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Charles, like most ghosts, has a few advantages over your typical living person. That excess spiritual energy has got to go somewhere, what with them not having bodies and everything. Edwin’s the rare sort whose power manifests as magical ability. And Charles?
Well, Charles has always had a pretty good arm. Strong cricket swing, excellent follow through, as his childhood coach always said. And in that respect, death’s made him better, if only because he doesn’t have to worry about the limitations of his body.
Point is, he nearly gets out in time.
He would get out in time, except the fall jostles Edwin up against the side of the coffin, and he makes a sound—a quiet sort of gasp. More surprise than pain, really. It’s nearly drowned out by the sizzle of his shoulder making contact with the iron, loud and crackly, like steak pressed against a searing hot pan. It’s not the sort of sound that Charles ever likes to hear in relation to another person. Especially when the person in question is Edwin.
And they’ve talked about it before. In both directions, because this particular crime is one they’re both guilty of.
When the two of them are in active danger, they’re supposed to handle the threat first. Then they can check up on each other. The last time Charles broke that rule, he’d ended up impaled by a metal pipe, and Edwin had to banish the rakshasa on his own—even with iron buckshot in his thigh and ectoplasm seeping out the corner of his mouth.
Charles looks back anyway. He can’t help it.
The coffin door hits him on its way down, hard enough that it knocks his arms out from under him as it slams shut. It must weigh 50 kilos at least, and in his current position, it half-crushes him against Edwin. He’s pinned. One side pressed against Edwin’s arm and chest, his other shoulder and part of his back burning through his jacket—flesh smoking and bubbling into ash.
“Charles,” Edwin tries to reach for the lid of the coffin, but he can’t get through the tangle of their limbs. “Don’t let them—”
Outside, a latch snaps shut. What sounds like a dozen more follow almost immediately. The barely perceptible seam of light, just visible where the top of the coffin rests flush with the rest of the casket, thins to nothing.
“—lock us in,” Edwin finishes, belatedly, just in time for the wyrlight that lives in his cufflinks to sense the darkness and start glowing with a delighted, helpful little hum. Edwin’s eyes flutter shut in clear frustration. “Fuck.”
Understatement of the century. Charles swears his agreement, throwing his elbow back against the coffin lid. It burns, but Charles has never let that stop him before. He tries again. And again. And again.
The coffin rattles, but the lid doesn’t budge a fucking millimeter. It doesn’t even show any signs of strain. Because of course it doesn’t. It’s thick, soldered metal. For all Charles’ efforts are worth, he might as well be a gnat, bumping ineffectually up against the ceiling. Throwing itself endlessly into the burning coils of a bug zapper.
He just needs a little space to move. A different angle, maybe, to give himself more room to build up momentum.
“Charles,” Edwin says.
“Just a sec,” Charles grits out. Fuck, his elbow hurts. So does his shoulder. But he’ll have time to figure it out later.
This time goes a lot better, the impact resonating up his entire body in a way that suggests he’s actually hitting with some real force now. Unfortunately, the lid remains unmoved. But the progress is heartening enough that Charles is happy to give it another go. He’ll keep trying till the latches give or someone lets them the fuck out. Whichever comes first.
He draws his elbow forward again, but Edwin fixes a hand around his wrist before he can lash out with it again.
“Charles,” he repeats, voice strained and just a touch shrill. “That is enough.”
“It’s not,” Charles says back. He’s distantly aware that he’s getting a bit pitchy himself, but he can’t help it. “If I can just…”
He feels a little bad tugging his arm free of Edwin’s grip. It’s just a touch too close to using his strength against Edwin, which is maybe nonsense, but he doesn’t like it regardless. It’s not right, especially when Edwin is clearly so intent on trying to keep him in place.
But at the same time, Charles can’t stand the idea of them being in this casket even a second longer than they need to be. It’s not like the iron burns won’t heal.
His next strike is stopped short by Edwin frantically grabbing his elbow.
