
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/703376.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      No_Archive_Warnings_Apply, Underage, Major_Character_Death
  Category:
      M/M, F/F, F/M
  Fandom:
      X-Men:_First_Class_(2011)_-_Fandom, Sneedronningen_|_The_Snow_Queen_-
      Hans_Christian_Andersen, Mass_Effect, Fa_yeung_nin_wa_|_In_the_Mood_for
      Love_(2000), Skyfall_(2012)_-_Fandom, James_Bond_(Movies), Harry_Potter_-
      J._K._Rowling, Doctor_Who_(2005), Cardcaptor_Sakura, Star_Wars_Original
      Trilogy, Community_(TV), Les_Misérables_-_All_Media_Types, Battlestar
      Galactica_(2003), Inception_(2010), The_Avengers_(Marvel)_-_All_Media
      Types, Young_Avengers, Marvel_Cinematic_Universe
  Relationship:
      Erik_Lehnsherr/Charles_Xavier, Female_Shepard/Liara_T'Soni, Emma_Frost/
      Sebastian_Shaw, Sean_Cassidy/Janos_Quested
  Character:
      Charles_Xavier, Erik_Lehnsherr, Emma_Frost, Sebastian_Shaw, Liara_T'Soni,
      Garrus_Vakarian, Kaidan_Alenko, Tali'Zorah_nar_Rayya, Jeff_"Joker"
      Moreau, EDI_(Mass_Effect), Female_Shepard, Raven_Darkholme, Ororo_Munroe,
      Anna_Marie_(Rogue), Elizabeth_Braddock, James_Bond, Moira_MacTaggert,
      Sean_Cassidy, Prince_Henry_of_Wales, Female_M_(James_Bond), Armando
      Muñoz, Angel_Salvadore, Saito_(Inception), Clint_Barton, Natasha_Romanov,
      Pepper_Potts, Billy_Kaplan, Logan_(X-Men), Hank_McCoy, Janos_Quested,
      Azazel_(X-Men), Original_Characters, Javik_(Mass_Effect), Doctor_Chakwas,
      Thane_Krios, Kurt_Wagner
  Additional Tags:
      30_Day_OTP_Challenge, 27_Days_of_OTP, self-imposed_challenge, Fairy_Tale
      Retellings, Young_Love, Holding_Hands, Ambiguous/Open_Ending, Cuddling,
      Synthesis_Ending, Fluff_and_Angst, Artificial_Intelligence, Alternate
      Universe_-_Still_Have_Powers, watching_a_movie, Kid_Fic, Chocolate,
      Infidelity, on_a_date, Unresolved_Sexual_Tension, always-a-girl!Charles_-
      Freeform, Alternate_Universe_-_Gender_Changes, Secret_Intelligence
      Service_|_MI6, Spies_&_Secret_Agents, Casual_Danger_Dialogue, Chatting_&
      Messaging, Sharing_Clothes, Snow_Day, Motorcycles, Cosplay, Tea,
      Conventions, Unconventional_Families, Families_of_Choice, Shopping, Tea
      Ceremony, Kimono, Lucid_Dreaming, Meetings_in_Dreams, Making_Out, Always-
      a-girl!Erik, Fingerfucking, Mansion_Fic, Alternate_Universe_-_Canon,
      Coffee_Shops, Ice_Cream, Alternate_Universe_-_War, Guerrilla_Warfare,
      Ambiguous_Relationships, Separations, Scars, Waking_Up, Morning_Rituals,
      Hotels, First_Kiss, Alternate_Universe_-_Boarding_School, Massachusetts
      Academy, Ghosts, Survivor_Guilt, Orphans, Spooning, Recreational_Drug
      Use, Alternate_Universe_-_College/University, Inheritance, Power_Swap,
      Inspired_by_Music, Suits, Suit_Porn, Urban_Fantasy, Magic_Revealed,
      Reality-bending, House_Music, Dancing, First_Meetings, Cooking, Hurt/
      Comfort, Sickfic, Mercenaries, dreamshare, Guns, Dream_Battles,
      extraction, Alternate_Universe_-_Restaurant, Kitchen_Brigade, Banter,
      Trash_Talk, Blow_Jobs, top!Charles, Sparring, Companionable_Snark,
      Duelling, Trenchcoats, Survival_Training, Staring, Held_Gaze, Weddings,
      Military_Wedding, Navy_Wedding, Space_Wedding, Inspired_by_Novel, Marine
      Corps, Babies, Alternate_Universe_-_Canon_Divergence, Photography,
      Winter, Birthday, doing_something_ridiculous, Up_All_Night, sharing_food,
      Getting_Together, Students, doing_something_sweet, allusion_to_mythology,
      Sleepiness, PTSD, Imprisonment, Mental_Breakdown, Altered_Mental_States,
      Mental_Instability, Rough_Sex, Barebacking, Rescue, Rescue_Missions
  Collections:
      ninemoons_42's_self-imposed_challenges
  Stats:
      Published: 2013-02-28 Completed: 2013-03-26 Chapters: 27/27 Words: 36045
****** 27 Days of OTP: The Charles/Erik Mostly AU Edition ******
by ninemoons42
Summary
     A collection of OTP-related fics with prompts taken from here. The
     fics will explore various themes and various AUs. Mostly Charles/Erik
     in XMFC, but that is subject to change.
     [I've tried to tag the pieces in general with everything that
     applies, partly to show how I approach the individual themes and
     partly to cover as many trigger warnings as possible. If I miss
     anything, please let me know and I'll do everything I can to tag
     accordingly.]
***** take my hand, and lead me *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Erik sped through the halls, black walls and white floors closing in on him.
Broken and blind and bleeding, his hands torn from the year of his desperate
quest: lashed with rough ropes and pricked by the blades of friend and of foe
alike, torn and tender and half frozen now. There was no way of knowing where
he was going, and with every step he could hear the Frost Queen coming closer,
the Frost Queen and the menacing shadow of her demonic consort.
He’d lost his way; he was fairly sure he’d passed this corner before. He was
running around in circles, and he was being herded to his death, as surely as a
lamb to market and thence beneath the knife.
He stumbled, and barely caught himself with his hands on the wall. The icy
touch seared him through fur and skin down into his bones, and he wept with the
futility of it, wept with the tears that only a broken heart could shed.
Come to me, a voice said to him.
Not the Frost Queen’s musical tinkling tones, beautiful and deadly.
A voice that he knew: the voice of the one whom he loved, and Erik had always
been helpless against it, and he threw himself heedlessly forward, into the
heart of the great castle, through the doors of its great hall.
And in that hall there was a circle of shattered glass, shattered ice,
shattered snowflakes, and within the circle stood a boy – but Erik blinked, and
the boy was gone. Standing in his place was a young man, pale and cold and
beautiful, ice in his hair and in his blue eyes, beautiful and changing like
summer skies in a storm.
He did not know that with every step toward the man in the circle he, too, was
changing: for when he’d begun this year, this quest, he had been a boy who had
never known sorrow or loneliness, but now he had been forced to grow by the
days and nights of endless searching, forced to grow in the despair that had
steadily taken over his heart, piercing into it like shards of snow.
The young man in the circle held a hand out to him, and called his name:
“Erik.” His voice was sweet and strange and powerful, easily filling the hall
with softly whispering echoes.
Erik looked into those blue eyes and suddenly, he knew who this was. “Charles,”
he said, hoarse and filled to the brim with happiness like blades. “Charles,
it’s you. I’ve been looking for you.”
“And I’ve been waiting for you,” Charles said. “Come here. Take my hand.”
Erik blinked, and heard the footsteps behind him, and saw the line drawn
between him and Charles. “Is it not forbidden to cross that circle?”
“It is forbidden to others, but not to you.” Charles’s smile was familiar and
strange at the same time, older, full of light and of darkness. “I have
mastered it. This, at least, is now mine.”
“But the castle.”
“That, too, will be mine. Or it will be ours. But give me your hand. I cannot
do this alone.”
“Charles, the Frost Queen is coming to kill us.”
When Charles laughed the entire hall shivered in time with his breaths. “Not if
I have anything to say about it.”
There was a flash of white in Erik’s vision, and a flash of night, and that was
what pushed him through the circle. The bits of ice at his feet parted for him,
or was that just his imagination?
Charles’s hand in his was cold and then warm.
“Come, Erik,” Charles said, and drew him close. “Let me take your pain away.
Let me close your wounds. Lend me your strength, and give me your heart. Take
mine in return. It was always yours.”
Erik seized both of Charles’s hands, then, and the motion came easily to him.
He was strong again, and he was whole, and only traces of his own blood
remained on his clothes.
“Thank you,” Charles whispered. “You’ve come so far.”
“Are you my Charles?” Erik whispered back. “Are you really him?”
“I am him and I am not him, as you are my Erik and yet you are also not,”
Charles said. “We are who we truly are, now.”
“What does that mean?”
Charles smiled, again, and this was a smile that Erik knew. “I did not know
that I loved you all those years in our little garret, Erik. I only knew that I
wanted to offer you roses in summer and I wanted to keep you warm in winter.
Now, I know what it meant when I watched over you when you could not sleep for
your nightmares. Now, I know why I could not be content unless you could smile
at me.”
Erik understood, and smiled at Charles. “I knew only that I wanted to be with
you. I did not know that I loved you. I know better now.”
Dimly, he became aware of shadows all around them, completely surrounding the
circle on the ice.
“Will you give me your heart, Erik?” Charles asked.
“Only if you will give me yours in return, Charles,” Erik said.
“Then so be it.” Charles raised their joined hands between them and placed a
kiss over Erik’s knuckles.
“So be it,” Erik echoed. “And from now on we will no longer be alone.”
There was a light coming from their hands – but Erik never saw it, because he
was lost in Charles.
Chapter End Notes
     This first fic is for the theme "Holding Hands". It is a takeoff from
     Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen", and owes part of its
     inspiration to aesc's Tumblr post here.
     The "Underage" warning applies to this chapter on a technicality, as
     the relationship between these versions of Charles and Erik begins
     when they are both little boys.
***** all of us have been changed *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
We’ve lost contact with the Commander!
Erik’s fingers fly rapidly over his consoles, and he doesn’t spare a glance for
the chatter on the comm lines: panicking voices, explosion after explosion
after explosion. He doesn’t spare a glance for the footsteps bearing down on
him, doesn’t have to look up into his screens to know that there are people
standing around him, everyone looking drawn and fearful where they haven’t
simply begun to blank out for the pain and for the blood and for the price that
they might all still have to pay.
Up ahead, he can see the Citadel: its arms are wide open, which had been one of
their objectives, but now he doesn’t know what’s coming next. The Crucible is
docked - and then what? And what of the Commander - what’s taking her so long?
She should have gotten in contact with them by now -
Liara is whispering frantically under her breath, just out of Erik’s peripheral
vision - and that cannot mean anything good, because Liara’s with the
Commander, and she’s here and not there with Shepard.
“Please let me through,” says a familiar voice, and Erik does look over his
shoulder then, because that’s CHARLES, and he is still covered in the soot and
the grime of London but he’s there, and whole, and looking terribly grim.
“Status,” Erik snaps at him. This is no time for politeness. His nerves are
strained to the breaking point.
“We have lost contact with the Commander,” CHARLES says, curt and cold and
fearful, and Erik has never heard him sound like that before, not once, not
even once, when he’s been on a shit-ton of missions with the others. “All
attempts at contacting her or the Citadel forces have gone unanswered. And I
cannot hack into any of the comm lines because none of them are working. The
Citadel is dead in this dead space.”
“Shit,” someone says, feelingly - Erik thinks it must be Kaidan, whom he can
almost see wringing his hands.
He doesn’t even have the luxury of that - not the least because he could
actually break his own bones if he tried.
Besides, his hands are tense and ready on the Normandy’s controls, waiting to
fly forward - or, worse, fly away.
“We have activation,” Tali gasps after an agonizingly long moment. “Look, look,
the Citadel is lighting up!”
Erik has no idea what the bright green light means.
But apparently Admiral Hackett does because the next thing anyone knows, every
single one of the comm channels is ringing with a single broadcast, loud and
strong and clear:
All ships, pull out!
Nearly everyone behind him shouts, and all the words are all the same:
variations on “The Commander!” or “Shepard!”
Except for CHARLES, who is on his right side, his face and his blue visor lit
up with the eerie green glow from up ahead.
CHARLES looks worried.
“I’m not leaving without her,” Erik mutters.
“We must,” Liara suddenly says. “We must - we cannot be here when the Crucible
is fired, or we’ll all die - ”
“I’m not leaving the Commander!” Erik shouts.
“Erik,” CHARLES suddenly says.
“I’m not leaving.”
“Then we will all perish here. And there will be no one for the Commander to
find, should she make it back out alive.”
“This is her ship - ”
“I am this ship, Erik. And I must survive, and all of you with me, or the
Commander will have done all of this for nothing.”
“He’s right, Erik,” Garrus mutters, finally, reluctantly.
“I can’t - Shepard - ” Erik says.
“Signal from Admiral Hackett,” CHARLES says. “We have to leave. Erik, we have
to leave now.”
The Citadel is all but lost in the brilliant green light of the Crucible, now,
and it is the last thing Erik sees as he slurs out several insults in all the
languages he knows, as he turns the ship around and kicks it into maximum
impulse.
*
The green light overtakes them, and CHARLES cries out, once, before crumpling
to the deck.
Erik shouts his name as he loses control of the Normandy.
The last thing Erik remembers is falling out of his chair - no pain as the
green light washes over him and kills all of the ship’s systems - and he’s no
longer thinking about the controls, he’s no longer thinking about anything else
but CHARLES’s body, inert in his arms as he pulls him close, heavy head against
his own chest, his heart beating double-time, the ship shuddering around
them....
*
He dimly hears someone shouting: “All hands brace for impact!”
All he can do now is hang on to CHARLES, the two of them twisted together on
the deck. All he can do is whisper: “Stay with me, stay with me, I’m here - ”
*
Crash.
*
“Erik,” someone says. “Erik. Wake up.”
He should be hurting all over, shouldn’t he? He has an impression of the ship
glowing all around him, bright enough to blind, and he’s been through hell and
back and all the forsaken corners of the galaxy - and bright light in the
cockpit has never meant anything good, not when he worked so well in the semi-
darkness, just enough light to see by from all of the consoles -
“Erik,” the voice says.
It’s a familiar voice.
It’s CHARLES’s voice.
It’s a struggle to open his eyes. “What hit me? I need to get to medbay - ”
“There is no need for that. Not any more,” is the response.
“What - ” Erik begins.
Then he looks at CHARLES and every thought in his head careens to a halt and
dies in a fiery wreck.
Same silver skin, same bright eyes, but the visor is green, and softly rippling
currents of green light flicker over CHARLES’s shoulder, where he’s holding
Erik’s hand firmly in place.
The same currents of green light that ripple over his own skin - and Erik is
speechless, he can’t do anything but stare, because the green catches in
CHARLES’s eyes and on his own fingers, as if they were passing the light back
and forth between each other.
“You can stand,” CHARLES says. “I promise it won’t hurt. I have been scanning
your bones. No damage. Your nerves are intact. You can get up.”
“I - okay, CHARLES, if you say so,” Erik says.
CHARLES smiles, and shifts his grip - he gets to his feet and in the next
second he pulls Erik up, and they’re standing, face to face, hand in hand.
“There,” the AI says, looking quietly pleased.
“What happened to us?” Erik asks. “Were we really supposed to survive?”
“Yes,” Liara says, when she comes into the cockpit.
Erik boggles some more. The green light is an intricate shifting tracery of
circuits over the asari’s blue skin. “You too? What is this? You and me, we’re
organics - but CHARLES, too?”
“That word no longer signifies,” CHARLES murmurs. “There is no longer any
distinction between that which is organic and that which is synthetic. We are
all the same now; we have been synthesized.”
“Synthesized - that’s a good word for it,” Liara says, soft and sad and sweet.
“A good word for what she must have been preparing for all along. I have to
choose to believe that this was the option Shepard took for all of us - so that
we could all still be together, even when we’re here, at the end of all
things.”
“Is she - ” Erik can’t bring himself to ask the question. “The Commander - ”
“I have to believe,” Liara says again. “I have to believe that she lives on
like this, in this gift - because I do not think that we will be seeing her, in
the flesh, for a very long time....”
“I am sorry, Liara,” CHARLES says.
“Don’t be.” The asari’s smile is full of pain and full of joy. “We are here. We
are all together. We could have lost you, or Erik, or anyone else, or everyone
else. Don’t be sorry for me. Don’t be sorry for Shepard. She did this for us.”
“Yeah,” Erik says - and he steps closer to CHARLES, because he can, because he
won’t break now, not here, not this way.
“Look after each other,” Liara says.
She leaves them alone, then.
And CHARLES wraps his arms around Erik, and holds him close. A firm grip, cool
and sturdy and unyielding, and achingly familiar.
Erik clutches at him, and when the tears begin to flow he lets himself hang on,
and lets himself be held.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Cuddling Somewhere". This AU involves a fusion
     of Mass Effect and X-Men: First Class. Erik here is a pilot with
     Vrolik Syndrome, and CHARLES stands for "Computerized Holistic
     Analytical Reasoning Logistical Electronic System", which is the
     invention of wallhaditcoming, as explained in this_unrelated_fic.
     Spoilers for Mass Effect 3: Synthesis ending.
***** alone time *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
“Not another movie night, Charles – don’t tell me you don’t remember what
happened last time. And the time before that, and the time before that.”
Charles winced, but held stubbornly on to Erik’s sleeve anyway. “I already
apologized, didn’t I?”
Erik sighed. “Look, Charles, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m not a fan of
the brats.”
“You only call them brats because you think you’ve got an image to uphold. Come
on, Erik, we all know you’re absolutely head over heels for all of them.”
“’M not,” Erik said, out of sheer reflex.
Charles rolled his eyes and pressed closer. “Yes, you are. I can hear your
thoughts as well as I hear theirs, you know. You like them very much, and they
adore you. You’re very kind to them.”
“...Okay, okay, I am, I like the whole lot of them – only I don’t like them
when they keep crashing our alone time. I swear, it’s like they keep tabs on us
or something.”
“Nonsense, Erik, I’m the only telepath in the family.”
“Ask Betsy about that,” Erik said, and it was his turn to roll his eyes.
“...Wait, what?” Charles asked.
“You seriously don’t know?” Erik asked. “You’re the worst telepath ever.”
“Be that as it may,” Charles said, at last, after he was done spluttering.
“Please, Erik, give me a chance. Proper movie night. Properly alone. I swear
I’ll think of something.” He topped that off with a kiss that curled Erik’s
toes in sheer delight, and he had to give in then.
But he still dragged his feet about heading to Charles’s place on his next day
off.
The thing was, Charles would be all alone in that house if not for Raven and
Ororo and Betsy and Anna Marie. He’d already as good as confessed to Erik that
he had almost forgotten to smile before the girls appeared in his life,
trickling in one after the other, and filling his days with running and
laughter and outrageous demands to bake fancy cake after fancy cake, mostly in
every color and flavor except chocolate. Oh, and glitter: the only thing the
fearsome foursome could ever agree upon other than that they all loved Charles.
Erik didn’t really have any plans of making Charles forget that he was nearly
always wearing glitter in his hair because the girls had way too much of it.
Now Erik put his hands in his pockets and reached out to the ornate door-
knocker with a thread of his ability, tasting the tang of old weathered cast
iron in the back of his throat.
Come on in, Charles said. A little busy right now.
The bottom dropped out of Erik’s stomach a bit, and as he closed the great
front door behind him, quiet and firm click of the lock, he looked around with
not a little dread. The girls had to be somewhere inside the house, waiting for
the right moment to interrupt – it was something that just kept happening to
him and Charles, all the damn time, even when it wasn’t movie night.
He followed Charles’s telepathic cues all the way into the heart of the house –
all the way into the cozy smaller kitchen, where it was warm enough that he
could take off his jacket and his scarf.
Except that he couldn’t do that because he was transfixed on Charles, and on
what he was doing: namely, that Charles had rolled up his sleeves to show off
his freckled forearms, and that he was currently busy icing a really rather
magnificent-looking chocolate cake. Pale cream on deep dark brown, light
catching on the bowl of silver sugar sprinkles at his elbow. Deep red flush on
pale skin, blue eyes like a storm of light.
It wasn’t the first time Charles had left Erik speechless, not by a long shot,
but there was something about those steady hands and that concentrated
expression that left Erik in need of a chair, or at least something to keep him
upright, that he could lean on so he wouldn’t just storm over and kiss Charles
until they were both breathless.
“I don’t know, I could be amenable to that,” Charles murmured, looking
mischievous as he finished spiraling the cream over the top of the cake.
“You should – finish what you’re doing,” Erik said, somewhat strangled. “Before
you’re – we’re – interrupted.”
“Hm? Not likely.”
“Charles. The girls. The cake’s for them, right? So any moment now they’ll be
here.”
“Not likely,” Charles said again, “unless they learn how to teleport or how to
fly or otherwise how to make it here, when they’re not in the house to begin
with.”
“What,” Erik said.
Charles looked up, then, and suddenly burst out laughing. “You look like you’ve
seen a ghost! All I said was that the girls aren’t here. Sleepover of some kind
at Emma’s,” and he hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing out one of the
windows. “Tea and gossip and, heavens, scones. And a spa trip of some kind in
the morning. I’m not supposed to be seeing them till late tomorrow afternoon.”
“We’re alone?” Erik said, at last, after several long minutes to process what
Charles had said. “Until tomorrow?”
“Yes, and I’ve got a few films we could watch- more James Bond? - unless you’d
rather pick up where we left off with The West Wing - Erik!”
Erik yanked Charles in at that, and now they were standing so close, and he had
Charles pinned against the kitchen counter, and they were kissing, enthusiastic
and heated and sweet with sugar and chocolate and time.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Gaming / Watching a Movie". This is a sort of
     continuation to this, which sets up the fact that Erik and Charles
     are dating and that Charles is also the adoptive parent of four
     small, rambunctious mutants named Raven, Betsy, Ororo, and Anna
     Marie.
***** years of flowers *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
He wakes up in pitch dark, with the sweat pouring off his skin, and he’s
breathless and near tears, and even when he opens a window he still doesn’t
feel like he can get his thoughts back in order. The world is a scatter of
thoughts without words and words without thoughts, and he is at the center of
it all, and he is wrecked and he might never be whole again.
To Erik, every breath is like fire scoring at his insides, and every breath is
like millstones pulling him down, and the terrible part is that he can’t even
remember if he was having a dream at all. He can’t remember if the dream was a
good one or a bad one. He can’t remember falling asleep.
There’s nothing outside his window: just the same old lit-up city, wasted
energy, lifeless and strange. It should have been something he’d never seen
before, should have been something new, should have been something bright and
interesting.
Instead he sees the drawn faces of his neighbors, the quiet hopelessness in
white-knuckled hands around chipped and battered cups of coffee. Instead he
sees a welter of torn-up lottery tickets and laminated menus from cheap
restaurants, empty shopping bags whirling aimlessly in the wind.
He’s alone, and this is a bad place for a person to be alone.
But he’s awake by himself in a room that was built for two, and every step and
every breath feels like he’s rattling around in a place that’s far too large
for his body and far too small for his heart.
Erik reaches mechanically for his cigarettes, shakes one out with trembling
fingers. He wastes three matches before he can get a small blue flame going,
and he chokes and coughs out the first tentative drag.
There’s an inch of cold water left in the pitcher in his refrigerator; it
spills over his chin, but not even that is enough to cool him down.
He strips down to his undershirt and his briefs and sits on his windowsill,
chain-smoking, and he’s down to his last two when the phone suddenly rings.
Erik stares at it balefully; it takes him a moment to decide to answer, and
another to make a long arm for the receiver.
“Hello,” he says.
“Hi,” comes the quiet, shivering whisper.
“Charlotte,” he says.
