Chapter Text
There's thin grey light pushing weakly past the blackout curtains. The bed he lies in is not his, and the slow pounding behind his eyelids links seamlessly to the body next to him, full of birth marks he doesn't know and doesn't care about. He closes his mind from it. The pain ebbs from the forefront of his head to a dull sensation in his shoulders.
A part of him had hoped he'd miss the entire thing, but the thin steel arms of his watch show there's still plenty of time.
He sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. There's a painful stiffness in his back and legs most mornings, making him inelegant as he, with careful, cottony touches, pushes sleep further into the other, still resting mind. When he rises and pads out of the bedroom, it goes unnoticed.
The clothes he wore yesterday are scattered over the living room parquet. It's a line that points to the bedroom, with a detour to the restroom - he finds a sock and his wallet on the laundry hamper.
The apartment door clicks softly shut behind him. He laces his shoes on the front doorstep.
He's somewhere in Tribeca, he knows, because he watched when - Gavin? Gary? No, Gabe - instructed the Lyft, one hand already in Charles's back jean pocket.
It's a short walk then, to the Grand Hôtel, where a sleepy valet hands him the keys to his car, and then a short drive to Hassan's dry cleaning, where he'd dropped off the black suit the day before. He changes in their backroom. The hangover must be loud, because Hassan himself hands him a Moroccan espresso on his way out the door, and straightens his black tie with subtle pity in the lines around his eyes.
Charles doesn't know if it’s the black suit or the hangover he's pitying, but he's grateful either way.
She's being interred at the family plot in Westchester. The traffic is Saturday-morning light until it thins out to just a few cars, and then to nothing. It's just him and the slight mist over the reservoirs, the luggage rattling around in the backseat.
Asphalt turns to gravel, and he drives slowly, right hand on the steering wheel, left holding a Dunhill out the window.
Through the long lines of elder trees, older than the House. Through the little village, the way-church gates.
The green linden trees that crowd the road, and the dust that rises behind him.
Someone is singing on the radio, a folksy tune about the dichotomy of life and death, and it's a bit on the nose.
Just as he likes it.
When it hurts, it should burn.
And if it doesn't hurt, it can at least be a little bit funny.
The parking lot isn't deserted, but the empty spots by far outnumber the filled. He pulls up beside Moira's city jeep and cuts the engine.
She's standing on the church stoop, when he trudges up the gravel, looking at the children. They've found sticks to battle out an imaginary scene in sombre black clothes, lacquered shoes. White ribbons in hair, among the weathered grave stones. He waves. They shout, a chorus of Hi, uncle Charles, but they're too busy to come greet him.
Moira accepts the cigarette he offers, but fishes out a lighter from her purse. Her thin arms are bare from the elbows down, and she clutches them across the tailored sheath-dress she's wearing. Her finger is unadorned, and the tan has faded from the shadow of a ring. Her mind is radiating a level, violet practicality that he has always found at once calming and heart-wrenching.
He motions at the parking lot, says, "The press isn't here."
"Should they be?"
She doesn't look at him, but he shrugs anyway. "I thought maybe she'd put that in the will."
Moira pauses before speaking. "Well. You know the will better than we."
"Right," he says, softly. He nods at the children, playing as if death isn't waiting inside the chapel. "If they ever need anything. Well. Anything at all."
Moira watches them with him. After a while, she nods, too.
"Well," he says, again, and tries to smile.
"Kurt's inside," she says, and it sounds like a warning. "Holding court."
"Yeah, I figured he'd be."
"He's been calling me."
He looks up at her then, at the strained lines around her eyes, and they never really got to know each other. His fault, mostly, for not being around. Despite this, she holds his gaze like she's trying to say something. "What does he want?" he asks.
She shrugs, but she looks bothered. "He and Cain have been talking. Don't know why he wants me to be involved. But I can guess," she adds, heavy intonation.
She's sharp. He always wondered why she fell for Cain; why she didn't see through to his rotten core at a glance. But people do inexplicable things all the time. He, if anyone, should know how complex the mind is.
Moira looks away. Says, neutrally, "I don't think he ever loved her."
He stops, his cigarette halfway toward his boot. "No, I - I think you're right."
He crushes the butt against the leather sole. He doesn't say, we don't always get to choose who we love. They both know that.
The chapel is beautiful. It reminds him a little of a castle, a fairy tale, softly open to dreaming. The dust mites don't dance, they float in the grey light of the overcast skies, across the domed ceiling, the wooden pews. But the way sound echoes in here; it cuts through the air like blasphemy. It feels like the inside of his head.
He doesn't see the Xavier crest anywhere on the walls, but then, he doesn't look very hard for it.
The Markos are already sitting in the front pew. Cain, slightly slouched, and Kurt, ramrod straight, deep in conversation with someone Charles doesn't recognise -an aunt, probably, or a great aunt, or someone of the kind. Surely Kurt wouldn't bring the latest flavour of the week to the funeral of the woman he was still, technically, married to.
He sits down in the empty pew behind them. It's made of a heavy wood that doesn't creak, a row of deep-red bibles and the Book of Psalms lining the pew in front like prizes at a carnival.
Cain glances at him over his shoulder before facing away with a grimace.
"Brother," Charles says in quiet greeting, but Cain only grunts. He doesn't seem to notice that Moira and his children take their seats three rows back from him. He wouldn't.
It takes twenty minutes of the hour-long service before the children start to whine and squirm. Charles could send a gentle calm, a cloudy pink, a little sleepiness, to the edges of their minds. He doesn't.
The priest is an ordinary, middle-aged man: salt and pepper hair and bags under his eyes. His voice isn't horrible, it doesn't drone, but it might as well. "Whatever sins kept by you in life," he is saying to the echoing chapel, and the quiet audience of fifteen, at the most, "and walked side by side with you through its narrow hallways and wide fields, we pray that they may stay behind, forgiven."
Whatever sins Sharon Xavier committed, Charles thought as he looked at the back of his stepfather's head, would indeed stay behind. And like salted earth, they would stay the growth of anything green.
The family plot is fenced in, a wound of gravel in the green lawn. Iron railings with delicate details line it. His father is to the right, three headstones away. It wouldn't do to have them next to each other. Not when Kurt is still living. Not least because Brian Xavier committed that unforgivable sin of dying before his wife.
Charles is fairly sure that there is no eye wet with tears during the internment. A distant cousin lets out a believable sniffle into a handkerchief, but he sees the thought in the front of her mind as clear as if she was shouting it in his ear. It's easy to read it, full of scorn and restless, leg-jerking impatience. It's another person who didn't make the will. He knows this, too.
He closes his eyes and draws the curtains in his mind, mentally stepping away from the thoughts and inner lives of what is left of the Xavier clan, ever thinning out, ever growing smaller.
She's lowered into the earth, and that is that. The stone shines white in the grey dullness of the early morning. It's made of marble. Marble polishes well, but moisture will erode it. Given a little time, her name, her life, the verse she chose, will thin out into nothing.
The stone says, "Cor. 15:56: O death, where is your victory?"
Where indeed, he thinks, when his phone buzzes softly in his pocket.
Is it over? Raven asks.
Yes, he types out, and allows himself to smile a little. Relieved, fit for the gallows. Melted away with a bucket of water.
Then a hand on his shoulder - real, and heavy, and not so kind, and brimming with thoughts Charles dare not read. He turns. The hand comes to rest on his arm, heavy and invasive.
"Charles," his stepfather says. "My condolences."
He straightens. "Thank you," he says, and, "I'm sorry for your loss," and it’s perfectly civil. Like all things are, always, when your name is Xavier. Here, they wear civility like a blunt club. In other places - well. In other places, not so blunt.
"I was sorry to see your sister was unable to join us," Kurt says, his concern like a grimace on his face.
"Very unfortunate," Charles commiserates. She wouldn't have attended for any price in the world, and Charles would never have asked.
Kurt missed you, he thinks wryly, across Westchester and into the city, able to find his sister in a second despite the myriad of minds. He is met with the sensation of a snort, and then of vivid, velvet red - the ridiculous bath robe that he wrapped her in, so many years ago, shaking with grief. Gratitude. She would never have to ask, if he had anything to say about it. These days, he had a lot to say about it.
Kurt just smiles. It's been a few years since they last stood before each other, and Kurt's jowls have started to droop. His hair is turning white. It doesn't detract from the intense, blue-eyed stare, the shiver down Charles's spine. The fear that seems instinctive, reflexive.
"I want you to know, son, that if you ever need anything -," Kurt says, and it takes effort, hearing Charles's own words to Moira echoed back to him, not to react. "I'm just a call, over in the city. Anything."
"Thank you," Charles hears himself say.
"The separation doesn't mean we aren't still family, Charles."
"Of course."
"It's a very big house," Kurt says.
"I'll manage." He smiles.
"You've always been very strong," Kurt says, and it's a slow, predatory, proud smile that cuts over his face. And yes, Kurt's features may be softening, but that still makes Charles heart race.
"Thank you," he responds weakly, and it's in that precise moment that he feels it. A mind he hasn't touched in so long, has only dreamt of, in slow and confusing dreams, every summer that feels like that last one.
It's been fifteen years, or almost that many. He hasn't seen Erik since Charles took him out to a lonely parking lot and asked if it wasn't better if they both forgot, and since he drove away, eighteen and desperately in love. Since he was Charles with the knobbly knees, a child who had lost his father and gained a stepfather in the same year. Since he was Charles, eighteen and too clever, the one dreaming of Oxford, and of running away. The one who felt running away was a victory all of its own. Who Kurt called strong, and saw as a challenge.
Erik still tastes of iron, in the back of his throat. Like his lungs after a hard run, after gruelling physical therapy. The aftertaste of such a mind could never be less than the polyester in that pickup, a front seat, sweaty under his knees, and the intense steel-blue focus, jet-blue jealousy of infatuation. Except it isn't, not now.
He doesn't know exactly when he realised the enormity of what he had done to Erik. The scope of the betrayal, the violence of the act. It might have been a slow thing, something that crept up on him like a shadow. Like losing faith, like doubt filling the cracks of a zealous mind. But this is not a question, and could never be, because Charles walks with a lot of sin, too. Maybe with such a mother, it was somehow destined. Or maybe he is the one to blame all on his own.
"Pardon me," he all but croaks to his stepfather, and he turns away from Kurt, and there he is. Erik. Looking so much like his eighteen-year-old self, and so much like no one Charles has ever met before. Standing apart and away from the small crowd, a monolith unto himself. He's tall, he's broad, and he looks dangerous. That much is the same. But his Erik had a wild look in his eyes, caged and explosive, and this Erik is a steel wall in a black coat and shined shoes, a severe undercut, his hair a dark amber.
Who taught him to dress for his body? Did he still have those ripped jeans, ripped from hard work, and those band shirts, fraying at the hems?
Impossible. His mind might taste the same, but his eyes are different.
"Erik," he says when he reaches him, then nothing else.
"Hello, Charles," Erik says. His voice is deeper, unrecognisable. It takes Charles's breath away. "I'm sorry about your mother."
"Thank you," he replies when he's able, and has to look away, just to breathe. Back to the crowd, to Kurt holding court, shaking hands and nodding and grimacing as if in pain.
"He puts on a good show," Erik observes, quietly.
"His foremost talent," Charles agrees. He takes a deep breath. "How are you?"
"I'm well."
Charles nods, hums, good, good.
"You?"
"Not too bad," he says, and tries to smile a little. Every action feels like that of an automaton, and not quite his. He feels like a projector, as if he's forgotten his own person.
"Do you have to go back?"
Charles shrugs. "Not really." He should probably see Moira off, but he's itching. It's been 15 years, and he just needs a few minutes. Maybe.
Erik looks at him. "A walk?"
He nods. "Please."
He follows Erik through the churchyard, around to a circuitous pathway that takes them away from the mourners. Stretches of the path are lined with juniper bushes and low stone walls. It makes it look vaguely reminiscent of a British garden, dusky and a little wild. Charles has managed to absolutely crumble a cigarette in his coat pocket. Small flakes of tobacco fall out of it when he removes his hand to fish out the entire packet, offering it to Erik.
Erik declines it. "I don't smoke."
You used to, Charles thinks, and lights one for himself. "I didn't think you'd be here."
"It wasn't far."
As far as reasons go, it's a shitty one, Charles thinks, and thinks about responding with a joke. He doesn't - doesn't really trust himself to deliver it well. "So you're in Westchester, then?"
"I've taken up the firm."
Charles almost comes to a stop, his breath stuttering on an exhale. "You have?"
"Shaw died," Erik says and nods to another plot further away. There's a tall, black headstone, engraved with golden letters that look opulent, unbecoming. Wrong.
He wants to ask why - why on earth, and hadn't Erik moved on from whatever poisonous opinions he had fifteen years ago, and why would he care enough about Shaw's bloody legacy to take it up himself, and several other things. Following close behind is a gut-wrenching fear. Do you know? he wants to ask. Do you know what Shaw had Kurt do?
But Erik doesn't offer anything for free. So Charles just says, "I see."
At Charles's look Erik deduces, wrongly, that his confusion is for the name. "My stepfather," he explains and Charles wants to snap of course. Of course I remember who Shaw is. As if Charles could forget Shaw, or forget who he was to Erik. It's a little bit - it's a little bit cold, maybe. And rightly so, of course. "My condolences," he says instead. And, my condolences, really? Just like Kurt, and everyone else back there, saying so many things and meaning so few of them. "I mean," he murmurs quickly, blows smoke away from Erik, "Good riddance?"
Erik, thankfully, snorts. "Yes."
"Was it recent?"
"Not really. Years ago now."
It strikes him then that Erik, for whatever reason, just showed up to Sharon's funeral, and Charles didn't even know that Shaw had died. If he didn't blame himself for so many things already, this might have been a heavy realisation.
Erik comes to a stop in front of Shaw's headstone, but it doesn't read on his face why.
Charles wishes they were still walking.
"Was he ill?"
"In a way," Erik replies.
"Oh."
It's not the most awkward conversation he's had, but for the life of him, he can't recall a worse one. He can't blame Erik for being standoffish, though.
His phone buzzes.
He had been so intent on Erik that he hadn't noticed anything else. I'm with Erik - Erik came, he tells Raven, answering her text with a thought, although frantic, and pulls away before he can feel any response. When he does, Erik is looking at him like he knows.
He has the most arresting eyes, Erik does. It doesn't make sense that they're in Erik's face with its hard lines and bones, his teeth, his gold brows. Charles's heart jolts just looking into them. He feels it in his fingers like a pain, like touching electricity. "Sorry, did you say something?" he asks.
Erik shakes his head. "You used to have your hand to your temple when you did that."
Nausea, a cold clenching in his stomach. "I'm sorry, I wasn't - Raven was just checking-" He swallows. "Sorry."
Erik is looking back the way they came. "Is she here?"
"No, she's in, she's - she didn't want to come."
The silence falls heavy. It settles between Charles's shoulder blades like old anxiety, like a pressure to say something. I'm sorry, again, perhaps, but more likely, I know you'll never forgive me. But what's the point? The point would only serve Charles. Apologies are selfish, after all, and Charles likes to think he is better, now. He really has to be better.
"Are you staying for a bit?" Erik's gaze is level, his shoulders relaxed.
Charles nods, tries to loosen the panic-hold over his own shoulders. "I have some business to take care of. Close some accounts, and. Well, you know how it is." He could do that from New York, just as easily. Easier, really. But that's not why he's here. "She left everything to us."
"Sharon left everything to you," Erik repeats. Incredulous, and why wouldn't he be, because it is an insane thing to do. "And, what, she left the Marko's without?"
"It's a long story," Charles says, then adds, "But the house is mine now."
He doesn't remember ever really surprising Erik. During the short time they knew each other, before their disastrous last meeting, Erik always had an air about him that he expected the worst and accepted the good as part of it. But now, the way he stares intently at Charles, holds himself perfectly still, breathes deeply - Charles thinks he might have succeeded.
Inexplicably, Erik asks, "So, when are you leaving?"
Charles tries a little smile. Just a crooked, deprecating one. "I'm not. For a while."
Gaze falling to the ground, Erik jaw's works silently. He roots about in a pocket, then another one, and presents a business card in hard white paper, black, embossed writing. He says, "I thought maybe we could have coffee."
Maybe Charles doesn't quite know if it's love or terror or what that feeling is that makes his heart race painfully, but he doesn't believe a lie can be unintentional, and he doesn't mean to deceive when he says, "I'd love to."
Moira has already left when they separate at the parking lot. Charles wants nothing more than to just sit a while behind the wheel, just take a second to process, but there are still people milling about. So he drives, finding himself at the house far too soon.
It towers above you when you approach it. Even Charles, who had lived there for eighteen years, feels out of place and small in front of it. Standing on the stairs outside the main entrance, looking up at the stone façade, still gives him vertigo.
That same sense of lost balance is in the sandstone trimmings, the empty flower pots, the wild ivy growing across walls and windows. Stately and forbidding.
The double doors do not creak when he opens them - the whole thing is far less dramatic. They swing open easily, like they always did when Charles lived here. The handles are slightly too high, slightly too big to wrap a hand around.
He walks through the house like some sort of haunting. Like the ghost that never was, noticing all that has changed since that lifetime when this was his home, his world. What little he feels, treading on the long carpets that silences his steps. The grandfather clock above the stairs has stopped; nothing keeps the time as he weaves through one room after another.
Only the west wing had been in use when Sharon died, and many of the rooms in that wing, too, are closed and empty. His old room smells dusty, the walls have been redone since he left, but he recognises the scratch in the wooden flooring from where he once pushed his dresser against the door. He wonders where the furniture is. If she sold everything, or just hid it away somewhere.
Her favourite sitting room is in the upper northwest corner, overlooking the long, leafy drive to the main entrance. It's the first room that looks lived in, with its old chaise lounge and the fully stocked drinks' cabinet with the Swarovski crystal inlays. A greenish rug, an Oushak, if he remembers correctly, a little worn but beautiful. When he rounds the couch, there are hypodermic needle caps on the floor, a glass of water, a pillow left behind. This is where she had her stroke, then. Even if she died in the hospital hours later, it's a bit too grim even for Charles.
He walks out and closes the thin double doors, suddenly cold.
The kitchen is downstairs, of course, and it seems like a good place for a base. It's the only room in the house that he remembers having proper scuff marks in the wood flooring. He imagines the many chairs that have scraped across it. It's homely. It's certainly more homely than any other part of the house.
The fridge is nearly empty of fresh vegetables. There's a tired cauliflower in the drawer, a few shrunken carrots. No milk, no butter. Bottled water from some upscale brand he's only seen in sky bars and five-star hotels.
There's an old electric kettle, full of lime scale, but it boils water just fine for the bags of PG Tips in the pantry. They sit next to some digestives, and he chews on one, a little disheartened.
The open spaces around him makes him feel a slightly agoraphobic, somehow.
In Oxford, he'd shared a tall, narrow Walton street house with five other students. The furnishings had been bright and new, and the house old brick and made for awkward run-ins on the too-narrow stairs. It had been perfect. He'd taken to his impersonal, off-white little room like a bird to its nest, like a mouse to a hole, revelled in the sound of feet running up and down, pacing above him, and the humming of minds so intently focused on work that the outside melted away. He'd sat in the rainy Autumn and greying light and allowed himself to breathe deep for what felt like the first time.
I can be anybody, he'd thought. That seemed a bit silly now. He'd been younger than his housemates, he'd been attending Oxford, and money still flowed through his fingers far too easy, leaving residue on his hands for anyone to see. But the feeling had stuck.
Oxford had saved him, and he had allowed it.
Two PhDs, genetics, then biophysics, and then he had bid goodbye to Oxford. None of his original house mates had remained, his reputation had grown too large and it had been time to move on - but that house is still a dear place in his mind.
He tries to wear that memory like a blanket now, a little ratty, well-loved and warm.
He'd bought an air mattress before the funeral that will work just fine in the kitchen, until one of the guest bedrooms have been cleared of dust and moths and bad memories. Maybe never the latter, who could tell, really. He unfolds the mattress, watches it fill with air noisily, and sits down with his tea and crackers, suddenly bone tired. His laptop and the mobile WiFi come to life like old friends, must faster than anything this house was made for. It's comforting. There's always work, he thinks, and puts on a more tea.
It's Raven who wakes him in the morning with a video call, not the Boston traffic or that one loud neighbour.
They chat like their mother isn't dead, and Charles isn't sitting alone in a house with far too many rooms, on an air mattress that smells like a plastic pool toy in the middle of the kitchen.
"So, tell me about Erik," Raven says. She's taking her breakfast in a silk slip, bread flakes stuck in the lace. Manicured fingers delicately pick them out when Charles calls attention to it.
"You're such a messy eater," he complains.
"You try eating a croissant without it ending up in your pubes somehow," Raven says primly.
"This is why we live alone."
"I'm getting married."
"And yet, you live alone."
She shrugs. "I don't want to be unmarried and live alone."
"Yes, those are the two options."
"So, tell me about Erik," Raven says again.
Charles sighs. "He wants to go for coffee."
"That's nice."
"He's living in Westchester."
"Weird."
"I know," Charles agrees. "He nearly threw a fit when I told him I got the house."
"Can't imagine Erik throwing a fit."
"Well," he amends, "I think he frowned at me."
"Oh," Raven says, dragging the word out a little. She chews thoughtfully on her croissant. The light is soft where she is, somewhere between grey and bright. Living alone suits her. No locked doors, no looking over your shoulder. No standing perfectly still listening for what made a sound, and wondering what it meant.
"Should I invite him here?"
Raven snorts with her coffee cup raised daintily, her pinkie sticking out like a flag. "Oh, yeah, you can steal mom's designer vodka and climb to the roof again. Fuck him in the garage, for old time's sake, why don't you."
Charles unintentionally makes a sound of disgust in the back of his throat. "God, you're nasty in the morning."
"I try not to limit myself to mornings. No, of course you shouldn't invite him to the house. Go to a café, like a normal person."
"Thank you, that's all you had to say. Do you remember that his stepfather had a firm? Shaw something Legacy, something?"
Raven frowns, looks away a little to the left. "Didn't they fund Kurt's research?"
"Yes, among other things." He shifts a little, uneasy. "I have to look them up, see what they're up to, but Erik's heading it now."
She stares silently through the screen. "Why on earth? I mean, Erik was always a little radical, but he hated Shaw, and everything he did. Didn't he?"
Charles nods. It was one of the things that brought them together, him and Erik. You have a lousy stepfather? Hey, me, too. Ultimately, it's also what drove them apart.
"I wonder what he'd say if we told him what we're doing with the house. He'd probably be all over that sort of thing. Shaw would've," he adds sardonically.
"I mean," Raven says slowly. "What does that even mean? Do you want them to? Is that the sort of thing we'd want to associate it with?"
"God, no," he says hurriedly. "I was just thinking. The Erik we knew wouldn't let that sort of thing happen, right? He'd make sure the firm did good."
Raven makes a considering noise. "Doesn't hurt to ask, I suppose." She smiles suddenly. "Was he devastatingly handsome?"
He doesn't answer, but Raven hums anyway, as if he did.
They ring off, and suddenly it's difficult to take a deep breath in the silence that falls. The air sort of stutters high up in his chest, doesn't reach lower than that. The more he tries, the less he reaches.
He'd spent a few years at King's in London on a psychology degree before Raven convinced him to return to America. London had been cramped, people came and went too fast, and the city was always thinking, churning, ticking fast. He'd picked up a restlessness there that still pulses through his legs and fingers even now, and it is an old friend ensuring he'll never stay too long or stagnate. Boston hadn't felt like coming home, and indeed, he'd never come home in the fifteen years since he left New York. From a studio apartment, truly alone for the first time, to this empty shell of a home, and understanding that London, Boston - they were never lonely. This, right here: this was what it meant to be alone.
He has always been well-equipped to handle hard and difficult. But alone? Alone is different.
He gets up. The pantry needs urgent restocking; the fridge, too. When he peers into the freezer, it's full to the brim with frozen dinners, and even with ready-made pancakes and bread. Evidently his mother had only had a skeleton staff before she died, and none that would cook.
It's only when he's driving out past the electric gates in his mother's 2012 silver Cadillac, full tank and not even a little dusty, that he's able to take that deep breath again. That will have to change, he tells himself. Nothing else is going to change, after all, so he must.
At first glance, Salem is much the same as when he left.
It's almost a little obscene. Is that the word, he wonders idly from the car, parked between BMWs and Teslas and SUVs. Immoral and repugnant, but there is something else to it as well. It longs for a world that used to be, but only in hindsight. There is certainly something about upper middle class ahistoricity that strikes him as particularly distasteful. The quaintness of the streets, the sameness of the people, the mundane troubles and the feeling they project, that brownish, beige understanding that life is right and deserved. That whatever happens, happens for a reason.
As ever, he's not quite sure how much of that is something his mutation picks up and how much is his own cynicism. Unhappiness colours most things around it with its own custom shade. He's well aware of that.
Determined to prove himself wrong, or at least to prove himself open to being wrong, he finds a spot in the sun at a café to take his coffee and breakfast. Idly taking notes when inspiration strikes, or when he remembers yet another tasks that needs to be done, he tries to watch instead of read the people around him.
There's a plan, and he needs to stick to it, lest he loses himself to memories and forgets why he is here. The plan is simple and complicated - make the house into a school, somehow, do something worthwhile with his money, his resources, and his time, and stop the circle of hurt he's still walking the path of. Divide his days into physical work, and the last hurdles of his final thesis.
Surveying the floors and editing footnotes, excel-sheeting problems and questions for contractors and conforming to made-up formatting instructions. Budgeting, he thinks with his own brand of dark, violet loathing.
It would be wise to contact an antiques dealer, as well. It didn't make sense to keep Oushaks in a school for children, after all.
In the end, it's a long fucking list.
He's early enough at the shops that they're nearly deserted, and as he stands in the supermarket isle with a cart and a head of lettuce in his hands he feels suddenly absurd. Thirty-year-old academic, he thinks, orphan, now, and starving, too. Trying to remember what foods he likes, and how to stock a kitchen. His mother is dead, and nothing has changed, except he forgets what he eats for breakfast. As if he doesn't know exactly who he is when he isn't away from home. Who he is when he is home.
Bags packed gingerly into the Cadillac, he drives home to the radio station someone - his mother, her nurse, someone else entirely - had last listened to. It's generic, top 40 stuff, and it's a relief somehow. No revelations to be had.
He cooks - expensive taste, simple recipes, Magnus had observed when they were together. Tajarin, with truffle, and a glass of red wine - maybe two - and he's again at the kitchen table.
Despite turning the heat up he shivers in woollen socks and three layers of shirts. Then suddenly it's three o'clock and he's sat still staring out the window for an hour, his mind wandering. As if the bed will bite - as if sleep might. As if the silence might overwhelm him, suffocate him, a great blue pressure that his own breaths could not dent.
That's not what happens. The old fridge knocks and hums, an owl hoots in strange synchrony outside. After all, he thinks to the racing of his heart, it's not silence one should be afraid of. Silence is good, it's kind, it's - well, lonely.
He does intend to fix up a bedroom, but the air mattress is surprisingly comfortable and something tugs him back down the stairs every time he goes up to the first landing. The kitchen is more important, anyway, he thinks, as he sorts out the plain china for charity, and orders new chairs and cleans out the Nineties plastics from the kitchen island. That is, until he wakes up one morning to a whistling sound and the uncomfortable realisation that he's lying on the floor with his feet in the air.
The to-do-list grows, like his anxiety, until it wants to run off the page and straight into his lap.
That afternoon, he hesitates outside his old bedroom, but it is - too much, isn't it? Far too much, not what he needs right now. There's a smaller room, fewer windows, and it looks out over the apple orchard, further down the corridor, and he moves all his things inside. Reflects a little over the urge to close himself in, to live smaller and to draw the curtains on his four-poster bed when he does go to sleep that night. A contrast to a childhood led out in open spaces.
He orders a new mattress after sitting down on the old one and sinking alarmingly down into a sort of grove in it. He doesn't remember who used to sleep in the room, but is sure it must have been a long time since they did. He adds a new frame as an afterthought, and new curtains, and a different rug. The bedside table of oak can stay.
Throw money at the problem, he thinks, and breathes, and sips his cappuccino from the new espresso maker he splurged on. He's allowed to do that. Hell, he's allowed to walk away entirely - he knows this. There are no awards for staying in the same place, not if that place hurt you. Not if it holds nothing but bad memories.
That's not quite enough, though. Not for him.
What's easy? he thinks, glancing sideways at Erik's business card from the hasty exchange at the funeral, weighed down by a pot of rosemary in the kitchen window, as if a breeze might otherwise blow it away in this stale house. What's best?
He goes out through the tall glass doors in the back, where a lonely, spindly chair and table stand, ashtray hinting at who used it before.
The call nearly rings out before Erik picks up. Charles has lit a cigarette and taken two long drags before his voice comes over the line, unaware for a moment who he's talking to. "Hi, Erik," he says, around the cigarette. "It's Charles."
Erik pauses for a short moment, but Charles imagines he can hear it, and the thoughts churning hard and fast inside him. "What can I do for you?"
"I, uh," he says eloquently, forgoing the pleasantries he'd planned. How are you and what's up, or something equally terrible. "I have a sort of professional inquiry for you. Do you have a moment?"
"What sort of inquiry?" Erik asks, and Charles can hear him moving, the sound of a door closing, noises he hadn't clocked as voices disappearing.
"Well, see," he starts, fingers dancing over cigarette and ashtray. "I don't mean to be rude, but I was surprised when you said you've taken up the firm."
Erik makes a short, encouraging noise.
"When your stepfather ran it, well. I remember your opinions on it. On him. So I couldn't really equate it in my mind."
"Right."
"Shaw's big thing was mutant research, and he worked with New York private schools, as I recall. Yes?"
"Yes," Erik agrees at once.
Without pausing to consider, Charles asks, "And he funded private research on the side, correct?"
This time, Erik's reply is slower, less sure. "Yes, but -"
"Do you know much about that?"
Again, Erik's reply is slow. "Not a lot. The records are sealed to the public. I could request specific ones, if you know what you're looking for?"
"Oh, no. That's not important," he hurries to say. He doesn't want Erik to go looking if he doesn't already know. "But, that's not something you do?"
"No," Erik replies, his voice strangely heavy. "That's not something we do."
Charles sighs, exhaling long and slow. "Right." He takes another drag, preparing. "The thing is, Raven and I are looking for someone to help us with a project. Instead of a private school, we want to start an institute for learning. For - for us."
Us. What a concept.
He steamrolls on, the hand not holding the phone to his ear suddenly jittery. "But we need help. Obviously. Would it be possible to hire you for it? And would you be interested? I looked at your website, and it seems up your alley, as it were. "
Erik is silent for a long time before he speaks. Charles blows on the end of his cigarette, its fire uneven and burning out.
"Where?" Erik asks at length.
"Here," he says. "The house.
"You're kidding."
Charles snorts. "No. Not at all."
"All right."
"All right?"
"I mean," Erik emphasizes. "All right: let's talk about it. We did the Bering Institute for Mutant Education and Outreach, couple of years ago. We know what we're doing. I'll get you a portfolio."
Charles blows out a big breath. "Another thing, then. I'd like to have a bedroom for myself. Upstairs. To sleep, and to work. I am without other housing at the moment."
