— У меня правильнописание хромает. Оно хорошее, но почему-то хромает...(с) Винни-Пух.
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2011-07-24 21:51 (UTC)
"Did Charles teach Lehnsherr how to drive, too?" Alex mutters, mostly to himself, and covering his eyes as they veer past a silvery purple Ford Windstar. They're momentarily close enough that he can see the fascinated horror in the eyes of the three kids in the backseat, plastered up against the fingerprinted glass.
From the front seat, Raven says, "Charles and Erik are both great drivers."
"So it's like one of those evil feedback loops, basically," Angel clarifies.
The car swoops across another two lanes, heading toward the offramp at warp speed, and then Alex is too busy bracing himself against the centripetal force of the turn onto the local road to ask where the hell they're going until they're already there — a stark military compound in the shadows of massive satellite dishes, that CIA woman waiting for them at the gates.
"Armando," she says, and nods at Angel, too, and Raven.
"Is Charles okay?" Raven asks, locking the car doors and flashing her badge at some rapidly approaching dudes with a fuckton each of guns strapped around them. "When I left, he was still — "
"Erik has managed to convince him to get out of Cerebro," the CIA woman says, too diplomatic, which probably means that Lehnsherr probably broke whatever the hell Cerebro was into itty bitty pieces with his mutation while Xavier stared at him with bleak, pitiful blue eyes. "And — " the woman, McTaggert?, says this looking directly at Alex " — he wanted me to go ahead and tell you that your brother isn't hurt."
It's like all the muscles and bones in his body go on strike at once, and he's leaning heavily against Armando before he knows it, feeling his heart palpitate in his chest. It takes about ten seconds for him to push away, to get some distance, but when he does it he gives Armando an apologetic smile, because Munoz seems like good people — Alex just doesn't really trust himself right now.
"Good," he manages. "That's good. Do they know where he is?"
McTaggert's face grows sober. "That's where it gets more..."
"Unprecedented," is what Xavier says.
They had been forced to go through like six hours of security clearance, during which Alex becomes pretty well sexually acquainted with the guy who does his unnecessarily thorough body search. It's a sign of how sleep-deprived and crazy he is that he thinks, How much do you want to bet nobody tried that shit on Xavier, before he'd followed Moira up a creaking metal platform, flanked by Angel and Armando — both hesitating — to find Xavier, flat out, lying on someone's suit jacket, head in Lehnsherr's lap. Hank's sitting on the ground next to them, his face the color of Elmer's glue.
"Oh, come the fuck on, Charles," Raven says, long-suffering but not particularly alarmed.
Hank is saying, "I'm so sorry, professor — "
"Can I kill him?" Lehnsherr is asking Xavier, half-joking. Probably, and Alex hears himself say, "Hank, get over here," without any input from his higher brain functions. What the fuck.
"Alex would be terribly upset if you did," Charles says.
" — I had no idea," Hank finishes in a babble, and Xavier, from where he's prone on the ground, pats Hank on the knee — ugh — and says:
"It's quite all right, Hank, really," before turning to Alex and waving. "Alex! Did Moira — "
"Thanks," Alex interrupts, because he knows that Xavier is a creeper and a fucking weirdo and has jacked up designs on Hank's nubile genius, but he's grateful that the guy is on his side, that he is telling Alex the most salient point while everybody else keeps talking about catching terrorist ringleaders — as if Alex cares about that shit at all. He just wants his brother back. "Did you see where he is?"
The "so I can blast out of here and get him" part is unspoken, but he must be projecting that so hard that Hank hears it, because that asshole just narrows his eyes and gets up, lickety-split, darting over like he could stop Alex from doing something stupid. Alex is champion at doing stupid stuff, and it doesn't matter how much Hank stares at him, pleading, or if he let's himself bump shoulders with the guy, reassuring: what's gotta be done has got to be done.
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2011-07-24 21:53 (UTC)
"That was what is so unprecedented!" Xavier says, propping himself up on his elbows successfully for about 20 seconds before Lehnsherr drags him back prone again, holding Charles flat by his shoulders and scowling down at him in a way that would probably be scarier if Charles wasn't looking back up at him like he was the basking in the sun or some equally gross comparison.
"Charles," Lehnsherr warns.
Raven stomps over, too, and nudges her brother with one foot. "What did he do to himself?"
"It's irrelevant," Charles insists, and before anybody else can disagree, goes on to say, "What I was saying is that while I failed to ascertain Scott's exact location, I have much more information on Shaw's associates — specifically Ms. Frost."
Lehnsherr, because he's not so secretly a troll, reflexively turns to smirk at Alex, who can't help but think, BOOBS really loudly, which would be bad enough even if it didn't prompt Xavier to give him a quelling look, although he doesn't comment on it, thank fuck, before he goes on to add:
"She's not just a telepath, Alex, she's a terribly powerful one."
Raven is getting down on her knees now, leaning over her brother to brush his bangs out of his face, inspect his eyes with distracted ease, and Alex wonders if they're like how he and Scott were like. He's never been scared of Scott, of what Scott could do, but he's worried a lot, and he's kept a hand over Scott's eyes to reassure him when Scott had been scared he'd look by accident and blow something up — and the memory makes him sick. He wants Scott here and safe so badly it feels like a still-tearing gash in his chest, down the line of his sternum.
"Terribly powerful, more powerful than you?" Lehnsherr asks, helping Raven slaps Xavier's protesting hands away when she starts to take his pulse.
"You two are absolutely maddening," Xaiver accuses, but submits when they both glare at him at the same time. He settles for clearing his throat to say, "I hate to speculate, but she is quite powerful."
Lehnsherr looks up to catch the CIA woman's eye. "That means 'no,' by the way."
"I've been sufficiently briefed on Charles-to-English, thanks," the woman retorts, disinterested, and says to Xavier, "What else?"
"She's not merely a telepath, either," Xavier says. "I had let myself in a few moments before she'd realized the intrusion and thoroughly kicked me out."
Hank, next to Alex, leans in to say, "And that was when the Professor yelled and Agent Lehnsherr ripped the helmet mechanism off of the machine."
Alex looks beyond the scene on the platform, at a huddle of forgotten scientists cooing over the giant fucker of a machine in the background. As Hank has reported, there is some sort of metal colander hat with a medusa knot of wires spilling out of it abandoned on the ground.
"Which Erik can repair in very short order," Xavier insists. "Ms. Frost was fascinating. She seems to have a secondary mutation that turns her…well, I suppose the best word is crystalline — " and not breaking breath but turning to pout at Lehnsherr, he says " — and would it be a terrible imposition if you and Raven find some way to return me to to an upright position? My dignity is feeling extremely bruised."
Lehnsherr, as charming as ever, mutters, "Fuck your dignity," but he calls the wheelchair over, floating it soundlessly over the platform, and with practiced cooperation with Raven, they help Xavier into the chair, their hands easy and reflexive and Alex guesses they've done this a lot before, that this is one of those shitty things you get used to the way you get used to a lot of things. "Is that okay?" Raven asks, and Xavier says, "Yes, it's fine," like it's something he never wants to talk about, and nobody says thank you or you're welcome — the whole thing smoothed away like a wrinkled bedsheet. It makes Alex hate Lehnsherr maybe 2 percent less than before.
The CIA woman, who seems to be ignoring almost anything that isn't mission critical going on around her, asks:
"So what does that mean for us? Did you manage to get any insight into Shaw's plans?"
"A little," Xavier murmurs. "Enough to worry me."
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2011-07-24 21:54 (UTC)
'Enough to worry me' from Charles-to-English turns out to mean that Sebastian Shaw wants himself a mutant army. But the thing is most people aren't angry enough or hurt enough to batshit enough to want that. They have families and mortgages and some bullshit paperwork deadline at work, a vacation scheduled next week; it's easiest to hate in broad strokes. It's when you get to individuals it's almost impossible. So the plan involves aggressive recruitment, possibly with the help of Cerebro.
"He's aware that any war between mutants and humans would be disastrous," Xavier says, grim. "But Shaw seems to fancy himself a builder, and he's looking forward to the challenge."
