Work Text:
"What's your favourite colour?" She had asked.
It was a blatantly stupid question, yet so vision blurring that it blinded him physically; mentally, he could see— he always could see after that October. He had an answer, but he never wanted to give it. Was there any point?
Blue.
The colour that reigned above that beach in Cuba. The colour that had haunted every waking and sleeping thought, images of the saddened and lost and facaded soul that used to silently cling to every word of advice he had ever uttered. The eyes that had accompanied the lips that had whispered his own confessions, ideas, struggles, only for Charles to hear. The trust in his desperate confidence, his need to be heard ever so quietly. His blue. The blue in Charles' own suit, his own face, concentrated at the centre of bruises— the blue in his own soul. That blue he could never see again without his own blue turning into a desert oasis.
He would think about this often; if Erik himself were still his, what would he advise? He never believed Erik to be reliable emotionally, his own past memories ruining his future, but he would contemplate what he would say, in an attempt to find comfort in loss.
"Move on," maybe.
"Who is she Charles? Better yourself," probably.
He liked to pretend he still cared, drafting letters of stale confessions and empty insults, complaining about this life-ending loneliness that had loomed for months, before settling and residing in his own languished heart. The paper began honest and virtuous, sitting and acting as a form of self soothing; yet as all good things do, it ended. The paper aged, stained with whiskeys and ink smudging the very world he had created to act as a companion for the one Erik journeyed alone. Every hurt was in an envelope, never to be opened.
And everything did hurt; there was nothing he could do about it. He was gone. Really gone. Not a break, or a temporary parting. He had left again, but for good. It broke him, harder than it had in '73.
"Red."
He had replied, the falsified answer burning his chest out of guilt. The only person who really saw him for him had left. He would not relive that same mistake.
'Red, the colour which I shed after the night that you left. The colour that I see in hatred. The colour of your costume, yet I never saw it in you. You were my blue.'
Those words died in a paper confinement, edges folded and now frayed with age; ink smeared in alcohol across the front, with no address but 'Erik', followed by a scribbled heart that looked like an 'M' more than anything else. But it was there, loud, and even in Charles' own death, his love remained loud, behind the blue eyes of a sad man that lied.