Chapter Text
Life being as it was for him, Noel had little time to play in the realm of maybes. Time was a precious commodity, and he wasn’t in the business of wasting it hating himself for things Lord knew he’d already much worse than in the war. The only people who had time to worry about things like that hadn’t lived in hell for very long. No, they just watched it from their glass castles at the top of the sky, building higher than God, and drinking champagne that had been watered in the blood of the infantry. They rode the Orient Express while people like him fought their wars for them, dying and being buried a thousand miles away from home without anyone ever learning their name. They were ignorant, which felt like a crime worse than being evil, the luxury of ignorance lost on them in their desire to try and build a ladder to the stars without considering who had to do the damn building.
So, yeah, Noel had shown the Queen’s guardsmen a good time when he’d been stationed in England.
He’d held a torch for a comrade while they’d huddled in the trenches in France.
He’d had sex with a German soldier before the war became war, fucking hotly in the dark, the other man crying so handsomely, both of them frantic and feral and terrified of killing each other the very next day.
So what?
It was a damn topsy turvy world where a man could die for his country but wasn’t allowed to love his countryman.
Now, Noel wasn’t a big fan of poets, but there was a line by Whitman that spoke to him from a young age. “The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.”
There wasn’t a god-damned thing more beautiful than tracing the way someone’s back arched in the dark, and to hell with whatever those god-damned purists had to say. They were all hypocrites anyway. Back when Charlie had been Charlie, and Noel had been Noel, Noel’s father used to say that the only difference between a Catholic and a Baptist was that a Catholic would say hi to you in the liquor store, and a Baptist wouldn’t.
It took all sorts, he supposed.
These days, Noel wasn’t truly close to anyone anymore, not like he used to be. Now, the only lover, the only pal, he had was a lady named Marjorie— Maude, really. She’d looked at him in the street one afternoon, clad in his new policeman’s uniform before he’d gotten his trench coat, and asked, “Burned or beaten?”
“What?” Noel had responded dumbly.
She’d tapped her foot, rolling her eyes and staring down at her watch. “Burned or beaten— which was it? I haven’t got all day, you know.” Noel hadn’t said anything. “Well?”
“Um…” he said eventually. “Uh, both, doll. Both.”
“Maude.”
“What?”
“My name. Not ‘doll.’”
Noel had put his hands up in surrender. “Didn’t mean anything by it, ma’am, honest.”
She smiled at him then. “Good.”
Then, pleased as punch, she’d stuck out her hand for him to shake. “Nice to meet you Mr. …?”
“Uh, Noel. Noel Finley.”
And the rest was history.
Recently, he’d even gained the high esteem of being allowed to call her ‘doll’ again. This was after she’d spent a great deal of her time teasing him for gaining a tender pash for one Arthur Lester.
“You’ve seen the bird, what, once, Natty? And you’re already mooney over him?” She ribbed.
Noel couldn’t tell her about Roland’s lighter, of course, but even so, it was more than that. Arthur Lester was a thrice-damned hurricane. He was a real ‘handsome desperado’ type. Had this sort of ‘alone against the world’ look that made you want to root for him. In some ways, Noel wondered if it wasn’t always meant to be like this. That he wasn’t doomed to fall in love with the man, over and over again, staring into those yellow eyes like it was the end of the world.
Noel fell in love like most people fell into debt. He was in love with Roland before he’d died. He was in love with Marjorie as it was. And now, he was in love with Arthur Lester, too.
When you thought the whole world was beautiful, it was easy to find yourself taken with anyone in it.
All of this wasn’t even counting John, the entity.
Splashing his face in the ice cold water of the kitchen faucet, Noel gave himself a good slap.
‘Hey,’ a little voice in his head joked. ‘At least it’s not John, the Baptist.’
He chuckled to himself, drying his face with a clean rag.
John looked at Noel through Arthur’s eyes like Noel was the greatest thing since the electric cigarette lighter. A man could get crazy ideas from a fella looking at him like that.
And now he’d invited them both to live with him.
“Noel!” Arthur called from somewhere nearby. “John wants to know if we can borrow a pair of undergarments? I told him it was uncouth to ask, and we’re probably different sizes besides, but he’s insisting, so—“
Arthur. In his clothes. In his shirtsleeves and boxers, walking around his home.
God. He muffled the sound of his groan into the meat of his palm. What was he thinking?
He was never going to make it out of this alive.
**********
One Week Prior
He blinked awake at the edge of tomorrow. Sun was sneaking in through the window by then, drenching walls and curtains in hazy reds and purples, and it was the morning after the morning after the most important day of his life. His journal was on his nightstand. His body was holding onto memories he’d hoped he’d never recall. Time was a slippery thing, but he felt like he’d lost track of it, it slipped out of his hands somewhere between thirty-eight and forty-one.
