FIC: dirt and light
Title: dirt and light
Author: _samalander
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 2200ish
Warnings: Inventive sex, including reference to bondage, breathplay and pegging. None of it graphic.
Characters/Pairings: Erik/Raven, the specter of Charles, the Brotherhood.
Summary: A series of conversations between Erik and Raven, in which they deal with the loss of Charles and the broken pieces he left behind.
Notes: A conversation with rubynye and some_stars led me to thinking about the way Erik and Raven would cope and build together. Then this happened. As always, thanks to Emmypenny and theoreticalpixy for enabling.
Title from Stephen Kellogg & The Sixers's song "Long Days, Fast Years."
The first time Raven doubts Erik, they're lying in bed together, her skin brilliant blue against the coppery tan of his, and she's concentrating very hard on not actually falling into a disjointed, fucked-out mess, because she feels like one, and sometimes her insides dictate her outsides like that.
Erik is breathing heavily, his lungs grasping for air because she's not constricting his airway anymore, her hands have just finished sliding back to their native shape, and he chokes a word that she swears, absolutely promises herself, is "Charles."
At that moment she wishes she had dissolved, let herself fall to ashes like Darwin did.
"What did you say?"
He just shrugs, and turns onto his stomach, and his ass a veritable sin, a thing of legend and story the way it rises under the tangled white sheets, and he throws an exhausted arm across her chest like a lead bar.
Raven doesn't press the issue, in part because Erik is already asleep in that annoying way he has, the way that forces her to take her pleasure before she grants him his, but she stores the word away like ammo, like arrows and slings and stones, heavy in the pit of her stomach.
---
They don't talk about it, the Charles slip, and Raven starts to think that maybe she did imagine it, maybe it was just an errant exhalation.
It's two months later, four months since the beach, and they're in bed again, the cock she prefers sometimes rippling back into her, turning back into the genitals she was born with, and he smiles up at her sleepily, his fingers tracing the indentations of her skin, the mottled spikes and splotches that are her native form, and he breathes a tiny laugh, his thumb ghosting over the place where her nipple would be, if she chose to manifest it.
"You are a singular woman," he says, and she shivers.
"You don't prefer women, do you?" she asks, and tries to pretend that the question hasn't been eating her alive since they last saw Charles.
Erik raises an eyebrow and presses another reverent kiss to the hollow between her breasts.
"I prefer you," he mutters, and she can hear the sleep creeping into his voice, can hear the long-repressed German accent shake its harsh influence into his speech.
"I'm being serious," she says, but she knows she's lost him to his post-orgasmic lethargy when he grins at her like the guilty cat Charles' mom never let them keep.
"You're always serious, Ravala. Nudnik," he smiles and hooks a finger under her chin, pressing their lips together in a chaste kiss.
Yiddish means the end of conversation for them, and she sighs deeply, resolving to have the talk, really have it, when they're both clothed and awake.
---
They're recruiting, though, and that means a lot of time on the move, and Raven isn't sure if it would be better to broach the subject when they succeed in convincing another mutant that he doesn't have to hide, or when they lose one to fear, to Charles, and all Erik wants to do is fuck the feelings away.
She opts for the second, leading him back to the safe house in middle Oregon that Emma showed them before she lets him touch her. She spends the journey maneuvering her body out of his hands like putty when he tries to grab her, tries to caress her. She gets him back to his bedroom, the room that was Shaw's (which isn't Oedipal at all, not a bit) before she stops and assumes the form.
Charles is taller than her, and she sometimes wonders that it doesn't hurt, shifting into something of such a difference, compressing or expanding every cell in her body to become what she wants.
Erik flinches when he sees her game, the fingerless gloves and the floppy hair.
"What are you doing?" he hisses, and she walks toward him, swinging her hips like her brother never did.
"Isn't this what you want?" she asks, "Charles Xavier, the man you left wounded on a beach in Cuba so you could go off and fuck his sister?"
Erik balls his hands into fists, and for a moment Raven thinks she's gone too far, but then his expression softens and he laughs.
"You think that?"
She shrugs, and lets the costume ripple away, back into what she is. "You love him." It's not a question. You don't live with someone for six months and not know things like that, don't share a bed with someone and miss the signs.
Erik shakes his head. "So do you."
"Is that what we are, then?"
She doesn't know what she means by that, nor why she says it, but once it's out there it just seems right.
