Chapter Text
The dusty attic room of the Truham Hall dormitory was the only place where Charlie Spring really felt as if he could be himself.
It was his fourth year boarding at Truham, a rowdy all-boys boarding school several hours north of his family home in Kent.
Charlie hadn’t grown up knowing he’d be a boarder. No one in his family had ever ventured outside of their county to attend school.
Of course, Charlie wasn’t like anyone in his family. His physician had made that very clear.
At thirteen, brittly thin and sallow-skinned, Charlie had sat at the top of the staircase, his sister Victoria at his side, clutching his hand as they both strained their ears to try and hear what their parents and the doctor who had been summoned to their family manor to examine the Springs eldest son were saying.
Jane had insisted on a house call, not wanting anyone in town to know that a doctor ( especially a psychologist) was seeing her son.
Jane had always cared deeply about appearances, one of the reasons that her husband had stopped going by his given name, Julio, in favour of the more traditionally English John.
The two Spring siblings eased down a few more stairs, trying desperately to hear what was going on in the parlour below them.
“Anorexia Nervosa. I’ve seen a few cases, mostly in young girls but it’s not unheard of in boys. Especially those of…a certain affliction”
“And what’s that?” Jane demanded. Tori and Charlie could both perfectly picture the intense set of their mothers' jaw.
“Homosexuality”
Tori squeezed Charlie’s hand so tightly.
At the time, Charlie hadn’t even been positive about what the word meant. He’d heard it before, whispered in hushed tones or hissed as an insult.
“No. No that’s not possible” Jane said decidedly.
“Is there a cure?” It was his father's voice Charlie heard that time, sounding stricken.
There was a pause long enough to make Charlie’s blood pressure bottom out.
“There are options. Although at this time my concern is for your other children”
“ The other children? Is it contagious?”
“Not per say. However, isolation from the family is recommended, for the benefit of the patient and the family. A boy with anorexia nervosa well…they can be quite a drain on the emotional health of a family”
“And what about Charlie?”
“A change of environment may be best for him as well”
“ What about a sanitarium?”
“Is that really necessary?” Charlie’s father cut off his wife, with more authority in his voice than Charlie had heard in a long time.
“Not right away. There may be another course of treatment”
When Charlie came downstairs the next morning, his parents were sitting at their dining table, waiting expectantly for him.
Charlie took a seat across from his mother and Father and a plate of breakfast he knew he wouldn’t be able to bring himself to eat.
He’d sat in silence, staring at his hands as his parents told him he’d be starting at boarding school the following term.
Neither of them used the words anorexia nervosa or homosexual, but they did stress that Charlie needed to go away to get better.
Charlie’s first two years at Truham had been quiet and lonely. A teaching assistant had sat next to him for every meal for the first five months, ensuring that Charlie ate the entire contents of his plate.
It felt like a very specific form of torture.
When Charlie returned home for school holidays he’d find that his little brother Olly would be off visiting a cousin or otherwise out of town.
“They think I’m going to ruin him” Charlie had whispered one night, tears flowing over his pillow as his older sister sat beside him in bed, stroking his hair.
“You’re not ruining anything. They are”
Letters from his parents were sparse, but Tori wrote to him twice a week, each time including a note from Olly or a scribbled drawing from the little boy.
Charlie kept the drawings and letters in a box tucked under his bed, many of which were tear-stained.
He’d never shown anyone any of those letters, until the beginning of his third year as a boarder, when new student Nicholas Nelson, was assigned to his hall.
Nick quickly became the best friend that Charlie had ever had.
Despite being eighteen months older than Charlie, Nick was placed into the same class as he’d been educated in France for the past few years and the school hadn’t thought the education was equivalent.
Nick wasn’t like the other boys who flooded the halls of Truham, all bravado and distasteful humour. He was kind, funny, and thoughtful.
He’d sit with Charlie at dinner, sometimes waiting with him for hours, as Charlie tried to finish enough of his food to avoid punishment.
They’d take long walks through the grounds together, roughhousing by the small pond that bordered the campus on one side, or sitting under the abundant branches of the willow trees that were so long they sometimes tickled the tips of their noses as they lay in the long grass, talking about whatever happened to be on their minds at the time.
