Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It starts as most things do, with Charles shooting him a grin so warm it might have melted the glass panes of the original Crystal Palace, and quickened the fire of the Great Exhibition within. 

“Don’t worry, mate,” he says. “I’m aces with kids.” 

Edwin does not doubt this fact, of course, because Charles is aces with most people, regardless of age. Certainly, Charles will break through whatever crisis their client’s son has been caught up in within the first minutes of locating him, and he will smile that melting-glass smile and something in the recesses of Edwin’s chest will catch fire along with the rest of it. Charles will charm this child with the same easy grace as he does everyone else who has the pleasure of crossing his path. Edwin does not doubt this. But there is just the small matter of reaching the boy first. 

Charles, meanwhile, is still talking. “I bet you were proper adorable when you were small, with your posh little accent. Probably knew more than all your teachers.” 

Edwin shrugs, a sharp little jerk of a movement. He doesn’t look up from the task at hand as he answers, rolling a colourfully patterned rug back from the sigil beneath.  

“I have never once been called adorable,” Edwin says. “I am given to believe that I was rather…off-putting as a child. Too precocious .” 

The symbols are just as they left them the day before, untouched and glowing now with renewed energy. Ready to use. When Edwin looks back up, Charles’ smile has softened.

“You’re not off-putting to me, mate.” 

“I know.” Edwin flips open the book at his knee, searching for the matching incantation. “Although, if I was you might spend less time distracting me.” 

“You love it, really.” 

Edwin ducks his head down to hide a smile, but he’s certain that Charles sees it all the same, because a hand bumps gently against his knee a moment later. 

“Are you two are done?” Crystal cuts in, and Edwin’s head snaps up automatically, to give her his attention. 

She’s seated on the boy’s - Connor’s - bed, looking about as out of place as she can get, with her wild curls and her earth tones and chunky purple jewelry. She has one leg crossed over the other, both hands spread over the blanket beneath, which is patterned with primary coloured airplanes. It seems to Edwin like the caricature of a child’s room, if someone were to imagine one from nothing, without any personality to go along with it. 

And this, of course, presents the problem. As it always does. Imagination.

Charles settles back on his heels, shooting Crystal a nod across the room. 

“He’s going to freak out when you guys go in,” Crystal says, again. She has yet to comment on the room’s garish colour scheme, which Edwin takes as a sign that she must be truly nervous. He has not had time to make any such comments himself either, he finds. 

“That’s fine.” He can tell that Charles is doing his best to be reassuring. “We’ll just talk to him, won’t we? Tell him we’re not a threat. Convince him to come back with us this way, and save us all a trip to the fae realm, just like we planned.” 

Crystal tips her head back towards the ceiling in an aborted little gesture of franticness. 

“Yeah, obviously, that’s the plan! But anyone would freak out if two random ghosts showed up in their head with no notice! Like I’ve been trying to tell you, I don’t know what’s going to happen when you get in there; his mind might try to protect itself. Somehow.” 

“It won’t be real,” Edwin says, then, because sometimes a conversation requires him to state the obvious. “Whatever we see, it will be in Connor’s mind.” 

Charles nods again, in Edwin’s direction this time, like Edwin has said something far more profound. And, up on the bed, Crystal seems to admit defeat. 

“Fine,” she says. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I just - maybe don’t burst in thinking of Hell?” 

Edwin frowns. They very much do not have time for this. 

“It may surprise you to hear that I too prefer not to go about my days thinking of Hell,” he mutters. 

The hand brushes his knee again. “Everything will be fine, mate. We can deal with whatever memory shite he throws at us and if anything does happen, Crystal will be here to bail us out. Right?” 

“If anything goes wrong,” Crystal shoots back. “ Crystal will be here to say I told you so.” 

“Great!” The barest hint of Charles’ grin from before. “That leaves Edwin free to deal with Connor.” 

Crystal rolls her eyes and Edwin pointedly looks back at the incantation without bothering to respond and everything is set back to its glorious, tenuous equilibrium. 

