Chapter Text
The first time it happened—well. Charles realized, later, that it wasn’t really the first time at all. He’d seen Edwin hurt himself like it was nothing a dozen times already, shaking off the corrosive burn of iron with no more than a frown of distaste. He did avoid it when he could, of course, he wasn’t daft—wasn’t even like Charles, who could get so fired up in a fight that he forgot to watch himself sometimes, forgot he wasn’t actually untouchable even though he was dead—but if he had to scorch his fingers down to ash to get at a clue, well, he never hesitated, did he? And it was no good snapping at him about it, because he’d just give that dismissive little sniff of his, the one he did instead of rolling his eyes, and move on so briskly that all Charles could do about it was sigh and keep up.
So it wasn’t actually the first time. But he’d noticed by now that Edwin had an uncomfortably high pain tolerance, and he figured it was just that. He was bloody jealous, too. The few times they’d gotten into any sort of scrum, it was always Charles who went in swinging, but he’d never be as tough as Edwin. It rankled, which was a small and shameful thought that he tried not to dwell on. Edwin was only that tough because he’d been through literal, actual Hell, and it was fucked up and petty of Charles to feel anything other than horror over it all.
And then came the Case of the Lovelorn Laundress. He felt plenty of horror over it after that.
It was one of their more exciting cases, but straightforward all the same: a ghost had gone poltergeist in a crumbling old manor house in Wiltshire, and they had to find and destroy whatever was keeping her trapped in the memory of her death. There was loads of racing through dusty old rooms and hiding in held-breath silence while she stormed past. It was proper exhilarating, really, a big dramatic chase keeping them on their toes. Charles was having a grand old time.
Edwin was not. He was getting snippier with every room they searched through without finding the poltergeist’s anchor. After nearly three years of friendship, Charles could tell that it ran deeper than his usual irritation when they couldn’t wrap a case up through tidy deduction and were reduced to guessing instead, but he didn’t catch on to just how much deeper. He just kept trying to draw Edwin into the excitement of it all, kept trying to cheer him up, like there wasn’t clearly something deeply wrong.
Maybe if he’d noticed how quiet Edwin was getting, in between the snippy comments. Maybe if he’d noticed how Edwin bolted every time the poltergeist found them, zero to sixty in less than a breath, or if he’d noticed Edwin’s breaths as they ran, fast and harsh and panting even though neither of them really needed to breathe at all. Maybe if he’d noticed Edwin’s panic when they hit a seeming dead end, his shock when Charles grabbed his wrist and yanked him through a wall, like he’d forgotten there were no more dead ends for the two of them.
But he didn’t notice any of it. And, in the end worst of all, he didn’t notice how much iron was in the room he pulled them into. Some of the older ghosts he’d met said that iron had an aura, that you could learn to sense it from over a metre away, but Charles’s only method for finding it was singeing his fingers.
It was a dusty old storeroom, narrow and cluttered, full of random odds and ends piled in a haphazard jumble. Sunlight seeped faintly through the single shuttered window. The dead could see just fine in the dark, but with so little light the world was bleached of colour. It was proper jarring going from the bright sitting room they’d been cornered in to these muted shades of grey. Charles pulled up short just inside, blinking in momentary surprise.
They were safe here—poltergeists generally didn’t realize they could go through walls, since they generally didn’t realize they were dead at all, and this one was no exception. Charles ignored the eerie shrieks of rage reverberating through the wall at his back. His eyes were already roving over the mess in front of him, looking for anything that could be a clue.
Edwin stumbled as they came through the wall, but he didn’t stop moving. He staggered forward, jerking away from a pile of drawers and gardening tools only to step halfway into a stack of cobwebbed boxes taller than he was. His wrist slipped out of Charles’s grasp. Charles glanced over and found him moving clumsily, none of his usual elegant precision, as he half-fell right through the stack of boxes, vanishing into the cardboard.
And then he screamed.
It wasn’t actually a scream. It was way too quiet to deserve the name, for one. But Edwin let out a muffled, high-pitched sound somewhere between a whimper and a groan, brief and sharp, and panic lanced through Charles like a streak of lightning. He lunged for Edwin, leaping right through the boxes and skidding to a halt on the far side.
Edwin was standing with one foot in a dusty cardboard box, pulling in silent, heaving breaths. His eyes were wide, his face as pale as—well, as death. He was staring in horror down at his own leg where it vanished into the box.
