This Is Not A Place Of Honour

For the Archivist, @the-archivist-system !!!! Happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday! I’m so glad we’re friends. It is incredibly wonderful to have someone who also appreciates the same madness that I do (*looks significantly at The Crackfic.* *hisses in a lower voice* hey, do you think we’ve intrigued them enough yet…)

This is quite an angsty depressing fic as a birthday present, so I do apologise! Then again, it’s Skul and Val, so when is it NOT depressing or angsty… though, halfway through writing, I had an idea to write a completely different and much more light-hearted fic. So you might end up with a second belated birthday present too…

Ages ago I saw a post on tumblr by @peterjohnsonandanniebellcheese , about what’d happen if Val never returned from Colorado, and wanted to write a fic on it. Interestingly, canon would have been very very different (I mean, I know that’s obvious, but.) As my notes said: “No time travel, so no cadaver and no obsidian so no darquesse so no sebastian”…

Anyway! Happy birthday!!!!! I really hope you enjoy it!

Baby, sometimes I feel like dying

Driving while I’m closing my eyes

Moving in and out of hiding

Trying to catch some truth in my life

There’s not a sound I can’t help but listening

Wishing I was somewhere else instead

A church, a lonely road

All the people come and go and come and go

I’m gonna run to you

I’m gonna count on you

I’m gonna follow

Baby, what else can I do?

- Run To You by Roxette

He stands on the doorstep, that day, the brim of his hat visible through the frosted glass. He knocks, and once Danny’s gone through the back door she opens the front one, and there’s enough adrenaline left running through her veins that she hugs him too. Properly. Her arms go around his bony neck and she inhales leather polish and exhales tears, and he hugs her back too.

He pets Xena. Stays with her until the American Sanctuary operatives have searched Cadaverous’s house. No signs, he’s gotten away. Skulduggery makes her a tea and cracks a joke about her microwave.

In the end she makes it clear that’s enough for the - day? Night? - and he leaves again. She watches him walk away. He knows she does, and she knows he knows. Eventually he’s far enough away and she shuts the door. Locks it out of habit.

The urge to scream builds up. And instead she just falls down to her knees like a puppet who’s strings have been cut.

After all, Valkyrie Cain didn’t deserve the things she wanted. So she let them walk away.

****

She’d intended to come back after a year. Or two. She really had. But one year became two, and there was Xena to raise, and then she was halfway through her training with Coda, and then she kissed him, told herself she could love him, and let him walk away too. It was okay, right? She got it. He couldn’t love, not properly.

Neither could she. It was a lesson she should’ve learnt at twelve. Never touch anything, hold onto anything, because your touch will cause it to wither and die and be hurt and no matter how precious it is, how much you care, it’ll escape anyway.

But Valkyrie Cain did love. Love was why she did all the things she did - love and selfishness and ego. Though when you really really studied it, for far too long like coffee percolating in a mouldy mug without a handle, she’d loved Skulduggery more than her folks. More than Alice. Because she’d chosen to keep doing magic, to keep learning how to take the punches and dodge the kicks, how to become a weapon, a combat accessory, just so she could stay with him.

Wasted precious years away from her family. Her friends. School. All the things she’d scoffed at, let her reflection do in her place. She told herself, next year. Soon. I’ll get it under control. But another adventure became another villain and another long trip and another person to chase down and elbow in the face and the years rolled by, so many broken bones and laughter and tears and nightmares. And in the end the adventure was to stop her, the villain was her, the long trip was to repress her, the person to chase down and elbow was herself. Her her her.

Because she couldn’t make the decision to leave, not until it was too late. And now she’s left them all, pushed them away, and she braces her hands on the cold ceramic of the sink, stares at her brown eyes in the mirror, and wonders why, if she had to love so much, why she had to hurt them so much too, in so many ways.

****

She dipped her toe back into the choppy riptide-current waters, chasing down Cadaverous. But the idea of going back, diving headfirst by Skulduggery’s side, is so much too much that she can’t handle it. So she makes herself poached eggs with cucumber slices and coriander for breakfast two weeks later, when the snow thaws, and eats it by the sunny window, while Xena snuffles at her bowl by the back door.

“I’ll give you leftovers, girl,” she says. Her voice is croaky. Well, when did she last speak? Maybe forty-eight hours ago. She’d texted her folks last night instead of the weekly phone call. Sore throats were the perfect excuse when you needed them.

Xena wags her tail, looks up with golden brown eyes.

“Remember?” she says to her. “Chasing down the bad guys?”

Xena does not remember. Valkyrie pretends that she does.

“We saved Danny. You were brilliant, girl. You were so good, weren’t cha?” She rubs the dog’s head when she walks over, thunking her chin onto Valkyrie’s knee. “The nasty man stabbed you, but you were so brave. So clever.” Then she stops, because she realises - again - that she loves Xena, and that that love put Xena in danger.

She does a workout, goes for a run, hoovers her bedroom for some reason. When she’s doing the dishes, her phone rings.

It’s him, of course it’s him. She doesn’t want to answer, doesn’t want to talk, but she wants to hear his voice.

Hobson’s choice. Between a rock and a hard place. She presses ANSWER in the end.

“Hey.”

“Valkyrie.” His voice is smooth. “How are you?”

