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Things start going poorly when they find the demon.
Crystal is benched with a twisted ankle, sprained in a root-filled old graveyard. She’d cursed a blue streak when Edwin told her she would just be slowing them down. And worse when Charles backed him up. Not just for the ankle, but in case it was too much after David. Which, to be fair, was a little bullshit of him, which Crystal told him at length before limping out of their office.
Now he was wishing she was here even if it really was impractical for her to be unable to run, because the demon kicks their asses (mostly his ass) with an iron knife until he’s able to lure it into the binding circle. Edwin chants something that makes it scream and leave its host, a girl with green hair and a nose piercing, and Charles pulls her out of the circle before the demon can recover.
He’s all set for Edwin to send its ass back to Hell before it recovers but it’s quick, pulling together into a slender demon with dark purple skin, long, curling black horns. It smiles.
Behind him, he can hear Edwin stop moving.
“Ah,” it says. “An old friend.”
Charles’s stomach drops to his feet worse than it had the first time he’d phased through the floor by accident.
“Edwin,” he says, and turns back to him. “Don’t listen. Incantation quick, yeah?”
Edwin is shaking. He almost drops the book when he turns the page.
“Aww,” the demon says. “Good to know where you and your little boyfriend are so I can come pay a visit.” It sighs wistfully. “Pretty little thing. Tough to make you scream. I had to actually work for it.”
Charles actually blacks out with rage. When he’s aware of what he’s doing again, he has the cricket bat in his hand and he’s stepped in front of Edwin, who is standing perfectly still, mouth slightly open.
“Charles,” he says, but Charles doesn’t listen.
“Get the fuck away from us,” Charles says. He’s shaking all over, worse than the night he died, worse than Edwin was just now. Behind him, Edwin says his name again.
The demon grins. “Going to beat me to death with a wooden bat?”
“Can’t kill you,” Charles says. “But it’ll be fun trying.”
The demon just stands there and laughs as Charles hits it, over and over. Its arm is dislocated, its dark purple face is stained with black goo that must be its blood, and it keeps laughing.
Behind Charles, Edwin is breathing wrong, but Charles only notices at a distance. The whole world is narrowed to one point, him and the demon, and he just wants to make it stop. Make it stop laughing. Make it leave. Make it leave them alone, forever, make everything and everyone leave them alone, let them get a chance to stop looking over their shoulders like they’ve had to do their whole fucking lives—
The demon vanishes.
Charles whips around, wild. Edwin has the book aloft.
“Why did you do that?” Charles barks at him, blood rushing. He hadn’t been done, he’d wanted it to hurt—
Even Edwin’s lips are drained of color. “You couldn’t kill it,” he whispers. “It’d just go back to Hell.”
But Charles is still full of rage, with nowhere to put it. He turns back to where the demon was and smashes the bat into the ground, one, two, three times, until it snaps in half, splinters flying. He sucks in air for a few moments, the handle of the bat dangling from his hand. He looks at the dent in the linoleum and the wood on the ground. He slowly turns around to see Edwin, looking as scared as he did on their way out of Hell. Sudden shame washes over him like ice water. He can’t breathe, eyes starting to sting.
“I think there’s something really wrong with me, mate,” Charles sobs, the remains of the bat falling from his hand.
Edwin’s approaching him like a feral animal, which just makes him cry harder.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” he says, and wipes his eyes with his sleeve.
“I know,” Edwin says. “I don’t want to startle you.”
He tilts his chin up just as Edwin gets close, but he can’t stop crying.
“You should be the one crying.”
“I think I’ve forgotten how,” Edwin says, softly, and puts a hand on the back of Charles’s neck. Charles sobs raggedly and pulls Edwin to him. Edwin lets him. After a moment he wraps his other arm around Charles’s back.
“How are you not angry?”
“I’m angry,” Edwin says into Charles’s shoulder, quietly. “Every day. Without you I’d probably have gone mad with it.”
Charles sobs again. He didn’t even know that, didn’t quite realize how hard Edwin keeps himself under control, while Charles is a proper mess. Edwin holds him tight for another few minutes, until he gets his breathing under control enough to step away. He can’t even look at him.
“Charles?”
“I’m fine,” he says, barely managing to not start crying again. “Let’s go home.”
Charles can barely look at Edwin the next few days. When he does, Edwin is usually looking back with a drawn expression that makes him want to throw something, or cry again. He learns later the green-haired girl had run out of the room in a terror while he was “occupied,” as Edwin puts it. That just makes him feel worse, insides churning. He makes it three days before he says to the desk, “I’m going out.”
He hears Edwin close a book somewhere behind him.
“Where?”
