FIC: Utopia 12/? (WIP)
Title: Utopia
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Pairings: Charles/Erik
Genre: drama, angst, au, dystopia, future!fic
Rating: R
Word Count: 3900/?
Warnings: dubcon, emotional manipulation
Summary: Based on this 1stclass_kink prompt (and originally posted there).
"Erik has succeeded in taking over the world, but mutant utopia has yet to materialize. Charles is his reluctant companion."
Beta'd by the marvelous idioticonion.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23
lxxii.
As Charles lay in bed that night his mind churned with anger and he tried to tell himself that it was not because he suspected Erik might be right. After all, he hadn’t had much of a choice, had he? Although, Erik had stopped, before, when Charles had been uncomfortable… The man had listened to him then; it stood to reason that Erik would listen to him again, but… But Charles needed to be close, didn’t he, if he wanted to be near enough to drug the dictator and remove his helmet? In order to save the world.
Regardless, it was Charles’ body and he could use it any way he wanted and this was definitely something he had already squared himself away with-and except for the small issue of actually finding Erik’s touch… Not entirely unpleasant, the telepath did not have a problem. He was, in fact, handling everything marvelously and if he maybe enjoyed some aspects of the physical intimacy then, well, Charles had a sex-positive outlook, didn’t he?
So really it was a good thing that he had a healthy appreciation for Erik’s body-no, techniques-no, okay, body, because it meant he was still human. Mutant. One of those. Either way, really; if Erik wanted to imply that he was a whore then surely the best refutation was to enjoy sex for sex’s sake. If Erik wanted him to feel bad about it, then Charles simply wouldn’t be ashamed. Maybe it was something Erik owed him, for his troubles; for his legs and subsequently less exciting sex life. Charles couldn’t say that the idea didn’t have a certain appeal, although… Although it did seem a bit heartless, to bed a man he intended to betray.
Still, it wasn’t as if he was going to rush out to sleep with Erik. If Charles was going to use his body to bargain, then why not use it to the fullest extent that he could? Besides, he was still very much irritated with the man and he fully intended to enjoy giving Erik the cold shoulder for a while. In the meantime, however, it neatly solved Charles’ own stresses about his emotions and he would no longer feel guilty imagining Erik in that way, because dammit, he could imagine anyone he wanted, couldn’t he? Erik couldn’t take that away from him. His mind was still his own and that included all the primitive parts as well.
Charles let his eyelids drift closed and reminded himself again, sex-positive-I’m pro-sex, I’m not going to be ashamed about this. Then, because he could, to prove that he could, he moved a hand from his chest and trailed down his stomach, bare beneath the covers, and touched the hem of the soft boxers he slept in.
As he paused to rub the worn cotton between his fingertips, Charles remembered Erik’s mouth by his jaw, the soft breath of the word whore stirring the short hairs through the channels of his ear down to shiver the tiny bones in his skull. He shivered now, too; his skin prickled and he felt his dick twitch against his thigh and Charles thought, maybe not in that direction.
So as he slid his fingers under the waistband Charles instead thought back, to a different Erik, one who didn’t know anything about this future and what he’d done. Charles felt a moment of pity for that Erik and marveled at how young he’d been, although of course Charles now was still not as old as Erik then. But that was good; it was easier, to think about that man. There was less chance of getting him mixed up with the modern Erik.
He recalled Erik’s kiss before Cuba; or maybe he remembered the older Erik’s kiss and had simply substituted those lips between the nervous glances of the younger man. As Charles stroked himself slowly, not yet in earnest, he recalled the feel of muscles held too anxiously taut to tremble beneath his hand; the rough textural ensemble of nylon and Kevlar and the rich commingled scent of leather and polymer and Erik’s cologne.
He pictured Erik’s too-casual smirk, after, only this time instead of dismissing his advance Charles grabbed for the other man’s neck and pulled him down again; stifled the shocked noise Erik made with the crash of their mouths together; imagined the Erik of the past holding onto Charles’ ribs at first in hesitant disbelief and then out of desperate reflex as the telepath drove him back to the wall.
Charles moistened his lips with his tongue, shifted his hips, and pulled his underwear a little down his thighs so that he could touch himself unobstructed; he cupped the palm of his hand around his cock and began gently to tug. If he had actually pinned Erik against the wall that day-well, they would have been too late to stop Shaw, for one thing, but Erik would have been very surprised, to say the least. Charles was after all fantasizing about jumping the man after a peck on the lips.
Rather than envision an entire story where they slowly grew comfortable with each other, Charles decided that he liked the idea of Erik off his guard; confused and aroused. He chose to imagine that perhaps, although the Erik in his head was younger, the Charles that pinned him down and devoured the line of his throat was still himself, somehow gone back in time to take out his frustrations on a man who had not yet committed any crimes.
