howl (1/?)

[minarchy]

TITLE: howl (WIP) | ao3
FANDOM: x-men: first class
PAIRING: charles xavier/erik lehnsherr
RATING: r
SPOILERS: x-men first class
WARNINGS: au; graphic imagery (violence); language
WORD COUNT: ~11,120
DISCLAIMER: x-men: first class belongs to marvel and matthew vaughn. all characters belong to marvel. anything you do not recognise is mine.
SUMMARY: "It would be nice to know if there's a dangerous, wild animal wandering my grounds," Charles says, and Erik almost laughs at the irony. Almost.
"No," he confirms, "you have no dangerous, wild animals wandering your grounds." Just the one sitting in your kitchen, he adds, internally.
A/N: part one of a fill based on this prompt from 1stclass_kink. (unimaginative) title from florence + the machine's howl. original thread here. fill thread here. alas, unbeta'd, as usual. also: shaishda made me arts! ♥



The most prevalent memory from his childhood is one that is not uncommon amongst others of his age and creed: pain, cold, hunger. It is raining when he first arrives, and the mud and freezing water oozing through his battered leather shoes, worn thin through years of use and stretching-out as his feet grew within their constrictive confines. It aches in his bones.

(Winter howls down from the mountains like a dozen screaming hags racing through the streets; he isn't supposed to be out of doors at this hour, the curfew bell having run long ago and the guards out in the streets but they need something, anything that his thin, bony hands can scavenge from the gutters outside of the ghetto. He didn't mean to stray so far, but now he looks about and finds himself so much further from the tall walls that he had ever thought it possible to be.

The thought twists in his mind to just run, to flee and escape and never look back. Mama would want him to, he knows; but he cannot leave her, cannot just go and not tell her that he is alive and free rather than beaten and broken open on the cobbles beneath the hobnailed boots of the soldiers on patrol.

He can smell - meat, he thinks, thick and cloying with blood; which means that it's not kosher, but that was never an option, and the copper tang is so heavy on the air that it must be fresh. Mama could make stew to last for a week on a single slab on meat.

Bright eyes glare at him out of the darkness, and Erik screams as teeth rip into his chest.)

No one in the camps is fed enough, not even the guards, most of the time. Some of the prisoners, ones with more hope and thought enough to look to a future that filled more than just the next few minutes, believe that this must mean that the war was going badly, that Göbbels Four Year Plan has fallen flat and the Nazis are losing. That the Allies will come for them, any day now.

Erik does not believe this. He believes in what he knows: the constant, spasmodic pain in his hands and feet where the bones are brittle and the joints swollen from the cold and wet; the sores where his clogs and prison uniform have rubbed, ill-fitting, against him; the endless ache in his belly, where his stomach makes conversation with his spine.

Even after Herr Doktor takes him aside, Erik is not fed. Sometimes, not for days. Especially in the week leading up to the full moon: Herr Doktor wants to see if hunger makes him stronger. Makes him more violent, more angry, more desperate for the kill.

Measurements are taken, stone-faced nurses pushing him roughly in the direction they want him to go as they carefully write down his weight, width, muscle mass. Erik assumes that they make similar measurements when he is changed. He doesn't remember enough from those times to know.

The first time Herr Doktor lets him hunt, Erik awakes feeling bloated and heavy, his stomach a swollen mound beneath his protruding ribs. There is blood everywhere, and military-grade boots lie discarded on the floor. When he is able to move, he finds feet still within them.

Schmidt smiles brightly when Erik is pulled before him.

"Well done, Erik," he says, beaming and folding his long fingers before him on his desk. "You may keep the boots, if you like."

His toes curl within the leather, warmer and more comfortable than they have been for as far as Erik's memory allows, tacky with the blood that remained after he had pulled the feet from them, fingers slipping on the protruding bone as he tugged them free. He has no shirt, just the trousers that the nurse had thrown at him when she had come to take him to see Herr Doktor. Schmidt's eyes feast greedily on the swell of his heavy stomach; filled, Erik knows, with the flesh of the soldier sacrificed to him. Erik watches him stare, and dreams vividly on the day when he will be able to open Schmidt's chest with the doctor still alive and breathing, when he will be make him watch as Erik holds his beating heart out towards him, dripping his own blood onto the doctor's face.

He only hopes that he will not have to be wolf when he does, but he will take what he can get.

Life in Westchester is just as boring as Charles remembers from before leaving for university. He had chosen Oxford deliberately: it was as far away as possible from the dusty, dreary old house he had grown up in, as much a prison as a three foot cell even with its size, dark-panelled corridors spilling out from the atrium in a sprawling, haughty mess.

The mansion is a mess of painful memories, the very air calling forth the small, skinny child who was a constant disappointment to his high-society mother, a constant source of annoyance for his step-father, an endless source of vicious amusement for his step-brother.

But no. He will not think of that today. Today is his thirtieth birthday, and Charles is determined that he will not spend it steeped in melancholy and brandy. Briefly, he considers driving to town to while away the day in a bar or restaurant or coffee shop, but upon further reflection he decides to spend the day in the house, to make memories within its walls that he isn't afraid to touch.

This decision stimulated mostly by his accidental stumbling into the second floor lounge and registering with some dismay that everything was still dust-sheeted. His mother would have thrown a fit, and Charles is momentarily tempted to do the same: to turn on his heel and slam the door, leave the whole place to rot into its foundations, inheritance be damned. But he doesn't, because he is a grown man, now, and he will not be shackled by pubescent rebellion.

He has no staff to keep, or to keep him, but he had made arrangements with the butcher's and the grocer's and the milkman to keep him stocked: the single gardener, a bitter, cynical Presbyterian whom Charles had hated as a child and hates only a little less as an adult, lets them in to fill the pantry. He helps himself to what he wants as well, more like than not, despite the generous salary that trickles directly out of Charles' inheritance.

Charles himself spends most of his time in the large and well-furnished library, buried deep in the centre of the mansion; it is, aside from his own bedroom and the servants' stairway, where he would play imaginary games with himself as a boy, the only place in the house that he can stand to be. As such, it is also the only room that shows any sign of inhabitance; although Charles has a favourite corner, and so the majority of the stiff, expensive leather furniture remains sheeted and covered.

If Tompkins, the gardener (or grounds-keeper, to give him his proper title, but Charles has seen the grounds since returning to Westchester and they don't look very kept to him), ever creeps around the house apart from letting in the deliveries, then Charles never hears him. He shuts himself away with his tea and his books for days at a time, and pays no willing attention to the outside world.

