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weepylucifer · 4 years

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Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 11

David makes a mistake. Thomas makes an entrance. Peter deescalates.

The theatre was dark. The sun was fairly well set by now, and the streetlamps were flickering to life. The heat was easing up by increments, the air already less sweltering and humid than it had been all day. David popped round to the back entrance, as agreed upon, where Cora Watley let him in.

She looked wary. Also tired. She’d borne this secret all week... she’d borne her other secret inconceivably longer. David imagined it had exhausted her.

He nodded at her. “Ma’am.”

“You’re really... police?” she asked with no further preamble.

“I’m...” Well, this required some mental acrobatics, but technically David had never stopped working for the Folly, had he? “I’m a specialist with the...” What had Peter called it? “The Special Assessment Unit.”

Ms. Watley raised an eyebrow. “That’s... special.”

“That’s what Mamá used to say about me.” The joke... well, it didn’t quite fall flat, but she sort of winced. Perhaps in solidarity.

She gestured for him to head inside, so he did. The back door was a heavy steel monstrosity, and David almost got his fingers crushed as he pulled it shut. “Where is the object?”

“I’ve hid it in my dressing room,” Ms. Watley confessed. “Are you... sure you can handle this thing? Because someone’s been murdered over it and I don’t want to really... leave it with a normal person.”

“I’ve been handling objects like this one before your mother’s mother left the hill.” Well, perhaps that was a slight exaggeration. Fae have long lives. “What do you mean you left it in your dressing room?”

“It’s not been searched.” Cora gave him a pale smile. “Nobody bothers me overmuch.”

Glamour. David nodded. “Still, why did you not call anyone? I’m told the Folly’s relations to the demi-monde are rocky as ever, but surely not so rocky as to half-inch a murder weapon before even considering going to the police.”

Cora shook her head. “You lost me. The relations of what to what?”

They had reached the backstage and were proceeding to the actress’s dressing room. “The... demi-monde, people like you.” Was that not the term anymore?

The actress turned around to face David. “People like me?” In the dim light of the hallway, she suddenly looked very young. “There’s never been people like me. I never knew any... there’s always just been me.”

How lonely, David thought. How very lonely.

Cora’s hands shook as she pulled a ring of keys out of her pocket and unlocked her dressing room. “I’m the only weird thing I ever saw. Until that goddamned crystal ball that Deirdre brought.”

She let herself and David in, and dropped to her knees to rummage in the bottom drawer of her vanity. “She bought this thing at a flea market or garage sale or something...” Goblin market, David mentally inserted, “...but she said she felt weird about having it at home. Like... it was showing her weird things she didn’t want to see. So she brought it here, thinking maybe we could use it as a prop or something... but I started noticing how other people got... weird around it. Never me, though. So I talked to Deirdre, thought maybe I could get her to throw it out or give it away or we could smash it maybe, but she kept it in the props department... and then I found it next to her dead body.”

David couldn’t help his eyebrows shooting up. “You found the body?” He began patting down his pockets. Perhaps he’d thought to bring a notebook? He should probably write this down, like a proper policeman. Oh, or didn’t his new-fangled telephone have a recording device? He pulled it out.

“Yeah, I found it,” Cora said, still bent over her cluttered vanity. “Look, I knew someone was going to call the police. But the damned thing’s cursed or whatever. Was I gonna give it to just any police guy? They’d get got by the curse just like people here did.”

“There‘s special police for special cases,” David said.

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Cora got up, in her hands a round object, wrapped in a silk shawl. “And heeeere we go.”

“Very good,” said a voice in David’s back, accompanied by a sound that rang awfully familiar from the war: the telltale click of a gun being cocked. “Hand it over, Cora, nice and careful.”

----

I was in the tech cave just finished feeding the interviews we had conducted during the afternoon into HOLMES when Nightingale swept in. It wasn’t quite a burst in, but not a normal entrance either: yes, a sweeping.

I was actually about to go home, but I clocked that something was off. Far as I knew he’d headed to the basement once we’d got back, and now he was here, and notably by himself. “Everything okay, sir?”

Nightingale clicked his tongue. “It’s David. He went out and left this... cryptic message and now he won’t answer his phone.”

He handed me a post-it with a scrawled-upon note. I read the cryptic message. “’Actress is a demi-fae’? Does he mean Ms. Watley?”

“I assume so.”

“He’s not... he didn’t go meet up with her or something, did he?” But a sinking feeling in my gut said he’d done precisely that.

Nightingale frowned down at his phone. “I’d know that if he’d answer any of my messages.”

And that... was worrisome. David had had a mobile phone for less than a week, but he was already startlingly adept with it, and he delighted in carrying it with him wherever he went. “Hey, maybe he’s just... out for a walk. Maybe he needs... time to himself.”

Nightingale now glared witheringly at his phone, probably so as not to glare witheringly at me. “Or maybe he put himself in danger.”

Just then, his phone beeped, alerting us to...

“What is that thing?” Nightingale asked.

I stepped up next to him and peered at his screen. “Oh, he sent you a voice recording. The app has a function that lets you record something and send it...”

“Oh, spare me,” Nightingale muttered, and looked at his phone in thinly-veiled disgust, so I took it from him and played the recording.

“Yeah, I found it,” we heard a female voice say. People often sounded different on the phone, but this was most definitely Ms. Watley. “Look, I knew someone was going to call the police. But the damned thing’s cursed or whatever. Was I gonna give it to just any police guy? They’d get got by the curse just like people here did.”

“Hrm,” Nightingale said.

I stood still, excitement mounting. If David had managed to get us a spoken confession...

“Would’ve thought most of the demi-monde at least knew of us by now,” I commented.

“There‘s special police for special cases,” David said.

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Some rustling was heard. “And heeere we go.”

“Is she actually handing it over?” I asked. Nightingale shushed me.

Then we heard a clicking, and a male voice, empathically not David’s, said, “Very good. Hand it over, Cora, nice and careful.”

Here the recording ended abruptly, as if... well, as if something had prevented David from recording any further.

I looked at Nightingale. He’d gone pale, his jaw clenched, his eyes slightly widened. Other than that, he betrayed no emotion. He went... cold, rigid, all over.

“Shit,” I said.

“We must locate them.” Nightingale’s voice was calm, but only because he was expending considerable strength of will on making it so.

“Probably the theatre, right?” I suggested, but there really was no way to tell. If only I could track David’s phone. But we hadn’t exactly stuck a tracker on him, and why would we have?

“Is there a spell for tracking them?” I asked.

Nightingale shrugged. “Not that I know of.”

“Bev always knows where I’m at.” Later, I would ask myself what on earth I’d meant by saying that.

“Well, I’m not a river deity,” Nightingale snapped. “I can’t well scent my lover.”

Lover. That word, so casually, from Nightingale, somehow made me shiver. And was that what Bev was doing? Scenting me? “Technically, you’re... something, sir,” I argued.

Now Nightingale outright gave me the glare. “This is hardly the time.”

----

“Get behind me,” David murmured. He ignored how Cora hissed “What?” and cast his shield, only to remember... oh, right.

He couldn’t cast at all.

“What the fuck did you just try to do?” Cora hissed from over his left shoulder. This, David thought detachedly, was probably the first time she’d seen (an attempt at) Newtonian magic.

“I won’t repeat myself,” said the man with the hunting rifle, whom David vaguely recognized as Mr. Sheen, the theatre’s director. Behind him, a taller man - the janitor, right? - was looking on with a deeply conflicted expression. “Hand me that crystal ball, and no tricks, and we might just get out of this one with nobody getting hurt.”

“Howard, the damned thing’s cursed,” the actress said. “This isn’t hyperbole, I genuinely fucking mean this.”

Mr. Sheen waved his rifle. “Will you bloody hand it over already?”

It was good of Ms. Watley to warn her employer, David thought, but unfortunately useless. The signs were all there. Mr. Sheen was utterly enthralled by the enchantment permeating from the object. It was potent in a way that he had rarely witnessed, and only decades of experience prevented David from reaching for it himself. And it had apparently been in this building for a lengthy amount of time, several days at least. Being so exposed to the enchantment, a susceptible mind might be driven to lengths...

Ms. Watley took a deep breath in. Wisps of her glamour escaped from her, but David nudged her side. “He has a gun, do as he says.”

“But I can--”

“Your glamour doesn’t make you immune to bullets, you know.”

Slowly, extremely reluctantly, Cora handed the crystal ball over.

Mr. Sheen unwrapped it from the silk shawl that had covered it and, aglow with triumph, held it in his hands. “Finally someone sees sense here.” He turned towards David. “Now, who on earth are you?”

And David realized exactly what else it was the crystal ball did.

The enchantment enticing people to take it, to seize possession of it and own it, well, that was one thing. But it was not the object’s actual use.

He felt nothing as the director probed his thoughts (nothing but a sense of revulsion, of violation that was uniquely his own) but he certainly saw the man turn pale.

“What the hell...?” Mr. Sheen said. For a moment, he recoiled, startled, and David lunged.

It earned him the barrel of the rifle jabbed into his ribs.

“You better not try that again,” Mr. Sheen said. He gave the crystal ball an appreciative pat. “This little gizmo here alerts me to anything you’re thinking to do. Now, Derrick, if you’d please...”

The janitor stepped forward. In his hand, he was holding a roll of zip ties.

“One of you acts up, I’ll have to shoot the other,” Mr. Sheen proclaimed, and David couldn’t tell whether or not he was bluffing. Most civilians weren’t quite prepared to actually eliminate a person at close range. But on the other hand... that certain glow in Mr. Sheen’s face, the rigidity of his features, that frozen smile... he was deep in the throes of the enchantment, practically possessed. There was no telling what he would or wouldn’t do.

“Derrick, are you fucking nuts?” Cora demanded as the janitor pushed her into a chair and began tying her hands behind her back.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Johnson whispered. “It’s just... he knows.”

Knows what? David wondered. But there would be time to find that out later. For now, he thought it best to not resist as his hands, too, were tied.

“Derrick, take their phones, will you?” Mr. Sheen commanded. David held his breath as his mobile phone was fished out of his pocket. Now they’d know he’d sent that recording off...

“Now what’s this?” Mr. Sheen asked, holding David’s phone aloft for everyone to see the screen. There were about half a dozen unanswered texts. “A gentleman caller?”

Thomas, David thought, and then tried his utmost to suppress the thought. But it was too late.

“Is this the same Thomas Nightingale who has been investigating this place? The same one I am seeing so prominently displayed in your memories?”

“I’m not saying anything,” David said.

Mr. Sheen shook his head. “An utterly futile effort.”

----

Suddenly there was a sound from Nightingale’s phone.

“Well, thank goodness,” he huffed, acting put-upon but poorly masking his actual pure relief as he took the phone back from my hand and glanced at the screen. The relief was short-lived.

“Sir?” I asked. “What’s the news?”

Wordlessly, he waved me closer so that I could read over his shoulder.

There were the unanswered texts that Nightingale had sent David’s way, in his usual flawless grammar and diction which has a way of looking weird in text message format. They ran,

David, this is extremely vexing. Where are you at?

You are utterly out of line. There is a very good reason why I prohibited you tampering with the investigation. Come home.

I am not mad at you, but we must address this along with everything else. Do not put yourself needlessly in danger. Do not take any unnecessary risks.

Answer your damned phone, Davey.

And below that, a picture that someone, empathically not David, had sent. It depicted David, back to back with Cora Watley, both zip-tied to chairs by their wrists and ankles. The background showed that this was clearly the stage that we’d only recently stood on during our encounter with the theatre ghost. While Ms. Watley looked enraged and scared in equal measure, David’s face showed, if anything, deep indignation at being so held. Someone else was barely visible in the very margin of the picture, little more than a hand and, unfortunately, the barrel of a rifle.

The text below said, “I’m sure we are all reasonable men here. The two of them will be set free upon your payment of a modest fee and a guarantee that I should be left undisturbed. Do not alert any further authorities. The consequences will be severe.”

Our mystery texter had included below the message proper the ‘modest fee’ they wished to be paid. (We would later find out that it covered the theatre’s various debts, plus a little extra.) It was a pretty high six figures.

“Shit,” I repeated. “This has become a hostage situation.”

Nightingale shook his head. “Unbelievable.”

“Sir?”

“A hostage? David “Gold Star” Mellenby, the scourge of the Wolfsstaffel, a hostage?”

“He... is wearing the cuffs still, sir.” I contained myself from asking what either of those epithets meant.

For a moment, Nightingale went very silent. Then he said, “Well, that is true,” but I got the distinct feeling that what he meant to express by that ran more towards “Fuuuuuuuck.”

“We’re heading over,” he said.

I nodded and grabbed my own phone. “I’ll call Belgravia for backup.”

Already in the process of sweeping back out, Nightingale paused. “You think we will have need of them?”

“It’s their murder case.”

“Quite frankly,” Nightingale said, “I don’t think the situation warrants extensive support. In fact, I’ll head in by myself.”

Woah, I thought, what? “Sir, there’s no way I’m not coming with you.”

This got me a steely, grey-eyed stare. “It’s one man, I’ll be quite able to handle myself.”

The expression on Nightingale’s face put fear into me. Not fear for him, or for myself, but for our very unlucky kidnapper. “Yeah?” I asked. “You will be?”

----

“This is insane,” David said. He strained against his ties a little, more for the look of it than anything else. Besides which, they felt uncomfortable around his wrists.

“Hush,” Mr. Sheen said.

They had been herded at gunpoint out onto the stage, and pushed down into two folding chairs that maybe served as props for the musical. Perhaps the actors just sat down here during reading rehearsals normally. David didn’t like it here. He felt put on the spot, and the, well, dramatics of having the hostages sit on the stage struck him as deeply overwrought and annoying.

“No, I mean it. This device you’re holding lets you sample my memories, no? So you realize this is going nowhere fast for you. You’ve seen what Thomas did in fall 1944 when we captured those two Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften officers and were civilly questioning them for intel and then one of them called me a Saujude and the other one grinned?” The memory was definitely at the forefront of David’s mind currently. “You’re seeing what Thomas did to another human being because he grinned? Mr. Sheen, you better let me out of here while you still can. I know my lover. Thomas will not pay a bloody ransom, Thomas will kill you.”

“Bluffing,” Mr. Sheen said calmly, but it was a projected calm. David could see the beads of sweat on the man’s brow. He reckoned that some part of Howard Sheen knew that he was in too deep and with no feasible way out, and that setting Thomas “The” Nightingale on his trail had been the dumbest decision he had made today or perhaps in his life, but the thrall of the object was stronger than reason. Besides which, the ‘modest fee’ (David wasn’t sure, if the idea was even being entertained, if the Folly budget would survive it) beckoned, promising an end to the theatre’s financial problems.

“I’ve also sampled your recent memories. Nobody’s coming to rescue you.”

David clenched his fists at his sides, and stayed silent. Oh, yeah... that.

“What the fuck is he doing,” Cora whispered. “Trying to blackmail a police officer?”

David nodded. “Said police officer happens also to be my boyfriend, so there is that.”

Is that the one with the walking cane? The one who made out with Roger? That’s nuts. That guy was radiating don’t fuck with me so hard I could feel it all the way across the hall.”

Briefly, David wondered who Roger was. Would’ve liked to see that. “That aptly describes Thomas.” These days, anyhow.

“What fucking is he? I tried getting him to leave this place alone and he just stared me down. I put on a show and everything. Most people just sort of do what I want them to when I do the... you know...”

“We call that a glamour,” David muttered distractedly. What was Thomas, these days? It was an interesting question. Of course, being impervious to glamour, especially a clumsily wielded one like Ms. Watley’s, could simply be chalked up to experience. Decades and decades of experience. But clearly nowadays there was more to Thomas. Why, for example, was he not aging? Did he not technically qualify as fae now, by virtue of that?

“I thought he might be... weird like me,” Cora contributed, as if on cue. “Because he resisted. No other people ever did that.”

“That’s a hypothesis we must certainly consider,” David agreed. Good gracious, if only he had his magic. He would have gotten rid of these plastic ties already. “But frankly, I don’t know. They have a medical professional trying to figure that one out.”

“You figured me out,” Cora said almost accusingly.

“It’s not so hard to unmask a demi-fae, if one knows what one’s doing.” Not just the ties, but also that rifle. And Misters Sheen and Johnson... well, suffice to say they wouldn’t be upright still. David was slow to anger. He considered himself a good-natured, mellow, even-tempered person. But he was beginning to grow peeved, and when that happened, there tended to be consequences, as evidenced by certain parts of the former Third Reich where grass would likely never grow again.

“Demi-what?”

David sighed. His mind was swirling with thoughts of Thomas, of his situation, of how on earth he was going to get out of this one. (Was there a way to get these ties gone without magic...? Unfortunately his pockets had been searched earlier, and even if he’d carried any useful little tools of escape artistry with him, which he hadn’t, those would have been gone by now.) And he wasn’t really all that confident that Thomas would come get him. Not after all that had happened between them.

But there was a man with a mind-reading device in the room with him, a man who might just shoot him if he deemed him useless, and answering Cora’s questions was at the very least a way to focus his thoughts elsewhere.

“Demi-fae,” he repeated. “That’s the scientific term for people like you. Or at the very least it was that when I was last active.”

“I didn’t know there was a scientific term,” Cora said. “Or more people like me. I’m a... changeling, that’s what I know. I’m weird and I can do some stuff. But I was always the only one I knew of. I just... kept my head down and tried to live like normal.”

David nodded. A pale, skinny young woman in drab, dark clothing who faded into the background - that was the look of a fae in hiding. Fae dress according to their chosen vocation, he remembered, and he thought of Oberon’s uniform jacket, Molly’s dress, Foxglove’s coat with its myriad paint splatters and so many pockets for pencils and paintbrushes - for a split-second, he even thought of Thomas’s suits. A theatre fae, he pondered, would likely be in costume at all times, with the most sparkling, fluctuating, dramatic personality. He looked at Cora and thought, how sad.

“Do you want to know what else there is?” he asked.

“Will you two stop whispering back there?” Mr. Sheen snapped. “I’ll have Derrick gag you, you know!”

The janitor, hanging around by the curtain, shifted uneasily.

Mr. Sheen resumed pacing, the crystal ball tucked under one arm. He had lots of room for it on the empty stage. Periodically he would pause, pull out David’s phone and glare at it.

“Thomas hen-peck-types,” David said helpfully. “Whatever reply he’s going to make, it’s going to take a while.”

He grinned, the cheekiest grin he could muster, and hoped it masked the thoughts he had. He’s not coming. No one’s coming for me. No one wants me.

----

We parked the Jag around the corner from the theatre. As we got out of the car, we were joined by what looked like half the murder team stuffed into two plain cars of about the same quality as my old Asbo. Apparently the call I’d placed well out of Nightingale’s earshot as I’d presumably gone to grab my gear warranted Stephanopoulos showing up herself.

“What are we looking at?” she asked, strolling over to us, all business.

Nightingale gave her an irritated look, like he was having to remember what on earth she was here for. “Ah, Miriam,” he said. “So you received... Peter’s call for backup.” The glare he shot me promised consequences later. I almost imperceptibly lifted my shoulders. I’d take the stern talking-to over whatever would have occurred otherwise.

Stephanopoulos scrutinized the dark building. “Looks calm for now.”

Nightingale nodded. “We’re dealing with one man, armed, two hostages, the suspect in possession of one, well...”

With respect to Stephanopoulos’ sensibilities, it seemed he didn’t want to say ‘magical object’ quite yet. “Of Falcon-contaminated hazardous material,” I improvised.

Stephanopoulos’ eyebrows rose. “Like a biohazard?”

“Something like that, I suppose,” Nightingale said.

“How come this is the first time I’m hearing of anything like this existing?” Stephanopoulos asked. Behind her, I could see Guleed peeking out of the car in curiosity, craning her head out of the window to hear.

Nightingale went as far as to click his tongue in impatience. “Perhaps something to be considered at a later date,” he said, neatly smothering that burgeoning argument. “For now, while the threat is imminent to non-Falcon personnel, I consider it low enough at present to handle it myself. I suggest your team guard the entrances while I head inside.”

“You want to head in by yourself,” Stephanopoulos said. “And do what? Do you intend to play for an exchange?”

“I do not intend to humour that man for anything.” Eyes narrowing, Nightingale also scrutinized the building. “I’m of a mind to go in there and set him ablaze, to be frank. Hell, if I had a clear line of sight at him, perhaps from a window, I could blow up his head from here.”

Stephanopoulos took a sudden, sharp breath. “What the hell, Thomas?”

I was very glad I’d decided to call her in.

Nightingale didn’t look at any of us. He gripped his staff so hard his knuckles were starkly white. “My... David’s in there.”

“And who’s David?” Stephanopoulos asked. Apparently she’d been left out of the loop regarding the last week. Her eyes strayed quickly to the car where Carey, the David she was probably thinking of, sat safe and sound next to Guleed. “Anyhow, I’m not having you go in there and irreparably harm our suspect.”

“I am not,” Nightingale said through clenched teeth, “going to stand here and do things by the book while someone’s got David at gunpoint.” He whirled around suddenly, face to face with Stephanopoulos. “God dammit, Miriam, what would you do if it was your wife in there?”

“I still wouldn’t blow heads up.” Now Stephanopoulos, too, was exposing teeth. “Also, what the fuck, Thomas?”

“Look, I am getting him out. I’m prepared to face whatever consequences later.”

Stephanopoulos grabbed him by the arm. “Even if your consequences turn out two dead hostages? Our kidnapper has murdered someone once before, and there is clearly a hunting rifle in that picture.”

Hunting rifle, hunting club, I pieced together. The director, then. At least one accomplice, seeing as pointing a rifle and taking a picture required more than two hands.

“And listen, if it were Pam in there? I wouldn’t rush into things and endanger her life.”

----

Most likely, David reflected, he was going to get shot here today.

He was going to get shot here today, and he didn’t feel the least bit... excited about it. What would he leave behind? A miserable little pile of notebooks, and no one who would mourn him, because no one wanted him in the first place. Thomas would go on with life as he had before David had woken from his long sleep. Peter would certainly not care overly much; they had barely gotten to know each other, and any sense of kinship between them had surely been a figment of David’s imagination. This was fine; this should have happened over seventy years ago.

But there was an innocent young lady here, a person whose life had only just begun, and she was also going to get shot here today unless someone did something. And that wasn’t right, and if David could prevent that somehow, he would.

But what were his options, really? He tried to fumble for the ties around his wrists, perhaps he could manage to loosen or undo them somehow. The unyielding plastic chafed at his skin, but he continued, hoping his efforts wouldn’t be noticed.

Magic was right out, unless he found a way to get the inhibitor cuffs off. The cuffs required Thomas’s word to open. They encircled his whole wrists. Having been forged by Thomas personally and imbued with Thomas’s magic, they would hold. Having also been forged in a hurry, they weren’t perfectly smooth. What with all his fidgeting at them for the past days, David was well familiar with every notch and ridge in the metal.

Perhaps, if he bent his wrist just right, he could get an edge of the metal to catch on the plastic of the zip-ties...

“What are you doing?” Cora hissed irritably. “Why are you squirming like that, do you need the bathroom?”

“No,” David whispered at her. “I’m trying something. Distract them, will you?”

He still wouldn’t have his magic. But he’d have both his hands free. There was a lot a man could do with both of his hands free, especially if said man had had experience on battlefields.

Cora glared at him. “Distract them how?”

“Well, you’re an actress, aren’t you? Make something up.”

“Make something...?” It must have been a wrong thing to say, judging by how mad she sounded. But she rolled her eyes and slumped in momentary defeat. “Ugh, I guess.”

“Howard?” Cora asked, leaning forward as far as her ties would allow, getting Mr. Sheen’s attention. “I know you’re not going through with this. You’re not killing your female lead a week before opening night. The understudy is a catastrophe and we both know it.”

This of all things got Mr. Sheen to pause. David shook his head to himself.

“Lindsay is a fine understudy. She knows her stuff.”

“She still keeps forgetting her lines.”

“Frankly, she brings a passion to the role that I often felt you... lacking, in rehearsal.”

“Passion?” Cora snarled and wrenched at the ties that bound her wrists to her own chair, back to back with David’s. “Bullshit! You really think you can kill me off and replace me with Lindsay Reilly because she has bigger tits than me?!”

As the theatre people argued, David stealthily flexed his fingers...

“Now, this simply won’t do,” Mr. Sheen said. “We’ve all wasted enough time here. Derrick, take another picture...”

----

Nightingale was still arguing with Stephanopoulos when his phone buzzed again.

It was a new picture, this time of the barrel of the rifle being pressed directly into the curls at David’s temple. If it weren’t so dramatic a situation, David’s facial expression, all disgruntled and annoyed at such dramatics, would have been deeply comedic.

“I’ve waited quite long enough,” said the voice in the recording that was sent along with the picture. “You know that Mr. Mellenby here is of the opinion that no one will come? He’s trying to mask it, but it’s at the forefront of his mind. He’s believing himself abandoned. Isn’t that sad? Anyway, I need a decision here, DCI Nightingale, and soon.”

Nightingale stood with his back to me. I was glad I couldn’t see his face. Suddenly, flame erupted from his closed fist, enveloping his phone in fire. The smell of burning plastic spread.

“Woah, sir,” I said.

Nightingale’s voice was low and quiet when he announced, “I’m going to light the fucker up.”

“Thomas,” Stephanopoulos said sharply, and I expected her to set him to rights, tell him he was being way out of line, but she added, in a kind of voice I’d never expected to hear out of her, “You’re scaring me.”

“Apologies, Miriam, but we cannot delay.” And, you know, Nightingale wasn’t wearing his combat boots this time - probably because he’d had no time to change into them - but he didn’t need to. He radiated the soldier so hard we all felt it.

“Sir,” I urged. “You know we can make a clean arrest of it. All we need to do is obtain the object that’s causing all of this. No one needs to be set on fire today.”

Nightingale half-turned and looked at me. It was horrible. I have already lost everything once, his eyes said, I might now lose everything again. That kind of look. The look of people who go dancing in the light of their blazing homes.

“Um,” I said. “Please?”

----

David was beginning to become seriously annoyed by Mr. Sheen’s, for lack of a better word, theatrics, plus the gun still pressed to his temple. It made thinking hard, getting up close and personal with the business end of a rifle like this. “Best take that away,” he suggested irritably. “You’re not going to shoot, and we both know it.”

“Oh, do we both know any such thing?” Mr. Sheen handed the rifle to the highly reluctant Derrick. That, in David’s book, was an improvement. Then Mr. Sheen took up the crystal ball again, gazing deep inside, probably meaning to intrude and scan David’s thoughts again.

David wasn’t going to make it easy for him. Out of spite, he thought hard of nazi corpses.

At first he thought it was that which made Mr. Sheen recoil and scrunch up his face in dismay, but then he turned to the janitor, back to the crystal ball in his hands, and then peered around the stage and asked, “What is... is someone else in this building with us?”

Mr. Johnson’s shoulders rose and fell. “I’ve locked up everywhere, there’s not... supposed to be anyone else here.”

“Then why is... what is this?” Mr. Sheen stared down at the crystal ball in confusion. “Whose... where do these thoughts come from? Are you two doing this in some way?” He pointed at the two hostages.

Truly, David hadn’t the faintest clue what was going on now. But any confusion was a good thing and was to be furthered. Perhaps his captor would slip up in some way... allowing him to take steps to escape or at least ensure Cora’s safety. “May I be of help, sir?”

“Why would--”

From somewhere behind the stage there was a sound, like something falling down, or a door falling shut. Mr. Sheen looked up, and suddenly there was fear in his eyes. “What the-- who is there?”

Derrick Johnson looked at him with a sliver of doubt on his face. “Um, something wrong?”

“Those images...” Mr. Sheen shook the crystal ball like a snowglobe, as if it would show different pictures then. “Whoever... whatever is making those images...” He looked around the empty stage, out at the empty auditorium, a slightly deranged look to him. “It shouldn’t be in the building with us. Derrick, hand me the... no... go search the backstage, will you?”

“Er...”

Another sound. Like footsteps? Footsteps on the creaking wood of the floor?

“I don’t know about this,” Mr. Johnson said. “Nah, you know what, fuck this.”

“Derrick...” Mr. Sheen said threateningly. “You want me to tell our friends from the police why this establishment is truly so chronically short of money...? Ah, of course you don’t. Now be a reasonable chap and go backstage.”

Johnson disappeared behind the curtain, rifle in his hands.

David, still with nary a clue what was happening, craned his neck to shoot a questioning glance at Cora. Are you doing whatever this is?

She shook her head. No.

Muffled and a ways off, they heard Mr. Johnson walk around, then, “Hello? Hello? Is someone... Oi!”

The curtain flew aside as Mr. Johnson was flung headfirst back onto the stage. David felt the impello-palma, so powerful it would punch through ten-inch sheet metal, and he knew that burst of magic. As familiar almost as his own.

Tears shot to his eyes, but they were of joy. He hadn’t believed it would happen...

Mr. Johnson went down hard and stayed down.

Then several things happened in quick succession.

With a gasp, Mr. Sheen ran forward, to help Mr. Johnson, David thought, but he disregarded his fallen accomplice and grabbed the rifle from him. As he scrambled back up to his feet, hands shaking as he attempted to cock the gun, Ms. Cora Watley suddenly flung herself against her ties, and unleashed the full force of her glamour.

Mr. Sheen stumbled, and even David reeled as he was overwhelmed; this was the stage, here were the actors, and the overhead lights sprang on and the fog machine whirred to life, and soon they were ankle-high in billowing mist, and an end of the curtain was lifted just ever-so-slightly by a delicate hand.

Up above their heads, the huge stage light rotated on its axis by itself, and the beam of a spotlight fingered across the auditorium, the stage, and came to rest on the new arrival. A grand entrance.

“Evening, all,” said Thomas.

“Yes!” Ms. Watley hissed in triumph. “Enter stage left! Love it!”

Thomas grinned - not in response to Ms. Watley, he was wearing the sort of grin that David usually knew exclusively from battlefields. The sort of grin that used to say, All you Jerries are about to die.

----

I entered the building and therefore the stage on Nightingale’s heels, but just this once, no one was paying attention to me.

I was right behind him when he sucker-punched the janitor, using his impello palma like brass knuckles, nevermind that the guy had a gun. He didn’t hesitate for a second, just flung the fellow out through the curtain. It was just on sight. Now, I’ve seen Nightingale attempt to rugby-tackle suspects before, in the heat of the moment and all. The pure, vicious force of that punch still blew me away. I took a second, I know not why, to actually tug at his sleeve, and he gave me one of these looks he sometimes gets that signifies he’s not fully here right now but trying very hard to be.

“Let’s proceed,” he said, rubbing some life back into his hand. So we proceeded, stage left.

What I now recognized as Ms. Watley’s glamour permeated the stage. The fog was swirling, the spotlights were bright upon us, and, brushing past the curtain, I felt the excitement and the trepidation again: an actor readying for the great entrance. But I was happy to cede the stage to Nightingale.

The director was stood blocking the hostages, and he’d picked up the rifle. Now he was holding it in shaky hands. “I’m warning you! Don’t come any further!”

Nightingale chuckled. It sent a dart of cold, primal fear down my spine. Of course he already had his shield up. Very courteously, it also covered me. “Oh, do try and shoot me, I beg of you.”

Even his voice was different.

Fuck, this was bad.

“How about this, then?” His movements almost erratic, Mr. Sheen spun around and pointed the rifle at David. David, for his part, only raised an eyebrow.

“You fucking moron,” someone said. With a start, I realized it was me.

Nightingale raised his hand. I could feel a forma coming, and I didn’t know what it might be, and I was afraid.

I gripped his wrist. Again, I don’t know what fucking compelled me, my arm just shot forward and grabbed his wrist.

“Sir.”

He gave me an indecipherable look again. His magic kept ticking away as he turned back towards the little tableau in front of him.

“Please don’t hurt anybody unduly,” he said.

“That’s a mighty lot of you to ask,” Mr. Sheen replied, mad triumph making its home in his face - prematurely, it would turn out.

“Mr. Sheen,” Nightingale said aloofly, and released his forma into the world, “I was not talking to you.”

At first, I’d thought the spell had done nothing.

Then I heard two tiny plinks of metal, like, well, like the clasps of two wristlets opening.

David got up, the zip-ties and inhibitor cuffs falling away. Before Mr. Sheen could even turn around again, David waved his hand and subdued him, all his extremities suddenly locking into place and sending him tumbling to the floor. Another wave, and a length of cord unspooled, came loose from one of the curtains and wound tightly around Mr. Sheen’s arms and legs.

David looked at me, a glint in his eye. “What do you say? ‘You’re nicked, chum’?”

Well, someone’s getting quite into thief-taking, I thought, and for a split-second I wondered what David’s future within the Folly and therefore the Met might entail. But still, as the great Blackboard Monitor Sir Samuel Vimes once said, it’s so embarrassing to hear civilians try to speak policeman, so I shook my head.

“No,” I said, “You don’t say ‘you’re nicked’. You say, Howard Sheen, you’re under arrest for the murder of Deirdre Maxwell and the abduction of Cora Watley and David Mellenby. You have the right to remain silent...”

The teachable moment didn’t last long, because by the time I got to ‘right to an attorney’, David was looking at Nightingale, who was in turn looking at David.

“I’m sorry for causing you such inconvenience,” David said quietly. He picked up the crystal ball, which had been discarded in all the confusion, and held it out to Nightingale. “Here. This should probably be stored in the Folly.”

Nightingale was across the stage in three long strides. His hands found David’s shoulders, his face, his hair, roving unsteadily, as if committing the shape of David to memory, as if searching for something, as if having to make sure David was really there.

“God, Davey,” he said, in a voice that was soft and wounded and seemed to belong to an entirely different person than the Nightingale I’d known for the past three years, “Don’t ever - ever - do that to me again.”

By chance, his hand brushed the crystal ball that David was still holding, and for a moment they both stood very still.

“Oh... Thomas,” David then said, shivering. “You... genuinely, still? After all I’ve done?”

“And you really believed I wouldn’t come? That nobody wanted you?” Abruptly, Nightingale pulled David closer and, abandoning all his usual restraint, stooped down to bury his face in David’s sweater, and then he just stood breathing for a minute. I felt like I was witnessing something secret and forbidden, something highly private happening, jarringly, in semi-public, something most definitely not intended for my eyes. So I went and checked if both our perps were secured, and then I untied Cora Watley, who gave me a grin.

“I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” she said, “But hell yeah, love wins.”

“It does at that, huh,” I said and helped her to her feet.

“I’m so sorry, Tommy,” David was saying, one hand cradling the crystal ball, the other one resting on the back of Nightingale’s neck. It might have been the first time I’d ever seen anyone touch Nightingale like this. “None of this was supposed to happen.”

I could feel something strange and magical happening between them, in the literal sense; I could feel things being poured into the receptacle between them, perhaps seventy years’ worth of things.