He tries to abort the movement at the last second, but he doesn’t have very much room to work with. He manages, just barely, to avoid crushing Edwin’s fingers, but he still jars them up against the iron lid and burns his elbow again to boot.
“Fuck,” he says, dropping his arm down and fumbling for Edwin’s hand. “Fuck, Edwin. Sorry. Let me see.”
Edwin curls his hand up into a ball and yanks it away before Charles can check it over. “I would thank you to stop hurting yourself, if you please.”
“That’s not—”
The glare Edwin gives him then is enough for Charles to shut his mouth before he can finish that particular thought.
“Even you,” Edwin informs him bitingly, “are not strong enough to break through three inches of iron. We’ll just have to wait for Crystal and the Night Nurse.”
“Worth trying though, innit?”
“You’ll only indispose yourself,” Edwin says. “And you are ashing all over the place besides.”
Charles looks down at that and quickly finds that Edwin’s right.
In fact, if he hadn’t said anything, Charles would probably be freaking out right about now. There’s ash all over Edwin’s jacket, and more still streaking the white of his shirt. It’s pooled about his head in piles like cotton fluff, and delicate flakes of it have caught in those long, downcast eyelashes, forcing Edwin to blink every few seconds in a mostly fruitless effort to keep the soot out of his eyes.
“Oh,” says Charles blankly. “Sorry, mate. I’ve made a mess of you, haven’t I?”
It takes some doing, and it’s probably only possible because his left elbow’s gone a bit concave from iron exposure, but he’s able to get one of his hands up to brush the ash off Edwin’s face.
Unfortunately, Edwin’s glower only darkens.
“I don’t care about that!” he practically shouts. Or maybe he doesn’t shout at all, his slightly raised voice being magnified ten times over by their narrow metal prison. Charles flinches at the volume, if only because it’s so unexpected, and Edwin startles too—glancing around as if to search for the source of the words before he turns the full force of his piercing attention right back upon Charles. “Look at you .”
“Me?” Charles does try to glance down at himself, but even with the pale glow of the wyrlight keeping them from total darkness, he can’t see anything through the mess of shadows and tangled-up limbs. But if he’s judging by Edwin’s state beneath him, yeah…okay. He’s probably a bit of a mess. “Looks worse than it is, really. Barely even feel it.”
He tries to lean back then so that Edwin can see for himself, but only manages to graze the back of his head against the top of the coffin.
He ducks back down with a hiss. His shoulder is still smoldering away.
“I’m not inclined to believe you,” Edwin says with a disdainful sniff. “Turn over, please. There’s not enough room on your side like that. You’re burning.”
“S’alright,” Charles tries to make himself smaller to minimize the burn area. It works a little, though perhaps not as much as he’d like.
“It certainly is not,” Edwin counters. “I’d rather you didn’t make me wedge my hand up there, but I will if I must.”
“Don’t,” Charles says, his phantom stomach twisting miserably at the thought. “Seriously, Edwin. It’s okay. I’ll stop trying to get out.”
He knows that Edwin’s right. Frankly, there wouldn’t be enough room for him to lie on his side if he were in here alone. With two of them squeezed in here, there’s literally no way for him to manage it without searing off a significant portion of his upper arm.
Course, there’s not really enough room for both of them anyway, and with them both halfway physical, he’s not inclined to rest his full weight on Edwin’s chest for even a moment, much less for however long it takes Crystal to track them down.
Edwin’s claustrophobic enough around people as it is. The last thing he needs is to deal with Charles crushing his entire body for hours—if not days—because of something Charles fucked up to begin with.
His arm barely hurts anymore besides.
“Fine,” Edwin says, and Charles is so distracted he doesn’t process Edwin’s tone—not the slightly petulant voice he uses when he’s conceding a point, but rather the same exasperated one he uses to say I’ll do it myself, then —until Edwin quite literally reaches up and tries to dig those slender fingers in between Charles’ burning arm and the lid of the coffin.
