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Pressing his palm against Charlie’s forehead, Mick’s lips took a sharp downturn when his hand came away coated in sweat.
The man was burning up.
Still.
As he shifted, slightly, in their bed, he held his partner’s shoulders flush with his chest, keeping Charlie propped up against his body.
It had taken an age to get Keith out and to his room to take a nap. Normally he’d have been happy to share the duty of caring for their partner, but Keith had been with him for the last day and half, never stopping to sleep or even, as far as Mick could tell, eat.
The kind of thing that you could get away with in your 20s, but which became an increasingly dubious prospect as your 60s approached.
Rationally, he knew that a few sleepless nights wouldn’t kill Keith, and a bout with the flu, however bad, wouldn’t take Charlie from them. But there was a knot of anxiety twisting in the pit of his stomach which wouldn’t go away until he saw them both back to their normal states. Prim, proper, and ever put together for Charlie, and a sharp eyed, loose, not nearly so lackadaisical as he seemed for Keith.
Keith’s nonchalance never lasted long when their percussionist was in peril.
Sinking further into the (absurdly) plush hotel mattress, he continued his ministrations, hoping quietly, for all of their sakes, that it would be over soon.
◑ ◐
He startled awake, dragged back to consciousness by the sensation of someone’s burning gaze on the side of his skull.
Someone turned out to be Charlie.
Two massive, fever bright cobalt eyes peered up at him, questioning.
Briefly, he wondered how much of that look was the product of his temperature and how much of it was codeine. Keith had too liberal a hand with painkillers, partly a holdover of his own narcotic past and partly a result of the fact that he hated to see anyone he loved suffer.
“Hi.”
It was a pretty uninspired greeting, but Charlie grinned up massively at him, though the look was soon erased by a wracking cough.
“Hello.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“No.”
“Brilliant.”
The drummer simply shrugged, and snuggled further into Mick’s chest, until his head was nestled directly above his heart. Softly, he could hear Charlie counting off his heartbeats, tapping lightly against his ribcage in time.
“I love you.”
They weren’t the words Mick had expected to come out of his own mouth.
Truthfully, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d said them to Charlie, or if, indeed, he'd ever said them to him at all. Ditto with Keith.
Keith said them quite regularly, especially if they were going to be apart, and often with a joking air. Charlie more rarely, and always serious. He never did.
Smile growing even wider, Charlie pressed a kiss to the inside of his hand.
Well, that at least confirmed his theory about Keith’s generous dosing. Not that he could say he minded, in the moment.
“You’re nice.”
Barely stifling a laugh, Mick gave a small flick to his partner’s right ear.
“You say that like I’m not nice all the time.”
“Different nice. Mick doesn’t say that.”
“So I am?”
“Dunno. Fantasy, maybe? Good dream, either way.”
It was like someone had poured cold water down his spine. The warmth of Charlie’s affection melted away, and he looked more closely at the man huddled in his lap, pondering (fearing?) that the old wive’s tales about fevers and their ability to draw out honesty were true.
“You think that’s the only way I’d say I love you? In a dream?”
He tried to keep his voice light, but he doubted it was working.
Charlie didn’t appear to notice the difference. His smile wasn’t quite as large as it had been a minute before, but a grin painted the edges of his lips, and he leaned into whatever of Mick’s touch he could get.
“It’s okay, it’s not an easy thing to say. And you shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.”
“Things I don’t mean?”
An ache settled at the base of his throat, and he extracted one of his hands from the softness of Charlie’s hair, using it to (futilely) try to massage the hurt away.
“You do love me, I know that. But to say it the way you’d mean to Keith - you’re not in love with me.”
“Charlie.”
Evidently, the sheer pain in his voice penetrated, however briefly, the fog over his drummer’s mind. The fingers which had been counting his heartbeats wandered up to stroke, briefly, the side of his cheek, before they fell back to rest on his chest in exhaustion.
“It’s okay. I like what we ‘ave. It’s more than I ever thought I’d get again.”
“Why?”
“Hmm?”
“Why do you believe I’m not in love with you?”
He was almost certain he didn’t want to hear the answer, but it was what he deserved, in penance at least, if he couldn’t fix the mess he had (unknowingly) created.
“You haven’t got any reason to be. You already had it all with Keith, and you just let me in because it made getting back together then easier. Made him happy and meant you could paper over the cracks. But I’m too boring for you, not enough as a person.”
It was the most sustained, lucid thought Charlie had been able to communicate in nearly two days, and Mick wished he had heard none of it.
He didn’t realize, until Charlie’s fingers returned, sweeping clumsily under his eyes, that he’d begun to cry.
“It’s okay, don’t be sad. I never imagined I would be somewhere so good again, feel like this again. It would be selfish to ask for everything.”
For a horrible moment, he considered clamping a hand over Charlie’s mouth, just to stop the stream of words that felt as though they were physically burning him from the inside out. The drummer’s ugly perception of himself was a reality he’d lived with for most of his life, but that never made it easier to confront face to face.
“I love you, you fantastic idiot. I’m in love with you. Have been for a decade, at least. And as for it being different than Keith, yeah, it is a different love. But not in depth, or quality. You’ve got no idea what it’s like, when you’re around. Even before this, ages before this, I never knew having a single person around could make me feel so safe. In who I am, in what the future is, in the mess Keith and I seem to make of ourselves every few years. God, simply seeing the two of you together is enough, but then you give that to me, too. You two can practically see each other’s thoughts, and just when I’m starting to feel jealous, we get up on that stage, and you anticipate my every move and word. Dancing in front of you is like watching someone read every beat of my heart and make it real.”
Tracing the outline of Charlie’s features, and savoring the feeling of the man’s breath on his skin, he continued.
“It’s not only safety, though, you know? You scare me more than Keith, occasionally. It's why I have to run away so often. There’s this beautiful, strange vision of the world that you have, and somehow, you actually manage to make it come alive around you. Sometimes it, or you, stand completely at odds with me, but you still manage to coexist, and to go on, and - I don’t know how I haven’t been swept away by it, some days. I’m not good enough for it, and I fail the model you’ve set for me as a man so often, but you’re still there, at the end of the day. Don’t know what I’d do, if I lost you. It would kill Keith, and I think it would kill me, too. That’s why I always let those words sit on the tip of my tongue, unsaid. Because I’m terrified, if I do say them, then there’s no getting out, and if I really do have to let you go, in any way, then I just wouldn’t wake up the next day.”
With a short, crackling sob, he let his forehead collapse onto the crown of Charlie’s head, feeling so thoroughly like a coward he could barely breathe. He’d only admitted the truth because he saw Charlie drifting off to sleep and was certain, even if he managed to stay awake through his shattered monologue, that the fever and the codeine would ensure he’d never remember any of it.
“I just wish I could say it to your face.”
◑ ◐
Charlie was fully healed by the next week.
He smiled, in those unguarded moments he rarely allowed himself, as brightly and as beautifully at Mick as he had forty years before.
And Mick prayed, to no particular deity and a fate that had never been particularly kind, that one day he could return that smile, knowing the world that existed behind those placid blue eyes, without his chest aching like the harbinger of a heart attack.