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London, October 1990
There were a lot of perks to being a ghost, Edwin did have to admit. He never needed to worry about food or water or shelter ever again. He would never have to worry about if he was going to be conscripted into service for the military. All of those things that had previously been required pressures of him: to be the perfect son, student, young man, ect, were all gone now. There were very few people who could see him to judge him or tell him that something was wrong with him. And the few that could were definitely put off by Charles’s presence in his afterlife.
Anyone that had a problem with Edwin had a problem with Charles. Which had already caused a few conflicts, but so far nothing they couldn’t handle.
But by far, the best perk he could think of was mirror-hopping. Being able to avoid long treks, drives, trains, planes, anything else like that just by stepping through a mirror? It was wonderful. It almost made being sacrificed to a demon and dying worth it.
Not entirely, but it was still a good perk.
But mirror travel was difficult. It took a high amount of concentration, and while Edwin knew that a skilled ghost could go to almost any mirror in the world, he had so far been restricted to mirrors at places he had been before. This left far too few options in his opinion, so he was working on it.
Charles, it seemed, was even worse about mirror traveling than Edwin was. He also seemed less affected by it, less bothered by their substandard abilities at traveling. It was rare for him to be the first to go through the mirror, but when he did it usually took them to a random location. So early on they established that Edwin would go first and Charles would hold his hand on the way through.
It had worked wonders and prevented them from getting lost along the way. Now the only problem to solve was how to travel to new mirrors. At least he had plenty of time to practice while Charles was off, busy with other things.
They spent almost every moment together, but that didn’t mean they didn’t both occasionally need their own space. Edwin was aware that he could be… ill-natured at times. And while Charles always took it in stride, Edwin did sometimes fear that there might come a day where he didn’t and Edwin… Well, Edwin didn’t want to think about that.
So he took great pains to make sure they had time to do their own things, as well as doing things together; when they weren’t working on cases, that was.
Now was one of those times. Charles had bounced out earlier, claiming that he was going to go see some horror movie that the two of them knew Edwin wouldn’t be interested in, but that he would come straight back so the two of them could play a round of Cluedo.
He sighed as he slapped at the edge of the full length mirror in front of him. It wouldn’t be long before Charles would return, and he really, really wanted to have perfected this by the time he came back. Imagine how impressed he would be if Edwin could mirror-hop him wherever he wanted to go? If Edwin could cut their travel time for cases in half? He knew that Charles would be surprised and delighted to learn that Edwin had solved yet another of their “ghost abilities” as he sometimes referred to them.
Yet he couldn’t do it. He’d been trying for ages now to go to a place Charles had described, a place that Edwin had never personally visited, and yet he couldn’t do it. Every time he tried to peek through it felt as if something were blocking the otherside, like someone had put a wall up or something, except that shouldn’t matter because he was a ghost and ghosts can pass through walls and this was so stupid...
Edwin had always been a quick study. Usually, with a little bit of effort and time, he had found that he could master most subjects, social settings notwithstanding. Languages, maths, sciences, even the little bit of magic he’d taken to studying, all of it could be understood with just a little bit of time and energy, but this? This was driving him insane.
He’d seen countless other ghosts utilize it to its full abilities. So if they could, then Edwin could as well!
Without thinking, he went to slam his hand against the mirror. Instead of the resounding slap he had heard over and over as he had tried to master this skill, he heard the familiar ripple of mirror travel.
It was as if something had sucked him in, a force that he couldn’t fight against, nor was he certain he wanted to yet. Maybe this was how it felt when you traveled to a new place? Charles did often complain about mirror travel making him sick.
There was nothing graceful about this mirror travel. It was rough, almost like getting tossed from a moving vehicle or bucking horse but without the pain. Colors flashed by, merging into a mess of blurs and flashes so mixed up Edwin was sure he was going to be sick.
He’d told Charles plenty of times that that was impossible as a ghost, but the sheer number of times he was sure he’d flipped head over heels he wasn’t so sure now.
It only lasted for a moment, although it felt much longer as it was happening. A second later and he was slamming into the ground, the air forced out of his lungs in a little rush as he tried to get his bearings straight.
He’d been aiming for a candy store Charles had mentioned enjoying going to as a kid, somewhere Edwin had never personally been, but something that had been described to him so often he was sure he could paint it from memory alone.
Charles had described it before, a long mirror that lined the back wall to make it look like an infinite number of candies. That was what he had been aiming for. That is what he hoped to hit when he moved through the mirror.
That is not where he ended up.
It was hard to say exactly where he was. There were endless mirrors, too many to count. Or maybe there weren’t, maybe it was just too hard to count how many there were without a body to reflect back into them.
