A.N: here we are again. I've gone and done something gay lmao. Warnings: child abuse spousal abuse , period typical homophobia/internalized homophobia period typical racism. I wrote a lot of lines in this fic that made me die slightly inside. This is ALL from Bill's perspective, so that's why some characters are a bit ooc, because I tried to write them as I imagine Bill sees them. One day I will write actual Bill/Munro in its on fic, probably.
Bill Hobart's first memory, as much as he can tell, is when he's four. He's sitting on the stairs, watching his mother get a thrashing from his father. He has his elbows on his knees, and his small hands on his little face, watching. He's not sure what to make of it. He doesn't even understand the permanence of the whole situation.
He thinks, lying in his bed, that if she'd simply done as he'd asked then surely, surely, this wouldn't have happened, would it? It doesn't really matter. She doesn't stay around much longer anyway. She walks away from the family when he's five.
She kisses his forehead with her soft lips, and he looks into her one open eye, the other is swollen shut. She seems sad to him. He's five, but. He doesn't know better. He holds her hand to the door the way he always has and when she gets into the car with a suitcase he doesn't stop her. She drives away, and he's left holding onto what was left of her perfume in his lungs.
It's also the first night his father hits him and one thought rolls around in his head that night, while he lay in his bed, his face toward the roof: He deserved it.
…
Bill Hobart first realizes what kind of boy he is when he's thirteen. All his mates talk about girls. Breasts and hips. A warm feeling in their stomach when they look at them. Bill takes it all in. He supposes that he must also like girls because anyone who didn't (according to his best mate Tommy) was a faggot, and they deserved to die. He supposes he doesn't want to die therefore he cannot be a faggot. He tells his mates that he likes girls with curly hair and that Jenny Sanders from two houses down is the woman he would like to be married too.
He doesn't tell them about the warm pit of his stomach when he sits in the locker room and changes with the other boys. He doesn't tell them about the magazines where he hovers over the pictures of men. He certainly doesn't tell them about how he blushed for an hours after his knees touched the knee of another boy on the bus.
He first kisses a girl when he's fourteen. He kisses her because that's what he was meant to do and he's not a faggot and he kisses Jenny Sanders from two houses down. Jenny Sanders says that she thinks he's really handsome. Bill would disagree with her. His nose is too big and he has a mole that he hates on his face but she tells him he's handsome and she's easily the prettiest girl in the street so he doesn't tell her she's wrong At the time, he thought he was being kind.
He looks just like his father. His father doesn't much like that. Bill sat across from him at the table, while he picked at the food Bill had provided. He was already slightly drunk. It was a bad day if he was drunk before seven. Bill cleans up alone. He thinks of Tommy, who never had to clean up, who had a mum who did all this womens work for him. He wishes his father would just remarry already.
He's nursing a black eye that night, trying to work out long division when he wonders what it would be like to kiss a boy. If it would be like kissing a girl. If he would have soft lips. If his nose would bend under his. If his hands would grip onto Bill's arms. Bill doesn't know. More disturbingly: He wants to. He abandons long division in favour of a cold shower, because that's what he thought he should do about these sorts of thoughts, because he was no fucking faggot. At least, the rest of the world was going to be convinced he wasn't. He was sure of it.
The first boy he ever kisses is named Jimmy. Short for James. He has blonde hair and green eyes. He's not very beautiful, or much of a looker but he's fine enough for a highschool romance Bill thinks. They kiss in the locker rooms after school, inside the showers. No one else is there to see them. He tastes like sweat and soap. He puts one hand in Bill's hair to steady himself on the slippery tiles. Bill lets him. They kiss and kiss and kiss some more until Bill stops it because he won't allow himself to be swept away by this right now. He tells Jimmy that they'll see each other some other time but now he has to go.
And go he does. Right into the arms of Jenny Sanders from two houses down. He takes her out to a dance that night, and they spin the in the lights, her skirt spins up and around as their bodies twist back and fourth to the pounding beat of the drums. Bill can't dag his eyes of the main singer, he's tall and beautiful with a solid jaw and well shaped lips. Jenny Sanders from two houses down kisses another boy when she thinks Bill doesn't know. Bill lets her.
His father is drunk when he gets home. He tells Bill stories about his time on the force. Bill thinks that his father is good, he has to be, if he's a police man. He decides then and there that he wants to be a police man as well. That he has to be, that if he's a police man, he'll be cured of any and all of his unnatural perversions.
