Possession - 2/?
Title: Possession
Author: molliexwobbles
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Wordcount: 2269
Rating: R
Pairing(s): Charles/Erik
Warning(s): Brief sexual assault and torture in a dream sequence; might be disturbing.
Summary: For the better part of his life, Erik owned only what he could carry on his back or in his hands.
Chapter 1
------------------------------“I sent ahead to the housekeeper as soon as I was assured you would be staying with us. The rooms on either side are empty, which I thought might comfort you. I hope this is satisfactory.”
Charles reached for the doorknob, but Erik grabbed the bolts of the door and swung it open himself, brushing past Charles to enter the room. He stopped and took it in.
Compared to the rest of the house, it was a hovel. It was large enough to contain twice the amount of furniture it did, but the main furnishing was a double bed with beige cotton sheets. A plush armchair stood in the corner next to a small record player; a neat stack of vinyl sat alongside. There was a plain armoire for his clothes, a bookshelf stocked with tomes in both German and English, and on the bedside table an absurdly bright sunflower grinned at him. Something about the room immediately put him at ease. It took him a moment to realize what.
“Charles, is everything-“
“Metal, yes. I had Mrs. Brownsworth put copper backs on all the books, and find furnishing that used iron instead of wood whenever possible. I debated ordering one of those space blankets the military is developing, but they looked quite uncomfortable. I’m afraid I might have done a teensy bit of snooping to find your artistic tastes, but what I found is all here, and of course if you need more all you have to do is ask... I do hope it’s all right,” he said nervously.
“Charles, you did not have to do this.”
The professor looked embarrassed, shuffling his feet. “It was no trouble, really. I thought it would make you feel more… at home.” Erik was struck by how small Charles looked, when he wasn’t puffed up with his fatherly persona. The pads of fluff on his bones, earned from a lifetime of privilege, made him look almost sagged under the weight of his sweater. “You can move into the servant’s quarters if you like, I don’t mind, but I believed you might be more comfortable closer to-up here. Please tell me what you are thinking, Erik, I feel like a damned fool right now.”
In two long strides Erik reached Charles and pulled him to him, gripping his shoulder blades. There was none of the awkward fiddling he had seen when he saw other pairs do this. He had been expecting Charles to pull away at once, and so grasped him tightly; when the smaller man did not balk, but instead leaned into him, he held him all the tighter. He could not help it.
They fit perfectly; Charles’s temple was on his shoulder, and Erik suppressed a shiver as the professor’s breath whispered across his stubble. He was not one for touch, but when he gave it he gave it fully, and it was only when Charles began to shift against him that he realized he had been holding on for some minutes. With a sniff and a ducked head, he came away awkwardly, and avoided Charles’s eyes.
“Thank you,” he said gruffly. After a beat, he spun around and stalked to the stack of vinyl. A collection of Beethoven was the first. He slid it out of its sleeve and lay it on the disc, setting it to play.
He leaned over the stand with a bowed head, feeling the sound waves reverberate through his skull, the minute vibrations of the needle, the spinning of the gears. It was a fine machine; he wished it were smaller, so he could take it with him-when he left.
“Sleep well,” Charles said, finally, when three sonatas had come and gone. “I’m at the end of the hall, if you need me.”
“I don’t need you, Charles.”
But I need you.
He waited until the door clicked shut, and the metal of Charles’s belt and watch had moved far down the hall. The needle slid off the record and he straightened, breathing in the emptiness, exhaling quickly when he realized the professor’s scent still clung to his collar.
He didn’t think he was supposed to have heard that thought. He knew it wasn’t supposed to make him smile.
But it did. He smiled until the stars poked holes in the sky, until the moon showed her knowing face, and then he readied for bed.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Erik had only lived in two places for any extended amount of time: the cottage in rural Poland held his entire childhood, but as he had done to all the goodness his life amassed, it was seldom visited by his memories. Then there had been the forced march, the dank ghetto, the cattle cars - a room of steel and blood. For years thereafter he inhabited a small closet in the basement of Shaw’s manor, near enough to the operation room to feel the humming of the blades, but too far to plunge them into his own veins. The striving he felt every day to bring himself closer to that salvation twisted perversely into a raging desire to live, survive, endure, to better himself. He need live only long enough so he might fully enjoy the sweet sigh of death.