Except.

Today is his birthday, and today he will make an effort. Seeing as it was the lounge that sparked this sense of decision, it is there that he will start; and it is as Charles is heading down to the laundry room, his arms full of sheets and his hair full of dust, that he hears it: the distinctive noise of someone moving about in the kitchen. That entire room is stone and heavy, dark wood, and Charles knows both from memory and from scientific study how the sound travels and carries in that room.

He deposits his bundle of sheets in a corner, and heads towards the kitchen.

"Tompkins?" he calls, leaning and peering as he rounds corners, as if he will be able to catch sight of the gardener's familiar stoop and shuffle; the sounds from the kitchen pause, as if startled into silence by Charles' summons. "Tompkins," Charles says again, "is that you?"

He doesn't, honestly, expect an answer, so he isn't perturbed when one is forth-coming.

"If you're stealing," he says, finally reaching the entrance to the kitchen and throwing the door open, all righteous fury and Lord-of-the-Manor, "I'll have your hide -"

And stops dead in his tracks, staring.

There is a man in my kitchen, his eyes inform him, and his deep-bred sensibilities add, and he's bleeding all over my floor.

"You're not Tompkins," he says, dumbly, blinking at the man who is raiding his fridge, bread hanging from between his teeth. "Obviously," he adds, hurriedly, when the man looks like he's going to either bolt or stab Charles with the bread knife, and Charles isn't entirely sure which reaction he thinks worse of. "Of course you're not Tompkins. Ah. Are you okay?"

The man stares at him. Charles attempts a smile; it feels rusty on his face.

"You're bleeding," he clarifies, and the man doesn't look away. "Does that happen a lot?" Charles asks, when he still doesn't reply. "The bleeding thing, I mean; although you could answer concerning the breaking into people's homes as well, if you like. I'm kind of loose on that point, too."

The man doesn't speak. His fingers slip from the refrigerator door and his knees crumple as he slides to the ground, but his eyes don't release Charles' until he loses consciousness.

Charles, whose only prior experience with unconscious people is when they pass out due to over-consumption of alcohol, has a momentary blank as to what he is supposed to do.

Carefully, attempting to step around the bloody footprints smeared across the flagstones, he moves closer to the man, crouching next to him for examination. Now that he is unconscious, Charles affects a scientific approach, cataloguing the man's injuries (several vicious-looking cuts along his shoulders and arms, as if something has clawed him; deep bruising spreading out from one eye and down the side of his face, almost like the butt of a rifle, or a flat-soled boot was slammed into it; a myriad of small cuts and scratches, that are already closing). Reaching out to press a palm to his forehead, Charles deliberately ignores the brutal scar covering the man's stomach and ribcage, embossed onto his skin in ridges and sworls.

"Fever," he says, his voice echoing slightly in the empty room. "Well, my lad, you're in quite a state." His habit of speaking his thoughts aloud had irritated his flatmates in Oxford no end, especially when he was running through the arguments surrounding his thesis, but he found it calming. Letting his thoughts out into the open air allowed them to order themselves more fully in his mind, and made them seem more sensible and tangible. More achievable. Like, for example:

"We'd best get you upstairs to bed, I think." He frowns, pursing his lips as he looks down at the prostrate figure in front of him. "How we're to do that, though, I've no idea. I don't suppose you're lighter than you look?"

He isn't, but Charles manages as best as he can; arms looped underneath his armpits and hands interlocked around his torso, Charles gets him semi-upright, manoeuvring carefully backwards. The stairs are somewhat awkward, and Charles winces inwardly with every step as the man's feet bang upwards against the lip. He pays special attention to ensuring that they do not twist or catch - the state he's in, Charles is fairly certain a twisted ankle would be the least of his worries, but nonetheless. No need to add extra injuries.

Eventually, with much grunting and sweating, Charles levers the man onto the bed in one of the (many) spare rooms; he gets blood all over the sheets, but Charles hardly cares. It isn't like he doesn't have far too many spares, anyway.

"Water," he says. "Clean these cuts first, and then to find the iodine. I'll bet it's in the same place - back in a moment." He pats the man's arm. "Don't go anywhere."

Even in his sleep, the man hisses and half-flinches as Charles gently wipes the worst of the blood from him; his shirt, by this point, is a lost cause, and Charles mentally consigns it to the bin along with the sheets. Luckily, the shallower cuts only bleed a little, no more than surface cover to re-clot when he's cleaned them, but the more serious ones continue to leak blood over his shoulders and into the linen. Charles covers them with the spare cloth as he applies the iodine to the others.

"Can't do stitches, I'm afraid," he says, cheerfully, as he gently swabs the wounds and holds the man down as he tries to curl away. "Hopefully you won't need them, otherwise it's a trip to the hospital for you." He gazes into the man's face, noting the lines about his eyes and mouth, and the creases on his brow that do not seem to fade away. "And I don't know if you'd want that," he says, quietly.

The bowl of water is stained pink and brown with the blood and iodine. There is blood beneath his fingernails, and holding his shirt to his chest, drying tacky on the exposed skin of his neck.

"Fever," he mutters. "Sweat it out or cool it off? Why didn't I take that med class? Stupid boy."

After a moment's indecision, chewing on his lip as he considers the best action, Charles decides on both; he pulls the quilt up to his armpits, and collects ice water from the kitchen to lave a clean cloth in, before placing it on his forehead.

He's unconscious for two days, although he wakes, briefly, in the twilight before dawn. Charles has been cat-napping in the armchair, dragged over from the window to sit by the bedside, and he's on the verge of sleep himself when the man's eyes crack open and he focuses, delirious, on Charles.

"Hello," Charles says, his voice rough and slow with sleep. "My name's Charles Xavier."

The man stares at him for a moment, before licking his lips. "Erik," he says, scratchily. Charles wonders how long it's been since he last spoke. "Erik Lehnsherr."

"It's very nice to meet you." Charles angles a glass of water to his lips, and the man - Erik - gulps some down, spilling most of it over his chin. "I'm going to take care of you, Erik."

Erik blinks at him, slowly, before his eyes slid shut again.

His fever breaks half-way through the second day, and Charles sleeps for the rest of it, relaxing into exhaustion and slumping against the side of the wing-back.

