205 - c

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PART TWO



Charles turns eighteen close to the southern edge of Mexico. Raven sticks two candles in a store-bought honey bun, and lights them. Charles blows them out. He doesn’t have any distinct birthday memories. The honey bun is sweet and sticky, and Charles licks his fingers when he finishes it. Erik is watching him with a faint smile, one that speaks both of careful boredom and of rapt attention.

Charles gets a flash, bright and scalding, of Erik licking at the pads of Charles’s fingers, tongue wrapped around three digits at once, his mouth warm and wet and sucking. His eyes are hooded with pleasure.

Charles blushes, he can feel his face going hot, and he stuffs both hands underneath his thighs. The plastic of the chair is hard on his knuckles. Erik’s eyes widen, and then he carefully pulls the blank, bored look back over his features. Raven is pretending not to notice any of this.

- nothing I can do he’ll just see it - the two of them god it’s like - doesn’t matter what I think -

“Thank you,” Charles says.

“I know it’s not a real cake.” Raven shrugs. “I’d have gotten you a present, but.” She stops talking, and Charles takes it to mean, I didn’t want to leave you for that long.

“I don’t mind. Thanks again.” Charles smiles. He crumples the plastic honey bun wrapper in his fist with the two half-burnt candles, and hugs Raven.

Charles dreams of two big, iron gates, rusted and creaking with age. They’re curled like they’ve weathered an explosion, and they swing in the gentle breeze. Charles pays them no mind and walks past, down the cobblestone streets and muddy footpaths. None of the buildings are really standing - half a wall here, a first floor there. A building sliced neatly in half, so that the insides of all three levels are exposed to the open air.

“Hello?” Charles calls out, though he knows, somehow, that no one is going to answer him.

The cobblestones end, and Charles is standing in front of a hospital. It’s intact, electricity glowing through the windows, and someone is screaming. The sound of it wavers in and out, like static, and Charles is frozen. He wants to stop the screaming, but he doesn’t want to go inside the hospital. He doesn’t want to know what is inside.

Still, somehow, he’s moving forward, one pale hand curving around the door handle, like he’s not even connected to it anymore, and the door starts to open. Whispers slide out through the gap, oily and wrong - it’s the pain you see I knew it’d be - please stop stop stop please stop - one more treatment I think we really seem to be making - show you I will I - like they’ll crumble when he touches them, like they’re more than he should know.

Charles wants to close the door, cut off the flow, but he can’t. His fingers are stuck to the metal.

Charles sits bolt upright, his hand still reaching in front of him, breath sobbing out of his lungs. He and Raven are sharing a bed and he reaches out for her, just to make sure. Her hand is soft and cool underneath his, and she shifts at the touch of his fingers, but doesn’t wake.

“Erik?” Charles whispers, as quietly as he can.

“Go back to sleep, Charles,” Erik says, gentle, gentle, and he might mean, don’t pry, or he might mean, you need to rest, but either way, his tone brooks no argument. Charles could check, perhaps. He might have that power, but he doesn’t want to know.

It takes Charles a long time to fall back asleep, but he knows that Erik is still awake when he does.

Raven’s voice is the easiest to identify. Charles can hear her, now, can pick her thoughts out of the wash of noise. She’s a murmur in the background, like a radio turned low. She’s always whispering to him, soft and close.

C’mon, Charles, wake up, wake up, she thinks in the morning, her fingers pushing his fringe out of his eyes, and Charles opens them to her face peering down at him, her lips pressed close together. Good morning, she thinks, and then, quieter, he looks pale today is he sleeping enough is he - Charles pushes himself up on one elbow.

Good morning, he sends back at her, a hesitant nudge in her direction, and her smile is blinding. He’s not sure if it’s wrong not to tell her about the other things he hears, but she doesn’t want him to know, and so he doesn’t want her to know about him knowing.

Erik is already dressed, seated at the table by the window, and Charles watches him clench his fist and release it, the molten ball of what used to be a wire clothes hanger, or a couple of safety pins, or handful of loose change shifting with the movement of his fingers. There’s something razor sharp about him today, something brittle. Charles gets the echoes of a boy with a haunted face and the barrel of a gun, but he doesn’t know what that means. Erik’s jaw clenches, and Charles watches the way it changes the shadows underneath his cheekbones.

He glances at Charles, his eyes wandering down Charles’ body and then jerking back to his face. - goddamn him -

“We should be on our way,” Erik says.

