Woke Up In the Storm
Title: Woke Up In the Storm
Rating: PG-13
Words: 3,430
Summary: Sequel to All the Love You Stole, which can be found here. What Charles did to Erik worked fine while he had continual access to Erik's mind; unfortunately for him, after the end of First Class, he doesn't. All credit for this idea goes to uniformly, for asking me in this comment about a possibility which I had until then entirely failed to think of.
Erik feels Charles’ absence like an almost physical sensation: a hole in his chest, a piece of himself carved away. Maybe it’s a part of his mind that’s gone, left back in Westchester with the people he abandoned. Maybe Charles is still holding on to part of him.
He wonders whether Charles feels this too.
He doesn’t go with Raven when she returns to the mansion to collect her things. He writes a list for her of what he wants her to bring back of his - clothes, mostly - and with an intense effort they all pretend that these things are important. She comes back an inch from crying, and words start to spill from her mouth almost the second she sees him: a frantic near-incoherent stream, but some of them stand out, razor-edged. Wheelchair, Erik hears, doctors, and paralysis. Raven’s lion-gold eyes are shining with tears. Permanent.
He thinks of Charles running races with Hank in the mansion’s grounds, and feels nausea rolling, thick and oily, in his stomach.
He fights it back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says to Raven, because maybe offering someone else condolence will counter anything he feels himself. It’s only when the words are already hanging in the air that he thinks it sounds less like sympathy than an apology. Charles’ voice, breathless: she didn’t do this, you did. Of course he did. Charles gave Erik his trust, his love, his faith: bright and lovely and fragile things. Of course Erik broke them. What else would he do?
Raven nods and makes an mm-hmm noise, pressing her lips together because she doesn’t trust herself to say anything else.
‘Did he,’ Erik begins, and hears his voice come out rough-edged. He tries to control it. This thing with Charles is over, was doomed from the beginning, and he must start as he means to go on.
He allows himself to ask, this once, because nothing is ever that easy. ‘Did he say anything about me?’
Raven closes her eyes, opens them; fixes them on a point to Erik’s left, far in the distance. ‘He wouldn’t say anything,’ she says. Her voice is choked, and very quiet.
Erik’s mind is spinning images of Charles in a wheelchair, as Raven must have seen him. Charles, confined to a wheelchair; it seems impossible, incontrovertibly wrong. They sit heavy in his chest, a weight on his lungs, so that every breath he takes is an effort. He knows, already, that they will be there forever; he will never be able to forget that he has done this, or make amends. He wonders if it will ever get easier.
***
For the first week or so after Cuba, Erik dreams in unnatural clarity. The usual hazy images are replaced by crystalline visions of Charles, of Westchester; of himself, his helmet gone, on the doorstep. Coming home. The pictures are far clearer and far more coherent than any of the vague, illogical blurs which are all Erik can usually remember of his dreams, but there is something artificial about them, like a painting done in exacting detail with an impossibly fine brush, but still indisputably two-dimensional.
He wakes from these dreams over and over again, through the night, with want running over his skin like an itch. He could go back. He could be there within minutes, with Azazel. Charles would welcome him back with open arms -
And yet, every time his eyes snap open, these thoughts are followed within seconds by Erik reassuring himself that he is far out of range of Charles’ mind, that his helmet is within feet of him and can fly to his hands with a thought.
After a while, the desperate dreams begin to fade, and Erik can feel his own relief, even if he doesn’t fully understand it. He thinks back to that night he tried to leave theCIA facility - when he’d only spoken to Charles a handful of times, before it all became so damn complicated - and shocks himself by wondering, with a quiet, detached curiosity, why he stayed.
***
It gets easier - of course it does - and there is a new difficulty in that. Erik thinks of Charles, now, and he misses him, and he feels guilty, but it’s not the same towering, breathless pain that he felt only, what, a week or two ago? and he is almost disgusted at his own speed of recovery. The loss of Charles, and the clawing guilt, were awful; but to Erik there was a masochistic element of justice there. After what he had done, surely he deserved to hurt.
‘Left a bit of a hole in my life, if I’m honest,’ he says conversationally to Emma Frost, and yet already the hole seems to be healing, and Erik knows that it shouldn’t be. After all, Charles won’t.