Erik is already awake when Charles returns, having showered and changed and bearing broth, bread and coffee. Contrary to popular belief, Charles can look after himself to a reasonable degree; he had to survive university, refusing to take on staff for fear of becoming one of the trust-fund babies that swaggered around campus. He is an only child, and whilst there had been the housekeeper for when he was home during the holidays, she often wouldn't be around to cook for him when he wished to eat.

"Ah," he says, delightedly, when he re-enters the room to see Erik trying to push himself upright. "Steady now." He places the tray on the bedside table, and puts his hands underneath Erik's arms, helping him into a sitting position. "The cuts in your shoulders are barely closed - you don't want to be opening them again."

Erik looks at him, warily, like a cornered animal. Charles smiles disarmingly, hoping that he isn't about to get hit in the face; despite his weakened state, Charles has never really been in a fight, and Erik could probably knock him down without much trouble.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he says, earnestly. "Do you remember what happened?"

"I was - looking for food," Erik says, slowly, still watching Charles with a fierce intensity. "You interrupted me."

Charles' eyebrow quirks. "Forgive me," he says, drily. "I must stop intervening when people are trying to steal from my house."

Erik's mouth turns down at the corners, and Charles sighs inwardly.

"Well, if you're hungry." He sits in the chair, and picks up the bowl. "It's chicken," he says, when Erik eyes the bowl as if it might bite him. "Chicken soup is necessary when sick, I'm told. Speeds the road to recovery. Although," he ponders, "I've not real idea why. There's nothing particularly remarkable about chicken soup."

The spoon remains on the tray, Erik wrapping his long hands around the bowl and drinking from it, mouth against the rim. Charles sips his coffee, watching him slowly drain it.

"Why are you helping me?" he asks, lowering the bowl until it's resting in his lap. Charles' forehead creases, his eyebrows drawing together in confusion.

"You collapsed in my kitchen," he says. "What was I supposed to do?"

"Call the police," Erik says, flatly.

"Ah, yes." Charles smiles. "That would have been the more prudent course of action, wouldn't it?"

Erik stares at this strange man, reclining in his wingback as if he was entirely at ease, as if it isn't odd in the slightest to adopt and nurse thieves. Xavier sips at his coffee, the china fine and elegant, probably worth more than anything Erik has ever owned; but he holds it carelessly, clearly a habit of a lifetime spent around expense and luxury.

Xavier is watching him back, his face relaxed and calm but there is a focused intensity about his gaze that gives Erik the impression of being analysed. It's not a sensation that he is particularly comfortable with. Xavier cocks his head, ever so slightly, and the angle makes his mouth appear to curve upwards in one corner.

"Would you like me to?" he asks, voice still maintaining that careful balance between calm and kind. Almost as if he is talking to a frightened child, or an animal that might easily bolt. Erik's mind flickers with amusement at the comparison.

Erik's nostrils flare as he tightens his jaw against the irritation that surges; because surely it is obvious that he has no desire to enter police custody, and it is worse because, evidently, Xavier does know this. He does not answer. Xavier doesn't seem to require one, talking all the answers from Erik's face as he drains the last of his coffee.

(He leaves the dregs, Erik notes, a small pool of black liquid settling in the base of the cup, shifting lightly over the granules that lie there. The scent drifts around him, mingling bitter and dark with the watery saltiness of the broth he's just drank and the soft, warm earthiness of the bread that still remains on the tray, crust cracked and oozing crumbs to mingle with the baked, browned flour. He concentrates of the scents because it detracts from the emotions that rage through his system, flipping him from one to another as if controlled by a set of railway points, still powerful from his recent change.)

Placing the cup and saucer back onto the tray with the delicate, distinctive chink of bone china, Xavier braces his hands on the arms of his chair and pushes himself upright.

"Let's take a look at these cuts, then," he says. His hands, warm from the cup and firm on his skin. There is no ulterior motive to his touch, mere direction to move Erik where he needs in order to unwind the bandages; it reminds Erik of the nurses in the camps, and of nothing like that at all, at the same time. He feels Xavier's hands still, his fingertips just brushing the skin covering his shoulder blades, and Erik tenses instinctively.

"Well," says Xavier, after a moment's pause. "You certainly have an impressive metabolism, Erik."

Erik glances sideways, catches sight of the wounds on his shoulder; they are reasonably recent, but you would not know it to see them. Already, the skin has begun to knit back over them, although it is still thin and fragile. Erik can feel the pull as his muscles shift, deliberately keeping him still beneath Xavier's scrutiny. They could be weeks old, rather than merely days. He awaits Xavier's reaction.

"I suppose that must come in handy," Xavier says, lightly, "if you often get into fights with -" Erik can feel him measuring the width and length of the cuts, his fingers once more sure and solid against Erik's skin (but careful nonetheless, not pressing roughly against the wounds or twisting Erik into position with harsh movements) "a bear?"

The puzzlement is evident in his voice, but so is amusement at his own conclusion. There is smiling around his eyes and the angle of his head as he steps back into Erik's field of vision.

"Well," he says, roughly bundled the bandages into a ball and tossing them into the bin, "I'm no doctor and you know your body far better than I, but you're more than welcome to stay for as long as you like."

Erik replays that over in his head, trying to find indication of intention, of anything that he recognises, something he can use as an reason to leave. Try as he might, he can't find anything hidden. It galls him, and shifts the ground beneath his feet.

Prudency.

Vorsichtigkeit.

He has always considered himself a prudent man. Vernünftig. Not trusting anyone or anything is something that Erik has always been good at; something he can hardly help being good at, considering. An attitude that has kept him alive for almost as long as he has been out of the camps (because no one bothered him in the camps. He was Schmidt's Haustier; and the guards called him das Fleischwolf. Schmidt approved of the nickname. Erik had long since lost the ability to care) and one that he does not care to lose.

There had been occasions, of course, when all he wanted in all the world was someone to talk to, someone that would not spurn him or cast him out or flay him when he didn't do as he was told; and, when he was rather much younger, he had indulged himself.

And then he had learned another important lesson; one that Schmidt had not specifically focused on because, in his vision for the future, why was the any need? When you are like Erik, when fire and ice and bloodlust thrum in your bones, with the all-encompassing hunger pressing into-out of his skin and all it takes is for the moon to brush her beautiful, silver face across it to call the demons from your soul and change your flesh; when you are like Erik, people whom you get close to invariably end up dead. Normally, because he eats them.

Magda, as much as he had wanted to believe otherwise, had been no exception.

