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Maintenance of a continual consciousness has always been a bit of a sticking point for Charlie.
Already ‘always’ is a tricky word to use correctly, because one of his main issues is that somewhere in his life, he and linear time had something of a falling out and now there is something very wrong with the way he is. And has been. And will be.
(‘Now’ is also a tricky word.)
The symptoms are more easily defined than the cause—vivid visual and tactile hallucinations, frequent and intense deja vu, confusion and disorientation, severe memory loss.
Rarely does reality align with what he remembers it as, because half his memories are invented, half of them aren’t, and there’s an extra half that’s missing entirely.
His muscle memory generally knows better than he does–he may not know if he has work on any given day, but if he lets his mind run on autopilot and he starts getting dressed with practiced efficiency, it’s pretty reliable confirmation.
His vision and hearing isn’t so trustworthy, unfortunately.
Tentatively, he's landed on the theory that it’s not his singular, continual consciousness hopping between realities, he’s in the same one. He just doesn’t experience it in a linear fashion, and gets contributions from different Charlies in different realities.
For example, John has his own human body, but sometimes that’s a surprise to Charlie, who is borrowing a memory from a Charlie who saw the ritual catastrophically fail and permanently imprison John in Arthur’s body. Or his consciousness is lagging behind, and hasn't reached the part where the ritual was completed.
As if that wasn’t frustrating enough, often he’ll experience time backwards. He’ll go to sleep Saturday night and wake up the Friday prior, belatedly learning all the much-needed context for the day following.
For all he knows he might have already experienced the day of his own death, but the memory has been consistently swapped out for a completely mundane one from another universe. If it’s something as trivial as a time he went to the grocer’s and they were out of lentils so he bought rice, he’ll never be able to identify if it actually happened, let alone that it’s a placeholder for something much more important.
He’s yet to get trapped in a real, honest-to-god timeloop, and he’s almost excited for it. He flips between feeling incredibly smart and incredibly lost, which he supposes is a good way to keep from getting too cocky about his unmoored relationship to reality, while rewarding him often enough that his mind doesn’t break. It’s an unorthodox means of moderating one's self esteem, but a means nonetheless.
In fewer words; Charlie’s crazy. He’s lost his fucking mind. All the philosophizing is just for his own comfort, a band-aid for the fact that he has, inarguably, gone insane.
But all his attempts at mapping his memories against the objective does help, and it means that very few discrepancies in reality faze him anymore–even the gory and horrible ones are easily dismissed as hallucinations, signal flares from a Charlie who is still trapped in the prison pits. The present Charlie is safe in an apartment in New York, and he’s happy to shoulder what he can of the burden.
He’s woken up half-drowned in blood, squirming against thin, slimy tentacles crawling under his clothes, listening to Roland’s voice mutter Caracosan prayers from underneath the bed, and has always gone back to business as usual.
But when he rolls over to turn off his alarm clock one morning and instinctively slides a small silver ring off the dresser, it catches him a little off guard.
He stops, awkwardly leaning over the edge of the bed, and realises he’s already moved to slide it partway onto his finger. His ring finger. Left hand.
He mentally searches for any precedent of this, and comes up with nothing. No memories helpfully materialize to explain it. Okay.
That's… okay. Okay, well, something drastic has happened to either himself or his surroundings, and now he is married.
He looks back down at the ring, his vision a little blurred from sleep. The ring is silver, with a very small blue crystal in the center, neatly clamped in by the metal. It’s a very nice ring, subtle enough that if he’d come to wearing it already, he might not notice right away that it was there.
And it’s definitely his. It fits his finger perfectly, and his muscles slip too easily into the movement of slipping it into place. Not to mention the band on his finger that’s just a touch paler than the rest of his hand–he’s worn it long enough to get a bit of a tan line from it.
The next question is, of course, who?
He leans back over the bed and sets the back of his hand against the sheets, and they’re still warm. The duvet has been kicked off that side of the bed, making it hard to figure out the size and shape of the person who occupied it. He can’t remember ever having a wife, but he’s not sure how much of himself is misplaced today. He thinks he might’ve once gotten a piece of a memory, like a flicker of a film screen, of a girl he kissed goodbye before the war.
