Chapter Text
As he heads into Truham for the first time since the holidays, Charlie Spring can't help but shiver a little at the sight of the school. Had it been a few months earlier, terror might have been the cause of the sensation - but, with his bullying problem more-or-less dealt with at this point, Charlie’s able to convince himself it’s a good shiver - one he can put down to the fact that he's about to see Ben again.
Of course, Charlie does feel a little bit disappointed, a few minutes later, when Ben texts him to say that he can’t meet ‘til break-time - but that doesn’t dampen his mood, not really. He totally gets that the first day back from the holidays is busy for everyone, after all, and Ben Hope’s got tonnes of friends he probably needs to catch up with.
He's also relieved to learn that, even if he’s one of the rugby lads, Nicholas - the boy Charlie’s planted next to in form group - is, at least, neither one of the ones who'd bullied him the year before (a small group, now that most of them have gone to University or to a different sixth form college), nor one of those who'd watched it happening and laughed about it (a much larger one).
(He seems pretty nice, actually.)
That said, Charlie had been hoping that Ben might have become a bit more comfortable with himself over the holidays, so it does sting a little bit when, at break-time, the older boy spends more words, in the minute they share in one of the music rooms, telling Charlie to keep silent about what's happening with them than he does asking how Charlie's Christmas had been. But the kissing makes up for that - even if it’s not that nice to watch the way Ben’s face curdles as he walks away, just in case anybody sees the two of them and wonders.
Charlie gets it - he really does. They aren’t boyfriends, after all, and Ben has a reputation to uphold.
And Charlie understands what it’s like to keep a complicated secret. After all, he can't tell anybody about Hogwarts, can he?
January rattles along quickly enough. The routine of schoolwork, interspersed with occasional Bencounters (Charlie had thought that was pretty good wordplay when he’d come up with it, though Ben had ignored it), is more-or-less enough to let him focus on where he is (at Truham, with Tao and Isaac and Mr. Ajayi) and cut down the time he still wastes dwelling on where he isn’t allowed to be any more.
And Truham’s also where Nick Nelson is, and that’s… well, it’s nice. Nick’s nice. Even if their conversations are more typically measured in words than in sentences, Charlie still feels a little bit lighter afterwards, even if a part of him is sure that Nick’s just talking to him because he wants to find a way to make fun of him behind his back.
But, even though that anxiety doesn’t fully leave him, Charlie can’t help but smile back at Nick - and in those little moments when they talk, he finds himself forgetting how grey Truham feels - how grey everything really feels now, compared to before. The world just seems a tiny bit brighter, for a little while.
It’s such a change from everything else, in fact, that Charlie forgets himself for a moment when Nick’s fountain pen explodes all over him.
“Er - Charlie?” Nick asks, abashed, “you don’t have any tissues, do you? My pen’s, uh, sort of exploded…”
“Oh no!” says Charlie, “Sorry. I guess I could try an Evanesco, but -”
He cuts himself off immediately, horrified at the slip - but before he can make any excuses, Mr Lange is already there, railroading him into helping Nick clean up in the bathroom.
Nick gives Charlie a slightly confused look, but he doesn't ask what an 'evanesco' is, and by the time they’re in the bathroom, joking that Nick might be stuck with blue hands for the rest of his life, Charlie’s starting to think the danger’s passed.
“I’m sorry.” he chuckles, as he watches Nick scrub his hands to no avail. “But I think you might be blue forever.”
“I look like I’m wearing blue gloves.” Nick grouses good-naturedly, after one last attempt to make use of the school’s anaemic soap dispensers.
“You can make it a school fashion!” Charlie suggests, grin widening at the sight.
“Maybe I’ll pretend I’ve got a tattoo!” Nick laughs, smiling just as widely. “Unless - you said you had an, uh, evanesco? Is that a wet-wipe or something?”
Charlie freezes for a moment, but he leaps on the out Nick’s inadvertently given him.
“Yeah, um, exactly - I usually keep a pack in my bag, my mum swears by them.” He says, forcing a chuckle. “She says it’s cheaper than buying me a new shirt if I get something on mine - but I didn’t bring any today, sorry.”
He looks at Nick’s shirt, wincing.
“They’d probably have been useful today - sorry about that.”
“Don’t worry!” Nick says. “Thank you for helping - I really appreciate it.”
