Chapter Text
Before, Edwin had been very fond of thunderstorms. He took great pleasure in it when the dark, rolling clouds would come looming over the countryside, pouring rain down in torrents over their house, so loud he could hear it even tucked within the safety of its walls. On these roaring nights Edwin would gather up some of his favourite novels and an old, beloved blanket, knit for him by his mother and which had been his prized possession since he was five years old. With his father's permission, he would sit in the armchair in the corner of his study. There, wrapped up in the blanket and with the words of Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde to keep him company, the rain pattering white noise against the window, he felt more at home than he ever did in his day to day.
There was a period of time, however, after hell. In which every small noise made him jump. The dark corners of wherever Charles and himself were staying, before they’d settled down in their office, would leave him shuddering. And on stormy nights, all of Edwin’s now nonexistent nerves would fray and split at the ends. The roar of thunder and flash of lightning were now only precursors to memories of crimson red and the thundering footsteps of a giggling beast.
On more than one occasion, Charles had found him curled in on himself and staring into the middle distance, mind unmoored. He would sit quietly beside him and wait for Edwin to come back to himself. And when he did, Charles never asked where he’d been. Simply gave him a pat on the shoulder and took Edwin’s apology for his absence with an easy smile. The same way he took everything.
It is easier now, in some ways. He’d grown away from the skittish, wounded animal he’d been the first time he had dragged himself, by tooth and nail and desperate clawing, out of hell. He’d found companionship and a steady place of rest. In other ways, it was harder. There was now the black hole of grief for Niko to contend with. There was the ache in his muscles, phantom and clinging, from Esther’s machine. And there were old, hellish wounds splitting apart again, like stitches that continuously and unpredictably popped open.
And two weeks after their return from Port Townsend, the Night Nurse’s grafting into their agency, and the resettling into a newer new normal, a storm swept its way over London.
It is just him and Charles in the office that evening. Crystal had whisked herself away to her apartment after a particularly draining case they had been grappling with for the past few days. Even Edwin and Charles, non-corporeal as they are, were feeling the effects and so it was unsurprising when she’d bid them farewell, already fantasizing aloud about the food and the soft bed that waited for her back at her apartment.
So Edwin and Charles spent the evenings they had to themselves the way they usually did: in companionable silence.
Edwin at the desk, pen scratching away. He had taken, recently, to journaling. Actual journaling. What one, particularly Niko, might even call keeping a diary. His journals previously were all casework and small observations and his carefully curated map of hell. But this was pure thought, memory, feeling. Words spilled from his pen without real consideration to what he put down. A pouring of experience into something physical. And it was nice to have it all laid bare. Raw and unedited. Just for him. He found something cathartic within it, though it was a hobby he’d have found frivolous only a few months ago.
Charles, meanwhile, was seated on the floor. His back against the couch and tossing a ball which continually bounced off the opposite wall and back into his hand. The steady thunk, thunk, thunk was like white noise.
These nights were among Edwin’s favourites, as they were something like a return to form. That is not to say that Edwin did not cherish their new normal. But for all his life, Edwin had never contended well with change. Not when he’d been sent to St. Hilarions, or when he received reports by mail of how his cousins were doing in the trenches, or when he’d been dragged from his bed in the middle of the night. This was a good change, in comparison to much of the rest of his life. Nonetheless, these nights allowed him a reprieve from the whirlwind their afterlife had been as of late.
He settled comfortably into it, lost in the scratch of his pen.
Then, in an abrupt roll of thunder, the power went out. The whole office was plunged into inky darkness, the building bracketing their own residence kept even so much as the moon above from slipping in. So thick you could cut through it with a knife. Edwin resided in the middle of it, the desk an island in a sea of pitch-dark water.
In the dark he sits silent and does not see the ink pooling beneath the tip of his pen gone still. A few feet away, a series of small thuds and the sound of something rolling unceremoniously into a corner tells him Charles has failed to catch his ball in the sudden and enduring darkness. And Edwin…
Edwin cannot move.
He believes it a rather silly reaction, in retrospect. He has not been afraid of the dark since he was young and still needed the soft lilt of his mothers singing to get him to sleep. Not since those very early days, fresh out of hell, when he knew all too well the dark really could have monsters lurking within it.
But when the lights flicker out, something dislodges inside of him, some latch comes unlocked. It lets free some desperate, squirming creature. One who cowers in corners, silent and shaking. One who has spent countless decades running and clawing and fighting tooth and nail for its freedom. It rakes its nails over the inside of Edwin's chest, tears through his lungs, hooks through muscle and bone to break free and start running again.
In the dark, Edwin can hear it moving. Or perhaps it’s only Charles, shuffling around in the dark, searching for a light. Or maybe it’s the beast, lying in wait until Edwin has gathered his wits about him just enough to climb back to his feet and give it another round. But Edwin knows better than to get up now, with that thing lurking. Instead, he slides slowly, slowly, slowly out of his chair. Navigates himself beneath the desk, somehow, in the perfect darkness of the office, and presses himself into the corner to make himself as small as possible.
It should not matter that he can’t breathe. He doesn’t need to. Breathing is only an instinct still lingering from his living days. But it does matter. It matters terribly because he can feel the pressure of holding nothing and everything in his lungs, building until it feels that his chest is wrapped in iron. Sharp, searing, inescapable.
