a/n written after many conversations with a friend of mine on tumblr. So….this is their fault lol. I havent posted a fic here for a while but if you want to keep up with what i have posted then you can do so on a03 under miss_nettles_wife lol. Anyway. No real warnings aside from period typical homophobia bc it mostly discusses events from canon and charlie being in love with matthew. Enjoy! (yes title is from the taylor swift song of the same name. Find all the other t.s references in the fic and win a gold star)
Coming back to Ballarat was more difficult than Charlie had anticipated it would be. Not to suggest he thought coming back to the old stomping ground after a year and a half long absence would be a walk in the park but these days everything just feels like a slog through molasses. And people could tell. People who didn't even know him could tell he was having a hard time adjusting to the New Station, and the New Jean and the New Ballarat.
Maybe it was Lucien. It wasn't as if it were a surprise, coming back and him not being here. He'd flown to Sydney, to meet Jean and Matthew and help in the searches like a dutiful son but nothing had shown up. Nobody, no clothes, not even his damn hip flask. But when he's been seconded to that little town in the middle of nowhere for six months, away from everyone and everything, it had been easier to just forget, or just pretend that the reason Jean never handed the phone off to him for a chat on the long, dull nights spent in his little flat was that he was invested in a case.
But now he was back, it was like the lack of him was everywhere. Crime scenes are quiet without Lucien's constant stream of words and thoughts filling up Charlie's notebooks. There's a seat in the living room no one sits in anymore, the piano is silent and out of tune. Two doors downstairs stay locked tight and he's never even dared to try and find the keys to get inside. The practice is closed, and if one could peer through the front window you'd find everything covered in dust cloths. Jean's marital bedroom, which was Mrs. Blake's studio where Charlie had once found Lucien complaining about Mrs. Thooey's cleaning, was now their bedroom. But he's never been in there. No one has even looked at it. At the time, he didn't know why they would want their bedroom just off the dining room but now he knows it's not about that. It was about having something that was theirs. Everyone else seems to be coming out of the process of grieving, finding ways to move on around the spaces where he was instead of staring at them like Charlie was.
Then there was the new station. The new paint job hardly covered up the terrible thing that had taken place there. Honestly, he found the new green walls a little nauseating. There hadn't been anything wrong with the white-grey walls that used to be there. It was just another sign that Ballarat kept moving even when Charlie wasn't around to observe it. The officers were different, too. Bill was still there but Charlie suspected he'd be here until he died, probably still a sergeant. The people he used to talk to, used to think of as his friends were gone mostly, shuffled on by the Brass or by their own wont. But somehow, the place just felt more crowded, and more untidy than it had before. Matthew had given him a desk on the other side of the room, away from the spot where Ned died but a new carpet and a new desk don't cover it all up for him. He was shuffled off to Bonehead pretty much as soon as Christmas had ended so he felt like he never had enough time to properly say goodbye to the old station and Ned's ghost before all of this shit changed.
Peter Crowe was new. At first, Charlie felt a sort of untempered jealousy for the boy. It seemed silly now because he presumed he needed the same help from his boss when he first got out of the academy, but Peter needed guidance. He had the gall, and the big brain but he was just so...God! He was so fucking sweet! Who the Hell is that sweet all the damn time? Charlie didn't know but he did know that Peter's seeming mentorship with Matthew monopolized the man's time in a way that meant Charlie was out in the cold. Which looked ridiculous looking back because Peter was so sweet and Matthew decided he'd do better under Charlie's tutelage than under his own. It was difficult to stay jealous and annoyed at someone who had wormed their way into his heart like...Some kind of burrowing thing...It's late and Charlie can't think of any.
All he can think about is Matthew. Which isn't unusual, Matthew had always dominated his thoughts when he was alone. At first, because he was trying to figure the man out like a puzzle. Now he'd given up on that, now it was strictly a yearning for something he knew wasn't on the cards. Yes, he was haunted by the quiet spaces that filled up his life and the house that didn't use to be there. Yes, the changes at the station were hard to adjust too, and he didn't care to play the second fiddle to the newbie. But there was more to it, the jealousy. And thinking about it too long makes his head spin.
He looks down at the case file on his dressing table he's been fussing over for the last hour or so. Matthew has been giving him all the cold ones he'd hadn't been able to close in the time since he was gone and Blake was...Gone gone. As far as cases went this one had taken him a few days of solid work, and when he was working he wasn't thinking about the worry and sadness that crept upon him at the strangest of times. He heard Peter talking to Amy the previous day and she'd pronounced him 'melancholic'. Jean kept asking if there was anything she could do but she couldn't and if she could she'd have done it already. There was only one person who had the power to make him feel okay and he couldn't. Or, wouldn't. And it was better this way. He'd get over it, he thought to himself, looking up to see his face in the mirror staring back at him.
