Work Text:
The line Charles normally took to Green Park station had closed for damage.
Fine. No matter. He'd read the signs posted everywhere as he'd descended to the Underground, so he knew what was coming, which routes to take instead. It would take longer. He'd likely be twenty minutes early instead of his usual thirty. No matter. Take the detour, step on the wrong train on the wrong platform, on a line with wrong stops and wrong seating arrangements, and transfer at the wrong spot.
No matter. It’s only a train. I'll still be early.
As he stepped on the wrong train, he repeated these words to himself under his breath, over and over, until they had lost all meaning. Funny, how words did that, how language could lose meaning after so much repetition.
The inconstancy of it frightened him. He shoved the thought aside.
The train was crowded, and there were no seats left.
Fine. No matter. He could stand and hold onto a handrail, jostling against strangers who all smelled different and had no room to give him personal space and were probably entirely indifferent to him anyhow.
He was just another man on the Tube. His job was to fade into the background. His job was always to fade into the background. He could fade into the background so well some days, in fact, that he disappeared entirely into some distant recess where nothing could touch him.
No such luck today.
No matter.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to ignore the way the lights lining the Underground tunnels flashed relentlessly through the windows as the train sped along. Someone collided into his shoulder, muttering “sorry, lad” directly into his ear. Charles hoped desperately through the fog that it wouldn't come across as rude if the appropriate words to respond were currently beyond him.
The MI5 basement would be better, at least.
The MI5 basement was no better.
He was accosted almost immediately by a very cheery and very enthusiastic Ewen Montagu, who rushed over to clap him on the shoulder the moment he reached the bottom of the stairs. His voice, normally something of a comfort in its familiarity, grated against his eardrums until every muscle in his body was set to shove Monty violently away from his personal space.
This was wrong. All wrong. Monty was never early, not this early. Charles was not a violent person. The wrongness had seeped into their very personalities. Fine. No matter. He just had to ignore the wrongness and ignore the way the unfamiliar trains from earlier had seeped under his skin like some kind of awful residue that coloured everything he said and did and—
Why was Monty staring at him expectantly? Had he asked a question? Had Charles missed it?
He nodded desperately. Monty seemed to be satisfied with this answer to whatever he'd asked and patted Charlie on the shoulder one last time, saying something along the lines of “there's a good man!” in a voice that Charles knew logically had Monty's normal inflection but today may as well have been the scream of a howler monkey directly into his ear.
Not that it was louder, per se. Not that anything was any brighter or louder objectively. Not that had his trains been running normally and on schedule, had he been thirty minutes early like usual instead of the incorrect eighteen he'd been today, anything would have seemed even an annoyance to him, let alone whatever this was.
Nothing was louder. He was just going entirely mad. That was all. What a comfort that was.
He walked over to his desk and stiffly sat down in the hard, cold wooden seat. Monty, constantly in motion under normal circumstances (why was everything wrong stop being wrong go back to normal), didn't move.
It took a horribly long second for Charles to clock that Monty was staring confusedly at him.
Oh God oh God he can see my panic—
“Charlie?” Monty chuckled lightly, in that mildly uncomfortable way he always did that made Charles’ skin crawl whenever it was directed at him. “Johnny's office is upstairs. What are you doing?”
Charles swallowed, forcing the only word his brain could conjure up out of his mouth. “Wh—what?”
“The briefing.” The voice came from behind him now, bright and nonchalant and utterly disorienting. Jean. “The daily update Colonel Bevan asked for? The one you just agreed to give?”
A full five seconds passed before Charlie's brain caught up to the implication. Was that what he had agreed to? He didn't know. He didn't know. He didn't know. He didn't—
“What…” His throat had begun to close up, but he choked the words out anyway, each one heavier in his mouth than a slab of granite. “What do I say?”
“That we've had no significant updates since yesterday morning, that's all,” came Monty's bored drawl from the direction of his desk. Charles didn't dare turn his head for fear that if he did, he'd shatter apart like glass under an increasing amount of pressure, like the windowpanes on the ground floor that he could take a running start and crash through to escape MI5 entirely if he were fast enough and brave enough and didn't balk at—
“—oody hell, Charlie, you're looking awfully pale.”
“I'm fine.” He'd said it enough times now over the course of his life that it was automatic, slipping off his tongue with a shocking ease. “Fine. I'll go give the briefing.”
