A Nice Boy (The Family Matters Edition)

by pocky_slash

Summary:

Erik's not sure whether the problem is that he doesn't want his parents to meet Charles or that he doesn't want Charles to meet his parents. Either way, he never invites Charles to brunch. Why should he? It's not like they're dating.

Notes:

• For pearl_o.
• Inspired by A Nice Boy by pearl_o

Thanks to my beta team for their help and pearl_o for having so many excellent stories for me to work with!

When Erik wakes up, he has no idea where he is. There's metal around him, of course, but it's the usual detritus of living quarters. There are wires and windows and nails and screws. He can tell there's a kitchen not far from where he's lying and a bathroom down the hall. His own things--phone, wallet, money clip, spare change--are near the bed in the pockets of his pants. On the other side of the bed are an unfamiliar phone and wallet in unfamiliar pants, sitting on--

An unfamiliar wheelchair. Right. Charles Xavier. He went home with Raven's brother.

He's not entirely sure this is what Raven meant when she insisted that he and Charles work together. Of course, knowing Raven and her occasional nosing into his love life, it's also possible this is exactly what she meant.

Erik opens his eyes and props himself up on his elbows. Charles' bedroom is sunny and spacious--it would have to be, he realizes, given the combination of wheelchair requirements and insane wealth. Charles is still sprawled in the bed next to him, dead to the world, and the night before starts to come back in fragments. The party at Raven's apartment to welcome Charles back to New York after several years teaching at Oxford. Raven introducing Erik to Charles as a possible resource for Charles' book. The increasing volume of the party as more guests arrived, driving Charles and Erik to steal a bottle of gin and a bottle of tonic and hide in Raven's tiny home office until their flirtation hit the tipping point and they decided to go to Charles' place, if only because Charles refused to have sex somewhere his sister lived.

Charles yawns and rubs his eyes. It's far too endearing.

"What time is it?" he asks, his voice cracking in the middle. Erik reaches out for a clock while simultaneously shaking his phone out of his pants pocket and directing it towards his hand. He hits the home button on his phone the same moment he finds the wall clock in the living room.

Then he curses.

"What?" Charles asks, suddenly more awake, fighting to push himself up under the mountain of blankets on top of them.

"I'm going to be late," Erik says. He jumps out of bed and starts to fumble with his clothes. "I have to meet my parents for brunch at eleven, it's already after ten! Where the hell are we?"

"Upper West Side," Charles supplies.

"Of course," Erik says, rolling his eyes with a familiarity that should feel foreign after only one night together. The truth is, he already feels like he's known Charles for decades. "I'm headed to Queens--we have brunch every Sunday, me and my parents and my sister."

"That's lovely," Charles says. Erik's pretty sure he means it, probably because he's never had to deal with Ruth cackling at him when he shows up in last night's clothes looking like ten miles of bad road.

"Listen," Erik says as he tucks the tails of his shirt into his rumpled pants. "I wasn't just trying to get into your pants last night--though that was definitely a perk--I really am interested in your book. I lived at one of Shaw's academies for eighteen months when I was a teenager. You should call me." He pulls a business card out of his wallet and takes a pen off of the bedside table to write his cell number on the back. He hands the card to Charles, who takes it from him with one hand and grabs his wrist with the other, pulling Erik close enough for a quick, searing kiss.

"I look forward to it," he murmurs, and Erik reminds himself that Ruth will never let it go if he skips brunch to climb back into bed with someone he just met.

"See you around," Erik says, shoving his feet back into his shoes and tripping out of the bedroom. He gives Charles a final wave and Charles waves back, smirking.

***

Erik texts Ruth from the subway and tells her the trains are a mess and he might be late. It's futile, he knows--she'll take one look at him and make her own assumptions. Miraculously, the trip takes less than an hour, which is unheard of on Sundays, and he's only a few minutes late to brunch, breathlessly racing into the kitchen just as his mother is pulling a coffee cake from the oven. Erik hopes, distantly, it's nothing too extreme. His mother owns a bakery and everything on the menu is tested in her own kitchen first. Sometimes it's a delicious berry cinnamon crumble, but just as often it's something strange with avocado or random foreign fruits from the Farmer's Market.

"Sorry I'm late," he pants.

"Your sister told us," Jakob says, distracted by the paper. "The trains."

"Mm hm," Ruth says, eyeing his wrinkled clothes. "The trains."

He tries and fails to resist pulling a face at Ruth. It's possible that one day he'll stop reverting to a thirteen year old brat when he's around her, but he's seen no evidence of it yet.

"Sit, sit," Edie says, putting the coffeecake on the table. "You look terrible."

"I was out late," Erik says. He takes a seat around the table, which is the same round, battered workspace that his parents have had since his childhood. The rest of the kitchen was redone when he was away at college and his mother is house-proud enough that the light wood cabinets still gleam and the chrome appliances look like new, but the table is the same as it's always been--thick, solid wood, put together by Erik's grandfather as the first piece of furniture in his grandparents' new home in America after the war.

"Hm," his mother says. She slices a piece of quiche and then puts it on Erik's plate. "Did you meet anyone interesting?"

Erik briefly closes his eyes and regroups. He should have risked being a few minutes late to take a moment or two to himself on the sidewalk. He's still agitated from the rush to get here on time and hasn't had a chance to get his regular familial shields in place. He loves his family, he does, and he's grateful for all they've done for him. But there's the person he is for them, the life he's comfortable sharing with them, and the parts of it that he'd rather keep for himself.

"It wasn't that kind of party," he says, still frazzled. "My friend's brother is moving back to New York after teaching in England. It was a welcome back thing to introduce him to people."

"Hm," his mother says again. Then, "Jakob, put the paper down. It's family time, you know that."

Jakob sighs and folds the paper up, muttering in Yiddish and pulls his chair closer to the table. Erik would appreciate a paper to hide behind right now.

"Anyhow," Edie says, "I didn't necessarily mean it that way, you know. Friends are good too. You don't get out enough."

"I'm fine, Ma." Erik carefully doesn't say, 'How would you know?'

"Is this friend's brother nice?" Jakob asks. Erik sighs. "What? It's a party to introduce him to new friends, you said! If she invited you, I assume she wants you two to be...friends."

Erik did not get enough sleep last night to deal with this. He didn't have enough time to process the last twelve hours before jumping into this. Talking about life under Shaw, even if it's just casually admitting that he was in the academy, takes a certain amount of mental fortitude that he already didn't have after waking up in a strange place this morning. He's exhausted and he's frustrated, which is the best excuse he has for what he says next.

"He's an academic working on a book about Shaw's academies and the other mutant facilities in the early aughts," he says. "That's why she wanted me to meet him."

And then the heavy silence rolls in and Erik immediately regrets the words that slipped out of his mouth. His father looks into his coffee. His mother busies herself with invisible crumbs on the table. Ruth glares at him.

Erik pinches the bridge of his nose and tries to apologize. The words won't come. He's too fucking tired to deal with this--his parents' meddling, his night with Charles Xavier, the suffocating guilt of lashing out so immaturely. He's nearly thirty, he should be beyond this.

"So, I think I narrowed down what grad schools I want to apply to," Ruth says. It's not a seamless transition, but it's an excuse for all four of them to cling to and move on. "I have to start putting together applications this fall--I want everything in before the end of the semester, and all my professors warned me last year that it takes them ages to get recommendations written, so I need to start early."

"Good for you!" Edie says. "Any school would be lucky to get you."

"Yeah," Ruth says, "but I want them to feel lucky enough that they give me lots of money."

"That's my girl," Jakob says, and the tension releases enough that the muscles in Erik's shoulders relax into a slump.

Ruth gives him one last sharp look and brunch continues on past Erik's blunder. He updates his mother on his work. Ruth tells them for the fifth time what classes she's taking in the fall. Edie shares all the gossip from the ladies' auxiliary at the synagogue and the regulars at the bakery, and Jakob goes off on a tear about some ridiculous new policy at his workplace. Around one, Edie boxes up leftovers for the both of them, despite Ruth's insistence that she doesn't have room for them in her dorm, and Erik and Ruth leave amid hugs and kisses and promises to see them next week.

Down on the street, once they're out of sight of their parents' building, Ruth punches his arm hard enough to bruise.

"Ow!"

"Why do you have to be such a dick?" she seethes. "It's family brunch! Don't be an asshole!"

"I didn't intend to be an asshole!" Erik insists. "It just--I didn't mean to say it!"

"It was terrible, I get it," Ruth says. "And I get that it hurt you and I understand why you're fucked up about it, but you know it wasn't their intention for you to be hurt! They were trying to help you and that asshole lied to them and their whole fucking lives revolve around their guilt about that. You don't have to encourage it!"

Erik stops himself from making the same mistake twice in one day and reminding her that their guilt is nothing next to his scars. He's tired, but he's not that person--his abuse at the hands of Sebastian Shaw under the guise of a school for struggling mutants has definitely made him who he is, but it doesn't define him. A decade of therapy and growth later, he's turned his pain into fuel for helping other hurting children in the mutant community. And he doesn't blame his parents, not really--Ruth is right. Shaw lied to them, his school counselor lied to them. They sent Erik to Shaw's academy because they were desperate to help him. They had no idea what would happen, and they live with the knowledge that they paid a man thousands of dollars to torture their son. It's not easy for them. Erik knows that.

"I'm sorry," he says to Ruth. "I didn't mean--I'm just tired, Ruth. I'm tired and it just came out."

Something of his exhaustion must show, because she relents, leaning against his shoulder companionably. Erik puts an arm around her shoulders and squeezes her.

"Just… be nice, okay?" Ruth says. "They just want you to be happy."

"I know," Erik says. "I'd be happiest if they left me alone."

"Yeah, well, they're our parents, so that's never gonna happen," Ruth says, and Erik laughs.

"Are you walking back to the train?" he says. It's something like a peace offering.

"Nah, I'm gonna go see Annie first," she says. "She's flying back to Chicago for school on Tuesday."

"Okay, then I'll see you next Sunday," Erik says. He hugs her and rests his chin on the top of her head for a moment. It's strange to think of Ruth as being mature--she's an adult now, or nearly. When did his baby sister get old enough to drink? Or to offer him life advice?

"I hope your Sunday looks up," she says, then steps out of the embrace and waves before turning down the street.

Erik watches her go and sighs. He scrubs his eyes, then heads off to the subway. He has a sudden deep need to not leave his couch for the rest of the day.

***

Any suspicions Erik may have had that Raven purposely set him up with her brother are laid to rest when he comes into work on Monday and she punches his arm hard enough to bruise.

"Ow!" he barks. "What the hell? Why do people keep punching me?"

"How many other people's brothers are you sleeping with?" she asks, rearing back to punch him again.

"Just yours!" he says. "And just once! What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Raven relaxes slightly and forgoes punching him again, instead leaning against his desk with her arms crossed. His office isn't large--the space the Mutant Youth Cooperative Agency rents is tiny to begin with and the mutant peer counselors are lucky they get offices at all. It leaves Erik with very little choice but to sit down at his desk and stare up at Raven, waiting for her to say her piece.

"I guess I should have known better than to put you and your need for sex without attachments into the same room as my brother, who sleeps with anything that moves," she says. "Still. Ugh. There are lines you don't cross. Sacred lines."

"You were the one who invited me to his party," Erik points out. "I assumed you had ulterior motives."

"Well, you assumed wrong," Raven says. "Gross. Ugh. You're basically my boss. I only invited you to the party because I thought you'd be interested in his book."

"I am," Erik says. "I'm going to email him about it today, but we talked about me giving him an oral history and maybe some consulting work editing and fact-checking and reaching out to other victims."

Raven's expression shifts--less disgusted and more surprised. She relaxes, too, choosing to sit on the edge of his desk rather than loom over him.

"Wow," she says. "I thought you'd be interested in talking to him but I didn't expect...you're usually, uh...not super open about that stuff."