She turns the tap off and puts the sponge down. “Fine,” she says, with about as much enthusiasm as she can render without actually sounding enthusiastic.

He laughs. She presses the phone tighter to her ear, wishing she could hear the sound again, without the crackle of static and the bitter, disused undertone.

“You know, Valkyrie, it’s usually considered polite to enquire after the wellbeing of the other person.”

She pokes the floor with her socked toe. “How are you, then?”

“Sublime.”

“Cool.”

And the conversation simply dies there. She takes a deep breath, holds it, exhales slowly.

“How are your parents and your sister?”

I don’t know. “They’re grand,” she says instead. “Spoke to them yesterday.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah. Well. Texted. Had a sore throat.”

“Poor you.”

“Right?” She tries for a jokey tone, but it falls flat. She grimaces at the singular unwashed fork in the sink. “Uh…How’s…Temper?”

Temper Fray, the new partner he acquired three years ago; the partner he likes to spend time with; the partner who is probably a hell of a lot better than Valkyrie herself. At least he doesn’t kill everything he touches.

“Dead.”

Her eyes shoot wide open and she nearly drops the phone. “What?”

“Of course he’s not dead, Valkyrie, don’t be silly.”

Her lips part. She’s meant to laugh, now. She almost does, to be obliging. But her heart is still racing and now she keeps thinking of Alice and visions swirling in steam and Skulduggery falling apart and Solomon crumpling and-

“Valkyrie?”

She realises her breaths are coming in short jerky bursts.

“Valkyrie-”

She hangs up.

****

It’s five weeks before they talk again.

****

Eight months later, it’s Alice’s birthday. Melissa has been dropping hints. So has Desmond. And Valkyrie knows what the right thing to do is, and she’s been enough of a shitty daughter, shitty older sister, to know that what they want and what they should have are two different things, because they don’t deserve to have her come back. But she phones Fletcher for the first time in two years to ask a favour of him, and she sees him for the first time in six years, and she hugs a person for the first time since she hugged Skulduggery.

She feels the Irish wind of Haggard’s pier for the first time in too long. She sees the gleaming black car and the long bonnet and the small wheels, but she doesn’t take it in because she’s too busy crouching and checking that Xena is okay.

She is. She’s not even nauseous. She immediately looks around with interest, sniffing towards the beach. Towards home. Clever girl.

“She’ll bark in a Colorado accent.”

Valkyrie looks up then. Sees the Bentley properly, and sees Skulduggery walking towards them. He’s wearing a face. It’s smiling.

“I told him,” Fletcher explains.

“I would offer you a lift, but…” Skulduggery pauses, his fake eyes flickering to Xena.

“It’s grand. We can walk.” Alone, she adds silently; though if she’s left alone she might simply run screaming into the woods or off into whatever wilderness Dublin has to offer.

“But,” Skulduggery emphasises, “I was afraid you might start moulting.”

She blinks. He’s looking at her. “Me?”

“Your hair is quite long, in case you haven’t noticed.”

It is, because it’s been a while since she cut it. “Me and not the thirty-kilo salivating mass of fur down there?”

“That’s no way to describe Fletcher, really, Valkyrie.”

He’s trying anything to make her laugh, she realises. Even Fletcher laughs, too loudly, trying too hard to be infectious. But it won’t work. The most she can manage is a grimace. It doesn’t reach her eyes.

“We can walk, seriously,” she says. “Clear our heads. Xena can stretch her legs.”

“Certainly,” Skulduggery says, and doffs his hat to Fletcher. It’s a movement that takes her by surprise, but she understands it now. Fletcher’s a teacher. A respected man - well, as respected as he can be, with that hair.

“Later,” Fletcher says, and winks at her before he vanishes. Xena’s hackles rise in surprise.

“Hey, girl, it’s fine,” Valkyrie says. As much to herself, as the dog. Then she frowns at Skulduggery when he falls into step by her.

“I don’t need an escort, Skulduggery.”

“I am also a guest.”

She furrows her brow. “What?”

“Your parents invited me.”

“Why?” she blurts out. Xena stops to sniff a lamppost.

“Something wanting to get to know to me. It’s an understandable sentiment. As I-”

“No, wait, shut up. They invited you to Alice’s birthday party?”

“They did.”

They walk on. She studies Haggard, Ireland. It’s changed in ways that people wouldn’t notice unless they lived here. Signs of time moving on, regardless of wherever she was. Insignificant. People didn’t care about her existence unless she was threatening theirs.

Almost a minute passes before he adds, softer, “Is it a problem, Valkyrie? If you feel I’m intruding-”

“No,” she says, even faster than before, it’s a tumbled jerky sound. “No, stay.”

He does.

She leaves before the party’s over, before the streetlights have turned on.

Back in Colorado, her wrist still burning from Fletcher’s sympathetic touch, she cries herself to sleep.

****

Fletcher texts her a couple of months after the disastrous birthday party - disastrous only for her, trying to stomach the curious glances, the compassion of her parents who have aged while she wasn’t there, of her sister who was so shy of her.

Hey Val, you know you can ask me to come over or bring anyone over whenever you like, right?

You’re not alone, it means. The other side of the world means nothing when you have a friend who’s a Teleporter. In the snap of fingers, the send of one message, she could have anyone she wanted, who cared enough to come, standing right here in this room, between her sofa burrito and the glowing TV screen playing a film she can’t remember the name of.

