The Bell's Toll (8/?)
Title: The Bell's Toll (8/?)
Author: monstrousreg
Word count:
Warnings: Violence, fast pacing, eventual NC-17. So, uh, the usual for me, I suppose.
Pairing: Erik/Charles.
Summary: Nikkita AU inspired by this prompt. A sort of fusion between the two series, with a healthy (or not) dose of my own imagination. Charles Xavier goes to prison, and is recruited by a spy/assassin division of the government. Dismal a beginning as this might look, it unbelievably goes downhill. Erik, the necessary stoic ex-military man, gets sidled with him. Not a single person is amused.
Prologue
“This is outrageous! Why do you have a tub?”
“Because I’ve been here for six years,” Erik replied blandly, glancing up from the files in his desk.
Erik’s room wasn’t a room-it was a bloody apartment. Complete with bathroom with a tub.
“I am deeply, greatly insulted,” Charles said, turning around with a frown. “I am nearly your age and yet I have the sterilized equivalent of a dorm room!”
“I’m seven years older than you, you’re nowhere near my age. And you should count yourself lucky to have your own room at all; most agents share.”
“That’s a moot point,” Charles muttered, striding to the window-Erik had a bloody window-and snatching the curtains back. Oh. It overlooked the training courtyard. Disappointed, Charles flicked the curtains back in place. “As you know perfectly well un-dampened telepaths can’t share rooms.”
“You must be a fascinating bedmate.”
“No one’s ever complained,” Charles wandered over to Erik’s desk, his tone lofty.
Erik arched an eyebrow, “Did you convince them you’re a sex god?”
“They needed no convincing. Six years, you said?”
This time Erik did not bother to look up from his papers. “Yes; it’s all in my personal file, which I distinctly remember leaving on the desk in your room, for you to read at your leisure.”
“I haven’t had any leisure, because you are a slave driver,” Charles said, very pointedly. “Now-six years. You are thirty-two; so you came to be here at twenty-six-“
“You can count. I’m so proud of you.”
Baskerville, lying as long as he could stretch upon Erik’s blue-covered bed, snorted in amusement. Traitor.
“Which means your military career, however stellar, can’t have been very long at all. Why did you decide to come to the hush-hush part of the military?”
Erik glanced up briefly, as if considering something to say-and abruptly, like lightning striking, all of his shields slammed up, walling his mind off like a vault. Baskerville materialized next to Charles just as the telepath’s mind locked down, layers of reinforcements wrapping around his innermost self like snakes coiling about a pray.
Charles was conscious of one thing: he’d just been attacked.
Miss Frost, he thought, icily, sending a shard of pain through his mirrored shields-to hurt but not be hurt. He felt her recoil, startled and stunned, shocked at his control-and at his boldness.
Charles was aware of one other thing: he’d just blown his cover as a third-level telepath. A third-level wouldn’t be able to put up such shields-let alone send out a lance of pain.
Oh, bloody hell, thought Charles, and then, very distinctly, fuck you.
Baskerville’s eyes glinted like chips of ruby. Tightly restrained, holding back ninety percent of his power, Charles surged forward against his shields and pushed at the growing pressure of Frost’s mind, like fingers of ice trying to find purchase and attack. He imagined his mind to be a round, smooth, mirrored dome-impenetrable and slippery, impossible to fracture.
Suddenly, Baskerville’s head snapped to the side. Distracted, Charles glanced down; Erik’s nose was bleeding.
“Good God,” he said, appalled, and moved abruptly forwards to tilt the man’s head up and pinch his nose. Erik was completely unresponsive. Whatever Frost was doing to him was evidently taking up most of his conscious functions. Baskerville gave a quiet sort of whimpering cry, not nearly a bark, pained.
“Oh, for the love of-“ Charles said, exasperated, and swiftly slipped under metal shielding to reach the inner core of Erik’s mind, efficiently sliding his mirrored dome over it. He couldn’t protect the man from the surface assault-not without blowing his cover, and he didn’t need Erik that much-but he could make sure his personality core and basic memories would be untouched.
