burn me.

.

babe, there's something broken about this
but i might be open about this

.

don't you agree?

.

She's Valkyrie Cain.

She's Valkyrie Cain, at twenty-three, and she's an old hand at Befores and Afters.

She's Valkyrie Cain. She is.

Of course she is.

Like - like, hell. Hell, you could start from around the time she'd stopped being Stephanie Edgely and block her life from that point into an unstable, asymmetrical engineer's nightmare of a train, or something, with the carriages cut off at uneven halves, split at the bolts by however many twists had knifed up the track like really big, really unfairly aimed cosmic guillotines. And all of it, like, shrieking along after a freighting head car whose pilot was intermittently battling mutiny and actually didn't have hands spare to make sure absolutely nothing took a barrel roll. You could do that. You could probably do it without resorting to train metaphors. If you wanted to.

Valkyrie doesn't, though. She's busy. She doesn't particularly want to do it with the stupid train metaphor, anyway, because like? What the hell. She doesn't have time for it, anymore, and if that's true for the first time in a long time, whatever, it matters about as much as – as the stupid train thing.

Valkyrie Cain has a thing to do, she thinks loudly, and she's busy.

Not – nervous.

Because she's Valkyrie Cain, at twenty-three, and she's well used to worse. Like. Of course. Of course, this was only-

Whatever. Right? It was – it was going to be whatever.

The front door is only remotely like a guillotine if you're really looking for it or really disturbed. Valkyrie's neither, so the door's only a door and what's on the other side is only the rest of her life, or whatever, which is pretty much the opposite of what it would be if it was the guillotine she in no way sees it as. So.

The handle cools her fingers.

It clicks when she pulls it toward her and she thinks, now it's a little bit like in those nameless sci-fi movies she'd half-watched whenever, where an astronaut makes a crack in the ship and it breaks the shell of their bubble of flat light and computers and air open and then, whump, everything gets vacuumed out faster than you can close it or even swear properly and then there's just quiet space on both sides of the wall. It's a little bit more like waking up.

He's in lines of black and white on a literal threshold but it's, you know, probably not symbolic or anything.

Valkyrie half-notes that her head is either more brightly, buzzingly alive than it has been in forever or she's thinking absolutely nothing. She's hearing, though, for definite, maybe thirty percent of her brain fizzing with the static of a thousand conversations, listening to five years' worth of things she has to say at this moment while the seventy percent left over is just looking.

Skulduggery looks back. Skulduggery looks just exactly like she'd imagined he would, except for his hat, which is a little straighter than it should have been – as though he'd put it on so carelessly he hadn't thought to make it appear as though he'd put it on carelessly. The rest of him is perfectly straight, too, except his jaw. That's moving

Valkyrie says, "Uh," (the first thing she says to his face in five years is), "what?"

Skulduggery's head (oh) tilts. "What?"

"I, um. I missed what you were saying."

"What?"

"Yeah," she nods, the world rushes from the velocity. She drops her voice and talks quick, feels like an actor conferring to stage-left after forgetting their lines on opening night. "I missed it."

Skulduggery shakes his head at her in familiar slow incredulity and she stops feeling bad. Right there. "Valkyrie, there's absolutely nobody else around. You are, as we speak, standing two feet away from my person. My tones are invariably clear. My tones, by several accounts, are dulcet. It is largely accorded to that I captivate, Valkyrie, but honestly."

Valkyrie.

Twice. She wonders if he noticed.

She repeats, "Missed it," through a mouth doing something she's not sure is a smile or not.

It seems to hold his interest, whatever it is.

She shrugs around his gaze. "What did you say?"

"What."

"Skulduggery."

Skulduggery lifts his hands and for a shrill second Valkyrie thinks he's about to lay them on her for the first time in half a decade even though she's only just said his name to his face and that's plenty to be getting on with, thanks, but he's only raising them to ward off her prospective wrath. "No, all I had the chance to say was 'what' before you saw fit to leap back into your flattering old parroting of me and lead us, moments later, to the particular articulated aberration to the absolute abyss of appositeness on which we now find ourselves aground."

"Ooh," Valkyrie whistles, knocking sideways to shoulder the doorjamb. Phone calls, she's remembering, never had done enough for his voice. She's remembering. That was a lot of words in a row. (Good mood.) "The alarming alliteration. Someone's feasibly fucking frustrated."

He glances away from her face for the first time since she opened the door, adjusts some mysterious fault in his cufflinks and doesn't answer right away.

"What was the what for?" she prompts.

He unhooks a link entirely. He's (uncomfortable?) fiddling. "You were staring. It was throwing me off."

Valkyrie blinks once. It probably is a smile, she realises dimly, and it kind of hurts. "Throwing you off what?"

The cufflink refastens with a soft click.

The mouth-thing. "Did you have a bit?"

"If I did," he announces, grandly and off to the side, "you may rest assured that it was the suitable amalgamation of artful wit and touching sentiment such like the world has never before had cause to hear and now never, ever will."

"Ah," Valkyrie nods. "You put a lot of thought into it, then."

"I didn't need to." Skulduggery turns back to her. "I'm naturally gifted."

The short bleat that issues from her mouth is so unfamiliar to her ears Valkyrie jerks back, and the only reason she doesn't flinch is because she refuses to call it that. Her laugh is rusted, snappish as a stray and she hadn't had any reason to notice that until a second ago and now she's not sure what to do with it. She shuts her mouth.

She looks back up at Skulduggery but the angle of his head is so soft that Valkyrie loses her grip and her eyes fall back to the ground.