They’re still heading south, following the highways and skirting the cities. Erik lets his hand trail out the window and Raven steals a book from one their hotel rooms, something by some woman named Virginia Woolf. Raven says she’s famous, and reads a few passages out loud. Charles listens, sometimes, but mostly he dozes.

Erik finds another in Guatemala. This one begs and pleads and pisses himself, but underneath it Charles can still hear him calling Erik a filthy rat, an infestation to be exterminated, and so when the emptiness comes, the blood and the fear and then the sudden nothing, Charles doesn’t mind quite so much.

He brushes the blood off of Erik’s cheeks and forehead and chin with his thumb, and rubs it into his trousers. Erik’s breath catches in his throat and Charles pretends he can’t hear him thinking, I want you, god do I want you.

“He neglected to tell you about the one in Argentina,” Charles says, because it’s true, or, at least, he thinks it is. “Though I don’t know why.”

Raven makes a soft sound, and Erik goes rigid.

- his range my god - heard the bastard die - can’t imagine what that must be - how could we not know? -

Their voices clamor up, too loud and sharp, and Charles squeezes his eyes closed, pushing his fingers against his temple.

“Can you tell me where?” Erik asks, voice terrible and quiet. Charles isn’t entirely sure, but he nods anyway.

“I want to try something,” Raven says, just across the border into Nicaragua. They’re pulled over while Erik examines his map more closely, and Raven clambers over the seat into the back. She grabs Charles’s hand, and says, “Tell me if you see it.”

Charles has no idea what she’s doing, but when she closes her eyes, he closes his also. She’s thinking, well? and Charles doesn’t know what she’s asking him to do.

He gets a flash, then, of Raven as a child, standing on a tile floor, a kitchen, maybe, and there’s a small boy with dark hair opening the refrigerator. His grin is impish when he turns to her, and she laughs at something that he hasn’t said out loud.

“Do you see it?” Raven asks, voice tight and brittle, and the image shatters with her focus, splintering into shards. He nods, the words caught in his throat, and she pushes her fingers into his hair, pulling him close. “That’s you, you know? That’s you.” - before your father and mother sent you away and you never even said - I found the note but you never -

Charles tries to remember. He tries, has tried, but it’s like he’s caught in a dense fog. He can only see the things directly behind him, or the person standing next to him.

For Raven, he’ll try. But if he’s being honest, he wonders if there aren’t things he’s better off not knowing.

“Thank you,” he says, and leaves it at that.

“One of the girls pulled all of her hair out,” he says, quietly, in the car. They’re on a highway but it’s only two lanes, and slow going. “And one of the boys was certain that everyone in the ward was a demon sent from hell to tempt him. He stabbed another boy, once. With a fork.”

Charles doesn’t know why he’s talking. Raven is asleep in the passenger seat, and Erik is thinking about the mission, his mission, while he keeps an eye on the road.

“A man shot my mother in front of me,” Erik says, eventually. “He was trying to make me use my power, but I didn’t know how.”

There is some resistance, like Erik is trying not to think about it, but Charles can still see the German soldier with the gun to her head, and Erik is screaming, screaming. The gun goes off like thunder, like lightning hitting dry timber.

“Oh.” Charles’s voice is weak. He doesn’t want to see it, he doesn’t want to see any of it, but he can’t help it. There is nothing to keep the thoughts out.

“I’m sorry,” Erik says. There’s guilt there, and anger. There is, shouldn’t have told him that and, you stupid bastard keep your secrets hidden.

“You can’t though.” Charles doesn’t mean for the words to come out the way that they do. He doesn’t really mean to say them at all. “I hear - nearly everything, and I don’t know how not to.”

Erik doesn’t say anything for a long time. It doesn’t matter, Charles can still hear every doubt, every nearly subsumed note of desire, every, my god what will this world do to you? “You’ll learn,” he says, but Charles can tell that even Erik isn’t sure of that.

“Turn right,” Charles says. “Turn right here.”

He’s still not sure how he knows - some residue left over from the dead man in Guatemala, maybe, like a handprint on his mind - but Erik turns the car at his direction.

Are you sure about this, Charles? Raven sends to him, with ripples of worry and some frustration.

I’m rarely sure of anything, Charles sends back, and she turns around in her seat to smile at him. He thinks it’s a better thing to say than, I’m not sure of anything at all.

Charles tries not to ask Erik questions, because he’s half afraid that Erik won’t answer him, and half afraid that Erik will tell him to look inside if he wants to find out.

Charles couldn’t bear either, so he does his best to stay quiet.

