Brief Lives (8/?)
Aug. 17th, 2011 12:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
monstrousregimentAuthor: monstrousreg
Word count: 3339
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. So... This chapter might seem like little plot advancement takes place, but Charles does actually make a leap of faith
Their first excursion went so easily and smoothly that Erik rested comfortable in his confidence that he could handle whatever situations Charles’ madness threw at them.
He should have known better.
One of the principal problems he faced was Charles’ apparent inability to accept that Erik was not just along for the ride, and could in fact be an active participant. This became quickly evident when, on their second excursion, Erik realized that Charles was using his telepathy to hide him and make all the guards aim their guns at himself.
When, upon returning to the hotel room, he’d confronted a bloody and bruised Charles, the telepath had seemed genuinely stunned.
“Was I?”
“Did you not notice I wasn’t even shot at?” Erik had asked, rubbing at his eyes.
“Oh, I—I suppose. Well… that’s just as well, in any case.”
Erik had felt the violent urge to slap him.
“You’d better not,” Charles had said mildly. “You’ve not gotten hurt, but the night is not yet over.”
Charles is far from perfect. Though naturally kind hearted, he is sometimes cruel, whether carelessly or on purpose no one can tell. Erik’s noticed Charles’ mean streak shows more openly when the telepath is alone with him, possibly because Charles is attempting to grow comfortable in the certainty that Erik will not leave.
Erik doesn’t particularly mind. He’s cruel himself more often than not, most notably when it comes to Charles’ increasingly evident fear of allowing him close, and he feels no need or inclination to apologize for it.
He finds himself thinking about that one morning that both he and Charles are forced to take a break from training—Charles because of a concussion, and Erik because of a sprained wrist.
“Have you noticed I don’t apologize to you for anything, and you in turn apologize all the time?” he asks when Charles joins him by the lake near noon.
“Do I?” Charles blinks. “I’m sorry for that, too.”
“Cheeky little critter,” Erik grins fondly, blowing smoke through his nostrils. “What’s amusing is that you don’t even mean it half the time, have you noticed?”
“Oh, I know that. Let’s walk, hm?”
Erik nods amiably, relishing the chance to have Charles all to himself for the first time in days. Whenever Charles is injured, the children smother him with attention, leaving him scarcely a moment unattended. Erik’s been forced to gracefully submit to rather similar attention from Ororo, who’s not only recruited several children of her age to keep an eye on him, but also cunningly maneuvered him into taking over the German classes as a teacher.
“That should stop your whining,” she’d muttered as she dropped the textbook heavily on his desk.
To this Charles had replied with delight and a stubborn insistence to pay him for the job. Erik, who knew how to pick his battles, had helplessly folded to his will.
“I heard a little of the ethics class this morning,” Erik said idly as they walked, side by side, shoulders brushing companionably. “About genetic and social accidents. Is it true, then, than violence is written in the genetic code?”
“Somewhat,” Charles replied. “It’s rather a tendency towards violence, an inclination, I suppose. It is true that children of violent families, even when removed at birth from the bosom of the abusive parents, may commonly display such tendencies.”
“What then would you consider a social accident?”
“Religion, understood as a conglomerate of beliefs. It is a social structure, taught to a child by the child’s social circle.”
“How would you understand religion other than as a conglomerate of beliefs?” Erik arched a brow.
“Faith and religion don’t always go hand in hand,” Charles pointed out. “You can teach a child to pray, but what’s to say he will believe in the existence of God once he reaches the age of doubt? Faith is a personal, intimate thing that cannot be taught.”
“And it can so easily be destroyed,” Erik mused, dropping his cigarette to the mud at the edge of the lake to crush it beneath his heel.
“Faith is not destroyed,” Charles says quietly, continuing to walk behind Erik. “It is lost. And as it is lost it may also once again be found, may it not?”
Erik goes still, hands in his pockets, staring out across the lake to where a small, dark-furred doe is staring at them curiously, not yet wearily.
“Charles,” he asks gently, turning his head to look at the telepath, standing at his other side now, also seemingly looking at the doe. “You’re going to have to tell me what you need from me. I’m not a telepath.”
