Chapter Text
The car door slams shut, and Charles makes it about a minute before he starts to shake.
“Do not laugh!” Edwin hisses. “Your Mother thinks I am some– some backwater harlot—“
Charles loses it, bursting into hysterical laughter.
“—who seduced her son into a den of iniquity—“
“Den of iniquity?” Charles clutches at his stomach, wheezing.
“Tell me she believed us!” Edwin slaps at his knee. “Tell me I’m imagining—“
Charles shakes his head, snickering. Christ, his sides hurt from laughing so hard.
“Charles!” Edwin’s reached the pitch of a teakettle about to boil over. “Why did you not tell me to prepare a cover story?!”
“Cover—were not bloody spies in a black and white film!”
“What was I meant to say!? How was I meant to know she would ask—“
“Er, normal dating questions like how did you meet?”
“That is not a normal dating question!” Edwin snaps. “Normal dating questions are—what is your profession, your parents profession, while delicately skirting around any hint of sexuality or modern dating at all!”
Charles' laughter peters out.
Edwin’s brows draw together in the ensuing pause. Like two kissing caterpillars, Charles thinks fondly, chest aching.
Edwin throws his hands up. “Is this another blasted your parents are like something from bloody K3G moment?!”
“Yeah, love, might be,” Charles says gently. (Really, definitely is). “You’re upset. D'you want to pull over and talk?”
“I am not upset!” Edwin shouts.
“..right.”
“Fuck,” Edwin snarls, and pulls over. Carefully. Like a gran, because he thinks cars are “brightly colored, stylish death traps,” and he knows Charles gets twitchy when people argue in cars, and he hates to set him off, normally he’s dead careful.
Charles cracks the window, takes a slow breath of lacy silver fog, watches the autumn leaves sway in the breeze, dancing. They have to pull over loads because Edwin refuses to drive without consulting a paper map, so he doesn’t think twice about the silence til he turns back, and Edwin’s knuckling at his forehead, eyes closed. His shoulders have creeped up to his ears.
“Hey, hey,” Charles says, alarmed, unbuckling and sliding a hand up the tense line of his back. “What’s wrong?”
Edwin groans wordlessly, dragging a hand down his face.
Charles keeps up the petting, up and down the knobs of his spine like prayer beads, tracing the faint outline of the tattoos wings with his thumb. They’re in a quiet bit of town, barely any cars whooshing past over the cracked road. No one to see Edwin have a moment, which makes it easier by far. Slowly, the muscles under his hand loosen, inch by inch. Always feels like a miracle, being able to do that.
“I wanted things to go well. For you.” Edwin says quietly.
Charles' heart thumps a three step in his chest.
“Don’t make those.. eyes at me,” Edwin sighs. There’s an edge of warmth to it through the exhaustion, now.
“What eyes! I’m not making any eyes!” Charles lies.
Edwin waves an exasperated hand around his own face. “The—eyes! Those!”
“Dunno what you’re talking about,” Charles purses his lips, pinching down on a smile.
“Stop it.”
“Can’t. Love you too much.”
Edwin goes pink, still trying to frown. Charles can’t pinch his cheeks, Edwin would throttle him. Probably. Maybe worth the risk?
“What are we worried about, love? She loved you. Honest.”
Edwin’s breath hitches and—ah. Got it in one.
She did; Charles didn’t warn him Mum was a bit overprotective, cause Edwin had already worked himself into a conniption. He’d already asked Charles a thousand times what her favorite books were, her friends, her hobbies, memorized them like he was studying for uni, nearly ruined one of Charles' pans trying to make sticky toffee pudding from scratch when Charles said she liked it.