"Right."
"Also, there are a lot of antiques, memories, private things. I'd handle that."
"Right."
The nervousness hits him like a sledgehammer, goes straight for his solar plexus.
"So you're actually interested? I can certainly look for other -"
"No," Erik interrupts him. "I'm interested."
"Right," he says faintly. 15 years of silence, and they're diving headfirst into this. "I would be funding the school through a stipend. Compound interest, that sort of thing. And everything before that I will privately pay for. I obviously haven't worked out the details yet, but."
Charles taps the cigarette against the rim of the ashtray, too many times. The ash falls faster than he can smoke it, but the movement grounds him. "The thing is - and I want you to tell me now if this is not your thing - but I..." he falters.
"What is it?"
"I want the politics off the table," he says, and he might even soften his accent in an attempt to sound less confrontational.
Again, Erik is silent for a long time: so long, in fact, that Charles thinks he's reconsidering. Silence is often furious, Charles has found, and he feels handicapped when he can't see Erik's mind.
"What do you mean?" Erik asks at last.
"As I said, I know the sort of research Shaw funded when he ran-" Charles starts to say when Erik interrupts him, forcefully.
"We're not like that anymore."
Charles takes another long drag on his cigarette. "It will be a school," he says again. "No experimentation. No propaganda. Just a safe space. That's what I mean. Nothing but that."
"And you?" Erik asks quickly.
"Me?"
"What will your role be?"
"I don't know," he answers honestly. "It doesn't have to be anything."
"So you don't intend to go back to England."
"England?" he repeats, mindlessly. "No? Unless," he adds, "that is one of your conditions?"
"Why would I-" A frustrated noise; Erik interrupting himself this time. "Never mind."
His mother's crystal ashtray looks dirty under his hand. He draws a little line in it before he crushes the butt into it.
"Are we-" he starts to ask, and then decides to just press through it. "Are we going to be okay? Working together?"
Erik doesn't answer immediately this time either, but that's probably good. It means he's thinking it over, that he's actually considering it.
"I think so," he grunts out eventually, and Charles feels his shoulders drop from their tensed positions.
That's all I can ask for, he thinks, and says, "Good," like some cold-hearted bastard.
"I have my own contractors," Erik says.
"Shaw proofed and vetted," Charles tries to joke, but Erik doesn't laugh.
"It's Lehnsherr," he corrects, quietly, but it's polite in a way that feels even more embarrassing.
"Sorry. Lehnsherr sounds better, anyway."
"My contractors work closely with us to hire mutants. They're all unionised."
"Perfect," Charles says, relieved to have left that tense moment behind. "Sold. I'll send you a spec and you can give me an offer."
"All right."
"Great. I'll run it by Raven."
"Good."
What do you say? He wonders in panic. What do you say, when it's been 15 years and your last memories are of terrible infatuation and teenage heartbreak? What can you possibly say -
"Come by Wednesday at 9 and we can seal the deal."
"Yep, yes, perfect," Charles. "I'll see you then."
Nine in the morning is a time that tells you a lot of things, Charles thinks as he pulls the handbrake outside the firm, fifteen minutes late. Impossible to turn into an after-work drink, and too early to go for lunch, but not early enough that Charles should be his first concern of the day. It says Erik wants it over with, and Charles out of his hair, and maybe that is a relief, and fair, too. Clutching take-away mug in one hand, bag in the other, he locks the car and jogs the few steps up to the quaint stone building, half offices, half flats.
Erik glances at him briefly as Charles pushes the glass door open with his elbow. He's half bent over the reception desk, where a freckled young man is frowning wildly at the screen in front of them. "Took you long enough," Erik says in lieu of good morning.
"I was looking for Shaw," he explains, "not Lehnsherr and Frost." It's quite fitting, really, that Erik has a new last name. It's an entirely different Erik, after all, and Charles has to be reminded of that. "Who is Frost?"
"Emma. My colleague," Erik replies. "The conference room is in the back. I'll be a second," he adds, wearily, as the receptionist groans in apparent distress about something on the screen in front of him.
The conference room looks a little like a hybrid of an interrogation room in Criminal and a showroom in Ikea someone forgot to update. He sits in one of the polyester chairs and sips his coffee, regrets being late and missing his chance for a post-breakfast, pre-lunch smoke. He slides the spec he sent Erik late last night out of his Barbour bag before he turns it so the brand rests against his ankle, and not toward the room. He feels as obscene as Westchester looks, sometimes.
Erik is already talking when he enters a few minutes later. "My intern messed up an order. Sent a client 50 tonnes of granite gravel instead of 50 square meters worth. His driveway was under siege." The same spec Charles took out slaps down on the table between them, and Erik sits with a sigh.
"Ah," Charles says, nodding. "Well, we've all been there."
Erik looks up, scrutinising. "Have we?"
"Well, not really," Charles confesses. "But I once ordered 20 pineapple pizzas to my office instead of number 20: Pineapple pizza. It smelled like pizza for a month."
Erik looks at him like - like he doesn't understand the language Charles is speaking. Like he has to strain a bit to make sense out of the man in front of him.
"Anyway," Charles says.
"Anyway," Erik agrees, and there's a small, downward curve to the corner of his mouth. Charles ties his shielded mind even tighter, pulls strings around his thoughts and knots them. "I've put together a loose budget," Erik marches on, "We will need to specify it as we work, but this mock-up should give you an idea. If we are to fully equip the building with fibre, we will also have to rip out the electricity. I can't imagine it would sustain any long-term use."
"Ah."
"Yes. I'll have Emma look over them, but you should be aware we'll have to add about another three hundred to the total price, if worse comes."
"Sure. Thank you."
Erik frowns then, and narrows his eyes at him. "'Thank you?'" he repeats.
It is Charles's time to sigh. "You know money isn't an issue."
"I don't," Erik replies caustically. "Actually."
"Well," Charles says, matching him, childish and surly. "It isn't."
The moment sits, chafing, in the air between them. Charles considers peeking, just a little look, into Erik's - not even into his thoughts, just into the forefront of his mind, into his feelings.
He doesn't. He doesn't want to know, he tells himself sternly.
"The antiques," Erik says, still cold, but professional.
"I've got it handled. I'll sell them off."
"There's a shop in Salem. I'll give you their card."
"Great."
He thinks that picking at scabs had always been a pastime he'd been especially good at, and Erik is a barely-healed wound. It could mean the end of a whole lifetime of questions, and a lot suffering, regardless of which way it goes. Heal it, or cauterise it.
It goes on in the same vein, the frost never lifting, despite how Charles can feel himself soften. It is Erik, after all. It's still his handwriting, his broad hands. His sense of pride, and his gift with metal. The first time he uses it in front of Charles is when his phone chimes in his pocket, and he makes no move to pull it out. It floats up by his elbow as he doesn't stop writing out the details on the form he's working on. Charles cannot contain his reaction, a small intake of breath at the sight. Erik glances his way before the phone slides out of sight again.
"I have another meeting in ten minutes," he says, putting his pen down on the form, sliding it over to Charles. "Would you mind us coming by the house later this week?"
"Not at all," Charles says, and adds an extra flourish to his signature.
The antiques shop looks just like it should. Heavy browns with emerald greens, and the kind of clutter that feels intentional. Heavy iron bars across the windows.
A tall man in his early thirties, appropriately clad in a tweed jacket and green chinos, looks up from a wooden standing desk when the old bell above the door twinkles merrily. He rips off a pair of round glasses and smiles, and there's something almost soft in the air around him. His mind - gentle, like moss, and open, and Charles feels an instant attraction to it. He wants to sink into it, just a little, and maybe that's what stops him from immediately answering the man's enthusiastic, "Welcome!"
After the silent pause, the man's smile turns a little awkward as he says, "Can I help you?"
Charles shakes himself. "Yes, very much, I hope."
He launches into a long explanation for his visit - how Erik Sh - no, Lehnsherr, had referred him, what he needs, where he lives. The man is delighted by Charles's proposal, knowing all about the Xavier ancestral home and the supposed treasures within.
"I'm an antiques-dealer in Salem," he says, and smiles charmingly. "Of course I know of it, Mr. Xavier."
"Charles," Charles says. "Please. Mr. Xavier was my father."
His name is Jamie Madrox, and he's delightful, all mousy brown locks and hazel eyes and spindly fingers that write Charles's contact details down by hand on an old-fashioned card, his cursive elegant and hurried. Jamie has strange, high cheekbones and eyes set wide apart. It makes him look a little alien, and Charles barely registers how he leans closer to him, how he braces himself on his forearms and juts his hip out behind the desk. He only notices when Jamie does the same, and his smile turns a little maroon at the corners. No, that's his mind. His smile deepens.
"I - how soon can we start? We usually do our purchases at the end of each month, so, next week - but for this, I'm sure we can arrange something," Jamie says.
Charles waves that away. "Don't worry. Next week is fine. In fact, that's probably best. I have some cataloguing to do."
Jamie looks sympathetic, nods, says, "Lots of pieces?"
He doesn't sound very sorry about it, though. Charles laughs, channelling a little of Jamie's excitement over the desk between them. Makes it a small nest inside his own chest, and thinks about new beginnings, new mistakes, and how he feels hungry for it.
Notes:
...The pineapple pizza thing? Yeah. It happened.
Chapter Text
Emma Frost looks like a woman who's used to making men afraid of her. Despite the gravel underfoot, she walks easy on her high heels, her pointed chin in the air, and her shoulders straight. She's beautiful in the same way the sky is blue, but that's not what's interesting about her. She towers over Charles in both height and presence, and all that is fine - impressive, really - but the thing that makes him stutter and forget himself when he's shaking her hand is the realisation that she's a telepath.
He can't help in that moment to glance at Erik, eyes probably too wide, as he comes up behind her from his own car, but he really is astonished. Maybe it was hyperbole, or at least hubris, to think that he had somehow broken Erik, or to think that he could have changed Erik from someone fair and impartial to - what? Someone with prejudice against his own kind, different though they are?
Emma must notice him battening down the hatches, like someone anticipating a storm. She lays her hand on his forearm as she walks by him into the house, and says, "Don't worry, darling, I won't peek."
He deserves it. He deserves the condescension, and more, too, even if the things she thinks about him might not be exactly true.
Erik affects a blank face that Charles would have known fifteen years ago was entirely artificial.
The entrance hall beyond the foyer makes Emma hum, and Charles looks up and notices for the first time the air of decay and decadence. It's not that the house is dilapidated in any way. It's that the high ceiling is a little too high - how the chandeliers are impossibly big just to fill the void, and the paintings of English country sides that, though original, look garish.
"There's a lot to be done, obviously," he says.
"Obviously," Emma says, "but we'll make it perfect." She spins in a tight circle, her hair in an equally as tight ponytail that shines like platinum in the struggling, dusty light. "We will need a war room."
The term is apt, he thinks a few minutes later, as they set up shop in the old dining room overlooking the French garden. Erik and Emma hunt for outlets to plug in the four laptops they seem to share between them while Charles binds up the heavy velvet curtains, and then the silk ones behind those. They spread blueprints like maps on the ebony table, one for each floor, and even use tiny figures to indicate work crews as they form plans of action without any need for Charles's input.
In the end, he slips out to make coffee, and when he returns, they're not even there. He feels them, vaguely, moving about upstairs, and mutters, snidely, to himself, "Do go on, help yourselves." Leaving a steel thermos carafe and two cups, he decides they will be alright, and can find him - eventually - if they need him.
"Mr. Xavier," says Emma when she finds him in the kitchen. "May we return tomorrow?"
"Please, call me Charles," he says automatically, standing up. "Of course. Come and go as you like. The locks are automated—I’ll email the codes."
"Splendid," she says. "We'll get started right away. How soon can you empty the first floor?"
"The first floor?" he says. "Do you mean this floor?"
She smiles thinly. "Excuse my American - how soon can we begin work on the ground floor, the floor on which we are currently?"
There’s a challenge in her gaze, so he answers with a thin smile of his own. "I'll have it cleared at the end of the week."
"Perfect," she says. "Goodbye, Mr. Xavier."
"Goodbye, Ms. Frost."
They seem competent, at the very least, if not very extroverted, he thinks as he locks the doors behind them. He looks through the window as they gesture at the house to each other, speaking in short sentences and nodding to one another. He wonders what Erik felt, walking through the corridors. If the smells were the same as he remembered them, if he opened the door to the room where they touched each other for the first time as teenagers, afraid of the end of summer. He wonders what Erik remembers, how deep into his mind Charles got with his claws and his kindness.
He goes back to work.
When Jamie and his associate - an elderly gentleman who's introduced to Charles only as Mr. Wood - come for their appointment, they insist on seeing every room of the house.
"It's a big house," Charles warns them, but if anything, it seems to spur them on. Mr. Wood falls rather dramatically to his knees on the Oushak in mother's drawing room, remarking on the quality of the silk, the intricacies of the pattern. As Jamie makes to mark it for sale, Mr. Wood hurriedly says, "Maybe this one can be a direct sale."
Charles would like to see his face if he tried to gift the rug to the man. It wouldn't work, of course. So he lies, says, "Mother would have liked it to find a good home", and agrees to sell it for a fraction of its cost directly to Mr Wood.
Jamie smiling at him across the room is a fine incentive.
His belongings start arriving the next week, fresh off the boat from England, and the truck from LA, and the apartment he had in Boston. It's a joke, really, how spread out he's been. Ducking Lehnsherr and Frost contractors ripping into the meat and bones of the house, he weaves his way one box at a time to his bedroom and office on the first floor. He has quite forgotten the contents of the boxes, and disparages his old filing systems - they seem to have been reliant on the proximity of certain items, rather than their innate relation to each other. Not much else can explain the awful bamboo fruit bowl lying on top of his old research notes, and, close to the bottom, Raven's old bodice rippers, covers thumbed into oblivion.
He knows better than to overdo it. The urge not to be in the way, not to be a nuisance, is stronger, though, so the ache begins in his lower back and creeps down into his legs as the day grows. When he stands upright, something stops him from stretching back, and then suddenly, it stabs him right in the sacral nerve. It's one tiny part of the back, they had explained to him, one little joint that becomes inflamed and has nowhere to go. The pain is always brutal; takes the breath right out of his chest.
He drops the box in his arms, watches as it hit the carpet-less parquet and spreads his past all over it. A moment of silence from downstairs follows, so he shouts, "Just me, sorry!", and waits for the noise to resume.
Just after it does, though, Erik appears like a floating head on the stairs, peeking at him as he swears and braces against the bannister.
"You okay?" Erik asks.
"Ah. Yes," Charles replies, but quickly amends, "Well - no. Old - old rugby injury."
He doesn't know why he says it: maybe because it would be what Erik expects. It isn't the truth, god knows that.
And also god damn these heavy lifts, these weak legs, and god fucking damn Cain and his father. Damn them both to hell.
He slides down to the floor, stretching first one leg out and then the other, blowing out a controlled breath. When he opens his eyes, the room slowly unblurring as the pain fades a little, Erik has come up the stairs to narrow his eyes at him.
"Yes?" Charles asks. "I'm fine."
"Are you?" Erik demands.
It's rude, and Charles likes to think he's a pretty good liar. Erik doesn't look like he believes him, though. His arms fold across his chest like the first line of defence against - what, against Charles?
His pulse pounds in his ears, suddenly, like he should fight. He really doesn't want to.
"Did you need me for something?" he asks hurriedly. "I'll try to keep out of the way."
Erik's frowns, goes for the box. "What's all this?"
"Oh," he waves, "just stuff. From London, I think."
"Your stuff."
"Yeah, 'course."
"From London."
"Yeah. I left a lot behind when I moved to Boston."
Erik frowns harder, and Charles's pulse beats double.
"You lived in Boston?"
"Yeah, a little while," he says. "Just for this last thesis. I'm almost finished with it."
"Your second?"
He looks down, away. "Third."
"Damn." Erik says it neutrally, but there's something almost disgusted in his mind. He radiates something - a dark feeling, or feelings, that crash in waves before they're brought back. Crash, control, and repeat. Charles has to take a deep breath and look away.
"So why are you doing this?" Erik asks, out of the blue.
"Doing what?" he asks, looking around. Floor, box, sad belongings. His feet in old trainers, the fronts scuffed. "I just need a little break."
"No: why don't you just put everything in storage?"
"They were in storage," he protests.
"And they'll go right back when the house is finished. Won't they?"
"Will they?" he asks, confused.
Erik opens his arms wide, asking, "Then what is your plan?"
Oh, lord knows, he thinks, and it probably shows on his face. "Do I have to have one?"
"For when you leave," Erik elaborates.
"When I leave," Charles echoes.
Erik shrugs, and it looks mean. Maybe that's just the line of his mouth, turned down, but Charles thinks there's something cold over the tightness in his shoulders.
Charles nods slowly, focusing his eyes on the window, the stairs, the sad belongings spread over hardwood. A cheap notebook, labelled "Biophysics" in an elegant scrawl that somehow now feels childish, has slid out. He finds the coffee stains on the front pathetic.
"Yeah," he says. "You're right."
He doesn't have the right, after all, to argue, and Erik isn't wrong, exactly. Charles doesn't have a plan other than do this - do something he won't feel ashamed of, and then see how it feels. To see what he can do next with that feeling, if anything.
He gets up enough to shuffle the notebook, an old pen from a conference he doesn't even remember, back into the beaten box, and hears Erik sigh quietly above him. He walks away before Charles can say anything else, and that is just as well.
He leaves the rest of the boxes for another day, safely stored inside the entrance hallway, in the way of everyone but not worth the humiliation to move, and escapes into the office until the cars have all left the driveway - Emma's white Tesla, and what must be Erik's dark VW, the crew's vans.
People talk about struggle all the time, but no one ever talks about how to escape self-pity. So when he goes to the kitchen for a frozen dinner that tastes like cardboard, he brings a bottle of red with him back to his room and resumes the never-ending task of editing his footnotes.
He stops when he realises it's 1 am and he's doing what can only be described as substandard academic work.
Erik goes easy in him after that, and it's somehow worse. Like they are strangers - which they might as well be - but Charles can't shake the intimate knowledge he used to have. How he used to follow the thoughts in Erik's head like will-o-the-wisps through a maze, and how Erik enjoyed it. Charles could have sworn he did.
But fifteen years have done a lot to erase those memories. Well, fifteen years and the gift Charles left Erik the very last time they spoke. That's how he'd thought of it then, at least.
Now Erik nods at him, professional and aloof. They email, from one office to another, and Emma watches him like a hawk, her mind a steady presence in the house, and Raven sends him subtly worded, worried messages. He begins to wonder if he hasn't made a horrible mistake.
The spring rains start the following week. He roams the empty hallways like a ghost between work sessions, going down to the busy ground floor for food and for careful, nosy peeks into the work. They've ripped out almost the entire wall down by the old servants' quarters to get to the outdated electricity and to install some sort of high-powered Wi-Fi. One of them have a mutation that allows them to follow electricity. Charles does a lot of nodding when they tell him about it, and then says something back along the lines of "that's groovy", which spurs them on.
The rain is persistent, beating out white noise against the thin window panes, and it's not that he's relaxed, only lost in thought, and that's probably why he doesn't notice Kurt standing in the corridor outside his old bedroom until he's nearly upon him. Charles starts, violently, the same charged current going rampant through his body that he remembers from fifteen years ago.
Only, of course, it's not Kurt. Why would it be, he tells his racing heart. It's Erik, looking back at him like he's cracked, and maybe he is. Maybe this house has finally broken him, like it tried to for eighteen years. It's Erik holding a black folder and a yardstick, not Kurt's clipboard, and he's frowning now, going, "Charles?" in a slow and worried way.
"Oh," Charles breathes out in reply, but his heart doesn't calm down. "You scared me."
Erik doesn't stop frowning.
"Okay," Charles says, for some reason, and wonders if his heart is about to jump out of his throat. He turns on his heel, back to his office, and swears he hears Erik mutter, "You're a terrible telepath."
He doesn't slam the door, but it's a near thing, only because he's in a hurry to be alone. He slides, in a dramatic fashion, down it to sit on the floor. "Just breathe," he tells himself aloud, adding, "bitch," for good measure.
It takes a long time for it to work.
His first time with Jamie is nothing special, really, and maybe that's what makes it perfect. Slow and steady wins the race, his ex Carl had always told him, though he never explained where the race ended, or what winning should look like. He hadn't appeared bothered by it as he was bending his TA over the sofa that one time Charles dropped by his condo unannounced, but then, maybe that was a race Carl had already won.
They meet at a small Italian in town, tucked into a quiet street, surrounded by lush greenery harshly beaten into submission and straight lines by Salem gardeners. Jamie's dressed in the same warm jewel tones as his shop. His hair, all brown and glossy, is tousled and elegant, his hazel eyes warm. People aren't exactly their minds, or their feelings, but Jamie's still manage to surprise him with his cedar-soft, wind-blown silk. Charles remembers the minds of teenagers and young adults, the wavering paths of their thoughts leading to sheer drops of indecision. To now be thirty, and speak to other thirty-year olds, and relax into their stability, he wonders at anyone - at Carl perhaps, nearly fifty - for wanting to go back so bad that you'd only find passion in something so tangled and raw.
The wine is excellent, the food unimportant. They chat Westchester and Salem and the house, carpets and vases, the trouble with chandeliers.
Jamie asks him out again before he leaves. Unfamiliar warmth spreads through his chest, like he's been slowly freezing down to nothing for a long time. That Friday, they agree, and Jamie's smile is simple and happy. This is what I need, Charles thinks. Just someone to be close to, someone kind and uncomplicated.
It's not a nice thought. To call someone uncomplicated, and to wish for it, too, no: it's selfish. It rather distorts and any baggage they might want to share, down the line. Reduces them, flattens their nuances. It's not like anyone is truly uncomplicated. He knows this, intimately, and despite that, he finds himself preferring the caricature.
The befreckled intern from the office turns out to be called Sean, and he's only 18, but he's smart as a tack, and seems to know every single contractor working for the firm by both name and specialty.
"Are they all okay with you telling me about them?" Charles has to ask from a safe distance as a woman named Tanya takes out the kitchen wall with just her hands. "Acoustic levitation," Sean had explained earlier. The air seems to hum faintly.
"Sure," Sean says now, shrugging. "Why wouldn't they be?"
It's a naive question. Times cannot have changed that much, Charles thinks. Different is still dangerous. But he knocks on the door to the war room with fresh coffee for Erik and Emma. Sunlight filters through the old windows, casting patterns on the floor, filling the space with a rare warmth. He stays too long, lingers so he can say, "Your team is remarkable."
Emma, her focus is unbroken, doesn't look up from her computer, just tilts her head, and he feels the impression of her thoughts, all along the lines of naturally.
"Not many jobs come with an 'all mutants welcome' notice these days," Erik says, dryly. The sunlight catches the sharp lines of his face, the crows' feet, his straight nose.
"Is that so," Charles says. "I hadn't noticed. The universities are positively crawling with us. Why, telepaths especially are so sought after I had to get multiple doctorates just to satisfy them all."
Emma sniffs; an elegant version of a snort, he thinks.
Erik doesn't laugh though.
"Well, you're business owners now," Charles finds himself babbling, awkwardly filling a silence that hadn't asked for it. "So you proved them wrong."
"We didn't," Erik says. "What they are really telling us is that we'll never belong with them. And we don't."
Them, Charles thinks. And, somehow, me. In the end, money and a mutation that wasn't necessarily obvious made him part of another set.
"We dress the part," Emma says, distracted by something on her screen, the words like an old adage often repeated. Cool, collected Emma and steely, intense Erik. No one should doubt them, he thinks faintly. And the distinction stings. It shouldn't - Charles is the privileged one, after all - but it does. He could say, I never asked for it, but he hadn't hesitated to use it when he needed. He could say, privilege can be a curse, too, but that would meant he wasn't listening. So he says nothing at all, in the end.
After all, he is doing his best to atone, and you don't get far with your defences armed.
If anything, there's an ache in his chest that tastes more like nostalgia than sadness. As if he's longing for a time when there was still something that bound them together, no matter how temporary. School, and genetics, and attraction. Something more real than memory, and something more magnetic than trauma. Something with a gravity of its own.
He hesitates so long that Emma looks up, eyes narrowing.
"Right," he says, "I'll leave you to it."
Charles goes, a white-knuckled grip around his feelings that feels like iron-tinged heartburn.
A few days into July, he's pushed out of editing by a scream. Only it's not a scream, it's a powerful push, is the way he thinks of it as he takes the stairs two steps at a time to reach the ground floor, where Emma is still telegraphing rage and devastation.
"What's happened?" he asks, scenes of devastation, blood and accidents and broken people already fully formed, imagined, in his head. Out of breath, and surprising Erik out of a crouch by Emma's feet.
"This house," Emma hisses, and that's when he clocks the broken heel in Erik's hand, from her left white stiletto. She grabs Erik's arm to keep upright, her useless shoe still on her foot, her hand a painful claw in his fine wool shirt.
"Suit yourself for wearing heels to a construction site," Erik drawls.
"These are Louboutin," she snarls. "And I'm not at the construction site."
"I'm so sorry," Charles hastens to say. "Were they originals Pin Ups?"
Erik throws him a look that seems to ask how and why.
But Emma suddenly looks less devastated. "No," she says. "Thank god."
"Still," Charles says. "I'll get you new ones."
"You don't have to do -" Erik starts saying, before he fades off, Emma's hand on his arm going white.
"I would accept that," she says, respectfully.
"Of course," Charles says. "It's the least I can do. I'll go see if Raven has any shoes in storage."
"Thank you," she says, smiling thinly, still furious, but despite it all, impressed.
"You don't have to," Erik reiterates when they meet upstairs.
"I know," Charles says easily, because it is - it is easy. An easy fix, and a fair one, and it just money, in the end.
Erik looks at him like he wants to sigh, and also puzzle him out.
And Charles knows, intimately, that people change. That things have a habit of happening, and of colliding, so that you get softer edges to you, as you grow. Never the same, but not necessarily worse.
"I'm-," he says, and Erik stands there. "I'm glad you're here."
He frowns, Erik does, and looks away. There's some sort of violetness to him, not unlike embarrassment. Someone else would do better, he thinks, loud enough that Charles picks it up without trying.
Charles smiles, thinks his thoughts quietly, and leaves before Erik can reply.
He brings Jamie home, not because it's the expected thing, but because he feels eager. He feels starved, or frozen, or hollow, or - jittery, in the end, he concludes, observing his own hands shake in Jamie's hair. But Jamie is gentle, and unassuming, and his mind is a quiet space that doesn't theorise. He captures Charles's tremors in his own and kisses them, and when Charles makes to apologise, or explain, Jamie shushes him into another kiss, and it makes Charles feel - seen. Full. Entire. Good and right, yes, but also like he's fulfilling some unspoken design.
"We should do this again," he says when they lie in bed, and Jamie's hair has curled from sweat, framing his face in loose spirals that cling to his brow, and Charles is still panting, and aching from being taken apart.
Jamie laughs.
The grass still frosts over in the night, and turns silvery and glittering in the weak sunlight of early morning. It's the kind of hour Charles usually spends avoiding, but Jamie has an actual job, and obligations, and all the things Charles has spent his adult life trying to sidestep.
He brings the coffee Charles makes him to the double doors in the kitchen, to hum over the state of the gardens, the
"You should get a gardener," he says when Charles rests his head on his shoulder.
"Do you know one?"
"I do." He turns his head to smile, perfect white teeth except for one crooked incisor. "His name's Harold."
"Perfect," Charles decides.
Jamie is stepping out just as Erik is using his powers to close the doors on his VW. They greet each other politely, and as Erik gets to the front door step, he turns around to look at Jamie pulling out of the drive way, and then back to Charles’s morning hair, his thin sweatpants, his coffee still clutched in both hands.
He smirks. "Isn't that the antiques-dealer?"
"Is it?" Charles asks, going inside. "Huh."
Harold turns out to be an older gentleman who insists on being called by his first name only. He's frighteningly competent, and he climbs his ladder to the mossy pear trees with the agility of a twenty-year-old.
"Neglected," he confirms of the pear trees, and the apple trees, and then finally the cherries, too. "But salvageable."
When Charles tries to apologise, Harold just says, "Could be worse. How do you feel about bees?"
"Sure," he says.
"You have a pair of magpies nesting in an apple tree."
"Can I charge them rent?" he wonders.
"I'll let them be, if that's fine."
"No problem."
The birds start croaking in alarm as he comes near, so he stands a way away and looks, feeling proud for some unknown reason. In the mudroom, he finds a broken garden sign. It's a piece of jagged wood that he thinks used to hang by the garden paths. He writes "Magpies" on the back with a thick pen from a drawer in the kitchen, and hangs it loosely around the tree with twine. The birds chatter at him until he retreats.
Harold gets in a team of young people in the same colour trousers with patches on the knees and impossibly many pockets, and they're fascinating to watch. They bring power tools and ladders, and they seem to amass an impressive amount of branches and twigs and debris in no time at all. Charles almost worries if there'll be any trees left, when they've finished.
"Are you pruning these poor pear trees, or punishing them?" he asks Harold on one sunny afternoon. The trees look bare, especially for May, and gnarled and shivering in the breeze.
Harold makes a dismissing gesture, steady on his ladder, wielding shears against the untouched greenery. "They grow to love it," he says, and then, as if to himself, "Makes them stronger."
There are still rooms he avoids, places he shies away from on the grounds, but it helps to see them transform. He documents it for Raven, and receives gifs back, wrecking-balls and exorcists. It helps, too, that Sharon had not been sentimental. He stands in his old bedroom and remembers: the old bedframe, that Francis had made for his sixth birthday. The mirror that had been the original house in England, impossible to use, foggy and bent, but pretty. The old desk of massive oak he had taped secrets under.
Everything is gone, of course, thrown out, regifted, left in charity shops all over Westchester, probably. No doubt they're gracing some new haunted house now.
When he can't stand the heavy roof, or the insistent blinking of the text cursor on his screen, he goes into the fruit garden, and looks at the birds. The magpies have babies in early June. They walk around on the newly cut grass, confused and curious and dishevelled. Learning to be birds, learning to be.
He doesn't understand how someone can harm a child.
The blackbirds sing in the evenings, as if they had been waiting, too, for something to happen, for some sort of life to return, or suffocating blanket to be lifted. For the trees to be sheared, and the bushes, too, and the grass to be coaxed from beneath heavy moss.
He wishes he could still run. His legs were made to be stretched and pushed and used, so he goes to Jamie instead, and they have sex on Jamie's velvety couch, sitting, so Charles can use his thigh muscles to bring them both over the edge, once and then twice the same evening, sweating and exhausted and free. It's not running unconfined over soft grass, but it's still freedom, it's the near best thing.
His supervisor from Boston calls, and tells him November. He can do it, he says. Of course he can do it, he already has. She sends revisions on the first of July. They sit heavy and red and he stretches, stands, walks to the windows and back, and out the door. He goes to the kitchen and makes ragu, and pasta from eggs and flour, and then shortbread and biscuits and bread, and he doesn't seem to be able to stop.
Erik and Emma's team is delighted. A Friday afternoon turns into a bit of an early weekend.
