(Fic) FN - The Wrong Sort of Place to be Thinking of You
Title: The Wrong Sort of Place to be Thinking of You
Summary: Charley’s brain runs away with him a bit during an in-class assignment.
Word Count: 1397
Rating: PG-13 for language and implied homosexuality
Disclaimer: Fright Night and all characters therein © Tom Holland/Craig Gillespie
Author’s Note: Written for the Three Days Only challenge at 5_prompts, using Table 61, prompt 04: It’s the wrong sort of place to be thinking of you. Two down, three more fics to go!
“Alright class,” Charley’s teacher said, voice sunny and eyes bored, “Let’s work on a creative writing assignment, shall we?”
The students around Charley perked up in their chairs; creative writing tended to mean free writing, which was usually more interesting than essays for pre-assigned topics. Then Mrs. Granada turned to the board, scrawling out "TOPIC:” in large, clear letters, and the class let out a collective sigh of disappointment, slumping back down in their seats.
Charley propped his head up on one palm, tapping his pen idly against the desk. He resisted the urge to turn around and look at Ed’s empty desk. He knew that no matter how many times he looked, the seat would still be empty. Sometimes, though, it was just instinctive, and he would look before he could catch himself, only realizing when Ed’s missing presence registered like a baseball bat to the head.
“You’ll have fifteen minutes to write at least a page,” Mrs. Granada said, still scribbling out the prompt on the board, “and your topic is your best friend.” That made him look up. “I want you to write something about your best friend, and I want you to imagine them in a setting you’ve never seen them in before. In their old age, in their infancy, on a trip to Japan, whatever you want. Try to imagine them in a situation completely unlike anything you have ever seen them in, something unexpected or out of character, and imagine how they might react to such a situation. Fifteen minutes. Get writing!”
Charley’s brow creased as he stared at the teacher. Write about his best friend? His mind jumped immediately to Ed. He did not want to write about Ed. He did not want to think about Ed. Thinking about Ed made his chest hurt and his throat close up, and the guilt became overwhelming. The last thing he wanted to write about was Ed.
He tried to think of someone else, his mind turning to Amy next. He could write about Amy. His beautiful Amy, who knew he was a geek and didn’t care. Amy, who he had fought vampires with. He turned his pen over in his hand and brought the tip to the page, ready to start writing, and then paused.
What about Peter? He supposed he could say that, now that Ed was gone, Peter was probably his best friend. Certainly he loved Amy, and he loved to spend time with her, but she was not the one he went hunting with in the evenings. While she was doing track after school, or at home with his parents, or out with her girlfriends, he was usually at Peter’s place. He would sit in the back of the theater during Peter’s rehearsals, doing his homework and humming along to the ridiculous dramatic music. Other times, he would wait in Peter’s suite, studying the books in the magician’s expansive library. And on some of Peter’s bad days, he would sit and keep an eye on him and make sure he didn’t do anything too stupid, and help cart him off to bed once he was too drunk to keep drinking.
Peter was all at once his mentor, the older brother he’d never had, his ward, and sometimes Charley thought he was more than that altogether. Sometimes, he would catch a mischievous glance from across the theater, or long elegant fingers resting slightly too long against his cheek or shoulder, or a tender look during the vampire lore study sessions telling him just how much Peter adored him, and Charley wouldn’t know what to think.
He tried to imagine Peter being something else. A Peter who was not a magician, not a drunk, not a 40-year-old orphan with decades of loneliness weighing down his slender shoulders. What else would Peter do? What would have happened to Peter Vincent, had Jerry not torn his life to pieces before his eyes when he was six years old?
Peter could have been… a construction worker? An actor perhaps… except that was another form of performance art, far too close to his current profession as a stage magician to work for this assignment. Maybe a teacher. Peter as a teacher. Peter Vincent, in charge of a classroom full of small children - now there was a scary thought. What had Peter’s parents done? He could have followed in his fathers footsteps, except that Charley realized he had no idea what either of Peter’s parents had been like. Best not to dwell on that.
Peter as a soccer coach… or football, he supposed, being English and all. From what Charley knew, the older man had no interest in sports whatsoever. A scientist, a cop, a priest… any one of these was so very different from what Peter was now.
Perhaps he was looking at this too superficially. There were so many people in the world who hated their jobs; a career did not necessarily define a person. Peter fit his so perfectly - a master of illusions, hiding himself in plain sight by cloaking himself in shadows, and pretending to the world that he was not broken.
But Charley saw beyond that. He liked to think that he knew Peter far better than perhaps anyone else now. He knew that Peter was far more intelligent than he let on, despite a lack of any formal education. He knew that Peter hadn’t held onto any sort of innocence any longer than he’d had to after his parents‘ deaths, immersing himself in drugs and sex and the darker side of life at a very early age.
So what would the opposite of it have been? He tried to imagine Peter as stupid and could not. It was inconceivable, really. Peter didn’t always do the smart thing, but when he wasn’t drunk off his ass, he was one of the most intelligent people Charley had ever met. Well-read, with an excellent memory and good critical thinking skills. A Peter who didn’t read, who didn’t think the way his Peter did, who couldn’t explain anything and everything from mathematics to Bavarian folklore to human anatomy, wasn’t any sort of Peter at all. Not that the man was a genius or anything now, but still.
Perhaps the other route - a Peter who still held some innocence. What the hell would that be like, Peter untouched by darkness? Fright Night probably would never have come about, or his other show, the old one. Would he have still become a magician at all? Peter, not swearing. Peter, not drinking or smoking or using harder drugs when he thought Charley wasn’t going to swing by. Peter not trolling the nightclubs for hot bodies and easy one night stands.
Instead, Peter clean-cut and happy. With a steady girlfriend or boyfriend (or would this Peter be into guys? He didn’t feel like getting into a What Makes Gay People Gay debate with himself right now) or perhaps even a wife? Living in a nice house in England somewhere, where Peter would work as a teacher or maybe a doctor (all that intelligence had to go somewhere).
Peter as a father. He would be a good dad, Charley mused, this other Peter who was not so broken and not so darkened. With his intelligence, his very carefully hidden caring nature (he still didn’t know about the time Charley watched him feeding a stray cat in one of the alleys down the street from the Hard Rock, gently petting the tiny thing and murmuring softly as it purred), and a life not tainted by a traumatic childhood, how could he not be the perfect dad?
Peter as stupid. Peter as innocent. Not going to work. Those imagined men were too different from his Peter to be the same man. And anyways the assignment was to imagine them in a different setting or situation, not as an entirely different person.
The assignment. Shit. “Three minutes left,” Mrs. Granada said just then. Fuck. Fuuuck. Charley put his pen to his still-blank page and just started to scribble something down before he ran out of time, wishing he had just written about Amy after all. He wrote about the happy-father-Peter, wondering if it was too far outside of character to actually work. But then, it wasn’t like anyone else would know he was talking about The Peter Vincent anyways.