“Erik,” she says.
He listens to her breathe for a long moment.
She sounds damp – whether from tears or humidity or both Erik doesn’t know.
“You’re alone,” Charlotte says. It’s not a question.
“And so are you,” Erik says.
“What did she tell you?”
“Business trip. What did he tell you?”
“Boys’ night out.”
It almost makes him crack a smile. “He’s better at this than she is. That –
might not be too far off from the truth.”
She gives him a soft, watery chuckle. “Especially since I saw the tickets he
bought.”
“For her,” Erik says.
“For her.”
“Sucks.”
Charlotte chuckles again. “You do have a very succinct way of putting things.”
“I do.”
“Do you want to go out?” she asks, after a long silence, the two of them just
breathing.
“It’s too warm.”
“Would you rather suffocate.”
“...And here I thought that you were just saying I have a very succinct
manner.”
Charlotte sighs. “I seem to be taking lessons from a master.”
“Star pupil,” Erik says at last, and when he laughs a little, he even thinks
that he might feel amused. “All right. Coffee shop. One hour. If you get there
before I do, for goodness’ sake order something iced. I don’t want you to
suffer this heat more than you have to.”
“And they say that gallantry is dead,” she says, and then there’s just a soft
sound on the line before the final little click.
*
Even with a summer-weight suit on and a table in the coolest part of the coffee
shop, Erik still has several minutes to sweat before the bell over the door
rings again to herald the arrival of Charlotte.
The pale green dress is a startling contrast to the strong crimson of her lips,
to the storm-blurred blue of her eyes, to the constellations of freckles
sweeping over her arms and her throat.
The waitress serves her a bowl of thin noodles in ice and a golden-clear sauce.
Charlotte eats, contemplatively, for several minutes.
“They’re probably laughing and singing and doing whatever now,” Erik says after
a long time.
“Doing whatever seems more likely,” Charlotte murmurs in agreement. “Do you
think that they would be reluctant to wash the sweat and the smells off?”
“If they were sensible,” Erik says, blank-faced. “This is a punishment of a
summer. And they haven’t gone far. Whatever weather we’re getting, they’re
getting, too.”
“I wonder if I could even muster the energy to feel vengeful about that.”
“I stopped wondering already.”
“So you feel vengeful,” Charlotte says as she puts her chopsticks away.
Erik shakes his head and waves for a refill on his iced coffee. “No. I don’t
feel anything at all.”
“For your wife? For my husband?”
“Yes.”
“...Do you feel anything for me, Erik?”
“I do. And do you feel anything for me, Charlotte?”
“I do.”
Erik laughs and looks at her, looks his fill – and he’s pleased when she looks
steadily back, when he sees the subdued soft smile in her eyes. “You and I are
fools.”
“Yes,” Charlotte says. “We pay attention to things, and we notice what other
people do not see.”
“I see you, Charlotte.”
“And I you, Erik.”
He’s sitting across from her, and the table is fairly wide. He has a sweating
glass of coffee and ice cubes and cream before him, and she has a large black
bowl and a small glass bowl before her.
The heat is oppressive and the cold weighs down on him, but there is a feeling
of closeness rising in his heart.
“Thank you,” he says, at precisely the same time that she does, as they look
into each other’s eyes.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "On a Date". It's no secret that I'm a big fan
     of the Wong Kar-wai film In the Mood for Love [Wiki entry here]: I
     love the story, as haunting and understated as it is, and I
     especially love the two main characters, Maggie Cheung Man-yuk as Su
     Li-zhen and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai as Chow Mo-wan.
     I once wrote an XMFC short fic with this fusion, called flowering
     sixties. As it turns out, however, now that I've written this,
     Charlotte really does seem to fit in with this story, too. It was
     natural for her to say a version of Su's original line, "You notice
     things if you pay attention."
***** love and helos *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
The basement is a madhouse, but then again, when isn’t it, Charles thinks as he
runs critical eyes over the girls and boys at their desks.
Rapid-fire clack of keyboards from all sides.
They’re good people; they’re sharp people, and they know their jobs forwards
and backwards and inside-out. He has it on good authority that they dream in
code, most days, even when they’re working on more routine things and don’t
actually have the fate of the known world riding on their collective shoulders.
Which is all to the good, because right now they’re holding the lives of two
double-0 agents in their hands, and they are also about to be responsible for
his own.
The secure phone on his desk rings, twice, loudly, and the faces at the desks
get just a little bit more pinched and wary.
Charles takes a deep breath and packs up his laptop before picking up.
“Quarter.”
“You’re wheels-up in less than ten minutes, they had to scramble the pilot from
somewhere and now you need to be in a hurry - you’re going to have to run,”
MacTaggert says.
Charles smiles and flexes his shoulders, the better to feel the bite of the
harness winding around his ribs and one shoulder. The better to feel the weight
of the gun concealed in his heavy cardigan. “Luckily for you, I happen to be
exceptionally talented at that. Any last words from on high?”
“The usual.”
Charles says the words with her: “Come back alive,” and then he adds, “You know
I’ll do my damnedest best to bring them back.”
“She says you’re not listening, Quartermaster. You’re going to have to include
yourself in that statement.”
He rolls his eyes disrespectfully, glad that no one’s going to have a go at him
for the gesture, and without another word puts the phone down and starts
stalking toward the door.
“Oh, and everyone,” he says, just as he gets his hand on the door knob, “if you
get us out alive, I’m buying the whole lot of you dinner at St John. I hear the
feasting menus this season are particularly good - and that’s to say nothing of
the cellar.”
“Are you serious?” Sean Cassidy shouts from the front of the room.
Charles grins at him. “Dead.”
“Jesus,” someone else mutters.
Charles’s smile falls right off his face when he steps through the door and
closes it behind him, however - because the only possible response to the grim
look on Raven Darkholme’s face is an equally determined expression.
He nods at the gun in her hands. “Let’s hope you won’t need to use that, or any
of the traps you’ve programmed into this place. Don’t play innocent, I know
everything that happens in that basement, and I know exactly what you’ve been
mucking around with. Good fucking work.”
Her grin has too many teeth. “I wonder who taught me how to be prepared for
everything.”
Charles almost laughs, remembering a series of programming duels. “I can’t
imagine who’d do that to you.”
“Quartermaster,” she says as he turns away. “You’ve got to come back.”
“I’ll do everything in my power, and you and I both know I always mean that
literally. Look after our people, all right? Crack the whip on them if you
must, and yell at MacTaggert if you need anything else.”
“Will do. I’m looking forward to a good dinner.”
“So am I,” Charles says, and then he starts running, and his footsteps are loud
in the corridors.
*
Charles has to stomp hard on the urge to salute the pilot of the attack
helicopter waiting for him, even though technically he doesn’t actually have
any obligation to show such respect - but it’s very difficult to resist that
aforementioned urge when there’s a very familiar fringe of ginger hair falling
into those famous blue eyes.
He’s about to offer a greeting when that pilot throws him a jaunty wave. The
grin is bright and broad even through the bulky helmet. “When I was told to get
myself down to Babylon-on-Thames I had no idea I was going to be picking
someone like you up,” Captain Wales says with a roguish grin. “I’ve heard a lot
about you.”
“Hopefully you’ve only been hearing the good bits,” Charles says as he buckles
in.
Wales’s laughter rings in the cockpit. “No comment, Quartermaster, or the
redoubtable lady will have my head.”
“I can imagine,” Charles says, faintly.
Then his smartphone chirps at him, four pips and then two, and he can feel the
levity drop out of the cockpit together with his own smile. He reaches for his
scrambler and types in a rapid code before picking up. “Quentin,” he says.
There’s a lot of static on the line. “You’re not actually on your way here,”
Erik growls at him.
“All right, I’m not,” Charles says mildly as he boots up his laptop. “Status?”
“Closing in on 007’s location. He’s being bloody hard to home in on.”
“Have you considered the possibility he’s pulling your damn leg?”
“Several times,” Erik sighs. “You have an ETA?”
Captain Wales taps his headset, then, and Charles chuckles before he loops him
in to the call. “Here’s the pilot, 008.”
“ETA,” Erik says again.
“If we’re lucky, and if I’m reckless, we’ll have you in our sights in an hour
or less,” Prince Henry of Wales says, hands moving expertly over his sticks.
“I’m authorized to provide full air support in case you might have something
exciting in mind.”
Strangling sounds on the line, and a voice shouting, “What the fuck took you so
long, Lehnsherr, are you getting soft in your old age?”
“Bite your fucking tongue,” is Erik’s reply.
There’s a squelch that makes Charles wince.
“What’re you making me talk to the pilot for?” 007 growls. “Who is this and
where are you, you were supposed to be here hours ago!”
Charles watches Wales roll his eyes extravagantly, but he doesn’t get to hear
the insults they trade - goodness, are they old cronies or something? - because
his mobile phone is beeping at him again.
New text message
Message from a-book-forever: I bloody love you.
Charles grins as he hits reply, and never notices that Wales is all but
catcalling him.
Message from a-rose-for-love-and: :-*
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Kissing", and I seem to have cheated on this
     one but I'm not sorry. XD
     This ficlet is set in the same universe as A_Lily_and_a_Gun_Barrel,
     the story in which Charles Xavier is also known as the Quartermaster
     of the SIS, a/k/a Q, and in which Erik Lehnsherr is also known as
     Agent 008. Their screen names for the text messages are taken from
     the Catalan saying "A rose for love and a book forever", which
     describes the gift-giving that takes place on Saint George's Day (23
     April).
     Yes, I know the chopper pilot in this story would NEVER be seconded
     to this kind of work. Maybe. I just wanted to write about him for
     fun.
***** jacket wars *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Hank tries, and very nearly succeeds, in covering up his amused smirk when
Charles comes into the room.
Charles is very roundly having none of it. “Don’t make me go over there and hit
you with something. I have books. I am armed and dangerous.”
“Did you lose a bet?” Hank asks, smartphone already out and pointed in
Charles’s direction.
Charles growls wordlessly, and lunges, but he’s just too uncoordinated in this
cold and Hank is just too steady on his feet, and in the end Charles lands a
series of pulled punches on Hank’s upper arms to the sound of the camera
clicking away. “Is it going to be too much to ask if I ask you to kindly not
show the others those photographs?”
“Too late,” Hank murmurs - and then his phone rings, and he grins as he picks
up. “’Mando, hey, did you get the photos?”
Even as Charles trudges back to his desk, rolling his eyes and sighing in his
most put-upon manner, he can hear the laughter coming from the infernal little
device in his friend’s hand.
“I’m on my way,” he thinks he hears Armando say. “I want to see this one for
myself.”
“Tell him to get lost,” Charles says loudly.
“Come on down, and bring Angel,” Hank laughs before he hangs up.
“Kick a man when he’s down, why don’t you.”
“Come on, Charles, it’s actually a good look on you. If you like crimson and
purple, that is.”
“I didn’t do this on purpose,” Charles sighs. “I’m not actually sure that there
is a possible explanation for the chain of events that led to me being here in
one of Erik’s garish motorcycle jackets.”
“Try,” Hank says. “But save your breath for when the others get here.”
“I hate you,” Charles begins, and of course Emma and Ororo walk in right then,
and whatever they were gossiping about over their coffee cups dies away in
disbelieving smiles when they spot him.
“I happen to know who owns that jacket,” Ororo murmurs, grinning as she drops
gracefully into the chair on the other side of Charles’s desk.
“Only one person in the world could own a jacket like that - much less wear
it,” Emma says. “And that person is most definitely not here. It’s a little too
big for you, Charles, and it’s also not at all your style, for a given value of
style. So tell me - why are you wearing Erik’s jacket?”
Charles throws up his hands, and says it again. “I hate you.”
*
It turns out that Charles gets the last laugh after all, because when they all
have to go to the weekly staff meeting they find out that the heating in the
room has broken down.
Everyone else in the room is sitting huddled together, and the conversations
are accompanied by small plumes of exhaled warmth.
For once, however, Charles is the only person in the room who isn’t shivering;
he huddles gratefully into his jacket and zips it all the way up to his chin
and shakes the sleeves down to cover his hands when he’s not working on his
tablet computer.
Eventually, Moira drifts over to his seat at the long table so she can press
into his left side, and Ororo does the same on his right.
Charles sticks his tongue out at both of them, and at Emma in the opposite
seat, but he doesn’t move away; he slouches more comfortably into his seat and
lets the others sit more closely.
“Okay, Charles, you win,” a dejected-sounding Armando mutters as the meeting
crawls into its second hour.
“Warmth for style points sounds like a damn good trade-off to me,” Angel says
grumpily as she stares into her oversized mug.
“That is an eyesore of a jacket,” Sebastian says, “maybe I should get one of
those.”
“No,” Emma says, complete with a smack to the back of his head. “Not now, and
not in a million years.”
“Ugh, killjoy.”
*
By mid-afternoon Charles has managed to stop listening to the others’ jeering
by sheer virtue of being sunk in his work: he spends the rest of the day
powering through the documents that he needs to review for his next series of
experiments, and when that’s done he turns his attention to some of his grad
students’ papers, though he has to get an additional red pen some time after
lunch.
The day gets steadily colder and colder, and he’s not entirely surprised when
he looks up from the electric kettle in the break room to see the snow falling
softly and silently over the campus, dusting the buildings and the quads and
the dormant trees with crumbling, crystalline white.
He drifts back to his office after finishing his tea, absently thinking about
putting in an order for another textbook that he could use in an upcoming
lecture, when his mobile phone plays a high, tinny transposition of the
“Habanera” from Carmen at him. It makes him smile and thumb the screen on.
“Hello, Erik.”
“Hello, Charles. It’s a damn cold day, and I want soup and I want a game of
chess and I want to go home.”
“No one’s stopping you from just buggering off from the office, are they?”
“Pepper just finished kicking me and Bruce out. I’m on my way to you.”
Charles smiles. “Oh, a rescue, is it? I promise I’ll be very grateful.”
“You’d better,” and he can hear the grin in Erik’s words. “See you in a few
minutes.”
“Be careful,” Charles says, just as he steps back into his office; to Hank and
Emma, he adds, “I call snow day.”
“So Erik’s useful for a quick getaway, is he?” Emma laughs.
Charles leers at her. “And for other things which you shall never have the
pleasure of knowing.”
“And thank goodness for that. Now go away and take those colors with you.”
“Sod off,” Charles laughs - but he kisses her proffered cheek warmly, and
throws Hank a jaunty wave once he’s packed up and heading out the door.
The thickly falling snow means Charles has to squint into the distance when a
familiar roar reaches his ears.
“Is that - ” Armando says when he ducks through the door, shoulders covered in
snow.
“Yep,” Charles says, and walks out - and then he stops dead on the sidewalk,
trying to make sense of what he’s seeing.
Same sleek machine, dark and chrome and the very occasional accent in silver-
blue; same steady hands, same deep gray helmet - so it must be Erik, it has to
be him, except that Charles knows the coat that he’s wearing because it’s
nearly an exact replica of the one he’s not wearing today. Dark brown sweep
from shoulders to knees - strained seams and sleeves coming short.
“My coat,” Charles says, faintly.
“My jacket,” Erik says with a grin. “I am almost disappointed that it looks so
good on you.”
“Disappointed?” And just like that, Charles is laughing and pummeling Erik’s
shoulders and chest. “Did you plan this? Did you want to see me look like
birthday cake? People have been making fun of me all damn day, I’ll have you
know - ”
“I’ll make it up to you,” Erik says, soft growl full of promises.
“You had better.”
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Wearing each other's clothes". I have no
     excuse for the fact that the clothes exchanged here turned out to be
     outerwear instead of something like shirts or underpants or something
     else entirely.
     Charles's purloined coat is sort-of modeled on the Tenth Doctor's.
***** outbound flight *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Erik had been on the record as not wanting to do this, not at all, not by any
stretch of his imagination [which was broad and deep and wide when it comes to
Charles and his mouth and his freckles].
The inherently rushed nature of the trip. The overly bulky luggage. The
expensive entrance tickets. The overpriced hotel room in the center of London.
The terrible constant clatter of falling rain.
The fact that he’d been rather planning to sleep at home instead of haring off
on some kind of quixotic trek through endless crowds and endless queues.
But as he followed the smiling young woman in a perfectly, perfectly detailed
tattered dress, long limp lengths of blonde hair falling out of her grimy cap
with its unraveling lace, he thought he was beginning to understand what
Charles had been excited about.
The heavy wooden clogs on her feet did not seem to impede her progress over the
carpet, which was so plush and so thick that he felt like he was sinking into
it with every step.
Everywhere Erik looked there was something new or interesting or just plain
weird to see: here he was in an airy place, sturdy and elegant wood and metal
everywhere and tall glass windows, the curtains tied out of the way so the
stormy afternoon provided its own startlingly appropriate backdrop to the
lively sights and sounds within. Elegant china on the tables, cups and saucers
in several shades of ivory and cream; prettily mismatched silver, spoons and
forks raising their own musical clatter.
Charles laughed as they passed a table, and Erik turned his head to keep
looking at its occupants: a man in Hogwarts robes and Hufflepuff colors, who
was cutting up a sandwich for the little girl who was dressed as an improbably
adorable Weeping Angel. “I - did I just see that?”
“You did,” Charles said, cheerfully. “If she’s competing in the masquerade, I’m
rooting for her.”
“This place is a madhouse,” Erik said, staring at another table, where a man in
a gender-appropriate version of the slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi
was drinking coffee and perusing something on his tablet computer.
“You’re only figuring that out now?”
The young woman showed them to a table near one of the windows and murmured,
“Someone will be along with the tea presently.”
“Merci bien, mademoiselle,” Charles said. “They’re not working you too hard,
are they?”
“I’m only dressed as Cosette,” she laughed, before hurrying away.
Erik would have made fun of Charles if only he hadn’t been so busy gawping at
the other tables: two girls made up as Tintin and Captain Haddock, though the
bushy beard was [understandably] missing; what looked like an entire table of
blue-skinned women, who were all grinning and winking at the man in the black
hoodie striped in red and white; a girl in a white-and-yellow costume with
poufy shorts, the whole accented with a pair of green fairy wings, who looked
like she was having tea with a pair of stuffed toys [a lion and an angel, both
sporting huge white wings].
From inside the room came a loud shout of laughter and several people pointing
out the windows, where they were currently being menaced by a group of men and
women carrying an impressive arsenal of paintball weapons.
They would have looked more menacing if only they had not been huddling under a
series of dripping umbrellas.
“I - and you see these people every year, Charles? You run around in the
streets of London wearing all kinds of strange gear? Swords and weapons and
trench coats and pointed hats?”
“And everything that you haven’t mentioned, or can’t,” was Charles’s cheerful
reply. “It’s a celebration; it’s how we say that we are all in this together.
It’s how we tell each other that we’re not alone.”
The tea arrived then, and Charles grinned and shucked his heavy jacket. “Sadly,
I speak from personal experience when I say that tea and leather armor do not a
good combination make.”
With the jacket off, Erik knew that Charles was also wearing the same set of
sleeveless tops, dark over light, as he was - but there was a much more decided
contrast between the clothes and the freckles scattered all over Charles’s
broad shoulders, and he couldn’t help but get caught staring.
“Oh, that’s not fair,” Charles laughed as he heaped clotted cream onto a scone.
“Don’t I get to stare at you, too?”
“As if you haven’t been eyeing me up like a piece of candy all this time,” Erik
said dryly as he reached for the strawberry jam.
“Because that flight suit looks damn good on you. And I certainly haven’t
missed the fact that you walk like a pilot.”
“I actually am one, Charles, in case you’ve forgotten?”
“And you are also dressed up as one right now, and you’ve never looked so
delicious - hence, staring.”
Erik laughed and dosed his tea liberally with milk, and finally relaxed into
the madness of it all. “Shut up and eat, Charles.”
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Cosplaying". I went through several
     possibilities of what Charles and Erik would be wearing, and in the
     end I went with one of my favorites. Reference for their costumes
     here.
     The idea for the two of them going to a con and enjoying a cream tea
     during the event comes from Palalife and Aesc over on Tumblr.
***** lazy Sunday shopping *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
“Erik,” someone said, very close by.
“Go ’way,” Erik muttered rebelliously. “Sleeping.”
“I can see that. I just wanted to say hello.”
“Hello. Go away,” Erik said, and shifted so he could get comfortable.
“Going away now, but did you know you’re drooling into your pillow?”
“Charles,” he said, warningly.
“I just dropped by to borrow your laptop.”
“Whatever, go away, don’t bother me.”
A sweet soft sensation of a caress against his thoughts, gentle laughter,
receding footsteps, someone whistling “With A Little Help From My Friends”.
Erik turned over in bed and twitched a finger at his curtains to pull them
closed.
The oversized afghan that his parents had given him for his last birthday, the
worn and creased spines of his books, the plastic basin full of odds and ends
of scrap metal.
He was at home, and it was a Sunday, and he wasn’t anywhere near either the
pizza place or Charles’s house.
So why did he just have a conversation with Charles?
Erik sat up and groaned softly, muscles still aching from kneading dough and
slinging pizza boxes; it was a pain to get out of bed and it was a miracle that
he managed to navigate the staircase without simply falling ass over teakettle
to the first floor.
There were voices in the kitchen, which was weird, because his dad usually
worked on Sunday afternoons. His mother’s warm laughter, laced with sympathy
and amusement; Charles’s voice, dammit, why was he hearing Charles everywhere,
he was desperately in love with Charles but he couldn’t be that far gone
already -
And then Erik actually stepped into the kitchen.
“Hi Erik,” Edie said, waving cheerfully from the table. “Nice of you to join
us.”
“Mama,” Erik said, and went to lean on the back of her chair. And then: “What
are you doing here, Charles?”
Charles rolled his eyes without looking up from Erik’s laptop.
Erik was a little bit in love with the way those blunt, clever fingers flew
swiftly over the keys, rapid and soothing tapping rhythm.
“I told you everything when I arrived,” Charles said. “Here to borrow your
laptop. I called you about it last night. You told me to come by after lunch.
It’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Why my laptop, again?” Erik said, slowly.
“Mmm. Because of the girls. They use my desktop computer, and my tablet, and my
smartphone.”
“He’s buying something for the girls, and it’s supposed to be a surprise,” Edie
said around her coffee. “And I think he’s the sweetest thing because he wants
to get them presents, and because of what he’s buying them.”
Erik twitched with curiosity. “And that would be - what exactly?”
“See for yourself,” Charles said, and turned the laptop around.
Black device, large screen.
“E-readers,” Erik said, slowly. “You intend to give them one to share?”
“No, I’m buying four units, one for each of them,” Charles said as he pulled
his wallet out of his pocket. “I’m not going to assume that they all share the
same tastes in books.”
Erik thought about that for a moment: Raven hated raisins with a passion. Ororo
loved to wear beaded jewelry. Betsy was passionate about horses and dogs. Anna
Marie could beat anyone at checkers and hopscotch.
“...Okay, yeah, I see where you’re going with that,” Erik said. “But you
haven’t answered the other questions - ”
“Because you haven’t asked them yet,” Charles said, patiently.
A timer went off in the kitchen and Edie got up to peer in the oven. “Bread’s
almost ready, anyone for sandwiches?”
Charles looked up from the laptop to smile at her. There was a soft red flush
high in his cheeks, near his ears. “Yes, please, thank you.”
“Erik?”
“Yeah, I’ll go and slice the cheese,” Erik said. He floated a handful of knives
carefully over to the table and looked in the refrigerator for fixings. As he
went to sit at Charles’s side, he said, “I expected you to be with the girls
actually.”
“I’m picking them up in - ah, about two more hours. School trip to one of the
big gardens in the city,” Charles explained. “Emma was going to chaperone,
anyway, so she said she’d take the girls off my hands for the day. Again. I
kind of owe her now, so one of these days you might want to stay well away from
the mansion, because my girls are a handful and her boys are - well, worse.”
