Work Text:
A remix of Repeat Offenses by Populuxe, written for the X-Men Remix 2025.
2.
When Edie calls for the second time in as many months, he's half-way through his third flute of champagne, and silently talking to Emma from across the bland conference space. Erik had compared these fundraises to badly-executed rich-people's chess. Moving funds and attention at will without stakes; Charles's red lips the all-powerful queen. Say pretty please, and the deal's done.
Emma's attention sharpens into a dangerous point. She appears next to him before he hangs up.
"I have to go," he tells her. "Something came up."
She narrows her eyes at him, brilliant, uncanny and pale blue. "What, exactly?"
"Something private," he says low, and Emma understands.
"You don't need that drama, Charles," she tells him, equally low. Drama, he thinks, drama is an ex in jail. Again.
Behind her, senator Ross clocks them. He starts walking over.
"Please," he begs. "He needs me."
She tries to hide it, but her upper lip tugs into a thing of disgust. "He needs to grow up. He's a terrorist: what we do is important," she says, and Charles could finally say he's not so sure anymore, that nothing they do seem to make an impact: that sometimes when he goes to bed he feels so empty he's afraid one night he might just fall into the darkness and never find his way out. Nothing changes around them - and he feels himself growing smaller every day. Erik is larger than life: Charles could never compete.
He doesn't say that, of course. But Emma takes his glass anyway so he can wheel out before Ross catches them.
He tells Erik over burnt coffee, linoleum table, single-sheet napkins, that he was happy to leave, happy to come, happy to wait in the biting cold to bail him out from a protest gone sideways, and he doesn't miss the way Erik lingers on the cut of his suit. He's afraid to know why.
Erik, who is so used to violence he doesn't even seem to notice how people stare at his bloodied face, his bruises, his small brushes with -
With death, frankly, Charles thinks. Erik, out of anyone, should know how quickly life can turn. A cop with a baton, this time, a mutantphobe with a government pay check: potentially life-altering. But Erik just shrugs, and he treats his own body like a battlefield, as if he is a soldier, only no one pays him to stand at the front and taunt dangerous men until they hurt him so bad it's difficult to look at him and not feel like your heart is breaking.
He doesn't know how Edie does it.
He'd gotten used to not feeling that falling sensation each time the phone rings and it's her. The feeling of losing your footing, the ground disappearing: he knows what it is. The amygdala signals, the nervous system reacts through your spine, your blood vessels constrict, pulling blood from your skin, your organs: time seems to narrow into something cold and slow.
That doesn't stop it happening.
It's difficult to say there's a difference between martyrdom and plain self-destruction, and I can't watch you do this thing that you feel you have to do. Putting your body - the only one you have - on the line again and again - and the childish urge to say can't we just talk can't we just argue like human beings -
But to Erik, activism is not a scale: it's a do or don't. Even when Edie, in her advanced years, can't come to bail him out of jail, he's still proud of what he's done. Even when what he's done is got beaten by a cop, and ended up arrested for fighting back.
Charles looks at this man he used to love so intensely that everything and everyone else seemed to pale in contrast, and he feels the same terror that haunted him for the three years of their relationship. The terror that one day Erik won't come home, and Edie is calling to ask him why.
So he drops everything to come post bail, reduced to the most important, most hated aspect of his person: being rich.
0.
The thing about change is that it hurts.
When he got the wheelchair, rather besides the grief and the pain and the loss, his wrists would ache and ache in the evenings. Bright pain, thick swellings of red-hot sears, and Erik took to gently massaging them on the couch, in bed as he read, in that awful, shitty car he drove, one hand on the wheel. Careless and caring.
Micro-traumas, the specialists called them. Repetitive strain. There's no easing into using a wheelchair, he finds out, and he doesn't feel stronger after weeks and months, just tired.
Erik kept it up, unasked for. He was good at things like that.
When everything fell apart, Charles missed those simple things the most.
It's devastatingly mundane, in hindsight. But they were the stuff he thought, at the time, were the foundation of their relationship. Things you could build on, that would hold them together through the bad.
Turns out, it was just something Erik did because he thought it had to be done.
4.