The highway turns into a single lane road, and then to dirt. There is more greenery here, shading them from the sun. Charles looks out the windows and smells the air, the thick scent of pollen, the road dust kicked up by the tires. Sometimes Charles still wakes in the morning expecting only the smell of disinfectant and sweat, the harsh glow of the florescent lighting, the soft echoing footsteps of the orderlies. Anything else seems like a blessing, and not to be counted on.

He’s been wearing the same five shirts, the same two pairs of trousers, the same jumper with the hole in the hem every day since they left the house that Erik never owned. He’s worn and stained and threadbare, though his shoes still shine like new.

Charles doesn’t pay attention to time, but he can feel it ticking. Erik is getting restless. shaw, he thinks, whenever he’s been driving for too many hours on half a night’s sleep. I’m going to find you, I’m going to find you and I’m going to kill you.

Charles watches the trees pass over them, and he smells the pollen and dust, and tries to ignore the violence that Erik thinks of when he has nothing else to distract him.

In the shower, Charles puts tentative hands on his own body. It’s like a foreign object, some obscure piece of machinery that he only understands in concept and not in practice. They’re nearly into Venezuela, and the water pressure spits and sputters. Charles touches the hollow of his belly, slippery and pale underneath the spray. He presses the pads of both thumbs into the points of his hipbones where the skin pulls paper-thin. He can see the blue of his veins, branching off and trickling away.

Raven is humming under her breath in the other room, and Charles is trying to avoid thinking of Erik at all, but he still knows that Erik is trying not to think about Charles, slick and soaked underneath the spray. Charles brushes one thumb experimentally over his left nipple, and the feel of it makes his stomach shudder, unfamiliar. He understands the mechanics of pleasure in the abstract, but in practice his fingers rubbing over his ribs and down feels wrong, foolish. He wants, he wants, but this isn’t what he wants. He watches the water swirl over his pale toes and toward the drain, and turns off the tap.

He pulls back on his clothes, his hair dripping on the cotton covering his shoulders. He can’t see his face in the fogged up mirror, but he doesn’t really want to, anyway.

It takes them nearly two more weeks to get all the way to Argentina. Charles speaks to no one but Raven and Erik, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t hear things. Despite that most of the thoughts are in Spanish or Portuguese, the memories are just as vivid and colorful. Driving past towns leaves Charles weak and shaking, clutching at his head. They’re close to Córdoba when he has to force Erik to stop the car so that he can stumble outside to vomit, rather than soil the upholstery. He kneels in the dust, bent over and wiping at his mouth with the back of his hand, Raven hovering somewhere near his elbow.

He can still hear them all, the teeming millions of them, screaming and fucking and dying, and it’s all Charles can do not to retch again.

“Sorry,” he says, and spits onto the dirt.

Erik touches his arm just above the elbow and tugs him to his feet, so gentle that it makes Charles feel even guiltier. “Come on,” Erik says, “you can’t stay here. We’re too close to the city.”

“I know, I -” Charles has to cut himself off and grit his teeth. “Ah, god.”

Erik wants to scoop him up and carry him off, and even the familiarity of Erik’s protectiveness and Raven’s fierce devotion aren’t enough to keep the city at bay.

It takes them half an hour to get far enough away that Charles can do anything but close his eyes and ride it out. Raven turns on the radio and sings along. Erik watches Charles in the rearview mirror. Charles tries to sleep.

The car is parked when Charles wakes again. He’s exhausted, and his hand shakes when he moves to push his hair out of his eyes. Raven and Erik are near, but something is wrong. Something is wrong, and it’s woken him.

The house, he realizes, after a moment. There are more people inside than expected, and - Charles gasps, as he feels a sharp something go through his shoulder, Raven’s shoulder. He can feel the noise she makes, guttural and wounded, and Erik is livid but he can’t hold them all off. They have metal on them, yes, but his focus is too divided.

Erik! Charles calls, in surprise and desperation. Erik twitches, distracted, and Raven is bleeding, Charles can smell it. He wouldn’t make it to the house in time, not as drained and shaky as he is. He is yards away, half-nauseous and still trembling.

No, he thinks, and closes his eyes. All of them, all twelve men and Raven and Erik, all of them can hear him. I won’t let you, they’re all I have.

There is confusion, a what in the hell is going, and, another one not another of these freaks, and shaw said the one but even the money isn’t worth

Charles can hear them breathing, and he thinks, shhh, be quiet, quiet, as gently as he knows how. They don’t want to listen, but he pushes inside them and he makes them. He can see everything each of them has done, each bullet, each bashed in head, each order carried out, and the nausea rises up in his throat. He squeezes them tighter, twelve of them too much to hold on to except that he’s so angry that he can’t think or breathe or speak.

