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Charles is tinkering with the two pairs of glasses they'd just received as payment for their last case. Doing up their disguises for the first time. It's a lovely bit of magic, really, and he can already tell it's going to be dead useful. He might even be rambling about it, just a little, in his excitement, picking through the logistics of how two middle-aged versions of him and Edwin ought to look. He's just starting in on the necktie patterns he vaguely remembers his teachers wearing, when—
"Charles?" Edwin interrupts, and Charles turns toward him, expectant. "Actually, I. Well, I wondered if… I thought perhaps. If there is the choice… of course, only if it is possible, and if it doesn't—if it doesn't suit that is perfectly fine. But I—"
"Edwin, mate. What is it? It's all right. Whatever it is, just spit it out. Better out than in, yeah?"
"Well… I only wondered… must we both be men, as it were? In our disguises?"
And Charles feels taken aback, a little, if he's honest. It's a new thought, if not exactly an unfamiliar one, somehow. But he smooths his face out, keeps the catching up his mind is doing from showing. "I mean, I hadn't really thought about it, mate. Don't think I'd really fancy being anything else."
"I was not referring to you." Edwin's voice is tight and high, bordering on defensive, and suddenly it dawns on Charles that this is—this is something important to Edwin. Maybe more so than he'd picked up on, before. "I have been considering that I might prefer—but it is nothing. I can simply abide—"
"Oh, no. Shhh, no," Charles croons, overtaken with the instinct to step closer, to clear away the clouds from Edwin's expression. "Stop that right there, we're not having you abide anything, mate." And he puts his hands on Edwin's shoulders, where they belong, and rubs a little, digs his fingers into taut muscle that shouldn't be able to carry tightness. Feels the tension seep out slowly, as Edwin relaxes into his grasp.
"All right," Edwin says, as though he's convincing himself, "all right."
"I've just got to fiddle with the charm a bit, but… should be easy enough. S'not like there's rules to the disguises, after all. 'Course you can be a woman, Eds. Nothing stopping you. Don't matter one bit to me."
"Truly?"
Edwin sounds so unsure, and so terribly hopeful, as though he isn't asking Charles for the easiest thing in the world: to take him just as he is and still adore every part of him. The secret parts becoming not so secret anymore. The mystery of Edwin Payne revealed, piece by piece, the innermost bits of him entrusted into Charles' care. It makes Charles' chest tighten in sympathy. In something like love.
He nods, insistent. "Truly. Actually, it sort of… and don't be put out, now. But it sort of… fits, don't it? Now I think about it. Fits you." Charles gives him an exaggerated, appraising once-over, grinning. "Fits us, even."
And then Edwin is smiling back, a tiny upward quirk of the lips. His eyes gone bright and beautiful, the storm in them dispersed. Privately, Charles thinks he might even be well on his way to coaxing out that crooked flash of teeth he likes on Edwin so much: the one he looks forward to every time because it means Edwin is proper content.
"I daresay it does, Charles."