Were those Jean and Monty's whispers behind him as he ascended the stairs one at a time, counting them to fourteen to remind himself that this was fine, this was normal, everything was as it should be? Were the whispers about him? Concerned? Mocking? Or were they simply the whispers of sensitive work being done by sensitive people in a sensitive building being hindered by a sensitive man with sensitive ears and eyes and nose and mouth and stomach?
He didn't know. He didn't know. He didn't know.
Find Colonel Bevan's office. That instruction he could follow. Clear. Direct. Repeatable, like a good scientific experiment.
He cast his mind back, trying to remember where Bevan's office was. The war office was noisy around him with the relentless click-clack of typewriters, yanking him back to the present. He tried again. He'd been to Bevan's office many times before, hadn't he? He'd worked here for six years. He could do this. This was nothing. Countless officers and clerks and secretaries did this on the daily with no trouble.
Surely he could handle one Tube detour.
No, that wasn't right.
By some miracle, or perhaps by muscle memory, he managed to locate the door to Bevan's office. The door was made of oak. Fine British oak. Someone had told him that, at some point, but the memory left an awful taste in his mouth.
He needed to knock. He was supposed to knock, wasn't he? That was what people did in front of doors, but right now, just the idea of raising his fist and calling any attention to himself felt as impossible as scaling Mount Everest in his braces and tie, with no tools and no shelter against cold or oxygen deprivation.
Though if things continued in this manner, he might need support for oxygen deprivation anyhow.
Unsteadily, he raised his fist and knocked three times. There was a tired “come in” from inside, and Charles obeyed without any thought. It was almost a relief, getting another direction, and such a simple one at that. He could follow a direction, little as he felt he could do anything else at the moment.
The question, of course, once he had forced himself to push open the door and march himself in front of the desk of a very uninterested Colonel John Bevan, was what next.
Bevan's eyes bored directly into Charles as he fumbled with the door behind him, trying to force it shut without looking like the shaking idiot he felt he was. He'd done this before. He'd given briefings, delivered messages, pitched his idea for Mincemeat. Surely he could mutter a few words to Bevan to assure him that everything was fine. Those were the instructions he'd been given, after all, clear as day, or at least clear enough.
“Cholmondeley.” Bevan quirked an eyebrow. “I understand Montagu sent you up here to update me on the operation?”
Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Say it. Say it. Why weren't the words coming out of his mouth?
“Cholmondeley?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“Mm.” He narrowed his eyes, scrutinising so closely he may well have been breathing down Charles’ neck. Charles, meanwhile, wished he could vanish somehow into thin air, or at the very least transfigure into some kind of flying creature—any kind would do, really, insect (so long as the insect wasn't flightless) or bird (so long as the bird wasn't flightless) or bat (were there any flightless bats? Wouldn't that defeat the entire purpose of the classification—)
“—your update?”
Pity that until he'd realised that Bevan was speaking, the spiralling thoughts about airborne fauna had actually been doing quite a bit to quell his nerves.
“I—I—” He took a breath, swallowed. “I'm terribly sorry, sir, what did you say?”
Bevan paused a moment, clearly in thought about something, before sighing and finally taking his sharp gaze off Charles' face. “I was asking you for the contents of your update. Is there something distracting you?”
“No, sir.” A lie. He was a liar. What had become of him? But what could he have said? That his brain felt sluggish and confused and that everything was making him want to break down and scream bloody murder in the middle of the war office?
“Is everything all right?” He'd looked back at Charles now, studying him again, and Charles forced his eyes forward, hoping to death that he was somehow making his eye contact look enough like normal to pass as someone who wasn't sitting on thin ice and ready to fall through. “You seem…anxious. More than usual. Did something else go wrong? I swear to God, if Montagu—”
“Nothing's wrong!” It came out much louder, much more strained than he intended. “I'm just h-having…a…”
Something vaguely worried crept into Bevan's expression. Worried about the mission, Charlie supposed. Here he was, acting all suspicious when nothing was wrong, even when everything was wrong. How could nothing and everything be wrong simultaneously? Was that possible?
“Having a what, Flight Lieutenant? A breakdown?”
“No!” I'm just going mad, that's all. “A…a bad…day. I'm having. Is…what I'm having, I mean, a bad…wrong…day.”
