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lewkwoodnco · 8 months

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The Alcott - Lockwood x reader

A/N: (1.8k) lil bit of angst, a little bit of a happy ending, kind of a sequel to the august (tsitp trailer version) fic which you can read here

It had been a while since she’d seen Lockwood and a little while longer since he’s seen her. They were a busy agency and occupied themselves well - better than she occupied herself. She read their glowing articles in the papers and traced their outlines in their photos. Nobody else would have noticed the slight gap between Lockwood and Lucy, but she did. Not that it seemed to matter much anyway. They looked so normal, so capable, when all she felt like was a wreck.

She stayed holed up in her apartment for the first few weeks, face pressed against the dark window of the miserable flat she rented. She watched people scurry home as curfew approached, home to people who cared about them. A part of her felt that thought that wasn’t fair, and maybe it wasn’t, but she was too bitter to care. Bitter about what, she didn’t know. Her glassy eyes would reflect the pale glow of the ghosts as they shimmered in the streets, and a funny feeling would creep into her stomach when she realised all one had to do was reach up and touch her, and there wouldn’t be anyone to protect her, to pull her away from the window, to snap some sense back in her. In short, she had been having a terrible time, and in her grief, her resentment festered and oozed and infected her life.

Days passed in a blur, and eventually she had started leaving her dim dwelling, without realising. She felt badly scarred and numb and there was this grim quality to her life that made joy and grief one and the same. Lucy wrote her a letter; how she found her new address was beyond her but her knee-jerk thought was that if Lucy could have found it, so could have Lockwood. She didn’t believe anything in that letter anyway - it was probably riddled with exaggerations and half-truths just to get her to come back.

Lockwood and co’s articles piled up and littered her floors until she couldn’t bear to read them, only spitefully glancing at the pictures. Sometimes Lucy looked a little pale or shaky, or George looked exhausted, but not Lockwood. If anything, his eyes grew brighter and brighter with some manic energy, clutching George and Lucy tighter to his sides each time. It was revolting. Rude, even.

But her savings were running low, and she knew it would only be a matter of time before she’d have to go back home to her family. But home was so far away from here, so far away from 35 Portland Row, and maybe a part of her felt that going home meant never coming back. Even after all the glaring and stabbing their pictures right between his eyes, there had been something comforting in feeling like one day she’d wake up from this delusion, from being this angry mess and she’d walk right back in and they’d throw their arms around her like no time had passed and Lockwood would finally look at her like she was something more than vapour.

Her days were running thin, so on one of her last nights she decided to go to that cafe they’d eat at when there were lulls in the case. It was the closest she could get to an indirect goodbye. She was sitting at the back of the cafe like they always did, in a corner just dim enough for her to hide in the shadows she was going to melt back into soon. She wasn’t a sentimental person but she did keep a diary even though the others teased her endlessly about it, but she didn’t care. As she flipped through the older pages, stiff with hope and love, it felt like no time had passed at all - Lockwood was just as alive and breathing in her mind as he had been before she left.

It was deathly quiet in the little shop, with it being past curfew, but she couldn’t stay forever. Her mind was scattered and it was difficult to write, like a weakened muscle long forgotten. So she wrote about the common denominator of all her thoughts- Lockwood. How she missed him, how she wished he was here, how she felt her heart would stop if she ever heard his voice again. Somehow, it was as if her words slipped off the pages into reality, because she heard a rustle of fabric and there was Lockwood, standing in front of her.

She must have gaped at him for a minute, because one minute he was standing in front of her and the next, sitting opposite her, his expression as inscrutable as the day she left. They exchanged pleasantries but they were both a bit like goldfish, in that neither of them knew exactly what to say.

“I check the papers…sometimes. You guys look- you look good. Lots of cases.”

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

Silence.

“You know, I wondered sometimes - just a thought, and I’d forget it nearly as soon as it came - whether you’d seen the photos. Wasn’t sure…”

More silence.

“Come here often?”

“No, no, I was just in the area and I thought I’d pop in.”

“Pop in here, but not home?”

Something ugly reared up inside of her to hear him say home so casually like that, when she obviously meant nothing to him. She wanted to hurt him, stab his voodoo doll needle by needle, screaming at the top of her lungs.

“I’m leaving. London, that is.”

