Brief Lives (7/?)
Aug. 15th, 2011 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Author: monstrousreg
Word count: 3009
Warnings: None in this chapter.
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. Dude. This week is a giant clusterfuck and it's still Monday. I will set someone on fire by the end of this fucking week, I can tell.
{C}{C}{C}
Erik’s learned to recognize when Charles will leave for one of his excursions because he wears different clothes.
Normally comfortable in casual suits—impeccable cut and expensive fabrics, but certainly casual—Charles ordinarily gives the appearance of precisely what he is: a professor.
In the mornings when he’s about to leave, though, he changes those suits for tighter fitting clothes—something that won’t bother the shoulder holster he’s never shown, but Erik knows he has. So Erik follows his example, and trades his usual polo shirts and slacks for a sharp grey suit and overcoat. He finds Charles already having breakfast at the table, and sits his own travel bag and coat next to his in an empty chair.
He also finds the coffeepot half full of fresh coffee, and glances at Charles.
“I thought you didn’t drink coffee. Something about your insomnia?”
“I don’t. Raven made it.”
Erik frowns, “She’s coming with us?”
It’s not that he minds Raven. It’s that he needs Charles to start relying on him, and he never will of he has Raven close at hand. He’ll always choose her.
Charles glances at him briefly, slightly confused, and Erik knows he’s caught that thought. He doesn’t shy away from the telepath’s gaze, but rather arches a curious brow.
“She’s working with the CIA full-time. She has to go back because her holidays are over.”
“She’s your spy?” Erik laughs quietly and settles on the chair at Charles’ right, even though there’s an entire table of empty chairs out of which he can choose.
“I suppose,” the geneticist replies distractedly, eyes scanning his newspaper quickly. He hasn’t even looked up at Erik like he does sometimes when he sits too close, and Erik is careful not to spare much thought about it, lest the telepath freaks out.
Sometimes he feels like he’s dealing with a skittish foal.
“Are you going to be done with that anytime soon?” he asks, eyeing the newspaper over Charles’ shoulder.
“You can have the politics part, it bores me to tears,” the geneticist answers, manipulating the pages until he finds what he’s looking for and hands it to Erik.
“As a spy, you’re rather a lousy one,” Erik says, amused. “You should read everything. It all counts.”
“Well then, good thing I have you to do that for me now, don’t I?”
Erik grins. It’s a bet—a calculated one, but a bet nonetheless. He lays the newspaper on the table and, below the table, pats Charles’ knee as he normally does, easily and without much fanfare—only this time his hand stays there. As he reads an article he feels Charles’ knee make a tiny little movement—like an aborted flinch, like he thinks he should pull sway but… doesn’t really want to, or know why he should.
So his hand stays there, and Charles is unnaturally still for a few minutes, stiff and uncomfortable, but Erik simply continues to read. Eventually, Charles begins to relax.
Erik can’t remember the last time Charles told him not to get used to touching him. He counts it as a win.
They go to town with Charles’ battered old Cooper Mini. The man owns a castle, but some reason he’s don of this piece of broken down junk.
“Oi,” Charles makes an offended noise, “ Don’t diss the car!”
“You own a Bentley, and we have to go in this old can?”
“Oh, do forgive me, good sir, used to travel in class, are you?”
“Well, class—and maybe in something that’s not falling apart around you.”
“I’ll have you know this car—you know what, never mind. Just—shut up, alright? Be quiet. Don’t say any more words.”
Erik grins at the window.
They don’t drive all the way, naturally. Only as far as New York City, where they leave Charles’ precious little can and board a plane to Paris.
“Are you trying to imply something?” Erik asks once they get off the plane on French soil.
“Other than that you need to work on your French?”
Erik’s French is better than Charles’. He speaks it as if he were native. Charles speaks all languages with a slight accent, and a too-perfect, too-correct vocabulary that implies he’s learned it from books rather than speaking it constantly.
The German gives him a sharp grin, “The city of love, Charles.”
“That’s Rome.”
Erik laughs, “Must you be different in everything?”
“You wouldn’t like me if I wasn’t.”
Too true.
Erik abandons his playful taunts when Charles explains there’s a certain banker in Paris that often finances Shaw’s antics—with old Nazi gold.
“I understand if you feel you can’t—“ Charles starts quietly when they’re in the elevator, eyeing Erik doubtfully. Erik, however, is determined to keep his calm.
“I’m already here,” he grunts. “Stop coddling me. I used to use Nazi gold, myself. I think I’m rather entitled seeing as it’s made of all the things they stole from my people.”
Hesitantly, Charles touches his arm very briefly in a show of support, and immediately withdraws. Erik gives him a look, but Charles is staring at the elevator doors, hand clenched in a fist. Erik wonders if the geneticist has to resist the temptation to indulge in some sort of contact with him. The idea is thrilling.
“You need to stop that,” Charles says brusquely, pinning him with too-blue eyes.
“Make me,” Erik snaps, and he has to struggle against the urge to pin Charles against the wall—just then the doors slide open, and in a fraction of a second they’re both calm and composed, showing nothing.
