Chapter 1: i wake up and it breaks my heart
Summary:
In which Nick and Charlie meet, but not for the first time.
Notes:
cw/tw: general angst; references to charlie's canon mental health struggles; references to a previous abusive relationship
thank you to the lovely billie for the beta on this chapter
Chapter Text
I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds &
the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I
ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in
Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents
beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old
women hawking roses, & children all of them,
break my heart [...]
Cameron Awkward-Rich, Meditations in an Emergency
When Nick wakes, that feeling is there at the back of his mind again, failing to take shape. It’s fragmented; the edges of it scratch and make it impossible to ignore.
I’ve lost something.
There’s somewhere I need to be.
He lies there trying to chase it, but it slips through his hands like smoke.
Nick fists his hands into his sheets as frustration, and something else that feels oddly like grief, clouds his mind further. He turns it over again — that feeling. It’s in his gut and in his head; the sickness of loss has plagued him for weeks now.
This morning, though, something is different. This morning, the sharp edge of it catches; he feels a pull of knowledge, or instinct, from somewhere deep within him.
There’s somewhere I need to be.
Maybe it’s just blind hope, but he lets it pull him forward all the same.
He throws back the covers and follows it up out of bed, through his flat and out into the dawning light of day. He’s not quite sure where he’s actually going, or why he’s up at this hour, desperately chasing a dream through the slowly-waking streets of London.
All he does know is, for the first time in a long time, he feels like he’s running towards something.
⋆⁺₊⋆
The thing is, Nick has spent his whole life waiting. From the moment he was old enough to recognise the feeling, really, he’s been grasping for something just out of reach.
As a child, he would wait by the phone for his father’s call. With a small, gentle hand set on Nellie’s head, he would quietly murmur phrases to her in stuttering French, repeating them over and over, until the roll of the language felt familiar on his tongue. That way, he reasoned, when the phone rang, he would get them just right.
Eventually, his mum would come and gently guide him to bed, away from the accusatory stare of the unrung phone — and of his brother, who skulked in the hallway and pretended he wasn’t waiting too.
In secondary school, he waited to be found out. Found out by his friends, for the strange, heavy dread he would feel in their company; by his teachers, for the white static that would fill his head whenever they talked about the future, or making something of your life; and by his mother, for failing to be the boy she thought she raised — someone brave, and bold, and capable of more.
Rugby was better: on the pitch, any misstep just meant a bloody nose, or a dropped try, rather than the cloying shame that seeped through him when he sat by the school gates with his friends, looking around and wondering why everyone else seemed to know exactly who they were.
Towards the end of school, he drew away from his friends; the avoidance didn’t quell the dread, or quieten it, but Nick found a strange relief in answering only to himself.
Leeds brought him Tara, and Darcy, and shed light on why he tried a little too hard to make some boys laugh. Nick got some of the things he had been waiting for: friends who knew him, the strength to cut his father off, and a slow-growing sense of the edges of himself.
Now, a little more at peace with the rest of it, he’s not so afraid of being found out. Now, he’s waiting to be recognised — desperate for someone to look at him and say, I see you. Rest easy. I’ll help you sleep through the night.
He thinks about it as impulse guides him through London — the waiting, and the wanting. It’s not something he tends to ruminate on, usually. He has his job, his friends, and his quiet, good enough life; it does him no good to wallow in the shame of need.
He’s still thinking about it when he finds himself on a quiet, suburban side-street on the outskirts of London. Most of the houses are obscured by well-kept hedges, but the sleek glide of a passing car and the absence of the usual morning chorus of shopkeepers, buses and early-morning workers spilling out of the tube screams wealth.
The day has taken shape around him during his unlikely pilgrimage across London. As he pushes through one of the gates and moves up a well-maintained garden path, he is momentarily dazzled by the clear-white light of morning. When his vision clears, he is met with a front door; the instinct that has been guiding him since the moment he awoke slams up against it.
There is a discrete video doorbell set off to one side. Nick doesn’t ring it — something inside him is screaming not to, and he’s a little worried that its shrill toll will cut its way through whatever spell he finds himself under.
He raises his hand.
He knocks.
The wait that follows is almost enough to make him lose his nerve entirely. He hears no movement from inside and the silence of the street is oppressive, the absence of the steady thrum of life disquieting. Just as Nick is shifting his weight to leave, the stupidity of his actions dawning on him, the door opens.
A man stares out at him from the doorway; he’s shorter than Nick, with a shock of curly black hair, and eyes that shift colour even as he looks at them. They’re blue: the kind of blue that puts Nick in mind of storm clouds in moonlight, or the light-noise of deep space. There’s definitely something celestial about them, anyway, because Nick feels an odd pull of gravity in his gut as they meet eyes.
He’s beautiful, but even from this first glance, Nick can tell — he’s not been sleeping well.
They look at each other for a moment, something strange passing over the man’s face as they do: shock, joy, then a slow, rolling confusion when Nick can only stare back at him, unspeaking. Nick can’t shake the feeling that he’s letting him down, somehow.
The man takes a breath and opens his mouth to speak, but Nick gets there first. He’s not sure what to say, really — he doesn’t even understand why he’s there — but the whole thing is too strange to wait any longer.
“Um, hi, I’m Nick. I- I’m sorry for showing up like this. This is going to sound like the strangest thing, but… I woke up this morning, and you were in my head.”
⋆⁺₊⋆
Nick sits uncomfortably at the breakfast bar as his host flits around the kitchen making a cup of tea. After their moment at the door, the man had ripped those star-eyes from Nick’s, stepped to the side and said you’d better come in in a dead, flat voice.
Nick can see the man’s hands shake slightly as he pulls the teabags down from the cupboard. The set of ceramic on marble and the boiling of the kettle echo around the room as the silence between them stretches as far as the cosmos.
Suddenly, the man turns round and sets the tea down in front of Nick, before immediately taking two steps back. Nick murmurs a thank you and takes a sip – black tea, with honey, and lemon. He looks up in surprise. “I- you know how I take my tea?”
The man just looks at him for a moment. “Lucky guess,” he says eventually, before turning around to pick up his own cup, sighing and leaning against the counter.
Nick clears his throat. “What’s your name?”
The man pauses again before he answers. “It’s Charlie,” he says, voice quiet, as his face twists with something unrecognisable.
Nick still doesn’t know why he’s here, or why Charlie even let him in, or why they are dancing around each other like this, but he knows he would do almost anything to wipe that look from Charlie’s face.
And- Charlie. It feels right, somehow.
Nick leans forward, tea forgotten, and tries his best to be brave. “Did I know that, once?” He asks, the words landing heavily between them.
Charlie looks up and meets his eyes for the first time since he opened the door. He smiles at him briefly, tight and unyielding. “You did.”
Nick puts his head in his hands. “Fuck, I- I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Nick, ” Charlie says his name like reflex, like it’s fallen from his lips a million times before, “it’s not- God, I don’t know how to explain this to you.” He’s taken a step forward now, laying a hand on the counter across from Nick. Nick looks up. They look at each other for a moment and Nick briefly sees an aurora of feeling flash across those eyes.
Then, a car backfires outside, and Charlie flinches back.
“Charlie?” Nick asks when he doesn’t say anything for a few moments, hand withdrawn to his side again and eyes flickering wildly between Nick, the floor, and the door. Somehow, even laced with concern, the name curls familiar over Nick’s tongue. “Are you alright?”
Charlie shakes his head, and takes a sharp breath. “I need to get out of here.” He puts his mug down on the counter and the force of it rings through the room. “You’re- I- I can’t stay here. In this house.”
“Why?”
“I’m not-” Charlie shakes his head, “I just can’t.” He pauses and scrubs a hand across his face, staring at a fixed point on the ground. “There’s nothing keeping me here, now.”
“Where will you go?” Nick asks, feeling a little desperate, like something precious is slipping from his hands. He wants Charlie to look at him again.
“I’ll figure it out,” Charlie says, waving a hand in the air. He smiles at Nick tightly. “Don’t worry about me.”
Nick sees straight through the feigned nonchalance. The words trip from his mouth before he even realises he’s had the thought. “Come stay with me?” He pleads; something inside him rips at the prospect of never seeing Charlie again.
Charlie immediately shakes his head. “I can’t ask that of you.”
“Please- I understand if you’re not comfortable with it, of course,” Nick hastens to explain, “but I have a spare room and I just… I need to make sense of all this. I have no idea why- what brought me here. I just want to understand. And-” And I want to know you’re safe.
Charlie pauses, then sighs when Nick doesn’t continue. “Nick, you don’t know me,” he says gently, “I’m a stranger.”
“But you know me,” Nick says, and as he’s saying it he knows he’s right. Charlie just looks at him, so Nick presses on. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
After a moment, Charlie nods minutely.
“Then, please,” Nick begs, “let me help.”
. • ° ★
. • . * ☾
Charlie shouldn’t be doing this.
He’s just — tired. So, so tired. Losing Nick twice over has extracted every last echo of resolve that has kept him upright for the past few months — years, really — of his life. When Nick looks at him across his big, soulless kitchen and asks for his name, he feels the fight leave him entirely.
He’s left with just enough instinct to know that there is nothing left for him here. This house, Ben’s house, is a catacomb, and the bones of the bright and brave Charlie Spring who first entered it line the walls.
The thought of calling Tao, or Tori, or Isaac, or even his parents, after he had stood by and watched them be gradually winnowed from his life is nauseating. And, try as he might, the warm lure of Nick’s company is too much for his fragile, whispering heart to resist. Charlie’s body, the very atoms of him, still register Nick as a safe harbour.
So, he finds his small bag — the one that had been packed and waiting for a moment like this, but, God, not like this — and follows Nick across London to his flat, silent for the entire journey. He can feel Nick sneaking small glances at him as they go, as he ushers Charlie ahead of him onto the bus, and insists he take the last available seat in their carriage on the tube.
Charlie knows he’ll have to give him an explanation eventually.
You see I loved you, and you loved me, and I never let you say it but I saw it when you looked at me, and it was so unlikely the first time that I know now that this really is the end, because it’s impossible that I would be so lucky as for you to love me twice.
That probably won’t do; the concept of Nick feeling beholden to him in any way is almost enough to make him turn heel and run. As they walk up to Nick’s block of flats, Charlie vaguely wonders what it would be like to live a life unstained by guilt.
He knows better than to read too much into the offer of sanctuary — this was Nick after all; warm, generous, and kind to strangers. Because that’s what Charlie is now, to Nick: a stranger. He had known it from the moment he opened the door and saw him standing there, a startling absence of recognition in his eyes, and realised that all his dreams had come true in the very worst way possible.
Nick leads him into his flat, moving around him with a tender nervousness as he finds him bedding and towels. Charlie tries his best to tamp down the desire to scream and wring his hands and fight against the unfairness of it all. It’s worse than if he’d never found Nick at all, he thinks: at least, if he hadn’t, he could imagine Nick was out there somewhere loving him still.
He’ll leave in the morning, he resolves, and set off rebuilding his life around another absence.
Ultimately, exhaustion wins out; he curls up in Nick’s guest bed and sleeps for eighteen hours. If he dreams, he doesn’t remember it.
Chapter 2: what i was, how i lived
Summary:
Nick and Charlie have a necessary conversation.
Notes:
sorry, we still remain pretty firmly in angst territory for this chapter. originally, we were going to have things looking up by the end but it started to get longgggg so I have cut it at an earlier point. (also, I am moving to a different continent next week lmao, so wanted to get a chapter out before that chaos commenced.) I am keen to get the tone of this right so that when we do get our happy ending, it feels real, and earned. which means - they gotta talk! and process! reality begs to be reckoned with and all that.
thank you to the wonderful, incomparable theo for the beta.
tw's: we explore charlie's past in more detail here, inclusive of references to ocd, eating disorders and also past relationship abuse by ben (coercive control). in charlie's pov, he is still somewhat in a place of blaming himself for this. if this is triggering for you, or if you want to wait until things get a bit happier in the next chapter, I shan't be offended if you close this now! <3
let me know if you think I've missed something!
Chapter Text
Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.
I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring--
afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy
in the raw wind of the new world.
Louise Glück, Snowdrops
Charlie has always loved the night sky. Back at- well, not home — Charlie’s not entirely sure where that is for him, now — but, back at the house, there was a skylight above the bed. He would often lie awake at night, looking up through that little patch of glass.
You can’t really see the stars in London; it never even gets properly dark, the sky always disturbed by the light of the still-living city. Even in Rochester, on clear nights, the starlight that eked through was a weak imitation of the real thing. Still, he would find comfort in knowing that they were out there somewhere, shining beyond the haze.
His dad had taken him and Tori camping once, a long time ago, to a beach in some remote corner of Kent. His mum wasn’t there — pregnant with Olly, maybe, or just not willing to suffer a chilly night huddled under canvas. Even back then, both he and Tori had felt a little looser, more carefree, in her absence. They banded together, laughing as they made games of jumping over waves and digging holes in the sand, the belief they might actually reach China, or Australia, beating strongly in their chests as their dad attempted to cook sausages over a poorly made fire.
Charlie went to bed that evening bone-tired and delighted, in that hazy, warm way that spoke to a day well spent. Perhaps fuelled by their unusual turn in circumstances, Tori had shaken him awake in the middle of the night and whispered to him to come outside with her. Small hands clasped, they had stumbled over their sleeping bags, desperately trying to be quiet as their dad snored gently in the other section of the tent. Tori pulled one of the blankets out with them, wrapping it around both their shoulders as she whispered to Charlie to look up.
The stars that night split the sky wide open, pouring out across the stratosphere in thick ribbons. Charlie had never seen anything quite like it before; even as a child, he knew it must be an unusual and precious thing to witness. Suddenly wide awake, burdened with the curiosity of youth, he had turned to Tori — who was looking up, too, with something close to contentment on her face — and poured forth with questions:
How many are there and where are they and how do they work and why do they come out here but hide from us at home and… oh , oh no, how do we know they won’t fall?
Tori laid a hand on his and tried her best to answer, explaining that they were always there, even at home, no matter if you could see them or not. That they were very far away and, although she wasn’t sure how, she knew for a fact that they wouldn’t fall. Charlie had believed her implicitly; he wasn’t sure of very much, but what he did know was that if anyone could keep the sky from falling, it was his older sister.
God, he misses Tori. He wonders what she would say if she could see him now. Nothing good, if Ben was to be believed.
For better or worse, it had all started in Charlie a childhood fascination with the stars, and space. It spoke to his developing internal sense of order; stars were chaotic and disparate when you first looked — splashed up and through the dark of night seemingly at random — but after a little focus and understanding the chaos took shape, ordered into the constellations that Charlie mapped out on the walls of his childhood bedroom.