He lay in bed, that night, thinking about Jimmy's lips and the slide of their bodies and he wishes with all his heart that he'd allowed for it to go further. He never saw Jimmy again after that day, but he heard rumours from an older boy named Matthew that he was sent off to Melbourne for being a homofile, that he had dozens of boys that he'd contaminated. Fair is fair, he supposes, he didn't even want to be the first choice of an unnatural faggot anyway. (even though he did, more then anything. He wanted to be someone's first choice so bad.)
The next boy he kisses is called Abraham. Well, that's not the name he was born with, but that's the name they gave him at the orphanage. He has skin the same colour as the trees that he used to sit under while he watched the boys play cricket, asking if he too could play. He had eyes like swirling pools of night, warm and comforting and no father in sight.
He met the other boy also watching the cricket. They're friends at first, Abraham is more knowledgeable on cricket then he ever was. It doesn't take them long to strike up a friendship, one they have to keep hidden, not that Bill has anyone looking for him and would care, and the nun's don't care but Abraham doesn't want to be lynched, so they keep it between them.
They kiss for the first time near the cricket pitch, hidden among the trees, no one looking. It's soft. The second kiss is harder. The third the hardest yet, an almost violent press of skin to skin, the sort that had him gasping, hands trying to find something occupy himself with. Abraham has lips that taste like the cigarettes they just smoked, and he craves them.
Their fourth kiss is in his bed after school, and it's not as much of a kiss as it is a bite, from him. They're clumsy, as teenagers often are. Untrained. Uncomfortable. But he still loves it. Skin to skin. Lip to lip. The sheets rumple, his hair is messed. He doesn't care. He only cares about the lips he's kissing, and the feeling that fills his stomach.
It's also that afternoon when his father finds them, thankfully, not naked, and thankfully not kissing. Bill is able to hurry him out of the house before his father can react. Bill knows the drill by now. He's seventeen, and he was hanging around with a coloured boy. This situation could be remedied, he tells himself, but if they were found in bed then he is sure his father would have killed the both of them.
Later, he's barely able to drag himself up from the floor and into his bed. His breath is little more then an uncomfortable wheeze, his ribs ache, one of his eyes is in the process of swelling shut. His other eye hasn't fared much better. Everyone at school knows what happens here, but no one is going to file a complaint against his father the senior sergeant of the Ballarat police station. He just has to take it.
He does, somehow, make it up the stairs and into his bed. He wishes he didn't change the sheets. He hasn't even taken his clothes off, he can't, he doesn't have the strength. Lying there, he had a realization. Abraham wasn't safe around him. Couldn't be safe around him. He wasn't safe himself, so how could he be expected to look after someone else. He realizes, in dismay, that he's going to have to become like everyone else now. He silently adds words to his vernacular he'd never had there before, ones Abraham tells him not to say.
The next day, at school. He tells everyone how much he hates the 'darkies' (especially his best mate Tommy) and gets himself a place on the cricket team. Abraham tells him that he's just like all the other white people in this town, who take take take and never give. Bill can't fault him on that one. Lying in bed that night, he wonders if he's truly as bad as everyone else, if he's only playing pretend. He supposes in the end, they're both just as bad. He wonders if he's really doing this for Abraham, or if he's just scared of taking another beating. He doesn't much like the answer.
He keeps the act up for weeks, that turn into months and eventually Abraham stops trying. And, as with most things you tell yourself over and over and over again, Bill came to believe himself.
His following relationships, well, affairs, perhaps better put, all lasted a short time. He supposed he should follow the narrative his life was set for. Find a girl who wasn't looking for a movie star, marry her, and have a couple of kids. And he would have done that, probably around the time he was twenty five if his father hadn't died.
He died from cancer of the liver, something that Bill attributes to his drinking. (it's not enough to stop him, though. If anything, it spurs him on.). The funeral is not a large affair, but there's people there. Family members he hasn't seen in years. He hopes, in vain, that he will see his mother among the crowd, perhaps coming to spit on the corpse of the man who dragged her away from her son, but no such luck, really he should have expected it. But it still stings a little. His father had a little money in his will, which he leaves to him, for whatever reason. Bill's not even sure where it came from. They didn't have any rich family as far as he knows. Just bloody cops and train drivers. But it's enough for him to put down a deposit on a townhouse he likes, so he doesn't look a gift horse in the mouth.
