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magpiewindwitch · 7 years ago

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In Memoriam - A Lockwood and Co Fanfic

Written for the @lockwoodandcobigbang. Thanks to @theladysherlock for betaing!

Summary: Two years after Lucy and Lockwood were killed facing an ominous Visitor, their spirits have begun to manifest in the warehouse where they died. The remaining members of Lockwood and Co decide to take the case, opening old wounds, in honor of the friends whose loss has haunted them ever since.

“This shouldn’t be happening,” George said thickly.

Quill glanced up from his notepad. “Sorry, what was that?”

“Nothing,” George muttered. He gazed up at the squat, ugly windows of the warehouse in silence for a moment before abruptly changing his mind and going on. “It was quiet for two years. There was no sign of any psychic echoes. This shouldn’t be happening.”

Quill watched him for a moment, waiting to see if he would continue. As the moments limped past and George didn’t pull his eyes down to look at him, Quill returned to writing in his notepad. The temperatures lined up in neat rows and columns like child soldiers awaiting their marching orders, but there was something anxious about them still. “Hauntings are temperamental, George. You know that,” he reasoned. “Thing is, it’s not terribly unusual for changes in the environment to shake things loose. If they changed anything in the warehouse… Or even one of the nearby buildings, if any of them were storing a lot of iron or silver—”

“I know,” George snapped. Quill looked up again, surprised by the bite in his voice. George had surprised himself, too, and felt his mouth twist a little with guilt. “It just… I wish it had stayed quiet.”

“Yeah, of course you do. You’d rather be back at home with a comic letting your bottom expand. But we’re here, so perhaps finish your readings before we all die of old age,” Quill responded, squinting at his own numbers and scratching away.

They had cut it a bit close. While the sun had not hit the horizon yet, the air was beginning to cool and the light already felt thin and aqueous on George’s face. Quill was right; time was of the essence. They had the entire inside of the warehouse left to survey. While some faint phenomena—mostly creeping fear and intermittent miasma—had been reported in the yard outside, the real apparitions occurred within the building. They’d surveyed it in daylight before, of course. It was a storage area, mostly, filled with boxes and boxes of car parts waiting to be shipped to their destination. The ground floor had an open plan, albeit one currently broken up by a maze of stacked boxes. The second floor was empty at the moment, with the exception of a few disused offices crammed with file cabinets.

In spite of that, it would become treacherous after dark. The high stacks of crates were as good as walls, hemming them in and cutting them off at unexpected points. They’d be placing as many iron circles as they could without dampening their psychic senses too severely. In a way, the second floor would be worse. Without anything to use for cover, they’d be forced immediately into a direct confrontation if anything manifested there.

“Done over here,” Quill called from near the adjacent wall. As he fiddled with his tool belt, placing and replacing his notepad as if his hands hadn’t memorized every inch of its contents, Flo came up from behind them.

“Nothing, just like I said. Might as well be anywhere else in London,” Flo complained loudly.

Quill jumped and cursed. “Alright, thanks,” George said. Flo’s practiced surliness bothered him much less than Quill’s snarky composure. He knew the latter would crack as night fell, if not even sooner than that. Quill wore his worry in his face and frame, even when he wasn’t jumping and yelping like a bad tempered Chihuahua at the slightest provocation. Flo kept hers to herself, flying rude and unflappable into the most dangerous of encounters. George wondered if she felt her fear all the deeper for holding it in, and which was worse for keeping ghosts at bay. But for now, It didn’t matter. Evening wasn’t going to slow its approach, and they were going into this haunting the same people they’d always been.

“Thanks for appearing unannounced. I love being surprised by vicious, foul-smelling apparitions at haunted houses,” Quill snipped, glowering at Flo.

“It’s a haunted warehouse, and you can eat my-”

“Alright, even Kipps has got an imagination. He can put the rest together himself,” George interrupted. “It’s about time we head in.”

Quill’s sneer closed to a tight line as his thin lips pressed together. Flo did nothing, although George wondered if her scowl got a little deeper. After a moment he began to plod forward, appreciating the crunch of autumn leaves under his work boots. Once they entered and until daybreak, every sound would have to be second-guessed. It was goodbye to the world of the living, at least for the night.

He fumbled with the keys, taking as much time as he could without being conspicuous. It was always a bad idea to hesitate, of course, but he couldn’t help himself. After a moment the small side door swung open, complaining out of tune as it did. George pushed through, footsteps echoing very slightly in the stillness. Somehow the place was even uglier on the inside. The exterior of the warehouse was like any rundown industrial building just outside of London. Nondescriptly hideous. Inside, it seemed somehow resentful, as if it were glaring at George though all of those windows. He shook the fanciful thoughts from his head. He was an agent, not a frightened child. Buildings were just buildings, with no feelings, no anger, and no intent.

The things that died in them, however, were an entirely different matter.

