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There is a light at the end of the hallway.
The remains of Edwin Payne, his shallow breath rattling in his new-made lungs, gooseflesh stinging along his new-made skin, uncurls a little from his protective ball. He lifts his head just a bit and looks incredulously at the light, which is nearly obstructed by the jut of a mildew-ridden wall. It is orange and faint and unsteady, bobbing up and down as if held by an unseen hand, casting long shadows across the floor.
His first assumption is, of course, that this is some new form of horror his tormentor has dreamed up for him. It doesn’t seem so unreasonable a guess, given the unholy facsimile of a bear-sized spider that is currently tearing apart his recently-abandoned corpse, just a few meters away. The demon-thing doesn’t like light, though. It stings its many, many, many eyes. Actually, now that he thinks about it, there has never been a light down here – not in the undetermined hours Edwin has recently spent getting rent limb from limb, and not in the decades and decades and endless decades he’d spent down here, before.
And yet.
There is a light at the end of the hallway.
And now, it is getting closer.
Somehow, above the ringing in his ears and the bassy pulse of his own terror, Edwin hears footsteps approaching, rapid and muffled on the concrete floors.
The doll-beast snarls and snaps as it chews through once-Edwin’s abandoned sternum and begins to tear apart his heart.
Ghosts do not feel emotion in the body the way humans do, but they can remember. In his worst moments, down here, Edwin thinks maybe he is only his remembering – that he is composed of nothing more than fragments of memory, hastily muddled together to form something that vaguely resembles a boy. In those moments, he holds himself together with the determination of something dropped into the middle of the ocean and struggling to swim. He whispers, You are real you are real you are real you are real, until the words’ meaning starts to become fuzzy and strange inside his mind.
Now, as the light gets closer, Edwin remembers the physicality of fear. The clamminess of palms, the twist of a stomach, the frenzied slam of a heart within a ribcage. For a frantic, ridiculous, irrational moment, he almost misses it. At least, if Edwin still carried his fear inside his body, he’d feel like a person again.
His dead, empty chest remains stubbornly silent.
The light gets closer, and closer still.
It is very bright. The orange glow is tinted warmly gold as it flickers, homey and inviting, even in the sickly green wrongness of Hell’s dollhouse. Whatever is coming down the hall, it doesn’t exude malice the way the rest of the Hell-things do. It doesn’t hate Edwin the way the spider-demon does, unsleeping, unceasing, unrelenting.
Something quiet and small and bullheaded inside of Edwin – the thing that has kept him from accepting Death’s gift all these years, taking her outstretched hand – the thing that clawed his way up and out of Hell the first time – that thing thinks:
Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Edwin curls around himself again, feels the phantom of a tremor rack through his body, and then, in the depths of Hell, he dreams something very strange indeed.
Emily Dickenson once wrote an interesting thing about hope. I’ve heard it in the chillest land, she said, and on the strangest Sea – / Yet – never – in Extremity, / It asked a crumb – of me.
Hope asks nothing of Edwin now.
Instead, Hope takes his hand and opens its mouth. And then, in a voice Edwin knows better than his own, in a cadence he learned by heart against the hazy backdrop of an aging attic in 1989, Hope says, “I’m here to rescue you.”
Edwin memorized Charles’ face a long time ago. The high curve of his cheekbones, the straight jut of his nose, the quick and easy flash of his smile. The sweet and heady brown of his eyes, deep as fresh-turned earth. Whatever else he is, Edwin is a detective, an investigator by nature; he knows every tiny scar on Charles’ skin, the single freckle behind his left ear, the look in his eyes when he’s happy or teasing or burning with fury. Edwin looks at him now, sweaty and frightened, with his white-knuckle grip on the lantern in his hands.
He's the bravest boy in all of creation.
He followed Edwin into Hell.
Edwin loves him more than he’s ever loved anything else. In life and in death.