And yet, despite all that he has learned, he wakes after a particularly rough change in a stranger's bed, with no memory of how he had become to be there. This was the most worrying thing of all; because Schmidt had trained his mind to recall his actions when in wolf form, even if his human mind had no control over it; because what good was a hunting dog, a tracking dog, if it couldn't tell him what he wanted to know in the morning?

He scowls at his feet, long and pale against the darkwood flooring, gritting his teeth against the wave of weakness-induced nausea that threatened to overtake his body. Xavier, it seems has remembered his tact and made himself scarce, allowing Erik to fight against his body's better instincts in rather less embarrassment.

Even though he is now alone in the room, and Xavier had left no instructions before leaving, Erik can hear the thud-and-pulse of the plumbing as it rolled into life, and the booming wash of water being run into something large and deep. He can smell it too, all of his senses still heightened from the change; the convection current carrying the fresh, empty scent that typifies soft water with a coppery undertone that Erik does not understand. It flows through the house on air displaced by steam, bringing with it the scent of dust and bergamot and quiet, half-lit rooms.

He follows the sound and the smell, and finds himself in a bathroom larger than many of the apartments that he has lived in. Xavier is leaning over a large, burnished bathtub, the beaten copper gleaming dully in the cloud-shrouded daylight that swarmed in through the long windows.

"I don't know how hot you like it," he says, without turning around, "but I'm inclined to believe that too hot would melt all your wonderful healing." Turning off the taps with firm, even twists, he pushes himself upright on the roll-top lip of the bath and turns to face Erik, smiling. "So, if you like your water scalding, I'm afraid you're just going to have to wait."

Erik stares at him. Charles, seeing his bewildered expression, laughs a little, although not unkindly.

"You've just spent that past three days lying cocooned in your own sweat," he says. "Fever sweat, at that. I'm sure everyone would benefit from an improvement on your current state of hygiene."

Looking away from Xavier and down at the bathtub, where the steaming water traces whirls in its surface and carries with it the sense memory of soothingsoakingwarm; and a bath would certainly loosen the aches that Erik can feel knotted against his spine.

He pushes his fingers against the waistband of his trousers, knocking them down over his hips (Xavier makes himself scare with remarkable alacrity) and stepping out of them on unsteady feet, before lowering himself carefully into the water.

Despite Xavier's comments about temperature, it is still hot and Erik hisses internally as it stings against his wounds; he tenses, momentarily, before deliberately relaxing his muscles one by one, starting with his toes and moving upwards towards his neck. The water flowed around him, sliding into all the creases of his skin and washing away the gritty feeling of old, dried sweat; the heat seeping steadily into his muscles and working hot fingers against the collected lactic acid.

He doesn't relax completely, remains on his guard with his senses twitching as he hears Xavier pottering about further along the floor, and he is still in a stranger's house. He still doesn't know why Xavier is helping him. But he accepts the luxury of the moment, and wraps it up tight in his memories for him to access at a later date, when curling into a corner against the cold that rips through his clothing.

"Right," Charles says, pausing in the middle of the hallway with the bathroom door firmly closed at his back. "Clothes. He can't keep wandering around in just trousers. They are, if nothing else, entirely filthy." He determinedly doesn't think about how Erik had almost shucked his last remaining piece of clothing with Charles standing in front of him, and gnaws instead on the inside of his lower lip.

Where is he to get clothing to fit? Erik is easily a head taller than Charles, with a rather different build to match, so his own clothes are out of the question. Frowning, he looks about him, hoping the walls will offer forth some inspiration.

Kurt's clothing, he thinks. It'd still all be in his damn wardrobe; he has yet to have the inclination to got through it all. Lined up neat and organised and so bloody perfect next to his mother's expensive gowns and day dresses and pearls.

No, he decides, pushing back against the wad on unwanted emotion at the memory. Attic.

It still galls him that his mother consigned all of his father's belongings to the attic when she had remarried; had the staff pack an entire life into boxes and move it out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Charles hadn't been particularly close to his father, but that was more because his father didn’t really like people. Charles had only been a child when he died, and would have only been a distraction. He likes to think, though, that he would have been considered less of an annoyance by his father than by his mother.

The attic is huge and winding, just like the rest of the mansion; filled with dust-sheeted grandfather clocks and portraits of long-dead ancestors whom everyone had long-forgotten their relationship to; everything covered in a thick layer of dust. Everything apart from one corner, where the dust lies a little thinner than the rest of the room; where Charles can look down at the large, dark chest and still see the engraving.

Brian Xavier.

He rubs his thumb over the name, feeling the grooves under his skin, and tries to summon an emotion that is more than a sort of abstract indifference. He doesn't succeed, and tosses open the lid.

"Erik?" he calls through the door. He knocks, carefully balancing the bundle of clothing in his arms as he raps a knuckle against the wood. "I've brought you some clothes. Are you finished?"

"Yes," he hears in response, and it is with only a little trepidation that he pushes the door open, leaning his shoulder into it. Erik, however, is standing with a towel wrapped around his waist, the bathwater steadily draining. The heat from the water has brought the still-healing wounds across his upper torso out in stark, scarlet relief against the rest of his skin.

"I hope these fit," Charles says, handing the bundle over. "I'm afraid I've never been the best judge of clothes size."

"Thank you," Erik said, running his thumb over the cloth in a manner that would have been discrete if Charles hadn't been paying attention. Charles smiles.

"You’re most welcome," he says. "I'll just be outside whilst you change."

"Now," Charles says, leaning back against the worktop with his hands wrapped around a mug of tea, "I'm not going to ask how you ended up bleeding in my kitchen. But -" his eyes latch onto Erik's, and it feels distinctly uncomfortable, like he is seeing too much - "are you in any trouble, Erik? Is there anything that I can do?"

"You've already done more than most would," Erik remarks, drily. Charles fixes him with another searching, knowing look, and Erik bites down on the urge to snarl and rip his throat out.

"It would be nice to know if there's a dangerous, wild animal wandering my grounds," Charles says, and Erik almost laughs at the irony. Almost.

"No," he confirms, "you have no dangerous, wild animals wandering your grounds." Just the one sitting in your kitchen, he adds, internally.

Charles watches him for few moments more, before breaking his gaze to take a long swig of tea. Erik lifts his own cup to his lips, inhaling the steam (Earl Grey, loose leaf; bought in bulk and left in storage, because Erik can taste the dust at the back of his nose) and looking down at the leaves twisting at the bottom of his mug, slowly swelling as they diffuse their flavour into the hot water.

He takes a cautious sip as Charles lowers his own cup.