And a moment later, when Crystal crouches beside them and rests a hand on his and Charles’ arms, and her eyes start to glow white, and Edwin begins to read the incantation that bridges them to a young boy’s consciousness trapped in the fae realm. When the runes brighten steadily until they glow with the same white light as Crystal’s eyes, Edwin pointedly does not think of hell. 

***

The first thing Edwin feels is relief, because the room they have entered is quiet and darkened and pleasantly devoid of anything resembling high pitched giggles or the screams of the damned. 

The second thing Edwin feels is far less easy to put a name to, something contained entirely in the pinched look on Charles’ face, and the jump of muscle as he tightens his jaw. 

“Charles, what is it?” He can hear that his voice has gone soft, the way it sometimes does almost against his own will. 

It’s a tone for rare book rooms in high-ceilinged libraries and for rousing Charles when Edwin looks up from the final pages of a mystery read aloud to find him drifting - he can’t think of anything else to call it when Charles sprawls loose-limbed across the sofa, with his head leaned back against one arm rest and his feet tucked up under Edwin’s thigh. He will throw an elbow over his eyes sometimes, as if to block out the light; as if he truly means to sleep, lulled into it only by Edwin’s voice and the crinkle of turning pages. 

This, Edwin knows, is the time and place for softness. 

So, he is not certain why he’s pitched his voice this way now, as he inclines his mouth towards Charles’ ear. 

They stand together in an unfamiliar corner, Charles frozen in place just moments after stepping through the wall. Edwin braced with a hand against Charles’ shoulder to keep from stumbling into him completely, and now something about the place makes Edwin feel that it would be sacrilege to disturb it. 

There is a flight of stairs to their right, leading up to a closed door. The walls are covered with posters bearing unfamiliar names and brightly coloured pictures, a small shelf of trophies decorates the far corner, beside a single, unmade bed. Something in Edwin wants to smooth the rumpled sheets, but of course, he stays still; makes do with smoothing the back of Charles’ jacket instead as he removes his hand. 

“Charles?” he tries again. 

Charles eyes the carpet, a faded off-white thing. “‘S not real, yeah? Just like you said.” 

And that does more for Edwin's unasked questions than any real answers could have. Another glance at Charles’ expression tells him that no matter how much curiosity urges him, this is neither the time nor the place to push further. 

“There don’t seem to be any immediate threats,” Edwin says, after a moment of silent investigation. “Perhaps we can simply…” 

He motions to the door above, and something seems to snap Charles back to awareness. 

“Might be easiest to pop out the same way we came in, if that’s -” His hand slaps against the wall behind them with a dull thud, undeniably corporeal. “Bollocks.” 

Edwin shakes his head in lieu of the smile that threatens at the corners of his lips. There will be time enough for that when they are not finding their way through an unfamiliar space inside a frightened boy’s head. 

Edwin takes a step to the side, onto the very bottom of the staircase. 

“Mate,” Charles says, only a little strained this time. “Maybe don’t - “ 

But whatever it is Edwin should not do is lost to both of them, because in the next moment, the door in question has banged open, and a red-streaked ball of energy barrels through. The ball gets nearly all the way down the stairs before it slows enough for Edwin to recognize it as a boy. He's wearing a red jumper and black jeans with telltale patterns of distress around the knees, where a boy like this might kneel in the dirt or stumble as he ran, out on the street, or scramble up tree branches to survey his neighborhood territory. 

Above the knees and the jeans and the jumper is a face that Edwin would know anywhere, no matter how many years younger it seems. There are sparkling dark brown eyes and the swoop of a slightly less crooked nose, and a shock of unruly curls, fluffy and loose around the boy’s ears. Those curls move with a mind of their own now, as the boy stumbles to a halt a few steps above Edwin. They swish softly against the sides of his face as he turns his head, fixing them both with a familiar, narrow-eyed glare of confusion. 

There is no doubt now where they are, or who this is. 

There is a shuffle behind him. Charles shifting, Edwin assumes, out of a position like he might dart back through the wall. He remains otherwise uncharacteristically silent. 

