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Charlie
'I really think there were six paintings with crows,' Charlie said. His heart was pounding, both from the excitement and all the running. He was a runner in everyday life but usually he wasn't running while carrying chests of gold or cans full of gunpowder.
'No mate, it was five. I'm sure of it.'
He shrugged, unwilling to waste more time arguing about it. He watched as the man standing next to him put in the number and then jumped as the chest blew up.
'Told you,' he muttered. It was unclear if anyone heard him because the small group was already heading towards the next box. He stayed in the back of their small pack. There was no reason for him to rush. Best case scenario was that they had already opened it by the time he got there and then they would have to run back to the start.
As he jogged behind, he watched Nick Nelson. The man was in good shape. He was a former rugby player but had retired and was now a teacher. His previous career made him the most famous of the participants. Charlie had seen how everyone flocked to him when they arrived. That alone made him hang back. Even if he didn't want to.
Because Nick was stunning. Even with the protective goggles, Charlie could see his big brown eyes, the ones that made everyone he spoke to trust him instantly. His strawberry blond hair was heavy with sweat which should have been gross but somehow only made him sexier. And he would have sworn that production had given him a shirt that was a size too small as it stretched across his chest in a sinful way. All of it combined to Charlie's totally ridiculous crush.
If only the man wasn't a bloody traitor.
Charlie had been convinced since the moment they'd ripped off their blindfolds at the initial round table. He had seen how Nick's eyes had darted nervously around the table until they landed on Charlie. Nick had given him a half smile that would have melted him into a puddle under any other circumstance. As it was, Charlie had narrowed his eyes and looked away.
The two of them, along with eighteen others, were playing on a reality TV show called The Traitors. On the first night at the round table, the host had chosen a few players to be Traitors, leaving the rest of them as Faithfuls. The Faithfuls' job was to find and vote out the Traitors at a nightly round table vote. It was a tense situation since they didn't have much to go on. It was all speculation and guesswork. Thus far they'd only voted off one Traitor and all the rest had been Faithfuls. Everyone was chomping at the bit to find another Traitor.
Later that night, after the voting was complete and another faithful got the unfortunate chop, everyone would split up into their rooms and the traitors would meet in the castle turret to 'murder' someone, which meant the player was eliminated from the game. The rest of them would find out who'd been booted at breakfast the next day. It was all very dramatic. So far, Charlie had been lucky enough to not be a target, though he wasn't sure why. It felt like maybe someone was protecting him – which made him suspect Nick even more. The two had a flirtatious banter and Charlie suspected that it was one of the reasons he was allowed to wake up each morning.
Much of the game was about aesthetics. It was very gothic and over the top, lending to the air of treachery and murder. Whoever made it to the end would split the cash prize, unless there was still a Traitor in their midst. Then the Traitor would walk away with everything. It was a game of cat and mouse, and Charlie was stuck as one of the mice.
He'd been trying to get on the programme since season one and now, in the fourth season, he'd finally been accepted. Though being here was harder than he'd expected, partially because he couldn't fully trust anyone and partially because of the athleticism needed for the missions, which is where they got money to grow the cash pot for the end. All these people were complete strangers, but proximity made for quick alliances and after only a few days he felt he'd known some of them for ages. He appreciated the insights of a guy called Isaac, and the bubbly enthusiasm of a woman called Elle who wore stunning outfits even during the most arduous of missions.
Right now, they were on precisely such a mission. Everyone had been divided into small teams, four people per team, and had been given a section of a map. They followed the map to find labelled chests that had keypads on them. Each chest had a question with a numerical answer. If they input the correct answer, the chest would open to reveal either gold pieces or gunpowder. Either way, they had to drag the heavy contents back down the hill and to the place they'd started. The gold went in one pile while the gunpowder was poured into a barrel. When the challenge ended, the barrel would be lit. If they'd gathered enough gunpowder, they would light a giant statue of a Traitor and all of them would have immunity from being murdered for the night.
It was a damn good incentive. All of them were trying their hardest to get both the cash and the gunpowder. Though Charlie swore that Nick was holding them up. He'd gotten the last answer wrong, and he seemed to be constantly pointing them in the wrong direction. Maybe he thought he was being clever about it, but Charlie saw through it. The man was a Traitor bent on sabotage to try and prevent the players from being protected.
'Got it!' Another one of his teammates cried, opening the chest to reveal gunpowder. The team began filling buckets with the gunpowder before running back to the start. Charlie's arms ached as he carried his bucket. He swore they had given him the heaviest one and he was straining to carry it. Nick and the others were ahead of him, and he was watching them, wondering if anyone else on his team was a Traitor, so he missed a big branch on the ground. He didn't see it until he was tripping over it and fell on his face.
