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Charles disappears after the conclusion of Kelly Barnes’s case. He is there as they all three make the trek back to the office, but slips away either just before or just after they pass through the frosted glass door—Edwin cannot be sure which.
Charles’s absence is brought to his attention by Crystal, who looks around a few times, frowning, before asking, “Where did Charles go?”
Edwin spins in a tight circle as he surveys the room, searching, searching—
Ah. There. Charles’s cricket bat rests against the side of the desk by the mirror, handle up.
Edwin is not too surprised. He had expected something of this sort to occur, given the contents of the case.
Kelly died a few weeks before of acute cerebral trauma after an unfortunate run-in with the corner of a kitchen cabinet. There was nothing especially supernatural about her case, and indeed nothing much in the way of a mystery, but she refused to move on and leave her two younger siblings in the company of her father—a man known quite famously for his temper.
She was only fifteen years old. Her siblings were twelve and six.
Needless to say, it had been a difficult job.
“Not far,” Edwin assures Crystal.
Charles typically appreciates a spot of time to himself before receiving company, so Edwin does not rush. He busies himself with filing his notes on Kelly’s case, and then with seeing Crystal out the door, before he at last takes the mirror up to the roof.
Sure enough, there Charles stands at the far wall, his back to Edwin. He is silhouetted by the warm mist of London’s many streetlights. His shoulders do not shake.
“I thought I might find you up here,” Edwin calls.
Charles gives a telltale sniffle. “Predictable, am I?”
Edwin hums. “I rather think we both are.” He walks up to the wall beside Charles, but stands some distance away and carefully does not look over when he asks, “is it alright if I join you?”
“Go ahead,” says Charles.
Edwin continues not looking over. Even if he were to look, he knows he would not see much. The light of the city this late allows only for the dimmest awareness of each other’s presence; the loosely-sketched profile of a face, with only the slightest shine of tear tracks visible if one were to shift just so.
This is something they have begun doing, since Port Townsend. Edwin recalls standing just here as he told Charles in hushed tones of what all the Cat King had said, done, and threatened doing to him, in their many clandestine meetings across the coastal town. Of all Edwin had wanted and feared wanting.
The darkness makes it easier to speak. It makes it easier to tell the truth, when for so many years they both have grown too used to politely sidestepping each others’ most tender wounds—which were the wounds that, in truth, most needed tending.
Edwin waits for quite a long time tonight. He stands, looking out over the slumbering park, and listens to Charles breathe with the kind of slow intention that speaks to just how badly he is struggling to keep it even.
Eventually, Charles says, “you know, sometimes I wonder if that could’ve been me?”
He says it like a question. He says it like he is still doubting if it’s true—or like he is hoping it isn’t.
Edwin, by now, knows not to speak.
Charles takes a breath and blows it out, quick and forceful. “Not, like—I mean, obviously I’m not her, and he wouldn’t’ve done it on purpose, but—“
He stops. Or rather, it seems as if the words themselves stop, grinding their wheels against some blockage in his throat, and he has to come up with different ones in order to speak at all.
“He’d push me down the stairs, sometimes,” he says.
Edwin sucks in a breath. Closes his eyes, only for a second.
“If I wasn’t getting down them fast enough,” Charles continues. “Or just ‘cause he could. Just ‘cause he was angry with me. Seemed like he was always angry with me. And I learned how to fall, so I wouldn’t break anything, but sometimes—I mean, I bashed my head against the dresser once. Think I had a proper concussion, then. Dizziness, nausea, ears ringing, all that tosh.” He takes another shaking breath. “He got mad then, too. Had to sit out of cricket for a week.”
“Charles,” Edwin says, very quietly. He does not know entirely what he means by it; only that he cannot stop the soft, desperate utterance of Charles’s name from passing his lips.
“He wouldn’t’ve done it on purpose,” Charles repeats, almost frantic, as if to make it better. “But, like—I dunno that I’d’ve lived that long, even if my mates didn’t do me in. Dunno that my dad wouldn’t have killed me himself, eventually. Pretty sure he might've done. He’d have knocked me down the stairs, and I’d have hit my head and never woke up, or he’d’ve just—locked me in my room ‘til I starved to death.”