He used to like this green shirt, but now in the orange light of his bedroom it looks the same shade as the walls of the station and he looks washed out and sad. It's late enough that he hasn't bothered to fix his hair for a few hours, and the pomade is worn away enough that a few of his carefully smoothed curls are springing back up and making their way onto his face. He tried to push them back half-heartedly with his hand but they just fell back into place. He wondered what Matthew was doing downstairs, probably looking at Lucien's casefile. For about an hour each night before he goes to bed Matthew studies the thing, looking for something that they'd missed. Charlie would help him but he's not quite there yet, the wound is still open, gaping and infected for him.
He can't stand to see the bridge or read about tides and currents like Matthew can. He's got a head full of thoughts from Bonehead about decomposing bodies, saponification, and how the only thing that'll wash up is shoes someday. In fact, last time he heard a pair of shoes had washed up and Matthew was trying to figure out the likelihood they were Blakes. He doesn't know the outcome of the scrutiny, he's never asked. He feels bad about it, he does! Charlie knows without a shadow of a doubt, if one of them fell off a bridge and went missing then Lucien would move mountains, lift hell and pull the stars out of the sky with his bare hands to find them. He knows that like he knows the backs of his hands, or times tables he was forced to memorize. But it doesn't matter. The grief and the nausea pull him down like cement shoes when he even tries to help Matthew.
He shut his eyes for a moment and tried to imagine another world, where things were different. One where Dad never died, and he could go home without having to fight with Bernie. He could ask him what to do, seek out an answer from someone who wasn't going to blab to Matthew as soon as they saw him again. He already knows what the advice would be. Just leave it, Charlie, just stop thinking about it. Find someone else, what about that girl from the cafe? She seemed nice, a redhead! You like redheads, don't you? He does like redheads. Mattie was a redhead, and he liked her. Rose was also a redhead and he really liked her. Mattie would call it objectification probably, and well. She wasn't entirely wrong he supposed. But the issue, the problem was...He liked Matthew Lawson more than Mattie. More than Rose. More than some random redhead at a cafe who brought him a coffee and put her number on a napkin in case he ever needed to question her.
And what if he told Matthew that? At the very least he'd be out of a friendship. As temperamental as their friendship was, as delicate as it sometimes seemed it was forged out of the iron of mutual respect and struggle. Charlie was a man of few friends, for whatever reason that was. Perhaps his lackluster sense of humour. His brittle, tightly wound nature. The miasma around him Mattie once described as 'smug, and a little menacing'. So losing even one friendship was a hearty blow to the chest. To lose Matthew wasn't an option, not to him. To have to work at his station knowing he hated him would be...Unbearable. And that was the best-case scenario, where Matthew just accepts that Charlie...Feels the way he does. What if Charlie tells him, and then he decides to tell the Brass? Arrest him? Hand him over to Bill-Fucking-Hobart? What if he decided to bash him himself? Would Charlie be able to defend himself? Would he want to?
But he can't help it, it's like Matthew was put here exactly to appeal to Charlie. His cheekbones, those broad shoulders...His determination, dedication to the job, compassion for his community...All of it wrapped up in a neat parcel shaped like someone Charlie knew he could love. Did love, even. Wasn't that why he came back here? Because as much as being around Matthew sometimes feels like being plugged into an electrical socket, being away from him makes Charlie feel like an open wound. He should be content, with what he has. No reason to injure his sore heart anymore by lingering on these feelings that can't be returned. Even so, he still brings Matthew a cup of tea when he makes one for himself, still stays late even when he doesn't have to to help with paperwork, still finds himself drawn to the older man like a moth to a flame. It's inescapable, so why bother trying?
He leaned back in his chair, allowing the front two legs to lift and wiped at his face. What was he to do? Just keep trying? Live like this? Try to move past these feelings? What if, asked the traitorous little voice he had never quite been able to crush, what if he feels even a smidgen of what you feel? Wouldn't you like to know? He pushed the heel of each palm into his eyes and tried to wrangle his brain as it provided him a slideshow of images of Matthew in compromising positions. The two of them are trapped in the morgue cupboard, his thigh captured between Matthew's legs. The soft, breathy little noises in his ear as they both tried not to make any noise. Matthew's strong, wide palms on the small of his back. A different scene now, what about if the two of them got caught in the car in the storm? Like that night it was so cold, and Matthew gave him the green dressing gown? Coldness forces them together, skin to skin. Charlie has seen him naked before, in the showers at work where men have no modesty. He can almost conjure up what he looks like in his head, with the images caught out of the corner of his eye.