Beneath his skin, Erik can feel anger roiling, braiding itself together with something else, deeper and stronger. He can’t identify it yet, but he has enough mind to suspect what it might be, and he doesn’t particularly care, right now, that Charles isn’t even attempting to conceal he’s reading his mind.
But Charles is nothing if not disciplined. He turns his mind away, leaving behind simply a weak link through which thoughts may come and go only if they so will it. The temptation to abuse the trust and continue the conversation is great, but Erik pushes it down.
The banker is not alone—there’s a bodyguard inconspicuously tucked away in the far corner of the room, and he has a gun with him. Erik sends this information down the link and realizes Charles is fully aware of it, since he’s in both the banker’s and the bodyguard’s mind.
I’ll take the pawn, you take the king, Erik thinks.
Charles assent is a simple, pure feeling of acceptance in the link, too strong to be only about this mission—Charles has just understood Erik is letting take the lead.
Well, wonderful. That’s precisely what Erik is after. He wants Charles to understand he can control Erik when it matters.
Since they’re playing this game and have already decided who’s who, instead of sitting down Erik stands behind Charles’ chair, staring fixedly at the bodyguard. Two kings, two pawns—now to see who wins the match.
Erik expects some kind of foreplay to the inevitable violence, but with Charles in the game he really should have known better.
It takes him a fraction of a second to realize Charles has gone silent and the banker has gone unnaturally still. Erik is left to deal with the guard without any sort of aid—not that he needs it, mind. But he has to act quickly, because he doesn’t want to give the man time to realize something is off, or even worse—sound an alarm.
And sound an alarm is precisely what the man means to do as soon as Erik raises a hand. Erik catches his watch with his power and takes hold of his handgun from where he stabs behind Charles’ chair, and gently, ever so gently, presses the muzzle to the guard’s jaw.
Charles hasn’t moved an inch, still sitting elegantly in the chair, legs crossed, posture relaxed.
Calm now that everything is under control, Erik paces idly to the bodyguard, hands in his pockets, shoulders loose. He stops inches from the man’s terrified, pale face.
“Just so we understand each other,” he says softly. “If you breathe a word of this to anyone I will find you, and I will be very crossed. You don’t want someone that can do what I can to be crossed at you, believe me.”
The safety drops down with a quiet, ominous click.
“Erik,” Charles says quietly, rising gracefully from his chair.
Charles is moving to the lift with a calm, sedate pace that implies he’s leaving because he feels like leaving, and he could just as well sit in a while longer. He’s got the authority to so whatever he likes. Falling into place like a well-oiled machine part, Erik follows in his wake, fitting his hat back on his head with a rueful tilt of his head. He smiles politely and banker and guard until the doors of the lift hide them from view.
He’s normally have the sense to wait until they’re in the street to ask, but Charles has this lovely advantage in that sense.
I delivered the warning, Charles speaks into his mind, tone thoughtful—pun intended, Erik supposes. I also got a strange piece of information. He thinks Shaw is en route to Cuba.
So he’s playing communist now?
I don’t think so, Charles sounds doubtful. Not his profile, is it?
There’s only one thing that man loves more than money, and it’s power. Erik thoughtlessly reaches forward and pushes the door open, ushering Charles out before him as he glances over his shoulder briefly. No one seems to be looking at the strangely. Still—best not to linger.
Charles nods in assent, That’s what I think, as well. Yet—
He’s cut off when a fat, heavy drop of rain falls on his nose. He looks so hilariously bewildered that Erik laughs out loud, but a moment later it’s pouring, and he’s pushing the telepath to a nearby café to get shelter.
“Where’s Ororo when we need her?” he laughs as he shakes out his hat. Charles is shrugging out of his black coat, grinning widely.
“What are you so happy about?” Erik asks, instantly suspicious. “You’re scaring me.”
“My happiness is scary to you? You’re a dreadful friend.”
“I happen to know you,” Erik retorts. “And you’re always planning something. That minds of yours never stops, not for a second.”
“I can’t make it,” Charles rolls his eyes, and suddenly all the playful mood drops the ground and shatters, and Erik knows, instantly, that Charles has just slammed up against an old, painful memory.
“I don’t want you to,” Erik says easily, intent on keeping Charles from sinking. That’s what Raven told him to do—don’t let him take you with him, pull him back up, make him turn away from the memories. He’s made peace with it all, but sometimes he just… drowns.
“I don’t want you to hold back with me.”
Charles huffs, “You say that now because you’re as ignorant as a child. You don’t even know what it means for me to stop holding back. What do you think happens when you break down a dam, Erik? The river destroys everything in its path.”
“I,” Erik says, calm and cold as frost. “am no child.”
“You are when it comes to this. You hardly understand anything I—“
“Your sister told me,” Erik snaps savagely, and when Charles makes to move back away from him his hand shoots out and he grabs the telepath by the wrist, his grip bruising. “She told me everything you were too scared to tell me.”
Charles’ anger is sudden and hot like wildfire.
“She had no business telling you anything about me. Let go of me right now, Erik, or so help me God you will regret it for the rest of your short life.”
