new Erik/Charles fic time
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Title: You Make Me Drop Things (Like All The Plans I Had Made For A Life Without You)
Rating: PG-13 for implied sex, maybe?
Word Count: 2,898
Disclaimers: characters’re the property of Marvel, not me; title from Jimmy Gnecco’s & Brian May’s “Someone To Die For” (yes, the song from the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack; hey, it’s a decent album) (it was almost “Falling Slowly” from the movie Once, though)
Summary: Erik contemplates Charles’s freckles, and Erik and Charles celebrate an anniversary. Future!fic, Erik and Charles and their students, happy endings.
Notes: birthday fic for melissima, who requested Erik/Charles, freckles. The short story Erik’s discussing with his students is Lord Dunsany’s “The Sword of Welleran,” which I highly recommend.
Erik doesn’t attempt to count Charles’s innumerable freckles. Not with numbers, at least.
He counts with memories, instead. Each small cluster, each galactic spiral, becomes a moment, a smile, a signifier with meaning shared only between them. Their intimate language, private aides de memoire that neither of them needs, that bind them together like handfasting ribbons, bright and true.
The first time they kissed lies intertwined with, not the twin sparkles on Charles’s nose as might be expected, but the lower starburst scatter near the base of his throat, where the freckles become most visible. It’d been a quagmire night, a sticky hot night, down in the American South; Charles had slowly shed layers, unfastened buttons, during the second chess game of the night. Erik himself’d been down to a sleeveless undershirt and slacks and was busy arguing with Charles about whether recruitment should focus first on the most useful candidates or the ones most in need of assistance, while idly contemplating a bishop and the likelihood of Charles having set a trap with that knight.
Charles probably had. Elegant, intricate, and deceptively innocent: that’s how Charles tends to play, even now. Clear-eyed strength hidden behind innocuous kindness.
He’d watched a single drop of sweat slide lazily along the curve of Charles’s neck, along that open shirt collar, gleaming over exposed and startling freckles. He’d never seen those freckles before. They drew his attention like nothing else in the world.
When he’d looked up, aware that it’d been his turn for several minutes, Charles had met his eyes. Had smiled.
The freckles on Charles’s right ankle, the triangular cluster above the meeting-point of bone, mean the first time they’d had sex, not the same night but several weeks later, long glittering weeks of discovery and delight and anticipation. Neither of them had quite been virginal in this particular area-Charles less so, though those sapphire eyes’d gone enormous at the first sight of Erik naked-but it’d been an exploration nevertheless, learning through touch and taste and soft sounds and gasps and laughter.
They’d been as careful as they knew how to be, but Charles had been sore, after, only a little. Erik had carried him into the shower, and then proceeded to clean him up, unselfconsciously, soap and hot water and hands as tender as he could make them, because he wanted to, because he wanted to do this for Charles, even while Charles blushed vividly red everywhere and tried to argue that the gesture wasn’t necessary.
Erik’d ignored him. Had paused, on his knees on the shower tile for better access, fingers trailing lather over Charles’s leg and calf and toes, and leaned forward, caught by the small twinkling brightnesses, and kissed that ankle, gently.
Charles had made a very tiny sound, not quite a gasp, at that. But, as Erik sat back up on his knees, had put out a hand, and stroked it through Erik’s hair, before coaxing him to his feet for a kiss on the lips.
Charles, in the present, picking up that memory from two floors away and the middle of a biology lecture, smiles. Sends him over a gentle caress, wordless affection.
Love you, Erik murmurs back. He’s talking out loud at the same time, a trick he’s mastered over time spent with Charles, who carries on multiple conversations on multiple planes without ever batting an eye. Erik’s not quite that good, but he’s learning.
He says, to the assembled students, “Shall we talk about the ending?” and waits for the obligatory rustle to run round the room.
He’s teaching them a Lord Dunsany short story, mostly because Charles had proclaimed definitively that they weren’t doing another semester of T.S. Eliot or Rilke or even Marlowe. Charles’d had Erik’s cock in his mouth and several fingers doing extremely persuasive things at the time, so Erik had agreed.
He’d grumbled when Charles had handed him the volume of fantasy. But something about this story had made sense, in his soul.
He knows about ghosts. About phantoms that take hold of one’s dreams, and refuse to let go. About doing whatever might be necessary, taking up whatever weapon may lie at hand, to protect family and home.