She's not wrong. While he may use his experiences every day in his work, it took Erik almost ten months to tell Raven about why he chose to pursue this field, why he does what he does instead of taking a promotion to a cushy, bureaucratic office somewhere. They've been working together for nearly three years now, and there are still things that Raven's learning for the first time, tidbits of his time with Shaw that slip out when he's had too much to drink or is discussing ways to reach out to particularly recalcitrant kids.

It's the kids that keep him here. He looks at every shithead troublemaking mutant teen he counsels and sees himself at sixteen--angry, confused about his powers, his sexuality, his place in the larger social sphere of his high school. He remembers having all that turmoil inside of him and funnelling it into fights, violence, shouting matches, attitude to his teachers, vandalism using his powers. His control of his powers was still developing and constantly in flux and his parents didn't know what to do to help him reclaim his happiness. When his guidance counselor suggested a program upstate that specialized in helping mutant teens learn how to control their powers, they jumped at the chance to send him, even though it was expensive.

They didn't mean to hurt him. They were trying to help, and part of him knew that even then. But Sebastian Shaw wasn't what he claimed and his Academy for Mutant Excellence was not so much a school as a prison. Erik and the other "students" were routinely beaten and experimented on to jump start their powers. They were encouraged to gang up on each other and turn against each other, rewarded for ratting each other out and torturing each other. Shaw kept them in line with rewards for the more malicious and threats against the families of those unwilling to play into Shaw's system.

Shaw took a liking to Erik. He liked Erik's rage. He liked needling Erik to inspire explosive demonstrations of Erik's power. He liked threatening to murder Erik's mother and sister just to see what Erik would do.

Erik lived at the academy for eighteen months. He convinced his parents, finally, to come take him home against Shaw's wishes, and after four nights of screaming nightmares, he admitted to them what Shaw had done. They went to the police, the police went to the FBI, and a dedicated young agent who had been building a case against Shaw for two years led the charge against him that night. At the academy, they found evidence that broke a larger mutant trafficking case wide open. They also shut down the half dozen other facilities Shaw managed across the country and opened investigations into similar places all over the world.

Erik largely missed the media explosion surrounding all of it on account of not being able to leave his parents' apartment without screaming for months.

He got better. He learned to cope. He went to school and got a degree in Human Services and a job working as a Mutant Peer at a homeless shelter in Manhattan, then another job as a peer mutant youth counselor at the Mutant Youth Cooperative Agency in Brooklyn, and now he's the senior peer counselor. He likes his job. He likes knowing he's helping kids before someone like Shaw can get their claws in him. He has no problem telling the kids he works with about the brutal realities in his past. The kids never look at him the way his peers do.

"I'm not open about it," Erik tells Raven. "But something about him...I don't know. He didn't look at me the way people normally do."

Like I'm broken, he doesn't say.

Raven's still looking at him peculiarly. He knows that Raven has her own baggage--in an effort to get him to open up, she's shared bits of her own past, her wild teenage days that nearly got her sent off to the same academy that Erik was held in. Her brother, he knows, convinced her parents to give her another chance, and not six months later, Shaw was in handcuffs on the front page of every newspaper in the country.

Maybe that knowledge is why he trusts Charles so fully already. It certainly went a long way in getting him to trust Raven.

"Alright," Raven finally says. "Just as long as you feel no need to ever gossip about what my brother's like in bed."

"We're not dating," Erik tells her. "We slept together once. We're going to be working together. I wouldn't worry about it."

"We'll see," Raven says. "Now, tell me how things went with Jubilee last week."

Work successfully tables the discussion and keeps them busy for the rest of the day. For the rest of the week, really, what with school starting soon and the school paperwork starting to filter in from schools and parents. It's a long week, and when Raven announces after work on Friday that she's taking him to a party to loosen him up, he groans out loud. He wishes he knew why he has such a hard time saying no to her--it's not a problem he's ever had with anyone else.

The beer is good, at least, and the two-story artist's collective is dark enough that he can linger in a corner and be mostly ignored by the other party-goers. Raven abandoned him almost as soon as they arrived, finding her girlfriend in the crowd and telling Erik to have some fun for once in his life as she disappeared into throngs. He decides he'll stay for an hour and then sneak out and head back home to his Criminal Minds Netflix marathon. Raven will have no evidence that he split that early and maybe he'll actually get to have the quiet weekend he's been craving after the cluttered social calendar he's dealt with for the past two weeks.

Erik feels a mass of metal approaching his dark corner.

"If I had known this building wasn't ADA compliant, I probably would have skipped the party," Charles says. Erik glances down at him and smiles around the lip of his beer bottle.

"Let me guess, Raven dragged you here," Erik says.

Charles says something in reply that's lost to a song change and a loud whoop from many of the party-goers. It must be a favorite.

"What?" Erik shouts. Charles motions for him to lean over closer.

"Like most things, it was indeed Raven's doing. She thinks I need to make friends," Charles says right against Erik's ear. The way his words blow across Erik's ear makes him shiver.

Although… Erik moves his head to speak into Charles' ear.

"Why didn't you just use your telepathy?" he asks. He pulls back and Charles smiles slyly.

"Because this seemed like as good an excuse as any to get you into my personal space," he says. His breath is hot against the side of Erik's face, and Erik rolls his eyes, but that doesn't stop him from turning his head enough to kiss Charles.

It's not like there's anyone else at the party worth talking to. There's definitely no one else worth going home with.

They argue about taking a traditional cab versus an Uber, and Charles wins by virtue of the back streets of the hip Brooklyn neighborhood being mostly deserted. Erik's not too bothered, the gentrification of the transportation commodity, the regulatory nightmare of "ride-sharing," and the ingrained racism of the rating system withstanding--it means they're back in Charles' Upper West Side apartment in no time, stripping each other and falling into bed in record time. He appreciates being sober enough to notice the details of the experience and their surroundings this time. He likes Charles, and his memories of their last encounter were really too fuzzy to make for proper masturbatory fodder.

Erik makes them drinks, after, and they lounge in bed looking out at the stellar view of the park and the lights of the city. In other circumstances, Erik is fairly sure he'd be painfully aware of the amount of money an apartment like this must rent for. At the moment, he's happily distracted by an excellent gin and tonic, the way Charles is absently petting his knee, and the company.

"Sorry I didn't get a chance to reply to your email this week," Charles says after a jaw-cracking yawn. "I've been busy beyond belief."

"You said as much," Erik says. Charles' first email, in fact, had warned that he was buried under a mountain of new-hire paperwork and lesson-planning and that he was notoriously bad at responding to email in a timely fashion.

"I'm glad I ran into you," Charles says, and turns away from the view to give Erik a half-smile. "Of course, now I'm a bit too tired and tipsy to talk much about the book. Perhaps we should plan to meet somewhere intentionally this week."

"Mm," Erik says. He takes a sip of his drink and summons his phone from the pocket of his jeans, then does the same for Charles' and passes it over to him. "Maybe somewhere quieter and better lit as well."

Charles laughs. "For certain. This is uncharted territory for me--I'm a scientist, not a historian. But this is an important part of our history and I want to make sure the world doesn't forget it. Sebastian Shaw and his ilk left an indelible mark on the history of mutant education."

"He did," Erik says. It feels strange to be discussing Shaw while naked in bed with a beautiful man. It feels strange to be discussing Shaw with anyone other than his therapist or the kids he works with. "I'm happy to help however I can."

Charles thumbs through his phone, frowning. He chews on his lower lip, and Erik resists the urge to replace Charles' teeth with his own.

"Tuesday I'm working on an article most of the day," Charles says. "I've blocked off all day because I know how I am with deadlines. Why don't you call me whenever you're free and we can talk a bit then? I can tell you more about the project and you can decide how you'd like to assist."

"Sounds good," Erik says. He inputs that information into his own phone calendar, then takes his phone and uses his ability to take Charles' as well, moving them both to the side so he can lean over to capture Charles' mouth in another kiss.

It's early yet. Plenty of time for round two.

***

"You're in a very good mood this morning, Schatz," Erik's mother says as she pours him coffee on Sunday morning.

"I had a good weekend," he says. A leisurely lie-in with Charles, a nice jog around Central Park, and home and in bed in time to watch a few more episode of Criminal Minds and wake up plenty early enough to make his way to Queens for brunch. If only every weekend could be so relaxing.

"I can't tell if that means you got laid or you yelled at some human bureaucrat about the Mutant Accommodation Act," Ruth says, wrinkling her nose.

"Either way, we're all just happy you're happy," Edie says. "Now, who wants more pastries?"

***

Tuesday at lunch time, two of Erik's appointments cancel. He's not surprised--it happens frequently around the beginning and end of school. Mutant support counseling is not a top priority to baseline parents of mutant teens. As much as that normally rankles, it does leave Erik halfway to Manhattan with several hours free, so he switches trains and heads uptown to drop in on Charles.

He stops to get coffee on the way, and checks through his email to remind himself which building Charles works in, then strolls across the Columbia campus. The students must not have moved in yet, because it's mostly deserted and the few people he passes are all around his age. He finds Charles' office easily and hesitates only once he's standing outside of it. Maybe he should have called. He thought it would be convenient for them to do this work in person--working over the phone or even on Skype is always a hassle--but maybe Charles didn't just tell Erik to call because he knew that while Erik mostly works in Manhattan, his office is in Brooklyn, but rather because he specifically wanted to do it over the phone.

Stop dithering and come inside before the coffee gets cold, says a voice in his head, and Erik smiles ruefully and opens the door.

Charles' office is extensively cluttered at waist-height and immaculate above and below that. The desk is piled so high that Erik almost misses Charles sitting behind it, and he has to lift a stack of books off the guest chair.

"You've been here for two weeks," Erik says. "How does your office already look like this?"

"Effort," Charles says. He reaches out for the coffee Erik placed on the desk and retrieves sugar and non-dairy creamer from a drawer. Erik takes another slow look around the office while Charles fixes his coffee. Most of the books and magazines and journals and papers seem to be focused more on the science of mutation, but he sees a stack of books on the corner of the desk that are familiar to him--a few nonfiction books about the mutant behavioral facilities across the country, one about theories of mutant education and training, and, right on top, one that he's intimately familiar with. Moira MacTaggert's book on Sebastian Shaw and his international mutant-trafficking crimes has three chapters in the middle about the "academies" Shaw ran in the states. MacTaggert is the only person who has ever tried to contact Shaw's victims about the experience and, though she was baseline, Erik respected her work in bringing Shaw down enough to consent to an interview. He actually ended up liking MacTaggert quite a bit, and not just because she put Shaw in jail for life.

Charles follows Erik's gaze and pats the stack of books ruefully.

"I had wanted to have some more background reading done before we talked," he says. "I know the basics, of course, and I've talked to Raven and a few survivors and I've read all the court transcripts from the Shaw trial, but putting together something like this is much different than writing a scientific paper and I don't think I'll ever know enough. Plus, I keep getting distracted." He waves a journal in the air.

"What's that, then?" Erik asks.

"A fascinating study on various families where the children all share similar mutations," Charles says. "Which is an area that is still largely a mystery, given that many siblings have entirely different mutations."

"My sister is baseline," Erik says. "Your sister has a physical mutation and yours is invisible."

"Exactly," Charles says. "Granted, Raven and I are not blood siblings, but it still stands."

"Really?" Erik asks. Raven had never mentioned that, and the way she talked about Charles--he loves Ruth, but he definitely never went on madcap adventures with her that he remembers fondly.

"Adopted," Charles says. "She is, I mean. But I almost think that made us closer. I wanted a sibling, a friend, so badly as a child that I loved her instantly and never left her side. That's why I'm interested in the Shaw debacle, actually."

"She told me," Erik says. "She's lucky to have you."

