Button House and thought about how this, too, someday would be gone. Would he also be gone by then? Chances seemed low. At this point he had accepted that he was going to be here forever.

The length of human lives stopped mattering to him after this long. So did their relationships. Robin watched as countless men brought their wives to their homes, then proceeded to neglect them even as every year a new baby came wailing into the world. Then there were the wives who coupled with people other than their husbands, though their husbands did not know about it. 

It all confused him greatly. In his society, there had been no such attachments. Everyone simply lay with whomever they wanted, and though he had liked some more than others, it was not the sort of thing that was that important to him. And yet as time passed people were building societies around it. Girls and boys were married to each other before they were even old enough to know the scope of until death do we part.

The Captain taught him the word for it. “Monogamy”. Committing yourself to someone for the rest of your life. Robin thought it was quite the scam. He had watched as Humphrey and his young wife — the two of them just children — came to live in the manor that sprang up on his land, and how unhappy they grew up to be. Then he watched how Mary’s lack of a husband opened her up to the accusations from those conniving men. (Though all the ghosts would ask him about it at some point, he never told anyone about Mary’s trial. He hadn’t been able to watch the end, anyway. Time had not prepared him for all cruelties.)

He watched all kinds of marriages come through his lands, and by the time the Coopers arrived at Button House, Robin had made up his mind that this “monogamy” business was for suckers. Still, people kept doing it.

Alison was nice and she let him look at moving pictures of deer on the magic window, but even she was a sucker. Mike was nice, too. Both of them could be skilled tradesmen, Robin was sure, and would be very desirable as partners for procreation. Why did they stay together like this, and not even have children? It made no sense to him, and he was sure most of the other ghosts wouldn’t have any helpful answers for him, so he floated the question to the only person he knew who was as skeptical of monogamy as him.

“I suppose they love each other or something,” Julian said, sitting back in his chair and tenting his fingers. “I know it’s unthinkable for people like us, but those two actually want to spend their lives together. And children are just trouble, you know, they cry all the time and demand your attention…”

“Don’t get it,” Robin said. “Always see same person for the rest of life? They don’t get bored?”

“Well,” Julian said. “Do you get bored of me?”

“Uh, yeah,” Robin grunted. “Of course. Get bored of all of you. Sometimes have to go away and not talk to any of you for couple of days.”

“But… you always come back, don’t you, old chap?” Julian said, doing that weird, emphatic gesture with his fist. “Even though we fight and disagree and often get bored, when all is said and done, you come back.”

“You’re only person who play chess with me,” Robin said. “Plus, you know, dead. Nowhere else to go. Everywhere else very boring too.”

“Yes, we’re stuck with each other, aren’t we?” Julian said, sounding smug at having successfully delivered his message. “We’re stuck with each other because we need each other to make the days bearable. And that… is what this whole monogamy nonsense is all about. Allegedly.”

“Oh,” said Robin, more confused now than when he asked. “So we married?”

“No, heavens, no,” Julian said, punctuating it with his smarmy laugh. “I did that whole thing once before and I’m not interested in doing it again, thank you! But you do nag a great deal less than the missus, shall we say, so I’d rather spend eternity with you than with her.”

 

Thomas simply couldn’t understand it. Here he stood, the greatest wordsmith of his time, something that Alison knew very well (he only declared it every other day), and yet she seemed utterly resistant to all of his attempts to woo her. He was practically prostrating himself at her feet, laying all of the affection in his heart out before her, but even his most passionate pleas were only ever met with a sigh or an eyeroll. Even on the night of the party, when her declaration to him had filled his languishing heart with hope, it was Mike’s bed in which she slept, whilst Thomas retired to his room alone.

Suffice it to say, he did not like Mike. At all. Every time he witnessed Alison and her present beau embracing it filled him with rage, and made him irksome for the rest of the day. On occasion his emotions had reached a fever pitch and he had attempted to confront the man directly by bursting into their bedchamber, but after the second time Alison had threatened a ban on the record player, and Thomas didn’t feel that he loved his outrage more than he loved the Cure.

