Zweiundachtzig - Part 2
The chess set migrates to the studio and Erik fashions a pair of proper pawns for it out of left over bits from his work. The games become something of a spectator sport and Erik teaches Alex how to play when he’s restless. The boy has that look, the one that means he’s waiting for all this to crash down on his head and Erik has to explain to everyone that the only thing they can do is what they already are doing.
Erik comes into the studio on a Friday with his sling on and everyone silently gathered around Raven’s desk. Except for Charles, Charles is by the windows sitting in the weak winter sun nodding off. Thinking. They all fall into a silent hush as Erik slides out of his jacket and turns.
“Well, what is the impromptu meeting for?”
“Alex left this morning,” Sean frowns.
“He didn’t say anything!” Hank sighs. “I was with him all morning, he just sort of slipped out after breakfast.”
Raven sighs, “Look, two days ago he asked if he could borrow some money.” All eyes turn to her and she frowns. “It was only a hundred bucks and I figured why not. I hoped if he was gonna take off he’d ask for a lot more than that.”
There’s muttering and Charles wriggling his shoulders in his chair. Erik can feel the apprehension coming off him. It’s probably not helping the others. They fall into a sullen conversation about where Alex might go and after twenty minutes of that Erik tells them all to go take a walk or get some lunch before they drive him mad.
“How can you say that?” Raven snaps, finally and he’s grateful she’s not holding it in. “Alex is out there somewhere, still hurt and-”
“He lived ‘out there’ before us and did perfectly fine for himself for quite a while. Don’t insult him by saying he’s helpless.” Erik says firmly as he slides boxes down from the cabinet to start taking inventory.
It seems that he’s figured out Raven’s skill for having the last word because the trio frown and shuffle but eventually gather jackets and scarves. Raven hovers in his space for some moments before he nudges her. “Go, think about something else for a little bit.”
It’s a reward when she smiles and he looks across the newly emptied space to Charles once the door is shut. “You’re suspiciously quiet.”
He gets a smile and it becomes obvious that Charles was only uncomfortable because everyone else was so worried. “Did you know he asked Raven for one hundred and twenty-nine dollars? Such an oddly specific number.”
Erik rolls the thought over in his head and starts opening boxes and comparing figures. It only takes him ten minutes before he’s got Charles over there writing down numbers for him, filling out the spreadsheet for what he was going to have to order this month.
Alex slips in while the others are still gone. He’s dragging a guitar case behind him which he abandons by the door along with the wet slap of his jacket.
“Did you have a profitable adventure?” Charles ask as Alex flops onto the couch Sean had found last month and dragged in refusing to tell anyone where he found it.
“I hate Queens,” Alex mumbles as Charles is instantly drawn to the guitar case, as he is to anything new, poking at it until Alex grumbles at him.
“I didn’t know you played guitar Alex.” Charles says and Erik sees a light come on in the boy that he hasn’t before.
“Hell yeah. I had to hock the thing a while ago to pay off some shit. Figured if I got it back I could pull some weight around here after my shoulder stops being such a pain.”
It’s the most he’s heard come out of Alex’s mouth that isn’t ‘please’, ‘thank you’, or a string of expletives.
“You might be able to afford to give Sean his bed back,” Erik says as he adds up the last of his figures.
Alex rolls over onto his back and his grin is stunning, “That would be awesome. Shit smells like peanuts or something.”
Charles laughs and Erik grins shaking his head back and forth. Alex is asleep when the other three come walking in, dragging off soaked clothes. Erik and Charles are playing chess as they all jam up in the door blinking like owls at Alex.
“Did you bring back lunch?” Erik asks, shifting his knight.
His question is met with a chorus of ‘uuuhh’.
“Terrible,” Charles chides and moves a pawn.
oOo
Erik had made it up the stairs before he’d seen Sean and Alex grinning and waving at him. The studio was full of a sibling argument and the upstairs contained one of Hank’s experiments that he needed for earning his fifth masters degree in something or another so it was generally understood that no one went in there.
