a small 2k noel character study, for @coulson-is-an-avenger! who's post on noel sustaining an addiction for arthur i could not get out of my head <33
Charlie Dowd had a few bad habits.
He littered. Not always, never when others were looking - not one he was particularly proud of, but the defining factor of a bad habit, he supposed, was how much you wanted to stop. His meager apartment nestled inside the huddling masses of others sprawling throughout downtown New York wasn't the cleanest. Rarely did he have opportunity to tidy up when he lived most of the time out of his office, and no one was coming over to scold the clothes on the floor, anyways. He couldn't park a car between the lines if someone held a gun to his head to do it nor did he have the patience to try. If he didn't find a spot, he got out and abandoned it wherever he thought he could get away with it. More than one parking ticket he'd written off to the long suffering annoyance of the NYPD.
On the job, they called him a bloodhound for how he refused to give up a lead. Praised and admired him for it, sure, but inwardly he knew how often he pushed past his own limits. He got impatient when the boys down in evidence took too long to examine something necessary to a current case, despite knowing they were going as fast as they were able. He tended to run himself dry when in pursuit of an answer. Aching knees, a stiff back, dullness behind the eyes. Signs of his body telling him he felt old, a physical lament he mislabeled resolve and told himself he'd file it away with all the other flaws to work on. He was never good at giving up.
Most of them he knew of. Hard not to, when others kept reminding him these little blemishes were his own responsibility to corral. People loved to be involved, he figured out early on in life, were invested in the perceived imperfections of their fellow human beings. Gods or otherwise forbid a man keep what wore on him to himself. He hadn't forgotten one of the few dates he'd been on in the past, back when he half convinced himself he could settle down, telling him matter of fact he chewed louder than was polite. So what if he enjoyed blueberry pie? It wasn't that he outright disliked having these bad habits brought up, but rather he found the repetition annoying . There was no point in someone saying he needed to pick the clothes up off the floor when the thought ran through his mind well ahead of the remark leaving their lips. It didn't make the task easier.
Everyone had curiosities, small quirks of life. Charlie considered himself someone honest and able to change, open where most might balk at the possibility of all he'd seen. Some habits had shaped themselves around him against his will and he carried them for so long he couldn't find a place to put them back down. They were part of him now. Scarred in actions and in skin, he joked. For a man whose day job offered little predictability he held onto what structure he could, good or bad. A man, he said, was nothing more than a collection of habits and his second best suit, plus the high horse he rode in on.
His vices were like occasional drop-in lovers: a greasy breakfast at the local diner; a pretty face to flirt with in the dark of a bar; singing out of key along to Crosby on the long walk home. Things warm and tangible, tying him to the present moment, before they slipped out the door at first light. A second cigarette too soon after the first, if only for the small pleasure of the subtle warmth so close to the tips of his fingers when he breathed in.
He smoked for a few reasons, now. In terms of bad habits, he'd cultivated this one until it bloomed.
In the Dreamlands, he'd forgotten the taste. Before Egypt he wasn't one for cigarettes, hadn't really bothered to pick them up. He'd bum one off a colleague if he felt so inclined, but rarely on his own did he ever find himself itching for the pleasant burn of tobacco. It was one of the first recollections of taste to leave him, followed swiftly by whiskey, by pie, by diner eggs. If he managed to come across anyone in a state capable enough for conversation, he was lucky, much less anyone who had food they were willing or able to share. In the Dreamlands, he was lucky if he had food he didn't need to kill for any stretch of time at all. Egypt and those he knew, an image of Roland frozen in a grin and framed against a lens of smoke, were hard to hold onto when other patterns of his mind struggled not to slip away.
When he got out, it didn't seem real. A realm of nightmarish existence far beyond anyone's imagining suddenly flipped to stumbling down an empty New York sidewalk in the dead of night, and somewhere in that stepping from one plane to another he left parts of himself in the gap. After crawling blearily towards the general direction of his apartment and breaking in through the window he slept in the cool, dusty ceramic of the bathtub for two days; somewhere in between dreaming and burning, a surreal haze of gleaming silver lighters passing behind his eyelids.