“Buy her tequila,” Erik suggested. “To drink while you’re babysitting.”
“Already done. Two bottles.”
That made Edie laugh. “When you’ve got all of the children at your house, you
give me a call, and Jakob and I will come over to help you. Perhaps we will
show them how to make challah.”
“I couldn’t possibly - ”
“Say yes and thank you, Charles,” Erik said, grinning at his mother. He got a
toasted-floury kiss on his cheek for his troubles. “Still thinking like a
teacher, Mama.”
“Always,” Edie said, warmly. “Tea or milk or juice?”
“I’ll have whatever Erik is having,” Charles said as he squinted at the laptop.
“Ugh, so much extra for express delivery? I’m going to have to tell them off
about not bloody breaking these things. Usually they’re good with valuables, I
mean, they haven’t quite managed to break my phone yet....”
Erik made sandwiches and slid one of the plates in Charles’s direction. He
wasn’t sleepy any more; he was perfectly happy here, even when Edie decided to
paint her nails bright green right at the table, and even when Charles let his
food get stone-cold.
“Charles,” he said, over the sounds of fretting. “Can I be there when the boxes
arrive?”
Charles blinked, and made a face at him. “Not if you’re going to spoil the
surprise.”
“You can shield my thoughts, can’t you?”
“...Point. But that means Betsy will ask questions, and when she asks
questions, the rest of them do the same.”
“Like they’re not like that all the time.”
Charles actually pouted at him. “Do you have to be so insufferably right?”
Erik stuck his tongue out at him.
“Ugh,” Charles said - but the way he kissed Erik’s cheek after that left Erik a
little bit happily melty around the edges.
Love you, Erik thought, hand on Charles’s wrist.
I love you, Charles thought back as he clicked on Proceed to checkout.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Shopping". This is set some time after the
     action in alone_time. Charles is buying the girls something based on
     the Kindle Paperwhite, because he thinks they should carry libraries
     around with them.
     The idea of Edie being here and doting on these versions of Charles
     and Erik comes from Afrocurl.
***** floating bridge of dreams *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Charles looks up from where he’s inspecting the vials loaded into the PASIV
device, hands stilling over a set of fresh cannulae, still in their sterile
wrappers, as Raven comes into the room.
“Hi,” Raven says, looking sheepish and amused at the same time, even as she
sets a bag full of food on the already laden counter. “Sorry I’m late?”
“Traffic everywhere,” Charles says with a sympathetic shrug as he beckons her
closer and kisses her forehead. “You’re actually the first one here.”
“That’s a relief,” Raven says. “As is this, actually. Who ever thought that
we’d manage to get the team all together in the same city when none of us are
technically working?”
Charles knows he colors at that. “About that - ”
Her smile sharpens with interest. “Is there a job?”
“There might be an offer for one,” Erik says as he comes in.
“Seriously, this isn’t the dream world,” Raven laughs, “I will never know how
you do that whole stealth hello/goodbye bullshit. Charles must be getting tired
of it.”
“No comment,” Charles says, and he laughs when he catches Erik mouthing the
words along with him.
“Spare me!” But Raven laughs and steals a cupcake from the box Erik brought in
with him. “Mmm, red velvet.”
“Did someone say red velvet?” Moira asks as she comes in, with a slightly
frazzled-looking Emma in tow. “God, I’m hungry, give me one of those before I
expire. Wait - are we going to be allowed to eat before we dream or something?”
“What happened to you,” Erik asks Emma, deceptively mild.
“Don’t ask. Too many appointments. I do have to work out in the real world, you
know. Someone has to do it.”
Charles grins at her. “Maybe not any more. I was about to tell Raven about it,
but now that you’re all here, I might as well start explaining ourselves. At
least I’ll only have to say this once.”
Immediately Moira raises one eyebrow at him. “This is about all those phone
calls to Tokyo, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Charles says, and then, “Thank you,” as Erik passes him a glass of red
wine. “So, to the point: Proclus Global. They’ve heard of us. They’ve been
watching us. And they want us to work with them.”
“I hope you said yes!” Emma says, looking up from her sandwich. “I’m going to
kill you if you didn’t!”
“I said that I would run it past all of you first, hence the dinner party.”
“I’m in,” Raven says, raising both her hands. “I don’t need convincing, honest.
Where’s the contract?”
Erik smiles, and taps his own forehead. “We’re going to do it this way.”
“How?” Emma and Moira ask at the same time.
“Eat up,” Charles says, “and after dinner, you’ll see.”
*
When Charles opens his eyes again all thought of the needle pricking his wrist
has gone away.
He’s sitting quietly on his heels in a little square of a room, a little less
than three meters on each side. There is just enough flickering candlelight for
him to see all the corners, and to see that there is an alcove set into one of
the walls.
In the soft shadows he can just about make out the flower arrangement in the
alcove: the centerpiece is a magnificent and impossible head of hydrangea
flowers, blue petals shading directly into blush pink.
It makes him smile, and calls him to his true purpose.
Settling his mind into quiet and meditative patterns, he begins his
preparations. Overhead light, golden and languid and bright, throwing the
pattern of imperfections in the utensils spread before him into glowing relief.
As he lights the brazier, he hears a soft and distant chime.
That is his signal.
When he gets to his feet, when he crawls carefully out through the tiny door
into the tea room, he knows that he has never worn an outfit like this before,
and yet he knows how to move so his voluminous sleeves do not get in his way.
The silk is a warm whisper against his skin.
Erik was right: he does look good in dark copper belted in pale green.
The others are sitting on the bench outside the tiny house, chatting softly
among themselves.
Beyond them is the garden, and there is someone moving through this garden: a
tall presence radiating both command and curiosity. The curious extrasensory
awareness that Charles acquires when he’s in dreams tells him something of the
tenor of the newcomer’s thoughts: surprise and admiration and interest.
Charles starts forward on the path, and waits as the last guest comes into view
- and then he smiles and bows, deeply and formally. “Welcome, Mamoru Saito.”
“Seriously?” Raven whispers from behind him.
“How do we know it’s really him?” Moira mutters.
“How’d he even get in here - ” Emma begins, and then cuts herself off. “Oh -
wait. Oh my god. So it’s real? Dream hacking is real? I’d only started hearing
rumors about it from the others - ”
“It’s real - for a given value of real,” Erik says, and Charles looks over his
shoulder and smiles at him. Erik is just a marvel in the outfit that Charles
had dreamed up for him - a black kimono patterned with dark flowing lines,
gray-on-gray like the curves and meanders of a river. “But in the interests of
security and a paranoia which we would do right to cultivate - please identify
yourself, Mr Saito.”
Saito bows again and smiles, looking faintly amused. “Gladly.”
Impossibly, as the man speaks, the sound of waves fills the garden for an
instant. “I was in Limbo, once. An old man, waiting to take a leap of faith. I
was provided with a Beretta Storm to wake up.”
“I can confirm that - that was Cobb’s gun,” Emma says. “So you really did meet
him. Not many people use that gun now, or used it in the past.”
“I was the man who gave Dominick Cobb his last dreamshare job,” Saito agrees.
“It really is me, here in this dream; I am no projection.”
“So how are you here?” Moira asks. “Are you in the apartment with us? We never
noticed anyone coming in - and we are paranoid people, as I’m sure you can
imagine.”
“I am dreaming from one of the Proclus Global satellite offices in Kyoto.”
Saito draws a small vial from his sleeve. “And I can do that because of this: a
new type of Somnacin.”
“I want to know more,” Moira murmurs. “That’s the sort of thing I work with on
a daily basis.”
“You will have the time and the leisure to work on the blend, and I am perhaps
relying on your expertise to allow me to refine it and make it better. We will,
of course, keep the specific formulations secret.”
“Whatever this is,” Emma says after a moment, “it’s certainly a hell of an
experience.”
Charles smiles and waves a hand to encompass the entire dream. “Erik and I
built this place to look like something that Mr Saito might be familiar with.”
“Do we pass muster?” Erik drawls.
Saito smiles. “I will tell you when we have finished with the ceremony.”
“Ceremony?” Raven asks.
“Yes, a Japanese tea ceremony,” Charles murmurs. “And I believe that it is time
for us to begin. If you’ll all follow me?”
As he passes Erik he reaches out to him, and they clasp hands for a brief
moment.
This could be the start of something big for all of them.
Charles dons his best host’s smile, and steels himself to begin.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Hanging out with friends". I just realized
     that the title for this chapter, which comes from the Genji
     Monogatari, also turns out to be a really amazing pun, considering
     what takes place here.
     I used information from here and here while thinking about getting
     these characters together for an implied tea ceremony.
     Charles and Erik's dreamshare team works out like this: Charles is
     principal architect and secondary extractor; Erik usually takes the
     position of extractor. Raven is their forger. Moira serves as chemist
     and secondary architect. Emma is the point woman. Saito, of course,
     is Saito from Inception; when I was in that fandom I consistently
     used "Mamoru" as his given name.
     If you want a truly epic Inception/XMFC fusion, read Boden's_Mate by
     kaydeefalls.
***** steal some covers, share some skin *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
As Erika wakes she takes in her surroundings, methodically, slowly,
attentively: duvet tucked in around the contours of her body, wrapping her in
delicious warmth from shoulders to feet. Sleep-soft pillow under her cheek, and
the second one in her arms, around which she curls as she turns carefully onto
her side. Yesterday’s aches and pains are gone, though she can still feel the
bandages tied off around her right shoulder and her left ankle - the latter
injury being the reason she’s still in bed instead of out doing her usual
morning run.
Doctor’s orders, she thinks, muzzily, and the thought of glowering at McCoy for
the rest of the day is a swift amusement, there and gone again, as she shifts
again and tries to get comfortable enough to get back to sleep.
There is something missing from this cozy arrangement, though - or perhaps
someone.
The other side of the bed is empty - Erika doesn’t have to look at the other
pillow to prove that. Her abilities are awake enough to tell her that she’s
alone. All she has to do is think of her own blood, her own bones. Just her.
Charles must be somewhere in the mansion, she thinks as she opens her eyes,
though it’s hard to think about what could have possibly woken him up. Most
mornings begin with Erika leaving Charles in their bed; the reversed situation
is new and mildly disconcerting.
Just as she decides that it might be in her best interests to get up, there’s a
gentle brush of mental presence against her: Awake already, I shouldn’t be
surprised. Did you get out of bed? You’re supposed to be resting your foot.
“I’m here, Charles,” she mutters into her pillow, mutters in her mind.
Stay there, for me? I’m on my way back.
“I don’t even know where you are.”
Ororo had a nightmare.
That makes Erika turn her head to look out the windows: the curtains are drawn
closed, but she can hear the storm outside, steady drone of pouring rain. “All
of this storm is her doing?”
“No,” and she looks at Charles as he comes back in and locks the door behind
him. “Not now, in any case. The storm was there to begin with. What she was
doing was just helping it along.”
“I don’t mind a torrent like that so long as I’m not caught out in it,” Erika
murmurs.
He laughs softly as he pulls the curtains open. A sullen gray light, much
diminished, creeps slowly into their room. “My sentiments exactly. However, I’m
not entirely sure everyone appreciates rainy mornings like you and I do. It is
a Sunday, after all. The others will likely want to spend the day outside.”
“And good riddance to them,” Erika says, mostly in jest. She smiles at Charles
with just a little hint of tooth.
“You love all of them.”
“In moderation. Controlled doses.”
Charles laughs again, and finally climbs back into bed; he crowds into the
space of her body, fitting himself to her, his front to her back and protected
beneath the duvet. “You’re so warm,” he murmurs as he wraps an arm around her
waist.
Erika shivers at that reverent tone, at the soft hushed awe of his thoughts
sweeping gently against hers, and covers up for it with a jibe. “How can I be
warm, Charles, when I still feel so cold?”
“You throw off heat,” he says, and punctuates the words with kisses along the
bared skin of her throat and shoulder. “I’d talk about radiation, but I hardly
feel like shop talk this early.”
“Mmm, no, you’d be better off being quiet,” Erika says. I can think of other
uses for that mouth of yours.
Do you know, you might actually be reading my mind, is Charles’s delighted
response.
He pulls away, briefly. Before Erika can think to protest he’s back, naked, all
the warmth of his skin bleeding into hers, welcome overpowering rush, sweet and
drugging. “Charles,” she murmurs, letting herself go pliant in his grasp.
Sssh, let me take care of you, is the reply.
Hands pulling her clothes away, smoothing over the planes of her skin. She
can’t help but bite off her whimpers when clever fingers cup her breasts,
gently weighing, teasing over the sensitized skin.
“It’s all right, no one’s here but me. I want to listen to you,” Charles
coaxes. “You make the most beautiful sounds.”
“I - Charles,” she says, grasping desperately for her thoughts, for her reason.
Both unravel swiftly as he sucks a slow and insistent kiss into her collarbone,
leaving her whimpering. “Please -”
Yes, Erika?
She shifts against him, against the heat and the hardness of him, relishing the
pulse that speeds up between the two of them, that gives the lie to their
languid movements. Touch me, Charles. Touch me.
“God, yes.” You make me so needy I can barely breathe - let me in, let me have
this -
Erika throws her head back as Charles opens her up with his fingers. He works
her slowly, push by gentle pull, and every movement is too much and not enough,
never enough, and the pleasure pounds through her, insistent, powerful,
glorious.
It takes her a while to catch her breath, and a little longer to think about
reciprocating. Her hand is none too steady as she reaches for his cock, soft
skin over hard throbbing heat. I want this, she whispers.
Do you? Charles’s mental voice sounds strained now - as does his real voice.
“Show me.”
Erika laughs and turns around and pins him down, all in one smooth movement.
“I’m going to have so much fun with you.”
“Yes, please,” Charles laughs.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Making out". I've been looking forward to this
     one, a little, because I'm a little bit too fond of Erika Lehnsherr,
     and because I'd like to think that she often gets lovely wake-up
     calls like the one I've written.
     Title and lyrics from a certain Maroon 5 song, which really is where
     this entire ficlet got started.
***** I'm a sour cherry *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
He’s been stuck in his meeting for about an hour and a half when he gets a
message from Charles.
If you can find some way to sneak out of that office of yours, I’m going to be
at the coffee place for the rest of the day.
He glances at the glazed faces around him, and at the woman who’s still droning
through her presentation, and hits Reply. Okay, you’re going to have to tell me
how you manage such outstanding feats of laziness.
It takes a particular talent, is the nearly instantaneous reply, with a smiley.
You’d better hurry. They’re going to run out of ice cream at this rate.
Erik snorts quietly to himself, and no one seems to notice him. Not bloody
likely. Tell Clint I’m on my way. He knows what I usually have.
He’s laughing at me now, Charles sends.
But he said yes, didn’t he?
He did.
Erik allows himself a small smile, the first one since he’d arrived at the
office, and pushes his way out of the crowded meeting room.
*
The sidewalk might as well be a stove-top when he finally gets down to street
level, and Erik has to stop and steel himself for the walk: he can see the heat
radiating up from the sidewalk, and sweat glistening on every face that passes.
With a muttered curse, he shucks his suit jacket and his tie and puts his
sunglasses on, and barrels past the listlessly wandering tourists, past the
businessmen with the wilted collars, and past the children trudging home with
soaked shirts and heavy book bags. He doesn’t bother with apologies, and no one
seems to mind: everyone is numbed by the heat haze.
He almost swears his shoes are melting and leaving an obvious trail of burnt
leather as he pounds down the sidewalk. Sweat runs down his face, into his
shirt. The patches of shade are few and far between, and every restaurant’s
door is closed, the better to keep the climate control in.
Not for the first time, Erik wonders how he could have picked such an out-of-
the-way coffee shop for his favorite haunt, because it always seems to take him
too long to get there from his office, or to go to his office from the shop
after a hasty breakfast.
Finally, he spots the familiar red-white-and-blue awning, and he practically
runs the last few meters to the glass door with its handle painted a bright
startling scarlet.
The first thing that greets him when he comes in is a loud burst of laughter:
the usual group of twentysomething students is in their corner, long limbs
sprawled gracelessly over a trio of battered and mismatched couches. “Yo,
Erik,” one of them calls: the boy with the red scarf and the oversized silver
pendant of a single bird’s wing.
“Billy,” he says, and the other members of the group wave at him, with various
degrees of laziness.
Erik shakes his head and moves deeper into the shop, into one of the farthest
corners: he prefers to stay well out of the way, able to observe everyone
without himself being observed or disturbed except when he wants a refill on
his coffee, and that has been his routine here from nearly his first visit.
His favorite armchair is occupied, of course, and comfortably so: Charles is
sitting sideways in it, socked feet dangling to the floor as he plays a languid
game of chess against himself on his tablet computer. There is a white saucer
and a fork on the table next to him, both covered in sugary rubble. Sweating
glass of lemonade, half-empty, next to a bud vase containing a single white-
tipped carnation in deep red.
Erik lets his shadow fall over Charles and the next thing he knows, he’s being
pulled down by his cuffs into a tart and sweet upside-down kiss. “Hello,”
Charles says with his usual bright smile.
Outside the sun beats mercilessly down on steel and glass and concrete and
skin; in here, Erik grins back and takes the ottoman next to Charles’s seat,
pressing close, shoulder to shoulder.
“Okay, you’re here, can we break into the ice cream now?” Clint cracks as he
tops off the lemonade from a pitcher full of ice cubes decorated with bright
green mint leaves.
“Affogato for me,” Erik says. “Ice cream, Charles?”
“Yes, I already had an order - I was just waiting for you to come in to have it
served. Clint?”
“With pleasure,” he says.
“Explain,” Erik says, laughingly prodding at Charles’s shoulder.
“Will you stop that if I do?”
He pretends to think it over. “No.”
“Ugh,” Charles laughs. “Incorrigible.”
“You wouldn’t be with me otherwise.”
“Okay, that’s true,” and Charles saves his game and switches to normal two-
player mode. “How about a game?”
“Please.”
Clint comes back to interrupt them about ten moves in: the sweet hint of citrus
in the ice cream is a decidedly heady contrast to the pungent and brassy
espresso. To Charles he offers a bowl of white-on-white topped off with a
handful of richly red spheres trailing dark syrup, and the comment, “They
despair of you in the kitchen, you know.”
“I like sweet and I like sour,” Charles says, grinning like a child on
Christmas morning. “You can go away now if the idea doesn’t appeal.”
“I’m here because Nat and Pep told me to take pictures of your face while you
ate!”
Erik blinks, utterly mystified. “What the hell are you talking about?”
In response Charles picks one of the red bits out of the ice cream with his
fingers. “Any guesses as to what this is?”
“No. Okay, scratch that. I want to know, and I don’t want to know.”
“Sour cherry,” and Charles pops the whole thing into his mouth, staining his
lips with the syrup.
Erik only has a moment to appreciate that before Charles’s expression crumples
in on itself, an exaltation of a wince that brings out all the lines in his
face. He puckers and he grimaces and he shudders, and afterwards he blows a
syrup-stained kiss to Clint’s camera phone.
“Holy fuck,” Clint laughs, and speedily backs away.
“What he said,” Erik says. “I know you have a sour tooth, Charles, but this?”
“My favorite thing. Next to you,” Charles says as he digs into his bowl of ice
cream.
Erik quite forgets his affogato, entranced as Charles eats.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Eating ice cream". This was inspired partly by
     Nigella Lawson's assertion of "You either have a sour tooth or you
     don't" - and yeah, it allowed me to whack around with Erik a bit,
     just for kicks.
     Yes, those are Avengers characters at the coffee shop, and it IS
     Billy Kaplan, though he's obviously not related to Mags here. The bit
     about Natasha and sour cherries harks back to my fic omiyage.
     Happy birthday, Douglas Adams!
***** you know I’m hard to kill *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
There’s a deathly silence in the back of the truck, and Erika Lehnsherr takes
the time to assess the men and women under her command. Some old hands,
familiar faces: at least one of them is napping, good man, because in a war no
one ever misses out on a chance to sleep or a chance to drink or a chance to
eat.
She thinks she might try to doze just as soon as she can reassure the pale-
faced greenhorn sitting right opposite her. One of Emma’s people. At least his
hands don’t tremble around his rifle - but he looks like he’s never been in a
battlefield like this before.
“What front did Emma pick you up from,” she asks, gruff but not unkind.
The boy blinks, and then seems to shiver all over before he answers in a
reasonably steady voice. “I was supply, ma’am, they left me back at some
barracks or another because I lied about my age to enlist.”
“That sounds familiar,” says the woman on Erika’s left.
Erika rolls her eyes and aims a judicious elbow shot into her ribs. “Like you
didn’t do the same, Amanda.”
Amanda Muñoz laughs and draws all eyes and doesn’t seem to care. “I enlisted
with just four weeks to go before my eighteenth birthday. That time goes by
like a breeze when they put you in boot camp and get you running sunup to
sundown.”
Erika concedes the point. “I was sixteen, angry, and had no excuses,” she says
to the greenhorn. “And my mother followed me into the army after two months.”
“If we get out of this one,” Amanda says, “remind me to tell you about the time
when we had to teach Edie - that’s Erika’s mother - about rifles. Good times!”
The truck slows down and comes to a stop, and everyone in the truck looks at
each other. Shrugs, people with resigned or eager or surprised faces, and Erika
turns to Amanda and says in a clear, crisp voice that somehow manages to stay
just within the confines of the truck, “Get ready.”
“You got it,” Amanda replies.
Erika climbs out of the truck and weaves carefully around to the jeep at the
head of the convoy. She watches her surroundings with sharp eyes. Every noise
could be an attacker. Every shifting shadow could be an enemy. Every step
brings them closer to another battle, another part of the war.
“Good, you’re here,” the gruff man in the jeep growls as he stubs his cigar out
on the side of his vehicle. “Whoever got here before us, whoever the brass sent
in to lift the siege - they’re gone. Utterly destroyed. No sign of them.”
She’s not surprised at all. “That’s that,” she says. “Alternative routes?”
“Ain’t none. And you’re all under explicit orders to avoid going on foot.”
“If it means we can help the people in the town, I’ll be happy to risk a court-
martial.”
“They’re not gonna court-martial you, pretty lady, you’re too damn good with a
gun. Think of the others.”
Erika shrugs. “So it’ll be me and someone else I trust, who’s just as good as I
am.”
“That’ll be the day,” the man begins, and then there’s a loud thump coming
closer, like hoofbeats or someone on the run, and Erika’s hands are utterly
steady as she brings her machine gun up to bear on the source of the sound.
The man reaches over to the shotgun seat and retrieves a pistol that looks more
like a hand cannon.
“Friend or foe?” Erika whispers.
“No way of telling,” the man replies.
“Shit,” she says, very quietly.
The hoofbeats come closer, and now she can hear the rider, too, calling quiet
encouragement.
Something about that voice is familiar, just, and she holds one hand up to the
man, then taps her ear. “You listening to that?”
“Could almost sound like one of our own,” the man mutters. “Almost.”
“Come on, come on,” Erika mutters, and right on the heels of her words the
horse crashes through the dense undergrowth. Galloping and all but shrieking in
fear, the beast traces a wild wide circle around the jeep before its rider
cries out, once, sharply, and brings it to a rough shuddering stop.
“Damn,” the rider mutters, and then follows that up with an impressive string
of expletives.
And Erika feels weak in the knees all of a sudden, feels all of her equanimity
vanish as though it had never been, because she’s more than familiar with that
voice.
There is now just enough light to watch as the rider swings out of the saddle
and drops noiselessly to the ground.
Erika can only see the knives in the rider’s hands because she’s watching for
them - because she knows they’re there.
Because she put them there herself.
“Thunder,” the rider snaps, advancing cautiously on the man in the jeep.
“Flash,” the man says. “So you’re still alive, Miz X?”
“Barely,” and now the woman is close enough for Erika to make her face out.