So they pass a hand rolled cigarette back and forth, waiting. No one knows what Raven and Charles are arguing about. Apparently all Alex heard was a ‘Damn it, Charles!’ before he turned tail. Erik hopes they’ll be done before dinner, he was looking forward to Italian with Charles. Alex is explaining the rules of Texas hold’em to Sean who keeps frowning but nodding his head when the door to the studio slams open and Raven is there, an amazon in blue, and points straight at him.
“You. You’re going with him.”
Schisse.
oOo
“You don’t have to come.” Charles says for the eleventh time since Erik showed up at Raven’s apartment with a duffel bag and an espresso.
“No, I don’t.” Erik says and thank goodness that finally shuts Charles up long enough for the man to go get breakfast.
Erik is still trying to figure out the exact ‘why’ he’s doing this. This isn’t the sort of thing he usually did. Thought he did. He looks down at his cast, he’s only known this man personally for one month and a handful of days. He likes him, sure but that... You don’t just go into the country on vacation with someone you barely know. He’s gone crazy. That’s it. Raven makes him crazy. That’s her real mutant ability. The ability to drive Erik Lehnsherr utterly mad.
“Look,” she had said, dragging him downstairs. “Charles needs to take off and get some work done for whatever lecture circuit he’s starting. Which is normally fine, but my finals got shoved forward two weeks and I can’t go with him. Here’s the problem. All his materials and crap are in our childhood home in Westchester. We are talking a four story, twenty-two room Thornfield monstrosity. Where he will spend two weeks by himself.”
He’d opened his mouth but Raven had carried on. “I know he can take care of himself but there are a lot of screwed up childhood memories there and it bothers me, okay? It bothers him too but Charles is too Charles to say anything. I don’t want him to just sit there with no one to keep him company but the housekeeper’s daughter that only comes by once on the weekends. I mean, even if I call him every day I’m gonna be worried and I don’t want to be worried. Do you understand?”
She’d looked at him with those round golden eyes and of course he’d nodded because yes, he understood worry and the concept of having siblings. Then she said, “It’s just two weeks and you’ll love it. Please go with him?”
It was the please that made him hesitate and the fact that for once in his life he couldn’t think of a good excuse fast enough. Too many movies and dinners with the little group, he’d fallen out of the practice of saying no. It wasn’t like he had pressing matters to attend to, and he couldn’t beg off work because he hadn’t accepted any jobs since his arm was broken.
So he’d said, “I suppose.”
Then Raven had hugged him and dragged him back upstairs to tell Charles who looked at him like a deer in headlights until Erik rolled his shoulder and went to organize the take out menu pile like he was getting paid for it.
Over the next two days he’d turned the moment over and over in his head. This could be a disastrous thing. Something he never should have agreed to. He e-mailed Kitty in a fit of pique, asking her how to get out of this situation, but she hadn’t been any help. She just told him that if he trusted Charles enough to agree in the first place then it shouldn’t be a big deal if he goes and enjoys himself. She’d sent him a link to Charles’ recent essay about genetics and commented about how smart he seemed. When Erik had started complaining again she just started sending him tiny winking faces and excerpts from her latest novel.
So now he sits on Raven’s couch and drinks his coffee as Charles goes about getting cereal and cursing Raven’s French press. Erik lets him go on for a bit before he gets up and makes Charles’ tea himself because the man is hopeless at it without a ‘proper’ kettle.
The drive is quiet, they take Charles van and Erik dozes in the passenger seat. He does love the quiet he has with Charles. Erik understood the awkward silences that haunted him for years, the long uncomfortable stretches where someone should be saying something or has already said the wrong thing. These silences though. The comfortable, warm silence that curl around him when he’s in Charles’ company is nothing short of bliss.