It makes him itchy, but he’s been acting like a psycho these last few days and he owes Edwin that much. He can’t go see Crys, she’s still fuming mad with them and has dealt with enough of Charles’s anger issues. And Jenny seems like she might get it. Maybe. He’s out of options and he can’t look at the office anymore without wanting to explode and scaring the absolute shit out of Edwin two times in one week.
“Gonna see if Jenny’s in.”
“Alright,” Edwin says, clearly wanting to ask why and stopping himself. Charles has known him thirty years, fourteen more years than he knew his own mum. He can feel it in the air, when Edwin is curious but doesn’t ask. He can feel it when Edwin is hurt, angry, sad—or he thought, he thought he could, Edwin’s been hiding everything from him and he’s scaring him and he’s fucking this all up, actually—
“I’ll be back later tonight,” he chokes out, and dives through the mirror.
Jenny reacts surprisingly well to Charles popping out of the mirror. As in, she doesn’t throw anything at him like the first time he did it, she just curses and takes a long, deep breath.
“Still haven’t heard of doors,” she grumbles, and then her eyes flick to the mirror. “Where’s Oliver Twist?”
“The office,” Charles says. He shuffles from foot to foot. “D’you…have a minute?”
“For what?” Jenny asks, flat, and makes a neat cut in the slab of meat in front of her.
Charles shrugs, miserable. “Need to talk to somebody.”
Jenny looks at him for a long moment, then she picks up a clean knife from a butcher’s block behind them. She holds the knife towards him and he flinches. Her face twitches and she puts the knife on the counter, then gestures for him to pick it up. When he does, she drops a slab of beef on the cutting board in front of him, followed by a pair of clean gloves.
“If you’re gonna complain to me, you’re gonna work,” she says. “Dad always said it was soothing, cutting. Made me do it when I complained to him about whatever the hell I was upset about as a kid.” She pokes the slab with a gloved finger. “Little cubes.” Then she cuts her eyes over to him. “How old are you two, anyway?”
“We died when we were both 16,” he says. He keeps his eyes on the meat. “Edwin died in 1916. Me in 1986.”
“Jesus,” she says. “16.” She’s breaking down a leg next to him, and for a moment it’s quiet as they work.
His cut of meat disappears into chunks and they’re a little uneven. Jenny glances down at them and he braces for her to be upset, but she just flicks her eyes back up to his.
“Good,” she says, and tosses them into an industrial-size plastic container. She slaps another cut in front of him and gestures he should get started. They repeat this another time or two before before Charles puts the knife down.
“I think I’m broken.”
She looks at him. “Keep cutting.” When he starts again she sighs. “Why do you think I can help with that, kid? Not a shrink.”
Charles shrugs, miserable. “Crystal—I already scared Crystal once, and Edwin, and you’re the only adult we know, besides the Night Nurse.”
Jenny sighs again, much longer. She closes her eyes.
“You,” she says, using her knife to gesture. Charles flinches again. She puts it down. Much softer, she says, “I won’t hurt you, kid.”
“I know,” Charles says, miserably. “I can’t stop.”
“Cut,” she reminds him, and picks up her knife again. “Why do you think you’re broken?”
“I’m so angry, all the time,” he whispers. His hands are shaking.
She snorts. “So am I.”
“Yeah, but,” Charles says. “I scared Crystal, back in Port Townsend, the Night Nurse was going to take Edwin and I—”
Jenny looks over at him. “Probably not going to shock me, kid. Demons are real.”
“I bashed her head in and pushed her into a giant fish’s mouth.”
“Jesus.” Despite the promise, she sounds a little shocked.
“Yeah,” he says. He feels shame, down to the tips of his toes. He feels like he needs to run, is almost to putting the knife down before Jenny says, “So? What else?”
He glances at her but her face looks neutral as she works.
“A few days ago, we were working a case, and we ran into a demon. Who said he knew Edwin from Hell.”
“Right,” Jenny said. This time her face was blanker than was encouraging. “Edwin was in Hell?”
Charles’s hands start shaking again. “For 75 years.”
Jenny just nods. She leans her hip against the counter to watch Charles. He keeps his head down over the meat.
“I wouldn’t stop beating him,” he says, quietly. “And when he disappeared Edwin was afraid to come near me.”
She watches Charles for a few more moments, then closes her eyes and sighs again.
“Gotta say, kid,” she says. “Not ideal, but I would probably do that to someone who tortured my friends too. Or was threatening to drag them back.”
“But I don’t want to,” Charles says. He finally has to put the knife down before it clatters out of his hands. “They remind me of—of my mom. When my dad—” He can’t finish.