Christ.

She couldn't really see how he hadn't recoiled with her from the assault. It had halted Valkyrie as well as a gunshot going off against her thick tongue, a hard bullet fired hotly into the nerves of whatever muscle memory her words had been coming from.

And this time, her "Aah," is less of an agreement than a very quiet scream.

Valkyrie keeps her eyes down for a few beats, too long to be normal or polite but – this isn't normal even though it should be, maybe, it can't, it's far too big, and as for polite it's only Skulduggery.

It's only Skulduggery.

Skulduggery doesn't say anything, and Valkyrie knows he won't until she does. Because he knows not to. Because it's only Skulduggery.

His shoes are unfamiliar, a new pair, worked up to an ambitious shine that reflects her still face so Valkyrie flicks her gaze back up, away, and he's been watching her this whole time but there's no inquisition in the smooth angles of his skull.

Just staring.

How long has she been just staring? That's weird, definitely, adjusted people don't really do this, she remembers that much, but she's not an adjusted person exactly and besides, it's only Skulduggery. And besides, Skulduggery is staring back.

He's just standing there, just a reach away from her and neither of them are talking but they could if she just wanted to, he's just standing there at her door and Valkyrie feels so deeply something she doesn't know what the hell to do with it.

Maybe she's in shock. She checks her hands and they're not shaking, but now she's thinking about her hands and realises she has no idea what the hell to do with them either.

She doesn't – she doesn't feel like she has to do anything at all, is the problem. Right now Valkyrie feels so little pressure she's liable to float away.

She's not thinking, or, yeah, maybe she's thinking too much, but whatever she's doing when her hand goes to Skulduggery it goes to anchor itself to earth the best way she knows how, it goes all thoughtless and – weird.

She's looking at the hand, which is on his arm now, randomly. He is very real underneath it. It is, she thinks, very, very weird. She thinks she could be frowning, faintly, still looking at it.

Skulduggery is looking at it too. He looks back at her. Says, "You look puzzled," and sounds puzzled.

"Yeah," Valkyrie murmurs, adjusting her grip a little before pulling back all the way. She laughs and it's too breathy to be harsh this time, juxtaposed into quieting rebound from the frown still crinkling her brow. That had been her first human touch in five years. "That was weird. Sorry."

"You have nothing to apologise for," he tells her.

But, Valkyrie notices, he doesn't say it wasn't weird, and she kind-of-laughs again.

It's going to need practice.

For now she scrubs the same hand roughly down her face and shrugs an existentially dismissive sort of shrug. "Sooo," (and she presses her palm to her cheek to stop a wince at that one) "you want to come in?"

"You have a lovely doorstep," Skulduggery replies cheerfully. "It's quite satisfying in itself. At this point I could turn around and leave a fulfilled man."

"He'd miss you though."

His head tilt is much more amused than her joke was amusing. "You have a fulfilled man in your house?"

"I don't think there's a fulfilled anything anywhere near Meek Ridge," she finds herself huffing, and dear God, it does it feel good to complain. "There's just me."

Skulduggery says nothing to that, and this time it's his head that dips down, just slightly. It could be a nod.

Valkyrie takes and wastes a moment. Then she shuffles a delicate shuffle toward him, and toes at his shoe.

Asks again, "Are you coming in or what?"

He shifts the foot under hers for a span before he speaks, the nudges idle but just a bit too slow to be entirely playful. "Or what," he considers, as she lets him bracket her Batman-print sock between his gleaming black Oxfords, "implies that an alternative course of action is avai-"

"Shut up and come into my amazing den of misery and hermitdom." Valkyrie takes back her foot and Skulduggery sighs before following it into the house. He's very casually very careful not to touch her as he does so, except for where two of Valkyrie's outstretched fingertips brush his jacket's hemline. He moves a little ways past her but stops before she's even turned to close the door behind them.

It's already locked when Valkyrie remembers she isn't staying.

So she unlocks it. It doesn't look any different. She looks at the keys, sparse, one for the front and another for the back and those for the gas-guzzling off road truck that she kind of really hates and the last, a fob, for her panic room. She realises that she could drop them to the floor right now and never have to pick them up.

They clatter.

If Skulduggery had looked over at the sound or had been looking at her at all, he doesn't comment and isn't looking by the time Valkyrie turns back to him. He's not moving, either, having apparently decided that five feet into the house is far enough – understandable, with the floor plan being so uncompromisingly open most of the ground floor could be seen the second you walked in.

Despite the stellar tactical advantage and calm 'Fuck you' it sent to her claustrophobia, by Skulduggery's body language the view isn't something he appreciates. He seems to have gone partway into confrontation mode, his arms bent slightly and his stance braced as if he expects whatever force had kept his partner away for so long to charge from behind a bookcase at any moment and body tackle him.

Valkyrie isn't sure if it's funny or not.

Skulduggery tries, "It doesn't seem all that miserable."

Valkyrie turns and starts toward the kitchen, her mouth doing something more familiar, wry and pointedly skewed. "You hate it."

"I hate it," he agrees. "I'd like to burn it."

"I'm insured," Valkyrie calls backwards, waving a dismissive wave that she thinks comes out okay. "And, you know, despicably wealthy. And I feel like agreeing with you. So."

Skulduggery makes a noise just non-committal enough to not hold up in court.

Valkyrie pours herself a glass of water, reconsiders, and splashes it coldly onto her face. She dries with a tea towel and pours herself another. She'd pretty much gone unchaperoned for a full five years without setting anything on fire that shouldn't strictly have been on fire, she thinks, but ten seconds around Skulduggery and down goes that record. Alright.