"Well," Charles says, "that's a relief. And now, Erik," he cocks his head, smiling at Erik, "how're you feeling?"

Erik shrugs, one shoulder moving more freely than the other, movements still constricted by the stretching of healing skin.

"Fine," he says. "Better."

"That's something, then." Charles is still smiling. In Erik's experience, people who smile as much as Charles are using it to hide behind.

"Why are you helping me?" he asks, suddenly, raising his gaze and determinedly pinning Charles with it.

"I already told you," Charles says, deflecting.

"No," Erik argues; "you told me that you don't understand the concept of prudency."

Charles grins. "I did, didn't I?" He rubs his chin with his free hand, looking around the kitchen. He laughs, short and sharp and unexpected, and looks back to Erik. "I get so very lonely," he says, the amusement in his eyes derisive and directed only at himself, "in this ridiculous house. There's only the sodding gardener for company, and I'm fairly sure I'd rather chop off my own foot."

"You wanted a pet," Erik says, his voice flat and anger rising through his bones, threatening to overtake his vision.

Charles is shaking his head, still with that bitter self-deprecation behind his eyes. "No," he says, "no, and I'm sorry. That's not what I meant at all; and I do understand why you'd think that, but -" He stops, sighs, and takes another mouthful of tea. Erik is fighting down the surge of anger, because he's still probably strong enough to shatter the table he is sitting at, fever or no.

"I wanted someone to talk to," Charles continues, after a moment. "And you certainly weren't going anywhere; and I'm almost one hundred percent sure that you didn't want me to call an ambulance." He meets Erik's gaze, then, and Erik knows that he gleans all that he needs to know from Erik's face.

"You wanted a pet," Erik says, again.

"I wanted a friend," Charles corrects. "I'm sorry that I've upset you, Erik; but unless you want to have the police involved by taking a trip to the hospital, you really aren't going anywhere, at least for the next few days."

"I'm not a pet," Erik says, unable to move past Haustier and Fleishwolf. "You can't keep me. You can't make me stay."

"No," Charles says. "But I would very much like you to."

"No," Erik says, "you don’t."

"Erik." Charles leans forward, the lines of his body reading intent and certain. "I have never met someone more interesting that you in my entire life, and I would be honoured if you would allow me the opportunity to get to know you better."

They lock gazes, and Erik means to fight him on this, but he is just so tired, from the walking around this rabbit warren of a home and from squashing down the wolf that wanted to tear everything and feast on its remains.

His head gets caught up on I wanted a friend, and he can't help but think how nice that would be.

Time passes, as is its wont. Erik heals (of course he heals, he always heals, keeps the story of his life written into his skin), far faster than Charles clearly is expecting; he doesn't mention it again, however. Erik cannot decide whether he's pretending it isn't happening, or whether he feels that Erik is sensitive about the subject. He isn't entirely certain about how he feels concerning either event.

Time passes, and Erik heals. Erik heals, and he should leave. Instead, Erik stays.

It is all too easy to fall into a strange sense of routine around Charles, who seems to have sucked Erik into his orbit and is steadily pulling him closer and deeper into his strange, lonely life in his huge, empty house. He's given the run of the place (Charles explains that he is used to spending most of his time confined to the west wing, where the library is situated, so the rest of the house is largely unused); but everything is tidied away and covered up, and the house feels markedly sad, and more than a little forbidding. The walls and floors are dark, hard wood, the glossy sheen adding to the solemn feel. It feels odd, walking the labyrinth of corridors with only the click of his heels for company.

So, he spends most of his time with Charles. He doesn't seem to mind; in fact, despite his insistence that he tends to while away the days with the endless collection of books that the house boasts, Charles is almost eager for the company.

He walked Erik around the entire house, once, explaining the histories behind each of the features as if it were something that he had learned by rote. The knowledge of his ancestral home had evidently been embedded into his brain at an early age, and Erik could sense the distaste wafting from him for much of the tour.

"How do you never get lost?" he asked, once, when Charles lead him through a narrow corridor and they found themselves in a large, open room, wide and circular and almost definitely designed for entertaining.

"I did, when I was very young," Charles said. "It would take me hours to find my way back to my room."

He didn't elaborate, and Erik didn't press. It isn't as though Charles has any real feelings of hostility towards the house; but there is a definite sense of melancholy. Erik can taste it in the stale air of the unused portions, in the way that the ostentatious portraits of Xaviers gone by seem to be watching him as he passes. It is a sensation that he finds difficult to place: whether it is Charles projecting on the house, or the house affecting Charles.

He stays in the room that Charles originally put him in, for simplicity's sake. Every evening, he lies on the alien bed, feeling entirely out of place on duck feather mattresses and heavy linen sheets; he thinks of leaving the following day. He makes the decision, every night, to leave first thing in the morning, to slip quietly out of the door and disappear from Charles' life - because it is the best thing to do. And every morning, he wakes and finds himself thinking just one more day.

They play chess. Charles has an ancient, ornate set, with intricately carved ivory pieces inlaid with gold and tiny, perfect emeralds; it sits in a cupboard in the study adjoining Charles' bedroom, and they play instead with his childhood set. The board is wooden and varnished, the grain of the different shades of wood set at symmetrical angles to one another; the pieces are heavy, stained iron that grow warm beneath Erik's fingers as he rolls them, considering his next move.

He goes to sleep every night with the self-made promise of leaving in the morning; and awakens every day to the thought of one more. Just one more day.

One more day turns into an endless cycle of chess and chores - assisting Charles with opening up the west wing into something more habitable and less sad, clearing out the rooms of dust sheets and leaving windows wide open to draw out the dry air. They roll together, one slipping mindlessly into another as if there is never an option of things changing, of them going back to how they were.

He loses track of time.

The evening rain had cleared the air, but Charles is still finding it difficult to sleep. The sense of ennui that he normally associates with oppressive summer heat has wrapped its fingers around his stomach, settling into his bones with a restless ache that has him tossing between the sheets, unable to find a comfortable position. Thinking it might help settle him, he decides to take a walk; not outside, of course, because everything is still shiny and wet, and the last touch of rain lingers as a mist in the air that Charles can see pressing against his window pane.

Instead, he pads barefoot around the mansion's corridors, meandering with vague intent towards the kitchens with the thought of taking a cup of camomile and a cigarette.

