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monstrousregiment) wrote2011-08-12 12:57 pm
Brief Lives (6/?)
Author: monstrousreg
Word count: 3221
Warnings: Erik having.... feelings.
Pairing: Erik/Charles.
Summary: Erik thinks he's going to seduce, interrogate and murder some nondescript CIA intelligence agent, and winds up biting more than he can chew. Charles is not keen on being murdered, he doesn't favor interrogations, and he's certainly not willing to be seduced. That he's not cooperating is midly put.
Notes: Unbetaed, and stuff. GUYS YOU ARE AMAZING. Yes, I made an 'ororo is awesome tag' don't judge me.
It takes the average human from 6 to 8 weeks to recover fully from a broken rib.
Charles Xavier is a healthy, fit young man of excellent health, so it’s no surprise that, by the sixth week, he’s already able to join in some of the training exercise so long as he doesn’t overextend himself. It would be impossible for him to overdo it even if he had a mind to do so; for once able to have an active part in their professor’s recovery process, the children have kept a hawk’s eye on him nearly every single minute he’s been out of bed.
Erik’s continued on his own training at their usual rhythm, neither encouraging nor discouraging whatever student chose to join him.
Near the end of the second week after Xavier’s return, Erik find himself in the hall with Charles as he greets a new student—the boy seems to be able to control fire… or rather should be able to control fire, if he could control his gift at all—when front door flies abruptly open.
Erik immediately steps forward, pushing the kid behind him, but Charles is laughing out delightedly.
“Raven!”
Ah—the mysteriously absent Raven Xavier, finally home. Erik recognizes her as the girl that met him in the alley that day in Oxford almost four months back, long wavy blond hair, soft brown gold-specked eyes. But as he watches she changes, like a wave of scaled turning directions on her skin. Her skin is a deep shade of blue, her hair a fiery red, and her eyes the gold of a lion’s.
Charles steps forward to catch her in a fierce hug, exuberant in his joy, and her laugh is loud and happy. They pause, still in each other’s arms, as Charles presses his forehead to hers and closes his eyes. He seems to find some solace in the corners of her mind, and the girl grins, blue lips stretching over shockingly white teeth.
It’s not jealousy, Erik knows. Erik recognizes jealousy easily—he’s well acquainted with it, has felt it every time he saw a child and then saw the mother and remembered digging his mother’s grave with his bare hands, every time he see someone who didn’t go to a concentration camp. So it’s not jealousy, he knows. But it hurts, all the same, a small pain, like a cut that stings, a blossom of hurt that unfurls in his chest like a dove’s wings when their skins touch.
For the first time since Charles revealed the full extent of what Shaw did to him, Erik realizes for all of his fear, the man is touch starved.
He carefully tucks the thought away.
The next day Charles come looking for him after he’s finished the training circuit.
“You have lowered your time,” he says with a smile.
Erik, winded and breathless, nods and snatches he towel the telepath offers.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Charles starts. “About letting you come with me in the excursions—“
“You’re not letting me,” Erik interrupts with a look. “I’m coming whether you like it or not.”
Charles’ eyebrows go up, “Well, that’s hardly polite. I was going to say—“
“I’m German, not English. I don’t need to be polite.”
Charles huffs, “You’re insufferable this morning. What’s your problem, then? Sex-deprived?”
“Are you offering?” Erik smiles like a crocodile.
The telepath rolls his eyes, turns on his heels and stalks away. “Never you mind, then. I think I’ll leap off a cliff before I take you anywhere with me.”
You childish idiot, Erik thinks, fighting a smile. Let me shower and meet me in the grounds.
Half an hour later, Erik is lying lazily in the grass by the lake when Charles’ shadow falls across his stomach. Erik looks up at him, squinting in the sunlight and blowing smoke off his nostrils.
“I think you smoke too much, my friend,” Charles says, letting himself fall at his side.
“That’s fair. I think I don’t care about your opinion.”
Charles grimaces, “Wanker.”
Erik pats him companionably in the knee and counts it as a win when the man doesn’t flinch. It’s taken a while for Charles to get used to those fleeting, strictly-against-fabric touches, but Erik isn’t discouraged. He’s intent on getting Xavier accustomed to contact, even if not skin-to skin. Yet.