If it’s a woman at all. He’s sure plenty of guys wouldn't mind getting rings for one another as a symbol, so until he sees a framed marriage certificate on the wall he can’t rule anyone out.
The only thing on the wall is a framed poem, the typeface too intricate for him to read from the edge of the bed. From the shape of the signature, it looks like it might be Whitman. Definitely can’t rule anyone out.
He pushes the ring the rest of the way onto his finger and gets out of bed, movement coming easy again, and goes to find out who he’s married to.
Arthur’s coat is draped over the back of the armchair when Noel walks past it, but it’s John who’s standing in the kitchen. That’s another thing he’s gotten right, then; as far as he remembers John has a human body, and it looks like this one.
John’s leaning over the sink to take the potted plants off the windowsill, his shirt pulling across his shoulders as he picks up the pot. His hair is tied back and he’s squinting in the bright light from the open window, the shadow of the mullion in a thin grey line down his cheek. He looks nice.
Noel remembers the flowers, surprisingly—usually the more transient things get lost between mismatched chunks of memory, but as far as he can tell, John’s always kept daffodils. He takes good care of them, even in the cold, better than Noel ever could.
“Mornin’, doll.”
John’s not the perkiest of people, but his eyes brighten when he sees Noel, looking over his shoulder at him. “Morning.”
He searches for anything strange in the room, between the bookshelf and the strand of hair that’s slipped down the side of John’s face, the gleam of sunlight behind him that’s almost too bright to look at. His gaze falls again on the coat draped on the back of the chair, evidently forgotten when someone left the house. “Where’s Arthur gone?”
“Accompanying Marie on the train up to Hartford, so he’ll be back this evening,” John says. He walks over to pick the coat up from off the couch, and when he extends his hand Noel sees the glimmer of a small blue ring on his finger.
It’s John. He’s married to John.
Or, engaged, or something. John’s wearing a ring and it’s identical to Noel’s, blue stone on nicely polished silver. A warm, bubbly kind of feeling fizzes in Noel’s chest, and he tries and fails to shove it down. Really? It’s John?
It’s not that he doesn’t believe it was possible—in fact, it makes a decent bit of sense–he just had never thought of that kind of thing happening between them. Rings and everything, wow, he just didn’t really think—
“Noel?”
He’s been staring at the empty back of the chair in stunned awe. He blinks, looking over at John (his husband, John). “Yeah, sorry– Marie, you said?”
“Yes,” says John, who he’s married to.
“He’s still trying to win her over?”
“She would prefer that it was you or Oscar. But she’s coming around to him. Slowly.”
“Eh. He’ll get there,” Noel says, smiling, and when John only scoffs in response he’s struck with the urge to ask when it happened. He wonders how long it’s been for John—it’s been enough time for Noel to develop the muscle memory of taking it off the nightstand, and John hasn’t assumed it’s the reason Noel’s having to keep from smiling. He supposes there’s the same probability that he’s experiencing the day precisely after they were married, whatever that looked like, as a day four years out from it. Across infinite universes, there’s actually a zero percent change he experiences any individual day at all, but that’s more complicated than he’s willing to think about.
Two months ago, he hopes John would respond, suddenly flustered and shy about it, like he’s forgotten for a moment that they made it official.
Two months ago, why, are you okay? he suspects John will actually say, because normal people don’t forget that kind of thing. It’s weird being the only half of a newlywed couple that’s newlywed, and he doesn’t want to ruin his own good mood by making John worry for him. Sure, yes, he forgot who his spouse was and none of his memories gel together correctly, but that’s a constant with him.
He slips his hands into his pockets and wanders to where there’s a calendar up on the wall by the dining room table, flipped open to February 1937. Always helpful information to have. And to his luck, the calendar is pretty filled out—Arthur’s trip to Hartford is scribbled in John’s slightly clumsy handwriting, a fair few chores and interviews and outings included in his own, narrow and slanted.
