Chapter Text
Crystal stays long enough to see him perched back on the couch, still insubstantial, then makes her excuses. The last thing she does before she slips out of the door is shoot him a glare that says, as clearly as actual words, talk to him.
Well, he’s not about to risk Crystal’s wrath, is he? So he clears his throat of the knot that’s suddenly lodged in it and says, “Edwin?”
He turns, holding a thick volume in each hand. When Charles fell, he’d flung his stack of research material across the desk to rush over and — well, not help, because Charles couldn’t touch anything and him least of all, but to fuss over him as he climbed out of the furniture and thanked his lucky stars that at least he didn’t go through the floor.
Which is not to say that he won’t before this conversation’s over. It feels like a very real possibility, when Edwin’s eyes meet his and Charles lets himself notice that they’re pretty.
“Yes, Charles?” Edwin prompts, when a moment has passed and he still hasn’t said anything. He’s been stalled by the sudden, static-charge awareness of just how properly handsome his best mate is, now he’s allowing himself to see it. Edwin’s striking brows draw together a little more. “Whatever is the matter?”
“Nothing,” Charles rasps, and makes himself look away.
He can’t sit ogling Edwin just because he’s finally, belatedly noticed how fit he is. That isn’t fair. It’d make him no better than the Cat King.
Attention from random supernatural entities is one thing, but Charles reckons Edwin might not mind that sort of thing from his boyfriend. Or maybe he just hopes, since he’d find it pretty brills if they were together and Edwin looked at him like that — and then his mind catches up with his racing thoughts and snags on the idea. Is that what Edwin would want, to be his boyfriend? Is it what Charles wants?
It’s not even a question: he does, with a certainty that grabs him by the heart and won’t let go.
“We will get this sorted out, I am certain of it,” Edwin reassures him, misinterpreting his silence. He puts down the books and approaches the couch, sinking down into the spot Crystal had left beside him. He seems so much closer than she did, even though they’re in the exact same place. He says, “I found several books at the library that I think will be quite helpful. It may take slightly longer now that Crystal has gone for the evening and I am forced to do all the research myself —”
Charles can’t help it, he laughs. “Oh, come off it, mate, as if you’re upset about that. You love reading old books and then telling me how clever you are ’cause you worked it all out!”
Edwin rarely blushes, because he’s adamant that ghosts can’t so it only happens when he’s not paying attention. However, he shoots Charles a peeved look, and after thirty-odd years Charles is pretty sure that expression means he would be bright red if he was still alive, and he’s annoyed about it. That’s even cuter than his irritation over Crystal leaving — and those thoughts aren’t helping Charles get any more solid, but he can’t help it.
His love for Edwin grew with the persistence of weeds from a pitch dark corner of his mind that he couldn’t bear to examine, but it put down roots that spread through the whole of him. He’d thought it bloomed when Edwin turned the lights on with his confession, but he was wrong. That was just the first shoots, unfurling cautious baby stems when he wasn’t paying attention. Now, because he’s acknowledged it himself, it’s sprouting through every thought, budding in his senses, blossoming around his heart. That thrill he gets when he coaxes a smile out of him, the little squirm of enjoyment when he teases him that coils tighter when he actually inspires a reaction, the joy of Edwin just being beside him — it was all there, a vast buried root system, and finally it’s bursting into the vines and leaves and flowers of a lush garden. Or maybe a better word would be jungle, because this isn’t something tame and cultivated. It’s a huge mess of flourishing greenery that feels too wild for him to fully contain.
It’s beautiful and terrifying, both at once.
“Yes, well,” Edwin says primly. He shifts, and his knee slides into Charles’s, and the place where he turns to smoke burns to feel it instead. Thankfully, Edwin is too flustered to notice the way Charles freezes with his gaze fixed on the not-quite-contact: he continues, “Perhaps I do not mind the research itself, but I do not like leaving you in this state any longer than absolutely necessary. I rather thought Crystal would feel a similar urgency to resolve what is happening to you, but it would appear not.”
“Nah, she does,” Charles murmurs and drags his eyes back to Edwin’s face. They’re having a conversation, he can’t keep getting sidetracked. Not that Edwin’s face isn’t distracting by itself — because he’s learning that it is, and he might never be able to concentrate on a case again at this rate — but his concerned expression does remind Charles that he’s supposed to be explaining. He says, “Thing is, I don’t think you’re going to find anything that’ll help in those books.”
Edwin frowns. “You must not give up hope of finding a solution. We will remedy this, I assure you.”
“I haven’t, Edwin — I swear,” he says, when Edwin gives him an incredulous look. He wishes, rather guiltily, that he hadn’t sent him off on a wild goose chase for answers when he had them himself all along. He sighs and admits, “Look, I didn’t tell you everything, before.”
