Chapter Text
Uprooted Lives
Surprisingly, it had taken Jenny Green less than a month to arrange a new life in another country. It probably helped that she wasn’t very bothered about bringing big items like furniture, or with having a place ready and waiting for her when she got to the UK.
The two ghost boys, who had apparently been hanging around her shop invisibly for weeks, had offered to let her sleep on their couch until she found her footing in London. Jenny, who once spent a summer with her five male cousins and had had enough experience of living with teenage boys to last her a lifetime, had absolutely refused. She will stay in a hotel.
The insurance payment will cover it. Probably.
Everything that she’s taking – which isn’t much, but then she’s never really had much – is packed. The stack of cardboard boxes, sealed with packing tape, is smaller than Jenny had expected. Their ferry leaves in two hours; originally, Crystal had planned to leave for London as soon as she got her memories back, but decided to wait when Jenny said she would go with them.
Jenny’s said goodbye to everyone she has to say goodbye to. It didn’t amount to very many people. Jenny has never been particularly sociable, and while just about everyone knows her – it’s a small town – she doesn’t like most of them enough to say goodbye. There was one ex from high school she’d stayed on relatively friendly terms with. That was about it.
If Jenny had more friends she probably wouldn’t be packing up her life to move across the ocean.
“Jenny? Are you ready?”
Jenny jumps. She’s been a bit twitchy recently – which she thinks is very reasonable of her, since her date turned out to be a psycho stalker who tried to kill her and the local asshole turned out to be a child-stealing witch who blew up her shop.
Crystal is standing in the doorway, her bag slung over her shoulder. She’s back in her brown trench coat and a flowery top Jenny thinks she remembers Niko wearing.
Poor Niko. Jenny has a sinking suspicion her death was Jenny’s fault.
“Jesus, don’t do that,” Jenny complains. Crystal makes an apologetic face.
Jenny sighs. Crystal means well, but she’s still a teenager. Teenagers are stupid and thoughtless. So are most people, to be fair, but teenagers more than most.
“I’m just waiting on the moving company,” she says.
“This is all you’re taking?” Crystal asks, surveying the pitiful display in front of them.
“It’s rather depressing,” Jenny admits. “My life boiled down to a stack of boxes.”
“I mean, this was all I had for a while,” Crystal says, gesturing to her bag. Her face twists into something that isn’t quite amusement and she half-laughs, stepping forwards and then pulling herself short abruptly. “So I can’t really judge.”
“That was all you had?” Jenny asks, raising her eyebrow. She’d had an idea that Crystal wasn’t in a great position, but recently she’s been talking about her parents as though they’ve got money.
“Yeah,” Crystal says. She sighs, tipping her head back. “Remember my demon ex, David?”
Jenny does. Specifically, she remembers Crystal coming through into her shop talking about going to find her abusive ex, then being possessed by said ex, and finally having to deal with a tourist who had no idea how he’d got from London to Port Townsend. Which, fair. Jenny didn’t know either. Crystal had paid for his trip home and done something to his memory.
“Well, he took my memories,” Crystal admits. “That’s why I was with the boys in the first place – I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. I couldn’t remember anyone’s numbers or, like, any of the details for my credit cards. Or even that I had them. Sorry again for that.”
Jenny rolls her eyes. “At least you paid your rent. Not every tenant I’ve had has done that.”
“Who didn’t?” Crystal asks. Teenagers and their propensity for gossip.
“No one you’d know,” Jenny says repressively.
Crystal looks like she’s going to keep pushing, but she’s interrupted by the loud, rumbling sound of an engine. Charles races up, coming to a teetering stop just behind Crystal, Edwin following at a more sedate pace.
“The lorry’s here,” Charles says. “Think the bloke driving’s gonna keep going if someone doesn’t come out soon. He looks proper grumpy.”
Charles, and Edwin in a different way, is painfully British. Also, irrepressibly cheerful. It gives Jenny a headache whenever she has to deal with him.
“Right,” she says. She glances back at the boxes. “Right, I’m going to go deal with the moving blokes. Crystal, you two, try not to get into too much trouble. It’ll take thirty minutes, max. That shouldn’t be too hard for you.”
Edwin sniffs. Charles grins. Jenny rolls her eyes and makes her way through the shop to talk to the moving people.
Crystal’s original flight was booked with Virgin Atlantic, but this time she’s using British Airways. Not that she knows the difference. She’s still only sixteen, after all – the only international travelling she did pre-David was with her parents. She considered booking first class – her parents have plenty of money, they could totally afford it – but Jenny, who insisted on paying for her own flight, categorically refused.
So Crystal is currently sitting in Economy, headphones on to block out the small boy two rows back who won’t shut up about Spiderman, trying to remember every phone number David erased from her contacts and figure out what to say to all those people she treated like shit.
There’s a lot of them. God, Crystal really was a horrible person.
