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Jenny slipped back into the room to get met with a face-off. Charles on one side of the office rug, Edwin on the other, Niko looking back and forth between them with wide eyes, and Crystal looking like she was inches from either pulling popcorn from the ether or yelling “Fight! Fight! Fight!” like she was in an ‘80s movie high school hallway.
Jenny sidled over to Crystal. “What did I miss?”
Crystal didn’t look away from her entertainment, smile not so much wolfish as hyena-ish. “Charles is about to tear Edwin a new one.”
Jenny raised her eyebrows. “Seriously? I kinda got the impression they didn’t… work like that.”
“They don’t,” Crystal said, “generally. Which is why it’s great. Now shhh, they’re about to get to the good part.”
Charles’s mouth was, in fact, opening. “What the fuck did you think you were doing, Edwin?”
“Keeping all of you out of danger.” Edwin’s voice was calm, and reasonable, and a bit condescending, and even from the side of the room Jenny felt an instinctive urge to bristle at it. Charles, she thought, must be feeling downright incandescent.
“Oh, really? ‘Cause from here it looked like you were fucking - fucking locking us up and putting yourself in danger, for no - for no fucking reason!”
Edwin rolled his eyes and Jenny internally applauded Charles for just tightening his fists instead of throwing a punch. Not that she thought he would, but she’d understand if he did. “I am, for various reasons, far less likely to take injury from the manticore’s sting than any of you,” he said, and it was more than a bit condescending now. “If you simply took a moment to think, you would recognise that my course of action was the only reasonable one to employ, given the situation. You were all in far too heightened states to behave rationally.”
Charles made a furious sound in his throat, and, frankly, Jenny was considering joining Crystal in her ‘80s-movie chant. Not that any 16-year-old deserved his ass beat, but, you know, maybe some of them could benefit from getting yelled at some. And it’s not like Edwin was actually a teenager anyway. Or something. She would freely admit she hadn’t really understood his explanation of his age.
“You don’t,” Charles got out through gritted teeth, “get to make that decision for us.”
Edwin huffed, which was the closest he’d come to actually showing an emotion other than asshattery. “You would be perfectly fine, then, with Crystal being in danger unnecessarily? Jenny? Niko?”
Jenny sucked in a little air between her teeth. Dragging Niko into it was both a low blow and unfair to Niko. Edwin was definitely going to feel bad about that one later. She might still be catching up on their dynamics but she knew he tried to be nice to Niko.
Charles, meanwhile, was upgrading from incoherent sounds to a full growl. “Yes.” His fists clenched and then flexed out open. “I might not like it, but they get to make their own choices. Same as me. Same as you. Just because I don’t want you getting hurt doesn’t mean it’d be okay for me to keep you locked in the closet wrapped up in bubble wrap, and the same thing’s true for all the rest of us, damn it!”
His voice got high and break-y enough that, just for a second, he did sound very much like a sixteen-year-old.
Edwin’s mouth worked, jaw tightening and loosening, lips getting pulled in just a little like he was considering gnawing on them, until his face washed out into blank placidity. He spoke calmly again. “I am afraid, then, that we shall simply have to resolve to bear different opinions on this matter.”
Charles just stared at him in near-disbelief, which Jenny thought was fair, because “agree to disagree” didn’t really seem applicable here. Charles gave a small, bitter laugh, looked up at the ceiling with a twist of his mouth, and then back down at the floor, smile on, sour and dark. “Yeah, no.”
“Pardon?”
Edwin seemed downright flabbergasted that his ceasefire offer had been turned down, which Jenny thought was a bit disingenuous of him, given that it was very clearly, in fact, an offer to accept surrender, just dressed up a little. That said, from what she’d gathered, Charles normally would take pretty much any offer that ended a confrontation, so maybe he had a point.
“That’s not happening, mate,” Charles said, flicking his eyes back up, head still pointed down, bitter twisted smile still on his face. “This isn’t one of those times when you get to just… decide we’re done talking about it because you don’t want to anymore. That’s not a decision you get to make for me either.”
Edwin just stared at Charles, bewildered, while Charles rolled thoughts around in his mouth, before he came to a conclusion and straightened up, shoulders braced like he was ready to get hit. “You don’t wanna say I’m right, that’s fine. But I’m not doing any cases until you promise not to pull that shit again. So. It’s up to you, I guess.”
Edwin’s mouth opened and shut like a fish. “That - you can’t - I…” His eyes were wide and hurt, and Jenny was impressed Charles wasn’t caving to them. Edwin’s brows suddenly pulled tight. “What about the Night Nurse? You would let me be taken to Hell just to - to prove a point?”
Charles’s nose twitched, but he stayed calm. “That’s a low fucking blow, Edwin,” he said, quietly. “But I’m not part of that deal, anyway. You wanna keep doing cases without me, go ahead. I’m just not gonna be part of it.”
He stepped back, chin up, and Edwin’s body swayed forward like he was going to reach out for him instinctively.
