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Crystal Palace makes tea for herself that morning. The sky outside is still stained by the dawn when she wakes, awash with a rosy-pink that slips in streams through her curtains. It's stunningly clear overhead, all sunlight and endless cityscape below, though from the vantage point that is her kitchen window, Crystal can already see the rows of clouds that hang dark across the horizon line, heavy with the promise of rain.
She's alone in the flat today, mirrors and unlocked doors be damned.
The short hallway between her glorified hovel and the agency's office is uncharacteristically devoid of voices. Usually, Crystal expects to rise to the sound of distant chatter, Edwin and Charles’ conversations a strange sort of ever-present white noise in the background of her life. But this morning, for the first time in recent memory, leaves a lot to be desired vis-à-vis the unintelligible hum of conversation—she comes to consciousness with only the sound of rustling sheets to keep her company. Vague recollections of last night have her guessing at a case, echoes of the Night Nurse prattling on about a young spirit and a local park dredging themselves up from beneath her drowsiness. All told, she recalls it as a matter that most notably had involved far more ‘good, old-fashioned shoe leather’ than she could possibly have desired at that hour.
So: no boys, no Nurse, and certainly no office hours or open cases to eat away at her time until they return.
She rises early and pretends that she does so on purpose, that it serves her best to wake with the sun and to settle only when the day's work has been thoroughly exhausted.
She is not especially convincing in this venture, even when the only victim of her ruse is herself.
Idly, she listens to the kettle shriek for a few moments, sunken deeply in thought.
The kettle itself is a little on the ugly side, an older thing that's begging to be put out of its misery, at least just a little bit. She'd procured it from a local charity shop a number of months back, a heavily flaking price tag declaring its worth a whopping two pounds. She loves it anyways, and she's certain she's put it through the wringer these last few months. She loves it enough to keep it around, at least, and she cautiously allows it to remain on the back burner of her stove, rather than stowed away in one of the rotting cupboards overhead. There are wildflowers creeping up the sides, spilling out into the ceramic spout and reaching vine-y fingers towards the edges of the lid. It's weirdly beautiful despite the clear signs of wear, though to be entirely fair, Crystal finds many things beautiful these days. Stops to appreciate what she believes to be beautiful more often these days, anyway.
She halts her reverie long enough to lift the little thing off the open flame of her stovetop, wincing at the screech of its bottom against the metal grate as she pushes it aside.
She steeps an herbal blend today, leaning against the counter and bracing her weight on her elbows as she watches the timer she sets on her phone slowly tick-tick-tick down.
The room is silent save for her own breath. She swallows thickly, suddenly aware of the absence. It aches.
The quiet aches.
Crystal is lonely, and she kinda-sorta-like-really-fucking hates herself for it.
Of course she's lonely. In the time since her memories have returned, that much is obvious. David leaves, and inexplicably, she is so lonely the feeling almost physically pains her. She is grateful he's gone, thrilled by the power she's reclaimed, horrified by the extent she has damaged the things she's surrounded by. And she is, against all odds, lonely. There's a cold space pressed flush against her side. David wasn't ever able to fill it, not really, but he gave her an excuse to just pretend for a little while, if nothing else. It follows her like a shadow, that chill, unforgiving in its pursuit of ruin. Even as their relationship had reached its apex, the space at her side had remained woefully empty.
Now, David is gone. Hopefully for good. He's still choking down mouthfuls of dirt somewhere in the cobwebbed corners of her mind, completely and utterly unable to reach her. He's gone, right along with his shitty repair job. The cold grows all the more pronounced in his absence.
Crystal thinks that, just maybe, there's something terribly wrong with her.
That's nothing new either, really. Even before she met David, before she entered a world of ghosts and witchcraft and power, humming just to the right of her heart, heady and begging to be released, Crystal Palace had been–rather profoundly–lonely.
It sneaks into the places she least expects it to, corners of her life already reduced to rubble in the wake of other events. It shuffles into the corners of homework done alone, the glass top of their kitchen table digging uncomfortably into her elbows as she perches in a chair not meant to support someone so very small. It rears its head, ugly, defiant, so dreadfully angry, when the girls at her school turn their noses up as she walks by, when they lean into one another and whisper conspiratorially. Loneliness exists in the million moments between her birth and the movie theater she meets David outside of. Maybe that’s what drives her to his side, lapping at his heels, doing every awful little thing they dream up together. Maybe not. Either way, it lingers in the cracks of their relationship, and it does more than merely linger once the pair splits.
In the time since, she's met Charles. She's met Edwin, though privately, Crystal questions sometimes just how much she means to him, just how expendable her body and mind are. He is her friend. She is not certain he reciprocates the sentiment. Some days, the notion seems considerably more rational than others.
She's met Niko, with all her wonder and deep adoration of—her fascination with—the entire world and the grace with which she moved through life and the gentle curve of knuckles resting on both thin hands and the way her body felt when it dropped into both of Crystal’s unprepared palms, and, and, and, and, and.
She's met Niko.
The thought sours in her stomach as soon as it blooms there. The wound of grief is still open and rotting, still fresh and so, so painful, and Crystal knows a dangerous train of thought when she sees one. There will be time to revel in the magnitude of her loss. This is not that.
She's met Jenny, and however large the distance the older woman claims to be keeping, she offers Crystal a roof over her head and a shoulder to lean (and pretend not to cry) on. After their move to London, Jenny has only continued to integrate into their merry little band—her presence has become nothing short of a recurring facet of the agency’s lives, or lack thereof. The two text, sometimes. Jenny might invite her around for a chat once in a while. At the very least, maybe once a week or so, Crystal manages to grab coffee with her. They'll pay far too much for a latte, sit down in a little nook somewhere, and sip in companionable silence for as long as Jenny can justify straying from her perpetually hectic schedule. She's a constant, a rock in a sea of otherwise foreign experiences.
Point being: after sixteen years of suffocating isolation, Crystal has finally put down some semblance of roots here, with these people, in the cities she's most recently called home. Within the agency, within Port Townsend, within London, Crystal has known more warmth than she can (or particularly cares to) quantify.
It should be enough.
There's an emptiness that eats away at her still. It's nebulous, the want that consumes her the moment that no one is within arms reach, but irrefutable in its influence. Often, the feeling persists even when there are people well within her grasp. Crystal wants, loves, needs, perhaps more than anything in the world. It's a selfish desire. It's a desire that would have those same classmates scrambling once again to keep their existences untainted by her presence, a desire that might somehow justify the distance of her parents or the cold, ungratifying freedom that comes with a sparse and underpopulated childhood. It's a desire she has long convinced herself will damn her one day, if it hasn't already.