Jenny’s curled up in the seat next to her, snoring softly while some shitty horror movie plays on the screen in front of her. Crystal wonders how she’s doing. She’s totally uprooted her life, after all.
Crystal remembers having to move to England when she was twelve. That might have been what really set her off on her toxic mean girl act, now that she thinks about it. Some kind of Inside Out bullshit, except being on an entirely different continent was too much for Crystal to even try running away.
The problem is that half the people Crystal needs to apologise to have her blocked, or aren’t even people she knows. The sheer number of shop assistants she’s fucked over–
Maybe she should take a break from this. Trying to use an overnight flight to write long, apologetic texts to all the people she’s screwed over had seemed like a better idea before Crystal was actually trapped on a plane with nothing but her memories, a sleeping landlord-turned-maybe-friend, and two ghost boys who both vanished early into the flight.
Crystal puts down her phone. On second thoughts, she powers it off entirely – she doesn’t want to think about any of that now. Instead she searches through the movie options until she finds the first one she kind of likes, The Lord of the Rings, and tries to clear her mind.
“Thought I might find you out here.”
Edwin glances up. He’s sitting primly on the wing of the plane, his legs dangling off it. They’re so high up it doesn’t even give Charles vertigo; all he can see below them is a haze of white cloud.
“Oh,” Edwin says. He glances down at his notebook, which he’s been hastily scribbling in, and then back up. “I thought you were watching the pilots.”
Charles walks over to sit beside him. He slings an arm over Edwin’s shoulder and the other ghost sighs and leans into him.
“I was,” he says. “Got bored, though, didn’t I? No fun when they can’t answer my questions.”
“I imagine they appreciate being able to do their jobs without distraction,” Edwin says, raising an eyebrow at Charles prissily.
Charles smiles fondly back.
“They don’t seem to be doing much,” he says. “It’s all automated now, innit?”
Edwin’s eyebrows draw together like they always do when he’s confused.
“Ah,” he says. “Yes. I believe you mentioned something to that effect on the flight from London.”
Charles chuckles. Edwin’s adorable when he’s trying to understand the modern world. He gets this little crease between his eyebrows and this totally uncomprehending look in his eyes, which probably shouldn’t be cute but really is. It’s like showing a puppy, one which has spent its whole life inside, a tree. Adorable.
“I showed you Airplane!, right?” he says, instead of explaining. Charles’s knowledge of aeroplanes is limited to making model planes as a kid, and films. For him, planes were just a thing that existed. For Edwin, not so much.
“Yes,” Edwin says. “I did not understand it.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to understand it,” Charles says. “I think it’s just supposed to be funny.”
“Oh,” Edwin says. “Well.”
He kicks his feet over empty air. Most of the time Charles thinks of Edwin as much, much older than him – because he is, by over seventy years – but sometimes he’s reminded that Edwin also died at sixteen. Hell, Edwin is actually younger than Charles is, in terms of how long he was alive. He died a few weeks after he turned sixteen (Charles doesn’t know Edwin’s birthday. He’s afraid to ask; he doesn’t want to find out something devastating, like Edwin doesn’t remember it or no one ever celebrated it); Charles was a couple of months off turning seventeen.
Like this, head tilted back like he can enjoy the wind rushing through them, legs dangling over thin air, Edwin really does look almost child-like, vulnerable not in the way he was in Hell or in Esther’s machine, but in the way a kid is before the world beats them down.
Except the world has beaten Edwin down. It’s beaten them both down.
“I shall be glad to get back to London,” Edwin says, apparently not thinking as depressing thoughts as Charles is.
“We’ve been back,” Charles points out. “We’ve been back loads, since you got that bracelet off you.”
“It is not the same,” Edwin sighs. “We have not been taking any cases, for one thing.”
“Yeah,” Charles agrees. He shifts so that his feet are hanging beside Edwin’s, knocking his shoe against Edwin’s boot. “Been almost like a holiday, hasn’t it? Haven’t had one them since, oh, musta been 2003? 2004?”
“We are ghosts,” Edwin says primly. “We do not need holidays.”
“Doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy them,” Charles says. “You might enjoy working three hundred sixty-five days a year, but the rest of us appreciate some time off.”
“You have plenty of time off,” Edwin grumbles. “It is not as though it is a particularly consistent job; we do not have set working hours. Anyway, what do you mean the ‘rest of us’? There is only you.”
“Not anymore,” Charles reminds him. “I don’t think Crystal’s going to be too keen on the whole no-holidays thing.”
“I suppose not,” Edwin says. He sighs. “This is going to be terribly complicated, isn’t it?”
“Probably,” Charles says. Edwin glances up at him, brows furrowed, nervous. Charles smiles reassuringly at him, readjusting so he can take Edwin’s hand in his. “But we’ll work it out. We always do, right?”
Edwin smiles softly at him. Charles feels his heart swell with fondness for him.
“Right,” he agrees.