Charlie had dreaded going home even more that summer than he usually had, the idea of spending two months without Nick to talk to seemed like a herculean task. Was two months enough time for Nick to forget about him? To realize he could do so much better when it came to the calibre of friends?
He should have known better than to doubt Nick like that. Every week without fail a letter showed up with Charlie’s name scrawled in Nick’s elegant script.
Nick has even sent him a postcard from Paris when he’d been off visiting an aunt. Seeing the words,
Wish you were here,
xx Nick
Written on the back of the card of the Cathedral of Notre Dame had done something strange to Charlie’s heart. Suddenly instead of just missing Nick, Charlie was longing for him. Desperate as if Nick were a life-saving medication. He’d crossed the days off his desk calendar until he’d be back at school. Back with Nick.
It wasn’t until the winter of that next year that something changed between them. The continental plates of their lives seemed to shift, setting off something between them that neither could explain, but that scared and thrilled them both.
The first snowfall of the year had coated the campus in a dusting of fluffy white flakes. The students lost their sanity at the vision of the snow falling outside their windows and before any professor could call attention back to the lesson, everyone was out of their seats, barrelling towards the outer doors of the school and diving into the snow, scraping together as much of the precipitation as they could in order to create enough ammunition to pelt their classmates with endless snowballs and cannon.
Nick and Charlie had made snow angels, before chasing one another around one of the large trees, Charlie let out a surprised squeak when Nick caught him around the middle and the two went tumbling back into the snow.
Charlie had landed on top of his best friend, and laying in the snow, their faces so close together that their frozen breath mingled in a single puff. Charlie couldn’t understand the strange flipping feeling that had coursed through his stomach as he looked at his best friend.
He wanted to kiss him. He wanted to kiss Nick. He wanted Nick to kiss him.
It was a terrifying feeling, but as Charlie stared at his best friend's lips, he couldn’t find the will to make it stop, to even wish for it to stop. How could this feeling be wrong and immoral when it felt so incredibly right and…. inventible?
Charlie felt as if something had guided him there at that moment. That he was meant to end up in that very place, at that moment, just the two of them.
They broke the spell quickly, rolling away from one another and lobbing another snowball at the other as if that life-shattering moment had never passed between them.
Initially, Charlie had been convinced that the moment hadn’t passed between them. That it had only been Charlie who had been thrown off his axis and sent reeling into a whole new world.
Later that night, Charlie was cured of that affliction.
He’d woken up at half two, to find that Nick wasn’t tucked into the bed across from him. It wasn’t as if it were alarming to wake up and find Nick’s bed empty. The boy could very easily have just slipped away for a cup of water or to use the toilet, but something in Charlie’s stomach told him that that wasn’t the case. He was fairly sure he knew where Nick was.
Charlie placed his feet on the floor, flinching at the feeling of his toes on the frozen floorboards.
He padded down the hallway, trying to be as silent as possible in order to not awaken the dorm matron.
The door to the attic at the end of the hallway was meant to be kept locked, but Nick had quickly discovered that if you held the doorknob up and to the left, the lock could click and the door would swing open. It had become his and Charlie’s place to get away from the world when their classmates became too much and they needed a quiet place for just the two of them.
“Nick?” Charlie climbed the stairs up to the dusty attic, whispering his best friend's name.
As suspected, Nick was tucked up in the corner of the attic, his forehead leaning against the glass of the tiny window that was the attics' only source of natural light.
“Nick?” Charlie tried again, this time receiving a response as Nick turned his face in Charlie’s direction.
Despite the lack of light in the room, Charlie could make out the planes of Nick’s face from the snatches of moonlight that shone through the window. That’s when he saw it. There were tears glistening on Nick's cheeks.
Charlie rushed to his best friend, wrapping his arms around Nick to provide comfort as Nick leaned against his shoulder and allowed himself to cry.
Over the next hours, Nick and Charlie whispered confessions to one another, their fears and their feelings falling to the floor between them until both their hearts were bare. Neither knew exactly what their confessions meant for them, but what Charlie did know, was that when Nick held his hand, he’d never felt closer to happiness.
