Work Text:
Charles always liked to categorise.
It was part of the reason he adored the study of insects. Insects were straightforward things, either Coleoptera or Diptera, Hymenoptera or Lepidoptera. No confusion, no mess, nothing other than distinct groups and their wonderful variations within them.
Ever since he could remember he’d been sorting things based on whatever arbitrary rule his brain had landed upon; colour, size, texture, it didn’t really matter. There was always a way to implement a system, to give order and meaning to something chaotic.
Even if the other children came in and spoilt it all.
So it was no surprise really that Charles liked to divide his own life in sections.
Up until now it had always been the standard markings given to him by science; childhood, puberty, adulthood. There had been smaller boxes that he had used, happy moments, sad moments, confusing moments (that had mainly been filled with the actions of his peers) moments of frustration and all sorts of others.
But now there was one simple divide between two sides of Charles’ life. One divide that now represented his entire life
Before, and now during, Monty.
Sometimes it was hard to believe there ever could have been a ‘before Monty’. He filled up Charles’ life in a way the man himself had never realised was empty. In some ways he was a total enigma. How one man could be so self-obsessed and yet so totally unself-aware baffled Charles, a man who spent most of his life in a state of self-consciousness. But there was a magnetism to him, some form of electricity that even Charles couldn’t resist.
Monty couldn’t be categorised.
That hadn’t always been true, of course. In the ‘just before Monty’ section of Charles’ memories he vaguely recalled having lumped ‘Ewen Montagu’ in with all the other abrasive and over-familiar colleagues, the Johns and the Reggies, grouped up together in one neat little category named ‘Too Loud’.
But then one day Monty had marched out of Colonel Bevan’s office, swearing like the sailor he thinks he is, straight out of that neat little box and into Charles’ personal space.
Charles doesn’t think he’s more grateful for anything.
Not only because Monty had gotten his plan green-lit by Bevan allowing them to (miraculously) save thousands of lives, but because he can sit here now and say that he had someone for the first time in a good long while to categorise under ‘friend’.
Even after that awful business with the missing files. Charles didn’t really have anything he truly considered betrayal until the moment he thought Monty had been leaking information. Well, unless you considered the time the cat spilt tea all over Charles’ typewriter. Really, it would have been just Charles’ luck for his closest friend to have been a secret fascist all along.
And although, yes, what Monty had been doing was wrong, Charles had been sure that this was the moment that he had ruined the best thing he had going for him, that Monty was never going to look at him with that same warmth in his eyes and call him ‘his genius’. That he’d lost his friend.
But of course, Monty would never be as predictable as all that. Instead, he’d laughed the whole thing off with an “honestly Charlie, I told you from the beginning you could trust me” as if the whole thing didn’t matter at all. In fact, Monty had taken Charles’ refusal to be involved in his whole ‘film’ scheme as a much greater offence. Somehow.
Whatever the reason was, Monty had taken the whole thing remarkably well, and Charles couldn’t be more relieved. Because, despite all his protestations at the beginning of their relationship, Charles couldn’t bear to imagine an ‘after Monty’.
Not because he couldn’t, no, he could see exactly what would happen. His life would return exactly to the way it was, a precise schedule of work, home, study, brandy, bed. But because now, to lose Monty would be to lose a part of himself that he had grown to love.
After all, Monty had done something he previously thought impossible. He’d forced Charles into socialising and, eventually, taught him to like it. Hester and Jean had come into his life alongside Monty, and although they had been just as reluctant as Charles at first, now he had people that he could finally trust, but that he would also tentatively say he cared for.
Thanks to Monty, Charles finally had people he would categorise as ‘friends’.