Well, Edwin may not be aces with kids, as Charles put it, but he certainly has experience speaking with this one. 

“What are you doing in my room?” Of course, the young version of Charles gets in the first question. 

Edwin does his best to soften his own voice in response. “We mean you no harm, Charles.” 

A strange echo of the first words he spoke to his own version of the boy, all those years ago. 

Little Charles crosses his arms over his chest, in yet another familiar defiant gesture. 

“How do you know my name?” He asks. 

Edwin is in the midst of cobbling together an answer that might explain, reassure, and praise all at once - because it is worthy of praise, the way Charles has already cultivated the instinct to be weary of two strange teenagers in his room, and it is not one Edwin is particularly inclined to break him of. But before he can begin to put word to any of it, Charles speaks up. 

“Look, mate.” The mate is a different one to the term of endearment it has become for Edwin over the years. It has a hard edge: an unfriendly sort of placeholder. “You can just ignore us, yeah? We’re here because of a mix-up. And we were looking for a way to leave. Right, Edwin?” 

While perhaps not the friendliest tone he could have used, it does seem to convince little Charles that the two of them do not present an immediate threat, because he uncrosses his arms almost immediately and pushes past Edwin on the bottom step. Charles moves back against the wall to avoid him as he streaks by. 

Little Charles drops what looks like a school bag unceremoniously in the middle of the floor and makes a bee-line for the cupboard beneath his nightstand. 

When Edwin looks to Charles again, his face is impassive, only the slightest tick of a muscle in his jaw betraying nervousness. 

“Of course, we won’t bother you any longer than necessary,” he says, carefully. Because Charles is right about that, at least. They are fairly short on time. Finding a way out of this memory - vision? Apparition? Edwin files the particulars away for later deliberation - is their main point of order. 

Thankfully, little Charles seems to have come to a similar decision. 

“Fine,” he says, when he reappears from the depths of the nightstand cupboard with something clutched in one hand. His nose is scrunched up a little into an expression Edwin recognises well from his own version of Charles. “You can stay, but you have to promise not to distract me.” 

And then Edwin makes a concerted effort to hold back a cough-cum-laugh that has the Charles beside him patting his back a few times. 

“Of course,” he says, when he can speak again. “I wouldn’t dream of distracting you.” 

Young Charles narrows his eyes a bit. 

“What?” He asks, after a moment where his attention flicks back and forth between the two of them. There’s a new kind of mistrust in his gaze, an intensity to it, unfamiliar enough to be worrying. “Why are you laughing at me?” 

Charles’ hand moves from Edwin’s back to the wall again with a dull thump. When he speaks, his voice carries that same hard edge,

“You haven’t gone a day of your life without being distracting, mate.” 

It’s a subtle change that happens, but Edwin is nothing if not observant and he doesn’t miss the way young Charles hunches in on himself a bit, a slight difference in posture that makes Edwin’s heart clench unexpectedly. 

“I’m not!” Little Charles says, now, the words indignant, but directed to a hole in the toe of his sock. “Every time I get called up for talking in class it’s because Henry talked to me first!” 

Edwin does not have much experience playing peacekeeper, not that the current conversation ranks highly on the list of altercations they’ve had over the years. He’s been on the receiving end of enough quiet looks from Charles, little shakes of his head when Edwin pushes just a step too far with a particularly vulnerable client, or when the edges of his annoyance cuts too sharply on someone unfamiliar with his moods. This is different. 

There is a child closed in on himself, staring down at the off-colour carpet beneath their feet. He looks small in a way that no version of Charles ever should. In a way that he never will, if Edwin has any say in the matter. 

Beside him, ghost Charles has shoved his hands into his pockets and is poking the toe of one loafer into that same carpet. He won’t meet Edwin’s eyes, when he looks over. Edwin supposes this is one extremely specific circumstance in which the social interaction element of their partnership falls to him. 

He takes a breath, adjusts one cuff with a neat little motion, and steps forward, placing himself in front of Charles and into the main line of fire, so to speak. 