You’ve done enough, he says to them. One of them tries to cover his ears, but Charles holds him motionless, in thrall. Stop now, just stop. Stop.

He feels them go out, one and a time, like broken light bulbs, as they struggle to draw breath against a force that they don’t understand. He hears them plead, he feels their fear, and one by one they die.

Somewhere, somewhere else, Erik is caught between concern and awe, while Raven is half out the door. Charles loses consciousness again before either of them make it to the car.

Everything is white, bright white like the hospital lights that Charles thought he’d left behind. He is stuck, slowly sinking into the floor while people without faces walk right by and don’t slow or stop or look his way. He doesn’t scream or try to move, but they keep talking, chattering to the open air. Charles is so tired. All he wants is quiet.

Charles, come back. Please, Charles.

It’s cool when Charles wakes up. He pushes off the sheets and sits up, but he’s somewhere unfamiliar again. Hardwood floors with no carpet, a light sheet covering him, and the voices are dim, far away. It’s daylight, and the sunlight peeks in around the drawn curtains. It’s like the room he first woke up in, those months ago, but the angles are all wrong and it’s too quiet.

Charles waits for someone to notice that he’s awake, but no one does. He can’t help but wonder if he’s dreaming again. Eventually, he curls up on his side and goes back to sleep.

When he next awakens, it’s dark outside the curtains. There’s a lamp on in the far corner, and Erik is sitting in a chair by the bedside. Charles is struck with déjà vu so fierce that he grimaces. Erik sits up straight and leans forward.

“You stupid, stupid boy,” Erik says, his voice barely above a whisper. “You shouldn’t have done that.” you shouldn’t have had to - Raven shouldn’t - my fault, he doesn’t say.

“They were going to kill you.” Charles sits up and pulls his knees up to his chest, legs crossed at the ankles. “Where - is Raven all right?”

“She’s fine. Minor stab wound, three stitches and she’s all set. Sleeping off the painkillers, downstairs.” Erik pauses, like he’s collecting himself, but he fails. His thoughts are whirring just as rapidly as they ever are. “You shouldn’t have - Charles, you were out for five days. We weren’t sure you were going to wake up.” There’s a spike of residual, remembered terror - oh god so pale - what if he never - he has to he has to - strong enough to stick Charles’s breath in his throat. Erik swallows, and looks away. “I don’t want to go through that again. And Raven -” Erik cuts himself off. Charles understands, he can’t help but understand, but that doesn’t mean he would do anything differently, given the chance.

“It was the city that did it. Not the killing. It’s all the - hearing, the voices, they’re too loud and I can’t make them stop, but - I made them stop. I stopped all of them.” Charles laughs, a little, but it comes out twisted, like a hiccupped sob. He wonders how many people he could stop, just like that, how many he could manage at a time.

It had almost been quiet, for a few moments.

Erik touches Charles’ cheek, his fingers rough with callus, but gentle pressure. Charles leans in, presses his lips to the pulse point in Erik’s wrist. Erik jolts - taking advantage always taking - he doesn’t want he can’t - picking up what I’m giving him - and Charles knows that he’s going to pull away before he does.

“Why won’t you let me?” Charles asks, though, of course, he knows the answer.

Erik searches his face for something, but he leaves before Charles knows if he’s found what he’s looking for.

Raven is groggy but awake when Charles ventures downstairs. Erik is far enough away that Charles has to actively try to hear him, and he’s tempted, but he stays out. Raven is propped up on the couch, a bowl of soup in her lap, and a book face down on the coffee table. She smiles when he comes in. She’s wearing a shirt, so he can’t see the bandage on her shoulder, but he can feel her hurt.

“You scared the shit out of me,” she says, and pushes a lock of red hair behind her ear. He knows that she is serious, but he is just happy that she is alive. “You don’t know what it was like to see you lying there, motionless.” She shakes her head. He can see it through her, but he doesn’t want to.

“I did it for you,” Charles says, and sits down, pulling her feet into his lap. Her pajama pants are a little too short, exposing her thin ankles. Her skin is soft and smooth and cool underneath his fingertips. “You and Erik both.”

“They didn’t even struggle.” She’s remembering how they’d just stopped breathing at all once. How they’d collapsed one at a time, lips turning bruise-purple, eyes rolling back. They hadn’t even blinked.

“They struggled,” Charles says. “I’m just stronger than they were.”