It’s late afternoon when Charles maneuvers the van onto what Erik thinks is a road, and turns out to be a driveway. A ten minute drive leads them to a huge wrought iron gate that chimes in the wind when Charles hits the button on the visor of the van.
Erik peers through the windshield, leaning forward. “I thought Raven was exaggerating when she said you lived in Thornfield.”
“Nonsense,” Charles shakes his head as he drives up to the, God, it’s a castle. There’s a fountain out front, it isn’t on but still, it’s a fountain. “We let the mad wife out of the attic ages ago.”
Erik grins but really, the place is ridiculous. He’s dragging his duffel out of the back while Charles settles into his chair and comes around the van.
“We’re on twelve acres, and we’ve got an orchard over there,” He gestures vaguely towards a thick of trees before turning, “and somewhere over there is a small lake with a gazebo, used to take a canoe out on it and fall asleep.”
There’s a flash in the back of Erik’s mind of Raven scolding a sheepish and sunburned Charles before it slips away. Erik smiles when Charles does and grins when the man quickly turns away blushing. He did catch flashes of Charles now and then. Charles had said he was sensitive to it, Raven translated that to the fact that Erik simply paid attention to Charles more. The teasing had been horrendous.
He follows Charles through the front door after the man has a bit of a row with the keys that leaves Erik chuckling and trying to keep from just unlocking the door with his power.
The house is immense. Erik thought it was ridiculous on the outside but that was before he saw the front hall. Charles is nattering on about something, but Erik is trying to not gawk. How on earth did people live like this? He knew the same four walls for most of his life and there most certainly weren’t velvet curtains or gilded wallpaper on any of them.
“Your rooms are down this way,” Charles calls and leaves Erik blinking.
“Rooms?”
He ends up jogging after Charles down an ornate hallway as the man opens a door and Erik stops behind him. Yes, the man meant rooms. Charles informs him that his bedroom is down the hall towards the kitchens and if anything isn’t to his liking they can certainly find a solution. If anything isn’t to his liking. As if. Erik snorts as Charles wheels out into the hall, snagging his bag, and leaves Erik to explore the... front room?
He has his own living room with a couch and a small dining table in front of a wall of stained glass windows that overlook a garden, hedges, stone walkways, another fountain. Erik shakes his head as he pushes open a thick wooden door, the brass doorknob humming under his fingertips.
The bedroom is just as ridiculous as everything else he’s seen. Thick carpet and twisting silver sconces greet him as he drops his duffel down at the foot of the bed. The thing is monstrous. The white whale of beds. It’s all oak and mahogany with dovetailed joints. A rising canopy of green velvet surrounds it on all sides and Erik slides his hand across the smooth silken comforter. He tries to not think about his creaky single bed, with the dip towards the right side that he inevitably rolls into sometime during the night.
He leaves his jacket tossed over the whorls of the foot board as he flops backwards onto the bed. His feet are hanging over the edge and he groans as his back lets him know just how pissed it was with him for nodding off in the van. His eyes are closed and his arms sprawled out, with his cast tucked under the pillows when he feels the familiar movement of Charles’ chair.
“Is everything...” He hears the half chuckle that Charles makes. “You seem comfortable, my friend.”
“Honestly Charles, I don’t know how you survived. Living in such hardship.”
“Raven helped,” Charles grins as Erik turns his head to look at him. “If you can pry yourself up I’ll give you the tour and we can see what all we’ve been left in the way of food.”
Erik spends the rest of the day trailing after Charles, looking at ballrooms and bedrooms. There’s an indoor swimming pool, empty and covered in complicated mosaic scenes. There are several studies and it takes Erik a long time to pry himself away from the library once Charles shows it to him.
There are basic foodstuffs in the kitchen, along with a host of frozen casseroles all in stacked Tupperware containers with the contents and date on them in neat script.
Charles tells him about the ‘housekeeper’ who is the granddaughter of the actual housekeeper that Charles grew up with. She comes out once a week to check out the estate. Raven had apparently called her and begged her to leave Charles some food.