In his arms, next to him, Marjorie was curled in like a letter C and sighing grumpily. She was a comma, a piece of punctuation against the darkness receding from the room, like something Noel had seen in a dream once about what ‘mornings after’ were like but that he’d never believed until now. Of course, her skin was pink with sweat and tired from the night, wrinkled and imperfect and real, and they were lovers, but that didn’t have anything to do with the world’s understanding of ‘love’. It was about the closeness, and the physical shared space between two bodies in a world that felt like it isolated everyone on their own. It was defiance to have sex with someone, in such a place. It was defiant to share themselves unabashedly, in such a space.
“Morning, doll,” Noel said.
Marjorie sleepily opened an eye back at him.
“What time’s it, Natty?”
“Just after sunrise, I’m guessing.”
She groaned. “Then go back to sleep, you big egg. Why do you always get up when the cock crows?”
A piece of her hair twirled between his fingers, he hummed. He stared at the shape of the city’s morning on the walls as they played and danced in the sunrise.
“Something about the seeing the colors, I think,” he said. “I like the way they move.“
She laughed, yawned against him with tiredness of the body, and patted him on the arm. “What, you a poet now?”
“Nah, just the soul of someone whose read a lotta Shakespeare.”
Marjorie laughed. “Well, anywhose— I’m going back to bed, you goof.”
She rubbed at one eye with the back of her hand, the memory of black mascara wiping away onto her skin as she did so. “You’re welcome to do what you want.”
“And if what I want is to watch you?”
She smiled, stretching out long and falling into Noel’s chest to look up at him from under her eyelids, “I’m not opposed.” She kissed his chest. “You do that while I. Go back to sleep.”
“Cruel misstress,” he joked.
“It’s good for you to have patience. Teaches you character, my mother used to say.”
“Was your mother a prison warden?”
“Practically,” Marjore huffed. “May she be sleeping peacefully in Hell.”
A laugh startled out of him. “Tell me how ya really feel, doll.”
Arm wrapped around her, pressed skin against skin, the heat of both of them together in the already hot room made a sort-of comfortable sweat— a comfortable sauna of peacefulness to lay inside of. He ran his hand up and down the lanscape of her back.
“What do you think of that new kid?” She asked him.
“Hm?”
“The pretty one you were telling me about.”
“Arthur? He’s good, I like him.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Got a face like a cherub. Well sorta. Maybe more like a sad little orphan. He’s very thin, probably starved, but you can just in his eyes that he’s trying.”
She pushed up like a flower to the sun at his touch, and was very much a woman in a way that Noel so enjoyed. The covers pooled loosely around her waist as she sat up to catch a beam of the early morning sun.
“You always did like an underdog,” she said.
“I know. Gotta thing for the little guys.”
She curled her ankles over his. “Is he… you know…” she asked.
“Hm?”
She traced a finger idly, lazily, going nowhere, across the valley of his neck. Just touch for the sake of it. Closeness. People touching people. Being alive together. Lonely together.
“…’musical’?”
Noel was quiet, and thought.
From the brief glimpse he’d been allowed to steal, Arthur Lester was an ocean wearing the skin of a man. A guy leaning how to live with himself again, distant and strange. Desperate and dark enough to make a deal with the devil, but really trying so hard to find the light. He was a pianist, probably. Noel saw him tapping his fingers like notes when he was nervous— but being musical, like he and Marjorie were, had nothing to do with notes.
‘Musical’ wasn’t something you did, it was something you were.
More relevant was that he was a fighter. He was firm where Marjorie was sleek. He was angles where she was curves. Compared to her, Noel got the sense he was equally as dangerous, but twice as scared.
“I’d say he’s no dancing daisy,” he conceded at last. “But I think he’d be good for a dance or two.”
“You’re sweet on him.”
“A bit.”
It was as if, in that moment of seeing Arthur face the Butcher, wild and animal and free with his teeth, Noel had reached a sort of conclusion. There was this sense of, upon meeting him, “Oh, this story— its about him.” Maybe he always was, in every reality, doomed again and again to fall in love with Arthur Lester. Maybe that was just fate. Maybe he’d fallen in love with him before he’d even known his name, hearing of him from the Cana, imagining what he’d look like, how he’d speak. How he’d carry the weight of his past in himself, like a shield or like a pistol.
It was a sort of half-second, barely blink-and-you’ll miss it, but a wave washed over him. A shiver, and he knew.
It didn’t help that he was pleasant to look at, too, in that’s sort of gaunt, gangly sort of way you could enjoy if you’d ever been a war with another man before.
“I don’t know, doll, there’s just something about him.”
She patted his chest. “Well, that’s just jake, then. You let me know how it goes, you hear? If I don’t get a letter from you within the month with news of progress, I’ll just have to come back up here and meet him myself.”
“Oh Lord, Maude. And you’d do it, too, you little so-and-so.”
