Fic: Every Angel is terror (X-Men: First Class, R)
title: Every Angel is terror
author: ilovetakahana
word count: 2630
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, Sebastian Shaw [not named], Raven Darkholme
rating: R
notes: The penultimate chapter in the universe of Knife and Needle and Rope, in which there are several explosive confrontations and neither Charles nor Erik know for sure if they can get out unscathed. Title and cut text from Rilke's Duino Elegies - specifically the Second Elegy.
Warning for basically most serial killer / murder mystery tropes and everything else that might be associated with the idea of a dark version of Charles Xavier, including child abuse.
Also archived at http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org.
Blank, blind, alone.
He drifts in the treachery of his senses. Tied down or held down. Hard surface beneath his back. If he can’t feel cold or loss or pain, he’s been here a while. Cold curse crawling through his veins, sweet insanity, of sedatives and who the fuck knows what else.
He’s tapped out. Here he is like the lamb waiting to be slaughtered. He could be bait and he could be a corpse that doesn’t yet know how it came to be dead.
Pain in every part of him. His fingertips burning and freezing at the same time. Thousands of shocking-hot needles down his arms, up his legs. Patter of something falling onto his bare skin, water and something brighter-harder-hurting, sticky-sweet familiar scent of blood. His own, he assumes.
No one is coming here to find him.
He won’t be able to rescue himself this time.
He doesn’t even know where his things are: his books. The gun. All useless.
Erik keeps his eyes closed. He can’t move, can’t fight, can’t escape. Nothing left, so he lies limp and unfeeling.
But he can run. Not with his own feet.
This is one of those days when running is the only option - retreat is all he has. He grasps at straws with a vengeance.
Here is the idea in his mind. Here is the voice that pushes shadow and fear away. Better to listen to this than to the words of the other, than to notice the owner of the hands that are hurting him. Better to break the self on a good memory, on a thing of beauty, than to be made to break on pain and despair and shattering hate.
Erik dreams, unseeing eyes, wide awake and insensible to violation and humiliation and the chemical siren song.
In his mind, he is painting, and the canvas is vast and created just for him. Under his hands, a great and beautiful and terrifying beast rears up. Cold cruel eyes. He thinks of the beast roaring, baring its teeth. No, its mouth is closed. Perhaps it smiles, but only when Erik is looking at it. A living weapon - every inch of the beast is lethal and irresistible, fatally beautiful.
In his mind, he paints feathers, one by one, over rippling muscle and scales with jagged and broken edges. Remiges first, he thinks, the great flight feathers - he fills in the asymmetrical curves with gray and black barbs. The beast lives in caves and hunts in deep night. It must be colored to match. Darker, darker, he smears shadows all over his hands and in the end he gives up on brush and palette. His hands shape the trailing edge, fingerprints and flight surfaces.
The beast whispers to him, and he thinks of an orchestra of humming voices. Thoughts tinged in blue, a thousand shades of sky and sea and stars.
He fills in the feathers on the first wing, and starts on its mirror image. He thinks of long strokes, firm pressure, grooming the wing or shaping it, giving his creation the power to fly. To strike. To hunt.
No, that’s not yet complete. Another pair. Four wings? He changes to a deep midnight color, hazy transition between black and blue, and he roughs in the third wing. A little tentative, now, a little careful. One wrong line could destroy the beast, could maim it.
Distantly, Erik hears a thin scream, and he understands that someone is hurting him.
The beast on the canvas croons at him: its breath is almost too warm against his prickling skin. The edge of a scale catches on his arm. Brief flare of pain, there and gone.
He doesn’t think. He acts. Here is a new color. Erik dips a finger into the bright scarlet and paints a long red streak into the trailing edge of the fourth wing.
The beast roars, and rears upwards, thrashing life and power, and Erik catches a glimpse of blue feathers - he hasn’t even started painting those yet, where have they come from, what woke the beast up?
He’s flat on his back and the beast crouches over him, and the humming song suddenly crashes upward into some kind of challenge: Mine, mine, this one belongs to me.
Shouldn’t that be the other way around, Erik thinks. Or is the beast claiming me because I made it?
Pain flares and sparks in his eyes again.
Erik falls, and the last thing he hears is the beast screaming.
///
Charles all but leaps off the bus when it pulls in at his stop.
His bag is gone. His jacket is gone. He’s down to three layers of shirts. His knife in its sheath on his left arm; a coil of rope around his right.
He doesn’t know why he’s in a hurry. He doesn’t know why he’s going back to the tattoo shop. There’s nothing left there for him.