Besides, Mum was the kind to sit back and let people show her who they were. Actions spoke louder than words, and all that. Edwin didn't notice, anyways, cause she’d never try to scare anyone Charles proper loved, his Mum. She just smiled, warm, and made little jokes to put Edwin at ease, and like always, Edwin’d worried himself sick about a million things and done the right one completely without realizing, nattering his ear off about if Charles—
“—simply always had to be the one to cook, then the least you could do is practice proper kitchen safety—“
Charles rolled his eyes. “Mate, if I let you take over, you’d burn the bloody flat down. I’m not forgetting the lasagne incident of ‘25 anytime soon. Nice try.”
“Honestly, how do you not know how to apply a bandage,” Edwin muttered, cutting a neat line into each of the band aids arms and separating the sections to hug Charles finger.
Charles threw up the hand Edwin wasn't holding. “I’ve literally never seen anyone do that in my life! How the hell is that not knowing proper safety—“
“I am speaking of your lack of caution when slapping ingredients onto the pan with your bare hands in the first place—“
He waved at Mum, who’d paused in the doorway behind Edwin on her way by, alarmed by the spread of the first aid kit on the kitchen table. She relaxed when her eyes landed on his hand.
“Do you have any olive oil?” Edwin frowned. “It ought to help with a burn better than ice—”
“In the cupboard by the stove,” Mum said.
Edwin jumped, clapping his hands to his heart. “Goodness me!”
Charles giggled. Edwin shot a glare at him, seemed to remember they were in front of his Mum and sort of—squawked, all the swearing he’d been doing not knowing she was there flashing across his panicked face. He looked like a kid caught with his hand caught in a cookie jar. And Mum had tried not to, except then she looked at Charles with her lips pursed and they’d set each other off, laughing at poor Edwin, who stood there, smiling nervously at them, not sure what he’d done that was so funny.
“I haven’t heard her laugh like that in a long time,” Charles said quietly. “It was nice.”
Nice didn’t really cover watching Edwin, who towered over his Mum, babbling as he shook her hand, red faced, fetching her things from the high shelves before she could even ask, his legs crossed at the ankle at the kitchen table, asking polite questions about her art.
Edwin turned to him, brow creased in concern. He waits— god, he’s so irritable over everything, when people stop in the exit getting off an escalator, waiting for a book to come on hold—but he’s so patient with this it makes Charles squirm.
He wets his lips. Funny, he didn't realize he was nervous about them meeting, too, until just now when the adrenaline faded.
“Did my best when I moved out, but for years on the phone she just sounded.. smaller and smaller each time.” He scrubs a hand through his hair. “It really did go well, I promise. Dunno why I’m thinking ‘bout that now.”
Cool fingers slip between his, trace the lines of his palm, idle.
“Have I mentioned yet today how glad I am that your Father is dead?”
Charles snorts. “Not yet, but the day is new.”
“Well. My only regret is I did not have the chance to help him along. Blasted heart attack,” Edwin muttered. “Robbing a man of good old fashioned revenge.”
Charles shook his head, grinning, something in his chest loosening. He brings their hands up, kisses Edwin’s knuckles. Edwin tilts his head in that bemused, birdlike way of his, and Charles is so in love he could die.
“Thank you.”
“I am still not entirely sure what I did, but you are welcome.”
Charles shrugs. “Just for being Edwin, then. Existing at the same time as me.”
“Oh,” Edwin says, warm. “Then—thank you, for the same. I’m dubious at best about a higher power, but whatever act of chance brought us together—“
“My Dad dying and me going to a club to suck cock as revenge on his ghost?”
“The mercy of death’s sweet embrace, then—“
Charles cackles so hard he can’t breathe.
“—I am grateful,” Edwin brushes a kiss to his cheek, feather light, “to be here with you, in this moment in space, in time.”
Charles' heart swells, pushing up against the bars of his ribs, pops like a balloon. “So how d’you feel about car sex?”
Edwin stares. “I am having a romantic moment with you and—“
“Oi, that’d be a great grand finale to our lovely romantic moment—“
“—so some family can drive by and see me bare arsed through the window—“
“—doesn’t breaking the law make it hotter, though?”