The interest had fizzled out somewhat in his teenage years, around the same time he began to wake up gasping and chest-crushed at the thought of having to go to school. Around the same time that anything which might make him think about the world and his place in it became a terrifying thought rather than a soothing one.
His old books are still on the shelves of his room in Rochester. He still remembers, for example, that the starlight that shines on earth is from the past; Proxima Centuri is the closest star to earth, notwithstanding the sun itself, and even then, its light takes four years to pierce the night sky. Four years is a long time. Four years ago, Charlie didn’t yet know Ben. He tries not to think too much about who he was when that light was first emitted, and about all he has lost in the time it took to reach him.
⋆⁺₊⋆
When Charlie finally wakes up, sometime in the middle of the night, it takes a second for him to remember where he is. The orange glow of the street lamps finds its way through the blinds to slice across the unfamiliar room and, in the distance, he can hear sirens. As his brain registers the unfamiliar light and noise, the events of the previous day crash down on him: Nick, at the door, finding him like he always said he would. Nick, looking across the kitchen and asking him his name. Nick, who doesn't remember Charlie, and is probably better off for it.
Still — he had made Nick happy, he thinks. Hadn’t they made each other happy? He shuts his eyes again; without the steadying weight of Nick’s affection, it’s hard to claw back that feeling.
He tosses and turns for a while before accepting that sleep is beyond him. Getting out of bed, he takes a moment to look around the room; he had crashed so quickly after he had arrived that he barely had a chance to register his surroundings.
Nick’s guest room is small, most of the space taken up by the double bed and a desk shoved into the corner. There are photos on it: Nick with an older women that Charlie thinks must be his mother — they have the same kind, brown eyes — and another of Nick in graduation robes with his arms around two people — a girl with dark braids and a brilliant smile, and a blonde who seems to be wearing a tie dye jumpsuit under their own robes. In the second photo, the three of them have their heads thrown back in laughter, the comfort and conviviality between them evident. Charlie touches a finger to the glass and smiles. It’s heartening, seeing that Nick has people. That he’s loved. He wants to know about them, about Nick’s mother, about all the details of his life, big or small.
He doesn’t think about the fact that, in another life, his picture might be here too.
When he moves through to the kitchen, he’s surprised to find Nick already sitting at the table. He’s angled away from the door, his head bowed, so he doesn’t notice Charlie at first. Charlie takes the opportunity to really look at him since he first opened the door to him– this morning? Or yesterday, maybe; he has no idea how long he’s been asleep. However long it was, it wasn’t enough. He’s not sure he’ll ever feel rested again.
Still, he looks. The part of Nick’s hair, the familiar slope of his shoulder, the steady tide of his breathing — it all sends a cruel stab of recognition through Charlie’s gut.
This time last night, you nearly told me you loved me.
Eventually, Nick looks up and notices him. “Oh- hi,” he whispers, voice rough with sleep.
“Hi,” Charlie replies.
“You’re awake,” Nick smiles, a soft little half smile, and Charlie looks at the way one side of his mouth tilts slightly downward with it.
“Yeah,” Charlie says, “sorry, I– I must have been exhausted.”
“No, yeah, of course. I wasn’t– you seemed like you needed the rest.”
“I did,” Charlie acquiesces. “Sorry,” he says again for good measure.
Strangely, Charlie feels a little more settled than before. This is familiar territory for him: the two of them at witching hour. After all, it’s easier to be someone braver, and bolder, in the dead of night.
“I–” Nick hesitates. “Do you want a cup of tea?”
Charlie can’t help but let out a small laugh.
Nick looks at him and tilts his head, the corner of his mouth pulling up. “What?”
Charlie shakes his head. “Nothing. Just… that always was your solution to everything.”
Something flickers across Nick’s eyes. Charlie tenses as he remembers again that the shared history he is alluding to, the shared history that is lost to Nick. Nick doesn’t chase the comment, though. Even now, he’s being kind. Charlie loves him — he can’t help it.
After a moment of charged silence, Nick shrugs. “It usually does help.”
Charlie is grateful for the reprieve — he still has no idea how to have the conversation they need to have. He nods. “Tea sounds perfect.”
Nick leaps up immediately and sets to making the tea, clearly grateful to have something to do. Charlie sits at the table and watches him at it, helplessly endeared to see that he has loose leaf tea in a ceramic jar with cartoon leaves painted on the side. Nick carefully spoons it into a teapot as the kettle roars in the quiet of the kitchen. In the low light, the freckles on his hands look like constellations; Charlie knows them better than he ever knew the night sky.
“You’re not a Yorkshire Tea man, then?” Charlie asks, nodding his head towards the teapot, a rush of affection has pushing out the words before he can stop himself. Watching Nick move around his own kitchen feels like a gift. Still, he knows that he more he learns about him, the harder it will be to leave
Nick smiles, colouring slightly, as he pours in the boiling water and carries the teapot to the table, setting it down alongside two mugs. “I know it’s maybe a bit pretentious, but I quite like the ritual of it, I suppose.”
Charlie ducks his head — he knows all about rituals. “Sorry, I didn’t mean– I think it’s nice. You know, to want to do things properly.”
“You say sorry a lot,” Nick observes, but the words don’t cut through Charlie like they might from someone else. There’s no chastisement in Nick’s tone, just — curiosity.
“Yeah, s– I mean, force of habit.”
“Why?” Nick asks, and the question — even when asked with such gentleness — takes Charlie by surprise. So much so that he looks up in shock; he hadn’t really realised he’d been avoiding Nick’s gaze until now. Nick’s expression is open, his deep brown eyes imploring, like the answer really matters to him. Charlie’s not sure he’s ever been looked at like that, before Nick. Maybe occasionally by Tori, but it’s been so, so long. He suddenly wonders if Nick may be as hungry for the details of Charlie’s life as Charlie is for his; he’s not the only one who’s had his world upended, after all.
“Sorry,” Nick says suddenly, misreading his silence, and whatever expression has crossed Charlie’s face. “God– that’s so invasive. You don’t have to answer-”
“No,” Charlie interrupts, “no, it’s OK. You’re allowed to ask.”
“And you’re allowed not to answer, if you don’t want to,” Nick says softly.
Charlie smiles at him across the table. “I know.” Nick has never once made him feel like he owes him anything; Charlie is desperate to return the favour. “I want to.”
The worried expression on Nick’s face settles. They look at each other for a few moments as Charlie finds his words. Nick doesn’t rush him, just reaches out to pour out their tea, seeming to sense that a moment or two of distraction will be helpful; god, Charlie loves him.
“I um… I’ve not had a very easy few years,” Charlie starts, as he settles his hands around the mug. It’s just a touch too hot, but he tries to let the burning of his palms ground him. “I was in a relationship where there was a lot of… blame. Mostly directed at me.” He clears his throat. “I’ve always been scared of getting things wrong. Even before… Even when I was younger, I’ve always felt like the bad things that happened to me, to other people, might be my fault. Like, if I wasn’t good enough, or vigilant enough. He, um, Ben, he capitalised on that.”
Something flickers across Nick’s expression. Charlie takes a breath and rushes on before he can respond. If he doesn’t get this out now, he’s not sure he ever will. “So, yeah. Then we moved in together, and he really cracked down. He didn’t like my friends, or my family. I think he knew that they thought he was a bad seed. So, he… well, he… I wasn’t really allowed? To see them? I know that sounds stupid, like, I’m a grown man. But he convinced me… that I would be better off without them. That they would be better off without me. And then everything I did–It just felt like an apology, for even existing at all.”
He stares down into his mug. He can’t bear to see the inevitable look of pity on Nick’s face — or worse, the realisation that Charlie isn’t worth his time.
“ Charlie, ” Nick breathes. Charlie glances up — Nick looks despondent.
“He never, like, hit me,” Charlie is quick to clarify.
“That doesn’t mean you weren’t–”
“I know, I know,” Charlie interrupts him. They’ve had this argument before, even though Nick doesn’t remember. And logically Charlie does know that it was… abuse. The venom Ben would spit and the way he twisted Charlie’s world view until he really did think his friends and family were better off without him; that he wasn’t strong enough or good enough to even hold down a job. That it was much more appropriate, really, for Ben to make all the decisions: where they lived, what he wore, when they had sex, and what they ate. Still, he had let it happen. He was educated, and therapised, and all the things that meant he should have known better, and still he had let it happen. By the time he realised what was transpiring, the shame of that kept him trapped in that big house, with the bones of who he once was.
Then — Nick. A sudden and explosive arrival in his life. Like a comet; bright, burning and undeniable. Charlie had been getting there, drawing away from Ben and slowly planning how he might extract himself, but Nick’s light had helped illuminate some of the darker corners of his guilt. He shuts his eyes and tries desperately to remember that feeling; when he was with Nick, before, at times he really did believe that he might get back to the man he knew he could be. Now, though, he can't help feeling that getting Nick back, like this, might be a test — punishment for something awful he has done, or is yet to do.
He’s desperate that Nick, at least, makes it out unscathed.
The silence stretches out. Charlie turns the handle of his mug until it’s at a perfect right angle to the lip of the table, then, realising himself, clasps his hands together and digs a nail into the meaty part of his palm just below his thumb. The weight of his admission has sent blood roaring through his ears; the soft belly of him is splayed out for both of them to see.
Through the roar, he hears Nick say his name again and he chances another look up. Still, the expression on his face isn’t one of pity. Sorrow, yes, and concern, but not pity. Nick tentatively reaches across the table and hovers his hand above Charlie’s, looking to him for permission; Charlie knows him well enough to know he would never take what isn’t freely given. He nods, and Nick sets a hand down on his, squeezing gently. Charlie feels electricity spark up his arm.
He resists the urge to close his eyes again; it’s the first time they’ve touched since this side of their new reality. He’s hungry for the touch; hungry, hungry, hungry — like he has been his whole life.
“I’m sorry,” Nick murmurs, “I didn’t mean to upset you, or, like, invalidate what you were saying. You’re allowed to feel however you feel about it.”
Charlie shakes his head. “You didn’t. It’s alright.” Nick’s hand is still on his. He squeezes it again and runs a thumb over Charlie’s knuckles like he always used to. Charlie wonders if the body remembers things the mind doesn’t; if the soul does, too.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you,” Nick continues, “you didn’t deserve any of that. No one does.”
Charlie huffs and looks down. “You don’t know me,” he reminds him, trying to keep the bitterness from his tone.
“I know enough,” Nick says, and when Charlie looks up, his face is so kind that it hurts to look at. The statement is imbued with such certainty that he doesn’t try to dissuade him; he can’t muster the energy.
His eyes roam around the room, looking for a way to change the subject. “I like your tea caddy,” he says, trying to keep the desperation from his voice.
Nick blinks at the sudden change in direction, but doesn’t counter it. “I– yeah. My friends got it for me.”
“Who?” Charlie asks.
“Tara and Darcy.”
“Are they the ones in that picture in the guest room?”
Nick smiles, “yeah. My best friends.”
“How did you meet them?”
Nick looks up at that, confused. “I– Did I not talk about them, um, before?”
Charlie shakes his head. “You… you didn’t really remember anything.”
“Oh.”
Charlie shrugs. “Yeah, that’s why you couldn’t– Why I didn’t…” He looks away. “Anyway, I would like to hear about them. If you want to tell me, that is.”
“Of course,” Nick says, smiling at him. Charlie can still see the question behind his eyes, though. It must be so confusing, Charlie making these illusions to their past, and still without an explanation. He feels guilt wrap his way around his ribcage like an old friend; he just can’t seem to stop taking.
“I met them at uni,” Nick starts. “I was… I didn’t enjoy secondary school very much, by the end of it. I never seemed to be able to find my place, or, like, my people, I suppose. So when I got to uni, I sort of expected more of the same. I joined the rugby team, because I had played at school.” Despite everything, Charlie feels the corner of his mouth quirk up at that. He had always wondered.
“They were alright, the lads, but I could never seem to… I found it, um, difficult. To talk to people. Or–” Nick makes a little frustrated noise, and pulls his hand back from Charlie’s to take a sip of his tea before he continues. Charlie’s hand twitches with the effort of not chasing the touch. “I can talk to people, like, I can hold my own at a party or whatever, but I found it hard to really… connect .” They meet eyes, and Charlie doesn’t breathe for a moment.
“Anyway,” Nick continues, looking at his hands again, which now are wound together on the table top. “We went out one night for some social, and I went outside for a breather. I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, I suppose. They were in the same bar for a Queer Soc social and Darcy bounced up to me to ask me why I didn’t have any friends. Tara told them off and made them offer me a hit of their vape to apologise and, well, yeah. The rest is history, I guess. They really– yeah, they really saved my life, to be honest.”
Charlie thinks of Tao, of Elle and Isaac. They had history once, too. “They sound great,” Charlie says. “I’m glad you have… you know, people.”
“They are,” Nick confirms. He looks up at Charlie. “They would like you.”
Charlie suppresses the urge to shake his head. The thought of him fitting anywhere in Nick’s life feels like a fantasy. Like some dream he’s bound to wake up from.
The silence stretches out as they look at each other. Charlie knows he’s avoided the topic for long enough. “So, I should… I should probably explain some things, really,” he starts.
He sees Nick’s hands twitch together where they are still clasped in front of him. “You don’t have to,” Nick says quickly. “Not right now, at least. If it’s, um, difficult.”
“No, I… I owe you an explanation. I should have said something straight away, really. It’s just hard to think of… how to say it. I know this must have been really confusing for you. Thank you– for being patient with me.”
Nick shakes his head. “You don’t have to thank me for that.”
Charlie shrugs. “I’m going to, anyway.”
Before Nick can argue, Charlie takes a breath and launches into his explanation. He tries his best to express how they’d met, and kept meeting in their own impossible way. Nick’s eyes widen as he goes through- well, not all of it, but enough. Enough for Nick to know that they did know each other, before. That they were something to each other, even if Charlie is holding back the full extent of it.
Nick doesn’t fight against the improbability of it all like Charlie thought he might. He doesn’t counter with logic, or reason: he just believes Charlie, like he’s someone to be trusted. When Charlie is finished with the whole sordid tale, ending on their last visit, the night before Nick knocked on his door, Nick just blinks for a few moments, clearly processing.
He looks at Charlie, taking a breath before he speaks. “Were we..?” Nick trails off, clearly looking for the right words. Charlie understands what he’s getting at.
He clears his throat. “Oh, um… not really.” The lie feels acidic on the way up. Even now, though, he knows Nick: knows that if he tells him the truth — the full truth — his kindness and decency would implore him to stick by Charlie’s side. Charlie doesn’t want that. Or, he wants it, desperately, but what he wants more is for Nick to be able to move through his life unburdened.
