Fic: Keep On Walking (X-Men: DOFP, Charles/Logan, NC-17)
So I've managed to shake something fic-like out of my head, concerning the pairing that kind of ate my brain after I saw the latest X-Men movie :p It's here at AO3 if you'd rather read it there and was written in response to this prompt on xmen-firstkink. The title comes from the Passenger song of the same name:
Like a stone
Carried on the river
Like a boat
Sailing on the sea
Oh I’ll keep on walking
Well I’ll keep on walking
Till I find that old love or that old love comes to find me
Title: Keep On Walking
Fandom: X-Men: Days of Future Past
Pairing: Charles Xavier/Logan (Wolverine)
Rating: NC-17
Summary: "I want this while I can still have it," Charles says, sounding clear-headed enough.
Something in his voice stops Logan's breath. Logan swallows. "You can't have-"
"I am capable of having sex without the serum," Charles tells him and doesn't look away. "But I'm not talking about my paralysis."
Logan watches as Charles presses the needle of the syringe to his skin, red lips bunched in concentration. His breaths are pants shaken by the shudders that wrack his whole body, even in the warm, stuffy air of the mansion. Logan won't spare himself this, even as Hank looks away.
Watching his mentor shoot up is the smallest price Logan can pay for failing the man so badly, Logan figures. And this is Logan's failure - Logan believes that, no matter how the odds seem to have been stacked against him.
How was Logan supposed to convince this Charles to take up his cause? Logan's never been good with words, and he can barely wrap his mind around the fact that this Charles exists, bitter and broken and wrong.
Even as Charles's thumb hesitates on the plunger, Logan might have wondered if Charles could listen to anyone. Charles is too stuck in his own head right now - in his own pain - to hear. (Logan knows the look; he's been there.)
Except-
Except Charles keeps hesitating. He looks up at Logan... he looks over at Hank's bowed head. Charles's face crumbles, and seeing that actually hurts - but it makes Logan hope again.
'There you are, Charles,' Logan thinks, even knowing that Charles can't hear him. Not yet. 'There you are...'
Charles sets the syringe down beside him, the tiny clink it makes as he lets go ridiculously loud in this hushed space.
Logan nods. He keeps his expression neutral - at least until Charles's face is turned away, into Charles's own hands - but Hank looks like he's just found scientific proof that there really is a Santa Claus.
"Hank? Could you do me a favor, please?" Charles asks, when he's recovered himself enough to talk. It feels like it's been ages since any of them have spoken.
"Yeah! Yes, yes of course." Hank is only too eager to please.
"Could you help me to my study?"
Hank bends low and lets Charles throw an arm around him, grabbing Charles around his waist and helping him to his feet.
It makes Logan want to do something - anything - to help too.
"You need your chair or-"
Charles cuts him off with a laugh - and not a particularly pleasant laugh - but there's nothing unfriendly in Charles's eyes or his face when he looks up at Logan.
"I think we can hold off on bringing that out again for just a bit longer," Charles says. And although he keeps his eyes on Logan's as he adds, "I need a drink," like he's challenging Logan to try and stop him this time - Hank surprises them all (and breaks the tension) by muttering, "Amen to that."
Charles grins. "Perhaps there's even time to light up a joint. Do you think I could still operate Cerebro if I was stoned out of my mind?" he asks.
Logan rolls his eyes, but he grins with Charles. "I think it would make for an interesting experiment. What do you think, Hank?"
"You've never seen him stoned," Hank says. "He's not safe operating a telephone while he's wasted."
Charles laughs - for real this time - and if Logan had been about to argue with how Charles plans to wait out the serum still left in his bloodstream, he's sure he'd be giving up the ghost right about now.
"Oh, that sounds like a story I gotta hear," Logan says. Charles laughs again, and Hank starts to turn pink, which pretty much decides it.
They don't actually get stoned in Charles's study. Logan and Charles drink Hank under the table in there - or as close to it as Hank will let himself get before he stumbles off to his room, alone, waving away Logan's offer of help. But they've only smoked two joints between the three of them by that time.