He teams up with Emma to tackle the closed wing the next week. Sharon had removed all the rugs and paintings, so what remains is mostly storage and dustsheets. There are cardboard boxes in one room - one for each car they'd owned since the seventies, and one for each decade of Francis's golfing, and one for each child. Cain's is full of football diplomas and trophies, and Charles reluctantly sets it aside for later instead of throwing it right out. Raven's has her art projects, good enough to save, he thinks, and then upsettingly her baby hair and baby teeth. He shudders and throws them away without bothering to ask her about it. He knows her well enough for that, at least. His own box has their birth certificates, and his middle school grades. Charles is a delight to have in class, one of them says in fading blue ink. Raven is an aspiring abstract artist: especially when it comes to her handwriting.
There's no box for Kurt.
He vaguely recognises a cabinet, thinks maybe it had been in his room at the end, and finds it full of his old school work from high school. It's organised neatly enough that she must have had someone do it for her, but it's random enough that he thinks she didn't much care to know what was in it. It appears to house all the things he'd had in his room when he left, and some of Raven's, too. History essays and sketches of mitochondria, year books and art projects, some of the imagery pretty grim. The crumbling remains of his first motor, and the leaked battery acid. A pack of cigarettes that's mostly crumbled, and beneath, a progress report for Erik Shaw, dated 1997.
"Gosh," he says out loud. Emma comes over, her heels on the heavy wooden floor steady and sure.
"What is it?" she asks.
He pulls it out of the folder it's been in for fifteen years. "Erik's least favourite teacher," he says, and reads out loud, "'Erik finds it difficult to accept corrections cheerfully'. Ms. Davies strikes again."
"Erik?" Emma says sharply.
He gives the card to her, watches her scan it top to bottom. "He went by Shaw back then."
"I know that," she mumbles. "I didn't realise you knew each other."
"We were in the same year."
She narrows her eyes at him.
"I drew the caricature," he says, and points.
It is a little pathetic, sure. But it is proof that there had been a time when Erik, humiliated, would talk to Charles. Sharing small victories and defeats, and conspiring to hide the evidence of them.
"I had no idea," she says. "I can't read you at all."
Charles shrugs. "I'm good at shielding."
"Like a walking safe."
He smiles.
"What was he like?"
He shrugs again. There's a black trash bag by his feet, and he holds his hand out for Erik's old card, but Emma folds it up and puts it in the back pocket of her white palazzo pants, and why not, he thinks. He dumps the rest of the folder in instead. "Don't know," he says. "Going on eighteen, political. A bit intense. I don't know him well enough right now to say he's the same, but he seems fairly unchanged."
Emma hums, and Charles goes back to cursing whatever instinct he had possessed that made him save every last bit of his life from 7 to 18. He thinks he remembers swearing with Erik that they'd burn it all on graduation. He can't recall why they didn't. Maybe things like this had already started to feel less important by then.
Or maybe he'd made Erik forget all about it. When he left Erik and let him drive away with a hole in his memory, was this the kind of things he took away?
He ties off the trash bag and takes it down to the mudroom. The wing was warm and uncomfortable - the mudroom opens up to the fruit trees and Harold yelling up at a young woman on a ladder, and he stands there for a long time, letting the breeze cool his nauseated skin.
You run and you run, Charles thinks, and everything is still where you left it when you stop. So he pours himself a glass of red wine and pointedly doesn't drink it as his phone tries to connect to Cain's. The relief he feels when Cain doesn't pick doesn't even have that brown tint of cowardice to it. He calls Moira, instead, and she promises to ask Cain about the box. "I can send to him if he gives me an address," he says. "He doesn't even have to meet with me."
"I'll ask," she says.
He takes a long sip from his glass as the call disconnects.
The blue of his laptop screen has started to sting his eyes in the darkness of his office. When an email arrives, his first thought is that Erik somehow knows that he's just opening and closing tabs, switching between documents, and undoing his own edits.
But it's just the headline, "spec_5", and a question mark with a file attached.
Before he can give himself time to rethink the decision, he swipes to call Erik and puts it on speaker. The surge of adrenaline has him up and pacing as the phone dials, cold feet against the soft, red carpet.
"You didn't like it," Erik answers, as if they call each other frequently - as if - Charles realises with a start - they hadn't not called each other in the fifteen years that had passed.
"I did," he says, and grasps his right elbow tight against his chest. "Thought I'd tell you to go right ahead. Since you're obviously up."
"Did you even look at the estimate?"
"Do you care? I'll pay."
"Good," Erik replies, and there's the sound of a keyboard. "Done."
"Isn't it a bit late to still be on the job?" he asks, before silence can fall. Outside it's almost dark enough to see the stars, if he squints. He turns off the banker's lamp on his desk, so he can stand in the window and not see his own nervous face staring back. "I hope I'm not paying you extra for awkward hours."
"I'm a working-class hero," Erik replies, wryly.
"You drive a VW ID," Charles protests.
Erik is silent a short moment before he says, "It was on sale."
"It came out last year."
"Exactly."
Charles surprises himself by snorting a laugh.
He regards the scattered materials and traces the work crews have left behind on the lawn, and what it means for the house, and how he hopes he won't recognise it when it's finished. Pick it apart piece by piece and replace it, until no one could argue it's the same house anymore. His own ship of Theseus.
Maybe he can start on the garden next week, just him on his own for a bit. There should be a machete somewhere on the grounds, he thinks, gleefully.
It sounds like Erik is up and walking, too, now. Maybe packing up his work day. Loosening his tie, unbuttoning his cuffs.
It's interesting, isn't it, how one can feel loneliness like it's an actual wound?
"Anyway, I'll-" he starts, and fumbles on, "leave you to it."
"What are you working on?"
Charles smiles. "Nothing, really. Just waiting for the day to end so I can go to bed."
"So what are you doing, then?"
"If you must know, I'm looking at the garden from the office. Drinking wine. And I'm wearing a hoodie and flannels, if you're wondering."
Erik hums. "Do you remember that time," he says, over the line.
"Yes," Charles says, and it itches a bit, in a lovely way, with how gravelly Erik's voice is. How low and comforting, despite everything, and how it's a relief not to have to look at his face while they talk. "Yeah, I remember." He chuckles, adds, "I was very drunk that time."
"Sure, you were."
"I was."
Erik snorts.
"I was," he emphasises. "I will - die on this hill."
"Please don't," Erik says mildly.
He hadn't been drunk, but he'd certainly used that as an excuse when they saw each other in school the next day, and again when Erik had asked him if he had been serious about it, before guiding Charles into his lap in the front seat of his truck. Bare legs on old polyester, cigarette smoke on his fingertips, Erik beneath him and around him.
Charles sighs, aims at aloof. "Whatever. It's not a very big hill."
"The phone bill was. Very big. Shaw nearly had my head."
He chuckles. "So stupid. And it was a landline, too. Anyone could have heard us."
"Well," says Erik, and Charles can hear something clinking, the tell-tale sound of a beer twisted open, and tries to picture it so hard that he feels almost faint with it. "You have to work with what you have."
"Yeah," he agrees. "Still."
He closes his eyes. In his mind, Erik is standing in a dark kitchen, a bungalow, perhaps, full of steel details and simple lines, his lips around the bottle of a beer. His white shirt uncuffed and rolled up, the small of his back pressed against a counter. Warm and real and solid.
Longing is like a thirst, Charles thinks; like an ache in the back of your throat.
"Do you remember being 18?" he hears himself ask, and it's probably the wine, but he tries to remember himself. "I felt like it was the first time I was right in time. Like I'd always been misplaced before that. I was always too smart and too cynical. Too uncomfortable in my skin." He can hear Erik breathe on the other end, and his own heart tapping against his ribs. He doesn't know what it means. "People didn't speak to me like I understood them. I guess my mutation enhanced that feeling."
He can still almost taste that feeling. A constant, burning frustration, a tightness in his chest, and to suddenly forget how to breathe without thinking about the way his ribs expanded and contracted. He had always had one arm bound behind his back, and when he had tried to flex it, it just hurt.
And loneliness, too. Knowing people's minds, without them knowing. Distance. Solitude.
"But at 18 - I felt right. And I was so afraid that I'd fall out of tune again as soon as something changed."
"Did you?" Erik asks.
"Yes," he breathes. "But it was a lovely feeling."
He doesn't know how else to say, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I'm so sorry that some days I can't stand it.
"Charles," Erik says, and everything should be in the way he says that name - the answers, the possibilities.
"Yeah," he says, like he agrees with whatever Erik wanted to say with it.
It's a fine way to shut down a conversation, so when Erik suggests he gets some sleep, he promises he will. But when they hang up, he remains standing on that soft carpet, trying to remember what it felt like to be 18, and seeing the stars, and dreaming, dreaming.
He stands on the stone steps one overcast afternoon, the cursed box of memories at his feet, waiting for Cain to speed up the drive in his enormous SUV, twenty minutes late.
"Hello, Cain," he says when his step-brother gets out. "I-"
"Dad wanted some things from inside. I'll go get them, don't need your help. That my stuff?" Cain asks brusquely, nodding at the box.
"Yes, but -" Charles starts, finding himself backing up against the door: it's not like he's going to let Cain just waltz in. "Kurt doesn't have anything left here."
"He does, and I'll get it for him."
"No," Charles says, and nearly swallows his own tongue. He puts his hands out, feeling small, feeling ant-like under Cain's stormy, towering stare. "No, there's nothing."
"Are you slow?" Cain enunciates every word for him. "Move."
"Everything all right?"
Cain barely looks over Charles's shoulder, where Erik has come quietly up behind him. There's no look of recognition in his face.
"If Kurt wants something from my house," Charles says - he hopes - calmly, "then he will have to come get it himself."
Cain's car door flings open on its own, seemingly. He swivels on his heel, a look of hatred blowing ugly across his face between a vague confusion and green-tinted disgust. Then he snorts, looks Charles up and down, like he sees something chanceless, hopeless. "You'll regret that," he informs him.
"I'm sure I will," Charles murmurs when Cain is well beyond hearing. Louder, to Erik, the monolith standing with arms crossed in the doorway, he says, "Sorry about that."
"What did he want?"
"Oh, nothing, probably," he replies, mind going a mile a minute with the same question. Hadn't he looked? Hadn't he been careful, been painstakingly precise, when he searched the house? If even one piece of paper had been left, documenting Kurt's secrets, Charles is positive he'd have found it.
"I may not understand what's going on," Erik says and his eyes are heavy on Charles. "But I remember him."
There's not much to say to that, Charles thinks when Erik waits a second for a response, before he shakes his head and disappears back inside.
As with most things Charles tries his best to convince himself of, it rings false.
Once he throws the cursed box away, however, it's too easy to slip into wilful ignorance. Or perhaps, if he were to be kinder to himself, to put it from his mind in favour of immediate things - in favour of cooking Jamie dinner, and staying over at his place in Salem, and watching Harold, magpies and blackbirds and squirrels, and gifting Emma a pair of Manolo Blahniks that she goes veneratingly silent over, and that make Erik cringe.
But as ever, what's hidden in snow, is revealed at thaw, as Magnus always used to say - and thaw comes with the doorbell, one morning in late August. The crews let themselves in, so he thinks maybe Jamie has decided to come over, but when he sees that it's a priest on the other side, he very much considers closing it again.
"Mr. Xavier?" the elderly man says. He is balding, with white, short cropped hair around the side of his head, a small beer belly just barely straining his black shirt, his chin poking into the white collar. A black hat is in his hands, as if he just stepped out of a movie.
"Yes?" Charles says, warily.
"My name is father Thomas. I knew your mother quite well. May I come in?"
Charles wonders what a sight he must be. Half in his flannel, half out of it, and only a thin t-shirt beneath that he's pretty sure is see-through in bright light. Thank god that corduroy pants don't wrinkle. He hurriedly steps aside. "Of course, I'm sorry. Would you like some tea?"
They retreat to the kitchen, father Thomas wondering if he should take his shoes off, and Charles realises that he removed his shoes at his desk upstairs. He waves him off, embarrassed about his thick socks, and tries his best to lock down his emotions.
He's mildly successful.
Father Thomas has a folder of papers, and it's something about Sharon's extensive charity commitment, or something similar, and Charles can't focus.
It must show.
"I can come back...?" The priest is saying, and Charles needs to get a grip.
It's not the old man's fault, Charles thinks of the priest, when his mind is calmer. When he turns around, he has plastered an apologetic, self-conscious smile on his face.
"Forgive me, it's - still a bit raw," he lies through his teeth. "Do you take milk?"
"Thank you, yes. Of course," father Thomas says, his head a little tilted to the side. "I'm sorry to spring this on you at this moment."
"No, no, it's quite all right."
"It's just that," the priest says gently, "Your mother was our main benefactor. I wanted to make sure you knew where the money went, and see if you wished to close the account, so to speak."
"Ah," he says. "And who did you say the fund was for?"
The priest's eyes crinkle when he smiles, long lines running almost to his hairline. "The care of mutant children. Those without a supportive or stable home situation."
It's as if the world grinds to a halt in a stutter, in a breath and a half.
Charles forces himself to take a deep breath. And another. Thoughts can be like butterflies, chaotically fluttering, or they can be like soap bubbles in a still room. Silently, softly floating, he thinks, and visualises them behind a locked door. It's see-through, but it's the best he can do.
"She told me she had mutant children." The priest continues on, oblivious to the fact that everything is shaking, or maybe it's just Charles - "and that she wanted to see some change before she passed."
"Change?" Charles echoes weakly.
"Well, we're only a small foundation, but we've been able to accommodate four children so far." Father Thomas says this proudly. He's rummaging in his folder - and, of course there are photos. Four, smiling, toothless grins and bony elbows and they have goggles and tails -
"You take them in?" he asks breathlessly.
"We give them a home," says father Thomas.
"And-?"
"And provide them with a safe space to explore their uniqueness."
"Jesus Ch - sorry - oh, gosh."
He smiles at Charles and puts the photos neatly back in the folder. "We are very proud of our work."
"Yes," Charles mumbles. His day had certainly taken a - turn, certainly a turn. "And my mother knew what you were doing?"
Father Thomas frowns lightly at him, bemused, not offended. "Certainly. She was quite vocal about the mistreatment of mutant children."
It's Charles's turn to frown, and father Thomas hums a little, and amends, "Well, in certain circles, she was. I do not judge, Mr. Xavier. I only pray, and prepare to receive."
"Of course," he mumbles.
It's only after father Thomas has left, the folder of discarded children like a present in Charles's hands, after he's promised to have his accountant talk to Charles's accountant - who is Charles himself, but he didn't want to say - because he's not about to send money to a Christian foundation - at least, not without thoroughly examining it first - it's after that that his anger really starts to vibrate in his bones.
Was this Sharon's version of penance? Was this - quite literally - asking for heavenly forgiveness? Charles was still alive. Raven had been just the next city over. If Sharon had found her own deeds unbearable, why didn't she just say?
He had tried to reconnect with his mother when Kurt moved out. Thinking, he supposed, that she had seen him for what he was and thrown him out, and that it was actually only a matter of time before she would reach out herself to Charles. He thought he'd forgive her, then, in exchange for an apology - nothing grand, just an acknowledgement.
She'd refused. I'm not responsible for your life, Charles, she'd said. We can't blame other people for how our lives turn out.
He spends the rest of the morning and a fair bit of the afternoon in that state. He paces the rooms he meant to make inventory of and does nothing - picks up a broken lamp that he nearly drops and stubs his toes on the gilded claws and feet of immovable furniture. He gives up when he actually manages to draw blood from his naked ankle on an Arabesque, octagonal pewter table hiding under a dust sheet, and goes back to his own room in a quiet roar of emotion. He keeps a first aid kit in his still-unpacked duffel, complete with trauma pads and gauze, burn-aid and antiseptic wipes, because god knows where to find anything like that in this house.
That's where Erik finds him: cleaning up the surprisingly large amount of blood from such a shallow wound. They lock eyes and Charles's heart gives a pathetic extra beat, despite everything. He feels quite done with this day.
Erik glances at the ankle, the blood, the gauze, and says, "Charles, why are you angry?"
Frowning, he throws his cleaning wipe away and mutters, "I'm not."
"Really?" Erik asks, mildly. "My team have been at each other's throats since eleven this morning."
Charles shrugs. "So?"
"You're..." Erik gestures vaguely, "leaking, I suspect."
Oh.
And there's another telepath in the house.
Charles takes a breath and focuses. He is projecting: the holes in his veils are a poorly thatched roof, and the world is swimming in his torrents. Soap bubbles. He's over thirty - he should be able to do better than soap bubbles. Determined, he closes everything - envelopes it all inside a glass bowl, makes the glass bowl opaque, puts it inside a cabinet, locks it, like he tried that morning. That done, he feels strange. Almost like... Like he wants to cry for a bit.
And isn't that surprising. What does it say about him, that underneath his anger, there is a sadness?
"I can feel it," Erik says. "But I can tell that it's not my own."
That, or Emma told you, Charles thinks. He takes another deep breath. Ankle patched, anger locked away, he stands up and immediately wants to slump back down. "Sorry," he says, instead, going for humble. "I didn't notice."
Erik shrugs. "Sure. I wouldn't cuss someone out over their mutation acting up." He smiles crookedly, smug almost, terrible telepath, then leans against the door jamb. His biceps when he crosses his arms over his chest make Charles feel things he'd rather not. Not today, please. Not after... Whatever that conversation was.
"I know it's none of my business, but do you want to talk about it?"
Sighing, Charles waves it off. "It's just my mother. It's fine."
"Doesn't look like it. But I'll take your word, I guess," Erik responds, unconvincingly, and doesn't leave.
Charles sneers at him. It's childish, but then apparently, so is Erik. "Why wouldn't I be fine?" he challenges. Erik, quite wisely, doesn't answer, so Charles turns away and says, quietly, "It's not like I care that she helped mutant children in all her abundant spare time, like some sort of mutie-loving Mother Theresa."
Erik probably frowns at the slur, but Charles doesn't look. Apparently, no glass and cabinet can quite hold this anger back. "No, I really am fine. She gave all her money and time to a church full of strangers' kids, but. Why would I care?"
"Apart from the church bit, that sounds like a good thing," Erik observes, and he's so obviously not on Charles's side that Charles whirls on him.
"I was her son!"
In all fairness, he hadn't intended to yell quite so loudly. Even Erik looks surprised. Shocked, if his wide eyes are any sign, his arms coming down, his slouch gone.
"She was supposed to love me," Charles says, before he can stop himself, but at a much lower volume.
Erik's powers gently tug a bottle of whiskey out of Charles's hand by its metal cap. Charles stares at it. When did he pick that up?
"It sounds like she did," Erik says carefully.
"Impossible," Charles scoffs. "Never mind. I'll go sulk somewhere else so you can work."
Erik calls after him, a tone of resignation in his voice, but he doesn't turn back.
He doesn't return to the house until dark, opting to drive aimlessly around, hands drumming on the steering wheel in mute anger, but when he does, the house is a black hole, silent. Dead. Everyone has left for the weekend, and the long line of elder trees throw shade after shade onto the unlit road. The thought of going up the stairs, unlocking the door, and listening to the dead silence weighs like lead over his chest.
But in the nearly finished kitchen is a cold cup of tea. A post-it note under the mug, a bit soggy: She doesn't deserve anything from you.
Charles frowns. He doesn't know what that's supposed to mean. She is dead, after all.
He heats it up in the newly installed microwave and drags himself to the bedroom and the small tv inside. He sits on the bed, feeling lost, sipping tea and watching a program about the melting polar ice caps. It doesn't help.
Raven picks up on the second ring when he finally makes himself call her.
"Are you okay?" is the first thing she asks, and he can't really answer that without lying. "Honestly?" is the second.
He knows he doesn't deserve comfort, and that all things could probably be traced back to his own idiocy and his own unforgivable sins. But, he's so tired of feeling lonely, and of shouldering the blame, and of holding on to everything. And there's confusion, too.
So he says, pathetically, "No. Not really."
Raven arrives, and with her, Autumn. In one moment, he feels like the loneliest creature in the warm evenings, and in the other, he is part of a whole again in the frost-covered windows and crinkly green grasses, tinged silver. She brings the smell of cocoa butter, and of coffee instead of tea in the morning, and they go shopping for woollen blankets in differing shades of grey and emerald. She's blue and robe-wrapped, cold feet on his thigh, or white with blonde hair flying, purse in the crook of her elbow, and they revel in being together again after a year apart.
"I missed you," he allows himself to tell her, and she mimics barfing over the side of the sofa.
It's a light, slow piano over a slower violin, and it fills him until he has to wrap himself up in one of those blankets and start working again.
All the thoughts of his mother, of sins left to forgive or be forgiven for, well, they can stay still for a while, away from the fading sunlight. Just for a little while.
Notes:
I think I've rewritten this 400 times and I'm still not convinced it's good enough. But I'm lEtTiNg iT gO. This is the WIP Big Bang, and damnit, I'm finishing my shit, one way or another.
Chapter 3: We'll both be lonely
Summary:
Unless Erik asks it of him, Charles will not rake through their lives with an iron rake, looking for the long buried. It's not his call, and it never was. He wouldn't do to Erik what Sharon had done to him.
"You are avoiding it," says Raven, but he's happy, and asks her to let it lie. So she does.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Every day, the crews work and work and work, and it seems like it might never end. In fact, Charles will allow it, if it doesn't, just for a moment to breathe, for a moment when his house is filled with friendly minds always close to laughter, and Raven is there, and they don't have to make any decisions about charities or the Marko’s.
And unless Erik asks it of him, he will not rake through their lives with an iron rake, looking for the long buried. It's not his call, and it never was. He wouldn't do to Erik what Sharon had done to him.
"You are avoiding it," says Raven, but he's happy, and asks her to let it lie. So she does.
She smiles politely through dinner with Jamie, and when he's kissed Charles's cheek before driving home, she's in the kitchen, washing up.
"So?" he asks, refilling his glass and toeing off his shoes.
She nods over her shoulder. "He's nice."
Sighing, he asks, "What?"
"What do you mean, 'what'?"
"I mean, what."
"I'm trying to be nice," she snaps.
"I don't want you nice," he snaps back.
"My god, Charles, what do you want me to say?"
"I don't know, but 'he's nice' sounds like an insult."
He can tell even from behind that she rolls her eyes. "You want me to say he bores me to death?"
He sinks into the chair, groaning a little waveringly.
Raven looks at him and softens. "To be clear, he doesn't. It was an honest question. Is that what you want me to say? Because I can't help but feel like he bores you."
"Oh," he says, then falters. "I don't honestly know."
She folds a dishtowel neatly. Hangs it from the oven rack. Frowns and straightens it. Charles feels like he can see her thoughts even with his mind closed to it.
If Raven's mind was a colour, it'd be a glittery blue. Hues of turquoise with deeper marine, like her skin is now when Jamie has left. A living Caribbean ocean, and sometimes a quiet, secret salt pool, like the ones they went to in Turkey once, before Kurt and Cain. See-through, though, always. Must be nice for Hank, he thinks, never having to guess at what she's thinking. He wonders if that exacerbates her frustration with Charles own brand of forced blankness, that grey tinge he struggled to achieve at 18 and then never managed to purge.
"You don't have to be crazy about him," she says.
Good, he thinks.
"Have you met his siblings yet?"
"He's an only child."
She snorts. "Yeah, I'd figured."
"He's not the best at - reading the room."
"And you're too good at it."
"Hah."
"He likes you, though."
"He does. I like him, too."
"Good."
She doesn't ask when he's going to tell him. She wouldn't: she knows exactly his situation. It's all well and good to talk about mutant pride when you're able to look normal enough, or you're not a threat. When you don't have to sit in front of someone and look them in the eye and tell them, I can know your secrets and I can make you forget who you are.
"It's pretty nice here," she says after a while.
It opens a space in his chest, something big and momentous. "Isn't it?" he whispers.
"Well done," she says and smiles.
She knocks on his open door the next day, clad in baggy trousers and an emerald green sweater. Her hair is tied in a charming knot on top of her head, sunglasses perched on the tip of her nose.
"Hello," he says. "You look lovely."
Her eyes widen in surprise. "Thanks. I'm leaving for lunch with Erik, that okay with you?"
"With Erik? Why?"
She gestures out the door. "Because it's good to build relationships with colleagues? And also, we used to be friends?"
"Oh," Charles says, adding, "So it's not weird?"
"Nope."
"Right. Then you - have my blessing?" he guesses.
She smiles fondly. "Weirdo. I'll see you later."
She leaves, and he fumbles for a second for a joke, or a statement, something funny to say to show that he really doesn't care - but comes up short. "Huh," he says to himself instead, and tries to imagine asking Erik out to lunch. It's difficult, but then, most things are, he thinks, and checks his calendar. November looms.
He goes for a break and ends up in the kitchen, like an ill-fated magnet to the fridge, and clattering about in the bright room feels better than obsessing in his office - no wonder. On a whim, he starts making naan, and rice, and raita, loud enough to drown out his own mind, until someone says, "What's that smell?" and makes him jump about a foot in the air.
"Sorry," Emma says from the doorway. "I felt you shielding - I should've knocked."
A terrible telepath, Erik had told him before.
"It's fine," he says, heart thudding. "It's Indian."
She has black suit pants on, and a cream cashmere sweater, a startling monochrome effect. She nods, impatiently, he thinks. "Yes, obviously, but what?"
He gives her the image of the intended results - offers it up gently without intruding, because he can.
"Pav bhaji?" she says out loud, in surprise. An image in return, then: a young girl, brunette, awkwardly long legs, bread and bhaji in hand, and a street in Bombay. He feels the heat of the sun, the sound of heavy traffic, the weight of a backpack.
"You lived there?" he asks.
She nods. "Don't think I've had it since."
"Would you join me?" he asks, a bit out of politeness, but mostly out of curiosity.
They both jump later, when Erik clears his throat in the doorway. It must have looked odd, seeing them seated across from each other in complete silence, so deep in conversation in their heads that neither of them noticed him.
Emma recovers quickly. "Finished? I'll get my things."
Erik hums an affirmative, observing them as if they amuse and confuse him at the same time. He doesn't leave when Emma goes to their shared office, and Charles starts clearing plates. He fills up the sink with lavender-scented suds, and then Erik says, at last, dry and jokingly, "You can make anyone like you, can't you?"
And it’s not Erik's fault that Charles experiences an acute sense of vertigo. He stares into the sink to orient himself, to find his footing, stop falling into his own stomach. It's Cain's jeering, Did he make you think you like him? And he can make anyone like him.
He stares into the water and finds he can't lift his gaze. The little bubbles pop and dance, and his own breath is loud in the immediate quiet. It was joke, he knows: there's no malice in Erik, right now. It's just that it's too close to - everything.
"Charles?” Erik says softly. “I meant no offense."
Where's your head? And you don't have to be alone. God, but it's heart-breaking, all the things that used to be and all the things he fucked up and made sure could never happen.
He forces himself to meet Erik’s wary gaze, and smiles. "'Course not.” It's tight, and stiff, but he manages it. Erik doesn't recall it; it's nothing. Nothing.
It's not the best thing to say to a telepath, but he didn't mean anything by it. So he turns back to the sink and shouts, for Erik's sake, "Hey, Emma, I'll wrap up the leftovers for you."
Erik doesn't protest, but Charles can feel his confusion, grey and - for some reason - scared.
October: the apples fall. The magpies have grown, no longer dishevelled, no longer confused. Heavy rains and then bright skies, air that feels like air again, summer letting go. The sky seems higher, like there's more room to breathe. His back aches and burns from sitting down, nerves lit up with fire down his legs, but he drinks in the evenings, and he sleeps like the dead at night.
"I don't know what - words," he babbles at a confused, unhelpful Jamie.
"Yes, you do," Erik says to him when he tries the same thing downstairs. "Don't think so much."
It's a radical shift from anything they've talked about before. He feels like he lays himself bare, but he doesn't have much choice. His skin is coming off, his panic simmers like watery soup, and Raven just tries to feed him increasingly experimental juices and smoothies.
"What even - why?" he tries asking her, mouth full of ginger, but she just shrugs wildly at him.
The final edit sits quiet on his computer screen the day before the deadline, which was unlikely to happen, he thinks, bewildered, but then, there it is. It probably isn't, though, he tries telling himself. There's probably something left to do, something he can't quite recall, or can't see right, but he shakes his head, and hits send.
The first ten copies arrive two weeks later, and there's still a lot to be done, of course, but -
Raven coos over the book. "I want it signed," she tells him.
"I've signed all the others, haven't I," he mumbles, turning the pages like it's a flip book, and not a thesis. "And I have to defend it before it's official."'
"Yeah, yeah," she dismisses him. "Let's celebrate."
The first thing he realises, as he's able to engage with every part of himself for the first time since probably May, is that his office has started to look a bit like an island in the house.
"It doesn't make any sense to have a bedroom between two classrooms," he says out loud to the blueprints in Emma and Erik's room downstairs.
"I have been trying to tell you," Emma says.
"Well, I haven't been listening," he says, sorry, apologetic, confused with himself. It's a bigger question than just the room, he thinks later, when he's able. It's the question Erik asked him at the start of all this - and then what? Although, distressingly, it's starting to sound more like - now what?
He goes downstairs when the crews have left and stares at the blueprints, the classroom layouts, the careful planning for the future, as if there will be a room that says, in Emma's small, straight handwriting, "Charles's room, and also purpose".
Erik leans on the door behind him.
"What do you think I should do?" Charles asks him.
"What do you want to do?"
He says, honestly, "I don't want to have to make a decision."
Erik doesn't have a reply to that - or, he does, Charles can see it in his mind. Too bad.
"Do you want to know my thoughts?" Erik asks, mildly, instead.
"Please."
"Give it up."
It hurts. It tears. Of course it does. He's always cared about Erik's opinion, that never changed. "Really?"
"Are you honestly cut out for this?" Erik pushes off the door. He goes to his laptop, closes the lid. Looks up. "A school? Children?"
"Why couldn't I be?"
"You may have three PhDs, but none of them are very useful here," Erik says.
"How do you know that?" He doesn't seem to be able to keep the hurt out of his voice.
"Come on, biophysics? Genetics? Charles."
It's imploring.
Charles leaves.
He catches Erik on the steps of the front door, his car keys in hand, dark leather bag under his arm. "Here." He pushes the finished, undefended, book - the last one - into Erik's free hand. "This isn't just a whim for me."
"What is this?" Erik asks quietly when he sees the title.
"My thesis. In special education," Charles replies evenly.
"Mutant education is considered 'special'?" he asks, distracted.
Charles snorts. "Good night, Erik."
He lets Thanksgiving get swallowed up by exhaustion, and doesn't have the energy to feel anything about it. Raven celebrates with Hank's family, Jamie goes - out of state, somewhere - so he's alone in the big house, and he feels like the flaked-off skin has enough time to grow back without people clouding him up.
He eats and sleeps, and when he's completely honest with himself, he thinks it's okay that it only feels kind of nice. People no longer press into him from all sides: like peace, he thinks, when the crew returns after the holidays, but he doesn't miss their pitying looks, or thoughts, their minds soft with family, bonding, tradition, love.
Jamie returns, too, and he thinks maybe.
"How do you tell someone the fact that you can read their mind like other people read the morning paper?" he asks Emma, out loud, when they’re alone and private.