He knows now; it’s kinder to let things go. Trying to hold on always leaves a scar. For a moment, Nick’s expression flickers with- disappointment? Charlie doesn’t really trust himself, though; it’s more likely relief. Whatever it is, it’s gone from one moment to the next. Nick just nods, and takes another sip of his tea.
“Anyway,” Charlie laughs nervously. “Now you know. I– um. Thank you, for letting me stay. I’ll be out of your hair in the morning.”
Nick frowns, shaking his head before Charlie has even finished the sentence. “You don’t have to.”
“I can’t impose–”
“It’s not an imposition, honestly. And we were obviously… friends, before. I’d like to help you get back on your feet. And… surely all this has to mean something?”
Charlie’s breath shudders. “I don’t know… does it?” What does it mean, to be given something beautiful, and have it ripped away? What does that say about him? What was the cause and effect here? The terrible thing he had done that meant he was living a life meted by loss?
Nick’s hand twitches forward towards him, then, seeming to think better of it, he brings it up to the back of his own neck. “I think it does,” he says. “I think it means you should stay. You deserve to have your life back, Charlie.”
Charlie looks down at his mug, hands clasped tight around it. It’s cooled down now, the heat of it comforting rather than just the wrong side of painful. He thinks about who he was, before. He wonders if there’s even anything to go back to.
. • ° ★
. • . * ☾
People have always told Nick that he’s perceptive. Sensitive. It’s something that had even been written on his school reports from time to time. Nick is a sensitive boy. He always seems very preoccupied with how his classmates are feeling — perhaps too much, sometimes! A little more focus on his nine times table may be of benefit.
He’s not sure he really believes it — if he really was that perceptive, then surely he would understand better how to relate to the people around him. Regardless, he does know when he’s being lied to. He knows there must be more to their story than what Charlie has shared. About them. About what they were to each other. When he had touched Charlie’s hand, desperate to offer comfort, he had felt something like electricity strike him to the very marrow.
He wonders if Charlie felt it too.
Charlie must have his reasons for not telling him, whatever they are. They had been forced together, after all; maybe he’s grateful for the opportunity to let Nick down gently.
Nick can be a friend to him, though, he knows he can. Whatever draw he feels, however right it feels to be existing in the same space as him, Nick won’t push. He won’t strip Charlie of his agency. Although Charlie has been quiet, and withdrawn, since the moment they– well, since the moment Nick met him, anyway– Nick has seen the fire at the heart of him. The determination. It burns behind his eyes; white-hot and coalescing. Like starlight. Like the sun.
Light like that deserves to cut through the noise.
He finds himself oddly jealous of this other Nick, the one that knows Charlie. That knew him. He must have been better, and brighter, he thinks; someone worthy of Charlie’s attention. Someone who knew who he was, even if he couldn’t remember the details.
Nick knows he can’t compete with that. Not really. Still, as he looks across the table, he knows he’ll take whatever Charlie might be willing to give.
Chapter 3: starburned and unkissed
Summary:
Nick and Charlie begin again.
Notes:
hello! you may notice I have upped the chapter count to five chapters. it basically just works better for the pacing -- our boys get some well deserved happiness in this chapter, but there is still healing to be done and perhaps even a smidgen of plot! all that to say, due to the extra chapter, there is no poem for this one. instead, a wee musical interlude with a song that has been on the iod playlist since the very beginning.
thank you for the beta, wonderful mar<3
tw/cw: general angst, direct references to eating disorders, ocd symptoms and past abuse, including charlie’s negative self-view in relation to all this
Chapter Text
Hey you casanova
Hey you supernova
Come home
The kettle's whistling
My heart's a ghost limb reaching
Starburned and unkissed
Caroline Polachek, Starburned and Unkissed
Charlie means to leave, he really does. In the end, it’s all too easy to fall back into Nick’s orbit. He knows it's selfish; if he was a better person, a braver person, he would steal away in the dark, into the night-noise and hidden light of London, and leave him to move on with his life. He just… can't. There is some undeniable gravity keeping him in place.
The days and nights collapse into each other and, before Charlie realises, it’s been weeks. Weeks of this: him and Nick falling into a gentle rhythm of living and coexisting, each of them holding themselves on either side of some invisible line.
And the thing is, Nick is Nick, his Nick, but he’s not quite the same. Still kind, and warm, and so, so improbable, but — different. He’s quieter somehow. Less himself, when Charlie really tries to put words to it. Charlie can see him holding himself back at times: opening his mouth to speak and thinking the better of it, or cutting himself off in the middle of a sentence.
It hurts to see, but Charlie doesn’t hold it against him; he knows he’s doing the same thing. The past few weeks have been strange for them both. Charlie’s not really sure how to be around Nick anymore. Not when he’s lying to him. Not when his body is still driven by the memory of loving.
The nights are better. As the sun goes down, they both gravitate towards the kitchen table. It’s an unspoken agreement, set in motion from that very first night: Nick will turn on the kettle, and Charlie will rise from the sofa and the two of them will settle there together as London lays down its head. Nick’s cramped kitchen-living room is a very different place at night, struck through with lamp-light and blue-dark. It’s there that Charlie feels both their walls go down, a little.
Then, they talk. It’s practical, mostly: outlining the steps they needed to take to get Charlie back into the task of living. He’d left the house with little more than the clothes on his back. Ben had kept all their documents in a locked safe, anyway — ostensibly for safekeeping — and hadn’t seen fit to give Charlie the code. He’d managed the finances too, and Charlie hadn’t bothered to take the card for the one joint account he still had access to; he hadn’t wanted to carry a single piece of Ben out into the world with him.
So, he and Nick click their way through gov.uk together and figure out how to get him a new birth certificate, then a driving licence and a passport. Charlie contacts his bank and has his name removed from that last account. He emails his university to ask for a copy of his degree certificates; when they arrive in the post, he stares at them and tries to remind himself that he really did earn them.
Even after the practicalities are dispensed with, neither of them ever seem very keen to go to bed. Charlie tries not to read too much into it. He knows Nick hasn’t been sleeping well either: he can tell from the circles under his eyes, and from the way they both emerge from their rooms in the morning, pale and slow against the dawning light. The evenings are when it’s hardest to remember to hold himself back; it’s the only time that he really feels like himself again.
Tonight, Nick is telling Charlie about his day at school — the new PE teacher who insisted on microwaving their mackerel in the canteen, and how he’d found pen marks on the wall of his classroom, then been oddly moved by the fact his Year Two’s refused to give up the culprit — and Charlie responds, unthinkingly, with a story about how once, with Mr Ajayi’s reluctant permission, he, Tao, Elle and Isaac had once painted a mural in the art room during a free period.
The memory is crystal clear even though he can’t place when exactly it was; so much of that time is muted in his memory, the events of his youth stretching out and stacking on top of eachother as he tries to sort through them. Tori used to have to remind him of things that had happened when they were teenagers, the mire of the worst points of his illness obscuring them entirely. He supposes he must have been thirteen — the bullying would have already started if they were taking refuge in the art room, and Elle hadn’t yet moved schools.
They had gotten carried away with it, let loose in the one place in school they didn’t feel watched. Charlie can remember the colour of the paint and the sounds of their laughter, bright and immediate in the forefront of the memory. He had directed proceedings from a chair, whilst Tao hoisted Elle on his shoulders so she could reach the higher points of the wall, and Isaac held up various pots of paint for her, keen to avoid the tacky sensation of paint drying on skin. The twisting vines and leaves reached almost to the ceiling when they were done, and as they stood back to admire their handiwork Charlie felt quiet satisfaction at leaving a mark on Truham that wasn’t cut through with fear.
When Mr Ajayi returned, though, his satisfaction had been quickly replaced by a sudden, gripping panic that they had gone too far — that his favourite teacher might banish him back to lunches spent hunched at the picnic tables, where the best possible outcome was becoming invisible. The others had picked up on his change in mood instantly, and all immediately clamoured to take responsibility. Charlie feels a pang of nostalgia as he recounts how Mr Ajayi had simply smiled, called them all Spartacus — they didn’t quite get the reference at the time — and complimented them on the execution.
Nick laughs, and it’s a loose, free sound that Charlie tries very hard to commit to memory. “They sound really great,” he says.
“They are,” Charlie agrees. He misses them desperately.
“You should…” Nick pauses, clearly choosing his words carefully. “Well, have you thought more about reaching out to them?”
Charlie shrugs. “I doubt they want to hear from me.”
“I’m sure they would,” Nick replies. “You must mean as much to them as they mean to you.”
“Not after just dumping them like that.”
“They sound like good people, from all you’ve said about them,” Nick reasons, “I think they would understand.”
“Maybe,” Charlie hedges. It all seems so insurmountable, though. “I really want to know how they’re doing,” he admits, voice tailing off. “I know that sounds… stupid, considering I cut them off.”
Nick shakes his head. “It doesn’t at all. You love them, that hasn’t changed. It was just… circumstances.” He pauses and looks at his hands for a moment, before taking a breath and continuing. “It’s not really the same, but… Well, you know I stopped talking to my dad and my brother?”
Charlie nods. They hadn’t spoken about it in any depth, but Nick had mentioned in passing that they had both been less than supportive of his career, his sexuality, him, as a person: his brother actively so, and his dad through hot-and-cold spurts of attempted communication. He hadn’t wanted to push — it seemed to pain Nick to even talk about it — but he finds it so very untenable that anyone could know Nick and want to be anything other than wholly caught in his light.
Nick smiles at him like he can read it in Charlie’s expression. “Yeah, well, what I didn’t really say was that I still wonder about them, all the time. What they’re up to. If they ever think about me. Things like that.” He shrugs. “The love stays; it’s a hard thing to shake.” Nick clears his throat and blinks a few times. “Shit, sorry, I dunno, maybe that’s a bad comparison — my dad and David are bastards and you… well, you’re lovely.”
Charlie feels himself blush scarlet at the compliment. It’s an odd moment of boyish glee in the midst of fraught emotion, but he tries to savour it nonetheless. Nick is averting his eyes and twisting his hands together where they lay on the table, though, clearly unsure how to continue. Charlie decides to put him out of his misery. “It’s not a bad comparison,” he says gently. “I know what you were getting at.”
Nick looks back up at him, grateful. “I’m glad one of us does at least. Sorry– Things always seem to make more sense in my head.”
“Hey,” Charlie protests, “you can’t say that if I’m not allowed to.” Nick rolls his eyes at him good-naturedly and Charlie smiles. “They’re missing out, by the way.”
“What do you mean?”
“By being… bastards.” He feels a little hesitant using Nick’s own language, but how else to summarise such a betrayal by those who are meant to love you unconditionally? Nick just nods and laughs softly, though, so Charlie presses on. “They’re missing out on a really good thing.”
Nick flushes at Charlie’s words and the sight is arresting, as it always is — the colour sits high on his cheeks and creeps up his neck a little, as delicate and welcome as the first blush of dawn. Charlie loves him.
Nick runs a hand through his hair. “Well, thank you,” he says quietly. They look at each other for a beat before Nick continues, carrying them past the moment. “So… Do you think you’ll message them?”
Charlie blinks, caught out at the reminder of their original topic of conversation. “I dunno…” He sighs, resigned. “I don’t even know where to begin. Like, I can’t just walk back into their lives like nothing’s happened.”
“You could write them a letter? Explain things, a little.”
“Yeah,” Charlie replies, trailing off as he looks at where his phone is sitting on the table. It would be so easy to just… reach out. A simple act of fingers over keys, but the weight of it sits sisyphean on his chest, regardless. He really does want to know how they’re doing, though: to see for himself that they’re safe, and happy, and whole.
He picks the phone up and turns it on. Before he can think too much about it, he logs back into his Instagram account: back then, he’d deleted the app from his phone when the carousel of stories and posts from his friends had become a gut-heavy reminder of the unanswered messages from them weighing down his inbox. Of the missed calls. Of Tori turning up to the house three times, and Tao four, and Charlie sitting small in the living room and letting the bell ring and ring and ring.
Now, though, the temptation is too great — he wants to see their faces, at the very least.
The very first post that loads is from Olly, and the breath goes from him at the sight of his brother. It’s three pictures posted in series, actually: Olly in graduation robes, laughing with a group of people his age that Charlie only vaguely recognises; by himself, holding his diploma and grinning like the whole world is at his feet; and, lastly, Olly, Tori and Michael with their arms around each other, smiling bright into the camera. The post dated only a few days ago.
Something inside Charlie rips. The last time he saw Olly was in a cafe near Oxford Circus. He had just started first year, and had talked Charlie’s ear off about his course: whether to take Spanish, or Gender Studies or Early Medieval Poetry for his optional module; the terrible but cheap coffee at the library; his new friends, and the mysterious fourth flatmate that none of them had ever actually met. On the other side of the table in that drab Costa — Charlie had picked it because it was far away from the house, and in an area that he knew Ben would never frequent — Olly had been absolutely sparking with life and the joys of living it. Sitting opposite him, Charlie had already felt like a black hole, certain that if he strayed too close to his brother he would suck the light from him completely.
“God,” he says, lifting a finger to touch it to the screen. He swipes through the photos two, three times, careful not to accidentally double tap. He has fifty-two messages in his inbox, he notices: he never actually blocked anyone on Instagram, just deleted the app entirely. He doesn’t click on them, choosing just to zoom in on that last photo of his siblings. They look… good. Healthy, happy. If nothing else, at least there’s that.
Charlie puts his phone down and puts his head in his hands.
All at once he feels it: the weight of absence, the irreversible loss of missed years. How does anyone come back from that? It’s not accompanied with despair and hopelessness, though, as it was before. Anger flickers inside him, then suddenly — supernova.
“Fuck’s sake, ” he exclaims, sending his phone clattering off the table. “How did I let this happen ?”
There are a few, crystal moments where the air is cut only with the sounds of Charlie’s fraught breath.
“Charlie,” Nick says gently, then reaches across the table to put his hands on Charlie’s. Charlie catches himself digging his nail into the meat of his thumb again. “Nothing’s irreversible.”
He sighs and lets Nick’s touch anchor him, trying to breathe through the tension that has moved its way through his body. “What if they’re angry at me?” he asks quietly.
“They might be,” Nick admits, and Charlie appreciates that he’s not trying to spin a fairytale. “But then, they’ll forgive you.”
“ Why ?” Charlie asks. “Why would they? I left them.” It’s a stark truth that sits heavy in his gut.
“Because you’re Charlie,” Nick says simply, “and I can’t imagine anyone not wanting you in their life.”
