Armistice (3/?)
Title: Armistice
Pairing: Erik/Charles
Rating: PG-13 now, for violence and war? Later NC-17.
Genre: WW1 AU
Summary: 1917. Craiglockhart, a mental hospital in Scotland. Erik Lehnsherr is a Siegfried Sassoon-esque World War 1 poet, and Charles Xavier (Wilfred Owen) is a fellow patient at the hospital who turns out to share more than Lehnsherr's gift for poetry. Everyone's still a mutant, but the origins of the mutations are a peculiar form of shellshock, and (given the dates) major hunks of folks' backstories are different.
Prologue
Chapter 1
The nightmares were getting worse. For the past four nights Erik had been walking barefoot across a ledge of ice, with a growing terror that there was something horrible lurking beneath it. Don’t look down, he told himself. Don’t look under the ice. Keep moving. The not looking made it worse. Tonight he had made it almost halfway across before looking down, and when he looked down he had seen a thing almost like himself, lips frozen blue, walking a mirror path beneath the ice. The thing met his gaze with eyes swollen and wetly strange like the eyes of a drowned man. Then the ice began to crack.
He started awake, panting in terror. The bedstead behind him was bending and shifting and he could not get it to stop. He tried breathing. Control. Control. Make it obey you. But all he could feel was the pounding of his terror and the searing cold pain of the nightmare ice.
Finally it subsided. He lay in silence, panting, terrified.
In a room down the hall, he heard a scream.
Idly he wondered who it might be. It was a pure animal sound of terror.
He clambered heavily out of bed and turned on the lamp and tried to write. Nothing seemed to stick. The words looked like insects speared by his pen and left wriggling on the page.
Finally he stared at the pen. He tried to feel the metal, the curious clarification of the atmosphere around it, the hush of it.
Nothing.
That day over breakfast Rivers asked how he was doing. Coming from him the question did not sound like a form of politeness.
He told him the dream. For a moment he toyed with telling the man about the bedstead. He felt queerly certain that Rivers would not believe it, had a sudden picture of the man shaking his head and scrawling something on a clipboard. If Graves had not believed there was no reason to think the doctor would.
“Are you accustomed to nightmares?” Rivers asked.
“I grew up in the countryside,” Erik said. “I had a persistent nightmare about Lady Catherine of Wuthering Heights rapping at my bedroom window.”
Rivers grinned.
“Sounds silly now,” Erik said. He neatly decapitated his boiled egg with a swat of the spoon. “Horses helped. I’d wander to the stables and stand listening to them shuffle about in their sleep and breathe. Something solid about it I always found reassuring.” He neglected to mention the stable boy who for some time had been equally reassuring.
“Hardly an option here, I’m afraid,” Rivers said.
“Suppose not,” Erik said.
Rivers frowned. “Find me the next time,” he muttered. “I’m awake, generally. Going the rounds. Last night Summers managed to set his bed-linens on fire.”
“Summers?” Erik asked.
Rivers pointed down the table at a fair-haired boy who was staring fixedly off into space. Next to him sat the new arrival with dark hair. He seemed to be trying to induce Summers to eat a few spoonfuls of lumpy porridge.
A book was open on the table next to him and Erik wondered what book it was. No one else here seemed to read - not for pleasure, at any rate, only for want of anything more exciting to do, and then only cheap disreputable paperbacks. This couldn’t be one of those - one wouldn’t bring it to breakfast if --
Rivers was saying something. He nodded and tried to look as though he had been paying attention.
--
Erik sat at his desk. He had given up all pretext of trying to write and was simply trying to bend the pen. Nothing was happening. He had no idea how to find the muscle again, and he felt as though he were straining everything else in the process. It was giving him a headache.
Suddenly there was a knock.
He waited in silence.
There was another knock.
Then: “I don’t mean to intrude,” a voice said, “only I heard you were here and I couldn’t have forgiven myself if I didn’t come congratulate the author of the Old Huntsman.”
“I’d hardly call failing to congratulate me on the Old Huntsman an unforgivable offense,” Erik said, but he got slowly up from the desk and opened the door. It was the new arrival. Contemplated at close range, the man standing at the door was nearly a head shorter and the first adjective that sprang to mind was pretty, in spite of the hard angles that the uniform was trying to enforce, and his whole face lit up under unruly soft brown hair when he caught sight of Erik. Erik noticed with some alarm that he was holding three copies of The Old Huntsman under one arm.