Before Charlie can reply, though, a break-time bell sounds, and Charlie checks for the both of them to see if it’s the first or second.
And then he sees the messages he'd missed from Ben in the meantime, and frowns.
Apparently, missing a few messages during breaktime makes him ‘fucking useless’.
Okay.
Charlie feels more than a little bit queasy about that, even as he’s typing a hurried apology. Ben had ghosted him over the Christmas holidays “because mum doesn’t like me using my phone at home” (and Charlie had Ben’s username on Twitter and had seen him tweeting over the break, so he’d known that wasn’t exactly true at the time) - but he was somehow meant to reply to Ben as soon as he got a message, as if he was listening out for His Master’s Voice?
Not for the first time, he reflects that life had been a lot simpler when he’d been at a school where phones literally didn’t work.
“Charlie?”
Nick’s voice makes him look up from his phone, startled.
“Sorry!” he says, blushing. “Yeah - first bell. Guess I won’t get to miss any of double science after all…”
Even as Charlie starts to feel worse and worse about what’s happening with Ben - in the weeks that follow, he blanks Charlie in the hallways, makes fun of him to his friends a time or two, and never spends more than a few seconds apologising for any of that before he’s back to saying how pretty Charlie is and going in for another kiss - his new, preposterous, friendship with Nick Nelson somehow makes up for that.
It’s - confusing. Tao and Isaac (and Elle, judging by the way that Tao smirks at his phone after he lets her know about Charlie’s new rugby pal) think that he’s crushing on a straight boy, which he isn’t - but it still feels, well, a bit different, he supposes.
There’s so much that hangs over his friendship with Tao and the others, is the thing. Charlie’s really, genuinely happy that he was able to keep being friends with them, even if he’d only been able to meet up in the school holidays until last year; and they’ve never pushed him on what had happened to make him come back to Truham from the ‘boarding school he got that scholarship for’, because they know what a sore subject it is for him.
But all those unasked, unanswered questions still hang over their friendship like a cloud, not least because he’s never really been able to explain why he wasn’t able to call during term-time, or even send them letters.
(After all, even if he’d made up stuff to tell them about in a letter, he still would’ve had to deliver it by owl.)
And with Nick, all that history isn’t there. It’s the only time, if Charlie’s being honest with himself, that he finds himself able to focus on where he is without feeling upset about it. Even if they’re just casual friends - and it’s not like they’ve talked about anything all that deep, they’ve just been chatting in school, after all - it still feels important: like a new beginning, somehow.
It’s so different from the way that Charlie’s made to feel by Ben, in fact, that he’s able to decide - after a pretty embarrassing consultation with Mr. Ajayi - that he’s going to talk to him, to actually try and make him face up to the way that he makes Charlie feel and promise to do better by him.
Well, Charlie’s going to message him, at least. Phones might make life a bit more complicated, Charlie reflects, but they do make it a lot easier to ask difficult questions.
And then, just as he’s about to head home and steel himself up, he sees Ben kissing a girl by the school gates. Charlie feels like he’s taken a bucket of water to the face - a wave of nausea and anger descends, and he realises that he doesn’t actually want to talk to Ben at all.
A few angry messages and a lot of ignored notifications later, Charlie’s gone from kind of being in a sort of relationship to definitely not being in one, and, even if that’s a bit of a step back, in a life-progression sort of way, he feels so relieved at the same time that he catches himself on the brink of happy tears more than once in the days that follow.
Tori, insightful as always, is quick off the mark to notice the next morning, as Charlie’s staring at a bowl of cereal he can’t bring himself to finish:
“Why’s your face like that?” she asks, charming as ever.
“I - broke up with my boyfriend.” Charlie says, muted.
“Was he a knob?”
“Yes.”
“…Well done, then.”
Which is more-or-less the Tori equivalent of three cheers and an Olympic medal. Charlie smiles at her, then goes back to contemplating his cereal - only for her to carry on talking.
“I mean it, Charlie - well done. You’ve been screwed over by knobheads way too often, here and up north. Good on you for getting rid of one.”
Charlie, to his surprise, finds that he’s able to muster a small chuckle and a half-smile at that.
‘Up north’ was their ‘for use in polite company’ term for Hogwarts. Tori had, after she’d got over her shattered belief in a rational world, been jealous as all hell when Charlie had been sent a letter and she hadn’t, and that’d definitely tarnished their relationship in the years that followed.