From the looks of it, he’s been pretty present this month, probably spending most of it correctly following the even, forward footsteps of time: experiencing Monday before Tuesday before Wednesday. He knows there are stretches of time when he can live almost totally normally, for long enough for his life to congeal back into conformity. He can see in the notes from himself that his sensibility has been given time to pile up like sediment, his sanity left undisturbed for some time. Maybe that makes him, reading this, the outlier, a stranger to ‘Noel from February 1937,’ but it looks like the guy’s doing well. It’s good of him to share some of it.
He reads through the rest of the relatively mundane notes and there’s no record of a wedding or an engagement, but when he flips back to the previous month he sees that it was his birthday two weeks ago. That’s nice. It’s in January this time, oddly enough, and he’s a little let down that he doesn’t remember it.
He could ask John what it was like, of course. Tip his hand, reveal that something’s all wrong in his head and he can't remember anything useful. It just gets a little complicated when he doesn’t want to explain what’s wrong with him to an oblivious John or Arthur, because it’s awkward and embarrassing and takes two hours and sometimes a couple diagrams. He has memories of doing it multiple times, even though it should have logically only had to happen once. At one point in reality, before which Arthur and John don't know, and after which they don't.
But the more he avoids it, the less likely he is to explain it to them ‘early,’ which would delay Arthur and John’s realisation that his relationship to logical causality is rapidly deteriorating, placing it later on the ‘normal’ timeline. And that would shrink the number of days (presumably still numerically identical, only rearranged) that they’re aware of his condition, and make them more likely to be unnerved by his need to ask.
A less glaring side effect of his condition is the never-ending migraine he gets from trying to do simple things like reading calendars. Doesn’t matter. It was his birthday two weeks ago, and he’s married! God, why is he so taken by that?
He doesn’t know what it is. Maybe because to John, it should be silly and human and not make any sense, and Noel’s always assumed he’d never be something he’d get. Such an odd little ritual about promises and affection should be beyond both of them, given what both of them have been through. And yet they’re married.
Maybe it’s because a lot of the time he talks to John, he’s varying degrees of obvious about his affection for Noel, and apparently at some point, one of them decided to make it official. Maybe Arthur told them they oughta shut up and get married if they were so damn into one another, and they did. His face feels a little hotter thinking about it, and he fiddles idly with the page of the calendar.
“You’re in a good mood,” John says from the sink, more observation than question.
Noel’s wondering if they’ve kissed yet. God knows he’s thought about it, a guy like him can’t get away with living with John Doe without his thoughts ever wandering in that direction. He feels another stab of jealousy for the Noel he’s just stepped into, married to the guy Noel’s always wanted.
He blinks. “Am I?”
Once they’ve spent enough of the morning fussing with the plants and making the bed and gathering all the laundry, he and John walk to the laundromat together. John whines about the cold, keeping his chin tucked against his neck under his scarf, and Noel carries the laundry bags.
“We also gotta start thinking about your birthday soon, don’t we?” Noel asks once they’ve safely crossed the street, bumping his shoulder against John’s.
John sighs, long-suffering. “Yes. Arthur’s going to make a big deal out of it.”
“Do you like it when he does?”
“It isn’t my real birthday. I don’t have one.”
Noel isn’t sure if he has it worse as a man who does have a birthday, it just keeps changing when he isn’t looking. Even when he tries to use the day he came back from the dreamlands, or his first day back from the war, as a day of commemoration, he’s found they tend to slip between days and months all the same.
“Well, it’s a nice excuse to get you a gift, so I’m afraid I gotta side with Arthur on this one.”
“Oh, fine,” John relents, his resistance clearly weakened at the notion of spending the day being given things. He’s sort of materialistic in a way that’s easy to make fun of, collecting any keys and watches and locks he can get his hands on, but Noel’s the same way. They both took their turns unable to keep anything as truly their own, and Noel’s just worse at collecting things. It’s hard when he can’t consistently remember what he collects, where he finds things, where he keeps them.
“Anything you want?”
“I thought you’re not supposed to tell anyone. So it’s a surprise.”
“Oh, it can be, depends if you want people to guess or not.”