Perhaps I save the world through sex with Erik, Charles thought, breaking his silence with a coughed chuckle, eyes still squeezed closed. Then he dismissed that idea-it had the potential to turn painful-and tightened his grip; the slide of his fingers made a furtive sibilant noise in the dark room, broken by the hiss of air through teeth as Charles imagined peeling Erik out of the flight suit-seeing the muscles his turtlenecks and slacks had only hinted at, tracing them with his lips, grasping their lean planes with his hands.
Charles’ hand had farther to travel, now, and moved faster to make up for it; too fast to bother imagining foreplay and he was getting too warm under the covers. It was amazing, how much easier this went now that he could really feel it; even though he wasn’t touching his legs, and even though it was all pretty much automatic down there, anyway-his mind flashed, for a moment, to that old psychology question: do emotions arise in the brain and cause the body to react, or are emotions the brain’s way of responding to changes in the body? Charles didn’t know; even as a telepath he couldn’t be sure, but as he kicked his feet out from beneath the sheets and the fabric dragged back the hair of his legs and a surge of pleasure curled through his toes he thought, maybe, it might be true. But that was only anecdotal evidence at best.
So, the younger Erik-although Charles reminded himself again that it had been a long time since Erik had been young-the past Erik, maybe not so confident, still unused to the telepath’s touch-how would he sound, if Charles took him right there against the wall after no more preamble than a kiss? Erik tended to be quiet, he knew, but Charles conjured the memory of one of his infrequent, fractured moans, of Erik’s hands tight on his arse-shoulders?-no, arse, clutching as the geneticist pushed into him, because… Because it would almost certainly be the opposite, once Erik actually did-once they-so for now, the Erik in his head would have to be happy getting fucked, and since he was in Charles head-he would be.
Charles didn’t know how the logistics would work out between two men up against a wall, face-to-face, but he was sure it sounded lovely and probably their height difference would make it easier. He made a small noise of negation because no, that was not the point, the point was-Erik, my old friend, where have you gone, and Charles imagined Erik hot against his hips as he sank down onto Charles, just the barest tremor in his thighs as his legs bent and just the slightest gasp into the telepath’s hair.
Why didn’t I do this sooner, Charles thought, and wasn’t sure whether he meant the fantasy or what that fantasy contained. He was very warm; he tried to ignore it, he didn’t have all that long left to endure it, but his skin flushed in prickles until he tossed the covers off of himself entirely. The startling cold rushed over his body in a swirling welcome of current, almost electric in its intensity and it was like everything extra had washed away, all the extra heat and thought and worry, just sand surrounding one firm stone of desire lust mine and the pull around his dick that wasn’t Erik but was almost, nearly, close enough.
An eddy of cool air caressed the dip of Charles’ sternum and it occurred to him that with his boxers down below his balls and the covers thrown off he was essentially bared to the world, if anyone could look, and he imagined-he imagined what the modern Erik, the real Erik, his Erik, might think to see him like that, whether he would be jealous, excluded, if he would envy his mental doppelganger if he knew, if he would reach out and touch, yes-
Charles’ lips pulled back from his teeth, his mouth fell open, his knees pulled up and he arched into his hand, tugs turning slow and lurching as line after hot fluid line lashed and then pooled over his fingers and stomach. All thoughts seared out of his skull in a flash-bulb flare of light; for a moment he was nothing and going nowhere until his heart pulsed and one more stripe of semen draped itself over his thumb and dripped down through the groove of his nail.
Lowering his knees gingerly back down to the bed, Charles took a moment just to breathe. He felt sluggish and warm, despite the mixture of sugar, mucus, and genetic material evaporating cold on his belly, and the telepath opened his eyelids, low and heavy, to look down at himself. The blood was already draining from his penis, not quite fast enough to watch but he did so anyway and over the next few minutes it slid gradually down through the loose collar of his slick fingers, contented, job complete.
Charles, for a moment, envied its single-minded drive, and wasn’t that silly, to be jealous of a thing that was still only, distantly, a part of his brain? Like being jealous of his medulla oblongata for its easy capability to regulate his breathing. It was all hormones and neurotransmitters, in the end, every single bit of him, and maybe that was why he was doomed to be so stupid. This had been a stupid idea, obviously, because really, what good had he thought might come of this? That he might somehow get back at Erik by fantasizing about his younger self?
And the worst part was that Charles knew none of that would stop him from doing it again.
lxxiii.
Perhaps that was why, when Badger gestured toward a draped sheet that did absolutely nothing at all to disguise the crutches beneath and declared, “Guess what, I’ve got a present for you,” Charles only spared a moment to frown at the thing before asking, “Are you seeing anyone, Badger?”
The white tufts of her eyebrows jumped up and she examined him with a look approaching awe. “Whoa, Tiger, I didn’t think you had it in you!”