Yeah. To all the above. It's alright. That, she decides, had been an embarrassing record to have.

She finds that drinking is hard to do around a grin and has to towel herself off again before walking back out. When the water's gone she's still smiling, still thinking, Alright.

This is all right.

When she crosses into the front hall the smile is maybe a little big, maybe a little for him, but Skulduggery isn't looking her way. He's looking at into her living room type area, at all the little things he can see (single-speakers, flat pillows, pulp fiction, old undusted PS6) and especially all the little things he can't (pictures, mirrors, mirrors, metals) and maybe deducing her a little, because he can't help himself. He's taken three steps further in.

Valkyrie doesn't ask him what he finds because she doesn't need the setback, and the girl he's seeing isn't the one who left him and she isn't the one who opened the door. She thinks.

Smiles are hard to hold properly. "Sorry I kept you waiting there."

Skulduggery pauses in his cataloguing (and that's a good word for her house. Catalogue.) of her specific brand of incense from the make to the likely purchase date down to the country of origin (something green) and his gaze rests back on her. He says, "Don't worry about it."

He says, "I've become rather adept."

And Valkyrie's belly drops to the floor. It drops, so hard her eyes have to track it down, watch for where it lands so she can push it back in later, when she has a minute to herself, but for now her jaw clenches upwards as though it can haul her insides back up by the ligaments and her teeth have barely clicked shut before Skulduggery steps in, forward, toward her.

One step. The action is abrupt, too quick, enough to snap at her attention from reflex. "No," and the syllable is nearly as unsteady, "that's not-"

Her eyes have gone to the one long leg notched half-mast in her direction, they catch the almost-contraction and Valkyrie knows Skulduggery hadn't meant to move at all. "I was joking," he tells her.

She nods. She says, "Alright."

His leg doesn't go back right away, but it does eventually. He doesn't look like he knows whether to look at her or not, but he does mostly. They seem to be in competition for each other's attention with the floor.

Valkyrie's sure that isn't right. The floor is only wood, and it's boring as hell if hell is a hall stretch of 1.2m lacquered oak splints in minor need of waxing. Which, Valkyrie thinks, it well could be. Ha. She only figured out last year how good the varnish was for power-slides and she, honest to god, is a breath away from up and mentioning it before her tongue seizes up again as she thinks – actually thinks – about whether or not it's, like, appropriate.

The silence isn't so easy now and Valkyrie is deeply grateful to not own a clock.

Out of nowhere, I am a gift, naturally, issues from a mothballed corner of her mind. That's what she should've said, she determines, before he'd walked in. They could probably have gone somewhere with that.

She's been learning French, after everything, and she knows what to call it: l'esprit d'escalier. Staircase wit.

She doesn't mention that either.

She doesn't know what's appropriate here, or whatever, she isn't sure what's important past the awkward stage – and it is a stage because it has to be – and getting out from under it, from under the quiet that's muffling up her head like a chloroform rag round her whole body. She feels like a chloroformed mummy.

No, she doesn't. That's another shitty metaphor for nothing. Fuck.

She tears it away, provides her own sound-effects with the harsh breath she rips through her teeth. "I'm sorry."

Skulduggery can't quite do the same. "You have nothing to apologise for." His sockets are aimed somewhere around her belly which, she determines, is staying exactly where it's supposed to be and she unwraps her arms to prove it. He meets her eyes. "Please don't tell me you're sorry."

Her lips press together as she holds the stare, and she wets them before she speaks. "Fine. Alright, but can you do me a favour?"

"Yes," he says. (It's immediate and sure but it's braced up again, and the little invasive part of Valkyrie wonders what he'd do if she asked him to leave.)

(Another replies: He would leave. If she asked him, he'd go.)

She asks, "Keep talking?"

If Skulduggery had eyes they would have blinked, but he does not and his head tips toward her instead. "That's a big ask, there," he says, and his voice is working its way up to a lilt again and Valkyrie's mouth wants to do the thing. "That is an arrogation. An imposition, I could say, upon my base nature. I'm just a man, Valkyrie, and as such there is only so much I can drive myself to do."

"You," she responds happily, "are a goon."

"I am in fact an endearing curiosity subject to much extraneous condescension from the uninformed."

"That is what I said."

"Is there anything in particular you'd like to hear?"

"Just – talking, I guess." She pinwheels her arms about in a gesture to the whole hollow house and Skulduggery's head tilts contemplatively in another direction as he observes. They fall back to her sides with a lively smack. "The absence of non-talking."

His skull stays at its odd angle. "You want," he ventures, "to chat?"

Her nose crinkles at him. "Ew."

"Ew," he mimics and she finds herself scowling, quite beautifully. The skull switches position. "And why 'ew,' exactly? We've chatted on the phone while you've been away to a similar degree of success as can be assumed of any venture with which I am involved. We chat. That was chatting."

"That was different."

(Now, now she's thinking of her spine hard-hitting the panic room brick, the pressure of mouth against knees, lungs against ribcage, thinking of her body concaving like an empty pop can dragged to the bottom of an ocean gulf.)

Now.

"I don't want to talk about that."

"We talked about the mostly hypothetical worst things you could spill in or on the Bentley and subliminal messaging in the Cartoon Network shows for three and a half hours."

(She had dreamed of Alice.) "Yeah."

"I believe the two things were in some way related."

"In some way."