She doesn’t delete the message, but she can’t reply, either.

****

It’s a few months later when Skulduggery calls her and tells her about his day unprompted. He does that sometimes, when he’s executed a punch he’s particularly proud of.

“Abyssinia was your ex-girlfriend?” she says, at the very end, once he’s finished an anecdote about trying to ‘drive’ Coldheart.

“Really, Valkyrie?”

She laughs, scrunching up her toes against the inside of her duvet. Beside her, Xena’s paws are twitching in her deep sleep. The bedroom curtains are closed; a lamp spills golden light over the ancient wooden furniture. “You had a girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“I cannot believe this is what you are focusing on.”

She makes an incredulous face at her wardrobe. “How’d it even work?”

“No, Valkyrie.”

“Aww, come on. Can’t I have the Skeleton Sex Talk?”

“No.”

“You’re no fun.”

“I am lots of fun. Plenty. However, my tie is singed, my hat was shot at, and my partner is prioritising a girlfriend I had centuries ago over my thrilling tales of high stakes and uneven odds-”

“Partner?”

She can’t think of anything more pithy than the instinctive parroting that falls from her mouth.

“Partner,” Skulduggery agrees. He sounds faintly bemused. Or maybe it was just the bad reception.

“But…that’s Temper, right? Currently? Since I’m, like…”

“My partner,” Skulduggery repeats firmly. “Always, Valkyrie.”

It takes a moment, the bedposts blurring. She exhales. “Shit,” she says weakly, “you’re going soppy on me.”

He laughs. “Anyway, while you’re distracted and not talking about my ex-girlfriend who is now an internal organ, shortly to be incinerated-”

“Ohhh, harsh, who says romance is dead?-”

“-Lethe’s, aka Savant’s, recovery is underway. The ones who didn’t vaporise are arrested - currently being held at Ironpoint. Along with your old friend Cadaverous Gant.”

“Oh,” she says. Something in the backs of her shoulders eases up.

“Relieved?” How can he interpret her silences, halfway across the world?

She nods, and almost believes he can see it. “Yeah.”

****

He tells her about the special team despatched to Dimension X; the highly-proficient, deadly ‘assassination squad’ that were shunted over just a few hours before. She listens, sitting in her rocking-chair in the afternoon sunshine, watching the dappled play of shadows on the deck. Listens to that velvet voice that she remembers, from her darkest moments, from her best moments.

The Sceptre of the Ancients, found after Devastation Day. She takes several deep breaths. It’s over. Alice is alive. Alice is alive and she’s out of Alice’s life, keeping her safe that way. Loving, from a distance.

“China asked for the support of the Arbiters,” Skulduggery says at the end, casually. “Myself and Temper.”

Valkyrie feels goosebumps on her arms. The sun is still bright. “But you didn’t go,” she says stupidly, just to check, just to make sure, her fingers gripping tighter around the phone.

His voice is even. “No, we didn’t. Temper wanted to. He’s been assigned to the hypothetical - inevitable - clean-up team.”

“But you’re not going?”

“No.”

She breathes out.

“Why?”

“Because,” he says simply, then stops.

“Because of Lord Vile?”

“No, Valkyrie. Because of you.”

She nods. Chews on it. “Right, right, okay.”

He asks about her faulty fridge after that.

****

She hears about the ‘clean-up’; the assassination of Mevolent that went as planned, the victorious return, the dying dimension that they’ve sealed up and left behind, mercilessly. She lies awake that night and thinks of mortals, succumbing to the zombie-plague (“Draugr,” Skulduggery had said for the fifth time, “in the Leibniz Dimension. But habits are habits, and he’s never been an authority figure.)

****

Calls are missed, weeks go by, or they text every day. It depends. Valkyrie can count, on the fingers of both hands, how many calls Skulduggery hasn’t answered since her stay here. But sometimes she watches the phone ring, vibrating on whatever surface it’s on, listening to the bars of Me And Mrs Jones, until he gives up. It’s a punishment intended for her. He’s just caught in the crossfire.

However, this time it’s not even intentional when she doesn’t answer, plodding down the hill with snowflakes swirling around her, falling faster and faster. Her hands are way too cold to bring them out of her damp pockets. She’ll call him back when she gets home.

Only, when she does get home, she has to fix her malfunctioning boiler and then she treats herself to a scalding shower, and by the time she’s making hot chocolate, a blizzard blowing around the creaky old farmhouse, she remembers, and by then she’s too tired to conduct any kind of conversation, and she knows that wouldn’t bother Skulduggery but also, it isn’t like he’ll be surprised or concerned by her ghosting him, so she might as well just leave it.

****

It won’t start. It won’t start. Nothing she does will make this fucking Landrover start, and after the eighth attempt, Valkyrie gives up and lets the clunking engine splutter into silence. Cold seeps through the car, and she lifts her hands to the cooling vents but there’s no traces of warmth left.

Tears burn the backs of her eyes. Why, why won’t the car start. Some part of her knows that she needs to get out, start the long trek back to her farmhouse, but she won’t make it. The snow is too volatile. The windscreen is already covered in a feathery white sheen. If the car stays here overnight, it’ll be stranded and snowed-in. She might freeze to death anyway. But if she tries to make it on foot, it’ll get dark and she’ll freeze anyway.

What luxurious choices.