Charles’ palm catches Edwin’s face. Charles’ fingers curl against Edwin’s cheek, large and warm and somehow solid, realer than the ground beneath Edwin’s body or the wall along his back. Charles throws a lit bomb at Edwin’s demon – doesn’t even allow it time to extract itself from the concave interior of once-Edwin’s ribcage. Charles unfolds Edwin from the concrete. Charles takes Edwin’s arm and yanks him forward and takes off sprinting away from the monster and toward freedom.
Then Charles does the impossible, and leads him out of Hell.
The thing is – people do not break out of Hell. Never. It isn’t done. People especially do not break out of Hell twice.
Except Edwin did. And now he does it again.
It’s a stupid time to think about this – and, admittedly, Edwin is maybe a little hysterical, if that’s a thing ghosts can be – but as he sprints up the sky-high spiral of Hell’s staircase, Edwin thinks about his parents. They’d been good Christians, Edwin’s mother and father. Never did go in for any of the odd rituals that some of their neighbors practiced – always said they were too papist. But the neighbors…
Back when he was alive, people said prayers to ward off things like him. They crafted amulets and made hoops from boughs of the rowan tree and built shoes and locks of hair and cats into their walls. They tucked wooden crosses under their collars and feared the unquiet dead. Creatures that died and rotted and then came back, cold and hungry and half-human.
And, God, Edwin is hungry. Sometimes, he thinks he’s starving.
He thinks about Simon, palms sliced raw and bleeding, Despair clinging to his every word. He thinks about the warm, half-presence of Monty’s mouth, the instinct-memory of how a kiss should feel. He thinks about the Cat King’s razor-blade smile and his hand splayed, proprietary, across Edwin’s lapel. Where Edwin’s heart once beat.
He thinks about Charles and Charles and Charles and Charles.
There is a light at the end of the hallway, Edwin thinks. He thinks it to himself now, fighting his way out of an eternity of torture and misery, but he also thinks it to the incalculable versions of himself that have already died down there, the demon-spider’s teeth the last thing they ever felt. He thinks it to the boy who’d been laid out and sacrificed, kicking and screaming and begging to live. He thinks it to Simon.
The light at the end of the hallway is why he says, “I love you.” And then, when the first time doesn’t quite sink in, it’s why he says, “Charles, I am in love with you.”
In the end, it’s Charles who brings up Orpheus and Eurydice, not Edwin.
Bit hard not to read too much into that kind of thing, even if he is getting let down gently.
As they climb the last of the stairs and fling themselves through the door and into Crystal’s bedroom… Despite the fact that he knows better, that quiet and small and bullheaded thing inside Edwin says, one final time, Maybe.
He can’t blame himself too much. After all, as Orpheus knew – it is very, very difficult to kill a dream.
After everything is over, Edwin climbs to the roof of their office building and sits, feet dangling, on the ledge. The evening is unseasonably warm for London. He looks down at the city and feels a world away from the mist and chill and wide-open sky of the Pacific Northwest.
Edwin feels oddly worn-through, like stockings so old you can see through the fabric when you hold them up to the light.
He’s never really felt his age before; the years in Hell didn’t pass like normal time on earth, obviously, and something about Charles makes him feel so stupidly young sometimes. He feels it now, though. He keeps seeing the blood spreading across Niko’s blouse. The staring emptiness of her eyes. She’d held his hand only a few hours before. He keeps expecting to turn around and see her standing there.
He senses it more than hears it as Charles steps through the rooftop’s locked door and comes to a stop a few feet behind him.
“You alright?” Charles asks him.
Edwin shrugs. “I rather think not,” he forces himself to admit, in the direction of the London skyline.
Sharing this kind of truth is a muscle, he reminds himself. It will need to be worked on, before it stops aching.
“Want company?” Charles offers.
“Yes,” Edwin says, without hesitating.
He does not say, If it’s you, then always. He’s not sure he’s quite ready to get in the habit of sharing that sort of truth, yet.
Charles sits down on the ledge beside him, facing toward the rooftop rather than out toward the city. His shoulder is less than a hand’s breadth from Edwin’s, and then he tips sideways and lets their upper arms bump together gently, and now there’s no distance between them at all.
Charles feels solid and sturdy. He feels so terribly alive.
Even when he was dying in that attic, he was the most vibrant thing Edwin had ever seen.
