[fic] xm: fc - thousands of words - pg13 - charles/erik (modern au)
Title: Thousands of Words
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Characters: Charles/Erik (modern, non-powered AU)
Rating: PG13
Length: ~3700
Summary: Erik has always kept photographs, but it's not until the rainy return from their honeymoon that Charles truly appreciates them.
Notes: So, about a million years ago (the first email is dated Apr 30, 2012, actually), pearl_o linked me to this photo of Fassbender and this photo of McAvoy and commented that they looked like honeymoon photos. So...I started writing her a fic about it and then finished it this week. This theoretically takes place in the AU where Raven and her baby live with Charles and Erik, but it stands entirely alone as well. Thanks to pearl_o for her input ♥
For all that Erik is relentlessly modern--his office devoid of clutter, everything stored on hard drives, his computers always the newest and best, not out of a desire to to have the hippest gadgets but because they're better and faster and Erik likes to work as efficiently as possible--he's strangely old fashioned about the oddest things.
Pictures, for instance.
Barring their engagement photos, Charles hasn't made a hard copy of a photo since he got his first digital camera in college. He'd always intended to--that was the point, he'd explained to Raven, to be able to take as many photos as you need and only print the good ones. That quickly turned into never printing any, however, just emptying the memory card onto his hard drive. Everything is digital nowadays anyway. People don't carry photos in their wallets; they have phones full of the photos they want to hang on to. Instead of making physical albums, they upload images to Facebook. No one keeps paper photos any longer.
Except, Erik does; Erik keeps actual photographs.
Erik has a digital camera too, of course, and he's no more interested in the art of photography than Charles. Still, when he empties his camera, he marks down the file names of the photos he particularly likes. Not only that, but he follows through--he loads the images onto a memory stick and takes them to be professionally printed, coming home with glossy five by sevens that he either frames, hangs on the fridge, takes into work, or files away in the photo boxes in their living room.
"You don't even keep paper files," Charles points out, chuckling a little on a rainy Saturday that finds Erik neatly labeling a divider and adding a new stack of photos to a box.
"Files are files," Erik says dismissively. "It's work. It's not important."
"And this is important?" Charles asks.
Erik holds up the top photo on the stack, one of the two of them on a ski weekend with Moira's family. They're pressed close together in the lodge, faces pink and chapped from the cold and wind as Charles looks at the camera with a gobsmacked smile and Erik looks down at Charles with a similar expression. It's a good picture. Erik is smiling in that way that crinkles his eyes. Looking at it, Charles can suddenly remember exactly how he felt that afternoon, the way he kept watching the snowflakes caught in Erik's eyelashes on the lift, the snowball fight Moira had with Erik and a gaggle of young children, the way it felt when Erik's ice cold hands moved across the warmth of Charles' skin. He remembers, best of all, exactly what he felt in that moment--asked by Moira to pose for a picture, Charles had grabbed Erik around the waist as he was headed back to the bar, pulled him close in one smooth moment that made Erik laugh and stare down at him with no small amount of wonder.
I'm going to marry this man, Charles remembers thinking, suddenly and pleasantly overwhelmed.
"Yes," Erik says. "It is."
Charles bites his lip and nods. "Yes," he agrees. "It is."
Charles has photos now too, of course. Sometimes Erik will print him an extra of one that he finds particularly compelling and sometimes Charles will glance over his shoulder while he's going through the images on his tablet and say, "Can you print that one for me?" More often, though, Charles paws through Erik's boxes (careful to keep the contents in order) and steals the ones he likes best.
"Can I take this?" he asks every time.
"Of course," Erik says every time. "They're your memories too."
They are. His and Erik's together. Boxes and boxes and boxes of them. From stupid parties to nights on the town to quiet vacations to afternoons spent curled together on the couch. Erik is preserving their life together and even though Charles finds it strange, that doesn't mean he's not grateful.
Erik doesn't collect knick-knacks or totchkes. He doesn't have many possessions, period, but he does keep the photos. He's not a shutterbug. He's not incessantly snapping pictures or glued to his camera, but when they're on vacation, he usually has his camera tucked in his pocket and when they're out and about, he's got his phone to capture any pictures worth taking. Memories are important to him--the only thing he has left from his parents are boxes of photos.
They hire a professional photographer for the wedding, of course, a young woman who's a friend of a friend of Erik's. It's a task that is squarely assigned to Erik, one that Charles doesn't even think about, doesn't care about, right up until the ceremony starts. Then he's incredibly grateful for it.