Lockwood’s barely cynical expression softened. She didn’t know what made her say that - she didn’t need to, god, he probably didn’t even care. But she couldn’t stop the past few weeks from spilling out.

“There’s nothing left for me here anyways. It’s cold, the only apartment I can barely afford is pathetic, I’ve become so miserable I could look at a daisy and hate it for being so happy, it takes so much of me to just walk out the door and breathe and live like normal people. Just tell me how to forget about you and your stupid love and move on-”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lockwood told the tablecloth in a brisk tone. “You have so much here, you have us- ”

“Then why won’t you even look at me?” She was embarrassingly close to tears, but it wasn’t like she was ever going to see him after tonight, so what did anything matter?

Lockwood’s lips were pressed together and he finally raised his gaze, though not without some effort. It was almost embarrassing to have him watch her sniffle like this but she drank his eyes in desperately, like a man starved, and she didn’t even care.

“You left.”

She could barely croak out a whisper. “And you were supposed to care.”

Lockwood had this look of irrepressible thoughts and words bubbling under his surface, but he remained quiet.

“Give me…one good reason. I’d stay.”

“We miss you.”

“Not good enough.”

“Fine. I miss you.”

She slammed her hands on the table. “As if! You never wrote, you never visited, and don’t insult my intelligence by pretending you couldn’t have-“

“Yes, I could have visited you and yes, I didn’t, but not because I didn’t want to!” Lockwood’s face was white with suppressed anger. “Believe me, I’ve dreamt of it, of dragging you out of whatever hellhole you’d scurried off and bringing you home, but what was I supposed to say? ‘Oh, Y/N, please please please come back, I feel so lost without you and my life has no meaning anymore that every job is just a game of how fast I can join my dear old family! And that’s a good enough reason for you to continue risking your neck, believing in my fool’s gold when no sane person will, so come along while I worry myself half to death over situations I put you into.’ ”

And as she looked at Lockwood, she had that horrifying realisation that the only reason she had been stuck in that cycle of hatred and feeling like death was because she had been so angry with herself. The same anger brewing that had her frothing at the mouth had been swelling up in Lockwood too.

He scratched his arm absent-mindedly, slightly breathless, and she knew how he felt. She felt like she was breaking out in hives, it was all too much, too much to bear.

“I risk my neck…for you. Because I want to. And nothing, no ghost, type one, two or three could scare me off. I’d go for any and every crazy plan like I had a death wish as long as you were on board. In some ways,” she puzzled, staring into her coffee, “I think that’s my greatest crime. I didn’t stop you…I never have, and I’m probably not strong enough to ever do it.”

“You’d stop me.” He was looking at her in a strange way now. “I know you’d find the strength somewhere inside of you to stop me from jumping into fires. At least, you’ve been successful so far.”

It was a stupid half-joke, but they laughed anyways, and suddenly their fight was stupid too. There was something about the crow’s feet peeking at the edge of Lockwood’s eyes that made him irresistibly young, undoing the damage of years of dealing with the Problem for just a split second. It made him look boyish and full of life, thrumming with energy. Suddenly, she realised Lockwood was studying her curiously, though no where as intensely as she was looking at him, and she smiled awkwardly.

“I’ve always wondered where you run off to when you space out like that. It’s like your little…” Lockwood paused, tapping his temple, “your little…golden…birdcage of thoughts, just flirting about. After the poltergeist,” the shadows on his face deepened ever so slightly, “it was like I could…feel you, retreating back to it whenever you guessed none of us was paying too much attention. Like something…fascinated you, drew you in…away from us. So I was mad because I had to be. I needed to snap you out of it, smash that cage you were so wrapped up in. And then the next morning…your bed was empty.”

She spoke carefully. “I can’t quite explain it, but believe me; you’d be better off without me.” It was her Achilles heel, her Midas touch, that all she had to do was touch Lockwood and he’d be frozen in gold to be forever admired and loved in her head, but little more than dead to anyone else. Her touch brought ruin, but it seemed like a small price for him to pay after how he ruined her.

He seemed frustrated, but she felt oddly at peace. It was as though a vacancy had formed in her heart where her love for him would echo for days and nights until her last breath, but there simply wasn’t room for it in the real world. How cruel it was, to be able to reach out and feel everything she wanted under her fingertips, and having to pull away.

“I think I’m…falling back in love with you.”

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