"It was selfish," Charles says. "Our father was dead by that point and our stepfamily was...not particularly welcoming. I couldn't face it alone, even with college looming in the near future. I needed her. I think she resented it a little back then--she didn't want to be sent away to a strange school that she knew was meant to be a punishment, but she also saw how easily our mother caved to my pleading. I was the good one. I never got into any trouble. Charmed and charming, she used to say. But once the whole thing broke open and we realized what could have happened--well, we had both done a little growing up by then."

"The stories she tells, I doubt you grew up too much," Erik says. Charles laughs, delighted.

"Lies, all of them!" he insists gleefully. "What, exactly, has she told you?"

They don't actually get much done that day--the stories Erik relates back to Charles actually end up sending them down the path of the article Charles was reading. They stay in Charles' office discussing it until nearly dinner time, at which point Erik insists on taking Charles out for food to make up for the wasted day.

They go home alone, though, Charles staying in Manhattan while Erik heads back to his empty apartment in Brooklyn. His roommate is out again, which will be a boon as long as he doesn't come in at 3am drunk and singing loudly in Russian. It gives Erik some space to think about Charles and what's going on and what he wants to be going on.

Charles is funny and attractive. He's smart and just mean enough to be fun. Erik has enjoyed sleeping with him--understatement, really, Charles is amazing in bed--but he enjoyed sitting around chatting with him about science and politics and mutants and mutations too. It's possible they're friends.

It's probable they're friends, actually.

Which is an excellent turn of events. Erik's not particularly good at dating and is an altogether terrible boyfriend. He prefers to sleep with people who don't expect anything of him, but maybe this is an ideal solution: friends with benefits. Charles is clearly not expecting to be wooed and courted, but makes both an excellent bed partner and a wonderful colleague. They've only known each other a week or two, but they've clicked in a way Erik's never clicked with anyone before. He's not going to throw all that away on a relationship that won't last--this is the best solution.

He tries it out the next day, texting Charles about an article he reads online about the mutant population in the prison system. Charles texts him back an ongoing diatribe over the course of the day, with long breaks that Erik takes to mean he's actually in class. At the end, though, he asks Erik about his day and they transition into discussing Erik's Netflix addiction and Charles' DVR full of American Idol and The Voice, about which Erik is viciously judgemental.

Charles never goes in for the, "I had a great time last weekend when can I see you again?" line that usually spells clingy doom for Erik's hook-ups. They do make vague plans to have a sit-down meeting about the book, but Charles is juggling it alongside teaching two classes and overseeing a research grant in the lab, and Erik's hours are erratic. Which is fine--Erik came to terms with all that happened to him under Shaw's "care" a long time ago, but that doesn't mean he's eager to talk about it any more than he has to.

On Friday evening, Erik promises one of his kids that he'll attend a performance she's taking part in at Washington Square Park, a dance exhibition that's part of a larger street fair full of mutant artisans. Spending a Friday night outside in the late summer heat isn't his ideal, but Kitty is a good kid and he's had enough conversations with her parents to know that it wasn't easy for her to both agree to join an organized activity with other girls her age and for it to be an athletic one. He leaves the office and gets on the subway and hopes, at least, that he'll get home at a reasonable time.

Charles is at the street fair. Erik probably shouldn't be surprised.

"I'm starting to think you're stalking me," he says conversationally to Charles after crossing the park to where Charles is sitting in front of a booth selling photography prints. Charles turns at the sound of Erik's voice, grinning happily.

"Erik!" he says. "I didn't know you would be here!"

"One of my kids is in one of the performances," he says. "I told her I'd come."

"That's very sweet," Charles says, still grinning.

"Don't look at me like that," Erik says, shoving Charles' shoulder and fighting his own smile.

"I'll look at you however I want," Charles replies. "Now, you should go get me a diet soda and I'll find us somewhere to sit by the stage. You're lucky you ran into me; I can usually guilt the best seating at this sort of thing."

"I'll bet," Erik mutters, but Charles' presumption doesn't stop him from finding a street vendor and purchasing two sodas, a soft pretzel, and some popcorn.

As promised, Charles has secured them seats near the stage, close enough that Erik is able to see the look of delighted surprise on Kitty's face when she comes on stage and spots him in the audience. Her dance troupe performs to a series of pop songs that Erik vaguely recognizes from the snatches of radio he hears when he's in Raven's office. They're followed by a group of gymnasts whose physical mutations are brilliantly on display and then a singer whose songs are accompanied by a light show she somehow generates herself.

At the break, Erik catches Charles checking his phone.

"It's been a long day for me," Charles explains. "I'd love to chat, but between the noise and the people, I'm afraid I won't be very good company for much longer."

"We could always get a drink somewhere quieter," Erik suggests. Charles seems torn for a moment, looking up at Erik and then back down at his phone.

"You're welcome to come back home with me, but it would just be for a drink," he finally says. "As I said, it's been a long day, and I don't think my body is up for much else past conversation."

"Conversation is fine," Erik says. He wonders if he was angling for sex. He doesn't think he was, strangely. Charles is fantastic in bed, better than anyone Erik has had in a long while, but given the choice between arguing with Charles about politics and having sex with Charles, he actually thinks he prefers the debate. It's been a long time since someone has been willing to shout at him quite like Charles does.

"Then you are more than welcome to join me," Charles says.

They end up with a cab over an Uber this time and install themselves in Charles' living room with less haste. Instead of ripping each other's clothes off, Erik goes on a tear about the proposed redistribution of the social services budget for the city, which will leave the Department of Mutant Youth Services at 13% less funding than last fiscal year despite the increased need for services. Charles listens carefully to his points, refutes half his suggestions, and makes an argument for redistributing the funds to create afterschool mutant programing instead.

For all that Charles complained about the long day, the argument keeps them up until nearly midnight, both nodding off into their drinks.

"You're not going home in this state," Charles says. "Stay the night. You know where everything is. Help yourself; there are some pajamas that might fit you in the bottom drawer of my dresser. I'll be in the bathroom if you need anything, but if not, I'll see you in the morning."

It's a little strange for Erik to be changing into clothes rather than out of them, but he rolls with it. It's strange to be climbing into Charles' bed without him, too, but he's tired enough that it doesn't phase him. He's still genuinely pleased when Charles joins him, human furnace that he is.

He's pleased overall. And why shouldn't he be? Charles is his friend. Crashing at a friend's house--people do that all the time. There's nothing else to it.

His mind lingers on that as he falls asleep.

****

There's a stranger sitting at his parents' kitchen table on Sunday.

Erik stares at him. The stranger stares back.

"Who the fuck are you?" Erik eventually asks, just as Ruth comes skidding into the room. She grabs Erik's arm and stabs her nails into it.

"Erik," she hisses, loud enough for the whole block to hear. "Be nice. This is Benny, my boyfriend."

Erik blinks. The stranger--Benny, he supposes--stands up and offers Erik his hand. He's short, shorter than Erik, at least, and has unremarkable brown eyes and unremarkable brown hair, on an unremarkable face attached to a non-descript body. Even his plain button down shirt and faded jeans don't leave an impression.

"Really?" Erik asks, turning to Ruth. She squeezes his arm again, her nails digging in, and he sighs and shakes Benny's hand. "Nice to meet you," he lies.

"Likewise," Benny says. "I've heard all about you from Ruth. I'm so glad for a chance to meet you all in person."

"Right," Erik says. He turns to Ruth again. "Where are Mom and Dad?"

"Mom's helping Dad fold sheets," Ruth says. Knowing his parents, Erik's pretty sure that's code for 'gossiping about my boyfriend in the bedroom.'

"I'm going to see if they need any help," he says.

"Erik!" Ruth whines as he leaves the room, but he ignores her and makes his way through the living room and down the hall to their bedroom. His parents are, indeed, folding sheets, but from the way they both stop talking when he comes into the room, he's sure they're multitasking with the gossip as well.

"Well he's...unremarkable in every way," Erik says.

Jakob hums in agreement.

"I'm sure he's a very nice boy," Edie insists. Then adds, "But I do think Ruth can do better."

"Much better," Jakob mutters.

"We don't know him yet!" Edie says. "He might turn out to be wonderful."

"He looks like every other generic twenty-something straight white boy in the city," Erik says. "I don't have high hopes."

Ruth's footsteps echo quickly through the hallway, and then she's lurking in the doorway, glaring at all three of them.

"You're embarrassing me!" she snaps.

"We're folding the sheets," Jakob says.

"Erik's not folding sheets!"

"He's supervising," Jakob says. Ruth seethes, fisting her hands and straightening her shoulders to her full height. That's not saying much--Ruth takes after their mother, short and slight with Edie's auburn hair and blue eyes. She seems to have Edie's temper, too, based on the fire in her gaze, but Erik can't fault her--that's a trait he inherited as well.

"I like him!" she says. "Can't you just...go in and be nice?"

"We will, bubbeleh," Jakob says. He puts an arm around her shoulders and squeezes. Ruth relaxes slightly, but she doesn't stop glaring at them.

"If you like this boy, I'm sure we will like him too," Edie says. "We only want what's best for you; we want you to be happy, Ruthie."

"You have nine hundred thousand opinions," Erik adds. "I don't understand how you'd want to be with someone who seems to have zero."

Perhaps that wasn't the best thing to say. Ruth is back to glaring at him and neither of their parents look pleased.

"You're one to talk!" Ruth says. "You've never brought anyone home!"

"That's by design," Erik says. "In order to bring someone home, I'd have to find someone with the winning combination of being tolerable enough for me to spend extended periods of time with them, while also just unhinged enough that they can survive three hours with all of you and, sorry to say, Ruthie, but I don't think Benny's going to make it that long."

Ruth huffs, but before it can go any further, Edie steps between them.

"Erik, I know that someday you will find someone who means enough to you that you'll bring them to brunch," she says. "And even if you don't, what's most important is that you're happy."

Erik rolls his eyes.

"But for the moment, let's focus on meeting Ruth's young man," she continues. "Ruth, be kind and you can exact your revenge when Erik brings someone home. Erik, be kind if you don't want Ruth to be a terror when you bring someone home. Are we all clear?"

"Yes, Mom," Erik and Ruth say in unison. Ruth is still scowling at him, but that's hardly new. They've been bickering since Ruth became old enough to speak and went from being a plaything to a playmate to Erik, who had been eight to Ruth's two and too old to be hanging out with babies.

"Now, let's go rescue that poor boy from being left alone in the kitchen." She points out into the hall and Ruth and Erik troop obediently back into the kitchen with their parents trailing behind.

Erik didn't miss Edie and Ruth's careful lack of pronouns anymore than they missed his. He's pretty sure his family knows he's gay, though it's not something they've ever talked about. Ruth has teased him, now and again, about men she's caught him checking out or flirting with, but he's never confirmed it and she's never said anything concrete either. His parents are, perhaps, in a slightly better position to make assumptions--they walked in on him kissing boys twice that he knows of, and though he refused to talk about it after the fact, they immediately stopped haranguing him about dating the nice girls from temple. In the decade since, their wording about his love life has always been deliberate. "Do you have any friends you want us to meet?" "Is there someone special you've been spending time with?" "We'd love to meet the people important to you." They've never said anything, so it might be supposition on their part, still. After those first awkward non-conversations when he was a teenager, they never attempted to confirm again. Maybe they know. Maybe they're hedging their bets. Probably they just don't know what to think.

He supposes that means he's technically in the closet, though only to his parents and Ruth. It just feels more convenient this way--plausible deniability should anyone bring it up to his parents, with the perk of getting him out of having to have an actual conversation about it. It might be fucked up--he has a feeling it is fucked up, knows that struggling with his attraction to other boys is part of what landed him in the fights and careless vandalism that eventually put him on the road to Shaw--but it's easier this way, pretending no one knows, never talking about it, saving that part of his life for himself, keeping it private, keeping it separate.

He's never claimed to have healthy coping mechanisms.