“I see,” Edwin says softly.
He hesitates, lips pressed together, his eyes focussed solely on Charles as if he’s a puzzle he’d very much like to solve. A little shiver runs over his skin, lifting the hair down his arms and at the back of his neck. He likes it, being the centre of Edwin’s attention. He always did, but now his awareness of it fizzes in his belly, and it’s only the worried slant of Edwin’s mouth and the lines between his brows that keep it contained.
“Charles,” Edwin continues after a moment, and his heart trips up even without knowing what comes next, just from the way he speaks his name, “I understand that it can be difficult to speak of the things that bother us: I am afraid that is something we have in common.”
He pauses, a rueful smile twisting his lips. Charles thinks about Edwin telling him — telling everyone — time and again that he’d been in Hell for seventy years, but never a word about what it was like for him. Not a whisper of the many-legged thing that hunted him down and tore him to pieces, over and over and over. Charles thinks of all the times he’s shrugged off any mention of his dad: faked a smile, pretended that his whole life wasn’t spent failing to be good enough to avoid a beating and kept the memory of the belt to himself.
He huffs a tiny laugh, even though it’s not really funny, and says, “You’re not wrong there, mate.”
“Indeed. However, I hope you know that you may tell me anything. I would be honoured to share the burden of your troubles, if you will allow me,” Edwin murmurs, in a voice so earnest that Charles feels it like the echo of a punch curling up under his ribs.
Edwin, who normally shies away from the messy business of emotions, inviting him to talk about whatever he needs to talk about is as much a confession of his feelings as the words he’d spoken in Hell. He had done the same thing after the Devlin house, but Charles had been too raw — too busy hiding behind the paper-thin cover of a smile — to realise it, or see what it meant. Now, his chest feels full of helium, like he could float away any minute.
Except he’s weighted down by the familiar excuses queued up on the tip of his tongue, the urge to force a grin and tell Edwin he doesn’t want to hear about any of that, it’s not important, there’s nothing wrong.
He bites back the empty assurances. They’re a pack of lies on every level, and now Edwin can see right through them. Besides, he can’t keep smacking Edwin’s hand away every time he reaches out. It’s cruel to both of them. He doesn’t want to be like that.
“I had to sort it out in my own head, first,” he says quietly, instead of changing the subject.
His instincts, beaten into him by his dad’s unstable temper and honed in the firing-line of his schoolmates’ fair-weather friendships, clamour that he’s making a mistake — but Edwin smiles at him, small and pleased and kind, and the rush of panic dulls to a background roar.
“I can understand that,” he murmurs. Of course he can: he must’ve done a lot of thinking back in Port Townsend, before he came to Charles with his feelings. It’s the same thing, except Charles had to go and make it complicated by erasing himself every time he got close. “However, please know that you are my dearest friend,” Edwin adds, voice soft and sincere, “And whatever you have to tell me, I will think no differently of you. It will not change a thing between us.”
Charles hears the echo of his own words from the rooftop of the Tongue and Tail butcher shop spoken back to him, and his heart flutters against his ribs. He’s not sure what he did to deserve Edwin’s care and complete acceptance, but he’s grateful for every instant for it.
“Thing is, I’ve been ignoring a lot of things that I should’ve noticed a long time ago. And what it boils down to is that I love you,” he says, because loving Edwin is the beginning and the end of it all. His heart trips up, but he makes himself go on even as the words turn him translucent: “I’m in love with you back, I mean. Have been for ages.”
When he says the thing he couldn’t on the very long stairway up from Hell, Edwin’s eyes widen. His lips part, in what Charles knows by instinct is going to be a question. He barrels on, before Edwin can speak and delay the rest of the long-overdue explanation.
“Only I couldn’t see it, could I? Or I didn’t let myself. Then this started happening and I couldn’t ignore it any more,” he says in a rush. He’s all too aware of Edwin staring at him, and for the first time in a long while, he has no idea what his expression means.
“Charles. I am going to ask you something, and I would very much like you to answer me honestly,” Edwin says carefully.
It’s the verbal equivalent of holding up his hands and approaching with exaggerated slowness — like he’s worried Charles will bolt if he makes any sudden moves. Well, maybe he’s not wrong to think that, given Charles’s past habits.
Edwin waits for him to nod, then asks, “Why are you transparent?”
The words I don’t know leap into his mouth and he struggles to swallow them back down. That’s the path of least resistance, well-trodden and familiar: throw up a smokescreen of cheerful ignorance and hide himself behind it. With effort, he again stops himself from retreating. He trusts Edwin. He wants to give him the truth he’s asked for.