They head north, back the way that they came. Erik is closed off, his face stoic, his movements constrained. His thoughts are the opposite, roiling and wild, and Charles feels more like an intruder than ever. Mostly, Charles watches the hard angle of Erik’s jaw, the broad sweep of his hair back from his face. He waits for Erik to smile, sharp teeth and all, but it doesn’t happen.

Raven shifts into a dark-haired girl, innocent in her frock, to ask for directions and Erik slides his palm over the body of the car, almost possessive. Charles watches the way the metal ripples underneath his fingertips, and imagines, and has to turn away.

Charles only knows that it’s winter after they cross the border into the United States. He wonders if it has snowed yet at the big, old house his parents used to live in, but he doesn’t suppose that he’ll ever find out.

They’ve been in South Carolina for three weeks, in a shack just off the beach, when Erik starts to think about leaving. Charles knows he’s thinking about it, but he can’t believe that Erik would ever actually do it. He wouldn’t do that to them.

The wind blowing in off of the ocean smells like salt and sand, and leaves Charles’s hair stiff and coarse. He walks for hours at a time, until he can’t hear anyone at all, not without trying. When he reaches out with his mind there are glimmers - can’t you - have to try - John said he wouldn’t - satin and lace trim - but he doesn’t try for very long. It’s almost a gift, to have the choice, and it won’t last forever.

Charles sits in the sand, socks stuffed into his untied shoes, which he has tucked by his left hip. The sound of the ocean crashing into the shore isn’t that something he remembers. He wonders if his parents ever took him to the beach when he was little. He wonders if he loved them, and if they loved him. His mother’s face is nothing more than a blurry picture - swollen eyes and red, red lips. His father he has no memory of at all.

Charles digs his toes into the ground. There is no one out there in this huge, monstrous world except for Raven and Erik. For Charles, anyway. No one else matters. No one else ever believed in him.

Charles sticks his thumb through one of the holes in his jumper, picks up his shoes, and starts back to the shack. The wind is wriggling through the threads in his jeans, brushing against his skin and leaving goosepimples behind. Charles does his best to push his hair away from his face, sticks his shoes underneath one arm, and stuffs his hands into his pockets.

He walks for half an hour before he can even see the shack again, far off down the beach. The sun is setting, and he’s close enough, now, to hear Raven and Erik without trying very hard. He listens in for half a minute before he realizes that they’re arguing. He stops walking.

- she can’t Raven can’t know she won’t she’s too blinded by - he’s not listening to me you fucker take one look at me you know I’m not lying - it might be best for everyone for all of us for Charles if I just go - don’t you dare turn away from me Erik he can’t I won’t let him -

Charles takes off running.

The door handle is half-melted and searing to the touch. Charles burns his hand getting it open, but he doesn’t let that stop him from shouldering the door open, hand cradled to his chest. Raven is standing with her hands curled into fists, her face a snarl of fury. Erik isn’t looking at her, he’s facing the window, but his shoulders are so tense that they look as if they’re about to shatter into pieces.

“You’re seriously considering going,” Charles says. His hand is throbbing, but he’s angry, too. Angry enough to ignore it.

Erik turns, and his mind is reaching out to Charles - don’t make me - Charles, please don’t - you know what I - but Charles has been listening. He hadn’t thought - but that had been stupid, obviously. “I am,” Erik says. “It’s what’s best, Charles, you have to know that.”

“I know no such thing,” Charles says. His voice is almost peevish, high and thinly strung. “I didn’t think you’d actually do this to us.”

“Charles, you were nearly killed. I’ve always been better on my own, with no one to worry about. Raven is quite capable of taking care of you, and it isn’t as if - it isn’t as if you’re helpless yourself. I have to find Shaw.”

The terrible thing is that he means every word. If Charles thought he could talk Erik out of it, keep him from leaving, he would, but - Erik is the most stubborn of the three of them. He rarely wavers.

“I won’t stop you,” Charles says, “though I think - I think that I could, should I try. Just let me show you something, before you go.”

Charles tugs at Erik’s elbow with his unburned hand. Raven is still seething in the corner, her mind awash with betrayal and anger. Charles can’t push her away, and he doesn’t disagree, but he looks into Erik’s face, his pursed mouth, his clenched jaw, and knows that he has to try this thing anyway.

He reaches for Erik’s face, and the way that Erik flinches punches the air right out of his lungs. He pushes on, tucking his hand into the curve of Erik’s cheek, fingertips resting against his cheekbone, thumb less than half an inch from the corner of Erik’s mouth. Slowly, he brings up his other hand, the throbbing one, blisters already rising on his palm, and cups Erik’s other cheek.

