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Sometimes, even after regaining all her memories, it’s like Crystal’s body doesn’t remember things the way her mind does. Last week she and Niko went to the bakery down the street from the office, and Crystal ordered her usual without thinking, but taking the first bite of the cranberry-orange scone was like tasting a pastry for the first time ever. Niko giggled when she finished the whole thing in about thirty seconds flat, but she couldn’t help it.
Or just yesterday, when she twisted her ankle the wrong way coming down the treacherous stairs from the office. The pain was sharp, shocking, like she’d never been hurt before—even though she could easily recall a memory of stepping wrong in six-inch block heels.
Both of those pale in comparison to right now, though, as she sits in the mud and grass in a graveyard, staring at the eighteen-inch shard of granite currently embedded in her right calf. Her ears are ringing, and she doesn’t know if it’s the shock or if it’s because Edwin blasted away the ghost of a warlock with a spell that might as well have been a bomb.
“Crystal. Crystal, hey, look at me,” Charles is saying urgently, filtering past the whine to her ears. His hands are cupping her face, insistently trying to tilt her head up and get her to meet his eyes. “Look at me, Crystal, you’re gonna be fine, alright?”
Her eyes find his. They’re warm and dark, like always, the way that made her want to kiss him pretty much immediately after meeting him. “Good, that’s good. Don’t think about it, alright? You’re gonna be fine,” he promises, and with a voice as sure as that, she pretty much has to believe him. She thinks that he could probably get anyone to believe him about anything if he just talked to them like that, like he has unshakeable faith that things will turn out alright in the end.
“How?” she warbles, coughing up graveyard dust at the end, weirdly distracted by the tickle in her lungs. She meant to ask how the warlock had fucking exploded every statue and gravestone in the near vicinity, but Charles takes it differently.
“I know it looks scary but I promise it’s not so bad. I’m here, and Edwin will be over in just a tick after he finishes banishing that wanker,” Charles says. He’s always felt a bit cold to her touch, but the leather of his gloves feels warm on her face. Or maybe that’s just the blood rushing to her head, a side effect of having the full attention of someone like Charles Rowland on her. “Here, squeeze my hand if you need to, alright?” One of his hands finds hers, gathering it up from where it was planted firmly in the mud. “See if you can squeeze hard enough to hurt a ghost.” He smiles, a tight little thing, like it’s funny.
Her pants are getting wet, and she doesn’t think it’s from mud. Her eyes dart down without her permission, and she blinks at how red they’ve turned. “I liked these jeans,” she says as black spots start to dance in her vision.
“Fuck—hey, Crystal, come on, please,” Charles says, squeezing her hand. She squeezes back like a reflex. “Good, keep doing that. Edwin!” he shouts over his shoulder. “Might want to hurry it up, mate!”
Edwin’s reply is indecipherable, or maybe that’s the blood loss and aforementioned ringing in her ears. Soon enough, though, he skirts around the rubble of St. Joseph’s statue—poor guy, nobody looks good with half their face blown off like that—and stops dead (ha) when he sees her and Charles.
“Why did you not say you were hurt?” he snaps at her, because he can’t ever give her a fucking break. He takes off his gloves and kneels down on the other side of her, the side with the leg that’s been fucking skewered to the ground. He peers at the granite shard for a moment, his lips pursed tightly, before saying, “Charles, I will need your hands.”
With a small smile of apology, Charles extracts his hand from her grip without even wincing, even though now that his hand is gone she can feel the ache in her joints from gripping it too hard—and places them as directed on her calf, one on each side of the wound.
“Wait, don’t just pull that thing out!” she shouts, and Edwin freezes—about to do exactly that. “Aren’t you supposed to, like, wait for the hospital to do it? Never pull the knife out or whatever?”
“Crystal,” Edwin says, slow and patient, like she’s a child. “The granite is currently pinning your leg to the ground. With your size and estimated amount of blood loss, I do not think that waiting for emergency services to arrive is wise. There is a spell to heal traumatic injury and replenish blood, but first the granite must be removed.”
Okay, that makes sense, but—“Won’t it hurt?” She hates how the question falls from her lips, making her sound like the child she insists she isn’t, but she’s really not used to pain anymore and especially not this kind of pain, the uncomfortable wrongness of a foreign intrusion inside of her, pulling, tugging, splitting, how it feels too hot and too cold all at once, how she can’t seem to get her breathing under control and it keeps hitching, hitching, and fuck there are tears falling down her face, aren’t there, and she wants to go home and she wants to die and she wants them to fix it, fix her, she wants someone else to handle it and to let her fall apart.