Perhaps the worst part was that none of the other ghosts sympathized with him, or even really cared whenever he spoke of his feelings. Every time he brought Alison up to the others, all they did was groan in annoyance. Julian usually just got up and left.

“I am trying to bare my soul to you about the woman I adore with every fiber of my being,” Thomas would say, indignant. “I should think you would respect that!”

“You say that about every woman who come here,” Robin complained. “You even say that about Fanny.”

Fanny made a disgusted noise as Thomas — well, he couldn’t blush, but he would have if he could. Robin would never let him forget that period of time where he had carried a torch for George Button’s young wife, who so obviously did not wish to be there. He had spent many a year in those early days lamenting his inability to rescue her from this loveless marriage, until she, well. Let’s just say her temperament soured somewhat, and at a certain point, pining after her was no fun anymore.

The only one who was willing to hear him out was Pat, who was simply too kind and too awkward to excuse himself whenever Thomas got started on his woes. One day, as Thomas was in the middle of a long spiel about how much he resented seeing Alison worry about money (“a husband ought to ensure his wife is kept in the highest of comforts — had she and I wed, my father’s fortune would have seen to that…”), Pat piped up.

“Look, mate, you’re always on about Mike, but why don’t you think about it in a different way?” he offered, in his this can be a lesson voice. “Look at his good traits, and maybe then you’ll see why Alison loves him.”

Thomas huffed in annoyance.

“His one redeeming feature is that he is wed to Alison,” he declared petulantly. “There are no others!”

“Oh, come off it, Thomas,” said Pat (there he went, nagging again). “Don’t you respect Alison’s judgment?”

“Of course,” Thomas sputtered. “I hold her in the highest possible regard.”

“Then there must be a reason she married him,” Pat said patiently. “I think it would do you some good to try and understand that. Maybe you could even learn from Mike! And, I don’t know, not bother the rest of us so much? If you could?”

So Thomas tried Pat’s method, after much complaining and something that might be regarded by some as a temper tantrum but was actually just a gentleman’s physical expression of rage, thank you very much. After making sure Alison wasn’t around to witness it, Thomas deigned to join Mike on an expedition to the gatehouse, already disgusted at himself for what he was about to do.

As they walked past the field, Thomas began drawing up a mental list of Mike’s begrudgingly admitted virtues. He was fairly physically capable, always carrying heavy objects to and from the car. He was humorous, too; Thomas had had to stifle many a chuckle at Mike’s comments while they were watching a movie together. And he was, Thomas supposed as he looked closely at Mike’s features, rather good-looking. Not beautiful like dear Alison, but handsome, particularly when he smiled.

By the time they got to the gatehouse, Thomas had already amassed quite the list, to his chagrin. With effort he summoned his disdain for this man again as they stepped through the door, into the gatehouse. No, he was just being silly, and Patrick was getting in his head. There was nothing Mike could give Alison that Thomas could not, nothing that he could do for her that —

“Hey, Alison,” Mike was saying into his mobile phone. “You on your way back? Cool, cool, just so you know, I’ve already got dinner in the oven and I’m about to change out the sheets and pillows in the gatehouse. No, please, I don’t do it for the praise. But I do like the sound of what you’re saying, you can tell me more about it when you get home.”

Well. Alright. Homemaker, thought Thomas, and found that he couldn’t relate. Certainly, he had been brought up in an era where young men of his standing weren’t expected to learn how to keep house, and instead were meant to turn their attentions towards finding a suitable match. Ultimately, he had done neither, and here Mike was, doing both. 

The realization that Mike truly did possess a virtue that Thomas did not gave him pause. He had to turn and leave then, his ego quelled for the moment. As he traipsed back to the main house, he mulled over the thought that perhaps in this modern era, poems were not quite enough to keep a woman in one’s life.

