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When the Dead Boy Detective Agency was in its infancy, its cases were not as complex, for lack of a better term.
Charles and Edwin had only just begun to scratch the surface of the supernatural mysteries that unfolded in this realm previously unfathomable to them—to Charles, at least. Edwin had the more inquisitive mind and he’d been dead longer, so some things were a bit more cut and dry to him at first (Of course, Charles, this is a classic case of post-mortem hysteria, they talk about it in that field guide I gave you if you ever cared to read it), but Charles was a hands-on guy. He learned by doing, so he’d never been a big reader. Music and life could teach him everything he needed, he’d always thought. Until, well. He very remarkably began to lack one of those things for good.
All of that’s to say that in the beginning, they still had quite a bit of free time. Cases weren’t piling up yet. Starting a business took time. Word of mouth would get them there eventually, and really, if every other decade after the first was that breezy, Charles would make no complaint of it.
Boredom was a factor, though, and something that Charles had always been particularly susceptible to. He hated being idle. Felt like being an animal in a cage sometimes, the whole being dead and not causing a scene so you don’t get dragged to the afterlife forever thing. Charles didn’t do well with that in-between space they had to occupy at times.
His partner, however, seemed to relish in it.
From what he’d gathered of Edwin’s existence so far, he’d always been a solitary creature. That much could be deduced from the way he lonesomely traversed the attic of their old schoolhouse like he didn’t really know where else to be. The way he’d tried to push back at first when Charles suggested they stick together. You stay, I go. And Charles had pointedly thought, yeah, right.
So in the early days when wayward ghosts weren’t exactly knocking down their door, Edwin had time to read, and Charles had time to pout about it.
Often, Edwin read things that would help them solve cases, his mind like a constantly expanding filing cabinet, and he encouraged Charles to do the same. Give me the summary, he’d told him in reply. Though Edwin could get a bit persnickety about it, he usually sighed and did so.
Other times, though, he’d choose novels that were simply for enjoyment and little more. Charles noticed that he very rarely stepped outside of reading something he could’ve picked up for himself when he’d been alive, so he often saw him with frankly nauseating titles like Jane Eyre and A Room with a View. He’d died just a decade short of The Great Gatsby, though, which Charles is grateful for, because he’d had enough of it writing a paper in school based solely on the first half.
Charles had spells of it, the boredom that knew no bounds, so sometimes his only outlet would be to go up to Edwin as he read and pester him, as Edwin would put it, while Charles grinned ear to ear like a child.
“‘Madame Bovary’,” Charles read from the front cover with his dense English-accented vowels on one such afternoon. He smiled. “Got a lad in there named after me, don’t it?”
Edwin raised an eyebrow as he looked up momentarily from the novel. “You’ve read it?”
“Nah,” Charles laughed, nudging around the desk to peer over Edwin’s shoulder. “Never finished it. Are you reading it in French, mate?”
Edwin lowered his head once in confirmation. “Yes,” he said with an open tone, “It is always best to read something in its original language whenever possible.”
“Fat chance,” Charles said quietly, squinting at the page but getting next to nothing from it. “Read something to me.”
“I beg your pardon?” Edwin turned his head slightly to Charles, seeming to flinch upon realizing he had lowered his head closer to his own. Charles didn’t move, though. Exposure therapy worked for fellas like Edwin, he reckoned.
“Cmon then. I don’t speak a lick of French! Read something to me. Just a smidge.” He made pleading eyes for good measure.