It took only a glance, though, to realize he was quite late. There were large blackouts in the vast canvas of the man’s memories, like holes in the pavement of the street. Entire sections of recollection missing. Baskerville whined.
“And why should you care?” Charles demanded, arching a brow.
Abruptly, Frost withdrew. Charles immediately smoothed down a layer of shields, and felt the snag of her ice as she looked in, careless of permission. He threw up confusion and surprise, and even a little bit of fear. Let her think he had no idea what had just happened.
He looked down at Erik’s vacant eyes.
“Well,” he said quietly, checking to make sure the nosebleed has stopped. “Now we know for certain where those headaches come from, don’t we.”
Erik blinked, eyes suddenly bright with intelligence again. Charles looked at him, doubtful, but withdrew his hand. The man straightened, wiping his upper lip with distaste. Blood had run down to his lips, and then down his cheeks to the angle of his sharp jaw when Charles had tipped his head back.
“I apologize,” he said low, standing to go to the bathroom. “That happens sometimes.”
Charles was freshly sickened. The damn woman was liquefying his brain. Baskerville sat down, looking distinctly unhappy.
“Neurological damage is now certainly out of the question,” Charles said conversationally, striding into the bathroom with no respect for personal space-it was cramped-and sitting on the edge of the tub. “You might be dying, even.”
“Your concern is heartbreaking,” Erik mumbled, splashing water over his bloodstained face.
Charles eased himself back into the empty tub, crossing his knees to let his feet dangle over the edge. It wasn’t that big; two people would hardly fit. Still, it beat Charles tub-less little cubicle of a bathroom.
He watched as Erik washed his face, tracking the shifting muscles beneath the thin fabric of his t-shirt, the way they sloped gracefully from the long curve of his back to the column of his long neck. Charles liked and appreciated beautiful things, even if he did normally prefer a woman’s soft curves to a man’s hard angles. If he had been so inclined, though, one had to admit Erik was quite exquisite.
Baskerville came into the bathroom, sniffing around, curiously poking his snout closer to Erik’s hands.
The man reached for a hand towel and dried his face, turning around to arch an amused eyebrow at Charles’ position.
“You hair’s growing floppy,” he said, apropos of nothing.
Charles arched his eyebrows and looked up; he could just barely catch sight of his bangs, dark brown and unruly.
“All the better to grab onto,” he said, cheeky.
“By an assassin,” Erik pointed out, balling the towel and throwing it in the laundry hamper.
“Or by a lover,” Charles grinned, mock-seductively, turning his head to give Erik a look out of the corner of his eye. “Not that there are much prospects of such a thing in this place,” he added wistfully, after a moment. “Most of my fellow agents are much younger.”
“I’m sure you can survive without sex for a few months.”
“You’ve obviously never met me,” Charles muttered. “Oh, you missed a spot,” he added, pointing at Erik’s jaw angle, where a drop of blood remained.
Startlingly, Erik bent closer and docilely put the spot within Charles’ reach. Hesitating briefly, Charles gamely reached out and rubbed his knuckle on the spot, cleaning it. Baskerville’s ears were very straight, eyes very bright. He was paying close attention, and he felt just as well as Charles did when their skin came in contact. Erik’s mind did something strange-not unbecoming, exactly, but not something Charles would have anticipated.
Touch starvation, Charles thought, not for the first time. He couldn’t help but think that, in different circumstances, Erik would be a lovely man-beautiful of course, but also with an attractively intelligent mind and a willing disposition to touch and be touched. It was rare he got angry, and rarer still he held onto that fit of temper.
Yet he kept himself so tightly held back that Charles had to wonder: was the restraint self imposed, or ordered besides?
“Hm,” Charles withdrew his hand, crossing his arms. “What is your earliest memory?”
Erik frowned at him, confused. “Are you going to psychoanalyze me now, is that it?”
“Only if you want me to give you more traumas. Just answer the question.”
“Only if you answer one in return,” Erik said shrewdly. “Did you kill Marko?”
Charles scoffed. “That’s not an equivalent question. Ask something else.”