Charles followed his gaze and couldn't contain a gasp. It didn’t…look right. When a ghost was phased halfway through an object, the point of contact tended to glow that particular shade of ectoplasm blue that Charles had gotten so familiar with over the past three years, a fuzzy sort of glow that put him in mind of television snow. Edwin’s leg was glowing just like that where it disappeared, a little above his bent knee, but it was also…smoking. There were wispy tendrils of blue light coiling and curling away from his leg, growing thicker and heavier by the moment.
Charles’s voice came out hushed, lower and more frightened than he’d meant it to. “Edwin, mate, what is it? What’s going on?”
Edwin’s gaze snapped up to meet his. Charles tensed. Edwin’s face was a blank mask, no expression in it at all, and yet there was a blazing intensity in his eyes that Charles couldn’t read. Something in Charles went sharp and still at the sight. He went up on the balls of his feet, hands curling into fists, braced to put himself between Edwin and danger as soon as he knew what the danger was.
Edwin exhaled in a rush, like he’d suddenly remembered he didn’t need to gasp for air. Charles mirrored him, letting out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Edwin’s face lost some of that unnatural blankness, his mouth pinching in discomfort, his eyebrows twitching down in a flicker of irritation.
“I, ah—” Edwin cleared his throat. “I appear to be—caught fast.”
He sounded almost normal. Some of the tension uncoiled from Charles’s shoulders. He gave himself a little shake, trying to flick off the rest of it, and pulled a reassuring grin out of somewhere. “Better get you un-caught, then, haven’t we?” He knelt at Edwin’s feet and swung his rucksack around to rummage after a pocket knife. But when he went to slice open the packing tape holding shut the cardboard box, Edwin made a small, aborted sound.
Charles looked up at him. There was a nameless dread lodged in Charles’s chest, just under his collarbone. Something was horribly wrong, and he didn’t know what, and all he could do about it was keep smiling, smiling, keep calm and smile for Edwin and try to keep the panic out of his voice. “Alright there, mate?”
Edwin nodded stiffly. “Be careful when you open the box. Take care not to touch the contents.”
“I’m always careful,” Charles smirked, just to see Edwin give him that prissy little huff he did instead of rolling his eyes. Only there was no huff this time. Edwin just held Charles’s gaze, his eyes dark and serious, and nodded again. Charles clenched his jaw and bent to his task.
Edwin moved his leg aside to let Charles slice away half the tape, then moved again so he could get at the other half. His leg smoked more thickly when he did. The odd tendrils of blue light leapt up like smoke from a bonfire, rising on ethereal thermals to billow up Edwin’s leg. Some of them went up all the way to his waist before dissipating. The cloud of them grew so thick Charles couldn’t see Edwin’s leg through them at all.
Edwin made no sound. He was utterly quiet, not even breathing anymore, as Charles split the packing tape and yanked the cardboard flaps up to open the box. Another rush of smoke eddied out of Edwin’s leg as the flaps passed through it.
Charles took one look in the box and started to swear. It came out of him in a spitting involuntary stream as he reached in and stopped, grabbed at Edwin’s shin, let go, reached again. He looked up at Edwin, anguished, his hands hovering uselessly an inch away from Edwin’s still-smoking thigh.
Edwin looked down at him, a dissatisfied little twist to his mouth, like all this swearing was offending his prissy sensibilities. Like there wasn’t anything worth swearing over. It made a bubble of hysteria rise up Charles’s throat. “Mate, how the fuck are you not screaming?”
Edwin winced. Charles could have smacked himself. “Right, sorry, stupid question, sorry, sorry. But seriously, mate, why didn’t you say something, this is—fuck.” He looked back down into the box. The box which, it turned out, contained a bunch of rusted old bear traps, like something from a horror movie. Some idiot had apparently left one of them open, and when Edwin stepped into the box and touched all that iron, he’d turned corporeal enough for his weight to snap it shut.
The jaws had closed just above his ankle. His leg was smoldering blackly where the metal teeth dug deep into his ghostly flesh. This part was giving off the regular dark smoke of an iron burn. It must have been lost entirely in the strange blue smoke coming out of his upper leg.
