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Charles watches Edwin from his half-sprawled position on the sofa. He watches him, how he’s been watchin’ him, more and more these days—taking in the way his hands are shaking, where he’s trying his best to write something or another in his journal, there at the desk; taking in how his eyes’ve got those big dark circles weighing down under them. He keeps goin’ translucent enough Charles can see the windowsill straight through his throat, before he shudders and takes a breath and—forces himself, it looks like, right back whole again.
“C’mon, mate,” Charles says—and he’s well aware, isn’t he, of how low and shot his voice has gone; how close he is to going out himself. That’s why he’s over here on the sofa, after all. “Whatever that is can wait ‘til later, yeah?” He waits a bit, following a little curl that’s gone and fallen out over Edwin’s forehead. “And I reckon, whatever it is, you’re in no state to do a proper job of it now. Are you?”
He’s gentle with it, and Edwin doesn’t snap at him for it, how he might’ve once. He lets his eyes shut, finally closing the book and leaning forward to drop his pen back into the pen-holder.
“No,” he says. “I suppose I’m not.”
But he doesn’t move away from the desk. He just sits there in his chair, hands folded at his stomach, looking stretched thin and paler by the second.
“Come on,” says Charles again, feelin’ it stick in his throat. “You gonna orb out all alone over there?”
Edwin looks up at him again, and there’s something brittle there—something almost like fear, or maybe grief—but it passes quick, and then there’s just Edwin.
Edwin, getting up from the desk and curving ‘round the corner of it and stepping carefully over to the sofa, hands folded still; trembling still. He comes over and sits down—prim as anything, back all straight, feet flat on the floor—in the little space Charles has made in front of his feet.
Something twists up, then, in Charles’s chest. It just about does him in, seeing Edwin like that—so twisted up and scared and drawn into himself, how he hasn’t been in a good few decades. Not here, at least.
“Don’t got to be all the way over there, do you?” Charles says quietly.
Edwin looks up at him, mouth opening like he means to say something—
Then another wave goes crashing through him. Another almost-break. He stutters half-out; goes grey; screws his eyes shut, sucking in a breath. Charles can see the arm of the sofa through his stomach.
“I do not wish to—“ Edwin starts.
Charles shakes his head. “You won’t. I don’t mind, mate. I just—“
Just want you close.
He swallows, shuddering through a wave of his own—fighting it off. C’mon, he thinks, just a tick. Just gimme a tick, yeah?
He shuffles back and up, half sat up, so he can reach out to Edwin properly.
“Come on,” he says.
And Edwin is stiff, still, resisting a beat longer—
But then he nods. Takes Charles’s hand and goes slumping right against him, down and down as Charles eases them both back down against the sofa, gentle as anything. His face is pressed into Charles’s neck, breaths slipping out of him sharp and broken-up, and his legs are tanglin’ there with Charles’s—findin’ their place, just how they always do.
Charles runs his hand up Edwin’s back, then down it—and Edwin sighs and goes limp, a bit more runnin’ out of him every time.
A little curl of fingers at his nape is all it takes for him to shiver right out, ‘til he’s gone warm and small and thrumming on Charles’s chest.
Charles stays there a while longer. Holds himself together a while longer—just so he can hold Edwin there, right where his heart used to be. Right where it still is, maybe. Then, when he can’t stop it anymore, he sighs himself, and falls right down next to him.