Edwin sighed dramatically. Charles loved the way that things like that carry over; Edwin had a flair for the dramatic, and even when heaving sighs did nothing for his body, they were speckled into his overall makeup like his clothes or eye color or foreign tongues. “I suppose I was about here…I am nearly done with this chapter,” This, he said mostly to himself. Then he cleared his throat and began to read. “ ‘L’amour, croyait-elle, devait arriver tout à coup, avec de grands éclats et des fulgurations— ”
Charles, despite himself, felt his eyes go a little wide. He knew with the handful of cases they’d had to solve already that Edwin, along with most things of its caliber, was skilled with language. Some spells would only be documented in a certain language and Edwin would have to decipher it. He very rarely found him completely stumped by it. Even Charles could fumble his way through some Latin if he had to, but that was about it. He’d never heard Edwin speak any of it out loud, either, not when it wasn’t being used to cast demons out of their general vicinity. Not in this relaxed, storyteller’s tone he had on now, and not with the way that French demanded all space, nose to low throat, in the voice.
He couldn’t quite look away.
“‘– ouragan des cieux qui tombe sur la vie, la bouleverse, arrache les volontés comme des feuilles et emporte à l’abîme le coeur entier. ’” Edwin felt at the knot of his bow tie, clearly a bit unnerved at having been observed by Charles like that. Charles didn’t much care, though, because he couldn’t even quite place the feeling he got from it. Awe? Appreciation? Like watching a cellist play cello. Watching someone do what they can do and nothing more. Edwin finally cleared his throat once more and spoke, “I think it a bit silly to go on much further if you cannot understand me,” he said, voice a little quieter.
“That was pretty brills,” Charles noted, all but ignoring him. “What did it mean?”
Edwin seemed put off-kilter by the question. He stumbled, itching at the corner of the book’s page unconsciously, but Charles was a patient guy, and he could bet a billion pounds most of the nerves were Edwin simply grasping for the right words to describe it, his attention to detail trying to fine-tune the very essence of the words once they’d been retransmitted.
“It essentially says,” he started, swallowing needlessly, “That love must come as suddenly as a hurricane and take one’s entire heart with it. Though Flaubert and any translator could say it much more eloquently than I.”
Charles nodded. Frilly metaphors were part of the reason he couldn’t do books so well, but he admitted that having heard all that, he’d been pretty impressed with it.
“Can’t say I’ve ever been in love then, if it’s got to feel like that,” Charles observed, thinking back on his short life. No one would’ve harshly judged him for not being in love yet so young, but now it was one thing he could never truly stop thinking about. He would’ve been hard-pressed to have a love that swept his heart up like a hurricane now, wouldn’t he?
“Me neither,” Edwin muttered, almost shyly. Charles saw him straighten his back, though it wasn’t as if he’d been slouching. “I imagine books tend to make things sound a lot grander than they actually are. It’s all entirely irrational. It’s…nice to think about, though. In any case.”
“Yeah,” Charles agreed, a sudden heavy feeling over both of them. It happened every now and again, when a train of their conversation crashed loudly in the center of fuck, we’re actually dead.
In the odd decade since Edwin had found him in the attic, he’d pieced together things. Charles could pretty much recount his entire life in an afternoon, but Edwin offered up pieces of information over time, an unintentional scavenger hunt. There were threads of pocket watches and school bullies and, glaringly, the seven decades in Hell, but Charles had never heard Edwin talk about love. Not in relation to himself, anyway. He said the same sorts of things that he’d said about the passage he read before; it was irrational. It was overly emotional and probably overrated, too. He’d said he didn’t miss kissing the first time they met and Charles thought maybe Edwin didn’t have anything to miss. Edwin was a solitary creature and he’d only tentatively, with unspoken rules, allowed Charles in. It’s no wonder if he didn’t know the hurricane of love any more than Charles did.
“How about you take a break from reading,” Charles said, breaking the tension like he always did, “and play patience with me. And you have to say oui. You know in America they call it ‘solitaire’? That’s a French word, right?”
“Indeed,” Edwin answered, “Both words come from French, technically.”
“Okay, smarty pants, then let’s play,” Charles insisted.
“Charles, it is a one-player game.”
“You can definitely do it with two people if you try hard enough.”
Edwin sighed, knowing there was no escape, regardless of what game they really ended up playing, “Alright.”
“What was that?” Charles grinned, holding a hand to his ear.
Edwin looked intent on trying to see if one could kill a ghost as he said, tightly, “Oui.”