“Nevermind that,” he says, and forces himself to ignore the way young Charles’ eyes snap up to track his movements. It’s not unlike the way he might watch for a threat, Edwin knows well. “What is it that requires so much of your attention? Perhaps we can help.” 

He assumes it will be schoolwork, something that Charles has readily admitted he used to struggle with. Through no fault of his own, Edwin can tell, although Charles has always been a little cagey about things like this: any of the ways he suffered in his too short life. Edwin has vague notions of reassuring the little Charles in front of him, who seems to have grown up believing himself to be inept in some way, intellectually lacking. If it is in Edwin’s power to give him a scrap of hope or understanding amidst the darkness, he will do it. Besides, interacting with the scene in this way gives Edwin more hope of learning how to leave it. Helping Charles is useful for the case too, he tells himself. 

What young Charles says next, however, throws Edwin off completely: “I’m making a plane.” 

Edwin blinks. “I’m sorry?” 

“I’m building a plane,” Charles repeats, in a blunt sort of tone that suggests Edwin is the stupid one for not catching on. “Well, I haven’t started it yet. I’ve been saving it for months,” he adds, as if this provides any further explanation.

Edwin can now see the box squashed lightly in young Charles’ hand: the words Model Airplane, the particulars of the make disappearing beneath his thumb. The design of the package suggests that it might be a miniature fighter jet from the Second World War, a collection of words that never fail to horrify, no matter how many years pass. There was a second one, something always seems to scream. At him, within him. Had Edwin not been pulled screaming into the depths of hell for 70-odd years, he might have had the fortune to live through two wars: the Great War, and the next. 

Edwin watches as little Charles pushes his school bag aside and plops down to a sitting position in the middle of the floor. He rips open the box and upturns its contents onto the rug. And then, in perhaps the most Charles Rowland move Edwin has ever seen, tosses the small booklet of instructions away with that familiar scrunch of his nose. He proceeds to ignore it completely. 

Edwin can’t quite hold back a smile. 

It’s not a fully conscious decision, to pick up the discarded instructions and sit down beside this young version of Charles. It is more like a basic fact of the universe, that Edwin will help when Charles needs him, or at the very least do his utmost to try. 

“I think this might be a necessary part of the process,” he says, gently. 

Beside him, little Charles shrugs. “Don’t like reading all that,” he mutters, after a moment. “Gets confusing. All the diagrams.” 

This too is in line with some of the things his own Charles has alluded to. Or perhaps let slip is more accurate, if Edwin knows anything about the hard edge of self-loathing that Charles carries with him day after day, locked away beneath the not-quite veneer of cheerfulness. It only slips occasionally, when he’s presented with things that put a self-conscious little frown on his face, or tension in the corners of his lips, like he’s angry at himself for doing the thing that caused the self-consciousness in the first place. 

Things like, Edwin notes now, reading instruction manuals. 

Edwin flips the little booklet open to the first pace, taking stock. He registers vaguely that his own Charles has stopped stabbing at the carpet with his toe, and wandered closer, looking down from above them. He’s just behind Edwin, at the bed, and seems to be studying one of the posters on the wall with an intense and pointed sort of interest. 

Edwin scans the first page of the instruction booklet, taking stock. 

“The first pieces should be in the largest bag,” he relays to little Charles. “Just there.” 

Obediently, little Charles takes it and punctures a hole in the plastic before pouring out the contents. 

“There should be a big flat piece to start…” 

And it goes smoothly, for a tick. Edwin indicates pieces and Charles locates them, gloves them into place, and then holds them steady. It is a slow process, one that requires patience, trial-and-error, and not a small amount of “sitting around,” something that Edwin has heard endless, light-hearted complaints about from his own Charles for years. 

It doesn’t take long for the younger Charles to start fidgeting too, one of his knees bouncing in place, and then the other. It is familiar enough to be endearing. And it prompts Edwin to employ a strategy that usually helps Charles focus in moments like this: conversation. 