Lehnsherr looks heartsick, absolutely fucked up, like he's just aged ten years in an instant, and Alex thinks it must be fucking awful if he lets Xavier take his hand like that, lace their fingers together in public.
"Why would he want Scott?" Hank asks, gray-faced. "He's just a kid."
Xavier answers Hank's question by looking at Alex, solemn. "He was impressed by your mutation, and — "
It's weird to watch Lehnsherr and Xavier having a conversation in a crowded room in absolute silence. Xavier slants his eyes over, and Lehnsherr doesn't turn to meet his gaze, just tips his chin down, and then they both sit there like they're murmuring at each other through a closed door while everybody feels awkward as fuck. At least that's what Alex has gotten out of the experience so far, except when he looks around to find someone else feeling weirded out the only person who meets his gaze is Hank, who's biting his lip so hard he's bleeding, looking strung-out and tiny in a shirt that's way too big on him: a kid playing mad scientist. Alex can his own wordless conversation, too, because he hears Hank's I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, what can I do, what can I do? loud and clear, even though that's not it for either of them. Even though neither of them are lucky enough to have an easy or easily hidden mutation at all.
" — and he thinks Scott's good leverage, anyway," Lehnsherr finishes for Xavier, choosing his words carefully and turning back to Alex. "He thinks if he has Scott, you'll go fight for him."
He would. Alex would do it in a heartbeat. He's going to go right now, except that Hank's nearness has turned into Hank's fist in Alex's shirt, gripping him close, crazy-eyed and whispering in a hush, "Alex, no. You wouldn't."
"He would," Lehnsherr cuts in, mild and unworried, and Alex wonders what he's missing here. "I would."
"You would not," Xavier and Raven contradict, simultaneous.
"To borrow a phrase from you, Charles, it's irrelevant now," Lehnsherr points out, changing the subject.
Xavier is too busy giving Lehnsherr a dirty look to say much, but Raven says, "It wouldn't mean anything, Alex. Even if we let you go, what makes you think he'd actually let Scott free? You'd die for sure, when this all goes down."
"Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?" Alex shouts, because what the fuck is he supposed to do? That's his brother. That's his dumb kid brother who cried the first time he watched Beauty and the Beast and has an unnatural relationship with his Legos and who's already lost his parents, who's already had to take sink baths in public toilets and live in shitty mutant foster care and been turned out by adoptive parents because of something he didn't have any control of. And Alex hadn't been able to protect him from any of that, so what the fuck is he suppose to do now? Why did they even tell him that shit if they didn't want him to go? What did they think he would do? There's no right thing here — there's nothing he can — and Alex can feel it welling up behind his eyes, red and furious and 200 degrees Celcius, making all his skin hot with panicked fury, and if they don't say something soon he's going to blast through this entire facility.
"You fight, but not with him," Xavier cuts in, hard, all the soft, professorial edges gone. "You fight against him. It's the only way you'll have Scott back on your own terms."
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2011-07-24 21:55 (UTC)
Alex can either talk, or he can keep himself from blowing up the entire facility. He can still feel Hank near enough to burn though, so he just shouts inside his own head, tamping down on the blast that's boiling up in his throat, because what the fuck does Xavier know? What the hell could Lehnsherr ever know about this? Xavier lives in a God damn New York mansion with an elevator, and Lehnsherr's never been anybody's bitch. It's so easy to tell people to do the right thing when it's easy for you, when you're not the one with skin in the game, when you're not the person who's going to have to live with yourself if everything goes wrong, and —
Alex, Xavier's voice cuts in, crystal clear and loud and entirely inside Alex's head, I understand you're frightened and worried right now — but even if you don't believe that I have made any difficult decisions in regards to Shaw, believe this: no one can know your hatred of Shaw so well as Erik.
"Oh, God," Hank says. "He looks like he's losing it."
"What happens when Alex loses it?" Raven asks, alarmed.
Lehnsherr says, "Something explodes," and adds, "Charles, could you…?"
I'm very sorry about this, Xavier says, suddenly changed, back to tweed and guilelessness now. But we'll talk about this when you wake up. But briefly. You clearly need training.
Alex only has enough time to ask, "What the fuck are you — ?" before he's out, knees giving out, the room gone dark around him.
***
The part that Charles and Erik don't tell Alex is this:
Shaw knows Charles would come looking, that Cerebro would be involved. He knows mutants are outnumbered, and that while he'll recruit, and abuse Emma Frosts's telepathy to do it — there are already a small handful of the unwillingly converted in his tow, and Charles feels sick thinking about it — he knows that the easiest way to incite war is to let the human start it, to let it brew like poison in a water system. Shaw is nothing if not patient, and his theories of engagement are coy. He has a plan to gain access to Cerebro and the means to do it; it's a matter of time before he chooses his sacrificial mutants, those who are going to go berserker for the greater cause. It will be an ugly but necessary war, and it's a shame about little Scott Summers, too, but he's too useful a foot soldier in this — both for his marvelously dangerous powers and for his brother and his marvelously dangerous powers, too, Shaw had conveyed via Emma. If Charles dies, it will be a tragedy, but also a window for minor revolution, and one day, even Charles may come to appreciate this.
The part that Charles doesn't tell Erik is this:
If it is another mutant who kills Charles, someone unstable and obviously dangerous already, who Charles has taken a chance on and kept close, then it will be the only story anybody reads above the fold of every major newspaper in the world for weeks. The blue laws on mutants will become black ones, and that bill stalled in committee is going to be fast tracked. And as the pressure grows and people get more persecuted, it'll be easier and easier for his cause to take hold. The nonmutants will write their own doom with their inevitable backlash, Shaw thinks, and had conveyed with all due civility. The best part, of course, Shaw had noted, is that of course you will arrogantly keep this element of your discovery to yourself, thinking you can avert catastrophe. That Alex is as good as you, and knowing that if you were to tell your precious Erik, it would all come apart.
Charles has stringent rules for himself. No one else could ever set them for him. He knows that Erik and Raven think he's cheerfully amoral with his telepathy, using it to get out of parking tickets and eavesdrop, collect all the most ravishing gossip from his graduate students — but all of that is nothing on the grand scale of transgressions.
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2011-07-24 21:56 (UTC)
If he could, Charles would let his voice wither. It's so much easier to talk to someone else directly, and much clearer, with less margin for misunderstanding. He hates voicemail most of all, it being fourteen degrees removed from meaningful communication. If Charles could, he would simply sway everybody to his side, easy as pie, a simple tick and it's done. If Charles could have, he would have made Erik love him from the first, to the last, and unwavering, without any of the conflict and the doubt that roils them still, to scrape away the bittersweet ache of devotion until nothing lies between them but the drowsy perfection of Sunday morning love, tangled together in a bed they've made together. It would be so easy — no one would ever know, and everyone would be happier.
And he could, but he doesn't, and he won't even though it feels like ignoring the obvious solution. Like watching someone foolishly miss the easiest answer, to putter around in the half-dark knocking into furniture and overturning glasses when the light switch is just there on the wall. Charles will always handicap himself because he may be a mutant, but he is human, first, and he can't bear it, to engage in philosophical arguments about the reality of a thing. Is it real if he's placed it there? If he's the one that made it real? Would someone have truly changed their mind about mutant acceptance? Would Erik genuinely love him? Would it even matter if they felt they had, if Erik thinks he does?
But in ways Charles can't precisely articulate, it would, and the only reprieve would be forgetting. Charles's mutation is useless on himself.
So he can only do the ordinary things, the everyday human things, when it comes to influencing detractors, when it comes to convincing Erik of the right and just things to do, when it comes to appeasing Raven's upset and worry.
Raven helps Hank get Alex squared away, dragging his dead weight somewhere he won't be in the way and cuffing him to a railing for extra good measure while Armando interviews Dr. Lang and Angel is taking a bird's eye view of the compound, looking for obvious security weaknesses, her jacket left behind.