 

Kitty had always fantasized of an epic romance, the kind that she used to read about in her storybooks and breathlessly relay to her father afterwards. He always sat and listened attentively, no matter how many times he heard about the prince who slew the dragon and rescued the princess from her tower.

Even after she died, she was still infatuated with all the romances that passed through the house. She listened in on all of Isabelle Higham’s endless sighing over this handsome young poet she had fallen in love with, and oh, wasn’t it wonderful when he really showed up one day, his lovelorn looks a confirmation that he shared her feelings! Of course, he had perished shortly after, but even though Kitty liked the happy endings best, a tragic romance was still a romance.

The love story that occupied the halls of Button House at present, on the other hand, was quite a mystery to her at first. Alison and Mike enjoyed each other’s company, their marriage very much unlike some of the cold ones that had lived here over the centuries, but they had a strange way of showing their love for one another. The two of them never spoke of their feelings in long, eloquent speeches, for example, nor did they waltz about the ballroom to a music that only they could hear. Mostly what they did was run around the house, shouting at each other from different rooms, and go to bed exhausted at the end of the day, Alison’s arm draped over Mike’s chest.

It was very odd, thought Kitty, based on everything she knew to be true about romance. One day she asked Alison about it, puzzled as to why she and Mike never did romantic things like write admiring letters to each other, for example. Alison seemed taken aback to hear the question, but answered, as she usually did, sincerely.

“Mike and I show that we love each other in… different ways,” she said.

“Different how?” Kitty asked, her nose scrunching up. “You mean like what Julian was talking about today?”

“No!” Alison said quickly. “No, not — what I meant is that we’ve been together so long that we don’t really need sweeping declarations anymore, you know? Not that we’re done with romance entirely, but… we make each other feel loved with the things we do, which in a marriage is more important than anything else.”

“Ah,” Kitty said, nodding sagely. “Thank you, Alison, I understand perfectly.”

She did not. It still seemed strange to her that two such people should just know that their feelings were true without so much as performing a daring feat to prove their love. She continued to wonder about it until a few weeks later, while the Coopers were knee-deep in preparing for an upcoming wedding. One night Alison came trudging back into the house well after the sun had set, all sweaty and grumpy, in the sort of foul mood that even the ghosts knew to steer clear of. Kitty, who had been waiting all day for the next page of her book, peered around the doorway as Alison tossed her gardening gear down, swore quietly to herself, and stomped into the kitchen.

“Oh, poor Alison!” Kitty said in a hushed tone, tiptoeing into the entrance hall. “She’s been so terribly tired lately. If only there was something I could do.”

“Well,” came a voice from the low table. Kitty jumped and turned around to see that it was just Humphrey’s head again. “Fixing up this house is a lot of work. Hey, you wouldn’t mind giving me a lift to the ballroom, would you…” 

“Perhaps she would like it if I performed a song for her,” Kitty said, brightening up. “My favorite song from when I was alive! It might take her mind off things.”

“Actually, I think she might prefer if you just left her alone — ” 

His advice fell on deaf ears; Kitty had already made up her mind. She crossed the hall to peer into the kitchen before entering and was surprised to discover that Alison was, against all odds, sitting at the table and smiling. Across the room Mike was standing at the stove, stirring something in a pot and talking quietly. Kitty couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but whatever it was made Alison laugh. All of her exhaustion and irritation seemed to be forgotten as Mike spooned whatever he was cooking into a bowl and slid it in front of her.

Kitty withdrew her head from the door then, feeling as though she was intruding on something. As she crept away from the kitchen, she found that she was no longer worried about Alison for the time being. And that dragon-slaying was, sometimes, not necessary.

 

The Captain was not in the habit of making his feelings known. He had never been the sort of man to do so, having always found emotionality more trouble than it was worth, and besides, they hadn’t won the war with heartfelt talks, had they? No, he was perfectly happy being a single-minded sort of fellow, focused solely on his duty and ready to sacrifice his own needs for the greater good. Always staunchly on the straight and narrow, him.