Charles folded his hands in his lap casually, giving her a look of aloof disapproval. “What, just because I’m in a chair?”
Badger waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, no, I know you can do it-I just thought I’d have you cowering in fear by now!”
“You’re not that frightening,” Charles informed her, voice mild and tight.
The furred woman touched clawed fingers to her heart. “I’m hurt, Charles, really. You wound me.”
They stared at each other for a long, expectant moment, until Badger rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Yes, yes, I know it’s hard to believe but I do have a man and no, he doesn’t wear pink, he’s really very hunky and everything. You should get out more, hell, I’m so not your type, I can just tell.”
Charles frowned, but most definitely did not pout. “It’s not like I have much choice,” he muttered.
Badger clapped her hands and then rubbed them together with a rasp of thick callous. “I know what you need,” she declared. “You need a way to move around in style. You need a way to show all the girls that you’re no candyass square.”
Wincing, Charles said, “I know what you’ve got under the sheet and I can already tell you I don’t like it, so you can stop trying to sell me on it.”
Showing her pointed white teeth in a cruel grin, Badger replied, “Aw, but Charlie, you’ll be haulin’ ass in these.” She whipped the sheet away, revealing a pair of bright steel rods, each well over a meter long, kinked near the top with a plastic loop and a hand rest bolted into the metal. They were not graceful; rather, they suffered from the terrible affliction of pragmatism, clunky-looking and yellowed around the edges of the plastic.
The geneticist stared at the crutches forlornly; he was sure that not only would they fail to endear him to any women, they would bring him even more staring than the chair. Anyone could end up in a wheelchair, after all; it was common enough, especially since the war. In fact it was almost a luxury now; there were plenty of people who couldn’t even afford the ability to move themselves around without functioning legs. It was stately, in a way, to coast wherever one needed to go; dignified in a way lurching around on crutches was, by definition, not.
But more important by far was the fact that it hadn’t been much longer than a decade since the polio vaccine had been released to the public, and although Charles had never directly known anyone with the disease-well, he knew the precautions people took when confronted with the possibility of a recurrence, and in the memories of those old enough to have a Before, the epidemic seemed more recent than it ever would have been if there had never been a war. Vaccinations were probably scarce, now, and in a world like this-who wanted to take the chance of losing control of their muscles, if they could avoid it?
“Cheer up, bucko,” Badger chided him, picking the crutches up by their handles. “This is a good thing. This means progress. You’re one timid, shuffling step closer to being able to walk on your own!”
Grimacing, Charles set his brakes down and then reached up to take the woman’s hand; she hauled him up with unfair ease and pinned him to her side as she held one of the devices out for the geneticist to insert his arm into, passing his hand through the ring and grabbing onto the bar beneath. He went silent at her nearness and concentrated on propping the tip of the thing against the floor, rather than consider what he’d tried to ask of her.
Once he wore both crutches, Badger stepped away from him and Charles swayed, for a moment, feeling quite as if he were going to tip over. He blinked and concentrated on keeping his balance; he’d forgotten how complex standing in one spot could be. So different from standing in between a pair of fixed bars; there were so many little muscles, all flexing and relaxing at once. His had gone sluggish and responded only grudgingly, like temperamental children.
Badger poked the small of his back, and Charles hissed a little as his scar twinged. “Mind your posture,” she scolded him. “You don’t want to re-learn how to walk only to end up in bed again with a thrown back.”
She circled around him, examining the telepath’s pose before returning to his front and nodding appreciatively. “Why, Mr. Xavier, you almost look imposing! Let’s see about walking in these, eh? We’ll go until you fall over and then you’ll learn how to stand up in them. It shouldn’t take long.”
Charles grumbled to himself, something concerning people who ought to go back to school and get their certifications learned properly, took one lurching step forward, and toppled down onto the rubber floor.
“Not long at all, then,” Badger observed brightly.
lxxiv.
Charles’ ego was dented more than his body by the time he made it into the lab; Badger hadn’t caught him a single time, but she’d hovered nearby and made his falls gentler. Most of his bruises, in fact, came of wrenching his forearms on the hard loops of the crutches as he tried to stand up again, and he’d been less than thrilled when he’d gone to wheel gratefully away and the woman had set them over his lap with instructions to practice walking with them as often as he was able.
The telepath had left them back in his rooms-he’d try them again later-before going to see Beast, and as it turned out it was a good thing Charles couldn’t stand as he would only have needed to sit down again right away.
“They’ve denied my request for a re-print,” Beast told him glumly, staring down at the letter through his thick glasses.
“What?” Charles asked, although he’d heard just fine. “Why?”
The leonine scientist sighed and tossed the paper back onto his desk, where it drifted to a rest somewhat anticlimactically. “They don’t need to give me a reason,” he explained. “Clearly they suspect that something’s wrong.”
