A/N: IDEK? I make no apologies for the cheesiness of the title. I'm by no means an expert in the effects of chlorine exposure, 1950s swimming pools, or first aid procedures, so please suspend your disbelief with me, and definitely don't try this at home.
"Pass the sugar would you Charlie." To Charlie's knowledge, the Doc has made no move to ever demonstrate to anyone currently in the realm of the living whether he inherited any of his mother's rather impressive artistic talent, so he suspects he should feel rather flattered by the startling sight currently before his eyes.
And he would, if he could see anything beyond a vague blur of what might be blue just as much as it might be orange or purple.
Charlie carefully crab walks his fingers across the table towards where he heard Blake place something that he's pretty sure was sugar a few minutes before, moving as slow as the cooling molasses at his elbow to ensure nothing spills. He's already wrecked Mrs. Beazley's good tablecloth twice this week.
He's not entirely sure why Blake's in the kitchen, but he joined Charlie sometime around the end of his first week back home, around the time Charlie refused to stop baking his tenth soufflé of the day, and hasn't really left since. That was almost another whole week ago.
Charlie suspects Munro is currently throwing a party with Bill Hobart somewhere, but since the bastards are more than partly the reason a simple raid turned into a mad chase that ended in an exploding swimming pool of all things, and since said chain of events has more or less ended his career for good at the present moment, he privately hopes they choke on the balloons.
Charlie locates the sugar around the time the latest batch of baking is ready to remove from the oven, which means it took him roughly six minutes to successfully navigate the Doc's minefield of fragile backing accoutrements, but somehow, Charlie's face splits into a grin wide enough to nearly crack his jaw bone.
And somehow, he knows, across a sea of murky greyness, kitchen table and icing, the Doc's smile is equally as wide, glowing brighter than the foggiest day could ever conceal.
CBCB
Somewhere, someone is screaming. Loudly. Vaguely, Charlie registers in a far off corner of his mind that it is he who is screaming. He hadn't known anyone could scream quite that loudly.
Charlie had hated public bathing pools as a kid, for reasons that are too vague and choking to really recall anything except the vivid aftertaste of chlorine. He never quite forgets the taste.
He stands it just long enough growing up to become an adequately competent swimmer, then promptly abandons any further attempts to ever enter chlorinated water again.
It's a valiant effort, one that succeeds for a good number of years.
Like many things in Charlie's life these days, Blake is the one who blows the whole thing to pieces around his best intentions.
To be fair, nobody expected their suspect to make a bolt for it. Suspect is a rather superfluous description by the time the man rabbits out the door, having waited around long enough to make a full confession before suddenly running scared through a rather wide hole in the police presence backing them up. And there's the start of that wish for Munro and Hobart's deaths via party decorations right there, as Charlie pounds out the back of the shop they'd confronted their double murderer in.
And to be equally fair, nobody, not even the "suspect" had the foggiest idea that the pool building they charge blindly into was closed for repairs. And, while they hardly stopped to check the signage on the way in, Blake still manages to win a more than sizeable lawsuit on Charlie's behalf against the building owners, for criminal negligence among other things. Charlie never pays much attention to any of that, he's far too out of it at the time to even remotely care, but he later wonders where the defense found a lawyer stupid enough to try to represent them in court. Who leaves an unrepaired chlorine leak exposed to the open air for an entire week because the repair bills were too expensive?
The doors hadn't even been locked.
Because life is ironic like that, the "suspect" misses the leak entirely. Charlie blunders right into it. Somehow, in the tangle of falling arms and legs that follows, he gets a face and lung full of the stuff.
He doesn't really have a lot of time to process the burning, too preoccupied with screaming, something which he is always grateful for, and god only knows where the rather lucky "suspect" went.
Charlie doesn't know how long it takes the Doc to reach him, although when he's coherent enough to think about it logically, taking into account how short a distance Blake was behind him, he suspects it was a matter of rather less than a minute.
Still, the length of time between crashing onto the pool deck prone and screaming to being propelled backwards into the pool behind him always feels like an eternity in his memory.
Charlie doesn't remember who first took him in a pool, his father would be the logical answer but he's more than reasonably sure that's incorrect, because somehow being submerged in six feet of water with Lucien Blake's hands carefully forcing his head to remain under the surface, his lungs burning with something besides oxygen deprivation, his eyes whole new levels of on fire, thrashing madly against the Doc's hasty attempt at make-do first aid, the kind that saves your life but is neither pretty nor remotely painless or even vaguely humane at times, that is the closest he's ever gotten to swimming with someone there to guide him. To help him. To save him.
CBCB
Charlie doesn't remember much about waking up in the hospital. Mattie has to tell him he's in the hospital at all, because somehow, over the pervasive, burning odour of chlorine cloying against every sense like an inescapable fog, the strongest thing he registers is the smell of Mrs. Beazley's baking.
There's something wrong with that.
It isn't until he wakes up for the second time that he remembers it's that Mrs. Beazley is still in Adelaide.
It isn't until he wakes up for the second time that he realizes the firm hand carding through his hair, soothing his cough starved chest into a more comfortable position on the starchy pillows is slightly too strong and kind to be anyone but Blake's.
It isn't until he wakes up for the third time that he's awake long enough to realize that the reason he had to identify Blake by the feel of his touch, is because he can no longer see the blue of his suit.
It isn't until he wakes up for the fourth time that he realizes he can't really see anything at all.
CBCB
Blake brings a different flavour of cupcakes every time he comes to visit Charlie. Or more accurately, every time he leaves precisely for two hours on every second day, he returns promptly two hours later with a freshly smelling presumable tray full of baked goods.
