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Charles was not quite back, yet, from dealing with his part of the Case of the Wibbling Wiedergänger, and Edwin lay down on the floor in the office to wait. He had long since lost any capacity to track time while experiencing it, so he didn’t really know how long it was before Charles phased through the door.
He did know that when he looked up he saw the most beautiful thing in the universe. He hadn’t fully realized how different the Charles of 1989 was from his Charles, or how long it had been since he had seen his Charles, but the weight of all those years hit him like the most joyful agony he had ever experienced.
His Charles, standing taller than the Charles from 1989, subtly filled out as his self-concept had shifted, a bit of age in the way he held his face that was not there when he was sixteen in all ways instead of only some. His Charles in the jacket they had designed together and chosen pins and patches for - Edwin remembered pricking his finger putting on the first of them and them both being surprised that ghost-clothes could prick ghost-skin.
His Charles, standing confident in himself, holding himself like someone who knew he could take on demons and Death herself if he had to, so different from the Charles Edwin had left curled up in an attic, fearful of some teenage mortals. His Charles, with the tiny scar on his hand from a splashing potion that they had realized a bit late was able to leave lasting effects on ghosts.
His Charles, who instead of looking at him with fear, broke instantly and instinctively into a genuine grin before his mind even had time to process Edwin’s presence, whose face and soul were lit by Edwin as surely and automatically as an electric light with a finally-completed circuit.
“Oh, hey, Edwin, didn’t realise you’d get back before me! Are we doing floor time?”
Edwin nodded silently. He’d rather forgotten how to say words that weren’t either part of the timeline’s script or a carefully planned diversion from it.
“Great, give me a sec,” Charles said, and hefted his backpack off onto their desk. “Love me some floor time.” The way he moved, too, was different, the motions of someone who has had thirty-five years to learn the exact shape of his body.
He dropped himself to Edwin’s side with the casual gracelessness of an entity who knows at an instinctive level that his body does not, as Niko put it, “take fall damage”. He wriggled to press his arm and leg against Edwin’s, and Edwin briefly lost the ability to see. It had been so long. How could he have forgotten the way his Charles’s touch made his chest thrum?
Charles looked up, at the ceiling of the office, and Edwin did as well. At the ancient glow-in-the-dark stars they had installed when Edwin said he missed stars in London; at the bright purple streak from when Charles had playfully swiped a paint-laden brush at Edwin; at the worrying crack from when Charles had decided to experiment with a new metaphysical explosive, Edwin’s shield spell had failed, and since both of them insisted the crack was their own fault, they had gotten in a stalemate over who should fix it and never done so. The shapes in the variations of the paint that Edwin and Charles had traced with their eyes, together, lying at each others’ sides, hundreds or thousands of times before.
“You doing okay, Eds?” Charles nudged his hand against Edwin’s, not quite taking it, but offering. “You’ve been a little off recently. And not that I don’t love floor time, but… this seems like it might be the sad kind of floor time.”
Edwin struggled against the tangled words in his throat. It had been so very long since he had a conversation without knowing how it would end. But when he finally spoke, his ghostly larynx produced a voice without a trace of hoarseness, which Edwin found oddly disconcerting. “I have been thinking.”
Edwin could feel Charles’s grin without looking, like the warmth of the sun. “Well, yeah.”
Edwin felt his own face twitch in response. “The Spider was only the last of my tormentors, and I will not tell you about the others. You do not know most of the horrors of Hell, because I do not wish you to. I did not wish you to ever see it at all.”
Charles stiffened a bit, and then curled on his side facing Edwin. This time he didn’t just offer; he slung an arm over Edwin’s stomach, and put his face against Edwin’s shoulder, and Edwin’s sight went blank again, because it was either that or beginning to weep. The arm over him felt like crackling electricity, like the best and worst thing he had felt on Earth, at once.
“I do not wish you to know what I experienced in Hell. But you do already know, I think, that it is my greatest fear, and it was pain beyond imagining. And I do wish you to know…” Edwin’s voice finally responded to the mangle in his throat, choking off and roughening. “I do wish you to know that I do not regret it.”
Charles made a sound of confusion against Edwin’s neck.
“I am glad to have been in Hell, and I would do it again, and I would choose for it to have happened, willingly and freely and happily, because it brought me to you, Charles, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything, no matter what it cost me. And I just… I just wanted you to know.”
Charles made another sound, one Edwin couldn’t identify, and held him tighter, and it felt like finally going home, even as it hurt.
“I think,” Charles said after a while, and Edwin almost startled from the haze of Charles’s hold, “there’s something I want you to know too. Because I think there may have been a bit of a misunderstanding, yeah? In Port Townsend.”
Edwin made a sound that he hoped was encouraging, because this was the last time he would hear his Charles’s voice, and he was going to savour every syllable Charles was willing to give him.
“I said I don’t want to be dead, that I hate being dead,” Charles said, and Edwin’s body tried to stiffen even through the bliss of Charles’s arms. “And then I sorta tried to clarify it, some, after, but I don’t think I did a very good job.”
“You did not need to, Charles,” Edwin said, and he felt like he was at a bit of a distance from his head as he said it. “I understand.”
“I’m not sure you do, though,” Charles said, with a bit of urgency that felt wrong with their position on the floor, with the most comfort and rest Edwin had had in… in a sort of time that cannot be counted. “I said that if I had to be dead, I wouldn’t want to be dead with anyone else, and I’ve been thinking, too, and I think you might’ve heard that as… as I’d rather never have met you, but if I had to, at least it’s better than being dead without you. Like you’re just the least miserable of the miserable options.”
Edwin’s body pulled taut, and almost started to pull away from Charles, and Charles held tighter, clinging to his side.
“And that’s not true,” Charles said, and Edwin balked.
“Of course it is.”
Charles growled a little and his hand curled enough to dig into Edwin’s stomach. “No! No, it’s not, see, and maybe I kind of thought it was just a little when I said it, because I was upset, but that’s not what I meant even then, and it’s definitely not true.”
“Charles,” Edwin said, “I was not attempting to pressure you into any form of reciprocation, with my statement. I just wanted you to know. You don’t have to lie to me.” You can’t lie to me. I have seen you die over and over and over, not as many times as I have seen myself die, I think, but far too many, and you can’t lie to me even if you try.
Charles shook Edwin ever so slightly. “I’m not. Just listen. I - what I want, it’s not to have not met you, okay? It’s not something that could have ever happened. I want to be alive with you. I want to be alive with you and grow old with you and to cook for you and have you be able to taste it. I want to - I want to play chess with you in the park with our hair grey and feel the sun and the wind. And hug you and have everyone see it and know that I - that you’re my - my Edwin.”
He paused, and Edwin realized that there was a bit of dampness against his face, and he wasn’t sure if it was from him or from Charles.
“It’s a fantasy, Edwin. Because I wish I hadn’t had to be dead to do it, but there’s no universe, none, where we’re not together, and if there was I wouldn’t want to be in it. I’d choose a world where we were both alive together over one where we were both dead, but I’d choose being dead with you over being alive without you every time. I’d never, ever choose not to be with you. I don’t think I even could. Because there’s no version of this where I don’t come for you, Edwin. There isn’t.”
Edwin blinked up at the faded stars.
“Oh.”
There was a pain in his chest, and it felt so much like the pain every time he failed and Charles died again that he pulled the temporal magic to his fingers instinctively, felt it curling around them and readying to twist the world back again, and -
And Charles took Edwin’s hand in his.
And the magic washed away.