“You thinking about Niko?” Charles asks him.
“Yes,” Edwin says. He hesitates, and then adds, “I miss her.”
“Yeah. Me, too. Doesn’t feel real, that she could actually be gone.”
“I can’t help feeling as though I failed her,” Edwin admits.
Charles begins shaking his head before Edwin has even finished the sentence. “Edwin, buddy, you can’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I was right there, though,” Edwin whispers. “I watched it happen. And I just… What’s – what’s the point of me? If I can’t even protect the people I love?”
Charles is silent for a moment. It feels like half an age before he says, quietly, “I know what you mean. I really, really do. But you don’t need to do anything to be here, y’know. You don’t need to earn it.”
“The Afterlife seems to think we do.”
Charles huffs out a nearly-silent laugh. “That’s different, mate. That’s, like, work stuff.”
“Work stuff,” Edwin echoes, and he means to sound skeptical, but it just comes out fond.
“I really am sorry,” Charles tells him, with the same heartbreaking earnestness that he always uses when he speaks to Edwin. “We were all her friends, but… I know she was special to you.”
Edwin presses his mouth tightly closed until the urge to sob subsides. “Yes, well… As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I do not make friends easily,” he says, when it finally passes.
“I know this isn’t the point you were trying to make, but people really do like you, Edwin,” Charles tells him, leaning further into his shoulder briefly before sitting back upright. “Actually, now I think on it, you had about half the population of Port Townsend after you for a minute, there.”
“Two magical creatures playing around with my emotions hardly count as half the population of Port Townsend,” Edwin sniffs.
Charles laughs and gives him a gentle little jostle with his elbow. “Dunno about the Cat King, but Monty did help us out there, in the end.”
Edwin considers this and deflates a bit. “I suppose the Cat King did as well, in his own way.”
“Well, they must’ve felt something, at least.”
“Guilt, perhaps,” Edwin says, dryly.
“Edwin,” Charles says, sounding mildly exasperated. “Why is it so hard for you to believe a person might actually, genuinely want you for real?”
“I don’t know,” Edwin snaps back, feeling wrong-footed and vulnerable and suddenly, deeply defensive. “Why is it so easy for you to believe it?”
Charles’ jaw clicks shut.
Edwin thinks, Fuck it.
“What did you mean?” he asks, much more softly.
“Gonna need you to be a bit more specific there, mate,” Charles says.
At that, Edwin very nearly loses his nerve.
Reopening this door feels like an immense risk that isn’t worth taking. He already feels so unbelievably and unspeakably beyond lucky that his confession didn’t kill his friendship with Charles, leave it dead and buried in Hell along with the rest of the souls they left behind. Charles’ unhesitating acceptance, his gentleness, the love in his eyes when he looks at Edwin – they’re gifts that Edwin isn’t sure he is worthy of.
Since his death, the world has changed in ways that Edwin can hardly believe, but he thinks this is all Charles. Sometimes, in his weakest moments, he allows himself to daydream about what it would have been like, if Charles had been with him back when he was alive. A real boy, rather than the shadow of one. He thinks Charles would have forgiven him this, even back then. He’s just that kind of man.
Courage returns to Edwin in a flood. He curls his fingers into the hem of his blazer and says, steadier this time: “When we were leaving Hell. When I – said what I said. You said it was an Orpheus and Eurydice moment. What did you mean by that?”
Charles blinks. After a split-second, he smiles, crooked and easy, but there’s a flicker of uncertainty in his face that Edwin hates.
He shouldn’t have pushed, he thinks with immediate and profound regret. Always digging at things, prodding at them until the cracks show. Edwin has spent his afterlife poking at open wounds. He shouldn’t be surprised when they bleed.
Charles just says, “I dunno. First thing that came to mind, I guess.”
“Right,” Edwin says, grateful for the opportunity to pivot. “Yes, of course. Anyway, I was thinking, about our next caseload, since we’ve got Crystal now, and the Night Nurse coming on—”
“If fate denies us this privilege for my wife, one thing is certain: I do not want to go back either; triumph in the death of two,” Charles interrupts him. Then he clears his throat and ducks his head and says, with considerably less confidence, “Erm. Orpheus said that. S’from Ovid. My, uh – the boarding school made us take Latin.”