He had been rather an advanced age when the war started up, and yet many of the men under his command who were younger came to him leaving wives and children behind. Occasionally one would ask him whether he had anyone waiting for him at home, and he always declared that no, he did not, and all the better, for now he could devote his full attention to the war effort.

His men would look at him like they felt sorry for him, but he really had been content with a solitary life. It was true that he got lonely from time to time, but who didn’t? What did it matter if sometimes the empty spaces in his life felt so gapingly wide that it felt like they might swallow him? So what if the unspoken longing that rose in his throat could on occasion be so potent that it threatened to choke him? They were just some of the trials that he had been placed on this earth to endure, as far as he was concerned.

There was only one person who’d ever known about the Captain’s secret loneliness. He had confided in Havers about it, just once. It had been a stormy night. Voice masked by the howling of the wind and the creaking of the manor, the two of them sharing a bottle of whisky, the Captain had admitted that sometimes he did feel rather lost in his solitude — unmoored and floating, like he wasn’t sure where he was going to, or from. Havers had nodded and said that he understood, and then he’d smiled reassuringly, the way he always did when the Captain was worried about something. It never failed to soothe his nerves, Havers’ smile. Even decades later, well into the Captain’s death and long after he’d forgotten the sound of Havers’ voice, he still sometimes summoned the memory of that smile to calm himself.

These days, watching the young couple that now inhabited Button House did not make the Captain feel lonely — he had far too much company to ever feel that — but it did make him ponder what he’d missed. Though he’d met many married men during the war, their romantic attachments had always seemed very far away in the face of the looming threat.

Heather Button had inherited the estate a few years after the war was over, and she had never married, quite content to putter about the big empty house on her own for the rest of her days. So the Captain had never had the opportunity to observe a real romantic entanglement until Alison and Mike moved in. It fascinated him, though he would never admit it. There was a lived-in quality to their relationship, one that came from years of being together. He watched as Alison prepared eggs in the morning without having to ask Mike how he preferred them, and he watched as Mike repainted the guest bathroom in the color that he knew Alison liked. It seemed that truly being with someone meant knowing them and being known in turn. He wasn’t sure anyone had ever truly known him like that in life.

Sam and Clare’s wedding had been a marvelous affair as well, a tremendous opportunity to observe how expressions of love manifested in this modern age. Something about watching the two brides together at the end of the aisle had made an odd feeling settle in his chest, one that he was still puzzling over after the wedding was over. He wondered if it might be a lingering effect of the intolerance that had been taught to him in his upbringing. But the rest of the ghosts, save Fanny, seemed not to have the same problem.

“Yes, yes, I thought it quite scandalous at first,” Fanny said when he brought it up to her. “But my George was the same way, and to think of it now it must have caused him all sorts of strife, so all the better that people these days are allowed to follow their inclinations, rather than push their wives out of windows to hide them.”

“And you don’t hold any resentment towards him for that?” the Captain asked, fiddling with his swagger stick. “I mean, for the… the other thing, not the murder part.”

“No, not anymore,” said Fanny. “’Twasn’t his fault, after all. Neither of us really wanted to marry the other; it was simply the way of things then. And I could hardly have defied my parents’ wishes.”

“I see,” the Captain said. “I confess, I myself am having rather a difficult time wrapping my head around it, and I’m not certain why.”

“You can be rather rigid,” Fanny sniffed. “And that’s coming from me.”

It left the Captain with something to think about, at any rate. He wandered up to the room that had served as his office during the war and gazed out at the front gate through the window. Inevitably, he thought of Havers, as he usually did while he was here. His mind wandered to how Havers liked his eggs over easy, how his favorite color had been dusty blue, and something about that thought was comforting.

Chapter 2: appendix

Summary:

In which Mary thinks about the children she never had, and Julian thinks about the child he did.

Notes:

so, I actually wrote this 2 years ago, a little after the first part, but I couldn't think of any good ideas past mary and julian, so I abandoned it. but I just stumbled upon it again and reading it back I really do like the two parts I did write, so I'm just throwing them up as a little appendix.