About the costs of those weapons. And fields, to borrow Dunsany’s words, that will never be sown, after, except with blood. Children who will never be born, voices in the wind, because their would-have-been fathers will never come home from war.
At the end of the story, the city’s safe. That’s a truth.
The people of the city, and the young man standing over the bodies of the invaders slain by his sword, weep, at the end. That’s another truth.
“He is a hero,” ventures a girl with spiky black hair and fireworks that crackle around her fingertips, but she sounds dubious.
“Is he?”
“He saved the city…”
“He killed so many people. And now they all know the world isn’t safe.”
“Of course the world isn’t safe, stupid-”
“No. Not the people outside who want them dead, for the gold or whatever. The inside. Him. The hero. Who kills people with the creepy possessed sword. They’re scared about the outside, yeah, but they’re afraid of him too.”
The inside, Erik thinks, nodding in acknowledgement of that particular answer. Charles hadn’t said much about his choice of this specific story. Had smiled, a slightly peculiar smile, and said, “Go on, then, you’ll probably enjoy it…”
Charles knows about pain. About scars, visible and not, that never go away.
There are scars, visible ones, that slice through some of the freckle-constellations, silver-pink cometary tracks of long-healed wounds. One lies along Charles’s upper arm, a memento of fractured bone and a broken family and what after many years Charles can finally name aloud as abuse. Erik hates that scar, and would strip it away if he could; Erik loves that scar because it’s a piece of the past that makes Charles who he is, the person who fits into all the lonely places of Erik’s heart. Erik kisses that scar, from time to time, tongue lingering over the bisected freckles, imagining that he can taste sweet tea and cinnamon in the designs of that skin.
Charles always smiles at him, every time.
There’s another scar that’s neither the oldest nor the newest. It forms a dark star over Charles’s spine. That one’s a memory too: razor-sharp, both bad and good. The ugliest things they’ve ever done. The moment that Charles calls redemption and Erik prefers not to think about at all, though in the depths of night, sometimes, he’ll admit that Charles is right.
He’d almost left. He’d seen Charles lying on the sand, injured, himself with the helmet on, unhearing, not wanting to know what might be in Charles’s thoughts as the dagger-edged words fall out into the air.
He’d almost left. He’d turned away, sick at heart, bruised inside and out, and at the edge of hearing had caught those other words, soft and shocked and disbelieving: I can’t feel my legs…
He’d turned back.
Charles has, through the years and the countless hours of therapy and the best efforts of various healing mutations, regained some measure of sensation, and even of mobility. He walks slowly, and painfully, and on very bad days needs the wheelchair or Erik’s arms. But he can walk. He can stand at Erik’s side, where he forever ought to be.
The doctors had said, to Erik, as he stood there watching Charles shiver with pain even in his sleep, skin more pale than the hospital sheets, that they’d been lucky. That any longer delay might’ve made the damage irreparable.
He’d stayed, then, because he couldn’t imagine leaving. He’d continued to stay, though Charles has been careful never to ask him, then or after, because of the look in blue eyes when they’d found his in the first split second of awakening, before the hurt set in. Because he wanted to see that unguarded joy again.
He’d meant to only stay until Charles was better. Until the eyes could smile one more time. Until the winter’s end, perhaps. Or until he’d fixed the damage done to the ancient mansion roof by the snow. Or once he’d helped design a more efficient means of getting Charles up and down the sprawling floors of cavernous rooms.
Until he’d won three chess matches in a row. Until he’d ensured that all the new students arriving to fulfill Charles’s dream were aware of the consequences of any harm to those blue eyes, even accidentally.
One day Charles, lying exhaustedly in their shared expanse of bed, eyes tight with pain and back throbbing with the exertion of merely attempting to sit up-it’d been a bad day, no particular reason, simply one morning worse than another-had gazed at him and said, Erik, could you please go and teach T.H. White to the children this morning in my place?
Torn between utter horror and the perpetual need for atonement, he’d finally said yes.
And now, so many months later, that one other question and answer remaining both unspoken and understood, he’s still here. At the front of a classroom.
“Is it a sad story, then?” This from a dark-haired, curious-eyed girl in the first row.
Erik raises both eyebrows. “What do you think?”
“They aren’t happy…”
“Not being happy,” rumbles a distinctive Russian voice with metallic undertones, “is not the same as being sad, yes?”
“It’s not the boy’s fault.”
