Chapter Text
THE BOY THE SUN SUMMONED
The first time he meets Charles Rowland, his uniform blazer is discarded on the lawn with muddy footprints pressed into the cool blue fabric. He briefly thinks the cleaners will never be able to get the stains out and how cross his father will be, like the time the groundskeeper’s dog leapt on him in excitement leaving paw prints on his new aubergine jumper. Edwin Payne shivers, then, though not at the fear of his father’s wrath. It’s spring in the English countryside which means the temperature is so very slightly warmer than the snap of winter, but on this 3rd of March, there is still the damp bite of cold in the air that cuts straight through his uniform without the protection of his ruined blazer.
The boys that surround him don’t care much for his comfort and only sneer at his visible quiver. Gregory Milton calls him a word that would all but have his delicate mother covering her ears to protect her ‘sensibilities’ as he spills the contents of Edwin’s bag on the grass. Freddie Stevens and Harry Burton laugh their cruel laughs that are punctuated by each book and notebook that thuds against the ground, crowding him as if he were a sheep to be herded.
“Come on sissy, what you got to say for yourself then?” A rough open palm strikes his shoulder and he trips over a root, green eyes searching the grounds for any teacher or help that could be found. There never is, not when they find him. He was too careless today, too visible sitting beneath the canopy of the large chestnut tree.
“You think we don’t see you starin’ at us during practice?” Freddie tosses a look toward Gregory, as if for permission, before giving Edwin another harsh shove backward that pulls him from his thoughts causing him to stumble, nearly losing his balance.
“It’s disgustin’,” Harry chimes in with all the wit of a damp paper bag in a windstorm. There’s a light in his eye, something about seeing the fear in the one they torment brings forth a predatory hunger.
Edwin should be scared. Another shove puts him too close to the small lake for comfort, and really he is wishing he’d taken up swim lessons instead of fencing when his father suggested it. He should tell them to leave him alone, tell them they’re wrong and he’s sorry so they just go .
If only his legs hadn’t frozen in place and his mouth weren’t sewn shut with terror. He’d love to bite back at them with a curt:
‘I was only looking at you because I found it astonishing that someone who takes part in a gentleman’s sport could possess two left feet as well as the brain of a snail.’
The claw of fear is too deeply buried in him to do much of anything save for keep his feet planted lest he topple into the murky lake. They don’t wait for an answer. Hands are on his upper arms, barks of laughter suffocate him, drowning him before he’s even hit the water.
Edwin squirms and fights, feeling them drag him back toward the waters’ edge. They spew more insults but his ears ring like the aftereffects of a flash bang, making them nothing but muffled sounds on the edge of clarity.
He’s not even certain, even with their remarks, what brought on this new brand of cruelty. Perhaps this was just the sort of fate god had in store for boys like him. Maybe his father was right, and maybe that’s what he would say when they fished him from the lake. This is what he deserved.
That is until he feels himself fall, and instead of hitting the surface of the water he feels grass beneath his palms and wet dirt at his fingertips. The hands have left him to be replaced by the sounds of muffled shouting he can’t make out over the ringing, his vision is shaky from the stinging. Unshed tears sting at his eyes as he scrambles to a sitting position.
That’s when he makes out a new boy standing amongst the gathering of his persecutors. He has a mass of dark brown curls that brush at the tips of almost pointed ears and skin the color of the autumn sun at midday.
“Oi! What’s the deal, Rowland?” Harry grouses.
“Cut it out!” The new boy hisses. “Mr. Abernathy saw you mucking about out here and he’s already called the Headmaster. Dunno if he saw your faces.” The new boy warns them, motioning back toward the school.
Gregory tosses a look toward Edwin that makes the boy shift back, his hand ever so slightly dipping into the shallows of the water. It's freezing, and he retracts it so suddenly to cradle it to his chest he misses the boys deflating.
“Bugger it. If my dad finds out he’s gonna pull me from the team.” He tosses a little red pencil sharpener at Edwin that ricochets off his shiny brown boots caked in mud. “You bought yourself some time, Payne, and if you don’t want to go for a swim I’d keep that mouth of yours shut.”