—
Charles knew that there was one glaring gap in his education at St.Hilarion’s that he’d somehow managed to avoid confronting until he’d already died and seen a lot of it for himself.
He never finished reading the Bible.
It was not really for lack of trying. The required daily prayers, their lessons and recitations of the teachings were unavoidable in some capacity. It was thought that any good Christian boy going to St.Hilarion’s was reading his share of the Bible at some point during the day, and likely not for the first time around. That was the ideal, anyway.
Of course, Charles wasn’t the only one who found that aspect of school to be a proper snooze fest. Most people his age were turning heads of the older generation for their seemingly lackadaisical approach to spirituality. Charles himself was enough to set any strict follower on edge when he wasn’t in his school uniform and opted instead for his at the time edgy leather and loafers, his chains and pierced ear. He was part of the counterculture, while they were the culture that was namely countered.
He wasn’t the face of a boy with his eyes set on an exemplary and holy existence.
His father, of course, used that in part as an excuse for his violence. Charles wasn’t proper, Charles wasn’t the right kind of boy, always wrong somehow. Being himself was wrong somehow. He thought a lot about how his mother wasn’t even a Christian originally, how much things must’ve changed for her and how he would never truly know and now would never be able to ask.
Charles didn’t much like being told who to be and how to be it, was the short version of it.
So, within reason, he’d basically held the idea of a punk sixteen year old that the Bible could go where the sun didn’t shine.
This issue was that he really had nothing else to believe in. Heaven and Hell and God as concepts were basically a given. He took them because there wasn’t much of an alternative.
Ultimately, it didn’t end up making a big difference whether he’d read the whole thing or not.
Heaven and Hell were real, in a sense, and there were universal rules, but he discovered that the idea of the afterlife was a very individually dependent thing. Many of one’s firm-held beliefs shaped it. No one thing was necessarily right or wrong.
He only knows Hell is real, though, because Edwin had been there.
He’d dropped it so casually when they’d first met that Charles was almost certain he’d misunderstood him. I’ve just escaped seventy years in Hell, so and then carried on telling Charles he didn’t need a partner around because blah blah blah. Charles had mentally noted it, had wondered if it was metaphorical, like he’d just been in on some tough ghost shit that was like Hell but certainly wasn’t actual Hell.
It appeared it wasn’t so simple.
“Mate, that time you said you escaped Hell,” Charles had asked him hesitantly one day, “Was that, like, for reals, or was that you being…figurative?”
Edwin pressed his knuckles together in a movement so pronounced that Charles couldn’t help but notice it. He would see it again and again and come to recognize the feeling Edwin must’ve had when he did it. “No, Charles, unfortunately I was being quite literal. I spent seventy years in Hell, by my calculations,” His eyes looked so strange and faraway. “It feels as though it was both shorter and much, much longer somehow.”
Charles decided that was the only question he would ask for the time being. More would come in time.
One day, though, when he stumbled upon a Bible in a drawer as they scouted for clues on a case, the idea came back to him and he asked. “Edwin, have you read the Bible?”
Edwin made a face like he’d asked the color of grass. “Of course I have, several times. Haven’t you?”
Charles couldn’t help but nearly laugh. “I, uh, never finished it.”
“You never finished the Bible?” Edwin rephrased incredulously.
“Nope,” Charles said with a popping noise, “Found it a bit boring, innit?”
“I don’t know that I would use the word boring to describe it,” Edwin started, “Although I suppose if St.Hilarion’s methods of teaching remained at all the same for you as they were in my day, yes, the conversations could be…tedious.” He seemed to choose his words carefully, like he still felt he should approach it with respect.
“Well, what do you think? You believe it, or is it a load?”
“You are so crass, Charles,” Edwin chastised, crossing his legs as he sat, “And I know it is real because, if I may remind you, I’ve been to Hell.”
“I know, mate,” Charles answered gently, “But isn’t it, like, possible that that’s only because that’s where you believed you would go?”