Personally, Noel prefers that people guess, because he learns more about the person as a result. He knows what sorta thing he wants, that’s easy information, but not what someone who knows him would interpret him to want. Besides, he’s not picky about gifts—he mostly likes getting things that he can trace between memories, recognizable from place to place. A compass with an engraving of a ship on the front, cufflinks he knows belong to him, notes people have written him tucked in an envelope in his drawer.
“Hmph. A thicker coat.”
Noel humors him the rest of the way there, never quite bringing himself to ask what kinda husband he’d be if he didn’t get John exactly what he was hoping for. He does end up coaxing plenty of sincere requests from him—eyeliner, a rug in the bedroom he didn’t hate, Assam tea, a pet fish. Soap that smelled like something that wasn’t soap, like citrus or bay leaf. Tricking him into listing things he likes proves an effective means of cheering him up, and Noel has to steer John towards the laundromat door when he almost walks right past it.
It’s not too busy and plenty of washers are open, space on the bench to sit down next to one another. Noel leaves the empty laundry bag in a canvas heap between their feet, and his heart skips another beat once it catches up with everything again, giddily reminding him that it’s his husband he’s next to. Noel’s been with enough guys to be practiced at keeping to himself in public, but has to press down the urge to set his hand on top of John’s, feel where the warmth of his skin is broken by the cool band of metal. He settles for tilting his shoe to tap it against John’s, and John does the same.
He bites his cheek to keep from smiling. Married. He’s pretty sure the last time he thought he’d wind up as someone’s husband was before the war—from there he worked on the assumption that he’d be killed in the trenches, then that he’d be killed in his work, then that he’d never make it out of the Dreamlands. Even once he did return, his head was too jumbled to make him a good, reality-obeying human being, let alone a good husband.
“You do… like it, right?”
Noel blinks and realises that he’s fiddling with the ring, turning it to the thrum of the washer in front of them cycling through flashes of soap suds and dark clothing, occasionally interspersed with one of John’s brightly colored shirts.
“Hm?”
“The ring,” John clarifies. He’s looking right at it, but Noel’s pretty sure it’s to excuse the fact that he’s avoiding Noel’s eyes. He clears his throat sheepishly. “I didn’t want it to be gold.”
That’s considerate. The King tended to keep his jewelry to himself, never really exchanging or marking Noel with it, but he appreciates the thought. He sets his hand against the bench between them, splaying out his fingers to appreciate the glint of silver. “Doll, I think it’s beautiful.”
John shifts where he’s sitting, his voice stilted with the discomfort of a compliment. “Arthur was the one who–”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m thanking you for it,” Noel says, and moves his hand just enough for the sides of their hands to just touch. He can feel the heat of John’s hand next to his, and wonders how it felt to have John slip the ring on for him.
“Fine, fine,” John admits, glancing down at their hands, and clears his throat. “I’m glad.”
Noel looks back at the washer in time to see the timer tick down by a minute, and realises this means that John proposed. That makes sense, given that in most realities Noel has mostly given up on marriage, but it means John picked out a ring and decided he wanted a husband. And for it to be Noel. That’s wonderful. That’s the thing about John, sometimes he doesn’t realise when he’s being sweet until someone reacts accordingly.
He’s not sure if it’s happened yet or happened at all, but he has a memory of this same expression on John’s face– He’d been smoking on the couch and listening to the radio when Arthur leaned around the door frame, glasses slightly askew on his face.
“Noel, did you fix the door to the study?”
Noel leaned over, turning the radio down. “Can’t say I did.”
He knew what Arthur was talking about—it was a problem with the latch, where even if the door was firmly closed, it would reopen and slowly, silently drift outwards into the hall. Noel didn’t mind it, he rarely had a reason to keep the door shut, and he was sure John had never even noticed until now. The only one it ever bothered was Arthur, who couldn’t immediately tell whether a door was open or closed, or if there was something partly blocking the hall.
“I did,” John said, looking over.
Arthur turned, blinking a couple times in surprise. “Really? Why?”
“Because it opens by itself.”
“No I, I mean, why’d you…?”
“Because you complain about it,” John paused, tentatively, “and it sort of pisses me off.”