Doesn't change the fact that it renders her from its form, that it shapes her every waking moment. The sting of loneliness carves her in unpleasant clarity, her constant need for more, more, more a reflection of the girl she yearns to distance herself from. A reminder that she hasn't changed as much as she hopes to have. This is merely a fact of life.
Her tea has gone cold. Crystal blinks back to reality as she registers the chimes of an alarm that has gone unnoticed far past its intended use. -17:04, it reads, and the blinking text only further buries the weight twisting in her stomach.
Her hands curl around the (now tremendously oversteeped) cup, foggy, deep brown water reflecting her tightened jaw and the downward curve of her lips. She resists the urge to swallow it anyways, just so that she can pretend the time taken to make it hasn't been wasted entirely. Just so she can disrupt the image of her own face, painted in wavering strokes on the tea’s surface.
Grimacing, she dumps the whole thing down the drain in one, swift motion, the mug returning to her tiny dishwasher in a similarly hasty gesture.
“Fuck me,” she groans, to no one in particular. Unsurprisingly, the walls don't do more than return her voice back to her, the echo holding an air of mockery that she's sure is only a trick of the mind. She sighs, as if she somehow expected the act of breaking the silence would drive it from her room forever. Maybe she had. It's hard to tell these days.
The sun is well and truly risen now, its light creeping in through sheer curtains in rays that illuminate the dust floating about. Her phone’s clock reads 6:33. It’s as good a time as any to officially begin her morning.
Running her fingers absently against the brittle wallpaper, Crystal picks her way down the hallway and into her bedroom before all but tossing herself into her bed. The motion kicks another flurry of dust up, which does very little for her growing helplessness in the face of an unoccupied day.
It’s her first in a little while, maybe a month or so. She’s been so tangled up in the maelstrom of agency business, fierce, unrelenting grief, and the growing pains that come with moving into what is surely ancient enough to qualify as a historical site that she struggles to grasp a moment she’s had solely to herself since their return. She hasn’t even had the chance to properly clean out her new place, a fact that is repeatedly made clear to her whenever she has to spend more than an hour in any given room within it.
It’s old, and dirty, and it’s filled with weird dead boy knick-knacks accumulating grime, touched only by time in what is likely decades. It’s charmingly awful, and it’s hers. It’s hers, it’s hers, it’s hers.
Crystal lifts a hand up towards the ceiling, spreading her fingers until the sun peeks through and she can trace the wooden support beams that arch above her. The bedroom is small, just like the rest of the flat, but it’s the perfect size. Her bed is just big enough for her to splay in any way she likes across it, and on particularly late nights, she finds running her fingers against the wooden spindles bracketing her headboard particularly soothing. There’s an old wardrobe against the far wall, its slight shifting over the years evident in the scratches littering the floorboards. It creaks when she ventures anywhere near it. She’s rid herself of most of her old clothes, a step in her ongoing rebuilding, but the items she's decided to keep fit snugly within, any empty spaces occupied by souvenirs and other small placeholders until she can find the time to go shopping again. A rolltop desk, outfitted with bookshelves that creep up to almost brush the slanted ceiling, is tucked into the corner. Crystal has yet to really touch it, despite being immediately enamored with its elegance. Antique and expensive-looking, it’s almost certainly the result of a rare flight of fancy on Edwin’s part, though she hasn’t asked him about it yet in the irrational fear he might choose to reclaim it.
Aside from any pre-existing furniture, the room is largely empty, as is the rest of her new home. Having spent the last thirty years as a larger, less convenient closet for the agency’s odder forms of payment, it’s in pretty decent condition, she thinks, all things considered. The feeling it sparks in her is foreign, but it’s not unwelcome. Quite the opposite, actually. There’s a tiny voice inside of her head, now, one that is dogged in its resilience and absolutely brimming with hope, insisting that she could make this place something she could be proud of. There’s a larger, more bitter part of her that lives perpetually in the memories of vast luxury, towering ceilings, and frigid disapproval. Time and time again, Crystal finds herself fundamentally antithetical to the warmth she craves so deeply. This place is more of a home than anything she has ever known, and it’s only a matter of time before it, too, grows stale and cold in the fallout of her existence.
She’s lost track of time again. Her fingers have begun to grow numb, still extended awkwardly to frame the rest of her room between each knuckle. Sighing heavily again, she shakes the offending fist out at her side and lifts herself into a sitting position, using her free hand to scrub at her eyelids.
Not quite crying, never, but it’s close enough to bring a flush to her cheeks.
“Fuck,” she says, once again addressing an audience of precisely zero.
And then, in the hopes of not squandering any more time sitting in general misery, Crystal Palace readies herself for the day to come.
This is another segment of routine, though this is one she’s kept dutifully through all recent stages of her life; she scrubs her face at the sink, drags a series of products through her hair, and completes exactly half of her makeup before dressing. There’s no practical reason for it, not really, and she can’t put a finger on exactly when the habit first appeared, but the comfort of consistency in a time otherwise plagued by an identity in limbo steadies something inside of her.
It’s just as she’s tugging an outfit from its hanger, makeup still in a state of partial disarray and hair tied back haphazardly for the sake of sheer convenience, that her phone rings.
The ringtone is one she hardly recognizes: the gentle twang of a harp, a classical piece plucked to a tempo it was likely never intended to be played at.
The coat she’s holding falls unceremoniously to the floor, fabric crumpling with a soft rush of air as it meets the wood, and Crystal’s stomach drops with it.
Mom, the caller ID declares. Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom.
The harp carries on, uncaring of the pit that has opened beneath Crystal’s feet. She stands, stock-still, and finds that breathing has become markedly more difficult than she usually finds it to be. A horrible sense of dread that on most days, better days, lies more or less dormant in her chest, swallows her whole in just a single moment. And for as much as her mind begs her to pick up the goddamn phone, please, Jesus, Crystal, her body remains rigid, joints locked despite her strain.
As quick as it had come, however, the call ends. Her mother hangs up before she even reaches Crystal’s voicemail. It’s not as devastating as it should be, and it’s certainly not surprising. There’s a tinny beep as the call disconnects, and with it comes an abrupt end to what she distantly remembers now to be a Vivaldi arrangement she’d seen in concert several years ago.