"Is there anything you're not telling me?" Erik asks, low and just for Charles's ears. They keep so many secrets between them it's second nature. Just because it's national security doesn't mean it's the FBI or CIA's to know.
Charles thinks, thankfully, lying is a perfectly normal human thing to do, and says, "Nothing important."
Erik just watches him calmly. "Are you sure about that?"
"I'm sure that you knowing the rest will only upset you," Charles replies delicately. "And I'm sure that it won't assist in your search for Shaw at all, either."
"I don't like it when you lie to me, Charles," Erik growls, and Charles is painfully honest when he says:
"I don't like it when I lie to you, either."
TBC
(A/N: THIS STORY IS NEVER GOING TO END. JESUS CHRIST.)
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2011-08-05 23:51 (UTC)
They do two more sessions with Cerebro with Erik scowling the entire time after Charles and Dr. Lang berate him into reconnecting the helmet mechanism, but Emma Frost has taken to being less accommodating, and Charles has never been able to track Shaw for some reason. It's not the blur that comes with a low level telepath's shielding, or even the solid brick of someone higher up the OCP scale — it's just sheer absence. Charles has spent hours in Cerebro searching but never found a trace of Shaw, and the blanks in between active minds are too frequent and vast to use the process of elimination in unfamiliar places, not like the house or the office or the 23rd floor where Charles knows the shapes and sizes of blank spaces, the afterimages of people walking around, distracted and harried and happy and sad, leaving trails.
Every time Charles zeroes in on Scott, there's a quicksilver flicker of amusement and very good, Mr. Xavier before he's jolted out, rudely shown the door with a knife-edged hand, and before he can even regroup ,Scott's presence and Emma's sheer crystalline defenses are vanishing again, jolted away, leaving no trace, and Charles has to start all over — until it's dizzying, until he's dizzy, and Erik says:
"That's it — McCoy, off."
This time, there's no protesting it, and Charles concedes Erik's concern may not be baseless. His arms feel weak, his head feels heavy on his neck, and there's a quietly threatening throb of pain down his shoulder blades, stretching like the scrape of a knife down the line of Charles's spine. Although Charles hasn't been properly afraid of knives in years, now, he thinks with hazy amusement — Erik's fault, the unspoken promises of him laced in so much of Charles's recklessness.
It takes Angel, Armando, and Raven to get Alex into the car, still cloaked in artificial sleep, and Hank hovers the entire time, staring at him worriedly in the backseat while everybody else breaks off to head home or the office, Erik issuing last orders before their caravan of black SUVs heads for the highways. In the back, as dusk takes the city, Hank — ever so quietly — shifts Alex so his head is pillowed in Hank's lap, stroking the hair out of his face with clumsy-soft fingers, and under the surface of Hank's immediate concern and the chasm of his own self-loathing and fearfulness is something so sweetly aching it makes Charles feel 17 again, that end-of-the-world kind of in love he'd felt for Tony Stark at one conference or another, when that guilelessly end-of-the-world kind of love had been within his capacity.
Charles thinks it's just lucky that Raven had elected to head straight home; he would never be so crass as to make fun of him and Erik prefers to pretend he doesn't recognize human feelings, but Hank never would have survived the teasing if Charles's sister had been here.
"Why did you make us bring him?" Erik asks, after Hank has gone from fretful to sleepy to unconscious, his hand soft over Alex's eyes, slanting orange light skating through the interior of the car as they whizz through the Holland Tunnel. "All it did was upset him."
"It also proved Alex has far more control already than he thinks," Charles returns, murmuring. He's always been a student of teach by doing, although usually the process isn't quite so traumatic to his students. "He's scared of his own mutation."
Charles can feel the metal in the car shift into Erik's resonance as he clutches at the steering wheel. It's a moment of strangeness Charles hadn't been able to identify the first time he'd gotten into a car with Erik, under the blazing winter white sun of New York City, when Erik was still Agent Lehnsherr and a fantastic mystery.
"He should be scared, he has a dangerous mutation," Erik argues.
"Only if it's out of control," Charles contradicts. "It's no more dangerous than yours."
Erik frowns, and around them, outside the car, it feels like the Holland Tunnel is lengthening and lengthening, extending forever, so there's a strange hum to play background to their words. "My mutation — "
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2011-08-05 23:53 (UTC)
"Is enough to bring down skyscrapers," Charles finishes gently. "To rip airplanes out of the sky and send the Rose Planetarium rolling down 5th Avenue."
Grinning, unrepentant, Erik retorts, "Actually, I was going to say that my mutation is nothing compared to yours."
Charles has a dozen responses to that, but he's used them all already, more than once, for the dozens of iterations of this discussion — in shades of philosophical, curious, frightened, furious, and aroused — that they've had over the years. Erik isn't concerned or making a point, he's just saying it because it's true.
Hank, probably as a benefit of his mutation, turns out to be surprisingly strong, and carries Alex off to the annex without any assistance and just an incongruously shy, "Thank you, Professor Xavier, Agent Lehnsherr," that Erik thankfully doesn't ruin by saying anything purposefully vulgar about how Alex is slung over Hank's shoulder.
"We'll talk more in the morning," Charles promises Hank. "I have a plan. Alex and Scott will be fine."
"Good," Hank stammers, going red all the way down his neck, vanishing into the collar of his shirt. "Good night."
At which point Erik snatches up Charles by the wheelchair, and sends him halfway up the stairs toward their bedroom, calling over his shoulder, "Good night, Hank," and saying, "Charles, bed."
In another life, nights like these, Erik would be resentful and tied up too tight, all of his stress and anxiety and barely-banked revenge fantasies toward Shaw lashed together like a wall between them. And Charles remembers how easy it was to scale it, to bring it down by sliding up close, drawing near, pressing a kiss to the knob of Erik's spine or throwing a leg over Erik's hips and laying worshipful kisses on his face, open-mouthed ones down the line of his chest.
It's always with the sharp ache of loss that Charles thinks breathlessly tumbling into bed, how lucky and stupid and spoiled he'd been, to be able to press Erik down among sheets of or into backseats of cars, alleyways behind restaurants, along soft grass in Central Park, barefoot in the shade. Of all the things Charles hates about the wheelchair, of all the host of indignities and embarrassments Shaw's volley of bullets had visited on him, this is what he misses the most, the thing that makes him the most angry: losing the fizzy, effortless sweetness of love — the uncomplicated simplicity of saying I'm sorry or I love you or Be okay, please be okay and I would do anything for you with his skin and his hands and the way they cleaved themselves together.
He'll never surprise Erik with a mid-afternoon fuck again, slicked up like a five-diamond pro, furtive and hot and dangerous somewhere unwise. There won't ever be lazy handjobs in a shared morning shower again, and Charles is never going to be able to drop to his knees in the foyer of the house, slam Erik against the front door and suck him off, proud and joyful and abjectly hungry after a shitty chicken dinner on the FBI tab, Erik gleaming with his commendations.
It had been crushing, to wake up in the hospital for the fourteenth time and listen to the machine beeps and to realize he'd never known anything difficult before, to suddenly plunge headlong into the awkward negotiations that would dictate the rest of his life. The doctors hadn't known the true extent of the damage, although there was general agreement that Charles would be paralyzed with minimal to vanishing chances of any recovery of movement for his legs. He'd still been in the liminal stages of spinal shock, and the landscape of his paralysis was changing daily. Some days he'd believed he could move his toes so much he imagined he could feel it, that his telepathy engendered a secondary mutation for spontaneous healing. But most days, he'd laid in bed and shut himself in his own head because his choices of general oppressive pity, Raven's debilitating grief, Erik's frenetic guilt, or the nurses' bloodlessly efficient caring were all equally unwelcome.
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2011-08-05 23:54 (UTC)
Everybody was annoyingly helpful: they wanted to help him learn how to build up upper body strength; they wanted to teach him how to use a wheelchair; they wanted to help him cope with his grief; they wanted to show him how to use a toilet again.
Charles had wanted to wipe the memory of himself and Erik, trapped in a blandly comfortable hospital counseling room, stuck with a handful of generic pamphlets about sexual intimacy and relationships after traumatic injury, to erase the way Erik had spent the entire time casting Charles side-eyed glances, the air around his body buzzing with something that bridged the gap between revulsion and hurt.