The weeks he spent with Charles were almost certainly the happiest of his life, and so, Erik thinks, the lack of lasting pain must be his own fault. He thinks back, deliberately, to before Cuba, to the last night he spent with Charles, looks over his memories alone, and there’s - God, there’s nothing there. There’s the faint, familiar guilt that touches just about every memory of Charles he has, and probably always will, but it’s not much more than the guilt Erik would feel if his actions had crippled a stranger rather than the only man he has ever loved; he searches himself for any real emotion and nothing.
What kind of person is he becoming, that he can do what he has done, lose what he has lost, and be left without scars? He tries out the sound of some possible answers: psychopath, maybe, or simply monster. The words taste acidic in his mouth. The revulsion he feels for himself, at least, seems real.
***
He doesn’t know when he first has the thought: perhaps he wakes one morning with it already fully-formed in his mind, or perhaps it strikes him out of the blue, or perhaps it’s been there since the start and until now he simply refused to consider it. All Erik knows is that at some point it becomes difficult to think beyond the memories that suddenly swirl up into his mind like mud disturbed beneath water. Erik, completely fixated on leaving the CIA as soon as possible, abruptly changing his mind. His confusion at the feelings he was having toward another man, when he’d never had the slightest inclination in that direction before, and then the surprisingly easy acceptance. And the picture of Charles, over and over and endlessly over again, with two fingers touched lightly to his temple.
He hates himself even more for so much as suspecting anything like that, Charles would never, of course not; but he can’t stop himself from thinking of his helmet, and feeling intensely grateful.
***
Raven - no, Mystique now, Erik corrects himself - is doing yoga in her room when he knocks on the door, arching herself elegantly into some impossible position. The strength and flexibility of her natural body are astounding - Erik has been teaching her some basic combat techniques, and she picks it up faster than he would ever have expected - and he thinks with some regret of the years she spent ignoring her gifts (and Charles let her, an internal, disloyal part of him adds).
She stretches out on the yoga mat with a new and gratifying self-assurance, vivid and startling and beautiful. ‘What is it?’
‘Charles told me once,’ Erik says cautiously, ‘that he promised you never to…’ He touches two fingers to his forehead in a brief imitation of Charles’ usual gesture, and she nods. ‘Did he keep to that?’
Mystique frowns. ‘You mean he didn’t…No, of course not.’
‘If he had,’ Erik says quietly - and he isn’t sure, now, that he wants to continue this, but it’s as though now that he’s started this train of thought he can’t stop - ‘how would you know?’
She tilts her head, opens her mouth, then pauses, confusion clear on this lovely inhuman face of hers. ‘He wouldn’t,’ she says eventually, with a certainty Erik envies. ‘He promised not to read my mind, he wouldn’t do that. I know him.’
She does know Charles, of course, after all those years. Erik wonders whether he did.
***
It’s another day or two before Erik can bring himself to ask the obvious person. The expert, so to speak.
Emma sits at her desk, admittedly lovely in her ridiculously revealing clothing, writing down for Erik the details of the Hellfire Club’s various properties and bank accounts: the tools of a revolution which Erik has managed, in some surreal way, to inherit from Shaw. When he opens the door she has already turned to face him, with a smile like light on snow. ‘Magneto,’ she says, with only a slight curl of sarcasm. ‘How can I help you?’
It surprised Erik, how quickly she came to stand by him. He doesn’t really know how much was between her and Shaw; more, he suspects, than her cool acceptance and readiness to join Erik would imply, but then, he isn’t Charles. He doesn’t know.
‘Your telepathy,’ he says. His thoughts are twisting furiously with anxiety, stress, suspicion, and he can’t bring himself to bother with idle greetings. ‘Can I ask you a few things?’
‘Of course,’ she says smoothly.
‘It’s not as strong as Xavier’s, is it?’
Her lips tighten slightly at the bluntness of his criticism. ‘No.’
‘Can you change people’s thoughts? Not their perceptions, I mean, their…opinions toward something. Have you ever done that?’
She arches an eyebrow. She probably knows exactly where Erik is going with this. ‘Occasionally. Yes.’
‘Is that permanent?’
She looks at him, and the ice-bright smile doesn’t change, but there’s a certain thoughtfulness in her eyes. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It wears off after a while, if I don’t maintain it. Artificial thoughts fade.’
The truth, with this final confirmation, solidifies all of Erik’s guilty suspicions, clicks them into place like the tumblers of a lock. Understanding, now, it’s hard to see how he didn’t realise all along. He thinks of the hours upon hours he spent with Charles: training the children with him, talking over endless chess games, learning the lines of his body; quietly falling into what Erik thought, what Charles made him think, was love.