The house, as always, is quiet; the lack of sound is amplified by the long, echoing hallways that spread in infinite darkness before him, the soft sound of his footsteps twisted and absorbed and thrown back at him in weird shapes. But Charles is used to the idiosyncrasies of his familial home, knows to ignore the odd shapes that banister rails and busts throw against the walls, learned to push past the prickle of imagined fear that his imagination creates at the back of his mind. There is no one else in the house; there is nothing here that can hurt him.

Now, Charlie, said Kurt, we both know that's not true.

Charles bites down hard on the thrum of fear that spikes up his spine at the sound of his dead step-father's voice inside his head. The hairs on his nape prickle, lifting horizontal to his skin as goosebumps erupt along his arms.

You're not real, he tells his imagination. So stop it, now, you ridiculous fool.

Don't be like that, Charlie, Kurt says, his voice mocking, a flash of memory imprinting his smirking face on the back of Charles' vision.

Go. Away, Charles thinks, firmly. I am not a child. I will not be frightened of my own house by my imagination.

Still, it takes a conscious effort not to increase his pace, and he finds himself determinedly looking straight-ahead as paranoia stabs at the small of his back.

Behind you, Kurt's voice says, sing-song, and Charles curses his over-active imagination, stimulated too much too early and now allowing figments to run amok all over his brain. He can feel Kurt's voice's continuation pressing at the underside of his consciousness, and he pushes it savagely down coming to get you.

He exits the corridor with an evident increase in pace, and stops in the atrium; the large windows letting what little light from the cloud-covered sky drip in over the wide space. Charles presses a hand to the small of his back, cursing inwardly. He still doesn't look over his shoulder, despite the fact that he knows that no one is there; because if there is, then seeing them will make them real. Provoke them. Whatever.

Look out, Kurt's voice whispers. Look out, look out, there's a madman about.

It is the rhyme that the boys in Charles' dorm used to hiss at one another after lights-out, when the old building would creak and sigh around them.

He's creeping along; he's at your bed -

"Shut up," Charles hisses, his voice too loud in the quiet of the house. The disturbance jolts him, and he bites the inside of his lip to control the clawing of childhood terrors that wish to send him hurtling back to his room, to hide under the covers as if they offer impervious protection against the horrors that lie waiting in the dark.

And, in answer, a very different sound.

It slips up from behind the staircase, delicate and incongruous and sliding over Charles' skin like ice: the sound of padded, heavy footfalls, coming slowly and inconsistently closer to the atrium floor.

Imagination, imagination, imagination, Charles thinks, desperately, chidingly; until his entire brain slams to a halt as a long shadow moves up out of the dark block thrown across the ground by the wall. He stares at it, unable to rationalise its presence with the constant overlay of the rhyme running around and around his mind, interweaving with his thoughts and destroying all potential for reasonable explanations.
Look out, look out: there's a madman about.
He's creeping along; he's at your bed;
He can't wait to see you bled.
You cannot run: your legs he'll cut
And your eyelids will stitch tight shut.
And when he's done, he'll eat your heart,
And flay your body right apart.
Look out, look out: there's a madman about;
He's in your house, he's in your house.

Charles can barely hear over his own rapid heartbeats, and his breath seems caught in his chest; but he can hear breathing from down below: snuffling and heavy. Questing. Scenting.

He can see it now; it has stepped out from the shadows beneath the stairs and Charles is frozen, unable to move or speak or cry out.

Something very tall and very black and very thin.

It isn't even human: its face drags outwards, elongated into a muzzle; there are pointed ears, angled back along its skull. It stands taller than a man, with hands that end in claws and legs that bend in three places, the ankle too far up the leg. It balances on two legs, as a man; but it walks on its toes. Like a dog.

Look out, look out, Kurt whispers in Charles' ear, and his brain is so saturated with fear that he can almost feel Kurt's breath on his skin; there's a wolfman about.

Slowly, the beast turns its head to gaze up at Charles, two storeys above. He finds himself pinned by a pale gaze, the iris lit from the side by a sudden stab of moonlight through the cloud cover; in the new light, Charles can see the beast's lips curl back in a snarl, revealing large, glistening, pointed teeth. The moonlight highlights the tensing and shifting of the muscles in the beast's legs, and Charles' lungs leap into his throat as he recognises the contractions from watching the sprinters at school sports events.

The beast springs forward at the stairs, and Charles flees, running pell-mell down corridors, as far away from the atrium as he can.

Run! his mind screams at him, a cacophony of voices clanging inside his head. Run!

In his blind haste, bare feet slapping against the wood with almost painful force, Charles forgets about the rug in the hallway before him. He catches his foot in it, throwing himself forward and skidding, rolling. He can feel his skin burning as the coarse fabric tears at it, can feel the ache beginning in his ankle from where he fell. The weight of his body and the impact of his fall drags the rug with him across the floor, so it does nothing to prevent his slamming into the wall.

Charles, momentarily stunned, lies panting against the wall, the rug bunched around his legs and back. A snarl and roar echo down the corridor, and Charles' breath falls out of him in a sob as he rolls over and pushes himself upright, casting about for the best way to go.

He can hear it approaching, now that he isn't running; heavy footfalls surrounded by the clack of claws against wood and a deep, continuous growl that vibrates against Charles' skin and paralyses his mind.

He can hear it, just around the corner, just through the last doorway -

The dumb waiter. He can see the entrance to it, the slight change in the panelling where he pushes and the door slides back. Staggering, almost tripping over the bunched rug and his own feet, Charles runs over to it, slams his shoulder into the wood and prays that the box is waiting behind it.

The footsteps have stopped. Charles can hear the beast sniffing, scenting him out as he scrambles headfirst into the dumb waiter and desperately kicks the door closed behind him.

As it slides shut, he catches a glimpse of the savage, wolfish face at the far end of the corridor, teeth bared and eyes glinting in the darkness. The beast charges the wall; Charles can hear it coming, and he violently tugs the ropes that control the waiter so that it rises, pulling himself upwards towards the next floor.

The wood splinters as the door reopens, forced backwards by the strength of the beast - it isn't designed to open unless the waiter is behind it; they had too many accidents with the long, deep shafts before then - and Charles pulls faster, his hands getting caught up in each other in his haste. He expects to hear a roar, a snarl; hell, even howling. But what he hears instead sounds eerily, horrifically, like laughter. Followed by the dull snick of the rope being cut.

Charles screams as he falls.

His mind distances itself from him, leaving a pulsing, ringing white noise pressing against the backs of his eyes and a strange numbness in his limbs.