Maybe that’s what happened here. Maybe to John it’s not even anything special, because it only makes sense. They love one another. What would be wrong with getting married about it? He sort of hopes that’s the case, because it’d be so awfully, endearingly John. He’d love that. Married, just for the fun of it.
John shifts on the bench beside him, careful not to move his hand away from Noel’s. “...I didn’t think you’d like it so much.”
“Of course I would,” Noel says, and keeps himself from saying that he loves it because he loves John, even though that’s something he’d allowed to say now. But they’re in public, so he settles for, “It’s from you.”
John’s mouth opens but he doesn’t speak, like he hasn’t thought out how he’s supposed to react to being flustered. He almost looks like he’s found something to say but then he turns his head away, and Noel is sure he’s flushing.
After a moment staring at the washer in front of them he moves his hand a little higher up, his fingers covering Noel’s. Noel can’t help admiring him a moment longer—the warmth of his hand, the neat way he’s buttoned his shirt cuffs above his elbows, the silky strand of black hair about to come untucked from behind his ear. He’s gorgeous against all the hard metal angles of the laundromat, and Noel’s never felt so lucky.
On the walk home Noel’s vision keeps fuzzing, which is fine, it happens. John carries the clean laundry because it’s warm and dry, hurrying them both back in the direction of the apartment.
They pass the diner Noel likes and Roland is on the other side of the street, bleeding from the eyes and holding what appears to be his own tongue. Someone walks right past him, unbothered, and Noel looks away.
They get home, out of the cold, and John drags the quilt from the back of the couch to wrap around his shoulders while they fold and put away the laundry. They settle into silence after talking the whole way home, but the clothes are still warm against Noel’s hands, Arthur’s beaten up cotton shirts worn soft and thinning.
He’s just reaching back into the bag when Arthur himself walks in, pushing the half-ajar door the rest of the way open. He looks a little weary from the trip, but his overcoat and scarf are already off, no doubt thrown over the couch in the living room.
“Hi, Charlie.” Arthur says.
“Oh,” Noel says. “You’re back early.”
John gently nudges him with his shoulder. When Noel glances over, he hasn’t looked up from where he’s folding a pair of slacks. “It’s just us, Noel.”
Noel looks back at the door, and it’s firmly closed. Nobody’s walked in.
“Ah,” he says. “Thank you.”
John makes a distracted noise of acknowledgement, leaning over him to dig through the bag again. Noel tries not to keep staring at him, watching for annoyance or judgement on his face, but he looks like he’s already stopped paying attention.
He’s seen this before, then. Noel feels something inside him unwind with relief. John’s seen this before, and knows how to make him feel more like he’s mispronounced someone’s name and less like he’s fundamentally misunderstood the state of his own reality.
Well—of course he does. If anyone would know, it’d be his own husband.
“How has all that been, by the way?” John says, glancing over from where he’s smoothing out one of Noel’s ties. “If it matters.”
“What, the…?”
“Seeing things. The memory thing, too.”
It’s nice to have it said aloud.
“Eh, fine.” He glances down at the ring on John’s finger. “Pleasantly surprising, but good.”
“Is it?” John asks, fixing where the quilt has begun to slip off of his shoulder. “Everything else adds up?”
“Well, let’s see. I’m Noel Finley, we’re at 58 West 12th Street. You’re John Doe, you and Arthur are both PIs.”
“Right.”
“You know my old name?”
“Yes,” John’s eyes flick away. “But you don’t like hearing it.”
Noel grins. “Attaboy. What else, uh, Oscar’s alive and missing an arm, he’s a priest at St. Paul’s.”
“Jean Baptiste.”
“Huh.” Noel shrugs. “I was in the Dreamlands for ten years, and I’ve already explained why that’s still somethin’ of a problem.”
“Yes.” John sits down on the edge of the bed, folding the canvas bag up in his lap, splaying his hand out to press it flat. His ring glints, that little reminder of how much they’re both loved, and John glances up at him. “Anything else?”
It’d be a great time to say it. John knows he hallucinates, knows not to call him Charlie, has been nothing but the John he knows and loves, save for the wedding ring. Maybe if he says it now, John will reveal that yes, sorry, he’s just careful with affection until he’s sure where or when Noel’s head is, and then they can make out on the couch until Arthur comes home. Because they’re husbands.