‘Are you alright?’ Emma asks him, by her standards gently.
Erik forces back the nausea, and says roughly, ‘I’m fine. Can you get someone a message for me?’
***
It’s Sean who meets him at the gate. He smiles warily, and greets Erik awkwardly but without rancour; clearly he has no more idea what to say in this kind of situation than Erik does. His eyes flick over the helmet, of course, taking in the dull gleam of the metal and all that it implies, but he doesn’t comment. Erik is grateful.
‘He’s happy that you’re here,’ Sean says absently, at one point, as they walk up toward the house. ‘He misses you. I mean, he really misses you.’
‘I’m not staying,’ Erik says.
‘Sorry, man, it’s none of my business, but were you and him…?’
Sean doesn’t finish the sentence, tactfully enough, but, given the circumstances, without the exact semantics of the question it’s difficult for Erik to answer. He considers for a while, and eventually says, ‘It’s complicated.’
It’s answer enough. Sean pauses, and then shrugs and makes a vaguely accepting eh noise. Erik bites his lip and doesn’t disillusion the boy. Erik can only wish that their…whatever it was…were innocent enough to be worthy of indifference.
Erik doesn’t follow when they reach the door and Sean makes to go inside.
‘He’s in his study,’ Sean says uncertainly.
Out of the question; they used to play chess there. This whole damn house is saturated with the memories that used to be good ones. If Erik had been prepared to so much as be in the same state as Charles without his helmet, he would have wanted to do this in some anonymous public place, but at least he can try and find somewhere on the Xavier property that hasn’t been coloured with Charles’ lies.
‘Can you tell him I’ll be here?’ he says.
Sean sighs and nods, reaches for the door.
‘Wait,’ Erik says on impulse, because he and Charles weren’t the only people on that beach.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Erik says, and means it. ‘Tell the others.’
Sean looks at him for a long time, and then smiles. ‘Thanks,’ he says simply, sincerely, before he turns to go inside.
***
Charles is pale and looks impossibly tired, his eyes dark-shadowed, but they flood with longing the second he catches Erik’s eyes, wheeling surprisingly smoothly forward over the grass. Probably Hank’s doing; he must have built the chair. There’s something in Charles’ face which Erik remembers, but doesn’t feel: love, and loss. He looks as though he has been grieving.
It didn’t occur to Erik until this moment to consider that, regardless of his twisted feelings for Charles, Charles might have felt something entirely real for him.
‘Erik, God, I’m so glad you’re here,’ Charles calls the second he gets within reasonable speaking distance, voice bright with happiness. He continues to move closer, to within one or two feet of Erik, staring at him with something like wonder. His eyes skim over the helmet, crease briefly with hurt, but return to Erik’s face, reverently taking him in. A pause, and then, ‘I missed you,’ Charles says, almost tentatively.
‘Yes,’ Erik says. ‘I missed you too.’ It’s not a lie, if you factor in the past tense. He adds, ‘I’m so sorry about the…’ and makes a small gesture, allowing the sentence to end there so he doesn’t have to say the word, because regardless of why Erik is here and what he feels for the man in front of him there are some things which have to be said. ‘I’m sorry. I never intended this to happen.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Charles says, too quickly. Forgiveness shouldn’t, surely, be so easy? He looks down at the grass for a few seconds, the first time his eyes have left Erik’s face, and says, ‘You’re not staying.’
‘No,’ Erik says. ‘I’m here to talk.’
‘I’m glad you came.’ Charles smiles, bright and brilliant, and the pain briefly disappears from his face. ‘What did you want to talk about?’
Erik can’t deny that on the way here he went through endless iterations of this conversation in his mind, but the Charles he imagined speaking to there was cold, implacable. The person who warped Erik’s emotions into some twisted facsimile of love for his own amusement. He doesn’t know what to say to this fragile creature who looks at him with genuine adoration, smiles radiantly with a face that looks used to tears.
‘Erik?’
There’s a bench a few yards away; Erik walks over, sits down. Charles follows him and turns the wheelchair so that they face each other. Erik meets Charles’ eyes and thinks of their endless chess games. They were so simple, with their well-defined strategies and gambits; the board divided in black-and-white, clear-cut squares.
He finds the words: blunt, ugly, but they’ll do. ‘Did you do something to my head?’ he asks, quietly.