It takes a lot more than that to make Logan feel something even remotely like what someone without his healing capabilities (and metabolism) would feel after so many hits.
Apparently, it takes a lot for Charles, too. He seems only a little less coordinated than Logan feels as he rolls their final roach.
Then again, Logan can't be sure that it's the drugs and alcohol that have made him this lightheaded - almost giddy. They might not have indulged all that much. They've moved back out of the study, and onto the massive stairs in the very center of the mansion's great room - but Logan can only vaguely remember half-carrying Charles part of the way, and watching him crawl across the other.
Mostly, Logan remembers watching Charles's ass as Charles crawled... He's not sure if it took Charles as long to roll the joint Logan's currently pulling a drag from as he remembers - all he could focus on, at the time, was Charles's slender fingers bringing the roach up to his lips, Charles's tongue slowly tracing the edge of the rolling paper.
Charles lays back, sprawled across the stairs in a way that can't be comfortable, for all that his body lies as loose and easy as if they're lying on a pile of pillows. He lost his suit coat a long time ago, and his tie, and his shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, his shirt unbuttoned by three buttons. It gapes open, revealing that Charles's chest is just as flushed as his face.
Charles's whole body arches when he laughs, when he giggles. Logan didn't know that - or maybe the Charles from his time's forgotten. Whatever - it's shit like that making Logan drunk. All these little things he's learning about a man who knows, or will know, more about Logan than any other living being. All these things that make Charles Charles that are but aren't familiar.
"Did I really?" Charles says, clearly not believing it.
Logan holds the smoke in as long as he can - long past when the burn would've forced anyone else to cough. Then he exhales and grins. "You threatened to have one of the other X-men braid my hair."
Charles laughs until tears collect at the corners of his eyes. Logan passes the joint back and chuckles at the memory.
"Could I really do that, if I'd wanted?" Charles asks, sounding almost nervous beneath his buzz.
Logan misses that part. So he just answers honestly: "You could do anything."
Logan believes that, too. This is the guy who smiled in Logan's face - the smile the only sign of forgiveness the Prof could manage, all of his telepathy focused on holding back the wave of psionic energy tearing him apart - as he'd died, killed by the monster that Logan had let loose on the world. This is the guy who came back from the dead.
The Professor could forgive Magneto for his sins; he could see good in Logan when Logan couldn't see a glimmer of it himself...
He can - apparently - move like a ninja, as well, at least when he's high and Logan's distracted.
Charles pulls this move that involves half-crawling, half- throwing his leg over both of Logan's, fisting his hands in the front of Logan's shirt to give himself the extra leverage, until he's kneeling on the stair that Logan's sitting on, straddling Logan's lap with the joint clenched between his teeth.
Logan's hands move instinctively to Charles's hips. He can feel that what little strength Charles has left in his legs is giving out - Charles shakes all over with the effort it takes to hold himself up, not that he puts forth the effort for long. One more shift of his legs, and Charles is effectively sitting in Logan's lap, plucking the joint from his lips.
"You have too much faith in me, my friend," he says.
"That's... my line," Logan says back, heart pounding in his throat. He's still trying to catch up to what's happening when Charles takes a long, deep drag from the joint, grabs Logan's face with the hand holding the joint, and seals his mouth over Logan's.
Logan's lips part on reflex, and he sucks in the smoke Charles breathes into him.
Then the smoke has to come back out through Logan's nose, because Logan's mouth is too busy to fuck with it, and suddenly he and Charles are kissing.
No-
Logan's fucked with less desperation than he puts into the slide of lips and tongues and teeth that goes on between him and Charles - he doesn't really know what to call it. Just that the feeling seems to be mutual for the telepath. Or else Charles is feeding off of Logan's own arousal and projecting it back at him.
Charles is making these noises, too, that are way too hot for making out on a staircase. When Logan slides his hands up under Charles's shirt and scratches his palms up and down Charles's back, Charles moans. When Logan bites at Charles's lower lip, Charles mewls.