He leaves right before his keynote, the next time Edie calls. New York's most prestigious conference, and he lies and says family emergency, to bail Erik and his friends out for half a million dollars in Virginia. This time, there was an explosion: and Erik, being Erik, is mad he was falsely accused of orchestrating it. Charles thinks about overpressure shearing the blood vessels in the brain, negative pressure tearing at tissue, tympanic membrane bursts, vascular emboli from gas forced into the blood stream.
There are so many bridges burning, actively, as he ends up alone in Erik's wreck of car on the way back, before it, too, breaks and they're suddenly trapped in the deep darkness of Westchester, sheltering from winter and night inside the house that birthed him.
Whatever flaws he has, he traces back here.
Erik watches the chandelier light up and scoffs, hard, thinks in capital letters, about class, privilege, and how he's happy Edie never had to see this house. Charles agrees, of course.
He scoffs: but he eats the food, he drinks the wine. Of course there's wine, there's always wine.
"Ma said you had someone," he says across a sitting room, a polished dark table, to Charles sinking into an uncomfortable sofa. It sounds accusatory, but Charles can't see if the accusation is you lost him or how could you?
The answer to the first is the explanation to the second. He couldn't, so he lost. It really isn't any more complicated than that.
"I dated," he says. "It was brief."
"Who was it?"
Charles isn't surprised at Erik's ignorance. He makes it a point of pride to remain ignorant, in fact, of anyone who might be termed a celebrity.
"His name is Warren," Charles replies. "We met at a charity function. I blew him in the bathroom and he dumped me six months later, just before Christmas. Anything else?"
"Warren," Erik says, and Charles can feel the moment it clicks for him. "Warren Worthington?"
"Yes," he says. "Warren Worthington. The third, if it matters."
"Wow," he drawls. "Your mother must have been proud. Like calls to like, I suppose."
"And still fools keep each other company," Charles retorts. "Clearly."
Erik swallows hard, and something cracks. He starts laughing. "If only because no one else will have us."
He doesn't know how true that is for Charles. Erik has Edie, his posse, his club of die-hard fans and believers. Charismatic, and beautiful, in a poisonous combination, is Erik, has always been. It had been a heady thing, the first time they fell together, to choose chaos over rigidity. The difference between them, though, has always been that Erik has something left on the other side of that. Charles has always been the lonely one, despite everything.
Warren had been effortless. He'd never asked about Erik, even when Erik made about as many headlines in New York as Warren, at that time, though in vastly different papers. They'd spent their evenings in glass-walled apartments above the city, in private cars, on marble floors, with crystal glasses and wheel-chair ramps that matched the décor, and it had been a relief to be with someone who didn't need saving. He was easy to love, and easier to leave behind.
Charles looks at his own hands in his lap and the way he's kneading his wrists as if they hurt. They don't. Erik looks like he wants to reach over, do it for him.
"Come here," he tells Erik.
Maybe it's a testament to what Erik believes about himself that he does. He sits down beside Charles on the couch and he stares at him, wide-eyed, at Charles's hands grasping at him too hard, and he asks, "What are you doing?" with terror in his inflections, and Charles kisses him like they used to kiss each other, because there's no way to say. It's not because this will fix it - this is going to hurt. It's because the house is too quiet, and because no one has loved another well here before. It's because of the way Erik hurled Warren like a weapon, and because of the accuracy of his aim.
It's mostly because the only language they had before was touch, and they have stripped themselves of it, and now they don't understand each other.
"I don't care anymore," Charles tells him, chants, almost, like a mantra that has to make sense for this to happen.
Erik grunts like it hurts, and then kisses back - he kisses back so hard that he makes Charles lose his balance against the decorative cushions of the hard sofa. He thrusts his tongue inside Charles's mouth and fists his hand in Charles's hair, inhaling through his nose, taking possession, and his breath comes in ragged, angry bursts through his nose.
Erik is torn up inside his own head, between reason and emotion, such an old war, and Charles could nudge him either way so easily. He doesn't appreciate how vulnerable he is like this, how easily manipulated, how tempting he is, when he staggers and teeters on the edge of rage and lust.
Erik is claustrophobic, the way he can't fixate on what he wants, and the house is cavernous and oppressing at the same time. Charles thinks that if Erik needs this to hurt, too, he's going to help him.