The geneticist tilted his head. “Frost?” he asked, the doubt in his voice mostly self-directed. Charles felt sure that she couldn’t have found anything in Beast’s memory, but… Just to be sure, he held his fingers to his temple and brushed against the other mutant’s mind, soft as a feather.
Beast let him in and Charles took that whirling lightening-storm chaos and thought, too abstract, too unfamiliar, how would another person see it?-so he imagined it differently, set the storm into walls and floor and then he was standing in the lab-how could it be anything else?-but empty, empty except for the bottles on the shelves and the labels on the drawers, and Charles was alone except for the radio, quietly singing in a startling jaunty tune, a fool never learns to get away, just run away before his heart begins to break…
A tight, ironic smile crossed Charles’ lips, just for a moment, and then he turned his mental self around on the spot, on ephemeral legs, looking for anything out of place; anything that could point back to his tampering. There was, he was glad to see, nothing terribly obvious; Beast’s mind was a well-organized place, and if Charles didn’t look too closely at the labels on the drawers and solutions-one jar of fluorescent green liquid, he noticed, was marked 10 x 0.5M regret-it almost looked just like a lab in the real world, albeit unrealistically clean.
A fool never learns; he’ll wait around, just hang around to see how much his heart can take… the radio fizzed. The messes were always hidden, though, weren’t they? Stashed away. The records of failed experiments were torn from notepads, and wasted supplies were dumped into biohazard bins, calibrations expired and were forgotten…
Charles moved to tip open the lid of the sharps disposal, glanced over the contents quickly-nothing he wanted to dwell on, all gleaming points and shattered glass-and moved on to the sink. He peered down the drain, ran the tap, checked the date for the last time the deionized distilled water had been tested, and looked beneath for mold. Then the geneticist approached the biohazard bin and the radio crackled sharply. Professor, I’d rather you didn’t, ah, look in there, Beast’s distant voice advised, sounding sheepish.
The telepath drew his hand back and pursed his lips in bemused acquiescence, turning instead to glance through the drawers, until finally, there, on the floor-the chipped tile. Charles heard the hum of the vents circulating the air above, suddenly loud; as he crouched down to not quite touch the crack with his fingertip, the odor of bleach grew stronger and stronger in his nostrils, the bones of his wrist seemed to vibrate with the rattle of the vents, his lungs were full of chemical tang and linoleum and sound-
Charles stood up again without touching the tile. He looked down at it; the chip in its corner was tiny, under the shadow of the cupboards. Emma Frost would never have noticed it amidst all the juicy distractions of a genius’ mind, he decided, and because the lab wasn’t real he didn’t use the door, he just closed his eyes and-left-
The geneticist opened his eyes again and saw Beast do the same, blinking yellow-blue-yellow with surprise. “I was a room,” he stated, his shaggy eyebrows furrowed.
“You were never anything but yourself,” Charles corrected, taking his fingers from his temple. He sounded weary even to his own ears, so he forced more enthusiasm into his words as he continued, “I simply imagined your mind as something more-literal. For convenience. Your thoughts are very organized, by the way.”
“Thank you?” Beast guessed. “But-I felt like a room!”
“Sorry,” Charles replied flatly, slouching a little.
“No, no, it’s all right,” Beast assured him, a little dazedly. “It was just… Odd.”
“You were a very nice room,” the telepath commented, comfortingly.
“Oh,” Beast remarked, looking no less bemused than before. He glanced away, and then back; nodded to himself and swallowed. “Right then. So, did you see anything-uh-unusual, in there? In my head? That Frost might have caught onto?”
Charles frowned and shook his head. “No, if she noticed anything, it would have been our physical actions.”
“Have we been acting that strangely?” Beast asked, his black lips pursed in thought as he answered his own question: “It doesn’t really matter, does it? We’re under the control of the Brotherhood and we’re known sympathizers. They don’t need a reason to shut my project down.”
“If that’s the case,” Charles mused, “then what can we do?”
Beast hesitated. “I-I don’t-” He interrupted himself to breath deeply, then exhaled slowly, with deliberation. “I still remember several of the compounds and samples on the list, from before I threw it away. I could, I could make inquiries, discreetly, check around if anyone else might be able to get a hold of them…”
Charles almost wished he couldn’t sense the deep, fatalistic doubt beneath Beast’s words. Still, he nodded and agreed and tried not to let the numbness show on his face as he wheeled back through the lab to his workbench.
Hannah had left at some point-he presumed she had gone somewhere more private and less sensitive to contamination so that she could cough freely-so Charles nudged the door mostly-closed. He went to his bench, cleared away his pipettes and sample trays-then set his elbows on the table and his face into his hands, squeezed his eyes tightly closed, and thought, What do I do now? What could I possibly do now?