The new boy clamps him on the back. “Alright, alright, just go.” He says in good humor, though there is an ice-cold fire behind brown eyes that Edwin just barely catches, and then the boys are running off toward the main building of the school. All that’s left by the lake then are the contents of his backpack strewn about the ground and the brown-eyed boy whose smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
The shock of what happened and the relief that had punched into his chest dissipates when that same boy reaches out to him. Edwin wonders if he’s about to trade his three tormentors for another, but one look into that warm brown gaze tells him otherwise. They envelope him in a way Edwin has never felt before. Like the comfort of hot cocoa on a chilly night; sweet and luminous.
“You alright, Mate?” There is a beat of silence, a moment given for the boy in the grass to take the sun-kissed boy’s hand. “Name’s Charles, Charles Rowland, and as much as I’d like to, y’know, give proper introductions and all that I absolutely just lied to their faces so we should leg it,” he motions behind himself. “Before the jig is up, yeah?”
Had he really just helped him? He wonders why as he stares in abject confusion. Spring sunlight shines softly behind Charles Rowland, lighting up his tight curls in a halo that beckons the image of Venetian angels or the sun god Apollo. Edwin thinks for a moment that maybe he was wrong. Maybe Charles Rowland was what god sent boys like him and thank god there had been one more left just for him that day.
He takes his hand and there is a whirlwind of motion. Charles has his backpack slung over his shoulder, Edwin clutches his blazer in one hand and the other is clasped tightly as he’s drug across the lawn. They run and run well past the point of Edwin recalling he even had legs, and the ache in his chest almost has him longing for the water with how it stings on each breath he sucks in.
“You’re really out of shape for a kid, aren’t ya?” Charles comments, sucking in heavy breaths himself. Edwin is fighting for his life trying to remember how to breathe and keep his kneecaps from wobbling where he clutches at the school gate– he simply doesn’t have it in him to temper the glare he tosses Charles’ way.
Charles laughs, and when he smiles this time Edwin can see it reach his eyes.
“And,” he sucks in a painful breath, “exactly how old are you?” Each word is stuttered around pants and gulps of chilly air but it’s still laced with an edge of exhausted bitterness.
Charles stands up straight, recovering much quicker than him. “I’m twelve! Be thirteen in a month and a half. What about you? You a year 7?” He supplies with a grin so bright Edwin can’t bare to look directly at him.
Edwin tries in vain to brush off the grass and dirt from his uniform to distract himself, posturing as Charles would later call him on. He’s certain the only part of his uniform to be salvaged are his socks and boots at this point.
“I’m thirteen, if you must know.” He’d intended it to come out with a bit of bite but he sands the edges off, filing it down until it’s nearly playful instead as soon as he looks back up into the other’s inquisitive gaze. He then clears his throat, tossing his blazer over an arm. “I’m in year 8.”
“Whoa, year 8?! I didn’t reckon you’d be older than me…” For some reason that stings. They always mock him for being small for his age. His mother says he makes himself an easy target because of it.
Charles must see it in his eyes because he laughs it off and waves his hand through the air. “It’s just cuz your shirt all properly tucked in makes you look like a right school boy fresh to secondary school.” It’s the first time he really notices that Charles has his shirt untucked with his tie and collar all in disarray. Something tells him it’s a choice and not from running half a kilometer across the school grounds.
“We are school boys, Charles.” He rolls his eyes, but there is something in the good-humored elbow to his ribs that makes him smile back.
***
The first time Charles Rowland met Edwin Payne it was more of a sort of drive-by than a real meeting. He’d been listening to music, sitting on the large concrete newel of the perron leading to the school entrance when something caught his attention from the corner of his eye.
Simon Bell with his tight blond curls, aquiline nose, and toothy smile had just snatched a blue cap off of a small dark-haired boy who looked brochure-perfect in his school uniform. Not a bare thread or hair out of place– well, not until Simon snatched off his hat that is. Charles recognizes the jeering boys that stand a step below the smirking Bell from cricket practice but can’t place their names.