Erik arranges Charles the way he wants him, the way he used to do. He swings immobile legs up on the couch and forces his way between them, and it's easy to feel wanted like this. It's easy to think this is about him, when Erik shows how well he knows him. He grips Charles by the throat with one hand and holds him down hard at the hip with the other, and moves harsh and focused between his legs, creating a pleasure so fast and consuming that Charles gasps, again and again.
It's sex disguised as a fight, but that's okay. Charles would rather have this, Erik's body, whole and alive, than anything else. Besides, fucking is mechanical, in the end, or it should be; but it takes a second for it all to slip a little sideways, just a degree out of order. Erik's hold moves from Charles's throat to his neck, into a cradle. When Erik pants against his neck, somehow, there's relief in it, and it sickens him, sickens them both.
Charles does the worst thing he can do, and leans into it. He pushes an old memory into Erik, a loved one, just an ordinary day, when Erik had him on their bed, and when time had seemed to stretch slow for hours as he fucked him, edging himself and bringing Charles over too many times, until he was sobbing freely from it. Erik had thrust into him and murmured his love for the feeling into Charles's deaf ears, then pulled back, and started over when he'd come back from his peak.
Come back, he imagines saying, over and over. He imagines an entire life in the minutes that Erik gives him, and he feels how deep Erik has missed him, how he adds details to the memory that weren't Charles's - how he had looked, eyes red-rimmed and body flush, how he had felt through coming, and in coming down, how strong and taut and pliable and soft. How Erik had tried to make it last forever, because he knew it was ending.
When it's over, Erik keeps kissing him. He groans and he pants, before he quiets and becomes gentle, adoring, devoted to Charles's swollen lower lip, until Charles can't feel the air in his lungs anymore.
"So good," Charles finds himself murmuring, and Erik hums, his mind flying high.
He wakes in the morning to an empty bed, so familiar, and he knows he's just treading water before he drowns again.
Erik comes out of the bathroom with a soft smile on his face and Charles knows what he's going to have to do. Erik always does this - he makes Charles say the things they're both thinking, because he won't. It used to make him feel like the villain - now he thinks Erik needs it. Not just the clean break of a fight, but to hear out loud.
"I'm sorry," he says, and tells Erik, "This was a mistake", and Erik implodes. His insides turn cold and slippery with regret and anger and icy surprise. Charles feels all of it.
"Fuck you," he tells Charles sincerely. "And fuck your apology."
Erik thinks Charles cruel. To break up with someone, and then sleep with them, to pretend to be friends when their partnership is already played out.
Erik thinks friends are people ready to die for you. Charles is ready to die for Erik, but not for the same reasons.
He lies in his childhood bed in slow morning darkness and thinks; nothing has changed, despite the world revolving, time ticking. It's those specific synapses, their plasticity maintained, becoming more efficient: reinforcing the initial realisation - three years old, by now - that some things cannot be.
Erik still leaves with caustic fanfare, and stays silent in bitter rage, as always. And as always, before that: the metal of the wheelchair scrapes closer to the edge of the bed, easy to reach, even as Erik closes the door between them.
1.
When they were still together, this is what would happen:
At night after sex - and after clutching at Erik and telling him honestly that this is unequal to anything else he's ever had - he'd lie in the darkness and look up at the ceiling and feel tears sliding down his temples because he loved Erik, and he knew he couldn't bear to stay with him, and he knew that if he left he'd break his own heart and probably Erik's, too, and all the things Erik would tell him in anger as they fought and fought ceaselessly would seem to be true. That he never cared for a cause that couldn't be bought out, that he was never ready to stand up and say you have to go through me first.
He does, he would, for Erik, he would do anything if it meant he'd be safe - but there's nothing. One day Erik will throw himself in front of the wrong bullet, and then there'll be no more Erik, and never another person like Erik: never another person as compassionate and caring and selfish and rigid and principled as Erik, and never another person Charles could love as completely. Those are the thoughts you have as a teenager; thoughts that, as an adult, feel like they have to be just as true. What else is there, but this feeling in your gut? This pre-pain, this terror of not having, and the terror in the wake of that wave: that you've wasted three years, and neither of you have been made the better for it.