Their love bloomed as quickly as their friendship, sharing sweet moments in secluded corners and hidden cracks. They were both terrified of what this meant for them, what they had started and how it might end. Yet there were other emotions that tampered down the terror.
Elation, contentment, excitement…love.
Charlie had never imagined himself in love before. He’d had trouble imagining his future from one day to the next, but now the only future he could imagine was one with Nick in it, ideally in a staring role.
Even as the weather warmed and the air of the attic became stuffy, Charlie and Nick would still steal away to the upper floors. Charlie would lean against a wall, Nick lounged against him as he read aloud from his tattered book of myths from ancient Greece or other classics. Depictions of close male friendships that trended in the direction of the physical. Love shared between men and men and women and women even when not explicitly stated.
Charlie would run his fingers through Nick’s copper blond hair as he read, Nick’s head resting against his chest.
The attic felt like their own little world, a piece of the universe broken off from the rest that only the two of them could touch.
Charlie had never before imagined that he would wish for a school year to be longer, but as the final days of spring began to melt into the long days of summer and the days on the calendar ticked closer and closer to the end of that school year, Charlie found himself daydreaming of setting the clock back to September so that he could spend more evenings tucked up in the attic with Nick or taking long lazy walks down by the creek or through the dense trees that surrounded the Truham campus.
“I don’t know how I’m going to survive not seeing you every day” Nick mused as the couple laid on their backs, hands intertwined, staring up at the ceiling of the attic and watching the dust catch in the light as it danced through the air before settling back into stillness.
“It’s only a few months” Charlie reasoned, although the words sounded hollow even to himself. Days without Nick sounded like torture, let alone weeks on end.
“I’ll write you every day” Nick squeezed Charlie’s hand as if to solidify his promise.
“You just want an excuse to practice your calligraphy with that fancy pen you coaxed your mum into buying you for Christmas” Charlie reached over and lightly pinched Nick’s cheek, to which Nick reacted by twisting his head quickly and sneaking a kiss onto Charlie’s wrist.
“Really Char” Suddenly serious, Nick turned over onto his side, Charlie twisting onto his side as well so that they were laying face to face.
“I’m going to miss you so much” He muttered, running the back of one finger down the soft skin of Charlie’s cheek, his touch so tender that it nearly caused Charlie’s heart to skip a beat.
“It’s only for a few months” Charlie tried to reason when what he really wanted to say was
I’m going to miss you more. I feel like I can’t breathe when you’re not around and it terrifies me. I don’t know what it means but I want to find out, even if it hurts.
Charlie didn’t want to think about what would happen the next year. If Charlie were to turn the pages of the calendar forward twelve months to the same spot that he and Nick were now, they’d be facing a much longer separation. Maybe a permanent one.
Would they go to different universities? Would Nick move back to France? Would Nick find someone else? Maybe a girl could give him all the things that Charlie couldn’t? Someone who could hold his hand in public without fear of being thrown in jail on trumped-up charges? Would they ever see one another again?
“It’ll feel like a lifetime” Nick mused, scooting forward slightly so that his and Charlie’s chests were pressed together.
Nick's hand came up to rest on the side of Charlie’s neck, cradling the side of his face and looking Charlie directly in the eyes, pools of deep blue meeting the warmth of burnt honey brown.
“I love you” Nick murmured, leaning forward, his lips ghosting across Charlie’s.
“I love you” Charlie echoed leaning into Nick’s touch and wishing he could capture the moment they were in now to carry around with him every second that they were apart.
….
Nick had been back home in his mother's flat for a few weeks, and it seemed to him that he spent the majority of his time pinning for Charlie.
He’d thought he’d missed Charlie the summer before when they were only friends, but now that he’d held Charlie in his arms, had kissed him, had loved him, it felt as if a piece of his soul had been torn out and Nick wouldn’t be whole again until Charlie was back with him. Nick spent his time pinning away like a love-sick fool, counting down the moments until another letter from Charlie would show up with his name addressed on it in Charlie’s slanted handwriting.
It was nearly every day now that Nick was writing a letter and receiving one. His mother had teased him about the amount of stamps he was going through, needling at him about if he had a girl he was writing to.