Benny turns out to be as bland as Erik expected, though he's also a mutant, which at least perks Erik's interest. The whole family plays nice, for which Ruth whispers "Thank you!!" over and over again as they leave at the end of brunch. The whole affair does double duty in reinforcing all the reasons he's never bringing anyone home and keeping his mind off his sex-free weekend with Charles, which was definitely not nearly as awkward as it should have been.

He leaves not long after Ruth with the leftover strudel and a bag full of sweet potato pancakes to freeze, grateful that at least this weekend he wasn't the subject of his parents' unending scrutiny.

***

I FOUND IT!!!!! is the subject of Ruth's email on Wednesday morning.

"It" refers to an antique wooden roll top desk that matches the hutch, end tables, and buffet in their parents' living room. Attached to the email are pictures--it looks to be in excellent condition, possibly better condition than the pieces the Lehnsherrs already own. The price is reasonable and the antiques dealer who owns it seems, from the email chain Ruth has forwarded him, to be utterly charmed that Ruth and Erik are looking to buy this for their mother for her birthday, with lots of praise for their efforts and entreaties that his own children could be as thoughtful.

The only thing, the email said, is that it's up in like, the corner of Connecticut and I've got class tomorrow and Friday, and plans on Saturday. Do you think you could get up to get it?

Erik's schedule is clear, but that's only one part of the equation. He can't exactly take an antique desk on the MetroNorth.

If he asks his parents to borrow his father's precious car, the game will be up--there's no way he'll hand it over unless he knows exactly what Erik is doing with it. Ruth, he knows, was planning on using her boyfriend's car, and Erik doubts the guy will be eager to lend it to a virtual stranger. He's pretty sure he's looked at ZipCar before, and it requires some sort of waiting period to get a membership.

He hesitates on the quandary for another moment, then picks up his phone and texts Charles.

Hey, can I borrow your car?

It's only a few moments before Charles replies.

What do you need a car for?

Ruth and I are getting my mom a desk for her birthday, but it's up in Connecticut and I need to get it before this weekend, Erik types back.

The flashing three dots that mean Charles is responding seem to go on forever, and then the screen shifts to an incoming call. Charles. Erik picks up.

"So, the problem is--and I'm sure you're about to be embarrassed you didn't think of this--that I'm not sure you'll be able to use my car's hand controls," Charles says.

Charles is right. Erik is immediately embarrassed he didn't think about it.

"Right," Erik says.

"It's not actually that hard," Charles says. "But I just don't think two days is enough time to teach you, especially if you're jumping right into a trip."

"Of course," Erik says. "I didn't even think about it." He pinches the bridge of his nose, glad that Charles can't see him blushing. He's made an effort to be considerate of Charles' wheelchair, to think ahead about accessibility. He should have known better than to pat himself on the back at his thoughtfulness just yet.

"Don't fret," Charles says. "I'm free this weekend and up for a roadtrip, if you'd like."

"You can't want to drive all the way into Connecticut with me on a whim for someone else's errand," Erik says. "It's fine, I'll rent a car or something."

"No, no," Charles insists. "I do! It will be a nice excuse to take a day off for once and get out of the city."

"If you're sure," Erik says. "I mean, if you're not sick of me." They had lunch on Monday and have been talking intermittently on GChat. "The weather is supposed to be dire Saturday, so I was going to go Friday afternoon. It's about three hours away."

"I don't teach on Friday and my office hours are over at 11am," Charles says. "Is that too late?"

"No," Erik says. "That's perfect. I can meet you at your office?"

"Of course," Charles says. "We can stop for lunch along the way and have dinner on the ride back."

"Great," Erik says. "Thanks. I mean--you didn't have to do this."

"Don't worry, I'll be taking it out of you later by forcing you to hang art in my apartment once it comes back from being framed," Charles says.

"Fair enough," Erik says.

Friday morning is overcast and dark, with rain already threatening a full day earlier than the forecast had predicted. Erik knows he would feel like an asshole if he cancelled on Charles just because he wasn't looking forward to moving a desk in the rain, so he braves the wind and the grey clouds to meet Charles up at Columbia.

The rain holds out for most of their drive north, as does the traffic. Erik's tolerance for banal music does not hold out, and somewhere around Bridgeport he unhooks Charles' iPod and connects his phone to the stereo, flipping through music until they both agree on Lou Reed and Charles cheerfully begins singing along, only slightly off-key.

The antiques dealer is just as effusive as his emails made him out to be, more so once he sees that Charles isn't in a position to help Erik haul a solid wooden desk out of the shop and into the back of the car. The man helps Erik get everything tied down and situated and is in the midst of insisting they both come in for a cup of tea when there's flash of lightning and a sharp clap of thunder.

"It might be better for us to get on the road before it gets bad," Erik starts to say, but before he's even finished with the sentence, the heavens open and the downpour begins. Erik bids a hasty goodbye to the antiques dealer, but by the time he's back in the car, he's already soaked to the bone. He gets the feeling Charles would be laughing at him if it wasn't so difficult to drive down the dark and flooded streets.

"Bet you're wishing I rented a car now," Erik says. He's trying to wring out his t-shirt, but it's no use--the rest of him is just as wet and there's no where for the water to go.

"No," Charles says, "I'm wishing I'd packed a suitcase to take on the ark."

Erik laughs, but half an hour of driving through the backroads later and neither of them are laughing. They've only gone a handful of miles and Erik can tell how tense Charles is as he tries to navigate through the storm. He suddenly wishes he had spent more time watching Charles operate the hand controls than he did staring out at the scenery or at the way Charles' mouth looked when he whistled along to songs he didn't know the words to.

"It has to stop soon," Charles says, frowning. The crease between his eyes is giving Erik a headache.

"I don't think it does," Erik says. He sighs. "Maybe...maybe we should find a hotel. Or anywhere we can dry off and wait a few hours for it to die down."

Charles is still frowning, but as if by fate, the next sign that's lighted enough for them to see is the front entrance to the Lakeview Inn Bed and Breakfast. Charles slows as he approaches, then sighs and turns in, rolling down the bumpy drive towards the lit house at the end of it.

There's a step up to the path and then five more stairs to the front door. Erik eyes them warily and says, "I'll go see if they'll let us come in. I can--I mean, if you want, if it's okay with you, I can kind of… give the chair a boost. If not we can figure something else out, but I just--"

"No," Charles says. He lays his hand over Erik's wrist. "That's very kind of you, and, of course, the most expedient way to--of course." His face is slowly flushing and Erik feels his own flushing in return. The torrential downpour suddenly seems like a better place to be, so he forces an awkward smile and then bolts from the car and up the front walk.

The door is open and when Erik rings the bell at the front desk, an older gentleman soon appears. Erik explains the situation as best he can, though he thinks his drowned state speaks for itself. The proprietor--"Jim Whitman, call me Jim or Jimbo!"--promises to make them up a room on the first floor straight away and Erik steels himself and then dashes back out into the rain. By the time he pulls out and unfolds Charles' wheelchair and Charles gets himself into it, they're already soaked to the bone. They're squelching when they get inside (Charles' chair floated gently over the path and up the steps), where the lady of the house is waiting with a monstrous pile of towels.

"Oh, you poor things," Mrs. Whitman says, like something out of a cartoon or a sitcom. He supposes they are comically wet. "I'm going to heat up some dinner for you--why don't you go dry off? Are you sure you just want the one room or...?" She looks back and forth between them.

"One room is fine," Charles insists. "We're good at sharing."

Erik bites back a comment about Charles' tendency to steal covers, given his own tendency to cling to Charles in the night to leech heat off the furnace that is his body.

"If you say so," she says, and winks. Erik studiously ignores the wink, even as Charles laughs, delighted, and leads the way to the bedroom made up for them down the hall.

A hot shower does wonders for Erik's mood. When he steps out of the bathroom, he's content enough that he doesn't even care that the walls are papered in a busy pink floral pattern and everything is covered with doilies. There's a bathrobe and a hot bowl of stew waiting for him, and by the time Charles returns, similarly wrapped in a bathrobe, Erik's halfway through his food.

"Well, this has certainly been a day," Charles murmurs. He eyes the height of the bed speculatively, but manages to pull himself up onto it before Erik can haltingly offer to help.

"Sorry I dragged you into it," Erik says. "I should have rented a car."

"No, no," Charles says. He doesn't elaborate, though, instead rearranging himself on the bed until he's propped up against the pillows with his legs together. He sighs and closes his eyes and Erik wonders if he should ignore him or say something or--shit, there was only one bowl of soup, were they supposed to share?

"Mrs. Whitman already fed me, don't worry," Charles says. He opens his eyes and smiles wryly at Erik. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. I just don't deal well with the unexpected these days. I like to know where I am, where I'm going, how to get home, where all the bathrooms are, if some place is accessible. If I'm gone overnight, I want to have my pills, my things. And I can get by without all of that, of course, but...." He shrugs.

Erik places his dinner tray on the end table (also covered with doilies) and moves to sit next to Charles on the bed. He hadn't noticed before how tired Charles looked, how different compared to his easy grin and off-key singing this morning.

"You like to be in control," Erik says carefully. He can relate to that. Maybe. A little.

"I do," Charles says. He closes his eyes again. "It's not all seducing beautiful men back to my apartment and writing books and teaching classes. I want it to look that way. I don't want people to think I'm helpless, or that I can't get along on my own. I know that's what they think when they see the wheelchair. And I'm not just saying that out of self-pity, I literally know what they think. So I act like everything's fine, everything's normal, when really--it's not a struggle, not exactly. I'm used to it by now. But the life I'm used to is full of little inconveniences that can snowball into larger inconveniences and occasionally leave me with no other choice than to ask someone for help. And I hate that."

Erik is quiet for a moment. He can tell there's something delicate about it, about this fragile trust Charles has offered him, this uneasy admission of vulnerability. Charles himself looks fragile, more pale and drawn than Erik has ever seen him, lying back in overly fluffy pillows and quilts that leave the impression that Charles is too small, that'll he'll sink into them and never come out again.

"I don't… think you're helpless," Erik says finally. "And I'm happy to help with whatever you need. We don't even have to talk about it. I don't really--" Charles will be able to tell if he's lying, so he chooses his words carefully. "Obviously there are things you can and can't do, just like we talked about that first night we went to bed together. But there are people who can and can't do lots of things. I'd still offer to hang pictures for you even if it was because you were afraid of heights, not because you couldn't climb a ladder. But I understand needing to be in control and not being comfortable if things are out of your hands." He stares at the flowers on the wallpaper across the room, tracing the pattern until he finds the place it repeats, then following the tessellation until the edge of the sheet.

He licks his lips.

"When I, um." He takes a deep breath and forces himself to remain casual. "When I first got home from Shaw's--from the academy. I didn't leave my parents' apartment for a month. I barely left my room. I loved New York; I had grown up running around on my own, exploring the neighborhoods, getting into trouble, but after eighteen months of Shaw's academy, there was too much of everything. Too many people. Too much noise. Too much metal. Too much commotion. In my room, I could catalogue everything. I knew everything that was there. I knew it wasn't going to hurt me. And I got better because--well, that's what my therapist liked to say. 'We get better.' I could go to school again, run errands, visit friends. But I couldn't go far, because the second something went wrong, the second it was different from what I expected or planned for, I started to itch all over, and if I didn't get back to somewhere familiar soon after, I'd start to have a panic attack."

Slowly, something not unlike warmth starts to suffuse Erik's mind. It takes him a moment to realize the source. He's not sure whether he should be grateful for the comfort or annoyed at the intrusion.

He clears his throat.

"It got better. Obviously. I went up to Boston for college and I grew up and I got better and I took the pills they told me to take and I learned to channel my anger into something more productive and here I am."

He listens to his own breathing in the silence that follows, his and Charles'. He can still feel Charles in his mind, a mix of awe and affection and sympathy, tinged with a distant taste of anger that anyone would try to hurt Erik. It may be an intrusion, but he can't deny that it's comforting, too. He hasn't shared that with very many people--he picks and chooses stories to tell the kids at work, and outside of them, only his therapist and his family know of those frightening days he imagined he'd never leave the house again.