“It’s not like I can’t go to the grocery store by myself,” Charles is grumbling from where he’s halfway in the pantry looking for some sort of cookies.
“But would you?” Erik asks as he lifts the metal teapot from the stove moments before it starts shrieking.
There’s an indecipherable noise from the pantry that just makes Erik smile as he pulls cups down from the cupboard, a small flicker in the back of his mind letting him know where the correct one was. It directs him to the spoon drawer when he silently questions, honestly, there’s separate drawers for the cutlery.
They reach the breakfast nook at the same time, Charles laying the cookies out as Erik pours the tea. Some spicy cinnamon blend that fills the room and slides into Erik’s bones.
“So,” Charles frowns over his cup, narrowing his eyes in faux seriousness. “How good are you with an oven?”
“I understand the basic mechanics,” Erik answers, smiling behind his cup.
“Ah, brilliant. We’ll get by just fine.”
oOo
Erik can’t sleep the first night they’re there. He’s not surprised. It’s a large change. He lays in the giant bed and tries to not feel agoraphobic. The bedroom is too big and so is the house. He wonders how Charles did it. He’d seen pictures here and there tucked on mantelpieces, hidden on shelves. An unsmiling boy in a sailor suit holding a toy boat. The same one on Christmas amid carelessly strewn gifts. The same unsmiling face until... There was one, on Charles’ desk.
A smiling Charles holding a bundle on his lap with all the care a eight-year-old could muster, a wide eyed Raven peering at the camera from her blanket. That was when the smiles started, always the pair of them. There is another photo, in the west study, where they are both covered in mud, white rose petals stuck all in their hair and Raven looks remarkably smug as Charles grins brightly.
Erik thinks of fluorescent lights, white walls and a string of plastic numbers in a plaque on a door. Stand under it, yes, no need to smile. Just stand and the click of a shutter... There we are Zweiundachtzig, go back to your reading now.
He sucks in a breath and lets it out slowly. Right. He wasn’t going to just lay there and dwell all night. Erik gets up, drags on a pair of jeans along with one of his button ups that he knows will go over his cast. He shoves his feet into his sneakers but doesn’t tie them, opting instead to tuck the laces inside. He’s got three of his buttons done before he gives it up as a lost cause and heads out into the dark of the mansion.
Charles finds him the next morning, curled up amidst a pile of books and he won’t know about the photograph the man took until the next time he sees Raven.
oOo
They settle into a pattern. Charles works all day while Erik explores or reads, curled on the chaise in Charles’ study. They don’t actually talk very much, not until meal times which Erik has to remember. Charles would be content to work all day with those hideous reading glasses perched on his nose. Erik had been prone to fits of laughter the entire morning after he saw them. He moves them when Charles takes them off. Sliding them a few inches by their metal screws until they aren’t exactly where Charles left them.
He’ll see Charles reach and... The soft ‘thump’ as his hand lands on bare desk. The first few times were met with confusion but now Charles will just pout at him and Erik will look perfectly innocent, pleased to used the moment to inquire about lunch.
It’s thrilling when he does it. Charles isn’t mad or scared of his powers. He doesn’t ask him to do it on command. He smiles and rolls his eyes, follows Erik out of the study to the breakfast nook.
They don’t eat in the dining room. The table could seat thirty, all old oak with inlaid patterns in teak and cherry. The only soft memory Erik got off Charles about it was using it as a fort when the tablecloth was on it. Hiding underneath it during parties, emerging just to sneak bacon wrapped shrimp and tiny tarts.
“What did your parent do?” Erik asks one night over a casserole that seems to be mostly cheese and kielbasa.
Charles pauses for a moment and Erik thinks for a moment that he’s asked the wrong question but the look Charles has is more ‘thinking’ than ‘offended’.
“Well, my father was a nuclear scientist and my mother was quite the activist when she was well... active.”