Charlie doesn’t respond; he’s not sure how. Nick is bound to see how wrong he is eventually — that the arrival of Charlie in his life has, so far, caused nothing but problems. Nick looks so very sure of the statement, though, and Charlie can’t help but want this, desperately: the kind words, and whatever aching edge of softness sits behind Nick’s eyes when he says them.
Charlie swallows. All this loss and wanting; it’s too much to face, tonight. “I should go to bed — it’s late.”
Nick bites his lip and leans back in his chair; Charlie hadn’t quite realised how close they had gotten. “I- yeah, so should I.” Then, after a pause. “I’ve not really been sleeping that well.”
“No, me neither, to be honest,” Charlie admits. They smile grimly at each other.
“We could…” Nick starts. “Well, do you want to go for a walk, or something?” Charlie blinks, surprised at the suggestion. Nick rushes on, “We don’t have to-”
“No, no,” Charlie interrupts, “no, it’s a good suggestion. It might help.” Now that it’s been mentioned, in fact, he finds himself thinking of little else other than the cool air on his face and Nick by his side.
Nick smiles wide, and it’s a dawning sun in the dark of the room. “Yeah, great. Good.” He slaps a palm down on the table like he’s not quite sure what to do with his hands. “Well- yeah. Let’s go then.”
⋆⁺₊⋆
After a bit of discussion, they head for the park near Nick’s flat. It’s deserted at this hour and, as they walk further in, even the noise of the city seems to fall away from them. The night is still and cold, but Charlie can’t help but feel warm; Nick insisted that he borrow one of his jumpers before they left the flat and, even without that, the steady rhythm of Nick walking in step next to him lights a gentle fire within him.
Most of the walk is spent in companionable silence, only the rhythmic sounds of their footsteps and the gentle susurration of their breathing cutting through the night. In the park, there are street lamps dotted along the path every so often, their dim light casting a halo that stretches a few metres out across the grass on either side. It’s peaceful; it feels like they might be the only two people in the world.
Suddenly, a fox passes in front of them, and Charlie grabs Nick’s arm and points in silent awe. They stop and watch it as it crosses the path. It watches back for a moment, eyes flinting in the lamp-light, before turning its head, flicking its tail haughtily and continuing its travels. Immediately after it comes two cubs, stumbling and adolescent as they chase after their mother, stopping briefly in the spotlight to nip and roll over eachother. They watch them disappear into the dark together, and for a moment Charlie wonders how he ever believed the world could be against him.
“Wow,” Nick breathes.
“Yeah,” Charlie agrees, then realises he’s still holding on to Nick. He drops his arm and takes a step away.
Nick looks over at him and Charlie can’t quite read his expression as it shifts in the low light. On some silent agreement, they continue walking. Charlie realises that they are nearly at the turn of the path now, and knows that the next logical step is to go home — back to the both of them staring at the ceiling in their separate rooms, chasing rest that won't come.
“Shall we sit for a bit, before we head back?” Charlie suggests, despite the chill in the air. He desperately doesn’t want this night to end.
“Yeah, let's,” Nick agrees immediately. “Come on, let's find a spot.”
They walk off the path, past the reach of the lights and towards the middle of the grassy field. The park is set up on a gentle hill, and in the distance the skyline of the city is glittering. Once they’ve walked some ways in, Nick crouches and puts a hand to the ground. “It’s dry enough,” he says. “Here OK?”
Charlie nods and Nick sets himself down, Charlie sitting next to him a few feet away. The ground is cold and only slightly damp. He cards his fingers through the grass and inhales the earthy scent, for once not tinged with petrol and dust.
Nick leans back in repose and sighs out a breath, resting his weight on his elbows as he tilts his head up. Charlie mirrors the action and for a while they both look up at the sky. Charlie feels very far away from everything — although somehow more in his body than he has been in months — but, it’s still London, and the sky is grey-dark and starless. The moon, at least, has managed to winnow its way through, pale and near-full through the haze of clouds.
“I wish we could see the stars,” Nick says, after a while. “Sometimes you can up here, a little. On a really clear night.”
Charlie hums his agreement. “I used to have all these maps of the constellations on my walls back home, actually,” he volunteers. Something about the cool night air and the solid weight of the earth beneath him is lowering his defences.
“Yeah?” Nick asks, and out of the corner of his eye Charlie can see him looking over with curiosity.
“Yeah. I was a little obsessed as a child. I’d like, subscribe to magazines about space and tear out all the free inserts. I even got those glow-in-the-dark stars from a toyshop in town with my tenth birthday money. Tori put me up on her shoulders so I could stick them on the ceiling of my room… My mum got quite cross about the bluetack on the walls, but I kept them up there for years.” Charlie smiles at the memory.
Nick’s still looking at him. Charlie chances a glance over and finds he can’t bring himself to look away again. “I was obsessed with Formula One,” Nick admits.
“Oh really ?” Charlie asks, delighted. “Don’t tell me — you had a racecar bed?”
Nick blushes. “Worse – I made wheels out of paper plates and stuck them to the side of my lame IKEA bed.”
“Oh my god,” Charlie laughs, putting a hand to his mouth.
“Yup. Nellie ate them. I was so upset.”
“Oh no!”
“I know.” Nick’s laughing now, too. “I forgave her instantly, obviously.”
Charlie nods. “Obviously.”
They settle down, both looking back up at the sky again. “I wish we could have met, back then,” Nick says, voice sounding very far away.
“Yeah,” Charlie sighs, “me too. I think… a lot of things might have turned out differently for me.”
“Same,” Nick admits, and the truth of it sits heavy between them. This time, when Charlie glances over, he sees Nick frowning up at the starless sky. It breaks Charlie’s heart; he doesn’t want either of them driven by regret. He tries to muster up some words of comfort, but comes up blank: the looming spectre of what might have been won’t allow it.
Everything in him wants to reach across the gap between them both.
“Charlie?” Nick continues eventually, and Charlie can hear the hesitancy in his tone.
“Yeah?” he replies, unsure of what is coming.
“Can– Can I hold your hand?”
Charlie is struck dumb by the request. “Why?” he asks, then curls in on himself at the unintentional edge to his tone. Still — it’s a question he needs to ask. If Nick is offering purely for Charlie’s benefit, he’d never forgive himself. He doesn’t want a single thing that isn’t freely given.
Nick doesn’t let him down, though; he never has. “I want to,” he says quietly, still looking staunchly upward.
Charlie can’t help but smile up at the sky; maybe, tonight, it really is as simple as that. He doesn’t know if it’s the fraught emotion of the day, or the quiet of the park, or the just the fact that he wants it so ardently, but he can’t find the resolve to draw away as he has been. “OK,” he breathes, before he loses his nerve. Then, for the avoidance of any doubt: “I would like that.”
He lays his arm out between them, and Nick slips a warm hand into his. Charlie swallows and squeezes tightly. Nick squeezes back, then runs his thumb across Charlie’s knuckles. It’s familiar and brand new, all at once. Charlie knows that isn’t logical, but nothing between him and Nick ever seems to be, anyway. Either way, it feels right.
For a moment, the earth spins on and everything is exactly as it should be; if Charlie didn’t know better, he would think they were drowning out the distant glow of the lamps and the city beyond with their own warm, yellow light.
He glances back over at Nick again just as Nick looks at him, both of them quickly looking away again when they make eye contact. Nick laughs, light and boyish under the pale moonlight. Charlie feels a little giddy, and he allows himself to lean into the feeling, joining in with Nick’s laughter.
As they lie there, laughing together, he finds himself glad that the stars aren’t out; tonight, holding Nick’s hand as they lie on the cool grass, he would be in danger of thinking they were hung just for them.
. • ° ★
. • . * ☾
When Nick was eight, his Aunt Diane gifted him a set of Matryoshka dolls , bought during a trip to Saint Petersburg. She used to do things like that a lot: before she met her husband, and had Leo and Tillie, she travelled voraciously and would always bring Nick back little gifts. Nothing big — mainly magnets, or postcards, or toys picked up at markets. Schlocky things, usually; appropriate for an overzealous child that would quickly love them to death.
Nick didn’t mind that they were cheap. Even as a boy, he loved the thought that someone so far away — over sea, ocean and channel — might be thinking of him kindly. The dolls always made him feel a little uneasy, though. For years, they sat up on the shelf in his room, amongst his figurines and rugby paraphernalia, staring out with vacant eyes.
He’s always had a hard time letting things go.
Sometimes, if he’d had a bad day, or wanted to avoid doing his homework — the ideas he had in his head never seeming to translate to paper, and the equations laid out in his maths homework bleeding together until they seemed to slide of the page entirely — he would take them down and systematically pop them apart, laying them out in order. The painted expression on their faces gradually blurred and disfigured as the dolls got smaller and room for detail was lost, until eventually all that was left was the impression of colour on cheap wood.
Nick would stare at that final doll, turning it over and over in his hand, and try not to think too hard about what he might find at heart of himself.
He doesn’t have them anymore: when he’d gone to Leeds, he’d packed his rugby cleats, a few jumpers, freshly laundered by his mum, and not much else. He’d been desperate, really, to leave school behind. He’d never admit this to Diane, or his mum, but as he’d been packing — agonising over each piece of clothing, wondering what it might say about who he had been, or who he was — he’d felt the weight of their gaze on him. Before he could think too much about it, he’d grabbed them, stealing down the stairs with Nellie on his heels so he could dump them in the bin outside.
He finds himself thinking of them, now, as Charlie lies across from him on the damp grass, their hands still joined as they tell each other more stories about their childhoods. He doesn’t tell him about the dolls: it feels too heavy after their admissions tonight, so he sticks to lighter fare, like the pranks he and David used to pull when they were younger, before his dad left and his brother became a stranger, and the time in primary school that he’d been cast as a tree in the school nativity and made his mum practice his only line with him for hours.
He’ll tell him about it one day, he thinks; he wants to tell Charlie about everything, eventually. As Charlie looks at him across the grass, he hopes desperately that he’ll get the chance. It feels wonderful, but oddly exposing, to be listened to like this; to sit under the attention of Charlie’s steady gaze.
The thing is, when Charlie looks at him like that, he feels his centre take shape.
Eventually, the evening bites, and he can see Charlie start to shiver. “You’re cold.” He frowns, reaching down with his other hand to rub Charlie’s hand between both of his.
When he sees Charlie go to protest he gives him a look. Charlie shrugs. “A little,” he admits. “We should probably go home, you’ve got work in the morning.”
Though he could probably lie here forever if given the chance, he can’t help but smile at Charlie’s choice of words. He nods. “Yeah. Let's go home.”
He helps Charlie up and they begin the slow walk back. When he sees Charlie shiver again, he shrugs off his jacket to place it over his shoulders, waving off his protest. “I run warm, anyway,” he explains, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“Well,” Charlie smiles, wrapping it further around himself. “OK, then.”
“OK, then,” Nick nods. For a moment, he feels lighter than he has in weeks.
If he was better, and bolder, this would be the moment that he would turn to Charlie and tell him the truth — that Nick’s life is better with him in it; immeasurably so. There's so much he wants to say, but as they walk from the field, back under the cast of the streetlamps, he loses his nerve.
When they get home, Charlie bids him goodnight and Nick goes to his room, lying on his bed still fully clothed. Not even the fleeting stab of warmth in his chest that he gets when he realises that Charlie kept his jumper is enough to cut through his quiet contemplation.
He knows why he held back. Every day, Charlie is getting a little brighter, and more sure: the steely-eyed determination Nick had seen in him from the beginning making itself known in his words and his actions, and in the bright sound of his laughter filling the flat. Nick has never met someone so strong, or so very brave; he is terrified that his own selfishness might be the thing that spoils that. Charlie, happy and whole, is all he wants. Even if it’s not with Nick by his side.
. • ° ★
. • . * ☾
Something has to give — Charlie knows that. After their moment at the park last night, he had caught himself nearly spilling forward with the truth of what they had shared. All of it. As they were walking home, though, he had tried his best to snuff out the flickering ember of hope in his chest, reminding himself that having Nick like this was better than not at all. Better than Charlie shattering this fragile, newborn thing between them with a clumsy hand because he had let himself need .
He’s making dinner when he hears the key in the lock. A few weeks ago, he’d come across his teenage meal plans on his Google drive, whilst trawling through it looking for his old CV. He’d nearly deleted them on reflex, withdrawing from the reminder of the inadequacy that seemed to be a guiding star in his life to date.
Eating had been hard recently, though, with the chaos and rending emotion of losing Nick and finding him all at once. It had been hard long before that, of course, but Charlie had been sleepwalking through life at Ben’s with a numbing, robotic efficiency: eat, sleep, and wait for night to come.
Now, though, he was awake — as awake as he had been in years — and old habits die hard. After closing the document, he had stared unseeingly out of the window for a long time, before reopening it and quickly pressing print before he had time to second guess himself. It’s progress, he thinks. He hopes. Nick had always been the bright spot, but now there seemed to be a light at the end of the tunnel that was all his own making.
Nick hadn’t questioned it when Charlie showed him the printouts that evening, just nodded and asked shyly if Charlie wanted him to make a shopping list.
Now, he hears Nick set his keys down on the side table. Last night, Charlie slept better than he had in months; so well, in fact, that he slept through Nick leaving for work for the first time. “Hi,” he calls through from the kitchen. Although he’s nervous — or, well, terrified that Nick regrets the closeness and the soft words they had shared last night — he can’t help but be happy that he’s home. He missed him, although it has been less than a day; he wonders how he went so long without him, before.
“Hey,” Nick replies, but it’s not tinged with his usual exuberance. Charlie sets his knife down and turns around. Nick is oscillating at the doorway, a slight furrow between his brow.
“Are you OK?” Charlie asks.
Nick sighs, looking down at the floor. “Yeah, no, I– I’m just…” He looks back up at Charlie. “I’m alright.”
“Here, go and relax. I’ll make your dinner,” Charlie says, pointing out towards the living room. He turns to the counter to continue chopping courgette. He glances behind him to find Nick still standing there, worrying his lower lip with his teeth as he leans on the door frame. Despite the nervous tic, something in his eyes is resolute.
“I don’t want to,” Nick replies, and stands a little straighter.
“What, you don’t want to relax?” Charlie goes for teasing, but he can hear the stretch of desperation cut through his tone. What if I hurt you? he thinks. What if I can’t give you what you deserve?
“No, I–” Nick blinks and shrugs one shoulder up, laughing softly. “I dunno– I just want to be around you,” he admits.
Charlie recognises the sentiment. After all, he’s watched Nick fall in love once before. It’s exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure; Nick’s heart in his hands is the most precious gift he could ever be given. He wants so desperately to lean into it, to sink into Nick and give in to the goodness and rightness of it. Of them.