It was dim, the only light that filtered into wherever he was was green tinted, almost like it was viewed through the bottom of a coke bottle.
Or the light that managed to survive in Hell.
This was not Hell. He knew that. It was obvious, Edwin was sure, if only he could convince his brain to understand that. He was not in Hell, he had escaped, he had escaped.
But had he? Where was the proof? He was alone, just as he was in Hell. And while there weren’t usually so many mirrors in Hell, the seemingly never ending hallways were a familiar trait of them.
Was he back in Hell? Or had he never escaped? What if this whole past year, meeting Charles, opening a detective agency, all of it, what if none of it was real? He always had a rather active imagination as a kid, much to his father’s dismay. So what if all of that, all of the things that made his afterlife worth it, had just been nothing more than in his mind?
Slowly he sank back down to the floor. There were two ways to deal with everything in Hell: run for your life or make yourself as small and as quiet as possible. He went with the second option and pushed himself back into a corner of the mirrors.
If he really had escaped Hell he should be able to use the mirrors to travel back to the office. All he needed to do was think about the office and….
He couldn’t. It was like he was stuck, or there was something blocking him from making his way back to the office, or maybe the office had never existed in the first place and…
The demon skittered around, its strange almost baby-like laughter filling the air as it raced around looking for Edwin. It would find him of course, it always did, but maybe if he sat here, hand over his mouth, he could avoid it for a little bit longer.
This could be a good run. He could get out this time, he could. He would.
Time moves differently in Hell. Not slower, perse, but different. It was heavy, something that almost physically weighed on him in a way nothing had since he was alive.
Time must also move differently here, because before he knew it a hand had appeared in front of his face.
“Edwin?” Charles asked, his voice low and soft. His hand was extended in front of him, the world’s softest offering anyone had ever made to him. Probably ever would offer to him.
“Charles?” he asked. He could hear the croak in his voice, the way the tears he hadn’t even known he’d been shedding clogged his throat and choked him. If it were anyone else in the world he would have been embarrassed, and he sort of was, but this was Charles.
If there was anyone he believed he could cry in front of and not feel judged, it was Charles.
“Where’d you go, mate?” Charles asked. He was already crouched down but slowly he shifted until he was sitting almost side by side with Edwin. It must have been obvious that Edwin wasn’t processing anything, because he slowly retracted his hand until he could rest it against Edwin’s shoulder. “I came back to the office and you were gone.”
“The office?” Edwin asked. Because he knew the office. That was something that came after Hell, after he escaped.
A frown formed on Charles’s face, although he quickly morphed it into a reassuring smile. “Yeah, mate. The office. I thought you were reading that new spell book?”
“Spell book,” Edwin mimicked. With every word Charles said he could feel himself coming back piece by piece, as if it were reversing what the demon had always done to him one word at a time.
Charles nodded. “Yeah. I figured you’d still be stuck in it by the time I got back.” Edwin could feel his arm brush up against his as he gently bumped into him. “Kinda hard to pull you away sometimes, y’know?”
Edwin did know. Even before he had died he’d always been absorbed in his books. But the fact that Charles knew that meant that this had to be real.
He blinked, his eyes burning with tears as he allowed himself to look around the room. It was still full of mirrors, still a long hall of a room, but the green light had faded. Now it was just dark. It was honestly hard to see much past Charles’s well-meaning form leaning into his view again.
“-win?” he asked, finally breaking through Edwin’s thoughts again.
He snapped his head back around, his eyes meeting Charles’s wide, scared gaze.
“Where are we?” he asked.
Concern dug itself deep into Charles’s expression. “I was hoping you knew,” he said. “Kinda looks like a funhouse, don’t it?”
It did. Now that Edwin actually took time to look at it, he could admit that it did look like a funhouse. While it was not something that Edwin had ever experienced in his lifetime, he had seen one in a movie he and Charles had watched not too long after Charles had died. And now that he was really looking at it, it didn’t resemble Hell as much as he had originally thought.
“Wait,” Charles said, his head tilting side to side. “I think I’ve been here before.”
He raised up onto his knees, still keeping one hand on Edwin’s shoulder and never breaking contact. “Yeah! This is the funhouse on the pier! The one close to that candy shop I mentioned.”
Edwin blinked, trying to see the room in a new light. This wasn’t the terrifying Hell vision he had thought it was. It was a place from Charles’s childhood.
“Charles, how could you possibly tell?” he asked. Even knowing that it was a funhouse didn’t make it any easier to distinguish between it and the one from the movie.
Charles pointed. “You see that crack on that mirror?” he asked, a cheeky grin on his face. Across the room was a rather large crack towards the bottom on a mirror that Edwin figured should probably be replaced. “I saw that happen! Watched a guy run smack bang into it and crack it.”