He brings flowers to the grave monthly because he's a good son and that's what good sons did. Afterwards, he finds himself sitting at the bar at the Pig and Whistle becoming mates with the bar tender and thinking about his best mate Tommy who joined the army, and wondering if he wasn't better off joining him. He doesn't which is probably a good choice for him. After all: He's making a good name for himself in the force as having inherited his father's violent hand. Matthew Lawson just came back to town as well, now doing suitably well for himself. He takes a drag from his freshly lit cigarette, and sighs into his beer.
It's not very often he's faced with homosexuals during work hours, and frankly, he'd like to keep it that way. People assumed, because he had his father's hand he had his fathers views, and while he'd fought them at first, he learned something very quicky: They wanted a monster, and fine. He's not going to be in the way of a good show.
After he's done roughing Conelly up, he stands back, called back by no one other then Matthew himself. He's a better boss then he is a cricket player, Bill supposes. He's being told off for being too rough and he wants to say that Matthew doesn't mind him being rough with the people he dislikes. He wants to call him a hypocrite, but he doesn't. Because he does like his job, and being a firefighter doesn't pay well so this is the best he has.
Walking away from the cell he feels guilty for not defending him, for not speaking up, but not too guilty. Not guilty enough to change. He could, if he wanted to. Just to Matthew, tell him to lay off, tell him to stop talking about it, but more then guilty, he's relieved. He's glad it's not him because he knows that it damn well could be if he stopped being careful and let his guard down.
Following that, he has a series of small affairs, mostly with married men. None of them mean anything to him, romantically. At least, that's what he tells himself. He doesn't really know the first thing about Romance, that he knows for certain. He's not even sure he would trust himself to be romantic with someone, not with how his father was. He didn't want to inflict that kind of pain onto anyone, at least, he thinks that's what he wants.
Violence is second nature to him, like the blinkers on a car, or slicing meat. Same, same, same. It's a part of him that he can never quite sate, regardless of how many men lie on the cell floors, bruised and beat. He can't trust himself to simply find a girl and marry, he doesn't trust said girl not to walk out, and he doesn't trust himself to raise his son as something other then a disgusting unnatural homosexual like himself. But he'd come to terms with that, by now. He knows what sort of boy he is. He decided long ago to simply do the best that he could, and leave the rest in God's hands.
Ironically, it was Matthew Lawson who saved his ass. He got too comfortable with one of the men he was seeing, a married man who's marriage was collapsing and wanted a bit of fun. He lost his head, one night, and decided to inform the boss-man exactly what Bill did in his spare time, sending over the left 'Victoria Police' sheeth from his left shoulder. It has B Hobart embroidered into the back by his own hand.
He's never felt more humiliated in his life, no amount of thrashing, kissing boys or anything could possibly have prepared him for the feeling of sitting across from a man he liked, a man he respected, who was not even able to look him in the face. He manages to keep himself silent, and still, and listen, listen, listen. Matthew tells him that there's no where near enough to charge him, which is good, but it's not safe for him to be at this station, not while this is going on, that he thinks Bill should press defamation or slander charges, and he's being sent to Melbourne for the foreseeable future.
He should be pleased to not be charged with anything, and to have had his sheeth returned to him, but on the train, staring at the platform as it passed, all he feels is hollow and he knows that he cannot allow such weakness, never again. And this time, this time he means it.
This lasts as long as he was in Melbourne for. He doesn't seek out the company of other men. When asked why the transfer he tells them he's lived in Ballarat his whole life and he wants to go someplace new. When presented with an urge he ignores it, or he takes a cold shower. It's not a great life, but it's a safe life. He makes friends, among the other coppers. They respect him for his heavy handedness. He writes a letter to his best mate Tommy, who's married now and has three kids and they haven't spoken in years. He looks up his mother's maiden name. He causes distractions for himself. He goes out with a girl who thinks that he's attractive. He supposes he must be getting better. He gets seconded back to Ballarat.
His affair with Munro is as intense as it is short lived. He's not even sure exactly what it was that inspired the man to approach him. Perhaps something in his file. Perhaps he was just lucky. Lying in the aftermath of his ruined office, all he can do is breathe in, and then out. It's refreshing. Munro is lying next to him, equally as worn out. Neither of them have words. Munro tasted like toothpaste, and he smelled like fancy aftershave, the sort Bill looked at, determined he couldn't afford, and put back.
William Munro is a force of nature. He's a tornado, a cyclone and a tsunami all squeezed into the skin of one man. He's a raging inferno struggling to keep itself at bay. He's perfect. Together, they're dangerous. They're messy and violent. They tear offices and bedrooms alike apart with the force of it.