Freckles and scars. Dark hair roughly chopped off above the shoulders, an
unruly windblown mess. A formerly lush mouth, its right corner permanently
pulled down by a badly-healed shrapnel wound. Scarf around the neck to cover up
the nasty souvenir of an attempted short-drop hanging.
Blue eyes, dark as the sky before a summer storm, deep and cold as winter’s
night.
“We’ve got a handful of people back there and they can hold out for a few more
days, no more,” Charlotte Xavier says. “Weren’t you supposed to be here
earlier?”
Erika finally finds her voice, finally finds the courage to step forward.
“Hello, Charlotte. We’re the replacements for the replacements.”
“Hello, Erika,” Charlotte says. “There were replacements?”
“I’m told they never made it to your position.”
“Someone found them first,” the man says as he lights his cigar again.
“Ah,” Charlotte says. She winces, briefly, there and gone.
“Is there a way in?” Erika asks. “We’ve got supplies, fresh ammo, a medic. Food
and water. Amanda’s with me.”
The apprehension on Charlotte’s face vanishes behind a smile that Erika is more
than familiar with, cold and cruel and beautiful. “Well, if you put it that
way, I’d be happy to have the lot of you. It’s going to be nothing but
dangerous. I’ll personally execute anyone who puts a foot out of line. You want
in or not?”
“I’m in,” the man says.
“I’m in,” Erika says.
“Hope you can all survive this one,” Charlotte says.
As she heads back to the truck, Erika can’t help but look over her shoulder, at
the magnificent ruin of Charlotte, and it’s not the first time that she curses
this terrible war and the questionable - and, yes, entirely justified - wisdom
of the men and women who put Charlotte at the very tip of the spear.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Genderswapped". This ficlet owes its existence
     to my husband, who is currently playing through Mass Effect 3 for the
     third time. He has a Paragon fem!Shep, and in one of her early
     conversations with Admiral Hackett he tells her that the only way to
     save the galaxy is to use her as the tip of the spear, to be the
     rallying point for all sentient life.
     My brain translated that to Charlotte and Erika in a war zone, and
     somehow along the way Emma and Armando and Logan showed up. [Amanda
     is the female version of Armando.] I think there's been trouble
     between Charlotte and Erika. I think they could have a chance again
     in the future. Right now, though, I think they've got quite a lot of
     fish to fry yet....
***** perhaps, perhaps, perhaps *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
She wakes up and the sun is a faint golden glow on the truncated urban horizon,
weak light reaching for her through the postage-stamp-sized windows. The hour
is early, but everyone else seems to be awake already, if the sounds coming
from the kitchens above and below and next door on either side are any
indication.
There is a heavy warm presence in the bed with her. Soft snoring.
Charlotte has to take a deep breath before she looks over, half dreading and
half anticipating.
Her husband is here, for now. He is oblivious.
There is a lipstick stain just below his ear, and Charlotte looks away, because
she used to wear lipstick but she’s never worn a red like that, not even when
she was young and reckless and wild and running around in ripped nylons, hair
falling past her shoulders, unfettered by any pins.
She’s seen the woman who wears that red. She knows that the woman exists. She
knows that the woman is still somewhere in this building - somewhere next door.
Long blonde hair in a braid that falls to the small of her back, lustrous and
eye-catching.
Charlotte wears her dark hair short, now, in a deeply unfashionable bob. Even
the matron in the dusty dress on the street corner looks better, wears her
trendy permanent wave so effortlessly. Charlotte is content with just tucking
the wayward strands away from her face with her fingers, no ornaments, no
pomade or setting lotion; she doesn’t need to look in a mirror to fix her hair,
and not just because she doesn’t want to meet her own haunted eyes.
Now she slides from the bed and dutifully lays out her husband’s clothes for
the day: a cotton shirt with a lightly starched collar. A handful of ties, red
and gray and green - the third one is the odd item out, because he never wore
that color before they came to this city. Fresh underwear and socks and a
handkerchief.
On the pillows, he rolls over and doesn’t wake, though her portion of the bed
must be uncomfortably warm in this terrible heat.
Into the kitchen for the kettle, for the canister of fine tea. A gift, but not
from her husband.
A gift from Erik: Rougui tea, sweet waft of earthy spice from dark dry leaves.
Boil water. Steep the tea - one small cup. Blue glaze on ivory porcelain, old
and fragile. A phoenix with outstretched wings. Dress. Today Charlotte chooses
the copper shift. Black lace. The jade earrings are her own, roughly shaped
beads dangling from silver clasps.
She should be drinking this tea sitting down, Charlotte thinks, when all that’s
left are the dregs. It’s an excellent tea, bracing, restorative: ridiculously
rare, frightfully expensive. She should show it the respect it’s due. Instead
she uses it as an escape: a solitude that she chooses instead of a solitude
that she is forced into.
The teapot clatters softly to itself as she turns it over in the stream of
lukewarm water from the tap.
No one wakes, and no one reacts.
Charlotte doesn’t leave notes behind, not any more, not when she knows they are
no longer being read; she simply picks her purse up from her bureau, and
doesn’t look back.
*
Erik is standing in the scant shadow of a newspaper stand.
“Hello,” Charlotte whispers when she slips her hand into his.
“Good morning,” he says, still looking at the headlines.
“Have I kept you waiting?”
He looks at her, but she cannot read his eyes, because they are hidden behind
dark sunglasses. All she knows is the strange rough warmth of his voice when he
says, “I would have waited for however long it took.”
“Mm.”
They set off, side by side. He walks near the kerb, at her pace. He is wearing
a silver-gray suit and a purple tie.
She wants to burst out of her skin with nerves - wants to stop in the middle of
the intersection, wants to run, wants to turn around and go back to her
apartment, wants to ask Erik if he’d let her into his.
Together they flee the downtown congestion, its muggy weather and shrill
voices.
Before Charlotte has time to blink or leave or entertain regrets, Erik has
chartered a taxicab. The driver doesn’t glance at them at all, doesn’t do any
double-takes - he just takes Erik’s money, starts the engine, and turns the
air-conditioning up.
Erik gives him the address of a hotel.
“I - never quite got to sleep last night,” Erik offers, when the silence
becomes too oppressive and chokes Charlotte’s voice off. “Oh, I was in bed, and
I pretended to rest when my wife came home. But as soon as she went to sleep I
got dressed and went to sit at my desk.”
“It’s a wonder you didn’t die from the heat,” Charlotte whispers.
“I never noticed,” Erik says. “I was too busy thinking.”
“About what?”
Erik shrugs. “Silly things. How I normally begin my days. I smoke and I drink a
cup of coffee and then either I’m stuck at my typewriter for hours at a time,
or I’m blocked, and I start wandering. I used to go to my wife’s office and sit
in the park, where I knew she might be able to glance out the window and see
me.” He smiles, here, and he looks like he’s tasting bitter ashes. “I’ve seen
lots of places in this city that they don’t write about in the guide books.
Beautiful places. Ugly places. Strange people. Good stories.”
“Was I just a story when we met at the coffee shop?”
“I thought it was strange that you were eating the same breakfast as I was.”
Charlotte almost laughs. “I told you, I learned to eat butter and condensed
milk sandwiches when I was a child. I was just pleased you could order them
here and no one would think it amiss.”
“Well, I didn’t know you when you were a child. So when I met you, you were an
anomaly, nothing more.”
The levity evaporates on the instant, and Charlotte is torn for a moment
between moving away and moving closer to Erik - but when he offers her his
hand, she takes it, shaking.
“We’re still anomalies now,” she says.
“Now we do it deliberately,” he says.
When they get to the hotel, Erik takes a key from his pocket. “Wait ten
minutes, then follow me.”
The wait is interminable, and the elevator takes forever to arrive, let alone
carry Charlotte to the twentieth floor.
Room 2046. Blast of cold. Erik in his shirtsleeves, putting his suit jacket
away. His sunglasses are on one of the side tables. He is lying down on the
bed, atop the sheets. “Stay with me.”
Charlotte is all nerves, but all she says is, “Where?”
“Anywhere you want.”
She sits next to him. “When I was younger, I would wake up next to all sorts of
someones,” she says, softly, slowly. “No matter who they were, though, I always
asked them for a good-morning kiss.”
Erik smiles. “Good-morning kisses are more intimate than good-night kisses.”
“And yet sometimes a good-morning kiss means goodbye, too.”
“Sometimes. Yes.” Erik closes his eyes.
Charlotte leans over and kisses him, sweet and swift, touch of warmth.
He doesn’t open his eyes; he just kisses her back.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "During their morning ritual(s)". This is more
     or less the sequel to years_of_flowers; maybe these versions of
     Charlotte and Erik can get some kind of resolution now.
     Thanks to Kannibal for indulging me when I talked about music to
     write by and also incidentally break your heart to; I used some of
     her suggestions and also this while writing.
***** need to be next to you *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
He’s never been in a bed like this before: a real four-poster, the dark wood
polished so he can almost see himself in it if he squints, if he tilts his head
a certain way. There is so much metal in the bed, more than just the screws and
nails holding it together, more than just the springs in the mattress:
beautifully worked steel in the canopy and in the frame itself, reinforcing the
sturdy wood, sweet tang on the tip of his tongue.
If he sat up and dangled his feet over the edge he would only barely touch the
floor with his toes. This is not because he is short.
Erik Lehnsherr was born in a flat where the walls smelled of boiled cabbage and
everyone else’s washing, sharp burr of bleach undercutting all the bread and
all the thin coffee. A hazy recollection of sour fruit, its seedy pulp scraped
roughly over coarse dark bread. One memory of honey, shockingly sweet: his
teeth had ached for hours afterwards, because he was completely unused to the
idea that there was something in the world that tasted so transcendent, sugar
shock like a physical blow.
In that place he had been surrounded by soft sad voices and soft sad songs: men
and women and children who were waiting for an end, perhaps the end. One more
end to punctuate the years of losses, the years of pain, the years of hiding
and terrible disappearances. Entire families, entire villages, there one day
and gone the next, never to be heard from again, and his mother and father
praying softly and talking about dust and barbed wire and gunshots.
He remembers the songs because they sang them to him, and he even sang them
himself, after his mother and his father kissed him and said their blessings
over him, one last time: torn away from them, the lingering warmth of the final
embrace gone before he had traveled five miles. Hidden in false compartments
and midnight-running trains, heading west, always west, away from home and away
from everything that he had ever known.
He remembers the days and nights of being lost at sea, salt and metal and rust
souring his rations: fruits that he had never tasted before, hot water mixed
with a little rum and a spoonful of soft butter, a single caramel cream in its
clear crinkly wrapping.
A long journey in which he’d mourned every night: not just for his mother and
his father, slowly walking east and away from home, away from him, moving in
the opposite direction. He’d mourned with the children who had been, like him,
spirited away - many of them younger than he was and yet looking so much older,
aged by pain and hunger and loss. He’d mourned the fact that he was different,
that he was so much unlike the men and women and children crossing the Atlantic
Ocean, because he could feel metal calling to him, because he could make metal
do his bidding.
He’d mourned the coach that took him away from the other children who’d come to
this land - alone, separated yet again, and sent onto a train to a place called
Massachusetts.
Now here he is in a room of his own, and he is by himself, and he has
experienced such strange kindness from the people living here. Who they are,
what they are - what he is - is a difficult thing to comprehend.
A woman who could read thoughts and speak directly, mind-to-mind - and if that
hadn’t been enough, she could also change, from human skin and flesh into
glittering living diamond. A tall gawky youth with strange feet that he could
use for walking and for running and leaping incredible distances - and for
grasping things. A scrawny little red-haired boy who spoke in whispers because
he could break things when he shouted. A baby girl with beautiful dark brown
eyes and the beginnings of shimmering wings sprouting out of her back.
Miss Emma, and Mister Hank, and Sean, and Angel - and then, startlingly, a
handful of humans in the midst of a school of mutants.
Erik voices the word, softly, just for himself. “Mutant,” he whispers, and the
canopy swallows that sound, wraps him in silence.
Miss Moira has told him that she is staying in the room next to his, and that
he only need knock if he wants anything. He remembers asking her if she had a
special ability, and remembers her honest smile, and her answer: “Emma jokes
that I am as human as they come, except that I do not mind being around so many
people with so many different abilities, so that must count as my ability.”
Here, now, Erik is cold, and that has always been his problem. He can never
really get warm, or at least that is what it feels like. The bed is placed near
an old-fashioned woodstove, sturdy steady heavy steel, and as he listens the
fire crackles and pops as it consumes another piece of wood. There are thick
blankets on the bed, and Erik lies beneath them still wrapped in his threadbare
coat and many-times-darned socks and his mother’s old gloves, ragged wool with
the fingertips roughly cut away.
He shivers and tries to get comfortable, but everything is soft and new and
strange and he desperately wants to sleep. He’s been told that he can wake and
eat and rest as he pleases, or come and go at his leisure so long as he stays
within the house and its gardens - but all he needs is to let go, all he needs
is bed but he can still hear the old sad songs, and he can feel the tears slide
down his cheeks again, startlingly hot.
Hush, hush, everything is all right, you are safe, you are not alone.
Erik sits up, alarm clawing frantically at his heart. He wants to shout.
Instead, he whispers, “Who’s there?”
I’m a friend. Rest easy. Hello, Erik.
“Where are you?”
I’m here, with you. You need to sleep. You have to let yourself rest. Soft
laughter. There will be a strawberry pie tomorrow, to celebrate that you are
here.
Erik looks around, slowly, because he is so tired. “I want to sleep. But I
can’t.”
I can help you with that, if you’ll let me.
“An ability? You have an ability? Or are you like Miss Moira?”
I’m just...me, the voice whispers. Let me help?
“Yes,” Erik replies, and the word is so heavy on his tongue; it pulls him down
into the bed, onto the pillows.
He gets the faint impression of a faraway sweet smile.
Cool weight fitting itself against his back, the idea of small arms wrapped
around his hunched shoulders, a light touch on his temple that feels like a
blessing and feels like permission.
Sleep, the voice says, and Erik does, at last.
*
In the morning, Miss Emma listens attentively as the house doctor prescribes
food and sunshine and milk and sports for Erik, and smiles when the examination
is done. “I’m glad you were able to sleep,” she says.
“I had some help,” Erik says after a long time, during which they cross from
one wing of the house to another. He’s wide-eyed, because he’s never been in a
place like this before. “This big house is yours?”
“It’s mine, and it also belongs to everyone who lives here. You see, it’s not
just a house. It’s a school, too. It’s called the Massachusetts Academy,” Miss
Emma says. “This is a safe place for humans and mutants.” She pushes one of the
doors open, and points out the chairs and couches arranged in a semicircle;
there’s a young woman curled up and fast asleep in the farthest couch,
startling shock of winter-white hair fanned out on a cushion. “That’s Ororo.”
“What happened to her?” Erik whispers.
“A few minor injuries,” Miss Emma says. “She doesn’t like being in small rooms,
so she sleeps here instead.” She leads him past other classrooms and at least
one library, and Erik stares, fascinated, at all the books in all their
shelves. “You can stay in here later,” she laughs softly, “first let me finish
giving you the tour. Out that door is the swimming pool, though you’ll
understand that no one is using it in this weather.”
“Too cold,” Erik says, and he smiles, and covers the smile with one hand.
“Yes. I’m sure you will all be fighting over that come the summer, though. And
now, here is the kitchen. Do you like strawberries?”
“Very much!” And there is a strawberry pie cooling on the sideboard, golden
brown crust and a hint of sparkling ruby beneath.
Miss Emma directs him to the milk pitcher. When Erik spots it, enameled iron
painted with sunflowers, he smiles more widely and lifts it without using his
hands, carefully guiding it to the table where there are forks and saucers
already laid out and waiting.
“Very good,” Miss Emma says, and she beams at him. “We will have to think up
some interesting things for you to do with your ability. You have a very rare
talent.”
Erik is only half-listening to her, because the strawberries are perfectly ripe
and perfectly juicy. “I was told that there would be strawberry pie,” he says
between mouthfuls.
“Hmm?” Miss Emma says. “How did you know?”
“Someone told me. A voice. In my room. Last night. I didn’t hear the voice with
my ears; I heard it with my mind. Like your ability.”
There is a long silence in the kitchen, and it makes Erik look up - into Miss
Emma’s suddenly sad expression.
“I’m sorry,” Erik says, out of reflex. “Have I said something wrong?”
“No,” she says, after a very long moment. “Can you describe your bedroom to
me?”
“Small. There’s a bed with a canopy. And a woodstove.”
“Oh.” Miss Emma blinks, and sighs softly. “I know where you are, now, and I
know who that voice was. Is.”
“It was a real voice,” Erik says. “Is it someone else with an ability?”
“You could say that.”
“They helped me sleep last night.”
Miss Emma nods. “You should make friends, but cautiously.”
*
“What’s your name?” Erik asks a few nights later.
His companion laughs softly. Erik likes it when he laughs, though it makes the
room grow briefly colder. Why should I tell you? I should make you guess.
“Because we’re friends, and you know my name,” Erik says.
The voice is silent for a while. Friends?
“Yes,” Erik says. “Friends.”
Friends, the voice says after another long pause. Perhaps. All right. My name
is - was - is Charles.
*
Charles is not in the classrooms or in the libraries or in the kitchen, and he
is not to be found in the gardens, but he is a steady presence in Erik’s room.
Every night, Erik falls asleep in his arms, to the soft strains of songs from
long ago.
*
“I want to see you,” Erik says after he’s been at the Academy for a year.
It’s not always easy to see a ghost, Charles says. You know that.
“I want a chance.”
The air seems to hesitate and tremble before Charles replies. Why?
“I want to see you smile.”
There is a long silence.
Erik murmurs, “Please, Charles.”
Charles sighs, and the room does grow cold, cold enough that Erik reaches for
his coat and his blankets. All right.
*
At midnight Erik is standing in his room. The woodstove is dark and silent and
cold. The curtains are drawn closed. There is no light in the room, except for
the wrought-iron candlestick floating next to Erik’s shoulder.
“I’m here, Charles,” he says softly, and pulls out the hand mirror that Miss
Moira has lent him. “Please show yourself.”
Look in the mirror, Erik. You’ll see me there.
He can barely make out his own face in the dim haze of the candle - but as he
stares at his reflection another face swims up from the darkness, faintly
visible.
Pale skin, wide dark eyes that could almost be the strange endless deep blue of
an autumn sky after a storm, strawberry-red mouth, dark hair, and a pair of
prominent freckles on the bridge of a crooked nose.
Erik looks closer, and catches his breath, softly. “Charles - ”
Charles points to the dark scar slashed into his neck with a trembling hand,
and says, I didn’t want you to see that.
“Who did that to you?”
Not important. Miss Emma brought them to justice.
“I want to hold you, Charles. I want you to feel better.”
Just being around you makes me feel better, Erik, Charles says.
“I want to hold you.”
There is a pause. You can see me here, in the mirror, he says. If I move, and I
tell you to move your arms in a certain way, you can see yourself holding me.
“Yes. Okay.”
When Charles is standing in front of him, when Erik encircles empty air with
his arms, he can see the soft smile on the face of the ghost, and he tries to
smile through his tears.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Spooning". Sorry for the feels, which were a
     direct product of the mood that I was writing this in. This was
     supposed to be something light and fluffy and happy; I guess my
     ghost!Charles had other ideas.
     The "Underage" warning applies on a technicality, as well it should
     because both Charles and Erik are minors [rather permanently so in
     the case of Charles].
     The "Major Character Death" warning also applies on a technicality,
     again because of this version of Charles.
***** when I breathe you in *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
“I hate this place,” Charles says when they get out of the taxi.
Erik glances sharply at him, tries to take in the tenor of his thoughts.
Even without his telepathy he can tell that Charles is not happy to be here,
because Charles has been clinging to him since last night.
But Charles has an obligation to be here today, because today is his eighteenth
birthday, and that means that this house is now his.
Other people would be celebrating. Not Charles, who is radiating such
dejection-fear-loneliness-hiding-trouble that Erik thinks they might both choke
on it, if he doesn’t do something.
“Do we have to go in?”
Charles squares his shoulders. On him, it looks like something he’s done a
thousand times, and the thought unsettles Erik even more. “Yes, we do.”
“Then let’s get on with it. Let’s do this.”
“All right.”
There are seals and locks on the doors.
Charles looks at Erik, and murmurs, “Be with me, here.”
“How do you want me to do that?”
“Come into my head,” Charles says.
“Okay.” Erik curls his right hand into a fist, touches those knuckles to his
mouth; he reaches out for Charles with his left hand, and hangs on.
His telepathy and the contact between them means his thoughts have nowhere to
go but Charles, and he lets those thoughts flow between them: he thinks of
warmth and sunshine and dark chocolate and pours them all into Charles.
“God, Erik, why are you so good to me,” Charles sighs, and he reaches out to
the sealed doors with his free hand.
Erik can feel Charles’s metallokinesis, heavy and inevitable like gravity
pulling them down - unexpectedly deft tendrils, curling around and into pins
and tumblers and hinges, making them bend and obey, and so the doors fall open,
yielding.
The smell of dust and mothballs and neglect makes Erik blink and look away,
momentary acrid shock. “How long has this place been empty? There aren’t even
any echoes, there aren’t any thoughts left behind - ” I can’t even feel you -
you were here, weren’t you? Didn’t you tell me that you lived here...?
“An empty shell, that’s all it was,” Charles says. “I was born here, and then I
grew up here, sort of, and then - ” I spent a lot of time trying to escape this
place. “We should at least bring our bags in. I - I just don’t want to stay in
there.”
“Yeah,” Erik agrees, and it only takes a moment to toss their backpacks and the
small duffel into the foyer, because all that needs doing is for Charles to
lift them up by the zippers and rivets and buckles.
Erik hangs on to his messenger bag, though, and once Charles turns his back on
the doors, great deep quavering thud of them closing, he takes Charles’s hand
and starts walking toward the remains of a path. “You’re going to have to tell
me where this goes.”
“The gardens. A pool house.”
“Empty pool?”
“Yes.”
“Even better,” Erik murmurs, and tugs Charles after him, through the overgrown
bushes. They pass beneath trees full of dark green growth, silent and strange
and and heavy.
“Where did all the people go?” Charles is murmuring as he gets his bearings and
tugs on Erik’s copper bracelet to point him down the left-hand path. “An entire
team of gardeners, everyone in the kitchen, the men who minded the cars. There
was always some other person to talk to, when....”
Erik knows why he trails off.
And that’s why he’s grateful when another step brings them around the house
completely, and they can see more than just moldy tiles going down for seven
feet, more than just a ramshackle little cabin with the half the windows
broken, more than just a rusted set of table and chairs that looks more like
makeshift trellises for unidentified plant life.
Beyond the fence that encircles the mansion and its grounds: rolling green
meadows, as far away as the eye can see.
Even Charles’s thoughts have gone silent; when Erik looks at him, Charles’s
blue eyes are suddenly full of bright unshed tears.
“I’d forgotten that this existed,” Charles murmurs.
Erik smiles, and kisses his temple, and goes willingly when Charles yanks him
back in and kisses him properly.
Thank you, Erik.
I’m just trying to make things better for you.
Like I said - you’re so good to me.
*
There’s no one here but the two of them, not another mind for miles.
Erik has hazy memories of his parents sitting next to him on a deserted beach,
rocks and sand and waves their only companions, no other humans in sight or
within the reach of his then-limited telepathy - but even that time of solitude
recedes into the far reaches of his mind when he lets his abilities go.
From the corner of his eye he can see Charles shiver as Erik’s telepathy washes
past him. “Wow,” he says, softly.
Erik smiles. “Sorry.”
Charles laughs, a welcome sound in the wind and in the rustling of the world.
“No you’re not. Not with a smile like that.”
“Okay, I’m not.”
“What are we doing next?”
“Good question,” Erik says. “Want to look in my bag?”
“Okay, it’s never fair playing guessing games with a telepath, I can’t win
against you and you’ll always find a way to win against me and - oh. Seriously,
Erik?”
