Chapter Text
“Are we ever gonna fix that goddamn record player?”
John chuckled, the spruce-brown rumble of his voice filling up the soft amber kitchen. “What do you have against the radio, Noel?”
“Nothin’, just—”
Noel padded over to John, his socks dampening the sound of his footsteps. Warm spices and the wholesome smell of roast chicken made his mouth water. His arms found their way around John’s body and he sighed, pressing himself into John’s broad back. John tilted his head and kissed lightly above Noel’s eye—Noel returned the gesture with a kiss to John’s jaw. The two of them closed their eyes and Noel crooked his neck up to slot his chin atop his lover’s shoulder. John’s long, raven hair tickled his cheek. A domestic image, almost unreal, yet one he and John had been living in for quite some time now.
“Phonograph’s got a better sound, that’s all. Surely you’ve heard the difference?” he pried.
“Why don’t you fix it, then?”
Noel nuzzled his face into the high collar of John’s turtleneck. John dragged a ladle through the earthy-smelling soup, sending the softened vegetables dancing in the broth.
“Oh, please. I can’t work with my hands, Johnny, you know that.”
John huffed. “You’re plenty good with your hands,” he murmured, and Noel blushed and smiled with a tinge of embarrassment.
“The lip on you, kid. Where’d that come from, hm?”
“I blame you,” John replied loftily.
“The student becomes the teacher.”
John turned the heat down on the stove and turned, leaning against the counter. Noel smiled slyly and was met with a cheeky frown.
“I have a thing or two to teach you about not distracting me in the kitchen,” he teased, tapping Noel’s chin with his thumb. “Besides, speaking of the radio, there’s—”
“That boxing match?” Noel suggested hopefully. John rolled his eyes. He couldn’t stand the things (and reasonably so, in Noel’s opinion—John had seen enough fighting to last a lifetime. Noel himself, on the other hand, had a nostalgic fondness for them).
“Just put on the classical station,” John said, long-suffering.
Noel unwound himself from his lover, left a kiss on the larger man’s cheek and stepped away. John shot him a fond look; Noel grinned at the knuckles that brushed the back of his neck. The world was ever-darkening outside, both from stormclouds and from nightfall coming earlier and earlier. It was mid-November and the cold snap hitting New York was well overdue. If Noel stepped towards the window, he’d catch the drifting, clean scent of an incoming snowstorm.
The window was occupied, however—old queen Charlotte sat diligently perched in the armchair beside the window, “surveying her kingdom” as Noel often joked. The scruffy-furred German Shepherd had become an addition to the Doe-Finley-Dowd household shortly after John’s return. She was a war dog, aiding in the recovery of blind soldiers in the years after the war ended—her penchant towards caring for the sick and injured stayed with her into the fifteenth year of her life, and she wriggled into bed beside both John and Noel on more than one occasion, licking their faces softly to wake them from terrible dreams. Now, with no terrified men to fret over, she wagged her tail and perked her ears towards the passing cars outside. Noel approached her and sunk his fingers into the thick fluff around her neck.
“Y’know, maybe I will fix it,” Noel mused. “Or hire someone to fix it. What do you think, girlie? You wanna listen to the radio some more, or get the record player fixed?”
She looked up at him, as if she understood every word he said and held no strong opinion in her glassy brown eyes.
“What music do you think our Charlotte likes, doll?” Noel called to John.
“Strings,” John replied immediately. “She always lays closer to the radio when a string orchestra comes on.”
“Really!”
John nodded, portioning out ladlefuls of the chicken soup into their respective bowls. Noel went back to the kitchen table, dog in tow, and scraped the cooked scraps of meat into a third bowl before setting it on the floor.
“I meant to go to an orchestra concert last weekend, actually,” John said slowly as he sat. “But it was at the university, so…”
Ah. Noel sighed sympathetically and laid his hand atop John’s. “Darlin’, it seems like everything’s pullin’ you straight back there. Why don’t you give it some more thought?”
“I have!” John exclaimed, frustrated. “S-sorry. Sorry.”
“No need for sorries, angel,” he soothed.
“I just– I have given it thought. A lot of thought. But I haven’t even…” John sighed, melancholy seeping in where anger bled out. “I haven’t written a thing since September, Noel. I try. I’m trying. But I can’t even put pen to paper—I-I can’t even read my old work without hearing his voice.”
Noel squeezed John’s hand. “I know, kid,” he said quietly.
Arthur’s name was rarely spoken aloud, but both of them felt it constantly in their mouths, as tangible and painful as biting one’s tongue. It took a week before John had told Noel what had happened. Noel would’ve guessed, regardless. John could do nothing but cry when Noel first found him.
Now, Arthur’s memory lingered around every corner. Noel saw the way John’s shoulders ached from carrying the weight of it. He did what little he could to soothe the man; some days it worked. Other days… well.