She thunks her head against the steering-wheel. There’s metallic clinks and clicks as the engine cools; Xena’s breathing in the backseat, her own ragged half-sobs.

God, the Bentley wouldn’t have failed her like this. She takes a deep breath, shakes her head. Maybe it’s what she deserves, today.

Xena grumbles, waking up. The noise jogs Valkyrie into action. Xena can’t stay here.

A hip-wriggle and two numb-finger movements later, she’s extracted her phone from her pocket and is dialling the only number in her call-log.

He picks up on the second ring. She wonders what ringtone he has for her, or maybe she doesn’t have a specific ringtone? Probably that.

“Valkyrie.”

“Hey,” she says. The world inside the Landrover is bleak and grey, snow silently blanketing the windows.

There’s a pause. “How are you?” Skulduggery asks. Tentatively. She’d almost laugh. Of course he’s tentative, of course he is, they both know the day, the day that is commemorated now in Roarhaven, or so she’s been told. That day.

Instead she has to sniff, wipe her nose with her sleeve, and blink back tears.

He can, presumably, hear all of that. But he doesn’t say anything until she unclicks the seatbelt and lets it slide back inside its reel. Then he seems to realise something’s wrong.

“Valkyrie? Are you alright?” There’s a sudden sharpness to his words.

“Sure. Yeah. Yeah.” She nods at the steering-wheel. The key is still in the ignition of her useless, useless car. “I mean, I’m snowed into my car halfway up a mountain and it’s getting dark, but…”

“Snowed in?”

“Car broke down.” She manages that laugh at last. It sounds pathetic. “Guess I’m spending the night here.”

There’s a few clicks from his end. “You haven’t taken that contraption to a reputable mechanic since you got it, have you?”

“Have you ever taken the Bentley to an NCT?” she counters.

There’s silence. “No, but there’s a difference.”

He’s not wrong. “There is,” she agrees. Still more clicks. “What the fuck are you doing, Skulduggery?”

“Changing my hats,” he says, very seriously. “I just got back from a round-table meeting.”

“Ah, King Arthur and his knights.”

“Queen China, rather. Yes. It was…”

“Tiring?”

“Yes. Stuffy. No air-conditioning in that place.”

“You don’t need air-conditioning.”

“My suits do.”

A moment. The car is getting colder now. “Was it to do with Devastation Day?” It’s the first time she’s said the words aloud. They sound strange on her tongue, thick and heavy, distancing her from the crimes somehow.

“It was.”

She closes her eyes. Of all the deaths that day, the one that haunts the most is the person who still goes on living, breathing, laughing. What kind of a person does that make her?

“I’m going to put you on hold. I need to make another call.”

She stares at the dusty dashboard in disbelief. “Are you kidding, Skulduggery?”

“No, I’m not, actually. It’s quite important.”

“Seriously?” There’s a tinge of arrogance to this assumption so she pushes it away, because she can’t make claims on his partnership anymore, not when she’s halfway across the world. “Fine, look, I’ll hang up, I’ll call you tomorrow or something.”

“Valkyrie-”

“It’s fine, see you, bye,” she says hastily and hangs up over him. Her eyes are smarting again. It smells cold. How is that possible?

Maybe it would be fun to just tear the stupid Landrover apart with her lightning. No need to aim or anything. If Xena wasn’t here, she’d do it.

She turns the key again, presses her foot on the accelerator. Catch, catch, catch, turn on, she begs silently, but it doesn’t quite catch, doesn’t quite start, and the hideous splutterings die away. The windscreen wipers are halfway across the glass now, in a pathetic parody of something that could actually function, and she peers through at the bleak world outside and then hesitates because there’s a dark blob in the world of whiteness, a dark blob flying, descending, his suit perfectly ironed. There’s not even a snowflake on him.

His skull is whiter than the snow when he gets into the passenger seat and takes off his hat. The gust of cold air makes her shudder, teeth trembling together.

“Fletcher?” she asks dully. Her phone is still lying on the dash, still lit up with the call log that shows his name after she hung up on him. It’s been four minutes.

“Yes. Teleported me to your house, then I flew. I noticed your new curtains. They’re nice.”

“Thanks. I made them and everything.”

She didn’t, and he knows it, but he plays along. “Sewing machine?”

“No. Oh, let’s face it-” She’s suddenly furious at everything, the kind of fury that melts into desperate tears. “I couldn’t make curtains, I couldn’t keep my fucking car in working order, I’m stuck in a snowstorm halfway up a mountain, and I’m a goddamn mass-murderer.”

“Darquesse is,” Skulduggery says mildly. “There’s a difference.”

“I’m a murderer.”

He can’t deny it. “It happens to the best of us.”

She takes a deep breath. Her phone goes black. “I hoovered this thing last week. Looks like that’s finally done it in.”

“I did notice the lack of crumbs.”

He isn’t truly human, but being in his proximity is just like being in anyone else’s. Scents, behaviours, tiny mannerisms. She knows them all.

“You patched up the paintwork yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yep. Found a spray-can with a colour-match and everything.” Valkyrie knuckles her eyes. He’s still there in her peripheral vision when she opens them again. She hasn’t looked at him properly yet, not once. She can hear the sedate wag of Xena’s tail in the backseat. Her doggy is used to Skulduggery, the bone-man that she isn’t allowed to gnaw on, who turns up at random moments and vanishes again.