"I've made a lot of sacrifices to be with you," Erik says as they stand in front of the clerk. "I'm sure I'll make more as the years go on. I'm not always happy with them, but I know that you make me happier than anything I've given up ever could."
Erik is holding Charles' hands in front of all their friends and Charles is crying and he wants to remember this forever and he knows, distantly, somewhere in the tiny part of his mind that isn't swept up in joy of swearing his own vows, that in two months they'll receive an album capturing this moment, capturing the whole weekend, really, from the rehearsal dinner until the time they leave the hotel tomorrow morning. They'll be organized and chronological and and professional and lovely, and Charles is looking forward to seeing them, looking forward to reliving every second over and over again until it sinks in that he's married to Erik.
He almost wishes, the next morning as he dozes against Erik's shoulder on the drive to the airport, that the photographer could come with them and capture what's to come as well, but as Erik shifts in his seat, Charles catches sight of the familiar silver point-and-shoot in Erik's pocket. That, he thinks, is even better than the photographer coming along.
They spend the first part of Sunday travelling and the second part of Sunday in bed. Saturday night, when they finally wandered from the reception to their suite, they had the kind of frantic, giddy, drunken sex that he imagines most newlyweds have, so awed by what happened and exhausted from a day of celebrating that they couldn't keep their hands to themselves or drag it out for very long. Sunday is better. They fall into bed as soon as they check in, taking their time. They're exhausted and ragged, the result of too many late nights and too much stress and too long travelling. Their touches are slow and almost sloppy, but reverent. There's no hurry to any of it; they spend forever just touching and kissing, twisted in the sheets. The drag of Erik's fingers across his skin feels different somehow, better. His ring is body-warm, but still cool where it brushes against Charles' skin, reminding him again and again that this is real, that this has happened.
"I'm so happy we're here," Charles murmurs, head falling to Erik's shoulder, breathing in the sharp, familiar scent of his skin.
After that, it blurs into two weeks of bliss as Charles feels all good vacations should. They alternately sleep in after staying up until sunrise and go to bed at nine so they can wake with the dawn. They go into touristy shops and eat at cafes on the street and hold hands everywhere they go, something they normally don't bother with in their day-to-day lives. Charles allows the sentiment, here. This is something special. This is their bubble of peace and Charles can hold his husband's hand if he'd like.
His husband. God.
He wants it to last forever, the long afternoons in bed, the evenings on the beach with a bottle of wine, the mornings spent lying in bed watching Erik sleep, memorizing the softness of his face in repose. He knows he has things to get back to, but everything else seems meaningless. He can't imagine getting enjoyment out of a life that doesn't revolve around being with his new husband.
It will pass. Intellectually, he's well aware that a life spent doing nothing but lounging around with Erik would start to grate, that he'd be bored, that even the beach will lose its luster with enough exposure. Still, it doesn't stop the tremendous melancholy that washes over him as they pack their bags and prepare for their final dinner.
"What's wrong?" Erik asks, curling up behind him. His skin is warm where it presses against Charles' bare chest and arms. "You look...quiet."
"I can't look quiet," Charles murmurs, though he thinks he understands the sentiment. He turns in Erik's loose embrace and rests his head on Erik's shoulder, hugging him tightly. "I don't want this to end."
"We don't stop being married when we go back to New York," Erik points out as he strokes Charles' back.
"No," Charles says. "But we go back to working and grocery shopping and doing laundry and...being people with lives."
"You'd be bored eventually if we stayed here forever," Erik points out.
"Well, why can't we just stay until we get bored, then?" Charles asks. He presses his nose against the spot where Erik's throat meets his shoulder and inhales. Erik wears the best aftershave. Not every day, but often enough that a faint trace of it lingers on all of his clothes. On their third date, Charles "borrowed" a hoodie that the smell had permeated. He still has it. He supposes he doesn't need it any longer.
"Not all of us can afford to quit our jobs and laze about the beach," Erik says.
Charles looks up at him and raises his eyebrows.
"You can, now," Charles says. "All of..." He struggles for a way to define his trust fund, his inheritance. "...that. It's yours now, too. You're my husband. Legally, it's yours."
It had raised some eyebrows, to be certain, the most surprising being from Raven who had explained, I like Erik, I do, but Charles...you're worth a lot of money. A pre-nup isn't like, out of line.
Maybe it's foolish, but Charles thinks that's rather the point of the thing. That he loves his man. That he wants to share his life with him. That he trusts Erik with his heart and, less importantly, the various material things he's collected over the years.
