Chapter Text
“Yes?”
He could do nothing but echo the word, rendered nearly dumb by disbelief.
When he’d had Keith with them, the possibility that Charlie’s answer would be anything but disgust or refusal felt distant. When his partner ran, a minute or two into the conversation, it had sunk to nothing.
“Yes.”
Charlie’s voice was soft and warm, the perfect compliment to the mid-evening Caribbean air.
“I don’t believe you.”
It wasn’t what he should have said, but he couldn’t stop himself.
“I don’t believe me either.”
The percussionist’s eyes were downcast, but when Mick turned, from his perch on the bed, to study them, they were wide and glazed with shock.
Likely half at what had been proposed to him and half at what he’d agreed to.
“You’re probably going to regret it.”
“I know I am.”
Laughter suffused the irreverent response, and by habit he reached out to smack Charlie’s arm, falling easily into old patterns.
They should, really. They’d been together long enough.
“You’re a good long-suffering husband already, then.”
“Don’t I know it. I’m sure Shirley’s thoroughly enjoying this.”
Funnily enough, the mention of the (heretofore) unspoken ghost in the room didn’t dampen the mood. Much as he thought any afterlife a load of bullshit, he could picture Shirley looking down on them, and laughing like mad, from the great beyond, and he felt the same frisson of pride he’d always felt when he did something to please her.
“She’d have encouraged it. Anything we did to you, she shrugged and said okay. We thought we were the clever boys pulling pigtails back then, but she had us under her whip like nobody’s business.”
Christ, only they could be dismal enough to discuss dead wives as a courting ritual.
“Me too.”
Without warning, he allowed his head to fall onto Charlie’s angular shoulder, and, he was certain, force of habit brought the drummer’s hands up to card through his dyed brown curls.
“Keith and I can’t even handle each other, I can’t imagine what we’re doing here.”
“Every circus needs a ringmaster, or something to that effect.”
Sticking his tongue out at his friend, he tilted his head just enough that he could take a playful bite out of the hand trying to sooth him.
“Who’s the tiger and who’s the clown?”
“I’ll never tell.”
Silence fell between them for a beat, less comfortable than it usually was, but weighted with anticipation rather than fear or anger.
“I can’t believe you agreed to this.”
“You said that already.”
“I know. That doesn’t make it less true.”
Charlie shook his head, as though denying that there were anything extraordinary about what he’d promised to give a try, as though there was nothing extraordinary about him and everything he could bring, and Mick seized him by the jaw to abort the movement.
His fingers were nowhere near as elegant or gracefully made as Charlie’s, but they served their purpose.
Keeping hold of the perfectly square, nearl protruding bones, he moved until he was eye to eye with impossibly deep blue, placed like a jewel in the most unlikely setting.
He tilted forward just a breath, letting their noses touch and leaving, without words, an avenue for Charlie to escape.
A smile merely curled the thin lips the barest hint upwards.
It was all he needed.
With an answering grin he was certain was at least as wide as Charlie’s, his mouth captured the one angled slightly under him, and he pressed an eager kiss to those infinitely familiar lips.
The gesture lingered, burning, in a way it never had before.
◑ ◐
“We need to find Keith.”
Chapter 2
Notes:
"Make no mistake about it
I'm gonna make you mine, no need to talk it over, we're
running out of time."-KR, "Make No Mistake"(Set in 1989, directly after the conversation where Mick and Keith ask Charlie to join their relationship)
Chapter Text
“Keith.”
He shied instantly away from the voice, going against decades of instinct
It was Charlie.
“Keith!”
Mick’s tone was more strident, but that didn’t make the siphon of fear twisting the pit of his stomach calm even a bit.
Five minutes into the ill-fated conversation, when Mick had been perched next to Charlie on his bed and he’d sat at their feet on the floor, the singer had finally directly broached why exactly they’d come by so early in the morning.
The look of mingled horror and confusion on Charlie’s face had been enough to send him running.
And now, on the stoop behind Mick’s massive bungalow, he took yet another drag off of his cigarette and shifted off the stairs, trying, perhaps childishly, to make an escape from the searching voices.
“There you are.”
He flinched violently the moment a spidery thin hand fell on his shoulder.
“I don’t want to hear it.”
The bravado in his voice sounded wane even to him.
“Don’t want to hear what?”
Mick’s tone was slightly teasing, and at the same time an arachnoid finger reached up to stroke his cheek.
It was a familiar tactic. Charlie had done the same thing for years to calm him when he was coming down from a bad high, or so gone on days of hard booze and sleeplessness that he was nearly inconsolable with confusion and pain.
A response stuck in his throat, which was rapidly closing.
Just imagining what Charlie would say, kind eyed and hiding his disgust at them, made agony rip across his chest and the premonition of tears clog his throat.
“Let it go, Mick.”
He hoped, with desperate stupidity, that if he signaled his understanding of Charlie’s rejection they wouldn’t actually have to go through the whole charade.
All he wanted was to get off this island, drink until he couldn’t remember his own name, and put touring off for another seven years.
“You aren’t sitting on the edge of your seat in anticipation?”
Typical Mick. Act like emotional honesty would provoke an allergic reaction and make a joke out of everything, their own devastation included.
Somehow, he doubted their relationship was going to get out the other end of this intact.
“Mick.”
The admonishment was all Charlie, whisper soft and no less powerful for it.
Was it strange, that he’d even miss the drummer yelling at him?
Though, admittedly, it was the quietest yelling known to man.
Slowly, the hand which had been rubbing his right cheek traversed the lined planes of his face, coming to rest in his hair and carding through the mess of graying curls.
While the action normally would have relaxed him (made him melt like butter in Charlie’s hands, in Mick’s words), now it felt as though a knife was running delicately over every synapse.
He would miss every little piece of this man he’d never gotten to love as fully as he wished.
“Love, can you look at me?”
Bullishy, he shook his head. The unusual endearment was a trap, he was certain of it.
Before he could so much as consider a response, thin lips brushed the crown of his head, whispering into his mane of wild hair.
“Please.”
Against his better judgment, and every instinct screaming at him to run for safety, he turned to meet the impossibly blue gaze.
“Thank you.”
The same lips, gentle but hardly without passion, found his.
“I think I’m ready to have a love again. Maybe even two.”
◑ ◐
If this was a dream, he had no plans on waking up.
Ever.