Fic: For Those Who Wake
Title: For Those Who Wake
Author: yellow_pomelo
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/Characters: Charles/Erik
Warnings: None.
Word Count: ~2, 000
Disclaimer: I do not own X-men: First Class or any of it's characters.
Summary: Post-divorce; Charles is asleep and there are things Erik can't tell him any other way.
Notes: For this Round 6 prompt at 1stclass_kink
Erik is not a dreamer.
He doesn’t remember there ever being a time when he loafed about thinking what if or maybe, if only or someday.
As a boy, he had no time for such fruitless thoughts. His mind was always occupied with hunger, with fear, with the knowledge that something dreadful was on the horizon. It was a state of being, bled into him through the stiff shoulders of his father and the worried twist of his mother’s lip, the icy stares of strangers and the wink of little yellow stars.
Reality was too large to allow space for stray thoughts, and when the worst happened, there were no clouds for Erik to lose his head in. It was like walls slammed down across Erik’s mind, boxing him in and chaining him down, saying, There is nothing else. This is the world. This is all that will ever be.
His mother was dead. She was dead because of Erik, but there was little time to dwell on that knowledge. There were few lulls between terrifying sessions with Herr Doktor, and what rest he got came in the form of sedatives or black outs.
He never thought about what might have happened if he’d been able to move the coin. He didn’t wonder how things might have gone if he’d been a little stronger and a lot less afraid. He was too busy struggling against leather bonds, crying for the pain to stop, please stop.
And then, when he was free, his imagination was put to better use hunting down his tormenters and planning revenge across world maps.
Sometimes, between kills, when the trails cooled or the exhaustion didn’t quite knock him out, he would pause to think about what he’d lost, but it was always the same slideshow: the unmoving coin, the drop of the body, the bloom of red on threadbare cloth. It never changed, just as the past could never change. Erik will have always failed to move the coin, his mother will have always died, and Herr Doktor will have always held the gun.
That is reality and Erik is planted firmly in it, body and mind.
Erik is not a dreamer. He’s not. So he doesn’t know anymore what it is he sees when he closes his eyes. Imperfect memories flickering on the backs of his eyelids, hallucinations brought by fever, glimpses of parallel dimensions, images that aren’t real, that never will be real.
“It always starts the same,” Erik tells Charles, voice soft so as not to wake him. “I stand on that beach, on that sand. The sky is always blue and cloudless, and I can feel metal debris being pushed ashore by the water. I hear the waves again. It’s like elevator music now and I hate it.”
Charles doesn’t murmur in his sleep, doesn’t toss and turn or even twitch, and Erik doesn’t know if it’s because of fatigue or medication. Either way, the stillness disturbs Erik and he resists reaching across the wide mattress of Charles’ bed. He longs to run his fingers through the fine strands of Charles' hair. In the monochrome of night, it looks like spilled ink across the pillow.
Erik settles for fingering the twisting embroidery on the duvet.
“Some nights I don’t even enter the submarine. I hardly set one foot out of the Blackbird and I don’t let you out of the jet.” Erik’s eyes track the almost indiscernible rise and fall of Charles’ chest, and he allows himself to settle on the edge of the bed. Charles’ breathing is an even rhythm, slow and steady, patient like the wide eyes of an avid listener.
“There was one night where I just reached out with my hands and took hold of the submarine. I bent the metal carefully, sealed the exits and crushed Shaw; slowly. Then I activated every missile in every ship before they’d even fired. The humans died, and you were safe.”
Erik half expects Charles to wake at that last part to lodge a protest or two. He’s always been terribly predictable when it comes to the sanctity of human life and Erik is almost disappointed when Charles slumbers on.
“On some nights I have better control,” Erik continues. “I stop the bullets in midair and let them drop to the sand like so many little specks. Sometimes I lock up the mechanism of the gun after that first shot or disassemble it with a thought, and then you’re safe.”
Erik hunches under his cape, the chilled metal of his helmet pressing against the nape of his neck like a blade.
It’s a cold night. Autumn has come early and new students will arrive at the institute next week. With more bodies roaming the mansion, it will be harder to visit than it already is with Beast’s acute sense of smell trilling the alarm at the slightest whiff of Azazel’s sulphur. Even so, Erik is glad for Beast’s presence. Somehow he’s sure that the thick bedding keeping Charles warm is Beast’s doing. Charles has never been very good at taking care of himself, Erik knows.
Beast should do something about the mansion’s heating, though. The cool air almost hurts to breathe and Erik tilts his head back like it might help pace his breath, make it slow and steady. “Some nights I’m just a little more careful. I angle my wrist a little more to the right; flick the bullets with a little less force.”
The mansion grounds are large enough to make it seem as if the school stands on an island far from the rest of civilization. The sky is clear tonight and the moon a thin sliver. Here, some of the brighter stars would be visible to the naked eye, but Erik is sitting in an unlit room on the edge of a mattress. What he sees is the deep dark of a bed canopy.
“One night, I died,” Erik says, “and you were safe.”
Erik turns his face to Charles’ still form and wishes he could confide as he used to. He thinks of a time long gone, where the only black and white was on the scuffed surface of a chess board. He’d like to see this room in colour again, made golden by warm fires or the low burn of incandescent bulbs.