“I cannot lose you again, David,” Nightingale murmured, one hand resting on the crystal ball, the other one cupping David’s cheek as they leaned in for the kiss to end all kisses. “You’re my... you’re my sweetest thing.”

I must’ve been thinking something too, something to the tune of Well, what am I, chopped liver? (for NO reason, I assure you, I guarantee you) because suddenly I had two pairs of eyes on me. I saw as Nightingale and David exchanged a long and silent look.

“We... should probably put this thing down for now,” David said, his voice straining to feign lightness.

“Aha, yes,” Nightingale agreed. He still had his spare arm around David, and a bit of that rattled look about him that I suppose people have when their loved ones have just come out of being kidnapped. “Here, Peter, why don’t you hold on to it?”

I took the accursed object from them, tucked it under my arm, and then I left them to it, switched my phone back on and called Stephanopoulos, informing her that it was okay for her team to head in now.

----

I spotted the former abductees sitting out front later, having been dispensed a shock blanket each, David primly sipping his conciliatory cup of tea and chatting to Ms. Watley about what types of fae there were. I heard him offer to take her ‘round to some demi-monde pubs, if they still existed, which in all left her almost more grateful than saving her from the kidnapping. Disenfranchised fae, I thought, and wondered how many there might be out there. People with no connection to the demi-monde as such, people on their own wondering why the fuck they were so much weirder than everyone around them. I decided to bring that up with Beverley, who had a heart for stuff like that.

Not at all deterrent to the raised spirits was the presence of Nightingale, who hung about with David’s hand tucked into his and most reluctant to leave his side for anything, even when Stephanopoulos stepped up and demanded he head back with her for signing off on the arrest we’d made.

“No,” he said and it jolted me. Nightingale didn’t, I knew that, always love the Job, but he’d always unswervingly done it nonetheless.

Apparently it jolted Stephanopoulos too, because she said, “What?”

“No,” Nightingale repeated. “I’d rather be staying right here, if you don’t mind.”

“I get it, I do,” Stephanopoulos said. “But I sort of have to mind. Paperwork won’t do itself.”

“There will be time for that.” Nightingale picked up David’s hand in both his own and held it against his chest.

“Thomas...” Stephanopoulos shook her head and sighed. “Don’t make me dial Alexander.”

David had watched the exchange attentively. Now he gave Nightingale a light nudge. “Go do your duty, Tom. I’ll be fine here. And later on you can come by and slip under my shock blanket.”

Nightingale went as far as to lean against him again. “David, you’ve been abducted.”

“And? I’m about four weeks shy of a war zone, I didn’t overly mind a botched abduction.” David took another sip of his complimentary tea, looking truly unbothered. He then passed the cup to Nightingale. “Here. You seem to have some need of it.”

Nightingale did go then, but he also took the tea.

I saw them together again later, not actually sharing the shock blanket, but passing a cigarette back and forth. They were touching shoulders, supporting each other. I didn’t approach them. This was not a moment for me to take part in.

...Which was alright.

#rivers of london #rol fic #david mellenby lives AU #couldn't get FV yet? maybe do this here instead #next chapter is another thomas interlude

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weepylucifer · 4 years

Text

Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 12

Thomas and David reunite, finally, properly.

(Reader beware: explicit content. Actually, no plot here, just explicit content)

They approached the Jag hand in hand together. It had long since grown dark, and Thomas very much wished to return to the Folly. He didn’t know why, he had used no strenuous magic today, but the evening had left him tired. Apart from that, though, he was perfectly alright. And why shouldn’t he be? The situation had turned out for the best, nobody having gotten hurt.

He waited for David to stash the crystal ball in the trunk and get in the car on the passenger side. He then turned the key in the ignition, shifted into first gear, and found that for some godforsaken reason his hands shook too much on the steering wheel to actually start driving.

It wasn’t cold out, so Thomas really didn’t understand why, even after he took a second to rub the clamminess off his palms on his trousers, that tremor crept over his whole body. He must have made some sound, because David looked over at him and asked, “Thomas? Love?”

Thomas ran his hands across his face and stayed like that, for just a second he told himself, with the heels of his hands pressed up against his closed eyes. “Give me a moment, alright?”

“Is something wrong, love?” Oh, there was that worried voice. David had no place being worried, after all, he’d had a gun to his head very recently. By all rights, really, it should be David who should be a mess as of right now. Not that Thomas wanted that, in fact, he was impressed with how David was holding up. But it would have been the thing to make sense, not this… not the other way around.

“I can’t precisely say,” Thomas replied. He wanted to get himself together and drive back to the Folly, but it seemed… presently insurmountable. But why? Driving to the Folly was something he’d done more times than he cared to count. Why was it impossible now? Good lord, he just wanted to have a bit of a lie-down.

“Switch sides with me,” David said. “Come on. I’ll drive.”

“Why?” Thomas asked.

“Because you’re no good for it right now.” And here was the patient voice. “Do it, you can kip out here for a minute. I am still your lieutenant, you know.”

“Which still makes me the superior officer.” They were falling into their inter-battlefield routine of back-and-forth bickering. It should not have been half as calming as it was. Thomas took his hands off his face and saw that David was giving him a lopsided smile.

“A prudent CO takes the input of his noncoms under advisement,” he pointed out.

Well, that had never stopped being a truth. They switched sides. Thomas wanted to curl up in the passenger seat, refrained from it, and then thought, what the hell. This was David right there. What was he thinking to hide?

David was a comparatively calm driver. This was rather boring, but conductive to any kind of zoning out or drifting off that needed to occur at a given moment. Thomas came back to when David parked the Jag up front of the coach house.

He uncoiled his limbs and reached for the door-handle but David whispered, “Wait,” and slipped out of the car, came around and opened the door for him, and this once, Thomas didn’t find it in him to object. David gave him a hand up and slipped an arm around his waist as they walked to the Folly’s back door and it felt too good and familiar to be touching David in that way for Thomas to stop and insist he didn’t need any coddling. Sometimes, he supposed, there was nothing for it but to drift with the flow of the events and enjoy some nice, warm contact.

Good lord, he had come so close to losing David again today, too close for comfort. Never would he ever let that happen again. In the future, he would have to look out for that. But for now, David was right here and touching him and it seemed that things, for a given value of the concept, were turning out alright.

Molly had waited up for them with a very late supper, which they took in the dining room. She hovered a bit, but left them to it after a while, placing a candle on their table, which David smiled at and lit with a small flame from his fingertips.

The dining room had been meant to house the entirety of the Folly’s residents for mealtimes, back when there had been many. It felt strange for it to be occupied by two people only, but Thomas was used to that particular blend of strangeness by now. Well, two people was already a 100 percent increase from one, the way the status quo had been almost uninterruptedly for the last seventy years. Thomas remembered having a similar thought back when Peter (and later Lesley) had first arrived. But it was different still now, because it was David now.

They started out sitting opposite each other, not touching, but soon Thomas brushed his ankle against David’s under the table. They intertwined their legs, footsying a bit, simply because they were in this room and they could, and it would not have been possible to do back in the day.

“Feels funny doing this in here,” David opined, his voice light, but a kind of wonder sneaking in on the edges.

Thomas gave him a grin. “Know what else we can do in here now?”

And ah, there it was. David’s breath grew that almost imperceptible bit shallower, his pupils beginning to dilate already. “What?”

Grinning ever wider, Thomas ran a foot up David’s inseam. “Oh, just about anything.”

David put his cutlery down. “Quite,” he said eagerly, “Who’s to tell us no?”

“It is my Folly now.”

David laughed. “And isn’t that weird? I’m still getting used to it. My songbird, master of the Folly. Who could have possibly predicted that, hm?” Then his smile fell a little, and he hurriedly added, “Although I’m sure you’re doing splendid at it.”

“That depends on what you would consider splendid.” Well, the Folly hadn’t been overrun or fallen into disrepair during his tenure as head of the Society of Nothing Much, Anymore. But that was largely all he could boast until such time as a stroke of luck had led him to take Peter on. And what changes had occurred since, and would continue to occur, could truly be attributed to Peter and his seemingly endless fount of new exciting ideas, rather than any achievement on Thomas’s part. He harbored no illusions concerning that.

But getting into that now would derail the mood, which, so far as Thomas was concerned, was shaping up into something rather promising. “I was thinking,” he said, “every room in the Folly.”

David blinked at him in momentary confusion. “What about them?”

Thomas twirled his fork in his hand. “Oh, you know. We could take a floor plan. Pick out every room in which you’ve ever wanted to push me up against the furniture and have a go at it. And then we could do that. As you said, who’s to tell us no?”

David visibly swallowed. He fidgeted with his hands in that way that told Thomas he was growing elated. “Yes,” he breathed. “Yes, goodness, please.”

Thomas pushed his chair back. He was finished eating anyway. “How about we start in my bedroom for now?”

“Oh, you mean, fuck in the master bedroom?” David followed suit so fast he almost toppled his chair. “Well, don’t mind if I do.”

—-

By the time they made it up to Thomas’s bedroom, they were already making out against the door. It was like some barrier that had up until now rather haphazardly kept them apart had fully broken down. Thomas, with his back against the door, shut his eyes and simply enjoyed being kissed by David, so hungrily, so desperately. He plunged both hands into David’s hair, felt the texture of the curls beneath his fingers, and it was as David’s hair always had been. He could have wept at the familiarity, suddenly reawakened.

But he didn’t stay here for long. Soon he ran his hands down David’s back, then up his arms again, caressing his shoulders, his chest, his sides. David wrapped both his arms around Thomas’s waist again, gripped him by the small of his back and pulled him closer, so close that not an atom could have fit between them.

“Yes,” he sighed, breaking the kiss for a moment, “Now I’m truly home.”

This tore something out of Thomas that surprised and startled him, and he stifled a sob into David’s sweater.

Because yes.

David was home.

David was here.

“Davey–”

And just like that, there was a hand in his hair again, stroking it in all the ways that always were sure to calm him down. “I know, sweetheart,” David muttered. “I know.”

“Wait.” Thomas took a shaky breath. “Wait, you’ve been abducted today, you’ve been held at gunpoint, you… shouldn’t be doing this for me.”

David shrugged. “Life is strange sometimes. You… I mean no offense, but you seem to be needing it more than me at present.”

Something changed as David said that, he… tensed, his eyes grew wary, and he took a step back. And… I mean no offense. So formal. As if they were strangers just making one another’s acquaintance.

Thomas put a hand on David’s shoulder and reeled him back in. “Hey. Where are you off to? Stay here.”

“I’m sorry.” David lowered his eyes. Since coming back out of that theatre, he’d seemed so sure, almost serene, always with a handle on the situation. Now this seemed to evaporate. “I don’t mean to offend you by implying… I mean, I’m sure you’re perfectly on top of things.”

David didn’t sincerely believe that. Thomas could tell. David had never been good at lying. Why was he trying now?

Well, perhaps it didn’t go amazing for him the last few times he tried to get close, said a reasonable voice from somewhere in the back of Thomas’s head, a voice that sounded strangely familiar…

Oh. Peter. Thomas’s voice of reason sounded like Peter now.

And it wasn’t like said voice was wrong. Thomas’s mind chose this instance to replay what he had seen earlier in the evening, when he had laid his hand on that crystal ball. David’s thoughts had been loud, a swirl of joy and sheer incredulity that they had come for him.

He had assumed no one would. That he’d stuck his head out too far attempting to fix things, and that Thomas would not care anymore whether he lived or died. He’d settled into certain death. He’d been ready to embrace it, for real this time.

And his reasons for keeping David at arm’s length for all this time… Thomas couldn’t even remember them right now. How inconsequential they all seemed, when life was fleeting, and all it took was one idiot with a gun to tear David away from him again forever.

He pressed a kiss to David’s lips, and another, and another. “Davey…” The surprised puff of breath that escaped David’s lips, that tingled against Thomas’s mouth, was the sweetest sensation in the world. “David, I swear, no more of that. We will get into things, we will get into all manner of things. Everything you want to talk about, we will. No more running from this. If something happened…”

“Yes,” David said. “We must remember not to go angry.”

Back during the war, their company had had a superstition. Such things sprouted among soldiers, little stories and rituals to pass the day, a natural human attempt to turn the vast, encompassing and utterly chaotic machinery of war into something controllable.

Do not go angry, they had said. When heading into combat, beforehand, try to the best of your ability to clear up any open disputes, any conflicts, any grief with your mates. Going into battle in a state of anger and resentment with your comrades, it was said, invited the worst of luck upon a man. On a certain level, this was purely pragmatic. In the thick of combat, you had nothing to count on but the man next to you. You did not want the man next to you to be someone who bore an unresolved resentment against you, who would hesitate even a fraction of a second to protect your life with everything he had, because in the thick of combat, a fraction of a second was all it took sometimes. Unit cohesion had to be total. The bond between soldiers had to be steadfast.

Into Ettersberg, they had gone angry. This had had no bearing on the actual battle, seeing as they’d been assigned to different squadrons, but still it undoubtedly felt like the whole campaign had stood under the unluckiest of stars. There was a myriad of very real reasons for that, but the fact remained that also, apart from that, they had gone angry. They had not settled their dispute, and as things stood, they hadn’t gotten to do it until now, seventy years later. And between then and now there had been a bottomless chasm of grief.

“But let’s not think about any of that now,” David said, reaching up to cradle Thomas’s cheek in his hand. “You’re here. I’m here. Let’s have a proper reunion finally.”

Thomas kissed him.

Soon the kiss grew heated, then downright sloppy as their focus shifted to areas south of the lips. Thomas soon found David’s leg between this thighs, and in a dizzy little moment of objective clarity realized that he was already rutting against it, making urgent little hums from somewhere deep down his throat, all of a sudden utterly in need.

David cursed under his breath as he undid the buttons on Thomas’s waistcoat, and then had to move up again to start over with his shirt. “This,” he almost growled, “is worse than the damned uniform. Why have you got so many things on?”

Through gritted teeth, Thomas replied, “Just get on with it.”

David made a little, understated downward hand motion, there was that gush of air that Thomas knew as David’s signare, and all buttons on his shirt sprang off and rolled away across the floor. A perfectly good shirt ruined. Somehow Thomas couldn’t find it in himself to mind. Immediately, David latched on to the strip of bare skin he’d uncovered, sucking at the hollow of Thomas’s throat, leaving a burning brand of marks behind.

“Hickeys? What are we, fifteen again?” And yet, Thomas could not deny how he arched into the touch. These tiny, blossoming pains felt exquisite, a delicious edge to proceedings.

David detached just enough to laugh. “Above the collar,” he said. “Everyone should see.”

Thomas felt his hips twitch just at the thought. The possibilities of it all made his head spin. “Yes,” he gasped. “Everyone should see.”

David gripped his hips, tugging at his trousers. “Off.”

Somehow, through a common effort, they got to the bed, dropping an array of clothes on the way. Thomas, now in nothing but his undershirt and pants, made quick work of David’s light jumper, pausing however when his wrists were exposed, now bare of his shackles but rubbed raw and red where he’d chafed against them trying to get free in the theatre. He lifted David’s right hand up to his face and kissed his wrist, but David pulled away with a little hiss of pain.

“Ah… I’m sorry. Davey, I’m so sorry…”

David interrupted him by putting two fingers to his lips. “No. Shh. Not now. Let’s just… have this, for the moment, shall we.”

He reached down, unbucked his own trousers and slid them off, and what followed was the fairly unerotic moment known to couples everywhere in which he had to shimmy out of his socks. Thomas, meanwhile, pulled his undershirt off over his head and finally, finally felt David’s inquisitive hand on the wasteband of his underpants, pulling them down as well. For a second, they just stilled on the bed and looked at each other.

“Nothing you’ve not seen before,” Thomas said, but that wasn’t quite true, was it?

David had somehow made it through over five years in the field without getting grievously wounded; the usual plethora of scrapes and bruises on your average soldier had by now healed over. Thomas hadn’t been so lucky, and he’d seen sporadic bursts of action since in service of the Met. Most of these scars David had been present for, and known to expect, but not all of them.

Suddenly David was on top of Thomas, kissing him within an inch of his life, his hands roaming everywhere, seeming to want to map every bit of skin, the hunger for this flaring dramatically.

“Gorgeous,” he murmured between kisses. “Beautiful, you’re always… always so beautiful.”

Thomas found that beyond an ambiguous grunt he could make no reply as David kept on kissing him. There were hands everywhere on his bare skin, now on his arms, soon on his chest and thighs and not yet where he really needed them, and it was at once not enough and almost too much. He’d kept… sporadically busy during the interim decades, in short bursts interceded by long lulls, his appetite waxing and waning irregularly and without any semblance of rhyme or reason in whichever way the bubble of heavy nothing in his chest demanded. In recent years he’d stopped venturing out after hours for light entertainment completely, this maybe or maybe not being connected to Peter’s arrival at the scene. Be that as it may, it had been long since he’d last been touched like that, not just with intent, but with devotion. It ignited him and he burned, and felt his hips jerk upwards for any kind of friction.

Then David finally had mercy, wrapping a hand around him, giving him a few strokes, too brief and too soft. He withdrew too soon.

“Not yet.” He was breathing heavier now, his chest and face flushed. “Not yet. Do you have anything?”

Yes, Thomas had. After all, one never knew. Besides which, he did bring himself off on occasion. “Nightstand, top drawer.”

David draped all across him reaching into the nightstand, fishing for the lube. The heat of his body was beauteous to have on top and Thomas hummed happily, running his fingers down David’s spine, settling on his backside and gripping there, attempting to haul him in even closer. His cock gave off a twitch, already leaking against David’s abdomen.

“I know, songbird, just let me get this,” David said, coming back up with the lube in his hand. He unscrewed the cap and squeezed some onto his fingers, waiting the requisite moment to warm it up.

“Don’t make a huge production out of it,” Thomas warned him. “This… isn’t going to last long on my end.”

David pouted minutely. “But we have all this time now.”

And that was true, and novel to them. Their romance had begun at boarding school, and had for the most part continued here, in a densely populated Folly, never far from the public eye. Trysts had by nature been furtive, quick, with one party stealing away soon after, the ever-looming Damocles sword of discovery preventing any more leisurely approach. But now, with the Folly in Thomas’s purview and the law, for once, on their side, they could afford to take their time. The concept was alluring, but it also only fuelled his need.

“Well, we can do it again, more slowly, later then. Not now, though.”

David pondered this for a second, and nodded. He got back up, kneeling on the bed, making Thomas groan quite inadvertedly with the loss of contact.

“Alright. Turn over?”

“No. I want to see you this time.”

“Right you are.” David grabbed the pillow with his free hand, and motioned for Thomas to lift his hips. Thus elevated, Thomas spread his legs, inviting David to get on with it.

He winced as he felt David’s finger at his entrance, and squirmed a little as he was breached, this having been something he’d rarely done in a considerable while. For a moment, he feared he’d be out of practice.

But there wasn’t anything to it really, was there? Yet it felt like David was taking forever, and soon Thomas was arching up, wanting a second finger at the very least. To his satisfaction, his body was remembering well; he could feel himself opening up under David’s probing touch, so skilled as he’d always been. Slowly, too slowly and too carefully, David slid the second digit in, scissoring both fingers to spread him open, then crooking them both and going after his sweet spot directly. Thomas thrilled at this part, he always did, the slight stretch of it, promising more to come.

“More,” he demanded.

Predictably, David shook his head. “Not yet.”

“David.”

“I’m not going to hurt you, Thomas, we’ve had that debate many a time.”

Then David angled his fingers just right, and hit home, and Thomas keened and said and thought nothing more.

David smiled. “That’s the spot, then?”

“Mm,” Thomas uttered (an influx of sensation had the tendency to render him monosyllabic) as he pushed upwards again, wanting David’s fingers back just there, just like that. And David complied, stroking lightly, but steadily, the tips of his fingers not letting up, rubbing up against Thomas’s prostate unceasingly until his vision whited out, until he lay panting and writhing, hands clenching into the sheets. His thoughts whited out too, just pleasure and the demand for more pleasure chasing each other in an endless cycle.

This was exactly why he loved doing this so much: the opportunity it afforded to, for a few precious moments, think nothing. Remember nothing.

David added a third digit, and Thomas moaned. He could have taken three easily, in his prime, back when this had been a habit of some regularity. Now, it required some adjusting. David added more lube and finally slipped his pinky inside as well, by now probably as impatient as Thomas was feeling.

When David eventually withdrew his fingers, the loss was unbearable. Thomas wanted nothing but to move, to do something, to counteract this all-consuming emptiness, but he knew what was to come very soon now (finally, finally) so he held still, and he waited.

Then David lubed himself up and pushed inside, and by now Thomas was whimpering, probably looking so horribly undignified, but he couldn’t care less, because lord, did it ever feel like something - not just David’s cock but some deeper something - was sliding right home where it belonged. Thomas wasn’t given to sentimentalism, but it felt like something that had been absent so long he’d forgotten how to even miss it was slotting back into place, the reunion finally fulfilled in its completion, body and soul, they were one again. He cried as his hips twitched upward to meet David’s thrust halfway, actual tears down his cheeks, and David saw them, (and muffled a sob of his own), and didn’t hesitate and didn’t startle and didn’t try to wipe them away, because he understood. They understood it all. They understood one another.

Nonetheless, because some courtesies must be observed, David halted for a second, and asked, his voice trembling like Thomas was trembling, tears glistening in his own eyes, “Sh-should I…?”

“Don’t stop.” Reaching out, wrapping all his limbs around David’s body and pulling him closer, Thomas said, “Don’t you dare stop.”

And David curled up closer, covering Thomas again with his body, and picked up his pace again. His thrusts were shallow, the angle imperfect, but it didn’t matter; they simply had to be this close. Feeling David’s skin on his, David’s hands pawing at him increasingly uncoordinated as pleasure crested and David’s hold on the situation faded, David’s every breath against his chest, was wildly overstimulating, and Thomas loved it, and never wanted to feel anything but it.

He thrust up blindly into David’s body warmth, rutting against his thigh, so very needful, having to come, and soon. David, as in all things, understood him, and fumbled a hand between them, wrapping it around Thomas’s cock. David’s palm was not soft, had never been, his hands always marred by the work in the lab or, later, the more gruesome labour of war. Thomas knew this, had anticipated it, and loved it for its familiarity, loved that it was David touching him, loved that, against all probability, he was getting to feel that dearest of touches again. He wept still, half driven out of his mind, as he came.

His body clenched with the sudden shock of his orgasm, and David’s breath hitched sharply as he ground down into Thomas in some more shallow, frantic bursts of movement, and not a minute later he followed suit.

David went boneless as he came, (he so often did) his face sweet and open with the flooding sensation of it, and it fell upon Thomas to support his weight. He twined their legs and wrapped his arms around David’s shoulders, scraping his nails down his back lightly. I have not marked him up even a bit, he thought with a tinge of regret. But there would be time for that later. There would be so much time for so many things later.

For a moment David lay still, gasping, coming down. Eventually he moved off, his spend leaking after him, and Thomas enjoyed this too as a bone-deep lassitude began to take hold of him. David rolled off, but he didn’t go far. They stayed on the bed, side by side, catching their breath and touching each other, gently, quietly and with a sort of wonder, need giving way to post-orgasmic bliss.

“That,” David said eventually, still getting his breath back, “felt different.”

Thomas was never inclined to talk much in these moments directly after. “Than?” he simply asked.

“Than it used to.”

“Hrm.”

“We both cried.”

Thomas cleared his throat, willing articulation back into his languid mind. David seemed to want to discuss, while Thomas’s body demanded for nothing but sleep. “That was to be expected, I suppose,” he said.

“Still…” David sighed airily and said nothing further, so it fell upon Thomas to prompt him.

“What?”

“I don’t like this to be tinged with grief.”

Thomas propped himself up on his elbow, and used the other hand to caress David. “It wasn’t grief,” he said, “Not on my part. Just… simply so glad to have you back.”

“Glad to be back,” David muttered. “And I’m so immeasurably sorry you had to spend so much time alone.”

“Shh.” Thomas touched his index and middle finger to David’s lips. “Not right now, please.”

David kissed his fingertips. “My poor darling,” he whispered. “Wherever did you get your entertainment without me?”

Thomas huffed a little laugh. He could go into it all in depth, explain about the bubble of heavy nothing, (as far as he could explain that at all) elaborate about the times spent alone, and the other moments too, the wild times leading up to the legalization, when people were of a mind to seize their rights, and all the insubstantial flings in between, but he really was tired. So he only said, “Where I could get it, if I wanted it.”

David considered this. “And now? If not Peter…”

“Please. He’s seeing a river goddess. I might be inclined, but I’m not suicidal.”

“What about your colleague, that brawny policeman?”

This time, Thomas’s laugh was more of a snort. “Alexander? Hah. Shout me halfway across town if I tried.”

This got a chuckle out of David. “Well, maybe Alexander would calm down if he had a Hephaestion to soothe him at night.”

Thomas yawned. “Hephaestion at my age? That’s asking a lot.”

Mirroring his yawn, David moved to get up. Thomas grabbed his hand, attempting to tug him back down to his side. “Where on earth are you going now? Stay.”

“We should clean up.”

Thomas groaned but allowed it.

“And then… well… do I go back to my room?” David hovered, uncertain. The way they’d done things for so many years was now to become invalid: things were different now, and new traditions were to be made. Thomas had already been through that kind of culture shock before, courtesy of Peter. For David, it was only now taking place.

“Why?” Thomas asked. “Who would mind if you didn’t? Stay the night.”

A look stole into David’s eyes like awe. “The whole night... with you.”

“And wake up here in the morning.”

Quite without advance warning, David launched himself back into bed to pepper Thomas’s face with kisses. “Oh!” he exclaimed, “I love this new world.”

—-

The war stole back into Thomas’s dreams that night, turning them nightmares. This he was not surprised by, not after all these years. A day of action tended to bring these memories to the forefront. What did surprise him was that after a few hours tossing and turning, he woke to a hand on his forehead, petting his hair, a gentle voice murmuring hushed and nonsensical comforts, and a warmth beside him in bed as of another living body there.

Now, after decades of night terrors, Thomas was an old hand at them. They didn’t come with a moment of disorientation anymore they way they’d used to. He half-woke, cracked an eye open and knew that he was in his bed in the Folly and not in fact on any of his battlefields. But this, the warmth, the voice and hand, were new. Never before had he woken from a nightmare to anything other than a cold, dark room and his own hammering heart. Never before had there been someone else to caress him and tell him, by the sound of it, “Shh, it’s alright, we’re not there now, we’re home.” But apparently, tonight, this there was. What was that all about?

Oh, David, right, he then remembered. Only my beloved.

Well, that was quite alright and natural. Blindly, he nestled closer to that soothing warmth, and went right back to sleep.

—-

When he woke, he was alone.

This was the common state of things, nothing out of the ordinary, until he remembered: last night, yesterday, in fact the previous week. David. And where had David got to?

It was barely dawn outside, the curtains hadn’t been drawn, so a pale blue light filtered into the room. Thomas sat up and took it in, and a slight sense of unreality overcame him. Surely he had to have dreamt it? Yes, that bizarre week, that could not have been real. A dream. A wishful figment. David reappearing, them quarrelling for a bit, then at last reuniting into absolute contentment. How nice, but still not real.

Partially, he wanted to shut his eyes and go right back to sleep, hoping that dream returned. The rest of him swung his legs out of bed and reached for his robe and slippers. He got up - oh, well, the soreness in his muscles was real enough, and it felt like a remainder from lovemaking rather than exercise or the convulsions of a night terror. Besides which, he was missing his pyjamas. So might he dare hope…?

Still exceedingly drowsy, Thomas let his feet carry him away from his bedroom, across the hallway and down the stairs. On the stair he met Molly, who took in his frazzled state without him needing to say a word. She pointed downwards, indicating the basement.

Thomas nodded and passed by her. After seven decades in each other’s company, there needed to be no words. He knew she could read in his face whatever was happening inside him right now, better even than he could interpret it himself.

Quite naturally, he stopped at David’s laboratory. The door was cracked, so he swung it fully open.

David was bent over one of the desks, a leaflet open in front of him, some papers next to it, murmuring softly to himself, pencil in hand, marking up things and crossing other things off a list. While it was looking to be another warm and humid day out, the basement was still cool, and David had put on a jumper over his pyjamas, and draped a woollen blanket over his shoulders. With his eyes still heavy and sleepy, his curls untamed and springing every which where, he looked the picture of coziness. Cozy and so inviting, to dive into all these layers and uncover the warm skin beneath.

“What’s got you down here already?” Thomas asked, keeping his voice down for reasons he couldn’t even name. A tribute to the early hour, perhaps.

“Oh.” David looked up, blinking at him owlishly, evidently still half-asleep. “Didn’t know you were up yet.”

Not quite knowing why, Thomas replied, “I woke up and I was alone.”

“I beg your pardon.” David said this sincerely, with a good deal of genuine regret. “I was going to come up again. You know I love going down here first thing in the morning.”

Ah, yes. Indeed, that had been - was - one of David’s habits. He’d always been in the lab way before breakfast, getting an early start on his work. “It’s funny, I’m only just remembering. It’s been so long.”

David looked soft and sad for a moment. It was strange, their whole disparity - that David had not lived these past seventy years. Long enough to make Thomas forget so many of his lover’s quirks - along with his scent, the sound of his voice, the feel of his skin. David had had no forgetting.

“What are you up to, anyhow?” Thomas asked, hoping to distract. He didn’t want to think about all that too deeply now, when relief still overwhelmed him in the face of David being here at all.

“Inventory.” David waved the list he had been making. “I need new lab equipment.”

Thomas shrugged. “I’ll check the budget.”

David suddenly chuckled. “Right. Of course. You’re the one I turn to now for that.” He shook his head, took up a thread again from last night, “Still... you being in charge here now... head of the Folly...”

“Well. By exclusion principle.” The way David said it still made it seem like some sort of achievement. “I was quite literally the only man fit to serve.”

David crossed his arms as he leaned against his desk. “Or the only man willing.”

Thomas sighed. This also wasn’t something that he liked to dwell on. Perhaps there had been a handful of others who might have been able to stay on after the war, and had simply preferred not to. Who had simply wanted to break their staves and never bother again with magic and all the grief it had brought.

“I cannot fault anyone for wanting to have peace and be done with this place. How could I, after Ettersberg? The lads deserved to rest easy.”

David brushed the blanket off himself and draped it over the backrest of his chair. Then he came closer, stopped in front of Thomas and raised his hand to brush a strand of hair (he hadn’t combed it back yet) from his forehead.

“You deserved the same,” he said.

Thomas kept silent, short of a reply. He couldn’t say he had considered himself deserving of anything much. Oh, certainly, he probably subconsciously, by way of his upbringing, felt himself entitled to all manner of things. Working with Peter was making that clear to him time and time anew. But I deserve? The words rarely occurred to him. In the face of facts, what did that matter? Oh, he could have raged against the fates that put him in charge of the Folly even as he’d been recovering from a gunshot wound and everything else besides. Or he could have gotten on with things, and that he had done. Besides, there had been Molly to consider. Would he have left her alone, or with anyone else? Chauvinists the lot, lechers some of them, and barely able to conceive of a fae or a girl or a mute or a member of the serving classes as a full person altogether. Molly had done so much for them in the past, but even if she’d done nothing, casting her out or leaving her to an uncertain fate had simply never been something Thomas could have done.

“Never mind all that now,” he said. “Would you like to come up to bed again?”

David took his hand. “Why, always.”

—-

This time, in the pale morning light, David took a moment to peruse the bedroom.

“Grand,” was his initial verdict. “Much better than we had.” Thomas didn’t quite know which stage of their lives and sleeping arrangements David was referring to: boarding school and dormitories, their former rooms here in the Folly, not nearly as large as the master bedroom, or the war during which they’d slept in a ditch? Probably he just meant that they now had privacy, and the leisure to sleep together, and all the time in the world to do it.

He meant to ask after that, to clarify, but David was by now peering at the pictures on the walls, smiling fondly at the photographs of them with the lads, all in their uniforms, and, “Oh!” he trilled. “You hung up the Leyendecker!”

Thomas grinned. “I did at that. Present to myself on occasion of the legalization.”

He’d had the painting done during his stay in the states, at the tender age of 24. It depicted a youth he sometimes could scarcely remember being - in profile, one arm dramatically extended, a werelight rising from his open palm, a grin on his face communicating look what I can do. It wasn’t a nude, but not much was missing to make it one: a large Union Jack covered the most private bits, but that was it. In reality, the sheet the artist - dear Joseph - had draped over him had been a simple white linen, the circumstances having been quite ad hoc to start a painting, but that was artists for you. The dedication at the bottom of the canvas, half-covered by the frame, ran “To Thomas in gratitude for your ‘enchanting’ company. Sincerely, your friends J. C. L. and Charles.” The whole depicted what Leyendecker had encountered back then as the essential, British Wizard.

Life had quite beaten any surplus patriotism out of Thomas in the ensuing years.

“What was it like?” David asked.

Thomas cocked his head. “What, being painted?” He remembered getting quite fidgety with holding the pose, especially immediately post-coitus. But whenever he’d complained of it - still so full of energy that wanted somewhere, in his youth - dear Joseph had put the paintbrush down and wandered over to… relax him.

“No,” David said, “when you hung it up here. The occasion. The legalization…”

Thomas smiled fondly, recalling. “It was a singular time.” He leaned in and gave David a kiss. “Let’s catch you up on the history later, hmm?”

“Later.” David nodded.

This time, there were much fewer clothes to divest, and they did away with them quickly. In the pale light of the dawning summer day, they beheld each other, and then, with twin sighs of relief, sank into each other’s arms.

“How do you want it?” Thomas asked as they were back on the bed, lying side by side for the moment, touching all over. Though they had been inclined to experiment a bit within their history, they’d established routines by which they gave each other mutual pleasure, and, despite the occasional deviation, had stuck to them more often than not. When coupling, usually, David did the giving, Thomas the taking, but within that seemingly simple dynamic hid a wealth of potential variety.

So Thomas asked, again, “Well? Do you want me in charge, or not in charge?” He could domineer from the bottom, sometimes. Other times, he preferred not to.

David was resting a hand on his flank. He now stroked downwards. “I want to drive you a little wild, my love.” His hand slid up Thomas’s inner thigh, softly cupping his balls, taking hold of his cock, soft still, but things were happening there with rapidity. Thomas groaned unabashedly as blood rushed southward (it had really been a while, excepting the previous night, since he’d been touched intimately). David’s other hand reached around and fondled the cleft of Thomas’s arse. He twitched, already, deliciously, the residual hint of soreness from the previous go only adding to the anticipation for more.

“I want you on your hands and knees,” David went on to say. “Bum up in the air for me.”

And that was David for you: cute and seemingly innocent with his overlarge jumpers, his boyish curls and doe eyes, and then he went and said things like this, or invented a spell that made an opponent’s lungs fill with their own blood on the battlefield, while muttering in Yiddish about vengeance. He steamrolled people. He steamrolled even Thomas, still.