“Is it?” He waits.
“No, because the sword and the ghosts and he was possessed and it’s like they made him do it-”
“He still killed all those people!”
“He says the sword did it, not him!”
“Wasn’t he holding it?”
“Don’t be stupid, a hunk of metal can’t make anyone do things-”
In the sudden meaningful silence, all the eyes swivel to Erik. “I think,” he says calmly, “that the important question is not what the boy did, whether or not he was responsible-and he may have been, or not-but what he chooses to do now, in the aftermath.”
“But can he ever be happy?”
On Charles’s left ring finger, there’s a quartet of freckles, not precisely symmetrical. No one can see the asymmetry, though, because one year ago Erik had been sitting on the side of the bed as Charles yawned and blinked hair out of his eyes and sat up, and had held out one hand with a mug of tea, Earl Grey, extra sugar, and the other hand with a simple plain circle of metal resting in his palm, and Charles had started laughing and said “Wait, is it one or the other, I can’t have both?” and in their heads had shouted YES!! loudly enough to wake every single person in a five-mile radius.
Erik brings him that first cup of tea every morning, these days. And those four cinnamon-spice freckles remain Erik’s alone, their secret, nestled under the happy curve of the ring.
“What do you think?” he asks his students.
He’d been expecting pale skin, academic’s skin, the first time he’d removed Charles’s expensive silky shirt, inch by inch. He’d not been expecting the freckles, and he’d ended up staring, enraptured, and wanting to seek out every one of them with his tongue. Beautiful. Exotic and astonishing, buried away beneath the professorial cardigans and the professional self-confidence, strongholds that cracked just a little as Erik forgot to speak at the unveiling.
He’d kissed Charles everywhere, in the wake of that discovery, until Charles stopped trying to babble nonsense about not being what Erik was imagining, sorry, if Erik wanted he could make himself look different, be anyone else, change everything…
Erik’d said several very impolite words in multiple languages, anger first like a crescendo at the very idea of Charles toying with their heads in that moment, emotion that collapsed and ebbed into comprehension of why Charles might think to ask that question at all; and then, speaking into the curve of one hip, skimming his tongue over coruscating shades of playful skin, don’t change anything. Not ever. I want you.
The freckles dance like playful jewels, each time he unwraps them all over again. Ruby and gold and topaz spilled over white damask. Someone carelessly left the treasure-box open, and now all the wealth is Erik’s to marvel at, to steal away and protect.
He can feel Charles’s amusement in his head, tart and sweet as fresh pineapple in the morning, sunshine-yellow and effervescent. You may steal me away any time you’d like. Though perhaps we can finish this day’s lessons first?
Erik eyes the clock, more discreetly than any of the students. Two minutes until the end of class. Meet you in the hallway in five?
Ah…make it ten? That question comes with apologetic shades, the tropical-paradise laughter blurring into darker wine and regret. Hints of pain, not hidden because Charles doesn’t hide that from him, nibble around the edges. Charles won’t be able to walk very fast, not today.
Don’t get up, Erik says, softly. I’ll come and meet you. And he feels the smile, sunbeam through raindrops, in reply.
“Homework,” he interjects into the first break in the discussion. “Next week. Think about how you would feel, as a citizen of the city. Write a page. Or two. Use specific quotes, please.” And, just to be sure, “specific quotes from this story, clear?”
Mumbles, but good-spirited ones, of agreement. The bell rings. And the class ends.
Erik lingers long enough to answer one or two questions-Charles, downstairs, is doing the same; no rush-and then ducks out the door. And doesn’t run down the corridor or take the stairs two at a time, but only because Charles is still chatting away, not because Erik has any respect whatsoever for academic dignity.
When he gets there, the classroom is deserted, except for Charles, who’s leaning not-entirely-casually on his desk, eyes all lit up with anticipation, despite the faint edge of flickering pain. Five minutes, hmm?
Four and a half. You like me being prompt. He puts both hands on those beloved shoulders, liking the way muscles tense and shiver at his touch: not all pain, then. Not that bad. He doesn’t try to pull Charles upright, though. Just bends down far enough to kiss him, lips sealed together like a pact, a declaration of fealty, knight to liege lord, always.
Charles laughs. Kisses him in return, decided and firm and with enough heat to spark the bloom of arousal in his veins, under his skin, along his spine. You imagine me as your medieval sovereign, do you? I rather like that one.