"It's nice to know I wasn't the only one hanging onto my every word." If she hadn't been focusing on him so weirdly hard even she might have missed the slow catch in his tone when he adds, "We haven't seen each other for nearly five years."

She doesn't look away. She nods.

"And you just want to chat."

"You can sing instead, if you want. That would be cool."

He stares her down and Valkyrie can see the Ew rattling behind his jaw for a few seconds before he doesn't say it. She wishes she had a better idea of what her face was doing at any given moment but this long without peer review or mirrors really did a number on a person's physical self-awareness and dear God for all she knows she's developed a twitch. Her poker face could look a lot more uncomfortable than she feels, especially if someone was looking for it – not that she was- wearing a poker face, or anything, around him.

She doesn't think?

She wants to remind him that there's no such thing as inappropriate, because he's only Skulduggery.

Instead, she flips on a grin. "You've sung on the phone."

He takes off his hat, checks for lint, finds none and brushes it anyway. "I was cheated," he informs it.

"And I was kidding."

"I did not know that."

"Yes you did."

"Ironic nuances are extremely difficult to detect over landlines."

"Skulduggery, obviously no two am karaoke of Moon River, sweet as it may've been, was going to send me running home. I wasn't serious when I said… I mean, you know…"

"I know that it was in no way a karaoke," he gripes mercifully. "It was a perfectly dignified, lone acappella. And that it was exceedingly sweet, thank you very much."

"You're welcome."

"Shut up." It's barely out of his mouth before his head comes up to check her reaction.

I didn't really mean that, she can see it, right there, tapping behind his left incisor. She makes her best approximation of an exaggerated sad face the second he'll catch it and Skulduggery loosens around the shoulders.

"Stop trying to guilt trip me. Your hat's clean."

"I have better fuel for a journey of peccability if such a thing was my goal, and it is now."

"The peccability journey?"

"My hat."

"How?"

"I cleaned it."

"No, the peccability journey." She wets her lips, fresh-paints the smile over any cracks. "You said you had better fuel."

Skulduggery pauses with his hat halfway onto his head.

"Like what?" Is she still smiling?

"It was a throwaway comment. I meant nothing by it."

"Skulduggery."

"It's nothing."

Valkyrie tongues at her mouth again. She doesn't want to know. "What kind of fuel?"

Skulduggery replaces his hat carefully. "You don't want to know. And, I think, that's why you're asking."

She looks at him and presses her lips into a line.

Skulduggery takes a moment to position his hat before slowly removing his hands, then he places them both into his pockets and looks back at her. "Valkyrie. I am not here to help you hurt yourself."

Her eyes had to have lowered again for her to snap them up like this, goddammit. "That's not-" she starts, "I'm not-"

Skulduggery nods.

"I just- I'm not-" she makes a noise, suddenly, something between a whine and a snarl. She isn't sure what it means but it doesn't stop her from putting effort into the delivery.

Skulduggery nods. "I know the feeling."

Valkyrie slumps. Straightens. "I wish I could – just-" her hands come up and tense as though she can still grip the air in fistfuls, and she mimes jamming her own space into his.

Skulduggery nods. "Perfectly understandable."

Valkyrie slumps. Stays there. "I hate you."

If he was nodding she was going to whack him. "Now you're just not making any sense."

Valkyrie exhales violently, knuckles digging into her sockets and then dragging down her face. She folds her arms behind her head and looks back up from under her lashes and Skulduggery, of course, hasn't moved, still has his hands in his pockets, still the goddamn picture of forbearance.

Still eight yards away from where she'd stopped.

Ridiculous. This is ridiculous.

Her arms fall back to her sides and Valkyrie crosses the stupid lacquered wooden lines separating them and Skulduggery remains exactly where he is, and waits for her.

She stops in front of him. Too close, but she's still getting the hang of this and backing up would defeat the whole purpose of marching over here, goddammit.

She reaches up and puts her hands on his shoulders and presses until she can feel the hard ridges of him under the pads. She shakes him and he lets her. She tells him, a conspiratorial hiss, "You're being weirdly passive."

"I was aiming for winsomely sensitive."

"I don't," she says, "need you sensitive, Skulduggery."

"Perhaps."

"I don't."

"As you say."

"Stop it."

Skulduggery's head tilts left. "Agreeing with you? Alright. No."

Valkyrie's head mirrors it. "No, what?"

"Whatever you see fit."

"I. Swear. To. God." She punctuates every word with a bump of her fists against his sternum, a frustrated knocking, only half-ironic.

After a few beats, he announces, "I have a deluge of biting anti-theist remarks for that and appear to have fallen into stupor under their combined weight. Would you like to pick a number from one to seventeen?"

Valkyrie deflates. "Not particularly." Her fists had uncurled on his lapels when she had run out of syllables and now pick up an impatient tattoo along his collarbones, fingers drumming like a desk worker's waiting on an important call.

It's that easy. She'd been so sure the physical contact would have been the worst, the most awkward and hardest thing to relearn after so long with nobody to touch or be touched by, but – it's good. To have him under her hands and staying there. It's like waking up years after the war and discovering a limb had grown back over night, strong and reliable and right where it was supposed to be no matter how much she prodded it. It's just – it's good.

She wonders if that little blessing has spent up the sum total of their luck. She wishes there'd been a more even distribution of, like, starting credits. Like in The Sims.

Skulduggery had shifted to watch her fingers move so gently she hadn't noticed, and when she breaks off with on last swift slap his head jerks up and the quick movement makes Valkyrie jump too. She frowns, and steps to arm's length.

She temples her hands in front of her, very officially, and declares, "I have an idea for a thing we can do."