“I don’t know that it’s such a good idea, Erik,” Charles says seriously. Erik sits up, leaning his elbows on his knees and breathing out smoke like a dragon. “I know you’re very capable, but Shaw really does want you dead, and I don’t want to risk it.”
“He wants you dead too, and you’re perfectly fine with risking that.”
“It’s my life.”
“And this is mine,” Erik counters, quick as a snake. “Mine to do with as I please. And if I find I want to go with you and, I don’t know, leap off cliffs as seems to be your habit—then you don’t have a right to stop me.”
“Neither am I obligated to indulge you,” Charles replies, eyes hard.
“You take your sister with you,” Erik retorted. “Even though I can tell you don’t want to. So?”
“There’s not much I can deny Raven,” the Englishman admits. “But I… it’s different with her. I can tell how she’ll react at any given time. I know her. I know what she can take and how far I can stretch her. With you, it’s—you’re unpredictable and uncontrollable. I never know how you’ll take something.”
“You could always ask.”
“Alright, how will you react if Shaw tries to rape me in front of you?”
Erik’s throat sizes and he chokes on smoke.
Charles huffs, “You don’t even know. I can’t trust you.”
“I’ll rip him to pieces before he even tries that,” Erik says quietly, and it hangs in the air between them like something too heavy to sink and yet too light to be dismissed. It gets stuck in Erik’s throat, sticky and thick like syrup—because he means it, and Charles can tell.
The telepath sighs, drops his forehead to his hand.
“It’s not about me, Erik. I mean, yes—yes, I want Shaw dead, of course I do. Very much so. But before we can even think of that we need to tear down his defenses and that means systematically taking down his accomplices. I know you’ve hunted down nearly every human that helped him torture you—I don’t fault you for that, although your methods are… hard to swallow, for me. But you’ve only hunted down those who hurt you. I want Shaw dead because he’s a menace to society. You want him dead because he killed your mother. Do you see how it’s not the same?”
He looks up, straightening, and stares out across the lake as if he’s seeing something beyond the veil of reality, something Erik can’t begin to grasp.
“Justice and revenge?” Erik inhales from his cigarette, eyes fixed on Charles’ profile.
“No, I… well, yes, I suppose justice would be served if he died. But Erik, he’s done… so much damage. I want safety. I want to be able to live and not be afraid of my own shadow. I want to… I wish I could be close to someone. And he ruined that for me, and I hate him for that—but most of all I hate the idea of him doing that to someone else. I can’t—I can’t live with that possibility.”
Erik continues to look at him for a long time, at the strong curve of his shoulders and the straight line of his back, the proud tilt of his head. This is a man that’s been destroyed and pulled himself back together on his own. It’s been a long time since Erik’s been ashamed of how fixated he is on Charles; that’s in the past.
The telepath smiles softly. Perhaps he’s caught some of that thought, but if he has he doesn’t zero in on it. His eyes are vibrant and alight when he turns back to him.
“I’m tired, Erik. I just want this to be over. If I could cut across everything and just reach him and kill him oh, I would do it in a heartbeat. But that’s not how it works.”
“I understand that,” Erik admits. “But why must you do it alone?”
“What if he gets you, Erik?” Charles asks, tone low. “What if he catches you and I can’t—“
“I’m a grown man, Charles, not one of your students. I’m your equal. You don’t need to protect me.”
This isn’t anything new. Erik knows Charles sees him as an equal, or he wouldn’t treat him differently than he does the children. The telepath stares at him curiously, as if puzzled that Erik might be making this argument, not because he’s never thought about it before, clearly—but rather, it seems, because he didn’t expect Erik to call him on it.
“Besides,” Erik adds, taking a lazy drag from his cigarette. “I know what Shaw can do to me. I’m not going into this blind; that makes all the difference.”
It does, and Charles knows it.
The telepath lowers himself to the grass and stares at the sky, folding his hands beneath his head, contemplative and at peace.
“We’re brothers, you and I,” Erik exhales smoke through parted lips. “And I can set fire to cars as well as the best of them.”
Charles laughs.
Later that evening when the house is at rest, Erik makes his way to Charles’ study and doesn’t bother to knock before opening the door. Charles always knows where everyone is, whether by choice or not, and can easily reject visitors with half a thought. Nothing stops Erik from entering, though, and he can tell Charles isn’t sleeping—you can always tell when Charles is sleeping because so is everyone else, almost automatically. There are ways around this, but Erik hasn’t asked to be taught yet—he can certainly use the sleep aid.