So Thomas assumed the position as he was bid, resting his weight on his forearms.

David dipped into the nightstand again, lubed up his fingers quickly. Oh, he knew what he wanted, didn’t David always, and Thomas felt hands on his cheeks - not indeed on his face - , gripping, kneading, massaging. Well, didn’t that feel awfully nice…

Still, “What are you getting up to back there?” he asked, craning his head over his own shoulder to try and catch a glimpse at his lover.

“I just missed this. Getting to take my time… getting to undress you and have you, here on the bed, and everything soft and nice…” Ah, yes. The last time, again excepting last night, they’d come together had been inter-war, even more furtive and rushed than their usual, in full uniform, probably in a foxhole somewhere, ready to split apart and start in on the action at any second.

Truly, this was better.

Then, a finger moving down the cleft of his arse, leaving a pleasant trail of lube. Downwards and around, David went, all the way across that space in between Thomas’s hole and his balls, and up again, and off for a second, and then back with more lube, until Thomas felt the moisture of it down his sensitive inner thighs. He hummed, shifted up into the touch, pleasured in a mellow way but wanting more than that. David kissed along his shoulder, down his spine, at the small of his back now, oh, he would… oh yes…

And now David was mouthing at his entrance, licking, suckling, kissing, making Thomas give way with just his lips, squirming his tongue inside, oh, that warm, wet, singular feeling…

“Hhhmmmmmnnn,” Thomas uttered, quite involuntarily, muffling it into the pillow.

David pulled off with an obscene smack. “Please,” he said, “make noises, darling. I do so love to hear you, and we are alone…”

Thomas sighed, head swimmy with bliss. An eternity beckoned. Eternity of making noise during this any time he wanted, who could object, what could threaten them now? He could be loud, even… “Yes. Yes… Davey…”

“Good.” David got right back to work, with his fingers now at first, spreading him open, then his tongue was back, and Thomas felt he should howl his elation to the heavens… did so, maybe… all was a blur… or maybe not. Decades of habits not so easy to break as all that…

There was nothing in the world now but this, the sensation of David’s clever mouth at work, this and the needful pulse of blood in Thomas’s cock. So heavy… aching, rather… perhaps he could shift his weight, get a hand down himself, or… lower himself down against the sheets… anything…

“Nn-uhh,” David’s noise, muffled against him but clear in its meaning, and then suddenly there was David’s signare, too, and god, Thomas knew what was to come seconds before it clamped around the base of his cock, not painful, just… tight.

“Oh,” Thomas breathed, remembering. Yes, David had designed this forma too, this one not for wartime exploits, and Thomas knew full well that his lover could hold this spell as long as it took, even rimming him into next Sunday.

He’d denied David his lengthy, drawn-out edging session yesterday evening, but now David was collecting his due.

David kept it up for what felt like hours, licking and stroking inside Thomas, bringing him closer, closer, almost, never quite satisfying, until Thomas was writhing, whimpering, seriously considering whether he should beg–

“Please… Davey, please, Davey…”

Again David pulled off, depriving Thomas totally of any sensation, and he keened–

“What, honey?” David asked, his voice rough, strained, surely he must be as impatient for it now as Thomas was…

“Fuck me now, do.”

David chuckled. “How demanding!”

“You’re wanting to, I know you do. Davey, it’s been ages, you must be wanting to get off as much as I do.”

“Granted,” David said softly. Thomas craned his head again to see what David was getting up to and, oh, David was touching himself. David was applying lube to his own cock. That meant any moment now… Thomas trembled with wanting. In another world, on some distant star, he possessed reticence, even gravitas. Imagine that. Now he was nothing but a receptacle of what David would put in him very soon very soon any second now–

–yearning for it, needing, gasping for it, so open, so ready–

–hard to the point of pain, his cock reddened and plump and so sensitive–

–and there it was, David’s glorious cock at last, nudging against his entrance, breaching him again, sliding inside.

This time, David had barely any difficulty. There was no struggle to ease his passage. Thomas was warm and wet and prepared for him.

David let out a breathy moan of his own, bent double and folding himself over Thomas as he slid further inside, so that he could mouth at his shoulderblade again, too scattered, too incoherent for a proper kiss, teeth digging in a bit, yes god. Now he was fully sheathed, in to the hilt, his balls against Thomas’s crack and they both groaned, nothing but mutual relief. Joined, properly, fitting together so well, David’s cockhead nudging Thomas’s prostate, sending showers of sparks through him with every small adjustment.

For a minute, they both simply stayed still, basking in their complete togetherness. Thomas arched his back, catlike, almost purring like one too. This felt good, better than he had in… oh, years, decades maybe. So hot. So full.

“You should move,” he suggested, after the appropriate moment had been taken. David complied, and his every thrust was heavenly delight, hard and fast the way Thomas loved it. He could hear David’s harsh breaths behind him, but not too loudly through the ringing in his ears as the sensations in him crested, as David’s hot length jabbed into him, withdrew, hit that sweet spot again, and then over, and then over…

…Thomas arching up to meet him halfway, needing David buried in him, filling him up, as deep as possible, and those sparks of pleasure, and he did try to pull at his own cock, but to no avail, David’s spell still held… and he was now making all kinds of noises, deep primal noises down in his throat…

But he needed to come. Had to. Now. Otherwise he’d burst, he’d go insane, he’d die.

David slammed into him once more… twice… growing erratic now, frantic, he was close… he was there, coming in spurts, and as he lost himself in it, Thomas felt the hold on his dick loosen. God, thank god, could not have stood another second, and he reached down, couple of harsh pulls on himself, and he spilled too, erupted more like, long streaks sullying his own abdomen. And it was everything, everything unloading all at once.

----

When David pulled out, he left a sticky commingling of lube and ejaculate leaking out after him, warm now but cooling rapidly, slippery and moist down Thomas’s thighs. Thomas rolled onto his back and appreciated it, trailing a hand through the mess, skimming his fingers gently down the length of his cock (it still felt so sensitive from being in that vice-grip earlier, still a little plumped, every soft touch an exquisite bloom of pleasure-pain), fingering the rim of his hole to trace where David had just been. So empty now, so deliciously sore. He barely resisted stuffing two fingers down there as a placeholder of sorts for whenever David would be up for it again.

David leaned over from where he’d been coming down from it, across on the bed, still panting a bit, and grabbed Thomas’s hand. “Leave it,” he said. “You’ll be sore enough as is.”

“Always so reasonable,” Thomas replied. “What if I want you again?” Because now his body was remembering again, oh yes, and it had been so long without. These embers, now stoked, would probably take a while to stop glowing.

He enclosed his free hand around David’s wrist, meaning to pull him off, but David hissed, a flash of true pain evident on his face as he wrenched his hands away. His wrists were still reddened, chafed, the skin looking raw in some places.

Oh. Right. That.

Very carefully, Thomas fetched David’s hands back, holding them gently up for inspection. “Oh, dear, your poor wrists. I’m so deeply sorry.”

“Please.” David took a shaky breath. “I don’t need an apology from you, Thomas, it’s fine, just maybe… maybe an explanation. Why the cuffs? Why all that time? Was it… vindictiveness, or…?”

“No. Nothing of the sort. It’s simply, being a practitioner, coming out of combat, it’s… prudent to go without for a while. I’ve experienced this firsthand.”

“What do you mean by that?” David asked.

Thomas took a deep breath. “When I was just a few weeks home, when things were… not settled yet within me as they are now… there were times when I wouldn’t quite… maintain control of my magic the way I ought to have. One instance, I was…” He halted. He hadn’t ever divulged the story of this incident to anyone. He’d never spoken of this, not even to Molly. Perhaps it was too much, perhaps it could never be said—But this was David.

David who was owed an explanation.

“There was a thunderstorm,” he said, his voice dipping into a whisper. “It sounded so much like mortar fire. I… confused it. Molly found me under the table in the dining room. Cover, you see. This hasn’t happened to me in, oh, decades. But back then… and Molly reached for me, which perhaps she should not have done. But what did any of us know about it? I didn’t recognize her. In that moment, I…”

He gulped. This had taken on an air like a confessional. “I hurt Molly.”

David held his hands, his eyes deep pity lakes. “Oh, Thomas. With your magic…?”

“Yes.” Thomas hung his head. “It haunts me to this day. Just imagine what might have been if she hadn’t understood. What if this instance had ruined our friendship? What if I’d hurt her worse? What if I’d…?”

He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t.

“I see,” David whispered.

“I didn’t want this for you. For your sake and others’, I needed you to be safe. At least until we could get a professional to assess you. But it backfired, didn’t it? Almost got you killed.”

“Don’t blame yourself.”

“Don’t blame myself for something I clearly did?”

David shook his head. “Your intentions were good ones. I know that now. But you have to trust me to know my own needs. To know how to handle my own combat fatigue.”

But how can you know that, Thomas wanted to ask. He certainly hadn’t known how to ‘handle’ his own ‘combat fatigue’ back in ’45. Would have been grateful for a guiding hand. For someone, anyone, anything to make sense of it for him. But he reckoned he could tell what David meant. He wasn’t claiming to have himself all figured out. That would have been a lie, anyways. He was simply asking not to have help forced upon him, and for Thomas to not presume that something that might have helped him would also be good for David. They were very different people still.

“But if you do need anything, you will ask me for it, won’t you?”

David nestled into his side, disregarding for a moment how sweaty and sticky they both were. “Will do, love.”

Thomas simply let that settle in the air between them, contented. They would face things together again from here on out. A double act.

Quite suddenly, he had to muffle another yawn. “Lord, but I’m tired still. Maybe we can go back to sleep.”

David moved against him somewhat. “We need a shower. You especially. And breakfast…”

“Perhaps we can ask Molly to bring a tray up.” It seemed ultimately slovenly/debauched/bohemian/libertine and any other number of such terms, taking breakfast in bed without being sick, the decline of steadfast English discipline. One took breakfast in the breakfast room, fully dressed for the occasion, come hell or high water. On the other hand… it wasn’t every day that the love of one’s life returned from the dead. They had nothing on for the day. And Thomas simply didn’t want to leave their (their!) bed yet, not when it was so comfortable and warm and something within him was still, even after being loved on so lavishly twice, watching the line of David’s body and giving off pangs of hunger that had nothing to do with breakfast at all.

He half-turned, capturing David’s thigh between both of his legs, slowly, lazily rubbing against it. Ohh- he was still very sensitive. He shuddered, half discomfort, half excitement.

“Really?” David raised a brow. “You cannot possibly be up for it again.”

“Maybe if we sleep some first.” Thomas smiled encouragingly, caressing David’s jaw, then wandering lower to the soft little hairs on his chest. “Have something to eat, as you suggested, and then… perhaps just spend the day in here.”

David laughed, and hugged him close. “Impossible. You are impossible.”

#rivers of london #rol fic #david mellenby lives AU #Dr. Mellenby's Patented Cock Ring Forma #no heavy angst from now on going forward

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weepylucifer · 4 years

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Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 9

David gets a clue. Peter gets confused. Nightingale wins two fights, both on a technicality.

I had no promising leads yet on our missing magical object. At this point, this wasn’t all that surprising: there was a long list of potential contacts yet to call and visit, and the demi-monde was vast. A list had found its way into my hands of potential sellers of magical objects, left on my desk in the tech cave and written in a loopy hand that most assuredly wasn’t Nightingale’s. And even if - when - I found the person who’d sold Ms. Maxwell the crystal ball, that still didn’t necessarily have to leave me with any hints as to where the damned thing had gone.

I was going over the list of phone numbers, working my way through them slowly, when Beverley entered. You could sort of slightly see a tiny bump beneath her dress now. I had to contain myself from dropping to my knees in front of her and smushing my entire face against it.

“Babes,” she said, “We agreed no police stuff in my house, right?”

I put the list away. “Sorry.”

“Why aren’t you doing this at the Folly?” she asked.

I had to struggle not to roll my eyes or groan. “Because it’s unbearable in there.”

“Yeah?” Bev came to sit with me on the couch. “I would’ve thought they would be getting way less heat.”

A heat wave was threatening to eclipse London at present. And Beverley was right: usually, the Folly with its high-ceilinged rooms was cool in summer and bordering on unbearably arctic in winter. It was probably that now. If the air at the Folly felt so thick it practically suffocated you, it was for a metaphysical reason.

“It’s not the weather,” I explained, “It’s Nightingale and David. Something set them off again, and it feels worse than it’s ever been.”

Beverley flicked her hair back. It was still slightly damp from her morning dip in her river. “Aren’t you people supposed to be professionals?”

“You’d really think that,” I said.

The day before yesterday, I hadn’t seen David around the Folly at all. And then yesterday he’d been back, but somehow he had, in my absence, managed to fuck some nebulous something up on such a tremendous scale that Nightingale flat-out ignored him now. Which somehow managed to be worse than the constant arguing. At some point I’d brought him a cup of coffee down to the basement and asked him what was going on, and he’d looked at me with haunted, red-rimmed eyes, looking like he hadn’t gotten any sleep the previous night, and rambled something about, “I went too far, but then again, I went too far a while ago.” Then he’d muttered something about wings and Oberon being right, and closed the door in my face.

I’d gone and asked Nightingale what the deal was, and he’d only said, “I shan’t get into it right now” and asked me how my investigation was coming along. I would have greatly enjoyed a little more active participation from him, but I hadn’t said that.

But I couldn’t avoid the Folly just because I didn’t like the atmosphere there right now, not when I had work to do, and when there was a practice session scheduled in less than two hours. Bev was right, I couldn’t do this stuff at her place. So I went, and told myself I could still make a day of it. Maybe I could just hole up in the tech cave, work through my list of contacts and avoid all nonsense.

—-

I found Nightingale in the gym, where he was busily maltreating the punching bag. “Ah, Peter, very well,” he said, looking up as if he’d been waiting for me. “Would you like to join me for a bout?”

He had evidently been at it for a while, or at least long enough to work up a sweat. He was breathing a bit heavier than normal, and his hair looked darker at the nape. Some almost artfully tousled strands were stuck damply to his forehead. It didn’t actually look half bad, I had to say, objectively, of course.

Now, normally I’d probably object to any kind of intense workout in this kind of weather. But the basement was still quite cool, and we’d been going to practice anyway.

“Sure, I’ll have a go.” I picked up a spare pair of gloves.

Nightingale was holding back, I noticed a few minutes in. He blocked my jabs and my impello with his usual natural ease, but he was on the defense. It wasn’t at all like earlier, when I’d spotted him take unbridled swings at the punching bag, swings driven by a real, deep well of… something. He kept his shield up, in more ways than the literal, as if he was scared to take it too far, as if he would forget himself, haul off and hurt me. It made for a tension in the air that I didn’t like, and the match failed to really get going.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a motion by the door. It was David, maybe lured here from his lab down the hallway by the unusual noise. He entered quietly, and sat down on a bench across the room to watch. And, well, Nightingale didn’t tell him to leave (didn’t acknowledge his presence at all) so I didn’t see why I should raise attention to it.

I tried not to give myself any openings by glancing over at David, but I felt myself getting distracted wondering why he was here. I fumbled an impello and Nightingale sharply admonished me to focus - and then I spotted a hole in his defense because he had been stealing a look at David for himself. And this wasn’t the angry sort of glare I’d been expecting. This was… something more complicated, and at the same time incredibly simple. I’d seen this before, once, in the memory Molly had shared with me of Nightingale so many decades ago. The way he assured himself he had David’s eyes on him, the way he casually flicked a strand of hair out of his face as he got back to tenderizing me with his magic and fists. He was making sure his boyfriend was paying attention.

Suddenly and seethingly, I became aware of what a sight we had to make to an attentive gay guy on the bleachers. I don’t mean to brag, but I keep fit, and Nightingale was all lean muscle under that suit that he was currently, in a rare instance of dressing down, not wearing. And now that I was aware of it, I definitely saw how David watched with rapt attention, his eyes a little over-bright. And it wasn’t just Nightingale, I noticed. His eyes also caught on me.

I wasn’t sure at first, so I made a show of flexing my right arm, snuck a glance at David in my periphery, and… yep. Definitely checking me out.

It felt different, then. Knowing that every single move I made, every single breath I drew, every single bead of sweat was being observed in that way. It heightened my awareness of myself, of my body moving in this moment, of Nightingale opposite me, but it didn’t necessarily heighten my attention to the match. I was having to try hard to focus, to not keep looking back at David, to move purposefully and not just in a way that David might find appealing.

(And why the hell was that a consideration in the first place?)

In the past I would have blocked it out, and maybe approached him later with some phrase like “Hey man, not that I’m not flattered, but I don’t really swing that way” or something else inane like that. We all change and grow. It seemed like a dumb thing to do now. He wasn’t doing any harm by sitting there and watching. And besides, Nightingale for his part probably wanted him to.

It still felt weird, thinking of Nightingale as, well… wanting. That he’d had that potential all along.

(Why did I want to appeal to David? Another man’s boyfriend, if of somewhat uncertain standing? Plus, I really didn’t swing that way. Or at least if I swung that way, I’d never sat down and unpacked that. Plus, Beverley.)

At about this point, I caught an impello square in the chest and landed on my back on the mat in the beached-turtle-position. Nightingale was on me quick and, even as I struggled, held me down.

“Count him out, Davey,” he yelled across the room to Mellenby, who, suddenly acknowledged, jumped to his feet. (I sort of craned my head and peered over Nightingale’s shoulder to see him). Two spots of red had appeared on his cheeks.

“Oh! Um… t-ten… nine…”

I pushed to get free, but Nightingale wrestled me back down. We were very close. I could smell his sweat, his aftershave, I could see perspiration glisten below his collarbone. I could feel his breath on my skin, and the hair on my arms stood on end. He could, I knew that now, subdue me with his magic, but he didn’t. It was a complicated and ethically dicey forma. Much easier, I reckoned, to hold me down physically for the ten seconds.

But was it? I could see his arms straining. I was younger, in my physical prime, and I worked out fairly often. I wasn’t muscle-bound by any chance, but I’d been keeping up with my fitness plan more regularly, I thought, than Nightingale. Within the bounds of his magic, he was unparalleled, and this was something he knew and relied on. But purely physically…?

I heaved myself upward in one final attempt to break out of his grip.

Nightingale gave me a grin. Suddenly, he was even closer, his mouth very near my ear.

“He has a way of looking at a person, huh?” he whispered.

All the air went out of me at once, and with a splat, I landed back on the mat. “What?”

I felt Nightingale chuckle, the subtle vibration of it in his chest. We were… really very close, you see. He was warm upon me, which could have been nice, actually, if we didn’t have a heatwave going. “You noticed it.”

Equally quietly, barely moving my lips, I breathed, “How do you stand it?”

Nightingale moved off a little so that I could see his expression. His grin had slid over into wolfish at some point.

“Used to it,” he replied. “He’s been making eyes at me on the rugby pitch since I was fifteen. But I am not fifteen now, and,” He gave me a light, friendly punch to the shoulder, “Neither are you.”

“…three… two… one, you’re done,” David said. He announced it in the tone of someone bringing a message of great relief: finally, the sports event is over. We can move on with our intellectual lives.

But the sports event had only just begun.

Nightingale let go of me, straightened up and wiped his brow. I was winded, so I stayed lying down until a hand inched itself into my field of vision: Nightingale again, this time giving me a hand up. I took it and got to my feet.

“That,” I said, slowly getting my breath back, “was fighting dirty, sir.”

“I learned my fighting in the army, not the police.” Nightingale gave me a smirk that was way too self-satisfied. “Nice going,” he said to me, probably out of sportsmanship and politeness rather than respect for the feat of athleticism I had just displayed (haha). He spared a vague nod at David, seeming to want to go back to ignoring him. Boy, would my therapist have had a field day with the two of them.

That thought gave me an idea. “Why don’t you two duke it out?” I suggested. “Might clear the air in here.”

It was a testament to how much of the… human side of Nightingale I’d glimpsed lately, or maybe just how long I’d known him, that his withering glare didn’t make me shrivel up and sink into the floor right there. He was doing that to hide his feelings, he couldn’t fool me anymore.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said.

“I’m sure I’d learn a lot. See how it’s done on the advanced level.” Secretly, I was hoping for some awe-inspiring demonstration of higher-order magic - and, of course, that they might just figure out their problems through the medium of controlled violence. Bev had made me punch a tree, back when, and yeah, it had felt sort of cathartic, truth be told.

“David is in no fit state,” Nightingale said.

“I am perfectly able, Thomas,” David objected. “And there is no need to speak for me.”

“Are you certain?” Nightingale asked. “We don’t want you having a little episode of some kind.”

“I don’t think little episodes are a problem with me.”

“You cannot know that yet.”

David raised his chin. “Yes, actually, you’ll find I can,” he said. He said it quietly, but there was something in his voice that warned us not to piss him off right now. “Different people will react differently to similar stimuli. I’ve had enough time, I should think, to learn to gauge my own reactions.”

Nightingale shrugged. “Have it your way.”

“The cuffs come off, then?” David asked.

“For a limited time.”

David nodded and held his hands out as Nightingale approached him.

“Do they need true love’s kiss to open?” I asked. Not that I wanted to see them snog it out again. Why would I?

Nightingale threw me a peeved look. “Yes, very humorous, I’m sure.” He touched David’s wrists and muttered a few words. I could feel him building up a forma, but it all went too fast for me to decipher what it was. The cuffs fell off.

David stepped into the ring opposite Nightingale. They exchanged silent nods, and threw their shields up.

It whoomphed.

I felt something almost like a pressure wave, something that made my head throb and, bizarrely, my teeth ache, as if someone was clamping my head into a vice. These were heavy-duty shields, such as I’d never seen Nightingale use outside of the few scrapes we’d had with Chorley and Lesley, and maybe not even then. These made riot gear look flimsy.

Nightingale’s felt like solid metal armour-plates, a weight upon the world, making the air around it hum. (I noticed he crooked his non-dominant arm a little, as though he was holding an actual shield.) I thought that if I squinted, I would almost see the contours of it. David’s shield felt different, flowing, liquid. More… abstract, somehow. Almost like a water bubble encasing him, ready to flow exactly where it was needed at a second’s notice to stave off any attacks.

“This is your… modified shield spell,” Nightingale remarked, in the same tone of voice he used when I experimented with tweaking formae he thought I rather should’t. He had sounded exactly like this when I’d come up with the skin grenade.

“Yes?” David sounded defensive. “It ensures a faster response time.”

“You don’t need a faster response time if you’re properly covered.”

David sighed through his nose. “I work with what I have, Thomas, not with what you have.” It had the sound of a tired reminder to it.

Were they going to get a move on, I wondered, or stand here and bicker forever?

Then David launched the first attack.

I hadn’t expected David to open fire, but he did. And these weren’t harmless little impellos meant to repel the opponent a bit. He threw a round of fireballs with no hesitation, and I thought he’d really lost control of himself, but Nightingale blocked them without so much as flinching. They splattered against his shield and, with a twist of his hand, he sent them back, where David’s modified shield… subsumed them. Apparently this was expected.

I suddenly remembered all kinds of stories about soldiers playing catch with live grenades and the like, things I’d thought were stupid jokes. I could vividly picture the two of them throwing a grenade back and forth between them now, bouncing it off their shields.

Nightingale retaliated with a shower of ice shards, something he’d learned, I recognized, from Varvara.

“Ah, thank goodness for Ivan,” David said as he dismissed them with a flick of his hand. They veered off sharply and bored into the wall a lot closer to me than I appreciated, making me duck.

David scrutinized the room for a split-second, eyes catching on the gym equipment. There was a lot of it about, monkey bars and the like, that no one ever used, both Nightingale and myself preferring the firing range or a turn at the punching bag. With a wave, David wrenched a massive metal bar free, about as thick as his forearm and as long as he was tall, and launched it, without wincing, without blinking, like a spear at his boyfriend.

It stuck in Nightingale’s shield, suspended in midair, the tip inches away from his face. He grinned a jagged grin. “Phallic imagery. Love it.”

Clanging loudly, the bar hit the ground. And then Nightingale threw the punching bag.

“Hey!” I yelled. “I bought that!” No one heard me. I considered ducking behind something, but behind what? Nothing seemed safe. It would’ve been wisest to get out of there, but I couldn’t. I was mesmerized.

David stopped the punching bag in midair and chucked it against the wall, and I swear the impact made the room rattle. Flakes of ancient paint rained from the ceiling. They both, with an identical gesture, zipped their shields upwards for a split-second to avert debris from above and clear their fields of vision. Most likely a reflex from the war.

David cast a twisty forma I’d never yet encountered before and threw something at Nightingale’s feet, something that glistened, something long and thin and silvery like a trip-wire. Nightingale evaded it easily, but while he was distracted with it for a moment, not paying attention to his shield, David stepped forward and swung his fist.

It was a good thing he’d put the gloves on, because he landed a solid blow to Nightingale’s jaw. Nightingale caught his fist on the next upswing and, magic forgotten for the moment, they simply struggled against each other for physical dominance. It was not a sexy kind of struggle. There were glares and exposed teeth and sweat and grunts of effort. It was all very masculine, and not sexy at all. A bead of sweat dripped from Nightingale’s hair into his eyes and got caught in his lashes. David snarled as they held each other in deadlock. If my crotch felt… tight, it was a simple pants malfunction, nothing more.

Then Nightingale remembered he had magic, and tried to chuck a dumbbell at David’s head.

David’s shield flowed back up within the blink of an eye, condensing where it was most needed. It repelled the foreign object, which bounced noisily across the floor with the force of impact as David grabbed Nightingale and attempted to wrestle him onto the mat.

Being wrestled to the ground by a hand on his waist and another on his shoulder was apparently a tad too intimate for my guv’nor’s taste as he threw his own shield back up in full force which, in turn, repelled David. David rolled himself off and, still with a snarl, threw an impello the size and force of an anti-tank missile against Nightingale’s shield, but Nightingale stood his ground.

And then he simply remained standing and increased power to his shield by increments as David chucked everything he had at it. He built up formae that were modified in such unorthodox ways as I’d never seen, and the results were… mean, spells designed to be nasty, put on the earth to cause the maximum amount of damage, of pain, and suddenly I realized that they were recreating here, in a safe environment, things they had done on actual battlefields, to people other than each other, people who hadn’t known how to block them within seconds, people now very brutally dead. I couldn’t suppress the chill I felt.

But David wasn’t going to bounce things off of Nightingale’s shield forever. His next spell was something that stuck, and Nightingale’s shield began to fizzle, crackle and sputter… out.

A shield-breaking spell? Why had I never learned that that existed?

There seemed to be only one thing for Nightingale to do. He’d have to extinguish his shield and cast a new one, which would leave him unprotected for a moment, all the time a skilled opponent would need. When the shield went down, David’s fist already jabbed through the opening - only to be instantly encased in a solid, invisible barrier when the new shield suddenly clamped around it.

The sudden tableau stood in silence.

“Too slow,” Nightingale breathed, panting slightly with the exertion. “Now you’re dead.”

“Fuck yourself.” David muttered some doubtlessly choice curses in what I thought to be Yiddish as he tried to pull his arm free. “Go fuck yourself! Why won’t you just let - me - inside!”

Nightingale suddenly released him, and he stumbled a few steps backwards. Nightingale smirked, in a way I’ve never hoped to see Nightingale smirk. This wasn’t that mischievous grin he sometimes got that made him look all boyish. This was a vicious, ugly thing. “The dead don’t talk, Davey.”

David let out a wordless cry of frustration. He swung again, smashed his fist against Nightingale’s shield, where it connected without any effect, and did it again, and again, and again. His hands were scrabbling at the smooth surface, feverishly clutching for any purchase at all, never attaining it.

“Just! Let! Me! In!”

“That’s simply not how it works, David.”

I was beginning to think there were undertones at play here, that maybe this was about more than the imminent fight. On the other side of the barrier, Nightingale stared down at David motionlessly, his face a mask, his grey eyes shuttered. I thought this was going to drag on forever, that this was simply never going to end.

But then suddenly, David stopped, and took a step back, and, more horrible than any of his attacks, then David slumped.

“I give.”

And the mask cracked. Right down the middle, like his shield had cracked before.

“What?” Nightingale asked. His voice was little more than breath.

David took two steps back. His eyes were fixed on the floor, shining with humiliation and the onset of tears. “I give. You win. You’ve made your point. Put the cuffs back on me. It’s no use.”

“What?” Nightingale said again, more sharply, taking a step forward - and stopping.

“I’m sorry…” David trailed off and took his gloves off. He let them fall to the ground where he stood. His knuckles were bloody. “You’re right. It’s never… going to be alright again, is it? There’s nothing I can do now.”

Slowly, like a boxer retreating from a match lost, David walked away towards the door. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in my room, catching up on some rest.”

And with that he left.

Like someone in a horror movie turning to face the monster, I turned to look at Nightingale. He was staring at David’s retreating back, his face filled with pure disbelief that this was happening. “But… you can’t just…”

The door fell closed.

“…stop trying.”

David was gone.

A minute-long horrible, empty silence elapsed. I couldn’t look at Nightingale during that silence, so I turned my back and I stared at the door. If I were different and he were someone else, I might have gone to him. Tried to do something. Put a hand on his shoulder, maybe. I sure as hell considered it. But I didn’t: I turned my back and I stared at the door.

“Sir,” I eventually said.

He exhaled audibly behind me. Somehow, this told me that it was safe to look again now.

Nightingale was peering around the gym, taking in the destruction he and David had wrought. Discarded equipment that had been used as weaponry was strewn everywhere. The punching bag had ripped open on impact with the wall and was now leaking stuffing. Most surfaces were covered in a fine layer of ceiling dust.

“Well, Molly will be overjoyed,” Nightingale muttered. He turned back towards the door, where David had disappeared to, and suddenly I got scared, like I hadn’t gotten scared throughout watching the whole fight, because Nightingale looked lost.

Nightingale could look many things, but lost?

“I… suppose I should…” Go after him, was how that sentence usually ended. But I could see he wasn’t equipped to right now. I still had no idea what was going on between them anyway, and therefore couldn’t tell what solution I should ride for. Go settle it now? Take some time and space? Dump him, gurl? And since when was I the expert on that sort of thing, anyway?

“Guess I’ll go back up to my list,” I said, backing myself out of this. “Someone should probably investigate the crime here.”

“Oh. Right. Of course.” As he spoke, Nightingale was gathering himself back together, like he was picking up pieces of his resolve from all over and pulling them back close to him. It was a remarkable thing he did. “You said there were… strange vestigia at the crime scene?”

“Very strange,” I said. “I couldn’t really place them, and neither could… David.”

I gestured to the door as I said his name, then noticed and quickly stopped myself. Nightingale’s eyes followed my gesture, and for a moment, emotion flooded back into his face: the disorientation, the shock, the… longing. But he got himself back under control.

“Perhaps we should both go and check on that, to be sure,” Nightingale said. “Before they fade.”

I was surprised, but only for a moment. And who was I to tell my boss how to deal? And I had wanted help with the case.

This I could offer him: distraction.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He looked down on his endearingly old-fashioned gym attire. “Let me freshen up and change into something more appropriate, and we’ll be on our way,” he said.

—-

Nightingale drove us; apparently he was eager to demonstrate sole ownership of the Jag again. He’d come down in a fresh suit and a pair of sunglasses that had been all the rage in… probably the 40s and had since circled back into fashion. It was very bright out, so I didn’t question this, and especially didn’t try to look at his eyes.

Halfway to our crime scene, even he had to make admissions to the heat and peel out of his jacket. “Really is hot out,” he said and loosened his tie and undid his top button and I wondered if the end of times was really to come.

The doorway to the backstage was opened to us by a man dressed in glittering corsetry, heels, tights and a wig. He took one look at Nightingale and said, “Sorry, hon, I already have an understudy.”

“No, we’re from the police,” I hurried to clarify, showing the man my identification. “We’re here about the murder.”

“Oh.” The man looked sheepish, scratching his head under the wig. “Oh, yeah, poor Deirdre. Come right on in.”

I led the way, wanting to examine the props department, Ms. Watley’s dressing room and the stage again.

“That lipstick is extraordinarily well-suited to your complexion,” I heard Nightingale tell the actor behind me. “Incidentally, are you free later? Oh, and I’m Thomas.”

He was going to kill me with all this someday.

But hey, again, who was I to tell my boss how to deal?

“Roger,” the actor replied. “That is to say, my name is Roger, and I am free later.”

“Splendid. Hold on a second, I do hope I brought my phone along…”

“I’ll just write down my number somewhere. Let’s step over to my dressing room and find a pen and paper, yeah? Loving the suit and cane, by the way. Very classy, though a bit on the nose, don’t you think?”

Nightingale didn’t explain that the cane was his wizard staff that held supernatural power. He said, “But it worked, did it not?”

They dipped on over into a dressing room labelled “Roger Cartwright” and I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. Seemed like it was on me again.

The props department was empty; apparently they hadn’t found a replacement for Ms. Maxwell yet. Forensics had been and gone, and the room had been cleaned up since. Then again, they hadn’t been looking for what I was looking for.

I started scanning the shelves and opening closets, but found nothing that looked like our errant crystal ball. But at one point, on a shelf in a closet at the very back of the room, there was a suspiciously empty space - I ran my fingers over the wood and felt, very faintly, the vestigia I had felt on the corpse: something smooth, round, made of glass, and a sudden stab of greed.

Behind me, a door opened and closed and Nightingale entered. “Pardon me,” he said. “Quite the engaging conversationalist, that Mr. Cartwright.”

“Got some lipstick right there, sir,” I said, gesturing at his collar.

He didn’t even have the common decency to blush. Not a muscle in his face twitched. “Found anything yet?” he asked me.

“Not the vestigia I was looking for,” I told him, “but our murder weapon was definitely here. See?”

I made room for him to examine the spot for himself. Owing to the narrow space, he passed very close by me, and I could smell the actor’s somewhat loud cologne on him. I couldn’t even say why that annoyed me so much. It wasn’t like I’d never gotten… involved with people connected to a case, even, on one memorable occasion, the perp herself. Roger Cartwright wasn’t even on our list of suspects. So then why did I feel all peeved about it? Maybe it was the vestigia having some kind of aftereffect. Maybe it just seemed inappropriate, this soon on the wake of the huge blowout with David.

Nightingale affirmed that yes, the murder weapon had been here. So Ms. Maxwell had bought it, most likely from someone on the goblin market or somebody affiliated, and had brought it here. And then… she’d been murdered?

Why? And why had she taken the damned thing here, and not to her flat to serve as a set-piece in her fortune-telling setup?

Next, we went up on stage again. There wasn’t currently a rehearsal on, so both the stage and auditorium seemed very large and empty. Yes, I knew that there were actors, technicians, and generally all sorts of theater people milling about the building, like Nightingale’s new friend, but out here, you could forget that fact. The set was still up for the scene they’d either last rehearsed or were planning to rehearse next: an elevated, throne-like chair, a banner behind it that said “WELCOME, TRANSYLVANIANS”. I didn’t remember enough of the musical they were putting on here to know what any of that meant. Maybe it was a play about vampires.

