Work Text:
If Edwin could ever know cause for a second death, it would be this: Charles, looking utterly devastating in an honest-to-goodness red velvet suit, the top two buttons of his cream dress shirt tastefully undone and his gold chain settled under the open collar in place of a tie. Edwin recalls how time abandoned him, in the office when they first donned their new formalwear; how his eyes caught on the shadowed rise and dip of Charles’s collarbones and would not let go. Crystal and Niko’s commentary had been but wind to him.
Worst of all, of course, is Charles’s smile, taking up his darling face with a glow like the sun as Madame Adeline returns to her duties as hostess.
“Job officially jobbed, then,” he says, tilting his head in such a way that his golden earring—a fixture of his appearance no matter what state of dress he is in, as unfaltering as the North Star—catches the light of one of the many chandeliers overhead.
“Job officially jobbed,” Edwin echoes. He tries to tamp down the longing in his voice, but it feels to no avail. It spills from him, as always, as blood comes springing from a fresh cut.
He swallows and looks away, busying himself with an idle survey the partygoers—anything to avoid whatever unwise things he might feel tempted to do at the prolonged sight of Charles’s collarbones. Madame Adeline is locked in conversation with her husband on the balcony; couples of all configurations oscillate arm-in-arm upon the dance floor to a song with a sultry melody; friends mingle on the outskirts, flutes of spectral champagne loose in hand; and tall women with extravagant, sparkling outfits, exaggerated curves, and painted faces loft through the crowd like swans, red and pink and violet lips letting out laughter Edwin recalls as deep and resonant from a few witness interviews conducted during the case.
“Now,” he says, steepling his fingers at his waist. “Shall we return to the office?”
His request is, in truth, one of self-preservation. The faster he and Charles get out of their ballroom best and into their usual attire, the faster Edwin will be able to regain the reigns on his attraction. Only, of course—
Charles laughs brightly beside him, and Edwin gives in to its pull. A sunflower could not reject the sun.
Beautiful. Always, his smile is simply beautiful.
“Come on, mate,” Charles says, wheedling. “We don’t have to go just yet, do we? Madame Adeline invited us to stay and enjoy the ball for a bit, if we wanted.”
Edwin could continue to fight it. There are, in truth, a great number of further protests he could make, if he truly wished to leave. He knows that if he pressed hard enough, Charles would accept defeat, and they would be mirroring back to the office in a wink.
But.
But love has made Edwin Payne weak. And there is something deeper in Charles’s eyes; something Edwin cannot quite parse, but which seems more weighted than his usual bullheaded determination to coax Edwin out of his comfort zone. It is—desperate, slightly, the look held there; desperate and just barely grieving on its edges, clamped tight under the force of a terribly, terribly hopeful smile.
Stay, the look says, and not just in the way that Charles’s voice has already said it. Not just to make the most of Madame Adeline’s hospitality. Stay with me.
Perhaps Edwin is merely imagining things. Wishful thinking, as it were.
“Oh, alright,” He sighs nonetheless, and immediately must glance away again in order to not buckle under the force of Charles’s pleased eye-crinkling. “I suppose we could stay a short while.”
“There’s a lad,” says Charles, warm.
Edwin suppresses a shiver. “What exactly is it that you mean for us to do here?”
For a time, Charles does not answer. He hums, hands in his trouser pockets as he bounces on the balls of his feet—looking from the few couples still swaying against each other in the center of the room, to the groups clotted together along the edges, to the ghostly band that has just slid into a slower song.
Then, he turns to Edwin and extends a hand.
“May I have this dance?”