Archive of Our Own

Love had forever been a touchy subject for Charlie’s tired psyche. 

A younger version of him cried out every time he felt alone and neglected, sequestered into the deepest crevice of his heart. Charlie didn’t let himself wallow in the past but that little voice, a niggling, squirming thing as dark as coal, it comforted him too much to repress fully. So it stayed and it spoke in the cadence of a child, an infant, Flippa’s age or maybe older, though he couldn’t tell. In moments of quiet or fear or grief, the voice would wail and sob and cry for comfort it would never get. And Charlie played his own parent as he always would, rocking back and forth under the moonlit sky, silent as stone as not to wake the sleeping child in the other room. 

Charlie was a stranger to love, truly. Maybe it should have bothered him more, although when one grows up without something, they learn to adapt. He’d evolved quickly into an adult and attachment, even now, was a fleeting thing. Structures and people in his life were more or less temporary enjoyments. Amusements for a while before they tapered off into obscurity in his mind. 

When Charlie thought of love, he thought back to the courthouse wedding. Him and Mariana hadn’t needed to get married at all. Many of the couples assigned to each other didn’t. They were different, however. It became extremely apparent when Mariana walked face-first into a sign and nearly knocked out a tooth, giving him a sizable bruise across his cheekbone and temple that was the colour of a grape within a couple of hours. 

Imagine Charlie’s surprise when he looked in the mirror and found that exact mark across his own skin. No pain when he pressed down upon it, with the same colouring and blotching as Mariana’s. He’d heard of this phenomenon but his detached self had only ever written it off as a fairytale. Never something that could be real and certainly never something that could happen to him, of all people. 

The wedding went forward a short while later, Charlie marrying a man he barely knew, Charlie marrying his equal, his other half if the stories were to be true. 

He felt nothing, strangely enough. Perhaps, even then, Charlie had thought that this would be temporary. Divorce existed, after all, and oh, how he had made that fact clear through their marriage. 

It wasn’t loveless. Their relationship had been one the colour of a bruise, sickly purple-blue. It was tangled fingers and tousled hair and passion and fire. Mariana was fun. Charlie enjoyed him thoroughly, enjoyed the fire that rose up in his gut and threatened to consume him every time they argued and every time they made up. It was a cycle he didn’t want to tire of. He’d spent so long feeling nothing that he yearned, craved, for a touch of actual substance in his life. Mariana did make him feel whole, though perhaps not in the right way. Charlie had always feared that if they truly went through with the divorce, if they left each other, he’d continue as a husk of a man, doomed to aimlessly wander this plane and eventually the next. 

Maybe he truly didn’t know what love looked like. Or maybe he ignored the quiet moments and hoped they faded into the back of his memory before they took root and poisoned him. Mariana finding him at home, red marks on his arms mirroring the puncture wounds of skeleton arrows in Charlie’s. Bandaging him up without a word. Gifting him with a kiss on the temple when he was done. Cooking breakfast for them all when he stayed over. Playing with Flippa when Charlie was hit by exhaustion. His husband was kind, sometimes. 

Charlie probably should give credit to himself too. He’d tried to be kind. Had tried to remember scraps of information about Mariana, had thrown himself into learning Spanish. He knew enough to pick up bits of broken sentences and put them together. It would make Mariana smile, at least, and refused to read into how the smile made him feel. 

But Mariana was only half of the picture Charlie could put together about love. Flippa was the other part, one that tugged so viciously on his heart that it frightened him terribly. 

She had Charlie’s fire, and Mariana’s looks. She was a firecracker, a bomb, perfectly suited to shooting even from as young of an age as she was. Charlie had made it clear to everyone else that his daughter was the coolest, the most badass. 

In the end, he was a fool for thinking it would save her. 

She had been beautiful and theirs. A child raised within a soul union should have been brilliant, strong, intelligent and every wonderful thing under the sun. Charlie would be lying if he said Flippa wasn’t already all of those things but he knew, deep down in a twisted part of his heart that if him and Mariana could get their shit together, she could be more.