An out of body experience, he thinks, with the part of his mind that is hovering over his left shoulder, watching the skin flay off the palms of his hands with a calm, detached curiosity. Fascinating.

He can feel the rope shredding the skin from his palms, can register the fact that coarse weave is slicing deeper and deeper into his hands and that it's his blood lubricating it, that the rope is tearing at his fingernails, breaking them into ragged splinters; but the pain is strangely distant, pummelling futilely against the tinnitus that is fogging his brain. All of his senses seem dulled; which is odd, because he is certain that fear is meant to enhance one's senses in order to prepare for fight-or-flight.

Completely pathetic, Kurt says, joining his mind on his left shoulder. Almost every other creature has that instinct. What are you, a possum?

The waiter shudders as the safety tries to kick in; the rubber brakes lining the sides of the shaft grip and shriek as he tumbles past them, the clamps attempting to slow his descent before he hits free-fall.

Well, says Kurt, at least something is working as it should. Which is more than I can say for you, my lad.

There is a section two feet below the final opening in the shaft that is designed as a point of no return: a thick band of chalked rubber fastened through the walls with four-inch long steel spikes, followed by a wire net pulled taut half a foot below. This final brake causes the shaft to become slightly too small for the waiter to pass though, and is supposed to clench the box tight enough so that it can come to rest on the netting. However, depending on the weight and the speed of falling, it is entirely possible that the waiter will crash straight through the rubber band and through the netting; in this case, both are designed in order to slow the waiter enough so that, when it comes to its final stop at the base of the shaft, a further five feet below, the box itself would not crumple and kill any persons within.

Charles knows the exact moment when the waiter hits this final brake, because the whole box jolts. The movement slams him upwards and forwards, smacking his head into the roof of the waiter and hurling him back into his own skin. He feels the deceleration further when it meets the netting: the metal bends, bows, and breaks beneath the force of the waiter, and the metal screams against the walls as he falls the final distance.

The waiter crashes into the shaft floor with the sound of popping welds and shattering wood, and a single, searing pain just above his right knee. He cannot gather enough breath to scream, and instead pants ragged, wet sobs as he reaches down and touches a long, damp splinter that has pierced the side of his thigh.

He can taste bad coffee at the back of his mouth, a strange, harsh scent-taste behind his nose; it is only after he swipes his tongue across his lips and tastes hot, rich copper that he realises that it is blood. He cannot remember when he hit his nose hard enough to make it bleed, but the scientist in him hopes that it is the result of a direct impact, and not some internal injury. He really doesn't want to die at the bottom of a lift shaft.

He forces the roof of the waiter open, and struggles upright. The shaft is entirely dark; the kind of all-encompassing blackness that feels like a physical entity, wrapping long fingers around his arms and rubbing the hairs upright so that goosebumps prickle across his skin. He cannot see anything, not the walls around him, not the opening above him, not his hand in front of his face. Panic grips the back of his throat, and despair leeches over his brain stem.

I can't do it, he thinks. I'm stuck.

For God's sake, Charles, his mother says, irritation carrying down through years and memories. It still hurts. You're not a child. Stop whining; you're making a scene.

I am not a child, he repeats to himself. I am thirty fucking years old. I am a grown man, and I am not afraid.

He doesn't pull the splinter out; he cannot see it, and would most likely cause more damage that he would prevent. The wood drags and pulls with rough edges at the inside of his leg, sending electric sparks of pain up Charles' spine that narrow his vision and make him feel light-headed.

Even standing on top of the ruined waiter, he is still too short to reach the edges of the opening; briefly, he considers staying. Surely the shaft is too narrow for that - thing to follow him down here. The thought dances around the edges of his consciousness, teasing and tempting, but he clamps down on it. A dangerous, intelligent animal is loose in his home, on his grounds; he has no way of contacting any form of authority more equipped to deal with it. This is his responsibility.

No one knows his house better than him; Charles spent a great deal of his childhood in boarding schools on the other side of the world, but there were many long, lonely holidays in which he had nothing better to do than discover every secret of this vast, winding house that was to be his inheritance. He takes a half-step forward, his leg bent at the knee as his bare toes slide into the carefully-cut foothold in the side of the shaft. He braces himself, palms flat against the wall and fingers gripping tight into the holes above him, and raises his injured leg.

Pain flares, bright and clear and Charles sways, his fingers slipping. He catches himself before he can fall, however, and pushes the bliss of unconsciousness away. Blood curls around his mouth, fresh and hot; he has bitten his tongue. He blinks, once, the only allowance he will permit to pain and fear, and the tears wash lines through the crusted blood on his face.

He climbs.

The cut-outs lead directly to the opening in the basement - the kitchens, more precisely - having been built for maintenance work and in the rare occasion that someone might become trapped at the bottom of the shaft. Their existence is written into the official blueprints of the mansion, and is a piece of information dictated to every new member of staff that enters the household.

What isn't on the plans is the fact that they continue farther than the opening. At three feet below the opening, just below the ragged remainder of the steel netting, Charles shifts his grip carefully and takes one step to the left. He has to raise his foot in order to find the hole, but that is only to be expected; the last time he climbed this wall, he was ten years old.

He has almost entirely resorted to hauling himself up to the next hole by his arms alone; the repeated pressure on his leg is making him shake and sweat, which is hardly helpful, especially considering that he was currently seven feet above a tangled mess of iron and wood with no way of stopping himself if he fell. Breathing in sharp pants that hiss through his teeth, he pulls himself higher.

Next to the opening, he pauses. He can hear no sound from the kitchens, cannot even smell the heavy, wet musk that he associates with dogs. It could still be there, though, waiting on the other side of the wall, listening to Charles listening to it.

Unhelpful, he chides himself. Good God, man. It's a wonder you ever get anything done.

He climbs higher.

There are several places throughout the mansion where the wall cavities are accessible from the outside by methods other than the official duct system; rather more than Charles' teenage self thought viable for security reasons. There are a few, most notably in the basement and on the second floor, that lead into the hidden tunnels that the Xaviers of previous centuries had used in the underground railroad. The network is long and twisting, and Charles only knows a small portion of it. As a child, he had used gypsy signs to prevent him getting lost as he explored under the pretext of 'keeping out of the way'.

One of these rather more illicit entrances into the space between the walls opens into the lift shaft; Charles hasn't figured out whether this was accidental, that the builders forged through the walls when they sank the shaft, or whether it was designed as such. The placing of the hand holds implies the latter, but Charles supposes that they could have been carved in once the gap was discovered.