And yet, when Charlie had come back home in tears the Christmas before last, still cradling the broken remains of his wand (as if he could will them back together by wishing hard enough), she had been the only one to believe him when he said he hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d even had to ask her not to confront their parents about it, because he knew it wouldn’t have fixed anything.
She’s a pretty great sister, all things told.
The good mood stays with him all the way to school, even while Tori tries to get him to describe his dream guy on the bus (Charlie says he’d be happy to settle for someone who liked him, and carefully avoids calculating the vanishingly small number of people who'd actually meet that requirement, as things stood).
(He avoids thinking about that even harder when he spots Nick laughing with his friends as the bus pulls up outside Truham.)
In a pretty surprising turn of events for Charlie, Truham actually starts to feel a lot better after he dumps Ben. Before Charlie stopped seeing him, he’d been spending half his school breaks making excuses to dash away to meet Ben - now, he finds that he’s able to spend more time with his friends than he has since he came back to Truham in the first place, and he doesn’t feel the need to spend as many lunchtimes in the protective solitude of Mr. Ajayi’s classroom, either.
He’s also able to spend more time with Nick Nelson.
Spending time with Nick’s not really like spending time with his other friends. They don’t talk that much outside of their form group, to start with (though they often keep talking all through their breaks, now, and they seem to spend more and more time walking to class together - Nick’s usually happy to leave a bit earlier and go out of his way if they’re not going to the same building, at that). But talking to Nick feels easy in a way that’s new to Charlie - there’s no baggage to avoid, no secrets which his friends are too polite to ask about (and which he’d be too afraid to be honest about, anyway).
Really, it’s just nice to build a new friendship from a blank slate - to recommend books and films to each other, or gripe about homework, or joke about the teachers and how ridiculously stuffy the school uniform is.
It’s so nice, in fact, that, when Nick startles Charlie by his locker and tells him that there was something he’d been meaning to ask, there’s a moment where Charlie’s absolutely certain that Nick’s going to ask him out.
“Do you want to join the rugby team?”
“…What?”
Even though he feels like an idiot for that little snippet of excitement, Charlie still can’t help but smile through the conversation - especially when Nick gets flustered for accidentally agreeing that he was small and weak - not least because Nick says at one point that he’d seen how fast Charlie could run, which meant that he’d been watching him in PE.
Charlie’s totally unwilling to think about what that might mean - but the whole scenario has him so flustered that, before he’s really realised what he’s doing, he’s actually agreed. To play rugby. With Nick. And all the other people on the rugby team who aren’t Nick.
It’s a good thing that Charlie has to dash for a drum lesson right after that - otherwise, he’s sure he’d have managed to find a way back out, and (to his surprise) he realises that he doesn’t actually want to. He’s still smiling even as he apologises, out of breath, to his music teacher for his lateness - and he’s in a good mood all evening.
For the first time he can remember, he gets through the rest of the day without thinking about magic once.
By the time that Thursday afternoon rolls around - when the sugar rush of agreeing to play rugby with Nick has been well and truly replaced by the crash of realising that he’s going to get absolutely clobbered - Charlie’s on his way to his first practice.
“I honestly can’t believe you’re going to go and play rugby, just because you’ve picked up another silly crush.” Tao pronounces, voice laden with all the disdain of a disgruntled duchess.
“I’m not!” Charlie protests, choosing to ignore the fact that he’s spent £25 of his extremely meagre pocket money on a school polo shirt. “Nick made it sound really interesting, and the team needed another player to go to interschool games.”
He pauses, because he’s definitely missed something in Tao’s statement, before adding, indignantly:
“And I don’t have a crush on him!”
Even fueled as he is by that indignation, Charlie still almost turns around by the changing rooms when he hears someone suggest that he probably hates sports because he’s gay - but he steels himself, and pushes open the door.
And it turns out that excited smile on Nick’s face, as he rises to greet him, is enough for Charlie to forget about all the gossip right away - before he knows it, he’s out on the pitch, doing his best to nod attentively as Nick attempts to explain the many, many rules of rugby to him.
“…and a drop goal is where you kick it through the posts during general play, a bit like a conversion except you’d get three points instead of two because it’s a lot harder. Not too complicated, right?”