Charles looks at him out of the corner of his eye for barely a second before his eyes cut down, almost of their own volition. For a moment Erik is confused, but then the fingers in Charles’ closest hand twitch, and Erik realizes what Charles needs. He turns his own hand around, offering his palm, long fingers spread.
The trick with Charles is not only figuring out what he needs, a task often made difficult by the fact that Charles himself doesn’t always know, but also to learn to provide it in a way that the telepath knows he’s free to take or reject. So many choices have been stripped away from him already, it’s important he make his own way towards what he wants.
Charles hesitates, but very slowly he slides his own hand into Erik’s bigger one, still maneuvering carefully so as to studiously avoid the accidental brushing of skins.
“Holy palmer’s kiss,” he murmurs, blue eyes fixed on Erik’s fingers.
“Not with your gloves on,” Erik says breathlessly, moving a step closer to Charles so their shoulders are touching.
Charles closes his eyes when Erik turns to face him, his free hand landing warm, fingers spread, on Charles’ ribs. The telepath shivers, seems to sway slightly. Erik slides his hand around to the small of Charles’ back, boldly bring him in so they’re flush against one another. The telepath reacts to that, hands going to Erik’s chest as he starts to push the other man away, but Erik dips his head so his forehead rests on the crown of Charles’ bent one, humming softly.
He’d never thought he’d find within himself the ability to be tender, that he’d have such patience with someone like Charles that withdraws two steps for every one given forward.
“Erik, please, I don’t want to hurt you,” Charles mumbles, fisting his hands on Erik’s sweater, moving to retreat but tightening his grip, uncertain.
“You will anyway,” Erik says honestly, bringing his hands up Charles’ back to his shoulders and up to cradle the shorter man’s head. “Might as well get it over with.”
He tugs Charles face up to his own, and when the telepath grows incredibly still, blue eyes wide, red lips parted, he bends closer and closes his eyes, breathing on Charles’ lips, sharing the same air—
He wakes up abruptly, lying in the grass by the lake, and Ororo jumps back, startled.
“What the fuck?” Erik asks with viciousness, fury rising quickly.
“He didn’t do it on purpose, I don’t think,” Ororo offers in a small voice. “He did feel terrible about it.”
“Where is he?” Erik leaps to his feet, muscles tense, ready for a fight. Ororo stands slowly, as if she fears a brusque movement will unleash the ferocity of Erik’s anger on herself. Erik gives her a glance, but he can’t swear he wouldn’t hurt her when he’s in this mood, by words at least, so he says nothing.
“Hank needed to go into town to buy some things,” she says quietly. “The Professor drove him in his Logan’s truck.”
Erik is momentarily speechless.
“That goddamned coward!” he roars finally stalking past Ororo without a single backwards glance, in the direction of the manor. Ororo struggles to catch up with him, looking weary and concerned.
“Um, I feel like someone should ask you not to do anything stupid—“
“You don’t know what happened,” Erik growls, and then whirls on her so abruptly the girl stumbled to a sudden stop, inches from colliding into him. “Do you?” he demands.
“No,” she answers quickly, raising her hands. “He didn’t tell me, but he—Erik!”
The German’s already stalked away, much faster in his longer legs, and by the time Ororo catches up with him again he’s throwing the great double doors open with his gift, ignoring the way they slam loudly into the walls. The students, who are not stupid, slither quickly away from his path like the Red Sea parting for Moses.
He finds Moira in the classroom where she teaches American History, kin the company of Rogue and a young Scott Summers. They take one look at him and flee the premises.
“This is where we stand right now,” Erik starts, slamming the door with his mind scarcely a second after Ororo has slipped inside. “Either I force him, or Charles goes completely, raving man.”
Moira looks torn between panic and confusion, so Erik pushes on.
“He needs an anchor or he’ll lose his mind. Raven told me how to do it, and I know I can.”
The woman looks down at the desk, blinks, seems to think for a long tense moment, and finally looks up, frowning.
“What do you need from me?”
Erik’s anger fades a little in the face of her cooperation. He’d thought he’d have to fight her for it, fight her, most importantly, for Charles, who he knows she wants. She doesn’t, can’t, want him as bad as Erik does, and she most certainly will never understand him as Erik does—but she wants him all the same.
Perhaps want is no longer even the correct word. Erik turns away from that thought.