Charles breaks away first - to kiss and nip and lick at Logan's jaw, down one side of his throat - and Logan feels a growl start deep in his chest.
Charles is hard. Logan finds this out when Charles tosses aside the joint to start working at the buttons of Logan's shirt (and isn't that just what this time-line needs, for them to burn the whole goddamned mansion down?) and Charles presses Logan back against the stairs. Logan feels Charles's dick through their clothing, as Charles rocks forward against his belly - and then back, nudging Logan's own erection with that ass Logan couldn't stop staring at earlier.
This is definitely not what Kitty and the Professor had sent Logan back into the past to do.
It's a little late for Logan to be having that thought, but it does the trick of making him stop and try to be rational for a minute, all the same.
Regardless of what Logan might have done, put in the same position, back in 1973 the first time... Logan hasn't been the type to have sex with just anybody in a long time. And though Charles Xavier is nowhere near just anybody, can Logan really just do this? Can he just fuck the Professor? While the kid's drunk and high, and still hurting from all the shit that caused the drinking and the smoking and the shooting up in the first place...
Logan pulls his hands away from Charles's ass, where they'd drifted, like he's been burnt, and tries to turn away from the hot mouth now using Logan's collarbone to short circuit his noble efforts before they've begun.
"I think we ought to just get you to bed," he says, not thinking about the phrasing of his words until he feels Charles - the cocky little shit - smirk against his skin.
"I don't need a bed for this," Charles says. And it doesn't help Logan's resolve that Charles is still rocking against him, casually. "Not yet."
"Fuck..."
"That is the idea, yes."
Logan tries grabbing Charles's hips again - this time to stop his maddening movements - but Charles goes abruptly still.
He lifts up and looks Logan in the eyes, the blue of his gaze practically glowing in the near dark. And maybe it's just wishful thinking, but Logan's almost sure those eyes aren't as dulled by the liqour and the weed as they should be. (He's never put much thought into how mind-altering chemicals effect telepaths.)
"I want this while I can still have it," Charles says, sounding clear-headed enough.
Something in his voice stops Logan's breath. Logan swallows. "You can't have-"
"I am capable of having sex without the serum," Charles tells him and doesn't look away. "But I'm not talking about my paralysis."
That's-
Logan breathes again, deeply, in and out, and his heart is back to beating in his throat, but he doesn't know what to do with that.
The corners of Charles's lips curl, just slightly, like he's telling Logan he knows and it's alright.
"The only way I'll stop is if you tell me you've a problem with that or that you're simply not interested," Charles says. He thinks, 'But I'll know that you are lying.'
"I'm not lying to you, Charles," Logan says. And before the unhappiness that Logan watches creep into Charles's face can take hold, he proves that he doesn't mean the words as a denial.
Logan lets go of Charles's hips to grab onto Charles's thighs, just below his ass, and leans up - then Logan tugs, pulling Charles back against him but further down so that their dicks line up through their clothing.
Charles gasps, hands falling to Logan's naked chest in surprise.
"If you change your mind," is the last rational thing Logan can say, "you gotta tell me right away. You gotta-" Charles has already gone back to trying to get the both of them out of their clothes as quickly as possible. He reaches for the button of Logan's jeans at the same time that Logan starts to shakily unbutton Charles's shirt. Logan squeezes his eyes shut and prays for strength. When he opens them, Charles is leaning in for a kiss. "Don't let me hurt you-"
Charles quiets him with his lips. And then says, pulling back just long enough for this, "Just don't stop."
Logan doesn't, until long after he's carried Charles up to bed at last, just escaping the sunlight starting to pour down on the stairs still littered with their clothes.
If the mansion stands for another fifty years - and Logan's around to see it - he knows he'll never look at the staircase in the center of the mansion without remembering Charles's flushed, pale skin, as he'd seen it in the moonlight that night that Charles had ridden him.
When he wakes up to the year 2023 - the new 2023, the one he'd had a hand in changing - Logan wanders the mansion's halls, feeling a new thrill each time he sees a face that he'd thought had been lost to him forever. But he stops at the stairway. Even when he sees Jean and Scott turning down a corridor, from a distance - and his heart lifts when he sees them (both of them) - Logan feels frozen in the moment.
