Work Text:
Erik visited Charles’ grave monthly, leaving flowers and telling him about the world. He was almost able to imagine Charles sitting beside him, absentminded fingers braiding blades of grass together, so much light and life in his eyes. Sometimes, Erik could hear him humming an old song, or his easy, carefree laugh. He could feel the faintest brush of familiar fingers ghost across his skin.
Once Charles had gotten sick, they had moved from Janus back into town, and Erik never saw fit to return to their island without the man who had made it theirs. He had loved Janus because of Charles, and without him, the isolation that had once been his respite now was too much.
Erik lived close to the water, in a quiet seaside village he thought Charles would’ve liked to retire to. The wind and the waves and the ocean were a part of him; they were in his blood. He could see the sea from his kitchen window; could hear the waves crashing down onshore with the tide. If he closed his eyes, Erik could imagine he was on Janus, and that Charles was right behind him, slipping a hand around his waist or reaching to tangle their fingers together.
As he watched the ocean surrender to night, Erik was suddenly awash again with the loving and the losing of Charles. He thought back to Janus, and the light he cared for there for so long, every one of its flashes still traveling somewhere into the darkness far out toward the universe’s edge. The light would reappear, he told himself. He wondered if he could ever let himself believe it again.
After the war, it had felt as though the light there, on Janus, was calling to him. It still did, sometimes; a longing ache in his chest, to return to the life before all of this. Before Charles’ illness, before their sudden and heart-wrenching abandonment of Janus – to when life was the two of them and they were happy, and the sunlight always fell through the clouds.
Now, Erik’s life felt overcast again. He carried a solemn, melancholy shadow, cast inward.
Janus had taught Erik more than he knew how to articulate. The light, with its five-second flash, true and steady. Erik had chosen that same, constant life when he’d taken the lightkeeper’s post. The war had not made him a soldier, but Janus had steadied his shaking hands and soothed the nightmares; Janus had taught him to live again.
Charles had taught him to live again. And that, Erik thought, was enough.