Chapter 13
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Pairings: Charles/Erik
Genre: drama, angst, au, dystopia, future!fic
Rating: R
Word Count: 3900/?
Warnings: dubcon, emotional manipulation
Summary: Based on this 1stclass_kink prompt (and originally posted there).
"Erik has succeeded in taking over the world, but mutant utopia has yet to materialize. Charles is his reluctant companion."
Beta'd by the marvelous idioticonion.
Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 | Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Chapter 21 | Chapter 22 | Chapter 23
lxxii.
As Charles lay in bed that night his mind churned with anger and he tried to tell himself that it was not because he suspected Erik might be right. After all, he hadn’t had much of a choice, had he? Although, Erik had stopped, before, when Charles had been uncomfortable… The man had listened to him then; it stood to reason that Erik would listen to him again, but… But Charles needed to be close, didn’t he, if he wanted to be near enough to drug the dictator and remove his helmet? In order to save the world.
Regardless, it was Charles’ body and he could use it any way he wanted and this was definitely something he had already squared himself away with-and except for the small issue of actually finding Erik’s touch… Not entirely unpleasant, the telepath did not have a problem. He was, in fact, handling everything marvelously and if he maybe enjoyed some aspects of the physical intimacy then, well, Charles had a sex-positive outlook, didn’t he?
So really it was a good thing that he had a healthy appreciation for Erik’s body-no, techniques-no, okay, body, because it meant he was still human. Mutant. One of those. Either way, really; if Erik wanted to imply that he was a whore then surely the best refutation was to enjoy sex for sex’s sake. If Erik wanted him to feel bad about it, then Charles simply wouldn’t be ashamed. Maybe it was something Erik owed him, for his troubles; for his legs and subsequently less exciting sex life. Charles couldn’t say that the idea didn’t have a certain appeal, although… Although it did seem a bit heartless, to bed a man he intended to betray.
Still, it wasn’t as if he was going to rush out to sleep with Erik. If Charles was going to use his body to bargain, then why not use it to the fullest extent that he could? Besides, he was still very much irritated with the man and he fully intended to enjoy giving Erik the cold shoulder for a while. In the meantime, however, it neatly solved Charles’ own stresses about his emotions and he would no longer feel guilty imagining Erik in that way, because dammit, he could imagine anyone he wanted, couldn’t he? Erik couldn’t take that away from him. His mind was still his own and that included all the primitive parts as well.
Charles let his eyelids drift closed and reminded himself again, sex-positive-I’m pro-sex, I’m not going to be ashamed about this. Then, because he could, to prove that he could, he moved a hand from his chest and trailed down his stomach, bare beneath the covers, and touched the hem of the soft boxers he slept in.
As he paused to rub the worn cotton between his fingertips, Charles remembered Erik’s mouth by his jaw, the soft breath of the word whore stirring the short hairs through the channels of his ear down to shiver the tiny bones in his skull. He shivered now, too; his skin prickled and he felt his dick twitch against his thigh and Charles thought, maybe not in that direction.
So as he slid his fingers under the waistband Charles instead thought back, to a different Erik, one who didn’t know anything about this future and what he’d done. Charles felt a moment of pity for that Erik and marveled at how young he’d been, although of course Charles now was still not as old as Erik then. But that was good; it was easier, to think about that man. There was less chance of getting him mixed up with the modern Erik.
He recalled Erik’s kiss before Cuba; or maybe he remembered the older Erik’s kiss and had simply substituted those lips between the nervous glances of the younger man. As Charles stroked himself slowly, not yet in earnest, he recalled the feel of muscles held too anxiously taut to tremble beneath his hand; the rough textural ensemble of nylon and Kevlar and the rich commingled scent of leather and polymer and Erik’s cologne.
He pictured Erik’s too-casual smirk, after, only this time instead of dismissing his advance Charles grabbed for the other man’s neck and pulled him down again; stifled the shocked noise Erik made with the crash of their mouths together; imagined the Erik of the past holding onto Charles’ ribs at first in hesitant disbelief and then out of desperate reflex as the telepath drove him back to the wall.
Charles moistened his lips with his tongue, shifted his hips, and pulled his underwear a little down his thighs so that he could touch himself unobstructed; he cupped the palm of his hand around his cock and began gently to tug. If he had actually pinned Erik against the wall that day-well, they would have been too late to stop Shaw, for one thing, but Erik would have been very surprised, to say the least. Charles was after all fantasizing about jumping the man after a peck on the lips.
Rather than envision an entire story where they slowly grew comfortable with each other, Charles decided that he liked the idea of Erik off his guard; confused and aroused. He chose to imagine that perhaps, although the Erik in his head was younger, the Charles that pinned him down and devoured the line of his throat was still himself, somehow gone back in time to take out his frustrations on a man who had not yet committed any crimes.