Edwin smiled. It seemed like such a fond memory, one that he hoped actually made Charles happy and not just nostalgic for life.
“So this is close to that sweets shop?” Edwin asked. He still kept his voice low, the back part of his brain trying to tell him that he still needed to be quiet just on the off chance that that demon might come back for him, which seemed to worry Charles.
“Mmhm,” Charles said. His expression softened again as he held a hand out for him once more. “It’s about a block down.” His eyes flicked up and down, clearly searching Edwin for something, although it was hard to tell what or if he found it. “Do you wanna see it?”
Edwin nodded and allowed himself to be pulled into a standing position. He straightened his clothes and brushed his hands across his face, trying to make sure all traces of tears were gone. It was a hard thing to do without a mirror, but he was fairly certain he’d done a decent job. Or at least he was until Charles used the sleeves of his coat to wipe softly across his face.
“There ya go mate, good as new,” he said, his room-brightening smile back in an instant.
It wasn’t long before Charles led them through the maze, his hand a strangely solid, reassuring weight in his. At least with him leading them there was no chance that they would get lost.
Although Edwin supposed that if they really needed to, they could use any of these mirrors to get out. He was sure that now that he was calmer, he could actually utilize them.
“You never did answer, you know,” Charles said once they were out. His hand still lingered in Edwin’s, the same way it had immediately after his death and he’d had trouble staying solid enough to not fall through the floor. “How you got stuck in the funhouse?”
Edwin awkwardly cleared his throat. Now that they were no longer in the funhouse he could feel the embarrassment crawling up his spine. “I was… Well, I was trying to master the art of mirror travel,” he said.
Charles nodded. “That’s brills!” he said, smiling. “You managed to get pretty far this time.”
Edwin frowned. It was always nice when Charles complimented him, but it didn’t feel like he had done anything to earn it this time. “Yes,” he said. “But it did not work out.”
Charles gave him a confused look. “Didn’t it?” he asked. It was obvious that something had gone wrong; most people didn’t end up crying in halls full of mirrors after all, but how wrong it had gone hadn’t quite set in yet.
“I was aiming for somewhere I had never been before,” Edwin said. “Somewhere that had been described to me in detail that I could picture when trying to go there.”
Charles raised his eyebrows. “The candy shop?”
Edwin nodded. “The candy shop.”
Charles gave a slight whistle. “Still pretty impressive, if I do say so. You were only about a block off.”
A frustrated groan ripped itself from Edwin. “Yes, but a block could make all the difference when it comes to a case! Or running away from an angry ghost or escaping any number of other obstacles.”
Charles pulled them to a stop, right in the middle of the street. It’s not like it really mattered, no one was out this late and even if they were they would go right through them. But it did force Edwin to look at him, green eyes meeting brown in order to make sure they were listening to each other.
“You’ve never been here, yeah?” he asked, looking from one of Edwin’s eyes to another. He waited until Edwin nodded before continuing. “Then this is amazing. You got here all by yourself, I don’t think I could get here just based on memory alone!”
Something clicked in Edwin’s brain then, a missing piece that he hadn’t even realized was gone until now. “How did you get here?” he asked.
Charles scrunched his face. “What’d you mean?”
Edwin looked away from him for a moment to glance around the street. It was a rather nice looking area, a sweet little place that Edwin could easily picture families strolling along on a summer day. It was far too late for that now, all the shops closed for the night and nothing but security lights left on.
It hadn’t even been sunset when he’d left. How long had he sat in that hall of mirrors?
“How could you have possibly found me?” Edwin asked. This was real. He knew it was. There was no way he could imagine Charles’s hand in his, the way his dark brown eyes tracked his every movement. Edwin had never shied away from mentioning that he had been in Hell, but he always kept exactly what had happened to himself. But when Charles looked at him like that, he felt as if he might be able to read exactly what had happened, and how he wished he could help him.
Charles looked away for a moment, something close to a blush spreading across his face. “Well, I followed you through the mirror, didn’t I?”
Edwin frowned. “Yes, I figured that much. But how did you know where to go?”
The blush seemed to deepen as Charles shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Well, I just did what I normally do,” he said. Edwin waited for him to go on, sensing that there was more coming to the conversation. “I followed you.”
Edwin huffed and rolled his eyes. He felt more and more like himself the longer they spoke, as if Hell were fading further and further into his memory. “Yes, Charles, I know. But how?”
“No,” Charles said. “I followed you.” He put a hand out, miming like he was touching a mirror. “When we go through mirrors, I’m usually just thinking about ending up wherever you go. Since you were the last one through the mirror, all I had to do was think about you and where you had gone and…” He trailed off with a shrug.