“A colour-match?” Skulduggery jibes. “There’s no similarity. Have you visited an optician lately?”

“Shut up, it is a good match. I asked the guy and everything, he said it looks identical. Danny said the paintjob was professional.”

“Ah yes, Danny, the local grocer boy with whom you have a very strange acquaintanceship. I can see how you would value his opinion deeply. Is he colour-blind, by any chance?”

“Shut up,” Valkyrie says again, but there’s a tiny smile at the corners of her mouth now. “It’s not the Bentley, I know.”

“Certainly not. They’re not even the same species of vehicle.”

“But it is better than something like, I dunno, the Canary Car, or any of those monstrosities-”

“You lack taste.”

“You lack subtlety.”

“Touché.” Skulduggery shifts slightly, appearing to examine her car. “At least, if I have to be a passenger, I’m still sitting on the same side.”

“We’re not going anywhere, though. Because…” She waves her hand. “Dead car.”

“Indeed.”

She wraps her coat-sleeved arms around herself. “It’s goddamn freezing.”

In response, Skulduggery clicks his fingers. Creates a perfect circle of a fireball, hovering in his gloved palm. She leans closer to the source of heat instinctively before hesitating.

“Uh, we won’t explode, will we? Because I topped up the gas yesterday, and-”

“It’s fine,” Skulduggery says simply.

She holds her cold fingers out to his hand, to the fireball, warming herself the way she would by a fire. He sits patiently, arm crooked at the elbow and held out, like a parody of a ‘teapot’. Flames dance and flicker across the darkening grey inside, casting shadows and reflections, lighting up in the dials on the dash.

Xena suddenly has enough. Skulduggery lifts his arm quickly as the big dog scrambles through, darting a quick lick against his skull as she goes - Valkyrie swears she sees him wince. Then Xena is on her lap and on her seat, and she’s wrapping her arms around her dog and laughing as Xena tries to lick her face too.

They settle. Skulduggery brings his arm back down, keeps the fireball clear of Xena’s lustrous fur. Snowflakes fall. Daylight becomes a grey grey twilight, an early dusk, and the Landrover feels submerged in the snow. They watch the blizzard, contained in a small sphere of church-like calm.

The silence stretches out, quiet, unconditional.

Until Valkyrie breaks it. The words tumble out, ungraceful and unplanned.

“I’ve been here for seven years. Almost eight.”

“...Yes,” Skulduggery says cautiously. Flames and shadows dance in his eye-sockets as he turns his head to her. “So you have.”

“I’m twenty-five years old. I’ve…I’ve, like, been here longer than I’ve been your partner, before that.”

His head tilts wordlessly. Her fingers curl into the fur at Xena’s neck, coarse and soft all at once. It’s true, isn’t it? Seven years, almost another eight and no true way of recovering, no fix-it peace found within herself and a new life built on the crumbled ruins of what she thought she had, a perfect replica without the bad parts - the deaths and tortures and desperate prayers that went to evil gods.

That’s the truth she’s discovered, she realises.

“There’s no coming back from it.”

He doesn’t ask what she’s referring to.

****

Coda Quell turns up on her doorstep - well, to be clear, at her gateway - a few months later, when the snow has thawed. She goes out to meet him, surprised, but whatever she expected wasn’t what he had to tell her.

She watches Xena sniff in recognition around his shoes and tries to formulate a response, because she doesn’t know what to say, and she is entirely too lonely to hear love declarations. That she, who killed and hurt everything she touched, everything she loved, had shown someone else what love was, how to love, how to want. How to come back, unmaimed, offering love.

“I’m glad you can love.” Starting simple is always a good option. Tanith told her that, once. “I’m glad you’ve broken through all that Cleaver training.”

He waits, looking at her under the morning sun, and she realises what she has to say anyway.

“And I hope you find someone. It…it just can’t be me.”

She watches through the cameras when he drives away.

****

Skulduggery turns up unannounced on his deathday. Twenty-third of October. But it has nothing to do with it, and everything to do with it, as it turns out.

“You assassinated some dude called Damocles Creed.”

“Yes.” He stands in her kitchen doorway and watches as she makes herself a coffee, even though it’s late at night, trying to comprehend what madness this is.

“You assassinated someone.”

“Yes.”

“Purposefully?”

“Obviously, Valkyrie.”

“And…and you have a grandson.”

“Crepuscular Vies, yes. He has an inferiority-slash-superiority complex where he feels it is necessary to measure up to me, so he took on his own partner. Auger Darkly’s twin brother, Omen. Good lad, from what I’ve heard. He’s got in a few scrapes, but nothing too serious.”

“And he - Crepuscular - was actually your old partner. Fregoli. Who died.”

“Didn’t die.”

“Well, okay, yeah, but! You thought he had!”

“Yes.”

“So are you sure it’s, you know, him?”

“Yes.”

She stares at him in disbelief. “Ohmygod.”

“Quite.”

“This is worse than the Abyssinia reveal.”

“I feel the same.”

“I mean, discovering you had an evil ex-girlfriend was one thing, but like, discovering that you’ve got a grandson and a daughter-”

“Twenty-one grandchildren, actually.”

“What?”

“Do you need to sit down?”

“I do, actually. Right. Carry on. You’ve got what?”