It takes Charlie three weeks to be able to breath well enough on his own to eat much in the way of solid food, and a further three before the coughing lets up for long enough periods at any one time to allow the Doc to gently sneak bits of icing clad fluffy dough into his mouth.
Licking crumbled sprinkles off the edge of his mouth, Blake's fingers lingering protectively on his chin, Charlie lets his head flop to the side and slowly breathes out the first truly non-shallow breath he's taken since coming up for air after his impromptu swim courtesy of the Doc's insanely fast response time in any kind of unforeseeable crisis.
Charlie had been in Ballarat for precisely seven months when his birthday had rolled around, and he had passed his twenty-sixth birthday the same way he had the precious nineteen, quietly blowing out a single candle on a single cupcake at precisely seven minutes passed ten in the evening, alone in his room, blowing out the candle at the mark of the eighth minute, watching the wax slowly congeal around the red sprinkles until the cupcake is as cold as the floor beneath his bent knees.
He allows himself a single whisper of bitterness before moving to clean up the mess as if it had never been there in the first place. "I hate red."
He doesn't seen Blake at all the next day, which is a real corker, capped off rather eloquently with Lawson insisting he stay an extra two hours to retype Hobart's typically shabby case reports.
It's nearly ten past ten by the time Charlie dragged himself through the deserted house to his room, and he's taken three unusually squishy steps before he truly registers the smell.
His bedroom is literally covered in cupcakes, decorated rather precisely in sprinkles in almost every colour Charlie can think of. Seriously, his pillow is adorned with yellow blobs, his desk covered in a carpet of orange, and his shoes have a suspiciously sticky pink tint from where he's ploughed blindly through the door. And that should probably be his catchphrase or something.
It takes Charlie a further two hours to clear enough space to actually go to bed, and the entire house pretty much eats cupcakes for nearly every meal for about the next week, but Charlie sits down at breakfast the next morning with a face that's deliberately stained blue with icing from eyebrows down, ignoring Mattie's literal jaw drop and Mrs. Beazley's smothered smile in favour of casually leaning around Blake for the toast, timing his only comment on the whole cupcake as carpet incident as precisely as he butters the toast he has just acquired with orange tinted fingertips.
"Good try Doc, but you left out my favourite colour."
Blake chokes on his tea rather spectacularly, but somewhere amongst the coughing and back patting, Charlie swears he hears a faint "damn."
He suspects the sentiment has nothing to do with the rather obvious green handprints Charlie's patting leaves on the back of his suit jacket.
Allowing the sugary lumps to melt on his tongue, Charlie carefully times his way through a cough, spraying crumbs into Blake's supportive shoulder for precisely a minute before swallowing a slightly sugar and chlorine tasting ball of saliva and fastening unfocused eyes on the slight blur of shape seated to his right.
"Mauve, really Doc?"
Blake never verbalizes whether Charlie's supposed remarkable ability to suddenly taste colour is even remotely accurate, but his gusty sighs are enough to tell Charlie more than his eyes ever could.
CBCB
Breathing is a chore these days, even in the calmest weather, a never ending battle between choking and coughing, every respiration tanging sharply of chlorine as it passes his burning nostrils and deflates from his scarred lungs.
Every fresh gulp of oxygen burns worse than the last.
Blake takes him to the beach for the first time three days after he gets out of the hospital.
He stands at Charlie's back in two inches of water, spray flicking into their faces, salt heavy in the stormy air. He takes more and more of Charlie's weight as the wind steals more and more of his diminished lung capacity.
Charlie's gasping like a fish in air by the time they finally turn away, taking in great gulps of air that for one glorious moment tastes of nothing but salt and sea spray.
CBCB
Charlie blinks slowly at the cupcake dangling from his fingers, waits for a moment, then pops it into his mouth. He's still not sure if the Doc inherited his mother's artistic talent even a smidgeon, but Mrs. Beazley's cooking lessons sure paid off.
These cupcakes are bloody fantastic.
Charlie hears a gentle chuckle somewhere beyond his right shoulder, turning instinctively towards the sound.
It's brief, gone in an instant, vanishing into the grey world he's never quite gotten used to, but for just a moment, for just a moment, he could have sworn.
"Doc, are you wearing purple?" Charlie's incredulity actually has more to do with the clothing choice than his sudden brief ability to see anything beyond a grey smog. And because he's logically illogical like that, the first thing he registers about Blake's attempt to hug the breath right out of his lungs is rather predictable.
"We're squishing the cupcakes Doc."
Apparently a crushing embrace actually means yes, I am wearing purple, because all he gets in response is a full belly laugh that shakes right through Blake's diaphragm into Charlie's chest.
The icing squelches alarmingly against the Doc's waistcoat, and a brief glance tells Charlie that apparently Blake loves green icing, and suddenly the Doc's not the only one laughing hard enough to shake them right down to their colliding toes, because he loves it too.
Charlie never does quite regains enough sight to find out what kind of artistic talent the Doc inherited, but those cupcakes remain the best thing he's seen tasted in his whole entire life.
He never quite tells the Doc that he guessed correctly either, but every cupcake the Doc ever makes after that has some connection to the colour green on it, so he figures that some things can just be left unsaid.
CBCB
The evening of Charlie's twenty-seventh birthday, he comes home from a predictably late and deserted shift to find roughly a thousand cupcakes crammed into Blake's studio, the Doc artfully bookended between Jean and Lawson, Mattie at his feet, like elegant center pieces on a green carpet of icing and flour.
It's probably the cheesiest thing anyone's every done in the history of Ballarat. Charlie could swear it's the most beautiful sight he's ever seen.