It’s a memory accompanied by a birthday spent waiting, always waiting, for the promise that this year, this one for certain, her mother or father might find the time to bear sharing a moment with her. Crystal hates it, truly, finds all the operas and 20-piece identical orchestral renditions to be a terrific waste of time, but each year an envelope containing three balcony tickets to whatever touring classical companies are in the area at the time appears on her bed, courtesy of whatever staff her parents have assigned to deliver it. Each year, Crystal spends an unreasonably long amount of time debating on going at all, and each year, her desperation wins out. The temptation of time spent with her parents, no matter how atrociously fucking boring she finds the activity, is always more than enough to get her in a designer dress and into the cushy seats of a local performance hall.
Her parents have never shown their faces, not once.
Inevitably, at some point during the concert, she stops twiddling her thumbs to the rhythm of reedy classical arrangements and starts charging Shirley Temples to her mother’s seemingly bottomless card, the time it takes for her to call it quits on seeing either parent shortening with each year they fail to show. Each year, she must look like some form of a wreck, a lone child wandering aimlessly through the lobby of a high-class venue, because no matter what bartender she asks, her question uttered softly in the wake of her disappointment, she always has them sliding her glasses of a dressed-up canned soda right up until the concert runs its course.
She hates the whole ordeal, right down to the sickly sweet and grossly expensive grenadine that clings to the glass she sips out of. And yet, each year, without fail, she returns, youthful naivety long gone and replaced instead by the burning want, want, want she still feels, a want born of a life dripping with let down after let down.
It’s not the resurfaced gut punch of a memory, not the premature cancellation of her mother’s call, and not the wretched guilt, the shame, that inevitably grows from Crystal’s neglect to answer it in time that startles her into working order again, no.
The world seems to delight in Crystal’s absolute and utter misery. She knows this to be true, because out from the mirror hung on her still-open wardrobe door pops Edwin Payne, the slight crookedness of his collar the only sign that he isn’t a statue masquerading as a teenaged ghost. The only sign that he is somehow, amidst all of his composure, even slightly fallible.
“Right then,” he remarks, the brightness of his voice laden with an undertone of fond frustration as he brushes dirt that does not exist from the lapels of his coat. Crystal resists the sudden urge to throttle him. Then, she resists the urge to correct the fold of his shirt collar, still offset from the mirror jump. “Good day to you too, Charles.”
Edwin is muttering to himself, and he seems to be winning whatever benign argument with Charles he’s decided to continue long after they’ve parted. Good for him, Crystal supposes, a bark of laughter startling from her chest at the sudden interruption to her wallowing.
His brow furrows, but that’s not really an unfamiliar look. Crystal has grown quite familiar, actually—it's certain to make an appearance whenever they occupy the same space for more than maybe five total minutes, give or take a few.
“Have I missed some sort of joke, Crystal? Fascinating. I don't suppose you'd like to share?” Edwin crosses his arms, feigning intrigue, the one-sided argument quickly forgotten as he whirls to face her.
“Learn to knock, jackass,” she replies, electing to occupy her hands with the act of tidying her discarded clothes. The action holds too much force to really be justified, her words clipped and her movements unnecessarily snappy. Edwin tries valiantly to retain eye contact, his perpetually impeccable posture rendering him almost half a foot taller than his counterpart and thus easily dodged as she averts her gaze. The weakness of her voice has Crystal scowling, her face hot once again with shame. She finds herself very abruptly and very deeply grateful for the wardrobe door that now shields her features from the threat of Edwin’s analysis.
“There is nothing for me to knock upon, Crystal,” Edwin corrects, haughty voice carrying up and into the rafters of her room. “The Night Nurse has, most inopportunely, obscured the mirror in the agency’s office. I merely borrowed the use of your mirror to return home. Simple, really. Nothing worth writing home about, and certainly nothing that might warrant getting so… riled up over.”
The matter of throttling is getting harder to ignore. Crystal grits her teeth against the compulsion, stamping the disproportionate rage down in her chest as it flares for what feels like the millionth time during their brief interaction. She can’t deal with this right now. Friendly jabs grow teeth as they beg to spill from her tongue and out into the open air. She can’t deal with this right now.
Crystal swallows, and chokes just a bit on her words as she does so. As the rage leaves her, a sense of distance takes its place. It comes in waves, just as her anger had, only now, the Earth feels a bit like it’s slipping out from under her. She hates this feeling, too. She hates that this disconnect is as familiar as her anger has become, as familiar as the back of her own hands or the sun on her skin. Maybe she hates a lot of things, she realizes, and it serves only to send her floating farther.
“Crystal.”
She yearns to be held. She needs something, anything at all, to tether her to the moment she’s living in.
The desire is met instantly with a revolt of her pulse, because God forbid she needs anything at all. The ache of loneliness returns tenfold, its own desires growing frenzied within the confines of her chest, a reminder of just how much she cannot have.
“Crystal!”
Ah, shit.
“Are you… quite alright?” asks someone to what is maybe her left, and how could she have forgotten that Edwin was right there?
Get it together, Crystal. Get it together, get it together. Rally through this one conversation, and hoard the rest of the day for yourself. The time will come to break apart, it’s just not right now. Just wait a little while longer. Just a little while longer.
“Yeah, no, yeah. I’m good. I’m good.” Crystal aims for dismissive, waves a hand vaguely about in the air, and hits so far to the left that it’s downright impressive her misstep can’t be seen from space. “No need to get all weird about it. Jesus.” Her voice cracks mid-sentence, and it’s almost enough to bring her to tears.
She just needs a little while longer. Edwin just needs to leave, and then she’ll be all fine and fucking dandy. Just a little more time. Please, just a little more time.
“I find that remarkably hard to believe.” Edwin’s voice swims in her skull. When the pallor of his face appears in her vision, his mouth is curled into something sour, his brow still furrowed. She almost laughs again, if for no other reason than delight in his displeasure. Immediately, the thought manifests in her rib cage like a punctured lung, stinging with what feels like all the guilt in the world, concentrated into one, throbbing well of regret.
The idea of weeping openly fills her with a mortified kind of disgust, but it’s also an idea that is becoming progressively more viable the longer Edwin sticks around for whatever is happening to her. It seems impossible that he remains, an unwavering presence as her gaze flickers dizzily across his features, and yet he does. Privately, her heart swells at the idea that he’s becoming less adverse to displays of emotion, less skittish around vulnerability.
She supposes he's had a lot of practice in the past few months, and there is a lovely influx of pride in her chest at the progress he's made. More pressing at the moment, however, is the primal distress it elicits when she remembers that she is the one on the receiving end of his attention.