Erik seemed honestly stunned that Charles was willing to play the game at all. His face took on a thoughtful look as he lowered himself to the tub edge, at the far side of Charles’ legs. He pushed back a damp strand of hair that had stuck to his wide forehead, stalling. Baskerville sat down and lowered himself to the ground, laying his great head on his front paws.
“Alright. What is your earliest memory?”
Charles hummed quietly. “That’s a convoluted question for someone with eidetic memory. I suppose-the first thing I remember, chronologically, was my mother’s hair brushing against my cheeks when she bent down to kiss me. I must have been, hm, about one year old? I think so. She always put vanilla scent in her hair; to this day I relate vanilla to her.”
It was an innocuous enough memory; affectionate and old, and nothing Erik could really learn from it.
Erik nodded pensively. “My first memory is of my father. He was a clock-maker. He sat me in his lap and showed me all the pieces of a clock, and named them one by one, and showed me how to assemble them.”
“What year were you born in?” Charles asked casually.
Now that he was looking for it, Charles saw it. The question fell, as he had suspected, into one of the many voids in Erik’s battered memory-but as soon as the blackness surged forward, an answer presented itself, the connection forced, the edges of question and answered non-matching. Artificial; an implanted memory.
“Nineteen-eighty,” Erik answered, lying without knowing. “You could get that from my file, if you ever cared to-“
“I’ve got you right here! Why would I waste time reading your biography?” Although actually-come to think of it, that file might prove interesting. At least three fourths of the information there contained had to be lies, but you couldn’t built a convincing lie without using the truth as a base.
Charles considered asking about the numbers tattooed on Erik’s skin-but he remembered distinctly the shade of his skin, pale under the tan, streaked with blood-red. Not again. Not today anyway.
The telepath offered a hand, “Get me out of here.”
Erik heaved a long-suffering sigh and did so, pulling Charles easily out of the tub, muscles flexing along the length of his arm. Charles allowed himself to brush against the man’s chest, noting the way Erik failed to push away, and moved past to the living room. Erik’s bed was made-undoubtedly to military standards-with a dark blue cover. The small apartment was Spartan to the point of being nearly monastic.
“I think we need a stiff drink,” Charles announced, pushing back his hair, which had indeed grown almost floppy.
“I’m on medication,” Erik reminded him.
For all the good it’ll do you, Charles thought darkly. “Very well. I’ll drink and you’ll eat.”
“This a military training compound. You’ll be hard pressed to find alcohol here.”
“Everything’s pallid with you, isn’t it?” Charles rolled his eyes. “You’ve got a ten-level clearance. Get me to a bar.”
“So I can pay for your drinks?” Erik arched a brow. “I don’t know why I think you have expensive tastes.”
“Not at all. The only things I’m really particular about are my clothes and my sexual partners. The rest I can do with cheap-though of course when given the choice I won’t.”
Erik sat down to his desk again, picking up his pen. “Could you go torture someone else for a couple of hours? I’ve got paperwork.”
“Half of those reports are about me; I’m not going anywhere.”
Erik gifted him a mocking smile. “You’re not the center of my Universe. Or my only operative. Most of these are about the people I’ve already trained, whom you’ve never even heard about. Besides, it’s dinner time. Run along.”
Charles exhaled an offended scoff and, after giving Erik the British version of the finger, scurried out of the apartment.
Baskerville remained, sitting silently at Erik’s side, inspecting the reports with keen eyes and a sharp mind. Erik was currently reading something about someone designing a fully combat-functional metal battle-suit complete with life support and outer space capabilities. There was a little note, made in smaller, sharper print, right in the margin of that paragraph, as if added to the file by someone other than the original writer: This is doubtful at best, speculation at worst. Have with a pinch of salt.
“One of these days, Tony,” Erik mutters under his breath, marking the paragraph up with a pen, possibly to remind himself to discuss it with his operative.
Tony Stark, thought Charles, striding slowly through the halls to the mess. How in the world did you end up down here?
Suppose there’s only one way to find out, he smiled to himself and took a quick turn to the right, following the route Erik himself had taken down the first time. He slipped, silent and invisible like air, between two watchful guards.