"Darling," she says, shaking her head, "If they treat you any different, they weren't worth it."
Raven says the same thing, most days. But it's easy for her, he doesn't tell her, when they sit with their coffee and their budgets, their careful plans and dreams, the house weighing a little less heavy on their shoulders. She met Hank, probably the only other blue mutant in the world, and if that isn't fairy tale stuff, what is?
"I just want there to be some way to convince him I'd never," he says, finding himself stammering because he once did, "-never look, or change his mind, or influence him."
"There isn't," Raven says, like it's something that's easy to accept.
"You know I would never."
"Well, but, I don't know."
“I wouldn’t-“
"No, I know. But Charles, if we're talking about knowledge - like, 'I know A is true because B', or whatever, I don't know. That you're not reading me. I'm not - I don't have a way of -"
"Falsifying," he says quietly. "I get it."
"I trust you," she says gently. "And you've earned that trust. And if he trusts you, well, that's the only way, right?"
He doesn’t reply. There should be something, he thinks. There should be some thing like the hole in the ground, on the other side of the gardens, where he could put his intentions, his abilities, where Jamie could lock him in and know. That Charles couldn’t, that there was no way. He’d even do it, he thinks. He’d open that door and go inside that thing, shut it behind himself, just to prove it. He’d rather that than a constant maybe hanging over their heads.
"Do you ever doubt me?" he asks Raven when she has finished writing out a sum on their latest projection. The rosemary in the kitchen window is crumbling into brow confetti from the cold creeping in, the dead of winter approaching.
"Isn't it normal to doubt? To wonder?" she asks, putting down her pen and fixing Charles with an open look. His heart sinks.
"But not for long. Never for long," she says. "And every morning I wake up I know I trust you. You can't really ask for more than that. Of anyone. In anything."
He doesn't know why that feels like a betrayal. "So love is something you earn?"
"You'll always have my love," she says. "And not because it's unconditional, it isn't, but because I can't see what you would do to make me stop loving you. And that means that, yeah, you have my love and attention for your love and attention. Is that bad?" she asks, finally, bewildered. As if she’s never considered love any other way, the way he has. Love that eradicates, that cleans you from the inside out until there’s nothing left to doubt.
When he doesn't answer, she says, quietly, "I don't understand why you can't tell him about it."
"That’s literally why I’m talking to you,” he snaps, confused.
"I meant, why you can't tell Erik why you did it," she says. "We just always keep coming back to it."
Charles grimaces at the whiplash of the topic. "It's embarrassing. Let it be."
Raven's voice is a little shrill when she asks, "Would you think that of anyone else?"
"That's not the point," he says, and sighs. "I just don't want him to think I'm looking for pity. Or trying to justify anything. He's the real victim here."
Raven's eyes soften alarmingly, and she says, gentler, "You can both be victims, Charles."
"Please. I'll talk to my therapist about it.
She shrugs - irritated, trying to look unaffected. Failing. "Be like that, then. Just don't -" She sighs. "Just don't let him walk all over you like it's some sort of penance you're paying. Like it's the price for your mistakes. It makes me sad."
He smiles weakly. "I'll try."
Her look tells him she doesn't quite believe him.
"Trust me," Raven says. "What people say and what they feel are seldom the same."
"Trust me," Charles tells her back. "I know."
"You think you know everything, Charles."
He wants to roll his eyes, cannot keep the frustration from his otherwise level tone, "I've never said -"
"You're a telepath, Charles, it doesn't mean you understand."
He doesn't say what he thinks - that, yeah, it actually does, but Raven sees it on his face anyway.
"It's like arguing with a brick wall," she hisses. "It's so dangerous, Charles. I wish you would understand that. You see small things, and you think it's a picture. It's not. It's really fucking not. It's tiny and it's private."
He laughs harshly. "I know my telepathy is a crime, you've already told me. Hell, who hasn't lately."
"Who?" she snaps. "Who has told you that? Because you know as well as anything I'd be the first person to set them straight."
"Everyone," he says, lamely.
"I don't think so." She visibly tries to relax, her hands doing little dances on the table as she does her best to not tighten her fists. "I don't think people are telling you that."
It's an absurd thing to say. "You mean they're thinking it?" he hisses. "You mean I read them without their permission? What a way to make my point for me."
She loses her fight against her fists. "I think you're assuming things. I think," she hisses back, "that you're the one thinking this."
"What?"
She raises her voice - Raven never raises her voice – it startles him: a violent thing. "But that's not the point."
He feels minds in the house sharpening, and red floods her cheeks. "The first thing we think isn't always the true thing we feel," she snarls. "That's what's conditioned of us. Not us."
"I know that," he groans, hushed.
"No, you don't! I decide what I am. Not my thoughts, not you, not fucking Kurt and his - his disgusting son. I know I deserve better," she says. "But I don't always think it."
She's winded when she stops, and her voice when she continues is quieter. "What people say to you matters so much more than what they think."
"Even when they lie?" he asks.
"Everyone wants to be better," she says. "They're trying."
"Not everyone," he says, and sees the moment she gives up.
He feels Emma and Erik just outside in the corridor, and pointedly doesn't look their way as he goes to his office, Raven to her room.
He breaks up with Jamie just before Christmas.
"It shouldn't be this difficult," he says when Jamie asks why.
"How do you know?" Jamie asks, frustration in the lines around his eyes. "How do you know that, Charles?"
Yeah, how do you know? he thinks as he drives home. You don't expect life to be easy, and love never has been, so how?
He goes home just to sit in his study, his little office of mahogany and silk carpets and gilded frames, and feels too aware of his body, his mind, his breathing. It's hell, isn't it? To be yourself, always, and never someone else.
At night he lies in bed, staring at the newly installed garden lights that shine through the window and feels like he's forgetting something; feels like he's not remembering something crucial. He runs through lists in his mind, curled around pillows, weighed down by blankets. Birthdays, death days, deadlines, things he has to fix, buy, plan, pack away, invoices to pay and bills and insurances and there is nothing. Nothing to be done. Nothing that he isn't already doing, nothing that he can fix.
He moves to another room, gets out of the way of the crews, never committing, jumping from place to place with his frayed edges trailing. Emma eyes him from the corners and Erik doesn't bring up the book, their conversation - hell, anything.
It doesn't let up.
Raven goes back to New York. He missed her packing - he missed telling her about Jamie. He expects it wouldn't change her mind.
"I'm sorry, Charles," she says, soft and gentle in the aftermath of their fight. "I have to go."
"I know," he says, and wonders if he does. If it isn’t the other way around, actually. "It'll be alright, I promise."
She doesn't reply. He doesn't insist. He kisses her cheek and watches her Mustang drive away and goes to sit at the table in the kitchen with his notes and his pens and his spreadsheets, like there is something in them that can solve this for him. Erik finds him there when the sun starts to set and Raven's chair remains empty. Charles finds it hard to meet his eyes, again. Look, they seem to say, how you lost one more person.
"What?" he says a length, but when he looks over, Erik is gone. The chair scrapes along the floor harshly when he gets up to follow him, spotting him out the glass doors, on the steps overlooking the sleeping garden. He has a bottle of whiskey in his hand, the air clouding with his breath.
The longer winter drags, the more amber Erik's hair goes.
"This mine?" Charles asks when he's sat down on the frigid stone and Erik offers it to him.
"Yes.”
Charles accepts it. It's just a blended, anyway. After a while, he hangs his head between his knees.
The space behind his eyes burns and aches. He swears, quietly. "I'm not talking about it."
"Whatever," Erik says, neutral and shrugging. "I'm not listening."
"Well, great."
The breeze is chilled with northern air. It sweeps across the back of his neck, pushing at his hair, walking a chill down his shirt. "I'm sorry if I'm 'leaking'", he says, bitterly, but Erik must hear it as an invitation. It is one.
"You're not," Erik assures, steadily.
"Then why this?"
Erik sighs. His shined boots have a worn indent below his big toes, as if they haven't fit quite right, and have been pushed into submission.
"You don't - " Erik starts and stops. Whatever he considers, the original idea seems to win out, because he starts the same again. "You don't show a lot of emotion, Charles. So I notice when you do."
Charles blanches. "That's ridiculous," he says before he can stop himself. As a reason and concept both, he thinks. He doesn't show more or less than anyone else. He just knows more, and that's not even his fault.
"Okay," Erik says to the garden, as if it doesn't matter one way or the other whether Charles believes him.
"I'm an open book," Charles mumbles to his feet.
"Did you have a fight with Raven?"
"No. Not another one, at least."
"Is she mad at you?"
"Disappointed, I think."
"And you?"
"Me, what?" he asks, too harsh, and apologises by handing the bottle back gently. Erik seems unaffected.
"Are you disappointed," he says, like it's obvious. He reads the back of the label before taking a small sip.
"I don't know."
"Do you want me to keep guessing?"
He asks as if he's genuinely curious. Charles snorts. "Yeah, go on, then."
"Something about Jamie."
"Good guess."
"You're sad."
Charles levels him with a tired look.
"Aha," Erik says. "Tired."
Despite himself, Charles snorts a laugh.
"Are you going to make some five-course feast?" Erik asks.
"What?"
"Isn't that what you so when you're-" he pauses meaningfully, "tired?"
"No," Charles says at length. "Not right now."
Erik claps him on the leg, once, an uncharacteristic show of determination, and hands over the whiskey again. "Take this. Go take a bath or something. I'll make you dinner."
"You really don't have to do that."
"I know," he says evenly, easy, disappearing inside.
When Erik raps on the door of the upstairs bathroom, Charles has sunk rather worryingly low into his bath, and it's a momentary thing, but the churning in his head is dulled by the dark and the drink. Downstairs smells like pasta and garlic when he gets up, and Erik has poured Charles a glass of red. He doesn't stay - it's a relief, actually. Charles doesn't think he can stand being seen.
It's gets to be a little too much one evening, in the weeks after new year's; this solo wallowing, this haunting of his own house, and he has to pick out his nice clothes, leave his dusty socks behind, and wear the latest cologne Raven got him. Something expensive and suitably veiled in erotic subtext for a night at the bar, he thinks, wearily studying the bottle.
Emma whistles low at him when they meet in the hallway on the way out, Erik trailing with a smirk. "Good luck," she wishes him.
"I'm going to need it," Charles admits.
There's a bar in Westchester he's only walked past before. He thinks a moment too long about where to sit, ends up on a bar stool, in the end. The room is humming, comfortably relaxed, comfortably buzzed, low in its seat, expectation mixed with anticipation. Hopeful, which is nice, and judgemental, which is less.
He orders Scotch, tries not to fight his own stereotype, or whatever his personality is. Most things adapt, he thinks, and his core seems to be a curiously loose thing these days.
"I have a rule," someone says over his shoulder. "I can't leave this bar without trying to talk to the most interesting person in here."
It's an older gentleman, which is how Charles still thinks about people in their fifties, regrettably. He could be taken for someone in his forties, though; clean shaven, fly-away hair impeccably styled, a three-piece suit that on anyone else would have looked over the top. This man looks elegant.
"Mind if I sit down and see if that's you?" the man asks casually, his voice a low baritone.
It forces a smile from him. "Sure," he says. "Do your worst."
"Thank you," the man says. He slides onto the stool beside Charles, and there's something smooth to his mind. Well-manicured, almost unsettling. "I'm Roman. Roman Fell."
"Charles," he replies, pointedly. Probably useless, trying to stay nameless in this town, but he can at least pretend.
"I see," Roman replies. "What brings you here, Charles?"
"That doesn't leave me much room to be interesting," he points out. "So I won't say."
"How mysterious," Roman says. He's holding a scotch-glass, too, and Charles despairs a moment over their shared clichés. Roman's light brown eyes are warm, but there's something, still, with his intense, strange mind that bleeds through, something cold over that smoothness.
He abruptly doesn't want to be here. He wants to go home. He wants someone else to look at him, and he wants to not wonder what they're thinking. He wants sweatpants and tea, hands he knows, humour he knows what to do with.
"How about this, then," Roman says, shifting his body towards Charles. "What's something people get wrong about you?"
He's tall - taller than Charles, and lean, and any other night, he'd have Charles begging by the end of it. As it is, he struggles to find himself present at all and by all accounts - by his own accounts - this should be easy. People may say all sorts of things about Charles, but never that he's incapable of small talk. He grew up on small talk.
Charles blows out a breath. "Wow."
Roman smiles reassuringly.
Charles doesn't want to be here.
"People think I'm 5'8". I'm actually 5'7". Sorry," he says, sudden enough that Roman frowns. "Sorry, but I should go. If you want interesting, you should talk to him," he says and nods across the bar. "He's climbed Everest."
The cab home feels like a failure, despite everything. The clock in the kitchen ticks, the floors don't creak anymore, new and soft and pliable. He can move through the house quietly, creep from room to room, classrooms now, empty chairs and bookcases, armchairs that Emma chose, whiteboards that have never been used. The comfortable smell of new wood, unused leather.
People get so much wrong, all the time. They would look at this and ask, aren't you proud?
There is little, he thinks, in his life that he's proud of. Inherited wealth isn't on that list.
Emma and Erik's office, the once-dining room, now lunch-room, is quiet and dark. There are no coffee-stains on the tables, no dust collecting. Papers neatly stored in folders and binders stacked on top of each other. Emma has left a cardigan, a cashmere-soft, lonely heap on Erik's chair, and when he picks it up, Erik's computer is under it.
He thumbs open his phone and hovers over the call button before deciding against it. Did you leave your computer? he texts instead, like a coward, when he's hung the cardigan.
Damn, he receives a minute after.
Want me to run it over?
No, I'll come back. Erik sends him, and then quickly, Sorry.
No worries, he writes.
It's a long drive, he knows. When Erik lets himself in through the front door, Charles has had time to change and toast some bread, tidy the crumbs, and order a new toaster that he doesn't actually need. He pads over barefoot to the foyer.
"Hiya," he says.
Erik frowns at his sweatpants and asks - commiserating, Charles thinks, "Did you strike out?"
Charles shrugs. In another universe, he'd feel embarrassed, but it is what it is. "Didn't feel like it, after all."
"You all right?"
It takes him by surprise, how genuine Erik sounds, so he laughs, self-deprecating and generous about it. "I should probably just get a cat," he says.
Erik snorts, "You'd never find it." He pauses in clasping close his bag and peers at Charles. The moment draws out. Charles carefully doesn't feel.
"Drink?" he offers, desperately.
"I have an early meeting in Salem."
It doesn't quite ring true. It comes across slightly tinted: but then, Charles reads minds, he's no polygraph, as Raven often reminds him. Maybe Erik is lying, or maybe he wishes he could stay. Either way, Charles shouldn't pry.
"Sure," he says. "Well. Drive safe."
He follows Erik to the door. There's an ice-cold breeze, northern air and winter, brushing his hair when he steps out. The trees lining the drive are quiet, as if the all the birds have fled, even the ones that stayed the winter. Charles nips a browned flower off the jasmine beside the door.
Erik stops just outside and turns. "Are you sure you're okay?" he asks once more.
"'Course," Charles says, genuinely. "Why?"
Erik shrugs. "I wish I could read minds, sometimes."
Charles snorts. "You already do, Erik."
That makes Erik look back at him, look closer. "So?" he says.
Charles thinks about it. "I feel restless, but I don't want to go anywhere. Make sense?"
Erik nods. "I think so."
He watches Erik get in his car, put his bag on the passenger seat, but it's a little too much like he's trying to prolong something, so he waves, short, and goes back in, making sure the heavy door locks behind him.
He wonders why loneliness feels so shameful. Even home alone by his own choice, he feels inadequate, somehow.
Upstairs, alone, his phone buzzes in the middle of brushing his teeth, half an hour later. He pulls it out of his pocket to see a text from Erik, saying, meeting got cancelled, and he doesn't know what he's supposed to answer.
Drove all that way for nothing, he writes, and Erik's reply is short, just, yeah.
He goes to bed without feeling tired, sleeps in incomplete, brief intervals, and when he wakes, he knows what it is he wanted to do, what he should've said, and that it wasn't restless that he was feeling, but impatient.
Notes:
Welp, I failed the WIP Big Bang. Like, by a lot. I failed it really well. Amazingly, really. Good job, me! Here's chapter 3.
(And yes, I made a Hannibal reference. Or is it a Silence of the Lambs reference? It's a reference.)
Chapter 4: In my hungry fatigue
Summary:
Erik joins him later in Sharon's study and pours himself a scotch without asking. Charles, curled with his book in the large armchair he vaguely remembers his father using, says, "There's ice in the freezer."
"I don't dilute single malt."
Charles smiles. "Good man."
Chapter Text
The renovations draw to a close in a frenzy that Charles is a little distant from – and the thing is, he doesn’t even think it’s his own fault, not this time. But it’s just that Emma's mind is a flurry of thoughts and lists and numbers, and she rarely stops for dinner. Erik disappears for days at a time, but Emma seems to constantly be on the phone with him, wherever he is.
The truth is that their work has grown separate from Charles's, and there is little that overlaps. Charles - and his third doctoral title, that comes as a diploma on heavy paper that he files into a cabinet - attend meetings with the Board of Regents, to prove that his school is safe and real and non-religious. He loses track of the number of petitions, each signed differently and with its own fee, he sends to NYSED and the Office of Counsel, that he posts by mail, that he drives into New York to file. It's bureaucracy at its finest, and he should be unsurprised, given his time in England, but mutant laws in America are strictly enforced. That doesn’t stop them from being ambiguous and cryptic and impossible to keep straight.
It's Raven who secures their first teacher. It's a hallowed moment, he thinks, when she calls him from the R-train, proud and giddy.
"Cecilia Reyes?" he gasps. "We got Professor Cecilia Reyes?"
"I'm telling you!" Raven exclaims from her side. They carefully don't talk about anything else.
For the first time he imagines children in the long corridors of the house, the sounds of so many minds working, and seeing it come alive, the way it was meant to. It feels right, like little else has the past year, year-and-a-half.
Buoyed, he closes his laptop. Emma is still working when he walks past to make dinner for himself. The lights are on when he passes it on his way back, but Emma's car has gone from the driveway. When he pops his head inside the room, Erik is sitting at the table, brow furrowed, intently focused on his laptop.
"There's a blood moon tonight," Charles says, gesturing out the windows, where it hangs just above the trees, heavy and ominous. Erik doesn't look up, but he does grunt out a short acknowledgement. "You work too late," Charles insists.
"I had a late start," Erik replies, hitting enter with a little too much force.
"How about that drink, then?"
"Sorry, no."
Charles sighs. "Would you stay, though? Save you the drive."
Erik shakes his head. "It's no trouble."
"You say that now," Charles snipes. Erik finally looks up at him.
"Excuse me?"
"I remember you saying something like 'this is out of the way of everything'."
"Alright," Erik says slowly. "But that's a good thing."
"I suppose," Charles shrugs. "Honestly, it'd be no trouble to set up a room for you. If anything, I have too many."
Erik's attention is back on the screen as he shakes his head again. Charles sighs. "Well. If you stay any longer, I shall. Up to you."
He's about to exit when Erik calls out, "Do you do that on purpose?"
He pops back in, perplexed. "Purpose? What?"
Erik gestures vaguely at him. "Talk like-", he says, and pauses. "Like that."
"What, like a twat?"
"I didn't say that."
"Ponce?"
"No." Charles gestures his bewilderment.
Erik closes his eyes, but he looks on the verge of a smile. "All right, then. Thank you."
"Dinner in the kitchen, if you're hungry," Charles calls over his shoulder.
Erik joins him later in Sharon's study and pours himself a scotch without asking. Charles, curled with his book in the large armchair he vaguely remembers his father using, says, "There's ice in the freezer."
"I don't dilute single malt."
Charles smiles. "Good man."
Erik sinks into the Chesterfield with a content rumble; his long legs splay wide, the fabric of his grey, wool slacks pulled taught over his thighs.
"So this is how the upper crust spends an evening,” he muses.
"Disappointed?"
"I thought there'd be more cigars."
Charles closes the book in his lap. "I'll make sure the staff are informed."
Erik grins at him. "I imagine this is how you lived in Oxford," he says, but the confrontation is missing.
Charles stands up and pours himself a drink as he answers.
"In Oxford, I lived in student housing with twelve other people."
He sips from his glass and sits again. The scene could have been taken from a period piece, if not for Charles's white and threadbare tube socks pulled up over his grey sweats. "I relied on my scholarship to eat. Didn't have a lot saved on the scotch budget."
"Really?"
"Really. How was Boston?"
Erik holds his glass up to the lamp-light to watch the crystal play. "Not as wet as Oxford, I bet."
"Safe bet. When did you come back?"
"When Shaw died." Erik rolls his eyes, suddenly. "Well, when he had his heart attack, anyway. Gave me a bit of a heads up before the big event, I suppose."
Charles hums, never really sure how to respond to that kind of plain hate. In his own experience, it's a safe and comforting feeling to have. Many seem to think hate is an ugly feeling: violent, and a failure. Sometimes it's slow and soft and soothing, he’s found. Regardless, he fully believes in the right to feel every emotion, not just the positive ones. And often hate doesn't come alone, anyway. Love and hate could never be antonyms - in fact, antonyms are a silly concept.
Self-hate, on the other hand, he thinks, is more a parasite than anything else.
"The heart attack have anything to do with his mutation?" he asks, carefully casual.
"Probably," Erik says quietly. "It put a lot of stress on his body. Fool used it for all the wrong things."
Charles hums at that, because there's nothing much else to say. Sitting in the parlour where his own mother had her fatal stroke, twisting her scotch in his hands, he's supposed to say, what? 'Well-deserved'? 'How poetic'?
"I haven't seen Jamie in a while," Erik says apropos of nothing, a wild segue from one personal thing to another.
"Oh," Charles says. "No. Jamie won't be coming around again."
"I see," Erik says after a few silent seconds. "How'd he take it?"
Charles frowns at him. "Why do you assume I broke it off?" he asks.
"Come on," Erik says. "He was crazy about you."
"He was?" Charles blurts out.
When he looks up, Erik is staring at him.
"Wasn't he?"
He can feel himself gape. He closes his mouth. It would be one of those things he'd be good at telling, one figures. But Jamie's - fondness - for him had been mellow and gentle, vaguely yellow, like a watered-down daffodil. That's not crazy: it's the opposite.
But then, that's mostly what love has been. Dark-red and passionate, white knuckles and deadlines. Raised voices at dinner tables. Ultimata. Is it possible he just wouldn't recognise if it took a different shape? "Doesn't matter," he decides, shaking his head.
"Sure," Erik agrees, uncertainly. "Did you ever tell him about - ?"
"Ah, the infamous trail-off," Charles snorts. "Of course - first date. I said, hey, you should know I can read your mind - no, really, don't think about sex, or, god forbid, marriage, or the way I chew kind of weird." He nods to himself. "It'd be a hit."
To his relief, Erik smiles crookedly. "I'm sorry," he says, unexpectedly.
"Really?" Charles asks. He has too much nervous energy to sit down, so he wanders over to stare out the window instead. The poor pear trees are carefully blooming, too early, their leaves like cautious mouse ears unfolding. He worries about frost, and rot, and thinks Harold should know. They look so weak. "I thought you'd say, 'be proud of your mutation', or some such."
"You should be," Erik agrees. "It still sucks, it sounds like."
Mother's old chesterfield creaks a little as Erik gets up. He comes to stand side by side with Charles, a polite two feet apart.
"Well," Charles says. "Yeah."
"Dating must be hard for you."
Charles swirls his whiskey thoughtlessly. He turns to Erik, full body to face him, an eyebrow cocked in a sardonic question. "Thanks," he says, dry.
"Funny," Erik allows. "Really."
Charles shrugs, says, "Depends on the person, I suppose. With some people I'm able to just -" he waves vaguely, not so much frustrated with the impossibility of explaining without words as he is with the potential buzz between them, the distortion in Erik's mind of everything he says. "With some people I can focus on myself. Others," he adds with another shrug, "well, they think too loud."
Erik looks at him like he's trying to hear what Charles means. "Yeah?" he says, kind of quiet and intent.
"Yeah," Charles says. It feels like an unspoken question, and he decides from one moment to another to extend the same kindness to Erik.
"You don't," he assures. "Not even - you never did."
Erik doesn't say anything, but he relaxes minutely. A little brush of fabric against fabric, Erik's arm against Charles's, and he doesn't know at what point they moved closer. Clearing his throat, he goes back to his chair, and Erik doesn't follow, as usual. He crosses his legs just for the illusion of more space between them.
Erik has his hand in the pocket his slacks, the other wrapped around his tumbler.
For some reason, Charles wishes he had his shoes on. They're forgotten somewhere under his desk, and there's something vulnerable over socks and soft feet.
"I'd guess you don't need to think about thinking," he says. Erik leans against the wall between the windows.
"What does that mean?"
"Not everyone can just be with their thoughts. They question themselves. They always plan what to say next. They live, constantly, in here," he says, and taps his own temple carefully, just with his index finger. Erik doesn't flinch. "I’m good at shielding but, some people, their minds are like a constant buzzing. It can be exhausting. Listening to it, I mean."
Erik cocks his head a little. "But not to me?"
There are layers to his question, but Charles can't for the life of him figure out what Erik is really asking. So he says, simply, "No, not to you."
Erik nods. "You know, I do question myself sometimes."
"Of course you do - I'm not saying you're without introspection."
"Explain, then."
He drums his fingers absently against the arm of his chair, but Erik lets him think for a moment. "I had a - his name was Magnus," he says at length, dragging up old memories from what could very well have been his past life, for all he thought about it now. "He was the president of a centre for osteological research. That’s not important.” He sits up a little more straight, a little less casual. Damn, but some things are hard to talk about. “Magnus was divided, always, between writing research grants, planning fundraisers, hosting open lectures, his students, his graduates, that the only time he could think about his own research, in silence and in peace, was in bed, just before falling asleep. That was how he relaxed. Or not relaxed, as he always had to get up and write something down."
"Sounds exhausting," Erik observes.
"Yes. But he loved it. He was really good at it, too. I just - he was always three steps ahead of the moment, because he had to be."
He remembers it as he speaks. It had been in London, and maybe that's where he got that haunted feeling. He'd been happy, though, right?
Magnus had been single for a long time when they met. At the pub, of all places. Charles had - well, Charles had been single, too, but not alone. There hadn't been time to be alone, not in Oxford, and certainly not in London. And Magnus had smiled very sweetly at him, surprised that Charles was in front of him, surprised that he had asked to sit down, and astonished that he had seemed interested in his research. Charles had gotten his first taste for Magnus's own brand of messy then - his mind had drowned out the rest of the pub, hyper-aware and churning like a machine and a wild thing all at once. I don't know how much I can take of that, he remembers thinking. But he'd taken it all the same. For a while.
"I'd offer him coffee in the morning," he says, smiling a little. "And he'd start to accept before remembering he had a coffee date with the Dean, and he'd think, 'two cups before lunch makes me jittery', and he had a lecture after lunch, and he thought about turning me down on it, but then, it was so nice of me to offer, but he couldn't say that, because we weren't together yet, and the morning after was probably a bad time to have that conversation."
Erik smiles crookedly.
"You get it?" Charles asks.
"I think so," he replies. "Sounds like his head wasn't in the room with you."
Charles nods. "Kind of like that. Right. Or maybe it was, but too much."
"What happened?"
The question takes him off guard, and his smile slips. He downs the last mouth of whiskey and puts the tumbler down on the side table decisively, Erik not even half through his own glass, and Charles had been the one talking his ear off. Eloquently, he shrugs. "If you try to change someone," he says, vaguely, and shrugs again.
"People can change," Erik says, shifting into something almost defensive.
"Yeah, sure," he agrees readily. "They just shouldn't always have to."
Erik doesn't say anything else, so Charles thinks. Maybe just one more glass.
Later, when they are both covering yawns, and Erik looks a little warm and a little fluid in his chair, and they have played a game of careless chess, Charles stands up and remembers to play the host. His white tube socks have wandered off under the chair, and he fishes them out and drapes them over his left arm, a shoeless butler, bowing to Erik. "Allow you to show me to your room."
"What?" Erik says.
"Your room. Fucking - allow me to show you."
He grabs the second blanket off his own bed, and a pillow, knowing, somehow, that Erik won't mind, and leads him to a guestroom, newly furnished and smelling faintly of particle board and sawdust.
In the morning, he puts on extra coffee in the remodelled kitchen and hums a little as he makes breakfast.
"Pancakes?" Erik asks when he arrives.
"They're gluten-free, banana - yes, pancakes."
Erik takes that in stride. "Tell Cook I take my coffee with milk," he drawls.
"Certainly."
"Splendid."
They share a grin, and it's a gift, an extra breath of air.
Falling in love with Erik for the second time in his life is, surprisingly perhaps, just as unremarkable as the first time. He wonders if Erik knows how easy he is to love – that someone like Charles, who can count on one hand the number of times he’s been really, truly, in love, has fallen victim to it twice.
It's not like it pops into being from one day to another, sudden and unwelcome. Like most things, it grows in increments, mostly from the little things. Love is so silly, he finds himself thinking, time and again. There's just nothing grand about it. It's the extra time Erik lingers, and Charles lets him, or the reverse, and the days are so short and time is so fast that an extra moment makes all the difference.
But then, as ever, as always, as before: the thaw comes.
It arrives suddenly, one day, as spring blooms with soft air and damp mornings, and Charles has thought he could live forever in that liminality. It’s quiet, and full. The gardens are different in the light, branches swelling, but not full enough, so that when Erik comes to find him with his mind occupied with - something, student safety, anti-MRA, the specifics go out of his head the moment he realises that they are too close to comfort to the place he doesn’t go, too close to the yawning pit of the past, that lies silent and unchanged, despite his acrobatics. Three PhDs, several countries, the entire rooting-out of the evils of the house: it doesn’t matter in the end. He still hasn’t gone inside the worst of it.
"What's that?"
Charles follows Erik’s gaze to the place where his mind freezes, still, where his heart does its hateful double-tap, where he thinks everything started, where everything can be blamed.
The top of it, of the bunker, as Kurt called it, looks innocent enough. The little rounded, grassy top, like an old ice cellar, except the door is metal, and locked with a heavy bar of rusted iron. It's easy to mistake it for a leftover from some other, earlier, more complex time. But Erik must feel that what is below is nothing like it pretends to be above.
"Oh, that?" he says, dismissively. "A bunker, I think." He tucks his hands into the pockets of his trousers, tries not to shake. It's a common and natural response to fear, he knows. It's inconvenient.
Erik's frown intensifies. "What's it made of?"
Charles shrugs, deliberately obtuse, of course. He turns to walk backwards, meeting Erik's gaze levelly. "Some kind of metal?”
Erik stops in the middle of step to stare at him, incredulity apparent on his face, like he doesn't quite believe how stupid Charles is. The good thing is that he does believe it.
"Oh," Charles says hurriedly. "Did you hear that our NYSED certificate went through?"
Erik finds him later in the laundry room, folding towel after delicately embroidered towel. The monogram - the letters S, F and X intertwined - proudly in velvet red thread, relics from another time, ready to be stored away, soon, and be used by grubby hands, probably far too seldom, not nearly often enough.
"It's vibranium," he states loudly as he comes through the door like a steam engine.