And that was all still in the hospital, before he'd been released on his own recognizance and the promise of three times a week physical therapy and Erik's constant watchfulness, to go back to his house and — do what? What the hell was there left to do? The elevator his grandmother had installed in Xavier House was a gorgeous example of art deco ornamentation, but had been nonfunctional since Charles was six and Charles's father had been in a tinkering phase. The wooden floors had indeterminate elevation and there was a gorgeous mosaic that would have to ripped up for something more even, and Raven and Erik threw themselves into the house like renovation would keep them from the reality of their situation. Charles watched them argue with contractors and each other and waited, lying awake at night listening to Erik typing or shuffling through files on the other side of their endlessly huge bed.
Erik is stubborn like a blood stain, has his claws and teeth dug in for the duration, and before the shooting the depth of Erik's loyalty, once won, had been like absinthe: maddeningly good. After, it had felt like an anchor around Charles's neck. Erik would never leave, no one halfway decent would, but definitely not Erik, and by the time Charles swam out of his immediate self-pity long enough to shift into grim practicalities, Erik had moved himself into Xavier House: clothes and shoes and work files and books drifting from Erik's sunny one bedroom in Astoria to mingle with Charles's clothes and shoes and work files and books. Who knew that after a year of unsubtle hints it would only take violent injury and paralysis to win additional commitment? Sometimes Charles had wondered if everybody in the Lehnsherr family had a constitutional attraction to only doubling down when something was hopeless or if it was a trait unique to Erik.
Raven, when he'd told her about it, had yelled at Charles that he was the world's dumbest psychic.
"Are you seriously serious?" she'd demanded. "This is Erik. He loves you. He's not going to break up with you because you — " and she'd stumbled on the words, her heart going cold in her chest " — because of this! Erik is better than that, remember how you insisted?"
"Of course not going to break up with me," Charles had agreed, resigned. That was part of the problem, really. "That's why I'm going to have to do it for him, the minute he's ready."
"I can't talk to you about this," Raven had said, and stormed off, which was fine, because Charles had had physical therapy scheduled in 15 minutes.
Raven hadn't, and doesn't, and probably won't ever understand exactly the way Charles feels about Erik. Raven's a romantic but a pragmatic one, and Charles can't explain how it had felt to land at JFK and step out to see Erik for the first time, the closed-down, forbidding face and hemmed-in scowl that had translated itself into a rush of pure happiness in Charles's chest, heart rattling with sudden greedy recognition. He's a reasonably intelligent man and his academic work had intersected a great deal with biology, so he knows theories about love as a chemical signal in the brain, triggered by pheromones, and research on the human anthropological drive to form packs. There's nothing in all of the science and wonders that Charles has known that has ever come close to explaining how he feels about Erik: like he's turning eternally toward the sun. Erik is mean to strangers and bad-tempered and genuinely hates cats, but he is kind in every way that actually matters and long-suffering about Charles and loves to the ends of the Earth.
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2011-08-05 23:57 (UTC)
Charles knows he is selfish, that he'd keep Erik forever if he could, but it would be wrong and unfair. Erik hadn't even wanted to live with Charles before the shooting — it would be ludicrous to think he wanted to stay out of anything other than the tattered guilt of remaindered love, the slow-building resentment of devotion, after the shooting, to be stuck with someone who can't keep up with him and won't ever walk and hasn't had a fucking erection in six months, who'll never be able to have a normal sex life again.
So the minute he'd felt Erik thinking, this is too fucking hard, just a stray and deeply hidden misery, he'd thought, okay, now, and thought Erik would be grateful to be off the hook, finally, to never have to drag Charles out of a bathtub or call ahead everywhere to ask about accessibility again.
The fight lasted four days.
"Stop thinking about it," Erik says, trying to unbutton the cuffs of his shirt in the shadows of their bedroom now, and Charles blinks and it's been years, years since that night he'd started yelling and hadn't stopped for days.
Charles makes a tsking noise and Erik surrenders his wrists automatically, letting Charles fret with the cufflinks as he murmurs, "I normally don't."
"So what prompted that terrible stroll down memory lane?" Erik asks, reasonable, and starts on the buttons of his shirt, watching Charles with oh-so-familiar and curious blue eyes.
Charles grins, ragged. "Mostly, I was thinking how once upon a time, if you were in this mood, I'd just fuck it out of you."
The laugh that startles out of Erik is wonderful, harsh and impolite and just for Charles, and Erik reaches over to press his thumb to the corner of Charles's mouth, considering, as he says, "You still could."
"Not quite the same," Charles demurs, because as forthright and brutally honest as his injury has forced him to become, sex is still an awkward subject in purely clinical terms. Nothing sucks the heat out of a moment like having to stop and figure out if his body would actually like to join in the festivities initiated by his brain. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; Charles had always thought sex could be funny on top of being fun, but he had never really anticipated being over thirty and snapping a cock ring into Erik's eye by accident.
Erik laughs again and replaces his thumb with his mouth, cupping Charles's face between his hands, and Charles laughs into the kiss, too, because how is he so lucky? How is he so lucky after all that after everything, it could be easy again — easy in a different way — and that Erik can keep smiling into his mouth and tipping Charles into their bed, to lace their fingers together and still want him.
"Didn't I say to stop thinking?" Erik asks, warm in Charles's ear. "I thought I was getting lucky here."
Charles huffs laughing, trying to mask the giggle trying to make its way up his throat, and says, "I never, Mr. Lehnsherr — who told you I was that kind of boy?"
"The entire student population of Oxford University, you slut," Erik says fondly, and before Charles can argue that he can hardly be held accountable for being sex positive on a college campus, Erik is kissing him silent, sliding a hand down Charles's shirt to hook into the waistline of his trousers, nails scratching underneath, exploring, and Charles reaches for Erik, too, for zippers and buttons and searching for skin.
Charles whispers, "I suppose it wouldn't do to have you feeling left out," and by now they know this dance, how to make this work perfectly like the inner workings of a clock fitting together.
Charles has always loved Erik's hands, their capability and warmth, and he loves the way the gun callouses catch on his skin as Erik strokes him roughly, thumb catching just under the head as Erik murmurs, "But that was then, wasn't it? I'm the only one who can have you now," and bites at Charles's mouth, possessing.
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2011-08-05 23:58 (UTC)
Behavior like that obviously needs to be rewarded, and Charles curls a fist around Erik, sighs into his mouth, and loops his other arm over Erik's shoulders, dragging him down until Erik is a breathless weight against Charles, pinning him to the bed.
"I only want you," Charles gasps, grinding them together as much as he could with them curled toward one another on their sides, the light of the digital clock and the street lamps the only illumination in the room. "I've only ever wanted you."
"Such a fucking liar," Erik accuses, but he's still laughing, voice shaking. He wraps his hands around both of them, jerks them off together so roughly it almost hurts, but that intensity — where it balances on that knife edge between sharp and too-sensitive pain and lavish pleasure — sparks behind Charles's eyes, going off like fireworks along his brain where it's hooked into Erik's building orgasm, too, tangling together.
And Charles says, "But I want it to be true," because he means it, he wishes sometimes that he could dissolve himself into Erik and live there forever. He feels overcome, rapturous, all the Harlequin bingo words strung up like carnival lights inside his head, and Charles gasps it all into Erik's mouth, the heady rush of gratitude and affection and how it hurts like a constantly deepening wound to love someone the way he loves Erik: with pathetic desperation, without regard for dignity, needful and begging.
"God," Erik swears, and it sounds like it's getting scraped out of him, ripped out of the marrow, "I fucking love you," and that's it, that's all Charles needed. He makes a sobbing noise as Erik jerks it out of him, chanting, "Yeah, yeah — just like that, let me see it, Charles, let me have it, open up, just like that," and when Charles comes, it feels like it blazes out of him, Erik's hands and his mouth and the weight of his body keeping him grounded, keeping him from flying away completely.