Perhaps I save the world through sex with Erik, Charles thought, breaking his silence with a coughed chuckle, eyes still squeezed closed. Then he dismissed that idea-it had the potential to turn painful-and tightened his grip; the slide of his fingers made a furtive sibilant noise in the dark room, broken by the hiss of air through teeth as Charles imagined peeling Erik out of the flight suit-seeing the muscles his turtlenecks and slacks had only hinted at, tracing them with his lips, grasping their lean planes with his hands.
Charles’ hand had farther to travel, now, and moved faster to make up for it; too fast to bother imagining foreplay and he was getting too warm under the covers. It was amazing, how much easier this went now that he could really feel it; even though he wasn’t touching his legs, and even though it was all pretty much automatic down there, anyway-his mind flashed, for a moment, to that old psychology question: do emotions arise in the brain and cause the body to react, or are emotions the brain’s way of responding to changes in the body? Charles didn’t know; even as a telepath he couldn’t be sure, but as he kicked his feet out from beneath the sheets and the fabric dragged back the hair of his legs and a surge of pleasure curled through his toes he thought, maybe, it might be true. But that was only anecdotal evidence at best.
So, the younger Erik-although Charles reminded himself again that it had been a long time since Erik had been young-the past Erik, maybe not so confident, still unused to the telepath’s touch-how would he sound, if Charles took him right there against the wall after no more preamble than a kiss? Erik tended to be quiet, he knew, but Charles conjured the memory of one of his infrequent, fractured moans, of Erik’s hands tight on his arse-shoulders?-no, arse, clutching as the geneticist pushed into him, because… Because it would almost certainly be the opposite, once Erik actually did-once they-so for now, the Erik in his head would have to be happy getting fucked, and since he was in Charles head-he would be.
Charles didn’t know how the logistics would work out between two men up against a wall, face-to-face, but he was sure it sounded lovely and probably their height difference would make it easier. He made a small noise of negation because no, that was not the point, the point was-Erik, my old friend, where have you gone, and Charles imagined Erik hot against his hips as he sank down onto Charles, just the barest tremor in his thighs as his legs bent and just the slightest gasp into the telepath’s hair.
Why didn’t I do this sooner, Charles thought, and wasn’t sure whether he meant the fantasy or what that fantasy contained. He was very warm; he tried to ignore it, he didn’t have all that long left to endure it, but his skin flushed in prickles until he tossed the covers off of himself entirely. The startling cold rushed over his body in a swirling welcome of current, almost electric in its intensity and it was like everything extra had washed away, all the extra heat and thought and worry, just sand surrounding one firm stone of desire lust mine and the pull around his dick that wasn’t Erik but was almost, nearly, close enough.
An eddy of cool air caressed the dip of Charles’ sternum and it occurred to him that with his boxers down below his balls and the covers thrown off he was essentially bared to the world, if anyone could look, and he imagined-he imagined what the modern Erik, the real Erik, his Erik, might think to see him like that, whether he would be jealous, excluded, if he would envy his mental doppelganger if he knew, if he would reach out and touch, yes-
Charles’ lips pulled back from his teeth, his mouth fell open, his knees pulled up and he arched into his hand, tugs turning slow and lurching as line after hot fluid line lashed and then pooled over his fingers and stomach. All thoughts seared out of his skull in a flash-bulb flare of light; for a moment he was nothing and going nowhere until his heart pulsed and one more stripe of semen draped itself over his thumb and dripped down through the groove of his nail.
Lowering his knees gingerly back down to the bed, Charles took a moment just to breathe. He felt sluggish and warm, despite the mixture of sugar, mucus, and genetic material evaporating cold on his belly, and the telepath opened his eyelids, low and heavy, to look down at himself. The blood was already draining from his penis, not quite fast enough to watch but he did so anyway and over the next few minutes it slid gradually down through the loose collar of his slick fingers, contented, job complete.
Charles, for a moment, envied its single-minded drive, and wasn’t that silly, to be jealous of a thing that was still only, distantly, a part of his brain? Like being jealous of his medulla oblongata for its easy capability to regulate his breathing. It was all hormones and neurotransmitters, in the end, every single bit of him, and maybe that was why he was doomed to be so stupid. This had been a stupid idea, obviously, because really, what good had he thought might come of this? That he might somehow get back at Erik by fantasizing about his younger self?
And the worst part was that Charles knew none of that would stop him from doing it again.
lxxiii.
Perhaps that was why, when Badger gestured toward a draped sheet that did absolutely nothing at all to disguise the crutches beneath and declared, “Guess what, I’ve got a present for you,” Charles only spared a moment to frown at the thing before asking, “Are you seeing anyone, Badger?”
The white tufts of her eyebrows jumped up and she examined him with a look approaching awe. “Whoa, Tiger, I didn’t think you had it in you!”