Charles stares at him in unguarded shock for two or three interminable seconds, and then - Erik sees it as if in torturous slow-motion - closes his eyes.
‘Oh God.’ The world, no, really, is starting to spin. Erik buries his face in his hands, inhales deeply. ‘Oh God,’ he says, again, indistinctly; the edges of the words blur together. ‘Charles, you - What did you do to me?’
‘Erik,’ Charles says, his voice wavering, ‘you don’t understand - ’
‘What the fuck -’ Erik cuts him off, shouting, now, ‘ - did you do?’
Charles looks at him pleadingly. ‘Erik, I’m so sorry, I just…I wanted…’
‘You made me think I was in love with you!’ Erik snaps. His voice is too loud, shattering the still air of the gardens like steel breaking glass. He makes an effort to control it. ‘Jesus, Charles. You know, I was half-mad, missing you, the first few days after Cuba. Blaming myself, hating myself for what I did to you. And then I just stopped. I stopped feeling anything for you. And then I hated myself for not loving you! Do you realise how much you fucked me up? Do you realise what you, what you did to me, without my consent?’ He’s shouting again. Impossible to stop. ‘Do you even care?’
‘Yes,’ Charles says, instantly. ‘Yes, I care, Erik, I’m sorry and I didn’t know.’ His eyes flick up, to the sky; down, to the ground. He’s stopped looking at Erik. One hand moves up to his face - on reflex, Erik thinks - and at the last second Charles bites his lip and runs it through his hair instead. ‘I love you,’ he says, with a simplicity that Erik might once have found romantic, or endearing, if sentimental; that now merely seems helpless. Charles is so accustomed, Erik thinks bitterly, to using his power to tell people exactly what he wants to without bothering to shape it into words, or to simply forcing them to agree with him, that he doesn’t know how to talk to Erik without it.
Erik looks up at the sky - pale, empty blue, appearing deceptively close - bites his tongue, and says nothing.
‘What are you thinking?’
The words slip out, clearly unintentional; Charles snaps his mouth shut almost immediately as if he wants to take them back. If I weren’t wearing the helmet, he could, Erik reminds himself. Maybe he’s done that to me before. How would I know?
‘You have no right,’ he says levelly, ‘to know that. You never did.’
‘No - no, of course not - I’m sorry.’ Charles jerkily rakes a hand through his hair again. It’s a gesture that he seems familiar with now, this aborted attempt to reach for his powers, but Erik doesn’t remember having seen it before. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he says quietly, in a tone of voice that makes Erik think he’s rephrasing the same question.
What Erik wants catches him by surprise: he wants, with a stupid, visceral insistence, to take off the helmet. To allow Charles into his mind and let him drown in the floods of violation and betrayal and sheer revulsion, because, in all of the languages Erik speaks, there aren’t enough words to make Charles understand how it feels, what he did.
He doesn’t do it, of course, because it’s love that makes people do things like that, and Erik knows now that he isn’t in love, and never was.
‘What would I have felt for you,’ he says distantly, ‘if you hadn’t decided to fuck with my head?’
‘I don’t know,’ Charles says. Too fast, again.
‘Yes, you do,’ Erik says with certainty. ‘God, Charles, don’t you think that after all you’ve done, I have a right?’
Charles closes his eyes, and doesn’t speak for several moments. Then he says, in a tiny voice, ‘You respected me. You liked me. We would have been friends.’
‘We’re not, now.’
‘I know,’ Charles says softly, staring at the floor. ‘I…’ He pauses, and then says tentatively, ‘I don’t hold it against you, the…what happened on the beach. Do you think you could ever forgive me?’
‘If you could,’ Erik says, the helmet a reassuring weight on his head, his neck, ‘would you make me?’
Charles doesn’t - can’t? - answer, which is answer enough.
Erik stands, abruptly, and Charles gazes up at him with wide eyes, pleading. ‘I was thinking, by the way,’ Erik says, quietly - and there’s a perverse pleasure in hurting Charles with the truth, when Charles has spent so long lying to Erik with the very core of his being - ‘that at least Shaw allowed me the luxury of hating him.’
Charles inhales, sharply, as if Erik has hit him, and his eyes shine with half-suppressed tears. They’re grey, in the pale light, as though the vivid blue that Erik remembers has been leached out of them; not, of course, that he can trust his memories. Not now.
Charles is still staring at the ground, not speaking, when Erik walks away, and he doesn’t have to turn around to know that Charles doesn’t look up to watch him go.