Bevan's expression hadn't changed. Was that good? Bad? Was Bevan worried about the mission or about him? Or both? Or neither? Had he had something disagree with him at breakfast?
Charles wanted—no, needed, needed desperately—for the constant barrage of mental questions to stop.
But something in his mind was shattering, and he didn't know why, didn't know anything, really, except for the fact that he couldn't keep up this charade much longer. Already his cheeks and ears were burning with embarrassment, his hands were shaking with anxiety worse than anything he'd felt in a long time, and if he didn't get moving from Bevan's office soon, he'd be violently sick all over his superior’s important papers.
He wasn't even sure what kind of formal goodbye his brain had inserted into default position and tossed at Colonel Bevan before he fled the office. All he knew was that someone was calling his name behind him as he descended the basement stairs into a different sort of hell entirely.
Monty and Jean were both engrossed in their own work when Charles returned, so much so that neither so much as looked up when he entered and sat.
Good. He wasn't sure he could take any further attention today.
Something was buzzing like a swarm of bees. Was that in his head or in the room?
No more questions, Charlie. People will think you're mad.
The seat was hard beneath him, harder even than when he'd left, and colder too. He was more than grateful for the opportunity to rest his shaking legs, but the texture of the seat was almost enough to drive him to his feet again.
It didn't. He forced his eyes on the paper in front of him and picked up a pen.
More buzzing, and something in the light that was very subtly strobing. The fluorescents, of course. Fluorescents buzzed. They'd annoyed him, but he'd handled them before. Never mind that now their very existence felt like a personal attempt on his sanity.
The fluorescent buzzed.
Charles tapped his pen against the paper.
The fluorescent buzzed.
Charles tapped louder.
The fluorescent buzzed.
Charles tapped faster, harder.
The fluorescent buzzed.
Another noise joined the buzzing and the tapping, something that Charles could feel vibrating in his skull. The noise was him, he realised distantly. He was humming, whining, humiliating himself in front of his colleagues.
Perhaps they wouldn't take notice of the little noises he was making beneath that incessant buzzing that made him want to attack the lights with a fire axe.
The fluorescent stabbed into his eyes in retaliation for the attempt at drowning them out. He squeezed them shut. Even the dim light that had managed to push its way through his eyelids was enough to hasten the tapping of his pen, fan the fire building behind his eyes, cause the all-too-familiar surge of senseless anxiety to rise in his chest.
They're lights.
They were drilling into his skull.
They're lights.
They felt wrong enough to make him actively nauseous.
They're lights, and you are Flight Lieutenant Charles Cholmondeley. This is ridiculous.
Get over yourself.
Get over yourself.
Get over yourself.
Get—
“Charles?”
He was fading into the background now. Success. Maybe. Or was it defeat?
“Charles, is everything…?”
They'd said more. Charles knew that they'd said more. It was just that his brain simply refused to sort the syllables into anything that made one iota of sense. He couldn't even assign the voice to a person.
It was noise, all of it noise. He needed the noise gone.
But his body seemed to have forgotten how to function.
This is what happens to background people, he thought distantly.
Worried voices. All grating. All with far too much volume. Saying things, lots of things, perhaps about him or to him or for him or something along those lines. He didn't know. He couldn't know. In seconds his native language had become something only vaguely familiar.
The world existed in snippets of that familiar, unfamiliar, foreign version of English.
“—is he—”
“—I'm sure, Jean, just stressed about—”
“—think we should—not sure what he might—”
“—no—senses on his own, I'm—”
“—Charles?”
He found he couldn't respond except to tense every muscle in his body. No matter. No matter at all.
“Charles, what's the matter?”
“Leave him be.”