“Sit down with me. It’ll be just a tick, nothing more, and then I’ll be on my way if you’d desire it. You’ll be alright.” Edwin's voice is rigid with discomfort. A hand smooths over her back, stiff but by no means unkind, as Crystal is guided gently until her knees hit her bedframe and waste no time in giving out. Someone wails, and it takes her a second to realize the sound originates from her own mouth.
The moment it hits her, Crystal almost wants to laugh again. She feels wildly out-of-sorts, more so than usual, at least, but the why is so obvious she still can recognize, beneath all the turmoil, how embarrassing it is that it hasn't clicked for her sooner.
Today is her birthday.
Then, Edwin knew before she did.
In retrospect, she regrets telling Charles about her birthday at all. It was the result of some offhanded comment or another, inconsequential in all ways except for the fact she had answered directly and truthfully on the matter. They’d all moved on quickly enough, but Charles drinks up that kind of information like a sponge, cradles it close to his heart, keeps it close like it means everything even when it happens to be nothing much at all. She should have known he would remember.
And of course Edwin knows, because Charles knows, and the two have some kind of freaky, codependency-induced mindlink shit going on.
He also might have been in the room. She doesn't quite remember, recognizing the memory’s significance only after it’s been worn down by the passage of time.
Edwin is steady against her side, her face now dripping with hot tears. He doesn't seem to mind as much as Crystal might have thought he would. She's not certain how long they sit there together, only that she spends most of it in varying degrees of unraveled and unwell. Edwin stays through it all, his comforts stilted by obvious disuse but wonderful all the same.
Just as it seems she's finally coming down from it all, a truly horrific thought strikes her like it's oncoming traffic.
“She never made it to seventeen,” she chokes out, the words fragmented through her renewed sobs. “Edwin. Edwin. She never made it to seventeen. I- Why- It's not fair.”
She knows instinctually that he understands precisely what she means, even before she cuts herself off in favor of indulging another strangled cry. It’s a social gamble. No one in their strange little household has processed their collective grief very well, which is a marginally kinder way to say that they haven’t addressed it at all. She can’t help herself, though, convinced that if she keeps the thought close to her heart any longer she might combust with the sorrow of it all.
She's grasping at his sweater vest now, her fists balled into incorporeal cashmere as she resists the urge to scream, scream like she's the one on the receiving end of a blade and not the girl who took it for her. He's shed his coat at some point, and it lays folded on the bed somewhere beside them. The bowtie has also gone, she realizes, and Edwin’s shoulder begins to shake softly against hers in twin shudders, his crying less violent, almost silent, but altogether undeniable.
“I suppose-” Edwin clears his throat, pausing and seeming to collect himself again before speaking. His voice is thick, weighed down by emotion, when he speaks at last. He's quiet, brushed raw, something Crystal recognizes only after so much time spent in proximity to him as indicative of his distress. “I suppose we are all a bit young, a bit… ill-fitted for the roles we fill. Not that any time is one necessarily opportune to die at, just that… just that it's a pity.”
He hesitates again, hums. “Maybe that's not quite what I mean. I do hope you understand the intention.” More hesitation, now, and the absence of his usual sharp tongue leaves Crystal slightly baffled. “I've looked for her ghost there, you know. As far as I can tell, her business is… finished, as it were. I believe she's content and may have truly moved on, though I must confess that a terribly selfish part of me wishes that wasn’t the case. Not that it is any… consolation, but wherever she is, I am certain she's doing very well for herself.”
Edwin brings a fist to his sternum and presses it there, an act Crystal now recognizes easily as being self-soothing. She's fairly certain that, given the blood needed to achieve any kind of its respective absence, his hand would be white-knuckled with the pressure.
They sit together for a long, long moment after that, unspoken truths hanging as clear as day in the air between their bodies: there is nowhere truly deserving of Niko Sasaki, nowhere that is good enough to house her spirit. Despite this fact, wherever the afterlife has taken her, she has inevitably grown fond of every tiny thing it entails, and she has bettered the place endlessly in the process of doing so.
“She was just a kid.” It's barely a whisper. Her face is pressed greedily against his side, attempting to drink in warmth he cannot offer her, and it muffles the words as she speaks them.
“Yes. Yes, she was. I-” He starts again, tapering off just as quickly and removing the hand pressed at his chest to cup against his mouth. Silence spills into the room, Crystal's cries quieting to noiseless, heaving sobs while Edwin's own tears continue to leave scarcely any indication they were ever there to begin with.
Edwin, full of surprises today, is the first to break the lull of quiet that has fallen. When Crystal looks up to meet his gaze, he's far more put-together than she expects, but there's a sorrow in his eyes that betrays the confidence he projects.
“May I ask something that is perhaps a bit intrusive, Crystal? Feel no obligation to answer, of course, but I find myself… somewhat concerned.” Edwin is anxious. This is not new in and of itself, but Edwin being anxious on her behalf feels comically incorrect. He speaks the word ‘concerned’ like it physically pains him to verbalize; Crystal finds it more endearing than anything else. Edwin is in rare form here, entirely off his game, and it offers an amount of levity Crystal knows she desperately needs.
“Yeah, man. Alright. Sure. Ask away.” She shifts slightly against him so that they're facing each other properly and lets a sigh slip from her mouth. Edwin fiddles with his thumbs for a moment, looking conflicted as his teeth worry a spot on his lip and his fingertips worry at his cuticles.
“Is there a particular reason you didn't inform us of today's significance? I'm certain Charles would be more than happy to make arrangements of some sort.” He carefully sidesteps the idea that he too might participate in any kind of celebration in her honor, but with every passing second Crystal is getting less and less sure he actually would be opposed to the idea. “I don't ask with the intention to pry. I just mean- Charles cares a lot about you,” he amends, without a hint of the poise she is so used to him carrying about. Again, Edwin dodges his own involvement, but it’s hard to imagine he’d ask at all if it hadn’t interested him to know her answer, at least in passing.
It's horribly awkward. Crystal spends several seconds debating the merits of telling Edwin everything. That awful need wages war with 70 years in Hell, and beating the shit out of me, and that's how it felt when my dad died. It's almost suffocating. There’s a part of her that wants, wants, wants and takes, takes, takes, and even if she can’t hold a candle to whatever the hell everyone else in her life has going on, there's the ever-present impulse to spill it all anyways.
And Edwin is asking her to. Edwin, of all people, is soliciting her sob story. Again, it's a tragic sort of funny she finds she can't entirely indulge in this state.