***
TBC
(Анонимно)
2011-07-24 21:51 (UTC)
"Did Charles teach Lehnsherr how to drive, too?" Alex mutters, mostly to himself, and covering his eyes as they veer past a silvery purple Ford Windstar. They're momentarily close enough that he can see the fascinated horror in the eyes of the three kids in the backseat, plastered up against the fingerprinted glass.
From the front seat, Raven says, "Charles and Erik are both great drivers."
"So it's like one of those evil feedback loops, basically," Angel clarifies.
The car swoops across another two lanes, heading toward the offramp at warp speed, and then Alex is too busy bracing himself against the centripetal force of the turn onto the local road to ask where the hell they're going until they're already there — a stark military compound in the shadows of massive satellite dishes, that CIA woman waiting for them at the gates.
"Armando," she says, and nods at Angel, too, and Raven.
"Is Charles okay?" Raven asks, locking the car doors and flashing her badge at some rapidly approaching dudes with a fuckton each of guns strapped around them. "When I left, he was still — "
"Erik has managed to convince him to get out of Cerebro," the CIA woman says, too diplomatic, which probably means that Lehnsherr probably broke whatever the hell Cerebro was into itty bitty pieces with his mutation while Xavier stared at him with bleak, pitiful blue eyes. "And — " the woman, McTaggert?, says this looking directly at Alex " — he wanted me to go ahead and tell you that your brother isn't hurt."
It's like all the muscles and bones in his body go on strike at once, and he's leaning heavily against Armando before he knows it, feeling his heart palpitate in his chest. It takes about ten seconds for him to push away, to get some distance, but when he does it he gives Armando an apologetic smile, because Munoz seems like good people — Alex just doesn't really trust himself right now.
"Good," he manages. "That's good. Do they know where he is?"
McTaggert's face grows sober. "That's where it gets more..."
"Unprecedented," is what Xavier says.
They had been forced to go through like six hours of security clearance, during which Alex becomes pretty well sexually acquainted with the guy who does his unnecessarily thorough body search. It's a sign of how sleep-deprived and crazy he is that he thinks, How much do you want to bet nobody tried that shit on Xavier, before he'd followed Moira up a creaking metal platform, flanked by Angel and Armando — both hesitating — to find Xavier, flat out, lying on someone's suit jacket, head in Lehnsherr's lap. Hank's sitting on the ground next to them, his face the color of Elmer's glue.
"Oh, come the fuck on, Charles," Raven says, long-suffering but not particularly alarmed.
Hank is saying, "I'm so sorry, professor — "
"Can I kill him?" Lehnsherr is asking Xavier, half-joking. Probably, and Alex hears himself say, "Hank, get over here," without any input from his higher brain functions. What the fuck.
"Alex would be terribly upset if you did," Charles says.
" — I had no idea," Hank finishes in a babble, and Xavier, from where he's prone on the ground, pats Hank on the knee — ugh — and says:
"It's quite all right, Hank, really," before turning to Alex and waving. "Alex! Did Moira — "
"Thanks," Alex interrupts, because he knows that Xavier is a creeper and a fucking weirdo and has jacked up designs on Hank's nubile genius, but he's grateful that the guy is on his side, that he is telling Alex the most salient point while everybody else keeps talking about catching terrorist ringleaders — as if Alex cares about that shit at all. He just wants his brother back. "Did you see where he is?"
The "so I can blast out of here and get him" part is unspoken, but he must be projecting that so hard that Hank hears it, because that asshole just narrows his eyes and gets up, lickety-split, darting over like he could stop Alex from doing something stupid. Alex is champion at doing stupid stuff, and it doesn't matter how much Hank stares at him, pleading, or if he let's himself bump shoulders with the guy, reassuring: what's gotta be done has got to be done.
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2011-07-24 21:53 (UTC)
"That was what is so unprecedented!" Xavier says, propping himself up on his elbows successfully for about 20 seconds before Lehnsherr drags him back prone again, holding Charles flat by his shoulders and scowling down at him in a way that would probably be scarier if Charles wasn't looking back up at him like he was the basking in the sun or some equally gross comparison.
"Charles," Lehnsherr warns.
Raven stomps over, too, and nudges her brother with one foot. "What did he do to himself?"
"It's irrelevant," Charles insists, and before anybody else can disagree, goes on to say, "What I was saying is that while I failed to ascertain Scott's exact location, I have much more information on Shaw's associates — specifically Ms. Frost."
Lehnsherr, because he's not so secretly a troll, reflexively turns to smirk at Alex, who can't help but think, BOOBS really loudly, which would be bad enough even if it didn't prompt Xavier to give him a quelling look, although he doesn't comment on it, thank fuck, before he goes on to add:
"She's not just a telepath, Alex, she's a terribly powerful one."
Raven is getting down on her knees now, leaning over her brother to brush his bangs out of his face, inspect his eyes with distracted ease, and Alex wonders if they're like how he and Scott were like. He's never been scared of Scott, of what Scott could do, but he's worried a lot, and he's kept a hand over Scott's eyes to reassure him when Scott had been scared he'd look by accident and blow something up — and the memory makes him sick. He wants Scott here and safe so badly it feels like a still-tearing gash in his chest, down the line of his sternum.
"Terribly powerful, more powerful than you?" Lehnsherr asks, helping Raven slaps Xavier's protesting hands away when she starts to take his pulse.
"You two are absolutely maddening," Xaiver accuses, but submits when they both glare at him at the same time. He settles for clearing his throat to say, "I hate to speculate, but she is quite powerful."
Lehnsherr looks up to catch the CIA woman's eye. "That means 'no,' by the way."
"I've been sufficiently briefed on Charles-to-English, thanks," the woman retorts, disinterested, and says to Xavier, "What else?"
"She's not merely a telepath, either," Xavier says. "I had let myself in a few moments before she'd realized the intrusion and thoroughly kicked me out."
Hank, next to Alex, leans in to say, "And that was when the Professor yelled and Agent Lehnsherr ripped the helmet mechanism off of the machine."
Alex looks beyond the scene on the platform, at a huddle of forgotten scientists cooing over the giant fucker of a machine in the background. As Hank has reported, there is some sort of metal colander hat with a medusa knot of wires spilling out of it abandoned on the ground.
"Which Erik can repair in very short order," Xavier insists. "Ms. Frost was fascinating. She seems to have a secondary mutation that turns her…well, I suppose the best word is crystalline — " and not breaking breath but turning to pout at Lehnsherr, he says " — and would it be a terrible imposition if you and Raven find some way to return me to to an upright position? My dignity is feeling extremely bruised."
Lehnsherr, as charming as ever, mutters, "Fuck your dignity," but he calls the wheelchair over, floating it soundlessly over the platform, and with practiced cooperation with Raven, they help Xavier into the chair, their hands easy and reflexive and Alex guesses they've done this a lot before, that this is one of those shitty things you get used to the way you get used to a lot of things. "Is that okay?" Raven asks, and Xavier says, "Yes, it's fine," like it's something he never wants to talk about, and nobody says thank you or you're welcome — the whole thing smoothed away like a wrinkled bedsheet. It makes Alex hate Lehnsherr maybe 2 percent less than before.
The CIA woman, who seems to be ignoring almost anything that isn't mission critical going on around her, asks:
"So what does that mean for us? Did you manage to get any insight into Shaw's plans?"
"A little," Xavier murmurs. "Enough to worry me."
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2011-07-24 21:54 (UTC)
'Enough to worry me' from Charles-to-English turns out to mean that Sebastian Shaw wants himself a mutant army. But the thing is most people aren't angry enough or hurt enough to batshit enough to want that. They have families and mortgages and some bullshit paperwork deadline at work, a vacation scheduled next week; it's easiest to hate in broad strokes. It's when you get to individuals it's almost impossible. So the plan involves aggressive recruitment, possibly with the help of Cerebro.
"He's aware that any war between mutants and humans would be disastrous," Xavier says, grim. "But Shaw seems to fancy himself a builder, and he's looking forward to the challenge."