Stop stop stop stop—
He was under his desk. When had he gotten under his desk? Why was he curled there like a madman who thought there was an air raid on when there wasn't one? It was darker under here, he supposed, marginally darker, but a much more effective solution would have been a closet or cabinet or something else, anything else to block out that awful buzzing, worried voices that were far too close now—
Some reflex deep inside him brought his hands desperately clapping to his ears. It didn't help, because his hands were sweaty and warm from clenching his fists and now his ears were too hot and the voices were still getting through and the light seeped through his closed eyelids and everything was wrong, just wrong, so entirely wrong that he thought he might die—
—voices too close, too far away to understand, maddening beyond words—
—touch on the shoulder, unwelcome, overwhelming, he flinched away automatically and hit his head against the underside of the desk—the pain bloomed like a flower and lingered—
—like anger in his chest, like the physical, internal sensation that told him he was angry, but this time with no sensible cause—
—he wasn't angry not really he just needed it to STOP—
—STOP—
—was someone giving an order?—
—STOP—
—it was helping, now, to move, to rock back and forth and slam his fist into his leg, but only just—
—should he be embarrassed? surely this was unbecoming—
—voices shouting, shushing—
—someone asked, he nodded—
—and the lights were off.
“Charles?”
He felt it behind his eyelids, the visceral, physical relief that meant his photoreceptors were suddenly resting.
And silence, blessed silence, except for that one quiet voice (still too loud still loud but better) directly beside him.
He opened his eyes tentatively to what was almost complete darkness.
“How are you feeling?”
Words still eluded him, at least the kind that he had to form and force out of his mouth. But the sort that he heard and interpreted were filtering properly into his brain now, slowly, not as noise but as human speech.
With them came memory, and with memory came shame.
“Nod once if you can understand me.”
He did, with minimal difficulty.
“Good. I understand you can't speak just yet?”
He tried a shake and found himself slightly dizzy.
“That's all right. It'll come back with a bit of time.”
How could he have conducted himself so horribly? How many people were watching him now?
“I sent Monty and Jean upstairs,” his rescuer continued, as though reading his thoughts. “They were understandably worried, but they also weren't quite comprehending what was happening to you, and I figured you'd be less overwhelmed with fewer people in the room.”
Hester, some functioning part of his brain supplied. This is Hester.
“All I need you to do right now is keep breathing. Can you do that for me?”
Charles’ world had narrowed to singular commands, singular pieces of information. Nod. Breathe. Feel your ears get hot at the infantile state you're in. Let the urge to fan fervently at them pass without moving.
Hester didn't move to touch him, which he was grateful for beyond words. He wasn't sure he could handle any contact that wasn't from himself right now, not without flinching away or lashing out or making some sort of humiliating noise.
The offending lights had been removed from his senses, but Charles still felt like an electrical conductor desperate to channel its energy into the ground somewhere. He pressed his hands firmly against the concrete floor and let it chill his sweaty hands. Breathe. Rocking back and forth was still helping a little, taking the pressure behind his chest and converting it to motion. Simple physics. Potential energy to kinetic, in a way that wouldn't destroy him.
The background-character feeling began to fade, and in its place came a cocktail of fear and relief that he couldn't be bothered to sort out.
It had probably been quite a while before Charles realised that Hester hadn't spoken since telling him to breathe. The silence was blessed and gorgeous but made his own breathing suddenly too loud in the darkness.
“Hester?” he tried, and was filled with joy to hear that his brain was figuring out how to process speech again.
She paused before answering. “Yes, it's me.”
“I'm s-sorry.”
“Don't be.”
“I've ruined everything…”
“You haven't.” He couldn't see her face, but her voice was gentle, practical. “We'll just work by torchlight for the rest of today. Or lantern-light, if that isn't too much right now.”
“Will you tell…” The words were still coming slowly and uncomfortably, like he had to push them through wet sand to get them to his mouth. “Will you tell Jean and Monty to…”
“To be quieter? Yes.”
“I don't want them to hate me.” It came out in a smaller voice than he had intended, and some part of him panicked the way it did ad nauseum that he was too childish for intelligence work, for adult life, for any of this. It had been easier, in some ways, hellish as it still was, to have these breakdowns of his as a child—less had been implicitly expected of him, and there had always been that sense that Charlie is still a child, he's malleable, there's still time to fix him. Something more hopeful, narratively, about a broken child than a broken adult. It was far too late to fix him now. “Or, or think less of me, I'm their coworker and I'm acting like—”
“You are their coworker,” she cut in firmly. “And mine. Charles Cholmondeley. You're clever and independent, and you've held down a trying job in military intelligence for six years. No one could think anything of you but that.”
He wasn't quite sure he believed her, but he said nothing, and they fell into wonderful, horribly thick silence again.