I’d fight for your honor any time you asked.
My champion, Charles says, lightly, but shuts his eyes and puts his face into Erik’s neck, nose brushing the hollow between throat and collarbone, and just breathes.
“Can I sweep you off your feet?” It’s a wistful question, but serious, underneath.
“You can help me walk,” Charles answers, the same way. To bed, that is.
Precisely where I want you. He kisses one hand, this time, teasing. The students would be scandalized, not at the flirtation, but at the idea that he’s capable of said flirtation at all. Not that he cares. He’s in love with Charles.
“Why are you contemplating our students, at this particular moment?” Erik?
“I’m not. I’m contemplating you. Is this a new freckle? Right here?” He slides his tongue between two fingers, licking along the crease. Were you asking me something, Charles?
“I…was, yes…and no, I don’t think it is…that’s very distracting.” I love you.
Still not a question, but I love you too. He taps at the ring, not physically. Warms it, a degree or two, where it’s keeping those freckles safe. Charles attempts to smile and whisper his name and shudder with desire, all at once.
“If I asked you that question,” Charles says, very softly, gazing at the ring, and Erik takes a deep breath and says, simply, straightforwardly, “Yes. I am.”
I’m happy, as well. “Erik?”
I’m glad. “Yes, Charles?”
“Happy Anniversary.” About sweeping me off my feet…it is a special occasion, after all…I think you can.
Erik puts both arms around him, wordless with joy, with concern; Charles shakes his head, and murmurs Not because I need you to carry me. Because I want you to, this time. And Erik says, because the words need to be said, because he needs to be the one to say them at last, “Charles, I love you, you know I love you, you know I want to-and I never did say it, I never asked you, I need you to know that I want this, tell me you know, tell me you know that I want to-”
Charles, who knows every word he’s going to say, jumps in, then, before he can finish. So they complete Erik’s sentence together, in the end, with one word: “-stay.”
I love every one of your freckles, Erik tells him, looking at his ring on Charles’s finger, there in the quiet classroom with the empty lab stools and the curious gleam of microscopes and the dusty gold afternoon, kissing Charles again because it’s that or cry and he is not going to cry. And Charles answers, also crying, laughing, kissing him back, I know.
Title: You Make Me Drop Things (Like All The Plans I Had Made For A Life Without You)
Rating: PG-13 for implied sex, maybe?
Word Count: 2,898
Disclaimers: characters’re the property of Marvel, not me; title from Jimmy Gnecco’s & Brian May’s “Someone To Die For” (yes, the song from the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack; hey, it’s a decent album) (it was almost “Falling Slowly” from the movie Once, though)
Summary: Erik contemplates Charles’s freckles, and Erik and Charles celebrate an anniversary. Future!fic, Erik and Charles and their students, happy endings.
Notes: birthday fic for melissima, who requested Erik/Charles, freckles. The short story Erik’s discussing with his students is Lord Dunsany’s “The Sword of Welleran,” which I highly recommend.
Erik doesn’t attempt to count Charles’s innumerable freckles. Not with numbers, at least.
He counts with memories, instead. Each small cluster, each galactic spiral, becomes a moment, a smile, a signifier with meaning shared only between them. Their intimate language, private aides de memoire that neither of them needs, that bind them together like handfasting ribbons, bright and true.
The first time they kissed lies intertwined with, not the twin sparkles on Charles’s nose as might be expected, but the lower starburst scatter near the base of his throat, where the freckles become most visible. It’d been a quagmire night, a sticky hot night, down in the American South; Charles had slowly shed layers, unfastened buttons, during the second chess game of the night. Erik himself’d been down to a sleeveless undershirt and slacks and was busy arguing with Charles about whether recruitment should focus first on the most useful candidates or the ones most in need of assistance, while idly contemplating a bishop and the likelihood of Charles having set a trap with that knight.
Charles probably had. Elegant, intricate, and deceptively innocent: that’s how Charles tends to play, even now. Clear-eyed strength hidden behind innocuous kindness.
He’d watched a single drop of sweat slide lazily along the curve of Charles’s neck, along that open shirt collar, gleaming over exposed and startling freckles. He’d never seen those freckles before. They drew his attention like nothing else in the world.
When he’d looked up, aware that it’d been his turn for several minutes, Charles had met his eyes. Had smiled.
