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At first Crystal thinks she's walked in on something really private.
And maybe she has, but the boys don't react that way. Edwin's talking when she arrives— or reading, she realizes, seeing the book in his hand.
"She found herself saying, without greeting, or waiting to hear his business..."
He looks up as the door swings more fully open. It's the sight and not the sound that alerts him. Edwin hates creaking noises so profoundly that they all know without asking that it must be something to do with Hell. So the Dead Boy Detective Agency office door is perfectly hung and well-oiled and always, always utterly silent.
"Well? Wha'd she say?" Charles asks after a pause. He's stretched out on the sofa with his eyes shut, in some kind of beige sweater or coat or something. He's half-draped over Edwin, legs in his lap, Edwin's free hand resting on his knee; Charles looks as blissed out as a dog allowed up onto his human's bed.
Honestly? It's cute.
"Crystal is here. You're awfully early," says Edwin, half-closing the book with a finger to hold his place. "Is something wrong?"
"No, I just have some boring shit to get done and figured I could come do some body doubling to get motivated."
"Hiya, Crystal," Charles waves without otherwise moving.
"You are of course welcome to peruse our library of spellbooks if you've decided to attempt to learn magic," says Edwin, "but I hope you don't intend to literally double yourself, we hardly have room enough for one of you."
"There's no way you have a spell that can do that," she volleys back, "or you'd have filled the building with an army of Edwins, all trying to order each other around."
He tilts his head, considering. "That would be tremendously useful."
"Oi, stop giving him ideas," Charles cranes his neck to squint at her in mock annoyance.
"So. This whole sofa situation. This is new?" Crystal ventures.
"This is old," Edwin says.
"The oldest," Charles adds contentedly. "Oh! Except this, this is new. Client from the haunted garden case dropped by and paid with a ghost blanket! I'm giving it a go."
"Ghost blanket?" she drifts closer. It's not a sweater after all. Charles is under a knitty sort of afghan thing, the tawny off-white of undyed natural fibers.
"Made from the fleece of a barometz, also known as a vegetable lamb," says Edwin. "The creatures and their wool have supernatural qualities, so the blanket is closer to being substantial to us than most things from the living world."
"It's nice. Soft," says Charles. "Or, well, I think it is. I can't exactly feel it... it's more like touching it makes me remember what it was like to feel a homemade blanket. All soft and nubbly."
"You feel it here?" Crystal taps her head ironically, and then feels a little mean about it. She probably shouldn't make that a New Crystal move, jokingly reminding him of sweet stuff he said during the short period when they were making out.
Charles just hums and says, "Maybe, yeah." Edwin retucks the blanket around him. It's the size of a throw, so it only covers from his chin to his knees, but he looks nicely cuddled up in it.
The whole scene looks way cozy. Like, boyfriend levels of cozy. To the point she wonders if they had some kind of revelation overnight and got together. It wouldn't be all that surprising, even after Charles spent weeks using all his adorably lousy pick-up lines on Crystal. She called them a dead married couple on acid for a reason.
Except if that had happened, no way would Edwin be this collected; he'd be performing some other high-key emotion to make sure nobody could tell he was happy.
God, Crystal can't even imagine. Edwin's normal range of feelings he'll actually display only has about three settings: Smug, Irritable, and Grudgingly Tolerating Your Foolishness. He'd have to invent whole new levels of Smarmy King Of The Office to cover for falling in love.
It took Crystal about a day of hanging out with these two to realize Edwin kept acting bossy and exasperated with Charles to maintain a very thin veil over what would otherwise be just, like, outright simping. Any time he eased up on fussing at Charles, he welled over with compliments instead, all 'Well spotted, Charles' this and 'You're a genius, Charles' that.
At first Crystal thought it was manipulative, the way Edwin kept veering between scolding and doling out praise. But Edwin really seemed to have no clue what he was doing or how effectively it kept Charles hooked. Otherwise Edwin wouldn't have been so wildly jealous of Crystal; he would've just drip-fed Charles more positive reinforcement to glue him to his side again.
Meanwhile, Charles never bothers with a thin veil and just goes all in on outright simping for Edwin. That 'harsh taskmaster gives frequent pats on the head' routine must really work on him.
...Okay, that was mean. That was the Old Crystal kind of mean. Since she got her memories back, she's had to look out for that.
Anyway, Crystal has noticed that things have changed some, since Port Townsend. Edwin carps at Charles less, and Charles mostly takes Edwin's compliments in stride instead of treating each one like a long-craved puppy treat.
"If Crystal's doing admin, can we go back to the mystery?" Charles asks. "We left off with Father Brown having suspicions and I don't even know yet what he's suspicious about."
Edwin gives the toe of his shoe a little squeeze. "We'll continue," he tells Crystal, "if it won't disturb you." The tone sounds much more like Charles wants this, so you had damn well better agree it won't disturb you.