Flo and Quill filed in behind him, ranging within a few feet of the door. The aisles of shelves and crates grew outwards, doubling back on themselves in ways that they shouldn’t have. Not for the first time, George felt a twinge of resentment. The best thing about industrial buildings was their haggard, organized predictability. The way an agent could keep the layout clear in the back of his mind and focus on the visitor. They wouldn’t even have that, tonight.

“Well, let’s split up. Flo, you take the upstairs by yourself. It’s open, so It shouldn’t take you long. If we’re still stumbling through stacks when you get done, start at the bottom and work your way out towards Kipps and me. I’d estimate we have an hour until sundown, so we’ll need to work quick. Eyes and ears open. Minds on, hearts off.”

Quill nodded and began to pull his notepad out of his tool belt. George wondered if he was searching for ways to stall a bit, too—there was a lot of that going around. If Quill hadn’t wanted to take a couple of seconds to fumble around in his pockets, he might as well never have put the damned thing away. Suddenly, George realized that Flo hadn’t moved. Her eyes were fixed on some distant spot high against the wall, and George was seized with an immediate, illogical panic that the manifestations had begun already. He wasn’t ready to see them, not yet. “What is it?” He asked her, trying to keep his fear from his voice.

Flo didn’t move and her eyes didn’t clear. “Wish Holly was here,” she muttered.

George stared. It was possibly the only thing she could have said that would have shocked him more than ghosts before sunset, but there it was. In spite of her quiet voice, in spite of the fact that she mumbled seemingly to hide her own words, he’d heard her clear enough. “Sorry, what?” He spluttered. He knew exactly what she’d said, but wasn’t quite sure how to respond.

“Nothing. Forget it,” she snapped, before disappearing at a lope behind a nearby shelf. Although her footsteps were still clearly audible and Quill hadn’t even rounded the corner on his side yet, George had a sudden sense of being alone. He shook off his surprise and flipped open his grubby notepad. He found himself pushing back a sudden, unfair anger towards Flo. Apparently, he would have to expect pointless emotionalism from her as well as Quill tonight. George was never particularly interested in accounting for his own feelings, much less those of his employees.

At the same time, he felt a twinge of guilt for being upset with her. He wasn’t even sure when he’d last heard her mention Holly. Once, not too long after she’d left, he made the mistake of asking Flo how she was holding up and had nearly joined the ranks of the unquiet dead for his trouble. “I’m fine, ain’t I?” Flo had snarled. “Holly was a coward, so she made like one and scarpered. It’s what cowards do. And I got no need for ‘em, so I got no need for her, either.” That, for obvious reasons, had been that as far as trying to comfort Flo went. Perhaps he should have tried harder. Perhaps he should have tried to make Holly’s excuses, in the hope that it made things make a bit more sense in a world that didn’t quite want to.

But at the same time, he half-wondered if she was right. Holly had just up and left them, because it was easier than facing her own guilt. She was the one who was supposed to be on watch that night, double-checking that the bars over the windows were closed and that the doors leading out of Portland Row remained locked after dark. She’d sworn up and down that she’d checked every last one twice, and she was so methodical that George personally believed her. They were agents—they knew as well as anyone that powers beyond understanding could always foul things up, no matter how careful you were. Regardless, what had happened had happened, and Holly had disappeared. She hadn’t even left a forwarding address. On his moodiest, most morbid nights, George thought she seemed almost as dead as the others.

Oh perfect. Now he’d have his own sentimentality to deal with, as well. Lockwood and Company was in a fine state, and it wasn’t even sundown. As George chewed himself out for his complete lack of professionalism and good common sense, he began working his way through his row of stacks. “56 by the door,” he announced for Quill’s benefit.

It was a mistake. As soon as George broke the silence, Quill began to babble. George made a mental note to send him upstairs with Flo next time. “I wish we hadn’t taken this job.”

“We agreed it should be us, Kipps,” George responded wearily. They’d talked themselves in circles about whether or not to go, just as they’d talked themselves in circles two years before about whether or not to change the name of the company. They’d had the same argument every night, but somehow no one was ever on the same side for long enough to reach a consensus. Once, they’d actually made up their mind to change it, start their lives over. They’d had the paperwork all done up and everything, but once they’d gotten down to the office to turn it in they all hesitated, waiting for someone else to be the first to step over the threshold, and finally they’d turned around and gone back home.

Eventually, they didn’t so much decide to keep the name as much as they simply stopped talking about it, and the name stayed by default. It was the worst possible decision. It didn’t give them any sort of freedom or closure, but their inability to decide still felt like a betrayal. It was the first time George failed them as a leader, and he felt the weight of it any time someone had to answer the phone with a dead boy’s name.

