A/N: I usually try to keep my notes as brief as possible but I think I need to preface this fic a little bit. This fic does not come from a place of malice and isn't meant to throw shade at people who write/enjoy the traditional soulmate au (Hell, I've written a traditional soulmate au for Marshall/Simon) it's just an exploration of elements that people don't always include or do include but done elaborate on. Secondly, I didn't realize this until editing, but this fic is NOT meant to imply that Charlie is leaving a ''gay'' relationship for a ''straight'' one, or that x type of relationship is better than y. If my name wasn't a dead giveaway, I always write Charlie as bisexual and this fic is no different. As per usual, feel free to leave a review if you liked it (or didn't) and uh, see you all around. I know I've been absent lately but I've been working on something I promise.

In the yellow half-light of the room, he could see almost everyone there. Seated on folding chairs in a little circle, they were a perfectly cliché image and exactly what he thought he'd see. Most of them he recognized from around town. Some of them were sipping tea from chipped cups, others were holding hands. A few had pins he remembered seeing Mattie wear. It's hard to bring up the words when all these eyes are on him, seeing if he's worthy of being here. No one was wearing gloves, every soul mark in the room was on display.

He also didn't see any fleshtape, which was interesting. Fleshtape was (aside from being exactly what it sounds like) generally considered the bare minimum for polite company. He wore it under his police issue gloves. Actually, speaking of, he hated those things. They covered the back of his hand, with a strap that went around his palm, and if he was being honest, was not especially comfortable or useful. Even Mattie, for all her defiance usually put the adhesive strip of skin coloured bandage over the back of her hands at home. Soulmate marks were a private thing, but here, they weren't. He put the backs of his hands against his trousers, suddenly feeling very, very exposed.

"Uh, hello, everyone." He began, trying not to let how nervous he was make his voice waver. He let out a long breath before barrelling on. "My name is Charlie, and uh, I'm sure you all saw me in the paper a couple of years ago when I married into the Tyneman family." The crowd chatters slightly among themselves. Behind him, Mattie reached out and put a comforting hand on the small of his back, the only thing he could do in this situation. The leader, Alice, speaks up

"Let the boy speak!" She insisted, and everyone settled down a little. All eyes that had been elsewhere seemed to be on him for sure, the air was so thick you could cut it and the light seemed to have halved. He felt like he was sinking into a giant tub of molasses."We're not here to judge you." Alice told him, "I promise." He'd never considered her a particularly warm person before but suddenly he could see her as an older sister. He cleared his throat and continued.

"I met my…Soulmate and now husband when I was undercover on the job. Uh, I'm a police officer. I met him, while I was undercover on the job and I did the right thing." He got a couple of odd looks. "Or, what I thought was the right thing. I told my family, and his family picked out a date for us to get married. There was a bit of a stir because I'm pretty sure it was the first homosexual marriage in Ballarat in over a decade. We had to have our marks verified by three or maybe it was four different priests –" He had to stop and breath. Mattie's had is firm and warm. Alice keeps looking at him, but he has to look away. He took another deep breath and let it out.

"Any-Anyway. I didn't really want to get married, because I believed that I wanted to marry someone I loved and we were just too different. I told everyone I could think of. My mother told me that I'd learn to love him, my brother told me that I should be happy to marry into money, my best friend told me that it was just the way things are. I asked my landlady, who I considered a reliable source of information on this sort of thing and she told me, Catholic to Catholic that it was Gods will." He paused again. He got a few sympathetic looks. "No one even suggested that I shouldn't go through with it, well, on person did but I suppose I just wrote her off as a radical non-conformist." He can't help his rueful smile. "So I got married, I did what I was meant to do. It was and still is, miserable. I've tried, God knows I've tried to make it work. I wanted to believe in soulmates. I wanted to so badly."

"Obviously, it didn't work." Someone prompted.
"No, it didn't. I put up with it, focused on my work and I did okay for a while. But when he brought someone else into our marital bed…I had an absolutely agonizing realization."
"Which was?" Someone prompted.
"I was happier without my soulmate." It felt, very suddenly like a hundred stones had lifted up off of his chest. Like maybe, just maybe, he could climb up out of this tub and find air. The chatter resumed. Charlie stood and waited for quiet.
"Thank you for listening." He said, lowering himself back into his seat. By tomorrow, this was going to be on the front page of every paper and Edward was going to be humiliated. His heart skipped a beat at the very thought.

Mattie put one of her hands on his leg, in an attempt to offer comfort. He lowered his hand over the top of hers. Someone else was already speaking, their story was much sadder than Charlie's about death and rebirth. Following that, they were all given pins which read 'Master of my Own Fate'. Then, they got down to business.

The first order of business was apparently an update about a petition to legalize soulmate divorces. A few eyes strayed to Charlie. He wasn't sure he'd leave Edward even if he could, despite the hurt and the anger he couldn't deny the pull of it. The safety net. In life, he has three constants: death, taxes, Edward driving him around the bend. Having a dead soulmate was one thing. To willingly turn away from one? Social and career suicide.

Well, he was committing social suicide as it was. But he was bringing Edward down with him. A divorce would be different, final. Great revelations aside, Charlie didn't want to be divorced, his mother would never forgive him, let alone the church. He didn't want to be here, he didn't want to be there either. Lucky for him, it didn't seem like there was going to be any major changes to the status quo in the near future. People are set in their ways and that's the way that they like it here and everywhere else.

Not to mention that Edward would never consent to a divorce, not if it meant making Charlie happy. There really was no winning for him in a situation like this. But for just one, shining moment, Edward was going to be humiliated. Small victories are the only thing in his future, that and much of the same.