A lump had grown in his throat when Sarah had made that joke. How could he tell his mother that it wasn’t a girl he was writing a love letter to, but another boy? The idea of the look in his mother's eye was enough to make Nick want to be sick.
Nick was in the habit of taking his beloved dog Nellie out for a long walk through the nearby park for at least an hour after breakfast each morning. If he timed his departure just right he’d make it back home just after the post had been delivered and there would be a fresh letter from Charlie waiting for him when he arrived back.
Nick hung up Nellie's lead on the hook by the door as the old girl ran ahead of him into the flat, no doubt headed straight for Mum in hopes of a biscuit being tossed her way.
Nick had been about to go into his room to change into a dry jumper, his current one rather damp from the cold morning air outside, when he heard his mum calling for him.
“Nicky? Would you come here for a moment?”
Changing course, Nick turned into the kitchen where his mum was seated at their little table, two cups of tea steaming in front of her.
“Come sit with me, Nicky”
Nick took his usual seat across the table from his mother, who was watching him with a look in her eyes that he couldn’t quite place.
“Nicky I, I promise I wasn’t snooping. I was doing the wash and I turned out your trouser pockets like I always do and”
Sarah placed a letter in the middle of the table.
Nick's heart dropped into his stomach. It was one of his letters from Charlie. He could see Charlie’s signature at the bottom of the page
All my love, Forever yours
Charlie
How could Nick explain this away?
“Charlie is a very special friend, isn’t he?” Sarah said delicately, still watching her son with that look he couldn’t understand.
He couldn’t deny it. There was no point in trying. He knew what else that letter said.
I dream that one day there will be a place for us. Where I can love you as loudly as I feel it in my soul. Until then, I’ll keep you locked in my heart, where no one else can see, but where I can still feel you. I wish I could hold you now. Be with you now.
Nick gulped. Bracing himself for what might be coming for him. What would Sarah do? Shout her disappointment and order him out of her home? Or would she drag him by his ear down to the old church on the corner they hadn’t been to since he was a child and force him to confess his sins to the priest?
There were tears pricking at his eyes. He felt the first one fall down his cheek.
“Mum I-“
Nick was almost grateful that his mother cut him off, he hadn’t known what to say anyway.
“I don’t talk enough about your Uncle Arthur” Sarah looked down at her hands clutching her mug.
“Your brother?”
Nick knew next to nothing about his late uncle who had perished in the Great War. They still took trips into the countryside every summer to visit with his widow, Nick's Aunt Enid.
Sarah smiled softly down at her tea.
“Yes. My baby brother. I wish you could have met him, Nicky. You remind me so much of him. He’s where you got all those freckles from”
Nick didn’t understand how they’d gotten to this point in the conversation. He’d thought his mother was confronting him about the love letter from Charlie, and now she seemed to be on a trip down memory lane.
“He had the biggest heart in the world. He was so sweet, and kind. Again much like you. He was a true romantic, really believed that people were fated to find one another. He found his great love after all. His name was Gregory”
Nick's jaw went slack, the tension that had been building there ever since his mother placed the letter on the table was instantly washed away by his surprise.
“But Aunt Enid-“
“Was his greatest of friends, and that’s what their marriage was. A friendship. She was such a comfort to him when Gregory fell ill. Then when he died well, I think Enid was the only thing holding Artie together for a long while there”
“So she knew that he was in love with someone else and she married him anyway?”
Sarah's sad smile turned wistful.
“Edie has her own great love, and after she got her heart broken well, she decided she was done. So she and Artie kept each other company all those years. It’s why I fuss over her. I worry about her out there on the farm alone but she won’t leave. It was their home”
“What happened to Edie’s love? Did they-” Nick's heart was hammering in his chest, he could hardly believe what he was hearing.
“Oh, she’s very much alive. She and her husband have three children. They live in Gloucestershire”
Nick felt as if his chest had been cracked open, so strong was his sympathy for his Aunt, who had always been so exceedingly sweet and giving with him.
Sarah reached across the table, offering her hand palm up and prompting her son to take it.