“Seriously, Charles.” He looks up, and grins at the incredulous look on
Charles’s face. He’s holding up a small plastic baggie in one hand, and a
package of rolling papers in the other.
“Edie’s going to kill us both.”
“Maybe,” Erik says. “But it’ll be worth it.”
“Yeah.” Charles sounds both awestruck and devilish, and Erik can’t help but
stare at him as he scrambles back over. “Definitely worth it.”
There isn’t much weed to be had, so Charles moves carefully when he rolls the
first joint.
“Have you done this before?” Erik asks when Charles produces a lighter from one
of his pockets.
“I room with Sean, what do you think the answer’s going to be?”
Erik rolls his eyes.
“But seriously, it’s not like I’m in there with him all the time,” Charles
says. The lighter, battered blued scratched-up steel, whirls intricate circles
around his fingers.
“I wonder why,” Erik says, dryly, and deliberately loops Charles in when he
thinks of sweat and of bared skin and of blood-heat.
“Not fair,” Charles groans.
“I know.”
“Stop being so smug.” Charles waves the joint practically in Erik’s face. “We
doing this or not?”
“We are,” Erik says, and he sits up with alacrity, just in time to watch
Charles light up and take the first long, lingering drag. “Any good?”
“It’s not bad,” Charles allows.
Erik’s first hit fills his lungs with a sweet dusty smell like libraries burnt
to ash.
And it doesn’t take long before the weed hits - between one breath and the
next, Erik’s perception of the world changes. The greens and the golden sunset
and the oncoming night are so much brighter and darker at the same time. He can
smell flowers and fruits on the breeze, though he’s not going to be able to
identify any of them at this rate.
He can sense Charles, all of Charles, as he takes another drag: cotton and
denim and leather, salt and shampoo and every single layer of the light cologne
that he uses. Aromatic sandalwood, apricots in sugar, and a faint hint of
citrus. He can see the exact way that the wind flows through Charles’s hair,
and the way the seams of his shirt strain around his shoulders. He can even
feel the heat that Charles is giving off, which is a feat considering that it’s
been a muggy day.
Erik blinks, and brushes his hand against Charles’s - and suddenly starts
shivering.
Only a brief spark of contact, but he suddenly knows everything that Charles is
thinking about: a lingering hatred for the house that still looms over them
even though they’ve both turned their backs on it. Unease and a morbid
curiosity for the people missing from the house. Longing and affection and
desire, and a stray idea of Erik undressed under the stars that are now
emerging from the gloomy evening.
“I think we can do that,” Erik says, and on any other day he would laugh at how
gravelly his voice has suddenly become, but right now all he wants is to get
his hands on Charles.
“Okay, okay, god, you’re bleeding over, I can actually sense your thoughts,”
Charles babbles, “but we still have one hit, and I think this is yours - ”
“You take it, I can’t wait any more - ”
“No, wait, I have an idea - ”
Erik has been flat on his back since the second hit, eyes tracing out familiar
constellations that seem to be whirling overhead - and then that sky is
replaced by Charles, looming over him, barely lit up by the tiny shard of fire
at the end of the almost-depleted joint. “Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” Charles says.
It’s much darker now, but Erik can see what Charles is up to: he watches,
pinned in place, as Charles takes the final hit. The end of the joint flares
brightly, brief glimpse of Charles’s storm-dark eyes, and then he’s coming
closer. He’s holding his breath, and there is a thought in his mind that runs
in a lust-haze of a loop: Open your mouth, Erik, open your mouth, I’m gonna -
Fuck, Erik thinks, and Charles’s mouth burns against his, fills him up with
heat and sweet smoke, burning vanilla and dust - and there’s nothing for it but
to scrabble at Charles’s clothes. “Naked. You need to be naked. Now.”
“You too,” Charles says, laughing long and languid and lazy, and they’ve come
close to ripping each other’s clothes off in the past.
This time they actually succeed.
There’s nothing sweet in this, which is just right for them in this state of
altered consciousness: and Erik drowns in the sensations of Charles, who kisses
him hungrily and kisses him everywhere and kisses him with far too much teeth
and tongue. Every bite and every lick and every bruise fans the wildfire of his
need, and he knows he’ll never be the same again, not after this, not with
Charles needing him like this -
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Doing something together". I was thinking of
     something relatively tame and then this showed up on my dash. Um,
     yeah, that actually worked so well for me :)
     This fic is a sequel to the previous power-swapped one, in which Erik
     is a telepath and Charles is a metal-bender: let_you_into_me. It is
     also sort of related to my Inception fic The_pleasure,_the_privilege
     is_mine.
***** the beginning is the end is the beginning *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Three nights ago, Erik had been as ordinary as he could make himself, as
ordinary as he preferred to be: nine-to-five graveyard shift, worn-out band t-
shirts and comfortable old sneakers, conversations with people who thought in
terms of programming and machine languages, hours and nights speeding by as he
dreams in code and holds the world together with ones and zeros.
That’s all gone, now. Everything that he thought he was is no longer true.
Everything that he believed in has been laid bare.
He’s different, now; he’s someone else, something else, and he still looks the
same as he always does.
Okay, maybe the formal suit is nothing like what he knows, nothing that he’s
ever been used to. After all, nobody invites code rats to black-tie galas.
But it feels right to wear crisply tailored, slim sharp black and white, while
he learns how to bend the world itself to his will.
And it’s more than nice to watch as others do the same: specifically, the man
who fell into his life three nights ago and triggered the Change.
(Erik thinks that capital letters might not be enough to express the magnitude
of it, the impact of it. One moment he’d been on his last coffee break for the
night, hurriedly sucking down the last remnants of the cigarette he’d bummed
off Armando; the next, he’d somehow run and braced himself for impact - only to
have blue eyes like bright stars in a bright night looking up at him. Only to
realize that he’d caught a man in his arms and never even staggered from the
sudden weight, the sudden push of momentum that should have driven them both
down to the sidewalk and didn’t.)
He looks up from the lightning arcing back and forth between his hands, power
that tastes like copper and iron and steel on his tongue.
The city is awake and alive far below his feet. He can still hear the noise
from street level, a hundred thousand voices, a hundred thousand minds, and the
rumble of the metal that lives in the bones and the sinews of the buildings and
the cars and the bridges and the underground.
At the same time, he’s caught and pinned on the man suspended perfectly in the
night, feet hovering above the very edge of the railing around the helipad. He
can see those blue eyes, gone nearly opaque and fathomless, filled with
terrible strength. He can see those hands in detail, the dark starburst of
freckles in a ragged facsimile of a barred spiral galaxy on the back of the
right hand.
(Erik bears a mark that is much simpler, much more elemental, and much more
pronounced: Fermat’s spiral, a thin continuous dark line tracing out a shape
that is slightly larger than his own hand. It is placed exactly between his
shoulder blades.)
The man is singing to the night: the words are in no language that Erik has
ever heard spoken before, but the more he pays attention the more he
understands, on a more visceral level.
The man is singing the balance of the world into existence, and the suit he
wears shifts and flows and changes to the rhythm of the balance. Now the suit
jacket turns into a long coat, almost like a cassock, its hems flying in the
strong wind. Now the long coat falls away silently, shattering into feathers,
reforming into a scarf twice as long as the man wearing it is tall.
“You’ll get to do this, eventually,” the man says, when he looks over and
catches Erik staring. “It just takes time.”
Erik wants to smile, wants to laugh, wants to be sarcastic, wants to be. “And I
suppose you’re going to hurry me along, because there’s not much time, or
something. Isn’t that what happens in the stories? Some poor sap is told he’s
so much more than himself, or comes into some kind of fortune, or gets swept
away on a quest - but that’s because he’s going to become cannon fodder, or
because he’s about to embark on a tragic journey - which is pretty much the
same thing?”
The man laughs. “Maybe if we were really in a story, that would be true,” he
says as he steps over thin air and then down to solid ground, to stand in front
of Erik. He’s no longer singing, but the power never quite leaves him: it shows
as silent rippling electricity contained in his cufflinks, wrapping around the
middle finger on his left hand for a ring.
Erik watches the other man glance at the light he’s still holding in his hands,
only now that he’s been distracted, the power has changed form: ones and zeroes
and parentheses and semicolons, and abstracted symbols that might have started
off as letters from the Latin alphabet but are now well on their way to
becoming gibberish.
“Not quite gibberish; I think I can read some of that,” the other man says.
“More to the point, I don’t want you to stop doing that.”
“I’m doing it wrong,” Erik says.
The man laughs softly, and only a little mockingly. “I only showed you to work
with lightning because it was the image that had been foremost in your mind at
that time. Clearly, I haven’t been paying attention.”
“You haven’t been paying attention?” Erik stares. “I thought you were going to
tell me off.”
“No, not at all, quite the opposite. I’m going to tell myself off.”
“Why?”
The man smiles. “Because you see the world like this. These are the building
blocks of the world to you. This is the essence of reality in your head.”
“Yes...?”
“So this is how you shall conquer your old self. Your old fears. The old way of
looking at the world.”
And before Erik can react or even take another breath the man is seizing both
of his wrists in a gentle but inexorable grip - the man is pulling him forward,
forward, and the railing melts as they pass through it.
They should be passing over it, Erik thinks. He might be slightly panicking.
The numbers and symbols he’s holding up are trembling and rippling.
“No, no, don’t lose your concentration. See the world as you truly see it. Fix
this in your mind,” the man says, quiet, encouraging, steady. “You’re a
programmer, aren’t you? You make machines do what you want them to do. It’s the
same thing here. You work with the world, make it work for you.”
“Not interested in falling; blood doesn’t go with suits,” Erik mutters.
“We’re not going to fall. I know we’re not. I know you’re going to keep us
here. I’m safe as houses with you in this place, in this time, in this moment.”
Bright blue stars in a bright blue night: Erik looks into the man’s eyes, sees
the reflection of the world, and as he stares the world begins to twist and
splinter into a syntax that is nothing like any programming language he can
learn from a book. Ones, zeroes, reality, the world and its rules.
Erik takes a deep breath. He knows ones and zeroes, at least, and when he sees
the man as a reflection of things that can be switched on and switched off, he
comes to see himself as the same.
And then, suddenly, they’re suspended there. They’ve fallen just a few feet.
The city’s sidewalks are just a little closer.
And over his suit jacket, Erik is now wearing a cape: an honest-to-goodness
cape that flies and flutters in the nonstop evening wind.
The man laughs and keeps holding on to Erik’s wrists. “There, you’ve mastered
your first lesson. That means I can keep my end of the bargain.”
Erik nods, and remembers the conversation from the beginning of the night.
“Tell me your name.”
The man pulls at Erik, just a little, so he can murmur, “I’m Charles.”
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "In formal wear". And yes, I WAS playing the
     Smashing Pumpkins when I finally decided on a concept for this tale.
     Um, basically, I had the final book of the Wheel of Time on my mind
     when I thought about Charles, Erik, black suits, and magic - all I
     did was update the setting to our present day. So yeah, think about
     this as time-transported Asha'man or something. Hee.
     Afrocurl says she likes Erik as an IT kind of guy, so Erik is a
     programmer who becomes, well, ANOTHER kind of programmer.
     And I just really liked the idea of Charles running around in a nice
     suit, throwing around some serious magical firepower.
***** now I can dance *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
It takes Erik a moment to recover from the sudden flash of overload when he
finally makes it past the bouncers and the velvet ropes: music and lights and
shouting. The heavy pulse of the music overtakes the rush of blood in his
veins, dictates the tempo at which he walks, weaving and ducking to get past
the multitudes.
Promising - even if people are staring at him for some reason.
He makes half a circuit of the dance floor before he finally spots some
familiar faces: thank goodness for a strobe light that illuminates two men
standing with their arms around each other’s waists, standing up on a platform
raised a few feet off the main level. The taller one has dark hair worn in a
low ponytail; the shorter one has a wild wavy mane of bright red and gold hair.
Janos immediately starts laughing when he catches sight of Erik. “I didn’t
think they’d let straightlaced types like you in! I mean, what are you doing
here in a suit?”
“I’ve had enough people staring at me since I came in,” Erik says, sounding
weary.
“Chill, man,” Sean offers. “The thing is, no one here realizes that you dress
like you’re at home when you’re at work.”
“Because I am at home when I work. It’s a virtual office, hasn’t anyone heard
of it before?”
“They are merely jealous,” Azazel says when he appears at Erik’s elbow and
passes him a beer. “Drink. You look like you need it.”
“I do,” Erik says.
When he’s halfway through the bottle the music stops and the lights come up on
the girls working the DJ tables.
“Good evening,” the blonde says, gesturing for silence. “It’s really nice to be
back here! We’ve really missed you!”
The crowd cheers for them; even Sean and Janos join in the raucous applause and
whistling coming from all sides.
“It’s good to see all the new faces! But we can’t forget our old friends and
regulars,” the other DJ says. There’s a wide streak of neon blue at her left
temple. “So we’ve put together a little something that’s just right for
everyone. Something old, something new, something borrowed - ” She points at
her own head. “I’ve got your something blue here. You guys ready?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer; she yells “Go go go!” at the other DJ, who
flips her a thumbs-up and gets the music started.
And it’s a beat Erik knows right in his bones, it’s a beat he loves and it’s a
beat he can move to - he races the others back down to the dance floor, and
they dive headlong into the crush.
Sean and Janos dance like they’re dueling, Erik thinks as he passes them by,
and it only takes a few seconds before Azazel is pulled into a throng of wildly
gyrating bodies.
With every shift of mad strobing light Erik moves from partner to partner. It’s
exhilarating and deeply unsatisfying at the same time; perhaps the people here
aren’t precisely used to dancing with strangers, much less strangers wearing
fine blue suits.
The beats go on and on, changing, capricious, and in the end he lets go of the
idea of dancing with others and dances with himself instead: he clears a space
around himself and doesn’t think about the avid eyes watching him. He uses
every perfectly timed kick and gesture to punctuate the driving music. He
lashes out with clenched fists, he steps and swerves and shimmies, and everyone
else is like shadows flitting past, insubstantial.
All there is, is the power of the music that pounds hotly in his skin.
The rhythm drives Erik on, even as it starts to distort and drag, making him
desperately aware of every movement and every breath, the steady drip of sweat
into his wilted collar.
Suddenly someone pulls at his necktie and he only has a moment to be astounded
at the strength that wrenches him right around - before he’s staring into blue
eyes under artificial blue shadows, bright hectic hypnotic spark looking right
at him.
Brief glimpse of dark clinging trousers, the hems artfully torn up; the top
three buttons on the jade-colored shirt are undone, and in the haze of the
adrenaline coursing through Erik’s veins he can just about catch a glimpse of
collar bone and jugular vein and delicate curling dark hair falling over an
arched eyebrow.
“You’re not half bad yourself,” the man growls. “Your suit’s held up pretty
well for the most part.”
Erik finds himself leaning closer, finds it startling that the man is pulling
him closer. Still, he manages to hold up his end of the conversation, “It had
better be; it’s all I’ve got in the way of club attire.”
“I like your way of thinking, and I like the way you dance solo,” is the
immediate riposte. “Do you think you can do just as well when you dance in
tandem?”
“Depends on who my partner is.”
The man smiles, bright and amused and sharp. “Me, of course, who else is
dancing with you right now?”
Erik shakes his head. “Not even my own friends wanted to dance with me.”
“They don’t know what they’re missing,” the man declares. “And I’m curious like
a concussed kitten is curious, so, I’m dancing with you, damn the
consequences.”
“Not unless you tell me your name first,” Erik says.
“Charles. And you are?”
“Erik.”
“Let’s dance, Erik.” Charles takes his hands: bright hot strength, pulling at
Erik, drawing him in, as merciless as he is inexorable - and so as the music
roars back into existence around them Erik finds himself wrapped around
Charles, inextricably tangled, every nerve ending alight and aflame in blue and
the beat that spears through them both.
Later on there might be time to talk, and later on there might be time for
deeper instincts to take over.
That’s later; this is now. And now means he has to dance; now means he has to
step in time with the rhythm that Charles sets. Now means being lost to the
music, to the dance - now means being lost in Charles.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Dancing". I love the challenge of writing
     physicality, and when it's expressed like this it's all just insane
     and reeking of synaesthesia and I can never get enough of it, so I'm
     glad that this was on the list of OTP topics.
     I had some experience of house music and other EDM in the late '90s
     to the first part of the 2000s, and I've drawn from that in the
     writing of the dance sequences here.
***** make you feel my love *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Erik opened the door and looked Charles up and down. “I still have objections
to you being here at all.”
“I still have objections to being ill in the first place, thank you,” is the
slurred mumble of a reply. “Bad timing. Terrible. When I have things to do,
important things, needful things. Can’t stop. Mustn’t stop.”
“You go out tomorrow,” Erik said, “and I’ll personally make sure that everyone
knows you’ve got the fucking plague. That you’re Patient Zero, you’re the
carrier.”
“Evil.”
“Only when it’s absolutely necessary,” Erik said, and the words were cold but
his thoughts were warm, the ideas twined with affection and worry and a deep
desire to be protective.
He knew that Charles was in a bad way when he reached out for him and picked
him up, supporting him around the shoulders and the backs of his knees - and
Charles made no protest when he would normally have used his abilities to make
Erik put him back down.
Hate feeling so watery, Charles thought at Erik. I have all the strength of wet
noodles, and I hate it. I hate it.
“It’s only reasonable you feel that way, though,” Erik pointed out as he
carried Charles through the apartment, through his bedroom door, to lay him out
on the one bed. “You’re running a temperature and you’re probably going to get
worse before you get better.”
“Help,” Charles began.
“I will. I will. Just.” I’m absolute crap at taking care of people. Fair
warning.
Charles shook his head, and winced immediately afterwards. “Fibbing. You look
after me.”
“I’m doing what I can. Medicine, soup, sleep?”
“Yes, yes,” Charles said, huddled in on himself in the blankets, a miserable
curl of a man, sweating and shivering.
“I’ll be back,” Erik said, and hurried to the kitchen so he could check on the
pot that he’d left to simmer. Chicken stock faintly scented with mace and bay
leaf. Split peas, golden and tender. He went back to his cutting board and
knife, slicing up the rest of the frankfurter, the motion of it mindlessly
soothing: his hands steady on the knife.
There was a little bread to go with the soup. The bowl was chipped and the
worn-down enamel on the handle of the spoon clashed with the red-checked tray.
Still, Charles attempted to smile when Erik came back with the food; he tried
to sit up on his own, and succeeded for the most part, though he was somewhat
listing to one side.
Erik steadied him and pushed the tray in this direction. “If you need help
eating - ”
Thank you, I think I can still manage - and you’ll know if I can’t -
“Okay,” Erik said, and watched patiently and tirelessly as Charles ate the
soup, slow mouthful by slow mouthful.
“Really good,” Charles said when he was mostly done. “Feel warmer now.”
“I’m glad,” Erik said as he put the bowl back on the tray and put the tray on
the floor. “It’ll help, I promise.”
Family recipe for people feeling poorly? Charles thought as he sank back down
into the pillows.
Mama’s idea of a cure-all, Erik thought. He climbed into bed with Charles,
carefully wrapped his arms around him, gently pulled him close. Mind you, she’s
not actually wrong. This is usually all I can eat on the rare days when I’m
under the weather.
“Ah. Yes,” Charles said.
The fever was burning within his skin, leaving him shaky and fumbling in Erik’s
arms; it took him the better part of two minutes to turn around so they were
facing each other, lying on their sides. Charles’s fingertips burned and
trembled as they skimmed over Erik’s face and throat and shoulder, and
eventually Erik caught both of Charles’s hands in his and held them in place
over his heart. Ten points of shaking heat.
Sorry, so sorry, Charles thought. You’re busy. You just recovered from this
same bug yourself. I fussed over you. Wasn’t helpful. Now you’re doing this for
me.
Erik kissed Charles gently between his furrowed eyebrows. “Don’t worry about
it.”
Erik -
“I said don’t worry about it; I’ll make you soup and care for you when you’re
not well and make sure you’re all right. Whenever you need it. However you need
me.”
Charles yawned and blinked and nodded slowly. Don’t leave me.
Erik smiled. “I’ve nowhere else to be.”
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Cooking / baking". The recipe for yellow split
     pea and frankfurter soup is taken from Nigella_Lawson; the title
     comes from the Bob Dylan song, which has been covered by artists
     including Adele.
***** don’t think about elephants *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
There is a gun in his hand, a necessary heavy weight of a weapon, and he is
standing in a corridor lit in shivering silver light, and he doesn’t know how
he got here but he does know what he’s doing, and Charles’s subconscious mind
catches up with him just in time for him to hear footsteps coming toward him.
He doesn’t think, just changes the pistol for something much heavier and much
more powerful, and his finger is tense, just off the trigger. He trains his SMG
on the source of the incoming sound.
And then Erik is hurtling around the corner, skidding into an ungainly dive -
Charles clocks the look in his eyes, the way he’s running, and as soon as the
men in the nondescript black suits heave into view he starts shooting: one
Mozambique drill after another, the echoes of it reverberating in the trembling
hall.
He only has time to look over his shoulder, checking his six, before Erik
fetches up nearly at his feet. He’s covered in dust. There is a long cut
running over his left cheekbone. His hands are scratched and battered, but for
all that, he’s perfectly steady as he gets up and holsters his pistol. “Thank
you,” he says.
Charles nods. “You’re welcome. Did you get what we were looking for?”
Erik winces. “Some of it. Not all. We’re going to have to look for the rest.”
“They’re not going to like that topside,” Charles says, and he briefly
considers giving in to the urge to groan. Instead he settles for exchanging his
SMG for his usual Beretta; he digs in his pocket for a fresh magazine and loads
and chambers the gun.
“We did know things weren’t going to be quite that normal coming in,” Erik
says, almost growling.
“For a given value of normal.” Charles looks around at the corridor. “They’re
almost certainly aware of us now. This is my architecture, and it isn’t. It’s
starting to turn on me.”
“That’s not good,” Erik says before he takes Charles’s free hand. “Not with no
way to kick out.”
“That’s your job. I’m in here to watch your back.”
“I know. You promised.”
The corridor flickers and twists sickeningly around them; Charles has to wrench
it all back, impose his will on it, to keep them where they are within the
labyrinth of this dream. He has to stamp down hard on the urge to throw up.
“We’ve stayed here too long,” Erik says, and looks worried now. “Can you move?”
“I will because I have to,” Charles says.
“I hate it when you have to say that.”
“It’s still true.”
Erik concedes the point with a quick nod. “Yeah, it is. Come on.”
Down an identical-looking corridor, up a set of stairs, through a door and past
a room that’s been torn up from floor to ceiling. “You did that?” Erik asks.
“No, it was like that to begin with. Moira’s suggestion. At least we know this
part of the maze is still ours.”
“Like something out of a horror movie.”
Charles turns away from the wrecked room and keeps going, following the clear
path he’d laid down. “It only becomes a cliche after we’re all done expecting
it. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t true to begin with.”
“I know.”
The next time they stop, it’s because Erik holds up a fist in warning. “Voices
ahead.”
“Do I need something bigger?” Charles asks.
“I can’t tell if they’re ours or theirs.”
“Only one way to find out,” Charles says after a moment, and he reaches out to
one of the walls, knocking out a signal: four rapid knocks, pause, two slow
knocks.
Silence.
Charles signals again.
“Find them! They’re somewhere in here!”
Erik smirks, and there is no trace of humor in his eyes at all. “Raven.”
“Raven,” Charles agrees. “And we can kick her out if she’s with anyone we don’t
want in here.”
“Makes life easier,” Erik says.
Someone fires into the ceiling, and the corridor’s acoustics and structure tell
Charles exactly where their enemies are. “Good work, Raven,” he murmurs under
his breath. To Erik, he adds, “Follow me.”
“To the ends of the earth,” Erik murmurs.