Listen to me, he says, and opens himself up, holds himself open, and pulls Erik in to look. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He doesn’t know if it will work. He only knows that he must try to make Erik understand, or he’ll leave and he’ll never come back.

He tugs Erik past the whispers of the ward - time to take your pills - shh, shh, it’ll all be quiet soon - to the house with the drawn white curtains and the overgrown backyard where Raven and Erik had touched him with such patience.

You are the only two things in this world that mean anything to me, Charles says, as brutally honest as he can find the courage to be. There is nothing else for me but the two of you, and if you leave, there will only be Raven.

Charles wants to show Erik the way that he sees him, the strength in him, the quick sharpness of his smile, the casual way he touches. The calluses on his hands, the slick of his hair. Charles nudges Erik until he can see Charles’s want, the desire that Charles has no idea what to do with.

No, Erik says, for the first time, you can’t.

I can, Charles argues, with the certainty of truth. I do.

And he lets Erik go.

Charles pulls his hands back and Erik wipes at his eyes. Raven is curious and angry and desperately sad, but she’s patient, too. She is better than either of them.

“Go to San Diego,” Charles says, his voice hoarse. “The man there isn’t the one that you want, I don’t think, but he organized Argentina. And he’ll know who you’re looking for.”

Charles kisses Erik on the mouth, a harsh press of lips, standing on his tiptoes. Erik swipes one thumb over Charles’s left cheekbone, and nods, and leaves.

“Charles?” Raven asks, -I can’t believe he would - how could he -, and she pulls him into a hug before he knows that she’s even moved.

“I think I’d like to stay here for a little while,” he says, vaguely. “I like the smell of the ocean.”

“We can stay as long as you like,” Raven says. Charles keeps reaching out for Erik, until he’s too far away to sense anymore.

Raven pulls out the chess set the first week after Erik leaves. Charles had almost forgotten that she had it. They play at least once a day, and they walk, and Charles watches the ocean. Charles’s burned hand heals slowly, but it does heal. Raven’s shoulder is mending much faster, but that’s not a surprise. Raven practices new shapes - an elderly man, a child, a matronly schoolteacher. Charles is never fooled, not even when he returns from a walk to find her treading toward him across the sand. She can change her appearance, but she sounds the same to him.

“You’ve stopped thinking about him,” Charles says. The nights are getting colder, and the wind coming in off the water numbs his cheeks.

“Who?” Raven asks. She’s beat him at chess four days running, but she still hasn’t gloated. Now she’s wearing her own skin, out in public. Charles knows that she puts on the blond girl garb to disguise herself, but he doesn’t think she should have to.

“Me,” Charles says. “The me from before.”

Raven nods, still looking out over the ocean. He still doesn’t get it, she thinks, but Charles doesn’t trace the thought back. He’s not sure he wants to. “I’m not waiting for you to remember,” she says, and lifts one shoulder in half a shrug. “I’m not holding out for some mythical, perfect, undamaged Charles to rise from the ashes. I love you.”

“But I’m -” he start, and shakes his head. “I’m broken, and crazy, and probably won’t ever be anything else. Don’t you miss him?” He’ll most likely never set foot in a city again. He knows so many things that he shouldn’t, and he can’t even stop himself. He’s killed men with only the power of his mind, and he would do it again in a heartbeat, should Raven or Erik need him to.

“No, I don’t. I don’t have to. You’re right here, Charles. You’re him, you’re my best friend, and my brother. You may not want that, but you have it.”

“Thank you,” Charles says, after a long, silent moment, and tries not to decode the love that she’s sending out, tries not to break it down into hopes and realities and disappointments.

“Let’s go inside,” she says, and wraps an arm around his waist. “It’s getting cold, and you’re starting to shiver.”

Charles leans his head on her shoulder and doesn’t say anything.

It’s two weeks later that Charles finally stops searching for Erik with his mind. He hasn’t heard Erik since he first left Charles’s farthest range that first day, but it hasn’t stopped him trying.

He won’t think about whether or not Erik is coming back. It won’t do him any good to worry. Still, they’ve been living on this beach for long enough that people are starting to recognize them at the small grocer’s in town and at the newsstand. It’s not enough to panic Raven, yet, but Charles can feel her unease.

Charles beats her at chess three days in a row, and then she thoroughly trounces him.

“Do you ever wish you were different?”

Charles is sitting on the bed, examining the wreckage of their game.