There were two things, only two, that Shaw gave him that were more gift than curse: to live at all costs, if only to spite him, and the conviction that, if he buried the cracks for one day longer, sewed up the scars holding his crumbling bridge together, held on, held on until his hands locked around the murderer’s throat, no man could match him. He would outlive them all - the Germans, the Nazis, the Jews, the Brits and Americans he heard snatches of over the radio - if only to say he did.
The cottage he hid for its happiness, the closet for its whispers of weakness. In time all he knew was the running. He stayed nowhere for more than a night. He slept in corners, his eyes trained on the doors and windows. He ran from no man, and not even from memories, for he truly believed he had left them long ago. He ran because Shaw had taught him how to do nothing else.
The mansion in Westchester was the most solid force he had met in years. It was built of stone, but the alloys of the earth told him it had stood before even the slums of Warsaw, which for him knew no beginning. An Xavier had built it, and an Xavier now owned it, and an Xavier would hold it through time unknown. It rose to greet every misty morning and settled down to sleep at night with the sun. When he thought its inhabitants long abed, he wandered its corridors, searching for a single draft, one rotting shingle, a mark of decay to tell him that calling it home would not be so strange.
Of course, there was always someone watching. Even when he lay his head down as the sun came up, with the unwinding of his muscles came a whisper in his mind, a phantom brushing through his hair, the settled weight of being watched over, acknowledged, known to be safe before the guardian could find rest himself. One night his shivering bones were too much - he did not sleep, and watched the sun rise from the roof, horizon bleeding in rivets through the haze of his cigarette. He found his steward foggy and drifting at the kitchen table, absurd in a velvet dressing gown. Erik lingered in the doorway, watching his head nod over long-cooled tea, small dots of perspiration on the darkness under his eyes.
“Stop this, Charles. Go to bed.”
“I couldn’t sleep without you.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
It did not matter that there were feathers in his pillow and silk in his sheets-no change came to the stainless-steel room. If anything, it was more vivid-as he learned about himself during the day, Shaw seemed to know the same in his nightmares.
It was the same: Erik stood with a scalpel in his hand, Shaw’s white knuckles around his wrist, his stiff cock in the small of Erik’s back. The person on the table was never tied down, never afraid, looking at him with a serene and trusting gaze even as the screaming blade entered their flesh.
It was usually his mother. Sometimes his baby sister. One unmitigated once, it was the man he had fucked the night before, a tubercular prostitute he took in an alleyway and paid with a stolen diamond. He died faster than his sister, and with more disdain than his mother. Rachel Lensherr smiled up at him, “Liebchen” on her lips, as he dug the blade into her vulva like he was scraping rust from a pipe. Always Shaw stood against him; sometimes he reached around Erik to fondle his twelve-year-old bits, other times he simply whispered in his ear: “Guter junge, Erik. My own good boy.” Erik did not think to turn the blade on its creator until he woke.
When he traveled, he slept when he could, and slept fitfully, so always in his dreams was the stench of horseshit or a rock in his spine to remind him that he need only bring Shaw to completion to wake up. At the Xavier manor, he slept deeply, fully, kept safe in his body if not in his mind. In dreams he forgot all he had gone through, the scars that had knotted and were no longer oozing down his skin. For the first time Darwin appeared on the table. A boy he had not really known, had felt only grim resignation for when he was murdered. His sins grew only with his comfort.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The day he moved the satellite, he did not see Charles for the rest of the day, so busy did he make himself with the youngsters. They looked at him and his shining face distrustingly, expecting this split in his shell would spew forth only badness for them.
He didn’t care. He felt Charles brush against his consciousness and laugh. He laughed back, aloud, causing Sean to shatter a Ming vase instead of the glass cup he aimed for. Erik laughed at that too. Charles did not laugh back, but sighed ruefully, and Erik teased him through the connection that made it seem they were sitting across a chessboard, not across a mansion.
