Notes
I am ecstatic to have finally managed to fall in love with a show which didn't stop airing 10 years ago. My fic in this fandom will generally follow the TV canon, mostly because I like Imogen and Isaac, but will include the wider webcomicverse unless it clashes with the show.
Title is from a Pablo Neruda sonnet,Keeping Quiet.
It was still early, the muted, sleepy early of Sunday morning, and Sarah eased the front door closed as quietly as possible, holding down the Yale lock with two fingers so it wouldn't catch. The dogs rushed to her in a small flurry of barks and yips, and she let them into the garden while she mixed their breakfast; Nicky would have let them out last thing at night, she knew. He never overlooked the dogs. She left them crunching noisily in the kitchen as she crept up the stairs.
She knew what this night meant to them. Charlie always spoke lightly and vaguely of his parents when he was here, but she hadn't failed to hear some of what he wasn't saying. Nicky, loyal and empathetic to a fault, never criticized the Springs to her, but she knew it was no accident that the two of them chose to spend more time here than the Spring house. She and Jane texted periodically, and she knew that it wasn't that Jane disliked Nick specifically, by any means, but the woman had managed to broadcast a pervasive sense of disapproval of Charlie and Nick's relationship in general and of teenagers being given too much freedom in particular.
But Sarah's house was her own. And she'd decided to meet a friend for drinks on Saturday night, and to take the opportunity to stay over. The boys didn't need supervision; they needed time. They needed space.
There was a golden, sunlight silence upstairs as she padded, in her socks, up the staircase. She strongly suspected that the two of them had gone to sleep not too long previously, and she would have given them a few hours longer of solitude, if she could, but work called. Nicky's door was open the slightest crack – one of them must have got up, for water or to use the bathroom, and not quite closed it. She paused outside it, easing her weight carefully so as not to make the floorboard creak, and reached out to pull it to. But she could not resist, just for one second, glancing through into the sliver of light.
And there they were. Charlie's shock of dark curls on the pillow; Nicky's thick auburn hair visible just behind him. Charlie's olive skin limned in morning light through the thin curtains. One of Nick's powerful arms wrapped around Charlie's waist over the duvet, holding him close, the freckles on it visible from where she stood. He had hated his freckles as a child.
Her baby and his beloved. They were so beautiful. She felt tears prick her eyes sharply. They had been through so much already, fought for each other and for themselves. She'd been so proud of Nicky; he'd been mature beyond his age in facing Charlie's illness, in a way that she knew had made a deep impression on the Springs. He'd stood up to his father, to his brother, to his friends. Changed almost everything he thought he knew about himself, for Charlie and to be with Charlie. No, she had never dreamed, before Charlie appeared, that her son would one day tell her he was in love with another boy. But Charlie had brought out everything she had always loved about Nicky. He'd only been half-interested in girls, before Charlie happened; but she'd known that someday he would fall, and when he fell it would be hard. He had too much love in him not to give it away freely, hand over hand, when the time – the person - came.
David, now. David worried her deeply. He seemed lost in a maze of anger, winding deeper and deeper, until she caught only glimpses of the boy she loved and still missed. He thought too highly, and too much, of his father. He had less of him in his father than he liked to think, at heart, but he tried to put on his father's indifference when in fact he was only angry and hurt. His relationships never lasted long, and he seemed almost to despise his girlfriends for liking him rather than feel much in the way of affection. His cruelty to his brother worried her most of all. She'd seen the look in his eye over the dinner with Charlie's family, the curl of his lip; he'd wanted to hurt them, humiliate them both, and she'd been helpless to stop it. She was still helpless. She could only hope that, one day, he'd give up on Stéphane, as she had done when Nicky was only a few years old, and that he could salve his own wounds and find his way back to them.
Nicky had never been lost, though. From the moment he'd been placed in her arms, she'd known that. She could still feel him there, so small, his wide, trusting eyes already shifting from blue to brown. Stéphane had all but ignored him, the child he hadn't wanted and had no time for. But they hadn't needed him. She and Nicky were enough for each other. That was what Jane Spring would never understand. She didn't need to hover over Nicky. She knew his heart.
He would always be her baby. But Charlie was his future.
She closed the door as silently as possible and padded quietly to her room.