Kaleidoscope (a Heartstopper fanfiction)

Talk

Radio silence from Charlie that night. Nick was afraid to text him, afraid that any response would be to finish what he had started to say at lunch. At form, they exchanged a very faint "hi" but then Charlie asked permission to go to the art room and disappeared without another look.

Nick caught Charlie in the hallway later and stopped him. He couldn't help smiling because seeing Charlie always made him smile, even now. "Hey."

"Hey." Charlie looked almost frightened to talk to him.

Nick took a step closer. "Did you want to get lunch together?"

"Um ... I can't. Sorry." And he walked away.

Nick looked after him in a panic. So this was real. Charlie was shutting him out. He felt so lost. He couldn't bear to just let this happen, but if being together was making Charlie this miserable, how could Nick ask him to continue?

He went out to the picnic tables at lunch in hopes of finding Charlie there, but Tao was sitting there alone. Nick approached him anyway, setting his lunch down. If he couldn't talk to Charlie, he could at least try to make things right with Tao. Maybe Tao knew what was going on with Charlie; maybe he could tell Nick how to fix it.

As Nick sat down, Tao asked, "Where's Charlie?"

"I thought he'd be here."

"I thought he was eating with you."

Nick shook his head. "Charlie avoiding you, too?"

"I'm avoiding him."

"Why?"

"Because I'm pissed off with him."

"Oh."

Tao leaned toward Nick. "Charlie's my friend. I was so worried about him joining the rugby team and becoming friends with you because I knew that he'd get picked on by some of the idiots in your year. And guess what? He did."

In hindsight, convincing Charlie to join rugby hadn't been one of Nick's better ideas. Possibly he should have known that at the time, but he hadn't had any clue then just how terrible his friends were.

"I'm done trying to protect him when he's forgotten I exist," Tao went on, "like, I deserve to be appreciated. If he'd just told me that you two were going out, like, maybe I would have done things differently. Maybe I would have stayed more low-key and Harry would have left us alone."

Nick doubted that. Harry would have found a way to be obnoxious regardless. But that wasn't the important part here. The important part was putting Charlie and Tao's friendship back together. They needed each other, and Nick's presence in Charlie's life had messed that up. He had to fix it. "I think Charlie might be nervous about telling you because he really cares about your opinion. Because he loves you a lot."

"Yeah. Well. I'll believe that when I actually see it." Tao frowned. "Why's he avoiding you?"

"I think maybe ... he's finding it hard having to lie to people about us. He's not angry about me being in the closet or anything, like ... He knows I'm not ready to come out, but ..." He left it at that, not wanting to voice his fear that Charlie was finding their relationship more difficult than it was worth.

"Look," Tao said. "I've known Charlie since we were eleven, and he's always had a tendency to believe that him just existing is annoying for other people."

"Yeah. I, uh— I sort of got that impression."

"He's not going to force you to come out. Which is good. He would literally never tell you this, but he probably wants to be something more than 'secret guy you kiss sometimes on the down-low'."