But he wants to play along for a little bit longer without his shit getting in the way, live a little longer in this version of himself that’s happily, knowingly married to John. Maybe that’s selfish, to want to keep the outfit of married life for just a few more hours. But it’s terribly comfortable.
“Nope,” he smiles. “Everything seems as it should be, doll.”
John can’t figure out why Noel’s in such a good mood.
He knows it has to do with his memories, he isn’t stupid, but nothing’s ever happened quite like this before. Usually the discrepancies make him say something strange in conversation, or come across like he just moved into town a couple weeks ago.
To be fair, Noel acts strangely all the time, for far more reasons than hallucinations or mixed memories. John likes that about him, an appealing kind of never-quite-predictable. After years John’s never been able to completely get a read on him, but he’s gotten closer than anyone else, he thinks. Once on a road trip he told John about the auroras that appear further north, great ribboning walls of light against the night sky. He’ll take John to see them sometime, ‘cause the great thing is that they don’t even really know why they happen. They’re just there, beautiful and rippling and glowing, completely inexplicable. John couldn’t help thinking that he was the perfect person to explain it.
And here he is again, painfully logical and still refusing to make any sense. He doesn’t seem joyful when his memories change. He’s relieved, sometimes, like when he clumsily detailed a disturbing memory of a failed separation ritual that had killed John, but that wasn’t contentment. Of course, John much prefers this to the days when he doesn’t trust that anything’s real at all, snapping at John that he knows where he really is, and he’s not falling for this bullshit again. That doesn’t change the fact that he wants to know why Noel’s acting like that, so warm and affectionate that John’s heartbeat hasn’t settled all day.
Arthur called the apartment in the later afternoon, something Noel instinctively ignored until John gently informed him the phone was ringing. Arthur and Marie’s train was delayed, they’d be home a little late.
That’s driving John crazy too. Arthur isn’t even here to confirm anything, to let John lean over to him and ask Noel’s being sweet today, isn’t he? That isn’t me? Have you noticed that, Arthur?
He was touching his hand, all easy smiles and calm confidence. John knows he’s hallucinating, he’s been glancing disconcertedly at empty walls and alleys, but whenever he looks back at John any sign of confusion or fear evaporates. John doesn’t want to ask why he’s doing it, in case he stops, but he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do about it.
What if he forgets tomorrow and is back to normal (‘normal’), and only laughs uncomfortably when John tells him how he’d been acting? There’s a chance that John never discovers the reason, Noel forgets the reason, and for the rest of his life neither of them have an explanation for it. It’ll just be ‘that one time Noel spent a day looking like he was an impulse away from grabbing the front of John’s shirt and kissing him’. How weird.
John wishes that didn’t make him feel cold.
“Hey, handsome.”
John doesn’t let his breath hitch when Noel slips into bed with him, drawing the duvet up over his shoulders. It’s already warmer with him here, and John struggles for a response. Wildly, he wants to see if he can goad Noel on, keep spurring on whatever new part of Noel keeps smiling and talking to him like that. He wants to see how much he can convince him to say until he laughs and gives up on the teasing and kisses him, because if he’s so fucking willing to flirt with John nonstop then surely, surely—
His face flares hot, and he looks over Noel’s shoulder. “Hey.”
Noel fixes his shirt cuffs under the cover, his button-up loose and open. He’s already taken his ring off, leaving it on the bedside table to put on in the morning. “You staying up for when Arthur gets back, or turning in?”
“He’ll wake us up either way,” John mutters.
“Oh, I trust he will. I’ll stay up just in case.”
“Thank you.”
Noel’s hand moves, just for a moment, as if to reach forward and touch him. He doesn’t, tucking his hand securely beneath his pillow instead, and John’s chest aches as the loss. There’s a chance Noel’s the exact same tomorrow morning, but it isn’t certain, and he doesn’t know if he’ll ever get this again.
Do it, he wants to tell Noel. I don’t care, I just want you to try it.
Noel inhales deeply, gaze no longer anywhere near John’s face, skating absently over the dim room past his shoulder. Disappointed, John rolls over onto his back to stare at the ceiling, because it doesn’t matter what Noel almost does. It’ll just stress him out.