Sex was the only time he felt hopeful that whatever plagued them could be patched, smoothed over; when he thought maybe, if I just make him feel good, he'll stop seeking out pain and anger and resultless flagellations. If I could just be the best thing he'd ever felt, maybe he'll start looking for more things that feel as good, value them higher than this idealistic duty that drives him. Maybe. Maybe maybe maybemaybemay-
And then morning comes and Erik leaves and the disdain stretches taut between them until he comes home again, and nothing changes until one day he leaves and Charles tells him he doesn't have to come back, and that's the thing, it's good, it's change, raw and tearing and biting and if he doesn't get out of bed for days, that's a kind of evolution, too. It is, because it has to be.
Micro-trauma. Repetitive strain. Something must come out stronger on the other side.
Because, he thinks, there has to be a definitive low point that you hit somewhere between asking your boyfriend of several years to marry you, and him starting to laugh. This can only be the climb out.
3.
"Wait, what?" Edie, her eyes that are so different from Erik's, and her mouth, which is the exact same, puts down her coffee cup in the hand-painted saucer. "You proposed to Erik?"
Charles, in his old, chairless space at Edie's dining table, does the same. "He never said?"
Edie's eyes water, so sudden, red and shimmering. "He never said."
"Well." He lines up the pattern on the cup with the saucer's. "Obviously, he... Said no."
Edie covers her mouth with her hand, and it's just as well. He's never seen Erik cry, doesn't want to imagine how it looks when his lips turn down, when they shake.
"Oh, baby," she says through sniffles. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't be, it is what it is," he says, uselessly. "I knew Erik didn't believe in marriage. Doesn't. I don't know what I was thinking."
That last one? That's a lie.
"It's my fault." Edie casts about for a handkerchief: finds one in her jean pocket. "I wasn't a very good role model."
"That's not true."
"I used to tell him marriage was a tool of capitalism," she says on a chuckle. "That capitalism was a tool of the patriarchy, in turn."
"Well," he says again. "You're not wrong."
"I was, a little." She dries her eyes again. The blood vessels there, swelling. "Being happy is a revolution, too, you know. Refusing to be unhappy, it's an act of aggression."
"Obviously he wasn't happy with me."
"Oh, honey, I don't think that's true, either."
He smiles politely.
5.
When Edie calls again, there is something so heavy in his chest that he can hardly speak. He says, "I can't help him, Edie, I can't do this anymore," but she doesn't listen. She doesn't care, he feels, suddenly, that this is actively destroying him. That the Dean has expressed his disappointment, how Charles has become synonymous with a flake, that Emma won't talk to him anymore, that the last time he tried to let himself get picked up (hotel in NC, red wine, dick like a sequoia) he'd panicked at the feel of another man's hands on him.
She doesn't listen, won't, and when he inevitably arrives to help, no one is actually in trouble: it's just Edie, in the community center, and Erik, surprised to see him, and a crowd, gathering outside for a protest.
"You two have to talk," Edie says. "I'll be outside."
It's all there: the amygdala firing, the cold, ice-water feeling of falling, pale, clammy hands slipping on the push rims. "Edie," he finds himself pleading, "please, Edie, don't do this."
There's a moment where he thinks she hesitates - where the genuine emotion he propels toward her makes her unsure - but then she strengthens her resolve and she leaves.
They're alone in the crumbs of an AA-meeting, just finished, chairs stacked against the sides of the room, the smell of spilled coffee, the quiet susurrus of people outside the windows, single-paned but carefully clean.
One of the steel-framed, school-issue classroom chairs scrapes over the laminate floor. Its varnished plywood seat is scratched, but Erik sits down on it like he's taking the stand in court. Turned toward Charles, arms crossed, he waits with his foot braced.
Charles has to claw, inch by inch, it feels, to return his blood to the surface, to calm his jack-rabbit pulse.
"So according to my mother, you proposed to me," Erik says finally. "Next you'll say you didn't break up with me. Maybe I imagined that. Maybe a leprechaun did it."
"I'm not going to -"
"No, please, tell me what else I missed."
"I'm not saying you -"
"You felt free to accuse me in front of my mother, so go on, when did this proposal take place?"