Erik knows that both of Charles’ parents had passed away. ‘Years ago’ Raven had said waving her hand in the air to illustrate just how long it had been.
“Raven’s father was a... hmm.”
Erik blinks as Charles thinks. “Raven’s father?”
Charles gives him that ‘I’ve gotten ahead of myself’ look that he’s so brilliant at before he takes a drink of the wine he’s dredged up from somewhere. “Ah! Raven isn’t really my sister by blood. My father passed away when I was three. My mother remarried. It was a very businesslike arrangement, I was too young to really understand what was going on.”
“You just got a Raven out of the deal,” Erik nods over his plate and Charles grins.
“I think I did rather get the best end of it. It’s well... It’s a rather terrible story but a bit funny looking back on it.” Charles pours another glass of wine as he settles back in his chair. “His name was Kurt Marko and his wife passed away giving birth to our dear Raven. A bit of a tragedy really, but I can’t be sure what was really between them. He never seemed too broken up about it. But I think my mother wanted a more masculine influence in my life, as well as to pair up these two mutant children, and it helped that at the time she believed Marko was a wealthy man.”
“He wasn’t?” Erik asks with a twist to his lips.
“He was not. He was in fact very pleased with the sum that my mother had inherited. That was his reason for being here, and my mother was well... I guess the polite way to put it would be too drunk to notice.”
Erik grimaces as Charles continues. “It wasn’t as bad as all that. As you can see the mansion was big enough that mostly Raven and I were on our own but for the nanny, a pair of wild children.”
“You took care of each other,” Erik smiles, remembering carrying Kitty on his hip reciting names of the trees he’d thought he’d never see.
“We still do,” Charles smiles before he returns to the story. “It continued on as such until I was fifteen. Now, you probably went through this as well, one hits puberty and any control you’ve had over your power goes out the window for some years.”
Erik nods remembering the crushed shed outside the little farmhouse and how sorry he’d been but Logan had only laughed.
“So everything is going haywire in my head, I don’t come out of my room except to steal food and assure Raven that I haven’t died. One morning I come down for a bit of breakfast, only my mother and Marko are there. Small talk ensues and then the man just thinks ‘When that bitch drinks herself to death, that kid’s the first thing to go’.”
Erik chokes on his wine and spends the next few moments coughing while Charles looks at him sympathetically. “You’re joking.”
“I most certainly am not. I was used to the horrid things that man thought, it was why I stayed away from him. But here’s the thing I didn’t know. I had been so startled at the time and my control was tenuous at best, I had inadvertently projected that thought to everyone in the house. I should have known something was wrong when my mother put her drink down.”
“Did she kick him out?” Erik asks, honestly this was like something he should have read in some Gatstby era piece.
“The housekeeper came that evening and asked if we’d like to spend the weekend at home with her and her daughter. We’d done it now and again when my mother was particularly bad off. I slept most of the time actually, and when we got back Kurt Marko was nowhere to be seen. My mother acted as if the man had never existed and Raven had always been ours.” Charles rolls his shoulder. “I didn’t find out until quite some time later from the groundskeeper that there had been an all out fight. He’d apparently threatened my mother. She’d given him a black eye with a candlestick and told him where to go.”
Charles smiles as Erik chuckles, “That isn’t the best part. The best part was that when he left he apparently stole roughly a thousand dollars my mother had stashed in a study, along with my mother’s best mattress, all the silver cutlery, and all of the plums off the tree in the garden.”
“Why the plums?” Erik asks reaching for the last of the wine.
“We haven’t the slightest idea.” Charles finishes with a shrug and that sends Erik laughing again. “What do, did? What do your parents do?”
Erik pauses in finishing off the wine. He deserved that. He was the one that opened a floodgate, he couldn’t pretend that it wasn’t owed. Fair’s fair, he hears Raven’s voice in his head. The spinning dime, how she shrieked and bounced like it was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen.