There’s a threat there as plain and clear as sunlight, and Erik knows from experience that Charles Xavier doesn’t make threats he’s not willing to deliver on. Erik has only one advantage over the telepath now, and it’s that he’s found a place he belongs where he previously had none. He can’t—won’t live, won’t allow himself to be pushed out of life at Xavier Hall.
It’s manipulative and low, because he knows there's one thing Charles will never deny him--a place he belongs, and the safety it offers. But it gets the job done.
Charles sits back, making a disgusted noise.
“Fine, I get it. I won’t get rid of you, just—seriously, unhand me. You’re hurting me.”
Erik compromises by releasing his arm and lopping a finger around Charles’ gloved ones. The telepath tries to jerk away, and Erik gives a warning tug and a glare. Charles curses and turns away, hand going limp as if saying do your worst, see if I care.
“You’re too easy to steer,” Erik comments idly.
You’re an insufferable little shit, yet I don’t you call you up on it.
“Didn’t you just?”
Charles huffs again and attempts to reclaim ownership of his hand, but when Erik persists in keeping his grip he gives up again, turning his face back. He looks confused and tired.
“I don’t—what do you want from me, Erik? I can’t give you anything. I’ve got nothing left to give. These—these feelings that you think you have for me, you need to get rid of them. They won’t lead you anywhere.”
Of course, Erik should have known—there are no unspoken issues, no secret thoughts with a telepath. And here’s he’s been thinking he was so subtle. But then there’s the thing—Charles has known all along, and he’s stopped flinching all the same. It’s this, more than anything, that gives Erik the boldness to keep pushing when everything else in Charles is telling him to pull back.
“Don’t you think that’s my decision to make?”
“I—I’m not giving you an order. I could just as well make you forget with half a thought, if I really wanted to. You have a tendency to repress; it would be simple enough to make you repress this as well and you’d be none the wiser.”
“But I’d remember.”
“You’d think of it a silly confusion, a trick your mind played on you. We’d be friends and—you’d stop feeling like this all the time, like I’m not giving you enough.”
Erik frowns, “I don’t feel that way.”
Charles gives him a tired look. “Yes, you do. And soon enough you’ll be frustrated and angry at me for it.”
“I didn’t know you could predict the future. Is that a secondary mutation? What’s your third one, changing gender and being hysterical?”
Charles scowles, “Wanker.”
Erik grins.
“Then yield,” he said intensely, leaning closer across the table. “Yield to me, Charles, I can help you. There’s nothing in your mind that can scare me off, you know that.”
Charles gave him a cool look, “You don’t have the vaguest idea of what is in my mind, Erik. It doesn’t work like yours.”
“So show me.”
“Did you know, the first time I met you, the very first Image I got from your mind, was your mother dropping dead to the floor?”
Erik freezes.
Charles smiles, an awful, dead smile that has too many angles and too little warmth.
“See, Erik? You’re just as always—you stomp and you scream and you think you can bend the world to your will. But as soon as someone starts biting back, ah—you panic.”
But Erik grins.
“And you think you understand me so well, and that I know nothing about you. But I do know this, Charles—if you start hurting me, it’s because I touched a nerve. Am I getting too close, Charles? Does the fact that I won’t turn tail bother you so much?”
Charles looks genuinely nonplussed, and his eyes fall to Erik’s hand where he’s still gripping his fingers, tight and firm and determined.
“You’re really not leaving?” he asks.
Erik realizes they’ve stumbled into a decisive moment without even trying to. Or rather—he’s been trying to for a while now, only Charles’ been ignoring him and now that he’s no longer ignoring him at all, they’ve fallen right into the perfect spot with the ease of a well-oiled machine.
Erik smiles softly, “I haven’t run so far, have I?”
He shifts his hand, moving his fingers and feeling satisfied when Charles doesn’t pull away his now free hand. He slips his long, long rough fingers through Charles’ pianist ones, feeling the caress of warm leather on the webs between them until they’re palm to palm, and then starts bending his fingers, tips closer to the bare back of Charles’ hands, closer, closer—
Charles’ fingers clamp down almost painfully, and Erik’s look like the broken legs of a crushed spider. All he can touch now are the valleys between Charles’ knuckles, where he lays the pads of his fingers almost tenderly.
“Who’s running away, now, Charles?” he asks softly.
The telepath stares down at their hands for a long time, silent and still. Eventually, he seems to relax, as it warming to the idea that Erik’s here and he’s not going anywhere. God only knows what’s racing through the man’s fascinating mind—yet he appears to find some peace in the evolution of his thoughts.
He releases Erik’s hand, and instead shifts his fingers up Erik’s wrist to the cuff of his shirt which he deftly undoes. To his forearm, where he lets them rest, heavy and warm through the leather. He’s not doing anything, so Erik knows he shouldn’t really count this as the unbelievable victory it feels like.
But the fact remains Charles is touching him, willingly, for a prolonged period of time, and somehow—somehow, in the public space of a café in Paris, sitting at opposite sides of a table and not even looking at each other—Charles’ hand beneath the fabric of his shirtsleeve, still protected by the leather of his gloves, feels unbearably intimate.
Chapter 8
no subject
Date: 2011-08-17 02:55 pm (UTC)