He might as well be fixing Charles’ collar, he’s so casual about it. The fact that his flesh is smoking and melting back around his fingernails hardly seems to register.
“Alright, alright, stop,” Charles tugs Edwin’s hand down, moving it into position so he doesn’t trap it between them as he turns clumsily over. Even despite his best efforts, he bumps them both up against the side of the coffin. “Shit,” he gasps, trying very hard not to think about the fact that one of Edwin’s thighs is now pressing up between his legs. “Sorry. Sorry. Didn’t mean to. You okay?”
“Fine, Charles,” Edwin says easily, because his pain tolerance is so absurd that it puts Charles to shame. He does exhale slowly as Charles finally settles his weight against him, but he gives no indication of pain or discomfort.
They’re lying chest-to-chest now. It is decidedly not the closest they’ve ever been. It’s not even close, but it is the closest they’ve ever been without one of them actively pulling the other out of danger, or at the very least without some sort of recourse in case Edwin needs to step back and give himself some space.
“Let me know if you’re uncomfortable, yeah?” Charles whispers. “I can always…go back.”
It’ll be tricky to navigate to his old position without accidentally shoving Edwin into the side of the coffin with his weight, but not impossible.
Edwin’s brow draws down in confusion. “Why on earth would I have you do that?”
“Well,” Charles says. He can’t really gesture in here, so he settles for sort of shrugging his shoulders. Even that small movement jostles him against Edwin more than he’d like. “You know.”
“Oh.”
Edwin’s reply is so abruptly quiet and uncertain that Charles knows at once he’s said something wrong. “I see,” Edwin continues. “We can…here, just stay still.”
His leg jars up into Charles’ crotch, and it’s so surprising that it takes him a moment to realize that Edwin’s actually shifting out from under him—or at least as much as he can in the terribly tight quarters—and he’s willing to shove himself into the iron side of the coffin to do it.
“Woah, hey,” Charles says, before he can get too far. “If you’re uncomfortable, I’ll move.”
“You don’t need to pretend that it’s for my sake,” Edwin snaps, before immediately glancing away, chagrined. “Charles, I…” He swallows hard, Adam's apple bobbing. “That was unkind. I apologize.”
Charles has no idea what’s going on, aside from the fact that his stomach is embarrassingly warm, and this coffin is far too fucking small, and they might never get out again, and Edwin is blushing , and—
“Do you think this is about your feelings?” Charles bursts out, before he can stop himself or think of a better way to phrase it.
Edwin freezes.
“That came out wrong,” Charles says. Fuck, he’d rather be anywhere but here right now. “Edwin, I’m not uncomfortable. I thought—I know you told me that you’re alright with me touching you. But, well, it has been a while, hasn’t it?” They’d had that conversation during the Case of the Rat King, back in ‘03. “And I also…well. This is a lot more than just a hand on the shoulder, yeah? I’m trying to give you space. That’s all.”
There’s a pause as Edwin studies him closely. “You’re certain,” he says, more confirmation than question.
Charles exhales in relief. “Yes. Absolutely. I’m sorry that I made you think otherwise, mate.”
“...Alright,” Edwin settles back down tentatively, and Charles gratefully lets his head flop down into the empty space just to the left of Edwin’s cheek. He’s glad, at least, that the bottom of the coffin isn’t raw, exposed iron. There would be little he could do to shield Edwin in that case. Still, it’s not great . They haven’t lined it or anything—just laid what looks like a bedsheet down. Shift too much, and they might move it out of place, and Charles highly doubts that they’ll be able to get it back again.
They stay like that for a while, neither of them speaking. Still as corpses, the two of them. Ha. Charles is pretty sure that’s not very funny.
He can feel his elbow slowly building itself back up—but the sensation is distant, sort of like he’s watching it happen to someone else and just getting sympathy pangs. His shoulder, which had been exposed less violently but for much longer, itches almost down to the bone, cracked stone and flaking ash slowly starting to go spectral again. He’s probably lucky that he can’t scratch at it. Edwin would throw a bloody fit.