He makes a swift movement with his hand and from somewhere unseen a loose ball of metal particles forms, spinning itself in the palm of his hand. "This is what I am," he says, and particles roll like quicksilver, between his fingers and over his palm, never touching skin. "I was this before your brother, before you, and will be this when you've tired of me and left."
Raven is no longer sure what they're talking about, not really. So she swallows hard and faces Erik. "Do you fuck me because you can't fuck Charles?" she asks, and she hates herself for a moment, for a brief fleeting second of terror before Erik's face splits into his jackal smile, the one that is equal parts mirth and danger.
"I fuck you," he says, and he stalks the room, metal still spinning over his hand, his arm, everywhere, little beads of metal from the air like armor, "because I want to fuck you, and because you want to fuck me."
She counters his move, feeling for the first time since they met that Erik is dangerous. "Am I a replacement for him?"
"Are you any man's replacement?"
She has her back to the door now, and she knows he could stop her because the hinges and the knob are his domain, but he doesn't, so she wrenches it open and leaves him alone, a star with nothing but dust to orbit it.
---
The next morning there's a spun metal rose on the floor outside her room, but Raven doesn't sleep well without Erik, misses his bulk, and she cuts her foot when she steps on it in her sleepy ramble to the shower.
It doesn't mend any wrongs.
---
Raven tells herself that she's better off not sleeping with someone who sees her only as a replacement for the man he lost, promises herself that she will work with Erik because his work is right, but she won't love him anymore.
She lasts a month. A month of little presents left in her rooms, little overtures from Erik, trying to entice her back. A month of gestures and no words, never an apology until she loses her temper.
They've just recruited a new mutant to the Brotherhood, a sniveling little punk who calls himself Toad, and she hates him, hates the way he looks at her and the way he talks. She's hit him more than once, and so have Angel and Emma, but he laughs and calls them cute for their attempts to curb his idiotic behavior.
She goes to Erik as a last resort, because she's not allowed to shoot the asshole.
"You need to do something about Toad," she says, no preamble, as she walks into Erik's room.
He looks up from the chess set- she thinks the saddest thing about Erik being alone, without Charles, is that he plays chess by himself.
"Are we speaking now, then?" he asks, and she rolls her eyes.
"We speak about official business, Erik. We don't fuck anymore, because you don't want this," she gestures to herself, "you want this."
She lets herself flicker into Charles for a moment, but doesn't hold it.
Erik sighs. "I'll speak to Toad," he says simply, and Raven turns to leave.
He doesn't call her back, not really, he just keeps talking and she stops walking to listen. "I remember a girl who put herself in my bed in upstate New York," he says, "A girl who had no idea how stunning she was because she let other people dictate what beauty meant."
"What's your point?" She asks, hand on the door and teeth gritted tightly.
"Seems to me that girl figured it out, figured out that I wanted her for how unusual she was. And then she started feeling guilty-"
"Don't presume," she spits, whirling to face him, "to know what I feel."
He holds up his hands in defeat. "Fine, she started thinking that because I had fucked her brother, the man she thought of as her brother, that the only reason I could want her wasn't for her beauty or her charm or her kindness, but as a stand-in for a non-blood relation that she assumed I want more."
"God," she snorts. "Don't you ever just say what you mean?"
"I want you," he says, his eyes steady on hers. "Because you are you."
"Do you love Charles?" she hates to ask it, but she'll never rest without the answer.
"Funny thing about love," he sighs. "You can feel it for more than one person."
"Not an answer."
"Yes, I love Charles. But I love you, too, for entirely different and totally similar reasons."
"I won't be second best," she says, taking a step towards him that she hopes in menacing, and Erik shrugs.
"You assume I rank you, Ravala."
"What we're building, the Brotherhood-"
"We'll build it together, if we're sleeping together or not."
Raven scrubs her palm over her eyes, and shakes her head. "I have to think."
Erik, bless the God he doesn't believe in anymore, swallows hard. "Okay."
---
The problem with Erik being the leader is that no one really knows him. Of the six of them, Raven knows him best; has known him longest. And though Emma is great to talk to, she has no interest in the interpersonal squabbles of the rest of the Brotherhood, be it Erik and Raven or Riptide and Azazel, she just doesn't care. And Angel thinks men are all sex obsessed pigs; so her opinion isn't really one Raven can seek out on this. She doesn't bother with the men; Toad is a pig and Azazel and Riptide are too caught up in each other to help with her drama.