"Still," Erik says. "Won't it be nice to go back to our apartment, with our things and our space and our bed?" He leans down and kisses the edge of Charles' jaw and then his earlobe. Charles shivers. "I know you miss our bed."
"I do," Charles admits. "I miss seeing you in our bed." He misses, too, the easy ownership. Our bed, our apartment, things that belong to them as a unit, things in a life they've made together.
"Well, then," Erik says. He scrapes his teeth over the edge of Charles' ear. Charles sucks in a sharp breath. "We'll finish packing. We'll have dinner, we'll go to the airport, and eventually we'll land in New York and go back to our apartment and fall back into our bed. How's that sound?"
Charles wraps his fingers around Erik's waistband.
"Why don't we skip the packing and dinner?" he asks, and flicks open the button of Erik's fly. Erik doesn't respond with words, but he does push Charles back onto the bed amid their partially folded laundry.
They manage to make their dinner reservation, but Charles hopes their bags aren't searched--they're in no state to be opened and Charles doubts they could be repacked without some effort.
The flight home is long and the weather in New York is terrible and cold and damp. It's a miserable state of affairs and it's a good reflection of Charles' mood. He's exhausted and grouchy and Erik is just as bad. He wants to wash the smell of recycled air off of himself and sleep for a week. His head is pounding and his ears won't pop and the traffic home from the airport is horrible. When he turns his cellphone on, he has thirty-two text messages and four voicemails that he can't work up the energy to go through. He rests his head on the window of the cab and closes his eyes.
Re-entry is awful.
When they finally reach their apartment, Charles can barely keep his eyes open. He abandons his luggage in the living room and trudges to the bedroom. He wants a shower, but he thinks he'll fall asleep if he has to stand for another ten minutes. He eyes the bed, and before he can come to a decision, Erik is behind him, nudging him forward.
"Sleep," Erik murmurs. "You're exhausted."
He's sad, is what he is, and he sighs as Erik kisses the nape of his neck. "I smell like airplane," he says.
"I don't care," Erik says. "We're home. Just relax. I love you so much."
Raven's been staying at their place for the past two weeks and she's clearly changed the sheets and aired out the room. When Charles strips and crawls into bed, everything is clean and crisp. With Erik pressed along his back, he has to sleepily admit to himself that maybe there are some advantages to being back home.
Charles sleeps for hours. He's not sure how long, exactly, because he forced himself to stop looking at the time while they were stuck in the weekend traffic on the way back from the airport. It's nearly two in the afternoon when he wakes up, and though he still feels stale and markedly bereft, his headache has dissipated, his ears have popped, and he can think clearly again.
Erik is already up and out, it seems; the bed is empty and the apartment is quiet. Erik can be nearly silent when he's reading or working, but somehow, Charles can always tell which silences indicate that Erik is hard at work and which silences indicate that Charles is alone.
He can't say he's not put out to wake up without his husband, but he's been asleep for at least twelve hours, probably closer to sixteen, and he can't blame Erik for getting impatient. He's also ravenous and caked in filth, though the latter may be an exaggeration. A shower wins out over lunch on the fleeting thought that maybe Erik will be back by the time he's done and, though Erik's seen him at his worst, he's just vain enough to prefer Erik seeing him at his best. He lets the hot water drain away the last of his fatigue, standing under it long enough that it starts to go cold. It doesn't do much for his mood, though he feels physically better once he's clean and in warm clothes. He wanders out, barefoot and wrapped in one of Erik's sweaters, and picks through the meager offerings of their cabinets before giving into the stack of take-out menus in the junk drawer.
He's putting the leftover pizza in the fridge, a mindless made-for-television scifi movie on in the living room, when his absent husband finally reappears. Erik smiles when Charles darts back into the living room, a smile that's warm and private and just for him.
"You're awake," he says, grinning, with all his teeth, and Charles can't help but grin back.
"You're home," Charles says, and they meet in the center of the room with long, familiar kisses. Erik cradles Charles' face between his hands and Charles is grateful for the chance to focus on something besides his imminent return to the real world.
"I brought you a present," Erik says, and motions towards the couch. Charles raises his eyebrows, but sees no good reason to protest, curling up in the corner of the couch and pulling his knees against his chest, waiting for Erik to join him.
Erik walks over to the closet and hangs up his coat. When he returns to the couch, he's holding two thick manila envelopes. They're small--not much larger than regular envelopes--and he hands them both to Charles once he's seated on the couch, pressed against Charles' side. Charles pinches the fastener and tips the envelope on its side until the contents slide into his upturned hand.