“I don’t know,” Erik answers and the confusion is more marked on Charles’ face than he’d seen on others. Charles wasn’t just making small talk. Charles genuinely wanted to know.
“You don’t know? Oh, you don’t. What do you mean they never told you?” He’s frowning now and biting his bottom lip with so much concern that Erik thinks he might start running.
“Charles.”
His voice is a stone thrown down suddenly between them and suddenly Charles is looking at him instead of him.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, my friend. I think I’ve had far too much to drink.”
“Maybe we both have,” Erik says, standing, there’s a sudden pang. Sorrow or loneliness. Charles doesn’t want him to go but he won’t say it out-loud. Erik needs to go to his room. He needs to calm down and reorganize his thoughts.
What he ends up doing is looking down at Charles and asking, “Chess?”
“Lovely,” Charles says and Erik isn’t sure if he’s talking about chess.
oOo
Erik still can’t sleep. He tosses and turns. Occasionally he nods off when he’s dragged all the covers over his head but it gets too smothering to do for very long. Something is strange. Something is off and if he thinks about it too hard he comes to the conclusion that it has blue eyes and a brilliant laugh. He likes Charles. He keeps saying that to himself, like he’d forget if he didn’t. He likes Charles. He wants to more than like Charles, but those kinds of things don’t last for him. He wants it to last.
It’s a tumbling sort of strange epiphany. Not the sort of thing you’d want to have at three in the morning in a bed that isn’t yours. Erik jerks out of bed, drags his jeans on, forgoes shoes all together and after twenty minutes of panicked wandering finds himself crouching in the bottom of the indoor pool staring at the mosaic in the moonlight.
This is exactly what it feels like to go mad. Exactly, because six months ago he would have been in his apartment watching shitty TV and trying to fry bacon without setting off the alarm. It was a... It wasn’t a good existence. It just was. It was the facility and it was two weeks in a hostel here and three weeks in a barn there and...
Suddenly there was the studio. Raven. Hank, Sean, and Alex. Angel now and again when she wasn’t working. Charles. Charles. Erik closes his eyes and tried to remember the last time he’d been this close to... something.
It was the farmhouse. It was being held by Logan even though he was too old to cry. It was sitting in the grass with Kitty as the cicadas started to sing, seeing her face light up in joy. It was trading the word Zweiundachtzig for Erik. It was having Piotr come home late with a box of pastries and huddling around the television to watch the strange flickering pictures.
Erik knows how that ended. Kitty and Piotr on their wedding day and Erik coming to the conclusion that he couldn’t stay. He couldn’t live with them like the third wheel, still lost and confused. Kitty cried when he left. Would Raven cry?
He lets out a long rattling breath and presses his forehead to the cool tiles. He had to... Something. Erik startles when the door to the west glides open, silently, but he hears the doorknob sing. Charles is there in a dressing gown, his hair a mess as he squints down into the pool. Erik closes his eyes as feels the pulse of sleepy confusion slide around him and he tries very hard to not think at all. He bites the inside of his cheek as he feels Charles roll to the edge of the pool in his chair.
“You know, this was not where I was expecting to find you.”
He grins and then laughs against the mosaic, feeling Charles smile before he looks up. “Um, I couldn’t sleep.”
“I know, I was listening to your German work it’s way all over the house before you stopped.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.” Erik knows that sometimes Charles catches the edges of peoples thoughts more easily when he’s asleep. He tries to remember how he knows that. When he learned it.
“It’s alright,” Charles says because he means it and he waits patiently for Erik to scramble to the other side of the pool and carefully climb the ladder out.
Erik doesn’t understand how Charles always means what he says. He spent years trying to navigate people who said something when they meant something else before he gave up. He hated that so much, it was all more confusing when he got out of the facility. All the things they didn’t teach him. He thinks he loves Charles a little bit every time he says what he means.
Charles turns his head at that and Erik swallows, was he projecting? Should he... stop?
“Chess or kitchen?” Charles asks and Erik smiles.