He found that when Sean succeeded and he smiled, Charles was proud. Erik wanted Charles to be proud. At dinner he commended Sean on his work that day, leaving the entire table open-mouthed and Charles beaming like he had never seen him, so afterwards when Erik was washing the dishes and Charles came up behind him and put a palm on his shoulder blade, Erik did not flinch, but quietly shut the metal faucets and bowed his head and accepted Charles’s forehead in place of his hand, his unaccountable care for him etched through the fabric like a carving in stone. He went to bed directly after dinner, not wanting his day to stretch and end on a note it had not started on.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
He was on the table that night. He did not look serene and trusting. He was screaming. His hands and legs were tied down with barbed wire but try as he might he could not move the metal. He felt the blade in his hand as he felt it scraping over his flesh, and he hissed in discomfort as Shaw dug his shaft into Erik’s back, urgently, not calm now, directing the blade to Erik’s balls, shrunken in terror. “You are mine, Liebchen,” he hissed, in a perversion of his mother’s endearment. “You will always be my little toy.” The scalpel cut into his thigh, and Erik screamed. Tears and sweat rolled down his face, gathering on the hand Shaw wrapped around his throat. He brought the scalpel to his left breast, drawing two scalloped arcs, a heart to reach his heart, to pull it out and thrust it steaming against Shaw’s cock and into Shaw’s mouth.
That isn’t yours, Erik thought wildly, but he just cut deeper and deeper, each slice drawing more blood, pumping and welling against his tight skin, staining the hairs of his forearm. He was close now; he could feel the heartbeats ringing into the blade, the aorta bulging past steel, the edge cutting through bone and muscle and finally the tissue there, there, where he did not know if the throbbing came from his body or Shaw’s or from the knife.
He was pale now, panting, trying to slow his frantic pulse so the valve did not burst of its own accord when a third hand reached to cover his; elegant, pale fingers instead of his, long and leathery, forearm covered in hair so light it was almost blond. He watched Charles heft the scalpel, caught in Shaw’s embrace, the shadow of himself pliant on the table, breathing even, looking at Charles with shattering trust. Charles lowered the blade, severed the final cords, and pulled up Erik’s still-beating heart, red and shuddering in his hand. He turned to Shaw, who kissed him full-mouthed and wanton over Erik’s dying body.
You do not need to see this, my friend.
He raised the heart to his mouth, and together with Shaw sank his teeth into the quivering flesh. It pulsed like an orgasm, and Shaw raked his hands down Charles’s body, at first leaving deep gashes but ending with a feather’s touch, to cup him gently, like a lover. His face and hands were Erik’s own, alight with a tenderness he had witnessed in one other but never himself, shining, brilliant, (beautiful) and for the first time Charles looked frightened.
Go home, Erik.
Is that what you see?
Go home.
Chapter 3
Author: molliexwobbles
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Wordcount: 2269
Rating: R
Pairing(s): Charles/Erik
Warning(s): Brief sexual assault and torture in a dream sequence; might be disturbing.
Summary: For the better part of his life, Erik owned only what he could carry on his back or in his hands.
Chapter 1
------------------------------“I sent ahead to the housekeeper as soon as I was assured you would be staying with us. The rooms on either side are empty, which I thought might comfort you. I hope this is satisfactory.”
Charles reached for the doorknob, but Erik grabbed the bolts of the door and swung it open himself, brushing past Charles to enter the room. He stopped and took it in.
Compared to the rest of the house, it was a hovel. It was large enough to contain twice the amount of furniture it did, but the main furnishing was a double bed with beige cotton sheets. A plush armchair stood in the corner next to a small record player; a neat stack of vinyl sat alongside. There was a plain armoire for his clothes, a bookshelf stocked with tomes in both German and English, and on the bedside table an absurdly bright sunflower grinned at him. Something about the room immediately put him at ease. It took him a moment to realize what.
“Charles, is everything-“
“Metal, yes. I had Mrs. Brownsworth put copper backs on all the books, and find furnishing that used iron instead of wood whenever possible. I debated ordering one of those space blankets the military is developing, but they looked quite uncomfortable. I’m afraid I might have done a teensy bit of snooping to find your artistic tastes, but what I found is all here, and of course if you need more all you have to do is ask... I do hope it’s all right,” he said nervously.
“Charles, you did not have to do this.”
The professor looked embarrassed, shuffling his feet. “It was no trouble, really. I thought it would make you feel more… at home.” Erik was struck by how small Charles looked, when he wasn’t puffed up with his fatherly persona. The pads of fluff on his bones, earned from a lifetime of privilege, made him look almost sagged under the weight of his sweater. “You can move into the servant’s quarters if you like, I don’t mind, but I believed you might be more comfortable closer to-up here. Please tell me what you are thinking, Erik, I feel like a damned fool right now.”
In two long strides Erik reached Charles and pulled him to him, gripping his shoulder blades. There was none of the awkward fiddling he had seen when he saw other pairs do this. He had been expecting Charles to pull away at once, and so grasped him tightly; when the smaller man did not balk, but instead leaned into him, he held him all the tighter. He could not help it.