"I didn't accuse you -"
Erik raises his voice, this time, a sharp yell. "Go on."
He squares up, takes a deep breath. "Do you remember Boston?"
Erik lifts a hand, bewildered, maybe, impatient. "When?"
"State v. Shaw. You were pushed into a steel fence during the protest. It was broken. You ended up in the hospital with a chipped rib that scraped your pleura. You had a partial lung-collapse."
Erik shrugs. "Okay?"
"They wouldn't let me in to see you."
"So?"
"So, I -" Charles sighs. "When you came out, I said, if we were married, I could've been there. If you would marry me, you could have my insurance. You laughed."
"Because that's ridiculous. You would've signed away a net worth of three billion dollars in order to see me in the hospital after a scrape?"
Charles looks him in the eyes, lined now, at his jaw working even after he's finished speaking. He wants to see it click for Erik. It doesn't.
"Yes," he says, heavy. "For that reason, and every other."
It's not often that Erik is speechless. Never, in Charles's experience, has he formed words with his lips and made no sound. He sits forward, elbows on knees, staring. Quietly, wearily, he asks, "You call that a proposal?"
"I call it a proposition."
"How romantic," Erik sneers.
"As if you'd want romantic," Charles sneers back. "You act like I don't know you, Erik. Being rejected was bad enough, you think I'd make it even worse for myself by, what, some grand gesture?"
"You know me, huh?"
"Yes. I do."
"Really. You're a telepath, Charles, and that has, apparently, made you delusional."
"Excuse me?"
"I would have said yes. If you wanted to marry me because you loved me, and you wanted a future together, yes, I would have accepted. But you framed it like a convenience. Like you were scared. Like you wanted more control over me than you already had."
Charles swallows. "I had none," he murmurs. "So I don't see how that works."
"You had everything," Erik says. "All of it."
"If I did, I would have used it to make sure you stopped doing this." He gestures out the window, the gathering mass of people, their anarchy, their idealism, their martyrdom served up.
Erik shakes his head. "Activism? No, you wouldn't."
"You don't know what I'm capable of," he hisses.
Erik snorts.
"What?" he demands.
"You don't even want me to stop."
"In what world - " he starts on a yell. "Fine," he amends. "Here's the truth. If I could take you out of the path of every baton, every raid, every cop with an axe to grind, I would. I’d pull you out and I'd lock you up somewhere until you see reason. I'd even force my way inside your head and change your mind, and you know I can do that."
Erik's mouth twitches. "And then what?"
"What do you mean?"
"You can't carve out what scares you and keep the rest."
He can feel the old drift toward persuasion humming under his tongue. He swallows it. "I could. I can."
Erik smiles like it pleases him, sharp and dangerous and with too many teeth, too close. "Boston. If I'd said yes, would you have stayed when it got worse?"
"Yes," Charles says. "And it would have gotten worse. But I'm not doing this - " he waves between them, " - anymore. I've set up a retainer with Morales - enough bail money to last you and Edie for a while. Use it, and stop using me."
The noise outside swells, a tight wave about to break. Erik glances over his shoulder, out the window. As if it's calling to him, specifically.
"Okay," Erik says. "I would have said yes. If you'd asked me to marry you for real."
"It was real," he murmurs, because it's difficult, isn't it, to say.
The chair creaks when Erik stands. He looks at Charles, and then he leaves.
###
The thing about change is that it still hurts.
Midnight. Phone face-down on the nightstand, vibrating: Morales, leaving a message. Protest dispersed, no injuries, charges unlikely.
He turns the screen down.
His wrists ache. He lies on his back and rubs them himself, thumb over tendon, patient pressure. Micro-trauma, repetitive strain, yada yada, bullshit. The body learns what you teach it.
He leaves the light off and feels the pain dim by degrees.
In the morning, Erik texts.
Make me stay next time.
It comes to him slowly. Small parts of the message carried in hesitant signals through his body, in echoes - of Erik’s pleasure, when he admitted to it, and of the way he always, without fail, presses every boundary and every line, ad absurdum, until Charles nearly snaps. Erik walking out, never wanting to.
He types, I will. Sends it.
Working over the tendons, the ligaments, he realises there's still a deep ache. For the first time, he thinks,
Good.