Charles nearly jumps, a startled, "Huh?" slipping out his mouth.
"I went to that ‘bunker’ of yours. It's vibranium. It's odd."
Ah, shit, a small, unsurprised part of Charles brain says. Of course Erik wouldn’t have just let it go. Outwardly, he fixes a smile on his face and folds another towel. The long side, the short side, and then roll it neatly. Keep, donate. Fold and roll. "That sounds expensive. We should sell it. How much do you think it goes for?"
Erik doesn't reply. A few moments pass before he asks, "Do you know what vibranium does to a mutant?"
Charles throws him a look he thinks is confused and appropriately concerned. "Does?"
"Have you ever been inside?"
"The bunker?" Charles repeats, fakes a little purse of his lips, as if he's trying to remember. "Why would I have? It was a cold war, not a hot one," he adds, chuckles a little. Folds another towel. Erik's not buying it.
"Did you know someone was using it?"
"What's with the third degree, Erik? Jesus."
"I found this." The towel unrolls pathetically as Erik tosses a clipboard onto Charles's work surface.
He shoots Erik an annoyed look before he picks it up. A few sheets of paper are clipped onto it at the top, yellowed with age, exactly 15 years actually, the lead faded but legible. They're Kurt's research notes, he knows at once. He'd seen that hateful clipboard, and many like it, so many times that his stomach doesn't really drop at the sight, just roils in unhappy anticipation. He can't read it very well since his head is swimming, but he can curse Kurt, loudly, in his head, for not cleaning up after himself. Kurt's wanting something from inside the house, Cain had said. But, of course, the forms from the bunker are not incriminating. Charles himself isn't mentioned by name - of course not - only by the moniker "X".
How imaginative.
They're early drafts of something else, something longer. Something that would never have been left out there. Something that is in the house, or was, could possibly still be, but shouldn't be. He rips off the papers and leafs through them - shrugs and says, "Kurt's research notes. Just mindless drafts."
Resolutely - calmly, he hopes - he tosses them into the trash can under the table and smiles benignly at Erik. "I'm sure he doesn't need those anymore."
He grabs the pile of folded towels and makes a strategic exit, thinking that must be that. Right? The universe has made him a victim, says Raven, and a scapegoat for many things, and a repentant sinner for many others. Cannot things begin and end, swiftly, silently?
"Charles."
No. They cannot. He turns, patiently.
"Erik?"
"Stop it."
"I don't understand what you mean."
"Why are you lying to me?"
"I don't owe you honesty," he says, and he's surprised enough by it that he slightly gapes at himself. Erik stares at him, mirroring his look.
"I know I hurt you," Charles continues. "But I don't owe you that."
After that, there's really not much more to say. He has drawn a boundary, just like Raven asked him to, and he knows himself well enough to know that he'll take it back if he stays any longer. So he walks away, leaves Erik standing there. The notes are gone from the waste bin the next time he comes to put the laundry on. He doesn't know what that means, but he's quite sure it's not good.
Raven sighs when he calls to tell her what happened. She's quiet for a long time. She doesn't say, I told you this would happen, and she's too nice to actually think it as well. Doesn't stop Charles from thinking it for her, of course, but then, hindsight is so much more reliable than foresight.
"What do you think Erik remembers?" she asks at length. It's not the big question, but it's an important one all the same.
"I don't know," he admits. "I've no idea. Could be everything, could be -" well, not nothing; that's not what he'd tried to do. "I don't know," he says again.
"I think he knows what you did," Raven says. "I think he knows you took something from him. But he can't possibly know exactly why."
Thank god, he thinks selfishly, cold and appalled at the same time.
"I think this - this collaboration," Raven continues, "is turning into something we - I, at least - want to continue with. So I think, maybe, that if he knew, then that would be easier."
She's so careful, so diplomatic, and he resents her for it. This tip-toeing around his feelings. He resents her for putting up with it, when he wants someone to yell at him, to break something. He wants someone to tell him what to do - order him, and take away his choice. Like a child, in the end, he wants to be mothered, he thinks; violet, violet shame.
"Yeah?" he asks instead.
"Yeah," Raven say. "Doesn't he deserve it? Don't you?"
He laughs, strained, because that's not it at all. "I don't deserve to even speak to him, after what I did."
"Jesus Christ, Charles, you were a kid," she says.
"I wasn't, though, I was 18."
"Yes, but, god, you can't tell me you think 18 is anything but too young to - to be in our situation. You forget, I was there, too."
"I don't. I could never forget that."
"Then he won't either," she says, certain. "Trust him."
He goes looking for it. Whatever Kurt left. The detailed reports of his experiments, his failsafes, his scientific discoveries. Charles's life as a seventeen-year-old in a pile of old, brittle paper. The last remaining evidence of his descent into - what? Someone who thought he could excise a person's memories at will? Change their narrative, and then make himself scarce? Use his powers for something resembling good too much to be - what, recognised for what it was? He finds himself sweating at the thought. Who knows, he thinks feverishly, rifling through cabinets he'd carefully filled with everything worth saving, who knows of what he's even capable.
The silence of the house curls around his skin.
There is nothing. There's just the cold, metal room buried at the edge of the apple trees, and that can't be anything but an empty museum of decades-old oxygen and one forgotten clipboard.
He's staring into a tool box in the garage - a tool box in the garage, Christ - when Emma parks outside, her electric Polestar humming as it powers down. She doesn't say anything at first, just comes to stare into the box with him. He has half a mind to tell her to watch out for oil stains, but, there are none. He doubts anyone has ever even used the tools inside. What a waste.
"You look like you've seen a ghost," she says, finally.
"Haven't I?" he murmurs.
"I don't know. Have you?"
She’s giving him an opening, he knows. A moment to tell her whatever it is she already suspects.
"Did you actually want something?" he asks instead.
She doesn't take offense, even though he sounds offensive. Sisters, she thinks, and sticks and stones and sisters. He snorts a laugh.
"Erik told me about the vibranium cellar."
His stomach clenches, but he keeps his face smooth. He drops the - torque spanner? - he's been holding back into the box. "Is that what we’re calling it now?"
"Would you prefer ‘buried trauma chamber’?" she asks sweetly.
He laughs despite himself, even as something inside him coils tight. "That has more of a ring to it, I suppose."
"Mm. Well." She eyes the box, the wrench, Charles, and adjusts the Cartier in the crook of her arm. "If you were thinking of sharing, I’d listen. If you’re not, then I'd remind you that you're not the only telepath in the house. And that the other one is less conservative with her gifts."
"I'm not conservative," he protests.
"Please; you're a walking safe," Emma says.
"Why is everyone saying that?"
"Yeah," she drawls. "Why is everyone saying that?"
He sighs.
"I'd also remind you," Emma says, turning on her heel, "that you're not the only one who has struggled as a mutant. That's what this entire school is about, isn't it? The grand idea?"
She leaves him with that, and the chilly breeze blowing old leaves into the garage, and the smell of rubber and iron.
He thinks, as he closes lid and box and garage door, that Emma always knows where to place herself in a situation. Never too far, never too close. It’s a skill he envies.
Notes:
Back from the near-dead with chapter 4.
(I drafted this fic last year and landed on a comfortable 35 000 words. And now, somehow, in editing, it has reached 40+ k??
That's the power of inflation, people.)
Chapter 5: I heard you asking questions of each
Summary:
"You're a very good cook."
Charles waves him off. "Needs must."
"You need truffles?" Erik asks as he removes the dish.
"Eh," Charles says into his glass.
The gentle smile on Erik lips, and then his strong and solid forearms when he starts folding up his shirt sleeves, makes something in Charles's chest snap so forcefully Erik must notice. He looks up, right at Charles, and there's a tense moment where Charles thinks if he breathes too loud, it'll snap, too. Then Erik shakes his head, snorting, and Charles can relax again.
Maybe, he thinks, toeing off his socks. Maybe.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Emma and Erik both stay for dinner - in some sort of coordinated gesture of support or attack, either one is possible, he thinks - so he makes truffle Tajarin, and he leaves the wine in the fridge, for once. Emma and Erik must have been friends for a long time, he thinks as they transition seamlessly from work to banter. It's like being invited to someone else's home, for an evening, and seeing well-worn groves lovingly carved into their souls. Stability, trust. Something evident, that doesn't decay.
Emma is looking at him with her head tilted.
He smiles at her. She shakes her head in mock despair, thinks, for some fantastical reason, sappy, at him.
He mouths it back at her, confused.
"No powers at the dinner table," Erik drawls.
So, yeah, dinner is warm, golden-lit, almost normal. Almost. He lets himself pretend for a moment that the weight pressing against his ribs is something that can be ignored.
There’s an ease to it, just for a moment, until Erik, casually, between bites of pasta, says, "So, that bunker of yours."
And Charles stills, like an animal, caught, basic instinct telling him to make no noise.
"I think it could be useful."
The words land like a punch. "Useful?" Charles repeats, feeling the acid creeping into his tone, noticing now how it burns into his throat.
"For the school," Erik continues easily, twirling his fork through his noodles. "A saferoom, perhaps. Extra storage. Training space."
Emma glances between them, perfectly still. Evaluating.
"You’d have to see what’s inside first, though," Erik adds, looking at Charles in a way that isn’t quite pointed, but isn’t casual either. "Wouldn’t you?"
His mouth is dry. He reaches for water and wishes it was wine. "Perhaps," he allows, and hates the way his voice doesn’t come out as smooth as he wants. Something eating into the core of him. "But it’s old. Likely full of nothing but dust and rust."
"Maybe," Erik agrees, too easy, watching him. "But it’s vibranium, Charles. It doesn’t rust."
He swallows. "No," he says, and picks up his fork again. "I suppose it doesn’t."
What an analogy, he thinks, caustic.
Emma's gaze is a weight on him. Erik doesn’t press further.
He should have bulldozed that cursed place the moment he came to Westchester.
The strangest thing, he thinks, in total dissonance to the pain crawling around inside him, in his throat, his stomach, his forehead, in colours like a prism: is that he is going to miss this. The way Erik, after a pause, exhales like he didn’t mean to push quite so hard. The way his posture eases. The way Emma, with a glance, shifts the conversation onto safer ground. The way the tension in the room thins but doesn’t vanish - never vanishes, it's built into the brickwork of the house - but becomes something manageable, something that feels, almost, okay. He’s going to miss this very badly indeed, he realises, because it's like having friends.
"You’re awfully quiet, Charles," Erik notes, reaching for the bread, almost an apology, but a sideways one. "Not that I mind the peace."
"He’s thinking," Emma says, spinning her pasta. "Always thinking."
"Dangerous habit."
"He might tell us what it's about."
"Or he might just be planning the next three-course meal."
"Or another thesis," Emma says.
"He thinks the world needs another?"
"If only there was a PhD in school administration."
"Or the matching of tube socks with sweatpants."
"Well, now, that's just silly, Erik."
Charles huffs a laugh.
"Fair," Erik concedes, smirking. Proud, in vaguely pink undertones. Happy to have made them laugh. To have relieved the tension. To have apologised, but not in so many words.
Oh, yeah. This is going to break him when it ends, he thinks when Emma looks at her delicate wristwatch of white gold and sighs.
She says, "I'd better be off. Can you-?" and looks at Erik.
"Yeah, I'm on it," Erik says, and he starts gathering plates.
"Oh, that's not necessary - " Charles hurries to say, but Emma speaks over him.
"Good night, boys, I'll see you on Monday."
She's gone before Charles has a chance to get out of his chair.
"Wine?" Erik asks.
"I - yeah, in the fridge."
It's an excellent Chenin Blanc, and Erik pours them both generous glasses. In preparation for the second third-degree, he thinks. Or maybe still apologising.
"You don't have to," Charles tells him, but he sinks lower in his chair and slips off his shoes, and doesn't try to get up.
Erik shrugs off his suit jacket and the play of muscles under his shirt hits Charles like a punch in the gut. Shoulder blades tenting the fabric, strong shoulders with collarbones that work and were never broken. A back that never snapped.
"You're a very good cook."
Charles waves him off. "Needs must."
"You need truffles?" Erik asks as he removes the dish.
"Eh," Charles says into his glass.
The gentle smile on Erik lips, and then his strong and solid forearms when he starts folding up his shirt sleeves, makes something in Charles's chest snap so forcefully Erik must notice. He looks up, right at Charles, and there's a tense moment where Charles thinks if he breathes too loud, it'll snap, too. Then Erik shakes his head, snorting, and Charles can relax again.
Maybe, he thinks, toeing off his socks. Maybe.
"What are your weekend plans?" he asks casually.
They've both finished their wine by the time conversation runs out again. Charles gets up, finally, to help, head swimming pleasantly, the sharp edges of his mind gone soft. He's idly talking, running a dishrag over the counter, when Erik comes up behind him.
"I know what you're doing," Erik tells him.
Charles's breath catches a little on the way out at his tone. "What am I doing?" he asks, innocently tilting his tone up, scrubbing at stains that aren't there.
"With your ridiculous hair and -"
Charles gasps a little laugh, taken by surprise, and leans back, only for Erik to follow him inside his space and crowd him against the kitchen counter.
"- naked fucking feet," Erik finishes.
"So sorry," Charles lies. "Is my hair really ridiculous?"
"All of you is. Did you send me that on purpose, before?"
"No," he has to admit. "I - it just happened."
Erik seems to like that, somehow. As if Charles letting go of his powers, those freakish, intrusive abilities, is somehow turning him on - as if the world started spinning the other way, somewhere between 1997 and now, or a few weeks ago, a year.
He presses the entire length of his body against Charles, the hard, warm planes of him, and Charles can feel himself going warm, almost uncomfortably, like he's running a sudden fever. When he tries to move, Erik presses into him harder, and it's gentle and steady, but Charles finds it hard to breathe. Erik places his hands on top of Charles's on the counter, his thumbs over Charles's thumbs, pushing them down.
"You're right that you don't owe me anything," Erik murmurs, his voice low and smooth and contained. "But I'm not going to pretend I don't want to know."
He feels sick. Is this what longing feels like when it's fulfilled?
"Is this what you want?" Erik asks, louder now, as if what he said before was a secret, or an aside, something they can deal with later.
"God, yes," he gasps, and Erik's breath hitches in Charles's ear. As if he wasn't prepared for enthusiasm. Charles can't lie about this, though, can't even play it cool, and he doesn't want to.
Erik runs his hands slowly up his arms, still that gentle pressure, and Charles realises that he can relax, because Erik's in charge.
His sweatpants are old and worn. The elastic gives away easily when Erik slides his hands down his sides.
"I've wanted to do this since you had me stay over," Erik confesses, the words spoken into his ear. "I'm surprised you didn't sense it."
"I didn't," he says. "I don't look."
"I wanted to put your ankle in my mouth," Erik murmurs, and Charles snorts. "It's very beautiful."
"You're so weird," he says.
"I saw you with him once. Jamie."
"Yeah?" he whispers.
"He had you pushed up against the wall. Your head was thrown back. You looked like bliss."
"You should try it," he murmurs.
Erik doesn't. He turns Charles around, and then hoists him up on the counter with all-together too-little effort.
Just before Erik kisses him, Charles can hear himself say, "Yes". This close, Erik smells like clean linen, like citrus, and the wine they've shared. He wants to smell Erik's sweat, he realises, his darker scents, and cradles Erik's jaw in his hands as cold snaps of electric attraction makes him shudder. Erik kisses like he's starving, not even close to gentle, but Charles can still see him smiling when they part. Charles had been afraid, he realises, in some far corner of his own mind, that if this ever happened again, he’d forget what to do, that he wouldn’t know what he ought to do.
"Yes?" Erik asks, satisfyingly low and hoarse.
It had been a useless worry, no doubt. He knows what he wants to do, and that suffices. More than enough. But he still has to say, to bring it out of secrecy: "We should probably talk about some things."
Erik nods, but uses one of his hands on Charles's back to bring them even closer. "We will," he says before they're kissing again.
It's a peculiar thing, to kiss someone you know you've kissed before, Charles has to think. They've done this before, he knows this, but kissing Erik, his Erik, this Erik, is entirely new. Not even new - it doesn't remind him of anything.
"We should move this upstairs," Erik murmurs.
"You're not that patient," Charles replies, tugging Erik's belt out of its buckle, the metal softly clinking, drowned out by Erik's harsh, surprised inhale.
"True," Erik concedes. It makes Charles shiver to hear Erik sound breathless.
"You want this fast," he continues, letting his lips travel from Erik's lips to his jaw, to his neck, down to the skin just above his shirt collar, where the scent of Erik's cologne is strongest. He slips the button on Erik's trousers, tugs gentle but hard on the zipper. "You're done waiting."
"It's like you're in my head."
Charles stills. Can't quite raise his head to meet Erik's gaze, keeps his eyes lowered when Erik forces a big hand into the space between his chin and chest, pushing him up with his thumb digging into the sensitive area of his jaw.
"You know me," Erik says. His other hand comes down decisively between Charles's spread legs, caressing with calm assurance, forcing a hiss from Charles's lips. "You've always known me."
He dares look into Erik's eyes even as he thinks he's wrong; steely grey and blue, washed-out in the sun, worn-out denim, the smell of grass and sweat and scorching car hoods, heartbreak in thin air, stupid mistakes so often remembered they taste nearly like nothing.
"Shut up," he tells Erik, finding his hands again, quickly pushing his loosened trousers and pants down far enough that he can feel Erik's skin. "Shut up, or I'll stop."
"You won't," Erik says, hand tightening on Charles. He slips easily inside the worn elastic of his sweats.
"Oh, fuck," Charles hisses into Erik's mouth. "Fuck."
"Yes," Erik murmurs. "I'm done waiting."
"That's - that's great." Charles groans. "Come on, then."
They do move upstairs, after. Erik makes a point to find the exact spot on the wall where Jamie had sucked so hard on Charles's neck the mark had only faded after a week and half, and he sinks to his knees instead in front of Charles.
It means something, probably, Charles thinks.
Erik undresses him slow, like it matters. Like it's the last time, or the first one that counts. Or maybe Charles is still struggling to get out of his own head. Erik's mouth traces the edge of Charles’s collarbone, tongue catching in the hollow from the long-ago break.
"I have an apology for you," Erik murmurs. "Do you want to hear it?"
Charles lets out a shaky laugh and turns away. "I'm fine."
The bedroom is cool and blue. He felt it during the day - that soft, heavy air settling in, the scents of dead things thawing. But the nights are still open and high, like autumn air, even though it's Spring. The oppression barely recognisable for a while yet. He sits on the bed, watches Erik unbutton his shirt, his pants, shaking his head at Charles. Sinks into the pillows to let his gaze roam over the long planes of Erik, strong and lean and beautiful.
"You have this habit," Erik tells him, "of answering a question utterly irrelevant to the one I ask."
"Excuse me?" he says.
"I asked if you wanted it, not if you needed it."
Momentarily speechless, he only blinks. "I don't do that," is what he says.
"Do you think you know better than me what I am actually asking?"
Erik folds their clothes with more care than Charles thinks is reasonable. Like his worn-down, half-polyester sweats and Erik's cotton belong in the same pile.
"No."
"Do you intend to skip the conversation to a point in the future, where I would ask about your needs?"
"No," he repeats. "Not everything I do is a result of my mutation."
"I know that," Erik replies evenly. He tugs the comforter out from underneath Charles. "I'm trying to explain my frustration. And that I read your book," Erik says, bracketing him. "And that I've changed my mind. And also, I'm sorry."
"Yeah?" Charles asks, throaty and vulnerable.
"Stay."
"You think I should?"
"Stay," Erik says again, covering Charles's body with his own.
He doesn't sleep. Of course he doesn't. Erik's heavy breaths puff the side of his face and he wishes, longs, to curl into him, but he can't.
Hadn't he just wished for someone to call him on his bullshit? And the moment someone does, he obfuscates, he admits defeat without surrendering, or changing.
He wants to wake Erik up and say I can't do this, it shouldn't be this hard, it's impossible. But what he really means is I can't do this without baring all, and that's -
He breathes in, slowly. Out.
He slips gently from the bed. Finds a pair of sweats on floor and pulls them on and thinks of pushing sleep into Erik's mind like cotton, so that when he slips out the heavy wooden door, it'll go unnoticed. He doesn't. Part of him wants Erik to wake up and stop him. The other part is terrified of himself.
He pads out of the bedroom with a jumper in his hand.
The bunker lies still and dead at the end of the garden path. The grass is freezing under his naked feet, but there's no sign of frost.
Erik has left the iron bar hanging from the door frame. It's unlocked, as if Erik knew. Expected.
Raven would stop him. Probably. It doesn't have to be at night, she'd protest, it doesn't have to be alone. She'd be right. But it's been a year, almost more, since he came back, and he's always been good at pushing things in front of himself. Decisions and confrontations.
He knew Carl was fucking his TA behind his back. He knew Magnus was waiting for him. Hell, he knew Jamie was in love with him, of course he did, and he still didn't stop it. He knew what was growing inside Erik, too, and he let it happen.
It hasn't been a year, he thinks and yanks on the heavy door. It's been fifteen, sixteen, since he first started avoiding accountability.
He props the door up with a heavy rock. Tugs on it several times to make sure it won't shut behind him.
The little sickly yellow light still whirs loudly when you turn it on.
There's Kurt's desk. An old thing with hollow metal legs that looks straight out of WWII. A swivel chair. Left-over clipboard, this one empty. An alarm clock, long dead, stuck on five-to-twelve for more than a decade. And another door, this one looking brand new. Not a scratch on it from where he forced Cain to run head first into it. Not a mark from where Cain had grabbed Charles and bashed his head against it in retaliation.
He'd missed two weeks of high school while the bruises healed. The concussion had made him sleepy and slow.
The door swings open on perfectly aligned hinges when he pulls on it. Did Erik come this far, he wonders. Did he see the brownish mattress pushed into the corner, foam and old flower patterns, and wonder, did someone sleep in here? Why, when there's no handle on this side of the door? Nothing but smooth, cold metal.
He closes his eyes. Let the feelings come, a therapist had told him once, one of very few things that stuck. Let them wash over your entire body and then open your eyes and see that you're still here. You're whole. At least as whole as you used to be.
You're not the one hurting yourself. You're not to blame. Not for this. So many things, over so many years, but this is not on you.
He sits down on the sad little mattress and looks at the light beyond the door.
Erik wakes up when he crawls back into bed.
"You're cold," he murmurs, and Charles presses his body against him, and Erik tugs him closer, lets him near.
"Sorry," Charles whispers. He presses his nose to the skin under Erik's ear and murmurs, "What is this scent? Like mandarin."
"My shaving cream," Erik tells him, grunting in pleasure.
"I love it."
Erik sleeps late, to Charles's amusement. Like a rock, he just doesn't move, while Charles is up and pushing restless papers around, making coffee, popping back up to look at Erik, and down again to make breakfast.
He puts a tray on the expensive sheets, most of them twisted around Erik, around his legs. He stole most of the pillows during the night, are holding on to them with his thick arms, like they might escape otherwise. He has dimples just over the curve of his ass. Stubble, a perfect moustache growing in.
Charles practices his words in his head. Goes to wake him, changes his mind. Goes to his office to retrieve that one folder, curses at himself, and nearly jumps when he comes back to find Erik awake and looking at him.
"Good morning," Erik rasps. "Why are you dressed?"
"It's pretty late."
Erik blinks at him. "So?"
Charles sits carefully on the bed, managing to spill coffee anyway, and presents Erik with both folder and now-half-filled cup. "I know who my first students are going to be."
"Orphans," Erik says, when he's skimmed the first few pages, propped on one arm in bed. The dimples just above his ass are too distracting, considering the subject matter. Erik raises an eyebrow at him when he pulls the covers a little higher up.
"Not all," he says. "The brothers were abandoned."
"Hell," Erik sighs, sips his coffee.
"Yeah."
"You realise you'll have to hire a child psychologist."
"I do. My degree didn't quite cover that."
"A church full of strangers' kids," Erik murmurs, as if to himself.
"Sorry?"
"Nothing. This is your mother's foundation."
"Oh." He feels the tips of his ear go warm, as if reddening, and he fights the violent urge to physically cringe. "Sorry about... about that."
Erik only shrugs, drinks his coffee like it's no big deal.
"I don't really understand it," he finds himself saying. "She never - she seemed to find us freakish. She could hardly stand to look at us. She didn't like me to be in the room with just her. Not that I'd ever look," he laughs. "I'm not that kind of masochist."
Erik doesn't laugh. He regards him with an uneasy pity, it seems to Charles. An uncomfortable sadness.
"It's fine," he assures Erik.
Erik opens his mouth twice to say something, but doesn't.
"Anyway, she got Cain, in the end," Charles continues, like a train wreck dodging bullets. "A consolation price."
That, at last, has Erik snorting a laugh. Then he looks at the pictures for what feels like a long time before he says, softly, "You had a plan all along."
"Not really," Charles replies.
Erik doesn't seem in a hurry to - anything. Leave. Get up. Get inside Charles, or finish, or clean them up. It's a strange reality, like time has slowed down, even as the sun moves across the wall and they have to eat. Fleshing out what a headmaster is, could be, between bites, and Charles tries several times to ask and what about you, what about Emma, could you ever consider maybe -
But it's too hard, and too soon, even though he's sure that somewhere outside, time is running out. Time is banging on a metal door, demanding to be noticed, to be let out, or in.
"Let's go back upstairs," he says instead, demands something for himself, he thinks, for once, and Erik doesn't laugh at him. He goes, unhurried, just like he lies back and makes Charles do all the work, keeps watching him through unblinking eyes, even when Charles has to bury his face in the perfect angle of his neck when he pushes inside Erik, feeling somehow thankful that there's something between them, some sort of barrier, shields and averted eyes and latex.
Sleepy, when the day fades, the night's terrors making themselves known. Erik's touch hypnotic, his body soft despite its bones and muscles and the many teeth of the past. Not quite held, but enveloped nonetheless.
“You’re wrong,” Charles murmurs, “about what you said before.”
Erik shifts just enough to glance at him. “Which part?”
“That I had a plan.”
Erik smiles faintly. "No?"
Charles's throat is too tense to laugh. “Not this time. This - this wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“But it did.”
“Yes,” he whispers. “It did.”
Erik's fingers keep tracing patterns across his skin, his bare shoulders, his back, raising every hair on his body. The faint cries of the magpies outside, angry, the harsh air in his lungs. Erik breathing loud.
“Are you cold?” Erik asks softly.
Charles shakes his head, “No," but pulls away, pulls his shirt back on anyway.
Erik sits up slightly, the mattress dipping. "What is it?"
“I’m fine.”
“Did I do something?” Erik says, and there’s no judgment in it. He doesn't know, never knows, why he always expects there to be.
“No - no, I just.” He swallows, hard, but the tightness in his throat doesn’t ease. His fingers twitch against the sheets, restless. “I don’t know.”
He tries to sit up and feels lightheaded, like the floor has tilted under the bed. He sucks in a breath. The air smells wrong.
“You should know,” Charles murmurs, trying to focus, to speak through the buzzing in his skull, “You're safe, with me. I don’t look.”
Erik’s hand settles lightly on his shoulder. “Yeah, no shit," he says, incredulous in pastel yellow.
“What?”
“Do you think it would’ve taken us this long if you did?”
Charles laughs, harsh. “Do you think you’d ever let me this close if I did?” he bites, sudden heat flaring in his chest.
"Yes," Erik says, simply, and then, "Can I ask you something?"
"Sure," he says, only his teeth clatter together.
"Why are you shaking?"
It's like a play button has been pressed - the world coming into focus in high resolution, and he realises what he's felt coming.
"Kurt Marko's in the driveway," he says.
Erik looks up and towards the front of the house. Sensing the extra car, the little bits of metal a person wears every day, no doubt. Charles ignores the extra swaying of the world, the breathless feeling in his own mind, and finds his sweatpants. There should be time enough to calm down on the way down the endless stairs, the quiet corridors, down to the front door, but he's a hurricane when he opens it.
"Charles," Kurt says warmly, hand raised to ring the doorbell.
He looks the same. Drooping jowls, yes, an illusionary softness to his face, but underneath, he is the same.
"Kurt," he says, aware of his own shallow breathing. "What brings you over?"
"I think you know," he replies, a careful smirk on his face. Jowls drooping, hair greying, but his eyes.
"Cain's box? I threw it -"
"No."
"No," Charles says, intending for it to be a question, though it comes out as an agreement.
"Where are they?" Kurt asks, gentile and reasonable.
"I don't know," he answers honestly. His shoulders are at his ears, the same as always. Terror woven into the fabric of his biology, it seems, into the knotting of his bones, the harsh tensing of his muscles.
From behind, Erik's sudden warmth, his powerful mind, his uncertainty. "Charles?" he asks. "Is everything all right?"
Kurt's eyes travel slowly, his height allowing him to look over Charles's shoulder as if he's inconsequential. A minor bump in the road. "Oh, hello," he says to Erik. "Shaw's boy, isn't it?"
Without turning his head, he looks back at Charles, and his mind turns in crowing delight. Like a man who has figured out his opponent's tells. Like a man, Charles thinks, who knows Charles's back twinges in grinding pain, who knows what power looks like, and powerlessness especially.
"Erik," Erik says.
"Erik," Kurt replies, as if it had been on the tip of his tongue. He huffs a little laugh, a short look at Charles blocking his entry, and says, "So nice to meet you," as if in apology of Charles's behaviour.
"I haven't found them," Charles tells him.
"It really would help if you let me into the house, my boy," Kurt interrupts gently.
"I-"
Kurt waits patiently for him to finish. Erik's confusion is growing like a cloud behind him.
Think, he tells himself. One box for Charles, one for Cain, one for Raven, two for the Audis, one for the Chevy, none for Kurt - "She destroyed them," he says, realising it as he speaks, his mouth filling with the sweet and sour smell of the mattress in the corner of the metal room. Rotting flowers, old foam. "She got rid of them."
Kurt's carefully manicured smile twitches. Just a little. "Now that," he says, "would have been beyond stupid."
"They're gone," Charles says. "And she's gone."
It would have been freeing, he thinks, in another life, where Sharon had given any indication that this was true. But Charles has gone over the house so many times, has cleaned out each cupboard, every forgotten corner of every document holder, every little box of sins, and there was nothing left.
She had, in another limp fit of bad conscience, burned every evidence of Kurt's abuse.
It wasn't closure. In a sense, she had taken the only thing Charles had left - every chance to find revenge, or justice, if those two things could be the same.
He wouldn't have, of course. But she didn't know that. She hadn't known anything about him.
"Those papers," Kurt tells him, the sense of reigned-in wrath only adding to the dearth of air around them, Charles chipping for air, Charles's feeble, physical presence, "- were invaluable. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
Kurt nods. He smiles suddenly, as if sometimes he loses - only he never does. "We'll work something out," he says. "It's not too late to recreate the study, I suppose. I noticed the bunker escaped your heavy hand. You are staying in Westchester, yes? Very good."
He sighs, still smiling. Then, as if noticing Erik again, "We might even have the same investor this time. What a coincidence."
Kurt's mind full of pieces, weights, measurements, numbers.
"Investor?" Erik repeats.
"Erik," Charles says, and it comes out too sharp. "Don't."