“What do you mean?” Raven asks, leaning back against the headboard.

“You know what I mean,” Charles says, and she does.

“Sometimes,” she says, with a shrug. “But then I wouldn’t be special. And I like being special.” not like you, Charles, and not like Erik. I’ve never been poked at and prodded until I broke, she sends him, and Charles only knows that it is purposeful by the clear focus of it, the way each word follows the next instead of flitting past, one association and then another. He doesn’t know why she decides not to say it aloud.

Different, he sends. The two things are quite different. Someone wanted something of Erik. The doctors wanted to cure me.

“And I can’t figure out which is worse,” Raven says with an unhappy frown. The truth is, Charles doesn’t know either.

Charles goes for a swim two days later. He can’t say what makes him do it; he rarely knows his owns thoughts with the clarity that he knows others’. He doesn’t have a swimming costume, so he strips down to his boxer shorts and wades in, leaving his trousers, jumper, and t-shirt in a neatly folded pile on top of his shoes. Winter isn’t quite finished, though the fiercest of the cold is long gone. The chill in the water still takes his breath away.

Charles is somewhere off shore when Erik comes back in range. He sputters and flails, startled by the - might have left even if they haven’t - not sure how - what if they - of Erik’s thoughts, fragmented by the distance though they are. He treads water, listening in without regret, unabashed in his relief.

Charles is shivering by the time he makes it back to shore, dripping seawater onto the sun-warmed sand. He gathers his clothes to his chest, and starts off down the beach.

Erik is knocking on the door to the shack. Raven has seen him coming out the window, but she still lets him in.

“- I won’t,” Erik is saying as Charles opens the door. Raven has her arms crossed over her chest, but it’s defensive, not aggressive. Erik’s eyes are red, and he has a bruise swelling over his left cheekbone. He is unthinkably tired and startlingly vulnerable, and Charles can’t look away. Erik feels so deeply that it cuts through Charles like a sharp wind, and he has to catch his breath. Charles could find out what they were talking about, but he doesn’t. He knows enough. He knows too much already.

Erik cuts himself off when Charles comes inside, his eyes tracking across Charles’s bare chest, his wet underwear, the sand stuck in a spray across both feet.

I am so - wrong for you - how could anyone ever really - Erik is thinking, a rush, half-formed thoughts sliding into one another and colliding.

“Erik,” Charles says, and tries to ignore the pleading in his voice. “Erik, please.”

There’s blood dried underneath Erik’s fingernails, a dusty brown, and he runs his hands through his hair, saying nothing.

Raven looks between them and her mouth twists up into something close to a grimace. She looks her age, for once, and it startles Charles to remember that she’s younger than he is - she can’t be much older than sixteen. She has given up so much for him.

“I can’t be here for this,” she says, shaking her head. “And it won’t help for me to be. I’ll be back in half an hour. If you run off again, Erik, I’m not going to forgive you so easily.”

She closes the door behind her, leaving Charles alone with Erik. Neither of them say anything for a long moment, though for Charles it isn’t precisely silence. It rarely is. He can still hear Erik’s thoughts, as clear and loud as Erik always is - his eyes I can’t look away from - why did I come back here? - those lips he’s frustrated and I want -

Charles won’t be the one to speak first, this time. He’s shown Erik everything that he has, and Erik has come back, but not even Erik truly knows why. Charles can see Erik’s jaw clench and unclench, and his hands are in his pockets, faux-casual.

“I’m not good at this, Charles,” Erik says, and Charles’s eyes snap away from the shadow of stubble along Erik’s chin, and the way his cheekbone is watercolor painted, blue and green and yellow, with bruise. “I’ve never had the time, I’m - I don’t know what you expected.”

“Did you find who you were looking for?” Charles’s voice is steady, but Charles himself isn’t. He takes a step forward and then stops himself.

“No,” Erik says. Yes, he thinks. Both are true.

“Stay,” Charles says. Kiss me, he thinks. He’s not sure if Erik hears him. “I can help you.”
Charles would kill all of them for Erik. He’d kill all of them.

“You feel them die, Charles. I can’t imagine what that must be like.” Erik’s hands are fisted in his pockets.

“I could show you,” Charles says, though he knows that Erik won’t want to know. Not really.

Erik is thinking, how could I ever think - I’ve fucked him up more than when - he’s so young and - but he’s also thinking about pressing Charles into the wall and biting into his mouth until he whimpers, shoving a hand down the front of his trousers and getting him off before Raven gets back. Charles has had enough.