He swallows, and looks down at the chopping board. Outside, the sun is setting, casting the kitchen in flame as it touches the horizon. “You shouldn’t,” he says eventually.
“Why?” Nick asks, and his voice cracks as he pushes on. “Why not , Charlie?”
“It’s better this way.”
Nick sighs, long and slow, before scrubbing a hand over his face. “Don’t I get a say in that, too?”
Charlie blows out a breath before he speaks. “I… of course you do. But, you don’t need me. This is… It’s better that you don’t remember. This way you can move on with your life.” Charlie has abandoned his chopping now, and they are staring at each other across the kitchen as day turns to night.
“Charlie… I don’t want to move on. If you don’t– If this isn’t what you want, of course I’ll respect your decision. But, please believe me when I say that I’m so grateful, every day, that something pulled me to your door.”
“You don’t mean that,” Charlie pushes. He can’t; does he not realise that everything Charlie touches turns to dust in his hands?
“Don’t tell me what I mean, Charlie,” Nick bites out. There’s no heat behind it — just sorrow.
Charlie pushes on regardless. “But, I’m not real, Nick . None of this is real, really. It’s a fucking dream, or a nightmare, or something . You shouldn’t get dragged into this. I don’t even– I– Sometimes, I feel like I don’t even exist.”
He looks at Nick, desperate for him to understand. Understand that, even though Nick was the dreamer, Charlie was lost, too. That back then, back at Ben’s, often Nick felt like the only thing tying him to reality. Everything else was out of Charlie’s grasp; in Ben’s attempts to hide himself, he had hidden them both. There, trapped on the edges, Charlie felt a moth desperately banging on glass — the warm and vital glow of promise just out of reach.
Nick is looking at him strangely. “Charlie,” he breathes, shaking his head a little and taking a step forward, “there’s nothing more real to me than you.”
Charlie opens his mouth to protest again, but nothing comes. Nick’s eyes are flickering across his face like he’s looking for something in his expression. “Nick,” he manages eventually, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Just the truth,” Nick whispers, “I just need the truth. And if it’s not what I think, then, that’s OK. I promise. I only want what you’re willing to give, Charlie. I’d never– I’d never ask you for more than that. But, if you’re holding back because you think I’d be better off without you, then I need you to know, my life is so much better , because I met you.”
“Nick-”
“And I’m serious Charlie, if it’s not what you want. If I’m… not what you want. I’ll understand. Completely. It won’t change anything between you and me. I’ll still– I’ll always want to support you, and know you. I just– I feel like you’ve been keeping things from me. I’ve just been… so, so confused.”
Charlie feels his resolve crumble at the pain threaded through Nick’s voice. He bows his head. Somehow, despite his efforts — despite the holding back, and denying, and convincing himself that things were better this way — he still hurt him. Nick steps closer and winds his hand through Charlie’s; it’s shaking. “It’s OK,” Nick whispers, “whatever it is, it’s OK.”
From most it would seem like an empty platitude, but from Nick, his Nick, it’s enough to smooth out the aching edges of regret and sorrow that have been sitting fast in his gut for weeks now. When Charlie looks into his eyes he sees whole universes; he wonders how he could ever deny that they belong to each other.
“It was strange, and awful, and wonderful. But, I was still me, and you were still you, and we–” Charlie stops and takes a shuddering breath. Nick is still looking at him with wide, endless eyes. Charlie can’t hold it in anymore; he doesn’t want to. “We loved each other,” he finishes, voice breaking.
Nick is quiet for a long moment, but the shock or betrayal that Charlie expected to play out across his face doesn’t manifest. Instead, he just pulls Charlie closer and cups his jaw with a hesitant hand, fingertips soft and warm on Charlie’s skin. “Do we still?” he asks, the tremor in his voice barely concealed, and Charlie loves him — this brave, brave man.
He feels it again: Nick’s heart, beating and vulnerable in his hands. He still doesn’t know if he can care for it well, but, God, he wants to try. He will try.
“We do,” he nods, and the truth of it blooms his chest — familiar and brand new, all at once. “God, Nick, we do.”
It’s no more than a whisper, but he sees the words wash over Nick all the same. He closes his eyes and sighs with a relief so palpable that Charlie can feel it too. It’s in the room with them: relief, regret, and the weight of all they were and are, finally pulled into the light.
Nick puts his other hand on Charlie’s waist, opening his eyes again and looking down at him. “I was hoping you would say that,” he admits.
Then, finally, he leans down to kiss him.
For all that the sun is disappearing past the horizon, and the stars coming out somewhere high above the fog of London, it’s the most earthly of pleasures: warm, corporeal and undeniable. Charlie has spent so much of his life feeling untethered — like one wrong move could send him floating far away, tiny and insignificant amongst the celestial — but, here, with Nick’s hands on him, he knows exactly where he belongs.
When he finally pulls back, breathless and alight, he sees the tears gathered in Nick’s eyes.
“I’m sorry. Fuck, baby, I’m so sorry,” he rushes out, reaching up to wipe them away just as they begin to fall. “I thought I was protecting you.”
“It’s OK. I know you did. I’m sorry, too.”
Charlie shakes his head. “You’ve not–”
“I should have been braver, for you. I will be now, I promise,” Nick says, gathering Charlie back into his arms and holding him close. “This wasn’t your burden to bear alone.”
“But, I hurt you,” Charlie whispers into Nick’s neck. His throat burns, and when he blinks he feels his own tears begin to fall.
Nick shakes his head as if to bat away the apology, swaying them both from side to side. “You didn’t mean to. I don’t– I can’t imagine what this whole thing has been like, for you. You’ve been so strong, my darling.”
“Nick,” he manages through his tears. Then, again: “ Nick .”
It’s not a question, or a demand, or an admonishment; it just feels good to say Nick’s name with the weight of affection that has been sitting stifled in his chest since the moment he opened his front door, all those weeks ago.
He knows Nick hears it from the way he grips him tighter and presses a long, lingering kiss to the side of his head. “Charlie,” he whispers back, and Charlie can hear the burgeoning smile in his voice.
Charlie’s not sure how long they stand there, holding each other close in the kitchen. It’s long enough for the sun to set completely, and the room to be met with darkness. Long enough for both their tears to stop, and for their breathing to fall into step. Long enough that Charlie feels himself relax into Nick completely, unsure if he’ll ever be able to let go.
Eventually, Nick steps back a little — one arm still wrapped around Charlie’s waist — so that they can look each other in the face. They both laugh into the soft quiet that has descended after such a display of emotion. Charlie leans up and places a soft, lingering kiss on Nick’s mouth, because now the things he wants and the things he can have are one and the same. Nick chases the contact and runs a warm hand up Charlie’s back.
“Will you sleep in my bed?” Charlie asks after they separate for a second time, the thought of Nick being even a wall away tonight too much to bear. He rushes to clarify. “Not to– I mean, just to sleep, for now. And then, after that, to talk, maybe?”
“Please,” Nick replies, nodding. “I would really, really like that.” Then, a little teasing: “what do you want to talk about?”
Charlie rolls his eyes and taps him lightly on the chest. “Anything,” he says. “Everything.”
Nick smiles. “That sounds like a good place to start.”
Chapter 4: how dark the beginning
Summary:
Nick and Charlie share their fears.
Notes:
thank you to theo for the beta, for saving me from the scourge of the run-on sentence, and for being such a pal <3
back to the poetry for this one!! i love, love, love this poem. also, honourable song mention for the chapter: francesca, hozier
cw/tw: references to self harm and disordered eating, implied sexual content
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
[…] We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark
the beginning of a day is.
Maggie Smith, How Dark the Beginning
Charlie feels his doubt rise with the dawn.
Last night had been over and above his wildest dreams. After the kitchen, they’d gone to Charlie’s room, Charlie leaving briefly to put on his t-shirt and shorts in the bathroom. He wasn’t particularly worried about getting changed in front of Nick; he already knew about Charlie’s scars from their late-night talks around the table, and, once, he’d run into Nick in the hallway when he was on the way back from the shower with a towel slung low around his hips, watching in fond amusement as the tips of Nick’s ears turned pink and he stammered out an apology. Still, he valued the few minutes alone to process the seismic events of the evening.
Returning to his room, Charlie hovered in the doorway and looked on as Nick settled himself under the duvet. He felt almost shy for a moment; like his body hadn’t quite caught up to his mind, forgetting that now he could let the weight and breadth of his feeling pour out into the world, without reproach. It had passed quickly when Nick opened his arms and Charlie crossed the room and let himself settle into his touch. There was more to talk about, he knew, but the exhaustion of the day hit him with a sudden and undeniable force; there, in Nick’s arms, Charlie had finally let himself sleep.
When he had first opened his eyes this morning, the sky outside still dark and Nick breathing steadily next to him, he had to reach out and run a tentative hand over his shoulder to check he was actually there. He was warm and solid under Charlie’s fingertips. Relief flooded through him, then, so acutely that he had to breathe deeply for a few moments until it simmered down into contentment.
Now, he’s been awake for about an hour, alternating between watching Nick sleep and watching the sun gradually rise between the cracks in the blinds. Nick looks younger like this, face relaxed and mouth slightly parted. One of his arms is shoved under the pillow and the other is lying across Charlie’s stomach. Occasionally, Charlie sees his eyes track behind his eyelids; he wonders what he’s dreaming about.
Charlie has never seen him look so peaceful. So much of the past few weeks — and even before that, when their time together was as finite and unpredictable as it was joyous — was defined by an undercurrent of tension, and sorrow. Charlie hadn’t quite realised how much of that was evident in Nick’s face: in the line between his brow and the deep purple under his eyes.
I caused that, Charlie thinks as he looks down at him. He knows he would be stupid to deny how deeply Nick feels for him after what they had shared last night. Was it worth it though, for Nick, if it was so hard earned, so pulled out of the rot like this? For Charlie, it was; he would go through the last few years ten times over if it meant ending up here, lying next to him. The thought of losing him again is shattering.
Nick begins shifting in his sleep. Charlie brings his knees up to his chest and presses his face to them, trying to breathe through his sudden discomfort. The movement dislodges Nick’s arm from around him, and the loss of contact only serves to unmoor him further.
“Charlie?” Nick’s croaky, sleep-ridden voice sounds from next to him. “You OK?”
“I’m alright – you should sleep.” Charlie’s voice sounds unconvincing even to his own ears. His eyes are closed, but he feels the bed shift as Nick pushes himself up to sit. Charlie opens his eyes and turns to face him, head still resting it on his knees. Nick’s face is creased with concern again, and Charlie hates himself for it.
The question rises through him before he can stop it. “Have I tricked you into this?” He asks, guilt clawing at his throat and making his voice sound small.
“What?” Nick asks, still blinking sleep from his eyes, clearly trying to catch up.
“I just… I know what you said last night, but – well, I’ve just appeared in your life out of nowhere. I wouldn’t blame you if it was… too much. You’ve not exactly had a choice in all this.”
He sees something like understanding coalesce behind Nick’s eyes. “ I came to you ,” Nick reminds him, running a gentle hand up his back. “I found you.”
“Yeah,” Charlie whispers, “you did always say you would.”
“This is why. I know this is why.”
Charlie looks away.
“Char, baby, talk to me?” Nick asks. It’s not a demand, just a softly spoken request. It’s enough to make Charlie look at him again, and to sort through the riotous tangle of feeling enough to find the words that have been threatening to spill forth since the moment Nick invited him to stay.
“I just don’t want you to feel some sort of obligation to me. I would hate that.” He chastises himself for the way his voice wavers on the last statement.
“Charlie, I– It’s not an obligation,” Nick shakes his head. “It’s, like, the opposite of that. I feel… selfish, almost.”
Charlie frowns. “What do you mean?”
Nick sighs and pulls Charlie’s hand into his lap, maintaining their point of contact even as he looks up at the ceiling. “I know you feel like I’ve had no choice in this. But, that’s not true. I could’ve walked away from the start. You never– you’ve never once made me feel like I owe you anything. I didn’t want to walk away, though. You’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met. It didn’t make sense to me that you would still... I thought– you know, me, before, he must have been different. Better. I’m worried that– that maybe I’m the one tricking you? I don’t want you to be disappointed if I’m not what you remember. Who you remember.”
Nick’s words are so far from the truth that Charlie can only stare at him open-mouthed for a second. Nick’s face shutters, and his eyes drop to the bedspread. Charlie realises with a dizzying clarity just how much their fear has been denying them; he knows now he can’t let it.
“You could never disappoint me Nick,” he replies, putting a hand up to Nick’s face and trying to imbue the statement with the certainty he feels down to his very marrow. Nick still doesn’t meet his eyes, so Charlie pushes on. “I mean that. I find it so hard to trust myself sometimes. I’ve spent a lot of time… being told how I feel. Or, how I should feel. Sometimes–” He swallows, throat clicking in the quiet of the room. “It’s hard to wade through it all and to know what’s coming from me and not, you know, someone else.” Nick’s looking at him again now, eyes wide and focused on Charlie’s words. “But this? You? I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
“Yeah?” Nick asks. The shake in his voice makes Charlie wish he could crack himself open and show Nick the indelible mark that he’s left on him.
Charlie nods. “Yes.”
Nick smiles, all the way up to his eyes, and Charlie feels relieved all over again. “I’m glad that you can… trust yourself, about this,” he says, squeezing Charlie’s hand in his. “I feel the same.”
Charlie sits there and tries very hard to let himself believe; he knows he owes it to Nick, to himself . Still, he can’t help but ask, “Do you think we would have… you know, if we didn’t meet like this?”
Nick looks at him, clearly deep in thought. “Do you want to hear my theory?” he asks after a moment.
Charlie smiles back; it’s oddly comforting to know that Nick’s been thinking about this, too. “Yeah, alright then.”
“I think it was inevitable that I was going to feel like this,” Nick starts, and the sudden rush of his words makes it clear just how much he’s been thinking about it. “Even if none of this had happened. If we had met… I dunno, at school, or on an app or something, I was always going to look at you and feel like I already knew you. I meant what I said at the park… I wish we’d met back then. But we didn’t, and, somehow, we’re here anyway. I can’t help feeling anything but so, so, grateful for that.”
Charlie is desperate for Nick to continue. They had so little time for this, before, every night defined by its end. He feels greedy, really, for Nick’s reassurance. “What do you think it would have been like, then, if we met at school?”
Nick pulls him closer so that his arms are wrapped around Charlie again. Charlie falls into it, as easy as breathing. “I don’t know,” Nick murmurs. “Maybe we would have had a class together, or met in rugby–”
“Let me stop you there. There is no way on earth I would have ever played rugby.”
Nick hums. “You never know. Stranger things have happened.”