Manufactured surprise. "Oh, dear," Kurt says. "You have a lot to catch up on. I should let you get back to it. We don't want this school of yours to be founded on half-truths, would we." He pauses. "I look forward to working together again, Charles." A smile that looks genuine, and warm, and that slithers into Charles's spine like a taint.
Kurt leaves behind him the same kind of silence that follows a violent explosion, Charles imagines. If his hands weren't shaking so violently, and if he wasn't fighting his own stomach, maybe the conversation that would inevitably follow could've gone another way. Maybe. Maybe the conversation had been festering for fifteen years, growing in significance in all that time, fermenting.
When Charles turns his head around to look at him, over his shoulder, Erik looks afraid. Fear is such a basic instinct, it's impossible not to recognise on someone else.
"I don't understand," is all Erik says. His Henley is untucked, thrown on, unbuttoned, showing a vulnerable collarbone.
And what is he supposed to say? Fifteen years ago I ruined your life because I had a secret I couldn't share?
A lie.
Fifteen years ago I broke you because I was so fucked up from that man that I couldn't -
Another lie. Closer, but still a lie. There is no because.
The silence is so thick and heavy and Erik's gaze is turning into something so betrayed that Charles starts, croaking, "Kurt was-" but can't for the life of him find the other half of that sentence. "He-" he tries, but nothing appears. "He wanted-" and then, "He-" again.
"Fucking - talk, Charles," Erik snarls. Fear, even back then, made him angry. Well, not angry, not really, he was always just trying to take back control.
And this time Charles is old enough to appreciate what a crime his mind is. How it goes against nature, and against everything that, when consciousness developed between tiny cells, and grew, struggled against the world to be alive and aware, makes an individual. This time, with the answers in his hands, he sees what Sharon saw all along.
"Kurt wants to research -" Charles throws out his arms, encompassing himself, Erik, the house - the school - all of it.
"Research?" Erik echoes. "Well, he's not going to. You told me we're not doing that. That wasn't part of the deal."
We. Charles, for some fantastical reason, feels a laugh bubble up from his upset stomach. "What do you want me to do, Erik? If Sharon destroyed his work, he can sue me for all I have."
Erik is a storm in the edge of his mind. Anger, frustration - a significant amount of disgust. Charles doesn't have to dip into Erik's mind to know who it's for.
"I want you to stand up for yourself," Erik snarls. "You are more powerful than that pathetic baseline by worlds, Charles. What are you doing?"
"Ah." He matches Erik's snarl tone for tone. "So I should just do to him what I did to you? Make him stop?"
And that does make Erik stop. Charles can see him go pale, from one second to another, as he asks, "What?"
"That went splendidly last time," Charles continues even as his body goes cold as ice.
"What are you talking about?"
He thinks that maybe he wouldn't be such a bad person if people hadn't let him get away with all his bullshit. Falling back into Erik might have been a mistake, but falling in love with him for the second time was something else. It was a need that had never gone away, a hurt that had never stopped aching, and doing it before he’d laid his cards on the table was a fantastically stupid thing to do. Maybe, finally, reckoning had found him.
“You know,” he says, not accusingly, but desperate, because if Erik knows, he won’t have to tell him. “Right? You know what I did.”
Erik breathes like a bellows, like a man preparing for battle, and still his mind is stormy with conflict. There’s fear and something metallic, something like guilt -
“Get out of my head,” Erik whispers.
Charles nearly throws himself back into the door frame with the force of his own shielding. “I wasn’t in your head,” he says.
“You were about to be.”
“Why-“ he starts, wanting to ask, why do you think it's your fault? But the door-bell chimes before he can say anything. Erik jumps: Charles almost goes to him to – do something. Calm him down, put his hands on him, what?
He goes for the door instead. He already knows it's Moira, so he opens it wide, scaring her with the suddenness of his appearance, the absolute bizarre situation, two scared adults staring at each other. "Moira," he says, maybe a little out of breath. "Are you okay?"
Her hair is in a wispy pony tail, and it takes him a second to realise what is off about her face - she's not wearing makeup, no colour in her face, and he doesn't think he's ever seen her without it.
"You said anything," Moira says, and then he sees the kids - god, the kids, Rebecca, so small, but holding the younger Kevin around the shoulders as if shielding him, or holding him up. A six-year old comforting a four-year old - his heart shatters violently. God, they’re looking at him with their big eyes - and he meant it - "I we needed anything-"
"Come in," he nearly shouts, "Come in, have you had lunch? Dinner?"
Moira nearly folds on the front step, but he grabs her elbow and steers the entire family inside the foyer. Locks the door, not trying to keep anyone in, but desperate to keep the world out.
"Erik - this is my sister-in-law, Moira, and my niece and nephew, Rebecca and Kevin."
The Marko's and Erik stare bemusedly at each other as Charles takes their coats, but the kids are well brought up - they say hello, mostly to the floor, but then, they have hardly missed the tight lines of their mother's face.
"I’ll just go," Erik says, uncertain, but Charles can't really spare him his attention.
"Have you had dinner?" He asks Moira again, who shakes her head, her hands trembling a little as they try to smooth her wrinkled blouse.
"I'll make something up for you," he assures them, but Moira turns sharply away from him, drawing long, shuddering breaths. It sounds as close to crying as it gets, and, suddenly panicked, he looks to Erik. Erik stares back for one short second, before he nods and says, "Pasta okay?" and leads the way to the kitchen.
The kids follow him uncertainly, only when Moira says, "I'll just be a minute, sweethearts."
Another of his sins coming to find him, at the worst possible time.
"Did Kurt do -?" he asks, but Moira shakes her head violently.
"It's Cain," she says. She straightens the kids' coats, looking everywhere but Charles. "He's unstable. He's become convinced that - " she looks sideways at Charles, then away, takes a deep breath. "He's become convinced that the kids are controlling his mind."
"Recently," she adds, and doesn't have to say any more. Charles is distantly aware that his blood has not actually frozen. It may be only his muscles, seizing from his lower back and out, the temperature dropping in the hallway, and the way he has to stop breathing so he doesn't say anything -
"His football team lost," she says so softly he nearly misses it. "Kevin only wanted to help."
"I had to get them away," Moira is saying, and it takes enormous effort to shake himself, to believe he isn't ice.
"You're - of course. Stay," he says. "Please, stay here. As long as you want. I'm so - I'm - anything you need."
His head keeps telling him round and round we go.
"Charles." Moira stops him. "Kurt saw us. I was driving up - and he was coming from - " she takes a deep breath. "Cain will know where we are."
He nods, even though his throat is made of sandpaper, his legs of thin reeds, and his courage out of nothing more than a sense of duty. "You'll be safe here."
It's late, very late, by the time everyone is full and sleepy and beds have been made and pyjamas pulled on. Charles closes the downstairs guestroom quietly.
Erik is still in the kitchen when he returns, drying a pan mechanically with his eyes far away.
"Will you stay?"
Erik looks at him for a long moment before he shakes his head.
Charles is suddenly too aware of the pounding headache he's developed, and he sags a bit in the doorway, his eyes closing.
He can hear Erik put the pan down and his soft steps coming towards him before cold, gentle fingers touch the thin skin of his temples.
"We should talk," Erik says quietly, rubbing small circles over Charles's pain. "Not tonight."
"Yeah."
They stand like that, some of the relief in that simple touch surely showing on Charles's face. "Thank you. For your help."
Erik doesn't say anything. One of his cold hands slide down the side if his face, tracing the line of his cheekbone, down to his chin. He opens his eyes just as Erik leans down and presses his lips to his.
A small sound, less than a whimper, escapes him.
Maybe he'd been remiss to think that Erik's affection, once won, could be discarded so quickly. Erik is nothing if not loyal and steadfast and, Charles thinks, stubborn. It's a dangerous thing, and Charles has already shown that he can't be trusted with it. But maybe some things can be put right. Maybe some things can be - if not forgiven - overcome. God, he hopes that's true. That life doesn't have to be an endless circle, violence repeated, every new generation cursed with it.
"I'm so sorry," he tells Erik. "I'll explain everything."
"You can't let that man ruin your life," Erik says, surprising Charles with how softly he speaks.
If not mine, then whose? he thinks, the children's scared faces, their big eyes, little, uncomplicated minds. "I won't let him do anything."
In the morning, Moira appears small and thin in the kitchen doorway, wearing good wool in a beige-brown colour that does nothing for her. She's beautiful all the same, enveloped by mellow sadness, a gentle vermillion. "Hey," he says, in want of something else. I'm sorry, probably. "Would you like some coffee?"
She accepts, gratefully, and the silence is nothing short of oppressing, he finds. "The kids will be up in a moment," she says.
"Did they sleep?"
"Yes."
"Did you?"
"Mm-hm."
"Beds okay?"
"Yes."
"Pancakes?" he asks, noting the tone of desperation in his own voice.
"Just," she says, a little too harsh, and changes her mind quickly. "Just watch Kevin with the syrup."
"Roger that."
Rebecca helps him with the batter, standing a commendable distance from the hot pan, while Kevin sits in his mother's lap in a dinosaur onesie with soft, polyester spikes, looking bleary.
"I've got pipe cleaners," Charles tells them after a sticky breakfast. "Do you know how to make soap bubbles?"
Turns out the internet knows. Kevin inhales a lot of dish soap before they get it right. The sun is warm enough to stand in without jackets, which is a good thing when Rebecca upends a bucket of soapy water all over hers.
Erik calls after lunch.
"How did you know about Shaw?" he asks.
Charles genuinely doesn't understand at first. Expecting a rather different conversation, no doubt.
"Know what?"
"You knew he funded private researchers. You told me when you hired us."
It takes Charles a second to realise what Erik has done. His breath stutters, like there's something inside him grasping at his lungs. "You went through Shaw's records," he deduces.
"Of course I did. I keep coming back to how you knew enough to ask about it. I thought maybe you just - you were well informed. That you'd had to be."
"And I know I talked a lot about Shaw," Erik says when Charles doesn't answer. "Back then. But I don't think we talked about this."
"I-," he says, has to clear his throat, tries again, "I just-"
"No," Erik interrupts. "How did you know, Charles?"
Rebecca laughs hard and loud when Kevin chases a bubble and nearly falls over when it pops in his face. Moira has noticed something about him. Her arms are crossed. Hypervigilance, he thinks. He knows it.
"All right," he decides. "Let's do this, Erik. Let's talk."
Erik arrives in his car, and when it comes to a stop, he doesn't get out, doesn't turn it off. Charles, watching from the kitchen, tells Moira he'll be a while, and she only nods. Glad, in some practical way, that he's taking his problems away from her and the kids. She locks the door behind him.
He slides into the passenger seat in silence. They take off, Erik's hands sure on the wheel, his mind tense with apprehension.
The old spot above Westchester - the outlook, they used to call it - is different now. What used to be a gravel lot littered with beer cans and broken glass bottles, cigarettes and condom wrappers, has been paved over. There's a small playground in primary colours, fake grass, bicycle racks, even a small kiosk with its metal grille pulled down and tagged in black paint.
Brown house sparrows balance in last year's brown, tall grass behind the steel guardrail. Moving with the wind, their chatter like pebbles falling against pebbles. Westchester looks dirty and far away.
"You were right about the vibranium," Charles begins, adding, of course, under his breath. "That bunker acts like a failsafe. A cleanse. Armour, I guess."
"Against what?" Erik asks, quietly.
"Against me."
Erik nods slowly, not in assent, in support. "Okay."
"It was how Kurt would know I wasn't - " he grasps at words. "- Influencing him. Manipulating them."
"Why would you do that?"
He looks at Erik. It's not like they're naive, at least not anymore. There doesn't have to be a reason, he'd realised a few years ago - a long time to come to that conclusion - for some people to do bad things. Outside of yourself, there is little you can control. What other's think of you is none of your business, and all that.
That's not why Erik is asking why Kurt Marko treated his family like that. He's not accusing Charles of causing it. He wants to confirm his long-held beliefs.
"I wouldn't," he says anyway. "And when Kurt understood that, he used me to further his own career. Me and Cain, primarily, I should say. He didn't know about Raven, maybe you remember. He wanted to know if a person could be trained to resist it. Resist me."
"How?"
"It started out benign, I guess." He clears his throat. "There were a number of experiments. But we found out quickly that forcing someone to go against their nature was most easily resisted. But not without difficulty."
"What does that mean?"
"Say I forced Cain to hurt me, the command would work well. If I forced Cain to hurt himself, the command would be weaker. It'd be like trying to walk into a wall by yourself. He could start to resist it, fight back, so that the injury would be significantly less serious with training."
He stares at a hangnail on his thumb. The skin around it is already red, raw. He resists the urge to make it bleed and sting, finding control in the knowledge he could, and can resist. Can still choose what pain he gets to feel.
Like the time Cain bit off the tip of his own tongue and laughed through the blood. Kurt made him repeat the word no until it stopped sounding like a word at all.
Charles blinks, hard. The dashboard, the horizon, Erik’s hands on the wheel. Holding tighter than before.
"Keep at it long enough," he says, voice a little thinner now, "I would be able to tell him to kill himself, and he'd try to kill me instead." He glances at Erik. "Self-defence. The mind is a clever thing, on its own."
"There was nothing about Marko in Shaw's records," Erik says. "Not by name, at least."
"Shaw was too smart for that," Charles agrees. "It's difficult to publish anything done under the table. On kids, no less."
"But there was money."
"Vibranium is expensive."
"You knew." For the first time, there is emotion in Erik's voice. Mind spun tight with anger and that flicker of guilt, guilty, blame.
"Kurt was confident in his ability to keep me quiet. He wasn't shy about talking."
"You never told me anything."
"Because I didn't want you to know anything," he replies honestly, doesn't add, because I didn’t want you to look at me the way he did, like I was something that needed breaking open to understand.
"Why?" - then, quickly, a sigh, and he says, pleading, almost: "Start from the beginning."
"I really don't know where that is."
Erik touches the back of his hand lightly, says, as if it pains him, "Start with me."
Despair is such a yawning, black hole. It's such a vast, open space that it steals all the breath from the body, leaves it chipping for air that's never enough.
Face it. His own voice in his head, the determination feeling iron-hard, like nails hammering into his hands, his chest, his throat. We'll always come back to this moment. Do you want to wait another 15 years?
He'll still be here. You'll still come back.
You can't forget. And you can't make him forget again.
Notes:
Wheeew. Did I cram about 90% of the plot into this chapter? Yes. Yes I did.
Other potential chapter titles, considered and dismissed:
Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas?
Chapter 6: The lost America of love
Summary:
Erik in his room, singing out of tune to Nirvana, all choking on the ashes of her enemies and I'm not like them but I can pretend, Erik, smiling, grinning, and also Erik, his jeans unbuttoned in the garage, his mouth tasting like vodka and Mountain Dew, and touching someone else's skin for the first time. Sweat tasting a lot like tears, and not so novel.
Notes:
* tape rewind noises *
Surprise.(CW: casual homophobia and antisemitism. See end note.)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
1997. The radio in Erik's pickup plays Oasis, and the sky is so much darker than it is back in the next millennium. How quickly and easily one forgets those things.
Other nights they would park on a hill above Salem and lie on the hood, just to watch the stars. Charles can't really remember anymore when he last saw them - the city obscures the sky with her light. But Westchester in the nineties is darker, heavier.
They're sitting in the car this night, both quiet, the first chilly breeze of late August outside. The summer is drawing to an end, pulling with it that slow, sinking feeling of time running out, of life waiting around a sharp and inevitable corner. Erik knows Charles wants to talk, Charles knows Erik hates the tension. Hates it with that helpless fear that makes him angry.
Charles with the knobbly knees, Erik with the radical ideas. The rich kid and the orphan. The snob and the charity case.
Charles just remembers thinking that Erik is the brightest shining person he's ever met, and that Erik kissing him feels like a beautiful improbability.
"It's just," he says, and falters, knowing how horribly he's messing this up. "I really feel like this is stupid. Of us. I'm going to Oxford."
"I know you are," Erik says, frowning. "You never said you'd stay."
"Well, I just." He takes a deep breath. "Erik, I'm really sorry."
"What, Charles? You're - what? You're breaking up with me?"
He swallows hard. Can you break something if you never actually made it real? Is that what Erik thinks?
"I thought you wanted this," Erik murmurs into the silence.
"I do," he says, but can't catch Erik's gaze. "If you'd only let me show you-"
"Yeah, right," Erik sneers, sudden and mean. "If only I let you show me how you don't feel and how you think I should feel."
"I'm doing this because I - I do, Erik, I do, I feel -"
"If you felt something for me you wouldn't break up with me in a parking lot on a Tuesday, Charles. That's just not what people do."
Charles looks down, watches his hands twist and then lay flat on his thighs. "Sometimes it is."
Erik is silent for a long minute, his arm braced on the steering wheel, his hand a fist over his mouth.
Charles thought Erik would understand. Charles isn't much to lose, after all, and Erik should understand that. That, and that Charles can't stay.
"We can do long distance. I can get a cellphone. It's just a few years."
Charles sighs. "I don't think you want that-"
Erik turns to him and snaps, "Would you stop telling me what I want?"
Charles swallows hard, his heart beating a little painfully. "Right. Sorry."
"I love you."
"Erik."
"I love you."
There is something like an iron band around his lungs. Charles has to struggle to take a deep breath.
It's too much. Erik's trust in him is so absolute that he doesn't even flinch when Charles puts his fingertips to his temple and stops them both for a second, stops everything for just a minute. He doesn't know in that moment what he's about to do: he just needs to think.
Erik, looking young and grown up at the same time, his arms bare, tense in the driver's seat. Dissonance. Belonging here and in his body and, he thinks, beside Charles. His mind is like an open wound when Charles feels his way inside.
Erik thinks he means it. He thinks loving Charles is something that will last forever, because that's how his mother loved him. As if love isn't a switch, and as if Charles doesn't know how to undo it for him. Reach inside and rearrange a little, altering the things that will alter themselves in a few years anyway. Speeding up the entropy.
Charles really does think that. That he's being kind to Erik - because all he really wants to do is to drive his nails into Erik's soul and shout remember me!
Worse, even, than that, he wants to say, come with me. Fuck this town, fuck these people, let's have each other, let's grow up together, or not, let's do whatever we want.
But he doesn't. They're eighteen, it's not supposed to be this. They have had too little love in their lives, that's why it feels so monumental.
He patches that hole that Erik calls love, that dam leaking, smooths that feeling over in Erik's chest, makes it into a rock softened by waves. Something that isn't quite stone, isn't quite anything. Tries to make the ache older, tries to decorate the pain. Tries to make this thing that wants to eat him into sea glass.
But the worst thing is, when he's done? He feels proud.
And he thinks, at any moment, very soon, he will feel at peace.
It had already been one hell of a year when the whole thing started, whatever it was. It wasn't dating, but it wasn't not-dating, either. It was messy, mostly, but it was beautiful to Charles. For a while.
The year he would turn 18, his father passed away, his mother married another man, a bad man, and his new step brother had a habit of jerking off to thoughts of his sister, and on this particular day, when he and Erik are just about to start, Charles has to get home before Cain, be the first one to come home to Raven, and his car won't start.
In the beginning of the summer of 1997, this is where he stands. He's not about to stick around to see what else will happen - he's about to take his sister and his car and get the hell out of Dodge.
The sun is scorching, Charles's freckles are coming out, and the wind is still freezing. Goosebumps over sunburned skin, this May, and Erik's jeans are too short for his long legs. As if he grew suddenly over night, his ankles stretching out of worn Reeboks like flowers, strangely sensual in their curves and bones.
Charles knows it's because Erik's stubborn, more a Minotaur than ever a bull, and wears his clothes until they fall apart. It's an admirable principle, Charles thinks during PE, when Erik lounges in the stands with Kitty from the year below, and Charles has trouble looking away from those same, naked ankles.
It's possible that Charles is a little obsessed. He wants to think that they are similar in many ways, if only because that would feel nice, and he's 17 going on 18 and desperate for a little bit of hope, a little happiness, a little light, a little less loneliness.
But then he imagines standing up to Kurt the same way Erik stands up to Shaw, and those fantasies crumble like the metal can Erik has just compressed into a tiny steel cube in his hand. Charles doesn't even have to read him to feel the anger that always, without fail, radiates from Erik's skin like heat from a volcano, rusty red and simmering. He wonders if Kitty can feel it. If it can influence the people around Erik, regardless of empathetic abilities. If maybe there's something dormant in everyone, that sixth sense, that can tell. Charles wonders if it can tell that Erik is a threat only to himself.
He tries to shake the thoughts away, make them fall out of his mind, or bury them deep in the peripheries of his memory. The only reason he knows anything about Erik Shaw is because he can't help but read him, quietly, and reach out to him involuntarily. Erik is a magnet, and Charles is a piece of scrap following him around.
Problematic, Raven had said, while looking meaningfully at him. And Erik knows nothing of this secret obsession.
As always, the world doesn't seem to have enough words yet to describe Charles Xavier.
He's the first to reach the showers when the bell rings for the end of the day. He's has left them before the other boys have even started clamouring, wielding towels like weapons, comparing bodies with anxiety almost coming out of their mouths.
Raven is home full of aspirin and with hot water bottles clutched to her stomach, and Charles doesn't want Cain to reach the house before him. He'd promised her to race home, not even stopping for chocolates. She doesn't know he used his lunch break to run to the corner shop for them.
It's all fine, until it isn't. Until his antique Volvo makes a sound like grinding stones, knocks five times in quick succession, whines one long note, and dies right there in the school parking lot. All he hears in the silence is his heart beating against his breastbone.
He turns the key several times. Nothing happens. Not even a sputter, or a sigh, or a short knock.
"Fuck," he whispers.
Erik isn't popular. He's not a jock or an heir or an exotic exchange; he's not even delinquent enough to be a bad influence, really. But somehow he's always around someone or some people, girls and boys and sometimes even teachers. Maybe his magnetism really does work like that, Charles thinks, as he sure as anything half-jogs across the parking lot to where Erik is sitting in his truck, students flocked around it.
"Excuse me," he calls, loud enough that they fall silent and turn, as one, to look at him blankly.
If Erik is magnetic, Charles must be oppositely charged. People approach him and then they run off him like oil on water. No one seems to stick. It really is the wrong way around.
He fixes his eyes on Erik. "Can I bug a ride off of you?"
Erik's arm where he's leaning out of the window of his truck looks hard and strong, and a little too old for his face. His face doesn't betray his thoughts, but Charles can feel them taking him in, feel them run over him shallowly.
"Where?" Erik asks.
"North Salem?"
"North Salem?" he repeats, incredulity in his thoughts, a matte sort of bemusement. A little bit of curiosity, but mostly the beige whatever.
"I can pay for gas," Charles offers - amends, rather. "I broke down."
Erik frowns and says, with a slight edge, "I can pay for my own damn gas."
But for whatever reason, he shrugs and says, "Whatever, yeah. Guys, I'll see you tomorrow."
Heart skipping wildly in his chest, Charles rounds the car and tugs on the door handle. The truck is higher off the ground than any other car he's been in - but he manages to hoist himself up into the seat before he can make a fool of himself.
"Is it terribly out of your way?" he asks, just to ask something as the seat belt clicks into place.
Erik turns the key in the ignition. "Nothing in North Salem is on the way to anything."
"Sorry."
"It's fine."
Charles has always found it a strangely intimate thing to be driven by someone. Sat in the passenger seat, watching someone's face when they concentrate. Erik's car smells a little used, a little worn, and the seats are of a polyester blend with a clinging tobacco smell - but it's not bad. It is, if anything, strangely arousing.
"I'm Charles," he says.
"I know, Charles," Erik says evenly.
Well.
They're pulling out onto the main road when Erik glances at him and asks, "What's wrong with your car?"
Charles shrugs. "It's old, I guess. It was my grandfather's, sort of a one-of-kind. I don't know. It makes a -" he imitates the grinding, "- sort of sound sometimes and now it won't start at all."
There's something about Erik's hand when he indicates at a crossing. It does incredible things to Charles's stomach.
"Have you checked the oil?"
That incredible thing sputters and dies, and Charles narrows his gaze at Erik, who glances at him again and says, "Sometimes you need to -"
"Of course, I-" he interrupts.
" - change the oil and replace -"
"I know how to change the oil!" he exclaims.
Erik just looks at him, and shrugs at the Toyota in front of them. "Alright."
I'm not useless, Charles wants to say, but rather thinks it wouldn't prove anything. "I'm going to fix it," he says instead, quieter. "It's just bad timing."
He directs Erik to the finer parts of Salem, up the green by-way, along the carefully curated avenue of blooming trees, and it's as if he's seeing it for the first time. As if he's borrowed Erik's eyes somehow, even though he's so tightly shielded he can't even really hear his own thoughts. It's gaudy, insincere, all the things he doesn't want to be. They're coming up to the reservoir, and before they can approach the long driveway to the house, Charles says, "Here's fine."
"Here?" Erik repeats, and keeps on driving.
"Here's great. You don't have to -"
"I don't mind."
"But it's really not necessary."
"It's fine."
"Okay," he says slowly.
Erik shrugs.
The mansion appears like a shadow on the horizon, like a stain on fabric. Charles finds himself sinking lower in his seat. It's too big, it's too expensive, and all it represents are the things Charles loathes about his own family. Old English, and old money. Sticklers for tradition and the Good Old Days.
Erik stops on the gravel in front of the main entrance, in his worn truck, with his blue jeans, and Charles in the passenger seat.
"Thank you," he says, and thinks of all the bad ideas. He slides out silently.
"I could have a look at the car. If you want."
Charles hesitates, the truck door heavy and real in his hand. "Would you," he says, and it doesn't sound like a question, or like doubt, but like bewilderment, perhaps.
Erik just looks at him. One of his shoulders barely moves in a shrug. "I'm good with metal."
It sounds like a challenge, almost. Like Erik is really saying, do you have a problem with that?
And, oh, how Charles has anything but a problem with that.
"Yeah," Charles hears himself say. "Okay. Thank you."
"Tomorrow."
"Sure," he says, although it's not posed as a question. He hesitates again. "Thanks for the ride."
Erik does the same half shrug, already looking away. The truck pulls away smoothly and Charles is left panting in the vacuum it leaves. There's a feeling like being punched in the gut with something electric, something that jumps inside his veins.
Raven gasps and pokes him in the ribs, a little too hard, when he tells her what happened. "Good job, Charles. You're halfway betrothed."
"Alright, smartass," he says in his best approximation of her Americanised accent, then sighs. "He's nice. I knew he'd be nice."
Raven props her legs on his on the bed, mimicking a fainting heroine, or perhaps a swooning maiden. Charles doesn't know quite which is worse. "Yeah, I think you can tell from the eyes. He's got kind eyes."
Charles snorts. "You've been reading Harlequin again."
"We're not all mind readers, Charles."
"No," he agrees. He leans over the side of the bed and fishes out the chocolate from his backpack. "But we are good siblings."
Raven's squeal is deafening. "The best," she says.
Then it happens, as it always does.
The floor creaks outside, and Charles feels Raven stiffen. His own hand is against his temple, fingernails pressing into the thin skin.
"Raven," Cain sings, something like nails scratching long trails on her door. The handle turns. Charles can only breathe again when it doesn't open, never sure he did remember to lock the door. "Open the door, baby."
He raises his voice a little to yell, "Fuck off, Cain."
There's a moment of silence, and then, "You in there, Charles?"
"Just go away."
"Or what," Cain sneers through the wood, and says something else Charles doesn't catch. Probably a slur, but which is anyone's guess. His heavy steps fade down the corridor, but the mood is sufficiently destroyed.
He lets himself out of Raven's room at half past eleven. They missed dinner, but nothing much else is new. His mind is only on the quiet snick of her lock behind him, the old whispers of a house too big and empty for the way they sneak and shuffle inside it. Every shadow is an enemy, every sound a warning. The net of his mutation like a vibration over every movement, every passing thought, all through the day. And at night, the exhaustion like lead in his veins, a mist in his mind.
It's no wonder he doesn't notice Kurt until he's nearly upon him. He stands like a statue outside Charles's bedroom, his clipboard in his hands, and he smiles when Charles starts. The sound of Kurt's voice saying his name. The fear that tears through him - he can't think. Hell, he can't even move. Kurt knows exactly how to do that. He knows how to disrupt Charles's mind, how to stop his defences, and make Charles into the same as everyone else. Less, really.
How do you control a telepath? he'd asked, musing. With fear, he'd answered his own question.
"I thought we could continue where we left off."
He phrases it like there's a choice. Like Charles can say anything but yes.
Silently, he follows Kurt out into the gardens, into the chilly night, the bunker waiting like a bad omen.
Friday evening they roll Raven's car down the driveway, careful not to make any noise, before Charles turns the ignition. The radio plays Springsteen, and Charles thinks about tight blue jeans while Raven and her friend Amy belt out the lyrics. It's a bit of a drive, and the girls have dared each other to finish their tequila mixes from cheap plastic bottles before they reach the lookout.
It's a motley of trucks and old scrappy Chevies and Fords. Someone has ripped out the entire boot of their car and installed a boombox system into it. It pumps rock into the night.
The night is warm enough, he thinks, as Raven flutters off, effortlessly, Amy in tow. He sits awkwardly on the hood of her car, hands in his denim jacket pockets. Like an out-of-tune instrument.
Even To Kill a Mockingbird can't distract him enough to get him out of his own head once the thought has struck. He thumbs the worn covers of the school-issue paperback, studies the front like it contains some message.
"Hey."
He looks up, his heart beating extra, because Erik stands in front of him in jeans and a flannel shirt, like Charles's mind had designed and conjured him.
"How's your car?" Erik asks, eyeing the beat-up Ford, one of Raven's more brilliant rebellions against Mother's old English sensibilities.
"Perfect," Charles says. "This one's Raven. Thanks again, by the way."
Erik holds out his half-drunk bottle of Bud and Charles imagines closing his lips over the head of it, the closest he ever would have been to a kiss. Instead he motions at the car. "I'm driving. Thanks."
Erik shrugs, hesitates for a second, then settles beside Charles on the hood like they're old friends, more than just acquaintances by force. Is this how people do it, he wants to ask. Is this how people make friends? Touch the outside of their thighs and talk, without saying I've seen inside your head and I liked it?
"Never seen you here before," Erik says plainly. Then, he adds, "I've seen your brother, though."
Charles doesn't know what to say to that.
Erik nods a little, as if he heard something anyway. "He's a massive dick, isn't he?"
Charles looks at him over the bony, jagged edges of his own shoulder. Erik looks back. He smiles a little, and Erik nods again. He fishes a packet of Marlboros out of his back pocket and offers Charles one. For some reason, Charles takes one. It's not the first cigarette he's smoked, but it's the best one.
"Mrs. Davis caught me smoking outside the gym today," Erik says on a sigh, smoke curling away from his like he's a model in a magazine. He leans back against the windshield, stretches his legs out. Impossibly long, ankles like promises of air-cold skin and - "Any other teacher and I'd just have to put it out. But I swear she's got it in for me."
Charles is talking before he can think about it. "You just remind her of -" And, shit. Charles does that. Spits out people's secrets like he's got a right to them.
Erik looks at him, his eyes intense. "Who?"
Charles shrugs. "No one. Well. Her son died. Or so I heard."
Erik just looks at him, then says, "Shit."