“I need this house, empty, for at least a couple of days. I need to be alone with him somewhere he feels safe.”
“What are you going to do?” Moira asks, growing worried.
“That is none of your concern,” Erik returns, beginning, slowly, to find the calm within himself. He pauses. “You know it’ll never come to anything, don’t you? Between you and him.”
The woman stares at him for a long time, seemingly at a loss for words. Finally she sighs, manages a shaky smile.
“I didn’t until you came around.”
Erik says nothing.
“We could go camping,” Ororo says faintly, desperately trying to diffuse the mounting tension between the two of them. It’s clear Ororo knows better than to allow herself to be caught in the storm of Erik’s anger, and is kind enough to hope to avoid Moira makes such stupid mistake.
“Camping… sounds fine,” Moira says doubtfully.
Erik leaves them alone, to work out together how the camping trip will happen. He goes to his bedroom, takes a long shower and attempts to calm down. Failing that, he prowls his bedroom, flexing his fingers and struggling to reign in the urge to storm into Charles’ study and destroy everything. It’s a petty, childish thing to do, and besides he spent days putting some order to those books, he’s not going to go and destroy them now.
Several hours have gone silently past when Ororo knocks on his bedroom door and lets herself in, to find him standing straight and tense at the window.
“You didn’t come down for dinner,” she says. “You can’t keep forgetting to eat.”
“I didn’t forget. I’m not hungry.”
Ororo closes the door silently behind her and creeps closer across the room, eyes swinging carefully around the neatly ordered space, almost Spartan despite the luxuries it came with. She pauses, and then her eyes pin him into place, black and wise.
“Children that are starved from a young age often grow to be lean, short adults. But you grew tall and broad-shouldered, so you must not have been starving by the beginning of your adolescence. Still, you should know better than to listen to what your body tells you. You might not feel hungry, but you need the food.”
Erik’s throat has gone dry.
“24006,” Ororo says quietly, eyes fixed on his. Erik glances down stupidly, to his left forearm covered by the sleeve of his sweater. He keeps it always hidden around the children, but perhaps it’s been a while since he’s made an effort to hide from Ororo. “There’s no one starving now, Erik,” Ororo continues, coming carefully closer as Erik stares at her, helpless and unmoving. “You wouldn’t be taking anyone’s food by eating despite your lack of hunger. I know what it’s like to give it away to save someone else. But this isn’t then, or there. This is now and here.”
“Who are you?” Erik rasps.
Ororo smiles, “I’m from Africa, Erik. We’re no strangers to starvation or segregation.”
Erik lets her lead him down to the kitchen, watch him eat mechanically a plate of cooked vegetables that she cooks for him. Just as he is about to enter his room he stops, reaches over and catches her arm.
“You know how to stop Charles from dragging you down with him when he falls asleep, don’t you?”
Ororo blinks, “Technically, but I’ve never done it. Why?”
“Teach me.”
Ororo spends a better night of the evening at it. When Charles falls asleep and the household falls asleep alongside him, Erik lets Ororo curl up in his bed under the covers and he remains sitting, alert and lucid, at the window. He doesn’t allow himself to fall asleep until well into the night, when the girl groggily rises to move to her own bed and, before leaving, she throws a long blanket over him and absently pats his head on her way out.
Charles avoids Erik for two whole days, but finally seems to drift helplessly to his bedroom, wandering over to Erik’s desk where various different German exercises are spread, some half-finished, some in the process of being corrected.
Erik watches him evenly from the bed, where he’s sitting with a novel. He thinks perhaps Charles will stall, uncomfortable and shy, but the telepath turns to face him entirely and says, “I’m sorry.”
Erik snaps the book closed, “You ought to be. You ought to be ashamed, as well, but I’m beginning to think perhaps that emotion is beyond you.”
Charles sighs, “As you say. I panicked, and I hurt you. I shouldn’t have.”
“We agree on that at least.”
“Erik, I’m trying to—“
“Lies,” Erik snarles, rising from the bed with the grace of an angry lion. “You’re not trying at all.”
“I’m—Erik, I don’t know how to…” he trails off, looking anguished. “I don’t know what to do with you.”
The German stares at him, wordless.
Charles’ eyes flick away, restless, but he steels himself and he faces Erik again, seemingly ill-at-ease but determined to say what he needs to say.