Charlie can’t help but laugh. “Yeah, they definitely have.”
“ Anyway, however it was, I think we would have been friends. Then… I was a bit fucking lost back then, to be honest, so it might have taken me a while to figure out why, but I don’t think I would have been able to keep myself away from you.”
Charlie blushes where his head is resting on Nick’s chest. “Did you go to your prom?” he asks, brushing his hand lightly over the fabric of Nick’s vest.
“I did,” Nick admits, “with some of my friends from the team. I called my mum to come and get me after half an hour, though. It just didn’t… I dunno. It didn’t feel like a place I wanted to be.”
“Me, Elle, Tao and Isaac did our own prom,” Charlie explains, “it was fun. I always wondered, though… Well, maybe we would have gone together.”
He feels Nick hold him tighter. “Maybe we would have,” he replies, and presses a kiss to the top of Charlie’s head. “I bet you looked great in your suit.”
Charlie hums noncommittally, letting the fantasy carry him away for a moment: him and Nick as teenagers, young and hopeful and facing the world together. School, then uni, and all that life they would have shared. Charlie knows that loving, being loved, doesn’t fix everything; by the time he was a teenager, he was already approaching the world with caution. Still, he can’t help but feel that it all would have been easier to face, with Nick by his side. From all he’s heard about Nick’s formative years, he thinks it would have been the same for him.
“Would it have been better that way?” Charlie asks, suddenly insecure. “Easier?”
“I don’t know,” Nick replies after a pause, “it would have been different. We’ll never really know, I suppose. Either way, however it happened, I’m glad it was us.”
Charlie hides his face in Nick’s neck. “Yeah, me too.”
⋆⁺₊⋆
They spend the morning in bed. After their conversation, Charlie feels infinitely more settled. He even manages to get a few more hours of sleep, the warm fact of Nick’s body next to him lulling him into rest. When he wakes again, Nick is still there, duvet pooled around his waist as he reads a book.
Charlie stretches and rolls over, touching Nick’s arm.
“Hey,” Nick says, reaching over to the nightstand to place his book face-down and carding a hand through Charlie’s hair. “Morning, sleepy.”
“Shit, sorry,” Charlie says in a yawn, “what time is it?”
Nick shakes his head. “None of that. I like knowing you’re rested. It’s only just past twelve, anyway.”
They smile at each other for a moment, and Nick shuffles back down on the bed so he’s lying opposite Charlie, head resting on the pillow. Charlie puts a hand up to his face and leans forward to kiss him. It’s a thousandth kiss for Charlie, and a third or forth for Nick, but they both look equally dazed when they part. Charlie leans in for another, then another, and thinks to himself that he could easily pass his whole life like this. He’s glad they talked, but this feels like the wake up they should have had; he hopes it’s the one they’ll have forever, now.
The rumbling of Nick’s stomach pulls him out of his haze. Nick flushes, and Charlie laughs, pulling back with a squeeze to Nick’s arm. “Let’s get you fed,” he says, “we can’t stay in this bed forever.”
“You’re right,” Nick agrees begrudgingly. “Do you want– Well, um, we could go out to eat? It might be nice to, like, go somewhere together.”
Charlie hesitates. He knows what Nick is getting at. Here, in the quiet cocoon of the bedroom, everything still feels a little unreal, like one of them might make one wrong move and send them both crashing back to reality. Being out together in the world would be undeniable: a flash of normality that would help them believe that this really is happening. The thought of a meal, though — an unfamiliar menu, and people, and eyes — is too much for him right now. He looks up at Nick, preparing himself for the look of disappointment, or reproach.
It doesn’t come. “Or we could eat here, then just go for a walk, or coffee or something,” Nick continues easily, “whatever you want… I just want to show you off a little.” He squeezes Charlie’s knee through the blanket.
“OK,” Charlie nods. He wonders how it is physically possible to love Nick more every day. “Coffee sounds good.”
. • ° ★
. • . * ☾
Nick is elated as they walk down the highstreet, hand in hand. It’s early spring, the air still cold, but the pavement is bathed in brilliant sunshine. Nick loves Charlie in any light — in the low-lamps of the bedroom, in the stark, fluorescent cast of the big light in his kitchen, in the dark, in starlight — but he thinks this is the one he likes best. He still can’t quite figure out the colour of his eyes: he remembers that, when he first saw him, they were that dark, space-bright blue. Now, in the clean daylight, they are light and sparkling; the colour reminds Nick of the pristine sea around Menorca. Either way, he wants to dive deep.
The coffee shop is crowded, but they luck out and get the window seat. It’s raised up from the rest of the shop, with pillows and a low-down table instead of the standard-height table and chairs that are dotted around elsewhere. They sit there cross-legged, facing each other. The whole world is going by outside, but neither of them seem to be paying it much mind; instead, they look at each other, settling easily into conversation. The mood between them has changed, too. Now that they both seem to have decided to be less cautious with each other, there is an undeniable charge moving through the air between them.
Charlie is laughing at something Nick said, and his fingers are drawing circles on the back of his arm where it rests on the table top. One of Nick’s legs is stretched out in front of him now, and Charlie’s knee rests on it, their bare skin brushing through the rips in his jeans. Nick is pretty sure his coffee is getting cold, but he can’t quite bring himself to move.
He watches as Charlie speaks, his lips pouting out with the plosives, and occasionally reaches up with his hand — the one not touching Nick — to push his hair back when it falls into his eyes. Nick wants desperately to do it for him; he never really realised he was capable of feeling desire so immediate.
“You alright?” Charlie asks. “You’ve gone a bit pink.”
Nick laughs, embarrassed. “I’m good.”
Charlie grins and pulls his arm up to meet him, pressing a kiss to the inside of his wrist. “What are you thinking about?” he asks, voice melodic.
“You,” he answers honestly, and he knows Charlie catches the meaning behind his statement from the way his eyes soften into heat. God — what colour are they? He hopes he never finds out: that way, he can spend the rest of his days trying to figure it out.
“Shall we go home?” Charlie asks lightly, rubbing his thumb over the pulse in Nick’s wrist.
“Yeah,” Nick replies, a little breathless. He was right: being out here in the world with Charlie feels restorative, and it seems to have helped them both settle into the fact that this thing between them is no longer something that needs to be contained. Nick never wants either of them to feel like they need to hide from each other ever again. Still, with Charlie’s hand on him, he thinks he’s had quite enough of the outside world for today. “Please.”
⋆⁺₊⋆
They all but run home, dodging dogs and prams and commuters as they go. Charlie laughs, carefree and joyous, when Nick nearly trips over a curb because he’s too busy looking at him and Nick picks him up and spins him round in retaliation, just so he can hear him laugh again. He knows he didn’t grow up together, but Nick feels more wonder than he ever did as a teenager.
They get back to the flat and up the stairs, kicking off their shoes by the door. Charlie leans down to slot them both into the shoe rack, then reaches up to hang his keys on the hook. Nick loves him, loves watching him move around the space with practised ease. Maybe they’ll stay here, he thinks, or maybe they’ll find somewhere new — somewhere they can pick, together. It all feels so possible now: their whole life, right at the tips of his fingers.
Charlie turns and looks at him, and Nick knows that everything he’s thinking must be laid out on his face for him to see; he’s never been very good at hiding things. Now, he doesn’t have to. “You look happy,” Charlie says quietly, like it’s something to be celebrated.
“I am,” Nick says, stepping closer. Charlie smiles and reaches for him, wrapping his arm around Nick’s waist. His shirt pushes up at the back, so the warmth of Charlie’s hand is settled on the small of his back. Charlie leans forward and ghosts his lips across his cheek. Nick leans against him with a sigh. “Why do I just want to put myself in the palm of your hand?” he murmurs into Charlie’s neck.
Charlie runs his hands up Nick’s back further, the movement sending a solar flare up his spine. “You can,” he breathes. “You should.”
And Nick does: he lets himself fall into Charlie, and his touch, and his softly spoken words. He lets himself be led, and leads in return. He leads Charlie all the way to his bedroom and lays himself out for him; they fit together as he knew they would. Every brush of skin and lip and tongue tethers him to earth, as vital and undeniable as gravity. Nick has spent his whole life waiting for something; suddenly, he’s here, right here, under his hands and sighing his name into the light.
. • ° ★
. • . * ☾
Charlie settles back on the bed, loose limbed, as Nick goes to the kitchen to get them both water. Gathering up the duvet around him, he can’t stop the smile that is overtaking his face. He’s spent so long with the salt of tears in the back of his throat; it feels so good to be breathless for an entirely different reason.
Nick comes back quickly, setting their glasses on the side table, and sits himself on the bed, facing Charlie. He’s in his boxers, and Charlie reaches out to glide his thumb over the prominent crop of freckles that lies over a spot on Nick’s ribcage — the same one he passed his lips over mere moments before.
They don’t look like anything in particular; it’s a constellation entirely of Nick’s own making. As Charlie maps out the pattern, though, he wonders idly if this is how people used to feel when they looked up at the night sky and invented whole legends to explain the light that lay there. The mythology written across the stars differs between ancient cultures — each having its own tales of heroism, and woe and love to attribute to them — but the impulse was the same. Beautiful things deserve to be named.
Nick looks down at him, opening his mouth as if to speak before looking away again, a flush blooming on his chest.
“What’s up?” Charlie asks, prodding him in the side.
“Nothing,” Nick shakes his head and smiles. “I was just thinking… with everything we talked about last night, and this morning, I never actually said what I most wanted to say.”
The anxiety Charlie might have expected to unfurl up his spine at the statement doesn't manifest. Not when Nick is looking at him like that: eyes shining with anticipation and something else entirely. It’s late afternoon now, and they’ve raised the blinds, the sun streaming into the room without reservation. Charlie sees Nick take a breath and knows instinctively what’s coming. He won’t stop him. Not this time; not when the sun is high in the sky and they both get tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. Looking at his face, he knows what is freely given should be freely received.
“I love you,” Nick says, and the words are a warm sunrise over Charlie’s skin. “So, so much.”
“I love you, too.” The words pour out of Charlie with an ease even he didn’t expect, diffusing through the air between them, dancing between the dust motes and particles and warm, yellow light that stretches out between them. He’s said it before, of course, but it is somehow all the realer for being heard.
Before with Nick, it was love. Golden, gossamer love wound its way between them, the tentative thread joining them together, somehow, across the very fabric of reality. But, it was a fraught thing. Charlie would gather it up in the dead of night and weave it through the melancholy of his days. In the cold light of day, in that big, empty house, it was hard to remember the gleaming brightness of the hue; when Nick was gone, for all those months, Charlie worried that it would fade from him entirely.
Now though, here, with Nick, it’s like he is bathed in love. Anointed in it. It is immediate, and undeniable, threading through every word and touch and gentle reassurance. Nick crawls up the bed and slips in behind him, winding his arms around his waist and pulling him close. “I love you,” he says again, nose pressed to the back of Charlie’s head.
And Charlie feels it: the future, and the past, and everything they were, are and will be to each other. He read about it once, back when he was researching, desperate to cling onto some sort of understanding about it all: the theory that time is actually happening all at once — everything that can, or did, or will ever happen playing out at the exact same moment.
He didn’t really get it at the time; it didn’t speak to his internal sense of cause and effect. Because, if everything happened all at once, then how could actions have consequences? How could he protect himself and the people he loved through routine, and ritual, as had become the mainstay of his loving?
It makes a little more sense to him, now. He knows implicitly that he will love Nick for as long as he lives, that the love was there already, before they ever knew each other, simply waiting to be uncovered.
It did neatly tie away entropy as a concept, though. It had always bothered Charlie: that general trend of the universe to march towards chaos and disorder. Because, if time wasn’t linear, then maybe everyone was wrong; maybe not everything is destined to fall apart.
⋆⁺₊⋆
Life takes shape around them. It’s not always easy; having both spent so much of their time making themselves safe in loneliness, a few dropped threads in the stitching together of souls is inevitable. Still, stitch together they do — struck through with a golden, gossamer thread.
Charlie goes back to therapy. It is, at times, hilarious to try and skirt the edges of plausibility as he explains the last few years of his life. His therapist is the artistic type, though, and leans heavily into what she must assume are all his metaphors about waiting and losing and finding. Despite that, it helps. Every day that goes on he feels more sure-footed.
He begins to write letters: to Tori, to Olly, to his friends. He doesn’t send them. He reads a book he knows Isaac would love and, before he can think about it too much, posts it to his house without an accompanying note. One day he hopes to know what Isaac thought of it, but for now it’s enough to imagine it will bring a pocket of joy to his day. He’ll know soon enough, he thinks; Charlie is getting there.
Nick brings him to meet his uni friends, Tara and Darcy, from the photo in his bedroom. They go to their flat for dinner, and so passes a glorious evening of easy laughter. He knows what they mean to Nick, and as he watches the free affection that moves between them all, the impulse rises in him fully formed: he wants Nick to meet his friends, the people that made him, and wants them to meet Nick in return. Charlie wants to tell them that he loves them, and give them the chance to feel whatever they might feel about his departure, then love him anyway. For the first time, the thought fills him with more anticipation than fear.
After dinner, he’s in the kitchen stacking their wine glasses into the dishwasher when Tara slips in and eases the door half shut behind her. “Charlie! You don’t need to do all that — you’re our guest,” she protests when she realises what he’s doing.
“It’s alright,” he replies, turning to face her. “It’s the least I can do. Thank you. It’s been… just a really lovely evening.”
“It has,” she agrees, then looks at him for a moment. Her gaze is searching, and it makes Charlie a little nervous. “Can I hug you?” she asks suddenly.
Charlie is taken aback. “Oh– Yeah, of course.”
Tara steps forward and does just that, and he raises his arms to hug her back. “Thank you,” she says into his shoulder.
He really is confused now. “What do you mean?”
“For this.” She steps back and gestures through to the living room. Through the gap in the door, Charlie can see Nick and Darcy locked into what seems to be a very intense card game, the rules clearly only apparent to them. Nick slaps down another card and bursts into laughter at Darcy’s exaggerated shout of protest. “I’ve never seen him so…” Tara pauses and shakes her head. “You’re just really good for him, I think.”
Charlie blinks. Although he’s not sure how to take the compliment, he is so, so glad Nick has people who love him like this. “I- Well, he’s really good for me, too.”
“Yeah,” Tara smiles. “Don’t you love it when that happens?”
They’re interrupted by Darcy bursting into the kitchen, ranting about card games and their strict code of ethics as Nick follows close behind, still laughing. When they eventually leave, Tara hugs Charlie again and squeezes his hand. Darcy hugs him too, and declares to Nick that they are keeping him forever. Nick smiles at him brightly as they descend the stairs to the street, and Charlie holds him tight the whole tube ride home.