Salt on a small patch of earth, no bigger than his hand. The smell of burnt wood and scorched earth, or perhaps he is only remembering the sensations, welded to his memories of this place as they are. He remembers the crackle and hiss of burning blood. He remembers how tired he’d been, once the screaming had finally stopped.
He remembers that there were no last words, or that they had not been worth remembering. He remembers only the echoes of the little house collapsing in on itself.
All that crashes through his head as he runs through the rain. He scrapes his hair out of his face, again and again. He runs as though he’s being pursued. The rain is the only sound he can hear.
No. There’s something else now. He takes a hard left, veering away from the tattoo shop at the last instant. Flash of white, a quiet groan, and - someone is speaking.
Charles skids to a silent halt and inches into the alley. There is just barely enough light to make out the figures at the other end. Erik is on the ground - he doesn’t question the certainty of his instincts - and that’s his voice, a soft keening wail, almost lost in the roar of the rain.
A sound Charles doesn’t want to hear.
He turns his attention to the standing figure - one foot in the small of Erik’s back, boot to bare skin. Glint of some kind of blade in one hand.
“...spent a long time looking for you. You shouldn’t have run away. I want to know how you escaped. That was ingenious; no one’s ever left me before. I’ve got you back now. I’m taking you with me. You’ve left your work unfinished, you know. Can’t have that. So much more to tell the world. I can’t do it without you.”
And Charles gives in at last. Hunger. Need. Desperate/delicious pull, like a hook set into his skin and barbed so that he can’t get it out. Every visit, every glance, every scrape of needle into skin. The handful of conversations. Erik offering him painkillers. He knows now why he refused - he’d wanted those eyes on him, that mute and wondering glance. Erik asking him to read to sing to talk. A stray memory of talking himself through an algebra equation, and the twist of amusement and chagrin in Erik’s eyes as he offered a correction.
Not yours, is the thought lashing through his mind, as he steps forward on silent feet.
His skin prickles. The ink on his back itches and burns. He thinks of the phoenix, thinks of it struggling in its restraints. His skin. He imagines it bursting free, imagines it calling a dark song into the night and sweeping down to protect its maker, the man who brought it to life.
The rain muffles his footsteps and his movements. He has enough room in the alley to move freely as he pulls the rope down from its loose slipknot at his wrist. He ties the rope off, a sliding loop, disdain and dexterity working together. It will hurt to be bound with it, water making it shrink and cut deeper into skin.
Charles aims for the throat of the man who’s still intoning nonsense over Erik’s unmoving form, and strikes - one perfect motion - he twists his wrists and the other man is down on the ground. He doesn’t fight the rope or resist it; he smiles mockingly up at Charles.
Charles smiles back as he kicks the man’s hand open, kicks the scalpel away - and draws his own knife. He flicks out the blade, and he draws circles around the other man’s eyes with the point, which glitters in the tentative light of the alley. “I think you’ll find your claim on Erik has lapsed,” he says, and all it takes is a little bit of pressure, the knife an extension of his hand, sinking into flesh and the man doesn’t make a sound, even as Charles turns the blade edge up and then slashes upward. Blood spilling out, and - Charles gropes for the word and abruptly remembers. Ah, yes. Humors.
“I had him first,” the man rasps, and there, he sounds like he’s not smiling any more.
Charles smiles and blinds him completely, unerring strike into the other eye. That gets him a groan. “And now you’ve had him,” Charles says. “You’ve had him and it’s done. He’s mine, now.”
He trusses the man up and tears off one of his sleeves for a gag.
Erik groans softly. Says a name.
Charles freezes briefly - then ties off the final knots, and takes a long step, moves over to Erik. Deep wounds on his body, his tattoos obscured with blood, lines from books marked up by that damned scalpel. He calls his name softly: “Erik?”
“Charles.” The response is faint but immediate, and it almost makes Charles smile again - if not for Erik’s next words. “A beautiful dream. A cruel one.”
Charles spares one glance over his shoulder at the hogtied, blinded third man, and then he kneels next to Erik, close enough to touch, but he daren’t bridge the gap yet. “Do you doubt me, Erik?”
“Entirely.”
Charles waits.
Erik shudders and gasps his name again.
“You have no faith in me?” Charles says, still quoting Edward Fairfax Rochester. Jane Eyre, Thornfield; one of their final exchanges. Erik had been working on the phoenix’s head.
“You’re the only one I trust,” Erik says, breaking the script completely. “The only thing I believe to be real. That and the ink, the words....”