Their marriage dissolved rapidly under the stress of caring for a child. She was the joy of their lives, the singular beacon of hope and light that kept them alive, kept them moving through their individual pain. Mariana had other people to love, too much of a free bird to be shackled by marriage. 

Which left loveless, twitchy, neurotic Charlie to care for their daughter. 

When he closed his eyes, those memories stood out the sharpest. Teaching Flippa how to shoot. Taking her to see her friends. That fateful day with Tilin. He was a coward at the end of the day, only able to dwell on the good parts. Maybe that was what love was, although he doubted it. He loved Flippa. He loved Tilin and he didn’t hate Mariana. 

The worst dreams, he found, weren’t the ones that had him bolt up with a racing heart and trembling limbs. They were softer, quieter. Having a picnic with his husband and the children, pointing out the butterflies and tracing shapes in the clouds. When he woke up, he’d still be in the dream state and so deliriously happy that he’d forget until he saw the rough, acacia walls of his shack and remembered everything. That day never existed, of course. Just a fabrication of his mind to cope with everything, but for the number of times he’d relived it, it might as well have been real. 

He couldn’t do much to stop his mind from thinking. So, to lessen the barrage of self-inflicted hatred, he worked until his fingers bled and prayed it was enough penance for his crimes before working himself more. 

His blood stained chiselled stone, a nice touch for the shrine he was building, brick by brick, consumed with only the thought of getting his daughter back and resetting to another time, a better time where he had something. Him and Mariana were on equal footing, both of them responsible for taking a life but by the gods, he would fix this. He had to, or he’d lose his mind trying. 

Charlie slung a bag of bricks onto his shoulders and staggered under the weight, straining against them for a second as he planted his feet and stabilised in order to make the journey up the mine and to the building site. He had time and opted to go slowly and steadily. He rarely slept these days, only ever in short fits and bursts in order to stay alive and alert enough to ward off attacks. Exile had made him efficient in a way he hadn’t been before. Sharper, maybe crueller. It forced his hand to develop skills he’d otherwise neglected living a relatively soft life before. 

He’d become better at wielding tools, at least. The pickaxe no longer felt so heavy in his hands and now, he could cut through monsters with relative ease, although livestock was a hard no. He needed to honour Flippa somehow and giving up meat was surprisingly easy. He’d chew on an odd carrot or celery stick and suck on the inside of a lemon to ward off scurvy. Flippa had a more balanced diet but he was an adult. He’d be able to handle it. 

With the bag over his shoulders, he stumbled, one foot at a time in his worn boots, toward the half-finished shrine and tipped himself forward, watching as the bricks tumbled to the ground. 

Charlie was unlucky. He always had been. One of them caught in the bag and slid down his clavicle on its sharp edge, freshly cut, and thumped onto the floor with one of its sides now bright red. Crimson dotted Charlie’s formerly white shirt which was already tattered and torn in places, so dirty it was more of a grey now, and he hurried to unstick the material from the new wound. 

When he looked down, he saw an ugly, jagged cut, starting at his shoulder that spanned the length of his hand from wrist to fingertip. Without another thought, Charlie pressed down on it with his bare hand and hissed through his teeth, knees nearly buckling under the pain. 

Or maybe it was a cocktail of old sensations catching up to him. Hunger, exhaustion, dehydration, joint pain and the unpleasant, sticky trail of blood seeping down his side. Oh, he was fucked up beyond recognition and not even he could deny it now, but what more would a god want? He was laying himself bare here, serving himself up on a silver platter as a bag of decay and agony if only to see a reward at the end of it. If only to undo his wrongs and finally make a fucking right. 

Charlie was rotting from the outside in. It would be his body to go first. He’d sink into the sand, or perhaps he’d make it into the saltwater or a bed of flowers and he’d wait for the earth to swallow him whole while his mind frayed into a million, potent shards. Then, and only then, would he be allowed the honour of seeing his daughter again. She’d squeeze his hand and maybe he would be able to gather the strength to pick her up and return home. 