For his ten-year-old self, it hadn't been difficult to fit himself into the gap; but Charles is no longer a child, and even though he cannot be considered a big man in any sense, it is a far tighter fit that he remembers. His breath is coming in short, heavy gasps through his nose as he finally worms his way over the jagged lip and into the gap, fingers scrabbling ahead of him for some form of grip, to haul his lower body up after him.

A long moment passes as Charles lies there, feet still dangling over the edge of the passage. The thick layer of dust mingles with the sheen of sweat covering his face and lingers in his breath; it tangles in the creases around his eyes, stirred into movement by the exhausted fluttering of his eyelashes. He tries to formulate a plan, but whenever his brain meets the fact that there is an apparently preternatural (he refuses, refuses supernatural) being wandering his halls, it slithers over it as though the concept is inimical to the touch. Even when he thinks in the extremist hypothetical, he still gets stuck on the simple fact of what it is.

He can feel the pricklings of despondent despair at the back of his eyes, and the damp touch of tears gathering against the dust below his face. He screws his eyes tight shut against it, and forces himself to his feet.

Can't stay here, crying in the dark like a baby, he thinks, gritting his teeth against the pain in his leg. Got to be up and doing. Only way about it.

It's a long, slow journey through the walls of the house, Charles limping sideways down the narrow passageways and clambering inelegantly up the inside to reach a higher floor. But, eventually, he stops, pauses, and tries to visualise the interior of the house. If he's got it right - and it has been an awfully long time since he's done this sort of thing, then he should be opposite Cain's childhood bedroom. Just a matter of finding the way into it -

His toe snags on something left on the ground near the wall; he bends down, as much as he is able, and carefully gropes for it. Something wooden, and poorly carved, but Charles recognises it as a wooden stake, one that could be driven into the mortar; which would imply that his guess was almost entirely wrong. There is no other reason that such a thing should be here, inside the walls, except if it is one of Charles' markers for important rooms: the rooms he should not enter.

The entrance through the wall is a few steps ahead of him, and awkward to fit himself through mostly because it is set low down, and he is forced to wiggle through it on his stomach. It is still very dark, and there are no lamps on for Charles to view the room by; but his night vision has fully kicked in by this point, and he recognises the room even without the aid of light. Father's study.

Carefully, quietly, he moves around the heavy, ornate oak desk to stand next to the imposing leather chair behind it; he never came in here, not even when his father was alive. The only times he was ever permitted entrance was when Father had directly requested his presence, usually to test him on something complicated that he felt Charles' should know and understand. Charles rarely did.

Just because you don't understand something, Father would say, when Charles would get aggravated and tearful at not being able to answer, doesn't mean it's not real. Now, Charles; ignore what you've been taught, and tell me what you see.

Charles squeezes the back of the chair, one hand tightening briefly over the ancient leather before letting go. He steps around the desk and over to the far side of the room; wrapping his fingers around the reassuringly cool and solid handle of the poker, he hefts the weight in one hand and heads into the adjoining bathroom. He needs to do something about his leg.

The bathroom hasn't been used for a long as the study; Kurt, when he moved in, used a different room on the other side of the house. Charles doubts it was out of deference to his father's memory. Even so, there are still linens in the cupboard and scissors in the cabinet, and Charles has never been more grateful for a bathroom without windows as he flicks on the shaving light and looks down at his leg.

The sight of it, with blood staining his pajama leg a dark rust-brown, and the savage point of the splinter sticking out through it, sends a wave of faintness up his body like a spreading wash of numbness; his vision narrows dramatically, fogging at the edges and making him blink hard. He opens his eyes to the feel of cold enamel under his hand and relief to find himself still upright. Biting down on the drag of unconciousness, he fumbles the cap from the medicinal alcohol and takes a long pull. Then, he wraps his fingers around the bloodied end of the splinter, and tugs it free.

He bites through his lip, tears of pain and shock gathering and falling; they are only joined by new ones when he splashes the alcohol over the wound with a shaking hand. Deep, shuddering breaths, and Charles cuts away the fabric sticking to the wound, soaked free from his skin by the alcohol. The gauze dressing stings as he puts it on, the filaments catching at the raw edges of his skin as he presses down on it. Carefully but firmly binding it in strips of linen, Charles delicately tests it. It hurts, but not as much as before he removed the splinter, and blood does not immediately soak through the bandage; so he counts this as a win.

Next thing: identify where the beast is.

One step at a time, he thinks. Break down the problem into sections that make sense.

He switches off the light and steps back into the study, standing with the door to the bathroom at his back as his night vision reasserts itself. Flexing his grip on the poker handle, he heads out of the door and into the dark corridor.

Will he be able to bank of the element of surprise? If he assumes that the beast deliberately cut the rope knowing it would send Charles hurtling to his death, is it logical to assume that it has figured out his continued survival? And, assuming its intelligence, should he consider himself to still be hunted?

Charles pads through the night-filled corridors of his home, mind flitting over chess strategies for capturing the queen and the stalking sessions of his youth, tracking deer through the woods of the estate. He knows how to move silently, how to position his body so that the shadows conceal him even when he isn't within them, how to hunt a wily creature through its own terrain.

He had even seen a wolf, once; just a lone one, perhaps a scout, although Charles hadn't thought so at the time. To him, squinting down the sights of his hunting rifle, the wolf looked too broad and powerful to take a position in a pack any lower than beta. Besides, the estate didn't have any wolf packs - they were forced off the grounds by the keepers, headed off back towards Canada. The thrill of seeing it was a mix of fear and enraptured adrenaline that smacked him in the gut and behind his eyes, sharpening and defocusing his vision simultaneously, leaving him with a giddy headrush that had him grinning helplessly to himself when lying in the dark that night.

When his guide (Charles would always, always think of them as 'handlers') had seen the wolf as well, he'd taken one look at Charles and touched his shoulder with two fingers; I understand, it said, I know how you feel.

Charles had never had anyone to share something like that with before. It's a novel experience.

So, he's not entirely at the disadvantage. Certainly, he's injured, almost entirely inequipped, and is up against a creature that is just as intelligent as any human opponent with the added bonus of heightened senses and whatever other animalistic traits it possesses. Completely outclassed by his opponent. But Charles has one advantage. Hunted he may be, but this is his home, where not even the servants knew all of the hidden passageways and blocked-up rooms. This is his trump card, and he's damned if he isn't going to exploit every last piece of it.