"Alright," says Skulduggery.

Valkyrie smiles at him. "Honesty Hour. Yes," she nods, the last word pointed over the groan he doesn't, but very nearly does, let out. "I'm forming a bubble. In this bubble we have to tell the one hundred percent truth to each other for at least the next sixty minutes."

"Thank you for clarifying that."

The smile shifts to a scowl (simple as that). "No, no, that was sarcasm. Sarcasm is literally just lying without effort. No sarcasm."

Skulduggery stares, as aghast as a skull could be.

"Sacrifices have to be made for progress to happen."

"But at what price? Dear God," he intones flatly, "at what price?"

"I know," she finishes, rocking agitatedly on her heels, entirely unmindful of how close she was to nutting him with every forward motion. "I know. It hurts me too. But, like, this way we can set a solid base – not that I don't think we're solid, like, we are, of course we are – but this way we can just drop our stuff at ground level so we know where we're at before we work our way up, you know? Clear up whatever."

He takes a moment to translate that and she gives it to him.

"You want," he says eventually, "to talk about our feelings?"

She colours in the careful blank of his words with disgust and, "Ew," spills another laugh. "God, no, of course not. Jesus. I just think – I think if getting some of the awkward junk out of the way now instead of rolling around in it for the next few months is a thing we can do, we should? Do it, probably. Yeah. And that way we can just walk out, I don't know, we can ditch it here because I already really kind of fucking hate this house and genuinely we can burn it if you were serious about that, but whatever. I've lost my track."

"We can ditch it."

"Thank you. We can ditch it here and then that way when we walk out we'll know where we're both sort of coming from, or something, and however long it takes things to feel normal again – like, unless it all backfires horribly or something – it probably won't be as unsure or shaky or – weird. Or whatever. So. Yeah."

Skulduggery waits for her to tail off in her own time. His head has rotated gradually to the right while she'd been speaking, and he only now parts his jaw-

Valkyrie objects, "You're the one pretending to have a problem with chatting."

-clicks it shut.

"I'm just saying." She crosses her arms.

She stares him down. Cautiously, he opens his jaw again. Valkyrie hikes her eyebrows and braces for argument.

Skulduggery says, "Alright."

"It's not l– wait. Alright?"

Skulduggery shrugs.

"Alright, you think it's a good idea?"

"Yes."

"Alright, you'll just do it?"

"Yes, Valkyrie."

"Oh," she says, and nothing else. She unfolds her arms. She reaches up and repositions them on either side of her partner's skull, angling it this way and that as though scanning the enamel for irony.

As she works, Skulduggery tacks on, "I agree that it makes more practical sense to talk through any particularities rather than play them by ear and make any avoidably spurious assumptions."

"Oh." Valkyrie pauses. Blinks. "Yeah, we can start with that, then. What were you assuming?"

He hesitates. He speaks around her thumbs. "I had assumed casual touching would be something of a distant goal."

"And, let's be honest, a worthwhile one." Her hands remain where they are. "I still think it is, though. Will be. This is just - it's weird, you know? It's weird that you're here, in this stupid house. It doesn't feel... it'll probably wear off, and then… yeah…" she trails off, huffing a chunk of hair out of her face, tapping at his cheekbones.

"By all means," he allays, "take your time. My experiences aren't in any way a blueprint for your own. And that's a very good thing."

Her smile is quick and unsure. "Well, you didn't have a you, did you? But I don't – I'm not sure how I'll be around – anybody else. Especially..." She leaves the sentence halfway through, doesn't specify.

(Especially a lot of things.)

"That's okay. Anybody else we can consider later, if and when they're relevant." He sounds assuring and sure, but it's the edge unobtrusively hardening his words that's softening Valkyrie around the mouth.

"What," she starts, lowers her gaze to his throat, "people back home are still holding a grudge about the whole gory grand-scale carnage, almost broke the world mass-murderer thing? Jeeze, I said I was sorry. Build a reinforced bridge over those pesky mass graves and get over it already, right?"

It takes her a moment to realise the stiffness of his frame isn't only a by-product of bone and that Skulduggery has gone abruptly rigid.

She peers up at him.

He stares down at her and Valkyrie has the strangest impulse to back away.

"I'm sorry," she deadpans instead. "Was it too soon?"

"You don't have to apologise," says Skulduggery.

Valkyrie squints at him.

"Sorry." Skulduggery shakes himself. "Sorry. I've been conditioned to respond to remarks like that quite… insistently. It will subside in a moment."

She clicks her tongue. "Did I throw you off?"

"You did."

"Do you know how long it took me to be able to joke about that?"

"I don't."

"Aren't you impressed?"

He starts to say something, then catches himself and answers honestly. "That isn't the first feeling that comes to mind, no."

"Come on," she dares him, "ask me how many monster teens it takes to wipe out Europe."

"I'm not going to do that, Valkyrie."

"It doesn't bother me," she point-blanks at the space between his first and second cervical vertebrae. She shrugs around the crystallised cut of that old skewed (not quite, not now she's remembered the difference) smile. "I've had years to see the funny side."

Skulduggery looks at her, quietly.

After a while, Valkyrie looks at him, and then immediately, away. Down. Down, down, down. Her hair falls between them, a thick dark wall.

His voice is so hushed, so heavy it sets off a sharp hard aching in her chest, a stinging like a hollow thing being filled up too fast, too much, so lovely Valkyrie almost hits her knees. "I thought we were being honest."

So did I. I swear to God, so did I.