The longer they’re there, the more the sides of the coffin seem to squeeze in on him. On them. Until Charles’ entire world is little more than the distant ache of his burns and the much, much more immediate press of Edwin’s body against his. He can feel that accompanies it, too: the illusion of warmth between them, the sound of Edwin’s shallow breathing, and the way his fair skin is dappled with shadows in the low light.
It ought to be a comfort, but it’s a fucking nightmare. This coffin is going to crush them, and Charles can only curl around Edwin and wait for it to kill them both again.
“Charles,” Edwin murmurs, interrupting his reverie. “You’re shaking. Are you alright?”
“Aces,” Charles replies, without much feeling. He doesn’t need to catch Edwin’s eye to know that Edwin doesn’t believe him in the slightest, but he keeps talking anyway. If he can’t convince Edwin, he might at least manage himself. “No offense, but you’re handling this better than I expected.”
“Am I?” Edwin says wryly.
“You hate it when we don’t have an exit plan.”
Edwin’s never been claustrophobic, or at least not as far as Charles can gather, but there’s very little that throws him off as much as hitting a dead end or not being able to find a way out of wherever they might be.
After visiting the Dollhouse, Charles can see why.
“Ah, well,” Edwin replies. “We do have one.”
Charles perks up a bit. “Have we?”
“Crystal and the Night Nurse.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“Of course it does.”
Charles rolls his eyes, even though Edwin can’t see it. “Since when?”
Edwin might appreciate their skills, and Charles is pretty sure that he’s even glad to have them as members of the Agency. But this is an unforeseen level of trust, especially since it took him nearly five years to be sufficiently convinced that Charles wasn’t planning to up and leave at random.
“Since they’re after Crystal,” Edwin points out, “and will certainly be leveraging us against her.”
Oh. Charles cranes his neck to eye the lid of the coffin again. Maybe if he can find some way to kick at it? “You think they want to hurt her?”
“I think that Crystal is exceedingly capable,” Edwin says, and he doesn’t even sound grudging about it. “And the Night Nurse wouldn’t have promised to protect her if she did not mean it. The only logical course of action we have is to wait.”
Charles groans.
Edwin considers him carefully then, those green eyes of his nearly gray in the shimmering light of his cufflinks. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. You’re right.”
“I often am,” says Edwin, agreeably.
After a moment’s thought, Charles adds: “Is that really it, though? Most ghosts would be freaking out in your shoes.”
Like me, he doesn’t mention.
Edwin considers this for a moment. There is something purposefully blank about his expression. “It’s not a suitable topic for conversation.”
“No?” Charles can guess where this is going. “It’s about hell, then?”
Edwin’s silence is answer enough.
It takes a few seconds of fumbling, but Charles is able to find Edwin’s hand with his own, and he tangles their fingers together to the best of his ability. Then he knocks one of his knees into Edwin’s for good measure.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he offers. “But you can. Just so you know”
“It’s rather silly,” says Edwin, which doesn’t bode well at all. “And I don’t think you’ll like it.”
Now Charles really is curious, but he manages—if only barely—to stay quiet. Best to leave the ball in Edwin’s court for now.
“Well,” Edwin continues, after the silence stretches out long enough. “You remember the Spider.”
“Couldn’t forget it if I tried, mate,” Charles says.
“Right, well,” Edwin clears his throat uncomfortably. “It spent most of its time in the Dollhouse. That was its home, I suppose, and I don’t imagine it had many other responsibilities. But there were a few times,” he trips clumsily over the words. “There were a few times it did leave. Four times exactly, over the course of the 35 years I was there. To keep me from continuing my escape attempts when it wasn’t there to stop me, it would bring me to—well, I don’t know what it was, but I called it ‘the Toybox.’ And it would lock me in until it came back. The entire thing was…perhaps three times the size of this. There were always pieces from my other selves inside. It was collecting the parts that stayed most intact, I think. For later use.”