He's lived for a long time. He'll live for a lot longer, if nothing stops him. 'I want this while I can still have it,' Charles had said. And isn't that the biggest, sickest irony of Logan's existence?
He's got all the time in the world, and no matter what he does with it, all he'll ever have will become nothing more than a memory, eventually.
"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure of that," a familiar voice says.
Logan turns, sensing rather than hearing Charles approach in his chair. It hovers above the ground, navigating the Professor up the stairs and level with Logan easily.
"Charles..."
'And if you're going to stand, staring, every time you pass a place where we've made love in this mansion,' Logan hears in his head, awed gaze caught in the Professor's mischievous one, 'we may need someone to cover your classes for the day.'
Charles looks almost just like Logan remembers him, from before the trip back to 1973. No. From further back than that.
"Classes?" Logan asks, because the other question just feels too big.
"You teach history," Charles says, with a sparkle in his eyes.
"Yeah... I'm gonna need some help with that." And then Logan can't hold back any longer. He reaches out a hand - tentatively, not entirely sure this isn't some vision that'll fade if he tries to touch it - and brushes his thumb along the curve of Charles's cheek, against the corner of one eye. There are far less wrinkles there than there should be in 2023.
Charles allows Logan's touch, smiling gently all the while.
"Oh, you and I will have plenty of time to catch up," Charles promises.
If thinking what Logan's been thinking was enough to speed up his heart, Charles's insinuation steals Logan's breath.
"What'd you do?" Logan asks, his eyes wide, feeling - as he had not so long (and very long) ago - a seemingly impossible hope.
"Someone once told me that I could do anything," Charles says. He leans forward in his (one day to be again unnecessary) chair and says, "so I thought, if I can't change time... Perhaps I can control how it changes me."
And it's a good thing that the students have all hurried into their classes - Logan doesn't know if any of them have ever seen their supposed history professor drop to his knees in the center of the mansion's grand staircase and kiss their headmaster for all that he's worth.
Maybe in another fifty years, they'll have gotten used to it.
[end.]
Like a stone
Carried on the river
Like a boat
Sailing on the sea
Oh I’ll keep on walking
Well I’ll keep on walking
Till I find that old love or that old love comes to find me
Title: Keep On Walking
Fandom: X-Men: Days of Future Past
Pairing: Charles Xavier/Logan (Wolverine)
Rating: NC-17
Summary: "I want this while I can still have it," Charles says, sounding clear-headed enough.
Something in his voice stops Logan's breath. Logan swallows. "You can't have-"
"I am capable of having sex without the serum," Charles tells him and doesn't look away. "But I'm not talking about my paralysis."
Logan watches as Charles presses the needle of the syringe to his skin, red lips bunched in concentration. His breaths are pants shaken by the shudders that wrack his whole body, even in the warm, stuffy air of the mansion. Logan won't spare himself this, even as Hank looks away.
Watching his mentor shoot up is the smallest price Logan can pay for failing the man so badly, Logan figures. And this is Logan's failure - Logan believes that, no matter how the odds seem to have been stacked against him.
How was Logan supposed to convince this Charles to take up his cause? Logan's never been good with words, and he can barely wrap his mind around the fact that this Charles exists, bitter and broken and wrong.
Even as Charles's thumb hesitates on the plunger, Logan might have wondered if Charles could listen to anyone. Charles is too stuck in his own head right now - in his own pain - to hear. (Logan knows the look; he's been there.)
Except-
Except Charles keeps hesitating. He looks up at Logan... he looks over at Hank's bowed head. Charles's face crumbles, and seeing that actually hurts - but it makes Logan hope again.
'There you are, Charles,' Logan thinks, even knowing that Charles can't hear him. Not yet. 'There you are...'
Charles sets the syringe down beside him, the tiny clink it makes as he lets go ridiculously loud in this hushed space.