“My…” Skulduggery hesitates. “Daughter…is currently incarcerated in a top-secret institution used to keep the rest of the world safe from its inmates. She married Abyssinia’s son, Caisson, who was not my son, as it turns out.”

“Wait, he wasn’t? Who found that out?”

“Temper did, along with a Sensitive friend of his. He was Mevolent’s child.”

Valkyrie stares. “You kept that quiet.”

He gives a bony shrug. “They had twenty-one children before China put Solace in the institution.”

“China? What’s China got to do with any of this?”

“Oh, did I forget to mention? China is Solace’s mother.”

Valkyrie’s mouth opens, closes. “I’m sorry, what.”

“China is Solace’s-”

“Mother, yeah, I heard, which means that…” Valkyrie shakes her head. “Oh. My. God. Jesus Christ. Fucking hell.”

“Incorrect and incorrect, and yes, partially accurate.”

“You and China?”

“We are centuries’ old.”

“This is insane.”

“Yes, I agree.”

“It’s not fun. Like, y’know, you said embrace your inner lunatic, but this is-”

“I know.”

“I can’t actually take it in.”

“Try again tomorrow.”

“So China knew? And didn’t tell you?”

“Precisely.”

She takes in a slow breath. “Right. Right. Ohmygod. This is just a lot, you know? Like I’m kind of - Okay, let’s go back to the other bit where you killed some guy - Fishy Creed or-”

“Damocles Creed. Leader of the Church of Faceless Ones. He ruled the Dark Cathedral and was planning to overthrow China.”

Valkyrie’s eyes widen. “Wait a sec, is she…”

“Aware, yes. We co-conspired. Exactly nobody else knows.”

“Well, apart from me.”

“Indeed.”

He isn’t usually this monosyllabic. Old-Valkyrie might have asked him why, tried to get him to open up about his feelings, but she knows better now. Some things can’t be talked about. It’s something she’s learnt.

So she tells him they’re going to watch a movie, and drags him into her lounge-room. He sits on the sofa and pets Xena and doesn’t pay attention while she finds the right DVD. He looks up when it starts.

“Valkyrie, why do you have a film featuring Grace Kelly?”

She pulls a face and scoots Xena along, sitting down between dog and skeleton. The couch groans unhappily. “Uh, it came with the house.”

“Really,” he says dryly.

“Yeah. It was, like, the one thing the old owners left behind.”

“You said this building had been dilapidated and you restored it.”

“Yeah.”

“That even the downstairs toilet cistern had been taken apart and destroyed.”

“Yeah.”

“But this remained, did it?”

She grins. “Actually, yeah. I found it in this secret compartment under the floor, wrapped in golden paper-”

“Valkyrie, you’re lying.”

She laughs, finally finally laughs and barely remembers how, and elbows him. “Stop complaining, Grinch.”

****

She falls asleep on his shoulder, Xena drooling sleepily on her knee.

****

She wakes up with the TV black, silent. Her head is resting stiffly on his shoulder and everything is quiet, unchanged, except that Xena’s stretched out onto her side and Skulduggery has put an arm around her, pulled her close into his side.

He stays, for the first time in years, for more than a week. He teaches her how to fly, and she teaches him how to make proper pancakes.

****

Another year passes. She paints the outside, sands down the doors and varnishes them, builds a shed entirely by herself, cuts trees and cultivates a small rose garden. She gets bees and offers a sticky jar to Danny, who beams wider than she’s ever seen. At some point, he teaches her how to play guitar and she appals Skulduggery over the phone by her awful strumming of Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac.

She texts Tanith at some point. Starts to skype her family every few weeks. Alice is growing older and Valkyrie can’t witness any of it, but she’s learnt that she can love without harming the ones she loves, so long as it’s distanced. Or that’s what she tells herself.

She gets another puppy, calls it Elsa because Alice begs and begs her to. A Golden Retriever, this time. Danny tells her about the Golden Retrievers his grandmother used to breed, and then winces when she hits a note wrong.

“I’ll learn piano next,” she says. “Next autumn.”

Danny smiles, eyes crinkling at the corners. Elsa’s asleep on his foot. “Next autumn, maybe you’ll say ‘fall’ instead.”

****

There’s a difference between being alone and lonely. Valkyrie is often both; rarely neither. But the house became a home. Meek Ridge is home, and Haggard is her hometown. There’s a difference between running away and choosing to stay, and at some point she stopped running from Ireland and chose to stay in Colorado.

And no one is ever truly too far away, after all.

The nightmares are only on bad nights. Skulduggery stops asking when will you come back, and starts to ask when can I come over? Though once he learns he can turned up whenever, he does. Too often. And Fletcher is all too happy to bring him over if he thinks Valkyrie might have some interesting biscuits in her pantry. Which, to be fair, she normally does.

****

She only remembers what day it is when she opens the front door and sees that her drive has been flooded with people.

Not strangers, though they might as well be. She sees all their faces and tries not to cry, to scream. Xena and Elsa bark, and the three people at the front beam, and Valkyrie shakes her head.

“Ohmygod,” she says, and then Alice hugs her, with a gap-toothed grin and a joyful “Stephanie!”.

She makes herself hug Alice back. Makes herself hug Desmond, then Melissa. Her folks have aged, but it doesn’t show, not with the way they’re beaming, holding her for a prolonged time as if she’s worth it. Fletcher grins sheepishly behind them, mouths happy birthday.

Valkyrie can’t take it in. The people on her drive become the people in her lounge-room, in her house. Tanith comments on the stack of DVDs. The Monster Hunters are far too intrigued by the antlers she found at a car-boot sale and hung halfway up her staircase wall. Melissa commandeers her kitchen and Valkyrie watches in disbelief as Fletcher teleports back and forth at her mother’s command, bringing over party food and gifts - so much of it.

“He’s a good lad,” Desmond says, coming to stand by her.

“He’s older than I am, Dad.”

Desmond puts an arm around her. “And yet still younger than your mother and me-”

“Your mother and I,” Valkyrie corrects, before catching herself. “Sorry, I sound like Skulduggery.”

Speaking of which…He’s always conspicuous, in any crowd, and yet, where is she? He’s not here. She excuses herself, goes upstairs to her bathroom, smiling at Alice crouched down fussing over the two dogs. Locks herself in, and pulls out her phone.

Skulduggery answers on the first ring. “Happy thirtieth birthday, Valkyrie.”

“Thanks.” She doesn’t waste time, raising an eyebrow at herself in the mirror. “Where the hell are you?”

“The Bentley. Why?”

She shakes her head. “Come on. You had to know. Right? They’re everywhere.”

“Who is everywhere?”

“The people,” she hisses. “Downstairs.”

“...Are you being burgled? Surely you can handle some measly burglars, Valkyrie. Unless Colorado has made you soft. Has it? Made you too soft to handle some weak little burgl-”

“Skulduggery. The surprise birthday party. They’ve even brought me presents.”

“Ah, yes. Mine should be in there somewhere. It’s a stick.”

“You just spoiled the surprise.” She takes a deep breath. “Why aren’t you here? Why are you in the Bentley? They’re all here, even China’s here-”

“Valkyrie-”

“People I haven’t seen in literally over a decade are here, but you’re just-”

“Valkyrie, I was-”

“I mean, I know you can’t eat cake, but you could, like, put the candles back on fire-”

“Valky-”

“-Never mind. Look, I’d better go back down before Dad sets the place on fire or-”

“Va-”

“It’s just…I want you to be here, goddammit, Skulduggery,” she finishes, slightly out of breath.

“And I am.”

She takes her phone away from her ear and looks at the closed door. Hangs up.

“Valkyrie,” Skulduggery says on the other side.

She shakes her head and holds her breath until the tears dissipate. Opens the door. Three-piece-suit, an immaculate hat. “Hey.”

“Happy birthday.”

“I’m sorry.” For everything.

“You don’t need to be.” He’s holding a twig, which he formally presents to her. “Many happy returns. It’s from Grimwood’s estate.”

She stares at it, at his skull and the shadows in his eye-sockets. Downstairs, someone - probably Desmond - has started a choir of whistlers. They’re trying to whistle Happy Birthday…and failing. Other people are chattering. It sounds nice. It sounds so nice, actually.

She lets out a sobbing laugh and hugs him and nearly snaps the twig in two between them.

****

A funny thing about friendship is that, in most cases, if you’re true friends, you don’t find it awkward to reunite after a long amount of time apart. Weeks, months, decades. China was a little icier; it melted. Dexter was sharper; it softened. Tanith was sadder; she laughed. There were a few faces that Valkyrie hadn’t met before. Oberon, Tanith’s boyfriend; a red-haired Scottish teacher called Militsa that was Fletcher’s ‘plus-one’ - “even though we’re not together,” he’d stressed, hands up. “I’m dating Myosotis…actually…”

“Who?”

It wasn’t until she touched a weird little bracelet that he wore that she remembered Myosotis, who was currently in the downstairs bathroom.

Beryl and Fergus and the twins were absent. They had sent gifts. Danny turned up, bearing groceries, and was sucked into the party. Someone had set up speakers, music was playing, the cake was evidence - evidence being slowly eaten - that her mother’s baking was as good as ever and only improved with time.

It was a good day.

Then Danny obligingly played the guitar for Alice, who stood and, with the kind of outgoing bubbly cheerfulness that Valkyrie had never had, sung Let It Go to the guests.

Her voice was thin, high, petering out on the strong notes. It was beautiful. It was the sort of thing Valkyrie had missed, stayed away from.

And one thought crystallizes like an icy blast I'm never going back, the past is in the past

When Alice finishes, amidst the cheers and whoops and applause, her eyes flit to Valkyrie first, seeking her big sister’s approval. Valkyrie cheers and beams and claps, makes sure that Alice sees it, and the moment she can, when Alice is swarmed by people congratulating her - even China - because it was a good performance - Valkyrie escapes.

She walks out into her backyard. She’s been in Colorado long enough to think of that. It’s swelteringly hot, bees buzzing around the blossoming flowers. Xena patters out after her.

Tears are running down her cheeks. They dry almost immediately in the heat of the sun’s rays.

Skulduggery can’t walk silently, not on the chaotic jumble of stones that she calls ‘loose gravel’. He stands beside her.

“Are you okay, Valkyrie?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” It takes a moment, but after she wipes her eyes, she realises she actually is. Fine, that is. It’s a feeling so old it might as well be new.

“Eleven years is a long time,” Skulduggery says quietly. “Perhaps it’s time to forgive yourself. Just a little.”

