Charlie - Somewhere Between The Shades Of Grey...
Title: Somewhere Between the Shades of Grey...
Rating/warnings: PG (to be absolutely safe)
Spoilers: general, non specific spoilers, mostly from season one
Summary: He’d like to tell you that he’s not a sinner - but that would be a lie. Written for lostfichallenge’s challenge #57: the seven deadly sins.
Disclaimer: Charlie isn’t mine - but that’s never stopped me from writing fanfiction about him before now! Text in the cut is taken from a Charlie icon I saw once - I don’t know if it’s from a song or what, I just liked it and memorised it.
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He’d like to tell you that he’s not a sinner. He’d like to tell you that he always honoured the commandments he learnt at Sunday school, that he never once stepped outside of the boundaries of black and white into the shadows and grey - into the space between that which is indisputably good and everything that is considered truly evil.
But that would be a lie.
Because Charlie? He’s lived in the space between for most of his life.
From a child he was taught to both fear and obey the rules set down for him to ensure a smooth passage through life. The first time he had been allowed to take the big Bible down from where it rested amongst the sad collection of books owned by his parents, his hands had trembled with the knowledge of what the book in his hands contained.
Over the years he had memorised passages not only through reading, but also through listening intently in church. The words all seemed so right to his young ears - he never would have dared question the good book if it hadn’t been for the fateful day he had first learned of the seven deadly sins.
Charlie had been most surprised to discover that one of them was pride. Should he not take pride in himself? he had dared to ask. Should he not be pleased to do well at school, to play his piano and receive accolades for creating music of the kind that surely could be called heavenly? It made no sense to him. For his trouble he got a blistering earful of accusations hurled at him and was ordered to say a hundred Hail Mary’s as penance.
That day marked the beginning of a long lasting confusion in his young mind between what was truly good and evil in this world.
As he grew older, his confessions became more like excuses than anything else. After all, he had been a good boy for years - why shouldn’t he have a little fun? Why shouldn’t he take what the world had on offer? He worked hard usually, so really, why shouldn’t he spend a little time doing nothing? Why couldn’t he be jealous of Liam’s easy popularity and winning confidence? And how could anyone really resist the call of fame when it beckoned so temptingly with promises of a life of sheer indulgence?
At his worst point, he practically glutted himself on women and drugs. And never in those years that he fell right off the rails and into a world of excess did he once have to pay penance. It felt good to be dangerous, to be mocking the Almighty who seemed not to even care that one of those who had once been so loyal to him was acting up, breaking all the rules.
Charlie should have known all along that it was too good to be true.
When the plane had crashed and he had woken up, still high as kite, on the bloodied sand of the beach - he had thought for a good while that he was actually in purgatory. Between the raging fires, the screaming and the carnage it was easy to believe that he had finally overdosed and ended up in hell. It seemed he might have finally run out of luck.
And then, to his great surprise, he met an angel.
That’s when he knew for sure, he sure as hell wasn’t in hell. How could someone so pure, so beautiful, so good, ever be sent to a place like that? Like this? It confused him - to put it mildly. He wanted to learn more about her, discover why she was here, why he felt such an irresistible pull to this woman who he would have never even bothered to talk to in the real world if fate hadn’t intervened and thrown them together. He had always believed in it - fate - and her appearance in his life seemed only to intensify that belief.
The first time he touched her, he remembered with a start just how familiar the glow she emitted was to him. He himself had once been like her he remembered, untouched by the darkness that now stained his soul. She seemed destined to be his redemption and he treated her as if it were so - not realising that in his attempts to save her, to save himself, he was digging himself deeper and deeper, succumbing to a wrath he had never felt before towards another human being, bitterly resenting all those who got in his way and ultimately fencing himself into a corner through his indomitable pride...
Little did he know that in reality - she thought herself a sinner too.