Edwin shrugs here, as if he doesn’t particularly care either way for The Mystery of What the Doll-Headed Spider Wanted With His Limbs. “My stays weren’t particularly long, in the grand scheme of things. I was usually only in there for a couple days at a time, though once…I think it must’ve left me for nearly a month. Give or take some weeks. Time is awfully strange down there.”
“Jesus,” Charles breathes.
“In truth,” Edwin says, sounding almost sheepishly amused. “I enjoyed it?”
Charles gives him an incredulous look. He really does try to hold himself back—Edwin gets skittish when Charles reacts too intensely to his stories about hell—but that simply makes no fucking sense. “What?”
“It was the only reprieve that creature ever gave me,” Edwin informs him. “The very rare occasions I was in the Toybox were the only times I could trust that I wasn’t about to be torn to shreds at any given moment. It gave me time to mentally chart my path to the surface. Sometimes, I was even able to sleep.” That last bit is said almost longingly. “So I suppose there’s a bit of comfort in it, for me.”
Charles can picture it far better than he really wants to, if he’s being honest. Edwin locked in a box for nearly a month, unable to stand or likely even sit upright, tangled up in his own dismembered body parts, and it being a mercy . A kind footnote that apparently offset some of the other horrors Edwin experienced daily.
Even imagining it makes Charles blindingly angry—and almost violently nauseous.
“And you?” Edwin asks. Charles blinks a few times.
“Sorry?”
“You seem more rattled than I expected,” Edwin clarifies. “You’re not acting very like yourself at all.”
“Fuck,” Charles says, embarrassment heating his face. He glances away. “Didn’t do a good job of hiding it, did I? Must be losing my touch.”
“I…” Edwin considers his words for a moment. “I have noticed similar reactions,” he finally admits, “to other cases, long past. But it wasn’t until Crystal remarked upon the changes to your behavior in the Devlin House that I realized their meaning. And their significance.”
For as genuinely abashed as Edwin seems, Charles can’t help but grin. “Are you saying that I was never that good an actor?”
“I’m saying that you were never that good an actor, and that I was…ignorant, perhaps willfully so, to what was right in front of me.” Charles opens his mouth, but before he can interrupt, Edwin continues. “There’s certainly no need to divulge anything you don’t wish to. But if you are in distress, to any degree, I do wish to help.”
“It’s stupid, after your thing.”
The look Edwin fixes him with is unamused and a bit haughty, entirely unconvinced. “I’ll be the judge of that, if you please.”
Right.
“Just don’t like small spaces,” Charles says. “Ever since I was a kid. But I—”
Christ, it would be easier to get himself some iron pliers and yank a tooth or two out, he’s pretty sure. But Edwin had been honest, and he knows—no matter how easy Edwin sometimes makes it seem—that talking about hell is a torture of its own.
“We had this little storage cubby,” Charles manages at last. “Not like this at all. More a,” he draws the shape with his finger, “squarish shape? I had to curl up to fit inside. Anyway, my dad knew I didn’t like tight spaces, so I guess he figured—it’s a good deterrent, right? So for my time outs, instead of having me stand in a corner or something, he’d…uh, he’d stick me in there. Lock the door so I couldn’t get out. Usually only for an hour or two, but once he. I don’t know, the details are a bit fuzzy. But I think he lost some money on a game. And he got drunk, and mum was visiting her sister, and he just forgot me ‘til the next morning.”
He doesn’t mention that he’d peed himself less than halfway through the ordeal, then spent the entire night sitting in his own mess and blubbering pathetically all the while.
Not exactly a dignified image.
“We talk in our storage closet all the time,” Edwin says. The expression on his face is completely unreadable.
“Yeah, well,” Charles replies. “Can’t get locked in there, can I? Besides, it’s ours.” Their games, their cleaning supplies. Their office spiders, even.
“How long did it continue for? Those punishments, I mean.” Edwin’s questioning is blunt and to the point, but the frank lack of judgment in his voice is an unimaginable relief.