A single stage-light had been left on. Weird.

I pointed this out to Nightingale, who explained that this was a sort of superstition among theatre folks. “They generally leave a light on at all times. For the theatre ghost.”

“And does this place have a ghost?” I wondered.

“I wouldn’t know, but it’s very likely.” Nightingale smiled slightly. “Every theatre worth its salt has a ghost.”

“No one here told us about any hauntings.”

“But have we asked?”

Just then, as if on cue, the strange vestigia flooded back.

For a moment I felt it all again, the heady mix of exhilaration and stage fright, the greasepaint and scratchy, weird-smelling costumes, the glare of the stage lights and the murmur of the audience, a million billion trillion lines rehearsed and recited, the applause and, at last, the bows before the crowd, the stresses and fears and utter joys of being an actor on a stage.

And the theatre ghost stepped out from behind the curtain.

It was a slight figure, smaller than me or Nightingale, in a dark tailcoat and a white mask. The mask brought back memories, and I shuddered.

You have to leave, said the ghost. They didn’t say it in words so much as... project it. I couldn’t have said how their voice sounded, if it seemed male or female, or anything like that.

The wave of vestigia was so strong, the order so vehement, I felt myself almost start towards the exit. Nightingale gripped his staff tighter.

“We are investigating a murder that took place here,” he said. “May we ask you a couple of questions, sir or ma’am,” and, after an almost imperceptible break, “…or other?”

You must go, said the ghost, even more intently. This place is not safe.

The cloud of vestigia swelled again, eclipsing me, urging me to comply. I spun around and would have run for the exit had Nightingale not grabbed my arm and held me in place.

“Stay,” he whispered to me. “We shan’t let this person or entity intimidate us.”

He straightened his back, and turned and faced down the ghost.

The ghost looked at him.

Were there eyes behind the mask? It was hard to discern. I was seeing this figure as if through a thick fog - fog machine, yes. Another staple of theatre. I could smell it now too, amidst the vestigia, that dry, musty fog-machine-scent. They’d likely have one here, for dramatic entrances and death scenes and the like.

What are you, said the ghost. And suddenly there was something in their “voice”, a tinge of… uncertainty.

Nightingale raised his warrant card. “DCI Thomas Nightingale, Russell Square. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Folly before?”

Are you

me?

“Pardon?” Nightingale asked.

And we were alone on stage again.

“What… the fuck was that?” I looked around the stage, peered behind the curtain, and found nothing. “Where did they go?”

“Interesting,” Nightingale said. He was doing that unflappable thing again. “They seem to have their own Phantom here. It’s almost a bit gauche.”

I stared a bit. “Gauche, sir?”

“Well.” He shrugged. “It is at the very least not all that threatening, seeing as we were able to withstand it with relative ease.” He seemed to want to flatter me by including me in that, considering I had almost given in to the ghost’s orders.

“What is it?” I asked. “Some kind of… genius loci of this house? A… spirit of theatre?”

“Perhaps,” Nightingale said. “Maybe something not nearly as strong as that. Maybe just a fae with a very specific glamour.”

I nodded. Of course, the strange sensations I had felt just now, and already once before, had to be someone’s glamour. But the truly weird thing about the ghost struck me as…

“They kept telling us to leave,” I said.

“There is likely something here that someone doesn’t want us to know about.”

“Maybe it’s that,” I said. It hadn’t sounded much like that. Or maybe it had, but there’d also been something else. It’s not safe here, the ghost had told us. Like they wanted to... warn us. Like they didn’t want us to get hurt.

—-

Back at the Folly, I did what I should have been doing all along, I sent a text to Zach Palmer asking for his help with digging up any person selling actual magical crystal balls on the goblin market. There was always a small but significant overlap between the various esoteric subcultures and the demi-monde.

I wanted to head home and spend the evening with Bev, but before wrapping up and heading her way, something compelled me to troop to David’s room. He’d looked beat earlier today, and I wanted to check in on him, and maybe gain some insight into what the hell the newest conflict was.

David answered the door after my first knock. “Oh, it’s you,” he said.

It occurred to me that if he’d been waiting - wishing - for someone to knock on his door, it had most likely not been me.

“Yeah, sorry. Has, um… Nightingale been by?”

David sniffled. “Briefly.” He showed me his hands, and I didn’t get it at first, but then I spotted the inhibitor cuffs, back on his wrists.

He’d said he’d rest, but he looked knackered. His eyes were red-rimmed and puffy, his curls springing every which way.

“What happened?” I asked. “I mean… earlier, that was… well. That was something.”

“I’m not sure what to tell you. Thomas is…” David sighed. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“That sucks,” I said eloquently.

“Yes, well. Thank you for asking.” I thought for a second he’d close the door in my face and go on moping in his room by himself, but then he said, “You know, I need to get out of here. Will you accompany me for a walk?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

We took a walk around the square. Molly spotted us leaving the Folly and hovered with Toby’s leash, so we took Toby along. Nobody seemed to have thought to walk him yet today, and he was enthusiastic.

“You know, I hear this used to be a good cruising ground a little while ago,” I told David. “For gay folks, I mean.”

David chortled. “Figures,” he said, “With Thomas being master of the Folly.” He didn’t deign to elaborate.

“We don’t really say ‘master’ anymore,” I said, which David received with a distracted nod. He seemed to have too much on his mind to inquire after that.

“So, what’s going on now?” I asked again. “I really thought you guys were… getting over things.”

David stuffed his hands into his pockets, looking morose. “The problem goes much deeper than I had expected,” he said. “If it were only the war, we would’ve settled it by now. We had… an understanding between us regarding the realities of the war. But it’s more than that. Thomas is… determined not to let me get too close to him again, and I’m beginning to feel like there’s nothing I can do. That this… will be the state of things forever.”

“If it’s not the war,” I asked, “what is it?”

David kicked a pebble across the pavement. Toby tried to fetch, and I had to hold him back. “Thomas has been alone for a long, long time,” David began, “Well, alone except for Molly. Molly’s splendid, but she’s not one for conversation. She’s apparently the only friend Thomas has had since 1945. He’s… forgotten how it is to have people, I think.”

“That really sucks,” I said again - exceedingly helpful, I know.

“He’s had to keep… everything close to his chest, I reckon.” David chewed his lower lip, apparently unsure how to best phrase his thoughts. I didn’t really know what to do with what he was telling me, what to focus on, what to think, how to react. So I ended up looking at his mouth.

“And he muddled along like that, somehow, and he’s… well, he’s out and about, he does things, I reckon he functions well that way. Or well enough. He doesn’t seem to want to… endanger this functional state by revisiting things from the past. I am… a thing from the past.”

“Nightingale’s not the vulnerable type.” I said this impulsively, without really thinking.

“He might begin to be,” David surmised. “If he had somebody near who broke down certain barriers. A lover, par exemple.” He bit his lip again. “Much responsibility rests on him now. Perhaps it’s best not to rock the boat.”

He looked miserable as he said that. I called Toby to heel, and David squatted briefly to pet him. Small, furry animals: invaluable in any crisis. Even annoying ones like Toby.

“Good boy,” David muttered. Toby wagged and tried to clamber up him with the verve of small dogs everywhere.

“Hey listen,” I said, “you’re not thinking of doing anything… stupid, are you?”

David looked up. “What, to the dog?”

“No,” I said. “Not to the dog.”

“Oh, you mean… that.” David got up and wiped his hands on his trousers. “I don’t think… not anymore. It seems an extreme sort of step.”

I nodded, and still resolved to keep an eye on him.

“You know, at first I thought… when I first saw you, I thought you were it. Thomas’ person. My replacement, I suppose. I know better now, but… goodness but I almost wish you were. It would be… well, it would certainly have been better than nothing at all.”

“High praise,” I said laconically. “But no, I’m really… not. Never been. I mean, I’m straight. That is, I’m probably mostly straight.” God, what was I saying? “I’m just, things are great with Bev. We’ve got a kid on the way.”

“Congratulations,” David said. Somehow it lacked sincerity. “Thomas and I used to joke between us that men like us get puppies, not children.” He stroked Toby’s head again. “Eh, my sweet boy?”

I nodded vaguely, barely hearing him. Because frankly up until now I had been coasting, swept along by all kinds of recent events. And… well… a child. My son or daughter (it was much too early to tell yet). I was sure that Beverley would get on swimmingly (hah), she had it all planned out. She’d start university again after taking a six-week leave, she’d take the baby to classes with her and get her degree with a kid on her arm, a high-powered career mom who still found time to heap love and support on her little sunshine and have her scheduled me-time on the weekends, and she’d do her river duties on the side. But I? Me?

I had no idea if I’d make a good dad. I mean, I was pretty sure I’d stay on top of changing diapers and the like. But later? When the kid was a bit older? Could I be supportive and present, patient and reliable in a crisis? I was leading a dangerous life out here. Most of the time I was busy with my job and apprenticeship. Police work and magic were time-consuming pastimes. But, and I’d felt this viscerally during the time I’d been suspended for the Chorley debacle, quitting would… well… quitting would make me feel as if…

…quitting was not an option.

I was still thinking of it - him or her - them - in the abstract, I realized, as ‘the kid’. They would have a name. They would have a personality. They would need me to be there.

I felt something touching my face, and jolted back to the present moment. It was David, gently tilting my chin down to meet his eyes.

“Hey,” he said lowly. “Where did you go?”

“Sorry.” Apparently the supportive walk for David had turned into me panicking by the side of the road. “It’s just… it’s nothing.”

I couldn’t unload this on him right now. He’d talked about having children with such an undertone of yearning. It hadn’t been possible for him back in the day, and I couldn’t see Nightingale adopting in the present, either. Men like them had been deemed dangerous to children, way back when, just by… existing. So he’d gotten all these apprentices to fill the gap, and Nightingale had had his young soldiers, and then they’d lost them all at Ettersberg, and at last lost each other.

“Hey,” David murmured. He still cupped my chin in his hand. It seemed… weird, but good-weird. I didn’t move away.

“You said I could kiss people on the street now,” David said. “I still haven’t gotten to.”

My eyes slid down from his eyes to his mouth again. “Yeah.”

“This is a street,” he stated.

And reader, I wouldn’t say his lips didn’t look… inviting.

He leaned in. I didn’t lean away.

For a moment, we hovered.

“Nah, we can’t do this,” I said, and tooka step back, breaking whatever had just possessed us. I laughed a little. “Um, not that I’d hate to. But, um, Bev, you know.”

“Heh. Quite.” David withdrew. He’d reddened a bit.

“And for you… I mean… it shouldn’t be me, right? Should be Nightingale.”

David saddened again. “I’m not sure that it will be.”

I patted his shoulder. “Hey, buck up. He’ll come to.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Toby tugged on his leash, making known to us that he’d quite like to head back to the Folly now.

“I’ll take him,” David said. “You go home and see your girl.”

That threw me a little. He had just tried to kiss me, hadn’t he? “Ah, what?”

He gave me a crooked smile. “It’s fine. I’ve known your type of men. You must go see your girlfriend, affirm certain things. Go on, I’ll be alright. Try not to think of me and Thomas when you make love to her. I hear It helps.”

I went home to Bev with my head reeling.

#rivers of london #david mellenby lives AU #you know how it goes. in the clearing stands a boxer and a fighter by his trade #and he carries a reminder of every glove that laid him down and cut him till he cried out in his anger and his shame #i am leaving i am leaving but the fighter still remains #you know that band simon and garfunkel that's hip with the kids #oh btw if you can guess what musical they're putting on at the murder theater you get a cookie

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weepylucifer · 4 years

Text

David (who’s been having a cold): “What’s wrong with this cough syrup??”

Nightingale: “Oh, I know this. They’re not making it with heroin anymore.”

David: “What the fuck??”

#david mellenby lives AU #Peter: >:O #posts by me #rol fandom

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weepylucifer · 4 years

Text

Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 2

Team Folly - with one exciting addition - returns to London.

“Was he serious?” Mellenby asked me later. “Eighty years?”

“Around about,” I said.

We were sitting up front of Aed’s cave, parked here for now while Nightingale was further down the slope towards the road, bossing the paramedics around. Of course that situation was very much ongoing, and someone had to get it under wraps, I had just naturally expected that to be me. I had offered to go into town and see everything squared away, give them some privacy to reunite in whichever... way they saw fit, but Nightingale had shot that down.

“I would rather not be left alone with him right now,” he’d said, tension radiating off of him. He hadn’t even asked for his staff again, so I just laid it across my lap as I sat.

I regarded David Mellenby with curiosity. I still knew very little about him: the scientist, dead no longer, and now a person who called my boss ‘songbird’ and seemed accustomed enough to getting away with it. He was watching the paramedics. The moor was pretty timeless in and of itself and had probably looked about the same in the 1940s, but the ambulances and the uniforms of the paramedics had to be, to him, a shrill discord.

“But he still looks the same,” Mellenby said, with the air of a man trying to wrap his mind around it all.

“Long story.”

He turned to look at me. He had large, clear eyes, not really the kind you expect on your classic mad scientist archetype. “Do tell?”

“He got old, and then younger again at some point. Or so I hear, I wasn’t actually around to see it then. Now he seems to be... stuck in his 40s. Not aging in either direction. It’s one of these mysteries.”

“So he’s about the same age he was when I last saw him,” Mellenby said, his curiosity evidently piqued. I had known this guy for all of five minutes, and I could already see the gears starting to turn behind his eyes. “Has anyone found out what caused it?”

I shrugged. In truth, I hadn’t asked myself this for a while now, my magical unaging guv’nor having become just another part of daily life, something I had long ago begun taking for granted. There’s a lesson in there about growing complicit, or something. “No, come to think of it,” I said. “Our cryptopathologist is trying to puzzle it out in his spare time, but honestly I don’t think Nightingale’s that bothered. I asked once and he just gave me the line about gift horses.”

Mellenby laughed, a sudden, high, loud sound that surprised me. Down the slope, I thought I could see Nightingale’s head turning at the noise. “Oh, of course,” Mellenby said. “Of course he hasn’t thought about it at all. That’s so Thomas.”

He continued laughing, way longer than the moment warranted, hunched over and his shoulders shaking, and soon there were tears dripping down his chin. He put a hand over his eyes, the other over his mouth, but nothing could contain the outpouring. “Take life as it comes and no need to examine anything, that’s Thomas. Oh, I thought I’d never see him again,” he sniffled, chuckling, sobbing, all at once. “I thought I’d left him there. Oh god, I thought I’d left him there.”

I shifted a little where I sat, not sure if I should touch his shoulder, or say something to him, or what I could even say. The slightly mad laughter subsided after a minute or so, but he was still weeping a bit when Nightingale eventually made his way back to us.

“Back to London, I should think,” he said and I got up, brushing some dirt off my pants as I did so, already relieved at the prospect of returning home. I suddenly couldn’t wait to see Bev tonight.

Nightingale shot a brief look at Mellenby, tossed him a handkerchief and off we went on the long trudge to where the Jag was parked.

----

It was funny, really, Mellenby’s reaction to the Jag. Similar to mine, back when, but coming at it from the other side. To me, the Jag had been (and was still) remarkable as an old-timer. To Mellenby, it was a futuristic sci-fi car.

“It’s from the 1960s,” I explained, because Nightingale was still giving us the near-silent treatment, but I did manage to catch a glimpse of him smoothing a hand across the side of the Jag in furtive appreciation, maybe secretly proud that his car impressed his... well, what? Comrade-at-arms? Best pal? Boyfriend? Ex?

Nineteen-sixty, Mellenby mouthed quietly, eyes wide and round. “And, um, what year is it now?”

I grinned and imagined him reacting to the Ferrari in a couple hours or so.

----

Suffice to say I had many questions for the both of them still, but the drive home didn’t seem to be the time for asking them. For a while, we had little traffic, and Nightingale utilized this opportunity to drive even more maniacally than usual. I swear, an open highway seems to unhinge something within him. I, having called shotgun to preserve the peace, was used to his speeding by now, but Mellenby in the backseat was, when I checked, looking paler by the minute. When he wasn’t holding on to the door-handle for dear life, he was staring, incredulous, out of the window, gawping at the brave new world.

We didn’t talk much. After 30 minutes it started to feel like somebody had cast a silence spell of some sort, like the silence was a physical entity growing larger and larger in the car between us, suffocating all attempts at conversation and about as solid as a block of cement.

We stopped at a gas station about halfway back to London. “Does anyone want anything from the shop?” Nightingale asked, the first words spoken since we’d started driving.

The proverbial spell had broken. “I’ve just woken up and found that near a century has passed in my absence,” Mellenby said, somewhat heatedly. “The cars, the people, even the bloody roads are unrecognizable to me. You punched me, and you used your magic on me like I’m some blasted Jerry, and you drive like an insane person, and now you’re asking me if I want anything from the shop?”

“I’d like a snickers,” I said.

“Alright, one snickers bar and that whole thing,” Nightingale said dryly. Without acknowledging us any further, he went off to get gas.

It’s a weird kind of atmosphere, sitting in a parked car with someone you don’t know. But there also was this strange air of ‘dad’s away, now we can gossip’. That one was probably just me, but I decided to carpe the diem.

“Jerry?” I asked.

“The Germans,” Mellenby said darkly.

We were silent for another minute.

“Thomas got even better, didn’t he?” Mellenby said then. “That was a tenth-order spell at least back there, and he executed it with ease. He didn’t even have his staff. This is highly fascinating.” He seemed like he’d pull out a clipboard any second now and start scribbling observation notes. But then he met my eyes and gave me a crooked smile, and his eyes were shining wetly again, and I realized he was trying to put a brave face on.

I nodded. “Yeah, it’s impressive.” I didn’t even try to mention how that spell was used on him, and how said spell, while undoubtedly impressive, kind of creeps me out on principle.

“Why is he so fucking pissed at you?” I asked.

“He has a variety of reasons, probably.” Mellenby gestured resignedly. “Towards the end of the war, several things... went awry between us.” And that was all he seemed to want to say about that.

“So you’re Thomas’s apprentice,” he now asked me, leaning forward in his seat. “How is that going?”

I didn’t really know what to do with that question, so I said something about it going okay, thank you.

“And what sort of things has he been teaching you?” he asked.

This struck me as a bit odd. “Same stuff everyone used to learn, I guess,” I said. “Some formae and a truckload of Latin.”

“Greek?” Mellenby asked in an undertone.

“Not yet.” I shifted a bit. “Nightingale says I won’t need it that much, and to be honest, I’m still not doing as well with Latin as he’d like.” I suddenly felt that gross little prickle of self-consciousness about the state of my Latin. I do my level best, next to my day job, even when all the homework is frequently kind of dull, and by now I’m sure Nightingale knows that, and knows to exercise patience when necessary. But here was a denizen of the old Folly, who had started learning Latin at ten years old. Would he ask why I hadn’t? Would he make his own assumptions? He’s not better than you, I told myself. And I knew that. Thing was just, it might have gotten a bit nasty in here if he thought he was.

“I didn’t mean...” Now it was Mellenby’s turn to fidget. “What I meant to inquire was...”

Nightingale came back then and tossed me a snickers bar as requested, and so I didn’t get to find out what Mellenby meant to inquire until a while later. My attention was diverted from that, anyway, when I saw Nightingale attempting to stealthily pocket a small, square, red-and-white packet.

“I thought you said you stopped in the fifties,” I remarked.

“As you may have noticed, I’m having a bit of a day, Peter,” Nightingale said, perhaps a tad snippy, and, giving up all pretense of secrecy, just shook a cigarette out of the pack.

“Light you,” Mellenby offered hurriedly, already thrusting a hand up into the driver’s space.

“Don’t you dare, I have my phone on.”

“What?”

I leaned back in my seat and tried not to stare too openly as Nightingale actually, genuinely lit a cigarette, in a completely mundane, non-magical way using a lighter he had to have also just purchased. ‘No smoking in the Jag’ was high up on the list of Golden Rules of Jag Etiquette, even as it had never been an issue before. One hell of a day indeed.

----

We were taking Mellenby back to the Folly. For the time being, Nightingale said, making it clear that this wasn’t happening because his heart was so inclined, but because apparently Mellenby’s story still needed examining. We were going to have Dr. Walid take a crack at him at the nearest opportunity and, because we don’t do anything by halves, we would also swing by the military cemetery where Mellenby was supposed to be buried, and see what we could rustle up there.

“So we’re going grave-robbing?” I asked, somewhat incredulously.

“Of course not, Peter, don’t be ridiculous,” Nightingale told me. “I will get in touch with the persons responsible and acquire a permit to open the grave.”

Right. We were still the police.

“Did you ever see the body?” I asked. Mellenby had implied earlier that he had faked his death, and that there had been a body for poor Hugh Oswald to find, so if his story checked out, something (someone?) had to have been buried in his place. Nightingale shook his head.

“I missed the funeral. I was still in hospital.” His mouth thinned into a repressive line. “Nobody thought to tell me at all until weeks afterwards.”

“Why would they not tell you that?” I asked.

“I wasn’t family, Peter.” Nightingale smiled sadly. “I was David’s superior officer, sure, and a personal friend, but, in the eyes of the world, never more than that. The... queer thing only stopped being a crime punishable by jail time twenty years later, mind you.” He looked at his hands folded in his lap and I realized that I’d just been subject to my boss coming out to me. Not that I hadn’t ever suspected, but it had never been put into words.

“Oh,” I said, “Okay,” I said, and it felt like the most inadequate statement in the world.

----

But first things first: Molly froze on the spot when we walked into the atrium with Mellenby. She just stared at him, and then stared at Nightingale, and then she hovered, a bewildered expression on her face.

“Ah, yes,” Nightingale said. “Molly, you will remember... David.”

“Hi, Molly,” David chirped. “It’s good to see you again!”

Molly looked from him back to Nightingale again as if wanting to say explain this. She raised her hand, index and middle finger extended, and put the fingers to her temple, very efficiently pantomiming the obvious question she had. I wondered if Molly had had to clean up the laboratory... after.

“Well,” Nightingale said, giving her a strained smile. “Apparently, no, he didn’t.”

“I’m sorry for giving you grief, Molly, Thomas.” Mellenby looked down at his feet, abashed. “I would’ve come back, you know. If I could’ve... if I’d known.”

“Oh, would you have?” Nightingale asked, in that tone he reserved for statements such as “So Johnson does rather believe that about women wearing veils?” or “Tyburn did say that, didn’t she?”

Molly drew up to her whole height, an impressive thing to watch, and gave Mellenby a scathing glare before she brushed past him and off in the direction of the kitchen.

“Oh dear,” Mellenby said, fighting to keep a wavering little smile up. “Now two people are mad at me.” He cleared his throat. “Ahem. Where’s everybody else?”

Nightingale gestured at the atrium, empty of anyone but us three. “This is everyone. Well, Abigail comes around once a week, but she’s not a full apprentice yet. Nobody else stayed active, and certainly nobody else started aging in reverse. It’s myself and Peter and Molly.”

I watched Mellenby work through that. How for a moment he looked lost, and small, and stricken, and then attempted to straighten his back and push the weight of that down. “And me, now,” he said. “I’ll return to duty. I’ll help in any way I can.” He tried to take Nightingale’s hand. Nightingale slapped it away, maybe a bit too forcefully.

“You will be doing nothing of the sort until I’ve corroborated your story,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I will be heading downstairs later and forge you a pair of inhibitor cuffs.”

David looked at him, still grief-stricken around the eyes. “You use inhibitor cuffs?” he asked. “But they are... a German invention.”

“You would know about German inventions,” Nightingale said, really almost hissed, and there was so much vitriol in it that I didn’t dare ask what that meant. In fact I got the hell out of dodge.

----

I went into the tech cave to check HOLMES for anything we might have missed while out of town. I didn’t turn up anything recent that looked like one of our cases, and I had no missed e-mails or calls except for a text from Bev asking if I would be home tonight. I replied in the affirmative and headed back to see where else the day might take me.

I heard voices from the reading room and was about to open the door and announce my presence when I heard Mellenby say, “So, an apprentice, Thomas. Does he put out?”

Oh, I thought, at the same time as Nightingale replied, in the most incredulous voice I’d ever heard from him, “What?”

There was a dagger in that word.

“Come now, he’s a handsome young man,” Mellenby said.

“And?” It only occurred to me much later that Nightingale hadn’t denied it.

Mellenby sounded apologetic when he said, “One’s given to assume.”

“Well, don’t,” Nightingale said. “My relationship to Peter is a purely professional one, and also none of your concern. But while we’re on the subject, there’s something else I’d like to discuss.”

“Yes?” Mellenby asked.

I heard faint rustling, like someone shifting in their seat, and I could just imagine Nightingale sitting up straighter in the way he does that conveys ‘let’s get down to business’. “Many things have changed while you were away and Peter is, as you heard, my apprentice, with all rights, privileges and obligations that entails, and he has been my second-in-command here for the past four years. He’s not the help. If you are to stay here, I will see to it that you treat him with the respect you would have paid to any practitioner of the Folly. I especially don’t want to hear any comments with regard to his skin colour. There is also a plethora of words and phrases that were in usage back when you went off to have your somewhat lengthy nap which I will not hear used in Peter’s presence, or even in his absence.”

I knocked on the door and went in before Nightingale could start listing them. The two of them were seated in armchairs, across from each other and separated by the table between them, not close and certainly not touching.

“Hey, sir.” I ignored Mellenby, who wasn’t making a load of friends here. “I checked HOLMES, nothing new for us.”

“Well, I’m sure something will be along,” Nightingale said in that wry way of his. “It does give us the whole afternoon to visit Abdul.”

I noted the us. “You want me to come?”

“Not necessarily.” Nightingale gestured Mellenby’s way. “I thought I’d just take David.”

“Right.” I nodded. As this had been a unit of two since the start, I was used to we meaning Nightingale and I. That we could also mean Nightingale and David now was... novel. For me. Not for either of them, probably. They might have done we for a good long while, and were simply picking back up where they left off.

When I left the room, I heard Mellenby say, “And you’re sure you two are not making it?” and caught the beginning of Nightingale’s incensed negative before I decisively walked away from all of that.

#david mellenby lives AU #the boys are putting their absolute clown shoes on for this fic #david mellenby has been crying for two chapters now and he'll be crying for at least one more #he will be very dehydrated once i'm through with him #rivers of london #posts by me #yes this time it goes in the tag where people might - oh god help me - see it

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weepylucifer · 4 years

Text

Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 10

We change the POV characters - several times.

I woke up from confusing dreams about Nightingale undoing his top button and/or wearing one of Bev’s pencil skirts sweaty and with an uncomfortable half-hard-on. Beverley, half-awake herself, tried to nestle against me, but it was so hot in our bedroom that this just made me groan.

“Too hot,” I complained.

“Come swimming with me,” she murmured in my ear, and that I did.

It was a very special kind of experience, being with her in her river, as she kept me from sinking, as we didn’t even have to come up for air. Feeling her body against mine, familiar to me and yet unusual with her new little bulge. That was our baby in there, the new life we had made together.

It’s enough to get a guy a little sappy, is what I’m saying.

And for many wonderful moments I was nowhere but with her, doing nothing but this.

Then David whispered in my mind, Try not to think of me and Thomas when you make love to her, and of course it was like being told not to think of a pink elephant. I remembered him saying that, wondering one second why he’d ever think this would be an issue, when being with Bev like this had me feeling so good, so complete and content, and the next second I was back to Nightingale’s top button and the sheen of sweat beneath his collarbone and the feeling of him atop me, and David and his lips and his kind, sad eyes, and the concept of Nightingale and David and how it would feel to witness that.

I groaned into Bev’s mouth, and I felt her gripping me tighter. We were in her river. Did she know what I’d been thinking? I wrapped my arms around her, pulling her closer, nuzzling against her shoulder, drowning myself in her and only her.

—-

Thomas woke as he always did, with a gasp and a start, like breaking the surface of deep, dark, troubled waters. He’d dreamed of the war again. This was nothing special after such a long time.

He wrenched his eyes open and lifted himself up on his elbows, attempting to replace the images behind his eyelids of the mangled forms of his school friends with the familiar, calm, tranquil view of his bedroom. Gradually and in fits and starts, his breathing calmed.

He peered at his alarm clock, which showed ten minutes after seven in the morning. “Surely not,” he muttered out loud to himself and laid back down. He could remember, vaguely, a time when getting up in the morning had actually been accompanied by joyous anticipation of what the day might bring. Nowadays, distressingly often, Molly still had to badger him into getting up at all.

Well, he had about twenty minutes until she’d come around to loiter in the doorway and stare menacingly. So Thomas took stock. Extremities: attached. Heart: working. Magical ability: intact (he cast a small werelight and extinguished it again). Mysteriously sustained eternal middle age: yes, still. That strange bubble of heavy nothing that had made its home within him sometime after the war and rarely ever totally went away: yep. It was still there and still numb, like an atrophied limb. Generalized existential dread: the usual. But there was… oh boy, there was something else, wasn’t there?

David, he thought. David.

David’s face just yesterday after their fight. David… not trying any longer. He wasn’t usually one to back out of a fight. Maybe Thomas had… pushed too hard.

But what else would he have done? It was… so much at once, after such a long time of nothing at all. Why would David not just let him be? To process the new state of things at his own pace? Was that too much to ask? Why did they have to settle everything now? They would get lots of time to themselves when Peter took paternal leave. Wasn’t that soon enough to figure things out in peace? Ugh, but David was always trying to get into things and break them open and apart and assemble them anew until they suited his tastes. But Thomas wasn’t one of David’s damned experiments. He resented being broken apart and reassembled. Things had been working fine when David had still been dead to the world, resting in peace or, as the people of his faith preferred, his memory a blessing. Thomas had always rather liked thinking of him like that: his memory a blessing.

(Well, he’d thought that of late. Once David’s absence had stopped smarting every day like a phantom pain. Once he’d settled into how things were, and it all started to feel less… close to him. The bubble of heavy nothing had eclipsed the raw pain. The bubble of heavy nothing had eclipsed a lot of things.)

And now David had given up on him, indomitable David. There was… a kind of hurt to it. It simply had been inconceivable up until now that this was something David could do. It had always been Thomas-and-David, it would always be Thomas-and-David. What was the point to the continued existence of Thomas and David as two independent things, not one whole, united, together? They were but a few rooms apart, and yet they seemed further from each other than at that time when they’d been on different continents.

He’s been back a week and I’m already taking him for granted, Thomas realized. But what was he supposed to do? Go to David and apologize? Let David inside, let David crack him open like some kind of geode for all the world to see his insides? It is that or letting him slip away.

Noiselessly, the door cracked open. Molly let herself inside.

“I’m up, I’m up,” Thomas hurried to assure her as he rose. She had a way of communicating Get your sad arse out of bed without ever utilizing words or, that approach failing, prodding him with the feather duster. Her jabs to the rib area were downright vicious.

Thomas threw on a robe and hastened to the en-suite, where Molly only appeared to him anymore when genuine need commanded it.

—-

David woke up with the tempest in his chest not having quieted even a bit. He’d caught a few snatches of unsatisfactory sleep, and if anything, he felt more tired than the previous night. The memory of the fight with Thomas continued to plague him, the icy and complete rejection in Thomas’ eyes. There was nothing for it now, simply by not being there when he should have been, when it would have counted most, he had lost Thomas forever. And trying to come on to Peter, well, that had been a harebrained idea which clearly nothing was going to come out of.

What was he going to do now? Where was he going to go next, now that no one wanted him here at the Folly? It suddenly occurred to David that there was nowhere else for him to go. The war had robbed him of all his close friends, and time would by now have taken his family away. Mother, father, great-uncle Aaron, great-auntie Tzipporah, even his baby cousin Ruth was most likely either a very old woman or dead now. David suddenly remembered that he’d left them all with the impression that he’d killed himself. This they had not deserved. Had they rent their clothes? Had they sat shiva for him? Would Thomas and Peter know the correct things to do, all the little rites to perform, in case…?

He shook himself. Here he was, getting all morbid again. He couldn’t die now. But he found himself gripped, again, by the urgent wish to get away, to flee to somewhere no one knew his face or what he’d done. Somewhere he could rest, somewhere he could truly be at peace.

But he couldn’t do that either: not with the inhibitor cuffs. Besides which, maybe once was justified, but twice… was simple cowardice. (And he’d never forgive himself, if he ran again but left Thomas to stew in his misery.)

He was backed into a corner here.

For one very silly moment, he considered simply… staying in bed. Sequestering himself in his room and wasting away into nothing. Then he’d be out of everybody’s hair.

But frankly, David wasn’t the sort of person who wasted away, and Molly wouldn’t let him anyhow. So he got up, sighed deeply, and faced another day.

—-

Nightingale hadn’t done up his top button today either, seeing as the heat persisted. I found him in the breakfast room, a half-cleared plate in front of him, staring listlessly at the newspaper.

“Morning, sir,” I said - trying not to show how much his top button upset me. His tie was a bit loose, and he hadn’t parted his hair as accurately as usual - a sign that the end of times had clearly not been cancelled yet.

He looked up like someone coming back from a long mental journey. “Ah. Good morning.”

“About yesterday,” I said.

Nightingale put the paper down. “Yes?”

Your boyfriend tried to kiss me.

“We should really follow up on the theatre ghost.”

Your boyfriend tried to kiss me and I almost didn’t stop him.

I was glad I hadn’t said that - Nightingale looked relieved to turn his thoughts to our investigation. I didn’t want to make things even more complicated.

“By all means,” Nightingale said. “I don’t suspect it actually is a ghost at all, do you?”

It was probably purely rhetorical, but I was tickled pink to be asked for my opinion.

“A person dressed as the Phantom doesn’t necessarily equal actual phantom,” I said. “They’ve got a huge room full of costumes. Our ghost could have simply grabbed one.”

“Quite so,” Nightingale agreed. “What we felt weren’t the sort of vestigia you’d expect from the place, they were specific to a live person.”

I nodded, feeling something like relief at watching the life seep back into Nightingale as the discussion got more animated. He stopped pushing his kedgeree around on his plate and actually loaded up his fork.

At that point David entered.

If anything, David looked worse than yesterday. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all. He looked like he’d either caught the flu extremely badly or spent the night sobbing hysterically into his pillow. He looked like shit, is what I’m getting at.

Nightingale dropped his fork and stood up, like the gentlemen in a Jane Austen movie adaptation will do when the beautiful leading lady enters. (Don’t ask me how I know about Jane Austen movies, okay? I watch them for the architecture. Those manor houses, you understand.)

“David,” Nightingale said.

David didn’t meet his eyes. He shuffled over to the buffet and began filling a plate. “Good morning, all. Not to worry, I’ll be quick.”

He sounded… like nothing. He sounded dead.

Nightingale opened his mouth, doubtlessly to say something really, really, really stupid. Oh, fuck. Then his eyes wandered from David to me and he snapped his mouth shut and sat back down. I suppose he had decided that whatever he was going to say or do was not going to happen in front of an audience.

