Nick and Charlie life after high school one shots

Love and the weather birds of a feather

In grammar school, maybe in year five or six, Nick became totally obsessed with weather patterns. He liked how predictable they could be to the trained eye, even though it was a mystery to the average person. When he grew up, he wanted to be able to tell the future like meteorologists did, to keep his mum safe. Rather quickly, he got fed up with waiting to grow up and decided he would just learn how to predict the weather then, at age eleven.

Luckily, there was a new girl in his class, Suzie, whose family had just moved from the states. She proudly told everyone on her first day that she was from Kansas, and anyone who has watched the Wizard of Oz knows that Kansas is where all tornadoes are made, and that everyone from Kansas can look at the sky and see it coming like Aunty Em and Uncle Henry, So, Nick decided if he was going to learn to predict the weather, he would have to befriend Suzie.

Suzie did not seem all that put off by the fact that the one person who bothered to approach her only wanted to talk about the weather. She did, however , set Nick straight about how tornadoes worked.

Much to Nick's disappointment, Suzie had not actually seen one. But her mum had. So one day after school, Nick headed over to Suzie's house to collect an oral history on tornados from a real-life expert, and it scared him shitless. Suzie's mum told him about how the sky turned green when a bad one was coming and how someone she called "paw-pawr" could feel a storm in his knees, while she would always get a headache the day before. She explained about the storm shelters and dust storms and how you can smell a storm in the air from your porch, and how sometimes the storm sirens would go off when the sky was clear and no one would run for the hills until they could feel that shift beneath their feet.

Sarah had to pick Nick up early from Suzie's because he wouldn't stop crying.

She assured him over a cup of tea that it wasn't true, that storms didn't work like that, even though they did. Regardless, Nick didn't want to be a meteorologist after that. But turns out, his abandoned grade school dreams would come true, as no one could predict Charlie's storms as well as he could.

Like a good midwestern mama, he could look into the sky just know if a storm was a comin. He could feel it in his bones when something was wrong with Charlie, even if they were miles apart. More than once in uni, Nick had run off the rugby pitch without warning to go check on him or left in the middle of a lesson to lock up all the sharps or pick up some comfort food.

And like any meteorologist, his predictions were not always spot on. Sometimes, he would come home and find Charlie happy on the couch with the dogs, no crisis in sight. Like Suzie's mum said, sometimes the storm sirens would go off without a cloud in sight. But most of the time he was right. He would find Charlie in the bathroom dismantling a shaving razor or on the bedroom floor sorting every piece of their clothing by color and size in a panic.

Tori could feel the shifts in Charlie's mood sometimes too. One time, she drove all the way from London to Leeds on a hunch that something was wrong. She was right of course. She called it her 'big sister senses'. Nick's therapist, Amanda, called it a trauma response, hypervigilance, because like it or not, Charlie's mental illness was traumatic for everyone involved, especially Charlie.

When Amanda had first told him this, Nick was incredibly offended, but not as offended as he had been when his coworkers suggested that he start seeing a therapist to help cope with the effects of Charlie's illness. How could anyone even begin to imply that Charlie, the love of his life, had traumatized him? It took time, and a lot of research, for him to accept that it was okay, and even normal, for loved ones to be psychologically affected by a loved one's chronic illness.

Nick didn't really care what anyone called it. Hypervigilance, spidey senses, meteorology, whatever. He was just grateful that he could feel the shifts in Charlie's weather so he could help him feel better. Because Nick wasn't just the weatherman, he was the storm shelter too. A safe place for Charlie to run when things began to fly out of control. And maybe it was fucked up and maybe they were as co-dependent as Jane claimed in her last fight with Charlie before he left the Spring household for good, but fuck, Nick loved being able to comfort him. He loved holding the younger boy as he weathered the storm in his mind. Because he knew in his heart that as long as he was there, no one could hurt Charlie; no one but himself.