Horror twists in Edwin’s gut, but Charles is laughing before he can speak a word of it. It is more of a bark than a laugh, in truth; cold, dry, and completely devoid of his usual mirth.
“He used to do that, too, when I’d been really muckin’ things up. Bein’ a proper nuisance. He’d leave me down there ‘til I was bloody begging—and mum never helped, neither. She was too scared of him, I guess. Too scared of what he’d do to her if she helped. Was never enough for her, either, was I?”
Edwin can hear him crying, now. The sound is well-suppressed—but he can hear how the tears wet and break Charles’s voice; how each effortful breath emerges more and more frayed than the last. They were the ones, he wants to say, who were not enough for you. They did not deserve an ounce of your goodness. Of your light.
“I was always so scared of him,” Charles whispers. “And now I’m dead, and it wasn’t even him that did it, but I’m—god, I’m so angry. I’m so bloody angry, and I don’t know how to stop. And I keep wonderin’—what if I’m like him? What if I was always gonna be like him? Just—angry, forever. What if I hurt people how he hurt me? How Kelly’s dad hurt her and her brother and-and sister and mum?”
“You won’t,” Edwin says. “Charles, you will not.” He swallows, attempting to stifle the tears he can feel clogging his own throat. “You have every right to be angry. Your father was positively horrid to you, and not once was he brought to justice. Not once was he stopped.” The words all but boil out of him, hot and corrosive. He dilutes them with a breath and tugs at his coat sleeve. “I find that I am… quite angry myself, just at the moment,” he admits. “I find that I am rather keen on the idea of making a visit to your childhood home and haunting your father out of his skin.”
Charles laughs again, wetter now. “Are you, now?”
“I am,” Edwin says.
He pauses and, after a moment’s consideration, takes a few steps across the roof towards Charles.
Charles is standing very tall; he is holding himself very still. His hands, when Edwin peers down at the fuzzy outlines of them in the dark, are balled into fists. His cheek is glistening just slightly.
His shoulders do not shake.
Edwin lands on it, then. He lands on the tender root, poking forth from the open wound.
“You did not deserve it, Charles,” he says. “You could never have deserved it.”
With a wretched sound like something has torn loose inside him, Charles sobs, his whole body curling in on itself. He bends and breaks as a tree in a storm can no longer withstand the gale.
“How—“ he begins, near-choking on the word, “How d’you know? How are you so sure?”
Edwin chances a step closer. He reaches up to rest a hand between Charles’s shoulder blades and, when Charles does not flinch, he leaves it there.
He speaks softly as Charles spoke to him in hell, fragments of porcelain bodies piled up around them. He speaks as Charles took his hand and said, Let’s get you out of here.
“Because even if you had behaved poorly, which I truly doubt, nothing you did could have been enough to warrant the pain your father caused you.”
Charles sobs again. Before Edwin can make any moves of his own, Charles turns and lurches forward, crashing into him with all the force of a battering ram. He buries his wet face in Edwin’s neck and clings tight to his waist.
Edwin returns Charles’s embrace at once, arms folding close around him. Remembering how Charles has enjoyed it when they have had their reading nights in recent months, he slides his fingers into Charles’s curls and begins scratching gently.
Charles’s shoulders start to shake.
“I know you, Charles Rowland,” Edwin says. “You are frightened, and you are angry, and you are good down to your bones. Being angry has never made you any less good.” His other hand, he notes absently, has begun to rub up and down Charles’s heaving spine. He does not stop it. “You were very frightened and very angry when you defended those children from their father today. That was quite a good thing indeed.”
Charles holds onto him a while longer. Then he sniffles and says,
“I don’t feel good.”
Edwin hums. “Then you will simply have to trust me. Is that alright?”
“Yeah,” Charles croaks. His hands clench and release in the back of Edwin’s blazer. “Always trust you.”
Something altogether too large for words winds itself up in Edwin’s chest. “Good, then,” he whispers.
Charles continues to cry quietly, giving wholly into the release these nights tend to bring. Edwin continues to hold him.
They do not return to the office for quite some time.