It's pictures. It's a stack of pictures.
"You were asleep and I wanted to run out and pick up some coffee and I thought it might be something nice to wake up to," Erik says. He leans his forehead against Charles' temple, effectively peering over his shoulder as Charles flips through the stack. The photos are from their honeymoon. Erik obviously hadn't bothered to go through and choose those worthy of printing from the hundreds of photos they took--there are some blurry ones of the hotel room, one that Charles remembers taking by accident while they were at the airport.
"I just gave them the first hundred pictures," Erik explains. "It was sort of...spur of the moment. I didn't have time to sort them. I thought maybe we could do that together, later." He kisses Charles' ear. "Maybe this will make easing back into our lives a little less difficult."
"You're unreal, sometimes," Charles murmurs.
"I like making you happy," Erik says.
"You're really very good at it," Charles assures him. He pauses on a photo of Erik standing in the hallway of their hotel. He's mid-movement, pulling his jacket on and grinning at Charles and the camera as they headed out for dinner. He looks pleased and affectionate and Charles brushes his fingers across the surface of the photo. "I like this one," he says.
Erik reaches over and separates it from the pile, handing it to Charles, then takes the other envelope and opens it. He flicks through the photos quickly and then stops, angling the top photo towards Charles. It's Charles, standing on the street outside their hotel. Erik snapped it during a tussle for the camera before they left for a very nice dinner at one of the premier restaurants in the city.
"I look hungover and exhausted," Charles complains.
"You were neither of those things," Erik says. "You were impatient for me to get moving and your tie is knotted messily because I kept trying to kiss your neck in the elevator. I asked you, right before I took that picture, why you even had to bother with a tie. I love your throat, your collarbones. Covering them up is always a shame. I said that ties should be barred from vacation. And you said it wasn't a vacation, it was our honeymoon, and it was special." He rests his head on Charles' shoulder, his eyes fixed on the photo. "And I thought, 'our honeymoon,' and...I think it was the first time it really sunk in, what had happened. What we'd done." He touches the corner of the photo. "That's what I think when I look at it. I remember that feeling of realizing that you had actually married me."
Charles swallows.
"Well," he manages to say around the sudden lump in his throat, "in that case, I suppose you can keep it."
"Thanks," Erik says. He waves the rest of the stack. "What do you say we go through the rest and decide what else we can keep?"
It's as dreary now as it was when they came in last night. They're not on the beach anymore. They'll be back at work tomorrow. But here's a little bit of what they left behind to bridge their way back into the rest of their lives.
The rest of their lives. The lives they're going to spend together.
"I think that sounds like a brilliant idea," Charles says.
"I thought you might say that," Erik says. "Let's start from the beginning."
Charles opens his mouth to agree and then pauses, thinks again. They've already been spending their lives together. This isn't really the start of something brand new, but rather another chapter in a story they've been telling for some time now.
He pushes himself up from the couch, gently untangling himself from Erik. Erik holds back his protests, but he watches with confusion as Charles crosses to the bookshelves. He studies the boxes there--they're dated, of course, and the one from the start of their relationship has gathered a significant amount of dust. Charles does his best to brush most of it away and then brings it back to the couch.
"The beginning," he says, pulling off the top and pulling out the photo at the very front. It's him, looking young and coy and raising his eyebrows at the camera. He thinks Erik took it on his phone. It was one of their very first dates. Charles had never wanted someone to like him as much as he wanted Erik to like him in those days.
Erik takes the photo from Charles and examines it. His smile is warm.
"You looked so good in that stupid red shirt," Erik says, shaking his head. "And you were so skeptical when I insisted on taking your picture."
Charles sits back on the couch, squeezing himself between Erik and the arm, holding the box on his lap.
"Tell me about it," Charles says. "Tell me everything. Tell me how you fell in love with me."
Erik wraps an arm around his waist.
"Well," Erik says, still holding the photo, but staring right at Charles. "It wasn't immediately. It took some time. But when it happened, when I realized it? It was after something not unlike this."
"A red shirt?" Charles teases, taking the photo from Erik and waving it back and forth. Erik just shakes his head.
"No, not like that," he says. He taps the box. "Like this."
Charles smiles. "Is that so?" he asks.
"So smug," Erik murmurs, but leans forward and kisses him, reclaiming the photo. "Now do you want to hear about the next one or not?"
"I do," Charles says, and ignores the miserable weather, the lurking work week, and the last of his lingering melancholy, focusing instead of Erik and their sprawling, wonderful history kept in neat boxes on the bookshelves.