“You and my...Raven,” Charles returns.
Erik moves, his face tracking up as though to look for Charles; his eyes are still tightly closed. “Avian motifs?”
“Raven is...my ward,” Charles says. “I look after her, and she cares for me.”
An unseeing smile. “You take in strays.”
“Sometimes I think she took me in, instead.”
“And I....”
“You will come with me. We’ll look after you. But unfinished business first.” Charles leans in, a hair’s-breadth away. “The man who was hurting you. He is here. I blinded him. I’ve got him tied up. I...do you want to?”
“Want to what?”
Why am I even doing this, Charles thinks to himself, and he reaches out to Erik, stops and snatches his hand away. “He can be yours, if you wish.”
“Mine? To...no, yes, oh,” and Erik opens his eyes.
Vengeance is a good look on him, Charles thinks, and he turns his knife handle toward Erik, offering.
“I - my things?” Erik asks. “I have a gun?”
Charles smiles. He tears off another sleeve and reaches into the nearby duffel, extracts a battered Heckler & Koch USP Compact and places it in Erik’s outstretched hand.
It takes Erik a long moment to focus - then he’s wrapping Charles’s sleeve around his hand and wrist, and then Erik smiles. “You really are here.”
“I couldn’t keep away,” Charles says.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” and he motions to the third man with his knife. “Tell me who this...worm...is, Erik.”
“I...I can’t.”
Charles looks at Erik, really looks at him, and he could drown in the fear in those eyes. Fear, hatred, loathing. Guilt.
Erik is speaking again. “I’ve spent so much time looking at your back, and wondering about the scars. You - you should see mine. His fault.”
“No, Erik, don’t, not now - ” Too late, Charles watches Erik turn around. He eyes him, warily, glances at his - their - victim. That lasts only until he sees the jagged mess of scars, vivid even in the faint light of the alley.
Anger flares up in him and he brings his hands down, and he gets his hands on Erik at last. He spans the gouged-in ends of the scars with his fingers, flattens his palms to the exposed skin. Erik radiates heat - and he gasps, he is shaking, though when Charles looks over his shoulder he’s holding the gun steady on the third man.
“Up,” Charles murmurs. “You choose. Do it from here, and he may think I was holding the gun. Or show him your face and let him know you it was you who killed him.”
“I don’t care,” Erik says as he gets to his feet. The gun wavers, but only briefly. “All I want is him dead.”
He makes to step away, to let Erik get on with it, but Erik hisses “Don’t” - and now Charles is rooted to the spot, hands still on Erik’s shoulders. The rain beats down upon them.
He watches Erik check the gun - and since he’s right there, he’s right at Erik’s back, he knows when the man’s moved into firing position, feels the movement of his muscles. The hands that had moved over him, that had branded him with the black phoenix - the same hands wrapped around the gun. Muzzle flash. Four shots, muffled in the storm.
Charles catches his breath, inexplicably. “How does it feel? To kill?”
Erik freezes under his hands. “I should ask you that. You said. Blinded him. Tied him down. You...you kill, too.”
“I do,” Charles says, quiet and cold and calm. “This is a problem....”
Erik talks over him, shoulders hunching. “Don’t care. Just...you. You look at me and it’s as if you see me.”
“How can I not,” Charles admits.
He feels the movement long before he sees it - Erik turns around slowly, the gun still in one hand - and he places the other on Charles, at the juncture of shoulder and neck. He is careful; he moves as though he knows Charles is still in pain.
Charles does not hurt. Not like this. Hot skin, cold rain, Erik’s eyes. Charles looks at his hands on Erik’s shoulders. They fit together.
His eyes are still open when Erik steps into him, though the rain spatters into his face. He can’t look away. The hand that held the gun, that is still wrapped in Charles’s sleeve, is at his throat.
Erik is looking at him - and it is more than just the look from the tattoo shop and the long hours under the needle, the look on his face as they had coaxed the black phoenix into existence, together.
Charles thinks of a string being pulled tight, tension thrumming through both of them. He thinks of degrading orbits, of collapse and of crash, and -
Yes. Erik’s mouth against his, Erik’s arms pinning him in place, and Charles submits, willingly. He falls into the other man, gives himself over without a second thought.
Erik pulls away, suddenly, long enough to gasp - and Charles catches at him, pulls him back down. Erik obeys him instantly. Charles smiles against his mouth, tastes him, drinks him in.
The rain falls and washes everything else away. Blood and grime and salt and soil.
