and one more new short thing...
Yesterday I posted all the happy fluff ever, and then I think my brain rebelled, on the walk to campus, and decided that it was time for something completely different. So...have some rather short, James point-of-view, angst-filled fic? Basically, all of the things I don't normally write for these two? (But I promise that in my head there's more to ( Read more... )
Soon, hopefully! Must finish the Erik/Charles Halloween thing in time for Valentine's Day! It's almost done. It got longer than I expected. That seems to happen frequently, with them. Silly boys, having all the emotions...
...here, want some of them?
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Annoyed at his own weakness, Erik flips through the shoebox of scattered photos. Some petulant and irritable part of him wants to shuffle them around and ruin whatever order Raven’s gotten them into, just because he can. But he doesn’t, because he does like Raven-even when she’s showing him these damn enthralling pictures of Charles, photos that prompt persistent thoughts about Regency-era waistcoats and pale skin and glowing freckles to circle uninvited through his brain-and also because, fundamentally, he just likes things to be tidy. He’s always liked neatness. Order. Precise plans that he can carry out, step by step. The lines on a chessboard.
Charles isn’t tidy. He eats candied pineapple with his bare fingers and licks them afterwards, and his hair leaps up merrily in every direction in the wind, and he leaves books and papers like a trail of breadcrumbs, a progression through whichever rooms of the mansion he’s been in that day, and Erik can always find him, following that familiar academic detritus, every time.
Always.
He works his way down to the very bottom of Raven’s collection, and stops.
This one is much older than the others, slightly faded, a little tattered around the edges, a ragged memory. It’s Charles and Raven, together, very young, and smiling, standing in front of a backdrop that Erik doesn’t recognize. They’re both dressed as cats, apparently, or sort of, because Raven’s not so much wearing her costume as inhabiting it, much more convincingly so than Charles, who has evidently drawn crooked whiskers on his own face and acquired a handmade pair of fuzzy black kitten ears.
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“What-”
“Oh,” Raven says, looking guilty. “I probably shouldn’t-he won’t want me to show you that one.”
“What? Why not?”
Raven, in the photograph, is grinning, obviously gleeful; Charles isn’t, quite, having looked up just in time for the flash, all unruly hair and wide eyes that look too old for that youthful face. Raven studies her younger self, for a minute, and sighs, a sound that might be amusement, or something else; regret, perhaps, or wistfulness. Erik’s not good enough with interpreting emotions-interpreting those emotions, at least-to know for sure.
“How much has he told you? About growing up here?”
“He…hasn’t.” And suddenly that statement feels like an admission of failure. He’s never asked. He could’ve asked. But he hasn’t done that either.
None of them have. They’ve all moved in and taken over Charles’s home, his life, Charles himself, who offered all of those things so freely. No one’s ever asked why Charles Xavier wants so badly to save the world, or why, when Charles knows everything worth knowing about all of them, he’s never felt close enough, or safe enough, with any of them, to share anything about his past in return.
All at once Erik wants to know. Wants to go find Charles, somewhere, in the maze of antique rooms and heirloom furnishings, and ask him something. Anything. Whatever words might fill the silence of the things that Charles doesn’t say, that they’ve all been taking for granted.
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