“My brother loved who he loved and I never thought anything less of him for it. In fact, it only made me admire him more. Baby-”
Sarah squeezed her son's hand.
“The only thing I care about is that you're a good man. The kind I raised you to be. The man you are. I love you no matter what”
Nick felt a sob burst forward out of his chest. Sarah hurried around the table, pulling her younger son into her arms.
“It’s ok baby” she soothes, running her fingers through his hair the way she had when he was small.
“I promise it’ll all be ok” She pressed a kiss to the side of his head before speaking again.
“So Charlie?”
“I love him” Nick got out between ragged sobs, his body may be almost twice the size of his mother's but Nick curled into her, grabbing at the back of her shirt like a child holding onto their mother's skirt so as to not get lost in the shops.
The next hour or so was spent in the sitting room, Sarah sitting on one side of their sofa, Nick's head in her lap. Nick's body was too long to fit length-wise on the sofa so he curled his knees in, facing away from his mum while he did his best to explain what he was feeling and how long he’d been feeling it.
“You don’t have to say you like girls if you don't,” Sarah reassured when Nick started talking about the crushes he had had on girls from town or from his primary to school.
“I do though. I just ... .love Charlie” More tears fell from his eyes, soaking into the fabric of his mother's skirt.
“Are you missing him?”
“All the time” Nick's voice came out in a hoarse whisper, thick from all the tears he’d shed.
“I’ve got an idea”
This was how a few weeks later, Charlie boarded a train from his home in Kent into London. When Nick saw Charlie step off the train and onto the platform, he’d wanted to bound over and sweep the younger boy into his arms, spinning him around before kissing Charlie like he’d been dreaming of doing the entire summer.
Instead, very conscious of all the other individuals milling around on the platform, Nick strolled casually toward Charlie, extending his hand for Charlie to shake. When his love's hand landed in his, Nick felt the familiar spark that had drawn him to Charlie in the first place.
Charlie squeezed Nick’s hand as he shook it, trying to put the words he couldn’t say into the simple friendly gesture.
“I’m glad you could come” Nick had been aiming for a casual tone, but it had come out breathy with relief as if he had taken his first proper inhalation of air since they’d been parted.
“Thank you for inviting me” Charlie replied, still shaking Nick’s hand, although he probably should have let go by now for appearance's sake.
Charlie had hardly been able to believe the words he read in the letter Nick had sent him, extending an invitation from his mother for Charlie to come to London for a week and stay with him in the Nelson household.
Char,
Mum knows. I’ll explain later. She was really…great about it. She wants to meet you. She wants to know you. To know us. Mum is writing your parents to invite you to stay with us for a week. A week! I miss you so much every part of my body aches. It's just a little less knowing you might be here soon.
Love always,
Nick
Nick plucked Charlie’s case out of his hand and gestured for the younger boy to follow him. Rather than change platforms or head out onto the street as Charlie expected, Nick seemed to be leading him further into the station.
Confused, Charlie followed without question, figuring Nick knew what he was doing. Nick weaved between the crowd until they ducked into a small dimly lit hallway, before darting sideways into what appeared to be a broom cupboard. Nick pulled Charlie inside and pushed the door closed behind them, pressing Charlie’s back against the door. Charlie let out a laugh, unable to control himself.
“Nick! What are you-”
But before Charlie could finish his sentence, Nick was kissing him, long and deep, hands in Charlie’s hair and on his waist.
Charlie pushed up onto the tips of his toes, wrapping his arms around the back of Nick’s neck and hanging off of his beau, lost in the feeling of closeness that he’d been lacking for the long weeks they’d spent apart.
“I’ve missed you so much” Nick murmured into Charlie’s mouth, lost in the feeling of holding Charlie against him again.
“Love” Charlie sighed into Nick, leaning closer against him “I’ve missed you just as much”
Nick kissed him again, nearly forgetting their surroundings. Charlie finally remembered himself, turning his face away from Nick so that the other boy's lips caught on his cheek rather than his lips.
“We shouldn’t do this here” Charlie gasped, not wanting Nick to stop despite the words coming out of his mouth.
“I know, I know” Nick's head fell so that his forehead rested again on Charlie’s shoulder.