Charlie shoots him a desert-dry look, but Nick’s just too enthused for him to stay that way for long.
“Well, it’s not rocket science.” he admits. “Though it’s a close-cut thing. What about fouls?”
Nick laughs.
“Fouls are black magic, and even fans don’t really understand them. There’s about twenty, all told - but they pretty much boil down to, don’t be a dick, don’t throw the ball forwards, and don’t be offside, which basically means don’t be in front of the ball. You’ll figure out what not to do before you know it.”
“…Right. Okay, I think I’ve got it - at least, as much as I’m going to today.”
Nick beams at him.
“Great! Why don’t we get onto the field and go through the basics, then?”
At least rugby’s a lot less complicated than quidditch had been, Charlie thinks, as he follows Nick onto the pitch. There were almost 700 fouls in that monstrosity of a sport, some of which literally had academic treatises on how they should be interpreted. Compared to all that nonsense, rugby was practically snakes and ladders.
Not that he’d ever actually played a real game of quidditch. Charlie had actually made reserve seeker at the start of his third year, but he didn’t get a chance to actually play in a match before he’d been expelled.
He wonders for a moment if that’s what it’ll be like to be a reserve on the rugby team - but at least he’s being allowed to practice with them, instead of just watching practice from the stands, like he’d had to at Hogwarts.
Nick starts him off with passes, which come to him easy enough - he’d had to learn how to catch a snitch on a three dimensional pitch, after all - and the beam and compliment Charlie gets after pulling off his first perfect pass is basically worth the price of admission by itself.
Charlie can’t help but wince when Nick suggests that they practice tackling, though.
“I know I was joking about being weak,” he says, “but I’m definitely too weak for this.”
It’s only half-true (wizards are really durable, and Charlie’s walked away from collisions with bludgers with nothing worse than bruises, so teenagers aren’t all that scary by comparison), but compared to Nick, he's built like a toothpick, and Nick’s nowhere near the biggest player on the team. Charlie's a fast runner, sure - but he knows that when a person runs into a brick wall, it’s rarely the wall that suffers, no matter how fast the person's running when they hit it.
“Where’s your can-do attitude?” Nick asks, grinning at him.
“She left. Long ago.” Charlie shoots back.
“Just try!” Nick encourages. “Give it a go - just run at me. I won’t dodge - I bet you can do it!”
“…Fine.” Charlie says, and goes for it - and, before he knows it, he’s toppled Nick to the ground and winded them both.
“That was perfect!” Nick croaks, as he hauls himself to his feet and offers Charlie a hand, beaming. “Let’s try that again while running!”
Maybe, Charlie thinks, rugby isn’t going to be that bad after all.
In fact - to Tao’s continual disbelief, and Isaac’s and Elle’s great amusement - Charlie actually finds that he’s really enjoying rugby practice. Spending more time with Nick’s great, obviously - it’s not a crush, it’s definitely not a crush - but more than that (and to his enduring surprise) Charlie finds that he’s - well, he’s not good at rugby, but he’s not terrible either, and he’s actually having a lot of fun, which is what school sports are meant to be all about, in theory.
He catches the tail end of Nick talking to his friend, Christian, at the end of their next practice, and can’t stop the grin from forming on his face when he overhears Nick saying that he’s a really cool guy - and then there’s the conversation they have while they head back to the changing rooms after practice.
“So…” asks Charlie, “Am I actually any good at rugby? I mean, I’ve enjoyed it, but -”
“Of course you are!” Nick interrupts, immediately concerned. “Why d’you ask?”
It’s more like a stream of consciousness than a sentence, but Charlie’s able to explain most of how he feels: that he’s worried he’s going to be a burden, and let people down, and that he still doesn’t know if the team actually likes him or wants him playing with them -
“It’s silly.” he says, cutting himself off as they reach the changing rooms. “It’s just - all of the older boys kinda remind me of the people who used to bully me.”
Nick’s silent for a moment - probably because he’s annoyed that I've slagged off his friends, Charlie thinks, horrified - and then he seizes Charlie in a tight half-hug.
“Well, I like you, and I definitely want you on the team!” he exclaims.
“Great!” Charlie laughs, his tension instantly dissipated. “That’s good enough for me!"
