Prompt Post: ROUND THREE

[oakenshields13]

ROUND THREE IS CLOSED

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FILL: Utopia 4/?

[takmarierah]

These are... I dunno, quieter than the others? Writing about people not getting beaten up is hard.

vii.
Charles never did get to see the research, but Erik waved it off, pulling Charles’ socks back on and tucking his feet down onto the chair. “Our trials suggest that it should take about a week to see improvement,” Erik told him.

“So soon?” Charles couldn’t help but be impressed.

Erik’s lips curved up very slightly along the edges. “It’s the physical therapy you’re going to kill me for,” he replied.

Charles didn’t match his playfulness, and said, “If this works, you have an obligation to make this procedure available to the rest of the world. You know that, right?”

To this, Erik huffed a laugh. “Oh, my old friend, there are bigger problems I have to solve first.”

viii.
The next day saw the clock moving with excruciating slowness. Charles traveled around his rooms, opening drawers full of unfamiliar clothing that might well have been something he’d wear, and reading the first few pages of several books on biology and history before setting them down and wishing Erik had provided him with novels.

That evening Erik brought a slim briefcase with him to show Charles. It was full of papers, which he spread out in two neat piles on top of the desk in what he’d referred to as Charles’ office.

Charles flipped through them absently, the numbers blurring before his eyes. “I studied genetics, Erik, not law,” he reminded the other man, who half-sat on the edge of the desk.

Erik nodded and explained something about budgets, expenditures, and programs, jabbing at the papers emphatically, until finally Charles stopped him mid-word with a touch of his fingers to Erik’s arm. The sudden silence was in its own way too loud, so Charles coughed to clear his throat.

“Just tell me the short version,” Charles recommended. “That, or take off your helmet.”

Erik’s eyes glinted wary and thoughtful in the shadow cast by the lamp. “I’ll take you to the next meeting,” he suggested instead, and then bade Charles to follow him back to the couch in the sitting room. There, they talked about Raven-Mystique, Erik called her now-but only about her changing tastes in food and faces; nothing about what she’d been doing.

As he spoke, Erik gathered up Charles’ feet again, stripping them bare all while recounting some of Raven’s more dramatic dealings with men, running the steel rod over Charles’ soles without pausing for breath. Charles could understand this hint, and smiled politely at Erik’s stories without remarking on the fact that, yet again, he couldn’t feel a thing.

ix.
His rooms were stifling after four years of being able to merely glance to one side and see mountains sprawling into the sky. Charles found that he never used certain areas of his rooms, wondered why, and eventually realized that he’d been moving from window to window. They were a poor substitute; each of his five windows looked into the courtyard, providing a view only of Erik’s mansion, his mind caged by a complex tracery of flaws within the immovable glass.

Charles began to watch the people below; they seemed unreal, illusory without the hum of thoughts to prove their existence, seen from too far away to catch the subtler clues of their emotional states. He assumed that most of them were mutants, however, and once that thought occurred to him, Charles watched their activities with the intensity of a hawk, waiting for some revealing tell.

So it was that he finally caught a glimpse of blue and red below.