There's nothing heartfelt about it, and he likes it better this way. Mutually assured destruction. High stakes. Somehow that makes it better. There's a certain stillness to be found underneath it all, a quiet peace. Something good. Bill likes that the best, probably. It's not the sex that makes it great, it's the peace and silence after. The hand on his arm, their toes touching under the blankets. He doesn't ask about other lovers, because it's an open wound. William doesn't ask about his family because it's an open wound.
But it is what it is, and it was never going to be something long term. At first, he sides with Munro out of loyalty, if he was getting off with the guy, he supposed he should be on his side, but it didn't last long. Matthew Lawson came back and with his lapdog the new sergeant, the one snapping at his heels, they found a way to oust him.
Standing in that hallway, looking in on them, his eyes met with Matthews. Both of them looked at one another, and then he nodded, as if he was giving permission for what he was about to do. He turned his glance to Munro, who just looks stunned, and Bill Hobart does what he does best. He chooses himself, and moves on. And if he cried that night, for the loss of a relationship that was never even truly his, well then that was his business, never to be told to another soul.
Blake vanishes off the face of the earth after that, and Matthew is back to how he always was, and Bill finds his way back to how he was pre-Munro. It's more bitter tasting then he would expect, moving on. He visits his father's grave. He wonders about his mother. Time passes at a slow speed, so slow that he would swear he could hear every single tick of the second hand on his watch. All the friend's he'd had at the station are gone now, except for Ned. But Ned doesn't really like hanging around him, and fair enough. He's not a very pleasant man to be around. He's used to it, by now.
Charlie Davis doesn't seem to think so, because out of the blue, one after noon, he invited Bill to come to his place for tea. He has to stop and think, because if he takes this offer of friendship what is he sacrificing? What has to change? What if he gives in to the urge to see what Charlie Davis tastes like? But all that's left for him if he says no is another night knocking them back at The Pig and Whistle, then listening to late night radio until he fell asleep back at the townhouse.
It's a nice evening, they both have maybe a little too much, and end up on the couch, making fun of the Doctor's record collection, and if their knees touch a little bit, then Bill doesn't say anything about it to him. Not here, not now. His heart burns his chest, and he never wants to move his leg away. Charlie doesn't seem to be as affected by the gesture.
Matthew Lawson is an enigma at the best of times. Bill's never been one for studying people and getting them, but Matthew Lawson stands out to even him. Time has passed since the humiliation and by now it's mostly just a distant memory. At least now the man can look him in the eye. They drink together now more as well, at The Pig and Whistle. It's a strange sort of friendship, but he likes it. He decided, then, that he possibly owed the man his life, and he'd need to be loyal to him now, to pay it back. Later he wishes he hadn't, that he could spare himself the pain, but for this time, it was good fun to finally have a mate he knew he could count on.
It's half three in the morning, and Bill has been studying his roof all night, unable to convince his eyes to close so he can sleep. But he can't, there's anger boiling in him that wants to burst but is simply stuck, waiting. The doorbell is rung. He gets up slowly, hoping they will go away so he can wallow in peace, but they knock with his door knocker so he pulls on his dressing gown glad that it's Sunday tomorrow so that he can sleep in.
He opens the door to reveal Charlie standing there, clutching a small bag with both his hands looking on the verge of tears. This is not an unusual look for him, all things considered, it was actually his generic look. Bill looked permanently annoyed, Charlie always on the verge of tears. But he suspects those tears a lot more real this time then they have been before.
They end up on his couch, Charlie sitting just a little too close, Bill's hand a little to high on his leg. Don't do this, he tells himself. You know what happens to monsters like you, and you know what happens to the boys who love them. You got caught once Bill, you won't take him down with you will you? Charlie looks at him, with those blue eyes, the sort of pale against the whites and yet still somehow the bluest blue. A hand on the side of his face, a slow draw together. A kiss. Bill wants it to never end because he's never had a kiss like this. So gentle, and yet equally so full of hope. He's only ever been with jaded older men since he was a teenager, but this? This felt like something new. Something he wanted to treasure forever.
They pull back, and rest their foreheads against each other. Charlie has his eyes closed and a single tear slides down his cheek. Then another. Then the flood gates burst and Bill finds himself holding the crying man wondering what he's meant to do. Eventually it stops and Charlie says he's sorry, and he explains that he came here because he can't go back to the house with Jean and Blake for one more night because it's overpowering, that echoing loss. Bill understands it all too well, and he offers Charlie his sofa. He feels like he should be surprised when Charlie ends up in his bed, but he's not. What surprises him is that it's just sleeping. No sex, just sleeping. Intimacy in the privacy of their own space. He likes it. He rarely spent the night with the men he's used to. And this? This is new, and it's good. Charlie doesn't seem to find it new or interesting, just takes comfort from it. Which, Bill decides, is a good thing.