…

Mattie dropped four papers onto the kitchen table in front of him the following morning after being called out in the earlier-er hours before. He'd arrived on the Blake doorstep a while ago, looking for sanctuary the way someone else might look for a church.
"You're all over the news." She said, excitedly. "Edward must have been furious!" Jean gave her a dry look from over a cup of tea. She didn't seem to share Mattie's free choice ideals.

"Oh, he was." Charlie grinned, turning to face her. She gasped, having caught sight of his bloody lip and black eye. Edward had been mad indeed, but not as mad as Mrs. Tyneman. God, it felt good to cause some damage to their name. "He was even madder when I came to breakfast wearing one of those pins from the meeting." Mattie laughed excitedly and fell into the seat next to him.
"You didn't!"
"Of course I did, you should have seen his face, I thought he was going to pop!" "I'll leave you too to it," Jean said, standing up and turning her back on him. Charlie rolled his eyes and turned to look at Mattie, not able to stop himself from smiling. She smiled back.

"I told you that you'd enjoy it." She insisted, "You did enjoy it, didn't you?"
"This has been the best thing to happen to me in the last two years," Charlie said, seriously. He looked down at the papers, though none were especially flattering, some showed pictures of him from work, some from old newspapers, one of his identification. One curiously had a picture of the meeting, but he hadn't noticed anyone with a camera. Actually, he hadn't noticed anything at all. Mattie noticed him looking and said

"Alice promised to get rid of whoever sold this picture." She said, turning it upside down.
"You think someone was spying?"
"Probably, it's a bit of a hot topic at the moment. Did you put anything on that bruise?"
"It's probably a bit late now." Mattie got up anyway and retrieved something from the fridge, Charlie chose not to think about what it was. She put it down on top of his eye and paused to run a hand over his split lip. He looked up at her, and she was beautiful. She was always beautiful, but it always managed to hit him like a ton of bricks.

"Will you humour me if I say something to you that may be considered blasphemous?" Mattie flicked one eyebrow and then nodded. "I think that I understand what God wants from me."
"That is a scandalous thing to say. What do you think God wants from you?"
"I think that Edward is my perfect match, and I'm supposed to make him into a good man."
"Why so?"
"Because I care. God help us all, I care about him."
"He treats you like shit."
"Oh, and I didn't notice that?" Pause, "Sorry, I didn't mean that."
"It's fine."
"No, it's not fine. I shouldn't be taking it out on you. I just-What I was trying to say is that, logically, I have to care."
"You don't have to do anything, that's what I've been trying to tell you."
"Not like that. I have to care about him, about our marriage because if I didn't, then why would I care if he's sleeping with other people? If I didn't care, wouldn't I just take the money and ignore it? Why does it hurt, to know that he doesn't think I'm enough if I never wanted to be enough, to begin with? So I figure it has to be me. I have to do something to make this tenable."

Mattie doesn't say anything, just stood there, hand on his face looking down at him. She is wearing gloves, the hospital sort. Plain white with a band around her wrist and the top of her palm. Almost identical to his. She doesn't usually wear gloves unless she's working. Charlie usually doesn't take his off, but he didn't really think to grab them before leaving the Tyneman house, Lucien gave him Fleshtape to wear until he went home. They'll always be like this. She'll always be there and he'll be right here where she left him.

"But I don't want to."
"You shouldn't have too." Mattie agreed, "But why tell me? You've got a priest, haven't you?"
"Because I need you to know why we can't."
"Can't what?"
"Do this."
"Charlie…"
"No. This is my problem. I won't drag you into it, and I won't make you an adulteress either."
"You're not making me into anything, didn't you pay attention last night?"
"Of course I did."
"Then you know that I'm choosing for myself and I'm choosing you."
"No, you're not."
"Why, then?"
"Because it's my choice too. My life, my fate, my choices."
"So you're picking Edward, over me, who loves you?"
"I guess so." Mattie doesn't give up, just like she didn't give up dragging him to that meeting.
"We could be happy. I don't remember the last time I saw you happy."
"We could be. You could also be happy with your soulmate."
"Only fifty percent of the population meet their soulmate."
"And what if you're part of it, but tied to me?"
"Then I'd pick you. I'm picking you right now, and I intend to keep picking you." For a moment, Charlie considers kissing her. Edward has had affairs, what would it matter if Charlie gave in just this once?

He knows why. Because it's not a spur of the moment affair. He's not drunk. Well, he is, but not on alcohol. He's drunk on Mattie O'Brien and how much he wants to be around her. If he gave in and kissed Mattie O'Brien, he'd never be able to go back to this life, this pre-kissing Mattie O'Brien life. He'd want to be with her forever. This is not possible – He's married. There's no way he could hold her hand or take her out. She deserved more.

"You deserve more."
"I don't want more. I want to try. With you."
"I'm married."
"I don't care."

He kissed her. His carefully constructed floor broke under the weight of all his longing and he was back in the molasses. He doesn't believe that people have a taste when they kiss. Mostly they just taste like the last thing they ate, Edward tasted like licking an ashtray, Beatrice tasted like wine, Mattie tastes hot, wet and a little like tea. She smells like chemical flowers and a hint of soap.

He pulls away and realized he was standing and the thing on his eye had fallen onto the floor. Neither of them picks it up, they just stood still. There's no coming back from this. They're in it now. He's struck by that feeling of sinking into molasses again. He isn't this person. He is this person, now.

"Charlie?" She asked, breaking the silence.
"Hm?"
"Stop thinking like that and take me upstairs. I want to lie down with you for a while."

And he does, Edward be damned.