December 12, 2012.

When Stephanie Edgley was five, almost six, she visited a nursing home with her school.

It wasn't a particularly cheerful experience, as far as she was concerned. Everything smelled odd, smelled like exhaustion and hurt and giving up, and even the influx of children didn't seem to give it much life. Dutifully, though, Stephanie talked to the men and women who lived there, pasted a smile onto her face and chatted, moved amongst them like a wandering comet.

There was one particular woman there, and Stephanie gravitated towards her. She was folding squares of paper into crane after crane, tiny and elegant and scattered in their abundance, over the fabric of her bedspread and the painted wood of the bedside table.

"Why are you folding so many?" Stephanie asked, after a few long moments of contemplation, her eyes widened at the clashes of color and pattern the woman had surrounded herself with. "Is it so they won't be lonely?"

The old woman smiled, though it didn't quite reach her eyes. "There's a legend, a Japanese legend, that says that if you fold a thousand paper cranes, your greatest wish will be granted," she explained, her voice even, practiced.

"Oh?" Stephanie tilted her head, brow furrowing with thought. "What's your wish? D'you want to be young again or something?"

There was mirth in the woman's eyes, then, and her lips twisted into a grin as she shook her head. "No, child," she said steadily. "I want my husband to be returned to me."

Stephanie nodded thoughtfully. "But would it really be good to pull him down from heaven?"

"He's not in heaven," the woman had said then, softly. "He's with the Gods without faces."

Stephanie didn't register her last words.

Valkyrie has an odd kind of memory. She stores the exact words, the shapes, but never the meanings, finds them only after running over them countless times.

She spent a lot of time going through her memories when Skulduggery was gone, when she had searched until she could search no more and then could not rest because her mind had been set ablaze. Mostly she thought about the time she'd spent with Skulduggery, but not always.

So one day she went back to that nursing home, in the moving-picture portion of her mind, and she made the connection, figured it out at last.

There were others, she thought in a blinding, aching moment. There were others.

And in an instant, without regard for the tiredness veined through her limbs, she was up, running on the adrenaline rush of revelation. She was at home, and so she tore through her cupboard for the small sheaf of folding papers she had been given by Gordon after one of his trips to Japan.

Staring at the instructions printed bright and shining on the plastic on the back, she started to fold a paper crane.

The first thing Skulduggery registers when he exits the portal is Valkyrie, pressing a small paper crane into his hand.

A/N: This was written before I had access to Dark Days. Consider it an AU.

Heartaches and syrup nails and cold, cold stone~
Sweethearted.