'Shit!' He swore as he looked up and saw the spilt gunpowder. He scrambled over, trying to shovel what he could back into his bucket. As he did, he saw his teammates turn back, about to come help. 'I've got it, you guys go!' He wasn't sure how much time they had left but he was sure it wasn't much.
They nodded, continuing to run. Only Nick stayed, watching Charlie for another second before continuing.
Charlie got less than half of the gunpowder back in before he gave up and started to run again. He made it as the last of his team was pouring theirs in.
'Let me,' Nick said, starting to take his bucket.
'I can do it,' he snapped. Nick went wide-eyed but then shrugged. Charlie pushed the bucket above his head, trying not to let his arms shake as he did. He eventually made it, pouring his bucket in as the time was called.
'Well team, let's see if you banked enough gunpowder to light the statue,' Claudia, the host of the show, said, holding a torch above her head.
Charlie was huddled with the others, holding onto a woman called Tara as he caught his breath. All of them watched, barely daring to blink, as she lit the fuse. It took and slowly made its way to the gunpowder. Charlie held his breath, waiting to see if the cloaked figure would light on fire. For a second it looked like it wasn't enough. He was worried that his spill had done them in.
But then it lit up, catching fire beautifully. Cheers erupted around him, and everyone started hugging. Charlie hugged back, relieved that he was finally going to get a good night's sleep.
'Cheers!' He found himself in Nick's arms, the two of them hugging and then slowly pulling back. Everyone else faded away as he stared at Nick. It was the first time they'd touched, and Charlie found that he was reluctant to move back. Nick had Charlie's forearms in his large hands and Charlie could feel the warmth of them through his all-black, weatherproof uniform.
'Well done,' Charlie said, his voice quieter than he meant it to be.
'You as well.'
Their eyes met and Charlie wanted to say more. If they had been at a pub or anywhere else, he might have given it a shot, asked Nick out, but here he couldn't. He shouldn’t trust anyone until this was all over. Someone flung their arms around Charlie, breaking the bubble and drawing him back into the thrill of their victory.
Nick
'Come eat with us, mate!' Harry called, gesturing to an empty seat.
Nick hesitated. He didn't really want to eat with Harry. The man rubbed him the wrong way. He didn't think Harry was a Traitor, only because if he was, he likely would have been too smug to keep the secret, but that didn't mean Nick liked him. He'd heard Harry misgender people at least twice and that was enough for him to steer clear of him.
Instead, he went in search of Tara, who he'd grown close to. While you could never be one hundred percent sure, Nick was fairly certain that she was a Faithful, like him. He wandered outside and saw her sitting at a table with someone. 'Nick! Come join us!' She called, waving a hand.
He moved forward and nearly gasped as he saw who she was with. Charlie. The man was balancing a plate of food on his beautiful knees – who had beautiful knees? Really? – and he looked up as Nick walked over, his blue eyes portraying his surprise. Nick's heart was in his throat. He'd thought that Charlie was attractive since the first day, everything from his curls to his cautious smile had drawn Nick in. If he had been anywhere else, he would have asked Charlie out for coffee. But here? He couldn't.
Especially because Charlie was a Traitor. Nick was sure of it. At their first round table, after they'd all taken off their blindfolds, Nick had looked around and found Charlie glaring at him like Nick had ‘prey’ written all over him. It made him incredibly anxious.
Nick's certainty had only grown today, when Charlie had spilled his bucket of gunpowder. He knew the man was a runner, there was no way he would have tripped like that. He was trying to sabotage them so they couldn't light the statute. But none of that stopped his silly little crush or the occasional flirting. He justified it by thinking that it might save him, if Charlie was a Traitor maybe he'd want to keep Nick around.
He went to sit with them, sitting opposite of Charlie.
'How was your group? Was anyone shifty?' Tara asked, taking a bite of her chicken.
Nick glanced at Charlie before speaking. He wasn't ready to reveal his suspicions, even to Tara. He would move on Charlie when he had more support. And maybe he wanted to keep the man around. Sue him, Nick liked the eye candy.
'Nah, everyone was trying their best,' Nick said.
Charlie's eyes narrowed on him, and, after a moment's hesitation, he nodded. 'Yeah, their best,' he echoed.
Nick heard the odd tone but that seemed like Tara didn't. She launched into her own suspicions. 'I still think it's Isaac, I know he's quiet but think about it. How many mysteries has he read? He can blend in perfectly! No one would ever suspect him.'
She kept talking but Nick was only half listening. Instead, he was looking at Charlie, wondering what the man was thinking, if he was disappointed that he didn't get to murder someone tonight. Charlie's eyes flickered up to him. At first he thought Charlie would be mad because he caught him staring but then he had returned a flirtatious smile, his eyes roaming over Nick's chest and arms.