“Where will you put the plane?” Edwin glances over his shoulder as he asks. 

Depending on how long the memory lasts, perhaps he and Charles can help hang it from the ceiling before they go. The little Charles has clearly not hit the growth spurt of the strong, lanky boy Edwin knows. 

“It’s not for me,” Charles says. He’s squinting at a couple of the pieces in his lap. “It’s for my dad.” 

And of course, there’s the memory of bitterness on Edwin’s tongue, a hard-edged thing that he has to swallow back along with the image of Charles with tears in his eyes, Charles slumping in defeat at the base of a lighthouse, Charles with dark circles like bruises above the points of his cheekbones after a handful of the worst cases, with the reminder of something heavy his body couldn’t bring itself to shake. 

When he speaks again, Edwin is careful in a way that feels entirely foreign. The softness again, slow and hesitant. “That is a…kind gesture, Charles.” 

Both Charleses turn to him then, with uncannily similar twin looks of surprise. 

“It’s not!” Young Charles says. “It’s to say sorry.” He bites his lip, taps the two pieces in his hands together for a moment. 

“What do you need to apologise for?” Edwin forces himself to ask.

Charles shrugs a little. In his peripheral vision, Edwin can make out the sixteen-year-old Charles on his other side, glaring at a poster, as if he might drill a right into the wall beneath, if he had the means. 

“I made him angry,” young Charles says. “Messed something up. I don’t really pay attention to stuff like I should. You know, rules and that.” 

The instruction manual is all but forgotten in Edwins’ fingers and it takes him a moment to realise that he’s gripping it so tightly that the edges have begun to crease. While he doubts either version of Charles will mind the minor damage to property, he pauses to smooth out the wrinkles before replying. 

“Surely you have already apologised for whatever it was you did?” He asks, cautiously. 

Young Charles nods, vigorously. The curly ends of his hair brush the tops of his ears. 

“Oh yeah,” he says. “Loads of times. I just thought this might be better?” 

Edwin hasn’t noticed Charles moving, and he nearly startles when a shoulder presses up against his arm. His Charles has abandoned the wall in favour of shoving himself into the corner of space between Edwin and the bed. When Edwin looks back, he catches Charles leaning back to rest against it with a movement that might have been casual. 

Charles’s right arm presses Edwin’s left and another glance over tells him that Charles’ jaw is tight in the way it gets right before a fight. 

“Are you okay?” Clearly, the movement hasn’t gone unnoticed. Young Charles is watching the two of them with a small frown. 

And Edwin isn’t sure what to do with the feeling in his chest, the way it clenches around an empty thing as this little Charles, who has just teetered on the edge of his own openness, vying for his father’s affection, immediately drops his own concerns when someone else displays any sort of need. 

Charles’ arm tenses. 

“Course,” he says, a little clipped. “I’m aces. Just getting comfortable. You guys keep building, or whatever.” When another moment passes in silence, Charles leans into Edwin’s side, peering over him to study the instructions. “What’s next, mate?” 

Edwin swallows down the phantom taste in the back of his throat; does his best to ignore the weight of young Charles’ gaze as he goes back to the instructions. This is Charles’ memory, after all, and Edwin is an unintended intruder in the memory. The very least he can do is follow Charles’ lead.

He points to the next piece. Then the next. 

As the little plane grows, Charles reaches to help steady the structure, allowing his younger counterpart to attach pieces. Charles’ shoulders are less tense, Edwin notes. Maybe, hopefully, there is a part of him that enjoys this. He is aces with kids, after all. 

The plane grows, and the two Charleses speak, a little, beyond a perfunctory “hold this.” 

They talk about a cartoon Edwin hasn’t heard of and a band young Charles wishes he was old enough to see. And Edwin does not frown when the Charles behind him says “Just wait for it. Most places aren’t too strict on the difference between sixteen and eighteen.” It makes young Charles smile, which makes Edwin want to smile too. 

And then, when they’ve reached the final few pages of the instructions, young Charles looks up and says, almost shyly, 

“I like your hair. The stripes at the side. That’s wicked.” 