She spends a lot of time thinking alone, watching sunlight glint off the bouquet of roses Erik made her.
It's not that she doesn't trust Erik, it's not even that she's jealous of Charles. It's just that Raven has spent a lifetime hiding, she decides, and that does things to a person, makes them feel unworthy all the time. She thinks Dr. Freud would be proud of her, and decides to blame a mother she barely remembers for good measure.
---
"The thing is," Raven is smiling, laid out in Erik's bed again, where she feels at home. "I'm thinking I should get a degree. Go to a University. Lean psychology."
Erik is listening, and he'd better be, because she spent far too much money on all that silk to secure him to not be listened to. She thumbs one of his nipples absently as she talks.
"I want to be my own woman, you know? We can vote now. Could walk right up to a poll and vote for a president, easy as you like, could be a white man or a blue girl and they'd have to let me do it. I have rights, Erik."
He makes a noise around the gag in his mouth, and that's purely decorative. It has metal buckles in the back, so he can take it off whenever he likes, but his mouth stretches around it so pretty. They both like that effect.
"So I'm going to do that. I'll still help recruit, still fight the fight, but when the world does turn, in 1987, when I'm just a normal mutant housewife, well, I'll need a job. All the liberated women have jobs now."
She straddles his prone body, and she's glad for the gag once more because Erik's eyes are so honest, they're actually shining with emotion, and Raven has never seen eyes do that before, thought it was something you read about in ladies' magazines.
"I got a whole life planned out, Erik," she says, and she's aching for him, wants to feel him inside her, wants to fuck and be fucked and finish exhausted. "And I think I'm gonna let you be part of it."
He removes the gag then, ghostly hands moving strips of leather by their metal clasps. "And me?" he asks.
"You can come too," she says, smiling. "I just think - I met a man once, an angry man, and he thought I was beautiful and smart, and he had plans. And I like his plans, I do. And once I'm grown up," she smiles wickedly and settles on him, feeling his arousal hot against her ass, "maybe he'll still be there, maybe we'll do this together. But we both need healing time, first, you know?"
Erik groans. "Leaving me?"
"No," she smiles. "Never."
He leans up, straining his neck and back against the dark blue silk, and she leans down to meet him in a kiss.
Author: _samalander
Fandom: X-Men: First Class
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 2200ish
Warnings: Inventive sex, including reference to bondage, breathplay and pegging. None of it graphic.
Characters/Pairings: Erik/Raven, the specter of Charles, the Brotherhood.
Summary: A series of conversations between Erik and Raven, in which they deal with the loss of Charles and the broken pieces he left behind.
Notes: A conversation with rubynye and some_stars led me to thinking about the way Erik and Raven would cope and build together. Then this happened. As always, thanks to Emmypenny and theoreticalpixy for enabling.
Title from Stephen Kellogg & The Sixers's song "Long Days, Fast Years."
The first time Raven doubts Erik, they're lying in bed together, her skin brilliant blue against the coppery tan of his, and she's concentrating very hard on not actually falling into a disjointed, fucked-out mess, because she feels like one, and sometimes her insides dictate her outsides like that.
Erik is breathing heavily, his lungs grasping for air because she's not constricting his airway anymore, her hands have just finished sliding back to their native shape, and he chokes a word that she swears, absolutely promises herself, is "Charles."
At that moment she wishes she had dissolved, let herself fall to ashes like Darwin did.
"What did you say?"
He just shrugs, and turns onto his stomach, and his ass a veritable sin, a thing of legend and story the way it rises under the tangled white sheets, and he throws an exhausted arm across her chest like a lead bar.
Raven doesn't press the issue, in part because Erik is already asleep in that annoying way he has, the way that forces her to take her pleasure before she grants him his, but she stores the word away like ammo, like arrows and slings and stones, heavy in the pit of her stomach.
---
They don't talk about it, the Charles slip, and Raven starts to think that maybe she did imagine it, maybe it was just an errant exhalation.
It's two months later, four months since the beach, and they're in bed again, the cock she prefers sometimes rippling back into her, turning back into the genitals she was born with, and he smiles up at her sleepily, his fingers tracing the indentations of her skin, the mottled spikes and splotches that are her native form, and he breathes a tiny laugh, his thumb ghosting over the place where her nipple would be, if she chose to manifest it.
"You are a singular woman," he says, and she shivers.
"You don't prefer women, do you?" she asks, and tries to pretend that the question hasn't been eating her alive since they last saw Charles.