“Into dreams and deeper,” Charles replies, and then they’re moving forward:
step by deliberate step. He watches the corridor, and Erik watches his back.
They pass two corners without incident - and then there’s a shadow moving
toward them, and Charles fires off the first two shots as soon as he sees the
thug.
“Down!” Erik yells, and he doesn’t think to question, just drops to a ready
crouch on the floor. There are more gunshots coming from behind them; Charles
whips around and takes out the three men creeping up on Erik with a series of
precisely placed shots.
“I can hear you,” a voice hollers.
“We’re taking Raven out to a serious steak dinner after this,” Charles almost
laughs as he reloads and gets up and dashes around the corner.
Erik’s on his heels, he can feel him breathing more or less down the back of
his neck, and as far as Charles can remember, that has never been a problem or
an annoyance, if it’s Erik doing it to him. He takes it as a sign that it’s
Erik, the real Erik, and he takes it as proof that the man’s still watching
over him, working together with him.
They find a woman in a black suit standing amid a welter of dead bodies. Her
eyes flash golden for an instant.
“It’s us, Raven,” Erik says.
“I know,” she laughs. “You’re looming over Charles.”
“I am.”
“And Charles, you’re practically purring.”
“No comment,” Charles says, allowing himself a small smile.
“So I’ve no doubts it’s really the two of you.” Raven holds up a folder in one
hand. “I brought you something.”
“Thank you,” Erik says.
“Kick soon?”
“I should hope so,” Charles says after a moment of looking up at the ceiling.
“There. We should have another few minutes of safety.”
He reaches out and finds Erik already taking his hand, large and warm and
rough, and he hangs on as best he can, tense and watchful until they can leave.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "In battle, side by side". The title of this
     fic is taken from the Inception soundtrack. It is a follow-up to
     floating_bridge_of_dreams.
     To repeat part of the end notes from the previous story: Erik is the
     team's primary extractor; Charles is their primary architect and
     secondary extractor; Raven is the forger.
***** if you can’t handle the heat... *****
Chapter Notes
     First of two parts. Story continues directly in Chapter 21.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Charles carefully catalogues the myriad pains and aches in his arms and
shoulders and back and thighs and calves as he plods past the stoves and the
prep stations and the sinks. Basically, everything hurts, and he’s probably
pulled a muscle in his arm again if the pain that’s setting his teeth on edge
is any indication.
The smoke from the kitchen has completely blurred out his vision to the point
that it takes him two tries to find the handle on the door that leads out to
the alley. Turning that same handle is another matter entirely; the simple
motion leaves his fingers cramping and the rest of him weak like water as he
steps outside.
There are footsteps following him: “Chef,” Angel says with a sympathetic wince
as she hands him a double shot of tequila. “One of those days, huh?”
“One of those days,” Charles mutters. He doesn’t wince at all as he throws back
the drink; it burns going down, and it is the only welcome source of heat he
can tolerate right now. It beats away the springtime chill nicely, but it
doesn’t do a damn thing for his aching head.
“You want me to send ’Mando here? Someone should look at your hands, at the
very least.”
“No,” Charles says, and looks down at the fresh set of crisscrossing burns on
his hands and wrists and forearms. “No point getting these seen to now. It’s
early hours yet.” Still, he dredges up a smile for the worried lines between
her eyebrows. “I promise I’ll have this looked at as soon as I can. All right?”
“Ice bath later, during your break,” Angel says, still looking dubious, but she
takes the empty glass from him and goes back into the madhouse of the kitchen.
Leaving him shaking and fumbling for the lighter he’s carrying around in his
pocket. The cigarette pack’s been empty for three weeks now, and even though he
still finds himself waking up with an overwhelming craving for nicotine, at
least he’s managed to move past the whole needneedneed that had plagued him
when he’d quit cold turkey.
Charles amuses himself with the lighter, tossing it from hand to hand, flicking
the flame on and off. It gives him something to do with his hands, and the
beat-up chrome is at least better to look at than the mess of old and new
blisters and burns and cuts. So many scars he’s no longer certain where they
end and his actual skin begins, light and dark lines and spots that clash with
the freckles spattered all up and down his arms.
From the other pocket he produces a battered watch, the crystal as scratched-up
as the rest of him feels. He still has ten minutes before he’s allowed to go
back on duty.
Not much to do when he doesn’t have his phone with him. Charles slouches
against the wall, trying to get comfortable, and cursing another busybusybusy
Saturday night at the Blackbird. He’s been hit hard already - several steaks
and fish in just the first two hours after opening - and he has no doubt he’ll
be dans la merde soon enough.
The door opens again; Charles turns his head, catches a faint glimpse of black
leather, catches a familiar sticky-spun-sugar scent, and then - movement, he’s
being backed up into the wall, up onto his toes and there’s a solid
overwhelming warmth all around him, hands tangled in his grease-stained jacket.
“Erik,” he hisses when the other man lets him snatch a breath - he doesn’t need
it, he doesn’t want it, he just wants Erik - and he surges forward and takes
control of the second kiss. More violence, he can feel the contact in his
teeth, he can feel Erik fighting toward him as he bites savagely at his mouth.
“I’ll never get it,” Erik growls when they really have to step apart. “You’re
in those damn fumes all night and you don’t smell like oil or fat or pepper at
all. I breathe you in and you drive me crazy. You smell like salt and lemons.”
Charles laughs in his face. “Is this how you show your interest? Strange food
metaphors? Oh but what else should I expect from a pâtissier. You lot talk
about sugar and fruit and chocolate and tropical fruits that don’t taste real
at all.”
“You’re one to talk.” Erik smirks at him, knowing, one-sided. “You take the
piss out of every damn table that orders something that isn’t cooked the way
you like. Which is just about fucking everything: you hate them when they order
chicken because that means they have no idea what to eat at all. You hate them
when they ask for a well-done steak because that means they might as well be
eating charcoal. You hate them when they want fish fillet because that means
they don’t appreciate the flavors of bone and head and tail.”
“Yes, and what’s your point? You disdain croquembouche, you laugh in the faces
of people who ask for chocolate-covered bacon and for salted caramel sauce. You
think white chocolate is not chocolate at all - not that you’re wrong, but you
might as well be topping the blonde mocha dessert with the words ‘Fuck you’ in
icing!” Charles punctuates the sentences by shaking his own middle fingers in
the other man’s face.
Erik takes a swing at him then, and Charles dances out of his way, just a step
back before he darts in and lands a pulled blow to Erik’s ribs. His hands hurt,
and there is a fresh streak of blood over the knuckles of his left hand when
the impact reopens one of his knife wounds.
“Get that looked after - ” Erik begins, though he’s still got his fists up.
“The others can tell me that and I’ll tell them, sincerely even, that I
thoroughly intend to. But don’t you coddle me, don’t you be kind to me.”
“Fuck off, Charles, I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Good!” Charles declares, and cocks his fist for another punch - and when it’s
neatly and decisively blocked he tries to slap Erik with his free hand. That
one doesn’t get anywhere, either - and Erik, the cheating bastard, uses
Charles’s own momentum against him so by the time he’s motionless he’s also
been pinned to the wall, facing it this time, both arms trapped in a double
hammerlock.
Charles hisses and struggles and knows that Erik is the steady fierce weight
all along his back, bearing down into him: knows that Erik is more than welcome
to do this to him. That he needs Erik to do this to him.
And he’s damn grateful that Erik doesn’t fall out of character when he growls,
“That’s as far as you get or I’m going to get beaten up for injuring you,
grillardin.” Tell-tale shiver in that rasping accent: Charles knows what Erik
wants, what Erik needs, and is more than prepared to give it back. “Can’t have
you out of commission or who the fuck knows what would happen to this dump.”
Charles twists and struggles for show; his wrists are the dead giveaway,
because he’s deliberately willed away all the tension in his hands. His fingers
are loose and pliant, and he can use them to brush careful little spirals into
the burning skin of Erik’s arms.
“All right, both of you, you’re done here,” Ororo says when she sticks her head
out the door a moment later. If not for her smirk, she’d look completely
unimpressed. “Charles, you’ve got several orders waiting; Erik, your fruit
delivery’s about to come in.”
Charles pretends to sneer at her, tipping her a wink after a moment. “You can’t
boss me around, it’s my name above the door.”
“Sure I can; it’s part of my job description to tell everyone what needs
doing.” And Ororo is the best damn expediter in the city; they can’t get along
without her, and they all know it.
“We’ll be right in,” Erik says, and he keeps looking at her until she
laughingly withdraws.
When he lets Charles go, Charles sighs, and reaches out for his equally gnarled
hand. “I fucking hate Saturday nights.”
“Just another long line of mouths to be fed,” Erik says, nodding wearily. “On
the other hand, you’re the brilliant mastermind behind this place.”
“Ugh, do me a favor and shut up.” Charles stretches and then rubs absently at
the sore spot on his arm. “See you later?”
Erik’s smile is beautiful and exists just for Charles and Charles alone. “Yes.”
He tries to ignore the hot pulse of blood beneath his skin, the warning haze of
desire setting in around the edges of his vision, and steels himself to face
the fires again.
When he inhales, though, together with the salt and the smoke and the spices he
remembers sugar and musk, and that makes him smile.
TBC
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the connected themes "Arguing" and "Making up after",
     hence the double post.
     This is written for Afrocurl and for Papercutperfect.
     A pâtissier is a pastry chef; a grillardin works the grill station in
     a restaurant.
***** ...get INTO my kitchen *****
Chapter Notes
     Second of two parts. Continues directly from Chapter 20.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Continued from previous chapter
It takes him a long time before he can finish scrubbing the sugar and the
chocolate and the rest of the mango coulis off his hands; when he sniffs his
fingers he can still smell pastry and butter, and the great irony of his life
is that he’d never had much liking for sweets.
Here he is, now, making his living with shortening and eggs and far too many
kinds of sugar than he knows what to do with.
His is the last station to close, as usual, and after the orders have all been
plated and carried away he still has cleanup to worry about; he insists on
doing this himself, and only begrudgingly accepts the occasional offer of
assistance from one or the other of the commis.
It’s well into Sunday morning by the time he’s done, and every muscle hurts,
from his neck all the way down to his feet. He only barely manages to stifle a
groan when his weariness nearly makes him trip over the stairs as he climbs
back up to the main kitchen area.
“You look like hell,” Armando observes as he makes a final sweep of the stoves.
“I feel like it,” Erik says. “So I’m gone, and you’re all just going to have to
fend for yourselves tonight. You’re not going to be seeing me till Tuesday.”
“The perils of Sunday brunch. Not to mention inventory, and climbing up into
the hoods to scrape, and yelling at suppliers. You got your list all marked
up?”
“Yeah, it’s waiting downstairs.”
“Okay, good, now get out, you’re making me dizzy just looking at you.”
He waves his middle finger in Armando’s face and gets nothing but a hearty
laugh for his troubles.
By the time he staggers out onto the sidewalk he’s so tired that he barely
notices that Charles is waiting for him next to his motorcycle.
“How many people were celebrating birthdays in there tonight?” Erik asks,
slurring over half the words as he clumsily lifts the helmet that Charles
passes him.
“There was a dispute over that in the kitchen; Moira said six, Emma said
seven.”
“Too many cakes. If I never have to touch the blue and pink icing again it’ll
still be too soon.”
He watches as Charles shakes his head, then pats his hair down so he can put
his own helmet on. “So long as people think it’s better to marry in June, we’re
going to have a lot of people celebrating their birthdays in March.”
“Apparently,” Erik says, and he sighs tiredly and tries his best to hold on as
Charles revs the engine and speeds them home.
He perks up a little when Charles gets a pot of coffee started. “Here’s to
those of us who toil in the kitchens at night and drink coffee to get to sleep
by daytime.”
“Hear, hear,” Erik says, and then he only has enough presence of mind to move
back from the table when Charles goes to sit in his lap, warm welcome heavy
real.
“You really do look wrecked; what else happened down at your station?”
Erik shakes his head and leans up for a kiss, and he smiles a little when
Charles gives it with alacrity. “Don’t want to talk about it. Just - tired.
Long week was long. And we spent most of it getting slammed.”
“I know,” Charles murmurs. “Bloody holidays. You’d think the cold would have
scared everyone off.”
Erik closes his eyes when Charles runs his fingers over his scalp. Rough as
those fingertips might be, catching on the strands of his hair and scoring
rapidfire lines of fleeting pain over the shell of his ear and the nape of his
neck, they are soothing and sorely needed after hours upon hours of being lost
in the bustle of the kitchen.
He’s most of the way to asleep when the scent of coffee fills up their spartan
postage stamp of a kitchen; still, he reaches eagerly for the mug when Charles
slides it toward him, and pours a generous dollop of honey into the dark
depths.
It’s Charles who gets up after a few sips, and Erik follows him through the
apartment, shedding clothes as he goes so by the time they’re in the bedroom
Erik is down to his boxers and the still-steaming cup in his hand.
Charles looks dismayed when he glances at Erik’s chest. “I pulled that punch, I
know I did, so why are you bruised there?”
“I know you pulled the punch, Charles, but you’re still pretty strong whether
you do that or not,” Erik says. He takes an experimental deep breath; it
pinches, a little. He’s been burned worse than this. “Come to bed?”
“Are you sure?” Charles asks when Erik pulls at him, so he’s on top. He’s still
wearing the t-shirt he’d had on beneath his chef’s jacket, so thin around the
seams that the white is practically see-through.
“I’m damn sure I need it,” Erik says firmly. He shifts his hips upwards,
experimentally, and nods when Charles groans softly. “And you won’t rest until
you get it, either. I know how you are when you’re exhausted.”
“That wouldn’t be the reason I couldn’t sleep,” Charles says, punctuating the
words by nipping sweetly at Erik’s mouth. “I’d have problems because I wouldn’t
be able to stop wanting you.”
“So don’t stop. I don’t want you to stop. I want you to want me.”
Erik makes a disappointed face when Charles rolls off him in response - but
he’s back a moment later, completely naked, and he wastes no time in stripping
Erik of the last of his clothes.
Someone groans when they’re lying next to each other, touching everywhere, skin
to skin; Erik doesn’t know which one of them made that sound, and in the next
moment he forgets about it, too busy being lost in Charles’s kiss.
Sometimes, when he’s more lucid than this and not lost in watching his caramel
before it burns, Erik tries to think about how to describe the way Charles
moves, the way he touches Erik. There is a spark of lightning about him, a kind
of energy and strength that can barely be contained by freckled skin stretched
taut over compact muscles.
It’s the passion of him, the passion he has for life and food and wine and -
improbably enough - Erik himself. That passion surrounds Erik now, deadly vice-
grip that he craves and craves and can’t get enough of - and it’s the need that
finally makes him move, that makes him grip Charles’s arms hard enough to leave
bruises, that makes him arch up desperately into Charles’s kiss.
“Want you want you,” Charles is whispering into his skin, burning words.
“Please please please,” Erik replies - and he gathers his strength, rolls them
over. He swallows Charles’s surprised cry in a vicious kiss, and listens
intently as he slides downwards: licking over Charles’s throat and the rapid
bobs of his Adam’s apple. Teethmarks over the prominent spur of collar bone, a
ragged circle of kiss-bruising around his nipple.
Down, to Charles’s groin, and Erik ignores the hard red cock in favor of
mouthing at his balls, and Charles’s voice fills the air with reverent
obscenities - not the rough speech from the kitchen, or the sharp sarcasm that
he uses with the rest of the kitchen brigade. This is something for Erik and
Erik alone: the sound of Charles willingly falling to pieces beneath him.
When he goes down on Charles the words stop entirely, and Erik smiles, because
a Charles reduced to speechlessness is a Charles abandoned to his instincts. He
hollows out his cheeks, sucks with sloppy enthusiasm, and Charles is hot and
writhing beneath him, almost enough to throw him off entirely.
“Erik - Erik stop - ”
He looks up, alarmed, but when Charles reaches for him and throws him back to
the sheets he laughs and he goes, enthralled anew, utterly willing. Lust pounds
in his bones as Charles reaches for the lube, a darker and darker rhythm as
Erik is opened up, one then two then three fingers, and then Charles is sinking
into him and Erik shouts his name, over and over, and this is the way he wants
to fall, spiraling down into Charles, shattering with and for him.
END
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the connected themes "Arguing" and "Making up after",
     hence the double post.
     This is written for Afrocurl and for Papercutperfect.
     A pâtissier is a pastry chef; a grillardin works the grill station in
     a restaurant.
     Some ideas taken from Anthony Bourdain's book Kitchen Confidential.
***** dueling hearts *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
One moment, Erik is in his room. The air smells stale, like old broken-down
rain and rust, undercut by grease and the brackish yuck of old coffee. Remnants
of a late dinner in cardboard boxes strewn all over the table, discarded
plastic utensils disturbing the thin layer of dust that shows the traces of his
movements.
He’s sitting in silence and the embrace of the smoky city night: the lights
flickered out on him for good at the beginning of the evening, and it’s now too
late to look for the super and get some help.
The room is not unlit, however: Erik is more than used, now, to the fact that
he no longer throws off shadows when he moves around. Now soft white light
follows him wherever he goes. It manifests as a wide glowing band around his
left wrist, snug against his skin, mildly buzzing against his nerves, pleasant
and constant companion. Rings, too, on the five fingers of his left hand,
connected by glowing cords shaped like flat chains to the band.
Sometimes he catches himself moving his hand just to watch the flickering play
that results, sparks of afterlight and temporary blindness dashing across his
vision.
As he looks around his room he consciously seeks out the currents of the world
and its underpinnings. Streams of energy winking in and out of his perception,
interference rippling in the corners of the room where he can most clearly see
the shields he’s placed upon the little rathole of space where he lays his head
down to sleep.
The shields pulse at him now, weak at first and growing stronger and stronger
as he stares: arcing flutter and flash, the seals and barriers slowly shading
into blue: a color he’s more than familiar with, now. A color he can’t seem to
get enough of. Blue in his dreams, like staring up into endless sky and down
into depthless ocean at the same time. Blue in the faint shadows that buildings
and people throw at the endless instant of highest noon. Blue worlds around
blue stars, blue heat and blue dark.
He looks up at the faint push on the edges of his perception, and thinks that
his fine black suit plus the cloak hanging around his shoulders are fundamental
incongruities in this dwelling, and says, softly, “Come.”
Tonight Charles’s black suit is hidden under a manifestation of a military-like
wool greatcoat, complete in every detail down to the shoulder marks. Black
slashed with blue. The hems do not move even as he walks rapidly through the
room. “Hello, Erik,” Charles says.
Once again Erik is unable to describe the precise shape and color of Charles’s
eyes: he’s too focused on the long eyelashes, strangely vivid shadow against
the pale skin of his face. He’s too caught up in the strange flashes of light
crisscrossing the irises.
Charles seems to enjoy looking at him, or maybe that is just Erik’s
imagination, because he’s looking up into that blue that looks back at him,
steady and warm and crackling with unimaginable power, until he’s out of breath
and more than glad that he’s still sitting down.
“Come with me?” Charles asks, deep dark sweet lilt in his voice to match the
faint lines around his bright smile.
Erik gets up, slowly, still staring, and takes the hand that is offered to him.
The apartment vanishes, clap of faint thunder that reverberates into his bones.
“You’re going to have to teach me that soon,” he murmurs after a moment. It’s
the work of a second to reach back to that place where he is rooted, and check
on the shields: they are whole, and they are stronger. The currents of
Charles’s passage are lending their power to the lines that Erik has already
laid down, and even now that he’s nowhere near that space he can feel that it’s
there, that it’s real and it exists.
“I did that, yes,” Charles offers after a moment, and Erik starts when he looks
down, because has Charles been looking at him all this time? “I can point to my
home across worlds and realities and existences. I always know where it is. I
can always make my way back.”
“Will I be able to do the same?”
“You will now.”
Erik smiles. “Thank you.”
“You might need it,” Charles murmurs after a moment. “I did not take you from
your home so that we could go sightseeing.”
“More training?” Erik asks.
“And not just with me, though I will take the role of the primary instructor
still,” Charles confirms. “Do you remember the story of my Change?”
He does. “There was a war. You were a child. You were powerful; they wanted you
to support the front ranks. But you asked to fight.”
Charles looks haunted and old and pained for a long moment; Erik watches him
pull the smile back on. It seems to take a long moment. “Yes. We were
unprepared then. So many painful lessons to learn. Now we will not make the
same mistake.”
The wind of their passage takes them to a great vaulted chamber sitting upon a
rainbow bridge.
“Yes, we call this Valhalla,” Charles says, nodding at Erik’s bemused look,
“but we have no access to Asgard, I’m afraid. That is a purely human idea, and
not without its merits. Follow me, and mind your hands and feet.”
As soon as they enter - the walls bow out, briefly, and the door admits them
with a crackling flash of light that lingers, a not unpleasant rainbow, around
Erik’s cuff and rings - he knows why the warning was necessary.
They have to duck and weave around men and women and the occasional child,
around the cries of battle and the crash of weapons meeting.
Erik stares, open-mouthed, as a woman wielding a spear comes within a hair’s-
breadth of running her opponent through. The opponent in question is a little
boy, no older than twelve, who smiles and shoves his unruly blonde hair out of
his eyes and then makes a punching motion forward with one chubby fist.
The woman grunts and falls, as though something has been dropped onto her, and
after a moment’s futile struggle she falls limp and begins to laugh: joyous and
sincere and musical.
“Nicely done,” Charles says to the boy. “May I introduce my companion?”
Erik stands a little bit straighter, and doesn’t know he’s doing it.
“Hello, Charles,” the boy says, and adds, “hello, Charles’s companion. I’m
Jason.”
“I’m Erik,” Erik says. As he shakes the boy’s hand it is all he can do to not
fall down himself: the power in Jason manifests as gravity, a profound and
regal weight.
Jason smiles, a little bit apologetic. “I understand my strength is the
antithesis of yours; Charles teaches you to fly, while I teach others to stay
grounded.”
“I think people need to be able to do both,” Erik says.
Charles beams at him, and he can’t look at that bright smile, not directly or
else he’ll be blinded - but he pulls it into himself nonetheless.
Another woman joins their group. Erik spots the short skirt first, and then
forgets it exists as soon as he notices the two hatchets hanging off her belt.
He wishes he had one of those.
“Hello, Charles,” the woman says. “I see you have brought your companion here
for a lesson. You should not beat him up too much.”
Charles laughs softly and shakes his head. “I think that he will take it amiss
if I go easy on him!”
“Excuse me,” Erik says, “what are you talking about? Are you all here to spar?”
“That’s what we use this place for,” Jason says.
Erik grins and meets Charles’s challenging look head-on. “I really wish you’d
said that right at the start instead of being mysterious.”
“I wonder if I can make you regret that,” Charles says, and then he moves,
rapid and decisive and surprising: suddenly there is a gun in his hand, softly
glowing lines of light. The muzzle is pointed right between Erik’s eyes. “I’ve
had quite a bit of time to practice, you see.”
Erik ignores the weapon. He focuses on Charles’s smile. “Try me,” he says, and
he never breaks his gaze even as he jumps away, straight up, until he’s a
handspan away from the ceiling.
All around him, the men and women in black continue to spar with each other.
It only takes a moment before he’s thinking of his weapons: sword in his right
hand, shield in the left. A one and a zero - “on” for offense, “off” for
defense.
He can see Charles’s expression sliding toward determination, toward mischief.
Erik smiles, and prepares to do battle, and never takes his eyes from
Charles’s.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Gazing into each other's eyes". This fic is a
     direct sequel to, and will not make sense without, the_beginning_is
     the_end_is_the_beginning.
     Quick summary of this AU: Charles is empowered and he triggers Erik's
     empowerment, and the powers they both wield have to do with reality
     itself, including the manipulation and protection thereof. They have
     different approaches, as they always do; but this time they seem to
     complement each other instead of work against each other or be driven
     against each other.