“Right,” Edwin says again, more slowly this time. “Yes. Metamorphoses. We studied it when I was there, as well.”
“It’s just,” Charles begins, and then stops smack in the middle of the sentence. He abruptly stands up, takes a few steps, and then spins around to face Edwin again.
Edwin pivots on the ledge so he can look at him fully. There’s an expressive furrow between Charles’ dark eyebrows. Edwin wants to touch it – wants to lay his fingertips along the downward curve of his lips – wants to curl his fingers into the mop of Charles’ hair. Now that he’s allowed himself to put words to the yawning hunger inside of him, he wants and wants and wants with the fervor and desperation of a wild thing.
“Charles,” Edwin says, carefully.
“It’s just,” Charles restarts, “that’s us, isn’t it? You and me.”
Edwin’s heart cannot beat. He feels the ghost of it anyway, slamming inside his throat.
“I would’ve stayed,” Charles tells him. “If I couldn’t get you out. I would’ve stayed down there with you. S’like Orpheus said, yeah? I do not want to go back either; triumph in the death of two.”
“Oh,” Edwin says, weakly. “That’s—”
“On the stairs, you said you’re in love with me,” Charles says, and he suddenly lifts his eyes to stare directly into Edwin’s.
Edwin gasps a startled little breath he doesn’t need into lungs that no longer function.
Charles’ eyes are wide and wild and starry with unshed tears. He says, with a note of something like desperation, “What’s that feel like, Edwin?”
There are multiple different paths Edwin could take here, many of them considerably wiser than the others.
Edwin does not choose one of those wise paths.
Instead, he steels himself and says, very calmly, “Well, I imagine it feels a bit like following me into Hell with no particular plan for getting out again.”
“Yeah,” Charles says. His shoulders square. The jewel-bright fever in his eyes banks like a smoldering coal. “Yeah, ’course it does.”
And then he crosses the distance between them with several long strides, catches Edwin’s face between his palms, and kisses him on the mouth.
It isn’t anything like the kiss with Monty, which had been surprising and brief and vaguely pleasant, like finding an unexpected one-pound note in your pocket. Charles kisses him open-mouthed and hungry, fingers sliding up and into Edwin’s hair, long eyelashes fluttering against the arc of Edwin’s cheekbone. He kisses Edwin like he’s been dreaming of it with the same ceaseless ache that Edwin has. He kisses Edwin like he’s been drowning and Edwin is the first gasp of air after breaking through the waves. He kisses Edwin like he’s trying to fuse their bodies together.
Ovid, again. Philemon and Baucis, intertwined in death – two trees close together, the union of oak and linden in one.
Edwin’s hands come up, unsteady, to clutch at Charles’ elbows. He feels like he’s standing at the top of a very tall cliff, scrabbling for solid earth. What is happening? he thinks, and that smaller, stubborn something inside his head replies, Who fucking cares? Kiss him back, idiot!
Edwin kisses him back.
Charles makes a soft little noise against his mouth – approval, or maybe relief – and slides his tongue into Edwin’s mouth. Edwin pretty much stops thinking entirely after that.
After a minute or an hour or perhaps a geologic age, Charles presses one final, trembling, closed-mouth kiss to Edwin’s lips and releases his grip on Edwin’s head. He steps away, blinking, with a slightly bleary-eyed look on his face that Edwin recognizes from that one case where a ghost they’d chased to a bowling alley climbed up into the rafters and dropped a ball directly onto his skull.
“That,” Edwin says, faintly, “was an interesting thing to do.”
“Was it – was that alright?” Charles asks, with the approximate tone of someone asking, Do I have much longer to live, doctor? or, Are you planning on executing me by gallows or guillotine?
“I suppose that depends on what you meant by it,” Edwin tells him, his voice miraculously only trembling a very little bit.
“I just. I wanted to,” Charles says. It is a bit of a disappointing answer, until he plows on. “I’m starting to think I always want to. All the time.”