Rating: PG-13
Words: 3,430
Summary: Sequel to All the Love You Stole, which can be found here. What Charles did to Erik worked fine while he had continual access to Erik's mind; unfortunately for him, after the end of First Class, he doesn't. All credit for this idea goes to uniformly, for asking me in this comment about a possibility which I had until then entirely failed to think of.
Erik feels Charles’ absence like an almost physical sensation: a hole in his chest, a piece of himself carved away. Maybe it’s a part of his mind that’s gone, left back in Westchester with the people he abandoned. Maybe Charles is still holding on to part of him.
He wonders whether Charles feels this too.
He doesn’t go with Raven when she returns to the mansion to collect her things. He writes a list for her of what he wants her to bring back of his - clothes, mostly - and with an intense effort they all pretend that these things are important. She comes back an inch from crying, and words start to spill from her mouth almost the second she sees him: a frantic near-incoherent stream, but some of them stand out, razor-edged. Wheelchair, Erik hears, doctors, and paralysis. Raven’s lion-gold eyes are shining with tears. Permanent.
He thinks of Charles running races with Hank in the mansion’s grounds, and feels nausea rolling, thick and oily, in his stomach.
He fights it back. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says to Raven, because maybe offering someone else condolence will counter anything he feels himself. It’s only when the words are already hanging in the air that he thinks it sounds less like sympathy than an apology. Charles’ voice, breathless: she didn’t do this, you did. Of course he did. Charles gave Erik his trust, his love, his faith: bright and lovely and fragile things. Of course Erik broke them. What else would he do?
Raven nods and makes an mm-hmm noise, pressing her lips together because she doesn’t trust herself to say anything else.
‘Did he,’ Erik begins, and hears his voice come out rough-edged. He tries to control it. This thing with Charles is over, was doomed from the beginning, and he must start as he means to go on.
He allows himself to ask, this once, because nothing is ever that easy. ‘Did he say anything about me?’
Raven closes her eyes, opens them; fixes them on a point to Erik’s left, far in the distance. ‘He wouldn’t say anything,’ she says. Her voice is choked, and very quiet.
Erik’s mind is spinning images of Charles in a wheelchair, as Raven must have seen him. Charles, confined to a wheelchair; it seems impossible, incontrovertibly wrong. They sit heavy in his chest, a weight on his lungs, so that every breath he takes is an effort. He knows, already, that they will be there forever; he will never be able to forget that he has done this, or make amends. He wonders if it will ever get easier.
***
For the first week or so after Cuba, Erik dreams in unnatural clarity. The usual hazy images are replaced by crystalline visions of Charles, of Westchester; of himself, his helmet gone, on the doorstep. Coming home. The pictures are far clearer and far more coherent than any of the vague, illogical blurs which are all Erik can usually remember of his dreams, but there is something artificial about them, like a painting done in exacting detail with an impossibly fine brush, but still indisputably two-dimensional.
He wakes from these dreams over and over again, through the night, with want running over his skin like an itch. He could go back. He could be there within minutes, with Azazel. Charles would welcome him back with open arms -
And yet, every time his eyes snap open, these thoughts are followed within seconds by Erik reassuring himself that he is far out of range of Charles’ mind, that his helmet is within feet of him and can fly to his hands with a thought.
After a while, the desperate dreams begin to fade, and Erik can feel his own relief, even if he doesn’t fully understand it. He thinks back to that night he tried to leave theCIA facility - when he’d only spoken to Charles a handful of times, before it all became so damn complicated - and shocks himself by wondering, with a quiet, detached curiosity, why he stayed.
***
It gets easier - of course it does - and there is a new difficulty in that. Erik thinks of Charles, now, and he misses him, and he feels guilty, but it’s not the same towering, breathless pain that he felt only, what, a week or two ago? and he is almost disgusted at his own speed of recovery. The loss of Charles, and the clawing guilt, were awful; but to Erik there was a masochistic element of justice there. After what he had done, surely he deserved to hurt.
‘Left a bit of a hole in my life, if I’m honest,’ he says conversationally to Emma Frost, and yet already the hole seems to be healing, and Erik knows that it shouldn’t be. After all, Charles won’t.