Charles’ arm brushes Edwin’s as he touches the design in question. It’s a tentative brush of his fingertips, like he’s forgotten it existed until that moment. Edwin understands the feeling. It is far too easy to lose track of any number of details regarding physical appearance when it has been so long since he could see them himself. 

Charles runs a hand through his hair, ruffling curls and, maybe, reminding himself of their existence. 

Then, he shoots young Charles a small smile. 

“Cheers,” he says. “They’re called racing strips. Bit of a daft name, though.” 

Little Charles does not appear to think so. 

“My mum cuts mine.” Little Charles tugs at the ends of it now. “It’s always fluffy.” 

The last word is spat out, as if fluffy is the worst insult one might level against hair. Charles snorts. 

“I think she’s doing her best, mate,” he says. “But maybe ask her to take in the sides more.” He leans across the small triangle the three of them had formed on the floor, over the nearly-complete plane. “Just a bit more here.” 

He reaches out a hand and taps lightly at the curls just below his younger counterpart’s temple. It’s a small movement, casual, a barely there thing meant to indicate, rather than touch. 

Little Charles flinches, hard, like it was something very different. 

And Charles flinches too, jerking back across the triangle and into the space between the bed and Edwin’s shoulder. A hiding spot, of sorts. 

“Sorry! I’m sorry, I didn’t - It’s just, I don’t really like people -” 

“Touching your face?” Charles’ jaw is so tight it looks painful. “Yeah. Shouldn’t have.” Another beat. “Sorry.” 

The feeling between them is a strange one. Not quite awkwardness, because Edwin isn’t certain there can be awkwardness between two of the same people , but it’s definitely tension of a horrible kind. 

He hadn’t thought anything of Charles reaching out; it was just a casual tactile gesture, the way he liked to brush shoulders or touch arms. And besides, Charles had likely seen that younger version of his own face every single day of his life for so many years. Edwin can imagine that it felt like second nature, like brushing a strand of his own hair back from his forehead. Only the two Charleses are staring at each other, with eerily similar twin looks of something that threatens the border between fear and embarrassment. 

Finally, Charles speaks again. “Let’s just finish the plane, yeah?” 

“Okay.” Young Charles looks undeniably grateful for the distraction, and he turns his eyes to Edwin, big and brown and, somehow, trusting. “What’s next?” 

***

They all reach for the final piece in tandem, and then all pull away again. Edwin motions to the piece between them. 

“Go ahead,” he says. “It’s the last one.” 

Little Charles, however, shakes his head. 

“You should do it.” He’s nearly shy about the way he says it, and a little bashful. His hands retreat into the cuffs of his jumper. 

“Yeah, go on mate.” Charles nudges Edwin’s arm. “Let’s be honest, it only got done because of you.” 

Edwin shakes his head, but he does oblige them. He picks up the last piece, and attaches it to the tip of the plane’s wing, as gently as he can. When he lets go and sits back, it is finished. 

“This is brills!” Young Charles snatches up the newly finished plane, holding it up to examine the details. “It looks just like the picture!” 

“Well done, Charles.” 

Little Charles shakes his head, still studying something on the smooth underside of the plane. “You did all the hard stuff.” 

“Hardly. All I did was read the instructions.” 

Edwin finds little Charles smiling, when he looks up and, as it seems to be with any version of Charles, his answering smile is instinctive. 

“You might as well take the praise, mate.” Charles speaks up again beside him. He hasn’t moved much from his slumped position since he went back to it: close enough that his shoulder brushes Edwin’s each time he shifts. “It didn’t look like that, for real. The way I remember it.” 

If little Charles is confused by the direct recognition of his older self, he doesn’t show it. Instead, he crinkles his nose again in an endearing look of consideration. 

“Isn’t that a good thing?” He asks, after a moment. “That it looks better than you thought?” 

“Yeah.” The word comes out sounding choked. And when Edwin looks over again, Charles doesn’t meet his eyes. “Might be.” 