“It isn’t that easy, though.”

“Alice is twelve. She is a happy, healthy child. Had we not defeated Darquesse, she would not be. But she does deserve better than you being nothing more than legends.”

“Legends?”

“Of course. We all tell her about you.”

Valkyrie breathes out slowly, keeps her eyes front. He’s nothing but a white-and-suited smudge in her peripheral vision. Maybe his skull will bleach in the Colorado sun.

“I’m a selfish bitch, aren’t I.”

“Neither of those words are applicable.”

“But even if…” Valkyrie speaks slowly, reluctantly. “Even if I could face a return…No one wants me.”

Skulduggery’s head tilts. “The house behind me, stuffed full of people, is indicative of a different fact.”

Valkyrie chews on it. “Should I holiday more to Ireland, maybe? I mean…It’s not exactly hard.”

“That would be a good place to start.”

“Baby steps.”

“Indeed.”

They don’t speak for a few moments. But she has to say it, has to have him know it, before he gets his hopes up and thinks that it could ever be the same like it used to be, when she was the teenager who would destroy the world.

“What if I can’t come back? Ever? Properly, I mean. As a partner - an Arbiter. What happens then?” To us?

Skulduggery takes a step closer, their arms brushing. Suited fabric, burning hot to the touch against her bare skin. “I said this before, Valkyrie. You’re always going to be my partner.”

She takes a shaky breath. Finally turns, looks at him. His head tilts.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. We made an entire phrase to encompass it. But you’ve clearly forgotten it,” Skulduggery adds affectionately. “You dimwit.”

She laughs. “I still can’t believe you won the Scrabble with that one.”

“I am a genius.”

“Until the end?”

He hugs her, or she hugs him. They hug.

“Until the end,” he says, and she links her arm with his as they walk back into the room.

Next year, she decides - for next year’s birthday party - she’ll kiss his cheek. And she’ll definitely write the invitations’ list.

****

Two Years Later

“This is so illegal,” Alice says, grinning. “My friends are so jealous.”

“You shouldn’t have told your friends.” Fletcher tries to do a stern face, but it falls apart because he’s chewing. Valkyrie still can’t understand he’s a teacher, let alone a Headmaster. Especially not with that hair. But there you go.

Alice takes another bite of the sandwich Valkyrie has made. “I told them the first day you did it. From here, I texted them when I was in the toilet.”

“Kids these days,” Fletcher mutters. He glances over at Valkyrie. “Were we ever little shits like that?”

“I dunno.” Valkyrie turns to Skulduggery, who is standing in the doorway, arms crossed. “Were we?”

“Worse,” Skulduggery says immediately. “Much worse. Especially when you were dating. You were intolerable then.”

“Hey!” they both say at the same time. Valkyrie laughs. It doesn’t feel disused anymore, which is nice.

If she’s in Ireland, living at Grimwood, then Fletcher teleports himself and Alice - and often Skulduggery, and occasionally others - to that kitchen for lunch. But she’s currently in Colorado, living part-time between the houses as she now does. Not that it makes any difference to Fletcher.

Life is okay. She meets up with her friends more often than she has to punch people alongside them, which is good. Healthy, or so the Sanctuary therapist, that China recommended, has told her. She still gets dragged into Skulduggery’s adventures every so often, especially lately, since Temper’s on a honeymoon with his new wife, Kierre. Who was a sister of the man Skulduggery had once assassinated. It was a small world.

That reminds her she hasn’t told Alice this story yet.

“Hey, Al, Fletch. Did I tell you? I had to rescue Skulduggery the other day.”

“Valkyrie,” Skulduggery says, injured indignation dripping from his voice.

She ignores him. Her little sister - not so little, anymore, but still her sister - grins expectantly. “Yeah?”

“From this absolute monkey-house.”

Fletcher takes another sandwich. Still a growing boy, he’ll protest, and when that doesn’t work he’ll use the my hair’s still growing excuse, and no one has yet found a good counter-argument to that one. “Sounds like Skulduggery.”

“I have a gun,” Skulduggery grumbles.

“I mean, it was literally a monkey-house. A monkey enclosure. In a zoo.” Valkyrie relishes the looks on her audience’s faces. “He’d been sealed in there.”

Alice giggles and tries to hide it with her hand. “How?”

Valkyrie points. “That’s what I asked him.”

“I had a very valid excuse,” Skulduggery says unhappily. “I didn’t have my magic, since I had been cuffed, and the glass was bulletproof.”

“The monkeys stole his hat,” Valkyrie continues, grinning.

Fletcher almost snorts salad out of his nose. By the back door, Xena - ancient, silvered muzzle and serene eyes - thuds her tail. Elsa gets up and slurps water.

“May I remind you that instead of rescuing me, you stopped to take several pictures and even a, you said and I quote, ‘selfie with the newest species of monkey they just discovered’.”

Valkyrie starts to laugh properly at that, while Alice and Fletcher beg her for the picture. She laughs and laughs and laughs - even though it’s not truly that funny, except it was, and their company makes it even more funny; and she looks up, across the room at Skulduggery.

He stands on the threshold of her kitchen, that afternoon, and brown eyes meet shadowed eye-sockets, and his head tilts in recognition. A smile, a silent laugh creasing the corners of the eyes he doesn’t have.