He imagined it every day while he built and mined. Ran through the scenario in so many different ways that he’d had it rehearsed down to every last second. 

A selfish part of him couldn’t wait to end this atonement and finally become the offering he was seemingly destined to be. 

He wouldn’t lie, the other part of him was fucking terrified. 

And yet, he ploughed on, unable to stop his hands as they laid out the bricks in formation and got to hauling them up, inch by inch into place. A scab on his hand broke open and began to bleed afresh, ruby red dripping onto the grass below. 

It reminded him of poppies, how they sprouted after bloodshed. It reminded him of love. 

“Still no Charlie, huh?” Jaiden offered him a sympathetic smile and a pat on the shoulder while sliding a teacup across the bench to him. 

Mariana wasn’t sure why he was here, exactly. The site of eggs made him feel nauseous more or less and so, he refused to look at little Bobby who had been there in the direct aftermath of Tilin’s death by Mariana’s wayward husband. But Jaiden was kind and Roier was welcoming enough and he couldn’t stand the look in Quackity’s eyes every time he grew near, desperately needing a place to cower and hide. 

So he shrugged in answer and knocked back the tea against his better judgment, coughing when he found it absolutely scalding. He frowned at the mug as if it had personally offended him and refused to look at the little dots and marks on his hands and arms. None of them were his, of course. Mariana had barely been out after Flippa…

No, he could not have wounds inflicted on him when he remained at home for days at a time so they had to be from Charlie who was absolutely nowhere to be found on the server. Exile, is what Roier said it was. Roier had been the last person to see his husband alive. No, Mariana had not even gotten an explanation or a goodbye. It was difficult not to feel bitter. 

From the looks of his skin, Mariana could tell that exile was not treating Charlie kindly. He wasn’t surprised. His stupid husband had left all of his supplies with Flippa before leaving and had trotted off into a harsh, unexplored portion of the island where no one could find him, even if they wanted to. 

Well, Mariana wanted to. He just didn’t know how or where to start without asking for help. And if anything got back to Quackity, he feared he’d be just in time to find a corpse rather than his husband. 

“I just don’t understand where he could have gone,” Mariana muttered thickly. His head dipped low, perched on his arms folded in front of him. “Why would he leave me?”

Jaiden was a master at dancing around painful subjects with nice answers. She demonstrated the skill frequently around Mariana and he admired her knack for it. He’d heard that she’d been the one to escort and tuck Charlie into bed after his drinking spree the first time Flippa died. “Guilt,” she said softly. “It has nothing to do with you. He probably thinks it’s safer without him around.”

“¿Sin mi?” His voice came out muffled through his sleeves as he spoke. 

There was a delay in the conversation while the translator worked its magic. Mariana studied the newest scar on his forearm, scratch mark from a three-clawed beast it seemed like, while Jaiden worked out an answer. 

“Maybe he’s trying to protect you as well.”

Really, he felt bad for exploiting her and Roier, though somewhat resentful of their perfect life in their lovely house with their lovely child and their lovely partnership. The universe hadn’t bonded them together and it worked out fine for them. 

Why couldn’t it be okay for Charlie and Mariana? He swallowed the guilt. 

Mariana stood and brushed himself off. “Tienes razón. Gracias de todos modos. me iré ahora,” he mumbled. 

Jaiden’s face grew comically blank as she waited for the translation before nodding and frowning. “You sure you’ll be okay? You can stay if you’d like.” 

He was touched that she was worried for him, honestly. Maybe he’d been craving any kind of positive attention since everything happened. Heat crept up the side of his neck. No, he was better than this. “No, no. I will see you around.”

Her eyes crinkled as she smiled, strained somewhat, and then dropped below his eye level to stare at something on his shoulder. “Mariana,” she said softly. “I don’t wanna alarm you but you’re…”

“Bleeding?” he said without thinking, peeking down his shirt. A ragged line ran over his collarbone, completely painless to the touch. He wouldn’t have noticed it if Jaiden hadn’t pointed it out. “It’s Charlie,” he said with no further explanation. Their union status was known to everyone on the server. This wouldn’t be a surprise, and with Charlie’s tendency to get hurt so quickly, it barely came as a shock to him.