Erik raises an eyebrow and presses another reverent kiss to the hollow between her breasts.
"I prefer you," he mutters, and she can hear the sleep creeping into his voice, can hear the long-repressed German accent shake its harsh influence into his speech.
"I'm being serious," she says, but she knows she's lost him to his post-orgasmic lethargy when he grins at her like the guilty cat Charles' mom never let them keep.
"You're always serious, Ravala. Nudnik," he smiles and hooks a finger under her chin, pressing their lips together in a chaste kiss.
Yiddish means the end of conversation for them, and she sighs deeply, resolving to have the talk, really have it, when they're both clothed and awake.
---
They're recruiting, though, and that means a lot of time on the move, and Raven isn't sure if it would be better to broach the subject when they succeed in convincing another mutant that he doesn't have to hide, or when they lose one to fear, to Charles, and all Erik wants to do is fuck the feelings away.
She opts for the second, leading him back to the safe house in middle Oregon that Emma showed them before she lets him touch her. She spends the journey maneuvering her body out of his hands like putty when he tries to grab her, tries to caress her. She gets him back to his bedroom, the room that was Shaw's (which isn't Oedipal at all, not a bit) before she stops and assumes the form.
Charles is taller than her, and she sometimes wonders that it doesn't hurt, shifting into something of such a difference, compressing or expanding every cell in her body to become what she wants.
Erik flinches when he sees her game, the fingerless gloves and the floppy hair.
"What are you doing?" he hisses, and she walks toward him, swinging her hips like her brother never did.
"Isn't this what you want?" she asks, "Charles Xavier, the man you left wounded on a beach in Cuba so you could go off and fuck his sister?"
Erik balls his hands into fists, and for a moment Raven thinks she's gone too far, but then his expression softens and he laughs.
"You think that?"
She shrugs, and lets the costume ripple away, back into what she is. "You love him." It's not a question. You don't live with someone for six months and not know things like that, don't share a bed with someone and miss the signs.
Erik shakes his head. "So do you."
"Is that what we are, then?"
She doesn't know what she means by that, nor why she says it, but once it's out there it just seems right.
He makes a swift movement with his hand and from somewhere unseen a loose ball of metal particles forms, spinning itself in the palm of his hand. "This is what I am," he says, and particles roll like quicksilver, between his fingers and over his palm, never touching skin. "I was this before your brother, before you, and will be this when you've tired of me and left."
Raven is no longer sure what they're talking about, not really. So she swallows hard and faces Erik. "Do you fuck me because you can't fuck Charles?" she asks, and she hates herself for a moment, for a brief fleeting second of terror before Erik's face splits into his jackal smile, the one that is equal parts mirth and danger.
"I fuck you," he says, and he stalks the room, metal still spinning over his hand, his arm, everywhere, little beads of metal from the air like armor, "because I want to fuck you, and because you want to fuck me."
She counters his move, feeling for the first time since they met that Erik is dangerous. "Am I a replacement for him?"
"Are you any man's replacement?"
She has her back to the door now, and she knows he could stop her because the hinges and the knob are his domain, but he doesn't, so she wrenches it open and leaves him alone, a star with nothing but dust to orbit it.
---
The next morning there's a spun metal rose on the floor outside her room, but Raven doesn't sleep well without Erik, misses his bulk, and she cuts her foot when she steps on it in her sleepy ramble to the shower.
It doesn't mend any wrongs.
---
Raven tells herself that she's better off not sleeping with someone who sees her only as a replacement for the man he lost, promises herself that she will work with Erik because his work is right, but she won't love him anymore.
She lasts a month. A month of little presents left in her rooms, little overtures from Erik, trying to entice her back. A month of gestures and no words, never an apology until she loses her temper.
They've just recruited a new mutant to the Brotherhood, a sniveling little punk who calls himself Toad, and she hates him, hates the way he looks at her and the way he talks. She's hit him more than once, and so have Angel and Emma, but he laughs and calls them cute for their attempts to curb his idiotic behavior.
She goes to Erik as a last resort, because she's not allowed to shoot the asshole.
"You need to do something about Toad," she says, no preamble, as she walks into Erik's room.
He looks up from the chess set- she thinks the saddest thing about Erik being alone, without Charles, is that he plays chess by himself.
"Are we speaking now, then?" he asks, and she rolls her eyes.