“You said you first felt that glamour in Ms. Watley’s dressing room,” Nightingale said to me, visibly fumbling for his composure.

I nodded. “Do you think she’s the ghost?”

“For now, I think we should pay her another visit.”

David looked up from where he was shovelling food onto his plate, apparently having listened in. “I could be of help,” he offered. “If I provided…”

I made throat-cutting motions in his direction, hoping to convey a general sentiment of “Dude, just don’t.”

Nightingale’s hand clenched around his fork. “No. No more tampering with the investigation.”

David nodded stiffly, hunkering down again into his bodily retreat. “I see. I’m sorry.”

Nightingale blinked, once more opening and closing his mouth. “Look, all I meant to say–”

“If you’ll excuse me.” David poured himself a cup of coffee, put it and his plate on a tray and headed for the door. “I’ll be taking this down to the basement.”

I watched his retreating back and I just… had to say something. This didn’t sit right with me. This didn’t sit right with me at all.

What came out of me was, “You’re going to eat in the lab? Isn’t that unsanitary?”

He barely turned his head towards me. “I don’t have any sensitive experiments on at present. How could I? And I do clean up, you know.”

“I can bring you some… disinfectant down.”

David was already pulling the door shut behind him.

“Well,” I said. “That went colossally to shit, huh?”

—-

“Well,” Peter said. “That went colossally to shit, huh?”

Thomas kept his mouth shut, because he wasn’t in the habit of snapping at his apprentice, and he wasn’t going to start today. Peter had come in just earlier with that loose, relaxed air, and smelling faintly of Beverley Brook’s glamour, in the way that made it indubitably known that he’d gotten lucky this morning. And Thomas had pursed his lips and thought, Good for him, and only that, good for him, because there were some sentiments one simply did not voice, not even in the privacy of one’s own head.

“Peter,” he said, keeping his tone polite, “I’m going to suggest you mind your business, yes?”

Across the table, Peter looked surprisingly rebellious for a moment. “I just…” he picked nervously at the tablecloth, most likely entirely without noticing. He huffed with momentary frustration. “I give a shit, you know.” Belatedly, he added, “Sir.”

Thomas was tempted to ask what about. He didn’t. Cruelty towards Peter was far from him. And with Peter, probing even the slightest amount towards any hint of his deeper emotions constituted a cruelty. In that way, he reminded Thomas of the boys he’d grown up alongside at Casterbrook. Of himself a long time ago. All the posturing, all the har-de-har, rugby and explosions and machismo. It seemed tiring, after tasting of the tenderness that came with spaces populated by men of the grecian persuasion. He’d have stayed wed - stayed shackled - to that kind of mindset forever if it hadn’t been for David, and the realisations that arrived with David. David had cracked him open (yes, once before) and taught him to be gentle.

In all, David had made him a better man before making him worse. But Thomas still didn’t like to dwell on the ‘worse’ part, not even 75 years later. It had been war. Things had been done in war that had been, if ugly, necessary.

David had been looking summarily horrible just now. He’d been looking horrible more or less constantly since he’d been back, like he’d spent his every unobserved moment crying his eyes raw. It ripped fiercely at Thomas’s heartstrings, seeing him like this. He had to do something - he knew not what, but something - before the day was out.

But work - duty - came first.

Peter picked out the actress’s address, and off they went. In an admission to the weather, Thomas left his suit jacket at home and rolled up his shirtsleeves (Peter observed this keenly, and not for the first time, Thomas wondered what on earth he was thinking that constituted a look like that). The heat was stifling, even driving with the windows down, and Thomas was sure he was leaving armpit stains on his shirt, and internally this bothered him more than perhaps it should. If only it was acceptable to attend work in more casual attire, such as, for example, a light sundress.

But he wasn’t quite that far gone yet.

—-

Cora Watley lived in a tiny studio apartment probably reflecting her actor’s salary. She had said that this was her first time playing a lead. She hadn’t been in the business long, and the kind of money she earned showed it.

She looked from Nightingale to me and asked, “What do you want from me now?”

Dull shock wasn’t that unusual of a response to being greeted at the door by two policemen. It didn’t even necessarily connotate guilt. Police at the door is rarely a welcome surprise for anyone, and most people possess some weird baseline guilt deep down when looking a cop in the face. Maybe Ms. Watley was involved in the murder, maybe she was only dreading another boring hour of answering questions, maybe she was thinking “Gosh I hope they don’t know about me illegally downloading music/that I smoked weed once in eighth grade/that I’m cheating on my partner with the cleaning lady”.

And yes, cleaning lady definitely applied here, as the humongous rainbow flag covering one wall of the bedroom/living room/kitchen conveyed. Nightingale looked at it and his face… softened, and he almost-smiled, and I thought, well, if Ms. Watley wasn’t flat-out the murderer, she had Nightingale on her side now. Solidarity, or something.

“We don’t want to bother you for long,” Nightingale told her. “We simply have a few follow-up questions regarding the scene of the crime.”

Ms. Watley didn’t ask us to sit down. The only opportunities for doing so would’ve been her bed, a bean bag in a corner and a singular kitchen chair. I knew I’d have to leave the chair to Nightingale if it came to it, and I didn’t want to sit in the bean bag. The bed was right out.

Ms. Watley didn’t sit down either. She leaned against her dresser, crossed her arms and said, “Okay?”

She said this with a pretty obvious question mark, “Okay?” It said in one word that she had already been asked tons of things, and did we really have to bother her at home for this? But she’d comply because what else was there to do, and thank us to be out of her flat quickly.

Nightingale decided to be direct. “Since you’ve started working at the theatre a year ago, have there ever been any rumours regarding a theatre ghost?”

“A… ghost. Really?” The actress cocked her head in bewilderment. “Like, I don’t know. I guess there’s always superstition and stuff with actors. But how is that in any way relevant?”

“I beg your pardon?”

While Nightingale gave the actress his famous emotionless face, I took a stealthy look around the apartment. There was no esoteric paraphernalia here. Apart from the rainbow flag, there was a collage on the opposite wall made up of posters advertising plays at different locations in and around London; I assumed these were plays that Ms. Watley had appeared in. The tiny bookshelf was crammed full of scripts and treatises on acting technique, accompanied by a little mainstream fantasy. A book of folklore that I vaguely knew: it was in the Folly’s mundane library, but it wasn’t the type of book that was exclusive or difficult to get. I still made a mental note of it.

“I mean, how is this relevant to the murder,” Ms. Watley said. “Like, what kind of thing is that to ask for a police investigation?”

“It’s purely a matter of routine,” Nightingale assured her - once again.

“We’re just covering all our bases,” I threw in. “It helps us gain an understanding of our crime scene. The dynamics at play between the actors, possible motives. Sometimes a ghost isn’t… necessarily a ghost.”

The actress’s frown deepened. “What, like sometimes it’s an old man in a costume? Like in Scooby Doo?”

Nightingale looked blank, of course. I said, “I wouldn’t have thought Scooby Doo, exactly.”

Ms. Watley snorted. “You’re completely lost with this, aren’t you? You haven’t got a single clue, and now you’re asking people about ghosts?”

I exchanged a look with Nightingale. If it worked as an excuse and let us ask our questions, so be it. But I didn’t want to make us look bad, either.

I settled for simply leaving it uncommented. “So you wouldn’t say you’ve ever noticed anything ghost-like, or anything at all strange or unusual around the place?”

“No,” Ms. Watley said - maybe a bit too vehemently. Then, after a moment of contemplation, she added, “You know, they say a lot of crimes go unsolved.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably nothing. I just… actually, I hope you find whoever did this to Deirdre. She was never… you know, she never did anything to anyone. She was a nice lady with a kooky hobby, and that’s all. This should never have happened to her.”

“And do you know why it did?” Nightingale asked - softly, but in the way that hides steel underneath. “Anything at all?”

A beat passed, and I thought, maybe…

“No,” Cora Watley said. “No idea. I realize this just sounded… super weird and possibly incriminating. I just think it’s… not fair, karmically.”

“You’re a believer in karma?” Nightingale asked.

“I’m not fond of the concept of bad things happening to good people,” Ms. Watley said, and that seemed to be all.

(”An idealist,” Nightingale summed up later, but I wasn’t so sure. We were both in agreement that something seemed majorly fishy here, and I was convinced that at some point, if not the whole time, we might have simply been lied to.)

Nightingale wanted to head back to the Folly, probably to check on David finally. But we weren’t done yet.

We went back to the theatre, but found no one there and all doors shut. I had to check on my phone to see why.

“It’s Sunday.”

Nightingale blinked. “My goodness, is it?” He checked for himself and shook his head. “Well, well. Goes to show what happens once you let yourself get all wrapped up in…” He interrupted himself abruptly. “I suppose there’s nothing for it.”

“We’ll have to catch our suspects at home.”

Nightingale blinked. “Hmm? Oh, certainly, certainly.”

—-

Mr. Sheen, the director, wasn’t home.

(“He’s at his hunting club,” his wife told us, just a slight touch bitter. “I swear to god, the place is falling down around his ears and what does he do? Spend his every free minute at the damned club.”

“The place is falling down around his ears?” I inquired gently. “So it’s true that the theatre is struggling financially?”

Mrs. Sheen snorted. “Struggling? The owners are flat broke.”)

But we did manage to catch the janitor, cleaning lady and night watchman for a chat. All of them denied any knowledge of a ghost or any rumours concerning a ghost, and recommended we maybe ask the actors, as this seemed to be a sort of actor thing. To them, as they all swore up and down, the theatre had been a perfectly ordinary workplace until the murder had happened there. Mr. Singh’s wife brought out samosas. It was nie. They were good samosas.

Following our tip-off, Nightingale even called his new actor friend. He went out of my earshot to place the call, and returned with the news that there were no helpful rumours abound among the actors, either. We had seen the theatre ghost - but no one else seemed to have ever heard of it.

Either that, or they simply didn’t want to talk to the police about it.

We were just about to quit for the day and make our way back to our respective homes when my phone went off. It was the reply from Zach Palmer I had been awaiting: he had asked around a bit and found the person selling enchanted crystal balls to the public.

—-

The seller was a shlubby white dude sporting greasy white-dude-dreadlocks who tried to get us to call him Ainsel, but whose actual name turned out to be Darren Wendell, significantly less magical. He had apparently been sold not just one but half a dozen artifacts which all, it turned out, had something a bit wrong with them. Zach knew him on a kind of friend-of-a-friend-of-a-cousin-basis.

According to him, he’d gotten these items from a mystery source - he refused to name them. That was something I’d have to come back and check up on, but the murder naturally took priority. Yes, he admitted, the items were enchanted to elicit desire to obtain them - the overwhelming greed I’d felt from the vestigia. “How else are they supposed to sell?” he asked, and I shook my head and didn’t get into it with him.

But there was something else wrong with these objects, something a bit outside of Wendell’s sphere of competence. These enchantments had been attached to the items when he’d gotten them. He showed me a voodoo doll that was rumoured to actually work. A flask of perfume that smelled like your deepest desire (To me, it carried the scent I had come to associate with Bev’s river. Nightingale sniffed it and made a face.). A book that mildly possessed the reader, who got compelled to read it in one sitting. A mirror that was supposed to show your future self, which Nightingale looked into and claimed it had to be broken. A little music box which played a melody that would put anyone listening right to sleep. So far, Wendell had only sold the crystal ball.

“Demi-monde seem less affected by the enchantment,” he told us, “they just… react less than outsiders.”

“So what on earth compelled you to sell to a woman who was completely unaware what she was dealing with?” I asked.

Wendell shrugged and gestured at his assortment of… stuff. “They wouldn’t sell on the goblin market.”

I turned to Nightingale. “What’s the law on this kind of incident?”

“How do you mean?” he inquired.

“I mean, selling hazardous magical artifacts to people with no qualifications to handle said artifact… endangering the public… surely there’s some rule or regulation to deal with that?”

Nightingale looked blank again. Of fucking course.

“Seems like one more item to add to your list,” he said, in a tone as if he or the universe in general was doing me a favour. It cost me a Herculean effort not to groan out loud.

—-

The Folly was quiet, very quiet. David couldn’t remember it ever being this silent here. Before the war there’d always been somebody milling about: the other researchers (none of his quality, but good chaps anyhow) in the surrounding laboratories, the fellows upstairs having their little convivals in the smoking room, and then of course the commotion of everybody meeting up for meals. Then later it had been people practicing in the firing range and gym, prior to being carted off to learn the uses of mundane weaponry within the army’s basic training (David still had rather pleasant memories attached to boot camp, revolving around Thomas in his PT gear). And after the war… the survivors, who had gradually begun filing out, leaving the Folly and the arts and wisdoms behind, unable to stay, too haunted by the empty rooms, the empty spots at the dinner table. (And then David, too, had reached his limits and had had to leave.). Groaning and yelling and whimpering at night, and yet still, at the very least a sign of life at all, and better than nothing.

David told himself not to be silly. Sure, they didn’t make a sound, but Molly and Foxglove were still very much within the building. He wasn’t alone. And Thomas would be back in the evening; Peter too, perhaps, if he didn’t go to see his orisa. It was simply… unusual for the Folly to be so quiet, that was all.

(Was this what Thomas had lived with for the last seventy years, this silence?)

David shook his head, hoping maybe to dislodge the cobwebs that these thoughts spun in his head. He focused back on his experiment.

Yes, there was an experiment: one of the very few he could conduct without actively using his magic. What he was currently putting through the works, clamped under his microscope, was a single, pale hair.

Oh yes, a single hair, one that he’d been so very fortunate to pluck off the back of a chair. Much could be told by a single hair.

(Of course when he’d developed this procedure first, long ago, before 1930 even, David hadn’t asked himself why. Hadn’t asked himself how people would abuse it. Hadn’t fathomed yet of Nazis, of what they would use his research to inflict on the demi-monde.)

(For the nth time he ground his teeth and cursed them, the ones that had built Ettersberg on the grounds of his knowledge, knowledge he had shared freely, for the benefit of all, a scientific Commons…

“Bullshit,” he whispered harshly.)

That was what Thomas had never understood: the scope of the betrayal. How they’d stripped him off his selfhood and butchered his work, and butchered hundreds of thousands utilizing his work in the name of their twisted, blood-thirsty nonsense ideology. How parts of the accursed mountain had smelled so faintly of his magic, or something born of his magic. How many of these self-proclaimed Aryans would have recoiled had they known that their instruments of torture were based on the discoveries of a queer Jew? How many would have pragmatized, and justified, and rationalized, and had in fact done so…?

Oh, some at Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften had known. For that there existed not a sliver of doubt. David knew their names, their faces, as they’d known his.

Here he had to pause, and brace his hands on the lab table, and calm his breathing until the nausea faded.

A fine red mist.

In retrospect, so much of it was covered by a fine red mist.

But he managed to shake himself out of it and return to the pale artificially-blonde hair.

The results were clear.

“Gotcha,” David muttered.

He could contribute. Now Thomas might as well get off his high horse about it.

He reached over for the flat rectangle they called a telephone nowadays. So many different uses to it, and you could carry it around in your pocket. The future was splendid.

He sent a text message to a number he had acquired on the same day he’d managed to pinch the hair.

I know what you are.

Oh dear, that sounded unduly menacing. Menacing was unnecessary.

That is to say, I know in which way you are different, David amended. And I think I know what you are doing.

I know you’ve been going it alone, and this cannot continue. You’re handling something you barely understand. I can help you.

And then, he waited.

He waited two minutes, three, five. Then, he got his answer.

What are you? she had written. Really.

I’m with the police, David fibbed a bit. Well, in a wider sense, that was true.

This time, he had to wait almost fifteen minutes for his answer. It felt like an eternity, and he was awfully fidgety by the time it arrived.

I want to meet.

“Good.” David nodded to himself. He shrugged out of his lab coat and went to follow his lead.

—-

Thomas did not consider himself a timid man.

He had walked through bullet hails and shrapnel rain without sustaining a scratch. He had killed Nazis in about every way a person could kill another, including with his bare hands and, one one occasion that still came back to him in the odd nightmare, with his teeth. He had lived risking complete ruin for the horrendous crime of his loving since he’d been a sixth-former. Cowardice was not a trait Thomas considered himself guilty of.

And yet, how his heart pounded in his chest as he made his way down the steps, along the hallway up to David’s lab.

Once, long ago, it had been normal and natural for him to go here, to pop in for a chat with David, or just to watch David work. Then, for decades, he hadn’t gone here at all. He’d willed himself to forget this room existed.

Now it still felt strange, visiting here. Normalcy had not yet returned to them. And how could it have? But Thomas wanted it to, he found. He wanted to settle things with David, and they would. They would talk, in depth, about everything, just so.

There was no light on in the lab. For a second, something black and frenzied wrenched again at Thomas’s heart - for a second, he feared the worst. But surely not. Certainly not. He couldn’t be too late twice over. This time, a second time, he knew his mind would not bear it. It had been hard enough to come back from the first time. A repeat of it would push him past what he could in sanity endure.

He opened the door and found… nothing. David wasn’t there.

And what did Thomas feel? Something sinking. Something between relief, disappointment and trepidation.

Which was nonsensical. David was simply somewhere else within the building.

As if on cue, he heard a rustle behind him. He turned, but it was only Molly.

“Molly, splendid,” Thomas said. “Do you know where David is?”

She procured something from the folds of her dress and gave it to him. It was a piece of paper - a note.

Thomas took it and read it. In David’s loopy handwriting, it said, “Actress is a demi-fae. Will get back to you later.”

What?

#david mellenby lives AU #posts by me #posting this at charlotte's place bc my wifi is still brokeeeeen!!!!!#rivers of london

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weepylucifer · 4 years

Text

Let‘s Go in the Garden - Ch. 4

Nightingale goes over some backstory. David discovers recent history. Peter’s therapist WILL hear about this.

Nightingale got his permit to grave-rob. Well, officially we were following a lead connected to a cold Falcon case that had suddenly warmed up. Inofficially, we were... actually in fact doing that, but we were also very much opening the grave of DCI Nightingale’s former boyfriend.

The military cemetary was depressing in its uniformity, the way places like this usually are. It must have been thousands of identical headstones. The fact that many of these graves were empty, because in a staggering amount of cases the body couldn’t have been recovered, did not make the environment any more cheerful.

The Folly practitioners were all buried close to each other - those that were, in fact, buried here and hadn’t been left spread over Germany - as they would have liked, Nightingale said.

“Officer present,” he muttered, patting one of the headstones, a twist to his mouth that sent a little stab to my chest.

“Would be weird, huh, if they came out and saluted?” I said, maybe attempting to lighten the mood. Maybe it was just another case of me being unable to keep my damned mouth shut.

“One has,” Nightingale remarked in that wry way of his. “Look, this is Ballantine. I knew him at Casterbrook.” He peered down the long line of graves. He was introducing me to his friends, I realized, and it felt horrible. “And next to him is Smith, and Dance. There’s Simmons, he was only nineteen. Blaise, he could do this impression of Churchill that had us all in stitches. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds... you know? Here’s Greenway, a good friend of David’s. And here we are already at our destination.”

Many of these graves were bare, no one having visited, evidently, in a while. David Mellenby’s grave was not so. Two tiny paper flags were stuck in the damp earth below the headstone, crossed, a union jack, then another one. It was even the new-fangled rainbow, I noticed, with the black and brown stripe added. London pride had been three weeks ago, so I could probably deduce where he’d gotten that. There was a flower too, now wilted, the petals almost completely crumbled into nothing, but even with my limited knowledge of botany, I could recognize a rose when I saw one. There was a sudden lump in my throat. Let nobody tell you that ancient, stern magicians can’t be sentimental buggers when the mood strikes.

I had expected Nightingale to have some spell at his disposal that would instantly remove all the soil in our way, but he just handed me a shovel and waited. Honestly, I sometimes wondered how he’d ever gotten anything done before acquiring his own constable. (He... hadn’t, mostly. He hadn’t at all.) The colleagues at Belgravia could have had an excavator here to get this done within minutes, what the Folly had, especially after the commissioner had gotten acerbic with us recently once more about our budget, was myself and a shovel.

It wasn’t every day that I had to dig a large hole, and soon I was sweating. It was beginning to run down my back when my shovel hit something solid.

I guess I had somehow managed to avoid thinking about the fact that I was standing in an open grave digging for a coffin. But now I had to awkwardly crouch in the hole and unearth the damned thing, and while it was the middle of the day, not at all conductive to a spooky cemetery atmosphere, it was still eerie.

The coffin was partially covered by a length of rotting fabric - “That would be the flag,” Nightingale said - but the wood of it was still entirely intact and very well-preserved. That smelled fishy right away, seeing as nearly eighty years had indeed gone by. I checked for vestigia, but if there was anything, it was very faint and very faded. Nightingale slid into the hole with me, rather elegantly really.

“Shall we open it?” he suggested, and I had to remind him to put a pair of one-way gloves on, which he did, and then we cracked the coffin open.

“Well,” I said after a moment of just staring, “I don’t know what the hell that is, but it’s not human remains.”

What we saw lying in the coffin had the rough shape and size of an adult person, but the resemblance was very much cursory. It was a life-sized construct, a doll of some sort, woven from what had to be thousands of small wooden branches, layered on top of each other to evoke the approximate shape of a head, a torso, legs, arms crossed over the chest. There was no discernible face, no hair, and only a few scraps of clothing that had long since rotted away.

I poked the strange figure with a gloved finger. The ancient, dry wood crumbled under my rather light touch. “What is this, sir?”

“Hmm.” Nightingale eyed it thoughtfully. “It seems to be a changeling construct. You don’t see many of these anymore. That’s... clever. Very unconventional. Very David, but he couldn’t have created this by himself. He had to have an accomplice in the demi-monde.”

“A changeling?” Immediately, I had to think of my adventure in Herefordshire. “Like Nicole Lacey?”

Nightingale shook his head. “Changeling is another one of these umbrella terms. This is an artificial construct, not a living being. The high fae didn’t always substitute members of their own societies for the people they took. In some cases they would leave constructs like this one behind. A fae would have woven something like this from twigs or reeds and enchanted it to mimic life for a short while. When the glamour inevitably collapsed, it would look like the person had died.”

“Could David... Mr. Mellenby... could he have used it to mimic a dead body? And the spell would have worn off after the funeral?”

“That seems to have been the purpose of this arrangement,” Nightingale agreed. “But again, David couldn’t have created a changeling. It’s entirely possible that he called in a favor from one of his contacts in the demi-monde. He was always seeking out the fae, forging friendships, researching. Very odd, for that time.”

I wondered why he had to have asked for help from a fae, and voiced that question. According to Nightingale, not even Mellenby with his unorthodox faerie friends could avail himself of their type (brand? flavor?) of magic. Creating a changeling was simply not something Newtonian practitioners were trained to do, and the demi-monde at that time had been even more tight-lipped regarding their secrets than they were at present.

“He really was serious about faking it,” I said, “Manufacturing a fake corpse... he wanted to drop off the map really badly, huh?”

Nightingale nodded. “Yes, it’s all... a bit much, isn’t it? I understand wanting to quit the service making a clean break, but this seems excessive. Moving somewhere quiet and avoiding the reunions usually does the trick. Hell, I don’t attend the reunions, and I’m left alone these days.”

“Is it... uncharacteristically excessive, do you think?”

Nightingale directed a thoughtful look to the grey, cloudy sky as he pondered that. He’s not a copper in the blood, in the Sam Vimes kind of way, he’s always been a soldier happening to be doing police work, and I suspect he always will be. But enough coppering had rubbed off on him that he knew where this line of inquiry was going.

“No,” he said at last. “David could get extremely melodramatic sometimes. About important things.”

I tried to imagine how Mellenby must have felt, right after Ettersberg. Guilty, Hugh Oswald had hinted at. He had shared knowledge with people who had turned around and used what he had shared to build Ettersberg, to commit unspeakable crimes against humanity there. Hundreds of his comrades had died in an attempt to get their hands onto that knowledge, to, in a way, correct the mistake he’d made trusting the wrong people. He’d gotten back to England in place of his boyfriend. He had thought that his colossal fuckup had to have claimed Nightingale’s life.

“He must’ve been really serious about no one coming to look for him,” I said.

Nightingale’s expression grew as clouded as the sky. “Oh, certainly,” he said. “He might have taken over my duties, had I not returned home.”

“Huh?” I asked eloquently.

“Command enjoyed his scientific expertise during the war,” Nightingale said, somewhat scathingly. “Besides, he’d never been wounded...” (Because you were there ensuring that, I thought but did not say) “...he would have been in an ideal position to inherit mastery of the Folly. I was considered missing in action at the time, as were a number of other, even likelier candidates. It’s not a duty either of us ever aimed for or desired. So he ran away.”

Like a coward, he didn’t add but I could almost hear it nonetheless. Now Nightingale, when faced with the duty of guarding the ruins of British magic, of remaining the last one standing, of shouldering responsibility for all of Britain’s magic-related concerns, had accepted it unflinchingly. He must have also been tired, physically and mentally, he’d been shot, he’d lost everyone he’d held dear. But he hadn’t run for the hills. He hadn’t always done the most stellar job as Britain’s last official wizard, but at the very least he’d been there.

“So that’s why you’re so mad at him, huh,” I assumed.

Nightingale shrugged. He looked very... resigned. “Is that it?” he asked. “Can I fault him for doing a runner? There were others who could have continued to serve in some capacity, not many, but there were a few. They chose to break their staves. Can I begrudge them that? They were my men, my lads, and I wished for them to heal. To get to enjoy life in peace.”

God, that noble, self-sacrificial bastard. I really wanted to throttle him.

“What is it then?” I asked instead. “Why is it still all weird and sad? I mean, no offense sir, but if I had a dead boyfriend and he suddenly came back, I would be dancing in the streets or something.”

Nightingale sighed, and then, right there at the open, empty grave, I got the full story.

----

So apparently on the eve of Ettersberg - well, not the literal eve, the actual operation had been a few weeks off yet - but when select officers were first briefed on the mission, there had been some disagreement on how to proceed. Hugh Oswald had already told me some of it, back in Herefordshire, that Nightingale had been against it from the get-go. That he’d wanted the site bombed from altitude and nothing else to do with it. Now, as a Captain he hadn’t held nearly enough sway to affect command decisions of that magnitude. But The Nightingale wasn’t just any Captain. As perhaps the most gifted and capable practitioner the Folly had turned out in his generation - he didn’t say that to me, but I extrapolated from what I recalled Hugh Oswald having told me - and one of Britain’s most experienced combat practitioners, he had enjoyed a certain reputation. And above all, he had held the unswerving and unyielding loyalty of his men.

That loyalty was hard-earned and entirely reciprocated, and when Nightingale had heard, after years of fighting the Nazis for every inch of ground, that they were sending all available troops into a death trap hundreds of miles beyond the front, he’d gone a bit ballistic. He had appealed to command to reconsider, and he’d voiced his opposition loudly and clearly, and word had gotten around to the enlisted men.

Now, in your ordinary army, the disarray would have stopped there. Command structures and the prevailing culture would have ensured it. But the Folly battallion hadn’t been composed of ordinary foot-soldiers. The Folly practitioners had been, to a private, sons of England’s proud upper middle class. They’d been men who came from money, men of privilege, men used to having their voices heard. So someone got it in his head to start petitioning against the objective, to take a stand, to rally around the Nightingale. He himself had had nothing to do with the petition, he told me; it had been the work of some fool NCO and he in fact only found out about it later.

But army hierarchy had still applied, and Nightingale had summarily been dragged off the field, into battallion command and thence back to London before a board of generals. He had been told in no uncertain terms that what he was doing was considered an act of treason against King and country, and that, out of respect for his service record and the loyalty of his men, he would be offered a choice: retract his opposition, stand down, be a good soldier and go to Ettersberg, or have himself and everyone who’d backed him up court-martialed, lined up against a wall and shot for mutiny.

“At that point, I would have let myself be shot alright,” he told me, “if I thought it might help prevent the worst. But all of my men, no. So I chose compliance... I granted the lads the fate of uncertain over certain death. And a handful of those petitioners actually did end up making it home.”

It was rare that I ever got a war story out of him, so of course I listened. This one was dreary, though, and I couldn’t believe they’d still gone around executing their own men by firing squad all the way in 1945. A less civilized age, indeed.

“What does that have to do with Da- with Mr. Mellenby?”

“Lieutenant,” Nightingale corrected absentmindedly. “Lieutenant Mellenby. Well, while I was opposing Operation Spatchcock, David was in favor.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I told him of the risk. I told him it would be a suicide run. He called me paranoid. He said surely they wouldn’t muster all we had left and send us off to die. Surely that was a ridiculous proposition. I told him he had always been a bit naive as to the way the world worked.”

He sighed. “He gave me a lot of regurgitated rhethoric from the mission briefing about hindering the fascists from their heinous atrocities, for the sake of their prisoners, for the glory of the empire. We got into a right row about the role of the empire in the world. Not that David really cared about the British empire any more than I did. No, David had been personally slighted, and David wanted his research back. And he seemed willing to delude himself so far as to believe he wouldn’t have to climb over the bodies of our lads to get it back.”

Reader, even if I’d known what to say to that, I genuinely didn’t dare interrupt Nightingale now. He was far away again, but this time his expression held none of the dull grief and shell-shock that seemed to be his constant companions. At this moment he was frighteningly alive, standing tall, encased by vivid fury. For a moment, I could see the man he’d been, the war hero. If I’d been some dude named Hans in a Wehrmacht uniform in 1945 catching sight of him, I honestly probably would’ve just shit myself.

“The thing is,” Nightingale continued, and even his tone had gone cutting and militaristic around the edges, as though he was giving an after-action report, “that petition was almost successful. Command really did stick their heads together for a moment and attempt to calculate whether the prognosticated loss of life could be considered worth the empirical value of the Black Library. To determine the answer to that question, they consulted a scientific expert. A scholar on the topic.”

“Oh, shit,” I said.

Nightingale looked at me, and seemed to simmer down. The years settled back across his shoulders like a soft but heavy blanket, the incensed soldier vanishing again. “Indeed,” he said. “And David told them yes, in his opinion, it would be worth it. He got what he wanted. He really must have hugged himself that night. I certainly didn’t. And when the time came to face the consequences, he ran away.”

“I guess I get now why you punched him,” I said.

“Take some samples of that wooden doll for Abdul,” Nightingale said, tossing us abruptly back into the present. “I hope you thought to bring a forensic bag.”

----

Mellenby took the news that he was undeniably himself pretty well. It was just about the only thing that went right that afternoon.

It all started going sideways when we got back to the Folly and ran into Molly in the atrium, as was often the case. When Nightingale asked her where David was, she pointed a finger downwards, indicating the basement, and I swear to god all colour went out of Nightingale’s face within a single second.

“Molly, he’s not... in the old lab, is he?”

Molly nodded.

I think me still being there was the only reason Nightingale didn’t break into a sprint.

I followed him as he power-walked down the stairs and down the hallway leading to the laboratories. Most of them were still unused to this day, but Nightingale stopped in front of a particular door. It was quite a solid door, but I was a bit unsettled by the silence beyond it. I knew Nightingale and I were thinking the same thing.

I kept my eyes fixed on his back, the tense line of his shoulders in the sturdy tweed he considers his work suit, as he reached out for the doorknob. I could spot a slight tremor in that hand. I heard his breath, a bit heavier than normal. For a moment, his hand hovered, an eternity caught in a second. Then he seemed to snap out of it, and in one decisive movement he turned the handle and wrenched the door open.

The air was stale in the room beyond, evidence of how long it had been in disuse. Most of the furniture had been covered by dust sheets, now torn down and haphazardly stacked in a corner. One of the closets was open, revealing dusty, out-of-date equipment. There were several desks, the surfaces tiled, the wooden lab benches shoved underneath worn smooth by continuous use decades ago. There was an ancient enamel sink with faucet, what had, in the old days, probably passed for an eye wash station. And there, by the ancient sink, David Mellenby was patiently and intently cleaning a beaker.

“David,” Nightingale said. It came out in one big whoosh of air.

Mellenby looked up. Today he was wearing a jumper over his shirt, overlarge and a bit worn, but cozy-looking. “Thomas!” he exclaimed with a smile, “And Peter... Constable Grant... hello.” So he wasn’t sure what to call me either. The feeling was mutual.

“You don’t intend to use this lab again, do you?” Nightingale demanded. Mellenby’s smile fell against the banked emotion in his voice, and whatever he saw gleaming in his eyes.

“It’s my laboratory,” he said. “Of course I intend to put it back to use. You left everything as it was, correct?”

“I suppose I can’t keep you from your... work, huh,” Nightingale said.

“You’re keeping me from my magic already.” Mellenby tugged at the cuffs he still was made to wear. “There’s not much I can do here without it, but... I must work. I must experiment. I know why you’re hesitant about it, believe me I do understand your doubts exactly, but I can’t not do my job.”

“You don’t have a job here now,” Nightingale remarked. Ouch, I thought. Me, I would be stung if someone - if he - told me that.

Evidently, Mellenby was too. But he only amended, “Say my calling, then.”

“Your calling.” Nightingale exhaled forcibly. “I can see there’s no stopping you. But, in here?”

“Why not? I always used this room.”

“You scared me,” Nightingale admitted. “When I heard you were down here... goodness, David, what was I supposed to think?”

“Now, it’s not... you know now nothing actually ever happened in here. I can move past that, can’t you?” Mellenby turned, and devoted his attention to the beaker in his hands again. He finished dusting it off, and reached for another one.

“Move past that! Just like that, hm? Of all the obstinate, insensitive--”

“You’re calling me insensitive? Ever since I got back here, you’ve been impossible, posturing like some--”

“Oh, now I’m posturing? It’s morbid, that’s all...”

“It’s not like anyone ever actually died in here, you know! But I suppose you command where I go within your Folly--”

Mellenby had said that last resolutely glaring at the vial he was polishing. Nightingale stepped into his space and slapped it out of his hand. Glass shattered all over the floor. Such a rash, aggressive, juvenile gesture from Nightingale shocked me.

“Now you look here, David--”

I ducked out of the door, not least to avoid the glass shards, but moreso to avoid this absolute scene. Molly was hovering a few steps from the door, hands clenched into her dress and a worried look on her face.

I gave her a frown of sympathy, and we both shrugged, because what can one do?

Something else shattered within the laboratory, and I chanced a quick peek inside, fearing that they were full-on fighting now. They were pressed up against a desk, hands clenched in each other’s lapels, kissing furiously, and I mean furiously.

It was a good thing they’d stopped noticing me a while ago, because I couldn’t stop staring if they’d paid me to. It’s not every day you get to see Nightingale be anything but unflappable, and to see him now, my distant, regal guv’nor, all but wrapped around another bloke, one of David’s hands in his hair, messing up that careful side-part, tugging to what I imagined was the point of pain, to hear him muffle some noise against David’s lips, ugh, well...

Feeling a bit hot under the collar suddenly for some reason, I turned back to Molly, who had arched an eyebrow but was looking no less worried.

“God, what the fuck,” I said to her. “Were they always like that?”