Jenny whispers something that sounds like, “16,” and then says, briskly, “Wait here.”
She leaves the room, tossing her gloves on the counter, and Charles hears Jenny yell, followed by a loud metallic clank, then another.
A window opens.
“Cut it out,” someone yells, and Jenny gives him the finger but goes back inside.
Charles stares at her. She’s breathing hard.
“Look, kid,” she says. She pulls on her gloves again. “I’m not a shrink.” She packs up the meat they just prepared, throwing it a little too hard into the containers. “But. Fuck. You’re dead. It sounds like you have a lot to be angry about.”
She starts stripping the gloves off of Charles’s hands and points towards the sink.
“But if you want my advice, figure out a different way to get it out. When you start getting overwhelmed, leave. Run away. And then hit a dumpster about it.”
The blood is already falling through Charles’s hands now that he’s not staying corporal enough to hold a knife, but he washes his hands anyway on reflex. Jenny strips her gloves too and then shoves him out of the way with her hip.
When her hands are clean, she puts them on his shoulders.
“Your dad was a piece of shit. You’re not. End of story.”
“How do you know?” he asks, terrified to hear the answer.
“You told me what you did and asked for help.” She shrugs and starts wiping down the counters.
“Are you sure?” His voice sounds so small he wonders if she could even hear him.
“Here. Christ. Look,” she says, and digs her phone out of her pocket. She pulls up a picture of a little kid with mousy brown hair. “My nephew. He’s 8. Would you hit him?”
“God, no,” Charles says, feeling ill.
She pockets the phone and turns back to the counter. “When did your dad start hitting you?”
Charles doesn’t answer. He still feels sick to his stomach.
She doesn’t look at him, and he thinks it’s so he doesn’t see her as a threat. He’s ashamed of how well it’s working. Like when Edwin crept towards him the other night.
“There’s always meat to cut,” she says, more gently. “For either of you.”
“I don’t think,” he says, and thinks of the pile of dead Edwins. “I think it would remind Edwin of Hell.”
“Alright,” she says, and takes a deep breath. She blinks a few times. Thickly, she says, “Think you need to get out of here now.”
Charles ducks his head a little and nods.
“Thanks,” he says.
She waves him off. “Run away. Remember.”
Charles nods again, then falls back into the mirror.
Edwin is a wreck when Charles comes out of the mirror and he feels twice as guilty as he already did. He’s pacing, fingers clasped behind his back and clutches so tight they’re turning white.
“Hey,” he says, and looks at Edwin for the first time in days.
“Hello,” Edwin says, and straightens. “Charles, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
“Me too,” Charles says, and tries to put on a brave face while his stomach feels like it’s going to fall through the floorboards.
They sit on the couch, and Charles sits far enough away that their knees don’t touch when they face each other. Edwin frowns down at the floor and then clears his throat.
“Before I say this, know that I would like to stay the best of friends.” Charles’s gaze snaps to Edwin’s face and the pit in his stomach grows larger. “But I think it’s appropriate we stop working together, as I have now put you in danger…several times, due to my prior experiences in Hell.”
“Whoa,” Charles says. “What?”
Edwin won’t look at him. “I simply feel it is prudent to not work together given it’s more dangerous than it already would be, due to my unique circumstances. It’s not fair to ask you to take that on, when it’s my—”
Charles feels the tide of anger rising in his chest again, and stands up abruptly.
Edwin stands too, alarmed, and Charles holds out a hand.
“Don’t move. I’ll be back in five,” he says, and dives into the mirror. There’s a broken compact in the opposite corner of London, lying forgotten in an alleyway, and he climbs out. Then he throws loose rocks at the dumpster until he’s out of breath. He turns around and Edwin is there, watching with an unreadable expression on his face.
“Fuck,” Charles says. “Why’d you follow me?”
“What was that?” Edwin says, carefully neutral.
“Jenny told me,” Charles says, panting, “that if I got too angry, I should run away, and hit something I can’t hurt.”
Edwin nods slowly. “I know this decision is upsetting for you, but I really think it best—”
“No,” Charles shouts. “Edwin. I’m not scared of being around you.”
Edwin blinks at him.
“I scared myself, the other day. Just like I scared you, and Crystal back in Port Townsend.” He takes a breath he doesn’t need. “I felt like my dad.”
Edwin’s face is hesitant. He steps forwards.
“Charles, you know you’re not—”
He shrugs, violently. “I guess. I dunno. Jenny said the same thing.” He kicks a rock on the ground halfheartedly. “I just get so angry.”
“I know,” Edwin says, close enough to touch. “I sometimes think you’re angry enough for both of us.”