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Characters: Charles/Erik (modern, non-powered AU)
Rating: PG13
Length: ~3700
Summary: Erik has always kept photographs, but it's not until the rainy return from their honeymoon that Charles truly appreciates them.
Notes: So, about a million years ago (the first email is dated Apr 30, 2012, actually), pearl_o linked me to this photo of Fassbender and this photo of McAvoy and commented that they looked like honeymoon photos. So...I started writing her a fic about it and then finished it this week. This theoretically takes place in the AU where Raven and her baby live with Charles and Erik, but it stands entirely alone as well. Thanks to pearl_o for her input ♥
For all that Erik is relentlessly modern--his office devoid of clutter, everything stored on hard drives, his computers always the newest and best, not out of a desire to to have the hippest gadgets but because they're better and faster and Erik likes to work as efficiently as possible--he's strangely old fashioned about the oddest things.
Pictures, for instance.
Barring their engagement photos, Charles hasn't made a hard copy of a photo since he got his first digital camera in college. He'd always intended to--that was the point, he'd explained to Raven, to be able to take as many photos as you need and only print the good ones. That quickly turned into never printing any, however, just emptying the memory card onto his hard drive. Everything is digital nowadays anyway. People don't carry photos in their wallets; they have phones full of the photos they want to hang on to. Instead of making physical albums, they upload images to Facebook. No one keeps paper photos any longer.
Except, Erik does; Erik keeps actual photographs.
Erik has a digital camera too, of course, and he's no more interested in the art of photography than Charles. Still, when he empties his camera, he marks down the file names of the photos he particularly likes. Not only that, but he follows through--he loads the images onto a memory stick and takes them to be professionally printed, coming home with glossy five by sevens that he either frames, hangs on the fridge, takes into work, or files away in the photo boxes in their living room.
"You don't even keep paper files," Charles points out, chuckling a little on a rainy Saturday that finds Erik neatly labeling a divider and adding a new stack of photos to a box.
"Files are files," Erik says dismissively. "It's work. It's not important."
"And this is important?" Charles asks.
Erik holds up the top photo on the stack, one of the two of them on a ski weekend with Moira's family. They're pressed close together in the lodge, faces pink and chapped from the cold and wind as Charles looks at the camera with a gobsmacked smile and Erik looks down at Charles with a similar expression. It's a good picture. Erik is smiling in that way that crinkles his eyes. Looking at it, Charles can suddenly remember exactly how he felt that afternoon, the way he kept watching the snowflakes caught in Erik's eyelashes on the lift, the snowball fight Moira had with Erik and a gaggle of young children, the way it felt when Erik's ice cold hands moved across the warmth of Charles' skin. He remembers, best of all, exactly what he felt in that moment--asked by Moira to pose for a picture, Charles had grabbed Erik around the waist as he was headed back to the bar, pulled him close in one smooth moment that made Erik laugh and stare down at him with no small amount of wonder.
I'm going to marry this man, Charles remembers thinking, suddenly and pleasantly overwhelmed.
"Yes," Erik says. "It is."
Charles bites his lip and nods. "Yes," he agrees. "It is."
Charles has photos now too, of course. Sometimes Erik will print him an extra of one that he finds particularly compelling and sometimes Charles will glance over his shoulder while he's going through the images on his tablet and say, "Can you print that one for me?" More often, though, Charles paws through Erik's boxes (careful to keep the contents in order) and steals the ones he likes best.
"Can I take this?" he asks every time.
"Of course," Erik says every time. "They're your memories too."
They are. His and Erik's together. Boxes and boxes and boxes of them. From stupid parties to nights on the town to quiet vacations to afternoons spent curled together on the couch. Erik is preserving their life together and even though Charles finds it strange, that doesn't mean he's not grateful.
Erik doesn't collect knick-knacks or totchkes. He doesn't have many possessions, period, but he does keep the photos. He's not a shutterbug. He's not incessantly snapping pictures or glued to his camera, but when they're on vacation, he usually has his camera tucked in his pocket and when they're out and about, he's got his phone to capture any pictures worth taking. Memories are important to him--the only thing he has left from his parents are boxes of photos.
They hire a professional photographer for the wedding, of course, a young woman who's a friend of a friend of Erik's. It's a task that is squarely assigned to Erik, one that Charles doesn't even think about, doesn't care about, right up until the ceremony starts. Then he's incredibly grateful for it.
