A/N: Oh, you lovely people! Thank you so much for all the kind words about the last chapter, and this story! They really do mean the world to me! Sorry about the bit of a wait; the new duties at work took more writing time out of me that I anticipated, but don't fear, I'm still writing and I'm still dedicated to seeing this one finish. ;) I hope you enjoy this one!

In which Charles is a blind idiot and not at all interested in salmon, chicken or meringue.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

When he was twenty-five, Charles met a girl - and she was a girl, just as much as he was a silly, silly boy - who danced like smoke, smiled like sunrise and kissed like it was an Olympic sport and she was going for gold.

He didn't realise, until he came home early one Thursday with a new roasting dish, a bag of fresh veg and the idea to make something special for Alice to go with the little black box in his pocket and found her entertaining his stage partner a little too intimately in their bed, that he wasn't Alice's gold at all, he was silver, maybe even bronze if everything he heard in the pub later was true.

He went home again the next morning, when Alice was gone, her one little suitcase packed and hardly a thing missing from the flat and sat on the edge of his bed just looking. Looking at the single photograph in a silver frame on the table at his side of the bed.

He sat there for hours just looking. And then his stomach grumbled, or his phone rang or he simply woke up and the smiling, lying, cheating face of Alice Neal was tipped into a drawer and shut away with a closed lipped nod. He was never doing this again.

Thirty years later he sits on the edge of another bed, looking at the smiling face of another woman in another frame and he wonders what might have happened if he hadn't shut that drawer quite so tightly.

-x-x-x-x-

Charles shakes his head, reaching out and picking up the picture of Elsie. He'd moved it in here on Thursday when he'd walked back through his door and seen it on the side table. He'd thought she might show up Friday and he hadn't wanted her to see it, not when he knows she'd have taken it back. He did steal it after all, with a threat to show all and sundry this little surprisingly piece of her past.

He hadn't really thought about why he was so reluctant to give it up, or why it had ended up on his sidetable in the hall instead of in his briefcase to be copied.

He certainly hadn't thought about why he felt his bedside table was a good place for it.

He does now, fingers absently tracing Elsie's smile. When he'd seen it, he'd thought about the changes, the differences between the woman captured in the photograph and the one he's known for so long. Now, eyes sweeping over every detail, he can see the things that are still the same.

She still tilts her hip like that when she's about to say something a little risqué, her eyes crinkle the same way when she's smiling and she means it. His thumb rests against the dust print at her waist; she's still the same curves and lines only shifted slightly, gentled.

His chest burns and he almost gets it now, now that Beryl and Bill have gone, now that Elsie has helped tidy up and left for her own rooms.

Staring into the younger face of his best friend, he feels like maybe he's been opening that drawer for years, so slowly he never even realised he was doing it. And now it's open, wide enough that he can see just how much he shut away and how empty he made himself.

He brushes his finger over Elsie's face again and then settles the frame back in place, turned so that it'll be the first thing he sees in the morning, like today and yesterday. Only he thinks it won't be long now before he knows why he smiles and why he's felt like pneumonia is only one cough away, his chest tight.

-x-x-x-x-

"-arles! Charles! Professor Carson!"

Charles jumps as Beryl's hand comes down hard on the table between them. She glares at him, but he can see concern behind the fire. "Sorry."

Beryl crosses her arms across her chest, leans closer to peer at him. "What's going on?"

His fingers tighten into fists beneath the table and he shakes his head. "Nothing. I was just thinking, my mind must have drifted."

"Right." She raises an eyebrow at him, gives him a look that usually comes from Elsie; his two friends are a terrible influence on each other. "And what was so important to think about, that you stopped listening to me, hmm?"

He thinks about what Beryl had been talking about; the wedding, the dresses for she, Elsie and Daisy, the suits for he, Bill and William, the lists of guests and flowers and food she needs to compile for the reception after. At his most attentive he thinks he would have drifted away from listening at some point, but Elsie had passed by with Molesley and her Miss Baxter, both of them nattering away in her ears and she'd turned just a little, to smile at Molesley and it had been the smile from the picture, the same smile she's given him and everyone around her for fifteen years but his heart had pounded, just once and he'd known that it wasn't illness, that all the tight chests and aching ribs hadn't ever been illness, or indigestion and Beryl's voice had faded completely away.

Of course, he isn't going to tell Beryl any of that, not while his mind is still whirling, rewriting he has no idea how many days, weeks, months - years? - of history, choosing new angles to look at and flooding him with emotions he really had thought he wasn't feeling.

He's not going to tell her what a blind idiot he's been, because sitting in the faculty lounge with Beryl frowning at him and a cold cup of tea at his elbow, he doesn't know what kind of idiot he's been, not really and not yet. He needs time to think, to figure out why he has Elsie's picture on his bedside table, why he's been so, so...jealous these last few weeks, and why he's only now noticing that the clearest memory he has of Elsie is not the newest but of a cold wet day in October twelve years ago when she'd looked up from her scotch, her hair still damp from the storm they'd been caught up in and she'd told him she loved him.

"I was thinking about Bill's bachelor party." Charles says, keeping his face blank and his voice even. "I need to speak to, uh, to Elsie, but do you think you could give me a list of the people he'd want there?" After all, he doesn't actually know any of Bill's other friends, his work colleagues. Doesn't know which of them Bill tolerates because he has to and which he would actually like to have join him on the night.

Beryl's still frowning at him, but she nods and agrees to send him over a list.

"Thank you. Now, you were saying something about salmon or chicken?"

He tries harder to listen this time, while she swings backwards and forwards over the decision but it's only with half a mind.

Years, he thinks and resists the desire to groan, nodding instead to Beryl's words. He has a horrible suspicion that he's been looking at this all wrong for years.

There's a part of him, still waking up, that rather wishes he could have had whatever this epiphany is over Elsie's smile, a long time ago.

There's a more familiar part of him that wishes she'd just taken a different route to her lecture today.

Beryl asks him what he thinks of meringue and he makes himself concentrate. He's not being thinking about this for years - years, and he once prided himself on his own self awareness! - a few more hours won't kill him.

"Everyone likes meringue." He says and gets up to make them both another cup of tea.

Key:

all and sundry - everyone

A/N: So I hope you don't feel this was completely anticlimatic. It was never my intention to have some big thing happen to make Charles suddenly see Elsie the way he's actually been denying seeing her all this time. But just a build up of little moments and changes and then her smile, it was always going to be her smile in some mundane why that he's always seen it and then...wham! his little denial house of cards falls down. There'll be more about this, of course. He's Charles; he's not actually going to give into what his mind is now letting him see straight away; after all, he doesn't usually listen to his heart. But, yeah...he's opening his eyes now.