The freckles on Charles’s right ankle, the triangular cluster above the meeting-point of bone, mean the first time they’d had sex, not the same night but several weeks later, long glittering weeks of discovery and delight and anticipation. Neither of them had quite been virginal in this particular area-Charles less so, though those sapphire eyes’d gone enormous at the first sight of Erik naked-but it’d been an exploration nevertheless, learning through touch and taste and soft sounds and gasps and laughter.
They’d been as careful as they knew how to be, but Charles had been sore, after, only a little. Erik had carried him into the shower, and then proceeded to clean him up, unselfconsciously, soap and hot water and hands as tender as he could make them, because he wanted to, because he wanted to do this for Charles, even while Charles blushed vividly red everywhere and tried to argue that the gesture wasn’t necessary.
Erik’d ignored him. Had paused, on his knees on the shower tile for better access, fingers trailing lather over Charles’s leg and calf and toes, and leaned forward, caught by the small twinkling brightnesses, and kissed that ankle, gently.
Charles had made a very tiny sound, not quite a gasp, at that. But, as Erik sat back up on his knees, had put out a hand, and stroked it through Erik’s hair, before coaxing him to his feet for a kiss on the lips.
Charles, in the present, picking up that memory from two floors away and the middle of a biology lecture, smiles. Sends him over a gentle caress, wordless affection.
Love you, Erik murmurs back. He’s talking out loud at the same time, a trick he’s mastered over time spent with Charles, who carries on multiple conversations on multiple planes without ever batting an eye. Erik’s not quite that good, but he’s learning.
He says, to the assembled students, “Shall we talk about the ending?” and waits for the obligatory rustle to run round the room.
He’s teaching them a Lord Dunsany short story, mostly because Charles had proclaimed definitively that they weren’t doing another semester of T.S. Eliot or Rilke or even Marlowe. Charles’d had Erik’s cock in his mouth and several fingers doing extremely persuasive things at the time, so Erik had agreed.
He’d grumbled when Charles had handed him the volume of fantasy. But something about this story had made sense, in his soul.
He knows about ghosts. About phantoms that take hold of one’s dreams, and refuse to let go. About doing whatever might be necessary, taking up whatever weapon may lie at hand, to protect family and home.
About the costs of those weapons. And fields, to borrow Dunsany’s words, that will never be sown, after, except with blood. Children who will never be born, voices in the wind, because their would-have-been fathers will never come home from war.
At the end of the story, the city’s safe. That’s a truth.
The people of the city, and the young man standing over the bodies of the invaders slain by his sword, weep, at the end. That’s another truth.
“He is a hero,” ventures a girl with spiky black hair and fireworks that crackle around her fingertips, but she sounds dubious.
“Is he?”
“He saved the city…”
“He killed so many people. And now they all know the world isn’t safe.”
“Of course the world isn’t safe, stupid-”
“No. Not the people outside who want them dead, for the gold or whatever. The inside. Him. The hero. Who kills people with the creepy possessed sword. They’re scared about the outside, yeah, but they’re afraid of him too.”
The inside, Erik thinks, nodding in acknowledgement of that particular answer. Charles hadn’t said much about his choice of this specific story. Had smiled, a slightly peculiar smile, and said, “Go on, then, you’ll probably enjoy it…”
Charles knows about pain. About scars, visible and not, that never go away.
There are scars, visible ones, that slice through some of the freckle-constellations, silver-pink cometary tracks of long-healed wounds. One lies along Charles’s upper arm, a memento of fractured bone and a broken family and what after many years Charles can finally name aloud as abuse. Erik hates that scar, and would strip it away if he could; Erik loves that scar because it’s a piece of the past that makes Charles who he is, the person who fits into all the lonely places of Erik’s heart. Erik kisses that scar, from time to time, tongue lingering over the bisected freckles, imagining that he can taste sweet tea and cinnamon in the designs of that skin.
Charles always smiles at him, every time.
There’s another scar that’s neither the oldest nor the newest. It forms a dark star over Charles’s spine. That one’s a memory too: razor-sharp, both bad and good. The ugliest things they’ve ever done. The moment that Charles calls redemption and Erik prefers not to think about at all, though in the depths of night, sometimes, he’ll admit that Charles is right.
He’d almost left. He’d seen Charles lying on the sand, injured, himself with the helmet on, unhearing, not wanting to know what might be in Charles’s thoughts as the dagger-edged words fall out into the air.