“Ah. I see,” Edwin says, even though he doesn’t, really.
“You’re my best mate,” Charles says.
“I know that,” Edwin says, as reassuringly as he can while his brain is still melting out through his ears, a bit. “And you’re mine. But, Charles, I don’t want you to feel like you have to – it’s like I said, just because I have feelings for you, I don’t need you to reciprocate—”
“I went into Hell for you,” Charles barrels on. “I would go into Hell a thousand times for you. I would tear Hell down brick by brick if it meant I could keep you safe.”
“I… Yes,” Edwin says. “I know that, too. But, Charles—”
“I love you,” Charles says, fiercely. “So much. You’re – you’re my person, Edwin. Whenever anything happens to me, the first thing I think about is how I can’t wait to tell you about it. Solving cases with you is the most fun I’ve ever had. You saved me, y’know? You brought light back into my life. And I want to kiss you. And I really liked kissing you, just then.”
Edwin pauses, and then says, thickly, around a throat full of unshed tears, “That’s what it feels like.”
Charles blinks. “Huh?”
“Earlier, you asked what it feels like, being in love with you. Well, that’s what it feels like.”
“Oh,” Charles says. “Right. Okay. Yeah.”
And then he smiles and it’s Edwin’s favorite kind, the one that illuminates his whole face and crinkles the corners of his eyes.
He says, “So, Edwin, funny thing. Turns out, I’m in love with you, too.”
A dream, Edwin thinks, and then Charles reaches out and curls his fingers around Edwin’s hand, solid and calloused and cool with the deepening night, and Edwin thinks, no. His eyes look closer to black than brown in the faded half-light of the rooftop’s single, yellow lightbulb. His inky curls are tousled, messy with wind and kissing. He’s looking at Edwin like he’s afraid that, if he blinks, Edwin might evaporate.
“Charles,” Edwin says, and he finds he cannot say anything else.
“’M not sure I’ll be a good – partner. Boyfriend,” Charles tells him, squeezing his hand. “I’ve got some, erm. Unresolved issues. You know.”
“Well, yes,” Edwin says, ears ringing with the words partner and boyfriend. “I do, too. And I can’t say I’m particularly experienced, as far as these things go.”
“I know. But, it’s like – we’ve always worked through stuff together. I dunno. I feel like we’re getting pretty damn good at that.”
“We are, of course,” Edwin says, with feeling. “We’re the best in the business.”
“Duh.” Charles smiles at him, a private thing, dimpled and a little lopsided and warm as the light he’d carried down into the dollhouse. “I don’t know what’ll happen to us,” he adds, more softly. “With the Night Nurse thing, or with the Agency in general, or with Death. But I do know that I’m not leaving you. We’re a team, you and me, until always. Or, I guess, we’re a team for as long as you’ll have me.”
“That’s until always, obviously,” Edwin tells him firmly, and the first tears finally spill over and onto his cheeks.
“We’ll figure out the rest, then,” Charles says.
Edwin nods and smudges tears off his cheek with the back of his free hand, offering Charles the beginning of a smile. “As I believe someone once said, we have literally forever to do so. Although, given our current track record, perhaps we’ll only end up needing a week, give or take.”
Charles laughs out loud at that, jostling Edwin gently with his elbow. “Alright, man, have a laugh, see if I care. I thought I sounded pretty good, back then.”
“It was quite a speech,” Edwin says, wryly. “Very convincing. I was prepared to revisit the conversation in a matter of decades. Not that I’m complaining about this turn of events.”
“You would’ve waited for decades?” Charles says, looking incredulous.
Edwin lifts an eyebrow at him, unimpressed. “Darling, I already have.”
Charles’ eyebrows go up. “Darling?” he echoes.
Edwin winces. “Too much?”
“Not sure,” Charles tells him, kissing his cheek, then his nose, then the line of his jaw. “Guess you’ll have to try it out on me again, love.”
As Charles leans in to kiss him on the lips, Edwin’s eyes slip closed.
The rooftop light glows orange through his eyelids.