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He could use a drink, quite badly.
Charlie is having a bad night.
It’s nothing new, in the grand scheme of things, but that lack of novelty doesn’t make it play any less on Keith’s mind.
Sometimes, Charlie’s bad days are easy to spot.
He’s not a man prone to grand displays of emotion, either positive or negative, and thus he’s harder to read than most people Keith knows. Bobby, for instance - you’d never have to ask when he’s in a bad mood, because that mood will be hitting you right in the face the minute you walk in the door, 200 pounds of Texas with a sax and attitude for days.
But they’ve been friends and bandmates far longer than they haven't, and Keith can spot the signs.
Eating is almost always the first to go. When Charlie is down, then it likely means he’s down about himself, and he’s got a tendency to self-flagellation that would make a medieval Benedectine jealous. It’s easy for him to drop 5 or 10 pounds in a week, even though they’re pounds he can’t spare, and they’ll take months to gain back. Lately, Keith has noticed that he’s largely stopped even trying to get the weight back on.
His appearance, curiously enough, doesn’t go by the wayside like food. If anything, he becomes a more careful dresser when he’s on a downward spiral. Were he the type to engage in armchair psychology, Keith would say it was a form of over-compensation, putting on armor and a mask and a barrier between himself and the world all in one, but he’s never had much use for that Dr. Ruth bullshit.
Practicing becomes a danger, too. He’ll drum and drum and drum, far beyond what should be the human capability, and he won’t bother to bandage his fingers when the consequences of that superhuman effort begin to catch up to him. Keith could still remember the first time Ronnie had seen the percussionist do that to himself, and how the young guitarist had looked at Charlie’s kit and Charlie’s hands, flecked in blood and gore, like his heart was cracking right down the middle. He’d insisted on patching it all up himself, and had placed a gentle kiss on the other man’s palm for good measure when he finished. Charlie had thanked him, excused himself to the studio’s bathroom, and cried in the dingy men’s stall. Not that Keith would admit to following him, or hearing it.
Quiet descends over him like a shroud. Charlie is quiet by nature, but this is quiet of a different quality. Keith considers himself something of a connoisseur of silence, and he can read Charlie’s like a seer reads lifelines. The quiet of the bad days isn’t content or contemplative or even angry. Instead, it’s funereal. It means that Charlie has dug himself so far inside of his mind no-one will be rescuing him anytime soon, and that the part of his mind that he’s made his home is the dark one, which says all of the things Keith hates so fiercely he could almost be pushed to violence, if he didn’t know full well that the only victim would be Charlie himself.
Other times, there is no warning, and he slips, seemingly inexorably, away from them for a day or a week or a month.
Stupid as it is, Keith never stops hoping that each of Charlie’s bad days will be his last.
◑ ◐
Ronnie is generally the one stereotyped, fairly or unfairly, as the dolt of the group. Silly and flighty and better at using his fingers than his brain.
According to Keith, LSE smart as he may be, Mick is a much bigger idiot than Ronnie when it comes to dealing with other people.
While he’d rather get hit by a truck than concede the point, he can’t entirely disbelieve it either. Ronnie is good, in his own puppy like way, at making everyone he comes in contact with feel good. He can read emotions with startling ease. And Keith, despite his prickly introversion, is better than good at picking up moods. Not that he always lets that stop him from being an ass.
Mick can see how other people feel. What to do with that information, well, it’s more complicated.
Part of the problem, he’ll concede, is that he has a tendency to view every interaction as a zero sum game. He looks at people and spends most of his time trying to divine what they want out of him. Fame will fuck you up but good, eventually.
So, on occasion, he can’t, or doesn’t, shut that reflex off. Which leads to hurt feelings or anger, or maybe a splendid cocktail of both, whatever the case may be.
Charlie is one of the few people in the world he looks at with absolutely no expectation of being manipulated or fleeced. There’s nothing he has which the drummer would sink to that level for, and, besides, brutal honesty is much more Charlie’s style.
He couldn’t bring himself to say it, but Charlie can have anything from Mick he pleases. The limitations there simply don’t exist.
It’s a thought which flickers through Mick’s brain a lot when Charlie, as he is today, is having one of his bad days.
Whatever he can give, he wants to. He wants to fix problems that lie at the heart of these misery inducing periods so badly that the wanting becomes a physical ache in his chest. No matter what else can be said about him, and a lot can, much of it ugly, he wants Charlie’s happiness above a vast panaploy of things in his life.
That doesn’t actually solve anything, desire.
But he sees the bloody fingers and the carefully knotted ties and the startlingly visible ribs and the air of melancholy, and his own inadequacy, his lack of ableness, and, a little cruel voice in the back of his head hisses, his inability to love Charlie as fully as he deserves, shines bright and clear.
Once or twice, Charlie has had to comfort him in the midst of his own sadness, to try to bring a smile to his face when his sole job was to do that for the man he loves, and God help him if that wasn’t always the type of night where he packed up and vanished for the next month.
Because, that same vicious voice says, turning in on itself, he makes Charlie’s pain all about him .
Nothing, eventually, will escape the hungry reach of Mick’s selfishness, and he’ll be facing the end of his life in a cold, empty bed for it.
Salvation might just have silver hair and bright blue eyes and a devastating smile, if he could see it, and save it.
◑ ◐
Charlie is having a bad night, and neither of them mention it.
Mick turns up some Woody Herman on the record player, makes sure he has the right LPs, the ones with Dave Tough, and dances around the kitchen while he makes a cup of tea, stopping to pull ridiculous faces every few seconds or ghost his lips over Charlie's cheek, mindless of the distant gaze. He sets the cup of tea in front of him, and makes another, just the way he likes it, strong and with milk and no sugar, when that one goes cold.
Keith sits in the library while Charlie flips mindlessly through a book, on a Persian rug at the drummer’s feet, head pillowed on his legs and breath warm against the hard muscle and bone. He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t touch more than that. Instead, he merely remains, making his ruined joints accept a day on the floor with no audible protest.
Together, they declare an early night, and, by tacit agreement, Charlie is between them. Keith wraps his arms around the small frame from behind, burying his face in an angular shoulder and endeavoring to kiss whatever tears fall in sleep from his partner’s lashes. Mick hums a half-familiar tune, carding his hands through Charlie’s soft white hair and murmuring an endearment every time he cries out in his sleep.
They count each heartbeat with gratitude.