He finds the telepath sitting on the sofa, legs crossed, one arm thrown over the back. His sister is reclining lazily against his chest, head fallen back on his shoulder as she sleeps. Her temple brushes his chin. Charles is reading aloud from a book about—
“Genetics?” Erik arches a brow.
“It always sends her right off,” Charles smiles ruefully.
“I can imagine. It seems a rather random subject, though.”
“Random? I’m a genetics professor.”
Erik pauses, “You are? I didn’t know that.”
“You never asked, you self-absorbed prick,” but the man’s tone is fond enough, so Erik smiles and lowers himself to a nearby chair.
“You never ask about anything, you meddling, long-nosed brat.”
“I’ll have you know my nose is as much an Xavier heirloom as this house, sir. Some respect, please.”
“I can see that. You Xaviers like everything big, don’t you?”
Why, do you have something big you’d like to show me?
Erik laughs out loud, “One of these days I’ll take you up on that and you’ll be in trouble. Anyway that’s not why I’m here. I was thinking about what you said earlier about not knowing how I’ll react to things or how I think. There’s a way around that. That’s a chess table, isn’t it? Where’s the set?”
Charles glances at the table in question, sitting between two comfortable chairs, and frowns slightly.
“You know, that’s a good—oh, I know.”
He sends Erik the image of a wooden box resting atop a row of books in the topmost shelf against the wall. The German grins as he stands.
“How convenient that you can do that. Can you send any kind of images to people’s heads?” he accompanies the question with a completely indecent mental image.
Charles laughs, “How very high-brow of you, Erik.”
“Oh, that’s me—the personification of intellectual pursuits. You might want to rearrange your sister.”
When Erik returns with the box, Raven lays stretched out comfortably on the couch and Charles is pouring drinks.
“I didn’t know you could play,” he comments, settling on his chair.
“Well, play. I know the absolute basics.”
Charles grins, “So I’m going to have to teach you?”
Erik pick up a random piece and moves it, pointlessly and carelessly. “You know revenge is a busy business, it doesn’t leave much time for playing around and sitting and just being idle. Furthermore, I’m not filthy rich, so—“
“You queen can’t do that. Christ, don’t—just, get your hands off my chess set and sit back, I’m starting over with you. You start with the—what are you even doing? That’s not—are you quite sure you know how to play?”
Erik doesn’t, but he doesn’t really care, either. He’s not trying to get Charles to be comfortable with the way he thinks. He’s trying to make him comfortable with his presence, his company, the way he moves and acts and how he speaks his mind. He needs Charles to know him—but more than anything else, they’re both going to need Charles to trust him.
They spend the days like this—training in the mornings, classes in the afternoons, chess and drinks in the evenings. Often when Charles is busy in class Erik thumbs through some of the books in his library, teaching himself things he didn’t know, familiarizing himself with what Charles likes and how he likes it, how to best approach him.
“I know what you’re doing,” Raven says sharply one afternoon when she finds him there, sitting at Charles’ desk, looking over sheets of piano music. The telepath plays beautifully, although he rarely indulges.
Erik’s not above asking Ororo to insist Charles play her something. The first time he did, the girl just stared at him, but by the third she understood what he was doing, and once Charles had shooed them both out of his study, she’d turned to him, hands in her skinny waist, and given him a look.
“You’re tall as a tree and you’re still ten years old, aren’t you?”
Erik had to lean against the wall until he stopped laughing.
“And what am I doing?” Erik asks easily, looking up from the music. He can read it, of course, but he can’t play a single note.
“You’re trying to get closer to him. What I don’t understand is what you want.”
Both her tone and her body language are aggressive as she leans over the desk, getting almost in his face, golden eyes aglow. She’s stunning, fascinating, one of the most beautiful things Erik has ever seen. He looks at her skin—vast, bare expanses of it firm and supple—and thinks only of her brother’s eyes.
In the end, that’s what makes him tell her the truth.
“Him,” he says simply. “I want him. All I can get of him.”
Raven is stunned speechless. She straightens brusquely, lips drawing back as if about to growl—but the anger leaves her as quickly as it’s arrived. She swallows, her hands clench and unclench, indecisive.
Finally she settles for a confused, “Why?”