“I’d say it’s even likely,” Edwin conceded, “But that changes nothing of its reality.”
“Right,” Charles said then, unsure. “I guess I also believe it. Or I dunno. I think anything’s possible.”
“Charles,” Edwin interjected. “We are two ghost boys sitting in modern day London solving mysteries for other ghosts. I am in no position to counter the idea that anything is possible.”
Charles felt himself smile. That had been Edwin’s attempt at making him feel better.
“Cheers,” Charles stretched closer and sat on the desk across from Edwin. He knew Edwin thought it was unmannerly, but he also knew he wouldn’t say anything. “What do you think then? About the Bible? Since you’ve read it so much.”
Edwin looked as though he’d never been asked such a question and had to really think about it for the very first time. “I think there are very beautiful bits and very unpleasant bits,” Edwin finally answered with almost uncharacteristic simplicity, “I think it is highly misinterpreted and the way those misinterpretations can cause people to act is…unsightly.” Charles felt like there was something personal in that observation, and he was sure there was, but now wasn’t the time to ask. Edwin would tell him when he was ready. “But there is good and evil in all things, and that was sort of the point of all of the stories. But I have read many major religious texts, Charles, not just that one. There is something in all of them to somebody.”
Charles felt a bit of a revelation upon hearing that. “Yeah,” was all he could come up with to say in response, which made him feel like a nitwit.
“I felt… ashamed of many things during my life, Charles,” Edwin began again, vulnerable in a way unlike Charles had ever really seen before. “I do not even claim to be fully free of it. But, at the risk of sounding proud, I think I knew I did not deserve to be in Hell. Otherwise I fear I would very well still be there.”
Charles still did not pry, instead mentally shelving these new pieces to the ever-growing Edwin puzzle he had tasked himself with solving. “I’m glad you’re not,” he decided on saying. It appears to be the right thing to have said, because Edwin looked him in his eyes and smiled at him.
—
“I’m sorry, have you just told me you never finished reading Hamlet ?” Edwin was saying to him in the tone he used when something had deeply offended him, high-pitched and airy.
Charles shrugged in response.
Edwin was aghast. “You have not read quite possibly the most famous and studied work of Shakespeare in history?”
“Oi, I read the first two and a half acts!” Charles defended.
“Well then, I do greatly apologize.” Edwin’s tone when being sarcastic was truly cutting.
“It’s not like I haven’t read Shakespeare!” Charles continued, hand in the air, “I read all of Romeo and Juliet!”
“Oh, I’m sure you did,” Edwin replied cattily.
Charles blinked. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Never mind that,” Edwin dismissed, continuing to rage on, “I mean, you didn’t even get to the soliloquy! It’s the most important part!”
“Is that the whole ‘to be or not to be’ bit?”
Edwin was shooting all sorts of sharp metaphorical objects from his eyes. Charles secretly liked when Edwin got like this.
“You don’t even have to read it to know that. Everybody knows that.” Charles followed up without allowing Edwin to blow a gasket over a long-dead playwright. He wondered what Shakespeare’s afterlife was like. He seemed chill. He wasn’t going to get Charles to fall in love with plays any time soon, but that earring he sported was pretty brills. He should’ve told everyone who called him nasty things for his own about that. Though, upon reflection, that might’ve reinforced said nasty things.
“Was Shakespeare gay?” Charles asked then, effectively cutting off more of Edwin’s incensed rambling.
Edwin stopped and his eyebrows knitted together so closely they nearly fused into one. “Pardon?”
“Like, I’ve heard people theorize it, I dunno,” He felt absolutely stupid for asking now.
“I’m sorry, am I misunderstanding? Are you asking if he was an overall cheery fellow?” Edwin sounded nearly miffed by the question.
Then it clicked in Charles' brain. Oh. Christ. “Erm, no, I-” He paused to really think about what he was going to say next. “When was the last time you picked up a modern dictionary?”