Charles folded his hands in his lap casually, giving her a look of aloof disapproval. “What, just because I’m in a chair?”
Badger waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, no, I know you can do it-I just thought I’d have you cowering in fear by now!”
“You’re not that frightening,” Charles informed her, voice mild and tight.
The furred woman touched clawed fingers to her heart. “I’m hurt, Charles, really. You wound me.”
They stared at each other for a long, expectant moment, until Badger rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Yes, yes, I know it’s hard to believe but I do have a man and no, he doesn’t wear pink, he’s really very hunky and everything. You should get out more, hell, I’m so not your type, I can just tell.”
Charles frowned, but most definitely did not pout. “It’s not like I have much choice,” he muttered.
Badger clapped her hands and then rubbed them together with a rasp of thick callous. “I know what you need,” she declared. “You need a way to move around in style. You need a way to show all the girls that you’re no candyass square.”
Wincing, Charles said, “I know what you’ve got under the sheet and I can already tell you I don’t like it, so you can stop trying to sell me on it.”
Showing her pointed white teeth in a cruel grin, Badger replied, “Aw, but Charlie, you’ll be haulin’ ass in these.” She whipped the sheet away, revealing a pair of bright steel rods, each well over a meter long, kinked near the top with a plastic loop and a hand rest bolted into the metal. They were not graceful; rather, they suffered from the terrible affliction of pragmatism, clunky-looking and yellowed around the edges of the plastic.
The geneticist stared at the crutches forlornly; he was sure that not only would they fail to endear him to any women, they would bring him even more staring than the chair. Anyone could end up in a wheelchair, after all; it was common enough, especially since the war. In fact it was almost a luxury now; there were plenty of people who couldn’t even afford the ability to move themselves around without functioning legs. It was stately, in a way, to coast wherever one needed to go; dignified in a way lurching around on crutches was, by definition, not.
But more important by far was the fact that it hadn’t been much longer than a decade since the polio vaccine had been released to the public, and although Charles had never directly known anyone with the disease-well, he knew the precautions people took when confronted with the possibility of a recurrence, and in the memories of those old enough to have a Before, the epidemic seemed more recent than it ever would have been if there had never been a war. Vaccinations were probably scarce, now, and in a world like this-who wanted to take the chance of losing control of their muscles, if they could avoid it?
“Cheer up, bucko,” Badger chided him, picking the crutches up by their handles. “This is a good thing. This means progress. You’re one timid, shuffling step closer to being able to walk on your own!”
Grimacing, Charles set his brakes down and then reached up to take the woman’s hand; she hauled him up with unfair ease and pinned him to her side as she held one of the devices out for the geneticist to insert his arm into, passing his hand through the ring and grabbing onto the bar beneath. He went silent at her nearness and concentrated on propping the tip of the thing against the floor, rather than consider what he’d tried to ask of her.
Once he wore both crutches, Badger stepped away from him and Charles swayed, for a moment, feeling quite as if he were going to tip over. He blinked and concentrated on keeping his balance; he’d forgotten how complex standing in one spot could be. So different from standing in between a pair of fixed bars; there were so many little muscles, all flexing and relaxing at once. His had gone sluggish and responded only grudgingly, like temperamental children.
Badger poked the small of his back, and Charles hissed a little as his scar twinged. “Mind your posture,” she scolded him. “You don’t want to re-learn how to walk only to end up in bed again with a thrown back.”
She circled around him, examining the telepath’s pose before returning to his front and nodding appreciatively. “Why, Mr. Xavier, you almost look imposing! Let’s see about walking in these, eh? We’ll go until you fall over and then you’ll learn how to stand up in them. It shouldn’t take long.”
Charles grumbled to himself, something concerning people who ought to go back to school and get their certifications learned properly, took one lurching step forward, and toppled down onto the rubber floor.
“Not long at all, then,” Badger observed brightly.
lxxiv.
Charles’ ego was dented more than his body by the time he made it into the lab; Badger hadn’t caught him a single time, but she’d hovered nearby and made his falls gentler. Most of his bruises, in fact, came of wrenching his forearms on the hard loops of the crutches as he tried to stand up again, and he’d been less than thrilled when he’d gone to wheel gratefully away and the woman had set them over his lap with instructions to practice walking with them as often as he was able.
The telepath had left them back in his rooms-he’d try them again later-before going to see Beast, and as it turned out it was a good thing Charles couldn’t stand as he would only have needed to sit down again right away.
“They’ve denied my request for a re-print,” Beast told him glumly, staring down at the letter through his thick glasses.
“What?” Charles asked, although he’d heard just fine. “Why?”
The leonine scientist sighed and tossed the paper back onto his desk, where it drifted to a rest somewhat anticlimactically. “They don’t need to give me a reason,” he explained. “Clearly they suspect that something’s wrong.”