Lehnsherr looks heartsick, absolutely fucked up, like he's just aged ten years in an instant, and Alex thinks it must be fucking awful if he lets Xavier take his hand like that, lace their fingers together in public.
"Why would he want Scott?" Hank asks, gray-faced. "He's just a kid."
Xavier answers Hank's question by looking at Alex, solemn. "He was impressed by your mutation, and — "
It's weird to watch Lehnsherr and Xavier having a conversation in a crowded room in absolute silence. Xavier slants his eyes over, and Lehnsherr doesn't turn to meet his gaze, just tips his chin down, and then they both sit there like they're murmuring at each other through a closed door while everybody feels awkward as fuck. At least that's what Alex has gotten out of the experience so far, except when he looks around to find someone else feeling weirded out the only person who meets his gaze is Hank, who's biting his lip so hard he's bleeding, looking strung-out and tiny in a shirt that's way too big on him: a kid playing mad scientist. Alex can his own wordless conversation, too, because he hears Hank's I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, what can I do, what can I do? loud and clear, even though that's not it for either of them. Even though neither of them are lucky enough to have an easy or easily hidden mutation at all.
" — and he thinks Scott's good leverage, anyway," Lehnsherr finishes for Xavier, choosing his words carefully and turning back to Alex. "He thinks if he has Scott, you'll go fight for him."
He would. Alex would do it in a heartbeat. He's going to go right now, except that Hank's nearness has turned into Hank's fist in Alex's shirt, gripping him close, crazy-eyed and whispering in a hush, "Alex, no. You wouldn't."
"He would," Lehnsherr cuts in, mild and unworried, and Alex wonders what he's missing here. "I would."
"You would not," Xavier and Raven contradict, simultaneous.
"To borrow a phrase from you, Charles, it's irrelevant now," Lehnsherr points out, changing the subject.
Xavier is too busy giving Lehnsherr a dirty look to say much, but Raven says, "It wouldn't mean anything, Alex. Even if we let you go, what makes you think he'd actually let Scott free? You'd die for sure, when this all goes down."
"Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?" Alex shouts, because what the fuck is he supposed to do? That's his brother. That's his dumb kid brother who cried the first time he watched Beauty and the Beast and has an unnatural relationship with his Legos and who's already lost his parents, who's already had to take sink baths in public toilets and live in shitty mutant foster care and been turned out by adoptive parents because of something he didn't have any control of. And Alex hadn't been able to protect him from any of that, so what the fuck is he suppose to do now? Why did they even tell him that shit if they didn't want him to go? What did they think he would do? There's no right thing here — there's nothing he can — and Alex can feel it welling up behind his eyes, red and furious and 200 degrees Celcius, making all his skin hot with panicked fury, and if they don't say something soon he's going to blast through this entire facility.
"You fight, but not with him," Xavier cuts in, hard, all the soft, professorial edges gone. "You fight against him. It's the only way you'll have Scott back on your own terms."
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2011-07-24 21:55 (UTC)
Alex can either talk, or he can keep himself from blowing up the entire facility. He can still feel Hank near enough to burn though, so he just shouts inside his own head, tamping down on the blast that's boiling up in his throat, because what the fuck does Xavier know? What the hell could Lehnsherr ever know about this? Xavier lives in a God damn New York mansion with an elevator, and Lehnsherr's never been anybody's bitch. It's so easy to tell people to do the right thing when it's easy for you, when you're not the one with skin in the game, when you're not the person who's going to have to live with yourself if everything goes wrong, and —
Alex, Xavier's voice cuts in, crystal clear and loud and entirely inside Alex's head, I understand you're frightened and worried right now — but even if you don't believe that I have made any difficult decisions in regards to Shaw, believe this: no one can know your hatred of Shaw so well as Erik.
"Oh, God," Hank says. "He looks like he's losing it."
"What happens when Alex loses it?" Raven asks, alarmed.
Lehnsherr says, "Something explodes," and adds, "Charles, could you…?"
I'm very sorry about this, Xavier says, suddenly changed, back to tweed and guilelessness now. But we'll talk about this when you wake up. But briefly. You clearly need training.
Alex only has enough time to ask, "What the fuck are you — ?" before he's out, knees giving out, the room gone dark around him.
***
The part that Charles and Erik don't tell Alex is this:
Shaw knows Charles would come looking, that Cerebro would be involved. He knows mutants are outnumbered, and that while he'll recruit, and abuse Emma Frosts's telepathy to do it — there are already a small handful of the unwillingly converted in his tow, and Charles feels sick thinking about it — he knows that the easiest way to incite war is to let the human start it, to let it brew like poison in a water system. Shaw is nothing if not patient, and his theories of engagement are coy. He has a plan to gain access to Cerebro and the means to do it; it's a matter of time before he chooses his sacrificial mutants, those who are going to go berserker for the greater cause. It will be an ugly but necessary war, and it's a shame about little Scott Summers, too, but he's too useful a foot soldier in this — both for his marvelously dangerous powers and for his brother and his marvelously dangerous powers, too, Shaw had conveyed via Emma. If Charles dies, it will be a tragedy, but also a window for minor revolution, and one day, even Charles may come to appreciate this.
The part that Charles doesn't tell Erik is this:
If it is another mutant who kills Charles, someone unstable and obviously dangerous already, who Charles has taken a chance on and kept close, then it will be the only story anybody reads above the fold of every major newspaper in the world for weeks. The blue laws on mutants will become black ones, and that bill stalled in committee is going to be fast tracked. And as the pressure grows and people get more persecuted, it'll be easier and easier for his cause to take hold. The nonmutants will write their own doom with their inevitable backlash, Shaw thinks, and had conveyed with all due civility. The best part, of course, Shaw had noted, is that of course you will arrogantly keep this element of your discovery to yourself, thinking you can avert catastrophe. That Alex is as good as you, and knowing that if you were to tell your precious Erik, it would all come apart.
Charles has stringent rules for himself. No one else could ever set them for him. He knows that Erik and Raven think he's cheerfully amoral with his telepathy, using it to get out of parking tickets and eavesdrop, collect all the most ravishing gossip from his graduate students — but all of that is nothing on the grand scale of transgressions.
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2011-07-24 21:56 (UTC)
If he could, Charles would let his voice wither. It's so much easier to talk to someone else directly, and much clearer, with less margin for misunderstanding. He hates voicemail most of all, it being fourteen degrees removed from meaningful communication. If Charles could, he would simply sway everybody to his side, easy as pie, a simple tick and it's done. If Charles could have, he would have made Erik love him from the first, to the last, and unwavering, without any of the conflict and the doubt that roils them still, to scrape away the bittersweet ache of devotion until nothing lies between them but the drowsy perfection of Sunday morning love, tangled together in a bed they've made together. It would be so easy — no one would ever know, and everyone would be happier.
And he could, but he doesn't, and he won't even though it feels like ignoring the obvious solution. Like watching someone foolishly miss the easiest answer, to putter around in the half-dark knocking into furniture and overturning glasses when the light switch is just there on the wall. Charles will always handicap himself because he may be a mutant, but he is human, first, and he can't bear it, to engage in philosophical arguments about the reality of a thing. Is it real if he's placed it there? If he's the one that made it real? Would someone have truly changed their mind about mutant acceptance? Would Erik genuinely love him? Would it even matter if they felt they had, if Erik thinks he does?
But in ways Charles can't precisely articulate, it would, and the only reprieve would be forgetting. Charles's mutation is useless on himself.
So he can only do the ordinary things, the everyday human things, when it comes to influencing detractors, when it comes to convincing Erik of the right and just things to do, when it comes to appeasing Raven's upset and worry.
Raven helps Hank get Alex squared away, dragging his dead weight somewhere he won't be in the way and cuffing him to a railing for extra good measure while Armando interviews Dr. Lang and Angel is taking a bird's eye view of the compound, looking for obvious security weaknesses, her jacket left behind.
"Is there anything you're not telling me?" Erik asks, low and just for Charles's ears. They keep so many secrets between them it's second nature. Just because it's national security doesn't mean it's the FBI or CIA's to know.