John changed jobs often. Grief sometimes sickened him to the point of being bed-bound for days at a time. Noel understood; that didn’t always make it easy, not when John skipped meals and showers and life itself for restless sleep. He tried to force himself up the first time it happened, back when he worked as a dishwasher. He broke a man’s hand that night, and Noel had found him miles away afterwards, ankle-deep in the frigid, black waters that bordered the Red Hook grain terminal.
(Then, of course, there was the part they never talked about. The shadowy, nightmarish part that reared its head when John was too distressed to stay human.)
But John had been doing better. His current job—a bartender, an oddly fitting position for him—had lasted four months at this point. And God, how the guy was trying.
Noel waited for a moment, hand in hand with him, and watched a resigned sadness settle over him rather than the crushing emptiness he had come to expect.
“Maybe December will be kinder,” John sighed.
“You’ll feel more ready,” Noel assured him. “I see you do a little better each month. I’m real proud of you.”
John’s eyes met his; they seemed to glint. John visibly steadied himself with a deep breath and laced his fingers with Noel’s.
“You really think so?”
“I know so, sweetheart,” Noel said, pointing his spoon at John. “And come spring, you’ll find it easier and easier. You’ll be writing again in no time, cross my heart.”
John smiled timidly and let go of Noel’s hand, a sign that he felt better. They ate in relative quiet, sharing various work-related stories and thoughts regarding the upcoming months. When Noel glanced down, he noticed Charlotte's absence, and raised an eyebrow in concern. She had only eaten half of her chicken—he scanned the space around them and found her in an eerie state.
She was at the window again. This time, she stood frozen with her paws on the low windowsill, her tail ramrod straight at a sharp angle. Her ears were strained forward and her mouth parted, exposing her teeth to the outside world. Noel stood, confused.
“What’s wrong, girl?”
“What’s she doing?”
As Noel approached her, he heard a low growl coming from her throat—so unlike her that Noel felt alarms go off in his head.
She didn’t turn to look at him. Suddenly, she bolted towards the far-right side of the window and barked viciously. Noel tried to calm her, to no effect; the wind began to whistle and he heard, all at once, a chorus of howling from the other neighborhood strays.
“Earthquake?” John suggested, uneasy.
“We’d see shit rattling. No, something’s wrong. Easy, girl! Quit that!”
Charlotte’s tail wagged rapidly and her snarling grew louder; she pawed frantically at the windowpane, the tk-tk-tk of her nails on the glass acting as the percussion to the terrible wailing of ambulance sirens. The overlapping sound crescendoed as the ambulances roared past their house. The lights flickered, and suddenly, all was quiet.
Charlotte shrunk away from the window, whining and making herself small beneath the table, and John knelt to soothe her.
The phone rang. John’s gaze shot up; Noel heard a dull thunk as he knocked into the table. It would’ve been humorous in any other context—Noel extended a shaking hand in a feeble attempt at reassurance and answered.
“Heh–” he cleared his throat, “Hello?”
“Detective Finley? It’s Maurice. Sorry to bother you so late, but we’ve got a situation down at Lenox Hill.”
“Yeah, I just saw an ambulance go by, what’s wrong?”
Noel paced as much as the cord would allow, a nasty, sinking feeling in his gut.
“Well, we got a report from a kid about a naked John Doe on the side of the road.”
Noel swallowed thickly. How sinister his love’s name sounded here. His mouth was made of iron. John came into the fuzzy peripherals of his vision, mouthing out a question. What happened?
Noel shook his head. In a minute.
“Jesus.”
“It gets worse,” the officer Maurice intoned, “The guy looked like a corpse. Skinny and covered in scars—maybe a soldier once, there were some old bullet wounds on him. On the verge of hypothermia. We went to deal with him, but when we tried to move him, he woke up. He was too out of it to answer any of our questions, he just kept repeating a name over and over.”
“Name?”
“Well—see, that’s the thing. It was a placeholder. He himself kept asking for John Doe. Ironic, if it wasn’t so goddamn creepy.”
Noel felt dizzy. He trembled and swore his heart dropped through the floorboards. “A-anything else?”
“We said we were with the NYPD—he said your name last and passed out.”
It couldn’t be.
“H-his accent,” Noel forced out. “Did he— did he have an accent?”
Officer Maurice clucked his tongue. “Yeah, he was British. Does that matter?”
It couldn’t be.
“Oh, I almost forgot to mention—he wasn’t really looking at any of us. His eyes looked distant, y’know? Like he was blind.”
The phone clattered to the hardwood. Noel turned the stove off and donned his shoes in the span of a few minutes—he called out to John breathlessly.
“Get your coat on. We need to go, now.”
John stared at him in wide-eyed confusion. “Where? Noel, just—would you slow down and explain?”
Noel froze with a hand on the doorknob.
“Arthur’s back.”