Only the ink remains. They remain.
[epilogue to follow]
author: ilovetakahana
word count: 2630
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr, Sebastian Shaw [not named], Raven Darkholme
rating: R
notes: The penultimate chapter in the universe of Knife and Needle and Rope, in which there are several explosive confrontations and neither Charles nor Erik know for sure if they can get out unscathed. Title and cut text from Rilke's Duino Elegies - specifically the Second Elegy.
Warning for basically most serial killer / murder mystery tropes and everything else that might be associated with the idea of a dark version of Charles Xavier, including child abuse.
Also archived at http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org.
Blank, blind, alone.
He drifts in the treachery of his senses. Tied down or held down. Hard surface beneath his back. If he can’t feel cold or loss or pain, he’s been here a while. Cold curse crawling through his veins, sweet insanity, of sedatives and who the fuck knows what else.
He’s tapped out. Here he is like the lamb waiting to be slaughtered. He could be bait and he could be a corpse that doesn’t yet know how it came to be dead.
Pain in every part of him. His fingertips burning and freezing at the same time. Thousands of shocking-hot needles down his arms, up his legs. Patter of something falling onto his bare skin, water and something brighter-harder-hurting, sticky-sweet familiar scent of blood. His own, he assumes.
No one is coming here to find him.
He won’t be able to rescue himself this time.
He doesn’t even know where his things are: his books. The gun. All useless.
Erik keeps his eyes closed. He can’t move, can’t fight, can’t escape. Nothing left, so he lies limp and unfeeling.
But he can run. Not with his own feet.
This is one of those days when running is the only option - retreat is all he has. He grasps at straws with a vengeance.
Here is the idea in his mind. Here is the voice that pushes shadow and fear away. Better to listen to this than to the words of the other, than to notice the owner of the hands that are hurting him. Better to break the self on a good memory, on a thing of beauty, than to be made to break on pain and despair and shattering hate.
Erik dreams, unseeing eyes, wide awake and insensible to violation and humiliation and the chemical siren song.
In his mind, he is painting, and the canvas is vast and created just for him. Under his hands, a great and beautiful and terrifying beast rears up. Cold cruel eyes. He thinks of the beast roaring, baring its teeth. No, its mouth is closed. Perhaps it smiles, but only when Erik is looking at it. A living weapon - every inch of the beast is lethal and irresistible, fatally beautiful.
In his mind, he paints feathers, one by one, over rippling muscle and scales with jagged and broken edges. Remiges first, he thinks, the great flight feathers - he fills in the asymmetrical curves with gray and black barbs. The beast lives in caves and hunts in deep night. It must be colored to match. Darker, darker, he smears shadows all over his hands and in the end he gives up on brush and palette. His hands shape the trailing edge, fingerprints and flight surfaces.
The beast whispers to him, and he thinks of an orchestra of humming voices. Thoughts tinged in blue, a thousand shades of sky and sea and stars.
He fills in the feathers on the first wing, and starts on its mirror image. He thinks of long strokes, firm pressure, grooming the wing or shaping it, giving his creation the power to fly. To strike. To hunt.
No, that’s not yet complete. Another pair. Four wings? He changes to a deep midnight color, hazy transition between black and blue, and he roughs in the third wing. A little tentative, now, a little careful. One wrong line could destroy the beast, could maim it.
Distantly, Erik hears a thin scream, and he understands that someone is hurting him.
The beast on the canvas croons at him: its breath is almost too warm against his prickling skin. The edge of a scale catches on his arm. Brief flare of pain, there and gone.
He doesn’t think. He acts. Here is a new color. Erik dips a finger into the bright scarlet and paints a long red streak into the trailing edge of the fourth wing.
The beast roars, and rears upwards, thrashing life and power, and Erik catches a glimpse of blue feathers - he hasn’t even started painting those yet, where have they come from, what woke the beast up?
He’s flat on his back and the beast crouches over him, and the humming song suddenly crashes upward into some kind of challenge: Mine, mine, this one belongs to me.
Shouldn’t that be the other way around, Erik thinks. Or is the beast claiming me because I made it?
Pain flares and sparks in his eyes again.
Erik falls, and the last thing he hears is the beast screaming.
///
Charles all but leaps off the bus when it pulls in at his stop.
His bag is gone. His jacket is gone. He’s down to three layers of shirts. His knife in its sheath on his left arm; a coil of rope around his right.
He doesn’t know why he’s in a hurry. He doesn’t know why he’s going back to the tattoo shop. There’s nothing left there for him.