"No, of course it's fine," says Crystal. "I just have dumb paperwork to do for school stuff and figured I know where there's a big desk and someone who'll judge me if I don't finish it."
Edwin gestures toward the desk like a game show host presenting a new car! "Feel free. And feel judged, if applicable." He goes back to the book.
"I'm so glad you've come. I've seen a ghost."
"There's no need to be distressed about that," said Father Brown. "It often happens. Most of the ghosts aren't ghosts, and the few that may be won't do you any harm. Was it any ghost in particular?"
"No," she admitted, "it wasn't so much the thing itself as an atmosphere of awful decay, a sort of luminous ruin. It was a face. A face at the window. But it was pale and goggling, and looked like the picture of Judas."
"Well, some people do look like that," reflected the priest, "and I dare say they look in at windows, sometimes."
It's a good thing Crystal's paperwork is just a matter of copying shit from forms onto other forms, because she ends up mostly paying attention to the reading. It's obvious why Charles enjoys this; Edwin's good at it.
Crystal doesn't think of him as having a particularly pleasant voice most of the time. Usually Edwin sounds clipped and uptight to her. But he sounds nice telling a story, and he makes it easy to follow. He doesn't do drastically different showy voices for the various characters, but he changes his tone and accent just enough to make it obvious who is who.
And now that she's seeing them from a different angle, the whole couch cuddle thing doesn't look as surprisingly intimate as it did at first glance. Charles' legs, propped on the arm of the couch, aren't actually on Edwin's lap, more sort of bridging over them. Edwin rests the book on Charles' shins, but that's not exactly snuggly.
So yeah, they haven't gotten their shit together. Maybe there isn't anything to get together. Just thirty-odd years of guys being pals.
“It all comes back to bees and wasps looking very much alike in this world, doesn't it?” concludes the story, and Edwin closes the book as if to provide extra punctuation at the end.
"They don't, though," Charles objects, after a moment's thought. "Bees have stripes. And fuzz. Never saw a fuzzy wasp."
"Some wasps have stripes," says Edwin. "Though really, Charles. It is a metaphor."
"I liked it, but I could do with less metaphors and more catching the crook."
"I think you can assume he was apprehended after the events of the story," Edwin assures him. "Father Brown did spell out precisely what he'd done. And he was not exactly a criminal mastermind."
"This is your oldest thing?" Crystal breaks in. "Reading detective stories and arguing about them? I guess I'm not surprised."
Charles levers himself up on his elbows to meet her eyes. "It's just the reading that's our oldest thing. Edwin read to me while I was dying."
She has no idea what her face does in response, but Charles snickers, and nudges Edwin's arm with the tip of his shoe. "I love the look people get when I tell them that."
"You're terrible," says Edwin, without a hint of censure.
Charles shrugs and speaks lightly, as if they didn't all see him sobbing with regret over his death just a few weeks ago. "I was already going when we met, but I didn't know it. Edwin brought me a lantern. Just then, that yellow light was the best thing I'd ever seen." Charles smiles. "We talked all night, but eventually I couldn't keep my eyes open. I thought he'd wander off."
Charles is just gazing away at Edwin, who's pretending he's too fascinated by the book in his hands to notice. "But he helped make me a pallet, and fixed the covers, and said he'd been reading these detective stories and maybe I'd like him to share the next one aloud. I fell asleep listening, and woke up dead. He couldn't believe it when I wanted him to read to me again, but c'mon, mate, how good're you at this, ey? Literally enough to take my mind off dying."
"You have an abominable sense of humor," Edwin says tenderly. "Absolutely awful."
"Top marks for this blanket, by the way," says Charles, snuggling back down into it happily. "Hope that garden mage needs our help again sometime, we can have her pay with another one."
"I don't need one of my own."
"Who says it's for you? Need another one for my knees down, don't I."
Crystal wishes she had someone to bet against, because she'd put good money on a second blanket showing up within a week.
She actually would have lost that bet, but only because what does happen ends up being a little more complicated: the blanket vanishes, Niko apologizing sweetly for supposedly spilling tea on it and sending it to be cleaned. It's an obvious lie, and Crystal tries not to be too annoyed that she wasn't enlisted to help with the Great Barometz Blanket Caper of '24.
Anyway, it returns a little more than a week later, a yard longer, and now dyed to match the red plaid lining of Charles' jacket. Charles is ecstatic and insists on using it as a group lap blanket at every subsequent movie night.
There they learn that actually, it's completely spill-proof, to the point that any liquid that touches it just disappears. After that, Charles starts hiding it in his backpack so they don't all use it as the office dishtowel.
"Tea towel," the boys correct pedantically in unison. She can't believe she ever thought either of these assholes were cute.