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The last day of 1962 is uncomfortably warm in Peru; probably disgustingly hot, if Charles didn’t have the doors to the balcony wide open and letting in the stiff breeze from over the ocean.
Charles spends most of the day reading December edition ‘the year in review’ articles—or he starts there, with the monthlies, but then goes on to the annuals and the quarterlies and the things he's already read—from the small stack of journals he didn’t think to ask for until two days ago. Erik showed up with them yesterday: the American Journal of Human Genetics, Advances in Genetics, Genetics in Medicine, Human Heredity, the International Journal of Genetics, the Journal of Applied Genetics, the Journal of Molecular Evolution, Mammalian Genome, the Cambridge Journal of Genetics, Monographs on Theoretical and Applied Genetics, most of which he’s read twice, and the Annual Review of Genetics, which is three months old and a review of last year but Charles isn’t opposed to rereading.
He checks the door to the underground in the morning, as he does every morning, but it’s very much locked, as it always is. He doesn’t bother with the two doors to outside anymore. He’s well aware that he can’t do the stairs in his chair, which means he has to get out of his chair, drag himself along the floor and down the stairs, stack the couch cushions under the door, pull himself up onto them to reach the handle, and then throw the cushions back up the stairs, pull himself back up the stairs, and then pull himself back into the chair, if he wants to check those doors. They’ll only be locked, and after the first two weeks, the bruises and scrapes and the sheer effort of it stopped being worth it.
So he gets up in the morning, checks the door to underground, makes himself breakfast, eats it on the balcony where the breeze is cool, and then settles down with his journals to make sure he hasn’t missed any major breakthroughs in the four months since he left Oxford.
He hasn’t.
The clock on the shelf above the sofa reads 10:12pm when the key turns in the lock on the front door.
Charles is stacking the journals alphabetically in the mostly empty bookshelf, and doesn’t bother turning around. He hasn’t yelled at Erik in almost a week, but that doesn’t mean that Erik deserves his courtesy.
Erik locks the door behind him. “Evening, Charles.”
Charles sets ‘Advances in Genetics’ atop the pile, and remains facing the shelf. “Good evening.”
Erik’s footsteps sound up the stairs, and then behind Charles across the room, and then he’s in the corner of Charles’s peripheral vision, by the bench around the open kitchen. “I brought champagne. It’s new year’s eve.”
“I know.”
Erik is doing something in the kitchen. Probably checking the fridge. There’s not much in there. There’s a cupboard full of long-life milk.
Charles wheels himself back over to the sofa, considers shifting back onto the sofa, and doesn’t. “I was thinking I might just go to bed. I don't have a lot to celebrate.”
Erik doesn’t rise to it; he never does. “I can leave, if you like.”
He should say yes, just to spite Erik, who Charles is quite sure has no desire to spend the evening with Raven and Azazel. But it’s new year’s eve, and he isn’t tired, and more than anything Charles is bored, and perhaps even more than boredom Charles is wary of sitting here alone on new year’s eve with a bottle of brandy and his thoughts until, give or take a couple of weeks, he’s as delirious and useless with depression as he was a month ago, when John Calker was still here and neither of them was stuck here for good.
Not for good. He is going to get home eventually. But not if he drives himself mad just to spite Erik.
Charles shakes his head, more at himself than anything, and wheels out from behind the sofa and the coffee table. “No. Stay.” He wheels himself just far enough to be able to see Erik in the kitchen. He’s checking the pantry. “Do you really plan to drink champagne?”
“I hear it’s the done thing.”
Charles half-coughs a hard breath of laughter, presses his lips together a moment because he’s really not in the mood to fight with Erik, and doesn’t point out that it’s probably not the done thing to drink it with a friend you’ve locked up against his will on the South American coast. Erik wouldn’t rise to it, but he might try to make a logical argument, in his own amoral brand of logic, and Charles knows that would make him furious and he doesn’t have the energy right now to be furious. He gives himself a moment, and lets it go.
“I’ll have brandy.”
***
They sit on opposite sides of the chess table by the window with two tumblers of brandy, the bottle of champagne unopened in the kitchen.
The chess table wasn’t here three weeks ago; nor was the set atop it. Charles doesn’t know where the set came from, besides the obvious, but it’s lovely—silver for white and brass for dark, obscenely expensive if Erik hadn’t charmed them into his possession by virtue of their being metal, albeit not magnetic. Perhaps Erik made them, like a lifetime ago he made the little dogwood tree that's sitting on the shelf above the sofa where Charles didn’t put it. Charles hasn’t asked.
They play chess.
Charles wins.
He lowers Erik’s brass king to its side on the board rather than knocking it over, because they’re metal pieces and they clang if they’re knocked over.
Erik catches Charles’s fingers before he can draw his hand back, not forcefully, not even very quickly. He raises Charles’s hand in his own, presses a kiss below the pads of his fingers, a single, lingering press of the mouth, not—anything—but too warm to be quite chaste.
He relinquishes Charles’s hand back to the board. “I hate fighting with you.”
“Then stop.”
Erik breathes out through his nose, and begins placing the pieces back on the board.
***
They consider bringing up the television from underground, watching the broadcast from New York, but don’t. Charles pours the champagne, which only he ends up drinking because Erik is still on brandy. Erik brought a radio with him, and he turns it on, and they watch the moon over the ocean. In the moonlight, the sand on the beach is black and the water is black and the cliffs are dull gold and the moon on the waves is quicksilver and it would be very beautiful, in better circumstances; still is, sometimes.
The commentator on the radio counts down with a live studio crowd behind him, and when the fanfare plays as the clock strikes midnight, Erik and Charles clink their glasses together, and drink deep.
“1963,” Charles murmurs, when the fanfare has segued into something slightly quieter.
Erik pours himself more brandy, then sips it. “It’s going to be a good year, Charles. I swear.”
“I’m not sure we have the same definition of ‘good’.”
Erik sips his drink again, and doesn’t deny it.
Charles finishes his token new year’s champagne, and raises the empty glass in a mock toast. “Well, happy new year. May auld acquaintance be forgot, and a cup of kindness, and all of that.”
Erik doesn’t forget anything, and they both know it. But he swaps Charles’s empty champagne flute for his other empty glass and pours more brandy, and when the bottle’s back on the table, he rests his hand atop Charles’s on the arm of the wheelchair, and Charles doesn’t stop him.
“Happy New Year,” Erik murmurs into the night, for the first time in so very many years.
If Charles’s eyes are damp, almost glassy, and the set of his mouth is more desperation than anything else, if Erik mostly just looks tired and almost wants to take the damn helmet off just to not be fighting, neither of them says it.
Charles turns his hand palm up under Erik’s on the arm of the chair, lets their fingers slip together. It’s all wrong, it’s all, all wrong, but…it’s just for now. Anything can be fixed, with time and effort. Everything will be better…when he figures out how. Erik’s gone—well and truly off track—but it’s Erik, and Charles knows him, and Charles will figure out how to fix it all eventually.
He squeezes Erik’s right hand in his left, just once, softly, and watches the moon turn the shadow of the ocean to strips of light.
“Happy New Year, my friend.”