The dark-haired boy was trying to say something over their raucous laughter, and Charles pulls back one ear of his headphones to hear the exchange over the heady bass of Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.
With all the boys crowded around him, holding his cap just out of reach, the scrawny green-eyed boy looks near tears. At first, he suspects it’s embarrassment or their taunting, but the way he clenches his fists at his side has Charles considering an alternative meaning there.
“Nice cap you got there Eddie boy, did your mum buy it for you in primary school?” Yet another chorus of ill-intent laughter.
Charles hated a bully, sure, if you could really call this bullying. Their insults are nothing more than childish taunts, and they don’t push him around too much. To Charles, it looks more like a boy pulling a girl's pigtails during recess in primary school. For that reason alone, he decides not to jump in, but he still sits at the ready, just in case the verbal teasing turns physical.
Thankfully, Simon seems content with a few needling words before discarding the other boy’s cap on the steps. He quirks a brow at the dark-headed boy and his smirk stretches wider before he shoulders past and toward the school entrance.
It's then that Charles realizes the glassy, near tears look on the boy’s face wasn’t really fear or embarrassment. Eddie, he can only assume, dusts off his cap and glares sharp daggers at the group’s retreating backs, the look on his face not remotely demur. The quip he utters under his breath is far too cheeky for someone who is afraid of, well, anything.
“At least my mother could afford to give me a personality.” Eddie slips his hat into his bag and adjusts his very barely disheveled uniform.
Oh, he likes this kid.
It takes everything to hold back the laugh that threatens to bubble up his throat so that he doesn’t give himself away. Frankly, Charles kind of wants to applaud him for it. What a little biter this Eddie was and obviously, he thinks to himself, Simon has no taste cuz he looks rather smart with his blue pageboy cap…
—
The second time is more of a rescue than a meeting, and it wouldn’t be until hours later, sat in his basement in front of the telly playing Super Mario that he’d realize he didn’t get his name. He’d given HIS name but the boy hadn’t seemed keen to return the favor. He supposes it’s fair, considering he was almost dunked full-on into a freezing lake. Charles has part of a name, Eddie (?) Payne.
Next time, he swears, he’ll get the full thing.
Unfortunately, next time is hard to come by, harder than he expected since their school isn’t quite so big you could full-on lose someone. He doesn’t specifically try to meet him, but when he scans a room or hall or ground for him, he is nowhere to be found. Payne tends to stand out, Charles realizes. The boy is the picture-perfect schoolboy, all clean edges and sculpted perfection. Charles can’t think of another 13-year-old boy who doesn’t at least have a crease somewhere or a half-untucked shirt, or even just tousled hair from horsing around. He’s really only seen him twice, and the boy stood out like a shock of red on canvas.
Even the bellend trio seems to have lost interest in whatever beef they’d had, their focus turned elsewhere.
Then, like a strike of lightning, he’s cutting through the main building after practice when he sees that blue pageboy cap just before it disappears into the school library. Charles briefly thinks about leaving and letting the boy alone, but he’s one part concerned and two parts curious about the barb-tongued 8th year. How had he managed to just cease existing for the last few weeks like a ghost haunting Charles' curiosity but never consistently enough to prove his existence?
Adjusting his bag on his shoulder, he makes his way into the library only to immediately get a sharp hiss from the librarian as he collides with a book cart right through the door. It wasn’t his fault it was there, but he still offers a pained smile and bows his head in apology. Once the librarian’s attention turns elsewhere, satisfied by his showing of shame, he scans the open area of the library, getting up on the toes of his Converse and craning his neck the best he can. The blue cap was nowhere to be seen.
Failing to find Payne in the main area, he adjusts his bag on his back once again and turns down an aisle to browse the stacks instead.
Maybe he was browsing for a book? He seemed like the bookish sort. Both times he’d seen the boy he’d had at least one thick book that looked like it belonged in a museum either in hand or his bag. Probably read Keats or Yeats or like Nietzsche or something, Charles figures. It matched his whole vibe.