Mary’s husband had been five years her senior. They’d known each other since childhood, and wed when she was seventeen. She learned the rules quite quickly: so long as she had food on the table when he returned from the fields, and kept herself to herself on the days he came home steaming over some disagreement or other, they lived quite a content little life together.

Most days she would tend to the crops with her neighbor, Alice, and Alice would ask her why she did not yet have children. Mary was the only childless married woman left in the village. Alice herself had three, with another on the way.

“Oh, we’s not much concerned with that sort of thing,” Mary would stammer out. In truth she and her husband had been trying to have a child since their wedding night. Back then it hadn’t been “trying” — it was just the expected outcome, really. But month after month Mary would bleed, and the spare room in their cottage sat empty.

Her husband grew frustrated over it sometimes. It upset Mary too, mostly because she wanted the persistent questions and whispers to stop. Privately, though, she thought of how harried and exhausted Alice was all the time, and was a little relieved that she didn’t have to deal with all the complications of child-rearing just yet.

Two decades after Annie died, the first baby since Mary’s death was born within the halls of the manor. All of the ghosts crowded around to watch as the child was brought into the world, crying at the top of her lungs. Robin grumbled and left, unable to stand the racket, and Annie soon followed suit, but Mary stood and watched as the lady of the house held her baby for the first time.

The following year another baby was brought to the house, one not born there but loved by the lord and lady all the same. Mary took a special interest in watching the children. Little Eleanor never could see her but baby Katherine did, clapping her hands and giggling whenever Mary made faces at her. Mary so enjoyed entertaining her as the nursemaid napped in the corner, up until Katherine learned to stand on her own two feet and couldn’t see Mary anymore.

Still, Katherine — Kitty, as she came to be known — remained a darling girl as she grew up, always cheerful and always smiling. Eleanor was far less pleasant.

“A foul wench, that one,” Annie would say disdainfully. “Loathe as I am to speak ill of a little girl.”

“No, a foul wench she be indeed,” Mary grumbled, sitting on the couch and watching as Kitty and Eleanor learned French from their governess and Eleanor laughed meanly at Kitty’s pronunciation. “And the father doesn’t see half the things what go on right under his nose.”

When Kitty died and subsequently stayed, Mary was secretly glad that the little girl she loved would be able to see her again. Kitty was scared at first, and it was difficult to get her to understand the concept of a ghost, but once she wrapped her head around it she was a very welcome addition to their group. Though Mary never told Kitty of the times they’d shared when she was a baby, Kitty remained an especial favorite of hers, even as the house grew ever more populated with restless spirits.

The Coopers’ arrival at Button House felt like a second awakening for Mary, centuries after Annie had died and galvanized the first. She learned to read her own name, which amused her to no end. Sometimes Alison found her staring at Mike’s ghost chart and cheerfully reading “Mary” out loud, over and over.

Alison’s help aside, Mary found herself quite taken with Mike. She developed a habit of slipping into the room he was in whenever Alison wasn’t around and watching him do whatever he was doing, whether he was cooking, brushing his teeth, or just looking at the little glowing rectangle he carried in his pocket. He was very handsome, she thought, and so good to his wife! She was struck by how kind he was to Alison, letting her roam about wherever she liked and hardly ever getting upset with her, not even when he came home and there was no meal waiting for him.

The Coopers didn’t have a child, either. It had been nearly a century since Button House had seen a baby, and Mary was surprised to see a young couple moving in with no little ones to speak of. But for them, it wasn’t the same as it had been with her and her husband.

“We don’t really… want children,” Alison explained, when Mary asked. “Not right now, anyway. Or maybe ever? We don’t know yet.”

“Which one is this?” Mike asked, coming up behind her, bowl of popcorn in hand.

“Mary,” Alison said.

“Ah! The toast one,” Mike said, and Mary felt a sudden giddy jolt upon realizing that he recognized her by name. “Why’s she asking about children?”