“Do you think he’s in trouble?” she asked anxiously, passing over towels that he pressed over the wound. 

There was obviously the part of him, one that refused to die, that screamed to drop everything and find his husband. He ground that feeling to dust and smiled broadly. “It’s Charlie,” he said simply, making his way out of their house without further comment. What more was there to say?

The walk home was a blur as it usually was. Maybe before, he might’ve tried to stay present and wave to passerbys. They were all each other had on this hellforsaken island but lately, he hadn’t the strength to do much at all. Mariana found himself barely remembering the hours he spent aimlessly walking around, as if there were massive chunks of his memory simply not present anymore. Days blended together, people merged into one, featureless silhouette that occasionally tried to talk to him before giving up. 

He didn’t blame them, of course. He was hopeless, most of the time. Silent and lumbering and nightmarish to talk to. He drove his friends off and was hostile enough to ensure no one new would ever talk to him. Mariana considered, not for the first time, that maybe he was always destined to be alone. 

Shutting his door with a gentle click and staring around at the house that was still mostly unfinished in his taste, he went straight to the bottom right kitchen cupboard with the intent on getting shitfaced, avoiding the picture frames and mirrors as he went. His fingers traced the shape of a child’s drawing on the wooden cupboard, an incident with his daughter he could not bring himself to be angry over. Now, those little drawings of flowers and stick figurines brought him a fierce, dizzying rush of indecipherable emotion. 

Drinking all but forgotten, Mariana sat cross-legged and studied Flippa’s scrawls. She had all of the talent of a child learning to function, with an imagination much too big for her tiny body. A green dragon wrapped itself around the handle which was painted bright gold and starting to chip slowly. Below, two stick figures, one in red and the other in green, held hands with the smaller figure in between them. 

They were all smiling. 

Despite the growing lump in his throat, he couldn’t look away, mouth trembling lightly while he explored every little doodle his daughter had left behind. Hearts and creatures and children and most of all, her parents. They were everywhere. Holding hands and shooting skeletons and hugging her. Always together, never apart. Despite how rarely Flippa had seen them together. Despite everything.

He was well and truly crying now, hiccuping shamelessly as he crawled to the wall and found it bare. He hadn’t had Flippa long enough for her to run out of space and somehow that felt worse than every feeling he’d been subjected to for the past few days. 

Grief stricken all over again, Mariana curled up in the corner, leaning against the side of the cupboard and swiped a framed picture off of the top, cradling it close to his chest while he rocked back and forth to quell the ache in his heart. It was throbbing, a relentless drum beat that took away his breath, that froze his limbs in place while he cried over the family he’d lost. 

Unconsciously, his hand reached upwards to stroke at the healing cut, the newest one, pressing into where skin split in a last ditch attempt to ground himself.  The nature of soul marks was against him, however. Still, it did not hurt as it should. Only Charlie harboured that pain. 

Charlie. His wayward husband, the love of his life. 

Mariana should have done more to keep him by his side when all was said and done. Foolish was a mistake. He acknowledged that, had to live with it. He hadn’t taken the soul bond well, and with how quickly the marriage had gone through, it left them no time to know each other beyond basic information. He panicked and started an affair and Charlie, understandably, hadn’t taken it well. 

And then Flippa died and it felt as if the rift between them had grown far too much to ever heal. Charlie called for Mariana’s blood in those days, had spat vicious words at him during the court case. Most of them were warranted and they stung. Mariana hadn’t realised how much he’d cared until those moments after, the night they got her home and went back to Charlie’s place. But his husband was intoxicating, flashy. Everything all at once in the shape of a man who loved desperately. 

He should have loved back too, with that same intensity. They should have tried harder. Charlie had been consumed with keeping it together for Flippa when maybe, they should have tried for themselves as well. 

