Chapter Text
Normal POV
Mr. and Mrs. Watts, of Cokeworth town were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious because they just didn't hold such nonsense.
Mr. Watts was the owner of a popular restaurant that served the finest fish and chips in the county, a fact he'd remind you of whether you asked or not. He was a big man, red-face, and broad-shouldered, with the sort of booming laugh that carried across a dining room and made the wait staff wince.
Mrs. Watts was a thin woman with gray hair she had to constantly dye black due to suffering from Marie Antoinette syndrome. She was quite fond of hosting her book club and tea parties with the other married women in the neighborhood. Although she appeared nice to others she was always fast to judge and place her hidden disdain upon anyone.
They had three children. The eldest, Marcus was seventeen and captain of the rugby team, a fact Mr. Watts brought up in conversation with a frequency that suggested he thought it reflected well on his own virility. The middle child, Elizabeth was fifteen, slender, pious, and often sang solos in the choir with a self-satisfaction that the vicar found to be trying. And then there was their youngest.
His name was Charlie Watts and if you'd asked Mr. and Mrs. Watts to describe him, they would have exchanged a look and then produce a word like "sensitive," “quirky,” or "odd," delivered in the tone most people reserved for a mild but chronic illness.
"He'll grow out of it," was Mr. Watts's preferred assessment, delivered at the pub to Councillor Briggs or anyone else who'd stand still long enough to hear it. Though he had begun saying this when Charlie was three and, somewhere around Charlie's sixth birthday, had stopped believing it. Mrs. Watts preferred not to think about Charlie at all if she could help it and had become extremely skilled over the years at redirecting any conversation that threatened to land on her youngest son usually toward Marcus's win count for the Rugby team or the alarming price of good sherry.
The truth, though neither of them would have put it so plainly even to each other, was that Charlie had never been a normal baby.
Marcus had arrived nine pounds and roaring, a great red fist of a child who'd bawled so loudly the nurse had almost gone deaf. Elizabeth had arrived neat and golden had gone on at four months old, to win Prettiest Baby at the Cokeworth summer fete, a rosette Mrs. Watts still kept pinned above the good china till this very day.
Charlie had arrived without so much as even a single cry. In fact when he did come out everyone thought he was dead if not for the nurse slapping his bottom causing him to finally let out a cry.
Unlike either of his siblings Charlie was unfortunate enough to inherit Mrs. Watts syndrome which made it so that he had both black and gray hair although it looked closer to silver.
This is where it got stranger, whenever Mrs.Watts tried to dye his hair it would go back to being gray the next day. No matter what hair dye brand she used, it always turned back the next day. She had even gone so far as to shave his head and then freakishly enough all of the hair grew back that next day.
These bouts of strangeness were certainly not the last either. One Christmas Elizabeth had taken the last of the good clementines straight off Charlie's plate. At which point the bowl of clementines still sitting on the sideboard randomly rose, floated six inches into the air and hovered there, rotating gently, for at least ten seconds before dropping back down as though nothing at all had happened. Elizabeth had screamed while Marcus laughed, then stopped laughing when no one else did.
Mr. Watts announced to the room in general that it had obviously been a draft, this despite every window in the house being shut fast against the December cold, and Mrs. Watts sent Charlie to bed without pudding for "causing a scene" much to the boy’s annoyance.
And there was the time during Mrs. Watts's tea party when Charlie, made to sit quietly in the corner with a picture book while eight women gossiped about the Hendersons' divorce, grew so thoroughly bored that every cup on the trolley began, very softly, to hum like a kettle three minutes from boiling.
Then Mrs. Cavanaugh asked whether anyone else could hear that, and Mrs. Watts produced her book-club laugh, the one that meant absolutely not another word, before she sent Charlie out to the garden for the rest of the afternoon regardless of the cold weather.
Other numerous occasions like this constantly occurred to the point where Mr and Mrs Watts finally decided that their son really was a freak.
Once decided, the fact took on the same settled, immovable quality as other household truths that Tuesdays were bin day, that the good sherry was strictly for guests, or that Marcus would play rugby for England one day if his knee held out.
Mr. Watts stopped saying Charlie would grow out of it while Mrs. Watts simply became more efficient at what she already did well. Within a year or two she could steer a conversation away from her youngest son in under four seconds flat, a personal best she never remarked upon aloud but privately took some pride in.
The practical effects taken individually were small enough that neither parent could have pointed to any single one as the moment things had changed. Although added together they amounted to a picture neither would have cared to see laid out on paper.
Marcus's birthday, every September meant a marquee in the back garden, a hired karaoke machine, and enough sausage rolls to concern the family doctor. Elizabeth's, every August, meant an outing to the Cokeworth Playhouse for whatever touring production happened to be passing through, followed by dinner somewhere with linen napkins and a rather expensive wine list that Mr and Mrs. Watts enjoy.
Charlie's birthday, in January tended to arrive and depart with considerably less fuss. There was usually a card, bought that same morning from the newsagent's because the calendar had only just been consulted, and a gift chosen for its convenience rather than any thought behind it.
Over the years he collected among other things, a six-pack of plain white socks, a set of random books, a pair of cheap sunglasses, and for goodness sake even a silver lighter with a nice design.
Had the boy been an ordinary one the Watts household would have been burnt down to crisp by the next day since a child should by no means ever be in possession of a lighter.
By the time he turned seven years old he no longer got anything. An oversight Mrs. Watts discovered when Charlie mentioned it in passing some weeks later, mildly, and almost apologetically which somehow made it worse rather than better. She resolved the matter later by buying him a jumper two sizes too large and telling him he'd grow into it.
He didn’t complain in the slightest though. This, more than almost anything else, was a detail that unsettled Mrs. Watts on the rare occasions she allowed herself to dwell on it because Marcus at eight had complained at great length about considerably smaller injustices and Elizabeth had once cried for the better part of an afternoon over an unflattering school photograph.
Charlie however simply took in each disappointment and never once threw a tantrum about it.
Marcus, to his very limited credit noticed some of it. At around age eleven he'd once asked his mother offhandedly why Charlie never got a proper party like he did. He was told, with a briskness that closed the subject before it had properly opened that Charlie wasn't really the party sort. Marcus accepted this the way he accepted most things his mother told him, and never asked again. Elizabeth on the other hand had never asked at all.
The boy was also increasingly put to use. The restaurant did a brisk trade on Friday and Saturday evenings, and Charlie would be found in the back of the place, peeling potatoes alongside Ted the dishwasher.
Marcus, on the rare evenings he could be persuaded to come in at all was allowed to stand near the till and be admired by his father's regulars.
Elizabeth was never asked to help at all, on the grounds stated more than once at Sunday dinner that it wasn't the sort of work a pretty girl like her ought to be doing with her hands.
The bedrooms told their own version of events. When Elizabeth turned twelve and announced that her old room was really too small for a growing young lady, she was promptly moved into what had been the guest room.
Charlie who until then had shared the larger back bedroom with Marcus was moved into what had been hers. It was in all fairness, only slightly bigger than a cupboard, though not by so wide a margin that the comparison failed to occur to more than one visiting aunt, none of whom ever said so within Mrs. Watts's hearing.
It was in that room where Charlie sat on the edge of the bed for some time in the dark, not crying exactly but doing the small, hitching sort of breathing a boy does when he has already decided that crying is beneath him. It was later in that moment when the bulb overhead gave a soft pop and died, despite having been changed only that spring.
Mr. Watts consulted the next morning, pronounced it a faulty batch from the hardware shop on Gilling Road and said he'd have a word with them.
He never did.