The rest of the day passed in a blur, once his racing heart had stilled and Hester had helped him out from under the desk. Monty and Jean said nothing about the incident to him save the occasional concerned question—are you feeling all right, et cetera, et cetera—and Charles suspected that Hester had given them strict instructions not to make him feel worse about losing control of himself than he already did.
It was nice to have the peace and quiet, he supposed, but he wasn't certain how to feel about it socially. Hester meant well, and he knew that being bombarded with questions and demands and concern so soon after one of his fits would have been the greater of these two evils, but it was at the same time still an uneasy break in the routine rapport he usually maintained with the others.
By the time the workday ended, he was feeling more himself yet exhausted beyond measure as he packed his things and mentally steeled himself for a torturous ride home.
“Charles?”
Hester’s voice stopped him a quarter of the way up the stairs. His stomach dropped straight through the floor, but he managed to get out a relatively normal-sounding “What is it?”
“Can I speak with you for a moment?”
Stiffly, he forced himself to turn around, head back down the stairs, walk over to where Hester was still sitting calmly at the table. Calmly as she'd been, somehow, when he'd lost his mind not three hours ago.
“Sit,” she said when he kept awkwardly standing there. Then, more gently, because something in his face must have given him away: “You're not in trouble, you know. I only want to have a conversation with a friend.”
“Right. Of, of course.” He pulled up a chair and sat, legs still unsteady beneath him. “Hester, I—I apologise for my behaviour earlier, it, it wasn't—”
“Charles.” She held up a hand. “There's absolutely no need to apologise.”
“But I acted so far out of proportion—”
“Nonsense.” Hester scribbled something on a document in front of her and set it aside with a huff. “Those fluorescents are nasty things. I don't blame you.”
Charles sat dumbfounded, unsure what to say to something like this. He pulled at his fingers under the table, praying to God that Hester wouldn't notice how fidgety he still was after everything. One, two, three, four, five. One, two—
“Was today a particularly difficult day?”
He blinked. “Hm?”
“Have difficult things been happening today?” He could feel her eyes on him again, but he found he couldn't meet them. Not now. “Things you don't normally have to handle?”
Tentatively, Charles thought back to a day that had passed in a general miserable blur. The Underground. The briefing. Car horns outside and the smell of cigarette smoke inside. Normal things. Things people dealt with every day with no issue, yet had somehow gotten his wires crossed and crossed and crossed again until things had stopped making sense entirely.
He felt shame burn his cheeks. “Nothing…nothing that should have been difficult.”
Hester closed her eyes and sighed. “To Hell with ‘should have been difficult’. Answer my question properly, Flight Lieutenant.”
The use of his rank—not sir, not Cholmondeley, not even Charles—was enough of a shock to his system coming from Hester that he found himself responding with no further hesitation. “Yes, ma'am, it was an unusually…difficult day.”
Something in her demeanour softened. “And the lights were the final straw, is that right?”
“I suppose so.” The flutter of anxiety returned suddenly with a vengeance, somehow, at having admitted this. What ridiculous behaviour, letting such small things break him into pieces. Him, a grown man. “But, but that doesn't excuse—”
“Stop chastising yourself. You're hardly the first person to have a breakdown in this building.” Another document signed with a calming swoosh of her pen, another set aside with a small rustle. “And even if you were, it doesn't matter. Everyone has their own techniques to manage stress, and when enough piles on, those techniques can backfire. That's simply how it works.”
“But the lights? I—and how did you—”
“You were ten minutes later to work today than usual. That's why I asked.” She looked up, and something in Charles’ expression must have once again betrayed the acute panic that was building in his chest, because she immediately added, “Christ, Charles, you're not going to be reprimanded for that! You were still twenty minutes early, which is more dedication than I see from most officers around here.”
“R-right,” he forced out. “Sorry, I, you see, I just didn't realise you'd noticed—”
“You apologise rather a lot, you know that?”
Charles winced. “Sorry—”
“Ah.” She held up a finger to stop him, and he shut his mouth immediately. “No more apologies today. Is that clear?”
Was it clear? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that something about all this made him want to cry. “Yes, ma'am.”
“Good. So we understand each other.” Swish, rustle. Grateful for something to look at that wasn’t Hester’s face, he allowed himself to watch as she signed off on yet another document that he couldn’t quite read in the low light. “Your routine was disturbed, then, I take it. Earlier today.”