The young man noticed the look and laughed, propitiatingly. His eyes were startlingly blue. “I’m sorry. I am absolutely positive that no words strike more terror into your heart than, ‘Here we are at the loony bin together and I’ve got three of your books.’”
“Bull’s-eye,” Erik said. His voice was level. “So you liked The Old Huntsman.”
"Adored."
"Were you reading it at breakfast?" Erik asked.
“I was working up the nerve to--” The stranger frowned and stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting you on a day when you’d prefer no one interrupted you, least of all some aspiring scribbler who is going about this all wrong but thought you merited congratulations and wanted to say that you’re not the only poet in the place, in case you wanted someone to bandy lines with or - God, I sound dashed silly, like it’s tennis, I can go rehearse this speech again.”
“You’ve been rehearsing it?”
The newcomer laughed ruefully.
“What’s your name?” Erik asked, holding the door open.
“You don’t mind?” He extended a hand. The books tumbled out from under his arm. “Xavier. Charles Xavier.” Erik bent to help pick them up. The boy grinned at him.
They walked in and he sat down at the desk. Xavier perched on the edge of his bed. He had the sense that if Xavier started talking again he might not be able to stop.
“Shall I endorse these?” Erik said. Xavier nodded. “To you?”
“One’s for my mother but I haven’t decided which yet, so, to me.”
“Xavier spelled the usual way?” Erik asked, mouth quirking upwards a little.
“Yes, like the saint. Although he’s not family.”
“Saints seldom are.” Erik began lettering out the dedication: “To Charles Francis Xavier (no relation to the saint.)”
“That one won’t go to my mother,” Xavier said, leaning nearer to watch him write. “Quite legible. How incredible! Mine’s scarcely legible; I have to print it all in block capitals if I want anyone else to be able to read it. Mother said bad handwriting was a sign of genius but I’m inclined to think she was humoring me and figured that if she couldn’t read a word of it that was the safest presumption.”
“It’s generally a safe presumption,” Erik said. “You ought to see H. G. Wells’ handwriting.”
“H. G. Wells?” Xavier perked, instantly.
“Illegible. And pink.” Erik gestured to the dresser. “I had a letter from him yesterday. See if you can make any of it out.”
Xavier hopped up and picked the letter off the dresser. “It is pink,” he said, after a moment. “I thought that was a way of referring to his epistolary style.”
“Like purple?”
Xavier chuckled. The chuckle sounded older than the boy looked. “You’re sure I can - nothing of a - personal nature?”
“From H. G. Wells?” Erik shuddered involuntarily. “No, mainly about something he’s ragging me to read called The Invisible King. Except for the illegible bits.”
Erik watched him read, scanning the letters impossibly fast.
“I don’t think this is a word, I think it’s just a drawing of a porcupine,” Xavier said at length.
“Which?” Erik stood up and squinted over his shoulder.
“That,” Xavier said, running his thumb over it. “At least it doesn’t look like anything else to me.”
“It looks more like a - dog that’s had a run-in with a porcupine.”
“Possibly a mutated echidna.” Xavier squinted at it, brow furrowing. “If this is always what his writing’s like I think the editor deserves most of the credit for The Invisible Man.”
“I am supposed to reply to him,” Erik said. “Right now I have made some very general remarks, mainly pertaining to the weather.”
“Why don’t you just cover the paper in noughts and crosses?”
“He might take that as an offense.” Erik sat back down at the desk and finished the last dedication. “Or worse, an indication that I belong here.”
Xavier stiffened a little.
“You don’t?” Xavier asked.
“I’m completely sane,” Erik said. “But I suppose everyone says that. In fact more likely if you aren’t sane. Present company excluded, I’m sure,” he added, feeling suddenly that he was talking too much. Xavier was giving him an odd appraising look. Erik studied his face again, more carefully. Xavier was pale and younger-looking and there was something a little frightened in those wide cool blue eyes, like ice beginning to form on the edge of a pool. There was only the faintest hint of stubble. Xavier’s lips were softer and redder than they had any right to be.
He wished he hadn’t noticed that.
"At any rate you look sane," he finished, somewhat lamely.
“There’s no need to flatter me,” Xavier said, looking momentarily puzzled, then picking up the letter again. “Let me have another go, I’ll bet I can see what he’s asking.”
Erik tried not to look at him. Dr. Rivers had been trying to warn him about these things. They had spoken of it in veiled terms, mainly borrowed from the Greek. That was the only untouched subject they’d managed to hit upon. Rivers thought it an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. No, that was another poem, about a different vice. One of the things about the war was that all the poetry Erik had memorized had turned into a dreadful hash. Marlowe kept bleeding into Tennyson in most unfortunate ways.