She bites her mouth, and only shrugs. His shoes, she considers, really are aggressively shiny. Looking down at the twin monochrome throwbacks of her eighteen-year-old's face, Valkyrie unscribbles the foreheads and, pop, thickens up the lips. But there's nothing she can do with those eyes than raise them back to Skulduggery's collar.

The words are rolled around her tongue like pre-bubblegum gobstoppers before she speaks. "I missed you."

"Oh, Valkyrie," he murmurs, that ridiculous voice softened to thick velvet that falls over her head, warm and weighty as a blanket, and she feels a responding heat prickle ridiculously behind her eyes. And then, "Of course you did."

Her laugh bursts as though through a blockage on its way out of her throat, and she shoves him, coughing, "You are such a goon, oh my God."

"Mmm," he hums consideringly. "Again, dear, I don't feel like you're affording the institution of Honesty Hour the respect it deserves."

She wipes at the absurd dampness with the heels of her palms, still chuckling thickly. "At least we're consistent there. Ugh." Hands over eyes. "Ugh, this is a mess. I'm a mess. Ugh. You want to talk instead?"

"Almost always," he returns, then stops. "What do you want to know?"

"Is there – anything you think I should? That you want me to know?"

He lets her stand there, half a foot from him with her hands over her face. "This isn't about me."

"Okay, I want to know why you're being so… ugh." She gestures with an elbow. "Swishy."

"Because this isn't about me. Swishy?"

"Swishy. Flopping about in a non-committal, really irritating way. To swish. And if it's about me at all then it's about you a little."

"How impressively vain."

"How obviously accurate." Into her cupped palms, Valkyrie sighs, masks her face with her own hot carbon exhale and tells herself, so long as she can't see him it's just like talking on the phone–

A cold gloved fingertip touches her left wrist and she jerks. And then it's gone. And she growls into herself but makes a point to not apologise, see what he does with that.

He waits, and she can hear the rote You have nothing to apologise for disarmed, almost smugly, under her silence. She sighs again.

The glove comes back. It stays, one half-inch of easy other on the whole of Valkyrie that's joined, a while after, high on both wrists, by seven more, and then by a ninth and a tenth just barely there on the insides of her palms like a little map of connect-the-dots are blooming along her skin.

Valkyrie has to relax to realise she'd tensed for impact.

Skulduggery's hand moves very slowly, long fingers curling up gentle as smoke over the ridges of her knuckles and not even pressing enough to tickle. It takes her a moment to notice when they pause, half-bowed like the hook of a question mark around the edge of her indexes. He doesn't pull at her – never that – so much as he taps without breaking contact and Valkyrie's hands are drawn carefully away from her face.

She squints at Skulduggery, and Skulduggery tilts his head.

Good girl.

"Whatever," she mutters at him. She clears her throat. "Whatever, it's not about you. How would this go if it were?"

"More stylishly, of course." He hasn't let go of her hands and she hasn't taken them away. "Something nearby would be on fire by now."

"Oh, of course."

He sways slightly. "And there would be slow dancing."

"Uh huh."

"Not straight away, perhaps, and not necessarily with you, but I feel it would factor in somehow and that spectators should be permitted."

"That is probably not going to happen."

"Substantially more charging toward things. A canon, of some description, confetti or otherwise. At least an ar-"

"Stop," she snorts, pulling back her hands to whack them at his chest and keeps them there, laughing unsteadily. "God, you're ridiculous."

"I wouldn't have minded a hug."

It jitters out. "You what?"

"Fire," he clarifies. "Something w-"

"No, no, after that. You – you wanted a hug?"

Skulduggery's hands almost pat her before they don't. "It's fine," he tells her.

"Oh."

Time stalls. "It's just a hug, Valkyrie. I can get by without them, and in spectacular fashion."

"Yeah. Right. 'Course." Valkyrie bites her lip and keeps her eyes on her fingers on his collar. "Just – let me work up to that, yeah."

"I will," he promises, and she catches the nod in the pull of his shirt, "because I am sensitive. In the most winsome of ways."

"Shut up," she croaks, abruptly very tired. "Don't really. Honesty Hour."

His tie is navy silk. She doesn't have anything made of silk in the house, had forgotten how lovely and cool it felt running over skin.

One of them has tucked in closer at some point and Skulduggery speaks against her temple when he says, awkwardly, more than a little off-beat, "I missed you, back."

"Mm, mm." Valkyrie takes a tight breath, locks her gaze on the flat blue thread count at her nose, can't even consider trusting her voice. She nods, instead, has to consciously cut it off before it gets too shaky.

Loosened, that old chunk of hair slips forward and Valkyrie flicks her head on reflex, but the motion dislodges a stupid tear from her eye and it spills down her cheek and she curses, bumps her elbow on Skulduggery's sternum in her rush to scratch it away.

His motions remain slow and precise as a man out of time when Skulduggery reaches back up, too wholly careful to be hesitant, politely disregards the wet tracks and tucks the hair behind her ear. Valkyrie's head tips into the half-circle those long fingers draw. She looks at him, steady but a bit watery. She sniffs.

She wonders what that big house on Cemetery Road sounds like, six thousand miles away.

She wonders what he'd do if she kissed him, right now. She asks.

"Oh," he replies absently, still occupied with the uncooperative strands. "I would mind terribly."

Valkyrie nods. There's that out of the way.

Skulduggery gives the stray lock a final curl before leaning back to check his work, for all appearances, satisfied. His hands are held on either side of her face, and the thumbs on her cheeks shade the indents of forgotten dimples.