"I've made a lot of sacrifices to be with you," Erik says as they stand in front of the clerk. "I'm sure I'll make more as the years go on. I'm not always happy with them, but I know that you make me happier than anything I've given up ever could."
Erik is holding Charles' hands in front of all their friends and Charles is crying and he wants to remember this forever and he knows, distantly, somewhere in the tiny part of his mind that isn't swept up in joy of swearing his own vows, that in two months they'll receive an album capturing this moment, capturing the whole weekend, really, from the rehearsal dinner until the time they leave the hotel tomorrow morning. They'll be organized and chronological and and professional and lovely, and Charles is looking forward to seeing them, looking forward to reliving every second over and over again until it sinks in that he's married to Erik.
He almost wishes, the next morning as he dozes against Erik's shoulder on the drive to the airport, that the photographer could come with them and capture what's to come as well, but as Erik shifts in his seat, Charles catches sight of the familiar silver point-and-shoot in Erik's pocket. That, he thinks, is even better than the photographer coming along.
They spend the first part of Sunday travelling and the second part of Sunday in bed. Saturday night, when they finally wandered from the reception to their suite, they had the kind of frantic, giddy, drunken sex that he imagines most newlyweds have, so awed by what happened and exhausted from a day of celebrating that they couldn't keep their hands to themselves or drag it out for very long. Sunday is better. They fall into bed as soon as they check in, taking their time. They're exhausted and ragged, the result of too many late nights and too much stress and too long travelling. Their touches are slow and almost sloppy, but reverent. There's no hurry to any of it; they spend forever just touching and kissing, twisted in the sheets. The drag of Erik's fingers across his skin feels different somehow, better. His ring is body-warm, but still cool where it brushes against Charles' skin, reminding him again and again that this is real, that this has happened.
"I'm so happy we're here," Charles murmurs, head falling to Erik's shoulder, breathing in the sharp, familiar scent of his skin.
After that, it blurs into two weeks of bliss as Charles feels all good vacations should. They alternately sleep in after staying up until sunrise and go to bed at nine so they can wake with the dawn. They go into touristy shops and eat at cafes on the street and hold hands everywhere they go, something they normally don't bother with in their day-to-day lives. Charles allows the sentiment, here. This is something special. This is their bubble of peace and Charles can hold his husband's hand if he'd like.
His husband. God.
He wants it to last forever, the long afternoons in bed, the evenings on the beach with a bottle of wine, the mornings spent lying in bed watching Erik sleep, memorizing the softness of his face in repose. He knows he has things to get back to, but everything else seems meaningless. He can't imagine getting enjoyment out of a life that doesn't revolve around being with his new husband.
It will pass. Intellectually, he's well aware that a life spent doing nothing but lounging around with Erik would start to grate, that he'd be bored, that even the beach will lose its luster with enough exposure. Still, it doesn't stop the tremendous melancholy that washes over him as they pack their bags and prepare for their final dinner.
"What's wrong?" Erik asks, curling up behind him. His skin is warm where it presses against Charles' bare chest and arms. "You look...quiet."
"I can't look quiet," Charles murmurs, though he thinks he understands the sentiment. He turns in Erik's loose embrace and rests his head on Erik's shoulder, hugging him tightly. "I don't want this to end."
"We don't stop being married when we go back to New York," Erik points out as he strokes Charles' back.
"No," Charles says. "But we go back to working and grocery shopping and doing laundry and...being people with lives."
"You'd be bored eventually if we stayed here forever," Erik points out.
"Well, why can't we just stay until we get bored, then?" Charles asks. He presses his nose against the spot where Erik's throat meets his shoulder and inhales. Erik wears the best aftershave. Not every day, but often enough that a faint trace of it lingers on all of his clothes. On their third date, Charles "borrowed" a hoodie that the smell had permeated. He still has it. He supposes he doesn't need it any longer.
"Not all of us can afford to quit our jobs and laze about the beach," Erik says.
Charles looks up at him and raises his eyebrows.
"You can, now," Charles says. "All of..." He struggles for a way to define his trust fund, his inheritance. "...that. It's yours now, too. You're my husband. Legally, it's yours."
It had raised some eyebrows, to be certain, the most surprising being from Raven who had explained, I like Erik, I do, but Charles...you're worth a lot of money. A pre-nup isn't like, out of line.
Maybe it's foolish, but Charles thinks that's rather the point of the thing. That he loves his man. That he wants to share his life with him. That he trusts Erik with his heart and, less importantly, the various material things he's collected over the years.