Integrating himself back into society took effort. He bought up every old newspaper still hanging around in corner shops, reading voraciously to find out exactly what he'd missed, how much time he lost. Reassembling himself, as he self-deprecatingly called it to take the edge off, was harder. A shower so long the water ran cold for hours took care of the soil and blood. New clothes to fit a leaner frame were odd against his skin, but good, although he kept his old too-large coat. He cut the hair which had grown past his shoulders, ate so much those first few days he made himself sick. Coming back to the world felt as though he were slipping easily back down into a facsimile of what he once knew and he met it half afraid it would be taken away, half wild with delight. Standing before the mirror in his bedroom, done up in a dark gray suit and clean shaven, he could almost convince himself he looked human.
He tried to live. He waited. And he smoked.
Charlie rejoiced, for a while at least, in being unkempt, all over the place before he threw himself back on track. How invaluable to existence, the mess one man could make, how soft and unyielding a proof he wasn't dead. These imperfections were his own to create, not inflicted on him by some larger, otherworldly king. If he was going to end up a disaster bottled into a new name and a new career at least it'd be on his terms - but eventually the severity softened. The pieces returned to patch him up. After a year Charlie became a man kept a safe hostage in his own mind for his own good, held there under the thumb of Noel Finley like someone pinning a moth so it cannot fly into the lamp.
Noel Finley was warm. Noel Finley cared, had a laugh loud enough to dance with you across the club floor. Noel was dedicated, inquisitive, charming, as sharp as the glint in his gray eye would have you believe. Inwardly he wondered if these were old characteristics returning as the distance between him and the decade of captivity grew, or if he even recalled what he was like before. Noel smoked too much, left his office a mess, forgot to return library books. Noel rarely kept his back to anyone, chose a seat close to the door. Noel always asked for a light and never carried his own. He took the bad with the good. At least it belonged to no one else.
Sometimes he felt like the last tangible wisps of Charlie were kept suspended in every granule of ash dropping off the edge of each cigarette to the pavement below. If he smoked he could keep him material for just a little while longer.
He became a connoisseur of sorts. Camels were a little dry, Lucky Strikes he preferred. Old Golds he once joked to a stranger sounded like Old Gods, and she didn't find it funny. Never before had he purposefully sustained an addiction. He couldn't even reason to himself why he continued, day after day, on the wan hope of someone who's words he struggled to hold clear and undiluted through passing time.
Wasn't it silly? Noel asked himself often enough, breathing in a puff of warm, acrid air, turning up his coat collar against the evening's bitter chill. Wasn't it hardly worth it, for a man he may not ever meet? Why he cared so much remained a partial mystery. Hope was a strange creature. It slunk beaten and bruised from his chest delirious with the notion that this all might have a point, Lorick's advice a constant tickle behind the everyday wall of thought. Something in this all needed a point, if his imprisonment had none.
Noel pictured him a hundred times, imagining anyone over a range of ages and physical descriptions. In crowds he wondered who among him could be the one, idly passing each other by, neither of them knowing. Whether or not Lorick gave him anything concrete he lost to pitfalls in his memory, dark blotches of time erased he cursed every day. A younger man, perhaps, he reasoned. Brown hair, a haunted set to his features, maybe, given what he likely had endured. Hey, darlin', he might say. Got a light? Got somethin' in you to keep me from feeling the weight of the world? Got eyes hazel enough to shine out like gold? Did he care for Chesterfields? He likely smoked. No other reason he'd carry that lighter.
Noel lifts his head. Something snaps as he does so, a crick in his neck nestled deep after so long staring down at the photographs on his desk. One of the men assigned to keep tabs on the case leans tensely into the room.
"Mhm?" Noel hums, gathering his bearings. He glances quickly at the clock on the wall, ticking mutely away at the hour. How long he's been here is anyone's guess, including his own.
"They need you down there."
"Down where? The hospital?"
The man nods, offering a wan smile. "Right away. Seems like he's finally showed his face. You got a real situation on your hands ahead of you, I think"
Rubbing a hand across his forehead, Noel pushes back his chair. It had gone cold in the room. Despite the shallow ache in his limbs from sitting still too long, an exhilaration was beginning to build, threading like live wire throughout his nerves.
"Better make it quick, Finley."
He flaps a hand. "I'm goin'. Tell the others to be down there about ten minutes after me."
"You sound so sure of yourself."
One corner of his mouth lifts. "That's all he's gonna get."
As he ducks out the door of the station, one hand slips into his pocket, checking to make sure the pack of cigarettes was there. The familiar weight in his coat comforted him. Dependence clothed in habitual, temporary stretches of relief, he thinks, quickening his pace. Or were all addictions the same? Some pattern of misguided hope in the mundane?
Wasn't that all he was, too?