Salt on a small patch of earth, no bigger than his hand. The smell of burnt wood and scorched earth, or perhaps he is only remembering the sensations, welded to his memories of this place as they are. He remembers the crackle and hiss of burning blood. He remembers how tired he’d been, once the screaming had finally stopped.
He remembers that there were no last words, or that they had not been worth remembering. He remembers only the echoes of the little house collapsing in on itself.
All that crashes through his head as he runs through the rain. He scrapes his hair out of his face, again and again. He runs as though he’s being pursued. The rain is the only sound he can hear.
No. There’s something else now. He takes a hard left, veering away from the tattoo shop at the last instant. Flash of white, a quiet groan, and - someone is speaking.
Charles skids to a silent halt and inches into the alley. There is just barely enough light to make out the figures at the other end. Erik is on the ground - he doesn’t question the certainty of his instincts - and that’s his voice, a soft keening wail, almost lost in the roar of the rain.
A sound Charles doesn’t want to hear.
He turns his attention to the standing figure - one foot in the small of Erik’s back, boot to bare skin. Glint of some kind of blade in one hand.
“...spent a long time looking for you. You shouldn’t have run away. I want to know how you escaped. That was ingenious; no one’s ever left me before. I’ve got you back now. I’m taking you with me. You’ve left your work unfinished, you know. Can’t have that. So much more to tell the world. I can’t do it without you.”
And Charles gives in at last. Hunger. Need. Desperate/delicious pull, like a hook set into his skin and barbed so that he can’t get it out. Every visit, every glance, every scrape of needle into skin. The handful of conversations. Erik offering him painkillers. He knows now why he refused - he’d wanted those eyes on him, that mute and wondering glance. Erik asking him to read to sing to talk. A stray memory of talking himself through an algebra equation, and the twist of amusement and chagrin in Erik’s eyes as he offered a correction.
Not yours, is the thought lashing through his mind, as he steps forward on silent feet.
His skin prickles. The ink on his back itches and burns. He thinks of the phoenix, thinks of it struggling in its restraints. His skin. He imagines it bursting free, imagines it calling a dark song into the night and sweeping down to protect its maker, the man who brought it to life.
The rain muffles his footsteps and his movements. He has enough room in the alley to move freely as he pulls the rope down from its loose slipknot at his wrist. He ties the rope off, a sliding loop, disdain and dexterity working together. It will hurt to be bound with it, water making it shrink and cut deeper into skin.
Charles aims for the throat of the man who’s still intoning nonsense over Erik’s unmoving form, and strikes - one perfect motion - he twists his wrists and the other man is down on the ground. He doesn’t fight the rope or resist it; he smiles mockingly up at Charles.
Charles smiles back as he kicks the man’s hand open, kicks the scalpel away - and draws his own knife. He flicks out the blade, and he draws circles around the other man’s eyes with the point, which glitters in the tentative light of the alley. “I think you’ll find your claim on Erik has lapsed,” he says, and all it takes is a little bit of pressure, the knife an extension of his hand, sinking into flesh and the man doesn’t make a sound, even as Charles turns the blade edge up and then slashes upward. Blood spilling out, and - Charles gropes for the word and abruptly remembers. Ah, yes. Humors.
“I had him first,” the man rasps, and there, he sounds like he’s not smiling any more.
Charles smiles and blinds him completely, unerring strike into the other eye. That gets him a groan. “And now you’ve had him,” Charles says. “You’ve had him and it’s done. He’s mine, now.”
He trusses the man up and tears off one of his sleeves for a gag.
Erik groans softly. Says a name.
Charles freezes briefly - then ties off the final knots, and takes a long step, moves over to Erik. Deep wounds on his body, his tattoos obscured with blood, lines from books marked up by that damned scalpel. He calls his name softly: “Erik?”
“Charles.” The response is faint but immediate, and it almost makes Charles smile again - if not for Erik’s next words. “A beautiful dream. A cruel one.”
Charles spares one glance over his shoulder at the hogtied, blinded third man, and then he kneels next to Erik, close enough to touch, but he daren’t bridge the gap yet. “Do you doubt me, Erik?”
“Entirely.”
Charles waits.
Erik shudders and gasps his name again.
“You have no faith in me?” Charles says, still quoting Edward Fairfax Rochester. Jane Eyre, Thornfield; one of their final exchanges. Erik had been working on the phoenix’s head.
“You’re the only one I trust,” Erik says, breaking the script completely. “The only thing I believe to be real. That and the ink, the words....”