And now, Charlie was off dying a slow death by a thousand cuts, Mariana unable to reach him. 

He peered down at the photograph. It was an older one, though he remembered it well. That first, blissful day Flippa came into their lives, they had a photo taken with Flippa sandwiched in between the two of them in their formal suits. She was still so beautiful alive in this captured moment, grinning so wide her glasses were askew, her arms wrapped around Mariana’s leg. 

There was another detail the camera hadn’t quite picked up, but Mariana could still remember it so well it hurt him. Charlie had pressed their hands together suddenly. Their fingers had clashed and clenched around each other, almost unsure of what to do exactly, before settling in a solid clasp, a secret unity. 

A unity they were still bound to. Soul bonds weren’t things that could be forgotten about or erased. Charlie was still his husband. Mariana was still sworn to him. 

In sickness and health. 

He twisted the wedding ring. His daughter was long dead but his husband was out there, struggling day by day. Mariana had little left to lose and a very empty house. 

He needed to pay the devil a little visit. 

“ Fuck! ” Charlie hissed, snatching his hand back from the furnace before it could char any longer. The burned area was bright red and rippled slightly from where it pressed against the hot metal of the smelting tray. Frantically, he dunked the hand into a bucket filled with his meagre water supplies, gritting his teeth and willing his tears to not fall. 

He was so close to finishing his structure he could taste it. 

There was a newly constructed alter in the middle. What he’d have to sacrifice, he didn’t know. Charlie had to only finish the arch of the roof before he could clean his hands and summon whatever god listened to him. Tilin and Flippa were so close he could practically reach out and embrace them. 

He wondered what the first thing he would do when he saw them was. He couldn’t cry. It would stress them out. He’d take their tiny hands and lead them back home. Drop Flippa off at Mariana’s place while he got to fixing up his own house. Leave Tilin with Quackity and hope it was enough of an apology. Charlie couldn’t really predict what Quackity would do to him if he returned with Tilin. He just hoped it would be quick and clean, at least. 

The crackle of thunder drove him back into his body. Now grounded with a body that ached all over and a hand that smarted to the touch with no real way of properly treating it, he begrudgingly got up and reminded himself of his mission, shoving a slice of cooked ham into his mouth and moving outside. 

Charlie hadn’t needed to worry about the new burn, as it turned out. The moment he stepped outside, he was drenched in a steady downpour of rain. Ominously, the shrine lit up for a brief second, pale as bones in the burst of lightning that spiderwebbed across the black sky. The torches he’d planted under the roof as strategically as he could had been blown out. He’d have to continue work in the darkness, it seemed. 

He dragged his feet and ignored the way they were caked in mud and wet sand. It itched horribly and the sensation crawled up his skin enough times for him to consider going back inside before he lost his glasses and spent an age trying to find them in this dark, wet hellhole. 

“Pull it together, Charlie,” he whispered, gathering a brick in his arms and climbing up his rickety, makeshift ladder to hammer it into place. There was already a bucket of mortar on the unfinished roof, thankfully covered with a rough, tin disc he’d fashioned himself. For safety’s sake, it would be easier to go one brick at a time while the storm held out. It wouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. 

Time ticked by. He settled into a rhythm. Grab a brick, scale the steps, slather the empty space with mortar and hammer the brick in before starting it over again.

The sun was hidden by storm clouds which still belched electricity and water and he’d never gotten around to crafting himself a clock or pocket watch, so dependent on the sun he hadn’t realised until this moment. Charlie grabbed each rung of the ladder carefully, took time to shuffle his feet to move so he didn’t miss. If he broke something, there would be no help for miles, no way to finish his shrine to ask for it. But the structure was coming together, brick by agonising brick. 

His feet had just touched the ground and turned to take another brick for the umpteenth time when he heard it. 

A sound that beat on just over the roar of the rain. A steady clop. Horses? No, just one. Running straight at him instead of acting like any sane animal and sheltering in this storm. 