“I haven’t experienced any kind of sexual desire in over five years, Erik,” he says calmly, without any intonation that would imply an accompanying emotion. He is stating a cold, indifferent, detached fact.
“I know how you think. You’re a sexual creature, my friend. I don’t think I can give you what you hope for.”
Erik runs a hand wearily through his hair.
“That’s not… I do hope I can have that with you eventually, but Charles, surely you must see that’s not my only motivation.”
“I don’t know what your motivations are at all,” Charles says, and for the first time since he has met him, Erik notices a flicker of fear in Charles’ blue eyes, in the way he pulls at his bottom lip with his teeth, a nervous gesture he’s never done before. It’s boyish and innocent, and Erik feels his stomach turn. He forgets sometimes that Charles is young and inexperienced when it comes to what’s between them—what could be between them.
“But you can read my mind,” he protests.
“And I can see what you want, see what you are doing—getting the children out of the house, I know you tried to hide it from me, but you must understand you can’t hide anything for me. Even if I were able to allow it, you must understand, I would not—I cannot trust you if you hide or lie to me—but then that’s not why I’m here right now. I can see what you plan, but not why you feel you must do it.”
Erik feels like pointing out that Charles is a large hypocrite, because he hdies and lies all the time, but instead he says, exasperated: “I’ve told you why, I want you to yield to me, to let me hold you!”
“It can’t be that simple, surely you must want something else that I can—“
“Like what?”
Charles falls silent, helpless.
“Then why are you not stopping me?” Erik frowns. “It’s high time we stopped dancing around each other, Charles. You either want me to do this or you don’t. Stop acting like you’re just along for the ride, or putting up with my whims. I ask you again: why won’t you stop me?”
Charles closes his eyes, “I can’t.”
Erik scoffs.
“Of course you can. You said so yourself, you could make me believe it was all just a—“
“I don’t want to,” Charles admits finally, finally, finally. He halts, swallows, pushes through. “I want—just as much as you do, I want to…” he stops short, and unbelievably, smiles.
“I like that about you,” he says suddenly. “That you force me to talk. I never talk to anyone, did you know? Telepathy is quite a curse, sometimes. My head is a crowded, lonely place. A whirlwind of other people’s thoughts. Your mind is so quiet, though, so neatly organized. I like that about you, too.”
Erik feels like he might come undone at any moment. Charles, as it turns out, is fond of the spoken word, which he seems to find more real, somehow, than drifting thoughts. So Erik talks more than he’s done in his entire life.
“What is it that you don’t like?” he asks dimly, unsure of what he’s saying but certain that he needs to keep Charles talking and in this very same subject.
“That’s the problem,” Charles sighs. “There’s nothing. I mean—I could do without you mocking my dear Cooper Mini or wincing whenever you remember my parents left me a fortune—but other than that, I suppose, I quite… It’s a strange thing, Erik. It’s as if the world is in black and grays and you’re amazingly, gloriously Technicolor. I do want you, yes.”
“So you won’t stop me,” Erik insists, because he needs to know where he stands, exactly.
Charles grimaces. “So Raven’s told you what… you’d need to do, yes?”
Erik nods.
“That might stop you, very definitely. It can kill you, too. Drop you into a coma, or starving madness, or fracture your lovely mind in a thousand jagged shards—“
Erik wants to ask ‘you think my mind is lovely, do you?’ but instead he sighs, and says, “I find the alternative—letting you continue as you are—as unthinkable as you find that option. Why don’t we compromise, and you promise me you won’t ruin me?”
“Would that I could,” Charles says wretchedly.
“We’ve reached an agreement, then,” Erik says diplomatically, folding his arms. “I want to do this, and you don’t want to stop me. It’ll happen. Moira is taking the children to the Yellowstone National Park on Friday and they’ll stay there a week. You have four days to try and prepare yourself not to destroy me, Charles.”
“I still don’t understand what you gain with this,” Charles insists feebly.
“Then you’re blind, deaf and stupid besides emotionally stunted. Now, Charles—I’m going to bed. You can either join me, or leave.”
Charles gives him a long, searching look. Then he leaves.
Erik doesn’t sleep. But he can tell that neither does Charles.
Chapter 9