He’d almost left. He’d turned away, sick at heart, bruised inside and out, and at the edge of hearing had caught those other words, soft and shocked and disbelieving: I can’t feel my legs…
He’d turned back.
Charles has, through the years and the countless hours of therapy and the best efforts of various healing mutations, regained some measure of sensation, and even of mobility. He walks slowly, and painfully, and on very bad days needs the wheelchair or Erik’s arms. But he can walk. He can stand at Erik’s side, where he forever ought to be.
The doctors had said, to Erik, as he stood there watching Charles shiver with pain even in his sleep, skin more pale than the hospital sheets, that they’d been lucky. That any longer delay might’ve made the damage irreparable.
He’d stayed, then, because he couldn’t imagine leaving. He’d continued to stay, though Charles has been careful never to ask him, then or after, because of the look in blue eyes when they’d found his in the first split second of awakening, before the hurt set in. Because he wanted to see that unguarded joy again.
He’d meant to only stay until Charles was better. Until the eyes could smile one more time. Until the winter’s end, perhaps. Or until he’d fixed the damage done to the ancient mansion roof by the snow. Or once he’d helped design a more efficient means of getting Charles up and down the sprawling floors of cavernous rooms.
Until he’d won three chess matches in a row. Until he’d ensured that all the new students arriving to fulfill Charles’s dream were aware of the consequences of any harm to those blue eyes, even accidentally.
One day Charles, lying exhaustedly in their shared expanse of bed, eyes tight with pain and back throbbing with the exertion of merely attempting to sit up-it’d been a bad day, no particular reason, simply one morning worse than another-had gazed at him and said, Erik, could you please go and teach T.H. White to the children this morning in my place?
Torn between utter horror and the perpetual need for atonement, he’d finally said yes.
And now, so many months later, that one other question and answer remaining both unspoken and understood, he’s still here. At the front of a classroom.
“Is it a sad story, then?” This from a dark-haired, curious-eyed girl in the first row.
Erik raises both eyebrows. “What do you think?”
“They aren’t happy…”
“Not being happy,” rumbles a distinctive Russian voice with metallic undertones, “is not the same as being sad, yes?”
“It’s not the boy’s fault.”
“Is it?” He waits.
“No, because the sword and the ghosts and he was possessed and it’s like they made him do it-”
“He still killed all those people!”
“He says the sword did it, not him!”
“Wasn’t he holding it?”
“Don’t be stupid, a hunk of metal can’t make anyone do things-”
In the sudden meaningful silence, all the eyes swivel to Erik. “I think,” he says calmly, “that the important question is not what the boy did, whether or not he was responsible-and he may have been, or not-but what he chooses to do now, in the aftermath.”
“But can he ever be happy?”
On Charles’s left ring finger, there’s a quartet of freckles, not precisely symmetrical. No one can see the asymmetry, though, because one year ago Erik had been sitting on the side of the bed as Charles yawned and blinked hair out of his eyes and sat up, and had held out one hand with a mug of tea, Earl Grey, extra sugar, and the other hand with a simple plain circle of metal resting in his palm, and Charles had started laughing and said “Wait, is it one or the other, I can’t have both?” and in their heads had shouted YES!! loudly enough to wake every single person in a five-mile radius.
Erik brings him that first cup of tea every morning, these days. And those four cinnamon-spice freckles remain Erik’s alone, their secret, nestled under the happy curve of the ring.
“What do you think?” he asks his students.
He’d been expecting pale skin, academic’s skin, the first time he’d removed Charles’s expensive silky shirt, inch by inch. He’d not been expecting the freckles, and he’d ended up staring, enraptured, and wanting to seek out every one of them with his tongue. Beautiful. Exotic and astonishing, buried away beneath the professorial cardigans and the professional self-confidence, strongholds that cracked just a little as Erik forgot to speak at the unveiling.
He’d kissed Charles everywhere, in the wake of that discovery, until Charles stopped trying to babble nonsense about not being what Erik was imagining, sorry, if Erik wanted he could make himself look different, be anyone else, change everything…
Erik’d said several very impolite words in multiple languages, anger first like a crescendo at the very idea of Charles toying with their heads in that moment, emotion that collapsed and ebbed into comprehension of why Charles might think to ask that question at all; and then, speaking into the curve of one hip, skimming his tongue over coruscating shades of playful skin, don’t change anything. Not ever. I want you.