Charles thinks, thankfully, lying is a perfectly normal human thing to do, and says, "Nothing important."
Erik just watches him calmly. "Are you sure about that?"
"I'm sure that you knowing the rest will only upset you," Charles replies delicately. "And I'm sure that it won't assist in your search for Shaw at all, either."
"I don't like it when you lie to me, Charles," Erik growls, and Charles is painfully honest when he says:
"I don't like it when I lie to you, either."
TBC
(A/N: THIS STORY IS NEVER GOING TO END. JESUS CHRIST.)
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2011-08-05 23:51 (UTC)
They do two more sessions with Cerebro with Erik scowling the entire time after Charles and Dr. Lang berate him into reconnecting the helmet mechanism, but Emma Frost has taken to being less accommodating, and Charles has never been able to track Shaw for some reason. It's not the blur that comes with a low level telepath's shielding, or even the solid brick of someone higher up the OCP scale — it's just sheer absence. Charles has spent hours in Cerebro searching but never found a trace of Shaw, and the blanks in between active minds are too frequent and vast to use the process of elimination in unfamiliar places, not like the house or the office or the 23rd floor where Charles knows the shapes and sizes of blank spaces, the afterimages of people walking around, distracted and harried and happy and sad, leaving trails.
Every time Charles zeroes in on Scott, there's a quicksilver flicker of amusement and very good, Mr. Xavier before he's jolted out, rudely shown the door with a knife-edged hand, and before he can even regroup ,Scott's presence and Emma's sheer crystalline defenses are vanishing again, jolted away, leaving no trace, and Charles has to start all over — until it's dizzying, until he's dizzy, and Erik says:
"That's it — McCoy, off."
This time, there's no protesting it, and Charles concedes Erik's concern may not be baseless. His arms feel weak, his head feels heavy on his neck, and there's a quietly threatening throb of pain down his shoulder blades, stretching like the scrape of a knife down the line of Charles's spine. Although Charles hasn't been properly afraid of knives in years, now, he thinks with hazy amusement — Erik's fault, the unspoken promises of him laced in so much of Charles's recklessness.
It takes Angel, Armando, and Raven to get Alex into the car, still cloaked in artificial sleep, and Hank hovers the entire time, staring at him worriedly in the backseat while everybody else breaks off to head home or the office, Erik issuing last orders before their caravan of black SUVs heads for the highways. In the back, as dusk takes the city, Hank — ever so quietly — shifts Alex so his head is pillowed in Hank's lap, stroking the hair out of his face with clumsy-soft fingers, and under the surface of Hank's immediate concern and the chasm of his own self-loathing and fearfulness is something so sweetly aching it makes Charles feel 17 again, that end-of-the-world kind of in love he'd felt for Tony Stark at one conference or another, when that guilelessly end-of-the-world kind of love had been within his capacity.
Charles thinks it's just lucky that Raven had elected to head straight home; he would never be so crass as to make fun of him and Erik prefers to pretend he doesn't recognize human feelings, but Hank never would have survived the teasing if Charles's sister had been here.
"Why did you make us bring him?" Erik asks, after Hank has gone from fretful to sleepy to unconscious, his hand soft over Alex's eyes, slanting orange light skating through the interior of the car as they whizz through the Holland Tunnel. "All it did was upset him."
"It also proved Alex has far more control already than he thinks," Charles returns, murmuring. He's always been a student of teach by doing, although usually the process isn't quite so traumatic to his students. "He's scared of his own mutation."
Charles can feel the metal in the car shift into Erik's resonance as he clutches at the steering wheel. It's a moment of strangeness Charles hadn't been able to identify the first time he'd gotten into a car with Erik, under the blazing winter white sun of New York City, when Erik was still Agent Lehnsherr and a fantastic mystery.
"He should be scared, he has a dangerous mutation," Erik argues.
"Only if it's out of control," Charles contradicts. "It's no more dangerous than yours."
Erik frowns, and around them, outside the car, it feels like the Holland Tunnel is lengthening and lengthening, extending forever, so there's a strange hum to play background to their words. "My mutation — "
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2011-08-05 23:53 (UTC)
"Is enough to bring down skyscrapers," Charles finishes gently. "To rip airplanes out of the sky and send the Rose Planetarium rolling down 5th Avenue."
Grinning, unrepentant, Erik retorts, "Actually, I was going to say that my mutation is nothing compared to yours."
Charles has a dozen responses to that, but he's used them all already, more than once, for the dozens of iterations of this discussion — in shades of philosophical, curious, frightened, furious, and aroused — that they've had over the years. Erik isn't concerned or making a point, he's just saying it because it's true.
Hank, probably as a benefit of his mutation, turns out to be surprisingly strong, and carries Alex off to the annex without any assistance and just an incongruously shy, "Thank you, Professor Xavier, Agent Lehnsherr," that Erik thankfully doesn't ruin by saying anything purposefully vulgar about how Alex is slung over Hank's shoulder.
"We'll talk more in the morning," Charles promises Hank. "I have a plan. Alex and Scott will be fine."
"Good," Hank stammers, going red all the way down his neck, vanishing into the collar of his shirt. "Good night."
At which point Erik snatches up Charles by the wheelchair, and sends him halfway up the stairs toward their bedroom, calling over his shoulder, "Good night, Hank," and saying, "Charles, bed."
In another life, nights like these, Erik would be resentful and tied up too tight, all of his stress and anxiety and barely-banked revenge fantasies toward Shaw lashed together like a wall between them. And Charles remembers how easy it was to scale it, to bring it down by sliding up close, drawing near, pressing a kiss to the knob of Erik's spine or throwing a leg over Erik's hips and laying worshipful kisses on his face, open-mouthed ones down the line of his chest.
It's always with the sharp ache of loss that Charles thinks breathlessly tumbling into bed, how lucky and stupid and spoiled he'd been, to be able to press Erik down among sheets of or into backseats of cars, alleyways behind restaurants, along soft grass in Central Park, barefoot in the shade. Of all the things Charles hates about the wheelchair, of all the host of indignities and embarrassments Shaw's volley of bullets had visited on him, this is what he misses the most, the thing that makes him the most angry: losing the fizzy, effortless sweetness of love — the uncomplicated simplicity of saying I'm sorry or I love you or Be okay, please be okay and I would do anything for you with his skin and his hands and the way they cleaved themselves together.
He'll never surprise Erik with a mid-afternoon fuck again, slicked up like a five-diamond pro, furtive and hot and dangerous somewhere unwise. There won't ever be lazy handjobs in a shared morning shower again, and Charles is never going to be able to drop to his knees in the foyer of the house, slam Erik against the front door and suck him off, proud and joyful and abjectly hungry after a shitty chicken dinner on the FBI tab, Erik gleaming with his commendations.
It had been crushing, to wake up in the hospital for the fourteenth time and listen to the machine beeps and to realize he'd never known anything difficult before, to suddenly plunge headlong into the awkward negotiations that would dictate the rest of his life. The doctors hadn't known the true extent of the damage, although there was general agreement that Charles would be paralyzed with minimal to vanishing chances of any recovery of movement for his legs. He'd still been in the liminal stages of spinal shock, and the landscape of his paralysis was changing daily. Some days he'd believed he could move his toes so much he imagined he could feel it, that his telepathy engendered a secondary mutation for spontaneous healing. But most days, he'd laid in bed and shut himself in his own head because his choices of general oppressive pity, Raven's debilitating grief, Erik's frenetic guilt, or the nurses' bloodlessly efficient caring were all equally unwelcome.
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2011-08-05 23:54 (UTC)
Everybody was annoyingly helpful: they wanted to help him learn how to build up upper body strength; they wanted to teach him how to use a wheelchair; they wanted to help him cope with his grief; they wanted to show him how to use a toilet again.
Charles had wanted to wipe the memory of himself and Erik, trapped in a blandly comfortable hospital counseling room, stuck with a handful of generic pamphlets about sexual intimacy and relationships after traumatic injury, to erase the way Erik had spent the entire time casting Charles side-eyed glances, the air around his body buzzing with something that bridged the gap between revulsion and hurt.