Logan nods. He keeps his expression neutral - at least until Charles's face is turned away, into Charles's own hands - but Hank looks like he's just found scientific proof that there really is a Santa Claus.
"Hank? Could you do me a favor, please?" Charles asks, when he's recovered himself enough to talk. It feels like it's been ages since any of them have spoken.
"Yeah! Yes, yes of course." Hank is only too eager to please.
"Could you help me to my study?"
Hank bends low and lets Charles throw an arm around him, grabbing Charles around his waist and helping him to his feet.
It makes Logan want to do something - anything - to help too.
"You need your chair or-"
Charles cuts him off with a laugh - and not a particularly pleasant laugh - but there's nothing unfriendly in Charles's eyes or his face when he looks up at Logan.
"I think we can hold off on bringing that out again for just a bit longer," Charles says. And although he keeps his eyes on Logan's as he adds, "I need a drink," like he's challenging Logan to try and stop him this time - Hank surprises them all (and breaks the tension) by muttering, "Amen to that."
Charles grins. "Perhaps there's even time to light up a joint. Do you think I could still operate Cerebro if I was stoned out of my mind?" he asks.
Logan rolls his eyes, but he grins with Charles. "I think it would make for an interesting experiment. What do you think, Hank?"
"You've never seen him stoned," Hank says. "He's not safe operating a telephone while he's wasted."
Charles laughs - for real this time - and if Logan had been about to argue with how Charles plans to wait out the serum still left in his bloodstream, he's sure he'd be giving up the ghost right about now.
"Oh, that sounds like a story I gotta hear," Logan says. Charles laughs again, and Hank starts to turn pink, which pretty much decides it.
They don't actually get stoned in Charles's study. Logan and Charles drink Hank under the table in there - or as close to it as Hank will let himself get before he stumbles off to his room, alone, waving away Logan's offer of help. But they've only smoked two joints between the three of them by that time.
It takes a lot more than that to make Logan feel something even remotely like what someone without his healing capabilities (and metabolism) would feel after so many hits.
Apparently, it takes a lot for Charles, too. He seems only a little less coordinated than Logan feels as he rolls their final roach.
Then again, Logan can't be sure that it's the drugs and alcohol that have made him this lightheaded - almost giddy. They might not have indulged all that much. They've moved back out of the study, and onto the massive stairs in the very center of the mansion's great room - but Logan can only vaguely remember half-carrying Charles part of the way, and watching him crawl across the other.
Mostly, Logan remembers watching Charles's ass as Charles crawled... He's not sure if it took Charles as long to roll the joint Logan's currently pulling a drag from as he remembers - all he could focus on, at the time, was Charles's slender fingers bringing the roach up to his lips, Charles's tongue slowly tracing the edge of the rolling paper.
Charles lays back, sprawled across the stairs in a way that can't be comfortable, for all that his body lies as loose and easy as if they're lying on a pile of pillows. He lost his suit coat a long time ago, and his tie, and his shirt sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, his shirt unbuttoned by three buttons. It gapes open, revealing that Charles's chest is just as flushed as his face.
Charles's whole body arches when he laughs, when he giggles. Logan didn't know that - or maybe the Charles from his time's forgotten. Whatever - it's shit like that making Logan drunk. All these little things he's learning about a man who knows, or will know, more about Logan than any other living being. All these things that make Charles Charles that are but aren't familiar.
"Did I really?" Charles says, clearly not believing it.
Logan holds the smoke in as long as he can - long past when the burn would've forced anyone else to cough. Then he exhales and grins. "You threatened to have one of the other X-men braid my hair."
Charles laughs until tears collect at the corners of his eyes. Logan passes the joint back and chuckles at the memory.
"Could I really do that, if I'd wanted?" Charles asks, sounding almost nervous beneath his buzz.
Logan misses that part. So he just answers honestly: "You could do anything."
Logan believes that, too. This is the guy who smiled in Logan's face - the smile the only sign of forgiveness the Prof could manage, all of his telepathy focused on holding back the wave of psionic energy tearing him apart - as he'd died, killed by the monster that Logan had let loose on the world. This is the guy who came back from the dead.