Author: monstrousreg
Word count:
Warnings: Violence, fast pacing, eventual NC-17. So, uh, the usual for me, I suppose.
Pairing: Erik/Charles.
Summary: Nikkita AU inspired by this prompt. A sort of fusion between the two series, with a healthy (or not) dose of my own imagination. Charles Xavier goes to prison, and is recruited by a spy/assassin division of the government. Dismal a beginning as this might look, it unbelievably goes downhill. Erik, the necessary stoic ex-military man, gets sidled with him. Not a single person is amused.
Prologue
“This is outrageous! Why do you have a tub?”
“Because I’ve been here for six years,” Erik replied blandly, glancing up from the files in his desk.
Erik’s room wasn’t a room-it was a bloody apartment. Complete with bathroom with a tub.
“I am deeply, greatly insulted,” Charles said, turning around with a frown. “I am nearly your age and yet I have the sterilized equivalent of a dorm room!”
“I’m seven years older than you, you’re nowhere near my age. And you should count yourself lucky to have your own room at all; most agents share.”
“That’s a moot point,” Charles muttered, striding to the window-Erik had a bloody window-and snatching the curtains back. Oh. It overlooked the training courtyard. Disappointed, Charles flicked the curtains back in place. “As you know perfectly well un-dampened telepaths can’t share rooms.”
“You must be a fascinating bedmate.”
“No one’s ever complained,” Charles wandered over to Erik’s desk, his tone lofty.
Erik arched an eyebrow, “Did you convince them you’re a sex god?”
“They needed no convincing. Six years, you said?”
This time Erik did not bother to look up from his papers. “Yes; it’s all in my personal file, which I distinctly remember leaving on the desk in your room, for you to read at your leisure.”
“I haven’t had any leisure, because you are a slave driver,” Charles said, very pointedly. “Now-six years. You are thirty-two; so you came to be here at twenty-six-“
“You can count. I’m so proud of you.”
Baskerville, lying as long as he could stretch upon Erik’s blue-covered bed, snorted in amusement. Traitor.
“Which means your military career, however stellar, can’t have been very long at all. Why did you decide to come to the hush-hush part of the military?”
Erik glanced up briefly, as if considering something to say-and abruptly, like lightning striking, all of his shields slammed up, walling his mind off like a vault. Baskerville materialized next to Charles just as the telepath’s mind locked down, layers of reinforcements wrapping around his innermost self like snakes coiling about a pray.
Charles was conscious of one thing: he’d just been attacked.
Miss Frost, he thought, icily, sending a shard of pain through his mirrored shields-to hurt but not be hurt. He felt her recoil, startled and stunned, shocked at his control-and at his boldness.
Charles was aware of one other thing: he’d just blown his cover as a third-level telepath. A third-level wouldn’t be able to put up such shields-let alone send out a lance of pain.
Oh, bloody hell, thought Charles, and then, very distinctly, fuck you.
Baskerville’s eyes glinted like chips of ruby. Tightly restrained, holding back ninety percent of his power, Charles surged forward against his shields and pushed at the growing pressure of Frost’s mind, like fingers of ice trying to find purchase and attack. He imagined his mind to be a round, smooth, mirrored dome-impenetrable and slippery, impossible to fracture.
Suddenly, Baskerville’s head snapped to the side. Distracted, Charles glanced down; Erik’s nose was bleeding.
“Good God,” he said, appalled, and moved abruptly forwards to tilt the man’s head up and pinch his nose. Erik was completely unresponsive. Whatever Frost was doing to him was evidently taking up most of his conscious functions. Baskerville gave a quiet sort of whimpering cry, not nearly a bark, pained.
“Oh, for the love of-“ Charles said, exasperated, and swiftly slipped under metal shielding to reach the inner core of Erik’s mind, efficiently sliding his mirrored dome over it. He couldn’t protect the man from the surface assault-not without blowing his cover, and he didn’t need Erik that much-but he could make sure his personality core and basic memories would be untouched.