“Scared, aren’t I?” he croaks after a beat of silence. “Not of you. Not even of feeling that way, not really — I mean, it sounds brills, doesn’t it? I get to be in love with my best mate, and he’s the very best person in the whole world.” A faint blush rises in Edwin’s cheeks, and Charles’s stomach flips as he grins, this one real and full and delighted, even if it’s short-lived. “And he loves me back! That should be aces. It is aces. Or it would be, but every time I think about it …” he trails off and gestures towards himself with a hand he can still see through. The last of his smile falls away. “Sorry.”
He is sorry: sorry this is happening, sorry he can’t explain better, sorry he can’t love Edwin without making it bloody difficult. Edwin, however, frowns at him.
“You need not apologise,” he says instantly and with aching sympathy that then sharpens as he adds, “Unless you are doing it on purpose, in which case, you will stop it at once!”
Charles surprises himself by laughing, soft and apologetic. “Wish I could, mate.”
Edwin hums thoughtfully, and then reaches for him. Charles wills himself to be solid, but it doesn’t work: his collar remains intangibly crooked, his shoulders unsmoothed.
“I had dismissed the possibility that this was as simple as an instinctive fear reaction,” he murmurs as he goes through the motions anyway. When he’s finished, he leaves his hands on Charles’s shoulders in a pantomime of touch that neither of them can feel. “Not to make light of your predicament, or to suggest it is simple to fix. I only mean that it is simpler in terms of explanation than an outside influence, such as a curse or enchantment.”
Charles hasn’t thought of his sudden flashes of intangibility like that before. He knows, obviously, that ghosts can make themselves insubstantial, and that sometimes it happens automatically in self-defence. It’s the same trick that lets them walk through doors and walls, but without deliberate intent. It had been a surprise, the first time someone had taken a swing at him and it had swept straight through his middle instead of knocking the wind out of him — but better to phase through a weapon when he can, rather than get clobbered. It’s a useful trick, and one he and Edwin feel the benefit of fairly often, in their line of work. He’s lost count of the times they’ve run straight into traffic while fleeing from something supernatural, and passed unharmed through the vehicles without even thinking. It’s one of the few benefits of being a ghost.
It hadn’t occurred to him that losing his solidity could be that, even when he was admitting to Edwin that he was afraid. He fidgets, uncomfortable with the idea that on some level he’s trying to protect himself — and his shoulders shear through Edwin’s unmoving hands in a puff of blue aether. However, Edwin doesn’t flinch away. He just moves his hands to correct the illusion, as if he can make Charles solid again just by pretending hard enough that he already is.
“I shouldn’t be scared, though. I’m not,” Charles insists. He doesn’t want to be frightened any more. He wants to love Edwin the way he deserves, with the uncomplicated devotion he’s always felt and the desire he’s just now learning to recognise. After all, he’d really like to try kissing Edwin at some point. He’s pretty sure that’ll be mint, if he can ever keep himself substantial enough to try it. He huffs a frustrated sigh and says, “It’s bloody stupid.”
“I do not think it stupid,” Edwin says mildly. “Sometimes our fears are not rational, nor so easily controlled by logic. After all, I know that a porcelain doll, in this plane, cannot harm me, and yet —”
“Yeah, but that’s not the same, is it? That’s because of a sadistic fucking demon. What I’ve got is a — a phobia of loving you!” Charles protests, furious with himself. “That’s bollocks! I can’t be scared of that, can I? It’s good that I’m in love with you!”
Edwin lifts one hand up to Charles’s cheek, and he goes still. His flare of frustration winks out, banished by the suggestion of touch. The blue particles of his disrupted form bloom in the edge of his vision, but Edwin doesn’t seem to mind. He keeps his hand there, anyway.
“Do you really think so?” he murmurs, and Charles gets the sense that he’s not asking because he doesn’t believe him, no matter how angry he sounded, but because what he said fills him with wonder.
“’Course I do,” he promises. He reaches for Edwin in return, because he can’t bear not to try even if he’s still not solid enough to make contact. His barely-there fingers catch on Edwin’s lapels out of sheer desperation, partly phasing through but just substantial enough that the fabric lifts at his numb touch. “It’s you, innit? And if I love you back, then that’s brills. ‘Cause we love each other. And nothing’s going to split us up or make us move on, so we get to be together. Forever.”
His voice trembles over the last words, emotion filling his throat, and Edwin’s breath hitches like he feels it too. He’s looking at Charles like — well, like he often does, when it’s just the two of them. Sharp hazel eyes softened by affection, a smile just creeping in at the corners of his mouth. Everything beyond the calm, safe focus of his gaze fades to insignificance, and tension Charles didn’t even realise he was carrying melts away. His heart sings with how much he loves the boy beside him. Then Edwin’s thumb traces across his cheekbone, with as much care as someone might show a priceless antique —
Charles feels it.