"Still," Erik says. "Won't it be nice to go back to our apartment, with our things and our space and our bed?" He leans down and kisses the edge of Charles' jaw and then his earlobe. Charles shivers. "I know you miss our bed."
"I do," Charles admits. "I miss seeing you in our bed." He misses, too, the easy ownership. Our bed, our apartment, things that belong to them as a unit, things in a life they've made together.
"Well, then," Erik says. He scrapes his teeth over the edge of Charles' ear. Charles sucks in a sharp breath. "We'll finish packing. We'll have dinner, we'll go to the airport, and eventually we'll land in New York and go back to our apartment and fall back into our bed. How's that sound?"
Charles wraps his fingers around Erik's waistband.
"Why don't we skip the packing and dinner?" he asks, and flicks open the button of Erik's fly. Erik doesn't respond with words, but he does push Charles back onto the bed amid their partially folded laundry.
They manage to make their dinner reservation, but Charles hopes their bags aren't searched--they're in no state to be opened and Charles doubts they could be repacked without some effort.
The flight home is long and the weather in New York is terrible and cold and damp. It's a miserable state of affairs and it's a good reflection of Charles' mood. He's exhausted and grouchy and Erik is just as bad. He wants to wash the smell of recycled air off of himself and sleep for a week. His head is pounding and his ears won't pop and the traffic home from the airport is horrible. When he turns his cellphone on, he has thirty-two text messages and four voicemails that he can't work up the energy to go through. He rests his head on the window of the cab and closes his eyes.
Re-entry is awful.
When they finally reach their apartment, Charles can barely keep his eyes open. He abandons his luggage in the living room and trudges to the bedroom. He wants a shower, but he thinks he'll fall asleep if he has to stand for another ten minutes. He eyes the bed, and before he can come to a decision, Erik is behind him, nudging him forward.
"Sleep," Erik murmurs. "You're exhausted."
He's sad, is what he is, and he sighs as Erik kisses the nape of his neck. "I smell like airplane," he says.
"I don't care," Erik says. "We're home. Just relax. I love you so much."
Raven's been staying at their place for the past two weeks and she's clearly changed the sheets and aired out the room. When Charles strips and crawls into bed, everything is clean and crisp. With Erik pressed along his back, he has to sleepily admit to himself that maybe there are some advantages to being back home.
Charles sleeps for hours. He's not sure how long, exactly, because he forced himself to stop looking at the time while they were stuck in the weekend traffic on the way back from the airport. It's nearly two in the afternoon when he wakes up, and though he still feels stale and markedly bereft, his headache has dissipated, his ears have popped, and he can think clearly again.
Erik is already up and out, it seems; the bed is empty and the apartment is quiet. Erik can be nearly silent when he's reading or working, but somehow, Charles can always tell which silences indicate that Erik is hard at work and which silences indicate that Charles is alone.
He can't say he's not put out to wake up without his husband, but he's been asleep for at least twelve hours, probably closer to sixteen, and he can't blame Erik for getting impatient. He's also ravenous and caked in filth, though the latter may be an exaggeration. A shower wins out over lunch on the fleeting thought that maybe Erik will be back by the time he's done and, though Erik's seen him at his worst, he's just vain enough to prefer Erik seeing him at his best. He lets the hot water drain away the last of his fatigue, standing under it long enough that it starts to go cold. It doesn't do much for his mood, though he feels physically better once he's clean and in warm clothes. He wanders out, barefoot and wrapped in one of Erik's sweaters, and picks through the meager offerings of their cabinets before giving into the stack of take-out menus in the junk drawer.
He's putting the leftover pizza in the fridge, a mindless made-for-television scifi movie on in the living room, when his absent husband finally reappears. Erik smiles when Charles darts back into the living room, a smile that's warm and private and just for him.
"You're awake," he says, grinning, with all his teeth, and Charles can't help but grin back.
"You're home," Charles says, and they meet in the center of the room with long, familiar kisses. Erik cradles Charles' face between his hands and Charles is grateful for the chance to focus on something besides his imminent return to the real world.
"I brought you a present," Erik says, and motions towards the couch. Charles raises his eyebrows, but sees no good reason to protest, curling up in the corner of the couch and pulling his knees against his chest, waiting for Erik to join him.
Erik walks over to the closet and hangs up his coat. When he returns to the couch, he's holding two thick manila envelopes. They're small--not much larger than regular envelopes--and he hands them both to Charles once he's seated on the couch, pressed against Charles' side. Charles pinches the fastener and tips the envelope on its side until the contents slide into his upturned hand.