'Nick was really helpful today, carrying all the heavy boxes,' he said abruptly.
Tara looked thrown by the change in topic but nodded. 'That's- good.'
'All that rugby training must have paid off.'
He was still looking at Nick, who was starting to feel warm around his collar. 'I suppose it did. Those chests were much heavier than a rugby ball. Though I think I could lift something even heavier, if I needed to.' He let his eyes travel over Charlie, wondering what it would be like to pick him up and carry him into his bedroom.
From Charlie's smirk he knew exactly what Nick was thinking. 'I bet you can.'
Tara changed the subject again and shortly after Nick left to get seconds. He got drawn into other conversations and never made it back to the table with Charlie. Before he knew it, it was time for another round table. Charlie was seated directly across from him and their eyes kept meeting. Nick knew he should bring up his suspicions of Charlie but couldn't bring himself to. He wanted to keep the man around for at least another day. Maybe, he could bring himself to ask the man out, Nick mused.
And then vote him off as a Traitor? Yeah, that would go over well.
He wanted to let out a groan but was hyper-aware of how people took things at the table. He needed to keep his face neutral. As far as he knew, he wasn't on anyone's radar and wanted to keep it that way. As soon as someone was accused of being a Traitor they were treated differently, even if they later proved their innocence. Nick wanted to avoid the black spot on his name for as long as possible.
Charlie
With everyone now safe after today's mission, the round table got heated quickly. A woman called Imogen started crying because she was insistent that she had no information to go on and Elle was sassing the host which was unheard of.
'Isaac,' Tara said, 'I still don't understand why you thought there were 30 counties in Scotland and not 33. You must have known full well how many there are. I thought you once wrote a travel guide about the best castles…'
Charlie liked how perceptive Tara was. Ever since the first Traitor, a chatty HR lady called Linda with a passion for the violin, had gotten found out, Tara had been out on the hunt for more blood. Linda had been acting suspiciously from Day 1. She couldn't keep a secret to save her life and had promptly been booted at the round table.
'I genuinely couldn't remember the precise number. It's an easy mistake to make,' Isaac tried to bat off the accusation.
'I agree,' Nick chimed in, 'things like that are really hard to remember!' Isaac hadn't asked for Nick's defense, so Charlie immediately got suspicious about what motivated this support. He could see Nick's Adam's apple move as he swallowed nervously. Someone pointed out that Charlie had spilled all that gun powder. Nick didn't immediately leap to his defense and instead nodded mutely.
Clearly, he was quietly but surely trying to frame Charlie. Charlie wasn't worried, though, he'd had this guy sussed out. He felt like Nick would crack on his own eventually without him adding additional pressure right then and there, but he would make his feelings known soon enough. Whatever those feelings were… When the count eventually came in, votes were spread wide and included one vote for him and one for 'Nyk'. They ended up voting out yet another Faithful, but the guy was kind of smarmy and Charlie was glad to see the back of him.
Charlie made it through another night and the next challenge didn’t settle his worries in the slightest. This time the challenge wasn’t physical but all about memory. Claudia asked the contestants to recite obscure facts about the player’s past voting behaviour or random facts from trials in order to win sacks of gold to add to the prize pot. For some reason Nick was able to name all the instances in which Charlie had been voted on by other people. Not even Charlie could remember this in the heat of the moment. All of this was further proof of Nick’s intense scrutiny and he couldn’t for the life of him decide whether he craved the man’s attention or whether he was deeply suspicious of it.
His whole game plan had been to play things cool and avoid sticking his neck out, but something about Nick made this impossible. In the evening Charlie finally decided it was time to speak to him. To his annoyance, any room he entered that night was completely Nick-less. It was almost like Nick was avoiding him. Eventually he found him in the library.
There he was, all by himself, just staring up at the picture of a graceful Basset hound howling up at the moon.
'You don't trust me, do you?' Charlie said without any prelude. Nick turned around and spluttered for a bit at the outright confrontation. Charlie stalked towards him and Nick actually backed into the leather footstool. If he didn't have a bone to pick, Charlie could nearly be disarmed by this bumbling display. He stepped in front of Nick and put his arms on his hips.
After a few beats, Nick managed to right himself. He squared his shoulders in response.
'I don’t,' Nick eventually admitted.
'Well, the feeling is entirely mutual,' Charlie said, but however much he tried he couldn't put much heat behind it. Instead, he tried what seemed to have worked earlier: mild physical intimidation. He walked up to Nick, planning on rattling him a bit more. 'You,' he began, intent on getting him to admit to something, anything, and poked his finger into the middle of Nick's chest, but whatever he was going to say completely evacuated itself from his mind. An eerie static ran through his whole body, like an Evanescence song crackling in slow motion through his whole being. He slowly flattened his hand against Nick's pecs, which were barely covered by the flimsy fabric of his T-shirt, and felt the man's thudding heart beat. He stared at his own hand and the way it moved up and down because of Nick's now rather heavy breathing. He had to restrain himself from squeezing.