He peaks around, stack after stack. At least once he’s fairly certain he sees a couple of year 12s most definitely not saving room for Jesus, as the Americans say. Still no brochure boy, though. After a few minutes, he finds himself face to face with the final wall of shelves and starts to feel like this had been a rather stupid idea.
Payne is probably not here and, really, Charles is starting to wonder why he’d wasted at least 30 minutes looking for him. Until he turns, and light catches on a shiny black boot. There, peeking out from beneath a table, shoved against the wall between towering shelves, is one boot-covered foot swaying back and forth.
Grinning to himself, Charles pokes his head round, leaning sideways, and asks in a loud whisper, “so what’s that you’re reading then?”
Charles has to bite back a laugh at the way the boy startles suddenly, hitting his head on the top of the table, and promptly hissing out his name in indignation.
“Charles!”
The fact that he remembered his name makes his smile grow wider, eyes almost squinting from the intensity. He says his name all proper and posh like he’s some disappointed teacher instead of a 13-year-old boy sitting and reading…. Hellblazer ? Well, that sounded wicked.
Charles tosses his bag on the floor and snatches the comic up in one fluid motion, before flopping on the ground against one of the tall shelves that bracket Payne’s hiding place.
Payne looks torn between a few emotions, perhaps an edge of fear and confusion with a slight muted annoyance. It's right funny to see the way his carefully schooled face battles to not show it all the while failing. He definitely wants to ask for his comic back but Charles is already flipping through it.
“Wicked…” he mutters, actually pretty sucked in by whatever this Hellblazer thing is. The art is gritty and disgusting. He loves it. Almost in awe, he finds himself saying, “you didn’t look like the comic book type. Half expected you to read like I dunno– Keats or something smart.”
Charles pauses suddenly, not able to comprehend what he just saw and his eyes go a little wider. “Is this bloke performing some sort of exorcism starkers or?”
The boy pulls it, or rather snatches it, out of his hand and Charles thinks he sees him blush a bit, embarrassed. “No!” Then quieter, “no. He’s trying to purify him because he did something stupid and it had consequences.”
Charles raises a good-humored brow, his smile only a bit teasing.
“It’s not weird like that…” Payne doubles down, clearing his throat. “You just happened to flip to the weirdest page.” He holds it protectively to his chest, his expression indignant as looks back over at Charles. “And I do like Keats but that does not mean I can’t like comics as well.”
He’s snippy, jaw flexing from where he clenches it but Charles feels no fire in his words, instead he just continues to grin. “Oi, don’t get so bothered, meant it as a compliment didn’t I?”
That earns him another look and then the boy is almost visibly deflating beneath Charles' smile. His smile is his greatest weapon, it makes almost anyone give to him and Charles rarely uses it responsibly.
Payne gives in a most interesting way, launching into explaining the brilliance that is John Constantine, the blonde, stubbled occult detective from Liverpool. Charles thinks he looks like a more handsome version of a stereotypical grizzled detective from some American film where his wife was killed or daughter kidnapped.
“His trenchcoat is aces though.” Charles says out loud, interrupting the peak of a rant. “Wonder if the headmaster would have an aneurysm if I wore a trenchcoat.”
Payne pauses, finger in the air, and frowns a frown that is almost a pout. “Charles, do focus. This part is important .”
Charles rests his cheek in his hand, elbow propped up on one of his crossed knees. “Yeah yeah, carry on then.” He listens as he’s told, trying to school the smile that tries to tug at the corners of his lips. Something about this boy as he tries to defend the comic he was reading by launching into a hushed rundown of the entire story of like…300 issues is kind of fun. He listens, and when the boy shoves another comic against his chest, he takes it.
“You might like that one better. It’s stand-alone stories and it’s a mystery.” He adds, realizing he’d just been talking and talking without any real input back from the other boy. This must be the first time he’s handed over one of his comics of his own free will, because those wide, green eyes flitter between the comic and Charles' face before finally darting away. He schools his expression again, wiping it clean of insecurity in an instant.