They're long behind him, but Erik knows the scars Shaw left behind are more than physical.

"Well," Charles says. "I, for one, am glad you're here." Erik glances over at Charles; he's smiling softly, warmly, and when he meets Erik's eyes, he takes his hand, too. He then looks around the room with comic distaste and adds, "Well, maybe not here."

Erik laughs like he's supposed to, and although they segue into several hours of necking, for the second weekend in a row, they sleep together without sleeping together.

Erik figures that means they're definitely friends, now.

***

"So this is where your parents live," Charles remarks on Sunday morning. They spent the night in Connecticut and arrived back in New York by lunch on Saturday, but it made more sense for Charles to keep the desk in his car for the time being. It made sense for Erik to stay where the desk was, too, so the two of them had taken another hot shower and whiled away the weekend drinking top shelf liquor and watching Charles' terrible reality television shows. Now they're out in Queens, about half an hour early for brunch, with the desk in the back of Charles' car. Erik is waiting impatiently for Ruth to pick up her phone and come down to help him move it.

"Yes," Erik says. He hangs up his phone and dials again when it goes to voicemail. "My grandparents lived a block in either direction, but my parents didn't meet until they were in business school together, believe it or not."

"Fate's a funny thing," Charles muses, just as Ruth finally picks up her phone.

"I'm downstairs," he says into the phone. "Come help me move this stupid thing."

"I'm helping mom with the french toast," Ruth says.

"Mom doesn't need help with the french toast, you just don't want to haul a desk up three flights of stairs," Erik says.

"It might fit in the elevator," she says, but they both know it's not going to happen. "Anyway, how did you get it here? Didn't your friend drive you? Can't he help you out?"

"No, now get down here," he says, and hangs up. He glances over at Charles; he's leaning back and smirking. "Like I don't hear how you talk to your sister," he says.

"Point," Charles says, but it doesn't stop his smirking.

Ruth is down in just a few minutes, wearing flip-flops instead of real shoes with a look that dares him to comment on their appropriateness for the task at hand. He restrains himself, and the two of them go around to the back of Charles' car and pop open the hatchback.

"Okay, if we both take one side and hold it upright, we should be able to navigate the stairs," Erik says. When he goes to pull the desk out, though, Ruth is staring strangely into the back of the car. "Ruthie."

"Right!" Ruth says, and turns back to him. She grabs the desk, and together they lift it out onto the sidewalk. It's only then that Erik sees what she was staring at.

"Yes," he says, "while my main motivation in making you help is payback for making me go get it in the first place, my friend uses a wheelchair and wouldn't be able to help me bring it up the stairs anyway."

"It's quite useful for getting out of things like this, actually!" Charles calls out cheerfully, turning around to peer out the back. "Hello, there! You must be Ruth."

"Hi, sorry!" Ruth says. She's blushing slightly. "Thanks for helping Erik pick up the desk."

"It was quite the adventure," Charles says, one of those stupid charming things that no one actually says, but which Charles means wholeheartedly. Erik rolls his eyes.

"Ruth, this is Charles; Charles, Ruth," he says. "Now, can we move this thing so Charles can go home?"

"Charles should come up to brunch," Ruth says. "I'm sure Mom and Dad would love to meet him."

"Unfortunately, I need to drop in on my own little sister today," Charles says. "But some other time."

"Definitely!" Ruth says. She sounds far too enthusiastic.

"Ruth. Desk. Now," Erik says.

"Pushy," she mutters, and waves through the open hatchback. "Nice to meet you!"

"You as well!" Charles says. "Erik, be a dear and close the back?"

"Sure," Erik says. "I'll call you tonight about that fundraiser this week."

"You're marvelous! Have a lovely brunch!"

Erik slams the trunk of the car and watches Charles start the engine and then wave as he pulls back onto the street and into traffic. Erik returns his attention to the desk, only to discover Ruth staring at him peculiarly.

"You should invite Charles to brunch, seriously," she says.

"He's gay, Ruthie, and thus immune to your charms," he says. Charles is actually bisexual, he thinks, but better not to encourage Ruth.

"Not for me, dummy," she says. She grasps her side of the desk and lifts, leaving Erik to rush to follow. "I'm not trying to steal your boyfriend."

"He's not my boyfriend," Erik says automatically. "He just let me borrow his car."

"You're calling him tonight," Ruth points out.

"We work together," Erik says. Sort of. "I told you, he's writing a book about Shaw. He's Raven's brother."

"I'm just saying," Ruth says. "He's cute, he's got a cute accent, and he actively seems to want to spend time with you. I'd snatch him up before he gets away."

"Less talking, more desk carrying," Erik says. "Lift on three. One, two, three!"

They manage to get the desk upstairs with only a few bumps along the way. Their mother is shocked and delighted by the surprise and makes Erik take pictures for her to put on Facebook. She sends them home with extra, teary hugs and even more leftovers than usual, and thankfully the hubbub is so overwhelming that Ruth doesn't get a chance to casually mention that an attractive man helped Erik pick up the desk.

(The hubbub is not overwhelming enough to stop her from whispering, "Snatch him up!" when she hugs Erik goodbye, however.)

***

The weeks pass and autumn turns into winter turns into spring. Charles settles into Manhattan and Erik settles into spending time with Charles. He has other friends, of course, and he still has his apartment in Brooklyn, but he finds himself at Charles' place at least a few nights a week. It makes sense, especially when the winter is historically bad and the snow keeps piling up--Charles' apartment is bigger and nicer and warmer and closer to most of Erik's work appointments. There's the book to consider, too--lots of snow days means lots of time for Charles to work on the book, which is helped along by having Erik loitering on the couch on snowy afternoons.

Erik was afraid, when he agreed to help Charles with the project, that it would be difficult to relive what he went through in the detail Charles was encouraging. He was afraid that Charles would look at him differently afterwards. They've been working together on it for months, though, and by now his fears seem silly. Charles is kind and compassionate when Erik needs something soft to bounce off of and brisk and businesslike when Erik needs to pretend that nothing's wrong and he's unaffected by his memories.

It's strangely intimate. But not in the way everyone seems to think.

Well, the way Raven seems to think.

"Are you at my brother's place again?" she asks him in early March. The snow is finally beginning to melt and it's time to start planning the Mutant Youth Advisory Council's spring social, which means evening meetings with the council itself.

"I was meeting with Warren," Erik says, peering into Charles' refrigerator. "It made more sense to come back here before meeting you than to go all the way out to my place just to turn around and come back to Manhattan tonight."

"You need to just move in if you're going to move in," she says. "No one's fooled by your apartment you never go to."

"What is there to fool?" Erik says. "We're not hiding anything."

"You're hiding your big dumb boner for my brother," Raven says.

"I don't hide that," he says because he can't help himself. Raven groans on the other side of the phone.

"That's what I mean!" Raven insists. "You told me seven months ago that you weren't planning on sleeping with him more than once. Now you live with him, you're fucking him, and you do everything with him--why won't you admit to anyone you're dating him?"

"Because I'm not," Erik says. He can't remember when they last ordered Chinese food, which makes the lo mein he finds in the back of the fridge suspect, but Charles really needs to go shopping and Erik is starving. "We're just friends. We work together and sometimes we relieve a little stress by sleeping together. It's completely normal and rational, Raven. You don't need to make it into something it's not."

"You know how much I hate to be heterosexist, but do you understand how much of a boy you're being about this?" Raven asks. Erik is distracted from refuting her by the sound of a key in the door. He reaches out with his power to open the second deadbolt and save Charles the trouble of doing it himself. He hears the door open and close and Charles appears in the kitchen a moment later.

"I have to go," he tells Raven. "Charles just got home. I'll see you at the meeting tonight. If you get there before me, gently discourage Bobby from sitting with Warren--Warren's still fucked up about Bobby teasing him last week."

"Ugh," Raven says, and hangs up.

"Was that my lovely sister?" Charles asks. He rolls over to Erik and peers around him and into the fridge. "We really do need to schedule a grocery delivery, don't we?"

"It was," Erik says. "Trying to convince me how much we love each other."

"Well, of course I love you," Charles says. He reaches past Erik to grab a questionable pudding cup. "You're my best friend."

Erik, whose stomach momentarily bottomed out when Charles said the first part, nods quickly in agreement.

"Of course," Erik says, although he's not really thought about it that way up until now. "That's what I was trying to tell her." It hadn't been, although it's good to have in his back pocket for the next time she inevitably interrogates him about his intentions towards her brother. Charles grins and licks the pudding off the aluminum lid of his pudding cup. Erik tries not to let himself get distracted.

"What time is your meeting tonight?" Charles asks.

"Seven," Erik says. "Why, do you want to do some work before I leave?"

"No," Charles says, still grinning, "I wanted to make out on the couch before you leave, but I suppose I can be persuaded to work instead."

A huff of laughter escapes Erik as he follows Charles into the living room, which has slowly turned into more of an office now that Erik is helping Charles with the book.

"You're in a good mood," Erik observes. Charles is generally cheerful by default, but most of their evenings together start with Charles methodically unloading all his complaints about his students and co-workers the moment he comes through the door.

"I got good news about someone I've been trying to hunt down on my way home," Charles says. He goes straight for his desk, though Erik chooses not to take his own chair on the other side of it, but rather to flop down onto the couch. "Christian Frost agreed to talk to me on the record."

The name "Frost" gives Erik pause. More than pause--he freezes halfway to laying down on the couch.

"Yes, he's Emma's brother," Charles says. Erik didn't even know she had a brother. She viciously complained about her baseline sisters and her suspicions that they weren't as "normal" as they claimed to be, but it never extended to a brother.

"I...knew Emma," Erik says, finally lowering himself the rest of the way to the couch.

"You've mentioned," Charles says. "Christian is older than Emma and the other girls. When he was a teen, his father caught him kissing another boy. He was sent to a religious conversion camp, and Winston disowned him. The three girls were left to fight for his favor and a role as the Frost heir."

"I guess he didn't learn anything from King Lear," Erik mutters, and Charles laughs.

"Apparently not," Charles says. "Winston was already a member of the Hellfire Club when Emma manifested, but his sudden interest in a mutant containment school is what turned Shaw's scheming into reality. He invested a gargantuan amount of money into it and made it clear to Emma that unless she was able to erase or suppress this part of herself, she would not be inheriting anything. Emma was very close to her brother, by all accounts, but I think she saw Shaw's academy as a necessity for survival."

A great many things about Emma Frost suddenly make more sense. As an adult, when Erik looks back on his time with Shaw, he recognizes that Emma was getting some of the worst of the torture. He remembers hearing her screams echo on the days that Shaw decided that hearing their fellow students' pain would be motivating. He remembers the sound of her diamond shell cracking under dozens of tests performed on it. He remembers the casual leers and sexual comments from the staff and other students. She was only a child, the same age that he was, and she didn't deserve it.

As a teen, though, he couldn't help but resent her. She was the worst of the liars and snitches at the academy, the queen bee of the school, eager to tell the staff anything they wanted to hear. She delighted in seeing those beneath her punished and was eager to use her power to hurt others. She and Erik came to blows more than once--it's not just Shaw who left his body riddled with scars.

She never snitched on him when she walked in on him messing around with Janos Quested, though. He was waiting for it, assumed she was holding it back for maximum leverage, but the punishment never came. He figured he managed to leave before she had a chance to wield it to her best advantage, but now he wonders if it wasn't something else.

"She was ruthless," Erik says. "Cruel. Gleeful, sometimes, to see other people punished. I thought she was a sadist."