“How modern do you mean?” Edwin asked.
“Okay,” That answered his question. Charles sighed and dug his palms into his knees. “So, definitions of words change. As you know.”
“Naturally,” Edwin said, matter-of-fact.
“So, for you, gay meant like…happy, or whatever. But by the time I was alive, and still to this day, it means, like, homosexual.” Charles explained. His very vague understanding of etymology told him Edwin should definitely know that word.
It seemed he was correct, because Edwin visibly bristled at the mention of it. “Oh. I see.”
Edwin’s change in demeanor was strangely unexpected for Charles, though he can’t be entirely surprised. A boy from the 1910’s was not going to necessarily pick up on modern ideas about sexuality. Even Charles found himself trying to understand new things when he saw them. There were lots of things going on in London that were certainly callbacks to what he recognized from his own life, but also definitely a product of their time.
Edwin appeared to recalibrate. “Well, that I do not know. He was married to a woman, but I cannot discount that some of his poetry was… interpretable.”
“Got it,” Charles nodded, suddenly feeling awkward, mostly because Edwin seemed awkward. “It’s dumb, I was just— the earring—” He waved his hand around in frustration at his own inability to form a thought, “Forget it.”
Edwin cleared his throat, adjusting the cuffs of his sleeve. “In any case,” he started, a renewed calm about him, “I feel as though I cannot allow you to just not know how Hamlet ends. I feel that would be a disservice to you.”
Charles felt a lightbulb go off above his head. “Mate, I just thought of something,” he said brightly, “Why don’t we go see it as it was intended to be seen?”
Edwin visibly thought it over. “As in, a performance?”
Charles snapped. “Exactly. Then it’s, like, an actual play and way less dull.”
Edwin tilted his head. “It is not your worst idea.”
Charles broke out into a smile. “Well, the West End’s not too far, is it?”
“Indeed it’s not,” Edwin responded, and Charles knew he had him.
In retrospect, he was lucky there was a theater house putting on Hamlet alongside other modern plays he knew even less about and that Edwin was certainly perplexed by (“Is that actually meant to be about a founding father?”), but they moseyed in with no tickets, no typical performance-goer snacks, completely unseen guests alongside the small group of living people in the seats.
“It’s kinda nuts we can just come see shows for free,” Charles whispered to Edwin when they sat, a force of habit, “Though I did like to collect the stubs for my wall.”
Edwin looked at him funny. “Charles, no one can hear us. There is no need to whisper.” Edwin was, however, also notably whispering. Charles decided to let it go without comment.
They watched the show, and eventually Charles recognized when it got to the part where he stopped following what was going to happen next. A man holding a skull, Ophelia drowning in the river. Tragic death after tragic death, the namesake of the genre.
By the end of it, Charles found that he was crying.
He glanced over and saw shininess in Edwin’s eyes as well.
“Bloody hell,” He mumbled, sniffing. “I wasn’t expecting to get emotional over that.”
Edwin replied quietly, “Nor was I.”
“Oi, Edwin, do you know how come we’re still able to cry?” Charles asked through silent tears he couldn’t really feel.
“I do not know,” Edwin said, “And frankly, I don’t much like to wonder about it.”
Charles laughed wetly, placing a hand on his friend’s shoulder that clearly startled him at first, but that he eased into. “Fair enough.”
—
Charles would yield to the idea that, of all forms of writing, poetry was probably the least egregious to him.
At the very least, it often captured his attention for longer than anything else. It was choppy and different and had fun little rhymes, so it was endlessly more entertaining to read a poem than a bloody dissertation.
That being said, you’d lose him if you asked him to read an entire poetry collection cover to cover. Call him crazy, but he thought that sort of defeated the purpose.
After a particularly grueling case, Edwin had been pretty shaken up. It wasn’t as though Charles wasn’t; he hated babydolls as much as the next guy and finding out their client’s friend went missing in a room full of them was certainly unnerving, but anything else about the case could be swallowed down for the betterment of both of them. That was what he did.
