Work Text:
Keith always accused him of getting sentimental when he was a few cups into the night and maybe, just maybe, it was true.
Nursing his third glass of Chateau So and So, the pleasant, slightly bleary haze of more alcohol than his body was really meant to handle pulsed sluggishly through him, tamping down nerves and creeping away with brain function.
Booze had never been his first round drug of choice, but needs must when years passing by meant cocaine was as likely to give a stroke as a stratospheric night.
If he ambled across the kitchen, he could replenish the nearly empty champagne flute, inappropriately filled with red wine.
Never in a million years would the guitarist give a shit about what glassware was meant to match what. He didn’t care if his brandy was breathing or his whisky was oak cask aged, he just wanted a wall up between himself and the world, and he wanted it up fast.
Drunk Keith came in a multitude of variations, like any good sonata. Tonight, he hadn’t had more than a sip or two out of Mick’s glass, and any notion of tipsiness was laughable.
In fact, Keith was the reason he wasn’t moving from his seat at the far end of their massive slate and steel kitchen.
Keith and someone else, that was.
Bent over the counter, Charlie was chopping cherries with a kind of monastic devotion and studiousness, his partner’s glasses resting on the tip of his nose and the glint of his paring knife moving across the battered walnut board to produce perfect quarters every time.
Allegedly, the man whose spectacles he’d stolen was making flan batter.
Realistically, he was going through the motions with automatic ease, sneaking glances at the drummer every chance he got.
Unable to resist, he reached over halfway through tipping the flour into the mixing bowl to brush a stubborn lock of silver from Charlie’s forehead, tucking it into the otherwise immaculate hairstyle.
In return for his little act of valor, Charlie turned from his task to kiss the taste of pilfered cherries off of Keith’s mouth, leaving an impression of his lips in faint red against his partner’s lined cheek.
It was, all considered, a very Charlie thing to do.
He and Keith favored more permanent methods of marking, and neither of them had ever been opposed to leaving a love bite, especially where it would be most obvious. Make-up was magic and all that. And it seemed an acceptable level of loving damage.
Charlie, though, had never been one for that approach to the intimate. He didn’t scar or maim or mark. Being with him, in any way, was soothing, almost healing, cliche though that might have sounded.
Deep into the bottle as he was, he considered that his lover’s lightness of touch wasn’t just born of his innate gentleness, but his horrifying understanding of himself. As someone who didn’t deserve to lay claim in blood or flesh or bone, because he’d never be anything but a stopgap measure, a perpetual second choice easily replaced.
Through the time which tied them together, they’d learned to see and raise a (metaphorical) sword against that tendency, yet slaying the enemy was another matter altogether. The enemy was Charlie too, or lived in him, at any rate.
They weren’t the heroes of this story, and they’d never slain their dragon.
Instead, they coaxed it into bed every night and smothered it into submission with praise and kisses and tender gestures, physical and not.
It was remarkable, how good Charlie was at calming their own worst tendencies to harm and hurt, internal and external, when his seemed only to grow with the years, albeit turned firmly to the side of internal. He’d carved up and scarred himself a million times, but hurts disappeared almost magically under his hands for everyone else.
Case in point. Keith, unsteady like he’d never been as a young man, had nicked a finger making dinner earlier in the evening. A defeat to the ravages of his arthritis, and an injury which was only partly physical.
Without a word, Charlie had cleaned and bandaged the cut, leaning, in a concession to Keith’s sentimentality, to leave a kiss over the plaster when he was done.
That gesture was all that they would ever need, words a near superfluity between them.
He was jealous of that.
Except when he wasn’t.
Like now.
Watching Keith let his hands fall down to Charlie’s hips. The way the drummer fit into his touch, tailor made for the limbs that encircled him. How a rhythm, unheard but present, dictated the flawless dance of their movements, allowing Charlie to snatched back the mixture from Keith and finish the dessert without a backwards glance. Keith’s easy laughter as he snatched the pan and bent to put it in the oven, one hand still fixed to his partner’s side.
Filling the silence without a sound.
From long experience he knew that, in a few moments, Keith would disappear to the library to grab a handful of records. Then he’d reappear in the doorway, holding up his quarry. It was never a question, Charlie would choose. He’d lay it on the turntable tucked into one of the low kitchen cabinets.
Maybe, they would dance.
But Charlie’s knee, or Keith’s back, could be acting up. Then they’d simply listen. Keith would sit at Charlie’s feet and crack jokes. Charlie would grin that tight-lipped smile until he lost the fight against his self-control and joined in, cutting and somehow not cruel.
That was the future.
For this stolen second, he let his eyes laze on the scene at hand.
While Charlie went to dispose of his bloody looking instruments, Keith’s gaze followed, as it had since time immemorial.
Or something like that.
Charlie didn’t notice. He never did. But anyone else could see it clear as day, the spell under which that shy little drummer held the supposed embodiment of rock ‘n roll darkness.
Twisted around his pinky finger and, ever so typical, Charlie hadn’t a clue.
People threw the idea and the words around too easily, but they were true.
Keith would die for that man.
He lived for him, too.