“Not sure,” Alison said, looking over at Mary, who was too flustered by Mike’s indirect attention to speak. “She’s, er, a bit embarrassed to say, I think.”

Turning his eyes up to the ceiling, Mike said: “You lot ought to be glad we don’t want kids at the moment, cause if we had a kid we’d be putting it to bed right now instead of getting ready to watch — what was it?”

“Murder on the Orient Express,” Alison said. “Fanny’s choice.”

The two of them headed into the movie room together. Mary lingered at the doorway, peering in at where the other ghosts were already sitting and idly chatting. She thought about Fanny, who had passed before any of her descendants, but ended up watching them all die anyway. Pat always spoke fondly about his son, while Julian was rather dismissive about the whole idea of having a child. Everyone had a different opinion. Everyone was allowed to have a different opinion.

Mary shuffled in and shyly took the spot next to Mike on the couch, the one that the others always kept empty for her. With her husband dead before her, it was a good thing the two of them hadn’t left a little one behind on its own. If they had, she was sure it would have broken her heart.

And if she was really thinking about it, hadn’t their life without a child been quite nice? Perhaps she had never wanted children of her own at all. Perhaps what she’d really wanted was not to be the odd one out. What she’d wanted was to belong. She glanced over at Kitty, who was quietly braiding Robin’s hair (and re-braiding it every time it returned to its natural state), the same way she used to play with her dolls as a young girl. The memory of it made Mary smile.

 

Julian, for the record, did not hate his wife. He never had, no matter how many things he said about — well, about how much he hated his wife, essentially. Yeah, he did think it was rather ball-and-chain-y when she said he had to be home to put Rachel to bed instead of snorting cocaine in the health secretary’s office, and he might have said as much, but people joked about that sort of thing all the time.

No, no, Margot was alright as far as wives went. Though she was prone to nagging and bothering, particularly after Rachel was born, she generally seemed just as disinterested in maintaining their relationship as he was. That was what had drawn him to her when they’d first met at that political fundraiser. A friend had introduced them and very quickly something had developed between them, a mutual understanding more important than attraction. He wanted a wife to parade about at functions, and she wanted a means to climb the social ladder. Julian was pleased to have met a woman who didn’t care what he was about. Also, she had a cracking figure.

After his untimely demise, Julian had a difficult time adjusting to his new state of being. The boredom was the main thing. It was more difficult for him, in his opinion, than for some of the older ones; they’d lived lives full of mundanity anyway (except for the Captain, who would not shut up about the war that he’d not even been terribly involved in). But Julian had been a man about town, so to speak, and in life there had always been something to do or drink or sleep with. It was cruel providence that had caused him to die in this country house, rather than someplace he would have quite enjoyed haunting, like a pub, or the House of Parliament.

The day he discovered his unique power was a revelatory one for everyone. Julian had gotten into a row with Fanny again over something or other, and things proceeded the same way they usually did: Pat tried to play peacemaker, Thomas inserted his opinion where it was not wanted, and Robin laughed. It ended the same way, too, as Julian eventually got up to storm out of the room, automatically reaching out to slam the open door behind him.

It was a habit he still hadn’t shaken, only being five years removed from life, and usually his hand went right through it. But something about this particular disagreement had whipped him into such a fervor that his hand flew out with great force, reached the edge of the door — and the door’s hinges squeaked.

Everyone in the room fell silent. Julian stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the door in amazement, then looked down at his hand. He had nearly forgotten how it felt, but he was certain then. He had touched that door.

The topic of the argument was completely forgotten then, both in the moment and in their collective memory, as the ghosts swarmed around Julian and started their infernal nattering.

“Do it again!” Robin said.

“Now, are you quite sure it wasn’t the wind?” the Captain suggested tersely.

“Can you open the jar of sweets in the kitchen?” Kitty asked excitedly.

“You can’t eat any of it, Kitty,” Fanny said.

“Oh, right.”

