Prompt Post: ROUND THREE
ROUND THREE IS CLOSED
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<< ROUND TWO | ALL ROUNDS | ROUND FOUR >>
Rules post.
Flat view.
Updates Post (WIPs only)
Fills Post (completed Fills only)
damalur's firstclasskink on Delicious.
Volunteers always welcome.
There may be some delay on posts appearing when there is a URL in the message body as they are automatically marked as suspicious and I ( Read more... )
Charles' control is brilliant. And, in retrospect, that's really the first thing that should have made him suspicious. Charles never, never makes mistakes--no misfires, no slips. Absolutely nothing. Everything he does, he means, every thought he shares is precisely what he wants to communicate.
Erik himself can't control his power half the time. He still makes snarled messes of the TV antenna when Alex's jibes wear a little thin and God knows, the rest of them make mistakes. Even Raven forgets her eye colour, sometimes, but Charles never does. Erik never sees him slip.
Erik could attribute it to a thousand things. Charles had a better education, a better upbringing, a better chance. A mutant sister, someone to grow with and around and into, because he and Raven don't finish each other's sentences, but it's a close miss. Maybe Charles learned so he could teach Raven. Maybe his power developed early. Maybe he's had longer to learn. Maybe he's just a natural.
Maybe.
Erik's been around Shaw's telepath--Emily? Emma? Something cold and forgettable--enough to know what to expect. She's hard as diamond, maybe, but she's an open book. When she's annoyed, he knows it. When she's pleased with herself, he can feel it.
Erik can't pretend that it doesn't give him a smug little jolt, knowing that his telepath is stronger. More controlled. Better.
Because that's what it has to be, right? Charles is simply better in absolutely every way and Erik is so busy congratulating himself that he doesn't ever bother looking. Why would he? To the wretched little Polish boy still nestled somewhere in the back of his head, scared and starving, Charles' life is a dream come true--a family, an education, a future. A home.
And God, what a home.
It's practically a castle, finer than anything Shaw could even have dreamt of, if a little dusty. It takes almost a week to clean it, a week where training is abandoned in favour of something normal, for once. It almost feels like nesting, what they're doing, settling into old money and older antiques, stretching themselves to fill the empty hallways, spreading their evening meals out over the sprawl of the dining room table.
And Charles, when he looks around the table at his students, his friends, his family--
He smiles so brightly, it almost hurts to look at.
So Erik never asks, because he thinks he understands, and Charles never offers. Six months pass this way, six months of chess matches and training and weaving themselves all a little closer together. Six months, during which Alex learns a focus so narrow he can light a match from twenty paces. Six months during which Raven can flick-flick-flick herself into near-perfect copies of anyone she sees on the television. Six months where Hank stops hiding in his lab and finally, finally lets himself loose on the grounds, where Sean actually grins at Erik, punches him in the shoulder and makes terrible jokes and stops looking like he expects to be backhanded for it.
Six months where Erik actually has friends.
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Erik might be happy in spite of himself and so, naturally, he assumes that Charles--soft, privileged Charles, with his delicate accent and his sweet naivite--must be happy too.
That's what he tells himself, after. He doesn't know only because he doesn't look. Because he doesn't know there's anything to look for. Because Charles' control is perfect.
In the end, Raven is the one who makes a mistake. She's sprawled out at the foot of Erik's bed, nose buried in a fashion magazine, flicking between a likeness of Jackie O and James Dean absently, like maybe she doesn't realize she's doing it. And then she flicks into Audrey Hepburn and smirks at him, like Charles told her about Erik's fondness for Breakfast at Tiffany's.
"Because of the book," Erik growls. "I like Capote."
"Suuuuure," Raven drawls and rolls over onto her back. Back to Jackie O. "I never saw it." She pulls a face. "Charles said I was too young. He and Cain saw it without me."
There's a whole beat, before she freezes up. Just enough time for Erik to frown before her shoulders go rigid, her borrowed fingers white-knuckled on her magazine.
"Cain?" Erik asks and Raven turns an alarming shade of pale. That, more than anything, unnerves Erik because he has seen Raven petulant and bored and just downright spiteful, but he has never once seen her truly scared.
"He was. Someone we knew," she says and it's stilted, awkward. She's not nearly as good a liar as her skin. "A family friend. Of Charles'."
"Uh-huh," Erik says slowly.
And Raven just bites her lip and dives back into her magazine. She doesn't speak for twenty minutes.
That, he realizes later, is less of a clue and more of a glaring neon sign.
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Anyways, I like that line about Erik liking Breakfast at Tiffany's and how Raven just chills in his room. XD
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The implications of the first paragraph are striking, come to think of it. So is this one:
Erik might be happy in spite of himself and so, naturally, he assumes that Charles--soft, privileged Charles, with his delicate accent and his sweet naivite--must be happy too.
Breakfast at Tiffany's made me laugh and also wonder if you're making a parallel here somewhere, except I haven't seen the movie for years so I couldn't guess, so I could be wrong, so just ignore me.
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And Charles, when he looks around the table at his students, his friends, his family-- / He smiles so brightly, it almost hurts to look at.
OMG, this section. It almost hurts to read, but it's perfect. <3
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And Raven is. She hasn't spoken to Erik properly in the week, and she keeps looking at him, these darting little glances like she's just waiting for him to explode. Her trips to the foot of his bed come to an abrupt halt and once--only once, fortunately--they run into each other in the hall outside the kitchen and Raven honest-to-God skitters away from him.
He's pretty sure that if she was the telepath and not Charles, she'd have snatched the memory of that conversation away from him days ago.
It would help if they had any servants to ask, staff who'd been with the family longer than they cared to remember, people who had been there for Charles' first awkward baby steps, and the day the new adopted daughter showed up with nothing but the clothes on her back.
But although the mansion is enormous, there's not a single employee. There's a service Charles contracts for groundskeeping, and a stack of telephone numbers stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet, in case anything breaks. But Charles cooks, and Charles cleans and Charles has even made a little chart outlining which chores the children will be avoiding on which day of the week.
It's not until Erik is wolfing down poached eggs on toast--part of Charles' ridiculous insistence that Erik eat three proper meals per day--that he realizes how very strange that really is.
"Something wrong?" Charles has a pan in one hand, a spatula in the other, and the little crease between his eyebrows that Erik's come to recognize as mild-to-marginal concern. Erik wants to say yes because something is, but he doesn't know what, not yet. He only knows Cain and the way it made Raven's shoulders tense, and now--this.
Charles grew up with servants. He's used to them. This isn't the sort of house that teaches a boy to do his own laundry, to make his own bed. Charles learned that in university, Erik assumes, but certainly he can't be accustomed to fending for himself. Not in a house like this. Why wouldn't he want servants, now that he's busy running a school?
"Erik?" Charles is frowning now. "Are the eggs okay?"
"Wonderful," Erik says dully and he wishes he could just ask.
But he can't and he doesn't, and there's this niggling feeling now, tickling at the back of his mind because Erik's not sensitive, but he understands danger. He understands when something is wrong, and when Raven shoots him a quick, warning look over her second cup of coffee, Erik realizes that something is very, very wrong.
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I love the way Erik gets suspicious and starts wondering about Charles *bites nails*
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(Although to be fair, I'd assume there wouldn't be servants there while he's training mutants, after all. But yeah, still wouldn't seem like the type to know all the details of running the mundane parts of a household.)
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