A few minutes later Noel shifts, the blankets rustling. He speaks quietly, like there’s a chance John could have already fallen asleep.
“Hey, doll?”
“Mm?”
“You remember what you asked me earlier?”
John looks over. That could mean a lot of things.
“About whether I was, uh, doin’ okay.”
John frowns. “...Are you?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’m all good, it’s no reason to worry.”
“Okay,” he says slowly.
“There’s just been something messing with me today.”
“Oh. What is it?”
“It’s not that big a deal, but I, uh, just had a question.”
“Just tell me, Noel.”
“We’re, um. Husbands, yeah?”
John blinks at him. “As in… married?”
“Yeah.”
“To–”
Noel hesitates. His eyes flick over John’s face in search of an answer. “To each other.”
“N-no?”
“Ah.”
John starts to sit up, feeling a little bit like he’s been slapped. Fucking Noel, his heartbeat had just settled. “Noel, what?”
“Hah, yeah, forget I asked, doll.”
“Though I, well– what gave you that impression?”
“Well, yeah, I just figured ‘cause of the, the rings. I said it’s no big deal, John, really, you know how I get with this sorta thing.”
“What? What do the rings have to do with anything?”
Noel stops with his mouth halfway open, and for a moment it’s just them, silent in the dark of the bedroom, staring at one another in blank shock. John can feel his mind trying to keep turning, trying to digest We’re husbands, yeah? and failing. Noel takes a couple tries to speak.
“Do you- not know?”
“No!” John hisses. “I don’t! What—?”
“Oh,” Noel mutters. “Well, shit.”
“What, does gifting you a ring mean I want to, be- be husbands?”
“Yes.” Noel clears his throat. “Uh– yeah, that’s pretty much exactly it.”
“You’re joking.”
“Nope.”
Dear god, John has fucked up.
He can feel where his ring was on his finger a moment ago, the skin still slightly tacky with sweat, and the rest of him feels cold with realization. He had no idea. He just wanted to get Noel something pretty, and Noel’s telling him he blindly stumbled into some universal human codeword for please god marry me.
“That’s fucking stupid.”
“A little. Yeah,” Noel laughs sheepishly. “I’m gonna guess that’s not what you meant by it.”
“No, no, I just thought you’d like it.”
“I do,” Noel says weakly.
John wants to punch himself. Why, of all things, did he decide on buying Noel a ring? He remembers watching Arthur play piano, bothering him about what they ought to buy for Noel, and they must’ve gone through a hundred different options before landing on it. The only reason John decided on it at all was…
“Wait.”
“Yeah?”
“This is Arthur’s fault.”
That startles a laugh out of Noel. “For not telling you?”
“No, for–” He remembers now. Arthur’s reaction had been weird, when John brought up rings, his fingers slowing on the keys. What had he told John?
“You don’t think that’d be a little much, do you?”
John shrugged. “It’d be small. It’s not like I’m getting him a statement necklace.”
Arthur stopped playing altogether, going still. “S’pose not.”
“And he doesn’t have one already, I don’t think.”
“No, he does not.”
“Hm. Maybe not, then. He might not like them.”
Arthur sat up at the piano, fingertips resting on the key cover. “No, no, hold on. I think you should.”
“You’re sure?”
“Oh, John, definitely. I think he’d love it. And you know what you could do? You could get one for yourself that matched his, so you could see it and think of one another.”
John flushed at the idea, feeling the urge to shut the conversation down and move on to something else, but it is an endearing thought. And a good excuse to buy himself more jewelry.
“Oh, that fucker.”
“What’d he do, doll?”
John clenches his jaw. No wonder. He’d been so enthusiastic about taking John to the jewelry store, and John was naive enough to think he was being supportive of John’s gift-giving decisions. “He told me to get two.”
And Noel knew right away. He’d grinned when he opened the box, eyes flicking to Arthur, and John didn’t know why he seemed so amused by it. He knew, and just hadn’t decided to say anything. Probably because he didn’t want to embarrass John.