“It’s not as if it’s going to make any difference to them,” Quill continued. “They won’t even know us, Cubbins. All it’s going to do is make us-”

“I know, Kipps.” George was surprised by the sound of his own voice. Whereas inside he felt like a bundle of lit firecrackers lashed together, each one pointing a different direction and trying to shake itself free from the others, on the outside he sounded confident. There was an appropriate level of remorse and understanding, of course, but he sounded as if this were the only clear and logical course of action and he didn’t doubt it in the slightest. That was, of course, entirely untrue. He thought of his hypocrisy—his confession to Quill that he wished things hadn’t been stirred up, his moment of doubt with the keys—and his stomach twisted a little. Still, it was nice to know he sometimes helped his agents keep their heads on straight. “Look, it’s not going to be nice and it won’t feel good. But we’ll know we were there, and that we did what we had to do. They were our colleagues as well as our friends. We owe them that.”

It was clearly the last word on the subject. Quill didn’t say anything more, other than comparing temps from the other side of the stacks. They got done faster than George expected (probably because he hadn’t accounted for Quill being on-task and focused, for once) and met up with Flo just as she came down the stairs.

“Nothing of interest up there. Colder than a corpse’s snot, but just as quiet,” she said matter-of-factly. Her uninterested expression didn’t fool George after what she said before she left, but he nodded and didn’t question her. Without speaking, they began putting on their gear. Their bags were heavier than usual. Not only did they need an extra source of confidence tonight of all nights, but they weren’t sure exactly what they were dealing with. They had no idea how powerful those two painfully familiar apparitions would be, as they’d only recently began to appear. They also weren’t sure whether or not the spirit they’d originally been called in to study would be active or not. No manifestations of it had been reported after that fateful night two years ago, and nothing in his research suggested that would change, but George didn’t want to count on it keeping its distance. Without a clear understanding of how many Visitors they’d be fighting or how powerful they were, he wasn’t about to take any chances, and had made sure that they were double-stocked on just about everything.

Their psychic corrective aids also added a bulk they hadn’t had to contend with when they were younger. Quill had refused to part with his his old pair of goggles, although the so-called Rotwell’s (now entirely absorbed into the Fittes empire, in spite of the name) now produced lighter, sleeker designs for mass consumption. Add to that their bulky sets of Para-Ears spectral headphones, and George always thought his team had a buggy, overbalanced look, like flies walking on their hind legs. But it had let them keep their jobs, and good thing too. Not many adults had rushed in to protect London when given the psychic tools to do so. Funny how people who had always lamented the use of children to fight Visitors now found so many reasons not to do it themselves.

“Right,” he said, as they finished gearing up. “Well, it’s just about dark now. If the information we got off of the workers is good, I wouldn’t give it more than fifteen or twenty minutes before we—”

“Lockwood?”

George froze mid-sentence. It was another huge blunder so far as maintaining his composure was concerned, but he couldn’t help it. He’d thought they had a little more time. Clearly, he’d been wrong.

George’s skin crawled. It was a tiny sound, more like a breath on the ear than a real spoken word. He’d missed and dreaded that voice so much that George almost could have believed he’d made himself imagine it, if not for the fact that the others had stiffened at just the same moment.

She’d manifested first. Of course she had. When all was said and done, her psychic abilities had always been stronger. It was more of a curse than a blessing in the end. George pushed back thoughts of those last few months, when her trances got longer and deeper. When they’d all tried to stop her from taking cases, but the compulsion—the terrible connection that drew her to the Visitors—had become almost unbearable for her. When she had slipped out on her own they’d all separated, rushed to the sites of active cases to search. They’d all looked, but none of them had found her, as their presence today proved. George had a theory that that brief stint in the other side had connected the two of them, and that they’d been drawn together at the end. Regardless, it had been him who found her that night, the perfect cap to the deadly drama that had unwound around them. As to their final moments, the prevailing theory among the DEPRAC agents was that she’d been drawn into a memory or connection so deep she was left defenseless and unable to wake up. He’d stayed, tried to protect her from something far too powerful to face on his own, and—

It didn’t much matter, George thought; the end result had been the same. And now she was gathering. Soon she would be here, in a cruel and empty sense. She wouldn’t know them or love them. She would be vacant.

They swung into a beleaguered triangle at the sound of her voice, each facing out into the aisles. George’s hands trembled at his side, so he shoved them into his pockets to keep his fear and the renewed throbbing in his chest to himself. His eyes scanned the shelves in front of him, sweeping the warehouse with a mix of fear and nervous hunger.

Behind him and to his right, Quill gasped suddenly. “There! I- I saw her. I think I did, anyway. It was something. It must have been…” They had all swung around. Whatever had been there was gone, but George had no doubt that Quill had seen it.

He felt his agents’ eyes on him as they waited for him to decide how to proceed. It amazed him now to think that he’d wanted this, a long time ago. On his worst days, his bitterest days, he’d often found himself jealous of his dearest friend. He’d wondered so many times what it felt like to be the leader, to feel all eyes on you and know just what to do. Now he realized that you usually didn’t have a clue what to do, and that you simply went ahead and did it anyway.

“Alright,” George murmured, “then let’s begin.”

#lockwood and co #lockwood and co.#lockwood & co #lockwood & co.#lockwood and co big bang #fanfiction #mine #my fanfiction #i literally haven't written for like years #other than stuff for classes #this felt so good #i need to start writing again

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