Something warm rolled through Edwin. The idea that Charles was able to find him because he was always looking for him was… Well, he wasn’t sure what it was, but it made him feel happy. Probably happier than anything else in his life had in a long time.
“And that works?” Edwin asked. “It… worked?”
Charles nodded, clearly excited after his initial embarrassment. “Oh yeah, loads. That’s why we don’t need to hold hands anymore when going through the mirror! I just close my eyes, try and think about where you are, and I usually pop out right behind you.”
This of course seemed like a reasonable act, and yet Edwin was still amazed by it. He wanted to be annoyed, Charles would need to learn how to properly mirror travel eventually after all, but how could he judge him when Edwin was just now starting to understand it? He should be grateful that Charles had learned to travel via this trick, otherwise Edwin would likely still be stuck in that maze.
Edwin nodded. “Right,” he said, straightening his already orderly clothes. “Well, I must say thank you. And that I am sorry you had to see me… like that.” His sentence fizzled out as his face heated up as he thought about what a mess he had been before.
None of that seemed to bother Charles. He merely leaned over and punched him lightly on the shoulder. “Nah, s’all good, mate. That place is proper scary. The price of it alone, whew,” he said. Edwin could tell what he was doing. He’d seen Charles do it before, carefully side-stepping any mention of Hell at Edwin’s slightest discomfort with a smile and a joke. It looked so easy when he did it, so much so that Edwin was almost envious of his well practiced ease.
It wasn’t a skill Edwin had ever possessed, or likely ever would, but he supposed that’s what made him and Charles such a good team. They complimented each other like Edwin had never dreamed of doing with another person.
“So where is this sweet shop?” Edwin asked, finally breaking eye contact. “I know that we cannot partake in any, but I thought that a visit might be nice.” He didn’t mention that he hadn’t originally planned for Charles to be with him when he had first visited, nor had he ever really thought about truly bringing him here in the first place. Familiar places from before their deaths could be a touchy subject, as they both had found out.
“Right over here,” Charles said with the biggest grin. It was a huge shop, one that easily could have contained several of their offices. It was easy to see why this had been a place that a young Charles had been so enamored with.
If Edwin squinted he could almost imagine a young Charles there with his mother, begging her for just one more sweet, which he was sure she would give in, because who could resist those big brown eyes? He was almost sure Charles had been spoiled to death, how could he not have been?
Edwin might not be able to spoil him with sweets now, but he could do something else.
“Do you want to tell me about your film?” he asked. This was practically standard for them; Edwin read to them at night and Charles recounted movies to the best of his abilities. Which, given that Charles actually had a hard time sitting still through most movies, was done with a startling clarity and completeness. And if he was really into it, or if he felt like he needed to get Edwin out of his own world, he would even act out the parts.
Charles was never going to win any awards for his acting, but it never failed to fully entertain Edwin.
“Yes!” Charles practically yelled. “So, it was actually a rerelease, just for the spooky season.” He wiggled his fingers, as if that was supposed to have some sort of effect on his words. “Anyway, it’s about this thing, they call it The Blob- but you won’t find that out until later, and it’s set in America and-”
Edwin listened to him go on and on as they phased through the wall of the shop. Together they walked around, their hands almost brushing as they took in everything in the room before setting off through the mirror back to the office. It would take Charles longer than the actual run time of the movie to explain it to Edwin, it always did, but that was fine with him. The more Charles talked the calmer Edwin felt.
Once they were back in the office Charles tugged Edwin down onto the couch, never once stopping his explanation. He didn’t even pause as he tossed his feet up into Edwin’s lap, almost as if they belonged there.
And maybe they did. Everything about this felt right, as if this is what he should have been doing all along, not practicing mirror travel alone all evening.
They would still need to take time to do their own things, be their own people in their afterlives. And Edwin would still need to work out the mirror travel thing eventually. But none of that mattered now, not when Charles was rambling on and on about such a ridiculous horror movie that Edwin was now invested in. Questions were already brewing inside him, although he knew that Charles wouldn’t appreciate him interrupting. There would be time for questions later, when Charles paused to make sure Edwin was still listening to him, and Edwin reassured him that he was.
Out of the corner of his eye the mirror glinted in the low night light. A shiver went down his spine, which he quickly hid by scooching further down the couch and pulling Charles’s legs even higher into his lap. Charles gave him a brief look, one that was clearly checking in on him as he continued on with the story. Whatever he saw must have reassured him because he smiled and took to waving his hands around, acting out the next part complete with different voices and limited gestures he could do without getting up from the couch.
Mirror travel could wait another day, Edwin decided.