Valkyrie arches one eyebrow. Check?

"You're fine," Skulduggery tells her softly.

And Valkyrie nods once more. She chews her mouth.

She takes half a step forward, and hugs him.

Alright.

It's alright.

His body is as solid and cool as it has always been and Valkyrie Cain, for the first time in a very long time, feels suddenly, piercingly young, in a way that makes her think of small bare feet on slickened poolside ledges and of throwing herself into deep ends before she could swim because she really wanted to jump from that big pier over Haggard's little sea, makes her remember how it felt to get turned around underwater and panic her lungs raw and curl her fingers around that first ladder rung all at once. Her nose is pressed into the hollow space between Skulduggery's neck and collarbone, and he smells of the same engine-warm leather and clean aftershave and something else expensive, and something else–

Safe, she guesses.

The arms at her back are held at even parallels, and feel about as personal as a seatbelt worn in a parked car. Whatever, it's whatever, it's him, she thinks, talking with measured encyclopaedic calm to a person he'd rather be hurling through a closed window. It's only Skulduggery, thinking a lot and doing a little.

Valkyrie adjusts her grip, pulls herself up against the frontlines of him and shifts onto her tiptoes. She tucks her head closer to his and sounds just barely ironic when she says, "Hey. It's only me."

There's a moment. And then he pulls her into him, hard.

(alright, alrightalright)

His suit is too well tailored to gather in her fists but Valkyrie still manages, and the returning grip Skulduggery has around her waist is vice-tight and a little bit painful but a little more desperate and she's distantly aware that her feet might not be touching the floor. She can feel the empty air where his ribs give way, the sharp dig of his hipbones near her belly and the press of his teeth against the jarring pulse point at her throat and he really was holding on pretty tightly, but then so was she, but whatever, it wasn't like he had any breathing to worry about and it's only when she notices the trouble she's having with that herself that Valkyrie realises she's even fucking crying.

It's difficult to manoeuvre tears when her hands appear to have seized where they are and Skulduggery doesn't seem inclined to cede as much as a centimetre of non-room, so Valkyrie thinks, alright, whatever, and wipes her face on the nearest bit of jacket.

Skulduggery's, "I can't actually believe you've just done that," comes through muffled, from somewhere under her left ear. Her reply is more of a grunt to begin with anyway. Neither grip loosens.

Not even after her breathing turns more toward sighs than shudders, nor when she sincerely begins to lose feeling in her lower half.

She's pretty sure she's not actually supporting any of her own body weight at this point. She feels tired, in a way she isn't used to; she feels tired, like she could actually sleep.

Granted, that could be the cut off oxygen circulation to her brain but whatever. It's still nice, is what she's saying.

She is dimly aware that it's getting silly. She sighs, sniffs, and traces little pictures on his shoulder blade.

Skuduggery asks, "Valkyrie, are you drawing a horse?"

"Yeah."

"It isn't very good."

"Shh."

His vertebrae have left those white pressure prints all along her nose, she's positive.

She genuinely starts to be equally as positive that Skulduggery is drawing it out on purpose so he can somehow turn it around and tease her about it for their whole lives, or at least until he's decided on one quip or another with which to cut this down into manageable bits. She's about to ask for a progress report when it abruptly ceases to matter.

It's thrown off by guttural snarling at her back.

Valkyrie freezes, and then she groans. Skulduggery's arms around her slacken gradually and retract with the air of someone disarming a live bomb. Valkyrie swivels around in them before they've dropped halfway, and she scowls at her dog.

"Xena," she scolds, stern and slightly nasal. "Knock it off."

Xena stops growling for just as long as it takes to lap her bared teeth before picking it up again. Her carnivore's eyes are focused to Valkyrie's left, where Skulduggery stands with his hands on her hips as though fully ready to use her as a human shield.

Xena has never seen her owner touched before, and by her flat ears and static-stricken hackles she wants to keep it that way.

"You jealous little toad," Valkyrie grumbles at the sixty slathering pounds of canine. "Xena, hold."

Xena whines. Xena looks back at Skulduggery, who has actually raised both arms in petrified surrender, and she starts growling again. Xena looks at Valkyrie, whines, alternates, and Valkyrie is fluent in German Shepard and gets: there are bones here and the bones are touching you please let me eat the bones please.

Ignoring the forefingers Skulduggery tries to hook through her belt loops, Valkyrie walks calmly over to the animal, kneels down to her level, and gently clamps a hand over her crumpled snout. Xena stops growling, but her ears stay down. Valkyrie jostles at one. "Be good," she tells her. "Come stroke her," she tells Skulduggery.

Skulduggery replies, "Um, no."

"Come on."

"I'm fine over here."

Hand still working into Xena's ruff, Valkyrie turns to him exasperatedly. "She has to get used to you sometime."

"Except it really doesn't," he insists, but hazards a half-step toward her.

Xena growls. He freezes. Valkyrie bops her nose. "Yes," firmly, looking at Xena but to them both, "she does."

"Ah." Skulduggery observes the two, nods consolingly. "You're under the impression that it is coming with us."

"I'm under Honesty Hour, Skulduggery." She notices her own smile now, because it'll barely shift enough for her to speak. "So are you. That doesn't put you in a position to pretend like this is an argument we're having."

He's slumped before her sentence is finished.

Valkyrie stays kneeling over Xena and buries her grin in the top of her furry head. "Just let it happen," she coaxes, lightly, when Skulduggery rolls up his head to look at them.

Skulduggery doesn't look away.