"Mm," he agrees, and yeah, what a way to kill a conversation.
"How'd you hear that?"
He shrugs. Better that than explain how he knows someone's secret, and worse, told it. Erik hums a little.
"Do you know what happened?"
Too well, Charles doesn't say. Mrs. Davis had a long time where she'd think of little else. She'd imagine the pressure, the push, of steel on bone and organs. How lungs, punctured, would wheeze and fill a chest with air while you thought you were drowning. Her face would remain passive, but sometimes it'd take two tries to get her attention. "Car accident, I'm afraid."
"Fuck."
Charles shrugs again.
"I'll have to show her report to Shaw now."
"Shaw?" he asks, as if he doesn't know.
"My stepfather."
"Oh."
"'Oh'," Erik echoes him. Dry.
"I've seen that movie."
"I'm sure you have."
They share a quick smile, and it hurts. Inside his hands, up his arms.
One time, when Charles was a strawberry-blond boy with expensive shirts and careless bruises on his knees, Sharon and Francis took him to the country. There were horses, and a quietly snapping fence. He remembers putting his hands to it, and the peculiar, terrifying pain.
Yeah. It feels a lot like that.
And as soon as you've done it, you imagine doing it again.
A small commotion - a raised voice he recognises, and then Raven appearing out the small crowd. She looks a little green, a little purple, if you look closely, and her jeans are absolutely covered in spilled beer. A quick-thinking Amy is at her elbow, dragging her back from the others before her hair turns red.
"Uh-oh," he says, clambers down to grab her elbow. "All right, darling. Ready to go home?"
She swallows hard and nods, once, and doesn't meet his eye.
When he turns around, Erik has already moved away. He waves when he sees Charles looking, long-empty bottle in hand, and just like that, leaves.
Charles drives home with two drunk girls in the back, frustrated, itching, restless. A little angry, maybe, but he doesn't know why.
He feels angry a lot.
It's not like anything changes. Time still moves like molasses. He still looks across spaces at Erik, still magnetised to his presence.
Only - sometimes - when Charles spots him, he thinks Erik had been looking back.
But they don't talk, only ever nod at each other, at the most. It was nice, speaking like their lives had more similarities than differences. Charles thinks he can live off that memory for a long time, but they say that birds of a feather flock together, and there's not a lot of shared feathers between them.
Erik didn't get that play-book, it seems.
He appears as Charles closes the boot after school one afternoon, a soft "Hey," and casual lean against the petrol blue of the car.
"Hi," Charles says back, and wonders if he should add, what's up, or how's it going, but deciding his heart is struggling enough just to beat in rhythm.
"There's another meetup at the lookout tonight," Erik says, his eyes fixed on Charles. "You coming?"
Me? he doesn't say. Coming? To that? Why? He clears his throat, scuffs his shoe on the tired tarmac. "Um. Not sure. I went mostly for Raven's sake last time, but. Yeah, maybe."
Erik straightens. The air is warm enough that he's wearing only a t-shirt, some rock band logo in peeling print on the front. He has an old scratch on his forearm, almost pink now, turning slowly purple as it's scarring in the sun. Charles wants to touch it.
"Cool," he says, as if Charles has already promised to come. And he looks at ease, hands in his pockets, but if Charles could only concentrate a little, then maybe there's a slight, shivering nervousness underneath the surface. No, not nervousness. Anticipation? But in a sickly yellow.
"I could drive you two, if you'd like. You could have a beer. I'm driving anyway."
"Oh," Charles says. "Okay. Sure."
"I'll pick you up."
"At the reservoir, maybe? My stepfather, you know."
"'Course." Erik smiles. As if they're sharing a joke. Perfect teeth, too many.
Oh God.
It feels wonderful.
Raven doesn't go, in the end. Cain's not home, she says, she wants to seize the opportunity to just - relax. Charles doesn't know if he's relieved or not. She says that's okay. To have fun. To see what happens, if anything. To relax a little, and not think about it.
Easier said than done.
But he stands out at the fake little lake come seven, his jeans washed out, his nicest Henley on and a thin jacket in his hand, trainers digging into the ground, and he wonders what the fuck, how the hell, and oh god. The way his breath disappears when Erik's truck comes up the road is unbearable. The relief when Erik hands him a cold beer and an opener from the glove compartment is enormous.
When they pull in to the lookout, he has already finished it. His mind fades into static, that dangerous cotton around his vigilance. It feels like freedom.
Erik, impossibly, smiles at him from the corner of his mouth and says, "There's more in the trunk. I'm just going to find Kitty. She owes me smokes. Be right back."
So he climbs out and feels the gravel under his shoes. The air up here is clear, there's a slight breeze, and it's packed with people standing by their cars, their bikes, talking and laughing, like Charles being here isn't a dissonance in the fabric, an errant note. Perhaps that realisation is silly - maybe it's pure, arrogant solipsism, the thought that everything around him operates according to his presence.
And anyway, when he opens the boot of Erik's car and pulls out another beer from the cooler, he feels another kind of disaccord - like the sound of nails on a chalkboard that's already scratched white. A voice he recognises all-too-well over the din. He swears, quietly, even though he wants to scream. It's a voice that sticks to the backs of his legs like something cold in the water, that feels like a rattling door handle, and pain.
The feeling of - of normalcy, or whatever it was, well, it disappears. Because, yeah, he realises: Cain isn't home. Because Cain is here. He's standing far too close to where Erik parked and talking loud and obviously started drinking early.
The beer bottle is wet and slippery in his hand. He hangs on to it tight as he rolls up the sleeves on his shirt, suddenly clammy and too warm.
He knows what's coming before it happens, because there's that sharp spike of fear - humiliated fear - and that anger that always stings the air when Cain sees him.
"The fuck?" Cain says, and Charles turns to face him. It's better than having his back turned.
He swallows hard. "Cain," he says, and he doesn't mean to sound antagonistic - of course he fucking doesn't. It's just that his accent, Cain's name, and the stupid layers of meaning behind them both conspire to make him sound like he has a chip on his shoulder the size of the state of New York.
Cain, red letterman jacket on even though it's balmy outside, spits, "The fuck are you doing here?"
"Nothing," Charles says, and leans a little on Erik's truck. Cain's eyes narrow, recognising, no doubt, who it belongs to.
Charles has never before met someone who looks as meant for violence, so obviously destined for the Marines, as Cain. His head is already shaved close in a crew-cut - it gives the illusion of age, of maturity and authority. Even at 17 he towers above most people, and Charles imagines that he's always been taller, broader, meaner than his peers, so that when he advances on Charles now, it's like watching a tsunami approach.
"Can't fucking catch a break from you," Cain sneers, and oh, how Charles wants to echo that sentiment.
"I'm not bothering you," Charles tries to reason, but he sees the scene from Cain's perspective and knows he's lost.
"Oh, you're bothering me, alright," he hisses, and he's too quick when he grabs Charles by his collar and yanks him around, just so he can whisper acidly into his ear, "Busy sucking Jewish dick tonight? Don't you think he'll miss you?"
When Cain shoves him, hard, he falls on the gravel with a pained gasp. The imprint like spikes, the beer spilled and suddenly stinking. No one pays them much mind, though. That's just Cain Marko being Cain Marko. You don't want to get involved. Charles doesn't blame them: he doesn't want to try entering that mind again, remembers the last time every time he accidentally looks into Cain's blue eyes. How the feeling of those thoughts, his feelings, the hate, the anger, the hopelessness, the dripping despair clung to him like a smell he couldn't shake for weeks. It was the same way he felt that shadow of an ache, of the feeling of Kurt's hand striking him across the cheek, and how maybe it wouldn't hurt so much if there wasn't so much shame in it.
Cain hates him for stealing his father. It's so ironic.
But maybe the curse of knowing another's mind is this - you can't really hate someone once you've been inside their head. Sympathy is the death of hate, and Charles wishes he could fight it. As it is, he just crawls backwards, scrabbling for purchase with his feet. There's a shout, somewhere behind him, but even though it's painful just to look at Cain - even though it makes his stomach roil just staring - he doesn't dare take his eyes of him.
Cain looks over him, coming to rest casually with one heavy foot on Charles's ankle. "What do you want, Shaw?"
"Back off, Marko," Erik says from somewhere behind Charles.
Cain smiles as if he thinks it's cute. "Muties sticking together. Adorable. Did he make you think you like him? You know that's his speciality, right? Making people like him?"
Charles can feel Erik's anger swelling at the slur, and then the heart-stuttering realisation.
Fuck.
It's not that Charles is ashamed to be like Erik - not at all. The opposite, really. To have something tangible that connects them? Fuck, but it feels good. He firmly believes that to be a mutant is something beautiful, something unique and precious.
But to be known? But to be a telepath?
Just. Fuck.
Erik repeats to Cain, dark and quiet, "Back off."
Cain narrows his eyes, glares down at Charles, and simply warns, "You better get the fuck out of here, freak."
The 'or else' is implied, and Charles isn't generally stupid.
"Whatever you say, Cain," Charles agrees. Cain sneers at him, but lifts his foot at last.
Erik is by his side as soon as Cain stomps off, lifting him up. Charles sighs as he brushes himself off. "Sorry about that," he murmurs as the din of voices grow louder again.
"Are you going?" Erik asks roughly, releasing his arm, but not stepping back.
"I'd better," he says. "Don't worry, I'll walk."
"No, I'll drive you," Erik says immediately.
"You don't have to -"
"I'm driving," he says again.
The silence in Erik's truck is compact. Charles wonders if he bleeds embarrassment. Feels like he has to say something. Explain. Explain himself. Explain why he doesn't wear a sticker on his window shield, like Erik, mutant and proud, why he's never said anything, and why Erik shouldn't feel - what, violated? Fooled?
"I didn't know he was going to be there," is what he ends up saying.
Erik is silent. He darts a quick look at Charles.
"I wouldn't have come," Charles adds.
He frowns, then. "It's not your fault."
"It sort of is, though," he sighs.
When they pull in at the reservoir, Erik shuts off the engine. "You okay?" he asks Charles in a strangely soft tone.
"Sure," Charles says quickly.
"I think you're bleeding a little."
Charles contorts to look at his forearm. He had been bleeding, but barely, and it has already dried. "It's just a scrape."
Erik unbuckles his seat belt, says, "Hang on, I've got some stuff in the back."
"Stuff?" Charles echoes.
"To clean it," Erik says, and steps out, the heavy door shutting off Charles's reassurance that's it's fine.
The night has cooled when he opens the door on his own side. An owl is calling out across the dead water, but the only movement is the slight mist across the surface.
"Here," Erik says, and he braces a knee beside Charles on the seat. It's a bit overwhelming - Erik smells nice, like laundry detergent, like everything he's wearing is fresh and clean. Charles feels dirty in comparison, embarrassed to be sitting bloody and dusty and a little tipsy in the passenger seat.
"Pull up your shirt," Erik says, and Charles does, rolls it gingerly up over his arm, not even fighting the red flush on his cheeks. Fucking Cain. Fucking town, even.
"Thanks," Charles murmurs, as Erik rips the top off a small packet of cotton, the smell of peroxide filling the air between them.
Erik clears his throat as he gently rubs clean the small abrasions. "So, you're a mind reader or something?" he asks.
"Telepath," Charles corrects. "Yeah. Sorry."
Erik frowns, throwing the cotton away over his shoulder. "Don't be sorry."
"I should have told you."
"You're under no obligation to tell anyone anything."
He sounds strangely formal.
"I guess," Charles says, dubiously. People tend to feel different about telepaths, after all.
Erik affixes a small, white band aid to the back of Charles's arm by placing the cotton against the wound and drawing away the small plastic bits, pushing gently against the glue to make sure it sticks. He swears. "I made it bleed again."
"It's fine."
"Your brother is a real piece of work."
"Yeah."
"Anywhere else?"
"No, that's it." Erik fixes him with a quelling look Charles knows he inherited from his mother. Her name was Edie, and she died. "All right, just here." He rolls his shirt up his other arm as well. A small stain has bled through the fabric, and there's a tear in it. His favourite shirt, ruined.
Erik repeats the procedure, swabbing at the wound. "He ever do shit like that at home?" he asks, the forced casual tone of his voice a surer give away than even the feel of his thoughts, boiling and dark green, almost brown, and furious in the back of his mind.
Charles considers his response.
"I'm fine," he says. "But, yeah. A few times."
Erik's hands are suddenly less steady.
"I can call someone for you," he says quietly. "You don't have to be alone."
Some big, suffocating emotion swells in his chest when Erik says that. It's nice. It's scary. "I'm all right. I can handle it."
Erik looks up at him, frowning gently. "Do you need a place to stay?"
Charles smiles a little. "I'm good."
Sighing, Erik stands. "Can I walk you back at least?"
Gathering up his jacket and rolling down his sleeves, he says lightly, "I'm not actually a damsel in distress."
Erik smiles crookedly. "Sure. Can I anyway?"
He doesn't bother locking the car, just bumps Charles's shoulder like they're sharing a joke. Charles has never been so at ease and so wound up at the same time.
"Do you have any plans for college?" Erik asks into the sound of shoes on asphalt.
"Yeah," Charles replies, his elbow bumping into Erik's accidentally. "Oxford, actually. In the fall."
"That should get you out of Cain's neat little buzzcut, at least."
Charles snorts. "Half way across the world? Nearly far enough. How about you?"
Erik smiles a little. "September. Boston."
"Nice."
"Yeah."
They're silent for a moment, but they're close enough that Charles can tell there's something unsaid. That Erik is balancing on something. He wonders if Erik feels the same as he does - this inexplicable sense of safety. Magnetism, as he's thought of it until now. He thinks maybe Erik does when he takes a deep breath and says, "When mom died, I didn't think I could stand staying here."
"Yeah?" is all he can say.
"Yeah," Erik confirms.
"I keep thinking, as soon as I'm 18, I'll go. I can stand it until then."
"Then what?"
"Up and vanish."
"Do they know? Your mom, stepdad?"
"No. I don't think I, you know. Owe them anything."
"Even your sister?"
"Oh, she's coming with me. We're the same. One unit. It's both or nothing," he says, a quick smile.
"You're lucky."
Is he? Yes, of course he is. But he can imagine a world where he has no one to care for but himself. An invisible mutation and no ties. Then he looks at Erik and imagines having another tie, another anchor, something like a friend. Someone like him. Someone stronger than him, with purpose. Pride, even.
It feels impossible.
It is, too, probably.
It is a strange thing to know that someone is going to break your heart, and to knowingly choose them anyway.
Erik looks at the ground when he hesitantly asks, "So, Raven is-?"
"Um," Charles says elegantly. "I don't - it's not my place to say."
"'Course. Sorry."
"It's not - not that we're ashamed, or anything-"
"Charles," Erik says over him. "Trust me, you don't have to explain why you're not open about it. I wouldn't judge. I don't. These baseline dicks make life hard enough for us anyway."
"Thank you."
"But," he says. "But if you'd like, we could get together. Just us and people like us. Or people who know."
"Yeah," he says, aware of his breathless voice. "Fuck, yeah, that'd be nice."
Erik smiles at him. "Who knows about you?"
"Ah, well, that's the... Cain, only, really. And mother, and my stepfather. They have no idea about Raven, though."
"Ah."
"But she has some friends who do."
"Sure. I'll talk to Azazel and Kitty."
"That'd be nice."
"We'll figure it out."
"It's just too bad."
"What?"
"That I'd manage to find people like us just as we're about to leave."
Erik looks so downcast for a minute that Charles feels even worse.
Then he gently runs his knuckles down the hem of Charles's shirt, as if to make sure he's okay, as if he hadn't already patched him up himself. Lingers a little, maybe. Or maybe it's all in Charles's head.
"Things will change," Erik says on a shrug, pulling back to himself. "I mean, with mutants. These are the fucking dark ages, you know?"
"Yeah," Charles says. But he doesn't agree - doesn't have enough hope yet, at this point. Mutant and gay? The world isn't that good, isn't ready.
Graduation looms and then arrives, springs on them like a hurricane, a storm. The weather turns angry, too warm, too sudden, and everything feels heightened somehow. Charles goes from longing to craving, to a sort of wild desperation clawing in his chest as the days grow longer and longer and his bedroom turns stuffy and confining. As if the world is saying now or never, Charles Xavier, and he wants to reply now or never what. Never, then. Rather nothing than this intense I have to be near him I have to talk to him I'm running out of time.
It's too perfect, then, when the Marko's and Sharon leave to look at colleges, and Charles and Raven have the house to themselves.
Erik comes with a whole set of people, some that Charles has never met and never heard of, from other schools and other towns, but with skin like Raven's, or minds like Erik's. There's never really a chance for it to be stiff and awkward. They treat the house like kind of attraction, only instead of a haunted house, they're not daunted by it - they're entertained. Raven finds Kitty, and Kitty finds the designer vodka no one ever drinks, and someone named Bobby pulls the cushions from the sofas to the floor, and it's - Charles laughs. Raven does, too, and Erik's eyes are shining and every time he looks up, Erik's there.
They turn Charles's telepathy into a game. What am I thinking about and how would you describe my thoughts, my mind. There's hurt there, of course there is, but it's as if he can close the door to it.
The sun comes up at the end of a long, long night, and it's heart-breaking. Isn't it? He knows exactly what he's about to lose just as it's happening. It's crushing and uplifting, it's a drowning.
And Erik keeps looking at him. So what if it's lunacy, he thinks, and asks, in silence, just with his head, if Erik would come to the kitchen.
"Would you like some tea?" he says, but it's just a distraction, really. They sit out on the stone steps, watching the sun rise over the garden, their thighs touching, their arms pressed together. The jittery feeling in his hands, the pounding of his heartbeat, like nausea, but welcome.
"We should do this again," Erik says, and Charles nods. Doesn't say, yes, every day until the last day. We shouldn't do anything else. But Erik leans into him, asks, "Where's your head?"
"I don't know," he laughs. "Can you find it?"
And just like that, Erik smiles and presses their lips together. He kisses him, so gentle, and it's innocent, and it's going to break his heart. Chapped lips, a miracle, and heart in his throat, spilling over.
Two kisses, and Erik looking at him. "Did you like that?"
Charles nods. Breathes through his nose, feels Erik's breath on his cheek.
"Come upstairs," he whispers.
"Okay," Erik says.
Erik in his room, singing out of tune to Nirvana, all choking on the ashes of her enemies and I'm not like them but I can pretend, Erik, smiling, grinning, and also Erik, his jeans unbuttoned in the garage, his mouth tasting like vodka and Mountain Dew, and touching someone else's skin for the first time. Sweat tasting a lot like tears, and not so novel, and having someone else's hands on your body, their palms warm and gentle, shouldn't by any means be so strange and wonderful. They aren't places he hasn't touched himself before, and the simple change of someone else doing it for him really shouldn't be that different.
But there's also this horrible, chafing feeling that he's wasting the time they aren't close. When they end up across from each other or a person apart, he can barely think, barely focus, for the entire night until he's beside him again.
Erik doesn't seem similarly afflicted. But when they're alone, he doesn't seem to want to stop touching Charles. His leg, holding his hand, resting his palm against his back. It heals some of that horrible feeling.
Still. Charles feels alone and lonely in the desperate longing. Obsessed, maybe that's the word. Erik calmly putting his arm around his shoulders when Charles has all but vibrated out of his chair just to be near him. Just to press his leg against Erik's, just to still feel so fucking empty and bereft. It's not enough, it never is. And Erik doesn't get it, he couldn't.
Kurt still waits for him in the corridor. It's a violent night. Cain almost doesn't resist, before he turns around and rams Charles's head into the wall like he really does just want to kill him.
"Enough," Kurt tells them, annoyed. "Charles, go to the bunker."
Charles goes, head ringing, throat full of copper.
He carefully doesn't listen to what Kurt does to Cain when he leaves. He sits on the thin mattress in the bunker for hours before Kurt let's him out, satisfied that any lasting effect of his telepathy is made null by its thick walls.
He thinks about Erik, in there. He thinks about summer ending. He thinks about the chilly breeze drawing through Westchester, how the evenings bite. He thinks about staying, about leaving, about staying.
/
Erik, turning to him, snapping, "Would you stop telling me what I want?"
Charles swallowing hard, heart beating despite everything, hard and harsh. Erik's mind is open, nothing like Cain's, thank god, full of good intentions, full of trust. Love is just a feeling, Charles wants to say. Love is like hunger, it can be sated, it can be switched.
/
Erik saying, we can still do it, we can still be friends, we can still have this and eat it, too, we can be sated, we can stop this hunger that they put in us.
And he doesn't say, I've told you things I'd never told myself, I feel like I grew up right in front of you, I feel like this is going to kill me.
/
When he's done, he feels proud. He fixed it, he thinks, as Erik drives away without ever knowing he'd been hungry in the first place. Doesn't remember saying love, because that wouldn't fix anything. It'd break it apart, expose the seams, and there would only be one thing left. The feeling that it wasn't enough, that they weren't enough, or good enough, to love.
/
At any moment, very soon, he will feel at peace. He stands in the empty driveway, waiting for it, waiting for the next moment to feel better.
/
He lies where he fell, gravel cutting into his spine, sirens rising somewhere beyond the line of elder trees, casting light over the reservoir, waking everyone up.
He lies on the gravel and listens to the sirens and thinks, at least Erik gets to live like this didn't happen.
/
Notes:
(CW: a shitty character makes a derogatory reference to Charles being gay, and Erik being jewish.)
This is the second chapter I wrote, and the one I'm most excited and anxious about posting. I REALLY HOPE YOU LIKE IT.
Chapter 7: Lonely old courage-teacher
Summary:
Erik is quiet for a long moment. He clears his throat several times, but then doesn't say anything.
Charles draws his mind tight, folds his thoughts like blankets over each other, tight and secret. There'd be no point, to think right now.
"So," Erik says at long last. "So."
Notes:
Final chapter! Thank you so much for the support, the comments, the kudos, the asks. Come find me on tumblr (isoleeshouldbewriting) if you want to keep talking ❤️
(CW: violence, vomiting, referenced child abuse)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
It's a long story. Full of unnecessary details, surely, and rambling, even. He doesn't half tell as much as show it.
Erik is quiet for a long moment. He clears his throat several times, but then doesn't say anything.
Charles draws his mind tight, folds his thoughts like blankets over each other, tight and secret. There'd be no point, to think right now.
"So," Erik says at long last. "So."
"I'm sorry." Charles has to say it. "I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry."
"I know." Erik stares at his own knuckles gripping the wheel. "But."
There's an insistent nausea building in his body, a tremble and a shortness of breath, and saliva floods his mouth like he's going to be sick. He opens the door for fresh air, tries to breathe through it, through his face turning cold, tries not to expel coffee and pasta and pancakes and whatever else he feels poisoned with.
"I never understood why," Erik says finally.
"No," he says, "how could you? I just didn't. I didn't want you to-"
Oh god, it has to be said - but it's insane. It'll sound clinically diseased, wrong. I didn't want you to miss me. I didn't want the be the reason you felt poisoned and broken and unlovable.
"For such a long time," Erik is saying, slow and bewildered and angry. "I thought you needed to do that because I wouldn't let you go."
"I'm sorry."
"Stop saying that."
"Okay."
"I thought I - that I might have done something to you. That you felt unsafe and had to run. That I might've -" he chokes, and Charles agrees. There are some things that can't be said aloud, some things that will do as much damage in silence as they will in the open.
Erik cracks his own door open. The breeze cuts between them, and all Charles can feel is feverish.
"What happened when you and Raven left?" Erik asks into the empty lot.
"What makes you think anything happened?"
Erik gives him a long look, and he finally lets go of the steering wheel. His palms look red and raw, roughened. "Something happened."
Charles swallows. He can't look into Erik's eyes, see whatever it is that he's thinking, whatever it is that lead him to conclude that Charles had broken apart.
"It was like any other night," he says. "We had snuck out so many times - like I said, we used to roll the car down the lane to be quiet. Go out drinking or just driving, just to get away for a few hours. But that night Cain was just coming back. And I." He shakes his head. "I didn't notice. I was stupid, and upset, and I was too busy thinking - or I wasn't thinking, rather, and I didn't notice."
Erik, quite rightly, doesn't encourage him, doesn't nod and say it's okay. It still manages to hurt, either way.
"He tried to stop us," Charles says, tries to imbue the words with finality, like this is the end of the story, the period at the end of a long life in that house.
"How?" Erik asks at once.
He hasn't learned a lot.
"He broke my back. They tried to get me back into the bunker and, after what I did, I couldn't-" he breathes. "I couldn't risk going back there again."
He can't resist: he drops his shields, just for a moment, just to see if Erik really feels as steady as he looks, and he's overcome, overtaken, blinded and deafened by the feelings he's met with. Grief, among them, he knows, anger, too, and helplessness, and he fights back a choked noise, because this isn't about him. He swallows and swallows around the thing that wants to break through him and he swims, tries to keep his airways free.
"And how is your back now?" Erik asks, unaware that Charles feels like he's fighting for his life to let go of Erik's mind, his soul pouring out of him.
"Fine. It's fine," he rasps out.
Erik gives him another quelling look.
"It's all right," he amends. "Much better. Mother called an ambulance. I was so grateful for that," he adds, swallows, swallows. "I was in the hospital. Then we left, and they didn't try to stop us. Mother even gave us some money. It wasn't enough to last until we got access to our trust, but we made do."
"Why couldn't you tell me this?"
"We couldn't risk telling anyone."
"No," Erik says forcefully. "Why couldn't you tell me? What did I do that was so bad you couldn't tell me?"
Erik's mind is still stuck on that hidden shoal, banging against it again and again because he can't fathom that it's not his fault, even a little. Fifteen years of rot, of guilt, and to be told it's all wrong -
"Nothing," he tells Erik. "It wasn't about you, or-" he fumbles, "It was, but, if I'd told you, what would you have done? What could you have done, for that matter? You had Shaw on your back just as I had Kurt, and you were a child, Erik, what could you have done?"
It is, he realises, as he ends on a yell, the question he'd asked himself over and over. In physical therapy, wondering if this was enough. In regular therapy, when nothing in his mind made sense. Across the world in a place no one knew him, and coming back, as well, seeing Erik, and seeing him, and seeing-
Erik takes a deliberate, long breath. "You're not listening to me, Charles. I could have loved you."
And that's it. Isn't it. The horrible truth of it. The final nail in the coffin, the big secret, the thing he couldn't and wouldn't think about. Because who would do that to someone who just wanted to love them?
He sways in his seat, distantly, breathes heavy through his nose and out through his mouth.
What could he possibly say?
I never expected that.
How could I?
My mother drank herself to death far away - and in the end, if she felt guilt, or shame, or prayed for forgiveness, that makes no difference. It can’t make a difference.
Kurt used me to torture Cain, and Cain broke me. Raven is a part of me, has been since the womb, what choice does she have but to love me?
He doesn’t say, what's wrong with you to look at this and say that?
"I was afraid you'd feel unloved," is what he says. "I was afraid I'd break you."
“You did that anyway,” Erik snaps, then immediately exhales. “God, Charles. What bullshit. I was 18, I would have been fine."
"Yeah," he agrees, "I see that now."
He does see that. Erik is the strongest person he's ever known - to take away his chance to even try to heal just on his own had been - stupid, is the least of it. Dangerous. Monstrous. But at 18, it had felt important.
"You made me forget I was in love with you."
"I tried to make you -" he starts, and falters. It was impossible to explain. "Yeah. I did."
"But you didn't take my memories."
"Just, that evening, I thought if - but nothing else, no. I don't think so."
"You just made me get over it."
"I suppose."
"You realise how stupid that sounds."
"Yeah."
"Do you have any idea, Charles, what it's like to know that there's something wrong in your head?"
At that, he can't help but laugh mirthlessly, say, "Fuck, Erik, that's my life."
They sit in the quiet of that run-down park and breathe the cold air, the soft scent of metal cooling, of asphalt and old earth. The urge to keep apologising is overwhelming and useless. It's a completely selfish need, to want Erik to shout at him, yell abuse, tell him how wrong he was. Because after a while he might even feel a bit more clean, a bit more human, and a bit less like a mutant, like less of an evil thing, but he'd still be him. "I've never forgiven myself," Charles says. "And I don't expect you to, either."
Erik just sighs. "You should have taken more. You should have taken all of it. You left and I had nothing and it still just grew back."
Charles can't look at Erik as he says, "But not the same."
"No," Erik agrees slowly. "Not the same."
Dusk falling, sunset in orange and pink. The birds quieting. Erik drives, slow and measured, and the past seems to overlay the present. Charles tries to fight it, but when he stares out the window, he's sure, on the other side is Erik, rubbed raw from knowing Mrs Davies's son is dead, and Charles is like him, and grasping for cigarettes in the door. He hears the rattle of a truck well-loved, not the quiet hum of electricity. He swallows and swallows around the past and tries to think about anything else other than Erik driving home alone that night so many years ago, wondering what was missing from his head, his chest, the thought gnawing at him that he did something to deserve it.
They don't speak. Charles feels the humiliation his eyes burning; hopes that just turning away and sitting perfectly still will hide the fact that he has never felt so much grief for another person as he does Erik, and him, two kids with nowhere to turn.
Then Erik hits the breaks, right by the reservoir, like he has to. He pulls into the small space and they still don't speak when he pulls Charles roughly onto his lap, his seatbelt flying off him, his knee jamming into the centre console.
It's the saddest thing, probably, that he clings to Erik with his knuckles white and desperate, and that Erik holds him just as hard.
Erik nearly pries his lips open with a hard hand on his cheek, and tugs roughly on his waist, wrenches both their jeans open, puts his trembling hands on Charles, his mouth on his, fingernails carving little indentations into him.
"Kurt," Erik says, something frantic and hurt, right from centre of him. "Did he ever-?"
It vibrates between them, unfinished, obvious.
No, he tells Erik. He never.
There was something, but he never looked at it closely. A promise, in the back of Kurt's mind. A silken, slick pinkness in the forefront of it. A satisfaction in the curve of his lips.
"Charles," Erik says quietly. As if he can't not express what Charles can already see in his head, how condoling, how compassionate, he feels, on top of everything else, on top of anger and fear and impotent hope.
"It's okay," Charles chants, over and over, as Erik throws his head back, hips pumping up into Charles's hand. "It's okay. It'll be okay."
Erik drops Charles off in front of the house, with Moira coming to the window, her arms around herself. Erik doesn't say, I'll see you tomorrow, or, I need to think, he doesn't even look him in the eye. But he doesn't speed away, and there's no violence in him. Charles wonders why he expected there to be.
The children are too quiet in the house. No cartoons, no arguments, no footsteps. Charles may be a selfish bastard, but even he knows that it's unnatural.
He digs out the marshmallows Raven bought six months ago, stale and wrinkled now, pastel coloured, and the old fire basket of cast iron, and he drags the splintering Adirondack chairs from the garden storage, manic but sincere. The kids run for sticks - the garden missing its gardeners, they're not hard to find - and Moira gets the woollen blankets from the library. Glasses of cider, watching closely to see the candy turn brown and hard, and not little hands and curious noses.
Further away, magpies warbling in the trees, back and forth. A fox chittering, a bird startled into flight.
"Are you all right?"