But Charlie was too cold, too exhausted to pay it any mind and turned back to his task, wiping his glasses free of water again and wrapping numb, quivering fingers around the next brick. He nearly dropped it and frowned at his hands, willing them to stop their shaking so he could just finish. 

“Slime!” 

No, he couldn’t have hallucinated that. A clear call for him of all people. Had they finally found him? Were they going to kill him? He hoped he’d at least bring Tilin back before they did. Charlie kept his mouth clamped shut, partially fear and partially weariness, but stayed totally still. 

A speck of gold, a glowing light bounced toward him in the grey mist. He squinted and backed up, feeling around for a weapon. He was only able to produce his hammer. Better than nothing, he supposed, hefting it up and trying to stop the constant shivering of his limbs. “Who’s there?” Charlie’s voice cracked slightly. He had barely used it in the last few days. 

“Fucking hell, Slime, donde estas?” 

It didn’t sound like Quackity but he didn’t want to trust his half-delirious mind in case it tricked him again. The voice sounded again, speaking Spanish this time. Too fast and jumbled for him to make out any words but it only got closer. The bobbing light was becoming clearer, sharper to focus on and Charlie could see a silhouette through the mist. “Quackity?” he called. 

No. Not Quackity. That would’ve been too merciful for his many sins. “Slime!” he shouted and ran forward, brushing the wet hair from his eyes. He hadn’t even grabbed an umbrella for himself. 

“Mariana,” Charlie said weakly. He felt his knees begin to buckle and held onto the stone wall behind him tight. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

His husband waved his arms around emphatically, as if to gesture to the awful weather. “What are you doing? Estas loco ?” The last word raised itself to a shriek to be heard over the rain. Charlie flinched backwards. 

“Go home.” He didn’t like how hollow his voice sounded. “Just-just go home, Mariana.”

“No! You’re coming to my home!” 

A short laugh bubbled up from Charlie’s chest and spilled out before he could contain it. “You’re fucking insane! There’s a reason I’m out here!”

“Vete a la mierda! I don’t care!” Mariana battled wind and rain to walk closer and closer. “Come home with me!”

He should’ve been angry. He should’ve been fucking fuming. He had no right to come here and beg for Charlie to go back with him after he killed their daughter a second fucking time. His fists balled up on their own accord and wanted to reach out, to strike and settle this once and for all while he screamed out every emotion coiled tightly in his chest. 

Instead, he stayed quiet and breathed through his nose. “Go home, Mariana. I’m not coming with you.”

The air was static and smelt rancid, cloying. In the dim light of the lantern Mariana held, Charlie could see the hairs on the back of his arm begin to stand on end. For a moment, he was dizzing and stumbling, looking backward at the shrine while Mariana pleaded to deaf ears. He tried to listen, he really did, but the blood rushing through his head stuffed up his ability to function for a moment. 

So Charlie looked up at the sky and took a step backwards, away from his creation, his lifeline, and watched the beam of light descend, as if in slow motion, striking the structure right in the middle of the altar. 

For a fraction of a second, it was something beautiful. The white-hot glow of melting rock, the fuzz in the air and across his skin for the briefest moment in time. His shrine lit up by the sky itself and held upwards in all of its glory, shown off to every single god that was available to hear his pleas. For a moment, Charlie was just a brushstroke in a painting as breathtaking and expansive as the universe. 

Darkness overtook his vision before he could savour the moment and then he was flying backwards, soaring through the air like a bird without wings. He tried to flap once or twice to move, to get higher, to find Flippa through the void he’d found himself in. When his back struck a surface, it was with a jolt that sent shockwaves through the rest of his body and left him gasping for air, as useless as a fish out of water as he blinked and breathed and tried to do anything other than stare up with sightless eyes. 

Hands touched his chest and Charlie screamed once, short and strangled before continuing to hyperventilate. “It’s me!” Mariana babbled. “The-the-iluminación! Mierda!”

The hands returned, full forced this time and ploughed on despite Charlie’s convulsive movements to shimmy free. They grabbed his head and cradled it, flitting over his cheeks and nose, sliding down the side of his neck while Mariana continued to assure Charlie in a mixture of Spanish and English. “I can’t see,” Charlie rasped. “I can’t see, I can’t--”

“Shh.” Two fingers slid his eyelids down gently. “I am taking you home. Please be calm.”

Carefully, well practised hands slid underneath him and picked him up surprisingly effortlessly. Charlie tucked his head under Mariana’s chin, continuing to blink futilely while he bunched up the fabric of Mariana’s shirt in his fists. “The shrine.” His voice wavered, close to tears. “It was-it was for Tilin and Flippa. Is it…?”

“It’s gone,” Mariana murmured. He didn’t say anything more, even when Charlie wept a few measly tears. He couldn’t remember the last time he drank and the abuse on his body had finally taken its toll, forcing Charlie to drift off into a fitful sleep before much longer. 

Wakefulness came to him in fits and bursts. 

There was sound. Birds and things outside, the wind whistling through the branches of trees, a creaking noise in the floor as someone bustled around. He could feel sheets. Warm with his body heat and clean too. Soft clothes layered over him and bandages too, over his fingers and hands, under his shirt. 

When he blinked his eyes open, he found them to be flooded with light instantly. Enough to overwhelm him. Colours and shapes stood out to him the most, but he could attribute that to his eyesight being naturally shitty. But, even then, Charlie could figure out pretty easily that he wasn’t home or in his exile cabin. Had he the strength to move, he would’ve tried lifting himself from the bed to go exploring. Or, at least, try to find his glasses. 

Instead, he stayed perfectly still and let warmth wash over him. Exile had been perpetually cold, no matter what he did. There had always been a biting sea breeze where he’d decided to live, and a constant drizzle too. Being dry and warm felt like such a luxury after that particular hell that he relished in this soft comfort, if only for a little while longer while he took inventory. 

The pain of existence had toned down today. Things were healing finally. Or, they felt like they were healing, at least. There was still the grief, an immovable rock in his heart, but even that had dislodged enough for the constant pressure on his chest to alleviate some. 

Charlie was okay. He was fine. He wasn’t dying or dead or torturing himself. He was warm and dry and clean. 

Those footsteps from earlier grew closer and Charlie allowed it in his mind, relaxing back into the pillows and debating the merit of pretending to sleep to conserve the peace a little longer. Before he could make a decision, his husband sat down next to him heavily and smiled. 

“Hey,” Charlie whispered, reaching out from under the blanket with a heavily bandaged hand. He winced, seeing the same wounds reflected in Mariana’s hands as well. Scabbed over and healing but still brutal. They didn’t hurt for him, of course, but it couldn’t have been pleasant. “You look like shit.”

His husband chuckled and grasped Charlie’s hand with his own. Mariana reached over and carefully slid glasses onto Charlie’s face. He blinked while his vision refocused and sharpened. “You look worse. ¿Tienes hambre?”

“Uh.” It took a moment to translate in his head but he managed a shrug. “Un poco.”

“Come.” Without any further talking, he slid his arms underneath him again and gathered him up as easily as if he weighed nothing more than a child. Maybe that true, however, given how hungry Charlie felt now. 

They walked down the stairs and Mariana had him propped up on a chair while he got to cooking silently. Charlie must have dozed off briefly because, before he knew it, he was being shaken awake with a steaming plate in front of him. “Eat, mi vida.” 

That alone was almost enough to get Charlie tearing up again. But he ducked his head and started eating obediently, refraining from stuffing his face in front of Mariana, who took a seat next to him and smiled at him gently. 

It was peace. It was love. He was practically drowning it in and he didn’t mind, for once. 

Of course, good things didn’t last for long. Knocking at the door startled them both out of their reverie. Actually, calling it ‘knocking’ wouldn’t be giving it the justice it deserved. The person on the other end sounded as if they wanted to bring the door down along with the rest of the house. 