The position he's holding – that joking slump with its loose limbs and curved shoulders and its near horizontal head, she's sure it's only him playing at a harried caricature, much-put-upon and long-suffering, but the longer he holds it the more she can see something – heavier, in some of its curves. Not – not, bad, really, not tired exactly, but–

Relieved of something, maybe. Unwound. At least unwinding.

Valkyrie knows the feeling.

And no, she thinks, the staring isn't too weird at all.

Then she flops Xena's ears at him and he sheds it with a snort, and he reaches an arm back and pulls open her unlocked door all at once and she realises that it is a goddamn beautiful day. The daylight spills through the door like bars of amber over Valkyrie and she stands through them, scrunches her eyes a little but doesn't blink.

She steps out after Skulduggery and the car, their car, is parked uneven and gleaming on the dirt drive of the house, so close to the front steps the sterling hood ornament is almost hanging over the porch. The paint is glossy and black except for where it catches the orange glow of sunset and reflects it back bright and warm as the sky.

The whole world is sharp and saturated with colour, the air is clear and smells of trees and cooling earth and Meek Ridge has never looked so gorgeous and Valkyrie has never been so eager to leave.

Xena puts her nose on the Bentley's passenger door and leaves a wet swipe on the paintjob and, honest to God, Skulduggery Pleasant whimpers.

He moves as though to pull her back but the Alsatian's ears flatten in a warning the detective heeds, backing up debilitated. Valkyrie pats his shoulder as she floats past him, remarking, "This is our car. Oh my god, I have missed this car. How is our car here?" She presses her hands and her face onto the roof.

"Fletcher," answers Skulduggery. "Fletcher can do cars now. Why couldn't you have greeted me like that?"

Valkyrie pulls up her head. "Fletcher's here?"

"No. He was, very briefly, but no." Good. "Did you want him to be?"

"No."

"Good," he hums, and then, "Oh," as she opens the back seat, he grasps "at least use a dog carrier, oh, come – come on," and he turns away with his hands on his hat when she motions Xena calmly onto the upholstery. Valkyrie ruffles her ears before closing the door and glides the back of her palm over the Bentley's sun-warmed side before turning back to her partner.

He seems to be in some degree of shock. "Dog carrier," he manages.

"Don't have one. Xena likes to stick her head out of windows." She is grinning like a lunatic. "Sorry, honey."

Skulduggery stares at Valkyrie and she's reminded of exactly what it feels like to laugh so soft and so hard it moves your whole upper body. It's really good, she decides, pressing a hand over her mouth, in a helpless sort of way. She swipes at a tear before it falls, looks at it caught alone on her thumb and starts giggling – giggling – again.

When he turns away Skulduggery's voice is gruff with something not remotely angry. "Get in the car, Valkyrie."

Valkyrie tips her last few giddy – fucking giddy – little chuckles toward the clouds, then breathes, expansively, luxuriously, and replies, "Okay."

And she gets in.

And he gets in.

Xena plonks her panting head on the armrest in between.

She cannot stop laughing, so she at least stops starting with the muffled fizz of someone trying not to. This time, the only interruption is the thud of a skull hitting the steering wheel and Valkyrie braces a hand on her dog's head and laughs harder.

"On the bright side," she eventually manages through her wheezing, "we still totally suck at feelings, so there's still technically a fair chunk of Honesty Hour left up if you wanna give her the what-for. File an official complaint, like."

"Wouldn't bother," he grumbles, angling his head toward the animal. "Dogs have a sixth sense for this kind of thing."

Xena locks eyes with sockets, pauses her panting and pulls her lips back over her teeth.

Skulduggery responds with a smug little nod and straightens to fasten his seatbelt. "How about you? Do you have any burning lines of thought you've been keeping to yourself?"

"Many," she tells him, "and magnificent."

"I'm all ears. Or rather, I w-"

"Stop."

"Sorry."

"You were doing so well."

"Sorry." He waves her on. "Feel free."

Valkyrie Cain pauses. Shrugs. "Sure. If you had to come up with a vehicle-centred metaphor for my life but couldn't use a train, what would it be? What movie did we watch where all the astronauts got sucked into space? Do you think my laugh sounds weird? Am I being very stare-y? Would it be more embarrassing to have gone five years without burning anything or to have not been able to? Do you think my house looks like a spread from an interior decoration magazine? Do you have any idea how fun that floor is to slide on? What's the difference between a resting face and a poker face? Would life be better if we were in The Sims?"

Skulduggery puts the car in gear. "A penny-farthing bicycle, Last Cosmonaut, not in the way you mean, it's very possible, but I can't say I mind, that much depends on your responses to impending follow-up questions, I think that's a nice way to put it, the thought is in the process of occurring to me, I don't think you have to think about the first one and I don't know, Valkyrie, I do not know."

"Alright." They could get on with that. "Also-"

"Seatbelt, dear."

"Also, I am a gift," she tells him, reaching for the strap. "Naturally."

She clips it and looks up smiling and Skulduggery has paused, mid-turn to check the rear view, with his body twisted to face her and his head angled just so.

Her tone is flippant. "And I can speak French now."

His isn't quite. "You're a marvel."

"A marvellous gift."

"Alright."

"Alright," she agrees. Because, you know?

It is.

"How the hell is my life even remotely like a bike?"

.

babe, there's something lonesome about you
something so wholesome about you
get closer to me

.

i own nothing, but my shame, and really, ""own""", there, is hugely misleading, so. and then

there's This,

This is what happens when you open a word doc with much emotion and entirely, absolutely no plan, at all

terrible.

terrible.