“It’s always that beach, and every night I do something different. Every night I save you - keep you safe - but every morning the world’s unchanged. You are still-” Erik’s voice cracks, “and we are still-” his hands clutch at empty air.
“And I will always be the one who had hurt you.” Erik bows his head, resting the brow of his helmet against a clammy palm. His breath rattles in his throat like the cold has frozen the moisture in the air into little glass beads, sharp-edged and abrasive.
They’ve been enemies now for nearly two years and that should’ve been enough time to wash away a month’s worth of memories. Yet somehow no amount of battles, physical or verbal, seem to be enough to make Erik forget what it’s like to have someone gaze trustingly - brokenly - up at him. These are memories as haunting as barbed wire fences and steel operating tables, and he’s not sure what he meant to accomplish by visiting Charles like this.
“In my dreams, I walk,” Erik’s head snaps up and his eyes meet Charles’, wide and unblinking, and so very blue in the weak moonlight, “and every morning I wake up and remember that I no longer can.”
“Charles,” Erik says, not knowing what else to say. He feels disoriented, senses mismatched, and when he swallows he thinks he can taste the metal of the wheelchair parked so innocently on the other side of the bed.
“Erik,” Charles greets in kind, as if nothing’s amiss. “It’s good to see you.”
“I’m sure.”
Charles drags himself up to lean against the wooden headboard and Erik tries not to stare at the dead weight of his legs. He’s not sure if it’s better or worse to see Charles out of his wheelchair. There’s something particularly awful in the illusion of full health.
“In my dreams things are different,” Charles says once he’s settled against the sturdy mahogany, and it takes a moment for Erik to connect it to his earlier statement, “but it doesn’t have to be different. Dreams are just the prelude to reality.”
Erik feels his blood freeze as he realizes that Charles must have heard some, if not all, of what Erik’s said this night. He was so sure that Charles had been asleep and a part of him bristles at Charles’ deception, anger and embarrassment mixing in equal parts to heat his words.
“Don’t delude yourself, Charles,” Erik says, standing up to leave. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you.”
“Is it so wrong to hope?” Charles asks stubbornly, leaning forwards and keeping himself upright with hands pressed against his mattress. His eyes are fever bright, the earnest set of his lips maddening.
“You cannot walk!” Erik practically snarls, spinning on his heel to fully face the bed. Charles flinches and there is an answering lurch in Erik’s chest. “This isn’t an exercise of mind over matter. No amount of struggle will help. We both know this, so why must you be such a fool?”
“Walking isn’t all I dream about,” Charles says. Erik sighs, feeling the fight drain out of him at Charles’ plaintive tone.
“I know,” he says, because Charles’ heart is too soft, too open, and he’d never forget the big picture. Erik knows Charles’ dreams, because it’s from them that Erik derived his latest ambition for mutant supremacy.
“Do you really, Erik?” Charles shakes his head, and there’s a waver in his voice, like a wrinkle in the smooth cream of a vellum page.
Erik looks away, the helmet feeling suddenly tight, “Some things are simply impossible, Charles.”
“Only if we make it so.”
Erik doesn’t say anything to that and he refuses to look at anything but the twining pattern of vines carved into the bedposts. The bed is ridiculously ornate, a behemoth of shadow and moonlit ridges. In the corner of his eye, Charles looks far too small even bundled under the thick duvet.
The silence stretches on until it isn’t silence, but a cacophony of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards, twigs scrabbling at the window pane and wind whistling through branches, such that Erik is sure no words could be heard anyways.
It’s uncomfortable, suffocating, and Erik needs to leave before the pressure of sound grows too great upon his ear drums. He thinks he should at least say goodbye, but the time for observing social niceties has passed and it doesn’t really matter. They never part on good terms.
The window in the hallway works best for quiet entry and exit, being unobstructed by any furniture or curtains. It’s not far, either, just a few steps outside Charles’ door. Erik is at the threshold, the bright rectangle of the window in view, when Charles speaks again.
“You know, it was silly for you to think you could save me.”
Something in Erik breaks at that. A clamour of accusations roar up in the back of his mind, his sins whispered a thousand times over, dredging up the guilt he tries so hard to ignore. He closes his eyes and it’s the beach all over again, a sky so blue it hurts to look at and sand on his skin, dirt rubbed so deeply into his pores that he’ll never be rid of it.
“It’s silly because there is nothing to save, Erik,” Charles continues. Erik can feel Charles’ eyes on him, even without looking, even with the helmet. It’s the lightest brush across his shoulders, trailing down and spreading out like fine-boned fingers. It’s a gentle thing, but Erik’s skin burns regardless.
“I don’t need saving. I’m not trapped or wounded. I’m not lost.” Erik can almost feel the circle of familiar arms around his waist, the gust of warm breath at the exposed skin on the nape of his neck. The words sound so close in the dark, like they might have always been coiled in his ear, and Erik doesn’t understand how it can feel so real when it’s not.
“I know that,” Erik says bitterly, trying to shake off the sensation of false comfort, of sand.
“No, I don’t think you do,” Charles says. “I’m here - right here - and maybe someday you will see that instead.”