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Charles had known his friend way too long to believe him when he said he was fine.
One minute they were having an audience with some tosser in leather and the next, Edwin was gone. Not just gone, taken. Charles had sworn a million times over that even if he had to go to Oblivion for it, Edwin would be safe. Then he’d just stood there, bat in hand, worse than helpless as the Cat King stole his friend.
The only reason he didn’t go completely mental on the spot was because he knew Edwin was probably counting on him.
He forced himself to inhale, exhale, and use the detective brain that was meant to be part of a set. Whatever magic that was didn’t have the telltale signs of a proper portal but did have a whiff of displacement. Damn it, magical transport was Edwin’s area of expertise, but Charles would have to do for now.
Crystal was looking at him with wide eyes, but he couldn’t dredge up a reassuring grin.
‘Right. Right. Wherever that fucker took him, it has to be somewhere on Earth.’ He said, fists and jaw tight.
‘That narrows it down.’ Crystal responded sarcastically. He chose to ignore the sarcasm, she was probably just stressed.
‘It does a bit, actually. The important thing is that he isn’t in Hell. I can work with that.’
So he tried everything.
He tried searching every nook and cranny manually for a summoning circle or any indication of where Edwin had been taken, he sent Crystal out to scout the cannery for any rooms they could be hidden in, on the off chance that the Cat King was just super melodramatic and used teleportation magic instead of walking a couple hundred feet, and he dug out every magic-sensing doodad he had in the bag.
No luck.
Nothing.
And while he looked under pallets, time was slipping away. Eventually, Crystal got desperate enough to try asking the cats.
‘They’re in his room.’ A fluffy black cat said.
‘Whose room?’ Charles asked, trying to keep his panic and anger at bay.
‘His Majesty’s bedroom.’ And then it slunk off.
‘OI! HOW DO WE GET THERE?’ He called after it.
No answer. Useless bloody cats.
Even if he hadn’t already been a dog person, this experience probably would’ve put him off felines for life. Well, for afterlife.
Charles was definitely hyperventilating a little. He’d known, he’d known that cat bastard was bad news, he’d known from the second he set eyes on Edwin. God, those eyes. They were freaky as hell and he hated the way they looked at Edwin. Playful and possessive like Edwin was just a toy. Add in the smug smile like he could do whatever he wanted-
He felt sick.
What the actual fuck did the Cat King want with his best friend and why was Charles so sure he already knew the answer to that?
His fingers twitched around his cricket bat. Look, Edwin was pretty. As a matter of fact, he was one of the prettiest blokes Charles had ever seen. Plenty of ghosts had tried flirting with him over the years, but, unlike Charles, Edwin wasn’t interested. Most of them got the memo and if they didn’t, he was at his best friend’s side with a sharp, toothy smile and a reminder of personal space.
That usually worked.
Charles was meant to keep him safe. From Hell, from rogue spirits, from whoever or whatever wanted to sink their claws into him- that was his job. Edwin was the brain and he was the brawn and whatever wanted to get to Edwin had to get through him first.
And now a pervy pussycat had snatched him like all of the agency they’d worked so hard to build for themselves meant as much as whatever he left in his litterbox. God, if they found Edwin and he had even a single scratch on him, the office was getting a new fur rug.
He hadn’t seen Edwin in an hour. Then two. The longer he was gone the harder it was to convince himself that it was just ‘an audience’ or ‘a discussion’ or whatever.
That guy had explicitly said that he was gonna punish Edwin. Charles started pacing somewhere around hour three. Why was it taking so long? Was he in a cell somewhere, rotting away and waiting for his partner to track him down?
No. He definitely wasn’t in a cell because he was in the Cat King’s bedroom.
Crystal was trying to psychically work it out, tracing their footsteps with her fingers and trying to get a read on Edwin’s location. Nothing. There was probably some magic stopping them from being tracked.
Hour four, and Charles was starting to lose the plot. To her credit, so was Crystal. She might not have liked Edwin all that much, (or at all,) but seeing one of only two people she was close to post-possession get spirited away was plenty of reason to go a little cuckoo. Even when it didn’t work the first couple gos, she kept trying.
Not a single clue. They’d literally vanished without a trace.
Hour five. Charles paced even though it didn’t do him or Edwin any good because he had nothing else to do. Sodding useless. They couldn’t find them because they simply didn’t know where they were and it felt like something was physically clawing at him and it wasn’t any of the dimwitted moggies that kept a safe distance between them and the bat wielding crazy boy.
His brain was going in circles, and he couldn’t help himself from imagining all the ways Edwin could be suffering right that second. Or had been suffering for the last six hours.
Charles was seconds away from a full-blown panic attack when Edwin reappeared.
He said he’d only been gone a few moments.
Nothing bad had happened.
He’s just been given a task.
He was fine.
Charles didn’t believe him for a second.
-
Edwin Payne had a whole load of wonderful things about him but also a lot of absolutely infuriating ones. Charles knew that and decided he was fine with it about five minutes after first meeting him. Not right now, though. Right now he was being driven round the bend by the fact that the person he trusted most in the world wouldn’t tell him a thing.
There was more to the story, he knew it. He felt it.
Why did the Cat King take Edwin to his bedroom? Why did he whisper in his ear? And why wouldn’t Edwin just say why he was so wound up?
Charles was aware that made him a total hypocrite. He had plenty of his own secrets that he had literally taken to the grave and as far as he was concerned, he’d take even farther than that.
Then the Cat King showed up again.
And Charles wasn’t there, again.
He practically pleaded with Edwin to just for once, open up. Edwin shut down even harder.
There was some riddle he’d heard about an unstoppable force vs an immovable object and Charles was quickly coming to the conclusion that all that happened in that scenario was that the force got sad and the object got tired.
He needed to know, though. He needed to know what hurt his friend so he could make bloody sure it would never happen to him again.
-
He failed at that over and over and over.
-
For some reason, Edwin stayed.
-
It took bloody ages, but eventually he got the full story. Kitty cat tried to be a perve but backed down the first time, then kept asking after setting him a probably impossible task.
Clearly, Whiskers had failed to realise he was dealing with Edwin Bloody Payne.
Of course he outsmarted him, of course he saw through his fairytale bullshit, and of course it was with a smartarse answer.
Then Edwin forgave the Cat King. And Simon. That nearly made Charles have a stroke and he was already dead. Still, he tried to accept that he couldn’t, and didn’t really want to, change who Edwin was. He may not have particularly liked how easily Edwin forgave the two people who inadvertently got him sent to Hell, but it was his choice at the end of the day.
Charles was trying to be better, these days. He probably couldn’t be as naturally good a person as his best mate, but he was trying. He took up journaling and shadowboxing and screaming into a pillow because Crystal’s internet said it would help. It wasn’t easy to let go of the anger that had basically been the only thing keeping him upright, but every day he could feel another bit of it leech away.
Good riddance.