***** amor vincit omnia *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Erik has learned to wake up very carefully since the world went dark around
him. He still remembers the fight on Mars. He still remembers screaming
wordlessly as he was rushed toward bulkhead, no way to react or think or
escape, bracing himself only for impact - and then again, again, pain like his
mind on fire as it had never been when he was using the full extent of his
biotic abilities. He still remembers an otherworldly sneer on an artificial
face: rage and contempt.
He’s had to learn many things since then. He’s learned about the Normandy’s
desperate flight to the Citadel; he’s learned that he was rushed to Huerta.
He’s learned about the myriad duties and responsibilities and burdens of a
Spectre: he’d always thought that spec ops was already its own strange lure and
tangle and headache and then he found out what exactly was expected of someone
ordered to a higher calling than that.
He’s learned about his visitors who were also his protectors, foremost among
them a drell biotic who watched over him with a solemn gravity that hadn’t just
come from the seriousness of his condition. He’s learned about the gifts on the
nightstand: a bottle of Peruvian whiskey, a cap with a familiar SR2 designation
- and two battered books.
He remembers seeing the books the moment he’d woken up, and remembers knowing
exactly whose hands had placed them there. Worn and fraying and dog-eared and
unspeakably precious now, with so many stations and worlds and moons and
vessels lost to firestorm and unspeakable indescribable destruction.
Familiar words in a familiar voice echo in his mind, in his own raspy voice, as
he breathes, careful, deliberate, knowing that he will soon have to wake up:
Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the
world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.
Something pings him on the bedside console and he smiles when he finds that he
has one new message.
Erik,
I think you’ve still got some of my things mixed in with yours. I’m really
sorry about the mess; we had to leave with all possible haste. In any case,
maybe there’ll be a way for us to reconcile the differences and the jumbled-up
things after tonight.
I think of you and remember that I must see the galaxy with my eyes, with my
mind, and with my heart, so that I will not lose that which is essential.
Even if my heart is, well, what can we call it, when we know it’s made of
silicon and electronics and all kinds of things that just happen to get mixed
in with flesh and blood.
I look forward to seeing you in another few hours. Just let me know, however,
if you would like me to rescue you from some of the others. Apparently you and
I are to have attendants. Take them out if you must, we’ll burn out in one of
the Kodiaks, and we’ll apologize to Chakwas later.
I love you.
Charles XS
Soft buzz of the proximity alert. Erik smiles, and shakes his head, and gets up
from bed. He still has to brace himself with one hand on the wall; the
dizziness is still there, but there is less and less of it every day, and that
is a mercy he’ll gratefully take. “Come,” he says.
Bulky blue armor, a friendly face for all it’s crisscrossed with terrible seams
and scars. “You all right, Erik?”
“I’ll be fine, Garrus,” Erik says as he makes his way to the head.
“Hello, Erik,” says a feminine voice, and he knows about EDI, he really does,
but there is still some animal part of him that quails away from the look in
her eyes behind the orange visor.
She seems to be hiding behind the protrusions of Garrus’s armor. Her hands are
out in the open, and - notably, though he’s been told she always goes about
like this anyway except when she’s going on a mission with the others, and even
then she doesn’t take up arms until they’re all down on Deck 5 - she isn’t
carrying anything at all.
“Hello, EDI - now please excuse me a moment,” Erik says, and when he looks at
himself in the mirror over the sink he’s pleasantly surprised to see himself
smiling.
It might be because of the day. It might be because he’s back here on the
Normandy where he has always belonged. It might be because he knows he’s in the
same place as Charles, among friends, among family.
It might be because he’s somehow managed to stay alive and make it through hell
and black holes and back to himself at last.
Cleaning up takes only a few minutes, though he does take the time to scrub his
hair clean and make sure that his cheeks are completely clean-shaven. He still
remembers making surprised and displeased faces once he’d woken up on the
Citadel, because of all the scruff sprouting every which way.
By the time he’s done Garrus is standing near the corner of the room looking
like some kind of funny turian-sized hat stand: he’s holding up a couple of
suit bags in his hands. On the made bed near the pillows is a velvet box, which
EDI opens to reveal a battery of familiar-looking decorations.
In fact, they’re Erik’s own decorations.
“I was told I’d have attendants,” he says as he towels his hair dry, “and I was
told I could kick them out if I saw fit, but I don’t think I’m going to do that
to either of you.”
Garrus huffs, embarrassed and amused at the same time.
EDI only keeps working, complacent, competent. “So we will be grateful that you
have such forbearance. Although I am not sure that it is not something you
might need anyway, in your daily dealings with the Commander.”
“You’re learning to make jokes, EDI, I’ll love listening in to you cutting
Joker down to size,” Erik says as he goes to Garrus and relieves him of one of
his burdens. “I can get started just fine, thank you,” he says.
“I’m not just sure as to why neither of you’re getting married in your armor.
It’s what we’d do on - well, it’s what we’d do at home,” the turian grumbles.
Erik tactfully ignores the hitch in his breath - he remembers the sorrow in
Charles’s eyes when they’d talked about the turian homeworlds, fallen and gone,
Palaven and Menae burning and lost - and concentrates on threading the studs
into his shirt. He could use his abilities for this, and no one would be the
wiser, and no harm would come to the shirt.
Instead he focuses on the simple pleasure of getting dressed the old-fashioned
way, on the fact that he can tell his hands and feet and body to do things and
they obey him, without any hesitations, without any pain, without any delays.
Pain is all around them in this time of war, but not today.
The shirt is clean and neatly pressed, and the trousers are heavy and gleaming,
and Erik smiles when EDI takes the second suit bag from Garrus. She deftly
extracts the formal jacket from inside, with its major’s insignia on the
shoulders and Erik’s own collection of unit patches, and holds it out for him.
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Major. Now you must let us see to your colors,” EDI says.
“Can you stand still?”
“I’m honestly surprised he’s not a fumbling wreck yet,” Garrus mutters.
“Then we’d lose the Normandy and all hands,” Erik says with a malicious little
grin as he briefly manifests the unmistakable blue-fire aura of a biotic life-
form. He doesn’t move; he simply lets EDI go about her task. Precise movements
of silverglint-covered fingers. “I really think that’s no way to celebrate a
wedding day.”
He can actually see Garrus roll his eyes, and counts it as a rare victory.
“All done,” EDI suddenly says. “And may I say, I have seen records of people
getting married, but you seem - so much more than merely happy. You have my
best wishes, Major.”
“Thank you very much,” Erik says, and he surprises even himself when he pulls
her in for a quick embrace. “You too, Garrus, come here,” he says.
“You’re the one who’s pulled Charles through everything,” Garrus says as he
offers a firm handshake, rough with years of combat and projectile weapons.
“Maybe now I have a more than ironclad excuse to do just that.”
Garrus shakes his head and grants Erik the turian equivalent of a wide grin -
and then the moment is broken, as moments on the Normandy inevitably are, by
the chime that precedes a shipwide broadcast.
“Attention all hands, please make your way to the War Room where we will try to
fit as many life-forms as we possibly can, unless someone is up to helping us
violate all the laws of physics that we know of,” Joker announces over the
comm. “Important day, important doings, and as such Major Erik Lehnsherr
Alenko’s presence is requested, and I quote, tout fucking suite.”
Erik raises an eyebrow at EDI; she rolls her eyes, as best as she can, and then
she waves at Garrus to precede them out of Erik’s quarters.
He’s more than grateful for their presence as they board the elevator. It’s
good to have company just before one goes on the most important walk of one’s
life.
Faces familiar and new all over the place when the doors open again. The dark-
haired Battlespace reporter, who for once is not being trailed by her camera
drone; comm specialist Traynor, who is sniffling into her sleeve; Liara and
Tali and an indifferent-looking Javik.
Dr Chakwas steps up to Erik, and he gives her a hug, too.
“You feeling all right?” she asks, kind and brisk and already a little damp
around the edges.
“Even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t miss this for the galaxy,” Erik tells her.
“That’s the spirit. Still, I must ask, and I must make sure. Remember to take
your medications on time, or I will program your omnitool to interrupt you, and
you won’t want me to do that.”
“I’ll remember, Doctor,” Erik says. “And thank you.”
“Not at all. Now go, go, I’ve never seen him that antsy before - and amusing as
the situation is, I rather think he’d want you to put him out of his misery
now.”
Erik nods and looks around at the others, all in their finery or what semblance
of it exists on a ship heading into war, and as he makes his way to the Quantum
Entanglement Communications room, one of the Marines yells “Oo-RAH!” - and
suddenly, the crew is cheering and whooping.
“Do I have to yell for order here,” someone says, suddenly, and Erik knows that
voice.
He spins around nearly fast enough to give himself whiplash - and standing in
the room to the galaxy comms is Charles. The jacket has seen better days, and
there are far too few medals when the man has spent the last few years saving
the galaxy time and time again, and he still looks like he hasn’t had a good
night’s sleep in months.
But he’s beautiful, and he’s there, and he smiles at Erik as though there is no
one there with them.
Nothing could be farther from the truth, not when Erik can hear the quiet soft
thud-thud-thud that sounds very much like Liara bouncing from foot to foot in
excitement, and not when there is an image in light up ahead that looks very
much like Admiral David Anderson.
He kisses Charles anyway, with his heart and his soul on his lips.
“Ahem,” the Admiral says after a moment, “can you two at least pretend to wait
until after I’ve helped you out?”
Charles is laughing as he breaks away; Erik groans softly, and then grins, and
then straightens his sleeves and walks up to the comm console at Charles’s
side.
“I could have used you here, Alenko,” Anderson says, “but far be it from me to
keep you two separated a minute longer. That said, we can still cling to
ceremony here, cling to something that makes us who we are. You two ready?”
“Yes,” Charles says. His voice might be quiet, but it is heavy with
determination.
They’ve had more than their share of disagreements and pain, but Erik wouldn’t
have him any other way.
“All right.” Anderson actually cracks a small smile. “We are gathered here to
join in marriage these two men; are there any who would object to this union
between Charles Xavier Shepard and Erik Lehnsherr Alenko?”
There is dead silence on the deck.
“Thought so,” the admiral says. “All right, no objections, and I’m pretty sure
you’re all armed and whoever would have said anything should have made out
their wills beforehand. Then we’ll proceed. Shepard, Alenko, if you’re sure
that this is what you want, take each other’s hands.”
Charles’s hands are cold in his. Erik thinks about sharing warmth with him, and
a soft blue glow springs up around the Commander’s freckled and scarred wrists.
“If you have any vows to make,” Anderson says.
“Everything I was and everything I will be and everything I am now - all of it
is yours, has been yours, from the very moment we met,” Charles says. A single
tear slides down his cheek, towards the curve of his smile. “Whatever truths
are out there, whatever fires might come, whatever light or shadow or evil is
lying in wait, I know I can stand and face them, if I have you with me. I want
to be yours, Alenko, if you’ll have me.”
Erik trembles, but he manages to say his vows in a clear and steady voice: “I
don’t care for sunsets or lamplight or foxes’ tails or boa constrictors
digesting elephants. I care only for you, because you are water and light and
all my laughter and tears. You are my heart, and I want to be next to you,
Shepard, now and always, if you’ll have me.”
Anderson coughs, once, and consults his omnitool for a moment. “Will you be
with each other and protect each other and fight and live for each other, in a
galaxy at war and in a galaxy at peace? Will you bear each other’s burdens and
each other’s happiness?”
“I do,” Charles says, and so Erik echoes him, joyfully.
“Then be married, and be happy, and be together, for all the time we might have
remaining for all of us,” Anderson says.
Erik wraps Charles in his arms and there are tears and laughter alike in their
kiss - and then he concentrates, and focuses on their bodies and their weight,
and he generates just enough of a mass effect field that he lifts them both off
the deck. Just a few feet, and just for a moment, but it’s enough, it’s his
first wedding present to Charles.
The rest, well, they can’t be here for that.
So Erik only laughs when Charles groans and tears himself away, only to bestow
a silly grin on all of the crew and then: “We should go.”
“Let’s,” Erik says, and they run for the elevator, hand in hand.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Getting married". This is also a Mass Effect
     fusion, primarily taking place during the events of the third game,
     but it is not in any way, shape, or form related to the other one I
     did in this series [all_of_us_have_been_changed].
     This one is for wallhaditcoming and papercutperfect.
     I don't know much about navy weddings, and in any case I'm working
     off a video game 'verse, so I have taken some liberties with the
     quick ceremony that takes place here.
     References are made to The Once and Future King and The Little
     Prince.
***** a son of the spring *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
He wakes up in the same bitter cold weather as he had gone to sleep in last
night, and foreboding runs its freezing-cold fingers over the skin of his
throat as he struggles out of his bed and into his thickest dressing-gown, old
and bedraggled around his ankles.
In the bed, a lump of blankets that looks rather a lot like Erik shifts and
growls softly before settling.
I’ll be right back, Charles thinks. He closes the door behind him, reaches out
to the rest of the house.
Many of the students have gone home for spring break, so he’s not hemmed in on
all sides by winter-dreams and people wishing that the sun would come back
soon, and it’s a relief, as it always is every year. Spring and summer are the
slack seasons at the mansion, when there are often more people out than in,
when it is possible for the permanent inhabitants to snatch some semblance of
rest or privacy or warmth.
Though that last one has been in distressingly short supply since the winter
storms came in, one week too early: record freezing temperatures all throughout
the holidays. The snow clings to everything, stubborn, tenacious, a chill that
reaches easily past clothes and skin, making its way toward the heart.
The snow begins to fall afresh as Charles turns the key in one of the side
doors, so he has to stay inside, because he’s not dressed for the weather – and
neither is the patch of earth just a step away.
He’s going to have to buy a fresh supply of bulbs come the warmer weather –
that is, if the warmer weather ever consents to return. He has the distinct
impression that it might be wiser to give up on his foolish hope.
He’d hoped to have something for Erik today, a rich armful of pale white petals
exuding a sweet fragrance, a breath of life in the midst of the seemingly
never-ending snow all around them.
Maybe he should have accepted last night’s offer of hothouse roses from Ororo
and the others, after all.
Not even Erik is sure of when his true birthday must have been; all he knows,
and he only knows this because Charles had helped him find this stray memory,
is that the first scent he clearly remembers is that of tiny wild strawberries,
tart and sweet at the same time, perfectly warmed in early summer sunshine. A
repeated offering, something given to him as a gift, every year, in the years
when it was still possible for him to run freely in fields full of sun and
flowers, among friends and neighbors and family.
It’s all the evidence they have, and it’s not necessarily going to support the
idea that he had been born sometime in the spring, and Charles remembers
pointing that out himself all those long years ago.
Still, he hadn’t been surprised, exactly, when Erik had begun to refer to
himself – if only in his deepest thoughts, the ones only Charles was privy to –
as having been born early in the year.
Now March is drawing to a close, and it has been a long and snowbound March,
and there will be no lilies for Erik. Charles allows himself a moment to feel
his defeat, really be despondent about a failure that he couldn’t have foreseen
or acted against – and he still closes the door softly, when he turns back
around and thinks about heading back to bed.
Except that when he passes the kitchen there are a few soft voices murmuring.
Familiar voices, familiar minds, but not among the ones who had been here last
night.
Raven calls out to him, then, just as he’s hesitating on the threshold.
Charles. Hello. Are we too early? Is no one awake? Where is Erik?
So he pushes in, smiling – but the smile drops off his face in shock when he
sees his sister cradling a soft bundle in her arms.
“I – when?” he asks, rocking back on his heels. “Congratulations! Why didn’t
you let us know?”
“Not entirely expected,” is the low, gravelly, amused response from Azazel, who
is rooting through one of the cupboards. “And then over before it began. No
harm done to her or to the child. Something to be grateful for, something to
celebrate. Now, where is your liquor cabinet? Have you moved it again?”
“Yes, and please accept my apologies. Most unfortunate. Some of the children
very nearly got into it a month or two ago. South library. Near the fireplace.
Mind the books, all right?”
“Obliged,” Azazel says. “I’ll be back,” he says to Raven, and then he’s gone in
a quiet puff of sulfur.
Raven grins and doesn’t get up from the chair, and looks proud and happy.
Bright white teeth in her dark blue face, lit up with happiness. “Wanna meet
your nephew?”
“...Nephew. That sounds good. And yes, please.” He pulls a chair around so he
can sit next to her, so he’s close enough to feel the child. Tiny thoughts
pulse against his, wordless, unformed, content.
Carefully, Raven pulls down a corner of the swaddling, revealing blue skin like
hers, though without her characteristic scales, and three chubby fingers
clenched into a fist. Dark blue-black fluff of curly hair.
“He’s magnificent,” Charles says as he presses a kiss to her temple, as he rubs
gently over soft little knuckles. The baby shifts, and catches his finger in a
gentle, barely-there grip. “How beautiful. Erik will be thrilled.”
“I’ll be what?” Erik himself says when he stumbles in just one moment later.
He’s mostly put together, dressed and jacketed, but there are still sleep-
creases visible in his face and along his throat, and he has to yawn before and
after his question.
“Happy birthday,” Raven says, covering up her laughter.
“Thank you.” Erik pauses and sniffs the air. “Azazel?”
“I sent him off to the liquor cabinet,” Charles says as he gets up, meeting
Erik halfway in a soft kiss. “Happy birthday, beloved. I’m sorry I don’t have
anything for you today. The winter’s killed my garden. All the lilies are
gone.”
“If you’re here, and if we’re among friends, I will take it. I’m starting to
feel the years in my bones, and I’m starting to learn how to take my victories
where I can get them.”
“Tsk. You’re nowhere near old yet,” Charles says as he watches Erik get on with
the preparations for coffee and tea. The kitchen lights play over his hair,
half gray and half dark; they catch on the deepening lines around his eyes,
visible every time he yawns or smiles.
“Worth the search party, as always,” Azazel says when he reappears next to
Erik. “If you are pouring the coffee, I only want half a cup.”
“Pour your own,” Erik drawls. “I’m not supposed to be ordered around today.”
“Right, right, your so-called birthday. So you’re a man of a certain age now?
Have you met my son?”
“Son?”
Charles raises an amused eyebrow at a giggling Raven. “Come here, and meet – ”
“Kurt,” Raven supplies.
“...Really?” Charles asks.
“I didn’t name him for us, Charles, I promise.”
“The name of the doctor who helped us,” Azazel says gravely. “We were
completely unknown to him, and we should have been anathema, because we look as
we do. Instead he did everything he could to make sure the ordeal was not so
terrible. He did not even allow us to pay him.”
“And he should have, if only because I damn near screamed my head off in the
birthing,” Raven adds, looking rueful.
“I’m glad you had that,” Erik says quietly.
Charles watches him take the seat on the other side of Raven, and peer
carefully at a still-oblivious Kurt, who gurgles and twitches in his sleep.
Erik is quiet for a long time, long enough that Charles feels compelled to
reach out to him, taking hold of his shoulder. “Erik?” he asks softly.
I’ll be fine, is the eventual reply. He reminds me of my sister. I remember
being led to her crib, and I remember that she would not sleep unless I was in
the room next to our mother.
Another memory recovered – that is something to be thankful for indeed.
“I just needed to remember,” Erik says, and then, to Raven, he adds, “May I
hold him?”
“I – of course,” Raven says.
“He knows what to do,” Charles mutters, swallowing past the lump in his throat.
“Okay.” Gingerly she hands Kurt over, and gingerly Erik tucks him into the
crook of his arm.
“Camera,” Azazel says. “We need a camera.”
“Yes,” Charles says, smiling so widely his cheeks hurt. A good kind of pain. A
warmth that lodges firmly around his heart. He heads toward one of the kitchen
cabinets, where Moira keeps something for when the strangest things happen
around this same kitchen table, and after a quick check to make sure that there
is film and that the batteries are still in working order, he peers through the
viewfinder and focuses on Kurt’s closed eyes, on the damp trails on Erik’s
cheeks.
Click.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "On one of their birthdays".
     This fic was partially inspired by people talking about writing
     things in which Charles and Erik are no longer young, but aren't
     exactly old quite yet. It is also inspired by pretty much everyone in
     the UK complaining about the terrible weather they have been having.
     This is a canon AU, and if Charles and Erik were approaching their
     thirties at the time of the movie I've imagined this one as being set
     somewhat in or near the 1980s.
***** lightly fall our hearts *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
Room 2046 is much cooler and much quieter than she remembers it from the last
time - a far cry from the relentless humidity outside, from the hovering weight
of rainstorms and shuddering thunder.
The bed is small and a little creaky, but it is comfortable, the more so when
she carefully peels off her dress: the linens are soft against her camisole and
slip.
Reluctantly she gives in to the urge to close her eyes, and she sighs and
promises herself a quick catnap while she waits for Erik to follow her here, to
find her and be with her.
When she wakes up, however, the little room is full of a fresh sweet scent like
spun-sugar and sunshine, and Erik is standing over her. A complicated mix of
emotions in the lines of his face, like fondness and amusement and a carefully
concealed longing.
It’s getting more and more difficult to hide her own emotions from him, so
she’s thankful for any distraction she can get - and she sits up with alarm and
knows that her cheeks are burning red with embarrassment. “Please excuse me,”
she murmurs as she forces herself to meet his eyes. “I was tired, and the bed
was comfortable - ”
Erik smiles. “I know it is, and you don’t need to apologize. I was trying not
to disturb you, actually. You looked like you needed the rest.”
Charlotte returns the smile, tentatively, from the pillows: here she is at the
head of the bed, stretched out along one half of the mattress; and she watches
as Erik shucks his suit jacket and his tie and his shirt, as he sits down at
the foot of the bed, facing her.
“It was still rude of me to fall asleep while waiting,” she says. “I don’t
really have much of an excuse. I was kept up all night last night. My husband
came home, reeking of beer, wanting to talk.” She makes a face. “Or he wanted
to make sure that I was really there, and really listening.”
“What did he want to talk about?”
“Nothing important. A new co-worker. Eating at a restaurant where the service
was terminally rude. Breakdowns on the MTR. Trifles,” she says, and sighs
again. “Up all night for nothing. He wasn’t looking for a conversation. Just
someone to nod in all the right places.”
Erik looks at her with sympathy. “Well, at least yours is still speaking to
you; that is much more than I can say for mine. Granted, she has never been
much of what anyone might call - grandiloquent. Silence has always been her
gift, but there were days when it was possible for me to hear her voice, if
only to ask me to pass the soup, or to - I don’t know - hand me a book or
something. Now? Now is a different story.”
Charlotte smiles, half bitterly, half with genuine amusement. “One wonders how
yours and mine could get along, then.”
He nods. “Yes. One wonders. Though you and I both know damn well that they do.
For a certain value of getting along.”
There are any number of correct responses to that: she could kiss him, again,
because she likes the single-mindedness of the way he kisses her back. Or she
could reach out and hold his hand, because he’s already confessed that he likes
it when she touches him.
They’ve crossed a line, already, and there is something easy and something
right in the crossing, and yet Charlotte holds herself back and contents
herself with asking, “Am I dreaming or am I really smelling strawberries?”
Her reward is Erik’s surprised and quiet laugh, and his hands sliding a small
wickerwork box across the sheets in her direction. “Yes. Strawberries,” he
says, grinning now, as though he’s been caught out in some little prank. “I had
a devil of a time finding those, I don’t mind telling you that.”
She inhales again. Sweet and bracing and just a little tart, the strawberries
announcing themselves with their tantalizing fragrance, and when she can no
longer be content with just the smell she reaches for the box and opens it.
Red and green wrapped in several layers of newspaper, to protect them from
being crushed. The colors are otherworldly and luscious and strangely unreal.
“They’re lovely,” she says, and then, “you really shouldn’t have - ”
“It was my pleasure to seek them out,” Erik says. “I seem to have too much free
time on my hands these days.”
“Your writing - ?”
“Still on hiatus. My editor wants me to wash my hands of the manuscript I just
turned in. It takes me some time to leave that behind and get into the mindset
for something new. Perhaps I might have a week or two left before I can start
again.”