The geneticist tilted his head. “Frost?” he asked, the doubt in his voice mostly self-directed. Charles felt sure that she couldn’t have found anything in Beast’s memory, but… Just to be sure, he held his fingers to his temple and brushed against the other mutant’s mind, soft as a feather.
Beast let him in and Charles took that whirling lightening-storm chaos and thought, too abstract, too unfamiliar, how would another person see it?-so he imagined it differently, set the storm into walls and floor and then he was standing in the lab-how could it be anything else?-but empty, empty except for the bottles on the shelves and the labels on the drawers, and Charles was alone except for the radio, quietly singing in a startling jaunty tune, a fool never learns to get away, just run away before his heart begins to break…
A tight, ironic smile crossed Charles’ lips, just for a moment, and then he turned his mental self around on the spot, on ephemeral legs, looking for anything out of place; anything that could point back to his tampering. There was, he was glad to see, nothing terribly obvious; Beast’s mind was a well-organized place, and if Charles didn’t look too closely at the labels on the drawers and solutions-one jar of fluorescent green liquid, he noticed, was marked 10 x 0.5M regret-it almost looked just like a lab in the real world, albeit unrealistically clean.
A fool never learns; he’ll wait around, just hang around to see how much his heart can take… the radio fizzed. The messes were always hidden, though, weren’t they? Stashed away. The records of failed experiments were torn from notepads, and wasted supplies were dumped into biohazard bins, calibrations expired and were forgotten…
Charles moved to tip open the lid of the sharps disposal, glanced over the contents quickly-nothing he wanted to dwell on, all gleaming points and shattered glass-and moved on to the sink. He peered down the drain, ran the tap, checked the date for the last time the deionized distilled water had been tested, and looked beneath for mold. Then the geneticist approached the biohazard bin and the radio crackled sharply. Professor, I’d rather you didn’t, ah, look in there, Beast’s distant voice advised, sounding sheepish.
The telepath drew his hand back and pursed his lips in bemused acquiescence, turning instead to glance through the drawers, until finally, there, on the floor-the chipped tile. Charles heard the hum of the vents circulating the air above, suddenly loud; as he crouched down to not quite touch the crack with his fingertip, the odor of bleach grew stronger and stronger in his nostrils, the bones of his wrist seemed to vibrate with the rattle of the vents, his lungs were full of chemical tang and linoleum and sound-
Charles stood up again without touching the tile. He looked down at it; the chip in its corner was tiny, under the shadow of the cupboards. Emma Frost would never have noticed it amidst all the juicy distractions of a genius’ mind, he decided, and because the lab wasn’t real he didn’t use the door, he just closed his eyes and-left-
The geneticist opened his eyes again and saw Beast do the same, blinking yellow-blue-yellow with surprise. “I was a room,” he stated, his shaggy eyebrows furrowed.
“You were never anything but yourself,” Charles corrected, taking his fingers from his temple. He sounded weary even to his own ears, so he forced more enthusiasm into his words as he continued, “I simply imagined your mind as something more-literal. For convenience. Your thoughts are very organized, by the way.”
“Thank you?” Beast guessed. “But-I felt like a room!”
“Sorry,” Charles replied flatly, slouching a little.
“No, no, it’s all right,” Beast assured him, a little dazedly. “It was just… Odd.”
“You were a very nice room,” the telepath commented, comfortingly.
“Oh,” Beast remarked, looking no less bemused than before. He glanced away, and then back; nodded to himself and swallowed. “Right then. So, did you see anything-uh-unusual, in there? In my head? That Frost might have caught onto?”
Charles frowned and shook his head. “No, if she noticed anything, it would have been our physical actions.”
“Have we been acting that strangely?” Beast asked, his black lips pursed in thought as he answered his own question: “It doesn’t really matter, does it? We’re under the control of the Brotherhood and we’re known sympathizers. They don’t need a reason to shut my project down.”
“If that’s the case,” Charles mused, “then what can we do?”
Beast hesitated. “I-I don’t-” He interrupted himself to breath deeply, then exhaled slowly, with deliberation. “I still remember several of the compounds and samples on the list, from before I threw it away. I could, I could make inquiries, discreetly, check around if anyone else might be able to get a hold of them…”
Charles almost wished he couldn’t sense the deep, fatalistic doubt beneath Beast’s words. Still, he nodded and agreed and tried not to let the numbness show on his face as he wheeled back through the lab to his workbench.
Hannah had left at some point-he presumed she had gone somewhere more private and less sensitive to contamination so that she could cough freely-so Charles nudged the door mostly-closed. He went to his bench, cleared away his pipettes and sample trays-then set his elbows on the table and his face into his hands, squeezed his eyes tightly closed, and thought, What do I do now? What could I possibly do now?
Chapter 13