Eventually, she lands on the fact that he'd find out about this particular lapse in her composure in one way or another. She hates, sometimes, how analytical his mind is, how hungry for information. How much attention he pays to the finer things in life.
“My mom called, right before you came in. She hung up before it got the chance to ring longer than a few seconds.” It's not really an answer to his inquiry, not exactly, but the words have been vying to escape her throat since the moment in question first occurred. Crystal buries her head in her hands, tucking loose strands of hair behind her ears and thumbing at dried tear tracks in an effort to rid herself of the feeling that blossoms as she speaks.
“I think there's something wrong with me, Edwin. Something big. I think something's been wrong with me for a very, very long time,” she manages, and in speaking it, the statement's condemnation is made tangible. “There- there has to be, right? I can't- I hate the girl that I used to be. It's only fair the people around me did too. Even before I met David, I was all… just, like, fucked. Wrong. Ever since I can remember, I just- I had to have been, right? Why else-” She cuts herself off with a jolt of teeth against her tongue, dragging her hands down her cheeks. “I hate that I still feel sorry for myself about it. I'm used to going it alone. Shouldn't I be used to it? It's like… I spent all this time breaking everything that I touch and then I just… what? Get to move on? And I can't figure out if I'm supposed to, and it's a bad thing that I can't, or if I'm not, and it's wrong of me to want to. Move on, I mean. It's not like anything was super bad, really. I had it… fine enough, and then I tossed that shit in the bin the minute I could, and now I'm throwing myself a fucking pity party just because I have to live with the consequences. God!” She throws her hands into the air, narrowly avoiding smacking her knuckles directly into Edwin's jaw as she does so.
She's crying again, she realizes, and the film of separation has crept back in around the edges of her vision.
“I can't keep wanting like this. I don't know how to stop. It's- I know it's selfish, you don't need to tell me. I already know that. But I can't stop, and it's eating me alive. ”
There's another beat of silence, one significantly tenser than the last. When Edwin reaches to return a hand to her back, he hesitates, hovers just above her shoulder blades before withdrawing.
Great fucking go, Crystal. Nice work. It's not like it wasn't the truth, but. She would have liked to have pretended a little while longer that they were finally getting along.
“Crystal,” he starts, and she musters all the energy she has left in her body to take a shot at feigning nonchalance.
“Hey, Edwin? Save the lecture, will you? Fuck off. Go... read a book, or something.” She feels stupid even as the thought flits by, but she's already gone and spoken it aloud by the time she can think better of it. No takesy-backsies. If shame was present before, it is amplified now to an almost catastrophic level.
“Crystal, that is potentially the weakest insult I have ever been on the receiving end of, and that is certainly saying a lot. Good Lord.” He shuffles a bit and sniffs, shifting his weight from one hand to the other. “But I digress. That was not the point I had intended to make. Here.”
At this, Edwin stands at last, quickly swiveling to face her. He folds to sit cross-legged on the ground, scuffing a knee on the bed frame as he does so, and takes her hands in his.
“Would you fault Charles for the violence inflicted upon him by his father?” Edwin asks, and the idea is so deeply gross and so very startling that Crystal lets out an incredulous laugh.
“Are you fucking kidding me? Of course not! Jesus, Edwin, what're you playing at here?” She withdraws her hands like they've been burned, balling them into the bedsheets on either side of her thighs.
“Would you fault me for my own parents’ disdain? Or Niko, for her mother's decision to send her overseas?”
“No, no, of course not. Never.” She understands what he's getting at, she does, but he doesn't know her like she knows herself. He doesn’t know, yet, the extent of her self-absorption, doesn’t grasp how plainly revolting she can be when examined under any level of scrutiny. Suddenly, the need to make him understand is the most pressing matter in the world. “It's different. It's different! It's not- you can't compare them like that. It's different, it's different, I'm different, it's-”
“Crystal.” Edwin cuts her off, now, his voice strangely gentle as he threads their fingers back together. “You are not responsible for your parents' shortcomings. There is not a child on Earth deserving of the hate of their predecessors. There is no question of justification in such a matter. You should have been cared for, and yet you were not. You have every right to be damaged as a result. Perhaps you have done others wrong in the past, yes. But that is not representative of who you have become, and it is certainly not the reason you have come to feel so, hm, poorly, about your familial relationships, nor is it a justification for their wrongdoing.”
“It's different,” she insists, but her words are sounding increasingly weaker the longer the conversation goes on. Of course Edwin had dug his stupid, bony little fingers into the crux of the issue. One of them, at least. Of course he wasn’t smart enough to know when to let sleeping dogs just fucking lie. "And you sound like a self-help pamphlet."
“They did not know you had been missing, Crystal. For weeks. And I suspect, as does Charles, this was not the only time they've behaved so… unfavorably. Admittedly, I still find myself wrong-footed in the matter. I-” Edwin twists his fingers further in hers, squeezing tight. It seems almost unconscious, and she's seen him do the same with Charles on more than one occasion. She squeezes back, despite knowing he can't truly feel it. She hopes beyond all hope it remains reassuring. “My mother and father had their own misguided ideas of parenthood throughout my upbringing, perhaps but a product of their time, perhaps from a simple lack of care. I find it most comparable to having a roommate that finds you a bit distasteful, as opposed to any definitive familial bond. It was not until recently that I learned such a thing was abnormal. Damaging for a child, often. It was simply the way it was. I've spent a lot of time deconstructing the ideals of my past, and though I wear similar doubts at times, I can assure you of your worth at this particular junction.”
“Been reading a lot of Psychology Today lately, Socrates? Shall we call up the committee? Tell them you've discovered something that'll change the world?” She can't help the barb, but she's satisfied when it lands well enough. He smiles, a look both warm and frigid in the way only Edwin can seem to be.
“Indeed,” is his only reply. She waits for him to volley back, but the time never comes.
He grasps her shoulders, voice tight but more sincere than Crystal thinks she's ever been on the receiving end of. Pinned beneath his gaze, she feels impossibly fragile. “Hear me, Crystal, when I say that you did not, not for one second, deserve anything but the best from this world. You are a tremendous pain, and you are one of the kindest people I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. I am so deeply sorry fate has not been as kind to you, to any of us, as it should have been.”
There are no tears left in her body to be shed, so Crystal subsists in the tidal wave his words induce by pressing herself eagerly into Edwin's chest and holding him tight. Great heaves wrack her shoulders, more comparable to violent spasms in nature, dry but still profound enough to leave her muscles aching as each one dissipates, the next unflinching as it rises to replace what came before.