The weeks he spent with Charles were almost certainly the happiest of his life, and so, Erik thinks, the lack of lasting pain must be his own fault. He thinks back, deliberately, to before Cuba, to the last night he spent with Charles, looks over his memories alone, and there’s - God, there’s nothing there. There’s the faint, familiar guilt that touches just about every memory of Charles he has, and probably always will, but it’s not much more than the guilt Erik would feel if his actions had crippled a stranger rather than the only man he has ever loved; he searches himself for any real emotion and nothing.
What kind of person is he becoming, that he can do what he has done, lose what he has lost, and be left without scars? He tries out the sound of some possible answers: psychopath, maybe, or simply monster. The words taste acidic in his mouth. The revulsion he feels for himself, at least, seems real.
***
He doesn’t know when he first has the thought: perhaps he wakes one morning with it already fully-formed in his mind, or perhaps it strikes him out of the blue, or perhaps it’s been there since the start and until now he simply refused to consider it. All Erik knows is that at some point it becomes difficult to think beyond the memories that suddenly swirl up into his mind like mud disturbed beneath water. Erik, completely fixated on leaving the CIA as soon as possible, abruptly changing his mind. His confusion at the feelings he was having toward another man, when he’d never had the slightest inclination in that direction before, and then the surprisingly easy acceptance. And the picture of Charles, over and over and endlessly over again, with two fingers touched lightly to his temple.
He hates himself even more for so much as suspecting anything like that, Charles would never, of course not; but he can’t stop himself from thinking of his helmet, and feeling intensely grateful.
***
Raven - no, Mystique now, Erik corrects himself - is doing yoga in her room when he knocks on the door, arching herself elegantly into some impossible position. The strength and flexibility of her natural body are astounding - Erik has been teaching her some basic combat techniques, and she picks it up faster than he would ever have expected - and he thinks with some regret of the years she spent ignoring her gifts (and Charles let her, an internal, disloyal part of him adds).
She stretches out on the yoga mat with a new and gratifying self-assurance, vivid and startling and beautiful. ‘What is it?’
‘Charles told me once,’ Erik says cautiously, ‘that he promised you never to…’ He touches two fingers to his forehead in a brief imitation of Charles’ usual gesture, and she nods. ‘Did he keep to that?’
Mystique frowns. ‘You mean he didn’t…No, of course not.’
‘If he had,’ Erik says quietly - and he isn’t sure, now, that he wants to continue this, but it’s as though now that he’s started this train of thought he can’t stop - ‘how would you know?’
She tilts her head, opens her mouth, then pauses, confusion clear on this lovely inhuman face of hers. ‘He wouldn’t,’ she says eventually, with a certainty Erik envies. ‘He promised not to read my mind, he wouldn’t do that. I know him.’
She does know Charles, of course, after all those years. Erik wonders whether he did.
***
It’s another day or two before Erik can bring himself to ask the obvious person. The expert, so to speak.
Emma sits at her desk, admittedly lovely in her ridiculously revealing clothing, writing down for Erik the details of the Hellfire Club’s various properties and bank accounts: the tools of a revolution which Erik has managed, in some surreal way, to inherit from Shaw. When he opens the door she has already turned to face him, with a smile like light on snow. ‘Magneto,’ she says, with only a slight curl of sarcasm. ‘How can I help you?’
It surprised Erik, how quickly she came to stand by him. He doesn’t really know how much was between her and Shaw; more, he suspects, than her cool acceptance and readiness to join Erik would imply, but then, he isn’t Charles. He doesn’t know.
‘Your telepathy,’ he says. His thoughts are twisting furiously with anxiety, stress, suspicion, and he can’t bring himself to bother with idle greetings. ‘Can I ask you a few things?’
‘Of course,’ she says smoothly.
‘It’s not as strong as Xavier’s, is it?’
Her lips tighten slightly at the bluntness of his criticism. ‘No.’
‘Can you change people’s thoughts? Not their perceptions, I mean, their…opinions toward something. Have you ever done that?’
She arches an eyebrow. She probably knows exactly where Erik is going with this. ‘Occasionally. Yes.’
‘Is that permanent?’
She looks at him, and the ice-bright smile doesn’t change, but there’s a certain thoughtfulness in her eyes. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It wears off after a while, if I don’t maintain it. Artificial thoughts fade.’
The truth, with this final confirmation, solidifies all of Erik’s guilty suspicions, clicks them into place like the tumblers of a lock. Understanding, now, it’s hard to see how he didn’t realise all along. He thinks of the hours upon hours he spent with Charles: training the children with him, talking over endless chess games, learning the lines of his body; quietly falling into what Erik thought, what Charles made him think, was love.