The Professor could forgive Magneto for his sins; he could see good in Logan when Logan couldn't see a glimmer of it himself...
He can - apparently - move like a ninja, as well, at least when he's high and Logan's distracted.
Charles pulls this move that involves half-crawling, half- throwing his leg over both of Logan's, fisting his hands in the front of Logan's shirt to give himself the extra leverage, until he's kneeling on the stair that Logan's sitting on, straddling Logan's lap with the joint clenched between his teeth.
Logan's hands move instinctively to Charles's hips. He can feel that what little strength Charles has left in his legs is giving out - Charles shakes all over with the effort it takes to hold himself up, not that he puts forth the effort for long. One more shift of his legs, and Charles is effectively sitting in Logan's lap, plucking the joint from his lips.
"You have too much faith in me, my friend," he says.
"That's... my line," Logan says back, heart pounding in his throat. He's still trying to catch up to what's happening when Charles takes a long, deep drag from the joint, grabs Logan's face with the hand holding the joint, and seals his mouth over Logan's.
Logan's lips part on reflex, and he sucks in the smoke Charles breathes into him.
Then the smoke has to come back out through Logan's nose, because Logan's mouth is too busy to fuck with it, and suddenly he and Charles are kissing.
No-
Logan's fucked with less desperation than he puts into the slide of lips and tongues and teeth that goes on between him and Charles - he doesn't really know what to call it. Just that the feeling seems to be mutual for the telepath. Or else Charles is feeding off of Logan's own arousal and projecting it back at him.
Charles is making these noises, too, that are way too hot for making out on a staircase. When Logan slides his hands up under Charles's shirt and scratches his palms up and down Charles's back, Charles moans. When Logan bites at Charles's lower lip, Charles mewls.
Charles breaks away first - to kiss and nip and lick at Logan's jaw, down one side of his throat - and Logan feels a growl start deep in his chest.
Charles is hard. Logan finds this out when Charles tosses aside the joint to start working at the buttons of Logan's shirt (and isn't that just what this time-line needs, for them to burn the whole goddamned mansion down?) and Charles presses Logan back against the stairs. Logan feels Charles's dick through their clothing, as Charles rocks forward against his belly - and then back, nudging Logan's own erection with that ass Logan couldn't stop staring at earlier.
This is definitely not what Kitty and the Professor had sent Logan back into the past to do.
It's a little late for Logan to be having that thought, but it does the trick of making him stop and try to be rational for a minute, all the same.
Regardless of what Logan might have done, put in the same position, back in 1973 the first time... Logan hasn't been the type to have sex with just anybody in a long time. And though Charles Xavier is nowhere near just anybody, can Logan really just do this? Can he just fuck the Professor? While the kid's drunk and high, and still hurting from all the shit that caused the drinking and the smoking and the shooting up in the first place...
Logan pulls his hands away from Charles's ass, where they'd drifted, like he's been burnt, and tries to turn away from the hot mouth now using Logan's collarbone to short circuit his noble efforts before they've begun.
"I think we ought to just get you to bed," he says, not thinking about the phrasing of his words until he feels Charles - the cocky little shit - smirk against his skin.
"I don't need a bed for this," Charles says. And it doesn't help Logan's resolve that Charles is still rocking against him, casually. "Not yet."
"Fuck..."
"That is the idea, yes."
Logan tries grabbing Charles's hips again - this time to stop his maddening movements - but Charles goes abruptly still.
He lifts up and looks Logan in the eyes, the blue of his gaze practically glowing in the near dark. And maybe it's just wishful thinking, but Logan's almost sure those eyes aren't as dulled by the liqour and the weed as they should be. (He's never put much thought into how mind-altering chemicals effect telepaths.)
"I want this while I can still have it," Charles says, sounding clear-headed enough.
Something in his voice stops Logan's breath. Logan swallows. "You can't have-"
"I am capable of having sex without the serum," Charles tells him and doesn't look away. "But I'm not talking about my paralysis."