He still wasn’t entirely sure what had gotten to Edwin about this particular case, but he was off and it was obvious, so he took matters into his own hands.
The one thing he could rely on to make Edwin feel more at ease was a good book. He wanted to find something to read for him, much like Edwin had done to comfort him in what was probably the scariest moment of his life, if for nothing else than the unknown. But it would also have to be something he could handle reading out loud for more than a few minutes.
“You sit right there on that couch and I am going to read you something,” Charles had instructed. He went over to one of Edwin’s bookshelves. “Say, you got any poetry?”
“A small collection,” Edwin answered, voice cracking slightly behind him after he’d been making very little vocal movement since they’d returned, “I sometimes find poetry difficult, but I keep a few special ones.”
Charles turned to look at him, “Any favorites?”
Edwin’s eyes were tired, but they looked to consider it still. “I quite like Leaves of Grass,” he finally answered, “by Walt Whitman.”
He smiled as he flicked the spines and eventually found it, small and fittingly forest green. “I’ve heard of it. What do you find difficult about poetry?” He came and sat down next to Edwin with little regard for their space, legs touching and all. Edwin shifted but did not move away. Charles had found that all their years together had finally amounted to this, because Edwin from 1990 would have absolutely shooed him away forcefully if he was a fraction as close as this so casually. They were different now.
“I think perhaps sometimes the emotion is so visceral that it’s hard for me to interpret,” Edwin explained, still subdued in his energy, “As though the way they describe certain feelings is so far away from me.”
Charles nodded empathetically. “Seems like it would be hard.”
Edwin simply hummed. “You may read now, if you wish.” A polite means of making the request to change the subject.
“Let’s see if I know any of these…” Charles flipped through the book, gentle with the aged pages. “Ah, Song of Myself. I don’t think I ever read the whole thing.”
“For God’s sake, Charles, it mustn’t be much more than a few thousand words,” Edwin said next to him, but the tone was not mean. Charles might’ve even said it ventured into sounding endeared.
Charles laughed lightly, “That’s pretty long for a poem, you know. You like haikus?”
“Read, please,” Edwin all but begged.
Charles made a point to clear his throat, feeling very Edwin-like for doing so. “ ‘I celebrate myself, and sing myself’ …”
Charles got into the rhythm of the poem, not remembering what he’d read before with precision but knowing there was a familiarity in the words. Edwin sat unmoving beside him. He guessed that if ghosts slept, Edwin would be on the verge of it right now. His very essence and spirit, as it existed in its current state, seemed to need rest to some degree. Even Charles felt the phantom sensation of droopy eyes and calm coziness that came with a moment as tender as this, though he knew it was all muscle memory for a body he once had. He read on.
“ ‘Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.’ ” The line made Charles stop reading, like he couldn’t move on until he’d let himself fully absorb it.
He looked to Edwin and found that his eyes were already on him. He thought maybe Edwin would look away because he so hated direct eye contact, but this time he did not. He simply looked back at Charles and Charles could not attempt to decipher what the gaze held. Visceral emotion, the very one he’d claimed to not understand.
Charles continued reading, but it echoed in his mind. It is just as lucky to die.
He thought he could say with confidence that he agreed. If death had brought him the best person he’d ever known, he’d consider that as lucky as life itself.
—
There are a few things that Charles never thought he would experience, and that he knew with some certainty he never would.
He’d never get to travel and meet his distant relatives and hear their stories. He’d never get to try an American-style sub sandwich even though it looked fucking fantastic. He’d never meet a famous person unless they walked into his office after dying, looking for case-crackers. He’d never kiss someone whose heartbeat he could feel under his hands (because of course, the dead can touch the living, but they can’t feel the living; even touching another ghost felt more real but muted, the softer version of a bright color.)
He also never would have even entertained the idea that he would be standing on the stairwell that descended into Hell, coming up the other way. And there’s no way in Hell, zero pun intended, that he would’ve thought he’d be stopped on said stairwell, running from a monstrous nightmare being, while his best friend in the universe told him with preventive cause should he cease to exist that he was in love with him.