“Just some damage on the Tube,” he desperately downplayed, much as the feeling of wrongness from the morning still pervaded his every cell through some kind of twisted osmosis he wished he could study under a microscope. “I had to take a different route. That’s all.”
“A stable ritual you relied upon got pulled out from under you,” she corrected. “It isn’t any wonder you lost your balance.”
Charles almost laughed. Almost. He wasn’t quite sure he could actually manage the energy required for laughter, not now. “You make it all sound so reasonable.”
This gave Hester pause, for reasons Charles couldn’t quite seem to puzzle out. When she spoke again, her voice was soft, almost uncertain. “I shouldn’t need to make it sound reasonable in the first place,” she said. “It is. It isn’t your fault or anyone else’s that no one seems to agree with me.”
“But if no one else thinks that way—”
“Then that isn't your problem.” Something harder had subtly crept into her demeanour—anger? No, not anger, not at Charles, surely, much as his anxiety told him otherwise. Frustration? Concern? He wanted to tell her that she shouldn't be worried on his behalf, but some undefinable instinct held him back.
Was it just him, or did something about Hester’s concern for him seem oddly…personal?
It wasn't that Hester was impersonal under normal circumstances. Far from it, really. Charles wasn't completely blind to the way Hester interacted with others, and he'd been invited by the typing pool girls to enough lunches that he knew secondhand the affection she was capable of showing them. But it was one thing to be the subject of Hester's regular, slightly distant concern—disguised in such a way that Charles couldn't always identify it—and quite another, what she'd done for him today.
Charlie wasn't new to this, much as he wished he could say otherwise. He'd had his share of days like this yet somehow never managed to see them coming until it was far too late, and consequently he'd had his share of well-meaning adults throughout childhood who would sometimes shout and sometimes whisper and never saw past what they assumed must be disobedience or a lack of impulse control. Overwhelmingly patronising visits to the headmaster's office still played like a terribly shot film in the back of his mind, some nights when he was trying to sleep.
Use the proper language, Charlie. Stay still, Charlie. Control yourself in class, Charlie, or I'm afraid we'll have to punish you. Would you like that? Of course you wouldn't. Now uncover your ears and stop ignoring what others are saying to you.
But Hester had known at a glance what all of Charles' parents and teachers hadn't been able to identify in years of knowing him.
“Hester,” he started awkwardly, after a moment’s silence. “Do you…?”
She froze mid-signature. “Do I what?”
“You know.” He waved his hand. “The…my routine. And the lights. You seemed to know what I was…having a fit about, so…do you, erm, also have…fits?”
His hand hung in the air for far too long in the middle of whatever ill-fated gesture he'd been attempting, and he quickly brought it back to his side. Hester looked at him oddly, but not the way most people did—there was a difference there, oh so subtle, probably meaningless, but what choice did he have other than to believe that Hester was seeing something in him that most people did not?
“I…wouldn't call it a ‘fit’,” she answered finally. Her pen hadn't moved in at least thirty seconds. “More of a limit, really. To me, it's less a matter of what happens when the limit is reached than it is how the limit is reached.”
Charles blinked. “What?”
Hester sighed and rubbed at one eye. “Oh Lord, I always have trouble expressing this properly. And you're still recovering from earlier. I apologise.”
“No, no, I—I see what you mean.” He swallowed an unexpected lump in his throat. Steady on. “There's only so much pressure a person can take before something has to give. Before things…start to fail to make sense? Right?”
“Right.” She smiled at him, genuinely smiled, and something deep within him that he'd been holding tense for God knows how long began to relax. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen the great Hester Leggatt smile, not like this. “You know, I've discovered over many years here that I depend on order and routine as well. Always have done. That's why this work suits me so well, I think. Proper channels…” She finished the signature she'd left halfway done and set the paper aside with a little affectionate pat to the stack she'd built up. “Proper documentation, proper organisation.”
“And what happens when there are organisational problems?”
The smile grew wider. “Then I have two options: I fix them before they can send me spiralling into panic, or I can remove myself from the situation entirely.”
Charles opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again with a stammer. “Y-you? Panic?”
“Indeed.”
“But, but I never see you—”
“Oh, believe me, I have my ways of managing it,” she interrupted gently. “Including taking into careful account the fact that my tolerance for certain things is extremely low.”