"We speak about official business, Erik. We don't fuck anymore, because you don't want this," she gestures to herself, "you want this."
She lets herself flicker into Charles for a moment, but doesn't hold it.
Erik sighs. "I'll speak to Toad," he says simply, and Raven turns to leave.
He doesn't call her back, not really, he just keeps talking and she stops walking to listen. "I remember a girl who put herself in my bed in upstate New York," he says, "A girl who had no idea how stunning she was because she let other people dictate what beauty meant."
"What's your point?" She asks, hand on the door and teeth gritted tightly.
"Seems to me that girl figured it out, figured out that I wanted her for how unusual she was. And then she started feeling guilty-"
"Don't presume," she spits, whirling to face him, "to know what I feel."
He holds up his hands in defeat. "Fine, she started thinking that because I had fucked her brother, the man she thought of as her brother, that the only reason I could want her wasn't for her beauty or her charm or her kindness, but as a stand-in for a non-blood relation that she assumed I want more."
"God," she snorts. "Don't you ever just say what you mean?"
"I want you," he says, his eyes steady on hers. "Because you are you."
"Do you love Charles?" she hates to ask it, but she'll never rest without the answer.
"Funny thing about love," he sighs. "You can feel it for more than one person."
"Not an answer."
"Yes, I love Charles. But I love you, too, for entirely different and totally similar reasons."
"I won't be second best," she says, taking a step towards him that she hopes in menacing, and Erik shrugs.
"You assume I rank you, Ravala."
"What we're building, the Brotherhood-"
"We'll build it together, if we're sleeping together or not."
Raven scrubs her palm over her eyes, and shakes her head. "I have to think."
Erik, bless the God he doesn't believe in anymore, swallows hard. "Okay."
---
The problem with Erik being the leader is that no one really knows him. Of the six of them, Raven knows him best; has known him longest. And though Emma is great to talk to, she has no interest in the interpersonal squabbles of the rest of the Brotherhood, be it Erik and Raven or Riptide and Azazel, she just doesn't care. And Angel thinks men are all sex obsessed pigs; so her opinion isn't really one Raven can seek out on this. She doesn't bother with the men; Toad is a pig and Azazel and Riptide are too caught up in each other to help with her drama.
She spends a lot of time thinking alone, watching sunlight glint off the bouquet of roses Erik made her.
It's not that she doesn't trust Erik, it's not even that she's jealous of Charles. It's just that Raven has spent a lifetime hiding, she decides, and that does things to a person, makes them feel unworthy all the time. She thinks Dr. Freud would be proud of her, and decides to blame a mother she barely remembers for good measure.
---
"The thing is," Raven is smiling, laid out in Erik's bed again, where she feels at home. "I'm thinking I should get a degree. Go to a University. Lean psychology."
Erik is listening, and he'd better be, because she spent far too much money on all that silk to secure him to not be listened to. She thumbs one of his nipples absently as she talks.
"I want to be my own woman, you know? We can vote now. Could walk right up to a poll and vote for a president, easy as you like, could be a white man or a blue girl and they'd have to let me do it. I have rights, Erik."
He makes a noise around the gag in his mouth, and that's purely decorative. It has metal buckles in the back, so he can take it off whenever he likes, but his mouth stretches around it so pretty. They both like that effect.
"So I'm going to do that. I'll still help recruit, still fight the fight, but when the world does turn, in 1987, when I'm just a normal mutant housewife, well, I'll need a job. All the liberated women have jobs now."
She straddles his prone body, and she's glad for the gag once more because Erik's eyes are so honest, they're actually shining with emotion, and Raven has never seen eyes do that before, thought it was something you read about in ladies' magazines.
"I got a whole life planned out, Erik," she says, and she's aching for him, wants to feel him inside her, wants to fuck and be fucked and finish exhausted. "And I think I'm gonna let you be part of it."
He removes the gag then, ghostly hands moving strips of leather by their metal clasps. "And me?" he asks.
"You can come too," she says, smiling. "I just think - I met a man once, an angry man, and he thought I was beautiful and smart, and he had plans. And I like his plans, I do. And once I'm grown up," she smiles wickedly and settles on him, feeling his arousal hot against her ass, "maybe he'll still be there, maybe we'll do this together. But we both need healing time, first, you know?"
Erik groans. "Leaving me?"
"No," she smiles. "Never."
He leans up, straining his neck and back against the dark blue silk, and she leans down to meet him in a kiss.