Edwin stiffens only briefly under her touch before he returns the embrace, if a tad mechanical in his motions. He rocks his body gently as he sits, and Crystal is more than happy to join, both sets of limbs now pressed tightly against one another.
“Better?” he asks. Unadept in the realm of emotional awareness, the question emerges lacking any conceivable form of bedside manner. Crystal finds she doesn't mind.
It's not enough to tempt the truth out any further. “Sure. Something like that.” The laugh that follows is a bitter imitation at best. Judging by the way Edwin’s eyes scrunch, his frown folding impossibly deeper, he has seen right through her.
Not that it would be especially hard, she figures.
“I must apologize. As you may well know by now, I am not… terribly good with other people.” He pauses, wets his lips, before continuing. “But I fear that very failure has led you astray, in some way. I feel as though you're under the impression that I, we, do not value your place here at the agency.”
She forgets they're proper detectives, sometimes. She has some choice words to offer whoever sparked that particular passion in Edwin Payne as he reads her to filth in her own home.
“It's only fair I set you straight: when I said I had grown fond of our little jests, I meant it. When I speak of our work here, your abilities as a medium feature front and center, just as the predispositions of Charles or myself might. And though the fact that I'd have to spell out how much Charles values you is mildly ridiculous, I feel the need to do so anyway. He adores you, Crystal. You do have a place here, it's important to me you realize such a thing to be the absolute truth. I am truly sorry if I have done anything as of late to convince you of the contrary.” Again, there's a pained sort of look plaguing Edwin's face to accompany the honesty, the praise, but Crystal finds it makes his words all the more believable.
They sit together, the moment sticky with what remains unsaid. The longer they wait, settled against one another, the more open Crystal finds herself to the idea that she trusts Edwin, his words, his intentions. Perhaps she should have been already. At once, she realizes she's been thinking the worst of him, of their friendship (because what else can you call it, when you're willing to go to Hell for someone, when they're willing to go to great lengths to keep you alive, keep you happy?), and the shock that runs through her is equal parts unbearably warm and acutely painful.
Edwin is good. And if he thinks, impossibly, she might be too, then where does that leave them? There's little reason for him to lie, to placate her and, in doing so, obscure the truth. What happens when the things she believed only hours ago to be mere facts of life are dissolving before her very eyes? What is she left with when her burning need for penance is dimming with every second he continues to linger at her side?
Fuck.
When she flinches at the onslaught of revelations, Edwin steadies her against his side, leans them back until their spines both rest against the bed frame. He keeps her in his arms, despite the fact that Crystal knows he’s probably itching to remove himself from the situation entirely.
Stay, she thinks, please, God, I don’t care, please just stay. And miraculously, he does. He holds her like she’s something worth giving a damn about, and isn’t that just so uniquely strange?
The thought she is, however inexplicably, valuable to someone, to more than one ‘someone,’ is foreign, exciting, and it tastes sweet, sweet, sweet against her tongue. Sometime soon, she knows, this feeling might grow cold once more. When doubt creeps in or the world cries out too loudly, she knows she may fall back into old habits, knows just how deep she can spiral before coming up for air. But in this moment, this now, Crystal is unashamed as she bathes in it.
“Sappy bastard. You're bad for my health, you've gotta know that by now, right? Gross goddamn misuse of privileged information.”
He snorts indignantly. “Forgive me if I find it hard to believe your own date of birth is particularly privileged, given the status of your parents. Even discounting the nature of your lineage, British birth records are public information. All one would have to really do is know to look.” Crystal feels his chest rumble as he speaks, and his chin has come to rest on top of her head. If Edwin had breath left to cycle, it would be hot against her hairline. It's odd, as is just about everything she's experienced in the last few hours of her life, but once more she finds it is not unwelcome.
She rolls her eyes. “God you must be fun at parties. Real charmer, you are. ‘British birth records are public information,’”—she gives a rowdy and decidedly atrocious mimicry of his accent when she spits the words back out—“I'd genuinely rather scrape my own eardrums out of my skull.”
“A word from the wise: never venture into acting, Crystal. I fear you'd bankrupt yourself. That impression shall hopefully never again see the light of day, for your sake as much as mine," Edwin chides, pulling their limbs apart just long enough to direct a glare her way. It lacks any real heat. “Truly abhorrent.” Crystal displays tremendous restraint, she'd like to think, when she doesn’t immediately repeat the words back to him in that same ridiculous impression. “The truth is only boring if you do not wish to hear it. It’s hardly my fault that an archivist might keep—and this may sound just preposterous—archives? Records of events that have come to pass, perhaps? Do try and keep up now.” Edwins's expression turns slightly mischievous, which bodes incredibly poorly for her, she imagines. “And, as I am told, Charles rather enjoys my wit. You seem to be quite fond of him, no? Would hate to leave him unsatisfied. Really, I would.”
“Hiya, hi- sorry, just popping in, sorry, sorry-” Speak of the devil and he shall appear, or whatever. Crystal briefly considers the turn of phrase as Charles stumbles through the same mirror Edwin had earlier, though with considerably less grace and with several bags of assorted bits and bobs in tow. The wording feels a little wrong, given all that she knows about Christian Hell and the up-in-the-air state of its management. She almost asks Edwin for input on the matter before immediately thinking better of it.
At Charles’ appearance, the ghost in question hastily disentangles himself from her arms—and, consequently, from whatever brief peace treaty they had enacted. The show he puts on is not an especially convincing one, given their matching reddened eyes and awkward crouch upon the floor, but she silently commends his effort anyways.
“D'you know Charlie has our mirror all mucked up? Bit fed up with it, to be honest, her puttering about the place like she owns it. Might give her a talkin’ to about that, I reckon, yeah, Edwin? I mean, we've managed just fine for the last thirty years. No reason to fix what isn't even broken, no? Sometime tonight, maybe? You should come with. United front, and all that.” He pauses only to wince, then, aimless ramblings braced by the disapproving scrunch of his nose and a self-deprecating smile. “Right, yeah. Sounds kinda violent, now that I’m thinkin’ about it, but I promise it's not. Real nasty business at the shops today, though. Just my luck, really. Should have seen the look-” Charles’ entire being stops all at once, finally seeming to register the tension still lingering in the air. His gaze flits about them both with a clinical sense of analysis, cogs turning visibly within his head as he tries to rationalize what lays before him. Something in the bags he's holding clinks at the abrupt halt of inertia, all motion aborted in favor of unabashed staring.