"Maybe she is," Charles says. "Though I've met her socially, I don't know her well enough to say for sure. But I do think the way she acted--the way they all acted, Emma and Adrienne and Cordelia--is rather more indicative of their parents. Winston was a cruel man, vindictive and power-hungry. Hazel took little to no interest in the well-being of her children. She had no problem with Winston sending Christian or Emma away and made no effort to defend either of them or her other two daughters in the power struggle that followed."

Something about that makes Erik's stomach crawl and it takes him an embarrassingly long time to understand his kneejerk reaction to defend the Frosts, who seem, by all accounts, to be horrible people.

"How anyone could sit back and let that happen to their children and not even flinch, I'll never understand," Charles continues, shaking his head. A lump is forming in Erik's throat and he has to fist his hands to keep his pulse from racing, to keep himself from picking a fight.

"Erik?" Charles asks, and Erik swallows and stares up at the ceiling.

"Yes?" he forces himself to say calmly.

"Are you quite alright?"

No. He's not alright. But he doesn't know how to articulate that without yelling at Charles, defending the Frosts, or indicting his own parents.

"Yes," he repeats. He tries to smile, not that Charles has a clear view of him, but he knows it must be stilted and strange. It feels strange on his face, forcing himself to smile when he feels slightly sick.

This can't be what Charles thinks about his own parents, can it? Of course it's not. Of course he can't. Erik's parents had no idea what Shaw was, they didn't choose this, they weren't attempting to eliminate it from him the way the Frosts were.

But how can he know that, whispers a treacherous voice in the back of his head, when you won't let them meet?

He swallows again and sits up. He doesn't look straight at Charles, but inspects him out of the corner of his eye. Charles is frowning, his eyes large and round. He's concerned. Sometimes, when they're talking about Erik's tenure at the academy, Erik needs to take a break, to walk away and get his head back into reality. It's easy to pretend that's the case now, to roll his shoulders and excuse himself from the living room and slip into the bathroom and stare unseeing into the mirror.

He's known Charles for months now, but, save for that first awkward barb about Charles' book, he's never mentioned Charles to his parents. He's never brought Charles by the bakery for a free mocha and whatever his mother is testing in the back, he's never told Charles any of the ridiculous stories from his childhood--he tries to avoid mentioning his parents altogether when he's around Charles and his parents don't even know Charles exists.

Charles half-lives in the history of the two dozen of Shaw's victim's who consented to interviews. He spends half his day pouring over the lives of people given to Shaw by their own parents. What must he think of Edie and Jakob?

Erik never wants to find out.

He splashes cool water on his face and lets it drip down the back of his neck. It doesn't quite jolt him back to himself, but he stares at his reflection until his skin fits again, until he doesn't look quite so pale.

Outside, Charles is typing, but his head snaps up the minute Erik steps out of the bathroom.

"Everything okay?" he asks with a forced sort of levity. His half-smile falls flat, and Erik has to swallow again.

"Fine," Erik says. "So, catch me up on what else happened today."

Charles is still eyeing him warily, but he launches into a story about one of the administrators in his department anyway, and by the time he's done, Erik feels as close to normal as he ever does around Charles. Normal enough to tempt Charles away from his desk and deliver on that suggestion of necking on the couch while they wait for their take-out to arrive, the Frosts and his own parents both out of his mind for the time being.

***

"...so I told Rebecca, 'If you're going to have friends come in during your shift, I expect the bake case and the front counter to be sparkling when your shift is over,'" Edie concludes.

"Yeah, but if you don't expect the same thing from everyone else, it's still a messed up standard," Ruth says. "She's not not doing her work when her friends are there, she's just not doing extra work."

"Keeping a clean storefront is part of her work," Edie insists.

"I'm just saying, you can yell at her for not having the place perfectly clean, but you should also be yelling at all the other clerks, then," Ruth says.

"I'm with Ruthie," Jakob says. "If it's part of her job, it should be part of everyone's job. You shouldn't just call her out on her own. What do you think, Erik?"

Erik looks up from his apple-potato latkes and blinks. His parents and Ruth are all staring at him expectantly.

"Uh," he says. "Sorry, I was miles away. What are we talking about? The bakery?"

"Yes, the bakery!" His mother swats at him with a napkin. "Rebecca's friends have been hanging around during her shifts and I told her that I expect the store to be empty and spotless if she's chatting with them."

"Obviously," Erik says, and Edie grins triumphantly.

"You see?" she says.

"Never side with Erik, he always has a stick up his butt," Ruth says. "He wasn't even listening, he was stoically pining."

"I was eating my breakfast," Erik insists. Ruth sticks her tongue out at him, and it's only by the most meager sliver of maturity that Erik avoids doing the same back.

"Oh, that reminds me! I have chocolate babka!" Edie says, and gets up to fetch it from the counter. Ruth gives Erik a look once she's gone, but he studiously ignores it and goes back to his breakfast.

He spends the rest of the meal attentively listening to his family's conversation and weighing in with perhaps more frequency than he normally would. He doesn't let his mind drift back to Charles, to the Frosts, to the book, to the conversations he and Charles haven't had yet.

He doesn't fool Ruth, though. He never fools Ruth. At least she has the decency to wait until they're alone, walking out to the train, bundled up against the sharp winter winds that refuse to accept the change of season.

"Thinking about your hot professor friend and how much better brunch would be if you brought him with you?" Ruth asks.

"No," Erik says. It's only half a lie. "He's not my boyfriend."

Ruth rounds on him. "Ha!" she says, pointing at him triumphantly. "I didn't say boyfriend! That was just your wishful thinking filling in the blanks. You totally want him."

"Ruth," he says, and rubs his eyes. When he lowers his hands, Ruth is still watching him expectantly. "It's not...." Reframing the conversation is probably the easiest way to do this. "We were talking about the book he's writing about Shaw. And it just sort of got to me. I've come to terms with a lot of that stuff, but it's weird to see it from someone else's perspective. It's weird to deal with the way that other people see it, how they interpret my experiences."

"You don't want him to think less of you?" Ruth asks.

"Sort of," he says. Close enough. "It's just weighing on me."

"You should talk to him about it," Ruth says. "I know you hate that, but one day you'll understand that there's no way for anyone to know what to say to you or how to react unless you tell them things. We're not mind-readers."

Erik very carefully doesn't laugh.

"Then," she continues, turning back around and leading them towards the train, "you should be sure to tell him about how much you want to bone him." She grins over her shoulder at him.

"I'm not going to tell him that." For several reasons.

"But you do, right?" Ruth asks. "You definitely like him. And you said he's gay, right? And you're gay… right?"

She looks less certain on the last point, hidden as that uncertainty is behind a show of bravado. Erik has to swallow hard. He doesn't understand why--he's been sleeping with and occasionally dating men for a decade. It shouldn't be hard to say the words. It normally isn't. He jokes with friends and with men at bars and has told the kids he works with countless times. Something about this though--his sister knowing--it makes his skin prickle. Even though she does know. Even though he's always assumed she knew. Even though she's obviously figured it out.

He nods slowly.

"I am," he says quietly. He doesn't realize he's stopped walking until Ruth stops too. She turns around and walks back to him, hands shoved in her pockets. "Um. Yeah. I'm gay."

"I kind of figured it out," she says. She's staring at the ground now, scraping the toe of her boot through the gravel and salt.

"Mom and Dad?" he asks.

"They know," Ruth says. She looks up at him again, and now he wants to look away. "You had to have noticed that they haven't pestered you about girls in a decade."

"Yeah," he says. He gives into impulse and stares across the street at the "closed" sign hanging from the dentist's office, then at the flashing lotto advertisement hanging in the window of the bodega. "They've never said anything about it. They've never tried to talk to me about it."

He doesn't know why this makes him feel so exposed. He's assumed they've known for years. It's been an open secret, one that he was grateful for. Somehow, though, hearing Ruth acknowledge it makes it all different.

"Well, you're not the easiest person to talk to," Ruth says. "Especially after the academy. And I get why, I do, I swear, but...you can't blame them for never having a personal conversation with you given the way you shut down whenever anyone asks you anything more personal than what you want for breakfast."

She's not wrong. It's probably something he should have addressed before he quit therapy five years ago.

As if to prove her point, Erik continues to stare across the street. There are half a dozen things he wants to say, about how much he loves his family, about how hard it is to trust people who know all of him, about how it's easier to make new relationships than repair his old ones, even with the people who matter most.

About how he flinches when Ruth teases him about Charles because he's starting to understand that there's maybe a sliver of truth there.

What he says is, "Yeah, I get that." He manages to look at her again, just long enough to offer a weak smile and let her pull him into a hug.

"I know it's not easy, but you can always talk to us about this stuff," she says. "And if it's too weird talking to Mom and Dad, you can always talk to me."

"And you're not weird?" Erik asks as he releases her. She glares at him.

"I don't know why I even bother," she says, but she links her arm through his and doesn't ask him any more questions the rest of the way to the train.

She does add, however, before she leaves him for the day, "Tell your hot professor I said hi!"

***

Erik spends Sunday night in his own apartment. Monday, too, has him in Brooklyn all day, so it makes sense to sleep there as well. It would be silly to go all the way into Manhattan just to get up and come back out to Brooklyn in the morning, even if Azazel is home and on a schedule that doesn't seem to require any sleep but does require a three course meal every three hours. Tuesday Charles is delivering a keynote address somewhere in New Jersey, so it's not until Wednesday afternoon that Erik sees him again.

He doesn't know why he's so antsy about the wait. It's hardly the first time they've been apart for a few days. As he frequently reminds Raven, they don't actually live together.

They're not actually dating.

Except, well, Erik's quit going out with anyone else. He hasn't so much as hooked up with anyone since he met Charles. He hasn't chatted anyone up in a bar, he hasn't had regrettable sex with one of Raven's stupid hipster friends, he hasn't idly perused MutantMatch or had more than a passing thought about the barista he has a crush on or the guy at the farmer's market who sells jam on behalf of the mutant co-op in Yorktown. Part of it is, of course, that he hasn't had time. Between work and working with Charles on his book and being dragged to Raven's various social events with Charles and unwinding with Charles when all the social interaction is too much, there haven't been many hours left for seeking outside entertainment.

He doesn't think too closely about the other part of it. He has a feeling that he'll have to soon enough.

Wednesdays are normally book days, though they skip as many as they actually work. Charles is already home when Erik gets to his apartment, though, and typing happily away on his laptop. Erik projects a gentle greeting, knowing better after all these months than to interrupt Charles' flow. He makes himself a drink and raids the cabinets for a snack. By the time he returns to the living room, Charles is slowing down and doing more reading out of a reference book than actual typing. Once the typing peters out completely, Erik sits across from him.

"Anything good?" he asks.

"Oh, it's all garbage," Charles says cheerfully. "But it has the potential to turn into something good in the second draft. I've gone on a bit of a tangent about William Stryker, I'm afraid, and I need to rein it back in. He's just such an interesting character. In that horrible, sadistic, megalomaniacal way, I mean."

"Stryker was before my time," Erik says. "I don't actually know much about him."

"He ran one of those 'pray the gay away' outfits in the early nineties, the one Winston Frost sent his son to. In the late nineties, when Stryker's own son manifested, he changed his focus," Charles says. "Vindictively cruel in the name of religion. He subjected his son to so many of the procedures he invented that the poor boy is in a vegetative state these days. He claimed all he was doing was trying to help the boy find his truth path, but he was horrible to him. Frost introduced Shaw to Stryker's ventures and Shaw co-opted many of his techniques and turned them into tenets of the academies. Stryker actually took him to court once the academies were shut down because Shaw had stolen so many of his methods. Apparently Shaw had paid for the rights to the materials via the Hellfire Club, which Stryker had no problem with until it was revealed that the Hellfire Club was full of mutants."

The trial seems vaguely familiar to Erik, but he thinks it mostly happened when he was housebound from PTSD and his parents, drowning in their guilt, refused to let anything related to Shaw and the academies into the house, even when that meant the New York Times.

"He probably hated that Shaw was gay too, then," Erik says. Charles raises his eyebrows.