And before Edwin can begin to address the situation at hand, they all look up in unison at the sound of a door slamming, somewhere above them, followed by footsteps overhead. 

Charles stands, resting a hand briefly on Edwin’s shoulder to lever himself upright. His expression is an awful blank thing. Little Charles stands too, scrambling upright in a flail of limbs and the flash red jumper. Edwin doesn’t think he will ever stop finding it endearing. 

Trying to be tactful, Edwin motions towards the ceiling and the faint sounds of movement above. “Your father, I take it?” 

Young Charles nods, once. His eyes are focused on the plane again, sitting on the floor between them still. It looks very small, now that they are standing, like the toy it is, rather than a creation built across the span of memory. 

“I guess I should do it,” little Charles says. “I’m going to give it to him.” 

The words shouldn’t hold that sort of weight, a child giving a thoughtful gift to his own parent. But they seem to fall to the floor with a heavy thump, resting alongside the fragile little plane. 

The words also mark a change. The starker details of the bedroom begin to fade, the colours on the posters and the marks on the carpet growing vague. When Edwin looks over, the stairs have taken on a hazy quality, each step blurring into the one above. The door at the top is a dark outline, no longer solid enough to use as any sort of exit. Edwin suspects they won’t need to leave through anything so literal. 

“I believe that is our signal.” He addresses both Charleses. 

The room grows hazy, vague and vaguer by the moment, but little Charles keeps watching them, his eyes huge and serious in a way no child’s should be. 

“You’re leaving?” 

“We have to go, mate.” Edwin isn’t certain which of them Charles is speaking to, his past self, or Edwin. 

“It’s stupid.” And though the room is dissolving as they speak, little Charles is still solid enough for Edwin to make out in stark, horrible detail the precise moment when his lip starts to tremble. “The plane is stupid. I dunno why I thought -” He swipes at his face with the arm of his jumper. “And now I’m bloody crying and he hates it when I cry and -” 

Charles moves towards him, stepping over the plane entirely in a single long stride, and he stops just before he reaches his younger self, jolted into motion, perhaps, by the need to stop his own truths from being spilled. 

This time, he isn’t the one to reach out. 

The curly-haired boy moves in another red-blurred motion, and wraps his arms around Charles’ waist. His head only just reaches to Charles’ chest and he hides his face there, clinging. Charles is frozen halfway through an instinctual movement, both arms poised just above the boy’s small shoulders. Slowly, he lowers them down to return the hug, uncharacteristically cautious with the touch. His eyes slip closed. 

Edwin watches them: holding each other, shaking just enough to be visible, until the boy and the room and the footsteps above all fade away. 

Then, he grabs Charles by the hand and they run.

Chapter Text

The room gives way to darkness first, and then to a thicket of trees that aren’t quite trees, tall trunks that flicker slightly in the dim light, as if they too are made up of tenuous memory. Beyond, where the sky should be is only vagueness. It fits with what Edwin might imagine the inside of someone’s head to look like. 

For a time, they walk in silence, with the sound of the strange wood around them and their hands still linked at their sides. Edwin hasn’t allowed himself to question the contact yet. It is simply enough for now that Charles has not let go. 

He is more concerned with the way Charles’ chin is tucked into the upturned collar of his coat and with the way his eyes are red and overly-bright the few times Edwin glances in his direction. 

They take a few more steps. Leaves crunch beneath their feet, a strangely tactile sensation for something Edwin knows objectively cannot be real. 

Eventually, Edwin breaks the tenuous thing between them, cautious as he can be. 

“Charles?” he asks. 

Charles startles a little, as if he’s forgotten he wasn’t alone, or at least forgotten that speech was an option. His hand tightens around Edwin’s in an odd, contradictory reflex. Charles favours him with a little hmm of a sound; sniffs a bit. 

Edwin thinks back to the Devlin House and that horrible night below the lighthouse, and tries his best to be delicate. 

“Is it, ah, the dust again?” 

Charles laughs and it comes out watery, unamused. “Nah, mate. ‘m crying.” 