At first, Charles hadn’t really understood. He heard I love you and thought, you blubbering fucking idiot, I know that, because someone like you couldn’t stomach over thirty years with someone like me if you didn’t, and I love you too because you’re my best mate in the world. And he wanted to keep moving because that grotesque babydoll spider was definitely on their tails, so he said with no question, “Great. Love you, too. Can we go?”
And then Edwin had clarified. More than a friend. More than a friend. I’m in love with you.
That was a bit more complicated.
It was not as though Charles could even be entirely surprised by it. He’d known for not too long now that Edwin had kept a lot of feelings about who and what he liked buried deep for a very, very long time. He’d seemed even afraid to tell Charles about that, though he can’t imagine a world where that would matter to him in the slightest. It was shit like that that he watched people die for. Carrying that into life after death was unthinkable.
But it wasn’t as simple as accepting and loving his friend for everything he was or was not. The notion of this kind of love was a call to action; it uprooted him and asked him to look at himself and see who he saw there, ignoring that he couldn’t see his own reflection in actuality. It asked him if he truly knew what he liked and whom, or if he, too, had buried it somewhere deep like Edwin had.
He couldn’t confront that right now. Regardless of if it called into question many decades of his existence, it was also far too much to sort through when running from a hell demon. Because they were still standing on the stairs to hell after Charles had gotten a portal open to go get him because there was no existence that mattered at this point without Edwin Paine and—
A thought occurred to him and he couldn’t help but laugh despite the totally unlaughable circumstances. He felt like he’d seen this before somewhere, like the part of another story he knew vaguely but never quite got to the conclusion of. Going down to hell for the person who matters most, bringing them back with you.
“Oh, I get it,” He said to Edwin, momentarily forgetting his fear and remembering the comparison he was searching for, “This is like one of those Orpheus and Eurydice moments, yeah?”
“I certainly hope not, that story ends tragically,” Edwin’s voice was weak with tears and screams of terror and probably the weight of a confession he’d held on to for heaven knows how long.
Charles looked to his feet, like he couldn’t help but note the irony. “Right. Never finished it.”
He could only guess based on Edwin’s reaction that they probably just both ended up dying in the end and were apart forevermore despite all their attempts to avoid it. Charles thought, humbly and with no offense intended toward the ancient Greeks, that that was a load of bollocks. He and Edwin were already dead anyway, and here they were, escaping from Hell, Edwin still with him. He figured that had to count for something.
Of course, it wasn’t lost on him that his genius reference was also about the story of spouses, so maybe he really did have to think harder about all this.
But that would have to come after he knew they were both safe and had all the time in the world to see what all of that meant.
He told Edwin as much.
—
Back in London, having left Port Townsend behind save for some new additions to the team, there was a renewed sense of something in the air that Charles was trying to place. Opportunity, perhaps. Anticipation.
This would be the first time Charles and Edwin weren’t alone in their bubble. They had Crystal, they had Jenny, even the bloody Night Nurse. They had support. While Charles maintained that they were okay when it was just them, he thought this would really unquestionably take a load off. They had no targets on their back (that they knew of), they had souls to help and rewarding work. They did not leave without scars, and Charles could still see the way Edwin grew cold at the mention of Niko’s name. It would be a very long time before any of that thawed.
A very long time, indeed. Charles had begun to think. He promised he would, essentially. And so he did.
Edwin was a proper gentleman about everything, or maybe he was just practiced at hiding his emotions, but Charles could hardly detect any change in their relationship since what he had started coding in his mind as the Almost Orpheus and Eurydice Incident. They were back to their normal selves.
Charles had to ask himself if that was what he wanted.
He started by reading a version of Orpheus and Eurydice and actually finishing it. It was as he predicted; bollocks.