"Shaw was gay?"

"Well, maybe," Erik amends. "Maybe he just got off on power or threats, regardless of gender. But he was--he would look at you in a way that no grown man should be looking at a teenager. He never touched me, but there were rumors about other kids, and you could feel it in his gaze sometimes."

"Hm," Charles says.

"Maybe I'm projecting," Erik adds, though the more he thinks about it, the more it was probably their powers rather than any sexual organs they may or may not have had. "Part of what fucked me up in the first place was dealing with my relative gayness. That's part of why I was starting the fights that led my guidance counselor to suggesting Shaw to my parents. I don't know if they realized it at the time--they caught me with a couple boys, but I don't know if they put together that was part of what I was struggling with. We never talked about it even though, given the conversation I had with my sister this weekend, everyone's known for ages."

Charles rests his elbows on the table and props his chin up on his hands, book apparently forgotten.

"Huh," he says. "I had wondered if--" He closes his mouth and seems to reconsider. "You've never come out to your parents, then?" he asks.

"Not… officially," Erik says. "But I was talking to my sister about it at brunch and she seems to think they've always known, which I guess I figured. It's been a decade since they asked me if I've met any nice girls."

"Dropping hints, then?" Charles asks, but Erik shakes his head.

"The opposite, I guess," he admits. Fuck, but he doesn't want to be talking about this. Charles is giving him one of those curious looks, though, and something about Charles makes him want to talk about himself for hours, if only out of a half-baked hope that Charles will do the same in return. "I'm...not very good at talking about myself. Telling them things. And when they start to ask me questions about my private life, I...lash out. I don't know why. I'm not eighteen anymore, I should be better than that. But I just figure out what will hurt the most and then...say it."

"Hm," Charles says. "That's not an uncommon reaction, you know. One of the reasons we're so quick to lash out and call people out, to act outraged, is because we get a chemical kick in our brains when we do it. Being angry feels better than being civil. There are more productive ways to get that kick, though." He raises his eyebrows at Erik. "More fun, too."

"Is that a science nerd come on?" Erik asks.

"Depends," Charles says. "When are you going to invite me for brunch?" He grins in a way that makes Erik think he's joking, but it's hard to tell. Maybe he's just reading into things. He's too keyed up from Ruth's pestering, that's all.

"Brunch is a family thing," he says. "You're not family, you're an annoying professor who won't stop eating off my plate or erasing my shows off the DVR to make room for nine million episodes of The Voice."

"Excuse me!" Charles says, delightfully scandalized, "You're the one who's practically moved into my apartment. I have at least half your wardrobe at this point. The way Raven tells it, we're already practically married."

"Raven thinks a lot of things," Erik says dismissively. "Raven thinks I'm pining for you."

"Possibly because you chase off anyone who even tries to flirt with me at the bar," Charles points out. "You nearly dragged me home over your shoulder the last time all four of us went out."

"You were nearly fall-down drunk and that guy was trying to take advantage of you," Erik insists.

"So you took me home so you could take advantage of me instead." Charles is definitely far too gleeful for this conversation.

"That's different," Erik says. "I'm not a random stranger at a bar. I love you." It feels jarring and strange to say it, even though it's true, even though he's said it a few times in the past week, testing it out and trying to feel as casual about it as Charles seems to. Charles hasn't made a big deal about it, hasn't treated it like it's strange or awkward, and that makes it a little easier for Erik to say it every time. They're best friends. They love each other. Obviously.

"I love you too," Charles says with the same ease as always. "Which brings us back around to you being the closest thing I have to family outside of Raven."

Erik knows from drunken conversations with Raven that their step-father is dead, but their mother is still living, locked away from the world somewhere outside the city, drinking her liver away. Charles' feelings about her were obviously similar.

"Did you come out to your parents?" Erik asks, reframing the discussion before it has a chance to get even further away from him.

"Yes and no," Charles says. "I never mentioned it to them either, even after I had figured it out. I'm lucky that the only time they were around and sober enough to catch me with a conquest it was a girl. I think Kurt would have had some opinions about his stepson being queer, and thankfully I'll never know for sure. I mentioned a boyfriend to my mother once in passing when I was in grad school."

The humor is gone from Charles' face and his voice. A pang of regret sits heavy in Erik's stomach. There were probably better ways to reframe the conversation. Anything that would stop Charles' face from looking like that, really, but he can't seem to come up with anything to say.

"I… take it that it didn't go well?" he asks.

"It didn't go anywhere," Charles says. He chuckles, but there's no humor in the laugh. "I feel guilty, still--I was using it as a weapon, bringing it up with the intention to shock her. The young man in question deserved better than that. But she just sighed. She was so far gone at that point, she was past caring even about how it might look to the rest of high society. This was the woman whose response to my accident was that a wheelchair was going to ruin family portraits and the renovations to accommodate it would make the house look ghastly. I was expecting something from her. I was ready for it, even. I wanted her to yell. Her being angry or disappointed would have been such a relief after years of her ignoring me altogether, but I didn't even manage to garner that."

Charles is too far away for a comforting pat on the back or a squeeze of the hand. He's too far away for an awkward half-hug. He looks miserable, though he's trying to hide it behind a shadow of a smile, and if Erik wants that expression to disappear, he has to use his words.

Fuck fuck fuck.

"I think...sometimes it's easy to forget that our parents have their own shit to deal with," is what he says, slowly and without looking at Charles. "And I think it's easy to want to define ourselves by their validation, their approval, when really… at the end of the day, being loved by our parents doesn't help us love ourselves. And that's what's more important."

He's making it up as he goes along, a series of philosophy 101 observations that come from his need to make Charles smile and the belief in his heart that Charles is brilliant and accomplished and wonderful regardless of anything his mother has or hasn't acknowledged. He's surprised, as he listens to the words coming out of his mouth, then, to feel the truth of it ring hollow in his chest.

He loves his parents and they love him. They'll always love him. And he can't define himself by their love or the missteps they've made in attempting to help him anymore than Charles can define himself by his mother's neglect.

Erik has no one to blame and no one to prove himself to outside of himself.

He looks at Charles. Charles is looking right back. His eyes are suspiciously watery. He crooks a finger, but it's not the motion that draws Erik forward--it's the burst of telepathic affection, overwhelming Erik's senses, making him dizzy with the need to be as close to Charles as he can. He stumbles to his feet and manages to make it to the other side of the table without tripping, but that's as far as he's allowed. Charles pulls him down as soon as he's in reach, tugging Erik onto his lap and kissing him even before he's fully settled.

Maybe the bedroom would be better? Erik manages to project as he pulls feebly at Charles' clothes, his mouth too occupied for words.

In a minute, Charles responds.

In the end, it takes many more minutes, and the book is forgotten for the rest of the day.

***

Another Sunday and Erik is running late again. He meant to leave twenty minutes before he did, but it's cool and drizzly, which is Charles' favorite excuse to stay in bed with tea and breakfast. This morning had the added lure of Charles reading aloud from a journal article he's working on, something for a popular audience rather than a scientific one--easy enough for Erik to follow and get caught up in, even without the soothing sound of Charles' voice to wrap himself up in. He'd nearly fallen asleep all over again when Charles stopped suddenly and told him what time it was.

It was hard to leave Charles. Especially dressed for the weekend, warm, inviting Charles, lying in the bed they share more often than not.

Erik tries not to examine that as he sprints through the rain and up the stairs to his parents' apartment.

The morning is much more sedate than he would have predicted by his run over. His slight lateness is overlooked by virtue of Ruth being twice as late and looking twice as bad. Erik has enough clothes at Charles' apartment that he's presentable, if damp. Ruth is clearly in the midst of some kind of walk of shame, though he's not sure if she was at her boyfriend's apartment or never made it home from some party or another.

"I almost didn't come," she moans, squeezing her hair out over the sink. "It was so gross out, but then at the last minute I figured if I didn't come, you'd all gossip about me all morning."

"So you decided to come so we'd do it to your face?" Jakob asks and Ruth's answering scowl makes Erik snort into his coffee.

It's not Ruth that they end up gossiping about for most of the meal, however. Their cousin Joshua's wedding is falling apart due to bad decisions on the part of both the bride and the groom and involving, according to rumor, multiple affairs on both sides. Bad for Joshua, good for Ruth, who viciously reminds everyone that she called the failure of playboy Joshua's attempt at marriage the day he announced his engagement.

"This is justice for the time he made out with my friend Alli and then blew her off," Ruth says, just as Erik gets a text. He tunes out her continuing diatribe to pull out his phone.

We're out of my tea. I can't believe you stranded me like this!

He smiles and types back, I told you yesterday morning that we were almost out! You don't listen when I talk.

I only don't listen when you talk shirtless , Charles replies almost immediately.

I'll get more before I come home, Erik tells him, and when he glances up, Ruth has finished her story and his mother is eyeing his phone.

"Who are you talking to?" she asks, almost too casually given the considering expression on her face.

"Just my friend Charles," Erik says. He puts his phone down self consciously. He purposely doesn't look at Ruth.

His mother, however, does. Then she clears her throat.

"You should invite your… friend… over for brunch some time," she says. She pulls the platter of coffee cake closer and picks up a knife, as if the air isn't heavy with the tension of the moment. "I'd like to meet a man who makes you smile like that."

It's hard for Erik to swallow, all of a sudden. It's hard for him to breathe. The way that all three of his family members are looking at him is making his skin crawl and burn and he needs to scream, to lash out, to get away--

But he remembers what Charles said about lashing out. And he remembers the look on his mother's face last fall when he gave in to the urge to hurt everyone to get them away from the truth he thinks he knew even then. He doesn't have anyone to blame. He doesn't have to prove himself. He just needs to be happy. He looks down at his cake plate, littered only with crumbs and a smear of butter and takes a deep breath.

"Charles is… he's not… Charles isn't just a friend," he says.

"Oh, darling, you don't have to--" his mother starts to say, but he holds up a hand to stop her.

"No," he says. "I do. I really do."

He tears his gaze away from his empty plate and up at his mother and father, at Ruth, who looks so proud of him she could burst.

"I, uh--" He wants to say all of it, all of a sudden. He wants to tell them everything, so much that he doesn't know where to begin, how far back to go, how to connect it all together. He flounders, then starts with Charles. "Charles is the professor I was telling you about in the fall. Raven's brother. And, uh, we met because he's writing that book. About Shaw and the academies. Raven thought I could help him but we clicked and we've… I don't know that either of us knew what it was, at first, we didn't define it, we just liked each other and liked spending time together, so we did. And some of that time was… um." Okay, maybe there's a limit on what he wants to tell them after all. "Romantic," he says awkwardly. "But a lot of it wasn't and we really did work on this book about Shaw. And I told him everything--he's so easy to talk to. I would just start and go on for hours and not even realize it. But it was always this, uh… it was friendship. And companionship. And I didn't think of us as… dating or anything like that."

He pauses for a breath, to rearrange his thoughts. There's so much to say, and he knows if he stops now, he won't get to the heart of it.

"I kind of, uh, I think about life as 'before' and 'after.' And they don't mix, things that were before and the stuff that comes after. It's easier that way. But if I want someone to… stay, to become a part of my life, I realize I need to fit the two halves together. I need to accept that I'm still the person I was before, even if it, um. Even if I've changed. It's a part of me. And you guys, you're a part of me, and if I want Charles to be a part of my life, he has to know about before, and I've been… not being a great son or brother by not letting you be a part of after."

Erik covers his face with his hands.

"I'm not making any sense, I'm sorry--"

"No, no, no!" his mother insists. He hears the scraping of a chair against the linoleum and then he's pulled into a strong hug, much stronger than he imagined his deceptively slight mother as capable of. Horrified, he realizes there are tears in his eyes. He presses his fingers harder against them. "Don't be sorry, I'm sorry, Schatz, we're sorry, we never should have--"

"No!" Erik says, dropping his hands so he can wrap his arms around his mother. "It's not about that, it wasn't--I don't blame you for that. I don't, I just--don't think I realized it until I had to tell Charles about my time with Shaw and was terrified he would judge you. It wasn't your fault. It wasn't my fault. Or maybe it was both our faults, but it doesn't matter because it's over and--and I love you and I want you to know me."