They fit perfectly; Charles’s temple was on his shoulder, and Erik suppressed a shiver as the professor’s breath whispered across his stubble. He was not one for touch, but when he gave it he gave it fully, and it was only when Charles began to shift against him that he realized he had been holding on for some minutes. With a sniff and a ducked head, he came away awkwardly, and avoided Charles’s eyes.
“Thank you,” he said gruffly. After a beat, he spun around and stalked to the stack of vinyl. A collection of Beethoven was the first. He slid it out of its sleeve and lay it on the disc, setting it to play.
He leaned over the stand with a bowed head, feeling the sound waves reverberate through his skull, the minute vibrations of the needle, the spinning of the gears. It was a fine machine; he wished it were smaller, so he could take it with him-when he left.
“Sleep well,” Charles said, finally, when three sonatas had come and gone. “I’m at the end of the hall, if you need me.”
“I don’t need you, Charles.”
But I need you.
He waited until the door clicked shut, and the metal of Charles’s belt and watch had moved far down the hall. The needle slid off the record and he straightened, breathing in the emptiness, exhaling quickly when he realized the professor’s scent still clung to his collar.
He didn’t think he was supposed to have heard that thought. He knew it wasn’t supposed to make him smile.
But it did. He smiled until the stars poked holes in the sky, until the moon showed her knowing face, and then he readied for bed.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
Erik had only lived in two places for any extended amount of time: the cottage in rural Poland held his entire childhood, but as he had done to all the goodness his life amassed, it was seldom visited by his memories. Then there had been the forced march, the dank ghetto, the cattle cars - a room of steel and blood. For years thereafter he inhabited a small closet in the basement of Shaw’s manor, near enough to the operation room to feel the humming of the blades, but too far to plunge them into his own veins. The striving he felt every day to bring himself closer to that salvation twisted perversely into a raging desire to live, survive, endure, to better himself. He need live only long enough so he might fully enjoy the sweet sigh of death.
There were two things, only two, that Shaw gave him that were more gift than curse: to live at all costs, if only to spite him, and the conviction that, if he buried the cracks for one day longer, sewed up the scars holding his crumbling bridge together, held on, held on until his hands locked around the murderer’s throat, no man could match him. He would outlive them all - the Germans, the Nazis, the Jews, the Brits and Americans he heard snatches of over the radio - if only to say he did.
The cottage he hid for its happiness, the closet for its whispers of weakness. In time all he knew was the running. He stayed nowhere for more than a night. He slept in corners, his eyes trained on the doors and windows. He ran from no man, and not even from memories, for he truly believed he had left them long ago. He ran because Shaw had taught him how to do nothing else.
The mansion in Westchester was the most solid force he had met in years. It was built of stone, but the alloys of the earth told him it had stood before even the slums of Warsaw, which for him knew no beginning. An Xavier had built it, and an Xavier now owned it, and an Xavier would hold it through time unknown. It rose to greet every misty morning and settled down to sleep at night with the sun. When he thought its inhabitants long abed, he wandered its corridors, searching for a single draft, one rotting shingle, a mark of decay to tell him that calling it home would not be so strange.
Of course, there was always someone watching. Even when he lay his head down as the sun came up, with the unwinding of his muscles came a whisper in his mind, a phantom brushing through his hair, the settled weight of being watched over, acknowledged, known to be safe before the guardian could find rest himself. One night his shivering bones were too much - he did not sleep, and watched the sun rise from the roof, horizon bleeding in rivets through the haze of his cigarette. He found his steward foggy and drifting at the kitchen table, absurd in a velvet dressing gown. Erik lingered in the doorway, watching his head nod over long-cooled tea, small dots of perspiration on the darkness under his eyes.
“Stop this, Charles. Go to bed.”
“I couldn’t sleep without you.”
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
It did not matter that there were feathers in his pillow and silk in his sheets-no change came to the stainless-steel room. If anything, it was more vivid-as he learned about himself during the day, Shaw seemed to know the same in his nightmares.
It was the same: Erik stood with a scalpel in his hand, Shaw’s white knuckles around his wrist, his stiff cock in the small of Erik’s back. The person on the table was never tied down, never afraid, looking at him with a serene and trusting gaze even as the screaming blade entered their flesh.