They went on like that until Julian called for order in his House of Commons voice to shut them up. His heart would be racing, if indeed it was still beating. Finally, something to shake up the monotony, and of course the awesome responsibility had fallen to him. Of course he was the only one who could wield such a power.

… Oh. He was the only one who could wield such a power. That was going to get annoying quite quickly.

Sure enough, after he learned about his skill it was a never-ending barrage of can you please push the window open a tad, Julian, and can you move this out of the way, Julian, and Heather’s fallen asleep again, Julian, can you change the channel? He got very petulant about it very shortly, and complained at length as he carried out every request. Honestly, he thought, it was like having to take care of a kid all over again, and he’d barely done that!

The first time he demonstrated his skill to Alison, she wasn’t terribly impressed. Granted, it was because he used it to change the oven setting from 175 to 250 degrees, an extremely clever prank that would have yielded hilarious results had Mike not clocked it and turned the oven off, but still. Alison seemed to find it a nuisance more than anything else. Regardless, Julian was pleased to have her around, at first. Things were much better with her help, and it was nice not to be inundated with stupid requests. 

Unfortunately it wasn’t a peace that lasted very long; Julian wasn’t good at breaking his habits, after all. He soon found that the sense of self-importance he’d cultivated here in their little afterlife was predicated on being needed, something that he no longer was. Though he had griped and groaned about it to no end before, more often than not he found himself just waiting to be approached, and most days, no-one came until it was time for Food Club or Music Club or whatever new thing Pat had concocted that day.

“Oh, Julian,” Kitty said to him one day as she bustled into the room where Julian was sitting and wallowing in boredom. “Have you…”

“No, I’m not busy at all,” Julian cut in, proudly standing up and adjusting his suit jacket. “Twist my arm, I’ll turn that television on, if you insist — ”

“Oh, no,” Kitty said breezily. “I was going to say, have you seen Alison? I have to tell her I’m ready for the next page of my book.”

“Well, I could turn the page for you,” Julian said.

Kitty frowned.

“Really?”

Her skepticism had an effect on Julian, though he could not identify exactly what that effect was. All he knew was that it wasn’t a very good one.

“Yes, it’s no trouble at all,” Julian said, proudly flexing his magic finger. “Just a bit of paper, isn’t it?”

“But,” said Kitty in a state of confusion, “you hate doing things for us. You called it God’s punishment.”

“What’s a bit of inconvenience between friends, eh?” Julian said jovially, striding forward to tap Kitty on the arm, an act that only served to heighten her bewilderment. “If it makes our Kitty happy, it’s no trouble.”

“You’re being weird,” Kitty said, her nose scrunching up. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing’s the matter ,” said Julian, a bit miffed that his offer to help had been so thoroughly rejected. “It’s just… do the rest of you not want to speak to me now that you have no use for me, is that it? Because I have to say I’ve been feeling rather neglected as of late.”

“Of course we still enjoy your company,” Kitty said, clearly still perplexed, but there was a sympathetic look in her eyes. “Up to a point, I suppose — but you’ve spent the last thirty-odd years talking about how you wish you were anywhere else, and being very cross when we ask you for anything. We all thought you preferred it this way.”

“Well,” Julian said, embarrassed, “maybe I don’t. Maybe I want to feel like, I don’t know — like you lot want me around, instead of putting up with me.”

“We’re all putting up with each other,” Kitty said. “It doesn’t mean we don’t care. And I can’t speak for the rest of them, but I do care about you. You’re just very resistant to being cared about.”

Julian huffed and looked away. He thought of his daughter, whose face was a faraway memory to him now. He’d always felt his love for her was a given, like he didn’t need to demonstrate it for her to know it was there. And then he thought about Alison, running around the house all day to satisfy her ghostly lodgers’ requests, even as she was swamped with her real-life problems. Perhaps that was what one did when they cared — they helped, even if it was difficult.

“Alright,” he said finally, clearing his throat and turning his attention back to Kitty. “Let’s get that page turned, shall we?”

Notes:

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