I think it’s frankly rather odd that fics don’t address more frequently Charles learning that Edwin’s death was a hate crime, too.
Because Edwin tells him up front that he was murdered by bullies, but for obvious reasons does not tell him why. He seems to have been pretty firmly closeted right up until Port Townsend. It’s conceivably possible he could have told Charles something like “I was killed because they perceived me as an [outdated term]”, but I think incredibly unlikely because he would not want to open that door in Charles’s perception of him (or his own perception of himself, either, frankly), among other reasons.
It’s significantly more likely that Charles figured that out on his own. I grew up in the ‘90s and 2000s, and boys were still being killed for acting like Edwin does, violently physically bullying people for that was still fully standard behavior. (And against perceived-girls who acted in the equivalent opposite fashion, but that’s a separate matter.) Charles certainly knew enough bullies and knew enough about social dynamics to identify that if Edwin was showing the mannerisms when alive that he does when dead, the bullies Charles knew might’ve killed him for it.
But, like, there’s a difference between part of you knowing that with plausible deniability (maybe they were just Like That in Edwardian times, maybe that was part of it but also Edwin has those Vibes that also drive bullies to people [those Vibes being autism vibes but Charles wouldn’t know that], and simply harshly repressing his awareness of what all that suggests about Edwin for a wide variety of reasons both historical and relational) - there’s a difference between that and being told, explicitly, that your best friend was murdered by people chanting a homophobic slur.
And, I dunno, I think it’s interesting that doesn’t come up more.