The days pass, and the more they laugh together on the sofa, or bicker about the bins, or sit and talk idly about a future measured in years instead of minutes, the easier it gets to forget how strangely they had met, and the dead-eyed desperation with which Charlie had looked for an answer to it all.
Once, at his wits end, he had posted on a forum — some buried Reddit thread of sleepless scientists passing their time debating the veracity of relativity. The replies had mostly been theoretical, and littered with jargon. The usual arguments about general relativity versus the quantum field had broken out in the replies, and Charlie had felt beside himself with frustration.
Star_Spring (02:38)
I’m not a scientist, I just desperately need an answer. Please.
QuarksRMyThing (02:59)
@Star_Spring What’s the difference?
At night, though, when he lays a hand on Nick’s chest and feels him breathe deep and solid and steady beneath him, Charlie begins to think that this is answer enough.
⋆⁺₊⋆
Then, one night, he is pulled unceremoniously from sleep. He can tell from the chill-quiet in the air and the orange glow of the streetlights outside that it is still the small hours of the morning. It’s achingly familiar, really: the dark and strange world they so frequently inhabited, before.
“Char,” Nick repeats, voice low as he shakes his shoulder, “ Char.”
Charlie groans, and drags a hand across his face, still ascending into consciousness. “You OK, baby?” He mumbles. It’s not like Nick to wake him up: although much better than before, Charlie’s sleep is still often a fragile and hard won thing. “It’s not even light yet.” As he blinks the fog from his eyes, his vision clears enough to see the expression on Nick’s face.
Suddenly, sleep is the last thing on his mind.
“Nick?” He asks, sitting straight up. “What’s wrong?”
“ Charlie ,” Nick says again, then takes a heaving breath, putting his head in his hands, “I– I had a dream.”
. • ° ★
. • . * ☾
“It was you, but I didn’t know it was you…” Nick explains as he paces up and down the bedroom. Charlie is sitting on the edge of the bed, looking unsure. “I can’t– It’s slipping away. It felt so real. ”
“Nick, I– what happened ?” Charlie is understandably confused; Nick has had bad dreams before, but none which have set him pacing about their bedroom like a caged animal.
“It was you and me, but not you and me . Nothing bad happened, really, but there was… you were frightened, or at least, confused, that I was there. I was frightened, and confused. We didn’t know each other. We were in a bedroom, somewhere. Not here. Fuck, I can’t remember. ” Nick stops and presses the heels of his palms to his eyes, dropping his voice to a whisper, “I don’t know why I’m… it just– it felt so, so real.”
“Nick…” Something in Charlie’s voice makes Nick drop his hands from his face and turn to face him. Charlie is looking at him strangely. “Can you remember what the room looked like?”
Nick sits next to him on the bed and lays a hand on his thigh, drawing comfort just from the touch. Charlie lays a hand over his and Nick flips his palm over so their fingers are interlaced. He takes a deep breath and tries to remember, but the liquid edges of the dream are already melting away. “I don’t know… it was dark, I think. It was just a room – there was a door, in the corner, a bed. I can’t–'' He drops his head in frustration. Why can’t he remember? Why does it feel so important, so essential, that he does?
“A skylight?” Charlie asks, and the words catch in his throat.
Nick looks at him. A perfect square of London night sky, glowing bright with light pollution, suddenly flashes across his memory. “Yeah,” he says eventually, “there was a skylight.”
Charlie doesn’t say anything. Something passes across his face, barely visible in the dark of the room.
“Charlie,” Nick breathes, as they sit side by side in the dead of night. “Was that..?” He trails off, looking somewhere in the middle distance, uncertain how to continue.
“Yes,” Charlie replies, sounding oddly calm. “That was the night we met.”
Notes:
i've had the final scene of this chapter written since about two days after I posted part one!! feels good to put it out there. see you soon for chapter five x
Chapter 5: the coming of light
Summary:
Nick and Charlie settle in to forever.
Notes:
the final chapter! I struggled a bit with this one, ngl. i'm not going to add to this series, this is very much the end of this story, and I think (i hope!) that i've wrapped it up in a satisfying way. thanks everyone for the gorgeous comments / kudos, or even if you've simply enjoyed it enough to stick with it to the end <3
thanks to the immeasurably talented mar for the beta (seriously, if you haven't read their latest fic, you should go and do so now) and extra shoutout to theo for being the unofficial grandpapa of this fic by tagging me in the tweet that sparked this whole concept!
tw/cw: nothing specific. a little angst around charlie's situation with his friends and nick coming to terms with the dreams.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow’s dust flares into breath.
Mark Strand, The Coming of Light
Love, like time, is a strange loop.
The dreams keep coming. They can’t predict when they will happen, but, when they do, Nick wakes with a start and the ghostly impression of a memory. It’s difficult; Charlie can tell it unmoors him. He keeps a notebook by the bed, and, occasionally, Charlie will blink awake and find him staring down at it, pen to paper, as the events of the night slip away from him. On these nights, Charlie sits up in bed and puts a hand on Nick’s back, gently taking the pen and notebook from his hands before pulling him into his arms.
“I feel like I’m letting you down,” Nick whispers into his chest one night, holding him more tightly than usual.
“You’re not,” Charlie reassures him, smoothing his hand down the back of his neck. “You never could.”
Some nights leave more of an impression than others, of course. Occasionally, something significant strikes through the haze — like the morning Nick is getting changed for work, unusually quiet, then looks across the room at Charlie and says thoughtfully, “I think we kissed last night, by the way.”
Charlie looks up from his laptop — he’s got an editing job at a small academic publisher now, and can mostly work from home — and smirks. “We did more than kiss, darling.”
Nick blushes and shakes his head. “No, I mean…” He clears his throat.
“Oh.” Charlie realises what he’s getting at, and sets his laptop down to the side. “And you remember it?”
Nick comes and sits on the side of the bed, tie still hanging loose around his neck. Charlie reaches forward to fix his collar over it for him, and Nick smiles at him before he continues. “Not really. I just woke up feeling like-” he puts his hand over his abdomen. “You know, butterflies.”
“Right,” Charlie replies, unable to suppress his grin.
Nick blushes scarlet. “Shut it.”
“What?”
“You look far too pleased with yourself right now.”
“Well, I am,” Charlie shrugs.
Nick laughs and throws himself back on the bed, covering his face. Charlie goes with him and pulls his hands away, leaning down to press a kiss to his cheek. They look at each other for a moment. “Are you OK?” Charlie asks softly. “I know this all must feel… really strange.” It’s an understatement, but it's been hard to find the words to describe any of this, really.
“No stranger than it must have been for you.”
Charlie shakes his head. “That’s not the point.”
“I know,” Nick sighs, adjusting his arms so that he’s holding Charlie properly. Charlie can tell he’s looking for the right words, so he gives him as much time as he needs, tracing a gentle path across his shoulder with his fingertip. “I think I’m mostly sad that I can’t remember it. That there’s this whole part of us that's locked away from me.”
Charlie frowns and reaches up to touch Nick’s face, smoothing his finger over the furrow in his brow. They’ve spoken about it a little: the things that Charlie remembers, that Nick doesn’t. It’s a hard line to tread. Charlie has been cautious about talking about it too much, aware of Nick’s concerns about living up to Charlie’s memories of him. He understands his anxiety, but for him it’s very simple: Nick always was and continues to be the man he fell in love with.
Still, although there had been so much heartache before, his time with Nick had always been the spark of light that had illuminated his darkest days. He wonders if he’s been doing them both a disservice with his silence.
“Do you want me to tell you about it?” he asks cautiously. “The first time we kissed?”
“Please,” Nick breathes.
Charlie nods and takes his hand. “I think we both knew it was coming,” he starts. “We’d been… skirting around it for a while, I suppose. You were so nervous, I could tell. I wasn't really. I think I thought… Well, I thought it would never actually happen.” Nick squeezes his hand at that, but gives Charlie the space to continue. “You asked me if you could.” Charlie smiles at the memory. “And it was the way you asked. Like you really, really cared about the answer. I just… I knew that whatever my answer was, you would still keep looking at me like that.”
“Like what?” Nick asks, his whole focus on Charlie’s words.
“Like I mattered to you.”
He doesn’t tell Nick how, in the moment before their lips touched, his whole existence had been contained in the hairsbreadth of space between them, burning and molten-hot, or how, when they finally made contact, he had felt it explode outwards into space and matter and reality. How it’s still expanding outwards, every day. He knows he doesn’t need to; they both still feel it, every time.
“Charlie?” Nick asks after a moment, his eyes shining.
“Hmm?”
“Can I kiss you?”
Charlie smiles down at him. “Yes, my darling. Please do.”
Nick leans up and does just that. It’s chaste, and as sweet and vital to Charlie as the first time, and the thousandth time. When they part, Nick looks up at him — always and forever the man he fell in love with. The man who found him, and loved him twice. Charlie knows now: they were always going to end up here.
“It makes sense, really,” Charlie muses.
“What do you mean?”
Charlie shrugs and pushes Nick’s hair back. “I dunno. That it was you. That it was you, all along.”
Nick smiles at that, but his eyes are still pinched with thought. “I feel… guilty, I think,” he admits.
“Why?” Charlie asks, a little surprised at Nick’s admission.
“Because, when I leave you there alone, I still get to come home to you. To this.”
“You told me that once. Or, you will tell me, I suppose.” Charlie still can’t quite get a grip on the practicalities of it all.
“What?”
“That wherever you were, wherever you went, that- that you belonged to me, too.”
Something in Nick’s expression eases. “Well, it’s true.”
“Yeah,” Charlie replies, pressing a kiss to the back of Nick’s hand. “It is.”
⋆⁺₊⋆
As the months go on, they stop questioning it as much. Most days they just set about the task of living, days filled with the mundane and the joyous.
Charlie excels at work. He’d taken the first job he’d been offered, worried that the gap in his resume would count against him at any of the bigger publishers. As time goes on though, he finds himself hungry for more, and starts scrolling the pages of Indeed with intent. It feels good to seek out a challenge; it’s a part of himself he had worried might be lost forever.
They see Tara and Darcy often, and they both quickly become dear friends to Charlie. Darcy works from home too, and they sometimes meet at cafes to spend the day working side by side. More often than not, Darcy will pass the time leaning over Charlie’s shoulder as he scrolls through job adverts, trying and failing to convince him to turn his CV neon green, or write his cover letter in rhyming couplets . Charlie doesn’t mind. Darcy is easy company, ridiculous and encouraging in equal measure, and he can’t help thinking about how well they would get on with Elle, Tao, and Isaac.
One afternoon, when he is walking home from one such session, he looks up from his phone and realises with a start that Isaac is walking down the street towards him. Isaac hasn’t noticed him yet, and it occurs to Charlie that he could still avoid this. He could duck into one of the shops he’s passing, or quickly cross the road, and go back to staring at his pile of unsent letters, never quite plucking up the courage to reach out.
He realises, though, that he doesn’t really want to. In fact, after the shock of seeing Isaac has cleared, his first instinct is to call out his name. He opens his mouth to do just that when Isaac looks up and spots him; fate has a heavy hand, it seems.
He sees Isaac stop fast, clearly unsure, and Charlie knows it’s his job to close the gap. “Isaac!” he calls out, striding over to him.
“Charlie,” Isaac says back, and Charlie could collapse in relief at the warmth in his tone.
Now they are face to face like this, though, he’s not quite sure what to say. “Um, hi,” he settles on, cringing to himself.
“Hi,” Isaac replies. Then: “how are you?”
Even after all this time, Charlie knows Isaac. It’s not a pleasantry — small talk has never been his style. He knows that if he’s asking, he really cares about the answer.
“Yeah,” Charlie reassures him. “Yeah, I’m good.”
“Are you still..?”
He shakes his head violently. “No… I– I left Ben.”
“Right.” Isaac nods. “Good, then. He was a fucking bastard.”
Charlie laughs; God, he’s missed Isaac. “Yeah, yeah he was.” He pauses for a moment. “You all tried to warn me. I’m sorry.”
Isaac shrugs. “You got there eventually.”
“I did.” Charlie searches desperately for the right thing to say. That he’s sorry. That he’s missed him, missed them all , desperately. That he’s scared: scared they won't forgive him. Scared they will , and he’ll have to face up to all the hurt he’s caused. Terrified that addressing any of it might mean they become strangers, and, in his darker moments, he won’t be able to lean on the comforting possibility that one day they could have it all back: the implicit trust, and safety, and the endless nights of laughter they had shared.
Isaac puts him out of his misery. “I got your book, by the way.”
“Oh! Good. You– you figured out it was me, then?”
“Charlie,” Isaac fixes him with a shrewd look. “With the best will in the world, which of my other friends would clandestinely send me a volume of reimagined Greek mythology?”
They both grin at that, and Charlie feels something in himself mend — both at the easy banter and at Isaac’s choice of words. “Yeah, sorry for the cloak and dagger. I’ve been… Well, I wasn’t really sure you’d want to hear from me.”
“We love you,” Isaac says simply. “We’ll always want to hear from you.”
Charlie looks away. “Tao and Elle, too?” he asks quietly.
“Of course. We’ve been saving you a place at movie night.”
“You have?” Charlie asks, feeling tears bite at the back of his throat. It’s more than he ever dared hope for.
Isaac nods. “Tao won't admit to it, obviously, but he still nearly always pours a fourth glass of wine. Sappy git.”
Charlie laughs wetly, and puts a hand to his face, trying to breathe through the surge of emotion. It unstoppers him, a little. “God, Isaac. There’s… so much I want to tell you all. So much has happened. And I want to hear what you’ve all been up to, and how you’ve been doing. Just… everything.” He’s suddenly very aware they’re having this conversation on a main thoroughfare, close to rush hour, and the bodies are parting around them as they stand in the middle of the pavement. “Maybe not here, though.”
“Yeah,” Isaac agrees, wrinkling his nose in distaste as someone brushes past him a bit too closely. “Definitely not the place for it.” He glances quickly at his watch, frowning. “I want to hear all of it, Charlie. I really do. I’m visiting home this weekend, though, and I need to go catch my train.” He looks back up, genuinely remorseful.
“It’s OK,” Charlie reassures him. He knows it’s a lot, anyway: this sudden and unexpected reunion. He also knows that Isaac will value the time to go away and process before facing up to what is bound to be an emotive conversation. “Go and do what you need to do. I’m not- I’ll still be here when you get back.”
“Good,” Isaac replies, and, before Charlie even realises what’s happening, he steps forward to pull him into a hug. It takes him a moment to register, but, when he does, he quickly wraps his arms around him to return it. “I missed you,” Isaac admits quietly. It’s not said with any reproach, just the clean honesty with which Isaac always speaks.