Molly shook her head. It occurred to me that of course, she’d already worked and lived here since before the 1920s, she’d know - perhaps - what they had been like.

“Wonder what it was like,” I said, not knowing what I was expecting from her. Did I want her to, what, whip out a notebook and start taking down the story?

Then Molly did something... weird.

For a moment she paused, her head cocked as if she were deliberating something. Then she suddenly grabbed me, something she had never done before, and she was very close, and I could see all her teeth, and--

I was stood in the same hallway, but different, observing from the outside, somehow. Molly was no longer in front of me, but on the stairs holding a broom, sweeping down. Just to test my hypothesis on what was happening here, I went up to her and waved a hand in front of her face. She didn’t react. So this was... elsewhere, elsewhen, even with her looking like the same old Molly.

I heard steps down the stairs and soon a young man appeared, one I had some initial trouble recognizing as Nightingale. I put this Nightingale in his early thirties at most, and not only was he not nearly as buttoned up as the Nightingale of the present, his whole demeanor was markedly different. There was a skip in his step, that smile on his face that made him look all of fourteen openly and permanently displayed, his hair artfully ruffled rather than strictly parted. There was a carelessness to him that was, to me, entirely alien.

“Hello, Molly,” said the Other Nightingale. “Is he in?”

Molly nodded.

“I’ll just...” He maneuvered himself past her on the stairs with a natural, fluid grace. “...pop on in then.”

Molly put a finger to her lips. The Other Nightingale laughed.

“Yes, yes, careful. I know, I’m always careful. You keep an eye on the hallway, yes? Splendid.” He sauntered, I noticed, towards the same door I had just exited. Halfway there, he turned around again. “Thanks, Molly. Don’t know what we’d do without you.”

Molly shook her head, in a display of fondness, I thought.

The laboratory, when he went in, was different, all surfaces clean to the point of shining, not a speck of dust in sight, but very much in use. All kinds of equipment and folders with notes covered the desks, all but one at which Mellenby was working. He was in a lab coat, and also looked younger, but it was undeniably him. He was doing something fiddly with a pipette and large petri dish, in which some unknown liquid was currently drying.

“Davey, thought I’d find you in here,” Nightingale said, giving Mellenby a fetching grin, which was met with an absentminded smile. Mellenby looked up from his work with an expression in his eyes that communicated both preoccupation and inordinate fondness.

“Ah, good morning, Thomas.”

“Morning? It’s almost noon.” Nightingale sat down on a lab bench as if he was in the habit to, like he was in and out of here every other day. “Been holed up in here since before breakfast, have you?”

“Yes, I’m... afraid I missed it, didn’t I?” Mellenby crossed the room from one desk to another, scribbling something in an open notebook. “I was going to go up and grab a bite to eat, but time got away from me.”

“And you with your nice new watch.”

“Hmmm.” Mellenby picked up another notebook, leafing through it. For a while he worked silently, peering at samples of something through a microscope and taking notes. Nightingale observed him with an expression of good-natured ignorance on his face, but I saw him grow bored by degrees. Soon he adjusted his tie, shifted in his seat and ran a hand through his hair. Only when he huffed theatrically, a bit of a pout on his face, did I understand that he was preening for his boyfriend’s attention, and I was glad they couldn’t hear the sudden laugh this shocked out of me.

When he wasn’t getting what he wanted, Nightingale leaned back on the lab bench in now starkly evident boredom and cast a tiny werelight. He popped impello and something else on it that I wasn’t familiar with, which enabled him to bounce the werelight off the table and into his palm like a small, glowing tennis ball. He did that a few times and then started shifting it between his fingers, obviously just fidgeting to keep himself occupied.

It got Mellenby to pay attention to him at last. “Thomas, stop. Your magic in here might taint the emulsion.”

“Oh, by all means.” Nightingale extinguished the werelight, looking just slightly put out. “I’ll get out of your hair, then, lest I taint your emulsion.”

That finally got Mellenby to put his many notebooks down. “Is something wrong, Thomas?”

Nightingale sighed. “Nothing. Well...”

Mellenby rounded the table, until he was stood directly in front of Nightingale, resting those large, clear eyes on him. They weren’t touching, anyone barging in would have seen nothing but an intent conversation between friends. But to someone in the know, which I was, there was a sort of intimacy in it, in how they leaned so close together. “Well?”

“I’m only in the country for another week. Once I leave, we might not see each other for half a year. I was hoping we might do something together, something other, that is, than me watching you work.”

“Oh.” Mellenby looked startled. “Oh songbird, oh no. Of course I want to go out with you, these experiments are rather time-sensitive, that’s all.”

“Well, you knew a month in advance when I’d be at the Folly. Yet you simply had to start a time-sensitive experiment just now. If it’s something I did, will you please let me know?”

Mellenby inhaled sharply. “Oh dear. You’re right, that was thoughtless of me. Of course you did nothing wrong. I’m overjoyed to have you here, to talk to you in person, to... just to see you. I was simply so enthusiastic about getting results here, I clean forgot we didn’t have all that much time.” For just a second, he leaned in, resting his forehead against Nightingale’s. “I’ll see if I can wrap up here by tomorrow, alright? Will you forgive me?”

“Tomorrow? But yesterday you said it would take several--”

“There’ll be time enough to start anew once you’re back in Lahore. And I’ll tell you what.” Mellenby disengaged, stepping back behind his desk and retrieving a folded piece of paper from a drawer. “This is a letter from my father. He owns this hunting lodge, out in the countryside. Not that he goes there anymore, on account of his injury. He’s been asking and asking me to go out and check on it. Next time you’re in the country, we could go there together. Hmm? Make a real holiday of it.”

Nightingale cocked his head. “You don’t even like to hunt.”

“We wouldn’t have to. It’ll be us two and the wilderness. Nice fishing pond, too. No one else for miles. Just you and me and a sizeable bed at our disposal.”

“What...” Nightingale lowered his voice to a near-whisper, “Share a bed?”

Mellenby grinned. “If we take enough provisions along, we won’t have to get up for days.”

“Davey!” I swear, not once has Nightingale ever been this gleeful in my presence. He swept around the desk and caught Mellenby in a hug, tilting his head to bring their lips together.

“Thomas!” David hissed. “If someone sees!”

“No one’s here to see,” Nightingale murmured against his lips. “No windows. Molly’s outside watching the door. Come on, just this once. Admit it, you’ve always wanted me in here.”

Mellenby huffed out a startled little laugh. “More to the point, you’ve wanted me in here. Distract me from my work like the menace you are.” Even as he said it, he was backing them up against the desk, hands coming around to rest on Nightingale’s backside and squeezing.

“Mh.” Another kiss, this one deeper, hungrier. “My diligent scientist. I would never.”

“Liar. Tease.” Mellenby stifled a moan, eyes falling closed as Nightingale’s thigh rubbed up between his legs. “Oh- songbird. My sweet songbird.”

I was pretty sure where this was going, and that I didn’t necessarily need to see any more. Thankfully, Molly seemed to share my view, or maybe she too had stopped watching at this point back then. In any case, I felt a sudden, painful, nauseating tug, and I stood out in the hallway again with Molly’s cold, bony hands on my forearms. She let go of me immediately and took a step back, as if apprehensive, maybe afraid she’d overstepped. Had she wanted to share this memory so badly? And most importantly, how had she done that? I leaned against the wall. I was dizzy.

Just as I decided to go upstairs and maybe sit down for a bit, Nightingale came back out of the lab. He gave me and Molly a somewhat quizzical look. He was just slightly ruffled, his tie a bit askew, his lips... oh dear... his lips red and slightly raw from kissing.

“What are you two still doing out here?” he asked.

Molly gave him a look that in essence communicated that she wasn’t standing here for any particular reason, that she did have every right to stand here, that she was going to stop standing here anyway, that she had much better things to do than stand here, and anyway who was he to ask? Then she turned and swept off.

I settled for a simpler shrug.

“Was there anything you needed, Peter?” Nightingale asked me. Behind him, Mellenby stuck his head out of the door. His lips also were very pink and plump, the lower one even bleeding a little. My boss had bitten someone bloody. It should have just been ridiculous, but it sent a chill down my back.

“It’s nothing, sir,” I said. “I was headed for...” Well, what would I be headed for? I’d followed him down here in the first place because I, too, had been worried about this bloke I’d known for a little over two days now. The gym, I might say, because that was this way, or the firing range. But honestly I didn’t feel up to actually going either of these places. I’d already dug a huge hole, unearthed a coffin, and been subject to whatever Molly had just done to me. All I wanted was a break.

“I was going back upstairs,” I said. “If there’s nothing else on, I’ll just be in the tech cave.”

Nightingale nodded. “Do go. You look a tad... worn.”

And you look kissed. I didn’t say that, but I got embarrassingly close. It was weird, how my eyes kept wandering towards his lips. Could I spot a remnant of some moisture there? From Mellenby’s mouth? And why did I care, anyway? It was weird, watching Nightingale get handsy with his boyfriend in Molly’s memory had done nothing to or with me. That had been a stranger I’d been watching, a person I’d never known, not my... not the Nightingale I was familiar with. But the man right in front of me right now was very, very real.

And... so what? He was allowed to have a life, I guessed.

----

Bev was in class right then, but she still answered my texts. How are things at the Folly? she wanted to know.

Still no new case for us, I told her.

I meant the Nightingale and his boyfriend situation.

It’s like watching a telenovela but with old white men, I texted her back. All cattiness and dramatic fight scenes and wild accusations and throwing stuff around. But old white men.

I didn’t tell her about my strange recent observations on Nightingale’s lips; it wouldn’t have been fair on her. Or would it? I needed more time to think about it, and at the same time, I wanted to avoid investing any further thought in it at all. I mean, why did all this even weird me out so much? Sure, I’d never seen Nightingale with anyone before, romantically, nor had he ever mentioned anything like that. But we weren’t attached at the hip, were we? We spent plenty of time apart, during which he might have gotten up to conceivably anything. Why did that thought seem so strange?

I just wasn’t used to thinking of Nightingale like that, I supposed, precisely because I never saw him... date, or whatever, and he never spoke about it. He had seemed, to me, as completely platonic as, say, Molly, or a potted fern, or a lamp. Objectively a good-looking bloke, sure, but I’d pegged him as completely uninterested in any of that. Well, you know someone until you don’t, as experience had proven.

If anything, I reckoned that while I’d been out looking for fun, I had pictured Nightingale in the Folly as always, reading... a slim volume of metaphysical poetry, or something, or sitting in a wall closet plugged into a charger until duty called. Well, maybe that was a bit much. The man wasn’t a robot. He was... he was an institution, was what he was. Nightingale was the Folly. I’d just supposed whenever I was out with Bev, or Lesley back in the day or even Simone, Nightingale would be... here. Not going anywhere. Always waiting.

(Waiting for what?)

(Waiting for me to come back...?)

I dwelled a bit on Molly’s memory, the one she had shared with me. She’d chosen a good one to get her point across. Nightingale and Mellenby had once been a normal couple: in secret, sure, given the times, but still... a normal couple who had pet names, made plans, bantered lovingly, had problems sometimes but talked them out in a level-headed and harmonious way. There was nothing level-headed about that mess now.

It’s not my relationship drama, I reminded myself once again. Sure, the novelty of Nightingale having a love life drove me to pay attention to it, but really it was none of my business.

I was thinking about just taking a look at what was on TV, when I remembered I had a Latin translation yet to finish. I groaned and reached for my textbooks when I heard somebody knock at the door.

Assuming it was probably Nightingale, I called out, “Come on in,” and went to open the door, which revealed David Mellenby instead. He looked... serious, grave.

“Thomas said you would be up here,” he said.

“Anything I can do for you?” I asked.

He nodded. “There’s something I’d like to discuss. May I come in?”

I stepped aside and let him enter. He wandered into the room, momentarily distracted by the changes I’d made to the tech cave. His eyes caught on my laptop that functioned as a HOLMES terminal and then the flatscreen mounted to the wall. “What is that?” he asked.

“It’s a television.” At least he’d picked the easier one to explain. If he’d wanted an intro to computers, we’d most likely be sat here until tomorrow.

“They’ve changed a lot, it seems,” Mellenby remarked. “This must be almost like the cinema.”

“Guess that’s the goal,” I said. “Feel free to come up here if you ever want to watch anything.” It wasn’t like I’d be getting as much use out of it as I once had, what with Bev capital e Expecting and everything. I’d started to wonder, lately, whether I’d soon move into her house completely, and take all of my stuff from the Folly. But Bev probably wouldn’t let me set up a HOLMES terminal at her house, and the Folly was still very much my nick, and would remain so especially if we got new apprentices in at some point in a vaguely defined future, and I simply didn’t have it in me to deprive Nightingale and Molly of their means to watch the rugby or the bakeoff respectively. I wondered idly what Mellenby would want to watch. Documentaries, maybe, or he and Nightingale could cuddle up on the couch and stream Queer Eye. I almost chortled out loud.

“Thanks,” Mellenby said, maybe a bit stiffly. “Much obliged.”

“Hey, not a problem. Um, you said you wanted to talk about something?”

“Yes.” He took a deep breath, as if fortifying himself. “Earlier, in the basement, you were stood before my laboratory. What did you see?”

I wondered where he was going with this. “Drywall?”

“No.” He sighed. “There’s no beating around the bush. Did you see Thomas and myself...?”

“Oh. Did I see you make out? Yeah.”

Mellenby grew pale. “God, I knew this would happen someday.” He was starting to wring his hands.

A bit belatedly, I remembered what he must be thinking now. “I don’t mind,” I said. The treacherous “Many of my friends are gay” was at the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t get to say that, or anything else, because within the blink of an eye, something about Mellenby seemed to... change. Within a second, he grew from nervously agitated to deeply, deadly calm.

“Thomas has rebuilt a life here,” he said, stepping forward. There was something in his eyes, something... wrong, like he wasn’t... wholly here, mentally. “I will not have anyone endanger that now. We have made it this far.”

He raised a hand, and I could feel that gush-of-air buildup of his signare again and it took no thought at all to raise up a shield as I propelled myself behind the couch and ducked and-- nothing. Whatever forma he’d been trying to build was suddenly, abruptly aborted.

Only then did I remember the inhibitor cuffs.

And then the door slammed open, and there was Nightingale, followed on his heels by Molly, and he threw his larger, much more impressive shield between us, and he was livid, I could see it in his face.

“Stand down!” he barked at David, who was so startled he snapped into parade rest. “See, this is why the bloody cuffs stay on!”

He peered over the backrest of the couch down at me, crouched on the floor in a defensive position. “You stand down too,” he said in a much softer voice. “Are you hurt?”

“No, sir.” And thank god all the electronics had been powered down too, I couldn’t afford a new laptop right now. Well, my phone had been on, I’d been using it to text Beverley. Another one ruined. “Just my phone.”

He waved that off. ”I’ll buy you a new one. Are you otherwise alright?”

Was I alright? My first response had been to duck, to make a shield, to defend, and it had come startlingly swiftly, without consulting my brain at all. Otherwise I would have remembered that Mellenby was unable to cast anything. “Well, my therapist will hear about this.”

Nightingale muttered something that sounded like “sorry to hear it” and gave me an absentminded pat on the shoulder as he turned back towards David. “And you! What were you thinking, trying to attack my apprentice?”

At some point, Mellenby had sunk into a squat on the floor. He was now staring down at his hands and avoiding Nightingale’s eyes. It was like all that power I had just now seen and felt in him had poured away again. “He said he saw us... earlier... I was just so scared.”

“I clearly remember telling you that Peter can be trusted with anything you’d trust me with,” Nightingale said sharply. “Including...” He gestured between them. “...this.”

“I didn’t... I forgot. I was just so scared,” Mellenby repeated. “And then for a moment it was like I was... back there.”

“In combat? Hmmm.” A tad gentled, Nightingale put a hand on David’s shoulder and guided him to sit on the couch. “I see, but there is really nothing to be scared of here.”

Mellenby looked exhausted. I doubted Nightingale’s words really registered. Of course, we should have probably considered that he’d be in a volatile mental state seeing as the war was still, to him, very recent. Besides, I doubted Nightingale had had the time or capacity to sit him down for a recent history lecture.

I tried to feel the scope of it all like he had. All the hiding, the extralegal nature of their relationship back then. All that sneaking around. Punishable by jail time, Nightingale had said. If anyone sees... keep an eye on the hallway... it was a lot. Suddenly, I wanted to be the one to give David the good news.

“It’s not a crime anymore, you know,” I said.

Mellenby looked up at me, pure incomprehension and confusion in his face. “What?”

“Oh, yes. That’s true,” Nightingale said, his hand still on David’s shoulder. “They decriminalized same-sex relations in the sixties. We don’t go to jail for it anymore.”

Mellenby sat in silence, mouth opening and closing for a moment. He looked like a guppy. “You’re telling me... what? When?”

Nightingale rubbed a thumb across David’s shoulder, and for a moment it looked like everything would be okay. “July 27th, 1967. That was the day. Just shortly after I started growing younger. When I tell you I wept over the newspaper.”

“What... does that mean?” David asked. “Is it... we can... in public?”

“Indeed.” Nightingale gave him a lopsided half-smile. “You always did say it was all a temporary quirk of our society, that prejudice.”

Mellenby beamed. “I did say that! I knew that a more enlightened era would dawn someday, and that we’d leave all that behind. Everything is change!”

And just like that, Nightingale’s face turned solemn, and cool, and detached again. “Yes. And then there I was, experiencing the new era without you.” He got up. “I shan’t deal with this right now.”

And then he left.

He left me alone with his boyfriend.

Mellenby looked torn between a lot of different emotions. He seemed like he didn’t know what to feel or think first, much less what to do.

“I am deeply sorry,” he said at last. “If I’d known about... this... I wouldn’t have attempted to... attack you, good lord, Thomas is right, what was I thinking?”

“You literally called him ‘the man I fell in love with’ yesterday. I was right there. It’s... I knew.”

“Yes, I did, didn’t I,” he muttered. “How could I have forgotten? It’s as though I lost all control of my actions. All I felt was the panic. Someone having caught us...”

I wanted to say that it was probably at least partially a PTSD thing, but he wouldn’t have known what that was either. Besides, the poor guy did urgently need a crash-course on all the history he’d missed, and it didn’t look like Nightingale was up for it. Inwardly, I sighed. Another item for the to-do list.

“Is he telling the truth?” Mellenby then asked. “Is it... did they really... it’s not illegal now?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” At least here was something nice to talk about. “You know what, if you wanted to, you could walk down the street holding hands with Nightingale, and no one... well, I won’t pretend that some idiots might not still catcall. But no one can arrest you for it. They have flags now, and a pride parade every year where they celebrate being gay and having rights and stuff, and when someone discriminates against you, you can sue them.”

Mellenby sniffled. “A parade? Of people... ahem... people being like this? How many people would possibly attend such an event?”

“In a city like London?” I said. “Easily a million.”

He stared at me for a lengthy moment. Then he said, “I... never dared to imagine there were a million of us in all the world.”

That kind of got to me. How lonely he must have felt. “Welcome to the 21st century,” I said.

Mellenby shifted in his seat, I could see he still had a question. “And I could even... kiss him? On the street?” He asked this almost in a whisper, as if we were discussing some illicit, raunchy behavior.

I grinned at him and tried to imagine Nightingale being kissed on the street. “If he wants that.”

----

I wanted to go spend the rest of the day with Bev, finish my Latin homework with her curled up against my side while she studied for her midterm, in peace and quiet, and also explain to her why I’d stopped replying to her texts, and how I’d managed to break yet another phone. But when I tried to step out, Molly and Foxglove both lingered by the door and stared at me until I got the message. They weren’t comfortable being left alone, with tension steadily mounting until the air in the Folly seemed to hum with it. And, well, fuck. I thought about all the things I didn’t know about Molly, all the things I did know of Foxglove, and why they’d be nervous in such an environment. I couldn’t just leave them.

I texted Bev from a burner phone and did my Latin homework in the mundane library all by my lonesome, but by dinner I wished I’d left after all. There wasn’t much talking. Toby, who had been hesitant about Mellenby at first, had grown to adore him because unlike Nightingale, he’d feed him scraps from the table. Molly placed a giant shepherd’s pie on the table before us, and Mellenby chirped, “Oh, my favorite! Thank you, Molly.” and Nightingale sniffed disdainfully and said “I see how it is, Molly,” and otherwise, the only one who spoke up was me, to inform Nightingale that I had finished my translation and left it at his desk in the reading room. It seemed like whenever fate deigned to nudge the two of them back together, my guv’nor, with the keen eye of the true DCI, unearthed something else to be mad about.

I excused myself once I was done eating and left them to sit and stare at opposite walls or whatever it was they did. But I’d promised Molly and Foxglove that I wouldn’t just go back to Bev’s house, and I was going to have to keep that promise. So I made my way up to my room and settled in for a long night.

#rivers of london #this chapter felt like two chapters #david mellenby lives AU #next up we have a pov change #peter is great but i feel like occasionally we need to hear from everyone else

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weepylucifer · 4 years

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nightingale, walking into the lab and seeing david’s research on the board: OH what the fuck is this, peter get me an eraser before i pass out

#david mellenby lives AU #i am prouder of this post than of the chapter i just finished #I HATE PLOT i wanna go back to writing feels exclusively #AND NOW I CAN! THANK GOD!#posts by me #rol shitpost tag

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weepylucifer · 4 years

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Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 8

Interlude: David

“Talk to Nightingale,” Peter had said. Of course David was going to converse with Thomas, frequently and on all manner of subjects. The matter of the missing crystal ball, however... well, it couldn’t hurt for David to ask around in his spare time, and catch up with Thomas on the matter at his leisure. Perhaps when he already had something to show for his efforts. Oh, Thomas would be delighted. Certainly, he was going to try to hide it and insist on him following the rules and not interfering with investigations in the future, but beneath that, he’d be glad to have this task taken care of. Then he’d see that David could still make a valuable contribution to the modern Folly.

So, inferring that Peter didn’t want to be bothered looking for that crystal ball, David ventured out (with what he dearly hoped was Peter’s covert permission) to see if some of his old contacts from the demi-monde were still around. Certainly, he expected to find the demi-monde as much changed as everything else, but some people stuck around for a seemingly indefinite amount of time.

Oberon had apparently wed one of the new river daughters, acquired some children with her and was now hosting something called ‘art therapy’. Well, David had always loved to draw. He accepted the offer of an easel, canvas and paint and got to work.

“And I may choose what I draw?” he asked.

“Of course,” Oberon told him. “The aim of this procedure is for you to confront upon the canvas whatever you feel you must.”

David nodded.

Oberon’s place was spacious in a way that was not to David’s taste, but he claimed the minimalism was conductive to his creative process. There was coffee on for him - sweet and almost white with milk, the way he preferred it - and a plate of snacks (no obligation). The food was kosher, Oberon informed him. David hadn’t often been in a position to keep kosher (it had been unheard of at the old Folly, at Casterbrook everyone had received the same boarding school lunches, and during the war you ate what you could get) and thus couldn’t claim he had been afforded even the opportunity to miss it, but it was a nice touch.

“This looks as though you knew I would return here,” he said.

“I suspected it,” Oberon said smoothly. “Your return has made little waves already, and I assume it will only make larger ones.” Apparently the orisa Peter was involved with was a sister to Oberon’s wife, and thence the news had travelled.

“Are you glad to have me back, old friend?” David asked softly. He kept his eyes fixed on the canvas, where his sketch was coming along. It would be a simplistic little thing, compared to his usual work: his hand was quite out of practice after six years of handling his staff and rifle with nary any time for anything else.

He had kept a notebook tucked into his breast pocket, where some of the other men had carried bibles, quite worn by the end of the war. Beyond drafts for new spells, notes on troop movements and strategy, and idle thoughts of his scientific work that he had let his mind drift to during the lulls, there had been little sketches there, and snippets of poems. He had drawn most of the men in his unit at some point. His poems had been dilettantish, and they had shifted focus with the time: what had started out as paeans to sweet Phoebus Apollo, the boyish god of the eyes of sun, had turned, later, to the warlike deities. He had read one aloud once, one he’d deemed sufficiently disguised, and the lads had teased him for weeks about what a harridan of a girl he must have at home, that she must compare to Athena of strategy, while their Captain had watched on with a lopsided smile.

(”What happened to Apollo?” Thomas had asked later, when they’d been alone, the only ones awake during the first watch of the night.

“The war changed him,” David had replied.)

(He’d never shown Thomas the poems to Thanatos, the angel of death.)

“I am glad you ceased the abandonment of your post,” Oberon said. “I am glad you stopped hiding.”

“It was rather chosen for me,” David argued. “The abandonment as well as the return.”

Oberon gracefully nodded his assent. He was always rather graceful in his movement. David liked to look at him, had always rather. All the controlled strength to him, the fluid, natural elegance of him. Masculinity misted off him like a golden vapour. Perhaps he should ask... but no. A wife, children: potent obstacles to that sort of thing.

For some reason, he had to think of Peter for a second. He shrugged it off. If Thomas truly hadn’t figured that one out yet, well, what on earth was David to do? Perhaps it was best to let the young man be, and look for suitable candidates for some... little adventures later. Or perhaps he was being overly optimistic, seeing as Thomas still barely gave him the time of day.

“And what is it you seek here now?” Oberon asked. “Hopefully not to disappear again? Because I am unsure of whether I would lend my hand a second time.”

David shook his head. He had wanted to disappear so badly, then. Oberon had taken pity and helped him find someone who might assist in that, who would create for him a replica of a dead body - his dead body. Now, funny enough, it was the furthest thing from his mind.

“No more running,” David said. “I am assisting the Folly in an inquiry.”

“What is your capacity within the Folly now?” Oberon asked. “I hear tell from my wife that certain elements will want to know, and soon.”

David didn’t know what certain elements meant, nor the answer to the question. “It is yet to be determined,” he said. “The Folly are looking for a dangerous magical object, that might have recently been sold to someone unaware. I don’t know my way around the demi-monde as well as I used to, my friend. With whom would I begin a search for such an object?”

Under David’s hands, the canvas began filling up with landscape. Not so simplistic after all, apparently. He couldn’t recall consciously deciding what to draw, but now he had already started, and it was going to take itself to some sort of conclusion. He had drawn the snow, the overcast sky, now for the leafless trees. He added the dark trunks, tall and imposing, and a clearing in the middle.

“I will outfit you with a list of names, and places to start,” Oberon said. “The goblin market has changed little since you last visited. The faces differ, but the customs remain.”

“That is heartening,” David replied. Satisfied with the look of his painted landscape, he started populating it. The dark shapes, so still in the snow, pitiful heaps of humanity, sunken now, vacated of their souls. A corpse, a carcass, where was the difference? The werewolf, writhing in the snow. Beaten but not yet knowing it.

“Mind where you step, though,” Oberon said. “The relationship of the demi-monde to the Isaacs has hardly grown any more cordial.”

David looked up from the canvas. “What happened?” he asked.

Oberon shrugged. His tight shirt left little to the imagination, and David watched the ripple of his muscles below the fabric with appreciation. “The Starling is working on doing things a new way, reaching out, establishing relations between the community and the Folly, but the Starling is... a recent phenomenon.”

“Pardon me. The... who now?”

“Peter Grant. Nightingale’s Starling. Some interesting ideas, that one.”

Peter Grant. David hummed thoughtfully. Peter was turning out to be a more interesting person by the day. New ideas. Peculiar methods. A man after David’s own heart, it seemed, and handsome too. And... Nightingale’s Starling, really? Then he remembered the actual topic of conversation, and mentally walked himself a few steps back.

“What does Thomas say to that?” he asked.

“Not much.” Oberon rolled his shoulders. He was doing it on purpose, David was sure. “The Nightingale keeps to himself.”

There was something odd to that statement. David picked up a smaller brush, to finish off the contours of the werewolf in its death throes. “Hm? Strange. Thomas was always the social butterfly.”

Oberon gave him an expression somewhere between amusement and incredulity, which to David was entirely weird. “Is that so?”

“I can’t imagine Thomas never popped ‘round to mingle. Sure, he wouldn’t have before the war. But he is technically fae now, and it does seem like the kind of thing he’d do, barring any other society... no offense meant.”

Oberon shook his head. “The Nightingale can barely show his face in any demi-monde pubs without half the clientele fleeing through the back door. His arrival heralds emergency, and most likely combat. Nothing else. He’s not... widely trusted by anyone in my circles.”

“I don’t understand,” David said. His hand holding the paintbrush sped up a little. The outline of the soldier, the only one upright, bent over the werewolf, got a little messy, so he corrected himself. He had not forgotten this moment, even after there had started to be many like it. The bayonet affixed to the rifle, pointed forward and downward, soon to arch for the werewolf’s throat. The staff, too, strapped to his belt. And then, out of some inexplicable impulse, David gave him wings.

These were not the serene, down-feathered wings often featured in depictions of biblical angels. These wings were breaking out of the man’s shoulders in a way that should not be, wrong and painful and bloody and raw. At last, David took another paintbrush, dipped its stiff bristles into the scarlet paint and flicked it with his index finger against the canvas. A fine red mist.

“Are you finished?” Oberon asked.

David nodded.

“Well, let’s see your offering for today.” Oberon crossed the room to stand behind David, scrutinizing the painting.

“This is a scene that you witnessed?” he asked.

“Well, the wings are an embellishment,” David said, “but otherwise, yes.”

“Is this figure supposed to be you?”

“I don’t have wings.” David shook his head.

Oberon crossed his arms. He chortled. “Oh, but you do. False wings, of wax, and the foolish hope to boot.”

“I’m Icarus,” David surmised, “my hubris caused me to fly too close to the sun and I plummeted. Very on the nose, my friend.”

“Oh, not at all. You’re Daedalus. You made these wings, you gave them to him, and you are watching all you ever loved take a nosedive off a cliff, and you’re asking yourself what you have done.”

There wasn’t much David could say to that. He wondered where Oberon had received that information. He wondered how Oberon knew what he had done.

Oberon cocked his head and gestured again at the painting. “This is the Nightingale, then.”

“I do wish everyone would stop calling him that,” David said. “The Nightingale is a construct that served to maintain troop morale. I am told that over seventy years passed since then.”

“A blink of an eye to some of us,” Oberon stated. Of course, David thought, he was much older. But that wasn’t the point.

“The point is,” he said, “I want to know what happened. I want to know how almost eight decades went by and this...” He gestured at the painting. “...is still the reality.”

“Maybe,” Oberon said, “I am not the person to ask this question.”

----

It really was a nuisance, David reflected, to be without his own vehicle. In town, it would do, but not outside of it, and as far as he remembered, his new destination was quite a drive out. He had only been once or twice, but he was certain that, outfitted with the navigation device on his new phone, if he figured it out correctly, he might get there without much trouble. But the problem of the car remained.

Well, Thomas and himself had had an agreement, back in the day, to share everything they owned between them. What’s mine is also yours, it had run. They never reneged on that agreement, and David figured this was important enough to infringe upon Thomas’s Jaguar again. At least this time around, Peter couldn’t possibly get caught in the crossfire.

As he was leaving London, he switched the radio on. Modern music was something he hadn’t gotten around to discovering yet, but he expected it to be as changed from what he remembered as everything in this new age. What he got was a mellow-voiced man singing (he would only later learn that the song was about as old as the car he was driving),

Try to see it my way Do I have to keep on talking till I can't go on? While you see it your way Run the risk of knowing that our love may soon be gone We can work it out We can work it out

While the lyrics were a little bit somber at times, the melody was upbeat and had David humming and tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. It was repetitive and by the second iteration of the chorus he was singing along. His singing voice wasn’t anything to write home about, not at all like that of Thomas, but it raised his mood a few notches and that, he supposed, was rather nice to have.

The melody stuck, and still coursed through his mind when, hours later, he arrived at that strange little tower. He got out of the car and stretched his stiff limbs expansively before walking up and ringing the doorbell.

The door was opened by... oh boy!

The door was opened by, there was no other word for it, a fuzzy young woman. Owing to the rather warm weather, she was in shorts and a black-and-gold top of some sort that, David observed, cut off an inch or so above her navel. It was very plain to see, because of this, that the whole of her was covered in a fine golden fuzz, like... like the fur of a bee, if the hairs on a bee were indeed called that. A single tendril of a glamour beckoned, almost probing, testing the waters out of routine rather than genuine interest, telling of the taste of honey and the steady buzz of the swarm and a... fuzzy embrace. As per usual with fae of the female persuasion, this left David largely unaffected.

“Yeah?” the young woman asked.

“I am looking for Hugh Oswald,” David said. “Does he still live here?”

“Sure, grandad still lives here,” the young woman replied. “Why, what do you want from him?”

Grandad. Indeed, David thought. Hugh always did ensure us rather too profusely that he was interested in beekeeping a normal amount.

“I’m come from the Folly,” he said.

“Oh,” Hugh’s granddaughter said. “They have another guy now?”

“They’ve had me for a while, in fact. Long story.” For once picking up on his opposite’s reluctance, David said, “He will want to see me. I know him quite well, we served together.”

The young woman - just now it occurred to David that he hadn’t asked her name, was it awkward doing it now? - cocked her head in a deeply sceptical way. “But you’re not the Nightingale.”

So she too knew that moniker. The Nightingale. David felt anger bubbling up within him. He took a deep breath to contain it. “No. But he is why I’m here.”

“I don’t know about this,” Hugh’s granddaughter said. “I don’t want to stress him out.”

“He will very much want to see me,” David insisted.

“I’ll go ask him if he’s up for it,” the young woman said, and slammed the door in David’s face.

David waited a minute that felt approximately like a thousand minutes, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet with pent-up energy, picking at his collar as always when he was agitated. He’d never known why very little other people tended to have these little nervous habits, but to him they seemed natural as breathing. One plucked at one’s clothes when one was nervous, and one flapped one’s hands at about chest-height when one was in extreme happiness. That was how feelings were appropriately expressed. Curtailing these expressions could feel grating to the point of extreme discomfort, so he had never put much effort in trying, even when people stared sometimes.

The door opened again, revealing the bee... woman. “He says you can come up.”

David nodded. “Splendid.” She waved him to come in, and in he went. Not much had changed from his vague recollection of Hugh’s weird tower. Some furniture had been replaced or positioned differently since, but it was still much the same place.

“Out back,” Hugh’s granddaughter waved a hand in the direction of the staircase. “He’s in the garden.”

“I know my way,” David said, and yet still she followed one step behind him. Should he ask her name now? He did not.

They stepped out into the garden and David registered the omnipresent buzz of the swarm, the many bee-friendly flower arrangements and fruit trees before he registered the old man in the wheelchair. “Hugh Oswald,” he said, “We’ve much to discuss.”

The old man made a startled sound and recoiled so violently he almost toppled his chair over. David winced in sympathy and started towards him hands raised, not sure what to do to help but needing to do something, but Hugh’s granddaughter beat him to it. She rushed to her grandfather’s side and steadied him, stroking his back soothingly, then turned her head to throw David a look of pure venom. For a moment, he felt a prickle down his arms, like the painful little stings of a myriad bees.