“I couldn’t help myself”
“Neither could I” Charlie confessed, taking Nick's hand and squeezing it tightly in his grasp.
“We should go. Mum is dying to meet you” Nick gave Charlie’s hand a last squeeze before letting it drop from his grasp.
Nick left the cupboard first, making sure the coast was clear before opening the door for Charlie to follow.
……………….
Charlie had been terrified to meet Nick’s mother, but he should have known that someone as sweet and incredible as Nick could only have come from a woman equally as wonderful.
He still found it a little hard to believe that Sarah Nelson was so accepting of her son being in a relationship with another boy. Charlie’s parents hadn’t even muttered the word homosexual since that despicable doctor had first mentioned it to them in connection with his other ‘afflictions’.
His mother did read a passage from the first testament of the bible each night after dinner, many of which focused on the punishment that would befall sinners, and on more than one occasion over the past several weeks Charlie had been positive that he’d caught Jane looking directly at him when she’d made mention of hellfire.
Sarah on the other hand had welcomed Charlie into her home with open arms and a wide smile. She’d made up her older son's bedroom with fresh sheets for him, but never made mention of the noise she no doubtedly heard when Nick or Charlie snuck across the hallway each night so they could fall asleep in one another's arms.
They’d never done anything more than sleep or share a few kisses, not wanting to disrespect Sarah after she’d been so generous to them, but unable to fall asleep alone when they knew that the other was only a few feet away across the hall.
“I wasn’t sure my parents were going to let me come” Charlie had confessed one night as he lay with his cheek against Nick’s chest, the rest of the city having long since gone to bed.
“Why not?” Nick ran his fingers through Charlie’s curls, the action so calming that it could almost lull Charlie off to sleep if the topic of his parents hadn’t been weighing so heavily on his mind.
“I think they…suspect something. About me. About you and me” He clarified.
“Why do you say that?” Nick reiterated, placing a finger under Charlie’s chin and tilting his face up so that they were able to look one another in the eye.
“They made comments last summer. About how much we were writing to one another, and back then it was only once a week. Now it’s nearly every day. I kept your letters locked up but I once walked in on my mother holding the post up to the light, trying to read what was inside”
“And they still let you come?”
Charlie chuckled slightly.
“I think they just wanted Olly home. They send him off to my grandmother any time I’m back from school. I’m already damned to hell, but they still have a chance with him”
“I don’t believe that for a second”
“Nick”
“I mean it. Any god worth believing in wouldn’t see you for anything less than an angel”
“You’re such a sap” Charlie swatted at Nick’s hand on his chest but Nick only reiterated his feelings.
“Char, you’re the most incredible person I’ve ever met. My life is infinitely better from having known you. You make me a better man just from being around you. Any god who can’t see that is no god of mine. The god I know sees you for what you are. Perfect”
“I’m far from perfect Nick”
“You’re perfect for me” Nick whispered, pressing a kiss into the mess of Charlie’s curls pulling him closer so that they might fall asleep encapsulated in one another’s embrace.
….
Sarah had shown Nick and Charlie pictures of her younger brother Arthur, both alone, with herself and their family, and with his ‘best friend’ Gregory.
“They were just as close as the two of you” Sarah had said with a knowing smile as she patted the top of Charlie’s hand as she passed him the photo of her brother and his ‘special friend’
Nick smiled across the table at his mother and his beau, heart swelling in his chest at the sight of his two favourite people pouring over photos over cups of tea and bright smiles. As Nick looked down at the photo of his Uncle Aurther, arm slung around his friend turned great love, Nick wondered if his and Charlie’s future might end up looking something like that and if it did, that it might have a happier ending.
Of course, Nick nor Charlie had no way of knowing what was coming on the horizon. Had no way of knowing what was brewing across the continent, of the whispers from the east of trouble approaching. That the truces and agreements made between nations would be cracked and fractured as easily as the shell of an egg. Charlie was so wrapped up in his love for Nick that even if the words had been splashed across the front of the newspaper he’d have never known that a battle to rival the great war was fast approaching and would have the power to tear Nick and Charlie apart, separated by land and sea, wondering each day if the other would be taken from them forever.