Charlie briefly hugs him tighter. “I missed you, too. So much.” He steps back, aware Isaac is pressed for time. “I’ll call you,” he continues, “I promise.”
“I know you will,” Isaac replies. “I trust you.”
Charlie looks at him, but there’s no hint of irony in Isaac’s expression. “Even still?”
Isaac nods. “Always, Charlie. I’ll speak to you soon, yeah?”
“Definitely,” Charlie replies. “It was… really, really good to see you, Isaac.”
“You too.” They smile at each other for a moment before Isaac eventually lifts a hand in farewell and continues on down the street. Charlie watches him disappear into the crowds of commuters and the piece of himself that his friends put there — the one he’s carried close to his heart since Kent, since the art room, since every triumph and heartache they’ve ever carried him through — glows bright with hope.
⋆⁺₊⋆
Something is bothering Nick. Charlie knows he’s mostly made his peace with the dreams, seeming to bounce back quicker and be more accepting of Charlie’s words of comfort and reassurance. In fact, as far as Charlie can tell, he’s not actually had one for weeks now. For the last few days, though, he has been quieter, less willing to let Charlie out of his sight. Charlie doesn’t mind the closeness, of course, but it doesn’t stop him from worrying.
It’s a Wednesday night, and Nick comes home from work bone-tired, setting his bag down by the door and immediately coming over to the sofa to fold himself into Charlie’s arms. He’s still in his work clothes, and Charlie reaches down to loosen his tie and undo the top button of his shirt, before pressing a kiss to the top of his head. He can feel Nick thinking from here, his finger twisting and untwisting around the fringe of the blanket that Charlie has laid across both their laps.
“What’s on your mind, my darling?” he asks.
Nick shrugs a little in his hold, clearly lost for words.
Charlie’s heart clenches in sympathy. “You don’t have to talk about it now if you don’t want to. We can just sit and relax and I can make something nice for dinner, yeah?”
Nick sighs. “No, I should. I want to.”
“You know you can talk to me about anything, don’t you?” Charlie reminds him gently.
“I do,” Nick murmurs, and Charlie feels the tension in his shoulders ease slightly. He winds the fringe around his finger once, twice again before he continues. “It’s just… it’s been a while since the last one.”
“The dreams, you mean?”
Nick nods. “I think… I think this might be the gap.”
The gap. The pain of it has diminished over time, but Charlie still remembers all of it: the waiting, and the wanting. He thinks it will probably live in him forever. “I survived it,” he says after a moment. “It got us here.”
“I know,” Nick says, nodding. “I know that that means I’ll find you soon. I know that all this… well, I believe you when you say you wouldn’t change it. I just… I feel so helpless. Knowing you’re out there suffering and not being able to do anything about it.”
“You do do something about it. You already have.”
“Yeah,” Nick replies, but he sounds unconvinced. Then: “God.” He sits up and raises a hand to scrub over his face. “This is just…”
“Weird metaphysical shit?” Charlie finishes for him.
“Weird metaphysical shit,” Nick agrees grimly. He looks up at him. “What if I could have done more?”
“Nick,” Charlie says softly, heart breaking at the desperation in Nick’s eyes, “I never expected you to bend the laws of the universe for me.”
Nick looks at him. “I would,” he says. “For you, I would.”
“I know,” Charlie replies, because he does. It’s impossible, of course, but no more than every other impossible thing that has happened to them since they met. “You found me, that’s all that matters.”
Nick finally smiles at that, reaching up to push Charlie’s hair back from his eyes. “I think we found each other.”
. • ° ★
. • . * ☾
It’s a warm, sun-soaked Friday: one of those days where the irrepressible light of morning leaves them no option but to throw themselves wholeheartedly into making the most of it. It’s still early when Nick wakes, the sun throwing bright shafts of light over the bed. He rolls over and runs a gentle hand up Charlie’s arm to wake him.
Charlie blinks one eye open, making some unintelligible noise which is probably supposed to be a sentence, then snuggles himself into Nick’s chest. Nick smiles and drops a kiss to the top of his head. “The sun’s out,” he whispers.
“That’s nice,” Charlie replies, voice rough, as he attempts to pull the duvet over his head.
Nick laughs and pushes it back down. “Can I take you somewhere?” he asks.
That finally gets Charlie’s attention, and he looks up at Nick properly, a glimmer in his eyes. “Somewhere fun?”
“Somewhere fun,” Nick confirms. “Bring your shorts.”
Charlie throws the duvet off and leaps from bed with more enthusiasm than Nick’s ever seen from him at such an early hour. He laughs and follows him up, grinning and putting a finger over his lips as Charlie tries to wheedle the information out of him. In the kitchen, Charlie wraps his arms around him from behind as he packs them a quick lunch, going up on his tiptoes slightly so he can rest his head on his shoulder, and Nick thinks about how he could easily live the rest of his life caught in a moment like this.
Nick’s school has already broken off for the summer, and Charlie begs off work with an imagined migraine. They giggle about it as they board the train at St Pancras, Charlie telling him that he feels like he’s bunking off school.
“Did you ever actually bunk off?” Nick asks as they settle by the window seat.
“I did,” Charlie confesses. “Sometimes, in sixth form, me and Tao would escape for the afternoon to get the cheap matinee tickets at the cinema. It would be us and all the retirees watching Singing in the Rain.”
Nick smiles. “That sounds fun.”
“It was,” Charlie replies wistfully, looking out of the window as the train begins to pull away.
Nick reaches out and takes his hand where it’s resting on the table top. “Have you spoken more with Isaac?”
“I have,” Charlie nods, “we’ve been texting.”
“That’s good, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Charlie smiles. “They’re having a movie night next week. Isaac invited me. I’m going to go, I think, and just… lay it all out on the table.” He looks at Nick, smile dropping slightly. “I dunno, do you think that’s a bad idea?”
“No.” Nick shakes his head. “I think it’s really, really brave. They’ll be so happy to see you, I know they will.”
“Brave and stupid, maybe,” Charlie replies, but the pensive tilt to his mouth is gone, and he glides his thumb across Nick’s palm in a silent thank you.
“Not as stupid as bunking off school, of course,” Nick reminds him.
Charlie rolls his eyes good-naturedly. “As if you never did.”
“I did actually, once,” Nick admits. “Some of the rugby boys convinced me, and we went to the arcade one afternoon. I held out for like two days before I cracked and admitted it all to my mum.”
Charlie laughs, full and deep. “I’d expect nothing less.”
The conversation moves on, and as the train heads further west, they watch the city fall away to suburbia, then eventually the fields and coastal towns of Kent. “Nick Nelson,” Charlie says when the sea finally comes into view, “are you taking me to the beach?”
⋆⁺₊⋆
Herne Bay is still quiet when they arrive, the beach mostly populated by dog walkers and tired-looking parents helping toddlers stagger across the pebbles. They meander towards the pier and get coffee from one of the cafes there. It’s barely open: a bored-looking teenager is still setting out white folding chairs around the tables outside, and the proprietor, a bearded man with a thick lip-ring, coos over what a cute couple they make as he lets the milk burn in the steamer. As they set back off towards the shore, hand-in-hand, Nick can't help thinking it’s the best coffee he’s ever had.
They walk down the path until they find a quieter section. Nick lays out their towels and they lie side by side, sharing earbuds as Charlie painstakingly choses them songs. Nick watches him at it, his brow furrowed in thought as he flicks through albums and recommended playlists. He can tell when Charlie gets to a song he knows Nick will like from the pleased smile he gets, and the way his eyes flick over to him briefly before he queues it. The hand not holding the phone is held out between them, and they take turns tracing patterns over each other's palms as the sea breeze moves over them. The air smells like salt and the barely-perceptible mossy aroma of seaweed. Nick inhales deeply and lets himself settle into the moment; it’s been a strange time, and he’s grateful for the opportunity to just exist with Charlie.
“You look relaxed.” Charlie smiles over at him.
“I am,” Nick agrees.
“I’m glad,” Charlie replies, brushing his fingers over Nick’s palm before linking their pinkies together. “I know it’s been a tough few weeks.”
The dreams are disquieting, for Nick. Although the events are lost to him, he is left with echoes of feeling: the blush of new love, and, at times, the sickness of longing. The latter dissipates quickly when he looks over at Charlie, held fast in his steady gaze and familiar touch, and remembers that he gets to spend his days and his nights falling in love with him.
He’s not had one in weeks now; he hopes that means that, somewhere out there, he’s knocking on Charlie’s door.
Still, the thought of leaving Charlie alone and questioning in that soulless house for any stretch of time haunts him. They’ve talked about it, of course; Charlie likes to remind him that he would do it all again, a thousand times over, to end up where they are now.
Nick does believe him. He gets it now, though: the intensity with which Charlie had looked for an explanation, and his relentless pursuit of some kind of cause and effect. Why this? Why them? Nick tries not to dwell on it too much — his life now is as wide and joyous as he could have ever hoped for. He has Charlie, and whatever unknown alchemy that brought them together, to thank for that.
“It has, a bit,” Nick acquiesces, “but I’m getting there.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” Charlie whispers, then takes his hand, pressing a kiss to his knuckles before laying their joined hands back down between them. They cycle through a few more songs, both of them looking up at the cloudless sky, before Charlie speaks again. “This sort of feels like when we were at the park, you know.”
“A little,” Nick agrees, and props himself on his elbow so he’s lying facing Charlie properly. “All I wanted to do then was kiss you. And tell you how much I love you.”
“Same,” Charlie admits, shading his face with his hands to keep the sun out of his eyes. “I’m sorry I didn’t. I was scared.”
“Me too,” Nick reassures him. Then, after a pause, “not running away this time, though.”
“Definitely not.”
They both smile at each other, and Nick tries to think of a way to verbalise the joy he feels, and the boundless pride at watching Charlie rebuild his life, brick by brick. How, even though they had been inextricably knotted together in ways neither of them could comprehend, it still feels like they have chosen each other. He knows they have, really: it’s a choice, to give yourself over to love like this. It’s too much to express in a single moment, but he feels safe in the knowledge that he has a lifetime of moments ahead to try.
In this one, all Nick can do is lean down and kiss him.
The warm fact of Charlie’s lips on his and the steady press of his fingers into his hip creates such a flash-bang of feeling in Nick’s chest that it necessitates him into action. When they finally part, Nick gets onto his knees, then bends down and scoops Charlie up into his arms, staggering a little on the pebbles as he straightens up. “Come on, then, time for a swim.”
“Nick!” Charlie shouts, laughing as he secures his arms around his neck. “Oh my God.”
“We both know it’s the only way I’m getting you in that water.” Nick grins, hoisting him up a little in his arms.
“Don’t you dare fucking drop me,” Charlie shrieks as Nick runs into the sea, the water splashing up and around his knees.
“Never,” Nick reassures him, tightening his hold. “I’d never.”
Charlie looks at him, then releases his arms to take Nick’s face in his hands. Not for the first time, Nick thinks about what a soul-deep honour it is to be trusted like this, by someone as kind and good and impossible as Charlie.
“I love you,” Charlie says, his words crystal clear over the crashing of the waves.
“I love you, too,” Nick replies, and he kisses him again as the water moves around them, holding Charlie secure above the waterline as Charlie tethers him to the earth itself.
Eventually, Nick’s legs start to go a little numb in the frigid water. He walks them back to shore and sets Charlie down gently on dry land. Charlie looks up at him, smiling fondly as he reaches up to fix his hair, before looking pointedly at his soaked-through shoes.
“You might want to take those off and dry them, you know,” he reminds him, before turning to make his way back to the towels.
“Fuck sake,” Nick bemoans as he pries them off, pouring out the brackish water and a surprising amount of wet sand. “These were my good Vans, as well.”
Charlie looks back at him, sparking with laughter, and he’s the answer to every question Nick has ever had.
. • ° ★
. • . * ☾
They never really do explain it. Regardless, for all of his pursuit of logic and reason, Charlie sees magic everywhere, now.
It’s in the unfailing warmth of Nick’s touch, and in the familiar way the sun streams into their flat at the end of an afternoon; it’s in the moments in the dead of night when Nick reaches across to hold him, neither of them afraid to sleep; it’s in Charlie’s rediscovery of all the things he once held so dear; it’s in Elle’s eyes when she opens the door to Charlie, after such a stretch of absence, folding him immediately into her arms, and in the crack of her voice as she calls back to Tao, babe, come look who’s here to see us; it’s in Tori’s steady gaze as Charlie tries to stumble through his explanations, and in her immediate forgiveness; it’s in Olly acting like he never left at all. It’s in Nick, folding into his life — Charlie’s real life, which he is wresting back to himself through sheer force of will — like he was always there.
Nick is an early riser, and so most mornings Charlie wakes to a note on the bedside table — always a note, never an absence — and the smell of coffee rising up from the kitchen, safe in the knowledge that there are no clocks to run from.
Some mornings, though, Charlie wakes first. He will startle awake at dawn with Nick still sleeping next to him, his heart pounding with the sense-memory of loss. It’s a habit he’s not quite kicked, even somewhere where he feels so utterly safe.
Before that morning when Nick had turned up at his door, Charlie had researched, theorised and, occasionally, prayed, aching for the comfort of understanding. Often, he had doubted his own sanity, wondering if the whole thing was a cruel dream wrought from desperation and heartache: the promise of paradise just out of reach. Sometimes, he had wondered if the universe had realised that he had been given something he was undeserving of, that he had made a habit of shedding the beautiful and the good, and had acted accordingly to even out the scales. On bad days, he wonders if it still might.
Most days, though, he knows better.
So, on these mornings, Charlie takes a calming breath and watches daylight fill the room, the sun kissing the floorboards and the foot of the bed before rolling its way up the bedsheets to anoint them both. On these mornings, he knows that the day is new, and alive, and made just for them. On these mornings, when Charlie looks over to where Nick is still sleeping and sees him slowly wake up, a smile dawning on his face, he knows for certain that what was once elysian has been made real, and is all the better for being brought to earth.
On these mornings — and on every morning, really — Charlie knows he couldn’t have dreamed this if he tried.
Notes:
and they literally lived happily ever after idk what else to say!!
if you have a passing interest in physics and philosophy, then I recommend the book i am a strange loop by douglas hoffsteader. i read it as a teenager and have referred back to it from time-to-time. thought i'd give it a wee shout-out as sections of it, especially relating to self reference and paradox, were definitely playing on my mind when planning and writing this fic!
never mind all that, though -- when you get past the science nonsense, it really is just all about love innit? thank you so much for reading, i had a great time writing this one.
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