He manages to stop his wandering mind before he can degrade his friend, his mentor any further. He's long since past the point of feeling dirty or unclean for how he feels, but this is a step too far. Yearning, wanting, wishing those are okay. But Matthew, if he saw Charlie as anything, would see his mentee. That was the problem, wasn't it? That Matthew was his mentor. He seemed to like Charlie in the way that all older men liked him: Like a son. He wouldn't deny needing guidance or wanting it. But the thing was...He'd had a father. A great one. For twenty years or so, he'd had a father, and a best mate, and a mentor. His father was always a listening ear when he needed one. When Charlie came to him at fifteen asking about the strange, intense feelings he had about boys as well as girls his father listened and did his best to guide him as well as he could, encouraging him to be careful if he wanted to get involved with men. When he got his heartbroken for the first time at sixteen when the girl he liked in his grade rejected him, it was his father who took him out to eat at his favourite diner where the old-timers all told Charlie their love war stories. When he got his first girlfriend a month later, his father would drive him and her out, and then come to pick him up as eager to hear what Charlie had been up to as Charlie was to tell him about it. Even as more brothers came along, his father remained his closest confidant, even when he was being punished for misbehaving, or for getting into fights.
But it'd been almost thirteen years since he had a father and everyone else was moving on. His mother had her new husband, and Ray had Bernie. Even the kids, his much younger brothers, seemed to be fine without him around and Charlie thought that with Lucien and Jean...He'd found not a replacement but a sort of...Raft on the sea. A cove to rest his weary head, and ask advice. Lucien was like his father, sometimes. But sometimes, with his casual defiance of the rules, Charlie had strived his whole life to obey he seemed so very different. But in a good way, he'd taught Charlie things his father had never had the time too. How to find the middle ground, how to navigate what rules must be obeyed, and what ones can be bent, how to follow his gut, how to put his observations to good use. His father had built a solid foundation of what Charlie believed to be a good man and Lucien had helped him build the walls and lay the carpet. Matthew helped him paint the walls, and build the deck. With a long sigh, he removed his palms from his eyes and let his chair drop back onto the ground.
He tilted his watch so he could see the face. Eleven thirty. Early for these kinds of thoughts, usually, his brain had the decency to allow him to go to bed before it tormented him like this. He reached under his shirt to find his father's St Michael's medal, worn almost smooth on the front. He ran his thumb against the metal, feeling the raised edges of his fingerprints run across where he knows the same raised edges of his father's fingers ran to a hundred thousand times over the twenty-two years he owned this medal, gifted to him by Mum. He thinks he still might be a believer, though he doesn't know why. Just this once, he asked Dad what he'd do. Predictably, he got no response. Enough of this. He stood, tucking the case file under his arm and tucked his chair under the table, and escaped out into the hallway.
One thing in this God-Forsaken town refused to change: and that was Jean's collection of hideous mismatched rugs. At least he could count on one thing, he supposed. Jean isn't around much anymore, she works a lot, probably twice as hard as any of the men on the council supposedly representing him but whose names he doesn't know. He'd been so enthusiastic when she decided to run. He'd put up signs, and door-knocked in her name, when she was elected he joined in the festivities and had maybe one too many glasses of champagne that hot summer evening. He was a happy drunk, who abandoned all sober Charlie's ideals and tight control on his emotions and wants. Indeed his happy drunk self forgot all his fears and worries and fell asleep with his head on Matthew's arm. And Matthew had just...Let him do that! He ignored the nagging wonder and trudged onward, forever onward, down the hall to Matthew's room.
He stood quietly outside the door. Was this what he came back for? To feel this bloody miserable all of the damn time? But the truth was that no other sadness in the world would do. This specific pain is preferable to the absence of it. What the hell kind of way of thinking is that Charlie wondered, his mind cast back to the few times he'd attempted sociality during his absence from Ballarat. Partying was hard to enjoy when the one person he wanted to be at parties with was in a whole other town, with new friends and new mysteries and Charlie was...Stagnant. Like always.
He knocked twice anyway, he wanted to show Matthew what he'd figured out about the robbery and make his case for a fingerprint warrant. He waited several moments before Matthew spoke up and welcomed him in. He pushed the door open with his elbow and then stepped inside, stood in the doorway looking at Matthew...And his arm. Like Charlie suspected, the casefiles for Lucien were open, and Matthew's three pads full of thoughts were lined up along the back of the desk. Everything seemed to have been shoved haphazardly into the file, and what he hadn't been able to put away was obscured by his arm.