“Jenny thinks we’re really fucking sad,” Charles says, and that’s what makes him start crying again.
Edwin starts, hesitantly, “What did she—”
“She didn’t say it but she kept saying, ‘16’ over and over.”
“Maybe we are sad,” Edwin says, and draws even closer.
“I don’t want you to stop working with me,” Charles says. “I just don’t want to hurt you because I got too angry about what they did to you.”
“Oh,” Edwin says, and puts a hand on Charles’s shoulder. “I told you before. You would never hurt me. I know that.”
“But I might hurt other people. And scare you.”
“Yes,” Edwin says. “But we can work on that. You worked on that just now.”
Charles swallows. A tear streaks down his face.
“I don’t want to be dead,” he says. “I want to grow up. I don’t want to be an angry kid forever.”
“I know,” Edwin says. “I don’t,” he says, and clears his throat. It doesn’t help much; when he speaks, it’s a croak. “I don’t like it when you get so angry, but I was petrified he would drag me back to Hell, bound or not. I’m always scared, Charles, and I can’t—”
Then Edwin breaks into tears too, and Charles pulls him into a hug. He rubs his back. Edwin sobs into his chest.
“I’m not letting anyone take you. And I got you once. I’ll get you again. I swear.”
“I know,” Edwin sobs. “I’m scared of that too.”
Charles leans in, pressing his cheek to the side of Edwin’s head. He doesn’t say it’s alright, because it’s not. He thinks of his mum holding him when his dad was out of the house. After. She never said it was alright while he cried that it was unfair. She just held him.
“I,” Edwin says. “Now that I’ve started I don’t know if I can stop.” He’s pressing into Charles so hard that the edges of his body are starting to phase into him as he loses concentration on keeping corporal.
“Shh,” Charles says, and rubs his cheek on Edwin’s head. “I’ve got you.” Because that’s true. Charles would hold him in this dirty alleyway until the end of time if that’s what Edwin needed.
Edwin cries for a long time, and then all at once he seems to run out of energy for it, slumping even further into Charles and closing his eyes. Charles holds him there for a few moments, then says, “I’ll get us home, yeah?”
Edwin nods, and Charles takes him by the hand and leads them both through the mirror back to the office.
Edwin doesn’t meet his eyes when they’re back in the office. He drops Charles’s hand.
“Part of why it scares me when you’re angry,” Edwin says, “is I don’t know how to stop feeling once I start. I don’t know how you can…feel like that.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have to stop,” Charles says. “Maybe it’s hurting you to keep it inside.”
Edwin looks up at him, eyes wide. “I have 75 years of Hell inside me.”
“I have 16 of my dad,” Charles says. “Not the same, but. I’m here no matter what. Even if you’re a right mess. You know that, right?”
“I do,” Edwin says, and finally looks up at Charles.
Charles clears his throat.
“Right.” He pauses a moment. “D’you want to tell me about that demon? As a start?”
Edwin freezes for a moment. “Not particularly,” he says, and breathes out shakily. But he walks over and sits on the couch, and pats the seat next to him. His back is straight as a board, so Charles takes his hand and squeezes it tight when he sits down.
Edwin tells him just a little of it, breathing hard. Charles has to walk away a few times, but comes back to hold Edwin’s hand.
Edwin trails off eventually. “I think that’s all—that’s all I can do.”
“That was brills,” Charles says, softly, and feels like an idiot about it. But Edwin gives him a shaky smile. Charles wiggles around until his head is on Edwin’s shoulder. Edwin inhales quietly at the contact.
“This alright?”
“Yes,” Edwin says shakily.
Charles curls into him more. Edwin’s thumb rubs over the back of Charles’s hand, as if he’s the one who needs comfort.
Charles wonders where his body is, how long they took to find it. Edwin, he guesses, is buried in a posh cemetery somewhere green. Charles’s bones are probably in the modest churchyard down the street from where he grew up. He’d never really bothered to check. His bones were never what was holding him here. He holds onto Edwin and thinks about how much he wishes he could have touched him when they were alive, how much he wishes that their bones could curl together like their spirits.
“I think I’d go mad without you, too, mate,” Charles says.
Edwin curls a little closer, his cheek pressing into Charles’s head. He sighs, and Charles can feel him relax all the way back into the couch. Charles thinks his eyes are closed, but he’s not going to move to look. Through the office windows, he can see that the morning dusk is starting to lighten, and he thinks about going to see Crystal, checking on the green-haired girl, thanking Jenny. But for right now he stays where he is. Edwin is there, still rubbing his thumb over Charles’s hand, and there is no blue light for either one of them, but there is the clear, cleansing light of a new day’s sun.