“Til I got too big to fit,” Charles says. “I think I was ten, the last time?” And that had been quite the squeeze. His mum had made dad bring him out after only an hour, because she’d been afraid he’d suffocate.
He’d gotten big enough for his dad to find the cubby inconvenient when he was as young as eight, though. That had also been when the beatings started—Charles is pretty sure that out of sight had indeed been out of mind for Thomas Rowland. And Charles had never been exceptionally good at staying out of sight.
“Ten,” Edwin repeats, the word strained and unhappy. “Charles, that is absolutely unconscionable. If I could…” his face does something then, sadness warring with anger eventually settling on quiet concern. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to apologize,” Charles points out. “And it’s really not as bad as I’m making it sound. I wouldn’t like small spaces either way. I just—uh. I suppose my dad’s just what I think of first. That’s all.”
“I’m afraid to inform you that it sounds fairly bad,” Edwin says with a sniff. “Have you embellished?”
“Huh? Course I haven’t.”
“Have you lied?” Edwin continues, with the confidence of someone who knows exactly where they’re going.
Charles tries to think of a way out of it, because he’s suddenly sure he knows what Edwin’s about to tell him next, but there’s not much else to say except: “No.”
“Then I imagine that it sounds only as bad as it is.”
It’s hard to argue with Edwin’s straightforward brand of logic, though the conclusion he’s reached makes Charles feel a little bit ill.
“S’ more complicated than that.”
“I find it very simple,” Edwin says. A hand brushes against Charles’ back, and it takes Charles a long moment to realize that the gesture is a hug. Or, at least, the closest thing that Edwin can manage from his position, arms half-pinned beneath Charles’ weight. “You didn’t deserve it, and I shan’t let any such thing happen to you again.” A pause, then he adds: “Though I’m off to a very poor start, I admit.”
Charles snorts. “Nah, mate, you’re killing it.” He can’t exactly return the hug from his current position, so he settles for squeezing Edwin’s hand, then turning his head into the crook of Edwin’s neck, resting his cheek on that absurdly bony shoulder of his. “It’s not as bad as I remember when I have you to talk to.”
“Oh. I can keep talking, if you like?” Edwin offers. His hand slides up to the back of Charles’ neck, and he starts to tug idly at Charles’ curls, rolling the locks gently between his fingers.
“Please,” Charles says, leaning further in to give Edwin better access.
“What would you like to discuss?”
“With you? Anything.” Edwin should know that by now, but Charles has no issue reminding him.
“Anything?” Edwin says teasingly. “Shall I break down all seventeen layers of warding that are on our copy of the Necronomicon? I’ve nearly cracked the code, you know.”
“Yeah? Tell me about it.”
So Edwin does. Then it’s Charles’ turn, and he gives Edwin such a thorough explanation of M.A.S.H.'s first five seasons that Edwin agrees to at least try watching it. All things considered, it only took fifteen years of nagging. Charles will count that as a win.
And by the time Edwin’s done telling Charles about the Book of Kells—history, making, purpose, and all—Crystal is there, hauling them out of the earth and pulling them into her arms. The Night Nurse stands a few paces behind, quietly dabbing blood off her face with a handkerchief.
It takes only a few awkward questions to unlock Crystal’s energetic account of everything they missed—a fight against a gang of vampires, the two of them versus five; plans for a human sacrifice; and a fledgling who helped them out in exchange for some help acquiring “drug blood.” Whatever that is.
“I’ll be back!” calls the Night Nurse, as they’re talking. “I’d best dispose of this nasty little trap.”
There’s a loud screech of metal as the Night Nurse hauls the iron casket up with a single hand.
Charles has no idea where she’s taking it, if she’s going to melt it down for scrap or have it disassembled or perhaps bury it in some long-forgotten corner of the earth where it will never be uncovered again.
But right now, with Crystal beaming and blood-splattered in front of him, and Edwin beside him, their hands still tangled together, Charles finds that he doesn’t particularly care.