He knew he didn’t finish a lot of the shit he started, didn’t close a lot of the books he opened. Even him still being a ghost, evading that blue light of Death whenever she came near, was in its own way a story he refused to let end. Edwin was in that story, always had been, and that was inevitable.
But, ultimately, rawly, honestly, he knew that there would come a day that he would decide his work was done, that he could be at peace, that he could go on to whatever was next. He also knew that that day would only come when he and Edwin agreed willingly that it had.
Edwin was there until the end in every version. The more he thought, the more that became clear.
Charles had never been the exemplary, holy boy. He was always wrong somehow. In many ways, he’d chosen it, but a lot of it confused him and angered him and hurt him. He wondered when he’d be good enough and when he’d be what would seemingly make everyone else happy.
Did a boy who made everyone else happy ride skateboards and go around getting into fights? Did he question authority? Did he fancy other boys? Did he pierce his fucking ear like Shakespeare?
Did a boy who was dead and had no consequences from the living anymore give a shit?
That’s when he decided that at the very least, he had to try. He’d never know otherwise, and the worst thing that could happen is Edwin was still by his side anyway, because he knew Edwin would never hold it against him. He was not good with words like Edwin, lacked his subtlety and finesse, he didn’t know how to take what happened in his figurative heart and make it into tangible statements that meant something. Still. He had to try.
Thinking is a wondrous thing, because suddenly things made sense that were fuzzy before. The way something fiddled around in his chest, like his mind still wanted him to believe he had a heart, upon hearing the stupid but kind of sexy sound of Edwin’s voice around the word ouragan, the way his temper was a forest fire underneath his fitted suit and pristine clothes and socks that went up way too fucking high. He was right snoggable when Charles really got down to it. He cried at plays and let Charles touch him because he trusted him and he loved him. And Charles loved him back. He would figure out exactly how and how much, but he knew he did.
“Did I ever tell you I finally finished a version of Orpheus and Eurydice?” He asked Edwin on an afternoon after he felt like he’d thought enough.
Edwin looked up from his book with a look in his eyes that flashed with panic before hastily cooling over. “Is that right? What did you think?”
Charles smiled big and goofily at him. “Thought it was absolute rubbish.”
Edwin gaped. “That’s harsh.”
Charles strolled over and sat on the desk in front of Edwin, who still, still, won’t say a word to him about it. “Well, I decided it was a pretty shit comparison to our situation.”
“Because they are wed?” Edwin asked dryly.
“Hardly,” Charles smiled, “It’s because when Orpheus turned around, Eurydice went back to the underworld. They never saw each other again. But look,” he flowed with the surge of his bravery and swooped up Edwin’s hand from the table into his own. The feeling was there, skin, lukewarm and neutral, muted colors, but unmistakably there. “I got you from Hell and we are both still here. You’re right in front of me.”
Edwin looked to have swallowed thickly on reflex. “That is true.”
“I know it probably annoys the fuck out of you that I start a lot of shit that I don’t finish, maybe this included,” Charles started, bringing Edwin’s singular hand between both of his own, both thumbs finding a knuckle. “But I’ve decided that I want to see this story through to the end. I mean, really. I have nothing to be scared of anymore. Not with you.”
Edwin was still silent, labored breathing that only made Charles feel fonder because his spiritual body was doing the same thing, trying so hard to mimic the nervous excited feeling that he knew the moment would’ve brought with it.
“Basically,” Charles added, so his point was abundantly clear, and raised Edwin’s hand to kiss it softly, “I’m saying I love you back, and I think it’s high time we figure out what that means, for reals.”
Edwin looked like what Charles would picture he would look like on a tilt-a-whirl ride, and he had the brief thought that he’d like to take him on one and see it, but then he doubted that type of vertigo would work on them anymore. It was worth a shot. “Charles Rowland,” Edwin looked at him, voice fighting to be steady, “You’re disastrous.”
“Like a hurricane?” Charles winked, proud of himself.
Edwin simply bit the inside of his cheek and arched one perfect eyebrow. “Precisely.”