It's pictures. It's a stack of pictures.
"You were asleep and I wanted to run out and pick up some coffee and I thought it might be something nice to wake up to," Erik says. He leans his forehead against Charles' temple, effectively peering over his shoulder as Charles flips through the stack. The photos are from their honeymoon. Erik obviously hadn't bothered to go through and choose those worthy of printing from the hundreds of photos they took--there are some blurry ones of the hotel room, one that Charles remembers taking by accident while they were at the airport.
"I just gave them the first hundred pictures," Erik explains. "It was sort of...spur of the moment. I didn't have time to sort them. I thought maybe we could do that together, later." He kisses Charles' ear. "Maybe this will make easing back into our lives a little less difficult."
"You're unreal, sometimes," Charles murmurs.
"I like making you happy," Erik says.
"You're really very good at it," Charles assures him. He pauses on a photo of Erik standing in the hallway of their hotel. He's mid-movement, pulling his jacket on and grinning at Charles and the camera as they headed out for dinner. He looks pleased and affectionate and Charles brushes his fingers across the surface of the photo. "I like this one," he says.
Erik reaches over and separates it from the pile, handing it to Charles, then takes the other envelope and opens it. He flicks through the photos quickly and then stops, angling the top photo towards Charles. It's Charles, standing on the street outside their hotel. Erik snapped it during a tussle for the camera before they left for a very nice dinner at one of the premier restaurants in the city.
"I look hungover and exhausted," Charles complains.
"You were neither of those things," Erik says. "You were impatient for me to get moving and your tie is knotted messily because I kept trying to kiss your neck in the elevator. I asked you, right before I took that picture, why you even had to bother with a tie. I love your throat, your collarbones. Covering them up is always a shame. I said that ties should be barred from vacation. And you said it wasn't a vacation, it was our honeymoon, and it was special." He rests his head on Charles' shoulder, his eyes fixed on the photo. "And I thought, 'our honeymoon,' and...I think it was the first time it really sunk in, what had happened. What we'd done." He touches the corner of the photo. "That's what I think when I look at it. I remember that feeling of realizing that you had actually married me."
Charles swallows.
"Well," he manages to say around the sudden lump in his throat, "in that case, I suppose you can keep it."
"Thanks," Erik says. He waves the rest of the stack. "What do you say we go through the rest and decide what else we can keep?"
It's as dreary now as it was when they came in last night. They're not on the beach anymore. They'll be back at work tomorrow. But here's a little bit of what they left behind to bridge their way back into the rest of their lives.
The rest of their lives. The lives they're going to spend together.
"I think that sounds like a brilliant idea," Charles says.
"I thought you might say that," Erik says. "Let's start from the beginning."
Charles opens his mouth to agree and then pauses, thinks again. They've already been spending their lives together. This isn't really the start of something brand new, but rather another chapter in a story they've been telling for some time now.
He pushes himself up from the couch, gently untangling himself from Erik. Erik holds back his protests, but he watches with confusion as Charles crosses to the bookshelves. He studies the boxes there--they're dated, of course, and the one from the start of their relationship has gathered a significant amount of dust. Charles does his best to brush most of it away and then brings it back to the couch.
"The beginning," he says, pulling off the top and pulling out the photo at the very front. It's him, looking young and coy and raising his eyebrows at the camera. He thinks Erik took it on his phone. It was one of their very first dates. Charles had never wanted someone to like him as much as he wanted Erik to like him in those days.
Erik takes the photo from Charles and examines it. His smile is warm.
"You looked so good in that stupid red shirt," Erik says, shaking his head. "And you were so skeptical when I insisted on taking your picture."
Charles sits back on the couch, squeezing himself between Erik and the arm, holding the box on his lap.
"Tell me about it," Charles says. "Tell me everything. Tell me how you fell in love with me."
Erik wraps an arm around his waist.
"Well," Erik says, still holding the photo, but staring right at Charles. "It wasn't immediately. It took some time. But when it happened, when I realized it? It was after something not unlike this."
"A red shirt?" Charles teases, taking the photo from Erik and waving it back and forth. Erik just shakes his head.
"No, not like that," he says. He taps the box. "Like this."
Charles smiles. "Is that so?" he asks.
"So smug," Erik murmurs, but leans forward and kisses him, reclaiming the photo. "Now do you want to hear about the next one or not?"
"I do," Charles says, and ignores the miserable weather, the lurking work week, and the last of his lingering melancholy, focusing instead of Erik and their sprawling, wonderful history kept in neat boxes on the bookshelves.