“I don’t understand,” Edwin said. “You want me to do cases without you? What if - what if we…” He trailed off, eyes darting side to side. “What if I…”
“I don’t want you to do cases without me,” Charles said, and he’d lost all his angry energy, now, just sounded tired. “But that’s your choice, just like not doing ‘em is mine. If you want to go do cases alone, instead of just, for once in your afterlife, admitting you’re not always right, then that’s - that’s your business.”
Edwin looked very, very sixteen now, hurt and confused, and Jenny knew that, at this point, Charles wasn’t being entirely fair; even just in the little time she’d been able to hear them, she’d figured out that Edwin just projected a vibe of superiority, he didn’t actually back it up. She’d heard him willingly concede disagreements to Charles multiple times, once even to Crystal. But she figured Charles still had some ways to go before he lost the moral high ground today.
Charles sighed. “Look, Edwin,” he said, and walked back forward, reaching a hand tentatively towards Edwin’s forearm. Edwin didn’t step away, and Charles took the arm, and pulled Edwin’s hand into both of his. “I get that you’re scared because we’ve got squishy mortals around now, and…” He screwed his eyes shut for a second. “And I get that you never wanted to see me in Hell. I get that. I’m pretty freaked out about it all too, okay?”
One hand lifted off Edwin’s to brush his cheek, and a tear dropped down across it. Jenny very suddenly felt like she shouldn’t be there, but there wasn’t any way to leave without disrupting the bubble the boys were in. And, for their part, they seemed to have no idea they weren’t alone.
“I’m scared about you going to Hell, and I’m scared about you getting hurt by another witch or something, and I’m scared about me hurting you, and I’m scared about Niko, and Crystal, and Jenny. And today I was really, really scared about you getting poisoned by a manticore while I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
He moved even closer and leaned his forehead against Edwin’s.
“I’m scared too. But I’ve still gotta let you do your thing, and let the others do theirs, because that’s just how it works, okay? I can’t stop you running at a manticore, but you can’t stop me either. And it’s scary. It’s really scary. But that’s, well. That’s life.”
Edwin smiled, even as glinting light showed his tears dripping past Charles’s nose, nuzzled against his. “Afterlife, Charles.”
The side of Charles’s mouth twitched up. “Afterlife, yeah.”
Edwin’s eyes were shut, Jenny wasn’t sure how long they had been, and they were all silent for a minute, the three of them watching, the two of them in the center, standing on the carpet like a stage, but also like they were entirely alone.
Edwin finally broke the silence with a quiet sniffle. “Alright,” he said. “I’m… I’m not quite sure what exactly you want me to say. But… alright.”
“You won’t make our choices for us,” Charles prompted.
Edwin nibbled on his lip a little. “What if you aren’t present, and I am forced to make a decision without time to gain your input?”
Charles gave a fond huff. “You won’t make our choices for us, when you are acting against our explicit intentions or projected desires,” he amended.
“What if you are under some sort of magical influence, or otherwise incapable of normal decision-making?”
Charles fully snorted and pulled a hand up to scrub at the back of Edwin’s head. “That one’s coming really close to a trap,” he said. “But sure. You won’t make our choices for us, when you’re acting against our explicit intentions or projected desires, when we’re at something approaching our normal capacity. But a ‘heightened state’ doesn’t count as lack of capacity. And that’s it, no more lawyer stuff.”
Edwin’s mouth did a little sideways smile again. “Alright.”
“I wanna hear it. And you should probably write it down in your notebook just in case.”
“Later,” Edwin said, and gave a long-suffering sigh that Jenny wasn’t sure was merited, because Charles was definitely suffering more long-ly today. Although she did get the distinct impression that it was a mutual kind of dynamic. “I won’t,” he recited obediently, “make your choices for you, against your explicit intentions or projected desires, when you are at or approaching normal capacity.”
Charles pulled away enough to look at Edwin with narrowed eyes. “Are you crossing your fingers behind your back?”
Edwin rolled his eyes, and his smile was a lot bigger and realer-looking. “No,” he said. “Nor my toes, either.”
Charles gave him another suspicious look, just long enough for Edwin to half-snicker, and then his whole body suddenly relaxed as a grin showed up on his face, and it looked like it was even one of his real ones, from where Jenny was standing. “Great,” he said. “In that case, holy shit, Edwin, that was badass. I’ve never taken out a manticore on my own, that’s, like, mythic hero level stuff! What was that spell you used? I don’t remember that one…”
Edwin gave credit for the spell to Niko, who was “excelling at research”, which brought her back onto the carpet to babble excitedly, and then to Crystal for one of the more physical moves he’d pulled, and then offered thanks to Jenny for the use of her cleaver to remove the end of the scorpion tail, in response to which she graciously offered to let them keep said cleaver. Which was wholly because it had magically lethal agony-inducing poison on it now, and, frankly, not at all because it wasn’t extremely expensive, or anything. Because it was, actually. Very.
And that, as they say, was that.