'Me what?' Nick said quietly, prompting him to continue. Charlie looked up. He could finally see Nick's eyes from up close. They were warm, whiskey-golden pools of light and they looked… kind of scared right now. Charlie could feel his annoyance melt away and be replaced by something else, although what, he wasn’t yet sure.
'I won't-,' Charlie began, not knowing where he wanted the sentence to end. Nick slowly placed his own hand over Charlie's and they just stood there staring at each other, breathing heavily.
Of course, it was then that the evening bell chimed. The sudden noise startled Charlie and he knew it was time to leave the castle for the day. He abruptly pulled his hand away, and rushed out of the vaulted archway into the cool air. What had just happened? And what was he going to do?
Nick
Nick stood rooted to spot, waiting out all twelve chimes of the bell.
What a disaster. Why did these things happen to him? Why must the hot guy he's fallen for be the Traitor? And why was the hot Traitor accusing him when no one else was around? Nick didn’t have it in him to play these mind games. He missed his dog. And his mum. Oh fuck, did his mum see all that? He must be so obvious. After taking a few steadying breaths, he started walking and made his way out of the library and straight into a night of fitful sleep.
The next few days were torture. The stakes kept rising. Isaac had fallen victim to a murder in plain sight, and Nick was certain that Charlie had been the one executing the deed when he fake-drunkenly insisted on reciting Oscar Wilde poetry to Isaac’s face.
Like the adults they are, they had been avoiding each other, only working together when they had to and trying to bow out of questions about speculations whenever the other came up. And somehow they kept surviving and surviving.
Nick had been turning things over and over in his head, and he had finally come to a decision. If he wanted to see Charlie again after this, he had to let himself trust his feelings. Yes, he did want to help out his mum with the sum he had been hoping to win doing this, but the odds had always been bad from the very start, so he never let himself imagine it fully. And perhaps he now also understood much better what, or who, he really wanted.
This is how he found himself standing here at the final showdown. The final three were Tara, Charlie and himself. The banishing room was much more sinister during this final phase. Their faces were illuminated only by the tall flickering flames from the ceremonial pyre around which they had assembled, and everyone kept exchanging nervous glances.
'Hi!' Nick whispered to Charlie, who stood to his right.
'Hi,' was the nervous response.
'Just us now.'
'Yeah, just us.'
Tara coughed politely. Claudia stepped from the shadows into the dramatic scene to explain the rules. In order to end the game, all remaining players would have to select a pouch to throw into the fire. If the flames remain green, the game would end because all players trusted each other. If the flames turned red it meant that the player didn’t trust one of the remaining players. In that case, another round of silent voting would have to happen until only two players remained.
Nick knew that often these rounds ended in tears and bitter betrayal, but he had done some thinking in those quiet nights with only the cry of the peacock echoing through the castle grounds.
Nick selected his pouches and handed it to Claudia. The others followed suit.
Solemnly and at an excruciatingly slow pace, Claudia threw Tara’s pouch into the fire and the flames lit up in green, meaning she trusted all of her fellow players to be Faithfuls. Claudia got to Nick’s pouch. She held it in her hands for a few moments and Nick could see Charlie hold his breath. She threw it in and the flames immediately turned green. Maybe everyone was screaming at their TV sets right now about how Nick was hopelessly gullible, but he no longer cared. Sometimes all it needs is a leap of faith.
And now it was time for Charlie. Nick couldn’t bear the tension and he directed his eyes towards the ceiling. And then there it was, a whoosh and a green flash illuminating the room. The game was done.
He still didn’t know whether Charlie was a traitor or not, the reveal would follow soon and one by one they were supposed to declare their true identity to each other. But Nick could no longer wait, it was done and he had to declare his feelings. He strode over, held out his hand for Charlie to take. ‘Charlie,’ Nick whispered, ‘I think you may be my 100 percent.’
Charlie grasped Nick’s hand, smiled up at him, and then stood on his tiptoes to place a timid kiss on Nick’s lips.
Claudia looked on to the scene and squealed with delight, and so did Tara, but for an entirely different reason.
Tara
‘Anyway,’ Tara drawls gleefully. She sat in the comfy confessional chair and stared right down the barrel of the camera lens.
‘I obviously won the whole thing. These two checked out to some other planet mooning over each other, so it was useful to keep them around. But, hey, they seem happy with it? Now I can finally open my own dance school. Rainbow Moves is going to be a place for people to perform and be their true selves - don’t mind that little bit of treachery on my part to make it happen.’