Whatever spell Edwin has cast, just by looking at him, has made him solid enough to be touched, solid enough to feel.
“Forever,” Edwin echoes, his voice quiet, his palm warm against Charles’s cheek. There’s no way he hasn’t noticed that he’s tangible: his fingertips brush, deliberately light, against his neck and set off a tingle of goosebumps.
“Yeah,” he whispers, overwhelmed. The irrational panic that’s been turning him ethereal seems to have transformed into shivery sensitivity.
He drags a thumb down the lapel of Edwin’s jacket and then along the edge of the fabric past the first button, just to prove to himself that he can, and maybe a little bit as payback, too. As his knuckles follow the line of a pinstripe, Edwin’s lips part around a gasp. Then his gaze dips, Charles’s stomach leaps — for a second he’s sure he’ll shiver right out of existence — but Edwin’s looking at his mouth and all he can think about is —
“I really want to kiss you,” he murmurs.
“I should like that,” Edwin breathes without looking up. The sweep of his lashes against his cheekbone as his eyes flutter closed strikes Charles like a knife between the ribs: he’s lovely, is Edwin, and he’s been a bloody fool not to notice it before now. There’s longing in his voice as he adds in a whisper, “Very much.”
Something about being able to give Edwin something he wants makes Charles’s long-dead heart seize. He’s denied him for too long already. So he leans in until there’s nothing between them but the memory of their breath, and then nothing at all.
Edwin’s lips are very soft. He’s shy, when they first come together, but that doesn’t stop him from melting almost instantly into Charles’s arms. Electric tingles of sensation race over his skin, vibrating outwards from every place they touch, matching the thrum of his heart against his collar bones. Charles can’t get enough of any of it. He’s desperate for more. He presses closer, catching Edwin’s lower lip between his, and lets out a muffled groan when Edwin kisses him back with enough clumsy enthusiasm to make his toes curl.
It’s more than just the meeting of lips, though that in itself is intense enough that he could believe he has nerves again. There’s warmth bursting in the very centre of his chest: a whole display of fireworks going off in slow motion, hot and bright and beautiful. He half-expects it to dissolve him into nothing, but he stays whole and present even as his insides swirl and jump — even when Edwin’s lips part, experimentally, inviting him in.
When they finally ease apart, panting for breath they no longer need, Edwin doesn’t let him go far. He keeps Charles close, brows tipped to lean against one another, noses bumping.
“I love you,” Charles says, and at last it’s easy. He doesn’t really know how it was ever hard. Loving Edwin is the simplest thing in the world. It’s more familiar to him than breathing: he’s been doing it for longer.
“I love you, too,” Edwin replies, and tilts his chin to kiss him again, and Charles burns from the inside out. When Edwin pulls back, a fraction further this time, he takes Charles’s face between his hands and just looks at him. His thumbs are extraordinarily gentle as they stroke along his cheekbones. “You seem much improved. Do you think it might last?”
“I bloody hope so!” Charles says, with feeling, because if nothing else he’s sick of being rendered truly ghostly — but as Edwin scoffs a laugh and moves his hands down to his shoulders, he considers it.
He thinks about how much he loves his best mate. About kissing him, just now.
It feels the same as it did before, just as intense: a stomach-clenching, heart-stopping sensation races through him. This time, though, he stays cradled between Edwin’s hands. He doesn’t dissolve. His misguided self-preservation seems to have found something that matters more than protecting him. Kissing Edwin, holding him — loving him — that’s worth whatever made-up risks his instincts can invent.
“Reckon I’ll be all right now,” he says more gently, “But if I’m not, I might have to kiss you some more. Remind myself what I’m staying solid for, yeah?”
Edwin purses his lips. “That might not be entirely convenient during a case, Charles.”
He grins, and ducks in to steal a kiss. It sets off another flash of pure joy in his chest. “Bet I won’t hear you complaining.”
“I most certainly will if you ruin our professional reputation with excessive displays of affection!” Edwin protests, but he’s trying not to laugh and Charles loves him so, so much. His whole body’s filled up with fizzing sparklers. He can’t resist: he kisses Edwin again, and again, until he stops pretending and laughs against his smiling mouth. “Charles! Do be serious!”
“Want me to stop, mate?” he teases, knowing very well that the answer’s no, because Edwin could easily push him away if he wanted to, and he very much isn’t doing that. He’s holding on, and when Charles asks, he pulls him closer.
“No,” he says, his eyes creased at the corners by his smile and glittering with fondness. “Never.”
“Never it is, then,” Charles cheerfully agrees.