And the admission - because that’s what it is, he knows, an admission - lays Edwin bare and leaves him blinking. 

He looks over his shoulder, into the shadows between the trees. The place isn’t one he recognizes, thankfully. Notably, they are not in the woods around Port Townsend, or the ones from St. Hilarion’s campus, both places that might suggest they’ve been thrown into yet another memory. Instead, they seem to have stumbled into some sort of imaginary waiting room, not quite in the fae realm or the boy’s mind within it, and not quite outside of it. 

It is as safe a place as any. He tugs on Charles’ hand, pulling them to a stop. 

“Why don’t we take a moment before we confront Connor?” 

“No!” Charles shakes his head hard enough that his curls bounce with the motion. “No. I won't fuck this up for us. Sorry. I'll get it together.”

He sniffs again, and tries to tug his hand from Edwin’s grip. It’s mostly by instinct that Edwin holds on.

He takes a breath. Looks up into Charles’ red-rimmed eyes. “I'm doing this wrong, I think.”

“Doing what?” Charles sounds weary. 

“Can I - that is, is it alright if I touch you?” 

Charles motions down to their still-joined hands. Of course, the question is redundant. 

“No. I meant…” He brings his free hand up to hover near the side of Charles’ head, just above the little stripes shaved into his hair. Right where his younger self flinched away just hours earlier. Charles’ eyes widen. He takes a breath; nods.

Edwin touches him the way he might touch the rarest, most fragile book in his collection, one that held magics and secrets of centuries so far past that even he cannot remember them. He barely breathes as he does it, all of his frayed focus on the act of being gentle. 

He pushes Charles’ hair back from his forehead, then wipes the tears from his cheeks, knuckle swiping over the shadowed point of a cheekbone. He straightens the collar of Charles' jacket, and watches with something like awe as Charles relaxes into the touch, the tight muscles in his neck melting just slightly as Edwin’s fingers skim his skin. He feels warm beneath Edwin’s palms, in a way ghosts shouldn’t.  

“You can tell me, if you’d like,” Edwin says, and Charles leans in closer. The tips of their noses might brush, if Edwin turned his head. “How it really happened.” 

Charles’ unnecessary breath stutters against his cheek. 

“It’s stupid,” is his hesitant start. “Like, really bloody stupid.” 

Edwin finds a great many things stupid in this modern age, and this very much does not number among them. In an effort to convey this to Charles, he shakes his head. 

“Nothing happened though! With the fucking airplane. Dad just looked at it, told me I'd done it wrong, and threw it out. He didn’t even yell or anything. It wasn’t, you know, bad .” 

His voice has grown hard and clipped, the way it might when someone threatens them or when a client is in serious danger. It’s a tone that usually goes along with hefting a cricket bat and growled warnings to back off .

Now it is punctuated, rather jarringly, by Charles turning his head to rest his forehead on Edwin’s shoulder. And Edwin’s hand, the one that isn’t still tangled with Charles’, moves almost of its own accord, coming up to cup the back of Charles’ neck, threading through the curls there. 

What Edwin wants, really, is to tell Charles that he is wrong, that the bleak picture he's painted does indeed sound bad . That Edwin knows firsthand the sting of parental indifference and the hopeless loneliness that festers along with a boy huddled alone in his bedroom, day after day. Some of this, Edwin knows, but he cannot lay claim to understanding the specifics of Charles’ pain. Edwin, quiet and subdued as he was when he was alive, had a very different reaction to the process than Charles must have, full of life and energy and elation; desperate to connect with the world around him. 

“The client.” The words come out muffled against Edwin’s jacket. “Need to find Connor.” 

Edwin runs his hands through the curls at the base of Charles’ neck, once, twice, and a third time for good measure, because Charles slumps against him a little more with each pass, like Edwin is untwining the memory from him with touch alone. 

They can wait a little longer. It’s not as if the boy will get lost inside of his own head. 

“We will,” Edwin assures him. “You are aces with kids, after all.”