Charles chuckled. “Well we’ve certainly made a hash of the past in every other way possible,” he said, almost as though he’d heard him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I thought you’d said something,” Xavier muttered. Shit, Erik heard. He was almost positive Xavier’s lips hadn’t moved. At the thought his head began aching again. He shut his eyes and ran a hand through his hair.
“Well. Pleasure making your acquaintance,” he said.
Xavier looked at him. “I quite understand,” he said. “I hope I haven’t disturbed you.” His lips parted as though he were going to say something else. Erik tried to keep himself from staring at those lips. Xavier wasn’t blushing - I wonder what it takes to make him blush. The boy looked frustratingly civilized. Obscene pictures began stirring to life at the edges of his mind. I bet he'd blush if he saw what I'm imagining, Erik thought, but thank God the human mind isn’t set up like that.
For no reason that Erik could see, Xavier chuckled.
Since arriving at Craiglockhart Erik’s thoughts had turned relentlessly to sex. He supposed it was the absence of battle. Battle at least brought relief. And in battle there was Tommy - never returning the affection, but aware of it, in his stodgy hesitant way. Occasionally he had permitted Erik to clasp his hand. Once the clasp had threatened to become something else and Tommy had pulled away, face clouding, suddenly sheepish. Graves had had similar luck. It had brought them together. The bitter fraternity of rivals, Erik thought.
But Xavier was nothing like Tommy. He had clean hands. Oxford, he looks like an Oxonian or - one of the better public schools, at any rate, shunted into the officer corps when war came. Erik felt positive that he could break him, that he needed breaking. War was adamantly ugly and there was nothing ugly about Xavier yet; he still looked helplessly young, somehow cheerful, and Erik had a violent desire to spread Xavier’s legs and grasp him by the waist and thrust him down onto his cock until Xavier’s head lolled back in ecstasy and the boy was his, marked, claimed, taken, gasping his name out of that pretty mouth -
Xavier shuffled toward the door. “Thank you for the dedications,” he murmured. His voice was oddly rough.
Instantly the imagining ebbed. With Xavier gone he noticed that the room was cold.
Chapter Three
Pairing: Erik/Charles
Rating: PG-13 now, for violence and war? Later NC-17.
Genre: WW1 AU
Summary: 1917. Craiglockhart, a mental hospital in Scotland. Erik Lehnsherr is a Siegfried Sassoon-esque World War 1 poet, and Charles Xavier (Wilfred Owen) is a fellow patient at the hospital who turns out to share more than Lehnsherr's gift for poetry. Everyone's still a mutant, but the origins of the mutations are a peculiar form of shellshock, and (given the dates) major hunks of folks' backstories are different.
Prologue
Chapter 1
The nightmares were getting worse. For the past four nights Erik had been walking barefoot across a ledge of ice, with a growing terror that there was something horrible lurking beneath it. Don’t look down, he told himself. Don’t look under the ice. Keep moving. The not looking made it worse. Tonight he had made it almost halfway across before looking down, and when he looked down he had seen a thing almost like himself, lips frozen blue, walking a mirror path beneath the ice. The thing met his gaze with eyes swollen and wetly strange like the eyes of a drowned man. Then the ice began to crack.
He started awake, panting in terror. The bedstead behind him was bending and shifting and he could not get it to stop. He tried breathing. Control. Control. Make it obey you. But all he could feel was the pounding of his terror and the searing cold pain of the nightmare ice.
Finally it subsided. He lay in silence, panting, terrified.
In a room down the hall, he heard a scream.
Idly he wondered who it might be. It was a pure animal sound of terror.
He clambered heavily out of bed and turned on the lamp and tried to write. Nothing seemed to stick. The words looked like insects speared by his pen and left wriggling on the page.
Finally he stared at the pen. He tried to feel the metal, the curious clarification of the atmosphere around it, the hush of it.
Nothing.
That day over breakfast Rivers asked how he was doing. Coming from him the question did not sound like a form of politeness.
He told him the dream. For a moment he toyed with telling the man about the bedstead. He felt queerly certain that Rivers would not believe it, had a sudden picture of the man shaking his head and scrawling something on a clipboard. If Graves had not believed there was no reason to think the doctor would.
“Are you accustomed to nightmares?” Rivers asked.