Erik stands slowly, eyes fixed on hers, and puts down the sheets of music, pentagrams with notes scribbled carelessly in pencil in Charles familiar handwriting. Charles’ own music—pieces he composes, sometimes, to settle his restless mind.
“Because I want him, and Shaw can’t fucking have him.”
For a moment, he thinks Raven is going to leap at his throat and rip it open with her teeth—her brother is hers, he belongs to her, everything he’s done since he was thirteen it’s been for her, he’s only alive because of her—but then she closes her eyes, and her shoulders seem to slump.
Because Shaw can’t have him—but neither can she be his refuge forever, the only shade in the endless expanse of deserted waste that is his mind.
“What do you need?” she asks quietly.
Erik looks down at the music.
“Time.”
With Raven on his side, it’s much easier to manufacture situations in which Charles is forced to spend time with Erik. Someone has to go to town, after all, and if Raven’s got a headache, well. Erik doesn’t mind. Somewhat childishly and only because he can, Erik also drags Ororo in on it.
“If he had pigtails,” the girl asks flatly one morning. “Would you pull them?”
Erik reaches over and pulls playfully at her right braid. Ororo is more than capable of taking care of herself—especially against Erik, who’ll back off as soon as she gives him a look—but she still gamely scowls and plays victim when Charles appears in the hallway, just out of class.
“Are you tormenting the children again?” the geneticist asks, arching an unimpressed brow. The man’s eyebrows have a mind of their own.
“He’s mean about my German,” Ororo says remorsefully. Oh, the girl can act.
Charles releases a long-suffering sigh, “Come along then, Lehnsherr. Let’s find you something to do. Ororo, your German is fine.”
“It’s your French that’s horrible,” Erik says with a grin.
Ororo pins him with her dark eyes, “My French is better than yours, vous laids arbres.”
“Did she just call me an ugly tree?” Erik barks out a laugh, even as Charles doubles over, peals of laugh spilling freely from his lips.
“Come, Erik, let’s save you from out little Storm, you look like you need it.”
Then, there—for the first time—Charles reaches a hand and closes his fingers over Erik’s wrist, loosely enough the man could easily break away. Erik can feel the heat of Charles’ hand through the fine leather of his glove. And it’s nothing, really—he’s just grabbing his wrist, but he’s doing it carelessly, easily, comfortably, he’s touching him.
Erik moves with him to make sure not to break the hold, but before he turns the corner he catches a glimpse of Ororo’s face—eyes and mouth wide, cheeks flushed with happiness.
Charles has Erik rearranging books alphabetically all afternoon, but somehow—somehow—it’s worth it. Besides, it’s not as though Erik minds—he takes the opportunity to read many passages of several of them, making the process slow-going and possibly pointless.
He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a forest of book piles, when Charles comes into the study in the evening.
“Have you read this? I hate this author,” he shows him the cover of Great Expectations. “Whiny little rat.”
“More respect with one of the greatest English authors, please.”
Erik grunts, “This is why you people lost your empire. All you did was whine about your goddamn weather and how very hard your life was.”
Charles breathes a put-upon sigh and takes the book form him, placing it carelessly on a shelf where it doesn’t belong.
Erik heaves an offended huff, “Well, if you’re just going to complicate matters for me, why don’t you scamper along to drink tea somewhere?”
“Hm,” Charles makes a thoughtful noise, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. “Get up early tomorrow and be ready to leave.”
Erik cuts his eyes up to him, going very still.
“Where are we going?” he asks cautiously.
Charles smiled that disarming, boy-like, iceberg smile.
“Out, Erik. I’m taking you for a ride.”
Chapter 7
no subject
Raven! But WHERE WAS SHE?! I like how she's so protective of Charles but still willing to help. Willing to allow someone in. And the chess! No idea how to play but still gets Charles to play with him! Ororo, as always, was amazing. I don't know, I think your tags mostly say what I want to say...
no subject
Raven, well, Raven is mostly... elsewhere. You´ll know soon enough! And yes, you know, sheçs very watchful when it comes to Charles and since Erik has slid himself very close, she instantly started keeping an eye on him. The thing is she knows she can´t help Charles as much as she would like, and that maybe Erik can.
Abput the chess, you know I thought it was funny because I barely know how the pieces move, let alone how to form a goddamn strategy. It takes a lot of time and dedication to play chess really, really well, and when did Erik have that chance? With whom?