“Of course I would. A person who can’t say what they mean is a fool over twice. Once because they lied to others, and another because they lied to themselves. I can’t abide people like that.”
“You know, you scare me sometimes, sweetheart.”
She smiled at him, wolfish. “Good.”
And then they didn’t speak again the rest of the morning.
*******
Come three days later, as it turned out, Noel learned that one pretty fella was actually two. Double trouble. Two for the price of one. Talk about an identity crisis.
Poor Arthur, though— and poor John.
Noel felt for them both, really. Especially considering the way in which one couldn’t understand the luxury of privacy until they had an otherworldly entity peeking in from on their shoulder while they tried to use the shitter.
Still, as far as problems went, there were definitely worse entities in the world to have to share a brain with. At least John and Arthur seemed to be on good terms.
He sighed and leaned against his desk in the station, rolling a cigarette beneath his fingers, watching the boys switch in and out for their ‘Butcher guarding’ shifts. They were practically slamming one another against the walls in their attempts to push away.
Fiddling in his pocket for a light, he huffed.
What was it about this city that bred people who moved so quickly through life, anyway?
They were always rushing somewhere— to somewhere, from somewhere. It made him wonder when they had any time to relax. Not to mention, it had been hell trying to get anyone in the damn place to guard the Butcher in the first place. He’d had to rattle a few skulls in order to get some action done at all.
Damn, he frowned. His pockets were empty.
“Hey, Hudson,” he said. “You gotta light?”
“Not for you I don’t.”
He rolled his eyes. “C’mon, don’t be like that.”
Hudson glared at him. Noel raised an eyebrow. From the way he’d been acting, you’d think Noel was asking him to play roulette with a loaded pistol.
“Don’t be such a pussycat— you a man or arent’cha?”
Dick Hudson, fellow detective-in-arms, poked two fingers into Noel’s chest. “I don’t wanna hear that from you, Finley.”
Noel laughed. “Better me than your wife!”
Hudson swiped the pair of cuffs off Noel’s desk, and was practically huffing smoke and embers at him from between his teeth. Shame.
“Real cute,” he sneered at Noel. “Real cute. We’ll see how cute you think it is tomorrow when I wind up dead!”
Then he marched off to go new the third person on the Butcher’s guard detail.
“Yeesh,” Noel said to himself, alone in the bullpen. “What a gargoyle.”
He shoved the loose cigarette in his pocket, mourning the death of a peaceful afternoon making love to it.
Then he gathered up the notes he’d been able to take on Arthur (and John), tucked the files underneath his arm, and went to go see if he couldn’t find himself a good goddamn cup of joe in the whole of the Big Apple.
If he couldn’t have a cigarette, the least he could do was have that.
*******
Just his luck that he never found it.
Instead of an easy cup of joe, he’d had to walk to Katz’s and get a pastrami on rye, because the station was out of coffee— and it was damned-near remarkable, a police station in New York City out of coffee— and he’d hit close enough to the lunch rush that everywhere worth paying for when it came to the good stuff was already being visited by everyone and their Aunt Sally’s.
Sighing, he leaned up against a brick wall between the Bowrey and East Houston St., and watched up above as the rolling smog curled by. Around him, car horns honked and people skated from one street to another, looking for a desperate fix, looking for a job, looking for something to get them out of this goddamn depression even if it came from the hand of the devil himself.
He chuckled. He was really starting to sound like a detective now. Roland would’ve been proud.
He pulled out the file from under his arm.
‘Arthur Lester,’ it read. Noel took a bite of his sandwich. Scribbled in the corner on top of the offense reports was the small summary, ‘Wanted in conjunction with murder of Eddie Feldler, and possible death of Peter W. Yang.’ Stuff he’d already gone over yesterday. Still, always nice to review.
These boys were really in it deep, after all.
He kept reading.
‘Personal Information ’ came up next. Listed things like the suspect’s age (thirty-one, which was damn near a decade younger than himself, like he was a cradle-robber, Jesus), complexion (pale), and modus operandi (strangling, apparently, which made him wonder if it was Arthur or John who’d been doing the strangling). Overall though, pretty boring stuff.
Eventually, his eyes scanned across something new. Something interesting.
‘Wife: Isabella Lester nee. Saltzman (deceased).’
Noel raised his brows. He took another bite of his sandwich.
‘Children,’ the next section read. ‘Y.’
He choked.
Then, he read it again. ‘Children: Y.’
“No shit?”
The file went on to say, ‘Daughter: Faroe Lester (deceased).’
“Dammit, kid,” he muttered. “Who haven’t you lost?”
Arthur Lester, it seemed, was a magnet for bad news. Both giving it, and causing it.
Then, three things happened all at once.
First, he went to take yet another bite. Second, his watch glinted. Third, he bit it into his cheek and cursed.
Half past one.