“That sounds ridiculous,” Charlotte says after a moment. “You should just write
- that is, if you already have an idea.”
“I have many ideas,” Erik says as he digs in his pockets for a battered black
notebook. “They’re all waiting for me in here. Perhaps you can help me with
some of them.”
“I don’t know much about writing, but I will certainly do my best,” Charlotte
says.
“That’s all I ask. Now, perhaps you’d like to try the strawberries. You can put
me out of my misery; I’ve been wondering whether they’re any good or not.”
She actually laughs. “You silly man, didn’t you try them yourself?” Eagerly she
dips into the wickerwork box. The strawberry is cool on her lips and offers a
welcome resistance to her teeth when she bites in. The juices explode in her
mouth, wash fresh sweetness across her tongue. It makes her sigh. “That is just
glorious. Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“You’re more than welcome,” Erik says with a smile.
She passes him a strawberry, but again he does the unexpected thing in
response: instead of taking the fruit from her hand, he takes her wrist in a
gentle grip and pulls her gently closer, guides the fingers holding the deep
red fruit toward his mouth.
“Please don’t bite me,” Charlotte says, faintly.
“Not unless you want me to, I promise,” Erik says, his voice gone low and
rumbly, before leaning in to catch the strawberry in his teeth.
Fascinated, Charlotte watches him chew and swallow, and stays where he’s put
her, her wrist in his hands.
“That is excellent,” Erik murmurs after a while. “I guess it was worth all that
effort after all.”
“I guess it was,” Charlotte says. With her free hand she reaches for another
strawberry, large and plump and softly damp, and she bites it in half and
offers him the rest.
His mouth brushes her skin as he takes what she offers; she shivers, and so
does he.
She looks at him, helpless, rapt, and he stares back at her with a depthless
intensity to match, and that’s when she makes one final decision. That’s when
she shifts closer, when she leans up into his personal space: “Tell me to
stop,” she murmurs when she’s just a breath away from kissing him.
Erik shakes his head, and pulls her into his lap. “I would die if you stopped.
I need you.”
“I’m here,” Charlotte whispers. “I’m really here. I’m with you.”
“Are you?” Erik asks, but not to be skeptical: he looks lost already, undone,
desperate. He looks like desire and despair and delirium all at once,
disbelieving, utterly devastated.
Charlotte can understand that; it’s how she feels. It’s how she has always been
around him.
But there are no words for that, none they can easily make sense of.
So she kisses him, mingled strawberry scent and recklessness, and with her
heart and soul offered up on her lips.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Doing something ridiculous". This gifset_of_a
     deleted_scene is certainly silly enough and serves as a visual
     inspiration for Charlotte and Erik in this fic.
     I think this might well be the third and final installment in the
     story that began with years_of_flowers and continued in perhaps,
     perhaps,_perhaps. Will it be a happy ending or not for them? I leave
     that to you, dear readers.
***** always bound to you *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
“Charles, are you even still alive in there?”
He blinks himself abruptly awake, and tries to move.
And that’s how Charles realizes that he’s gone and fallen asleep in his chair,
slumped over the great big ugly boat of his desk - a boat that now resembles a
paperbound shipwreck, because he is surrounded by mountains of books and dust
and loose pages and staple wire.
It hurts to breathe, not the least because his nerves are now loudly protesting
the awkward position he’d gone to sleep in.
When he manages to pull away from the book beneath his cheek he winces when he
notices he’s left a puddle of drool behind. Hastily he swipes his cuff against
his mouth, and his sleeve against the pebbled burgundy leather. A little gilt
comes off onto the cotton in the process.
About the only thing that hasn’t been ruined or fiddled around with or
otherwise displaced from its usual position is the zippered case in which he
keeps his pens and a small flat cloth bag in which he keeps the bare handful of
notes that Erik has passed him over the years.
They don’t share many classes, and it’s been over a year since they were last
in a classroom together, because they are pursuing very different things, so
when they can wangle it they almost always sit together, all the way at the
back of the room, and whisper commentary to one another before being asked to
share their thoughts with the class.
Still, Erik passes him notes, and Charles keeps the notes, and not just because
of the words on the paper.
There’s no time for him to read or reread those notes as he often does when
he’s reminded of them - the great crash of the library door being shoved
heedlessly open heralds the bright blue and red of Raven’s appearance.
Charles musters up a tired smile for the way she stalks in. “Hello,” he says.
She folds her arms over her chest and tsks at him. “You haven’t been out at
all, and you should be so I can call you something that our rudest and most
irritating cat dragged in from some forgotten mire somewhere in this place.”
“You can still call me all kinds of names, you’d just be joining the club,” he
says around a weary yawn. “Why’d you let me come here at all? Why’d I wake up
among my books when I finished all my finals yesterday?”
“I tried to stop you, Charles,” Raven says. “You looked at me with this weird
crazy-eyes expression and stalked right in here and closed the doors behind
you. I almost thought you were going to mind-whammy me or something.”
He feels the blood drain out of his face. “Oh my god, please tell me I didn’t -
”
“No, no you didn’t, but I really thought you were going to.”
“I am so sorry.”
“Fortunately, there is a way for you to make that up to me and to the rest of
us,” she says, and she rounds the desk and gets her hands on his arms.
One mighty heave, and he’s swaying on his feet with every bit of his spinal
column wailing loud and creaking protest.
Raven smiles at him, mostly fond with a large side of mocking, and proceeds to
march him out of the library. “Up to your room and don’t forget to scrub the
ink off your face,” she says, “and then you are to get out because Erik has
threatened, I quote, to pull this bloody dorm down around your ears if you’re
not in the linden grove in two hours.”
“But I didn’t forget - ” Charles says.
“You’re not forgetting it because I woke you up and told you to get,” Raven
says. “Which, really, get. Out you go because you haven’t seen any damn sun in
a week. You are a human being, you are Homo sapiens superior, and you are not a
lichen or some other strange thing that dwells in the dark.”
“I knew it was a mistake to let you sit in on one of the classes I TA for,”
Charles complains, but mildly, and he leans over to plant a kiss on her cheek
at the end of it.
“You’re gonna pay for that some day soon,” Raven laughs. She doesn’t stop
making him walk until they’re outside his actual bedroom. “Shower, scrub,
shave, and dress in something decent for once. We won’t wait up for you.”
Charles blushes, and nods, and reaches for his door. “Thank you,” he says, and
sends her a wave of affection-gratitude-be safe-I love you. “I’d really be lost
without you and Erik.”
“Damn straight,” Raven says, and she smacks a loud kiss against the side of his
head before letting him go and sprinting lightly back down the stairs.
Charles heaves out a sigh, and scrubs again at the corner of his mouth.
*
The sky above him is an endless clean blue, and the distant wisps of cloud
remind him of dandelion fluff coasting along on the brisk breeze.
He can normally make it to the linden grove in thirty minutes, but the
beautiful day makes Charles tarry in his steps. More than that, he’s still worn
out from the weeks of little sleep and irregular meals. He aches from head to
toe, and the hot shower has done nothing to loosen the kinks in his nerves or
the lingering bruises on his arse from sitting down for hours on end.
Still, he remembers Erik’s message, and he starts jogging down the path as soon
as he catches sight of the grove.
You’re almost late, is the thought that he catches as soon as he begins to
climb to the crest of the hill, and Charles wheezes out a soft laugh and
doesn’t reply - he just keeps going. Talking will just mean further delays, and
he’s kept Erik waiting long enough.
“You look terrible,” Erik says from one of the branches when Charles finally
collapses into the thick soft bed of grass growing within the grove. The trees
aren’t in flower yet, so there’s no need to worry about rolling around in buds
and pollen and other things.
“Like I don’t get like this every year?” Charles asks as he wiggles around,
trying to get comfortable. “I keep regretting going into genetics, sometimes.
Too much work.”
“You should have just stuck with the lit classes.”
“Oh god no, that’s worse. Many more papers in a shorter period of time. This
way at least I can take exams and be done with it.”
“Which means you’ll be useless for now,” Erik drawls.
Charles turns his head just enough to glare at Erik, but it doesn’t seem to
have any effect, because Erik merely rolls his eyes and shimmies back down to
the ground, limber and graceful and so beautiful it chokes Charles up
sometimes.
“I don’t know what’s making you look like that,” Erik says when he sits down
next to Charles.
“I just like being around you, that’s all,” Charles says. “God, I’m so tired I
can’t see straight. Can I lie down in your lap?”
“Yes.”
Charles sighs and settles in, and flings his arm across his eyes. “You have a
book?”
“You’re going to read?”
“No, you are. I want you to read to me.”
“Pushy,” Erik observes, but Charles doesn’t need to look at his thoughts to
know that Erik is smiling as he says it.
Please, Charles thinks at him.
I will, I will, get settled, Erik thinks.
You feel muffled.
You’re just tired.
Charles nods. “Yeah, maybe,” he whispers.
Erik clears his throat and begins: “The Golden Bough, by Sir James George
Frazer....”
The prose ought to be dry and far removed from them both, but Charles isn’t
really listening to the words.
He’s focused on Erik’s voice, its rise and fall and modulation. Erik is
deliberately keeping his voice down, in deference to their quiet place and
Charles’s own condition, but there is no denying that he really is interested
in this book as he always has been.
Charles remembers giving him this particular copy soon after they’d met,
remembers the shock and surprise on Erik’s face that had faded away into a
cautious and gentle happiness.
He likes to think that he alone is the cause and reason for Erik to ever look
like that, in the moments that they snatch for and with each other. Moments
such as this one, where they can pretend that they are the only two people
around, when Erik can let his guard down and Charles can drop his shields
partway.
And there, again, is the peculiar distance in a part of Erik’s mind, but out of
respect for his privacy Charles lets him be, and surrenders to sleep once
again, curled up in Erik’s lap.
*
Erik lets out a quiet sigh of relief as soon as he notices that Charles’s
thoughts are no longer conscious against his - that the light of his mind has
dimmed, strong and vital but a little more distant, which is what happens when
he’s unconscious.
He loves Frazer, could never get enough of debating the tales and the myths,
but he’s also using Frazer as a shield, because he has a surprise for Charles.
Carefully he thinks about the ring in his pocket, now, and it floats up into
the hushed space of the grove as he lets his abilities flow along the nicks and
imperfections of the metal.
Imperfect as it is, it’s important, because of what he’s chosen to make it
into.
Silver band inset with a representation of two spiraling strands joined by
visible horizontal bonds.
A DNA ring, a present for Charles.
Erik directs the ring down, towards Charles’s left hand. He places it on
Charles’s ring finger, snugs the ring so that it’s not too tight and won’t fall
off.
He leans over and kisses Charles’s fingertips, and then he goes back to his
book, and settles in to wait.
When it comes to Charles, he knows he can wait.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Doing something sweet". I already managed to
     brainstorm the idea of young!Charles and Erik sleeping in the
     outdoors somewhere, but then Afrocurl turned up something that just
     made that good idea so much better and so much more awesome: this DNA
     ring_in_sterling_silver. So I worked that into the story and now I
     think I might need to brush my teeth or schedule an appointment with
     my dentist :)
     I love the idea of this Raven being happily blue and happily kicking
     Charles's arse around because he can't be without her.
     I also really just liked the idea of Erik reading The Golden Bough; I
     like characters who are interested in mythology.
***** he’s come undone *****
Chapter Notes
     Inspired by the following, which was posted to Pangeasplits’s Tumblr:
     “Drop it,” Erik growls, and the man under his boot bares his teeth,
     fights to twist away, and Erik rolls his eyes and PINS the man down
     with all the metal on his body, and there is quite a lot of it, from
     the implant in the elbow to the rivets in the jeans. “Now tell me
     where Xavier is - ” /Xavier is RIGHT HERE/ - and the Charles who
     walks out of the shadows is a tatterdemalion demon with blazing blue
     eyes, who growls, “Chief scientist. He’s mine.” Erik grins, and gets
     out of his way.
See the end of the chapter for more notes
Erik very nearly gives in to the irrational urge to roll his eyes when he
finally crests the last rise and catches sight of the facility that the others
had located for him.
The boxy little building is embedded partway into the mountain, and looks like
a cancerous growth on it: too much stone, too much concrete, but even that is
reinforced by thin threads of steel running all throughout the construction.
They might as well have rolled out the red carpet for his arrival.
He’d bring it all down without a second thought - there are days when he
refuses to get his hands dirty, especially for most tasks like this.
He’s going to have to bring the personal touch to bear on this one, though,
because this facility is a prison and it is holding someone he’s been searching
for.
The information from Raven and Emma and the others indicates that the entire
place is shielded against telepathy, top to bottom, except for one room sunk
into the earth: something more powerful than Cerebro, something that can be
used to destroy mutants as well as find them.
His mission is to make sure that machine is reduced to dust and rubble, to its
component molecules if he can, and to that end he’s carrying a series of
special little packages, crafted by the geniuses at the Westchester mansion.
He allows himself a moment to remember the grim snarl on McCoy’s face when he’d
taken delivery of those packages. Dark shadows under his eyes, visible even in
his blue fur, and the way he’d whispered, “Bring it all down, please.”
“With pleasure,” Erik remembers saying.
That is a pleasure that now spikes through his veins and sings a high warning
note in his head. He needs to do other things before he can let the packages do
their work.
He gets to his feet and takes his helmet off, tucking it neatly under his arm
before he reaches out a hand to the cloudless sky and pulls - the earth’s
magnetic fields answer him, keen focus and keen hatred and keen worry, and he
is borne silently from one cliff’s edge to another, a hundred miles or more in
one long step.
Men with guns up ahead, and he cannot feel their guns but he can latch on to
the iron that flows in their veins and it’s easy to tear them apart, render
them down into bloody red dust. Red is the right color to be wielding and
seeing and creating here. Vivid splashes of death against pale crumbled rock,
silently gone; they will not be missed.
He uses the building against the men and women within it: the doors fall open
at his touch, the corridors twist and turn so they all lead back to him, and
those who hurtle into his path fall screaming to their knees, and soon are no
more than wet smears on the floors and walls and ceilings.
Anger in his blood, and he can almost see it, cold white light wrapped around
the hands that he extends before him. He is not using them to feel his way
forward. He is using them to find and sense his enemies before they can even
see him: minute traces of iron, better than homing beacons, allowing him to
kill, silent and easy and swift.
It’s more mercy than they ought to deserve for chaining down a telepath. For
locking a telepath within his own mind.
For taking Charles Xavier away from him.
Rage is its own serenity, now, for Erik, and he lives in that quiet seething
space in the turmoil of his mind: a turmoil that needs to coexist with the dark
shadows within Charles.
He calls out to Charles, heedlessly, broadcasting his thoughts as loudly as he
can: I am here. I am here. Find me and don’t let me go. Find me. I am here.
Silence answers him, pure dead nothingness.
Erik walks into the heart of the facility, deeper and deeper into the mountain,
leaving McCoy’s little packages behind like a trail of death. He comes to a
great domed room. The plates are heavy but they are still metal.
He’s had more than enough practice with this alloy, though: all he needs to do
here is look at one of the plates, and it peels away to the bare rock, floats
silent and resisting but obedient to his superior will.
“Come on out, if you’re still in here,” Erik says quietly into the dead silence
of the room. “Come on out and give me what I want. And if you do that, I’ll
give you a painless death.”
The man who comes out is carrying another one of those nuisances, a gun made
without metal parts. Its muzzle trembles and wavers violently.
Erik does roll his eyes then. “Put that away before you hurt yourself.”
“Guards!” the man cries out.
“There are none,” Erik says, shrugging one shoulder. “No one left but you. I
made my way down here, floor by floor, room by room. You can walk out if you
like and see for yourself. No one else lives who wears those badges and coats,
who carries those weapons. It’s just you and me. So think very carefully about
what you’re going to do next. Unless, of course, you can just give me what I
want.”
“I’m not giving you the telepath. He’s ours.”
Erik sees red. “He is not the telepath,” he says, evenly, though every instinct
is screaming at him to kill the man already and be done with it. “He is Charles
Xavier. He is powerful and he is mine. I am his. I have come for him. Give him
to me.”
The man levels his weapon.
In a flash Erik reaches out to all the metal in the man’s body. Their first
mistake was to take on a man with so much of it embedded in him - screws in arm
and leg and shoulder. Titanium is non-magnetic, but in these screws it is part
of an alloy - and the other half of that alloy is iron. It makes him smile as
he latches on to those familiar atoms and pulls, delicate and decisive.
The man’s screams echo for a long, long time around the domed room, long after
he’s been driven down to the floor with his shattered bones.
Erik tunes him out and keeps shouting for Charles within the silent spaces of
his mind. Charles! Charles, I’m here!
...no no no you’re not real you’re not real leave me alone
That rocks him back on his heels, that galvanizes him, and he strides to the
fallen man and yanks him roughly up by his collar. Fresh screaming - Erik
silences him with a smart blow across the mouth. Blood on his gloved hand.
“Where is Charles Xavier?!”
The man tries to speak - he chokes - he turns his head and spits out one of his
own teeth. “I - I - please - ”
“There is no more mercy left in me,” Erik hisses. “I never had much to begin
with. Don’t waste my time. Where is he.”
The man points down. “Holding cell.”
“Thank you.” He gets a grip on the iron rushing through the man’s veins,
through his heart - and he tears that in two with the next thought.
The man falls to the floor, eyes wide and staring.
Erik sends the panel he’d taken from the dome straight down, like a scalpel: it
reveals a warren of rooms in the rock. He follows its path, shearing steadily,
and the effort of it makes the sweat run down the back of his neck.
Erik - but it can’t be you it can’t be you my mind is mine alone and I am the
only one here
“Charles!” The room he ends up in is tiny, no more than fifteen meters on a
side, and there is a bed and a set of thin blankets and the wrist that
protrudes is chained to the wall. The links are plastic, but the spike is still
made out of steel, and Erik carefully eases it out. He cannot look away from
the pale bruised skin, from the head covered in rough light and dark stubble.
I want Erik. The real Erik. Not just a figment of my imagination, Charles
thinks at him. Every word is distorted with the weight of his fear and despair
and exhaustion, the unreal passage of time in a shielded place.
It’s me, Charles, I swear to you it’s really me, Erik projects as loudly as he
can. You put a gun to my forehead and wouldn’t shoot. You pulled me out of
waters as dark and as hot as blood. You showed me your scars when you saw the
brand on my skin.
“Scars,” the man on the bed croaks, and finally he shifts and pushes the
blankets away and Erik comes face to face with the ruin they’ve made of Charles
Xavier: he is so pale and so gaunt, starved, cracks in the skin all around his
mouth, bruises from shoulders to hips.
Blue eyes, cloudy and dark and dazed - but he’s looking at Erik.
“I’m here,” Erik says. “It’s me.”
“There were people here.”
“I’ve killed all of them.”
Charles blinks, and then - he smiles. It cracks open his lower lip, and blood
stains his pale skin when he replies, “Good. Though I wish you had saved some
for me.”
Erik smiles back, fierce and rough and feral. “All right.”
Silence again. Charles struggles up from the bed, and Erik lets him have his
pride, and doesn’t offer to help other than with an outstretched hand - which
Charles takes, eventually, reluctantly. When he’s upright at last, he whispers,
“How did you find me?”
“I had help,” Erik says. “A lot of help. Evidently you were missed; you were
needed.”
“And you, Erik, did you need me?”
He nods. He has always told Charles the truth, all of the truth, every single
meaning and nuance of it. “Every single day.”
The smile he gets is thin and haunted and unimaginably old. “I want, I need -
but how do I know you’re real? How do I know I won’t wake up and be back in the
machine? How do I - ”
Erik cuts him off, swiftly, decisively, and he isn’t gentle with teeth or
tongue: he kisses Charles, rough and demanding and reckless.
Charles is unresponsive for a long moment - and then his hands come up to
Erik’s wrists, familiar powerful grip, and there is a groan that echoes in
Erik’s head, needy and wild.
Hands ripping at Erik’s jacket and shirt and trousers.
Thoughts hammering at his mind: Give yourself to me give myself to you find
ourselves again -
Erik all but cries back Yes yes yes and follows Charles’s lead, lets Charles
tug him roughly into place so he’s braced on his hands and knees over Charles.
His robust frame is worn down around the edges but is also still recognizably
Charles, so beautiful he makes Erik’s heart ache, makes the blood in his veins
pound hotly, insistent passion.
Cold shaking hands framing his face, thumbs moving in soft little circles. “Is
it really you?”
“What kind of proof can I give you? What kind of proof do you need?”
Charles smiles - and the shadow in his eyes is something that Erik has seen
before, though it’s never been as strong as this. Darkness like the shadows
Erik carries around in his own heart of hearts: the things that have been
twisted beyond redemption. In Erik these things are sheltered and set aside.
In Charles, his dark side now follows him palpably, visibly: now Erik can see
the old scars that have faded from his skin but not from his mind. Rejection
after rejection, loneliness and boredom and hatred and neglect.
So Erik lays his mind bare as he never has before, shows Charles the seams and
the cracks within him, the places in his thoughts where his fear and his anger
and his sorrow have taken root and sunk so thoroughly into his being.
“Is this you, Erik - so wrong, so good,” Charles moans, and his voice
reverberates thinly around the room and fans the flame of Erik’s want.
This time when they kiss they fight each other for dominance: determination,
fervor, the slick slide of their bodies as they warm up to each other, sweat
and need easing the way.
Charles leaves savage bites and bruises and drops of his own blood on Erik’s
skin; Erik lingers worshipfully over freckle and fresh wound and faded scar.
Erik winds up working himself down to his knees on the floor, between Charles’s
legs which are spread as wide as they can go - and he takes a deep breath and
takes Charles in, overwhelming musk and iron and copper - it makes him gag as
he works his mouth down and down but he fights it off, and doesn’t stop until
Charles hits the back of his throat and then he swallows, again and again until
Charles is screaming beneath him.
“Fuck Erik fuck fuck fuck,” and the words fall broken and shocked from
Charles’s lips. “Fuck, please, ah - ”
Come on, Erik thinks - and then he drinks Charles down.
When he comes back up, gasping for air, there’s a hand on his chest and he’s
being pushed roughly down to the floor - he goes, falling into a clumsy heap,
and Charles is on his knees above him, his own fingers shoved into his mouth.
The noises he makes are wet and loud and obscene and Erik can’t stop him, won’t
stop him, is helpless to stop him - not even when pain flashes through the
spaces between them.
Wide-eyed, he watches Charles prep himself, rough and clumsy and hurried - he’s
reckless, he’s working himself up, and then it’s too soon before Charles pulls
his fingers out with a loud shocking pop.
Erik only has a fraction of a moment to ask, “Are you sure - is it safe - ”
“Fuck being safe,” Charles growls, and his voice and his words go straight to
Erik’s cock, and he cries out and reaches for Charles’s shoulders, pulls him
roughly down.
Bright spark of pain, unavoidable, but Charles is setting the pace, he’s in a
hurry, and he is hot and wet and so so tight that he takes Erik’s breath away,
he’s like a punch in the gut, he’s like a bullet to the brainpan, and Erik
can’t find the words or the strength to make him stop - doesn’t want him to,
not when he can hear Charles screaming More more more more, and it’s too soon
when he buckles under the incredible bliss and strain of it.
He’s entangled in Charles in the aftermath, sweat and semen smeared across
their skins, and Charles is holding on to him with all the strength he has left
- and Erik reaches for him, too, crushing him to his heart, until the facility
and the long months apart recede under the weight of captivity and reunion and
the two of them.
Chapter End Notes
     Written for the theme "Doing something hot". Lots of warnings for
     compromised mental states and PTSD and really rough sex.
     This is a fic in which Charles is not his cuddly gentle self at all -
     dark!Charles is a real weakness of mine and it was a real pleasure to
     write about him, as seen through the eyes of Erik.
     Thanks to everyone who read every day and to everyone who left lovely
     comments.
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