Low tolerance. Charles had always seen it as such a character flaw that he'd never put it nearly as bluntly as Hester was now, not even in his own head. “I sometimes feel like my tolerance is in the floor. I…I really don't know how I could have salvaged today, not after the Tube…” He swallowed. “And everything else. I just…couldn't anymore.”
Her expression softened into something complicated. “I know.”
“And this is such demanding work—”
“It absolutely is.”
“And, and Monty means well, I know he does, but doing anything with him is so exhausting—”
Hester rolled her eyes. “Honestly. I'm beginning to understand why Colonel Bevan has such a bee in his bonnet about that man.” She turned her gaze back to Charles and leaned in, just enough to draw his attention without either of them getting uncomfortable. “Listen, Charles. Between you and me, I don't think there's anything wrong with you, any more than there's anything wrong with me.”
“But I have such low tolerance, and if it can lead to days like these—”
“Then you've had an unavoidably bad day,” she remarked. “That can hardly be called your fault. For heaven's sake, Cholmondeley, give yourself some grace, or I'll have to give you a direct order.”
And then she was smiling softly again—joking, she was joking, he realised—and for the first time in a long and trying day, Charlie felt himself almost on the verge of his own smile.
“I'll try, ma’am,” he said, quiet but feeling much steadier. “Thank you.”
Hester looked back down at the table, blinking quickly. “I should be thanking you for being the first person to understand it when I ramble about limits and fluorescent lights and such. Half the typing pool think I'm going mad when I say I have to excuse myself because of the noise in the office.” She chuckled, but the chuckle was suspiciously thick. “Just…pay attention to your tolerance as best you can. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“And if you need time away from here,” she added conspiratorially, “let me know. I'll cover for you.”
He let out a breathless laugh, still not quite believing the conversation they'd just had. “Really?”
“Really.” She nodded her head toward the stairs. “Now go home and get some rest. You took a different Underground line than usual this morning; I believe in your ability to do it again.”
The wrongness of the trains that morning were at the same time hazy and painfully real in Charles’ memory, and he shuddered even as he stood from his chair. He'd forgotten that his commute to work would also be his commute home. “I'm not certain I can go through that again.”
“Then don't think of it as an upset to your routine. Consider it…forming a new one.”
“Forming a new one,” he murmured to himself. The damage would take some time to be fixed anyway, wouldn't it? “Okay. Forming a new routine.”
He was approximately a quarter of the way up the stairs before he stopped short, considering. “Hester?”
“Mm?”
“Did you know that hypersensitivity to certain things is a common survival trait in some animals?”
She paused before responding. “I didn't know that.”
Charles stood there awkwardly, not turning around, suddenly feeling rather foolish. “That's…that's all. That's all I had to say. It's just that…facts like that tend to alleviate my anxiety.”
“I see.”
“I don't know if you're the same way,” he amended quickly. “But you have no idea how much…thinking about facts like that can help. Regardless of how silly it may appear.”
And then he was in motion again, feeling embarrassed and lighter and more than a little shocked that of all people to share his particular peculiarities, it was the one person whose composure he envied the most.
“Actually,” he thought he heard her murmur as he climbed the stairs, signing one final paper with a swish, “I think I might have some idea.”
The line Charles normally took from Green Park station had closed for damage.
Fine. No matter. He'd done it this morning, and he could do it again. There was no time limit to getting home, not like there had been getting to work. Just remember Hester and her papers and her advice and that low tolerance is not a mortal sin or a sign of immaturity—
The train arrived, whipping his hair out of shape. He held his briefcase tightly to his chest and looked at no one else in the crowd of people around him.
What could he do that wasn't fading into the background, like he'd done earlier that day?
Form a new routine.
He stepped onto the wrong train, wrong but…somewhat familiar now.
Form a new routine.
He studied the details of the interior of the car. He stared at the patterns on the walls and seats until they swam before his eyes and he was certain he could replicate them in his sleep.
Form a new routine.
He searched for the emergency exits and was rewarded with a wave of calm once he had gotten their positions memorised.
Form a new routine.
The train sped along far beneath the streets of London, carrying wearied workers and excitable children with their parents and one rather singular man, a man allowing himself to get lost in the details and waiting eagerly to arrive somewhere safe and familiar.
Life went on.