The freckles dance like playful jewels, each time he unwraps them all over again. Ruby and gold and topaz spilled over white damask. Someone carelessly left the treasure-box open, and now all the wealth is Erik’s to marvel at, to steal away and protect.
He can feel Charles’s amusement in his head, tart and sweet as fresh pineapple in the morning, sunshine-yellow and effervescent. You may steal me away any time you’d like. Though perhaps we can finish this day’s lessons first?
Erik eyes the clock, more discreetly than any of the students. Two minutes until the end of class. Meet you in the hallway in five?
Ah…make it ten? That question comes with apologetic shades, the tropical-paradise laughter blurring into darker wine and regret. Hints of pain, not hidden because Charles doesn’t hide that from him, nibble around the edges. Charles won’t be able to walk very fast, not today.
Don’t get up, Erik says, softly. I’ll come and meet you. And he feels the smile, sunbeam through raindrops, in reply.
“Homework,” he interjects into the first break in the discussion. “Next week. Think about how you would feel, as a citizen of the city. Write a page. Or two. Use specific quotes, please.” And, just to be sure, “specific quotes from this story, clear?”
Mumbles, but good-spirited ones, of agreement. The bell rings. And the class ends.
Erik lingers long enough to answer one or two questions-Charles, downstairs, is doing the same; no rush-and then ducks out the door. And doesn’t run down the corridor or take the stairs two at a time, but only because Charles is still chatting away, not because Erik has any respect whatsoever for academic dignity.
When he gets there, the classroom is deserted, except for Charles, who’s leaning not-entirely-casually on his desk, eyes all lit up with anticipation, despite the faint edge of flickering pain. Five minutes, hmm?
Four and a half. You like me being prompt. He puts both hands on those beloved shoulders, liking the way muscles tense and shiver at his touch: not all pain, then. Not that bad. He doesn’t try to pull Charles upright, though. Just bends down far enough to kiss him, lips sealed together like a pact, a declaration of fealty, knight to liege lord, always.
Charles laughs. Kisses him in return, decided and firm and with enough heat to spark the bloom of arousal in his veins, under his skin, along his spine. You imagine me as your medieval sovereign, do you? I rather like that one.
I’d fight for your honor any time you asked.
My champion, Charles says, lightly, but shuts his eyes and puts his face into Erik’s neck, nose brushing the hollow between throat and collarbone, and just breathes.
“Can I sweep you off your feet?” It’s a wistful question, but serious, underneath.
“You can help me walk,” Charles answers, the same way. To bed, that is.
Precisely where I want you. He kisses one hand, this time, teasing. The students would be scandalized, not at the flirtation, but at the idea that he’s capable of said flirtation at all. Not that he cares. He’s in love with Charles.
“Why are you contemplating our students, at this particular moment?” Erik?
“I’m not. I’m contemplating you. Is this a new freckle? Right here?” He slides his tongue between two fingers, licking along the crease. Were you asking me something, Charles?
“I…was, yes…and no, I don’t think it is…that’s very distracting.” I love you.
Still not a question, but I love you too. He taps at the ring, not physically. Warms it, a degree or two, where it’s keeping those freckles safe. Charles attempts to smile and whisper his name and shudder with desire, all at once.
“If I asked you that question,” Charles says, very softly, gazing at the ring, and Erik takes a deep breath and says, simply, straightforwardly, “Yes. I am.”
I’m happy, as well. “Erik?”
I’m glad. “Yes, Charles?”
“Happy Anniversary.” About sweeping me off my feet…it is a special occasion, after all…I think you can.
Erik puts both arms around him, wordless with joy, with concern; Charles shakes his head, and murmurs Not because I need you to carry me. Because I want you to, this time. And Erik says, because the words need to be said, because he needs to be the one to say them at last, “Charles, I love you, you know I love you, you know I want to-and I never did say it, I never asked you, I need you to know that I want this, tell me you know, tell me you know that I want to-”
Charles, who knows every word he’s going to say, jumps in, then, before he can finish. So they complete Erik’s sentence together, in the end, with one word: “-stay.”
I love every one of your freckles, Erik tells him, looking at his ring on Charles’s finger, there in the quiet classroom with the empty lab stools and the curious gleam of microscopes and the dusty gold afternoon, kissing Charles again because it’s that or cry and he is not going to cry. And Charles answers, also crying, laughing, kissing him back, I know.