He still can't sleep, but during the night, he admires the feeling of Charlie's long and slim fingers as they tightened and untightened occasionally in his. He's never been a patient man before, but he doesn't mind waiting for Charlie to wake up. He only wishes that he could have stayed longer before he left for the house on Mycroft Avenue.
At work, they don't change. They do the things they used to do, like eat lunch together on the fire escape, and go on their patrols, but they don't change too much, lest anyone notice, not that he thinks it will be likely, with Matthew gone and Frank far to concerned with his own problems to be concerned about the friendliness of sergeants.
Even Blake doesn't notice, he's too busy with his wife and Mrs Beazley, and the man usually notices everything. Bill supposed that it was a good thing he wasn't really keeping track of the time Charlie spend at the plantation house anymore, with the amount of time he's begun spending at his. They don't usually sleep together, but they do other things, they watch the television, they dance and listen to the radio, they read or bake. He hadn't realized what it meant to be close with someone in a way that didn't require taking his clothes off and even if he knows it's going to end, he desperately didn't want it to. He wanted to stay here in the townhouse with Charlie forever, just the way that they were. But that can't happen. Can never happen. Maybe in another life, another time, another universe, even, but not now.
He wonders, watching Charlie sleep, how unnatural his whole business can be. He wonders because there is a mole on Charlie's left cheek, and he has never wanted to kiss anything more in his whole life. He wonders because Charlie's hand inside his feels so natural. So perfect. How could anything about it be disgusting, he wondered, as he looked away, up to the ceiling, unable to close his eyes.
It is Charlie who tells Blake. He shouldn't be shocked, but it still stings. Disappointment, but not surprise. Lucien Blake is as he always his. Unnerving. Generic kindness. Those soft edges Bill will never be used to, will never understand. A blunt blade on his neck. An iced black eye. Charlie loves him. Matthew liked him. Frank liked him. People all over Ballarat like him. Bill, to his distress, finds himself on the verge of agreeing with them.
He doesn't fight with Charlie over it like he thought he would. He knew the Doctor wasn't going to hurt him for what he was, at least, this aspect of it (if he politely ignores the fight they had in 1958 over Cooper's wife). He's an easy man to like, once Bill set his mind to it. Bill has always liked being like everyone else, and the safety there so he should just...Accept it, he thinks, sitting at the dinner table across from an empty seat. Charlie sat across from Mrs Call-Me-Jean Beazly (Blake?) and the doctor sat at the head. He supposes the O'Brian girl would have sat across from him and a tiny little thought is pleased that she's not here because he doesn't think he could cope with that.
It's a foreign situation for him, this sort of thing. He's not really a people person. Charlie is the first regular visitor he's ever had to the townhouse now that his best mate Tommy's gone and kicked the bloody bucket. Even his usual haunt at The Pig and Whistle has transformed into the fire escape with Charlie, their legs dangling over the edge, their lunches in their laps. Charlie's knee, under the table, is touching his, and Bill even finds himself joining in conversation.
Sitting on the sofa later that night, Bill knows he should go home. He's not stupid, he knows. He knows he shouldn't be joining in with the jeering and the Game of Champions and the excitiment that this odd little family seems to extrude. He knows he shouldn't smile when Charlie's pinkie nudges his, and he knows he certainly shouldn't place his over the top. There's a hundred and one reasons not to be with him. It's frightening, how much power Charlie has over him. How he can make something like this seem like something that could happen to them on a regular basis. How he can hear things about his childhood and tell him that it wasn't his fault. How he can make him feel things he wasn't even sure he could feel. That Bill would see his awkwardness endearing, and find his abrasive personality soothing. That there was something about him, something kind, but not strictly naive. Something Bill would walk to the ends of the Earth to hold in his hands for just one more night.
He knows Charlie. Charlie knows him, more about him then he's ever let anyone else knows and that frightens him. Charlie Davis with those blue, blue eyes and those hands that never quite know what to do. Charlie Davis, who someday, he might beat. He's so scared of becoming his father. And yet, sitting there, in the aftermath of the game, the record player playing swing, the doctor drinking and chatting, the soft click clack of knitting needles and the feel of Charlie's pinkie finger, he feels like this is the only place he'd ever want to be. And Bill Hobart does what he does best.
He chooses himself.