“Stay here,” Mariana muttered and left to answer it. Charlie bit back a retort. Where would he be going in his condition?

Charlie let his head slump as he chewed at a slice of bread and listened the chatter idly. He couldn’t understand the rapid-fire Spanish well enough to decipher it but he knew what an escalating argument sounded like and this was practically a textbook definition. 

Mariana started off low and soothing, the other person already in the higher cadence of incredulity, even anger. The more Mariana tried to calm them down, the higher their voice rose, until it was practically a shout that rattled the windows. Charlie hunched his shoulders and ignored it, even as Mariana rose to meet the challenge, also yelling now, before, as the grand finale, the door was slammed shut loud enough for that sound to echo several times around the house. 

It took Mariana an extra two minutes to return to Charlie. By then, he’d calmed, though rage still simmered behind his eyes. “It was just Quackity. He wants to see you.”

Charlie levelled him with a flat look. “You should’ve let him in.”

“Eres estúpido,” he snapped back. “He wants you dead.”

A shrug. “I deserve it. Yo maté a Tilín.”

Instead of a comeback, Mariana gave him a sad look and held his hand, squeezing it through the gauze. “Then you should kill me.” When Charlie didn’t answer and refused to meet his gaze, Mariana dropped the hand he held and stared down at the table. 

Looking at anywhere but his husband, Charlie studied the wall, the kitchen. Much better than his old one, though Charlie rarely used it for anything other than reheating old food. Mariana was the chef in this relationship, as he found out, and he couldn’t have been more grateful. 

He kept skipping over the bright bursts of colours on the cabinets, chalking it down to a design choice at first though he found it odd how irregular they were. Squinting, he could make out shapes adorning the light wood, scrawled on as if they’d been created by a…child.

“Oh,” he said listlessly as the weight of those deaths crashed down onto his chest once more. 

Mariana turned to find what he was looking at and wordlessly helped Charlie stand and hobble over to the kitchen where he slid down to the floor. Slowly, silently, he traced the shape of Flippa’s little drawings and felt his heart crack open a tiny bit more. She’d left behind a mural of her life, a permanent fixture of Mariana’s kitchen now. 

His fingers touched their three stick figures when Mariana spoke, startling him slightly. He’d forgotten he wasn’t alone. “She loved us together. More than anything,” he said slowly. “We are familia.”

“Familia,” Charlie breathed, pressing his forehead to the wood while the pain swallowed him whole. 

Arms wrapped around his shoulders. “I could not lose you, mi amor. I wish I came sooner.” 

“You saved me,” he said thickly. “I would’ve died there.” How could he right his wrongs as a dead man? How could he just leave the only family he had left in the world alone like that?

“For Flippa. Tu eres fuerte. But now you should stay home with me. We can get her back. Juntos, eh?”

“How?” 

“When you are better, we will think about it. This is not the end, Slime.”

He nodded listlessly and stared down at his hands. Something peeked out from underneath his sleeves and slowly, he rolled them up to reveal a mark he’d never seen before. A mandala, he thought, completely symmetrical and consisting of crimson lines twisting together in a complex array right in the middle of his wrist. “Mariana.”

“Ah.” His mouth was right next to his ear, breath tickling his neck. “That is mine,” he said sheepishly, rolling up his own sleeves to show the marking to Charlie. On him, it was fresh and raw and looked more like a burn than a pretty symbol. 

“What did you--”

“A deal. No te preocupes por eso.”

“ Mariana!”

“For you, mi amor,” he said softly, taking Charlie’s hands. “To find you. He did not ask for much.” 

“Why?” he hissed, that old fire starting to reignite in his heart. 

Mariana gave a wry laugh. “Familia, remember? It will be okay. Juntos, Slime.”

He couldn’t understand how he was so calm about this but forced himself to relax into the embrace anyway. “Juntos,” he promised, and held onto this moment tight, allowing it to wrap him up in a cocoon of light and safety. It would be okay. It had to be okay.