It took only a glance, though, to realize he was quite late. There were large blackouts in the vast canvas of the man’s memories, like holes in the pavement of the street. Entire sections of recollection missing. Baskerville whined.
“And why should you care?” Charles demanded, arching a brow.
Abruptly, Frost withdrew. Charles immediately smoothed down a layer of shields, and felt the snag of her ice as she looked in, careless of permission. He threw up confusion and surprise, and even a little bit of fear. Let her think he had no idea what had just happened.
He looked down at Erik’s vacant eyes.
“Well,” he said quietly, checking to make sure the nosebleed has stopped. “Now we know for certain where those headaches come from, don’t we.”
Erik blinked, eyes suddenly bright with intelligence again. Charles looked at him, doubtful, but withdrew his hand. The man straightened, wiping his upper lip with distaste. Blood had run down to his lips, and then down his cheeks to the angle of his sharp jaw when Charles had tipped his head back.
“I apologize,” he said low, standing to go to the bathroom. “That happens sometimes.”
Charles was freshly sickened. The damn woman was liquefying his brain. Baskerville sat down, looking distinctly unhappy.
“Neurological damage is now certainly out of the question,” Charles said conversationally, striding into the bathroom with no respect for personal space-it was cramped-and sitting on the edge of the tub. “You might be dying, even.”
“Your concern is heartbreaking,” Erik mumbled, splashing water over his bloodstained face.
Charles eased himself back into the empty tub, crossing his knees to let his feet dangle over the edge. It wasn’t that big; two people would hardly fit. Still, it beat Charles tub-less little cubicle of a bathroom.
He watched as Erik washed his face, tracking the shifting muscles beneath the thin fabric of his t-shirt, the way they sloped gracefully from the long curve of his back to the column of his long neck. Charles liked and appreciated beautiful things, even if he did normally prefer a woman’s soft curves to a man’s hard angles. If he had been so inclined, though, one had to admit Erik was quite exquisite.
Baskerville came into the bathroom, sniffing around, curiously poking his snout closer to Erik’s hands.
The man reached for a hand towel and dried his face, turning around to arch an amused eyebrow at Charles’ position.
“You hair’s growing floppy,” he said, apropos of nothing.
Charles arched his eyebrows and looked up; he could just barely catch sight of his bangs, dark brown and unruly.
“All the better to grab onto,” he said, cheeky.
“By an assassin,” Erik pointed out, balling the towel and throwing it in the laundry hamper.
“Or by a lover,” Charles grinned, mock-seductively, turning his head to give Erik a look out of the corner of his eye. “Not that there are much prospects of such a thing in this place,” he added wistfully, after a moment. “Most of my fellow agents are much younger.”
“I’m sure you can survive without sex for a few months.”
“You’ve obviously never met me,” Charles muttered. “Oh, you missed a spot,” he added, pointing at Erik’s jaw angle, where a drop of blood remained.
Startlingly, Erik bent closer and docilely put the spot within Charles’ reach. Hesitating briefly, Charles gamely reached out and rubbed his knuckle on the spot, cleaning it. Baskerville’s ears were very straight, eyes very bright. He was paying close attention, and he felt just as well as Charles did when their skin came in contact. Erik’s mind did something strange-not unbecoming, exactly, but not something Charles would have anticipated.
Touch starvation, Charles thought, not for the first time. He couldn’t help but think that, in different circumstances, Erik would be a lovely man-beautiful of course, but also with an attractively intelligent mind and a willing disposition to touch and be touched. It was rare he got angry, and rarer still he held onto that fit of temper.
Yet he kept himself so tightly held back that Charles had to wonder: was the restraint self imposed, or ordered besides?
“Hm,” Charles withdrew his hand, crossing his arms. “What is your earliest memory?”
Erik frowned at him, confused. “Are you going to psychoanalyze me now, is that it?”
“Only if you want me to give you more traumas. Just answer the question.”
“Only if you answer one in return,” Erik said shrewdly. “Did you kill Marko?”
Charles scoffed. “That’s not an equivalent question. Ask something else.”