Edwin, at least, doesn’t lie. Not to her, and not now. “Yes,” he says simply. “It will hurt. You, however, are Crystal Palace, the strongest person I know. It will hurt, and you will be fine.”
“Wow, did Charles teach you that bedside manner?” she jokes, to cover up how the words actually do set her frantic heartbeat to slow. “Fine. Just do it.”
“I will be quick,” Edwin promises, and then removes the shard in one smooth movement. Each tiny flaw along the rough edges seems to stick and pull at the muscle and tendons in her leg, and when one particularly rough point drags over bone she gags and has to trap a yell behind her teeth. Blood was already flowing heavily, but with the shard gone, it starts to flood up, spilling slippery over Edwin’s hands and her leg.
It’s only for a second before Charles’ hands are pinching the sides of the gaping hole in her leg together, but it’s enough for a sick shiver to travel down her spine while Edwin begins to chant. It almost doesn’t feel real, watching the edges knit themselves together beneath Charles’ fingers. It feels like it’s happening to someone else’s leg.
Her whole body feels kind of floaty, actually, and she wonders if that’s sort of what it feels like to be a ghost. Charles has tried to describe it to her before but she’s never really gotten it.
“Crystal? Can you hear me?” Charles asks. “She doesn’t look so good, mate, you sure that spell is safe?” he says over his shoulder, to Edwin.
“It is perfectly safe,” Edwin replies, but he sounds less snooty and more breathless. “It is a simple energy transfer, nothing more. I suspect she may be feeling the effects of adrenaline coupled with a sudden lack of pain—bodily chemistry, nothing more.”
“Yeah, Charles, I’m fine,” she answers, then giggles. She and Edwin agreeing, who would have ever thought?
It’s about time she got up out of this fucking mud, though. A hot shower sounds amazing. She flexes her calf to test, without any pain, and then gets to her feet. Or tries, rather, because suddenly up is down and her legs aren’t really responding to her brain and then Charles’ arms are around her waist.
“Hey, maybe take it slow, yeah? You were bleeding out, like, thirty seconds ago.”
“’M fine,” she insists, but the world really won’t stop spinning like that one carousel she went on as a kid and promptly puked all over. Then she couldn’t even find her parents and had to beg the funnel cake guy for napkins and it was really shitty, actually. “I don’t even need to puke.”
“Yeah,” Charles snorts, “that was super convincing. C’mon, up you go.” He hefts her into his arms, and for a second she forgets that they’ve broken up and her mind has all sorts of fun imagining the sorts of things they could do with that.
“Yes,” Edwin sniffs, “I would appreciate if you would not waste all of the spectral energy I infused you with on pretending to appear normal.”
Crystal sighs and rests her chin on Charles’ shoulder. This is kind of nice, actually, even if his arms are kind of bony. She feels, well, held like this. “It was your energy?” she asks, looking back at him as he follows Charles. He looks a little bit paler than normal, maybe, but he’s also usually about as pale as a Victorian urchin left outside in the snow, so she can’t really tell the difference.
“It was both convenient and necessary, seeing as the only other sources of energy in the area are trees, of which there are nowhere near enough to even fill a teacup, and bones, which can have unpleasant side effects when transferred to living humans. There is no need to thank me.”
“I wasn’t gonna,” she replies automatically. “Just because I’m part Victorian boy now doesn’t mean I have your insane encyclopedia of manners.” She breaks off into a yawn and closes her eyes.
Edwin says something else, but she can’t really hear it. Suddenly, though, it’s important to her that he knows she’s grateful. “I don’t hate you,” is what comes out of her mouth. Under her chin, she can feel Charles silently laugh. “No, it’s true, I know we fight a lot and I know I’m a massive bitch whenever I forget not to be and you’re also a massive bitch right back, and that’s good even if it drives me insane sometimes, because you need to know that I care about you. Both of you.”
“I know, Crystal,” Edwin says, and he doesn’t even sound like he wants to swallow glass about it. One of Charles’ hands finds her hair and tangles itself into it. “We care about you too. And even though you seemingly insist on vexing me at every turn, that will not change.”
She knows it’s about as high praise as she could ever expect from him, the boy allergic to feelings. She smiles and buries it in Charles’ neck so they can’t see.
“Right, time for a nap, I think,” Charles murmurs. “Soon as we get home, yeah?”
“Mhm,” she agrees, already halfway there. It’s easy to fall asleep knowing that they’ve got her.