“I grew up in the countryside,” Erik said. “I had a persistent nightmare about Lady Catherine of Wuthering Heights rapping at my bedroom window.”
Rivers grinned.
“Sounds silly now,” Erik said. He neatly decapitated his boiled egg with a swat of the spoon. “Horses helped. I’d wander to the stables and stand listening to them shuffle about in their sleep and breathe. Something solid about it I always found reassuring.” He neglected to mention the stable boy who for some time had been equally reassuring.
“Hardly an option here, I’m afraid,” Rivers said.
“Suppose not,” Erik said.
Rivers frowned. “Find me the next time,” he muttered. “I’m awake, generally. Going the rounds. Last night Summers managed to set his bed-linens on fire.”
“Summers?” Erik asked.
Rivers pointed down the table at a fair-haired boy who was staring fixedly off into space. Next to him sat the new arrival with dark hair. He seemed to be trying to induce Summers to eat a few spoonfuls of lumpy porridge.
A book was open on the table next to him and Erik wondered what book it was. No one else here seemed to read - not for pleasure, at any rate, only for want of anything more exciting to do, and then only cheap disreputable paperbacks. This couldn’t be one of those - one wouldn’t bring it to breakfast if --
Rivers was saying something. He nodded and tried to look as though he had been paying attention.
--
Erik sat at his desk. He had given up all pretext of trying to write and was simply trying to bend the pen. Nothing was happening. He had no idea how to find the muscle again, and he felt as though he were straining everything else in the process. It was giving him a headache.
Suddenly there was a knock.
He waited in silence.
There was another knock.
Then: “I don’t mean to intrude,” a voice said, “only I heard you were here and I couldn’t have forgiven myself if I didn’t come congratulate the author of the Old Huntsman.”
“I’d hardly call failing to congratulate me on the Old Huntsman an unforgivable offense,” Erik said, but he got slowly up from the desk and opened the door. It was the new arrival. Contemplated at close range, the man standing at the door was nearly a head shorter and the first adjective that sprang to mind was pretty, in spite of the hard angles that the uniform was trying to enforce, and his whole face lit up under unruly soft brown hair when he caught sight of Erik. Erik noticed with some alarm that he was holding three copies of The Old Huntsman under one arm.
The young man noticed the look and laughed, propitiatingly. His eyes were startlingly blue. “I’m sorry. I am absolutely positive that no words strike more terror into your heart than, ‘Here we are at the loony bin together and I’ve got three of your books.’”
“Bull’s-eye,” Erik said. His voice was level. “So you liked The Old Huntsman.”
"Adored."
"Were you reading it at breakfast?" Erik asked.
“I was working up the nerve to--” The stranger frowned and stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting you on a day when you’d prefer no one interrupted you, least of all some aspiring scribbler who is going about this all wrong but thought you merited congratulations and wanted to say that you’re not the only poet in the place, in case you wanted someone to bandy lines with or - God, I sound dashed silly, like it’s tennis, I can go rehearse this speech again.”
“You’ve been rehearsing it?”
The newcomer laughed ruefully.
“What’s your name?” Erik asked, holding the door open.
“You don’t mind?” He extended a hand. The books tumbled out from under his arm. “Xavier. Charles Xavier.” Erik bent to help pick them up. The boy grinned at him.
They walked in and he sat down at the desk. Xavier perched on the edge of his bed. He had the sense that if Xavier started talking again he might not be able to stop.
“Shall I endorse these?” Erik said. Xavier nodded. “To you?”
“One’s for my mother but I haven’t decided which yet, so, to me.”
“Xavier spelled the usual way?” Erik asked, mouth quirking upwards a little.
“Yes, like the saint. Although he’s not family.”
“Saints seldom are.” Erik began lettering out the dedication: “To Charles Francis Xavier (no relation to the saint.)”
“That one won’t go to my mother,” Xavier said, leaning nearer to watch him write. “Quite legible. How incredible! Mine’s scarcely legible; I have to print it all in block capitals if I want anyone else to be able to read it. Mother said bad handwriting was a sign of genius but I’m inclined to think she was humoring me and figured that if she couldn’t read a word of it that was the safest presumption.”
“It’s generally a safe presumption,” Erik said. “You ought to see H. G. Wells’ handwriting.”
“H. G. Wells?” Xavier perked, instantly.
“Illegible. And pink.” Erik gestured to the dresser. “I had a letter from him yesterday. See if you can make any of it out.”
Xavier hopped up and picked the letter off the dresser. “It is pink,” he said, after a moment. “I thought that was a way of referring to his epistolary style.”