What a ridiculous thing to do.
Why would Matthew care one inch if Charlie was comfortable looking at the case file? If those pictures of shoes peeking out the edge of the file made his stomach flip? It's such a weird little expression of care that seized control of his brain. Matthew could go missing one day, just like Lucien did. Would Charlie be fine living his life never having told Matthew the truth? He doesn't think so.
"Something troubling you, Davis?" Matthew asks, and Charlie's heart is ping-ponging around his chest, his voice seized by that traitor voice that seems to be happy to disregard his carefully placed walls of self-control. The same voice that takes over when he gets drunk and happy, but now it's as mournful as the rest of him.
"I don't know how to say this, without offending you so I'm just going to say it."
Something dark and sad crosses Matthew's face, but his eyes remain trained on him like Charlie's the only person alive who matters and it's just gutting. He was just thinking about him naked he doesn't deserve such tenderness from his friend.
"Well? Spill it then."
"The reason I came back, to Ballarat, was you." He starts, no longer able to maintain eye contact with Matthew, because surely this on its own is more than Matthew needs to know. But now he's started it's like he can't stop, eyes focused on the baseboard of Matthew's room. "I was - Am - I just -" He tries to start, but aborts all sentences before their completion. "I'm trying." He tells Matthew, "This is me, trying and I'm terrible at this but I have to tell you now or I might never be able too. I came back to Ballarat because of you because I love you and I just want you to know. You deserve to know. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I don't want it to be like this but there's nothing I can do about it. I've been trying to live without telling you and make things go back to how they were but I can't and Boss, I'm so, so sorry."
Matthew stares at him, pale eyebrows almost escaping that high forehead, and Charlie wants to kiss sometimes. Like he doesn't know what to do with the information and he doesn't blame him. It's a lot to take in all at once. All he can do is stand there, case file in his hands, watching Matthew's floor unsure what to do now. The little traitor voice has gone quiet now it's gone and caused all this trouble.
"Christ," Matthew says, eyes squinting slightly and he almost looks like he might be in pain. Charlie loathes causing Matthew more pain than he already has….Then he continues to do every time he does something, and it hurts his leg. When it's humid and the bone gets sore. When it gets sore in the cold. If he tries to walk too much. What a fool he is. Even if Matthew was queer, and it's the biggest if in the world, why would he care about Charlie of all people? Matthew should hate him. What the other man does almost scares him in its quickness. Matthew is on his feet, and stumbles over to Charlie, catching himself with his hands spread on each of his upper arms. Charlie abandons his case file to the floor so he can support Matthew's arms. "Don't be sorry." He says, in total earnest. "I was so...Happy when you said you were coming back because well...For me, it's you. Has been for a while now." The words take a while to settle in, for his brain to process them.
"Me?" He asks, the shock of it all hitting him like a punch in the gut. Not only is his boss, the hardened war hero, the investigator in chief, the interrogator who cuts through people like a knife through butter queer, but interested in him back? It's such a left turn from how he was expecting this conversation to go that he can only question the statement, wondering if perhaps he'd lost his mind or trapped in some kind of wonderful, magical dream.
"You," Matthew confirms, his eyes alight with happiness, and Charlie can't help but try to match. He let out a victorious little laugh. It escapes without his permission. Usually, he tries to avoid laughing when he can, preferring a scoff or a smirk. His laugh is...Gangly and awkward in audio form. Something he never felt like he quite mastered. Matthew doesn't seem to mind it because he laughs back, a little deeper, and a little more world-worn. "I used to lie in that bed, and wonder what you were doing." He says, "I used to wonder, is he okay? Is he holding up alright? But then...You were here and I didn't have to wonder anymore. I thought it was the best I would get, to share this house with you."
"I still wonder those things about you," Charlie said, not moving an inch, barely breathing not wanting to disturb this if it was a dream, or the moment if it was real. "Because I care about you, and I worry about you and I don't - I don't always know what I'm meant to do with those feelings."
"I do," Matthew assures him, and leans in to kiss him. Charlie kisses back. The future is happening outside the door, far away from him. Matthew pulls back, gazing at him. Charlie looks back, so...Happy.
"I don't belong anywhere but here." He says, "At Bonehead, there were so many...Cynical clones and I don't belong with them. I don't care, anymore, what Melbourne has planned for me. I don't want it. I just want to solve mysteries with you, and be with you."
"I think that can be arranged," Matthew promises, and all-encompassing open wound Charlie had on soul feels like it's healing.