That smoke, at least, was slowing. Maybe it was some weird reaction to the the forced corporeality of iron kicking in while Edwin was already phased halfway through something. Charles wondered, with another spike of hysteria, if having a piece of cardboard in his leg had hurt, if Charles had hurt him worse by slamming the box open right through him. He made another aborted grab at Edwin’s smoldering shin, wanting to help but afraid to jar something and hurt him worse. The gibbering panic was making it really hard to think of what he could fucking do.
Edwin said peevishly, “I did.” Charles glanced back up and found him straightening his cuff links, the way he did when he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong and was getting defensive about it. “I warned you to be wary of the box’s contents, and I informed you promptly that I was…” He shot an unreadable look at his own smoking ankle. “Trapped.”
Charles’s hysteria flipped in one vicious instant into fury. He lunged to his feet. “That is not sodding enough—”
Edwin flinched.
It was a small motion, but a full-body flinch—he jerked back, his shoulders hunching up, his hands jolting away from each other, away from Charles. His eyes were wide.
Charles’s rage strangled in his throat. Shame flushed through him, chased by a bitter self-loathing. “Sorry,” he said thickly.
“That is—ah—quite alright.” Edwin’s hands were fluttering at his waist. He straightened and folded them tightly together, stiff as a rod with his perfect posh poise despite the awkwardness of the still-bent leg he wasn’t putting weight on. He was eyeing Charles in wary incomprehension. Charles hunched miserably. Edwin always gave as good as he got. Charles must have really scared him, for him to be anything less than frostily disdainful at being yelled at.
Charles dropped back to the floor and reached into the box, trying to shift some of the other traps in the box aside so he could get at the one clamped on Edwin’s leg and figure out how to disarm it. It burned, of course it burned, vicious agony searing through his fingers and radiating further up his hand the longer he kept at it, but he didn’t stop, even if he couldn’t bear to touch any of them for more than an instant. He deserved the pain. He’d yelled at Edwin. He’d frightened Edwin, Edwin who never lost his cool under pressure, Edwin who was so devastatingly kind, Edwin who was maybe the only true friend he’d ever had.
He clamped his mouth shut over the little hisses of pain that tried to escape. He had no right to whine about a measly little sting of iron when Edwin was standing there with his leg stuck in a fucking bear trap.
There was hardly even a hint of strain in his voice. Charles had relaxed when he heard Edwin say he’d been ‘caught fast.’ He’d sounded so normal.
“Charles, what are you—Charles!” Edwin’s voice snapped up into sharp alarm. “Charles, stop that at once! You are hurting yourself!”
Charles ignored him and shifted another bear trap aside. It burned, it burned so badly he could barely think through it, but he’d had worse. He’d had worse and he’d never deserved it half so much as he did now.
“Charles!”
Charles’s hand slipped, or maybe he was just losing so much skin to the corrosive touch of iron that he couldn’t grip things properly, and the trap he was shifting aside slid down and hit Edwin in the heel.
Edwin’s leg didn’t so much as twitch, even as the iron started to eat away at his foot. Charles yelped and yanked the trap away, flinging it out onto the floor. He fell on his butt as he did. His hands flew out to catch himself, and the sudden lance of agony when they hit the floor wrenched a scream from his throat.
“Charles!” And now, now, Edwin’s voice was laced with pain. He was leaning forward, hands reaching for Charles, and Charles looked up just in time to see him stumble as he lost his balance and had to put his weight on his trapped foot to regain it. A wince flickered across his face as he did, and no more.
“I’m fine,” Charles snarled. It came out too loud, too angry, but this time Edwin didn’t flinch. His eyes were flicking between Charles’s smoking hands, and his face was twisting up in anger too. He opened his mouth to give Charles a lecture, like this was the sodding time, and Charles opened his mouth to yell at him some more because Charles was a piece of shit, and then they both jumped when someone hammered on the storeroom door.
It was the poltergeist. She started shrieking again, eerie howls that no human throat could produce, layered with discordant harmonies that set Charles’s teeth on edge. She pounded on the door in a hail of blows.
Charles surged to his feet, already casting about for a weapon. Edwin flinched into a crouch, that blank intensity back on his face as he stared at the door where it shivered in its frame.
Then he blinked, and seemed to come back to himself. “Oh, for crying out loud,” he snarled.