“See,” she exclaimed, “this is why I didn’t want to let you in here, moron!”

“Mellissa...” Hugh Oswald gasped. His voice sounded as frail as he looked, god, he looked wizened, he looked like he’d disintegrate into dust at a careful touch, this couldn’t be, this wasn’t Hugh, Hugh was twenty and strong and full of the brimming vigour of youth, Hugh wasn’t old, couldn’t be old, and David was beginning to tremble- “Mellissa, you see him too?”

“What?” Hugh’s granddaughter snapped. (Mellissa, she was Mellissa, that was her name.) “Of course I see him. The idiot! I had no idea he was going to scare you!”

“But...” Hugh raised a shaking hand, pointing in David’s direction. He had trouble catching his breath, and his other, gnarled hand clawed into the armrest of his chair as he gasped. “David Mellenby is buried.”

“No, Hugh,” David said softly. Oh, he was still trembling, he felt like he should faint, but he couldn’t now. “No, I’m quite alive. Please, we can sit together and I can explain.”

“Nope,” Mellissa said. “You’re leaving. Right the fuck now, or I’ll have the hive on you.”

The bees seemed to buzz louder. David began to retreat.

“Wait,” Hugh Oswald said, sitting up a little straighter with a small amount of struggle. “Wait, Mellissa, let him stay. I want to hear...”

“Grandad, I don’t think you should...”

“If he’s really here and not dead, I want to know why,” Hugh Oswald said, his voice a tad firmer now.

Mellissa seemed extremely reluctant to agree to this, but she relented. “I’ll be close by.” She glared at David one last time as she went back inside the tower. “You pull any shit at all and I’ll see you chased out, Mr. Folly.”

David could do nothing but nod.

He picked up the spare chair and sat across from the old man. When he looked into his face, he could just about see, beneath the fine net of wrinkles and the wisp of thin, white hair, the boy Hugh Oswald he had known. It sent a shiver down his spine. He hadn’t realized...

He hadn’t realized until that moment what ‘eighty years’ really meant. At times, it felt like he had simply been transported into a kind of fairyland, a place where up was down, being... the way he was was legalized and celebrated with parades, but his lover was determined to never let him near again. A dimension of opposites. But Hugh, here, like this, showed him plainly that it was the same world, although having turned times upon times without his active participation. Hugh Oswald had grown old in his absence, so very old it seemed a miracle he was upright still. How many survivors of Ettersberg had died in those long interim years, simply from a too-long life? How had David not thought to ask?

“Yes,” Hugh said, “it’s not looking too well, is it?”

It took David a second to realize he meant himself. “You look fine,” he muttered, drawing patterns on the tablecloth.

Hugh Oswald made a wheezing sound. David grew worried, but then realized it was laughter. “Still a miserable liar.”

“I’m not...!” David started, but was there any use in denying anything now? Hugh looked frail, and that was obvious enough.

Hugh waved it off. “Do tell, old friend,” he said, and while he was trying very hard to put a calm face on it, the tremor was still present in his voice, “what brings you here, back from the grave? I found your body...” His voice caught, and splintered on the last word, and for an endlessly, agonizingly long moment, he fought to maintain his composure.

David felt like dirt. What had he done to the boy? How could you do this to Oswald, Thomas had asked him, a few days ago in that cave, and he had been right to ask.

“Never, in fact, in the grave.” In short, David summarized what had happened to him, his heedless flight into the countryside, the faerie he’d met, the long sleep. “I’m dearly sorry,” he said, something he seemed to be saying often these days, “of course I should’ve remembered that my sudden appearance would startle you. Only, I assumed Thomas had already told you I was back. You would’ve been the first to call, no?”

Hugh Oswald wheeze-laughed again. “Thomas? Hah! The Nightingale hasn’t spoken to me in over twenty years.”

David blinked.

David blinked again.

David blinked back to the year 1944, to Arnhem, Private Hugh Oswald’s first engagement. The boy had barely been of age. After the dust had settled, he had broken down weeping, and David had found him later cradled in Thomas’ arms, head resting on his shoulder, both hands clutching his Captain’s jacket, tears and snot leaving a growing stain on Thomas’ uniform. Thomas had shushed him, muttering that yes, he knew, yes, he understood. Oswald had become one of Thomas’ boys, a favorite, maybe. Thomas had always had a way of almost obessively mothering the youngest recruits. And David, of course, as Thomas’ lieutenant and partner (although no one would have known about that latter part, obviously) had, as a matter of course, shouldered his part of the weight.

They hadn’t talked for twenty years? Why? How?

“What happened?” he asked.

At this point, Mellissa came back out with a cup of tea which she placed in front of her grandfather, and nothing for David. David decided not to mind.

“What happened?” Oswald carefully took a miniscule sip of his tea, testing the temperature. “Time passed. I grew older. Thomas grew younger. It... pains him, I suppose, seeing me this way. It pains you right now.”

David waved it off. Yes, it... shocked him seeing Hugh like this. But that shock was his own thing to overcome. “People grow old. Surely Thomas is not so thin-skinned as to break contact with one of his closest friends over this alone.”

Oswald shrugged. “I don’t know what else it might have been. We used to meet fairly regularly up until the late sixties. I can’t recall exactly when, but he broke contact fairly shortly after the rejuvenation event. We didn’t see much of him after that.”

“Who else is still standing?” David inquired.

“Ah. Arkwright is still alive, Patterson, Simpkins, Gerald and Mercier - John, not Edwin, obviously. Giles the younger and Rooney, although he’s been having heart problems. Blaine and Gardiner. A few others. Thomas doesn’t talk to them, either.”

David began drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “Have you fellas asked him why? Has he ever explained himself?” It seemed impossible that Thomas should, for any reason, leave his ducklings behind. A world of opposites, again.

Hugh Oswald looked out at his garden. “We weren’t going to make demands of him. He’s... he’s the Nightingale.”

The flat of David’s hand hit the table so hard it smarted. “No!”

Oswald winced. “Wh- what...?”

“Perhaps Thomas stopped talking to you because you insist on doing this!”

“Doing... what?” Oswald cocked his head, confused at David’s sudden ire. Oh, yes, they all tended to forget he could be angry. Had always tended to forget that. Lieutenant Mellenby had always been the soft, pale shadow attached to Captain Nightingale, until they’d learned that he had been made Lieutenant for a reason, that he held ferocity within him rivalling, and sometimes surpassing, that of Thomas.

“The Nightingale. You really kept that up all these years, hm? He is still going about his life like that, isn’t he! The war has been over for such a long time! How old are you now, Private Oswald, hm? You must be pushing a hundred. Did you lads have him carry you all on his shoulders for the entire duration? And then you did not even have the common civility to reach out and inquire whether he was struggling?”

Because Thomas was having troubles, as much was clear. David remembered the other night in the reading room in stark detail, remembered how something had been revealed to him there in its sudden vulnerability that he could not categorize.

“It was just his way. You don’t...” Oswald interrupted himself, but David could guess at the end of that sentence. You don’t ask the Nightingale whether he’s struggling. Goodness but he wanted to drop his head into his hands and stay like that for a while. Thomas had gotten that nickname when he’d joined the school choir. In this moment, David wanted very much to chuck a fireball at a few of Oswald’s pretty flower arrangements, and was almost thankful for the inhibitor cuffs.

“Well, you didn’t know him before the war like I did.” David sighed. And how indeed would Oswald know? He was much too young. “I see how it all changed him. And it’s not improved a bit, it seems, in all the years. He doesn’t seem to have one true friend in all the world. He secludes himself even from me, and I’m his lover.”

Oswald shifted in his seat. “You...?”

“You heard me right, his lover.” He didn’t originally come here to unload this on Hugh, but now that he’d started, he couldn’t seem to stop himself. It was allowed now, the law was on his side now, and there was nothing Hugh could do but sit and take it. “Do you understand me? We are as Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, we are as Wilde and Bosie Douglas, we are two Alan Turings. We are Friends of Mrs. King. We commit acts of buggery upon each other, and we do so extremely well. We-”

“I know what a gay man is, Davey, you can quiet down,” Hugh Oswald said with a tired wave of his hand. “Look, none of us knew this for certain about the two of you, but a fair few of us suspected. We thought it best not to pry at the time. What makes you tell me now?”

“I’m...” David rubbed his eyes. They stung a bit. “I’m telling you in part because I can, I suppose. And because I need to impart to you that Thomas is a man who bleeds red. He lost everything too, you know. He lost me, and that is my own shame to bear, but he would have needed a friend, and what he got appears to have been a gaggle of mouth-breathers chorusing ‘If the Nightingale can do it, so can I’. Yes, you lads needed something, too. But you went back here and lived out a life in peace, and Thomas has kept on fighting the war every second since. And you’re surprised he didn’t show at company reunions? You gave him notice of my ‘death’, didn’t you?”

“Yes.” Oswald gripped the edge of the table with both hands, attempting perhaps to keep his calm. “He sort of nodded, and dismissed me from the hospital room. ‘Thanks for telling me’, he said, ‘Dismissed, Private’. And he did that blank face of his. And that was it, that was all of it.”

David ran his hands across his face. He couldn’t begin to imagine how they both had to have been hurting. I’m such a bloody idiot. “This is a mess,” he groaned. “This is a mess and I’m not equipped to fix it.”

“Well, well.” Oswald patted his hand. “You’re back now, isn’t that enough?”

“No,” David said. “It’s too little too late. I fear we all broke Thomas, and there’s no unbreaking him.”

----

Back at the Folly, David parked the Jag, snuck in through the back door and collapsed on a couch in the drawing room. He felt drained. Driving from Herefordshire had taken a while. It was late, darkness was beginning to fall, and he was tired.

He felt more than saw Molly enter. When he turned and beheld her, she was carrying a tray with tea and small sandwiches. The small dog they had here now was following on her heel, hoping to catch a bite. David noticed just then that he had missed lunch and dinner, and he was quite hungry.

He gave Molly a small smile. “Oh, are these for me?”

Molly nodded, and set the tray down on a coffee table. The Folly was full of these rooms, David thought idly, rooms of artfully arranged armchairs and little tables, rooms that nobody now used. What a waste, what a tremendous waste. He took a sandwich. The dog - his collar said Toby - immediately begged, and David bent down and stroked his fur. Good boy.

“I still don’t understand it, Molly,” he said. “I saw Oswald, but he gave me more questions than answers. Why were things permitted to get this way? Yes, Hugh is old now, and frail, but he had a life, in his way. He continued doing what he loved to do. He fucked a bee, somehow. Why was this not a possibility... here?”

Molly tilted her head to the side. The look in her eyes was... calculating, somehow. Do you want to know? she seemed to be asking. Can you bear the knowing?

“I want to know anything anyone can tell me,” David told her. This was his penance. And more, he couldn’t stay his natural curiosity. He had to empty this cup to the bitter dregs.

She took a step forward, reached out her hands, and suddenly was touching him. In all this time, she had never touched him--

He blinked his eyes, and a brief bout of blackness enveloped him, and he was suddenly elsewhere. He was in his own bedroom. How had that happened? It was night, not dusk. He quickly cycled through, and dismissed, half a dozen hypotheses. He had certainly not sleepwalked, and Molly certainly hadn’t carried him here. This felt too strange to be any of those. And the room was different, clothes and books and magazines lying about that he didn’t own anymore and hadn’t in a long time. What...?

There was someone in his bed.

When David went closer to investigate, it felt like he was floating rather than walking. It took him a few seconds to identify Thomas there in his bed (where he had every right to be) because so much was different. This was not Thomas of present days, except if he’d fallen very grievously ill very quickly while David had been away. He was gaunt and sickly pale, messy, unwashed strands of his hair hanging into his face, his jaw littered with chestnut-coloured scruff. He was fully dressed, down to his combat boots, and clutching to his chest a piece of fabric - a jumper, one of David’s own old favorites.

He waved a hand in front of Thomas’s eyes and got no reaction. Just a vacant, empty stare fixed at the ceiling.

The door was cracked open, slowly, carefully, and Molly entered. She was carrying an empty laundry basket under her arm.

Oh, this had to be a memory, David thought. A memory that Molly was now sharing with him. How fascinating. How did she do that? Had she always been able to do that?

Molly approached the bed and gestured with her free hand in the vague direction of it. No reaction came from Thomas. He seemed catatonic, wholly somewhere else, or maybe nowhere at all.

Molly hitched the laundry basket higher up her hip. Still no reaction.

She gestured again, perhaps a bit frustratedly. When there was still no movement in response to this, she bent down and carefully, with the very tips of her fingers, reached for the jumper in Thomas’ hands.

“No!”

Immediately, Thomas snapped to, curling protectively around the bit of fabric. One of his hands twitched and his shield came up, with the same intensity as on the battlefield, with a whoomph of raw energy that, as always, even just in this second-hand memory, felt like it made David’s teeth rattle.

Molly threw up a hand almost in exasperation, and gestured again at the bedsheets, the jumper - a cream-coloured one - then at her laundry basket.

“No... no. You can’t... can’t.” Thomas looked up at her out of wild, red-rimmed eyes. His voice sounded like he’d screamed it hoarse. David thought of his boyfriend as he’d met him, with that easy grin and the sun on his face, thought too of his revered Captain, sure as a rock in every crisis, a force of nature when unfettered on the battlefield. This iteration of Thomas looked feral.

“It smells like him,” Thomas muttered. “It does, still, a bit. Nothing else does anymore.”

Molly shook her head, enveloped by deep pity.

“Do you understand, nothing else... Molly...” He began rocking himself back and forth, cradling David’s jumper to his chest like a mother her baby, like a child a favorite doll. “Please don’t take... please, please don’t make me...”

Thomas Nightingale, pleading.

Molly stepped back, and the shield broke apart, and Thomas buried his face in the cream-colored wool, and David could hear his flat, hitched sobs, like they were being torn out of him, and he wished to never have been born to cause such grief.

Beyond the window, the light changed. It changed rapidly, light and dark and light again, and David watched as Thomas remained still and unmoving on the bed, barely changing position, watched in fast-forward as his hair and beard grew, as he got ever thinner, as Molly came and went and tried and more often than not failed to force some food upon him, and the days turned to weeks turned to months--

“Stop,” he cried, “Stop, Molly, stop, I can’t see any more!”

Seemingly Molly had heard him and was complying, as David felt a huge, yanking tug and was back in the drawing room, breathing heavily and slightly nauseous and... still... holding a sandwich. He put it down for Toby. He wasn’t hungry now.

“Damn,” David said. He pulled up his knees and wrapped his arms around them, not caring if it didn’t look proper, there was no one here but Molly to witness it. “Was it like that all of the time?”

Molly vaguely waved a hand.

“But it’s better now. It is better now.”

Molly shrugged. She had always been able to communicate much with sparse gestures. She then lowered her hands, and looked at the floor.

“Listen, don’t you think that. You’ve done more than enough, I’m sure. You’ve given your all. You still do, don’t you?”

There was some movement at the door, and David looked up to see the second fae had appeared, the new one - Foxglove. Molly’s... sister?

She moved - in that gliding way the high fae moved - closer to Molly and opened her arms. Molly stood still as a statue for a second, then she accepted the comfort, hugging her sister, resting her head on Foxglove’s shoulder. Even amidst all the misery, David’s heart felt a flush of that comfort, too.

This is good to see, he thought. And he knew what he had to do next.

----

The light was still on in Thomas’ bedroom, pouring out under the door in a warm, golden sheen, so David knocked and then let himself inside.

Thomas hadn’t undressed for bed yet; he was seated at his desk, pen in hand, finally correcting Peter’s homework. It was good to see him, not whole by a long shot, but at the very least not driven frenzied by grief.

Thomas put his pen down. “What is it, David? Come to apologize for disappearing with the Jag a second time?”

“I’m sorry,” David said. He couldn’t bear to look at Thomas’s face and see that cold disapproval there now, so he hung his head, and scrutinized the carpet.

“You do realize you cannot just go off like that?” There was a small scraping sound as Thomas pushed his chair back and stood.

“What’s yours is mine,” David muttered. “What’s mine is yours.” He felt so very tired.

He felt the sigh more than he heard it. He knew without looking up that Thomas was rolling his eyes now. “Look, certainly it annoys me that you keep spiriting my car away, but there is more to this than me feeling territorial about my property. I didn’t know where you were all day. You only recently got back. We’ve not gauged yet how deeply you’re affected by what you’ve experienced, you might endanger yourself going off alone, you might be volatile...”

And now Thomas was stood before him, and David felt his hands resting on his shoulders - Thomas had such beautiful hands, fine and graceful, he had always loved them - cupping his face, combing through his hair, like Thomas was reassuring himself that David was really here. Searching. David laughed.

“I might be volatile? I? Me?”

“You’re something, that’s for sure.” A hand lifted his chin, gentle but unyielding. “Look at me, Davey. What’s going on?”

And David met those clear, grey eyes and something in him bubbled over. He threw his arms around Thomas with abandon, and pulled him close, and held him there. “Oh, Thomas. Oh, Thomas.”

A hand was carding through his hair, and it felt so good after the day he’d had. “David...”

“I went to see Oswald.”

Thomas’ hands withdrew, and he took a step back, disentangling them again. “You...?” For a moment, something flashed in his eyes, and was suppressed too quickly for David to decipher. “How was he?”

“He was old... very old. His granddaughter is a bee. But Thomas, I understand now. I understand it all.”

David laughed again. His head spun. “I understand why you are this way now. And you’re not mad at me because I ran away, you don’t even bear a grudge against me because of Ettersberg. Or perhaps you do, but that’s hardly the point, is it? You’re not angry, you’re scared.”

And there it was again, something flashing in the depths of those grey eyes, a flicker of uncertainty, ruthlessly smothered. “I beg your pardon,” Thomas said.

“For all these years you’ve had to go it alone,” David replied. He felt fevered in that way that resembled emerging from a week-long series of gruelling and time-intensive experiments crowned at last by success. How everything fit together so smoothly at last! Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion. “Letting no one close was where your salvation lay. You stopped contacting the lads because they couldn’t see that you were struggling with them starting to age past you. That you felt some sort of way about it. You’ve been Hugh’s Greek hero for so long. You don’t know how to step off that plinth and be human again. You have reason to fear that it will get bad... very bad, if you try it.”

David grinned, and seized Thomas by the lapels, and would have picked him up and spun him around the room if he didn’t feel so light-headed, so very drunk on the exhilaration of everything coming together at last. “But that’s all right now, my sweet songbird. I’m here! I will take good care of you. I understand you, fully. You’ve had to build these walls, but me going past them is a good thing. You can finally put that all down - that sword and shield, all down and away. And I will stand guard. Won’t that be good?”

Thomas tore himself away.

The exhilaration shrivelled, all joy in David took a fatal plunge at the cold rage in Thomas’ face.

“Lieutenant Mellenby,” Thomas said quietly (oh, he never raised his voice when he got angry anymore, he grew quieter), “What the fuck did you just say to me right now?”

David felt tears threatening to spill at last. He was no longer light. He was miserable and anchored to this carpet, his body a lead weight. “Thomas...”

“You have no right. No right at all. How dare you? How... dare you? After Ettersberg? After all you’ve caused to happen?”

“I only meant...”

“There’s the door. Leave now, before I start throwing fireballs.”

#david mellenby lives AU #rivers of london #oh boy 5:30 in the morning!#david: ''i am helping!'' *makes it worse*

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weepylucifer · 4 years

Text

Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 6

Thomas comforts. Peter listens. David steals his boyfriend’s car.

Halfway through the night, I was woken by a scream.

It had me sitting up straight in bed, disoriented, heart beating a little too fast, thinking at first that I’d dreamt the noise, whatever it had been... then someone screamed again, somewhere within the Folly.

I had my slippers on and was out the door within two seconds of the second scream.

As I cast a werelight and let it float an inch above my palm, I proceeded, slowly and carefully, down the empty hallway. I was grateful for the warm, steady, non-horror-movie-esque glow that my werelight provided, otherwise this would have been creepy. Of course, the part of my mind that wasn’t just primed on observing wondered who had screamed and why. Someone needed my help somewhere out here and I didn’t know anything further about the situation, but so help me I was going to be there.

Then, beyond one of the many closed doors in this hallway, I heard something. A rustle, a... whimper? I paused.

The door was nothing to me. Just another disused bedroom, like many on this floor. I turned the handle. It wasn’t locked.

The air in the room smelled like Molly had freshly cleaned here, readying it for its new-old inhabitant. In my werelight’s glow, I saw a shape in the bed against the far wall, writhing, flailing, making these little whimpers. I took a step inside.

“No,” said a voice in my back.

I full-body flinched. I’m not proud of this buy I almost shrieked when a hand fell onto my shoulder. I spun around.

“I know how to handle this,” Nightingale said. He was still fully dressed, his suit rumpled like he’d slept in it. His face was milk-pale in the darkness, and he smelled of booze.

“If you’re sure, sir?” I whispered. For a moment, as he passed me by in the doorway, we were very close. I held my breath as he breathed a cloud of alcohol onto my face.

“I am. Go back to bed, Peter.”

But I stayed standing where I was and watched as Nightingale knelt by the bed, plunged a hand into the multiple thick blankets piled onto there and muttered something I couldn’t quite catch. The flailing, writhing, blanketed shape quieted for a moment, and Mellenby’s curly head shot up from his nest. He was panting, gasping, shaking and clutching the blankets to him.

“It’s...” he gasped. “I’m...”

“You’re home,” Nightingale murmured. “It’s over now.”

Mellenby grabbed onto his hand like a lifeline. “I was back at... that place.”

Nightingale nodded, this wasn’t surprising or new to him. “Ettersberg. Yes. I dream of it too.”

Mellenby shuddered. “You do? Even all these years later?”

“Yes,” Nightingale said grimly, “Even all these years later.”

“So this never... never goes away? It never stops?”

“It hasn’t for me, not substantially.” Absentmindedly, it seemed, Nightingale wiped a bead of sweat off Mellenby’s brow with his thumb. “I wish I could tell you something more encouraging.”

“It was so cold,” Mellenby whispered. “I’m just... so cold.”

“Mmh. We’ll get you warm.” Nightingale sat down on the bed and rearranged them so that he could pull David into his arms. This accomplished, he looked back up at me.

“Still here, are you?” he asked me quietly.

Sorry, I mouthed and got away, not wanting to intrude any further.

I got a glass of water in the kitchen and went back up to my bedroom. On the way past Mellenby’s room, I peered once more, just for a second, through the cracked door. I could see the two of them nestled in bed like kids at a sleepover, I could hear their whispered words, too low for me to make out.

----

We didn’t talk about any of that at breakfast. Nightingale sat with his coffee and his crossword as usual, and if he hid a few yawns behind his hand, no one mentioned it. Molly served food. David had availed himself of Nightingale’s phone and was now tinkering with it with the fervor and enthusiasm of the true neophile. Periodically he would ask a question like “What does this button do?” and Nightingale would glance over and say something to the effect of “I don’t know, I never use that one.”

After a few such exchanges, Mellenby put the phone down with a put-upon expression. “Really, Thomas,” he said, “I can’t believe you have this... this wondrous gadget of near-infinite uses at your convenience and never ever figured out how to fully utilize it.”

Nightingale pointedly rustled his newspaper. “I will utilize it when and if it becomes necessary. Otherwise I don’t see a reason to waste time on it.”

Mellenby sighed. “But I have so many questions!”

“Look, why don’t you have Peter show you,” Nightingale suggested and went back to the newspaper, skimming the headlines and muttering something about “god-damned Cameron”.

“Why do you read the Torygraph, anyway?” I asked.

“Crossword’s stellar, unfortunately,” Nightingale said and gave me a get-on-with-it hand gesture. I went out in the hallway to phone Bev first and foremost, and when I had made sure she didn’t need anything from me right this second (she told me to stop fussing but, hey, she was pregnant) it seemed like my morning would be devoted to explaining cellphones to David Mellenby.

I ended up taking him into town and out of Nightingale’s hair. His opposition to us hanging out at all seemed to have subsided a bit, maybe he’d stopped suspecting that we’d conspire to do science behind his back. Or perhaps he just secretly wanted to have a lie-down with his hangover. One of these two.

“I want modern clothing,” Mellenby proclaimed to my surprise. “All of my things look like... well, like they’ve been mouldering in a wardrobe for eighty years, give or take. And I would love to avail myself of an... intelligent phone.”

“A smartphone?” I had to grin. “You’re going to need money for that.” I wondered if he had money, and what had happened to it after his “death”. Had Nightingale taken care of it? Had anyone? Had David had family?

The question became void when Mellenby said, “Thomas gave me, um, this,” and held up the Folly’s credit card. God and Nightingale and possibly but not definitely the commissioner only knew how much was on that. “He told me to just take whatever I need.”

I couldn’t help myself, I let out a wolf-whistle. “The man does love you.”

Mellenby ducked his head, a shy smile spreading involuntarily on his face. “I should hope so.”

I expected he wanted to head on over to Savile Row and get himself a wardrobe of bespoke suits true to the Nightingale way. It turned out what David Mellenby wanted was to dress precisely like everyone else on the street. He seemed drawn to comfy jumpers, cardigans and slacks and seemed to consider dumb novelty t-shirts that said things like “Don’t trust atoms - they make everything up” the height of wit and comedy.

We also got him a phone. He badgered an employee into explaining everything to him, but his friendly and unbridled enthusiasm made it near-impossible to be annoyed by him. I filmed the exchange on my own phone and sent it to Nightingale captioned “Let your bf loose in the electronics store”.

“Bf?” Nightingale texted back. “Ah. ‘Boyfriend’. Indeed. God help us all.”

As morning morphed into noon, I got us coffee just to see how Mellenby people-watched. It amused me in a weird way how he kept making googly eyes at the stores, streets, cars and people around us. He seemed to be taking the whole eighty-years-later thing remarkably well - scratch that, he seemed to be taking to it with a verve that surprised me. Probably because I was used to Nightingale, who tended to keep the modern world at arm’s length (that is, until he didn’t). At times, Mellenby simply looked astonished, or like he was wanting to ask questions but didn’t know how to best go about it. At other times I watched him smile like a kid in a candy store. I wasn’t going to ask, but then Mellenby ordered a giant unicorn-glitter-frappuccino-concoction because he saw it advertised on a billboard and “it piqued his curiosity”. Nightingale, when forced to enter a coffee shop at all, usually ordered a no-nonsense black coffee accompanied by that testy old-person-face of someone with opinions about and personally offended by the Starbucks menu.

I guess I just couldn’t help constantly comparing the two of them.

“Are you... alright with all this?” I asked him, feeling a bit hesitant to lance that boil, but curiosity winning out.

“I’m... yes, alright, I think.” He smiled at me. “This drink is... interesting.”

“Sure,” I said and waited for him to volunteer more information.

“To be honest, sometimes it all feels like a dream,” Mellenby produced. “Like a journey down the rabbit hole. I keep expecting someone to pinch me, and it’ll still be 1945. Of course things are... different, and strange to me. London has changed considerably. But then again, last I saw it, half of it was in ruins. Now there’s all these exciting new buildings, and different cars, and there are so many... well...” He looked at me and started visibly floundering, and I began to suspect what came next. “There are people on the... street who are... that is to say, there’s many...”

I decided to do the charitable thing and release him from his struggle. “Got a bit more colourful since the 40s, huh?”

Mellenby, too, coloured - as pink as his unicorn drink. “I don’t wish to offend. I... Thomas was the one who always got around within the... colonies, I rarely...”

“There’s no more empire,” I threw out, just to see how he’d react. Hugh Oswald had described him as very concerned with the fading British Empire, while Nightingale had claimed him uninterested, and I was wondering which one it was and whether I could still like him as a person after this.

“Oh boy!” Mellenby exclaimed. “That’s a big change.” And that seemed to be it.

“So you’re really just... adjusting alright.” It seemed almost too easy.

Mellenby shrugged. “I suppose so. There was... not much left for me to miss in 1945, that probably helps. And a part of me sees this as a chance, you know? Under normal circumstances I might never have experienced this new, enlightened era as I am now doing. Ah well, it keeps me from thinking about the war.”

I nodded knowingly. Distraction. Well, that sure was one explanation.

“I’m just glad I don’t get overstimulated, like I saw some of the lads do, immediately after our return from... that place. Just the nightmares, and that... unfortunate episode just yesterday. I, um... did apologize for that, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Parts of that moment were a bit of a blur, to be honest. He’d tried to attack, I’d snapped to defense, Nightingale had rushed in, then I’d told Mellenby about gay rights. All’s well that ends well. “No one got hurt, so... it’s fine.” After some thought process had gone into that, I added, “You’re going to want to get help for that, though.”

Mellenby made a face. “Help.”

“Therapy’s good now. I do it. They don’t just tell you to get up and show some backbone anymore, it really helps.” I looked at his wrists. He’d put on a silver-grey cardigan to cover the inhibitor cuffs, even with the warm weather out. “These cuffs can’t be a permanent solution.”

“No indeed.” He picked at them beneath his sleeves. “Most of my work relies on me using my magic in the lab. I cannot continue on like this. I get why Thomas sees the need, but I wish there were another way.”

“There is.” For a moment, I felt the impulse to pat his shoulder. I contained it. “Get better.”

Mellenby sighed. “Get better... easier said than done. You know, what with so much time having passed, for Thomas, in relation to me, I would have assumed I’d find him... having gotten better. But apparently... not.”

Oh, no. He wanted to talk about Nightingale.

I wasn’t about to snitch on my boss to his significant other, so I said, “He gets on alright.” Personally, I’d been happy to believe that, but then I’d started having... doubts. Lately.

Mellenby fiddled with the lid of his plastic cup, glowering down upon it like it had done him a personal injustice. “Does it truly just stay like this? Has he not found anything in all these years that helps?”

I shrugged. I don’t think Nightingale has ever gone anywhere near a therapist, and I’d much rather stick my foot in a bear trap than suggest it to him. “As coping goes, I guess he’s the expert. I mean, he did build that memorial wall.”

Mellenby cocked his head at me. “Thomas built a what now?”

----

“It’s a bit of a drive,” I said. “And I’ve only done it once. And the roads may be different than what you’ll remember.” We were exiting the coffee shop, proceeding down the road with the great, purposeful steps of people planning an endeavor. Really, that plan was still stuck in its earliest stage: We want to get somewhere, how do we pull it off?

“I’m sure between the two of us we’ll manage to find Casterbrook,” Mellenby said. “Have you got a car?”

“Yeah, but it’s at Bev’s house.” When Mellenby gave me a blank look, I explained, “Beverley Brook. My girlfriend.”

“Ah.” He nodded. Mentally, he seemed to cross me off a list. (Or was I imagining that?) I gave him three seconds... two... one...

“Like the river?” he asked.

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. My face just does this thing nowadays when Bev is discussed. “Yeah, like the river.”

“The Beverley Brook didn’t have a deity in my day.”

“A lot is different. What I’m getting at is my car’s halfway across town.”

“How long has your girlfriend been around? If you don’t mind me asking. Do you think she might talk to me?”

“I don’t know. Let’s cross the rivers when we get to them. About the car though.” Was this what dealing with me was like? All the questions and digressions? How had Nightingale not imploded under the strain of there being two of us?

“Yes, yes. Well, why don’t we just nip on back to the Folly and take Thomas’s Jaguar?” Mellenby suggested.

“The Jag?” I frowned. “I don’t know. He gets... territorial about it. And he is my boss.”

“Not mine,” Mellenby said.

I thought back on how livid Nightingale had been with David, that deep-seated rage I’d never seen in him before. And below that, other, even deeper shit lurked. “You’re not even a bit scared of him?”

“Hah!” He actually genuinely laughed. “Before he was my Captain, he had already been my boyfriend for a good long while. I’ve seen Thomas with his a--” He cleared his throat. “I’ve seen Thomas in just an array of posit- of situations. I’m not intimidated by him.”

----

He left a text.

Thomas, it ran, took the Jag. Will bring it back, presumably, by dinner. I love you. This, by the way, is David on the cellular phone.

What with the frequency with which Nightingale looked at his phone, or rather the lack thereof, he probably wouldn’t see the text until we were already back. Which explained why he didn’t immediately call both of us demanding to know where on earth we were taking his car. Still, he’d probably flip when he noticed the Jag was gone.

Between the two of us and Google Maps (Mellenby oohed and aahed accordingly) we did manage to find Casterbrook. The building looked about as I remembered it, perhaps a bit more overgrown.

“Oh, it’s desolate!” Mellenby exclaimed, looking at it with a facial expression bordering on horror. To me, it seemed fine - well, not fine, it really was kind of dreary, but it hadn’t been left to decay. Clearly, Nightingale still invested in the school’s upkeep. Then again, to someone who had known the place well-trimmed and teeming with activity, ‘desolate’ was probably accurate.

We walked across the grounds, the way Nightingale had shown me back then that led to the secret side-entrance. Mellenby was apparently reminiscing.

“Over there were the cricket and rugby fields,” he said, pointing. “That... is where I first laid eyes on Thomas.”

“Hallowed ground,” I said with a tired smile.

“I... suppose.” He lowered his head, but wasn’t deterred for long. “He was... well, in retrospect he was fifteen. But to me then, it seemed impossible that anyone should be so graceful. I had no idea why I was feeling so deeply about it. Oh my, the front door seems to be locked. And me without my magic. Do you know a lock-breaking spell?”

“Won’t need one. Nightingale showed me how to get into the night gate.”

“Ah, the night gate.” Mellenby beamed. “I remember when Thomas first asked me to meet there and go to the pub with him and his friends. No one had asked me before, and I was so nervous. I thought probably it was going to be a one-time occasion, a token of gratitude, perhaps, for my tutoring him, and that surely Thomas Nightingale wouldn’t want little old me along with all his big popular friends. It turned out he genuinely just- oh, I am boring you.”

“Eh, not boring me.” I definitely filed ‘big popular friends’ away for further examination. Bit of a jock, my guv’nor, apparently.

“But you don’t actually want to hear these stories, do you?” Mellenby lowered his head, and it was like kicking a puppy. He probably hadn’t ever talked to anyone about this, what with the subject matter being very illegal at the time. Now that he could, though, the stories seemed to just be pouring out of him, like he couldn’t help himself, like he was desperate to share them all as soon as humanly possible. I wondered what it had been like for him, having this relationship that had been so very meaningful to him, and not ever being able to mention it. I wondered how on earth he hadn’t exploded with it.

“No, no, I do,” I said. “It’s just... he is my boss and all.”

I let us inside through the notorious night gate. It had been a while since I’d been shown the spell for the door, and Mellenby remembered it but couldn’t cast, but we managed together. It was as dark in there as I remembered it being, and I cast a werelight to light the way. Mellenby cooed when he saw it.

“It’s fascinating,” he said, “your budding signare. I never thought I’d see the day Thomas took an apprentice.”