“Erik,” he says, “I’m not stupid. I’m eighteen, and I’m crazy, and I’m certainly never going to be normal, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what I want. You want me, I know you do, so please - please.” I want, he thinks, and pushes it toward Erik, tries to make him hear, make him understand.

Erik makes a noise like he’s been wounded somewhere necessary, a noise Charles has never heard from him, and his hands come up to frame Charles’s face, thumbs rubbing just over his cheekbones. Charles shudders; he couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to, and it’s all he can do not to push into Erik’s hands like a cat. “You,” Erik starts, and then changes tack. “I think that you can’t know what you do to me, that you can’t understand, but you do. You know everything I think about, each one of my nightmares. And it’s not even on purpose.”

“Erik,” Charles starts, to explain, to apologize, but then Erik leans in and kisses him. It’s almost an attack, Erik holding Charles’s face while he kisses and kisses him, teeth digging into Charles’s lower lip. Charles hears the muffled noises that he makes, tastes copper when Erik bites down too hard, listens to the his mouth I’ve thought about this it’s not nearly enough that is speeding through Erik’s head, incoherent and messy. Charles closes his eyes.

It’s nothing like he imagined it would be; not soft, not careful, and the taste of blood is his own, not some nameless man worthy of Erik’s hate. But Erik’s fingers press up Charles’s spine, and he’s making Charles arch his back, reach up toward him, trying to even their heights.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” Erik says, and he’s telling the truth, but his thumb is pressing into Charles’s lower lip, swiping across the skin. Charles would guess that his lips are red from kissing, swollen with it. Erik’s finger comes away reddish-pink with Charles’s blood and saliva.

“I only wish to help you,” Charles says, holding himself still and tense. He’s afraid that if he moves, Erik will come to his senses and remember all the reasons he has for keeping a barrier between them.

“You shouldn’t want to,” Erik says, licking the blood from his thumb.

Charles gathers his courage and presses his palm over Erik’s heart, beating beneath his shirt and skin and ribs. “But I do.”

Raven is sitting on the beach, watching the waves crash onto shore, drawing abstract patterns in the sand when Charles goes to her. She’s thinking about how good Erik could be for Charles, and how bad. She’s thinking, if he goes again he’s not ever coming back I won’t let him not after everything that Charles not after all that we’ve been through, and Charles sits next to her without talking.

“I’m not as forgiving as you are,” she says, after a long moment. Her long, blue toes, toenails painted in delicate gold, are buried in the sand. She has her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped underneath them. Her hair is loose and blowing in the breeze, the sunlight glinting red.

“I’m not that forgiving, either,” Charles admits. “Only for you, and for him.”

“I know,” she says, and then, after a moment, her voice choked. “Don’t let him fuck everything up.”

If Charles knew how to speak about it, he’d tell her how he’s wanted Erik from the moment he saw Erik’s face in her mind, before he knew that such a thing was possible, before he knew what wanting was. He remembers so little, just the rain hitting the car window, and the pills all lined up in their little paper cups, and the orderlies pitying smiles, and the involuntary clutch of his fingers in the sheets as the electricity ran through him, but he doesn’t want to remember any more than that.

“I’ll try,” he says, instead, and leans his head on her shoulder.

Erik is asleep when Charles climbs into the bed next to him. He’s deep enough that he barely stirs, even when Charles’s foot nudges his, and Charles can hear none of his dreams.

“Kiss me again,” he whispers, over the sound of Raven brushing her teeth in the bathroom. “Kiss me when you wake up.”

Erik doesn’t hear him, and Charles wouldn’t try to make him, but he hopes that Erik will somehow know anyway.

Charles is sad to see the shack go, shrinking in the rearview mirror, but he’d rather that than be left behind again. Raven has her feet up on the dashboard, barefoot, and Charles is stretched out in the backseat.

“Where are we going?” Erik asks, and - don’t know where he is but I have to find him Charles I have to - Charles doesn’t know yet. He doesn’t know, except that Erik does. Erik got the information in San Diego. Erik is still letting Charles choose.

“West,” he says. “We’re going to Arizona.”

Erik smiles, sharp and sudden, in the rearview. Raven reaches back for Charles’s hand, and Charles takes it. Charles watches the dust settle on the road behind them, and then closes his eyes.

Later, Erik’s mind whispers to him. Later I’m going to kiss you until you can’t breathe, until you’re arching up, helplessly, into me. Charles gets a flash, Erik climbing over the front seat and pressing Charles down into the leather, long, blunt fingers winding into Charles’s hair. It’s a promise. Charles smiles.