Charles's lips jut in his own form of acknowledgment before nodding and giving a slight roll of his shoulders. “Never said I didn’t like the first one but since you’re offering I’ll give it a read.” He settles back in, ignoring green eyes watching him momentarily like a prey animal expecting a predator to suddenly round on them, all big jaws and sharp teeth, or something. He glances up, raising a questioning brow and Payne looks away again, caught before settling back in beneath the table.
Charles turns half his attention back to the well-worn pages, a small piece of him taking in the sound of pages turning to his left and the boy subtly shifting beneath the table. He wants to ask why he’s there, but he thinks he realizes now why he couldn’t find the boy this whole time. He’d been hiding, not necessarily from Charles or maybe not even from the boys who’d been bullying him. Maybe from the world? After all, Charles himself noticed how much he’d stood out. So he hides where he can’t be seen, where no one can glimpse the secret parts of the brochure perfect boy who is both underspoken but hilariously witty. Also, an absolute nerd.
Maybe he’s not red against canvas but blue, shocking but not in the way that makes you clutch your chest in surprise. Rather, a calmer sort of surprise, a pleasant sort that settles slowly over you, Charles thinks, and pulls his attention away from the turn of a page and back to the comic in his hands.
He’s a few pages in, caught up in the whodunnit of it all when a thought finally occurs to him. “Wait.” The other boy startles ever so slightly, not enough to bang his head this time even when Charles peeks around the leg of the table, face too close for comfort. “What’s your name? Kinda odd I don’t know your name, innit?”
Payne’s expression is a perfect recreation of his maths teacher’s when he asks one of his ‘ridiculous’ questions. Then, it softens into something complex that he doesn’t quite understand.
“You….really don’t know my name?” He lowers the comic book to his lap. “Aren’t you friends with Gregory and half the rugby team? Simon Bell is also on the Cricket team with you…”
For a moment he’s a bit flattered that the boy has apparently paid enough attention to even know he’s on the Cricket team. Charles thinks about that, and if he really is friends with any of them. If he’s honest with himself he doesn’t exactly have any friends, not anyone he’d sit down reading comics with that’s for sure. He’s plenty friendly with folks and he’s the good sort of chap that knows how to make most people like him. Shake a laugh or two out of them. But he responds, with a shake of his head, “nah, not like that. They bother you a lot?”
“Edwin Payne.” He gets a quiet response though not to his follow-up question. It’s so quiet and forced out, like he’s punched it right out of his lungs and pale delicate fingers pick at invisible threads in perfectly pressed trousers. “And maybe sometimes. I am not special though, they do it to everyone.” One of those pianist's hands adjusts the lapel of his blazer as he shrugs. “I do not get it half as bad as others.”
Somehow Charles didn’t think that was entirely true but his mind sticks on that name. Edwin Payne was so much cooler than EDDIE or EDWARD Payne. It was badass, definitely not a brochure kid’s name. It felt old and yet it fit so perfectly.
“Edwin Payne? That’s brills. Like a noir detective from one of those old American films or like a Bond villain.” He grins, saying it again to commit it to memory, the sound of it scratching something in his brain.
Edwin actually gives him a chuckle, visibly unspooling from where he’d wound himself so tightly. “I’m just going to assume this is another one of your carefully disguised compliments?” He pauses, watching as the other grins and nods, very much looking the picture of a pleased labrador.
“Brills?” He asks then, that smile turning infectious and it’s obvious he wants to conceal it and can’t.
Charles' lower lip juts out ever so slightly as he nods. “Yeah Brills, like bril or brilliant? Just plural so it’s better, innit?”
Edwin’s brows are knitted somewhat like he can’t believe what he’s hearing, then they smooth out and he’s smiling a true, almost fond smile that makes that dark little corner of the library maybe feel a little too bright for a moment.
“I see, I suppose it does make it better.” He nods, and green eyes turn back to the pages of his comic leaving Charles grinning at his approval.
After a few beats of comfortable silence, Charles interrupts again. “This is mint, you got any more I can borrow?” And just like that, Charles Rowland and Edwin Payne become the best of mates.