Erik seemed honestly stunned that Charles was willing to play the game at all. His face took on a thoughtful look as he lowered himself to the tub edge, at the far side of Charles’ legs. He pushed back a damp strand of hair that had stuck to his wide forehead, stalling. Baskerville sat down and lowered himself to the ground, laying his great head on his front paws.
“Alright. What is your earliest memory?”
Charles hummed quietly. “That’s a convoluted question for someone with eidetic memory. I suppose-the first thing I remember, chronologically, was my mother’s hair brushing against my cheeks when she bent down to kiss me. I must have been, hm, about one year old? I think so. She always put vanilla scent in her hair; to this day I relate vanilla to her.”
It was an innocuous enough memory; affectionate and old, and nothing Erik could really learn from it.
Erik nodded pensively. “My first memory is of my father. He was a clock-maker. He sat me in his lap and showed me all the pieces of a clock, and named them one by one, and showed me how to assemble them.”
“What year were you born in?” Charles asked casually.
Now that he was looking for it, Charles saw it. The question fell, as he had suspected, into one of the many voids in Erik’s battered memory-but as soon as the blackness surged forward, an answer presented itself, the connection forced, the edges of question and answered non-matching. Artificial; an implanted memory.
“Nineteen-eighty,” Erik answered, lying without knowing. “You could get that from my file, if you ever cared to-“
“I’ve got you right here! Why would I waste time reading your biography?” Although actually-come to think of it, that file might prove interesting. At least three fourths of the information there contained had to be lies, but you couldn’t built a convincing lie without using the truth as a base.
Charles considered asking about the numbers tattooed on Erik’s skin-but he remembered distinctly the shade of his skin, pale under the tan, streaked with blood-red. Not again. Not today anyway.
The telepath offered a hand, “Get me out of here.”
Erik heaved a long-suffering sigh and did so, pulling Charles easily out of the tub, muscles flexing along the length of his arm. Charles allowed himself to brush against the man’s chest, noting the way Erik failed to push away, and moved past to the living room. Erik’s bed was made-undoubtedly to military standards-with a dark blue cover. The small apartment was Spartan to the point of being nearly monastic.
“I think we need a stiff drink,” Charles announced, pushing back his hair, which had indeed grown almost floppy.
“I’m on medication,” Erik reminded him.
For all the good it’ll do you, Charles thought darkly. “Very well. I’ll drink and you’ll eat.”
“This a military training compound. You’ll be hard pressed to find alcohol here.”
“Everything’s pallid with you, isn’t it?” Charles rolled his eyes. “You’ve got a ten-level clearance. Get me to a bar.”
“So I can pay for your drinks?” Erik arched a brow. “I don’t know why I think you have expensive tastes.”
“Not at all. The only things I’m really particular about are my clothes and my sexual partners. The rest I can do with cheap-though of course when given the choice I won’t.”
Erik sat down to his desk again, picking up his pen. “Could you go torture someone else for a couple of hours? I’ve got paperwork.”
“Half of those reports are about me; I’m not going anywhere.”
Erik gifted him a mocking smile. “You’re not the center of my Universe. Or my only operative. Most of these are about the people I’ve already trained, whom you’ve never even heard about. Besides, it’s dinner time. Run along.”
Charles exhaled an offended scoff and, after giving Erik the British version of the finger, scurried out of the apartment.
Baskerville remained, sitting silently at Erik’s side, inspecting the reports with keen eyes and a sharp mind. Erik was currently reading something about someone designing a fully combat-functional metal battle-suit complete with life support and outer space capabilities. There was a little note, made in smaller, sharper print, right in the margin of that paragraph, as if added to the file by someone other than the original writer: This is doubtful at best, speculation at worst. Have with a pinch of salt.
“One of these days, Tony,” Erik mutters under his breath, marking the paragraph up with a pen, possibly to remind himself to discuss it with his operative.
Tony Stark, thought Charles, striding slowly through the halls to the mess. How in the world did you end up down here?
Suppose there’s only one way to find out, he smiled to himself and took a quick turn to the right, following the route Erik himself had taken down the first time. He slipped, silent and invisible like air, between two watchful guards.