He’d been holding himself carefully this whole time, keeping his trapped leg still. Now he wrenched it out of the box and went to his knees in a single sharp movement. The bear trap clattered harshly when it hit the floorboards. It ended up on its side, its long maw parallel with the floor. Edwin shifted so his other knee was resting on top of it.
And then, before Charles could do more than shout, he bore down with all his weight, and the iron jaws snapped clean through his leg.
Charles was the one who screamed. Edwin sheared his own fucking leg off with nothing more than an air of set determination, and Charles screamed in wordless horror and lunged for him. He grabbed Edwin by the shoulders and yanked him upright, like he could pull him away from the danger, like it wasn’t far too fucking late for that, like Edwin wasn’t a danger to himself apparently.
Edwin sagged in his arms, blinking up at him in surprise. Charles let out another shout as stinging agony jolted through his burnt hands and, stupidly, let go in reflexive shock.
He clamped down again an instant later. Better pain than dropping Edwin, who’d have to catch himself on his missing fucking foot.
Edwin’s hands flew up to grab at Charles’s shirt. He raised his voice over the poltergeist’s howling to ask, urgent, “Are you hurt?”
“Am I—You cut your own fucking leg off!” Charles’s voice was high and reedy, almost a sob. “Edwin, what the fuck.”
Edwin’s face creased in anxious concern. “I apologize for—for alarming you.” He straightened a little in Charles’s grip, putting his weight back on his— single!— foot. “We should go on. We have yet to find the poltergeist’s anchor, and she will—”
“Her anchor?” Charles gave Edwin a shake, like he could rattle sense back into him. “Forget her fucking anchor, mate, we’re going home and I am going to sit on you until you understand why you are never going to pull this shit again!”
Edwin gave a little frown of affront. “It will grow back.”
Later, Charles would look back on what he was doing and hate himself. Edwin hated to be touched, and Charles had grabbed him and yanked him around. Shaken him. Shouted in his face. Bristled up with fury, made his anger a threat, made his anger something for Edwin to fear. Like the violent brute he was. Like the man he’d sworn a thousand times he’d never, ever become.
And, worst sin of all, in the moment he didn’t even think of it. Didn’t think of anything but the dreadful panicked rage pounding through his spectral veins. Edwin’s taut discomfort didn’t stop him, didn’t snap him back to himself, didn’t remind him to be gentle and kind to the best person Charles had ever known. Instead Charles just shook him again. “You don’t bloody well know that, do you?”
Sure, all the injuries they’d gotten from iron always healed up in a trice—Charles’s hands were nearly whole again already, despite how badly he’d hurt them—but they’d never even heard of a ghost who’d amputated a limb after their death. What if this was the thing they couldn’t take back? Ghosts were safe from permanent harm right up until they weren’t.
Unease flickered through Edwin’s eyes. He glanced down, and Charles followed his gaze. His leg cut off to nothing just above the ankle, letting off a constant stream of coiling black smoke. Charles’s nonexistent gut lurched at the sight. His grip on Edwin tightened instinctively, and he had to bite down on a hiss of pain at the increased pressure on his singed hands.
Unwillingly, drawn by morbid urge and the need to know what had happened to it, Charles looked over at Edwin’s severed foot. It was lying on the floor next to the snapped-shut bear trap, a shoe and stockinged ankle that ended in a smoldering black stump. The sock was still pulled taut and flush to the skin, not sagging like it would have been if it were real fabric instead of a manifestation of Edwin’s essence. The whole thing was slightly translucent. Like it was slowly fading away.
“I am sure I will be fine,” Edwin said dismissively, raising his chin to look Charles in the eye. “And we still have a case to close.”
“Like hell we do.” Edwin got a mulish look at that, but Charles wasn’t having it. “Absolutely not. We’re going back to the office now. End of.”
“I hardly think—”
The storeroom door gave out with a screech of splintering wood. Charles was distantly impressed it had held out so long. Edwin’s frown deepened as he caught sight of the poltergeist over Charles’s shoulder, but Charles didn’t waste time turning around for a look. He bent to scoop Edwin into his arms and took off toward the wall they’d come in through. He was pretty sure there’d been a mirror in the last sitting room they’d run past.
Edwin squawked and flailed, but Charles just tightened his grip and kept going. He was going to shove Edwin through that mirror whether he liked it or not, they were going to make sure his severed fucking foot would grow back, and then they were going to have a fucking talk.