The moment passes, they get busy changing - but that ‘I like you’ echoes in his head the whole time.
Yeah, Charlie thinks, despairingly, I’ve totally got a crush on Nick Nelson.
Just as he’s finishing changing, Charlie’s phone pings, and, as he reads the message that’s come through, all the elation he’d felt drains away, as he read’s Ben’s message:
Ur at rugby right? meet me at the music block after
Charlie almost ignores it - but he decides there and then that enough is enough, and he’s not actually as afraid of Ben Hope as he’d thought he was.
Why? he texts back, already on his way.
The reply - please charlie I just want to talk - is pathetic, frankly, and Charlie only deigns to respond with a monosyllabic fine. He knows it’ll be best to actually have a proper conversation with Ben to wrap things up - even if it's just to let him know just how much of a prick he was.
Only, that’s not how it actually goes. From the moment Ben sees him, he starts acting as if he’s not been dumped at all: first, making fun of Charlie wearing a coat, in February, then trying to touch him, then getting angry when Charlie stops him.
“God, what’s your problem?” he whines. “I’m trying to be nice.”
“I said,” Charlie says, voice as steady as he can manage, “I don’t want to meet up any more.”
“Yeah, and I don’t believe you.”
“What?”
Ben sneers.
“You’re just scared of getting caught.” he says - a statement so ridiculous that Charlie instantly forgets about trying to be level-headed.
“Why the hell would I be scared about getting caught?” he scoffs, anger vying with the urge to burst out laughing. “Everyone in school already knows I’m gay - you’re the one who’s scared of getting caught! You can’t even look at me when other people are around - not to mention that you have a girlfriend.”
Ben says nothing, so Charlie ploughs on.
“Yeah - that’s right. I’ve seen you with her at the school gate.”
“Don’t be angry at me because I’m not ready to come out yet!” Ben growls back.
“I’m not angry about that.” Charlie says, voice icily calm. “Feel free to take all the time you need. I’m angry because you never cared about me or my feelings - you just wanted to have a disposable boy to make out with whenever you felt like it, and thought that I was a safe bet, because nobody would believe me over you if I told them about it!”
“Oh, get real!” Ben hisses. “It’s not like anyone else would want to go out with you, is it?”
And then, in the stunned silence which follows that pronouncement, he shoves Charlie against the wall and tries to kiss him.
“Stop it!” shouts Charlie, though he knows nobody’s going to hear him. “Don’t - stop it -“
He keeps struggling, tears running down his face - but Ben’s bigger and stronger than him, and Charlie can’t keep him from pressing their faces together in a twisted mockery of a kiss.
It’s absolutely horrible - so bad that, for the first time in months, something starts to build up in Charlie: a tingling sensation which builds from his toes to his head, making him feel like he’s swallowed a bolt of lightning.
And suddenly it’s horrible for a whole other reason - because that feeling was how Charlie’s accidental magic showed itself, and if he had an outburst bad enough to attract the Ministry’s attention, his whole life would be over.
But just as the feeling’s about to overflow and flood out of him, Ben’s yanked off him and tossed away - and, somehow, Nick’s there, angrier than Charlie’s ever seen him.
“He told you to stop!” he bellows, as Ben takes a step back, then another. “Go on - fuck off.”
Charlie’s still trying to catch his breath as Ben storms off, waiting for the magic to recede as he calms down; it takes a long moment before he’s able to meet Nick’s gaze. All the anger’s gone from the older boy - there’s just an overwhelming concern, now.
“…Did you hear all of that?” Charlie asks, not quite knowing what answer he’s hoping for.
“Most of it.” Nick admits. “I just - it seemed like something came up while we were getting changed, so I… I wanted to check everything was okay.”
Even as he’s apologising to Nick for the bother (and Nick’s telling him off for apologising), Charlie’s more relieved than he can say - that Ben’s gone, that he didn’t accidentally kill anyone or destroy the school in the process, and, above all, that Nick is his friend.
As they head for the school gate, neither boy notices the scorch-marks where Charlie had been standing when Ben forced himself onto him - or the fact that every fuse in the music building has somehow blown simultaneously.
In fact, it’s only after they’ve split up, Charlie heading for the bus stop and Nick to the school car park, that Charlie thinks about his magic again - because, somehow, when Nick Nelson is around, it’s the last thing on his mind.