And that was all still in the hospital, before he'd been released on his own recognizance and the promise of three times a week physical therapy and Erik's constant watchfulness, to go back to his house and — do what? What the hell was there left to do? The elevator his grandmother had installed in Xavier House was a gorgeous example of art deco ornamentation, but had been nonfunctional since Charles was six and Charles's father had been in a tinkering phase. The wooden floors had indeterminate elevation and there was a gorgeous mosaic that would have to ripped up for something more even, and Raven and Erik threw themselves into the house like renovation would keep them from the reality of their situation. Charles watched them argue with contractors and each other and waited, lying awake at night listening to Erik typing or shuffling through files on the other side of their endlessly huge bed.
Erik is stubborn like a blood stain, has his claws and teeth dug in for the duration, and before the shooting the depth of Erik's loyalty, once won, had been like absinthe: maddeningly good. After, it had felt like an anchor around Charles's neck. Erik would never leave, no one halfway decent would, but definitely not Erik, and by the time Charles swam out of his immediate self-pity long enough to shift into grim practicalities, Erik had moved himself into Xavier House: clothes and shoes and work files and books drifting from Erik's sunny one bedroom in Astoria to mingle with Charles's clothes and shoes and work files and books. Who knew that after a year of unsubtle hints it would only take violent injury and paralysis to win additional commitment? Sometimes Charles had wondered if everybody in the Lehnsherr family had a constitutional attraction to only doubling down when something was hopeless or if it was a trait unique to Erik.
Raven, when he'd told her about it, had yelled at Charles that he was the world's dumbest psychic.
"Are you seriously serious?" she'd demanded. "This is Erik. He loves you. He's not going to break up with you because you — " and she'd stumbled on the words, her heart going cold in her chest " — because of this! Erik is better than that, remember how you insisted?"
"Of course not going to break up with me," Charles had agreed, resigned. That was part of the problem, really. "That's why I'm going to have to do it for him, the minute he's ready."
"I can't talk to you about this," Raven had said, and stormed off, which was fine, because Charles had had physical therapy scheduled in 15 minutes.
Raven hadn't, and doesn't, and probably won't ever understand exactly the way Charles feels about Erik. Raven's a romantic but a pragmatic one, and Charles can't explain how it had felt to land at JFK and step out to see Erik for the first time, the closed-down, forbidding face and hemmed-in scowl that had translated itself into a rush of pure happiness in Charles's chest, heart rattling with sudden greedy recognition. He's a reasonably intelligent man and his academic work had intersected a great deal with biology, so he knows theories about love as a chemical signal in the brain, triggered by pheromones, and research on the human anthropological drive to form packs. There's nothing in all of the science and wonders that Charles has known that has ever come close to explaining how he feels about Erik: like he's turning eternally toward the sun. Erik is mean to strangers and bad-tempered and genuinely hates cats, but he is kind in every way that actually matters and long-suffering about Charles and loves to the ends of the Earth.
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2011-08-05 23:57 (UTC)
Charles knows he is selfish, that he'd keep Erik forever if he could, but it would be wrong and unfair. Erik hadn't even wanted to live with Charles before the shooting — it would be ludicrous to think he wanted to stay out of anything other than the tattered guilt of remaindered love, the slow-building resentment of devotion, after the shooting, to be stuck with someone who can't keep up with him and won't ever walk and hasn't had a fucking erection in six months, who'll never be able to have a normal sex life again.
So the minute he'd felt Erik thinking, this is too fucking hard, just a stray and deeply hidden misery, he'd thought, okay, now, and thought Erik would be grateful to be off the hook, finally, to never have to drag Charles out of a bathtub or call ahead everywhere to ask about accessibility again.
The fight lasted four days.
"Stop thinking about it," Erik says, trying to unbutton the cuffs of his shirt in the shadows of their bedroom now, and Charles blinks and it's been years, years since that night he'd started yelling and hadn't stopped for days.
Charles makes a tsking noise and Erik surrenders his wrists automatically, letting Charles fret with the cufflinks as he murmurs, "I normally don't."
"So what prompted that terrible stroll down memory lane?" Erik asks, reasonable, and starts on the buttons of his shirt, watching Charles with oh-so-familiar and curious blue eyes.
Charles grins, ragged. "Mostly, I was thinking how once upon a time, if you were in this mood, I'd just fuck it out of you."
The laugh that startles out of Erik is wonderful, harsh and impolite and just for Charles, and Erik reaches over to press his thumb to the corner of Charles's mouth, considering, as he says, "You still could."
"Not quite the same," Charles demurs, because as forthright and brutally honest as his injury has forced him to become, sex is still an awkward subject in purely clinical terms. Nothing sucks the heat out of a moment like having to stop and figure out if his body would actually like to join in the festivities initiated by his brain. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't; Charles had always thought sex could be funny on top of being fun, but he had never really anticipated being over thirty and snapping a cock ring into Erik's eye by accident.
Erik laughs again and replaces his thumb with his mouth, cupping Charles's face between his hands, and Charles laughs into the kiss, too, because how is he so lucky? How is he so lucky after all that after everything, it could be easy again — easy in a different way — and that Erik can keep smiling into his mouth and tipping Charles into their bed, to lace their fingers together and still want him.
"Didn't I say to stop thinking?" Erik asks, warm in Charles's ear. "I thought I was getting lucky here."
Charles huffs laughing, trying to mask the giggle trying to make its way up his throat, and says, "I never, Mr. Lehnsherr — who told you I was that kind of boy?"
"The entire student population of Oxford University, you slut," Erik says fondly, and before Charles can argue that he can hardly be held accountable for being sex positive on a college campus, Erik is kissing him silent, sliding a hand down Charles's shirt to hook into the waistline of his trousers, nails scratching underneath, exploring, and Charles reaches for Erik, too, for zippers and buttons and searching for skin.
Charles whispers, "I suppose it wouldn't do to have you feeling left out," and by now they know this dance, how to make this work perfectly like the inner workings of a clock fitting together.
Charles has always loved Erik's hands, their capability and warmth, and he loves the way the gun callouses catch on his skin as Erik strokes him roughly, thumb catching just under the head as Erik murmurs, "But that was then, wasn't it? I'm the only one who can have you now," and bites at Charles's mouth, possessing.
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2011-08-05 23:58 (UTC)
Behavior like that obviously needs to be rewarded, and Charles curls a fist around Erik, sighs into his mouth, and loops his other arm over Erik's shoulders, dragging him down until Erik is a breathless weight against Charles, pinning him to the bed.
"I only want you," Charles gasps, grinding them together as much as he could with them curled toward one another on their sides, the light of the digital clock and the street lamps the only illumination in the room. "I've only ever wanted you."
"Such a fucking liar," Erik accuses, but he's still laughing, voice shaking. He wraps his hands around both of them, jerks them off together so roughly it almost hurts, but that intensity — where it balances on that knife edge between sharp and too-sensitive pain and lavish pleasure — sparks behind Charles's eyes, going off like fireworks along his brain where it's hooked into Erik's building orgasm, too, tangling together.
And Charles says, "But I want it to be true," because he means it, he wishes sometimes that he could dissolve himself into Erik and live there forever. He feels overcome, rapturous, all the Harlequin bingo words strung up like carnival lights inside his head, and Charles gasps it all into Erik's mouth, the heady rush of gratitude and affection and how it hurts like a constantly deepening wound to love someone the way he loves Erik: with pathetic desperation, without regard for dignity, needful and begging.
"God," Erik swears, and it sounds like it's getting scraped out of him, ripped out of the marrow, "I fucking love you," and that's it, that's all Charles needed. He makes a sobbing noise as Erik jerks it out of him, chanting, "Yeah, yeah — just like that, let me see it, Charles, let me have it, open up, just like that," and when Charles comes, it feels like it blazes out of him, Erik's hands and his mouth and the weight of his body keeping him grounded, keeping him from flying away completely.
***
TBC
@темы: fanfiction