“Ah.” Noel almost looks like he wants to laugh, scrubbing his hand over his face. “Well. I s’pose we both fell for that one, huh?”
“What the fuck is his problem?”
“Doll, I’m sure he didn’t mean to upset you–”
“Oh, yes he did.”
“Well, maybe.”
“I’ll fucking kill him.”
“Sure, sweetheart, in the morning.”
“I’ll still be upset then,” John responds. Arthur does that too, implying he’s just angry or stressed because he’s been awake too long. It’s deeply frustrating.
“I know,” Noel assures him. “But you can be well-rested and upset.”
“Fine.”
“There you go. Get some rest.”
John rolls onto his back and folds his arms over his chest, where his heart feels all twisted up. He hears Noel turn over as well, somehow unconcerned by the whole thing. John doesn’t want to just get to sleep and talk about it in the morning, he wants to grab Arthur and demand to know what the hell he thought he was doing.
He doesn’t think he’s going to be getting to sleep for a while. He thinks he’d much rather scowl at the ceiling, his heart racing, for another couple hours, until Arthur gets back and they can fight over it and then go to bed. Arthur will make fun of him when it’s relevant, and Noel either won’t remember or will never mention the mishap again, out of politeness. He’ll just pretend today never happened.
…John doesn’t like that thought. He liked today. They had coffee and went to the laundromat together and held hands sort of and it was good. Even if Noel was completely misjudging who they were to one another, John never felt the bad kind of confused. A little concerned, yes, and pleasantly surprised.
He just wishes he could relive the day knowing. He wishes he could have played along and been Noel’s husband in return, so he didn’t look so surprised when Noel kept affectionately bumping his shoulder on the walk home. He wishes he could’ve done the same in return, and known from the moment he woke up that he was allowed to call Noel handsome, too.
He wishes they were married.
Shit.
He has to turn his head to the other side, away from Noel, because he’s worried it’s going to show on his face. His chest feels tighter still.
He’s fucked, isn’t he? If Noel remembers this tomorrow, he’ll be sheepish and he and Arthur will laugh about it over coffee and John will sit with them, upset and humiliated. He’ll be married to no one, because Noel’s just his friend and they’re both guys anyway, Arthur won’t believe it actually worked—
John presses his eyes shut, an uncomfortable lump in the back of his throat. The problem is that Arthur didn’t trick him into proposing to someone he hates, he tricked him into proposing to someone he loves.
That’s worse. That’s so much worse. There’s a bitterness on his tongue that isn’t helped by the feeling of a warm body in the bed with him.
“John?”
John doesn’t move. “Mnm.”
“Doll, hey. I got an idea.”
Noel’s keeping his voice down and it’s a little rough because of that, the ghost of his throat injury buzzing at the edges. John opens his eyes, exhaling heavily before turning back on his side to lie face to face with Noel. He hates this more, lying so close to Noel under the warm covers of their shared bed, Noel’s stubble shading his jaw now that it’s later in the evening. He’s looking at John with something like sympathy.
“Wanna hear it?”
“Fine.”
“Arthur thinks he’s being funny, right.”
John draws his shoulders together, staying buried under the covers. “He isn’t.”
“Yeah, not really. But the joke is that we ain’t married, right?”
“Yes,” John says. They’re not even close to married. John didn’t know that was an option, let alone seriously considered it. They rarely hold hands. They haven’t kissed. His heart still flutters when Noel just touches his fingers, and he wants to feel it all the time, for as long as he can get away with.
“But you’d want us to be.”
So much that he’s dizzy with it.
“That,” John says, “was what he was implying. Yes.”
He wants to kick himself for swerving out of the way of a confession, because he can feel it resting in the back of his throat. The joke isn’t just that they aren’t husbands, but that John would do anything for it to be true. He’d spent the rest of his life with Noel. He’d buy him a ring and propose on Noel’s birthday.
And he would, if it made Noel happy.
“Right,” Noel says. And then he leans in close, fingers hovering for just a moment before settling on the side of John’s face. His hand is warm, and when John tilts his head into the touch he smiles, lowering his thumb to touch the corner of John’s lip. “So y’know what would really show him?”