I didn’t quite know what to say to that. But before I could even think of an answer, Mellenby was off again touching the walls and sighing at the many and varied vestigia within the old building. “It’s all so present and yet so far away,” he said. “They never ever reopened the school?”

“Who would’ve done it? Who’s they? There’s only Nightingale.”

Mellenby started to say something - and snapped his mouth shut. After a few moments in which we just walked silently, he asked, “Then why do we even still own the building?”

‘We’, in this case, I assumed meant the Folly.

Sentiment, would have been my first answer. Nightingale simply hadn’t borne the thought of selling his old school very well, and had felt overwhelmed to be in charge of a decision of such magnitude. He’d told me as much. So he had simply avoided thinking at all about it, keeping the whole thing at arm’s length again - a common tactic, I was beginning to notice, with Nightingale.

“Need somewhere to keep the memorial, I guess,” was what I said.

And then it was before us, the memorial. I let my werelight grow larger, brighter, and sent it up towards the ceiling where it illuminated the near-endless rows of names, just like I’d done the first time I’d been here.

Mellenby’s mouth fell open as he spun around himself and stared up at those hundreds upon hundreds of names, stretching all the way up to the vaulted ceiling, all painstakingly carved into the wood paneling in that familiar, slightly blocky font.

“Who all contributed to this?” Mellenby asked.

I was going to fit the realization that there had been only Nightingale left active in his head somehow. Eventually. Or so I hoped. “Nightingale all by himself,” I answered. “He told me there was no one else, and someone had to do it, or something.”

“Oh, Thomas,” David whispered. “Oh, Thomas.”

I kept quiet.

Mellenby spread his palm, to make a werelight alongside mine, I realized, and then when nothing happened put his hand down.

“There are some good friends over here,” he said, pointing at a particular spot within the rows of names. There was a strain to his voice, and I feared he might cry again. “Horace Greenway, here, we were in the Latin tutoring club together. Roy Fitzgerald, my first apprentice. Didn’t make it out of Ettersberg. There’s Edward Cobb. He considered himself an empiricist, too. We had the most outrageous debates. Ballantine the third all the way over here, one of Thomas’s best friends, I never quite got on with him. There’s Pascal from the chess team, we had that funny nickname for him... and over here we have... oh... me.”

I did a double-take. But of course, Nightingale would have included David on here along with everybody else. Another casualty of Ettersberg, although indirectly.

“He... he put me with my best friends,” Mellenby said, his voice now wavering. “And my apprentices. He knew... knew I’d want to be with them.”

“You had apprentices?” I tried, desperate to derail him from his oncoming crying fit.

“I had five apprentices,” Mellenby said, to my surprise. “I wanted at least double that. But, well, the war. Only one of them made it all the way through, but he dropped off the map practically as soon as the glider hit the ground. Oh, maybe Thomas will know what happened to him.”

I remembered Nightingale’s track record regarding other practitioners running around post-war, and had to stop myself from making a face. “I doubt it.”

“Geoffrey was his name. Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Is that... anything to you?”

I felt a chill.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft had, of course, infamously gone on to found the Little Crocodiles.

If I recalled correctly, Nightingale had reacted with mild confusion when we had happened upon his name at last in our search for the Faceless Man. I shook my head. How he hadn’t gone completely spare was beyond me.

“You better talk to Nightingale about that,” I said.

Mellenby huffed and crossed his arms, like something about that statement upset him, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe it was just my tone of voice. I’d probably sounded a bit foreboding. Well, I couldn’t have helped myself.

And then, with the dark and silent walls surrounding us, with the hundreds of carved names bearing witness, I asked him the only thing I could think to ask, “What was he like during the war?”

Mellenby gave me a long and strange look. He wasn’t always, this I had already learned, an expert in reading the room, but right now I knew he knew that I hadn’t asked about Wheatcroft. Then his eyes drifted off of me, to all the names on the wall, and from thence into a vague middle distance. Perhaps he was wondering what the men commemorated here would want him to say.

“Thomas was reckless,” he said.

I blinked.

That was not what I had expected.

He seemed to catch on to my astonishment, because he exhaled a long gust of a sigh and then deigned to elaborate.

“Thomas was a good CO,” he said, “Thomas lived for his men. His loyalty was to the lads under his command foremost. The brass, the objective, the enemy, the value of his own life, stipulations, orders... morals... Thomas lost sight of a lot when it came to ensuring the safety of as many of the men as possible. He got reckless, and from a certain angle it would look the same as getting ruthless. He would charge into situations...”

Mellenby was getting choked up again. He wrapped his arms around himself and stared at the ground, his lids fluttering, he was obviously struggling to contain himself. I could do no more than stand by.

“He was strong, I have to give that to him. He was a keen strategist. Most of the time, he judged his odds accurately. And he did win us some ground, you know. That’s why he was allowed to proceed with little more than a slap on the wrist. In combat, he would periodically forego orders, abandon his position... cross battlefields all by himself at full tilt with his shield up, firing at the Krauts like a maniac, just to get the men out faster. It worked, was the thing. Doesn’t mean I didn’t die a thousand deaths in fear for him whenever he decided to do this.”

“Shit,” I said. There was little else to say. I was trying to imagine the Nightingale I knew doing anything “like a maniac”, to imagine him without his ever-present composure. A bit of that had worn off recently with David’s return but it was still a long shot towards what he was describing.

“And he was valuable, as a Captain, as a practitioner, as a symbol. That’s why command let him alone. He never was disciplined in any meaningful way... never court-martialed... and neither was I, come to think of it. I suppose command found me valuable also, or Thomas was shielding me in some way. Some things were certainly kept off the record, some things I assume command never heard of.”

“Now hold on.” This was beginning to sound less than savory. “Court-martialed?”

“Oh yes.” Mellenby made a bitter little sound. Maybe it was supposed to be a laugh, I honestly couldn’t tell. “In the later years of the war, Thomas was flirting with a court-martial near-constantly. Going in, there was an attempt to do things by the book as much as was possible. But being in the field, it wears something down, you know, within you. Things started to fall by the wayside that we would never have thought ourselves capable of abandoning. Just... lord, the bloody fascists. That god-forsaken scum.”

He clenched his fists. The sudden anger was jarring to me - I’d seen him annoyed by now, or unnerved, but never truly furious. Now I first realized, really realized with all my brain that he was a veteran.

‘Veteran’... I’d taken it to mean ‘person who needs care’. And of course it still meant that. But it also very much meant ‘retired soldier’, with all that concept entailed. Here was a man who had made his living in slaughter.

“They made us worse people, and that I cannot forgive. I heard Thomas say once that they had waived their humanity when they elected Hitler. And he was right, he was right! Lord, did I hate the Germans. Do hate them. Then Ettersberg...” He grit his teeth. His voice quieted, dulled again. “Ettersberg vindicated us. Showed us what exactly it was we’d been fighting. But, it also confronted us with our own shortcomings. Showed us that we were complicit. That I... was complicit.”

He was beginning to tremble now, first his hands, then his whole body. “And my research started it all in the first place... my theories... I...”

Yeah, I had to get him out of here, or at least out of his head. I called back my werelight and, very carefully, touched his arm and led him out of the room, back into the light.

“Hey, listen,” I said as we walked, “I’ve changed my mind. Why don’t you tell me the story of how you met Nightingale after all...”

----

We walked back to the car in a somber mood. Of course you could never really feel chipper coming back from such a place. I tried to imagine Nightingale creating the memorial, just him and his carving tools in that vast, dark, empty room by himself. From what he’d told me, it had always seemed like he’d done this first thing after leaving the hospital. It was the kind of mental picture that could drive anyone to depression.

Mellenby, too, was not a happy camper. He looked pale, drawn, he wasn’t trembling anymore, but I could see that not having a total breakdown just now had taken a lot out of him. He dropped heavily into the Jag’s passenger seat, all but collapsing into it.

“Aw, man,” I said. “Maybe we shouldn’t have come here.”

“No,” David disagreed. “It was right for me to see this.”

“Still, Nightingale will have our heads for taking off with the Jag.” I was trying for some levity, but on the other hand, the reaction Nightingale might have to our impromptu Jag theft genuinely worried me.

Mellenby shook his head, as if wanting to dislodge the cobwebs of his almost-breakdown. “Let me deal with Thomas,” he said tiredly. “Why do you always call him that, anyway?”

What was he talking about now? “Call him what?”

“Nightingale.”

“It’s his name?”

“No, I know Thomas. He would’ve offered you first-name-basis three days into your apprenticeship.”

He was spot-on in fact. It probably hadn’t been three actual days after I’d started working for him that Nightingale had suggested I call him Thomas, but it was somewhere around that mark. It hadn’t panned out, and he hadn’t offered again since.

“He did offer,” I said, “but I didn’t take him up on it. It felt too weird. I mean, he’s... he’s Nightingale, and he is my boss. We’re not... friends.”

Mellenby laughed tiredly, sweeping a hand across his eyes. “I can’t believe I ever thought you were sleeping with him.”

----

We were back on the road on our way back to London when he picked up the thread of that conversation again.

“It’s probably just because I’ve known him for so long, but it’s strange to think on Thomas commanding that kind of respect. It seems so... unlike him to be so distant.”

I felt it appropriate to ask about the war again.

“That was different,” Mellenby said. “It’s poison for troop morale, having a combat leader who is too distant. It’s been a tightrope walk, certainly, for Thomas, because you can’t be overfamiliar with your men as the CO, but... comport yourself too aloofly in the field and the men may never connect with you. Company cohesion, the men’s emotional and psychological needs, those all fell under Thomas’s purview. He was mother and father to the youngest recruits out there. Besides, we experienced so much alongside each other, it made us stick together like glue.”

I for one couldn’t imagine a Nightingale who was anything but emotionally distant and removed from the world around him. Like he’d spent all his caring in the war, I thought, just used it all up and now there was almost none left. I was certain that he cared for Molly, and reasonably convinced that he, in a way, also cared about me, as far as our professional relationship was concerned, and he tried, he did. I remembered a short while ago, when I’d gotten myself suspended after the whole Chorley fiasco, and Nightingale had given me the nudge that had led to me seeking out therapy. He cared in these short bursts, triggered by external events, like a long-derelict bulb giving out random flickers of light, interspersed by long darknesses.

What a glum mental image that was.

“I sort of assumed he was like this back then,” I told Mellenby. “What with the whole... you know... ‘the Nightingale’...”

Suddenly, Mellenby smacked his hand down onto the headboard in front of him. His face darkened rapidly, and he fixed the road before us with a grim scowl. “The Nightingale? People still call him that?”

Again, not the reaction I had been expecting. “Yeah?” I said. “Pretty much all the demi-monde calls him that. I heard from Hugh Oswald that it started as a war thing, though--”

“You spoke to Hugh about this?” Mellenby asked.

“I went and saw him a while ago.”

“Well, I don’t know what Hugh told you. But the Nightingale is a miserable conceit, and it has brought nothing but pain and trouble unto Thomas. I dearly wish--”

I never found out what Mellenby dearly wished, because in that moment, my phone rang. I gestured at him to pick it up.

“It says on this here display that someone named Guleed is calling.”

Oh. If Guleed was calling me, that either meant karaoke night was being rescheduled again, or something serious was up. “Oh, yeah, um, can you take that? It’s PC Guleed, she’s from murder.”

Mellenby made googly eyes. “Women work in the police now?”

“Look, can you just take the call?”

To his credit, he immediately swiped to accept the call and held the phone up to my face as I drove. We were starting to make quite the little team.

“Hey,” Guleed said when I announced my presence to her. “Where are you at?”

Well, this didn’t sound like it was going to be about karaoke night at all.

“We’re, that is, I’m a little ways out of town. Just driving back.”

“Well, drive back faster, because we’ve got a body and we’re thinking it’s probably one of yours.”

#david mellenby lives AU #oooh. a cliffhanger? me? it's more likely than you think #rivers of london #this one is a bit lighter on the angst #i wrote most of this secretly at work #i am so tired all of the time

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weepylucifer · 4 years

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Really want to write David geeking out over modern science, really am a big dumbass who does not know or understand any of the sciences

#david mellenby lives AU #do you see my problem here?#yo folks do any of you know any neat science things that david would lose his entire shit over #if so please approach me with it if you want to!!#posts by me

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weepylucifer · 4 years

Text

Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 5

Interlude: Thomas

(reader beware: mature content)

It was strange to say the least to have David here again after all these years. (All these years and not a bit of change.) Sometimes Thomas felt that he was hallucinating it (losing his mind at last) or dreaming. But then again, that couldn’t be the case. If this were a hallucination or a dream, things would be easier. They would be happier.

They would be happy.

Thomas had never liked to think - or hallucinate or dream - about how things with David had soured, towards the end. It had been easy to remember the good things exclusively, the companionship, the tenderness, the comfort and thrill and love. David had stayed a joyful memory, despite the tragedy of his (supposed) passing, somehow still an oasis in a desert of grief. Perhaps this had been idealization. It is easy to idealize a dead loved one. It is less easy to keep up that pretense in said loved one’s bodily, live presence.

It was strange, yes. How often had he wished in vain that someone, anyone would come back, just one of them, it didn’t even matter who? Just one other occupied room. Just one person to turn to, when things got rough. Just one person who would understand. Now someone had come back. And not just anyone. David, within reach again, to see, to speak to... to touch. But whenever his hands started reaching out, there was that memory again.

“Well, I just almost got myself and half the men shot for mutiny.”

“Shot for...? Thomas, what on earth did you do?”

“I retracted my opposition. Not willingly, mind you. I am to supervise the rearguard. You, Lieutenant, with your expertise, will most likely be part of the task force that’ll retrieve the actual library.”

“They split us up?! Thomas... do you think they know?”

“What is there to know?”

“Songbird, please...”

“You got what you wanted, Davey. You won. Operation Spatchcock is a go.”

And yet, still, despite all that, he could only ever curtail, never stop, the urge to reach and touch.

It was David, after all. David with that beautiful hair so good for tugging, with his eyes as clear as always, with those sweet, sweet lips. Those capable hands. It was David whose body Thomas knew. Touching would feel like coming home. Touching might piece something back together inside him, something that remained by itself, broken and abandoned and forgotten, for decades and decades.

And there was something scary in that thought. That David might break him open and unearth that hidden something. That there would have to be a breaking. Thomas could not afford to break another time.

So he left David to sit at the dinner table and stare holes into his plate by himself, went and fetched Peter’s finished Latin homework and attempted to peruse it in the drawing room. Peter’s Latin was coming along, at a sedate pace but nonetheless, but today it was abysmal. Clearly he’d had other things on his mind. And who could fault him? After puzzling through the first paragraph of it, Thomas crossed the room to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a glass of Scotch. The bottle was almost (but not quite) as old as he was, and had been nearly emptied slowly, over the decades, a glass or two every other year, because Thomas wasn’t a man who drunk to excess.

He found he couldn’t concentrate on the paper before him as well as he would have liked. Scraps of old, old conversations kept reverberating within his mind, loud today, understandable under the circumstances.

“You’re being paranoid, songbird. I understand, but... I am certain Folly command wouldn’t muster every last wizard of serviceable age just to send them off to die. It will be a tough mission, I’ve no doubt of that. But I’m convinced that we’ll come out on top.”

“Bullshit. It’s hundreds of miles behind the front, David. We’ll be cut off from any reinforcements. Nowhere to fall back to. According to intelligence, the place is a death trap.”

“And who do you know in intelligence? How would you have gotten an intelligence officer to relinquish that information, hm?”

“This is hardly the time. I don’t need to blow intelligence officers to see what’s bloody obvious. You think command cares if we make it through this one? It’s high time you got that pretty head out of your stack of books and faced reality. They’re willing to bet all our lives on this bloody suicide run on the off-chance that someone makes it home with that library.”

“There is considerable empirical value to that library.”

“Oh? That’s what it’s about, eh, for you? You honestly believe that I am going to stand here and let them slaughter my men for ‘considerable empirical value’. My men, David! I’ve got them this far! I’m not throwing them into the meat grinder for your fucking research.”

“Would you prefer seeing said research in the hands of the Nazis? God only knows what they’re doing with it!”

“I would see it in the hands of no one. Chuck a few bombs at the place and bury all of it. Damn you and damn your revenge and damn your research.”

Thomas sighed and poured another glass of Scotch.

Just then, the reason for his discomposure entered the room and sat down in a chair by the fireplace, his back straight, his face resolute, determined. Like he was going to make it work. It irked Thomas, and he didn’t know why, that David wanted to get to the fixing of things. There wouldn’t have been anything to fix if David hadn’t been so stupid as to advocate for the Ettersberg mission.

“May I?” David asked, reaching for the bottle.

“Get your own.” Waspish. Juvenile. Why couldn’t he stop acting like this? Why didn’t he feel like even wanting to try? Thomas lifted a hand to his temples. His eyes stung. He’d been getting very little sleep lately; the return of David shook loose memories, and the night terrors had come back.

David’s face looked soft in the firelight. almost like before the war, when it had been a little fuller. If Molly kept making pies at the rate she was going, he’d soon get back to normal. Thomas clenched his hands in his lap, and it was as if they were sending him little impulses: touch him, hold him, have him. But spurn him, sang his blood, don’t let him near.

It was easier when... he didn’t finish that thought. Didn’t say it out loud either, because that would have been the height of cruelty. It was a lie, anyway. It had not been easier when David had, for all intents and purposes, been dead. It had been... differently complicated.

Thomas went to pour a third glass of Scotch, reconsidered and took the last slug directly from the bottle. It got David’s attention, so he flicked his tongue against the rim of it, just for a split-second, just briefly enough to have plausible deniability. Back in the day, he would have winked. He didn’t now. Tease him, ignore him. Reel him back in, push him away. His heart was loud and clamorous and contradictory tonight. It was like being fifteen again, or no, scratch that, it hadn’t been... he hadn’t been nearly as complicated at fifteen. He’d only known that he found the boy who tutored him and sometimes came to watch the rugby exceedingly pretty, so he had brought him wildflowers plucked from the wayside, and cakes nicked from the kitchens, and helped carry his books and quizzed him for tests and took him along for nightly excursions and eventually asked to kiss him behind the shed for the cricket equipment.

For practice, he’d said. An experiment, David had said. It doesn’t have to mean anything, they’d both agreed. But then they’d actually managed, somehow, to bump their lips together, and Thomas had been thinking, oh, and yes and so good and I’m never doing anything else but this. And eventually they’d had to admit to each other that the experiment only ever yielded a need for repetition, and they weren’t practicing for anything. Neither of them actually desired a girlfriend like most of the other boys at Casterbrook. They desired each other, and kissing behind the shed for the cricket equipment, forever.

Oh yes, he had known at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty that what they were doing could have seen them ruined, jailed, ousted from society. It had been a thrill to his young mind, a scandalous secret, an adventure. The glamour had worn off of it as they grew older, as their schoolmates were settling down with wives and children and summer houses in the country and Thomas and David were still sneaking around like teenagers, and ducking behind tiring pretenses and stupid rumours and Molly’s skirts for their safety. But that had just been what their relationship had naturally been like, a mundane fact of life, like taxes. And then there’d been the men with the pink triangles. The stark and final reminder that nothing about having to exist thus in secret was thrilling or mundane, that the people around them genuinely wanted them dead.

But everything had gone to hell in a handbasket by then anyway.

Thomas set the empty bottle down, and it hit the table a bit harder than intended. His hand-eye-coordination was already slightly off. Besides that, his face was starting to warm, in a way that told him that it was about time to retire from drinking any more before things seriously went south. But he didn’t want to listen to the voice of reason tonight. He wanted to listen to the voice that said, perhaps another glass.

So he traversed the room again and unearthed another bottle from the liquor cabinet. Walking straight wasn’t a problem - yet. Thomas wasn’t, usually, a man who drank to excess. But exceptions must be.

He had just poured the third glass when David asked, “What were you reading?”

Thomas gestured vaguely at the papers still spread out on the coffee table. “Tacitus. It’s Peter’s homework.”

“Oh,” David said. “Can I help you revise it? You seem tired, and I always had a hand for--”

“No,” Thomas cut in and poured the contents of his glass down his throat in one quick, decisive movement. “I told you before, and I was very serious: I won’t have you interfere with Peter’s studies.”

David sniffed. “But I am allowed to talk to him, aren’t I.”

“I suppose. I’m thinking about it.” Thomas looked from his glass back to David, meaning to give him a stern glare, but his eyes ended up roving, caught on the lines of David’s face, slightly unfocused. Here he was, back here, to touch. They’d kissed earlier, down in the lab, and maybe Thomas had hoped that after that, things would appear easier, clearer, somehow. But nothing was easier. He’d hoped, in secret, not even going so far as to articulate this to himself, that a kiss would put them back on an even keel, erase the clamour in his heart, restore tranquility to him. But nothing was tranquil. In fact, he hadn’t desired like this in a long time. He’d gotten one kiss, nowhere near enough to slake this suddenly recurring need.

“Come to bed with me,” he suggested.

“What?” David exclaimed with an incredulous little laugh. “You don’t trust me to go over your apprentice’s Latin homework, but you’d take me to bed?”

“Yes.” It really didn’t seem too extraordinary a stance to take. Peter’s studies were meaningful in the greater scheme of things. Sex wasn’t. “Personal is not necessarily the same as important.”

David shook his head. “I never could agree with you on that.”

To keep his hands and mouth occupied, Thomas poured himself another glass of Scotch, and downed it quickly. He was beginning to lose count of how many glasses deep he was. But that hardly mattered, because it made his lips tingle and it burned on the way down and the reasons why he didn’t want to touch David now were swimming out of focus.

“I had hoped it would be different,” David said, “our first time back home.”

Thomas couldn’t help it, he had to laugh. Our first time back home. “Davey,” he said, and it came out rougher than intended, “you’ve hoped for many things.”

“That’s true,” David murmured. “I suppose you were right, back then. It really was high time I faced reality.”

And this... was wrong, that David should suddenly talk like this. He’d much rather have naively optimistic David with his head stuck in a textbook than this broken, humbled version. Reach, touch, Thomas’s heart whispered, and it was easy to forget why it was a bad idea. Thomas reached, put a hand on David’s cheek, ran the pad of his thumb across David’s sweet mouth. David shivered, lips opening in a gentle gasp. It felt familiar in a way Thomas had forgotten things could feel. Like reaching back across the decades, and it was a miracle that his fingers remembered, even ever so slightly, what it was like to touch David’s face.

Suddenly, something dark clawed at his chest, something frenzied, almost like panic, because how could this be, this ghost of a sensation, remembered from all these years back, how could it be that this was real, brought to life again? Suddenly he feared that if he closed his eyes, and opened them again, David might have disappeared.

There was but one thing for it. Closer. More. Now their bodies were flush against each other, their lips crashing together, greedy, desperate, ungentle. Thomas fisted a hand in David’s hair - David whimpered so prettily against his lips - the other hand pulling up his shirt to get at the skin beneath, warm, living skin. The planes of David’s body pressed against his front, so familiar. His head spun, and fear threatened to drown him, choke him, so he sought salvation in David’s mouth, licking inside, kissing him frantically. Oh, he had been starved of this, and one kiss was not enough, so he kissed him another time, and another, and another.

“Mh... Thomas...” David disengaged, shifting back a little in his seat, a hand coming up to cup Thomas’s face. He sucked the index and middle finger into his mouth without hesitation.

“Thomas... shsh... you’re, this is not... you’re shaking, please stop, just a moment.”

David‘s other hand came to rest on Thomas’s shoulder, maintaining an arm’s length of distance between them, and it irritated Thomas, being so pushed away. Was he shaking? Maybe. But what did that matter? He could figure that out later, or never. He put a hand on David’s thigh and leaned forward against the hand gripping his shoulder, trying to chase David’s lips. “Now you’re complaining, Davey?”

“No, but...” David got up. Thomas, attempting to follow him, swayed into him, and steadied himself by in turn holding onto David’s shoulders. Whoops. Hopefully that looked like he’d meant to do that.

“See, you’ve been drinking,” David said. “It’s not right. Let’s just get you to your bed, okay, and I’ll get to mine.”

“Or...” Thomas flicked David’s chest with his index finger to stress his point, “we’ll both go to my bed and stay there and see what develops.”

David shook his head softly. “Another time.”

“What makes you think I’ll offer another time?”

“We love each other.” David’s voice was steady, his gaze clear and firm, and it rubbed something raw within Thomas, something that did not like being so exposed at all. “That is the one thing I am still sure about, even in this new world, even after the war, even after... that place. We will figure things out, but not tonight.”

Thomas laughed, a bitter, mirthless bark of a sound. Because he’d been impossible to David ever since he had returned, he hadn’t been able to contain any of the ugly slurry of his feelings, and he hadn’t been able to afford David even the slightest shred of courtesy, and yet here David was, talking about how they would definitely figure things out. “What if we don’t figure things out?” he asked, breaking contact, disentangling his limbs from David’s. “What if I don’t want to? What if I won’t want to figure things out with the man who led us all to go to Ettersberg?”

David bowed his head, his eyes now hooded, dark. “I’d understand that.” He took a step back, in the direction of the door. “Do you want to break up?”

It was a genuine offer. David was offering.

Do you want to break up?

Had he taken another step back? He was so far away. So, so far away. It was too dark in the reading room and he was slipping away, away into the past again, no longer in reach to touch, and maybe it was really just the darkness of the reading room, maybe it was Thomas’s vision going black around the edges, and he trembled, and he ached,

and he was close again somehow, hands clawed into David’s sweater, his head buried in David’s shoulder, breathing in his scent in horrid, flat, hitching gasps.

“No,” he muttered, when he had the air for it. “No. No, no.”

“Songbird.” David sounded saddened, startled. The nuances of David’s voice, suddenly again familiar. There was a hand down his back, a hand in his hair stroking along the hairline, fingernails lightly scratching his scalp in a way he’d forgotten he found comforting. David hadn’t forgotten. “Oh... Thomas. You’re not okay.”

It ought to have been ridiculous, you’re not okay. As much was evident. But he couldn’t recall ever hearing it said, and it did something to him, and he held on to David’s shoulder like it was the only anchor in a sea of chaos, and he didn’t know how to ride this out, so he clung and waited and the tide tossed him about and did not recede.

“I forgot what you smelled like,” he heard himself say, detachedly. “The sheets in your room lost your scent eventually, and then all your clothes did because I wore them, and it almost broke me a second time, because I was losing more and more of you with each passing day and you weren’t coming back to renew anything. I forgot what it was like to touch you. The sound of your voice. The feel of your signare. The feel of your hand.”

“Eighty years,” David whispered. “I’m so sorry... I didn’t understand.”

No, Thomas wanted to say, no you damn well didn’t, but he couldn’t. All he could do was cling to David’s shoulder and be battered by this, wrenched open by his care. Walking wounded.

“But I’m here now,” David continued. “I will take care of things.”

Somehow, Thomas found his voice again. It sounded strange to his own ears. “What things? What will you take care of?”

David looked at him, so earnestly it hurt to observe. “Anything needs must,” he said. “You.”

“But I am not for taking care of,” Thomas said. He didn’t know why he said it. Except... here is my duty, mine, alone. Do not suggest you will relieve me. There was never any relief. There will never be any relief.

“Oh, songbird, but aren’t you?” David asked. “The others, they all went into the country and attempted to heal, or they are at rest forever. When did you rest?”

“I...” Thomas tried to gather his resolve, put the walls back into place that David was wearing down with all these questions, and he found he couldn’t. He felt... once, as a child, he had watched Mother dispel slugs from her rose garden by pouring salt on the creatures. He, then five years old, had burst into tears at the sight of the slugs squirming impotently to get away as they succumbed to the fatal substance, and he’d tried to wrestle the jar of salt from his mother’s hand when tears wouldn’t stop her, and received a thorough scolding for it. He felt like one of those slugs now: soft and unwitting and utterly defenseless before an almighty fate. Tomorrow, the walls would be back in place. Tomorrow he would be The Nightingale again, unapproachable and aloof. But not tonight. Tonight he was soft and lonesome and powerless and there was nothing but the dark of the reading room, the alcohol making swirls in his head, and his boyfriend, sweetly returned from the dead.

“I... don’t,” he said. “I didn’t.”

“That’s not right,” David said. His hand was still in Thomas’s hair, stroking in a way that was infinitely soothing, blunt fingernails against his scalp. “That shouldn’t have been asked of you.”

Well, life doesn’t care about shouldn’t, Thomas wanted to say, it simply was asked of me, even when I was in so deep I could barely lift my head they were asking it of me, and not least because you weren’t there, because you ran away, but what he ended up saying, murmuring into David’s jumper rather, was “They needed me.”

David snorted. “Command? You never--”

Thomas shook his head. “The lads did.”

“Ah, yes. Your ducklings.” The smile was audible in David’s voice.

It had been a joke between them, Nightingale’s Ducklings. The younger and younger recruits they had kept sending down from London in the latter years of the war. Fresh-faced youths, barely of age, looking like they’d been playing dress-up in their uniforms. Some of them scared, some of them vigorous and over-eager to prove themselves to the more seasoned veterans, most of them now dead. Thomas had tried, whenever possible, to do his utmost to protect the boys, but tossed up against a place like Ettersberg, there had been no protecting anybody.

“And how are the chaps anyway? I’m assuming you’re still in contact with them all?” David chuckled. “Oh goodness, they must be old men by now!”

“I’d like to go to bed now,” Thomas said.

“Hm? Oh of course, of course.” Getting what he wanted, David was quickly distracted from his previous line of inquiry. I do know him so very well, Thomas thought disjointedly as David wrapped an arm around his waist. On autopilot - even still! - Thomas slung his arm across David’s shoulders in return. They’d done this on unnumbered pub crawls, then later on similarly unnumbered battlefields. “There we go, ay-up, Captain.”

“I can walk,” Thomas protested, even as his head dropped back onto David’s shoulder. Really, he wasn’t that inebriated. Slightly tipsy, that was all.

“In a straight line?” David questioned.

“That won’t be a problem.”

David sighed airily and nosed into his hair. “Let me have this, Thomas.”

----

Thomas tried again, when he had David in his bedroom kneeling before him (between his legs) at the foot of the bed, as David took his hand and unbuttoned his cuff and pressed one chaste kiss to his wrist. It made Thomas shudder, being so kissed, and seconds later he was reaching almost blindly for David’s face again, tugging him up, crashing their mouths together, wanting David’s lips on his, wanting David’s lips all sorts of places. But David broke the kiss and smiled at him, a smile full of such love as he didn’t deserve, and didn’t budge, even when Thomas slipped his right shoe off and ran his foot along David’s inseam.

David gasped, and twitched a little, but he said, “No, songbird. Another time.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Thomas said, which he hadn’t meant to, in a strange, rough voice that sounded much more 1940s than 2010s. Why on earth had he said that? Tomorrow he would remember all the very good reasons for not recommitting to anything where David was concerned. But tonight he was wanting, nothing else.

“I hope so,” David replied as he got up and smiled sadly, because oh, he knew those reasons too. He bent down one last time and ran his thumb across Thomas’s cheekbone, and kissed him again, a soft, small peck, a kiss goodnight. “Sleep well.”

And he went back to his own room.

So bereft of company and the warmth of David’s body, Thomas groaned and pressed the heel of his hand into his crotch. Somewhere along the way wanting had become needing, and now he was alone with it. As always, alone with it.

For a split-second he considered going and getting his entertainment elsewhere. Peter was in tonight, some few rooms over, perhaps this would be the night he finally tried to... but no, that thought was, as always, firmly tamped down, because Peter’s pregnant girlfriend was a woman of formidable power, and besides, there was never any use to any attempts upon the tragically heterosexual. He hadn’t considered Peter in such a manner at all lately, what with David around again, so perhaps this was one of these rare problems that solved themselves.

His pool of potential applicants already depleted, Thomas took himself in hand. He hadn’t felt the need to do this in a while, and didn’t expect to last any time at all. As if a tightly locked floodgate had been opened, his mind conjured up images of David, things he hadn’t let himself think about in decades and decades lest the grief make him lose his mind for good. But the memories were no longer tinged with grief now, because David was back, and his mind delighted in recalling again the lines and dips and curves of David’s body and being able to do so freely, without the crushing sadness of permanent loss.

David before the war, softer then, solid, (he still was too thin now) no shell-shock dulling the light in his eyes. The sensation of tracing the dip of David’s hips through the soft fabric of one of his jumpers, the hard line of him in his slacks, backing him up against a bookshelf in the mundane library (so risqué but oh, so thrilling) and listening to his breath deepen, sticking a hand down his pants, being greeted with the velvet heat of David’s cock, watching David’s face pinch and, eventually, release, going from biting his lips raw and red in an effort to not be overheard to slack-mouthed pleasure. David’s mouth just now, so pink and slick from their kissing, David kneeling between his legs and where that might have gone, in another, ideal world. While Thomas very much loved giving oral, he knew with David the receiving was just as sweet. He imagined them taking a night and just alternating sucking each other off until they collapsed in bone-deep, delicious exhaustion into dreamless sleep, and he felt his hips cant upwards into his fist with renewed need, and gripped himself just this side of too tight. Yes, god, he thought, my David.

At about this point Thomas noticed himself crying, a clear stream of tears down his cheeks, but they felt cathartic, so he left them. His heart was light. He had done this once or twice just after the war, brought memories of David to the forefront of his mind for this express purpose, simply exhausting any possibility of chasing a few seconds of relief from it all. The resulting crash and burn and slew of self-disgust when he’d inevitably remembered his boyfriend (supposedly) blowing his brains out in this very building had never been pretty. (He’d considered turning to drinking to excess then for a bit, until Molly had put her foot down regarding that.) Tonight he knew there would be no crashing and burning, because David was just down the hall, hale and whole and sleeping the sleep of the less-than-innocent.

He had flagged a bit, with the crying, so Thomas sped up his hand and remembered that week they’d spent at David’s father’s hunting lodge, the two of them alone in the empty countryside, free to share the bed in the master bedroom, free to wake next to each other and make early-morning love unhurriedly, free to prepare breakfast in the nude and take it back to bed. They’d been younger then, and made love almost unflaggingly, pausing intermittently to eat and generally observe life’s basic needs, only for this moment or that to start another round, and before they’d known it they’d come together again, fevered with need for each other, drunk on all this unobserved alone time.

My Folly now, Thomas thought disjointedly, we can do it in every room we never used to dare to, and he released another moan as he felt himself cresting, and the back of his head hit the headboard with a thunk as he came, came and came with the force of his lonely years, eking the moment out and stroking himself to overstimulation, until his hips twitched and his whole body shook with the pleasure-pain of it. And if he fell asleep in the wet patch before he could gather the resolve to get up and fully undress, half in déshabillé with himself still in hand, it certainly was undignified, but there was no one there to witness it.

#david mellenby lives AU #rivers of london #we change the pov character!!#there will be interlude: david also at some point and probably more than once #bc i want him to go off on his own a couple times #um idk what the f i did with the ending there #that was last night. it just kinda happened i'm still baffled by it

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