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When he was younger, Charlie was fascinated by dreams.
He still is, somewhat. He had learned early on that there wasn’t scientific data supporting dream interpretation and mental health, or his understanding of the world to be honest, but it was fun. His mother had kept a dream journal, and later, when she got sick and too tired to write, she’d narrate her dreams and Charlie would transcribe them. In the months after she passed and Charlie began to sort through her belongings, it struck him for the first time that she might not have been entirely faithful in her retellings. Maybe she wanted to tell stories to her son. Maybe there were dreams too dark to tell him. Maybe these were things that he’d have to live with in her absence.
Charlie had tried to keep his own dream journal through the years, but there were always other things to do and people to see and life to live. So he’d never been consistent in his journaling, but it was fun to do it when he could. Maybe that was enough.
Some of his dreams were fun, even when leaning into the nonsensical. He rarely had nightmares, rarely had dreams that lingered once the sun came up.
Well, most of the time.
The dreams that stayed with him came a few weeks after meeting Alex Standall.
The dreams started like this: there is a person, it doesn’t matter who they are, and in his dreams this person is always changing, but their smile is the same. Charlie was always in love with them. He’d wake up the next morning, bleary, and with an ache that he could never explain away.
Then he kissed Alex, and Alex pushed him away, and the dreams changed. Charlie is a knight, a blacksmith, a florist, a dancer, a scribe, a lover. The person changes each time. And each time Charlie loses them. He wakes up in a cold sweat, a series of phantom images splayed behind his eyelids. Of a love that is stolen away from him over and over and over again.
Then Alex found him after the riot, and he held his hand until the paramedics came, and once everything was clear and painkillers kicked in and they had time alone to talk and kiss again. The dreams changed the night he got into bed with Alex for the first time: there is a person, and in every permutation of every possible reality that they appear in, regardless of gender or hair colour or place they were in, Charlie was in love with them. And they loved Charlie back. Each and every time. Over and over and over again.
One day, a few weeks after waking up in Alex’s bed, Charlie opened his eyes to see his boyfriend, sitting up in bed beside him and reading a book. The early Saturday morning sunlight flitted in through the cracks in the blinds, casting the room in a soft glow that made the space seem somewhat surreal, dreamlike. Alex’s eyes moved along with whatever he was reading, eyebrows knitted ever so slightly in the way Charlie had learned long ago happened whenever he was focused in any capacity.
Charlie wasn’t sure how long he lay there, the quiet of the early morning only broken by birds chirping just outside of Alex’s window. Something about Alex, this Alex, the one Charlie could glimpse in the hours when they were alone, the one that only ever belonged to Charlie now, made his heart swell with something that he would only ever associate with devotion.
He probably could have kept staring at him forever, and maybe in his dreamscapes he would, but after a while Alex’s eyes flickered over to him, “Morning.”
Charlie leaned closer, pressing his forehead against Alex’s arm, “Mhm, morning.”
Alex closed his book and placed it by his side. His arm--the one Charlie had nuzzled against--moved, and Charlie almost bemoaned the lost of contact until Alex instead reached around and rested his hand on the back of Charlie’s head, fingers threading into his soft hair, “I think you were having a nice dream, didn’t want to wake you yet.”
Charlie hummed, eyes fluttering close when Alex’s fingers scratched lightly at the base of his skull, “I dreamt of you.”
“You did?”
“I think… I’ve dreamed of you for a long time.”
Alex raised an eyebrow, but it almost seemed more reflex than inclination, almost flustered by the declaration and gentleness of it all, “That’s cute. I can never remember my dreams.”
Charlie opened his eyes, tilting his head slightly to look Alex in the eye, “You are my dream now. I think you’ve always been.”