“You and my...Raven,” Charles returns.
Erik moves, his face tracking up as though to look for Charles; his eyes are still tightly closed. “Avian motifs?”
“Raven is...my ward,” Charles says. “I look after her, and she cares for me.”
An unseeing smile. “You take in strays.”
“Sometimes I think she took me in, instead.”
“And I....”
“You will come with me. We’ll look after you. But unfinished business first.” Charles leans in, a hair’s-breadth away. “The man who was hurting you. He is here. I blinded him. I’ve got him tied up. I...do you want to?”
“Want to what?”
Why am I even doing this, Charles thinks to himself, and he reaches out to Erik, stops and snatches his hand away. “He can be yours, if you wish.”
“Mine? To...no, yes, oh,” and Erik opens his eyes.
Vengeance is a good look on him, Charles thinks, and he turns his knife handle toward Erik, offering.
“I - my things?” Erik asks. “I have a gun?”
Charles smiles. He tears off another sleeve and reaches into the nearby duffel, extracts a battered Heckler & Koch USP Compact and places it in Erik’s outstretched hand.
It takes Erik a long moment to focus - then he’s wrapping Charles’s sleeve around his hand and wrist, and then Erik smiles. “You really are here.”
“I couldn’t keep away,” Charles says.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” and he motions to the third man with his knife. “Tell me who this...worm...is, Erik.”
“I...I can’t.”
Charles looks at Erik, really looks at him, and he could drown in the fear in those eyes. Fear, hatred, loathing. Guilt.
Erik is speaking again. “I’ve spent so much time looking at your back, and wondering about the scars. You - you should see mine. His fault.”
“No, Erik, don’t, not now - ” Too late, Charles watches Erik turn around. He eyes him, warily, glances at his - their - victim. That lasts only until he sees the jagged mess of scars, vivid even in the faint light of the alley.
Anger flares up in him and he brings his hands down, and he gets his hands on Erik at last. He spans the gouged-in ends of the scars with his fingers, flattens his palms to the exposed skin. Erik radiates heat - and he gasps, he is shaking, though when Charles looks over his shoulder he’s holding the gun steady on the third man.
“Up,” Charles murmurs. “You choose. Do it from here, and he may think I was holding the gun. Or show him your face and let him know you it was you who killed him.”
“I don’t care,” Erik says as he gets to his feet. The gun wavers, but only briefly. “All I want is him dead.”
He makes to step away, to let Erik get on with it, but Erik hisses “Don’t” - and now Charles is rooted to the spot, hands still on Erik’s shoulders. The rain beats down upon them.
He watches Erik check the gun - and since he’s right there, he’s right at Erik’s back, he knows when the man’s moved into firing position, feels the movement of his muscles. The hands that had moved over him, that had branded him with the black phoenix - the same hands wrapped around the gun. Muzzle flash. Four shots, muffled in the storm.
Charles catches his breath, inexplicably. “How does it feel? To kill?”
Erik freezes under his hands. “I should ask you that. You said. Blinded him. Tied him down. You...you kill, too.”
“I do,” Charles says, quiet and cold and calm. “This is a problem....”
Erik talks over him, shoulders hunching. “Don’t care. Just...you. You look at me and it’s as if you see me.”
“How can I not,” Charles admits.
He feels the movement long before he sees it - Erik turns around slowly, the gun still in one hand - and he places the other on Charles, at the juncture of shoulder and neck. He is careful; he moves as though he knows Charles is still in pain.
Charles does not hurt. Not like this. Hot skin, cold rain, Erik’s eyes. Charles looks at his hands on Erik’s shoulders. They fit together.
His eyes are still open when Erik steps into him, though the rain spatters into his face. He can’t look away. The hand that held the gun, that is still wrapped in Charles’s sleeve, is at his throat.
Erik is looking at him - and it is more than just the look from the tattoo shop and the long hours under the needle, the look on his face as they had coaxed the black phoenix into existence, together.
Charles thinks of a string being pulled tight, tension thrumming through both of them. He thinks of degrading orbits, of collapse and of crash, and -
Yes. Erik’s mouth against his, Erik’s arms pinning him in place, and Charles submits, willingly. He falls into the other man, gives himself over without a second thought.
Erik pulls away, suddenly, long enough to gasp - and Charles catches at him, pulls him back down. Erik obeys him instantly. Charles smiles against his mouth, tastes him, drinks him in.
The rain falls and washes everything else away. Blood and grime and salt and soil.
Only the ink remains. They remain.
[epilogue to follow]