‘Are you alright?’ Emma asks him, by her standards gently.
Erik forces back the nausea, and says roughly, ‘I’m fine. Can you get someone a message for me?’
***
It’s Sean who meets him at the gate. He smiles warily, and greets Erik awkwardly but without rancour; clearly he has no more idea what to say in this kind of situation than Erik does. His eyes flick over the helmet, of course, taking in the dull gleam of the metal and all that it implies, but he doesn’t comment. Erik is grateful.
‘He’s happy that you’re here,’ Sean says absently, at one point, as they walk up toward the house. ‘He misses you. I mean, he really misses you.’
‘I’m not staying,’ Erik says.
‘Sorry, man, it’s none of my business, but were you and him…?’
Sean doesn’t finish the sentence, tactfully enough, but, given the circumstances, without the exact semantics of the question it’s difficult for Erik to answer. He considers for a while, and eventually says, ‘It’s complicated.’
It’s answer enough. Sean pauses, and then shrugs and makes a vaguely accepting eh noise. Erik bites his lip and doesn’t disillusion the boy. Erik can only wish that their…whatever it was…were innocent enough to be worthy of indifference.
Erik doesn’t follow when they reach the door and Sean makes to go inside.
‘He’s in his study,’ Sean says uncertainly.
Out of the question; they used to play chess there. This whole damn house is saturated with the memories that used to be good ones. If Erik had been prepared to so much as be in the same state as Charles without his helmet, he would have wanted to do this in some anonymous public place, but at least he can try and find somewhere on the Xavier property that hasn’t been coloured with Charles’ lies.
‘Can you tell him I’ll be here?’ he says.
Sean sighs and nods, reaches for the door.
‘Wait,’ Erik says on impulse, because he and Charles weren’t the only people on that beach.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Erik says, and means it. ‘Tell the others.’
Sean looks at him for a long time, and then smiles. ‘Thanks,’ he says simply, sincerely, before he turns to go inside.
***
Charles is pale and looks impossibly tired, his eyes dark-shadowed, but they flood with longing the second he catches Erik’s eyes, wheeling surprisingly smoothly forward over the grass. Probably Hank’s doing; he must have built the chair. There’s something in Charles’ face which Erik remembers, but doesn’t feel: love, and loss. He looks as though he has been grieving.
It didn’t occur to Erik until this moment to consider that, regardless of his twisted feelings for Charles, Charles might have felt something entirely real for him.
‘Erik, God, I’m so glad you’re here,’ Charles calls the second he gets within reasonable speaking distance, voice bright with happiness. He continues to move closer, to within one or two feet of Erik, staring at him with something like wonder. His eyes skim over the helmet, crease briefly with hurt, but return to Erik’s face, reverently taking him in. A pause, and then, ‘I missed you,’ Charles says, almost tentatively.
‘Yes,’ Erik says. ‘I missed you too.’ It’s not a lie, if you factor in the past tense. He adds, ‘I’m so sorry about the…’ and makes a small gesture, allowing the sentence to end there so he doesn’t have to say the word, because regardless of why Erik is here and what he feels for the man in front of him there are some things which have to be said. ‘I’m sorry. I never intended this to happen.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ Charles says, too quickly. Forgiveness shouldn’t, surely, be so easy? He looks down at the grass for a few seconds, the first time his eyes have left Erik’s face, and says, ‘You’re not staying.’
‘No,’ Erik says. ‘I’m here to talk.’
‘I’m glad you came.’ Charles smiles, bright and brilliant, and the pain briefly disappears from his face. ‘What did you want to talk about?’
Erik can’t deny that on the way here he went through endless iterations of this conversation in his mind, but the Charles he imagined speaking to there was cold, implacable. The person who warped Erik’s emotions into some twisted facsimile of love for his own amusement. He doesn’t know what to say to this fragile creature who looks at him with genuine adoration, smiles radiantly with a face that looks used to tears.
‘Erik?’
There’s a bench a few yards away; Erik walks over, sits down. Charles follows him and turns the wheelchair so that they face each other. Erik meets Charles’ eyes and thinks of their endless chess games. They were so simple, with their well-defined strategies and gambits; the board divided in black-and-white, clear-cut squares.
He finds the words: blunt, ugly, but they’ll do. ‘Did you do something to my head?’ he asks, quietly.