He feels slightly better about sobbing knowing that his mother is sobbing along with him.

"Oh, Erik," she says, and they sit there in the kitchen, with Jakob and Ruth looking on, crying together.

They both calm down eventually. Edie stands up and wipes first Erik's eyes, then her own. When she steps away, Jakob stands from the table and pulls Erik into a long hug that almost brings his tears back up again.

"You're a good boy, Erik," Jakob says when they part, and Erik tries to hide his sniffling.

Erik takes his seat again, looking down at his cold coffee. His father awkwardly clears his throat. Edie calmly walks back over to the other side of the table.

"Well," Ruth says, as though she's not as teary-eyed as the rest of them, "now that that's over, tell us all about the hot professor."

"Yes," Edie says. "Tell us about Charles. Is he a nice boy?"

Erik rubs his forehead.

"I don't know if 'nice' is the word I'd use," he says. "And--hell, he doesn't know--I haven't told him any of this. I have no idea if he feels the same way or--" He shrugs helplessly.

"How could he not love you?" Edie says with a conviction that Erik wishes he could feel. "Now, tell us more. Don't be stingy!"

"Okay, okay," Erik says, but he can't help but laugh as he tries to describe Charles to his eager parents.

***

Brunch goes on longer than usual after his revelations, and by the time he's back in Manhattan it's late in the afternoon. He considers skipping Charles' place altogether and going back to his own apartment, but he knows that's the coward's way out. He needs to have a conversation with Charles, and it should probably be sooner than later.

He's still figuring out how to broach the subject when he pushes open the door and is nearly run over by Charles.

"Oh my god, are you okay?" Charles asks him immediately. He looks harried--concerned, maybe, like he's upset.

"I'm fine," Erik says. "I'm--are you okay?"

Charles rolls back to allow him some room, but doesn't go far, leading the way into the living room in fits and starts.

"I just--I got these bursts of… of feeling from you," he says. "And I didn't want to say anything, I didn't want you to think I was being strange or crossing boundaries." Next to the couch are three empty mugs of tea and a mess of what might be yarn and… knitting needles? He looks to the yarn and then at Charles expectantly. "It was taking you so long to get home and I can't really pace any longer but I wanted to do something with my hands and Raven was trying to teach me how to knit over the winter for the days I was snowbound and--"

The pieces click into place all at once. Charles was reading him, at least superficially, and when Erik got upset, Charles got upset and in order to keep himself from racing out into the street and over to Queens, he pulled out yarn and and proceeded to make a hell of a mess.

Erik has to kiss him. He thinks he might die if he doesn't.

He cuts off Charles' words with the kiss, though Charles goes with it quickly enough, sinking his fingers into Erik's hair, his hands trembling faintly. When they pull apart, Charles gazes up at him with those big blue eyes that make Erik dizzy.

"Are you okay?" Charles asks. They're still holding on to each other. Erik slowly lets go.

"I am," he says. He sits down on the edge of the couch, close enough that his knees butt up against Charles'. "I'm--better than I have been for a while, I think."

"Good," Charles says. He looks marginally less frightened, if just as confused.

"I talked with my parents," Erik explains. "I talked to them about… a lot of things. Some things from before--from Shaw, from when I was a kid. And why I am the way I am now. And how I want to be better." He takes a deep breath, but he doesn't let himself look away. "And about you."

"Me?" Charles asks faintly. "Erik, I--"

Erik takes Charles' hands in his own and squeezes them.

"No, just listen," he says. "I… did a whole speech for them and I can't remember it now, but basically, I live my life with no connection to my past. To what happened to me, yes, and I use it as fuel to fight against it happening to other people, but I don't really connect to… to my parents, to Ruth." Charles nods slowly. "I'm not friends with anyone from before. I don't talk to those people. And I don't think of people I meet now as being a part of it. I don't cross those lines."

He breathes deeply again, swallows against the panic in his throat. He needs to do this, if only because his family will be insufferable if he doesn't. "But I can't do that anymore because I love you and I've told you so much about what happened to me, but nothing about who I was and who my family was and why it happened. And I can't--they're not bad people, my parents, and I wanted you to meet my mother months ago, but I thought, 'Fuck, I can't let that happen, because Charles probably thinks my parents are monsters.'" He can see Charles opening his mouth to interrupt, but Erik squeezes his hands again, hard. "But they're not, not at all. They made a hard choice from a bad position that I put them in, and they were lied to and manipulated just like I was. And I can't let you think otherwise."

Charles shakes his head back and forth, twisting his hands so he can grip Erik just as tightly as Erik is gripping him.

"Erik, I swear, I never would have thought that," he says. "I never would have judged them."

"They're not the Frosts," Erik says. "They're not the Strykers. They were good people who had a fucked up son who didn't know how to deal with being gay or a mutant and did some things he wasn't proud of and made them think this was the only way."

Charles has to believe this. He can't go any further if he doesn't.

"Erik," Charles says, and squeezes Erik's fingers in his own. He smiles kindly, warmly. "Your parents weren't alone in that, you know. Most of the parents of Shaw's victims aren't like the Frosts. Most parents didn't know what they were sending their children into. Most parents regret it. That was all part of Shaw's machine--manipulating the parents so he could get his hands on what he wanted--namely you and the other children."

Erik lets out a long breath. He feels his shoulders relaxing, his muscles loosening. He feels a wave of relief that makes him dizzy.

"I would never think of your parents are evil or cruel, especially given the lengths you go to see them and spend time with them," Charles says softly. "I certainly wouldn't drive three hours out of my way if I thought you were getting a gift for someone horrible and abusive. I'd barely drive three miles out of my way for my own mother." He tries to smile, though it doesn't quite hit his eyes. Erik lets go of his hands to stroke his cheek instead, leaning closer into Charles' personal space and touching his hair, his face, his throat.

"I wish you had told me you felt that way a long time ago," Charles says. "I could have alleviated the fear. I hate to think you were carrying this with you for so long."

Erik swallows. This is it.

"Well, to get there, I had to admit some other things to myself, too," he says. "Charles--" He just needs to say it. Just say the words. "I love you."

Charles smiles at him.

"I know," he says. "I love you, too."

"No," Erik says. "No, I mean--not just because you're my best friend. Or maybe because you're my best friend, but not--it's more than that. Or different from that. It's--" He places his hands on Charles' shoulders and looks him in the eye, trying to make it as clear as he can that he's being serious. "I'm in love with you."

Charles' eyes soften and he reaches up to cover Erik's hands with his own.

"Darling, I know that," he says. "I'm in love with you too. I have been for a long time. I was just waiting for you to catch up."

Erik has to kiss him again, of course.

Twice.

Three times.

And after three, he loses count. Charles pulls him closer and closer until it makes much more sense to climb into his lap, pressing his lips to Charles' mouth, sucking on his lower lip, tasting the edge of his jaw, the side of his throat, the space behind his ear, his hands grappling for any skin they can reach. Charles finds his way under Erik's shirt and then his nails are dragging down Erik's back and Erik thinks that this, here, is what he survived his adolescence for. He escaped the academy with the desperate hope that one day he would be able to be this happy.

He pulls away and presses his forehead against Charles'.

"Do you want to come to brunch with me next Sunday?" he asks.

Charles grins at him.

"I thought you'd never ask."

***

"Are the flowers too much?" Erik asks. It's another Sunday morning outside of his parents' building, but he's more nervous about this one than he's been in a long time.

"The flowers are fine, they're your mother's favorite," Charles says. He readjusts the bouquet of lilies on his lap and then readjusts his sweater vest. Erik relaxes incrementally. If Charles is fussing with his clothes, he's much less calm than he wants Erik to think he is. He looks perfect--any mother would adore him, Erik knows. He's neatly dressed in pressed slacks and a sweater vest, his hair is combed and his face his shaved and scrubbed clean. Between his charming smile, his adorable accent, and his well-bred manners, any mother would fawn for hours over what a catch he is.

Erik isn't worried about any mother, though. He's just worried about his own.

"Relax, darling," Charles says. "I brought her favorite flowers. I stopped by her bakery this week to do some reconnaissance, so I'm all stocked up with compliments. I am charming and funny and sweet and smart. Your parents will love me."

Erik thinks about his mother and her gentle, earnest probing. I'd like to meet a man who makes you smile like that.

"You'll do," Erik says, and holds open the door to the building for Charles to roll past him.

"I'll have you know I'm a very nice boy!" Charles insists, but he laughs as he says it and he's still laughing when Erik holds open the door for the building and motions him through.

The elevator ride is short but tense. There's absolutely no reason why his family won't love Charles. They put up with Benny, who was boring as anything and had no personality. Charles is vibrant and funny and sweet and outgoing and has made it his mission to win them over.

They'll love him. They have to.

You're so nervous, Charles says, the whisper in his mind soothing and warm, wrapping around him in something not unlike a noncorporeal hug.

I've never done this before, Erik tells him. And, what the hell. I'll probably never do it again, so I want to get it right.

The warmth intensifies as the elevator dings for the third floor. When Erik glances down, Charles is blushing.

Erik holds the elevator open for Charles and then unlocks the door to his parents apartment and ushers Charles inside first. No one is in the living room; he takes one last deep breath and then leads Charles into the kitchen. His parents and Ruth are sitting around that same old table, watching the doorway eagerly. It would be slightly creepy if Erik wasn't so nervous.

"Hi," he says awkwardly. "Uh, this is Charles. Charles, you've already met Ruth, but this is my mom, Edie, and my dad, Jakob."

"Oh, it is wonderful to finally meet you!" his mother says. She jumps up from the table, clearly unable to contain herself any longer, and pulls Charles into a tight and unexpected hug. "We've heard so much about you!"

"And I you," Charles says, returning the embrace. "I'm so pleased we're finally meeting!" Edie lets Charles go and backs up enough for Charles to hand her the flowers she nearly crushed on his lap. "These are for you--and whatever is in the oven smells amazing. The leftovers Erik brings home are always incredible and I know the pastries from your bakery get rave reviews, so I'm quite excited to see what you have in store today."

He smiles. Charles' smiles are enough to melt even Erik, who's essentially asentimental. His mother never stood a chance and is already fawning over Charles all over again.

"Ruthie, get a vase," she says, holding the flowers out to Ruth. "Charles, darling, come sit next to me. Do you want coffee? Or Erik tells me you drink tea. Erik, make Charles some tea. Jakob, get the eggs out from the stove and bring the cake to the table. Do you want juice? Ruthie, get the juice."

"Oh my god, mom, you're going to scare him off," Ruth says. "Back off a little."

"Oh no, it's fine," Charles says to Edie. To Erik, he adds, "I could get used to this."

"You'd better," Edie says. "We plan on having you back here for a long time."

Ten years ago, Erik would have paled at that thought. Hell, two weeks ago it would have made him uneasy. Today, though, standing in the kitchen with his parents, with Ruth sitting at the table and fawning over Charles, with the comforting feel of Charles' wheelchair buzzing in the back of his brain while he smells the sweet, yeasty promise of his mother's cooking, it seems like exactly what he needs to hear, exactly what he yearns for. A future where everything he loves can come together in the same place.

"I would be honored to become a part of your family tradition," Charles says, and Edie coos and squeezes his shoulder.

"What a nice boy," she says. Charles tips his head back to grin pointedly at Erik, eyebrows raised in haughty victory.

"See?" he says. "I told you."

"Shut up," Erik says, but this is one argument he doesn't mind losing and when he leans over to kiss that arrogant smile off of Charles' face, he can't hide his own.