That's-
Logan breathes again, deeply, in and out, and his heart is back to beating in his throat, but he doesn't know what to do with that.
The corners of Charles's lips curl, just slightly, like he's telling Logan he knows and it's alright.
"The only way I'll stop is if you tell me you've a problem with that or that you're simply not interested," Charles says. He thinks, 'But I'll know that you are lying.'
"I'm not lying to you, Charles," Logan says. And before the unhappiness that Logan watches creep into Charles's face can take hold, he proves that he doesn't mean the words as a denial.
Logan lets go of Charles's hips to grab onto Charles's thighs, just below his ass, and leans up - then Logan tugs, pulling Charles back against him but further down so that their dicks line up through their clothing.
Charles gasps, hands falling to Logan's naked chest in surprise.
"If you change your mind," is the last rational thing Logan can say, "you gotta tell me right away. You gotta-" Charles has already gone back to trying to get the both of them out of their clothes as quickly as possible. He reaches for the button of Logan's jeans at the same time that Logan starts to shakily unbutton Charles's shirt. Logan squeezes his eyes shut and prays for strength. When he opens them, Charles is leaning in for a kiss. "Don't let me hurt you-"
Charles quiets him with his lips. And then says, pulling back just long enough for this, "Just don't stop."
Logan doesn't, until long after he's carried Charles up to bed at last, just escaping the sunlight starting to pour down on the stairs still littered with their clothes.
If the mansion stands for another fifty years - and Logan's around to see it - he knows he'll never look at the staircase in the center of the mansion without remembering Charles's flushed, pale skin, as he'd seen it in the moonlight that night that Charles had ridden him.
When he wakes up to the year 2023 - the new 2023, the one he'd had a hand in changing - Logan wanders the mansion's halls, feeling a new thrill each time he sees a face that he'd thought had been lost to him forever. But he stops at the stairway. Even when he sees Jean and Scott turning down a corridor, from a distance - and his heart lifts when he sees them (both of them) - Logan feels frozen in the moment.
He's lived for a long time. He'll live for a lot longer, if nothing stops him. 'I want this while I can still have it,' Charles had said. And isn't that the biggest, sickest irony of Logan's existence?
He's got all the time in the world, and no matter what he does with it, all he'll ever have will become nothing more than a memory, eventually.
"Oh, I wouldn't be so sure of that," a familiar voice says.
Logan turns, sensing rather than hearing Charles approach in his chair. It hovers above the ground, navigating the Professor up the stairs and level with Logan easily.
"Charles..."
'And if you're going to stand, staring, every time you pass a place where we've made love in this mansion,' Logan hears in his head, awed gaze caught in the Professor's mischievous one, 'we may need someone to cover your classes for the day.'
Charles looks almost just like Logan remembers him, from before the trip back to 1973. No. From further back than that.
"Classes?" Logan asks, because the other question just feels too big.
"You teach history," Charles says, with a sparkle in his eyes.
"Yeah... I'm gonna need some help with that." And then Logan can't hold back any longer. He reaches out a hand - tentatively, not entirely sure this isn't some vision that'll fade if he tries to touch it - and brushes his thumb along the curve of Charles's cheek, against the corner of one eye. There are far less wrinkles there than there should be in 2023.
Charles allows Logan's touch, smiling gently all the while.
"Oh, you and I will have plenty of time to catch up," Charles promises.
If thinking what Logan's been thinking was enough to speed up his heart, Charles's insinuation steals Logan's breath.
"What'd you do?" Logan asks, his eyes wide, feeling - as he had not so long (and very long) ago - a seemingly impossible hope.
"Someone once told me that I could do anything," Charles says. He leans forward in his (one day to be again unnecessary) chair and says, "so I thought, if I can't change time... Perhaps I can control how it changes me."
And it's a good thing that the students have all hurried into their classes - Logan doesn't know if any of them have ever seen their supposed history professor drop to his knees in the center of the mansion's grand staircase and kiss their headmaster for all that he's worth.
Maybe in another fifty years, they'll have gotten used to it.
[end.]