Charles stares at him in unguarded shock for two or three interminable seconds, and then - Erik sees it as if in torturous slow-motion - closes his eyes.
‘Oh God.’ The world, no, really, is starting to spin. Erik buries his face in his hands, inhales deeply. ‘Oh God,’ he says, again, indistinctly; the edges of the words blur together. ‘Charles, you - What did you do to me?’
‘Erik,’ Charles says, his voice wavering, ‘you don’t understand - ’
‘What the fuck -’ Erik cuts him off, shouting, now, ‘ - did you do?’
Charles looks at him pleadingly. ‘Erik, I’m so sorry, I just…I wanted…’
‘You made me think I was in love with you!’ Erik snaps. His voice is too loud, shattering the still air of the gardens like steel breaking glass. He makes an effort to control it. ‘Jesus, Charles. You know, I was half-mad, missing you, the first few days after Cuba. Blaming myself, hating myself for what I did to you. And then I just stopped. I stopped feeling anything for you. And then I hated myself for not loving you! Do you realise how much you fucked me up? Do you realise what you, what you did to me, without my consent?’ He’s shouting again. Impossible to stop. ‘Do you even care?’
‘Yes,’ Charles says, instantly. ‘Yes, I care, Erik, I’m sorry and I didn’t know.’ His eyes flick up, to the sky; down, to the ground. He’s stopped looking at Erik. One hand moves up to his face - on reflex, Erik thinks - and at the last second Charles bites his lip and runs it through his hair instead. ‘I love you,’ he says, with a simplicity that Erik might once have found romantic, or endearing, if sentimental; that now merely seems helpless. Charles is so accustomed, Erik thinks bitterly, to using his power to tell people exactly what he wants to without bothering to shape it into words, or to simply forcing them to agree with him, that he doesn’t know how to talk to Erik without it.
Erik looks up at the sky - pale, empty blue, appearing deceptively close - bites his tongue, and says nothing.
‘What are you thinking?’
The words slip out, clearly unintentional; Charles snaps his mouth shut almost immediately as if he wants to take them back. If I weren’t wearing the helmet, he could, Erik reminds himself. Maybe he’s done that to me before. How would I know?
‘You have no right,’ he says levelly, ‘to know that. You never did.’
‘No - no, of course not - I’m sorry.’ Charles jerkily rakes a hand through his hair again. It’s a gesture that he seems familiar with now, this aborted attempt to reach for his powers, but Erik doesn’t remember having seen it before. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he says quietly, in a tone of voice that makes Erik think he’s rephrasing the same question.
What Erik wants catches him by surprise: he wants, with a stupid, visceral insistence, to take off the helmet. To allow Charles into his mind and let him drown in the floods of violation and betrayal and sheer revulsion, because, in all of the languages Erik speaks, there aren’t enough words to make Charles understand how it feels, what he did.
He doesn’t do it, of course, because it’s love that makes people do things like that, and Erik knows now that he isn’t in love, and never was.
‘What would I have felt for you,’ he says distantly, ‘if you hadn’t decided to fuck with my head?’
‘I don’t know,’ Charles says. Too fast, again.
‘Yes, you do,’ Erik says with certainty. ‘God, Charles, don’t you think that after all you’ve done, I have a right?’
Charles closes his eyes, and doesn’t speak for several moments. Then he says, in a tiny voice, ‘You respected me. You liked me. We would have been friends.’
‘We’re not, now.’
‘I know,’ Charles says softly, staring at the floor. ‘I…’ He pauses, and then says tentatively, ‘I don’t hold it against you, the…what happened on the beach. Do you think you could ever forgive me?’
‘If you could,’ Erik says, the helmet a reassuring weight on his head, his neck, ‘would you make me?’
Charles doesn’t - can’t? - answer, which is answer enough.
Erik stands, abruptly, and Charles gazes up at him with wide eyes, pleading. ‘I was thinking, by the way,’ Erik says, quietly - and there’s a perverse pleasure in hurting Charles with the truth, when Charles has spent so long lying to Erik with the very core of his being - ‘that at least Shaw allowed me the luxury of hating him.’
Charles inhales, sharply, as if Erik has hit him, and his eyes shine with half-suppressed tears. They’re grey, in the pale light, as though the vivid blue that Erik remembers has been leached out of them; not, of course, that he can trust his memories. Not now.
Charles is still staring at the ground, not speaking, when Erik walks away, and he doesn’t have to turn around to know that Charles doesn’t look up to watch him go.