“If this is a weird thing, I want nothing to-”
Crystal lobs a pillow at his head, which, in the most predictable move potentially of all time, he dodges by phasing through the thing in its entirety, leaving it to slap dully against the wall behind him.
“Charles Rowland, not another word. God, you're gross. I was, like, crying and shit. Just- ew.” She feels her mouth pucker in disgust, an expression Edwin is quick to mirror. Charles’ grin falls a bit flat in tandem with his joke.
“Just messing, yeah?” Charles pauses to take in the rest of her words, brow furrowed thoughtfully. “You alright, mate?”
Under Charles’ scrutiny, Crystal folds like a house of cards. Always has, likely always will. The instant the words leave his mouth, such a simple phrase, Crystal knows she's just about doomed. Because above all else, it's a vow to talk about it at some point, now or later, though that part goes unvoiced. He blinks, eyes very dark and very wide, and doesn't even seem to register his sway, Crystal pressed under his thumb and pried open even when a lifetime of repression has her scrambling to avoid that kind of naked vulnerability.
Edwin, now preening at the success of a trap he's barely helped to set for her, is quickly deflated as Charles rounds on him as well.
“And are you feeling alright, mate? You're all-” he gestures vaguely to his face with one hand, the bag it was previously responsible for now lying on its side, contents spilling from its opening and onto Crystal's floor. Edwin seems to fold just as quickly as Crystal had under Charles' watch, his brief ego trip soundly stamped out beneath the black leather of the younger ghost's loafers. For a grand finale of sorts, Charles takes a final moment to address them both.
“And I thought you lot were, like, permanently feuding, or something. Not all chummy like this, ‘least. I’ve been gone hardly three bloody hours. Is there something in the air I should be worried about? You both get clocked in the head? Some real Freaky Friday shit? Yes? No? Maybe?”
Charles is playing up the incredulity, she's sure, his arms gesticulating wildly to punctuate his sentences, but Crystal supposes his confusion isn’t all that unwarranted when she really thinks about it. She had woken up this morning believing she was little more than a plaything for the agency to tire of when she exhausted her use. While the notion is not entirely banished, her friendship with Edwin now exists in a sort of limbo, his actions a massively unexpected veer off the path of their months-long stasis. It's not unreasonable for him to be lost on the matter entirely; she's hardly better off herself.
“You're an idiot,” is what she lands on at long last. “Come here.” Charles, perpetually tactile as he is, hesitates no more than a single second before he half-launches himself into her arms.
“Didn't answer my question,” Charles mutters into her neck, his voice a lilting sing-song.
“Oh, come off it,” says Crystal, at the same time Edwin says, “We're perfectly alright, thank you, Charles.”
He giggles. It's a beautiful thing. Edwin's quiet huffs of laughter join him not long after, and this, too, is beautiful. She can't help but laugh along, if for nothing else than at the absurdity of it all.
“Oh!” Charles splits from their hug without warning, shuffling back as Crystal startles from a rather blissful zone-out in his arms. He rustles around in one of the bags he's left scattered on the ground before procuring a white, rectangular box from out of the mess.
“Cheers.” Charles softens, his smile growing impossibly wider by the second as the box trades hands. “Happy birthday, Crys.”
There comes a pang in her chest at his words. For the first time ever, though, she finds her cautious excitement far outweighs the bitterness that wells up at the idea.
“You didn't have to get me anything.”
“Did anyway, didn’t I?” He crows, looking incredibly smug about the matter. His eyes are creased where they fold into the edges of his smile, a thousand watts captured in a flash of teeth and the upward curve of his lips.
Crystal feels more than a little like crying all over again. He didn't have to, but he did. His hands are insistent, tucking the gift closer to her chest when she reaches to return it to him, and he smiles downright radiantly when she relents at last. He didn’t have to. He did anyway. He did, and she teases the lid off, her heart on fire within the confines of her chest.
Inside is a dainty glass tube that bows slightly outwards towards one end. It's an opaque white, and the surface is smooth, cool against the pads of her fingers when she runs them overtop it. Like her kettle, it is adorned with wildflowers in varying degrees of bloom. Like her kettle, it is breathtakingly beautiful, and unlike its ancient twin, this item remains unsullied by the tolls of time.
“Hey, Charles? If you bought me a pipe for my birthday you have to tell me now.” To her left, Edwin opens his mouth to ask something before promptly thinking better of it. The click of his teeth against one another is audible, leaving Crystal in a flurry of both utter delight and pleasant satisfaction.
“Certainly not,” Edwin musters, while Charles busies himself with keeling over into peals of bright, wheezing laughter. The incredulous look playing across Edwins’s face only further serves to send Charles gasping for breath he doesn't actually need between fits of giggles. Peppered by equal parts confusion and offense in the fallout of a joke he only barely grasps through vague implication, Edwin’s face shifts through several emotions in quick succession before returning to its natural, impartial state. “It's intended for scrying, I believe. May I?”
Crystal is still grinning as she hands it over, her body alight with something she can't seem to put a finger on. Edwin handles it like he's never touched anything quite so valuable in his life. Crystal watches as he evaluates the new maybe-probably-not-pipe, balancing it first in one palm before running a thumb across the side and raising it to his face. As he lifts it to peer through one end, she realizes suddenly that the emotion is joy. Pure, lovely, unrestrained joy, wild and frenzied as it burns through each and every nerve ending.
Edwin passes the instrument back to her just as gently as he had when he first picked it up, seemingly satisfied with his initial conclusion. Mirroring his movements, she places the tube to one eye, instinct leaving the other to flutter shut.
Crystal gasps sharply at the scene it lays out before her. Her attic apartment has been swallowed by a vast cityscape, buildings bathed by the ambient glow of neon signs and billboards that hang at every street corner. In the pavement’s scarce few puddles, lights reflect in columns, their nature distorted by the rainwater but persistently gorgeous despite it.
She blinks, and now the splendor of that nameless urban night has bled into the glint of a creek, framed by greenery that stretches like spindly fingers towards a clear, blue sky. Beneath her, where her feet would otherwise be, is a sprawl of river stones. Each glows in the morning light, slipping gently between white, lathering foam, and each has been rendered smooth by the ebbs and flows of water across their backs.
It's beautiful. Every inch of every scene. It's the only real gift she's ever received, which lends it some amount of advantage by default, but it's undoubtedly her favorite.
Crystal lowers her hand slowly, the return to her bedroom almost as much a shock as the experience preceding it had been.