The chief would have his keister if he wasn’t back soon.
Shit, Shit. Shit.
Papers became origami disasters as he quickly shoved them back into the file. Like a goddamned lunatic, he started running down the sidewalk, sandwich bit between his teeth. Thank God they couldn’t arrest people for crazy, because if they could, he’d be halfway to hoosegow by now.
As it was, the door to the station slammed shut behind him just in time for the captain to give him no more than a threatening look.
Noel gave him a sloppy salute back. “Noel Finely, here and reporting for duty, sir.”
*****
Then it came:
The Day of Reckoning.
It was a Tuesday like any other in New York City, and Noel was standing at the edge of the universe, looking up into the face of God. She looked down at him with such kindness that, for a second, he could almost believe there was no such thing as cruelty in the world.
“Coffee?” She asked him.
“Please,” Noel said, rubbing at the deep purple spaces underneath his eyes. He slumped into a stool in front of the counter and sighed into one of his palms.
“That’s a big sigh for such an early morning,” a familiar English voice said from next to him.
Noel smiled. “Hiya, doll.”
“Hello, Detective Noel.”
The coffee set in front of him was hot and fragrant.
“Thanks, love.” He sipped at it black, burning hot, steam still rising up. It was bitter as dirt, and strong as engine oil. His shoulders loosened and he took another sip. “Ahh, that’s the stuff.”
He turned to the face next to him to catch a glimpse of what was no doubt his favorite private eye. Thin as a stick, flighty as an antelope, but twice as mean— much like a territorial buck, Arthur Lester was a nasty little fucker. Noel’s smile broadened at the thought.
As it did so, Arthur’s, or technically John’s, yellow irises caught his gaze. Noel winked at him, raising his mug slightly into the air— something of a ‘good morning’ greeting just for the two of them to share. A chuckle caught in his throat as John’s eyes widened and then sharply looked away. Then he had to bite his lip to contain it as the hand that belonged to John began fiddling with the edge of the counter, too.
“So, what brings you two to my little part of town, huh?” He asked eventually.
“House-hunting, currently,” Arthur said.
Noel frowned. “I thought you ’n Johnny were staying with Marie?”
“Yes— well,” Arthur stammered. “We, we were. But as things with the Order of the Fallen Star get more and more heated, I don’t want to put the woman in any more danger than she’s already been in.”
Noel raised an eyebrow. “Danger?”
“Oh— ah, you know, just— um— everything with the Butcher and Larson, and all of that…”
Arthur Lester was many things, but good at subterfuge was not one of them.
“Sure. Right,” he just agreed pleasantly. Cornered animals and all that. He’d find out later, if he had to. “How’s that going for you?”
Arthur rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Poorly,” he admitted.
Let it not be said that Noel couldn’t recognize an opportunity when he saw one. “You needing a place to stay?”
“Just… just for a little while.”
Noel finished off the last dregs of his coffee, letting out a contented sigh. “You can come stay with me, then.”
“What?”
Noel laughed. “Whattya mean, ‘what?’”
“Well, it’s just that— we couldn’t possibly, Noel, I mean, you’ve done so much for us already, and really it just wouldn’t be right to—“
Noel pressed a finger to Arthur’s mouth, ears tingling at the way in which the other man quieted near instantly. “You worry a lot about being polite for someone whose admitted to killing at least seven people, you know that?”
Arthur opened his mouth, but empty sound was all that came out.
Noel laughed. It had been a long time since he’d felt comfortable enough with someone to play around like this.
“Close your mouth,” he said, pressing his knuckle gently into the softness of the skin beneath Arthur’s jaw. “Or you’ll catch flies.”
Arthur’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click.
“So you’ll stay?” Noel asked.
“That would be...” Arthur started to say. He stopped again, frowning. Then he tried again, clearing his throat. “That is, I mean to say that— ah— only if you’re sure—”
“I am.”
“And you’ve really— really, thought about this?” Arthur sounded a bit peaky.
“Sure have. You boys need a place to stay, I’ve got one. Seems simple enough.”
“You’re positive? Really, really positive?”
Noel was tempted to roll his eyes. “Johnny, would you be so kind as the tell Arthur here that I’m not in the habit of saying things I don’t mean?”
Whatever John was saying made Arthur turn the most fascinating shade of pink, and caused his eyebrows to narrow on his face by a good few centimeters.
“Fine then,” he said eventually. He straightened his collar. “Yes, we’d be honored to stay with you.”
*********
And that was how he’d ended up here.
What began as a spur-of-the-moment idea had led to Arthur Lester asking to borrow his underpants at two in the afternoon, and Noel realizing he was doomed— or damn-near close to it. The kitchen counter was cool against his forehead as he Decidedly Did Not Slam his head into it.
Same fool he’s always been, really.
He really shouldn’t have been so surprised by now.
He’d always liked playing with fire.