“Kitchen then chess.”
Charles nods, like that was the answer he was hoping for and Erik lets him lead the way.
oOo
The next morning heralds change but not in the way Erik imagined it. He’s getting dressed when a sharp spike of frustration ripples across his awareness before disappearing. There’s a sense of irateness and urgency behind it. This causes him to drag his sleeping pants back on and make his way down the stairs sans shirt.
He follows the feelings to the kitchen where they turn into audible grumbling. He thinks Charles’ irritation is the only reason he doesn’t hear Erik coming. But he knows that he’s barely said the first syllable of Charles name when the telepath turns and the frustration turns into something else altogether.
The only thing Erik can compare it to is entering a place while it’s freezing numb outside. That sudden blast of heat that sears your face. Only the feeling seems to go straight to his dick.
“Uh...” He trails off and gets an excellent view of the tips of Charles’ ears going pink.
“The freezer broke,” Charles blurts and Erik is distracted by the sheen of water that is currently covering the kitchen floor.
It’s a hurry to mop it up and try to salvage their food supply after that so he doesn’t quite think about that moment until later on after he’s dressed. They have peanut butter and jelly for breakfast while Charles makes a fuss about it until Erik toasts the bread and cuts the crusts off taking care to smooth peanut butter on both pieces of bread and spoon the jam in the middle.
Charles goes quiet after Erik had set it down on the table in front of him. “Raven told you didn’t she?”
“About the Great Peanut Butter Tantrum of ‘87? Yes.”
The face Charles makes is brilliant and his voice has gone an octave higher when he speaks, “Is that what she calls it?”
“No,” Erik says sitting down and dragging the latest novel he’d filched from the library over. “That is what Sean named it.”
“You are all terrible.”
Erik makes a non-committal noise and then the feeling from that morning is there again. The blast of something only it twists into something infinitely sweeter as Charles lifts his sandwich and Erik finds himself staring over his book instead of at the text.
Charles is pleased with him. Very pleased. He can feel it coming off the telepath in waves. Over a sandwich? No, the act of it. The intent. Erik wanted Charles to be happy so he’d given him something to make him so. He went out of his way. He remembered. He was a very attractive man.
It takes Erik a moment to realize that Charles has lost interest in his sandwich and is staring at Erik with an odd confusion before it turns into that ear pinking horror.
“I was just projecting, wasn’t I?”
Erik nods his head slowly because he’s still trying to wrap his mind around the fact that Charles likes him but there’s an edge of indecency in there that Erik hadn’t thought about but sure as hell is thinking about now. Charles is stammering now, apologies and excuses that he’s stumbling over, because while Charles is talking what he’s actually doing is watching Erik.
Erik who has closed his book and stood, coming around the breakfast table and he feels the muted feeling of panic and apology spark off of Charles as he leans forward to rests his hand and his cast on the armrests of Charles’ wheelchair. Something in him feels like it’s spinning, all the confusion pushed away in the sheer hope that Charles wants this. Charles wants him. He’s not a stranger to kissing, to sex. There had been a long time between the facility and now where Erik was left to explore. There had been women and men. The named and the nameless, always kept at arms length. Physical pleasure exchanged before sunrise.
The feeling, though, as he leans over and kisses Charles on the corner of his mouth is completely new. It’s a flutter, warmth, and the soft sound that Charles makes slides right into a place where Erik can keep it. His power has locked the wheelchair in place, not allowing Charles an inch to get away. Not that the man wants that, the surprise that had rushed through Erik’s mind has turned into yes, welcome, come twining around something that Erik can’t name. He doesn’t move as Charles pulls back, just enough to turn it into a proper kiss making Erik growl with a possession that he didn’t know was there. They don’t break for a laughably long time. Not until Erik is panting while Charles’ mouth is wrecked pink and he’s blushing everywhere capable of blushing.
“So, um, good morning,” Charles murmurs and Erik can’t help but grin.
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