“Like purple?”
Xavier chuckled. The chuckle sounded older than the boy looked. “You’re sure I can - nothing of a - personal nature?”
“From H. G. Wells?” Erik shuddered involuntarily. “No, mainly about something he’s ragging me to read called The Invisible King. Except for the illegible bits.”
Erik watched him read, scanning the letters impossibly fast.
“I don’t think this is a word, I think it’s just a drawing of a porcupine,” Xavier said at length.
“Which?” Erik stood up and squinted over his shoulder.
“That,” Xavier said, running his thumb over it. “At least it doesn’t look like anything else to me.”
“It looks more like a - dog that’s had a run-in with a porcupine.”
“Possibly a mutated echidna.” Xavier squinted at it, brow furrowing. “If this is always what his writing’s like I think the editor deserves most of the credit for The Invisible Man.”
“I am supposed to reply to him,” Erik said. “Right now I have made some very general remarks, mainly pertaining to the weather.”
“Why don’t you just cover the paper in noughts and crosses?”
“He might take that as an offense.” Erik sat back down at the desk and finished the last dedication. “Or worse, an indication that I belong here.”
Xavier stiffened a little.
“You don’t?” Xavier asked.
“I’m completely sane,” Erik said. “But I suppose everyone says that. In fact more likely if you aren’t sane. Present company excluded, I’m sure,” he added, feeling suddenly that he was talking too much. Xavier was giving him an odd appraising look. Erik studied his face again, more carefully. Xavier was pale and younger-looking and there was something a little frightened in those wide cool blue eyes, like ice beginning to form on the edge of a pool. There was only the faintest hint of stubble. Xavier’s lips were softer and redder than they had any right to be.
He wished he hadn’t noticed that.
"At any rate you look sane," he finished, somewhat lamely.
“There’s no need to flatter me,” Xavier said, looking momentarily puzzled, then picking up the letter again. “Let me have another go, I’ll bet I can see what he’s asking.”
Erik tried not to look at him. Dr. Rivers had been trying to warn him about these things. They had spoken of it in veiled terms, mainly borrowed from the Greek. That was the only untouched subject they’d managed to hit upon. Rivers thought it an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. No, that was another poem, about a different vice. One of the things about the war was that all the poetry Erik had memorized had turned into a dreadful hash. Marlowe kept bleeding into Tennyson in most unfortunate ways.
Charles chuckled. “Well we’ve certainly made a hash of the past in every other way possible,” he said, almost as though he’d heard him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I thought you’d said something,” Xavier muttered. Shit, Erik heard. He was almost positive Xavier’s lips hadn’t moved. At the thought his head began aching again. He shut his eyes and ran a hand through his hair.
“Well. Pleasure making your acquaintance,” he said.
Xavier looked at him. “I quite understand,” he said. “I hope I haven’t disturbed you.” His lips parted as though he were going to say something else. Erik tried to keep himself from staring at those lips. Xavier wasn’t blushing - I wonder what it takes to make him blush. The boy looked frustratingly civilized. Obscene pictures began stirring to life at the edges of his mind. I bet he'd blush if he saw what I'm imagining, Erik thought, but thank God the human mind isn’t set up like that.
For no reason that Erik could see, Xavier chuckled.
Since arriving at Craiglockhart Erik’s thoughts had turned relentlessly to sex. He supposed it was the absence of battle. Battle at least brought relief. And in battle there was Tommy - never returning the affection, but aware of it, in his stodgy hesitant way. Occasionally he had permitted Erik to clasp his hand. Once the clasp had threatened to become something else and Tommy had pulled away, face clouding, suddenly sheepish. Graves had had similar luck. It had brought them together. The bitter fraternity of rivals, Erik thought.
But Xavier was nothing like Tommy. He had clean hands. Oxford, he looks like an Oxonian or - one of the better public schools, at any rate, shunted into the officer corps when war came. Erik felt positive that he could break him, that he needed breaking. War was adamantly ugly and there was nothing ugly about Xavier yet; he still looked helplessly young, somehow cheerful, and Erik had a violent desire to spread Xavier’s legs and grasp him by the waist and thrust him down onto his cock until Xavier’s head lolled back in ecstasy and the boy was his, marked, claimed, taken, gasping his name out of that pretty mouth -
Xavier shuffled toward the door. “Thank you for the dedications,” he murmured. His voice was oddly rough.
Instantly the imagining ebbed. With Xavier gone he noticed that the room was cold.
Chapter Three