It was usually his mother. Sometimes his baby sister. One unmitigated once, it was the man he had fucked the night before, a tubercular prostitute he took in an alleyway and paid with a stolen diamond. He died faster than his sister, and with more disdain than his mother. Rachel Lensherr smiled up at him, “Liebchen” on her lips, as he dug the blade into her vulva like he was scraping rust from a pipe. Always Shaw stood against him; sometimes he reached around Erik to fondle his twelve-year-old bits, other times he simply whispered in his ear: “Guter junge, Erik. My own good boy.” Erik did not think to turn the blade on its creator until he woke.
When he traveled, he slept when he could, and slept fitfully, so always in his dreams was the stench of horseshit or a rock in his spine to remind him that he need only bring Shaw to completion to wake up. At the Xavier manor, he slept deeply, fully, kept safe in his body if not in his mind. In dreams he forgot all he had gone through, the scars that had knotted and were no longer oozing down his skin. For the first time Darwin appeared on the table. A boy he had not really known, had felt only grim resignation for when he was murdered. His sins grew only with his comfort.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
The day he moved the satellite, he did not see Charles for the rest of the day, so busy did he make himself with the youngsters. They looked at him and his shining face distrustingly, expecting this split in his shell would spew forth only badness for them.
He didn’t care. He felt Charles brush against his consciousness and laugh. He laughed back, aloud, causing Sean to shatter a Ming vase instead of the glass cup he aimed for. Erik laughed at that too. Charles did not laugh back, but sighed ruefully, and Erik teased him through the connection that made it seem they were sitting across a chessboard, not across a mansion.
He found that when Sean succeeded and he smiled, Charles was proud. Erik wanted Charles to be proud. At dinner he commended Sean on his work that day, leaving the entire table open-mouthed and Charles beaming like he had never seen him, so afterwards when Erik was washing the dishes and Charles came up behind him and put a palm on his shoulder blade, Erik did not flinch, but quietly shut the metal faucets and bowed his head and accepted Charles’s forehead in place of his hand, his unaccountable care for him etched through the fabric like a carving in stone. He went to bed directly after dinner, not wanting his day to stretch and end on a note it had not started on.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
He was on the table that night. He did not look serene and trusting. He was screaming. His hands and legs were tied down with barbed wire but try as he might he could not move the metal. He felt the blade in his hand as he felt it scraping over his flesh, and he hissed in discomfort as Shaw dug his shaft into Erik’s back, urgently, not calm now, directing the blade to Erik’s balls, shrunken in terror. “You are mine, Liebchen,” he hissed, in a perversion of his mother’s endearment. “You will always be my little toy.” The scalpel cut into his thigh, and Erik screamed. Tears and sweat rolled down his face, gathering on the hand Shaw wrapped around his throat. He brought the scalpel to his left breast, drawing two scalloped arcs, a heart to reach his heart, to pull it out and thrust it steaming against Shaw’s cock and into Shaw’s mouth.
That isn’t yours, Erik thought wildly, but he just cut deeper and deeper, each slice drawing more blood, pumping and welling against his tight skin, staining the hairs of his forearm. He was close now; he could feel the heartbeats ringing into the blade, the aorta bulging past steel, the edge cutting through bone and muscle and finally the tissue there, there, where he did not know if the throbbing came from his body or Shaw’s or from the knife.
He was pale now, panting, trying to slow his frantic pulse so the valve did not burst of its own accord when a third hand reached to cover his; elegant, pale fingers instead of his, long and leathery, forearm covered in hair so light it was almost blond. He watched Charles heft the scalpel, caught in Shaw’s embrace, the shadow of himself pliant on the table, breathing even, looking at Charles with shattering trust. Charles lowered the blade, severed the final cords, and pulled up Erik’s still-beating heart, red and shuddering in his hand. He turned to Shaw, who kissed him full-mouthed and wanton over Erik’s dying body.
You do not need to see this, my friend.
He raised the heart to his mouth, and together with Shaw sank his teeth into the quivering flesh. It pulsed like an orgasm, and Shaw raked his hands down Charles’s body, at first leaving deep gashes but ending with a feather’s touch, to cup him gently, like a lover. His face and hands were Erik’s own, alight with a tenderness he had witnessed in one other but never himself, shining, brilliant, (beautiful) and for the first time Charles looked frightened.
Go home, Erik.
Is that what you see?
Go home.
Chapter 3