Charlie is far and away my most obsessed over character in Twilight and it's not even close. Grew up in a small conservative town, married his high school sweetheart because it seemed like the thing to do, spent the rest of his life telling himself they belonged together because once she was gone he could actually believe it.
When they were together her psychic projection made it almost feel like he wanted to be with her, and that was the closest he ever got to wanting to be with anyone. Or wanting to be with anyone he could want. When he was with Renee he almost felt like the person she saw in him, the person he wanted everyone to see, and it's so much easier to tell himself that feeling made him happy when he doesn't have to live with it anymore.
Now he just misses her, and missing is easy. Lonely is easy. Lonely is no secret, lonely is exactly what he's supposed to feel, and it's a relief to feel it so easily. It's a relief to feel something he doesn't have to lock up in a secret place inside himself where no one can find it.
Billy has no secrets. Or if he does, and maybe he does, and sometimes it really feels like he does, Billy knows how to keep them locked tight. A glance, a graze of hands, a spark in a brief touch, and then it's locked up tight and Charlie can't see it at all. Charlie owes it to Billy to do the same. To make a world that makes sense.
He's lived in Forks his whole life. Putting certain things in a special place in your mind, a place that you don't think about, is how you get by in this town. Strange things happen every day, and locking them away is how you make your world make sense. He's been doing it all his life, was taught to do it since birth. He can do it with this, too.
And besides. Billy loves someone else. Loved someone else. Someone he loved, too, but like a sister, and since he ought to love Billy like a brother that ought to have been a good thing. He ought to feel like a brother to Billy now, and thoughts of how much he misses Renee ought to drive away even the possibility of ever feeling anything else.
If he feels guilty sometimes, feels scared sometimes, feels like the part of himself he's locked inside is pounding the ceiling and screaming to get out, he doesn't think about it. Pictures of Renee on every wall remind him of how it should feel to feel like Charlie Swan.
And then Jacob takes him outside to show him something. And suddenly Billy has a secret, had a secret, and Billy wasn't ever really Billy Black. Suddenly nothing is what it was supposed to be, he's not what he was supposed to be and he never was, and nothing makes any sense unless maybe for the first time it finally does.
If Billy isn't who he thought he was. If Billy had a locked room. If they're saying out loud all the strange things, the secret things, the things that are supposed to stay in the part of your brain that you don't think about. If the room isn't locked.
How much are they going to say?
If Billy isn't Billy Black anymore, not the way everyone thought he was.
Is he still the same Charlie Swan?
Does he still have to be?