Almost.
She throws her arms around Charles’ neck at once, one hand dragging Edwin by the collar directly into the throes of their messy embrace.
“Holy shit,” she breathes, and there aren't enough words in the world to accurately describe the elation she feels thrumming in her chest, thudding against her ribs like the beat of a drum.
“Be gentle with it, yeah? Cost me a pretty penny. The shopkeep—that bloke from Venice, 'think?—sends his regards, by the way, Edwin. Sentimental fella, to be honest. Should have seen that one coming.” There’s that smile again. Crystal wonders, not for the first time, how the world has not been burned to ash beneath the easy glow of his grin, the sheer magnitude of his joy.
Charles is delighted by Crystal’s delight, and he's not even slightly subtle about it. Edwin is delighted because the pair of them are. He's a tad more discreet than his counterpart, tilting his chin ever so slightly towards the wall in an effort to hide the smile spreading across his face. Crystal sees through it almost instantly, and in the hundredth-and-first startling realization of the day, it dawns on her that Edwin has been vastly easier to read in the months since they returned from America. With this rises the idea that she may, honest to God, really, properly, actually be Edwin Payne's friend, however strangely he chooses to show it.
From the confines of their little huddle, Edwin still manages to dish out a light slap to Charles' shoulder.
“No need to be crass, Charles. I'm sure she's well aware of its value. And, if I am recalling correctly, we’ve strictly sworn off insults about magical proprietors and their selections, lest we have another repeat of prior incidents, have we not? You have a terrifically poor track record, one that absolutely does not necessitate a new addition. Not that I should have to remind you.” The scolding has another bout of—at this point relatively nonsensical—laughter bubbling up inside of Crystals' chest, and she doesn't fight to reign in the string of giggles that tumbles from her lips.
“Oh, stop fussing,” she hears Charles mutter under his breath after a mere moment's hesitation, in doing so failing tremendously at maintaining their brief stint in attempted civility and serious, open dialogue. Really though, she supposes, they had already abandoned that venture ages ago. “He can’t even hear us, mate.” The retort is lacking in almost all departments, and she feels Charles shift to cross his arms as best he can beneath two added weights. It's all good-natured, as it almost always is, but Crystal finds herself slightly surprised when Edwin fails yet again to return the serve on their banter.
Slowly, her laughter peters off into a soft smile, her giggles calming amidst the silence until she can breathe deeply once again.
‘Crys?’ She sees Edwin mouth over her head, Charles’ only response a fond eye roll and another vague wave of the hand.
The dread that had shadowed her day has well and truly dried up by now. Edwin tires quickly of the continuous contact, but when he backs out of their hug he merely recedes a bit. Not far enough to be out of reach, just distant enough not to catch a stray brush of skin from any party involved. Eventually, the three of them wind up draped across her bed, mattress dipping with the weight of only one as Charles slings an arm around her shoulders and Edwin hovers at what she's sure he deems a sensible distance.
With a crack of thunder, rain begins to pour from a midday London sky.
Crystal is tired, suddenly. So very tired. Now that she has time to take stock of herself, she realizes the extent of her disorientation. It's hardly even noon yet, but there is sand in her joints and lead in her legs and she is so, so ready to experience the closest thing to a coma that resting can provide her with. Her head spins, and she can feel the aftermath of tears as a buzzing beneath her skin, between her teeth. A headache has crept unbidden into her temples, and though the total despair of her morning has been chased away, thoroughly cleansed, Crystal can still feel the hollow spots in her body where grief or loathing have taken up residence.
“Well, I feel fucking terrible,” she declares to the dead air around them. It's the first time any of them have spoken in almost an hour. Charles chuckles, and the sound reaches up, up, up to echo through the rafters.
“Yeahhh. Yeah. Yep,” he agrees, amiable as always, while Edwin only nods primly from where he's seated, a gesture that seems to be some form of equivalent sentiment. There are several seconds where Charles works his jaw, obviously in pursuit of speech but unable to sift through what he means to say, exactly.
“Not that I’m not… happy to see you both getting on so well, but, like. Still not entirely clear on how that happened? Don’t think I’ve seen either of you so… well, wrecked, in a minute. ‘N not, like, together.” Charles cracks a lopsided smile. It’s an obvious prompting, one it seems neither she nor Edwin are eager to rise and meet. His head tilts with the motion, and however minute the action is, Crystal feels a renewed sense of deep affection for the two dead boys, their shared detective agency, and their real dumb fucking name. She needs to get on Edwin's ass about fixing it, actually, now that she's thinking about it. Very quickly, she decides it is, like most things at the moment, a task to be reserved for later.
“Can it wait?” The request comes out more hesitant than she had initially intended it to be. “Please? I think I need to nap for maybe a few decades before literally anything at all happens to me ever again.”
“I suppose,” Edwin hums, pensive from his perch against the wall but visibly fraying a bit at the edges. It’s so short that it nears almost impossible to parse, but Crystal hears the way Edwin’s voice fizzles out into worry as his mouth curves around the last consonant.
In stark contrast, Charles does a truly poor job of concealing the concern that lies pulsing just underneath his skin, his body shifting against her side as he struggles to tame an overflow of nervous energy. He’s just about hit capacity for the day, she reckons, between herself and Edwin. They make quite a pair, if their overarching goal was to frighten Charles Rowland into a second, deeply unceremonious death. She catches yet another shared look between the two of them, one that is largely indecipherable to her as an outsider but is likely to heavily feature her recent fall from grace. Which, like, rude, but whatever. Not terribly slick either, but she's willing to allot them some grace in that regard. She's too weary to bother with bickering at the moment. They’ll talk eventually, ideally once she feels equipped to experience literally any conceivable part of the world ever again.
It feels weird to be cared for. Somewhere in the back of her mind, there remains a tremendous guilt that begs to be acknowledged, sharp-toothed and scared. She's too tired to care.
“Cool,” is all she manages before promptly passing out, gracelessly sandwiched between two of her only friends and with a lightness to her soul she hasn't known in months. It's not by any means perfect, but it's inarguably as good a place as any to start. When held to the light of their last few emotional escapades, it’s more than Crystal could ever really hope for. There is love enough to fill her new apartment, love enough to spill out the rotting door and into the office outside. Love enough for Crystal to consider, for the first time in a very long while, that there is something, someone waiting for her, looking out for her, caring.
Crystal spends her seventeenth birthday drifting, caught between dreamless sleep and a groggy, unwilling consciousness, and it is wonderful.