A light clicks on.
A torch, Edwin realizes. It shines at the back of the office, placing everything into a stark, washed out beam of light that bounces off the back wall. The desk casts a sharp shadow against the floor. It warps as the torchbearer moves closer.
“Some storm, huh?” Asks a familiar voice, and just that is enough for Edwin’s shoulders to start relaxing, just a little. But his nonexistent heart still seems to be racing several miles ahead of his frazzled mind and Edwin cannot think to respond. All he can think is a panicked litany of be quiet be quiet be quiet be quiet be quiet. Charles’s feet appear in the opening in front of him. “Edwin? Mate, where’d you go?”
Edwin stares at the legs in front of him numbly for a moment before some part of his rational brain kicks back in. His voice is lost to him still, but he reaches out with one shaking hand and tugs at the hem of Charles’s trousers. Charles, in response, jumps about a foot in the air with a loud curse. This is followed closely by him kneeling down on the floor to peer into the underside of the desk where Edwin is curled up.
“Edwin? Hey, are you…” Charles trails off, seeing the mess that Edwin has no doubt become. Messy hair, unkempt clothes, and a familiar haunted look. He sets the torch down on the flat end so the light points up, bounces off the underside of the desk, and illuminates the small area around them. He crawls under the desk and sits beside Edwin.
Then, silently, Charles holds out an arm. Edwin stares for a moment, uncomprehending, before it clicks in his brain what is being offered. He has not had an episode like this in a long time. But even now, after all that time, he knows this is a break from the routine, as so much of their actions have been increasingly often lately. Charles would sit next to him but he would never touch, always assuming (always correctly) that it would be too overwhelming for him. But now here he was, holding out his arm.
Edwin wasn’t sure when this switch had flipped, what drew Charles to reach out this time, nor was he entirely sure what he felt about yet another small but insurmountable change. But looking at his friend, arm out, silently beckoning him closer with his round, worried eyes, something small and needy cracks open in his chest.
He doesn’t become aware of the tears rolling over his cheeks until Charles has got his arms around him. The rules of touch are vague and complicated. Touch is a phantom of a memory of a sensation, but there is something to be said for the placebo effect. His friends arms are only the vaguest of pressures around him and yet crushingly tight all the same and they are the safest place that Edwin has even been. He curls into that ghost of a memory and exhales sharply. And then all at once, he is sobbing into the crook of his friend's neck, where his head had been securely tucked. They are not the quiet, controlled sobs he’d allowed himself in hell, when he’d become too tired to do anything but sit and cry. They are heaving, chest-concaving, unneeded-breath-stealing sobs. Charles holds him tighter.
“Hey, it’s alright, it’s alright,” Charles whispers against the crown of his head, his lips almost warm, “I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
Charles continues to mumble gentle comforts into his hair as the sobs slowly, but surely turn into quiet, shuddering breaths. And, inevitably, the sadness and panic pour out, and shame and embarrassment usher in to take their place in that hollow of Edwin’s chest. Nauseating and dizzying and prickling like heat at the back of his neck. Despite this, he does not move away. Charles is running his fingers ever so gently through the short hair at the nape of his neck and no amount of tangled-up emotions could move him away from that soft, rare, rhythmic comfort of his friends fingertips on his skin.
“I’m sorry-” Edwin begins.
“Hey, we’re not doin’ all that, yeah?” Charles cuts in, sternly but not unkindly, “You’ve got nothing to apologize for, mate. I get it. I used to be scared of thunderstorms, too.”
Edwin has nothing to say to that, so for a time it is quiet again. The tears have stopped, tracks drying on his face, but Edwin is still trembling. Little tremors that run up through all his long-dead nerves and muscles. Some part of him wonders if he should begin to move away before the cradling becomes awkward. But Charles makes no move to pull back, only continues to run his fingers through Edwin’s hair. So he stays where he is, measuring his breaths until they’re even and calm once again, leaving only the faintest trace in his shuddering limbs that anything was ever wrong.
“It’s the dark, too…” he mumbles, before his better judgement can stop him. Charles moves away just enough to look at him, brows furrowed, and Edwin can tell in the way his eyes swim and the small divot between his brows that he is thinking of hell. Of the low, sickly light and all of its dark corners. And Edwin really, truly
loathes
the very idea of that look ever crossing Charles’s face. He cannot be sick, but Charles Rowland setting foot in hell, willingly or not, is enough to make anyone ill, living or otherwise.
Then that face is replaced by something else. Something determined and protective.
“Alright then,” Charles says and starts to shuffle away, but not before he gives Edwin’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze and snatches up the torch to press it into his palm,” We’ll have to get some proper light in here then. You wait right here, mate. I’ll be back in just a tick, I promise.”
Then, he crawls out from beneath the desk, backing away into the darkness. Edwin clutches the torch close to his chest, staring out at the empty space it illuminated in front of him. In the absence of Charles, he feels impossibly cold.
But it takes only a few moments for Charles to return, crouching down with his arms full of soft cloth, and battery-powered candles they’d acquired ages ago for instances just like this one, and beaming at Edwin so brightly that the candles may have very well proved unnecessary.
“What’s all this?” Edwin asks, and Charles’s smile somehow gets wider.
“We’re gonna make a blanket fort.”