He turns to see Moira eyeing him carefully, tucked in blankets in the chair beside him. Not careful of hurting him, he knows, but careful of his reaction. She doesn't know him yet, hasn't had the chance to, because of him. And she is naturally - rightfully - mistrustful.
"I'm okay," he assures her, and, for some reason, finds himself continuing with, "Erik and I had a -"
A fight? How domestic, he thinks, caustic at himself.
"A disagreement?" she asks.
"I don't know," he says, truthfully. "Now, or fifteen years ago, I don't know."
She nods, like that makes sense. "Have you apologised?"
"Yes. He had to tell me to stop apologising."
Moira nods again. Kevin burns his marshmallow, black and bubbling. Sugar sticks to his small hands like spiderwebs. She sips her cider. "My dad never apologised," she says. "Not even for the small stuff. Nothing was his fault."
Charles stares into the flames, feeling the cool evening air at his back. Spring calming down for a moment.
"Mom always told me, ‘if you step on someone's toes, you apologise’," she continues when he doesn't interrupt. "Doesn't matter what you meant to do, or that some people are all toes. So I apologised for everything. And I married a man like my father."
He aches, in a small part of his chest he must have left over from earlier, for the woman who carried that fact like a quiet law of the universe. There's that vermillion again, Charles thinks. Parasite.
"Hoping apologies would change him," she says under her breath, like she's disgusted by it.
Charles looks away, ashamed of how familiar that sounds.
"What do you tell them?" he asks, nodding at the kids.
"Only apologise when you mean it. When you're sorry for the pain you caused. If you caused it. If you caused more than anger." She pauses. "Kevin apologised when Cain struck him. So I must be doing it wrong."
Charles feels his heart fracture along old lines. Fragmentary pieces, hard and crystallised. He shudders out a breath, says, desperately, "He's only four," and "You're here now, aren't you?"
She doesn't look at him, just stares straight ahead.
"Can he actually do it?" she asks.
"Who?"
"Can Kevin - " she shrugs.
"May I?"
She looks at him for a moment. Risk assessment, he thinks, sure he's right. When she nods, he reaches out with a careful thought. Not invasive, not even really there, and finds something, a little kernel of something, bright, subdued. "There is something," he says. "Might stay small. Might grow. You never know."
She breathes out in a shuddery sigh.
"I can teach them," he says, voice small, for some reason.
"Them?" She turns to him fully, her brown eyes strained, wide.
He says nothing. It's not his place, probably, to say how she should feel.
Then she smiles. "Of course they -" she laughs, and it's a little loud and harsh, but it's genuine. The kids look up in surprise. Rebecca's marshmallow falls off. "My special kids," she says to them, and Kevin goes back to watching his marshmallow melt and droop like a sleepy cloud off his blackened stick.
But Rebecca observes her for a long moment. She glances at Charles, so he smiles reassuringly. Wanting to say, you're six, you can't help, shouldn't have to, your mom is fine. It'll be okay.
Only when Moira sniffs and chuckles, clearly okay, clearly relaxed, does she look away.
"How do I even talk to them about this?" Moira asks, hushed. "I don't know anything about - about-"
"If you want," he says slowly when she falters, "we can do it together."
To say it's a shift, like the world shudders suddenly to the left, is to overstate it. It's only a feeling, after all, in a day of many feelings, but he recognises it as hope anyway, deserved or not.
Moira looks at Emma's curriculum, at Erik's regulations, at the careful weavings of Raven's and Charles's team, while Rebecca and Kevin run the gamut of Sharon's old sitting room. It's a big room for a headmaster, he thinks, but it feels right.
"What does Raven think?" Moira asks carefully, too careful, or too aware, so he snaps a picture of the kids standing with their heads in the cleaned-out fireplace, and sends it to Raven.
Two students ready for class, he writes, almost deletes it - unnecessarily facetious, damn it, but it's been a long day - and sends it.
Raven doesn't answer. Moira's phone starts ringing instead. She covers her face with her hand while they talk, presses her lips together, and smiles. Raven has always been good with people.
He goes to bed exhausted, long into the night, nearly morning. Stares at his phone for a long time in sheets that smell like stale coffee and mandarin while the walls of his room soften.
He types and deletes the word sorry twice. It’s not enough. It’s not right. It’s too much.
A question is too demanding. Are you okay - unnecessary.
He types, I don't know what to say, and deletes it. The screen dims.
He types Good night, and sends it.
The read receipt appears a moment later.
Nothing else. No typing bubble. No reply.
He turns the screen face down and stares at the ceiling. Silence isn't loud. It isn't cruel.
He closes his eyes, and tries to imagine a kind version of what Erik is doing on the other side of it.
He's already out of bed by the time the gravel crunches in the driveway. He’s moving on instinct - barefoot, pulling on yesterday’s shirt, the jeans flung over the dresser. It's still early, the kids in the kitchen, Moira making coffee and pouring cereal, stopped in mid-air, flakes overflowing, a creature in horrific headlights, and he sends her a desperate plea before he even reaches the stairs.
Hide.
And he reaches the foyer to see Cain already inside, key in his hand, because of course Kurt kept one. Of course Charles didn't even think about changing the locks.
He recognises the face from so many years ago, that reckless, heedless stare, and as Charles puts his hands out to stop him, starting to say, you can't come in here, Cain grabs him by his hair, and slams his head into the cold stone of the archway. The sound is dull.
His first thought is that he has gone blind, and his second that he should lie down before he falls, but he's already on the cold marble floor. All his focus is on the numb point in the middle of his temple, the explosion behind his eyes, and he whimpers a little as the pain creeps in, and nausea, and as he cradles his nose in one hand and tries thoughtlessly to push himself up, all he manages is to overbalance. Tears and something warm and wet fill the back of his throat, and he coughs, his vision stormy and loud.
Moira's voice cuts through the shock, yelling, Cain coming back with Kevin, crying, held too hard in his father's arms, Rebecca putting her heels into the ground as Cain drags her in a white-knuckled grip.
"Cain," Charles rasps, feebly attempting to reach him as he passes by, crawling after him onto gravel. "Stop."
"It's my family, Charles," Cain snarls down at him. "Rebecca, get in the car."
Stop, he thinks. It's been a long time since Cain had any training against telepathic commands, and Charles is scared and in enough pain that it staggers him. Kevin slides out of Cain’s arms, but then just stands there by his father. He doesn't know what to do, snot and tears down his chubby cheeks.
Charles catalogues the pain - nasal fracture, concussion - and shoves it aside. His mind fragments, but the command forms anyway, sharp and clear, to Rebecca: It's okay. Go to your mum. And she goes, thankfully, quickly, grabbing Kevin’s hand with her own.
Close the door behind you. Go upstairs.
The sound that escapes Cain is more a roar than anything else. Charles has enough sense to cover his head with his arms as Cain bears down on him. In that moment, the thought comes to him, sudden and unsurprising and fully formed, that there's no end to it. That this is same hurt, always the same hurt, round and round. Energy doesn't die, it can't, it just changes, turns everything into a movement with the same destination: back to where it started.
And despite that, he still reaches out - instinctively, desperately: tries to push into Cain’s mind, to stop him, to find something, anything to grab onto. Cain’s head is a furnace: blistering, shapeless rage, too hot to touch. There’s no language left in it, just hurt and fire and noise, and Charles recoils: tries again, slips off like oil on water. Years of hate and fear, caustic, burning, and stop doesn’t exist.
A sharp spike of nausea stabs through him, and he reels back, gasping, flinching, dizzy, and doesn't mean to spill his mind out, to unfurl it past the gravel, and the pain, the feeling of ribs fracturing, going further, finding - Erik, from so many years ago, coming back to save him this time, to stop the bleeding with his careful band aids and his gentle love. His car door slamming, his mind made up, his palms no longer rubbed red from overthinking.
Cain flies backwards: tears away with a roar of disbelief and rage. He lands hard into the side of his own car, head thudding wetly against the passenger window. It cracks, but holds. Metal form shackles around his arms.
Charles rolls onto his back, trying to ease the pressure on his ribs, wheezing.
Erik is shucking off his jacket. He slips it underneath Charles's head, gentle, his phone hovering in the air beside them. "Police and ambulance," he says into the receiver, rattling off the address as Charles tries to say, "I'm fine."
"You don't know that," Erik snarls, abandoning him quickly as Cain roars and strains against his bonds.
The police are on their way, Charles tells Moira instead. Don't worry.
He's sure she's never had a voice in her head like Charles's, and certainly never one as distressed as his, but her usual forced calm is there. He retreats, hearing Erik ask, "Can you calm him down?"
Like suddenly he’s supposed to stare into people's souls, bend people and break them with his mind.
He tries to shake his head. "Doesn't work on him," he repeats to the sky above. Grey, overcast, a cold breeze sweeping past. It's going to rain in a few hours.
"Charles," Erik says, sounding like he's repeating himself. "Can you breathe?"
"Yeah, fine," he replies. "Just concussed."
He promptly rolls over and vomits, blood mixed in with the sick. "Fuck," he gasps.
"It's all right, I've got him," Erik says, one hand coming to rest high on Charles's back just as Cain roars again.
Erik disappears from his side. "He's very strong," Charles spits, and immediately gags again.
"Is it drugs?"
"It's not drugs," he says, breathing shallowly. "It's just Cain."
When the police come pouring in through the wrought iron gates of the drive, his only thought is that there's too many of them for one man.
The paramedics bundle them into the kitchen, Rebecca not looking at anyone, Kevin eating cereal from the box, like nothing's happened. Two soggy bowls on the island, a spilled glass of orange juice.
He doesn't know how to fix it.
Erik talking on the phone nearby, Charles's blood on both of them.
He doesn't know why he came.
The paramedics want to take him to the hospital. He refuses, gently, at first, then less politely, before one of them, a woman in her forties, hard, tattooed neck, tired of his shit - finally - says, "Sir, don't be stupid."
At last, someone giving him clear instructions. He could laugh.
They buckle him into the ambulance, and in his sore head, he tries to give Moira instructions. Change the locks, and tell the police everything, you've done nothing wrong, please stay -
It might be a concussion, after all, he says to the paramedics. He has had his fair share of them, he babbles, concerned that they don't find that reassuring; says that he's breathing and awake, and painfully so.
The last thing he sees before they leave is Erik, standing just outside the stately double door, clad in Charles's blood.
It's definitely a concussion, they tell him at the hospital. But nothing's offset, or displaced, just fractured in hairlines. Not much to do. They glue his eyebrow and give him Advil and make him sit on a chair behind a curtain and think, alone, and much later an officer comes to takes his statement - they use their iPhone to document his bleeding and bruised parts, which just seems humiliating, for some reason. His face, his arms, the torn skin at his temple. Pull up your shirt, sir, and bare your stomach to me. Standard procedure, they say.
How are the kids, he wants to ask. Will they grow up with holes in their hearts; does one person's love erase another person's hate - in what world will there be a balance, and in what world can this violence that passes from parent to child ever just end.
"It can take a long time to heal from domestic violence," the officer tells him sincerely.
How can anything heal if it doesn't end, he wants to ask. How does that work.
"Can I call you a taxi?" they ask, but his phone seems fine despite the fractured glass, so he begs off, bandaged and bruised and dirty.
I'm coming home for a bag, he texts Moira. Don't let the kids see me.
He can't imagine Erik stuck around, and when he parks outside the house, it’s empty of cars.
He doesn’t try to explain or comfort anyone. He just goes upstairs, rinses the blood off his hands, and changes his shirt. Packs a small duffel. Stuffs it in the boot of his car. Claws a shaking hand through his hair behind the wheel, snagging on dried blood, and drives away.
No Dunhill out the window, no mist over the reservoir. No looking at the fake little lake, no scuffing of shoes on uneven gravel. The way-church gates, closed and uneven, rotting and falling apart. The car slightly hacking uphill, not thinking about it. Leaving lonely bunkers, the prison in his mind, the house sitting silent, changed and different but still the same. Still the same.
Raven calls.
"Where are you?" she asks.
"New York," he replies. He didn't run very far this time. Feeble.
"Why?"
"Sometimes you need to walk away," he says.
"Yeah," says her voice on the other end. "Sometimes."
Magnus picks up on the sixth ring, surprise and worry colouring his voice.
"Charles?" he says, instead of hello. A mix of Swedish and Scouse, warm and welcoming and familiar.
"Hi, Magnus." He tries in turn to sound warm, and safe, and whatever else he isn't.
"Is - how are you?"
"Yeah, no, I'm fine," he hurries to say. "Sorry, I didn't mean to - I just wanted to catch up. I should've texted."
"No, that's fine," Magnus says, a chuckle in the breathy reassurance. "I'm just watching the rugby."
"Yeah?" Charles grabs at the lifeline gratefully. "How are we doing?"
"Oh, it's all rubbish. I don't know why I do this to myself."
"You do say that all the time."
"I should get into football," Magnus complains.
"And yet," Charles says, "you never do."
It's like following old railway lines to familiar places, finding the groves easily. "I'm back home, now," Charles says, and Magnus asks, "In Oxford?" and maybe that burns a little - he could be, he thinks, he could be anywhere; hell, he could go back to London and see Magnus, could do it in just a day. "America," he replies instead, but doesn't elaborate.
"Was there something you wanted?" Magnus asks before they ring off. It's a gentle question, and a probing one, and Charles finds his throat closing up.
"Not really," he croaks. "I just..."
"It's okay," Magnus says. "I was just curious. Are you sure you're okay?"
"Well," he replies. "It's all relative."
"Most things are," Magnus agrees. "Call me again if they become more absolute."
"I will. Thanks, Magnus."
New York is noisy, he thinks when the call is over. He looks out the window—twenty-some floors up, the city seems less like a real place, more like he's hovering over a simulation. The myriad of voices are easy to shut out, the sirens just a backdrop, traffic a constant buzz.
He should have said my mother died, and asked, maybe, how are you really, Magnus? Did I break you? I tend to. I tend to use people, and discard them, and then trail back years later just to see the damage I did. To see if I can run my fingers through the holes in you, the scars I wore into you.
He looks at himself in the mirror until the bruises and bandages stop making him nauseous. It takes a few days. They turn yellow, sickly brown, and stop hurting so bad. Wounds heal with the right care, and heads, too, with a little luck. The world rights itself after a week or so, but that doesn't bring clarity. He doesn't know what to do.
It's a nice hotel, and money gets you aspirin, no questions asked. A second bathrobe if you ruin the first one with blood. An extra pillow for a sore back. A concierge who lets the police up without blinking, who sends someone to serve coffee and tea on a gilded trolley before disappearing, wordlessly, like they can guess the shape of the pain he’s in.
"And the children?" the female detective asks. "Are they mutants?"
He levels her with a look he hopes Erik would be proud of.
"Whether they are or not, it emphatically doesn't matter," he snaps.
It would be a kindness, he thinks, if the concierge also showed them out.
When Erik does text him, it's not where are you, or what the fuck was that, or even are you alive. It's just, Can I see you?
What could anyone even say to that.
Erik looks - rough. Maybe that's not a nice thing to notice, and much less to be surprised by, but Charles does, and he is. Erik has dark, severe circles under his eyes, and the fine lines that only used to appear when he smiles are there in this new, austere look. He assesses Charles silently, snagging, just like Charles had, on the palette of his terrorised face.
"You left," is the first thing Erik says.
Charles motions him in, locks the door behind him. There's cold tea and a minibar, but Erik doesn't want anything.
"Are you okay?" Charles asks him, and Erik's jaw hardens.
"I'm fine," he says. "You left."
"I didn't want the kids to have to see - this -" Charles says and waves a hand. He tries for deflecting, comes across as disparaging. "Me. I'm not exactly pleasant to look at right now."
"Considering how I thought I arrived just in time to witness your murder last week," Erik bites out, "I'd say you're looking remarkably well."
Charles draws a long breath to apologise.
Deflates.
Erik apologises instead. "That was harsh. Sorry."
"No, I deserved that."
"Deserve." Erik says it with derision, but, curiously, not at Charles. "Can we sit?"
Charles leads him to the bed, where he takes a seat with his bruises and his aches, his last band aid, and his loose pyjama pants and the complimentary slippers, on the edge. The couch is still too hard, a bruised tailbone to thank.
It's an old building, but the window panes are thick, muffling the sound of rush hour outside. Charles wonders where Erik parked, if he found a spot in this jungle of a city, or if he made one for himself with his powers. The light filters in pale from the glass of the building opposite, the day turning to late afternoon.
Despite asking, Erik doesn't join him. Charles thinks he can read a lot into the way Erik looks at his face, his ribs rising and falling, in how he stands too many feet apart, but he doesn't.
"What's going to happen?" Erik asks, and the absurdity of the question nearly has Charles snorting. Why on earth Erik thinks to ask Charles that is beyond him. He's rarely the first person asked to deal, to take control, to manage.
He wants to say, I don't know and I don't want to know, but he realises there is so much to lose if he just - lets go.
So he says, "I’m not sure. There's a restraining order on Cain, for Moira and the family. Me. They released him on bond, so I suspect he's run home to daddy." Kurt. Charles swallows. "I haven't heard anything from Kurt. I haven't figured out what to do. I don't know what I should do."
"What do you want to do?" Erik asks, brusque, impatient.
"I want to watch him rot in hell," Charles sneers, wrenching the words out. "But I'm going to fix it."
It's true. He is going to fix it, as soon as a viable solution appears, magically, and presents itself to his aching head.
"I'll sue him to 1997 and back," he tells Erik. "I'm not going to let him lay a hand on those kids. I don't care what I have to do."
It's fantastical, but Erik smiles suddenly: he's relieved. Too many teeth, as always, like he doesn't quite know where to stop. "All right," Erik says. "Will you let me help?"
Charles stares at him. "Can I stop you?"
"Depends on what you say next."
Charles, wisely, doesn't speak. Erik's smile drops, but he no longer looks so hard, so drawn.
"What you did to me was - wrong," he tells Charles, voice forced soft and gentle. “You violated me.”
Charles nods. Keeps nodding.
"I always thought you never meant to do it. That I was being...", he trails off. "That I was too much, that you felt you had no other choice. That you had to protect yourself from me. It fucked me up, Charles. For a long time."
"It's on me."
"I know." He says it like it's easy. Just another truth, like grass should be green, and magpies should nest in the trees and be left in peace. "Even knowing why you did it doesn't fix that. But it helps."
"I'm sorry."
"I know that, too."
He has never known Erik to be cruel, only accidentally, so he asks - thinking it might be something he could give - "So what do you want from me, Erik?"
And Erik looks at him, and says, "You," and, like he's seeing Charles clearly for the first time since he came, he comes close enough to trace that last bandaid with his fingertips. "Yeah," he says, having made sure. "You."
It's a gentle gut-punch, and Charles wants to say, with honesty, I'll try to let you mean it. Because he doesn’t know how that’s possible, or how he’s going to be able to move forward with it. If forgiveness is a long process, he doesn’t know what that looks like, or what he will have to agree to along the road.
Instead of all that, he says, for once, "Okay. You can have that."
Erik watches him for a beat, to make sure he doesn't retract or run away, for sure, and then asks, "And what do you want, Charles?"
"I- " he stutters. "I - I'd like- "
Erik kneels, comes down to his level. "Tell me what you need," he simplifies, closer to Charles. "Right now."
Want and need. He's learned to live with his wants, afraid he’ll somehow try to justify them as needs and commit the same sin all over again. What’s the difference, otherwise, between I want you to be happy and I need to make you happy? The road to hell, and all that, blinding you.
"I need you to undress," Charles gets out, biting back an apology. "If you'd like. Would you?"
Erik smiles. Happy. His long fingers start in on the white button-down he has on, wrinkled, like he hadn't thought of ironing it. His chest, his golden-red hair, and then to undo the cuffs.
"You're too gorgeous," he quietly tells the flat dark of Erik's nipples.
"Too gorgeous for what?"
His shoulders as he stands, fluidly, to shake out his white shirt, hang it around the back of a chair, toned, broad. He creates a little pile on the seat, socks and undershirt, plain white, too.
Me, Charles thinks. Certainly not for the hotel.
"You're ridiculous," Erik decides.
"Probably."
Erik slips the button on his pants through the hole, perfectly content being watched.
Sex doesn't unnerve Charles. Hasn't even made him nervous in a long time. But there is such intimacy in the way Erik pulls at the fabric of his underwear, down over his thick thighs, over his straight knees, the raised ridges of his shins. He even folds his boxers, but his lips are twitching while he does it.
It strikes Charles, for the first time and far too late, that Erik is good at openness. That Charles has fallen far behind at it, running away.
"I told you before that I didn't plan any of this," he says. He has to close his eyes when Erik turns to him fully, and fully naked. "I didn't. But I could have let you be. I could have come home and not forced you to see me every day. I think I've always known that I am -" he swallows - "easier to like after repeated exposure."
What he means is similar to what he says. I didn't mean to come home and set fire to the life you built. I had hoped to exist without picking everything apart. I’m easier to stomach if you’re already used to me.
Erik pushes him flat on his back on the bed and says, "Aren't we all, Charles?"
He wasn't really thinking about sex at all when he asked Erik to undress. It was vulnerability Erik was looking for, and nothing’s more vulnerable than letting someone else know your needs.
Erik seems to sense it, lays his heavy body only half on top of Charles, gentle of his aches, even the ones he can't see, and he presses his forehead into Charles's temple. It's the most anyone has ever invited him before.
Charles swallows through a throat that feels thick. He puts his fingertips to Erik's head, moves them through his hair, the thin skin of his forehead, feeling the bone underneath, until Erik is shuddering on top of him. There's fear there - here - he feels. There's a stubborn decision to disregard that fear.
Outside, the low city noise softens by degrees. The sun has dipped behind one of the taller buildings, and the light in the room has begun to shift—cooler now, pale blue-grey crawling in along the floor. Charles watches it edge toward the bed. Soon they’d need to switch on the lamps. He doesn't move.
You see small things and you think it's a picture, Raven had told him. Maybe the small things are all he's ever seen. He hadn't seen his mother for all she was, that's certain. He'd seen the place where Erik held his affection for Charles and he'd erased it: what amounted to the tip of the iceberg, the flower without the roots. I had nothing, Erik had said, and it just grew back anyway.
When Erik rises to his elbow above him, Charles follows him with his hand, loathe to unlink their minds, despite the raw nature of his own.
"We're not the same as we were," Erik says out loud. Stating a fact.
I hope not, he answers. I hope I'm not.
Erik kisses him, gentle, his lips soft.
Charles feels himself slow to respond. It can’t be this easy.
One hand finds his cheek, the other his side, warm through the fabric.
The second kiss is slower. Breath catching, mouth opening just a little. His fingers stay where they are, curled against Erik’s scalp, gripping hair in his fist. He can feel Erik’s heartbeat in his lips, a foreign, alien sensation. In the hand carefully pressed to his ribs he feels the weight of Erik as he shifts, just enough to brush their legs together. Charles sucks in a breath and closes his eyes.
“Okay?” Erik whispers, mouth against his jaw.
Charles doesn't have to speak to tell him it's all too good. Erik's fingers are steady as they ruck up the hem of the worn t-shirt he'd packed in a panic, bloodied, beaten, fleeing. His skin flares with every inch of it exposed to air. He isn’t used to being treated like porcelain.
Erik leans in to kiss the hollow of his throat, the bruised edge of his collarbone. His stubble scrapes faintly as he moves lower, tracing down the centre of his chest. Charles’s hips shift involuntarily. He fists the sheets beneath him and anchors himself in the weight of Erik above him, and in Erik’s steady mind concentrating, in the deliberate pace of him. In the soft breath that hitches when Erik's hips come to press against his leg.
“Erik,” he breathes.
Erik lifts his head at that. Watches him for a beat. Then he kisses him again, even slower this time, lips barely moving against his. His hand traces downward, past Charles’s ribs, over the soft give of his stomach, the yellowed edges of bruises, pausing at the hem of his pyjama pants.
Charles arches into the touch, breath stuttering, but Erik stills him. “Your back,” he says, voice low. “Tell me what not to do.”
Charles exhales shakily. “I’m okay,” he says, but Erik doesn’t move. “Lower left,” Charles adds. “If you’re putting weight on me - just mind that.”
Erik nods. “Okay.”
Then, the heat of Erik’s hand on him, firm and careful. Charles lets out a sound, something caught between surprise and pleasure, and Erik responds by tugging the sweats down with both hands, and leaning down to put him in his mouth.
Charles’s breath punches out of him. He’s shifting involuntarily, but Erik adjusts with him, mindful, one hand braced beside him on the bed, the other holding his hip. The thought that he could have had this, even before, this benign consideration, is overwhelming. The warm pressure of Erik’s mouth, the precise rhythm of it, sends goose bumps down his legs, his sides. He threads his fingers through Erik’s hair again and murmurs something soft, senseless. Gratitude, probably.
By the time the lights in the buildings across the avenue begin to flicker on, the room has darkened into soft shapes and shadows. The city lights cast honey-coloured pools on the carpet, and Charles thinks absently that this suite has seen its share of people pretending nothing’s wrong until the minibar runs out. Perhaps a few last chances, too - this one included.
It must be close to midnight when he wakes with a gasp. Some nightmare - never very clear when he opens his eyes. Terror like iron on his tongue, but the images fading fast. Erik's arm across his chest, falling when he sits up.
Erik, murmuring a question. Sirens outside the windows, nothing unusual in this city, but a frantic feeling stuck in his throat anyway.
"Let me," Charles asks, hopes he doesn't demand, and Erik makes space for him between his legs, spreads them for Charles, no hesitation. If only they could, Charles thinks, does everything but remove his pants, kisses Erik deep and forceful, grinds into him until Erik is hard and moaning under him.
"Do you have a condom?" he asks, hiking Erik's leg up, getting even closer.
Erik swears, a negative, and Charles groans. "It's a very nice hotel."
Erik stills his hips, pushing Charles's head back, asks, "You want to call room service for condoms?"
"There are worse things," he argues. “Though I’m not sure they’ve handled both the police and - that - in one day."
He decides he can live with that.
Erik stares, breath laboured, pupils blown. "Hang on," he sighs then. "If it's that important, I might have a spare in my wallet."
He rolls it onto Charles, and with nothing else at hand, they have to be unhurried, despite the electricity coursing through Charles. He feels himself infecting Erik with it, but it's sweet, almost.
Jamie had been passionate, and quick to please, but Erik is thorough, and Charles wants desperately to please him. It's a bearable moment, at first, but then when Erik rolls them over, and sinks down on him fully and it starts building for real, it becomes unbearable, and it breaks quietly, just a soft, shuddering release and Erik’s hips under his hands, his mind a colourful dance over Charles.
Erik ties off the condom, cleans them up, and Charles can't remember ever being so taken care of.
Someone laughs in the corridor outside. Erik pushes his face into the sweat on Charles's stomach. He breathes deep, says, contemplative, "We never used condoms, before. Back in 97."
"No one had ever touched us," Charles murmurs, his fingers in Erik's hair.
"Yeah. You were my first."
"You were mine."
"My first crush," Erik amends. "My first. You know."
"Yeah," Charles says. "Like I said."
Their breathing syncs.
"I can't change it," Charles says, finding to his horror that his voice breaks at the end.
"You can't change it," Erik agrees. He speaks into the middle of Charles's chest, right between the dips of his rib-cage folding inwards. "Come back," he says. "Come home."
"All right," he says.
Sleep is thin, but dreamless. Morning comes, golden, through the curtains. Breakfast arrives far too early, exactly on time, and Erik despairs at the amount of food prepared for just one, but he sips the coffee and makes a pleased sound. "Better than yours," he says. "Less aggressively strong."
Charles pauses. "By 'yours', you're referring to the coffee I have been making for you for free over - what, the last year?"
Erik smiles into his cup. “You should try working on accepting corrections cheerfully.”
Charles lobs a diced strawberry at him. It lands wetly, leaving a red streak in middle of his chest. Erik ignores it, says, "My point exactly."
Before he leaves, Erik presses a kiss to the side of Charles’s cheek, one to his forehead. "See you soon," he says, and goes.
A sleepy valet hands Charles the keys to his car and offers to pack his things for him. He tips outrageously, of course: has left a tip for every bad feeling he had in that hotel, convinced it helps.
He folds himself into the driver's seat, turns on the radio, shucks off his coat in the early spring sun. Hums along to some acoustic cover, drums his thumbs on the wheel.
He comes up on the house like always, slowly, creeping from the end of the long drive. It looms, of course it looms. Stone-heavy, set in its ways.
But in the garden, the apple trees are blooming.
Notes:
The End ❤️
Pages Navigation
LeighAdam on Chapter 1 Wed 30 Oct 2024 05:30AM UTC
Comment Actions
PandaViking on Chapter 1 Mon 04 Nov 2024 10:59PM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 1 Mon 24 Mar 2025 03:15PM UTC
Comment Actions
Gerec on Chapter 1 Tue 05 Nov 2024 01:17AM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 1 Mon 24 Mar 2025 03:18PM UTC
Comment Actions
teacup_gremlin on Chapter 1 Sun 23 Feb 2025 08:59AM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 1 Sun 23 Mar 2025 09:34AM UTC
Comment Actions
BobbieW on Chapter 1 Sat 29 Mar 2025 03:03PM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 1 Wed 16 Apr 2025 12:47PM UTC
Comment Actions
vvividlyy on Chapter 1 Thu 24 Apr 2025 11:56AM UTC
Comment Actions
LeighAdam on Chapter 2 Tue 05 Nov 2024 01:12AM UTC
Comment Actions
Gerec on Chapter 2 Tue 05 Nov 2024 01:21AM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 2 Mon 24 Mar 2025 03:20PM UTC
Comment Actions
PandaViking on Chapter 2 Tue 05 Nov 2024 03:58PM UTC
Comment Actions
joshriku on Chapter 2 Mon 11 Nov 2024 11:44PM UTC
Comment Actions
pinkcatafalque on Chapter 2 Wed 27 Nov 2024 06:46PM UTC
Comment Actions
ana8lle on Chapter 2 Sat 30 Nov 2024 09:56AM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 2 Mon 24 Mar 2025 03:15PM UTC
Comment Actions
PandaViking on Chapter 3 Mon 17 Feb 2025 10:35PM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 3 Mon 24 Mar 2025 03:31PM UTC
Comment Actions
Darkeybutterfly on Chapter 3 Tue 18 Feb 2025 12:35AM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 3 Mon 24 Mar 2025 03:28PM UTC
Comment Actions
Gerec on Chapter 3 Tue 18 Feb 2025 04:04AM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 3 Mon 24 Mar 2025 03:14PM UTC
Comment Actions
LeighAdam on Chapter 3 Tue 18 Feb 2025 04:27AM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 3 Mon 24 Mar 2025 03:26PM UTC
Comment Actions
vvividlyy on Chapter 3 Fri 30 May 2025 12:41PM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 3 Wed 11 Jun 2025 12:17PM UTC
Comment Actions
StillOhana on Chapter 3 Sat 14 Jun 2025 09:17PM UTC
Comment Actions
LeighAdam on Chapter 4 Fri 28 Mar 2025 12:46AM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 4 Wed 16 Apr 2025 01:46PM UTC
Comment Actions
Gerec on Chapter 4 Fri 28 Mar 2025 01:18AM UTC
Comment Actions
Isolee on Chapter 4 Wed 16 Apr 2025 01:41PM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation