XMFC/Darkover fic: The First Gift (for Marvel Bang) (post 1/2)
Title: The First Gift
Author: ciaan
Artist: justfollow
Betas: Thanks to livewareissue,
elf, and
ilyena_sylph for the great feedback!
For: marvel_bang
Fandoms: X-Men: First Class/Darkover crossover fusion AU
Pairing: Charles/Erik, references to other pairings
Note: Takes characters and plotlines from XMFC and translates them onto Darkover.
Summary: In the time that will later be known as the Ages of Chaos, many strange new mutations and powers are arising. Charles is a young noble lord, and when his psychic abilities manifest in a way that is dangerous for both him and those around him, he is sent away for healing and captured in transit by an evil bandit. He and his fellow captive Erik, a young man with a powerful affinity for metal and magnetism, must attempt to free themselves and defeat the seemingly undefeatable bandit. Meanwhile Charles's foster-sibling Raven seeks to track him down. What new shape will Charles's life have when all this is over? 11,000 words.
Warnings: Contains explicit scenes of physical and psychic violence and references to sexual assault. No explicit sex.
Charles Alton stood in front of his mirror dressing for dinner. It was his birthday and tonight was to be a special celebration, for he was turned fifteen years and a grown man now.
There was a light knock at the door and he turned toward it, leaving his shirt unlaced, recognizing the brush of thoughts just before someone entered. "Raven!" Charles scolded, for his foster-brother was still in riding leathers. Then he saw that Raven was carrying something. "What do you have there, preciosu?"
"It's for you, dear brother." Raven held out the carved wooden cage, revealing the small songbird within it, a brightly colored little thing from the plains of Valeron. The bird fluttered its wings and hopped nervously around inside the cage as Charles stepped closer. Raven set the wooden contraption down on Charles's dressing table and leaned in toward it. "Don't be afraid, little singer, my brother won't hurt you." He whistled, a high, sweet trill, and the bird settled and cooed in response.
Charles's mind flashed to the first time he had seen Raven, when he was twelve and had snuck out to ride alone along the edge of the forest. Suddenly his horse had shied out of his control and plunged toward a strange figure who emerged from the trees, sniffing the being's outstretched hand. Charles had slid from the horse's back and dropped to his knees at the sight of what stood before him.
"Child of light, you lend us grace," he remembered murmuring. Before him had been a strange girl-child dressed in flowing white silks, almost as tall as he yet clearly quite young, her eyes bright molten gold. A mass of flame-red hair fell around the delicate, strange features of her face, skin pale and thin enough that the blood showed through, like a layer of ice on a lake, blue under white. She reached toward him, six slender fingers touching his cheek, staring at him, shy and curious.
An image flickered into his mind from hers, a swirl of birds flashing through a forest, dark shadows winging over a battlefield, crowding down to enjoy the spoils of war. And then a question, clear yet wordless.
"Charles," he replied. "Charles-Francis Xavier Alton y Hastur, of the blood of Hastur and Cassilda." He had never expected to see a legendary chieri, even if her coloring indicated her only a half-chieri child, and though supposedly drops of chieri blood flowed through the veins of all the Comyn lords, including his own. The mysterious, powerful beings who had inhabited the world before humans were generally thought to be gone now.
The girl's fingers dropped away from him and a wave of sorrow emanated from her as she tilted her head to the side. He knew without her speaking that she was alone, and that she had nowhere to go, no family and people she could find.
"You will come with me," Charles said. "My parents will keep you at Armida. They never refuse me anything, and they cannot turn away a child of the yellow forest. You can be my sister." He was alone at the estate, for all his parents' other children had died in infancy, and there were currently no other noble children fostered there.
The small six-fingered hand had slipped into his and the girl had smiled up at him brightly, his horse whuffing at her hair.
Over the next few months Charles had taught his foster-sister to speak and she had quickly picked up both casta and cahuenga. She had learned to ride, and to eat at a table with utensils, and to wear decent clothes and play the rryl and embroider. And then she had declared that she did not like dressing as a girl and following the rules of polite feminine behavior and that she was a boy now. After a few days her nursemaid had told everyone that it was true: the strange child with the strange name of Raven was indeed a boy now.
And so, after three years, the gentle, wild young girl-child Charles had first seen had become his foster-brother, a boy who seemed only slightly younger than Charles himself, tall and slender now as he straightened up from the cage on the table. The bird began to sing, a beautiful rush of notes, and Raven grinned. His face with its high cheekbones and small features always seemed somber in repose but lit up when he was happy.
"Thank you, bredu," Charles said, smiling back. The reverence he could dimly remember feeling that first day seemed strange and impossible to him now, made foreign by these years of living together. Though Raven still looked alien in many ways, those brilliant gold eyes were as familiar to Charles as his own blue ones, or as his mother's and father's, and Raven as exasperating much of the time as any younger sibling.
Laughing, Raven brushed a grubby hand through the mop of red curls falling around his face to his shoulders. "And now I will go clean up and dress myself nicely before you kill me for ruining your party!" Charles cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, and Raven turned away to leave, stopping for a moment to allow Charles's body-servant to enter. The man carried the ornately embroidered tunic Charles was to wear.
Charles opened his mouth to speak and the whole world disappeared behind a wall of blue sparkles, colors running and dripping and swirling.
He felt himself fall, all sensation dulled as if through insulating silk and gauze, crashing to the floor, his body convulsing and his head pounding against the floor tiles as his spine arched. From a million miles away he could hear the body-servant yelling, "Dom Charles!" and Raven calling for help. Then other people were in the room, more servants, guardsmen, his mother and father, the household leronis Ysabelle.
Charles could sense Ysabelle reaching out with her laran to monitor him, and something inside him rose up to meet her as her mind touched his. She screamed inside his head, a choked echo that was quickly cut off as all her thoughts were stripped bare to him. Flashes of her memories dropped through his, sinking like stones into the swirling mess inside his mind, images of her childhood, her years spent in the Tower, her lovers, watching Charles himself as a child and testing him, testing his laran and finding potential yet unmanifested. Threshold sickness, he heard her think, convulsion and crisis and late-developing laran, and Charles had long thought he had but little telepathic gift.
He reached to touch her mind and she screamed again, her thoughts dissolving like mist now beneath his own, until they were quiet and he couldn't feel her anymore. But he could see now, through the slashes of color that still obscured his vision, see her body crumpled to the floor beside his, and his mother kneeling to check her pulse.
"She lives." The words meant nothing to him, mere sounds.
"Her body lives," and that was Raven's voice, warbling nonsense like when she had first come to stay with them, "but her mind is gone."
Charles tried to call Ysabelle back to him, to ask her for help, she was a leronis and she could help him, but every time he probed toward her he met only silence.
"Merciful Avarra!" one of the serving women whispered, and a guardsman standing beside her made a warding gesture. Charles felt Raven cupping his head, fingers cooler than a mere human's. Raven's voice trilled again and the world dissolved fully.
The mists rose and faded and rose and faded around Charles’s mind, until finally they flowed away and he could see again, the pale sea-green crescent of Kyrrdis shining high in the violet sky, the only moon showing, and the great bloody sun hanging low in the west off his right side as he jounced along. He was wrapped in a travel blanket and lying in the bottom of a wagon. He could hear horses’ hooves clopping along the road below his head and the low voices of men talking around them.
He turned his head and gasped. The leronis Ysabelle was lying beside him, her eyes closed and arms folded over herself. Her chest rose and fell with low breathing. He remembered feeling her thoughts, remembered them crumbling away beneath him, and Raven’s voice speaking words that hadn’t made sense at the time but jumped back to him now, sharp with meaning. "Her mind is gone."
The clopping hooves of a horse dropped back to the side of the wagon and Charles looked up to see Eamon, the captain of his father’s guards. "Good to see ye awake, m’lord," Eamon said, touching his brow respectfully.
"Where are we going? What happened?"
Eamon frowned slightly. "We travel to Neskaya Tower, where the vai leronis is from, in hopes that the matrix workers there can do summat to aid her, and ye as well."
A rush of anger and embarrassment flushed him. It was his birthday, he was fifteen, he was supposed to be preparing himself for the journey to Thendara, for his first season as a cadet in the Garduin, the city watch that he would one day command as an Alton. Instead he was sick and being carted along to a Tower like a piece of luggage, not even able to ride manfully.
Charles levered up on his elbow enough to glance around. The other three men riding in formation around the wagon were all soldiers who had been at Armida for years, men whose families had long been pledged to the Altons. Eamon himself had taught Charles swordplay when he was a child.
All of these men, loyal strong men, were leaking fear. Behind him, from the still body of the leronis, there was nothing. The Altons were typically strong telepaths, skilled in rapport, but Charles had never been so. He had never been able to send thoughts to anyone or read their mind, unless someone stronger was broadcasting to him, and then he could pick it up. From Raven, or his parents, or a trained laran worker. He had thought that since the ability had not developed yet, at this age, it never would. Now he could taste the men’s fear, stale and metallic, in the back of his mouth.
"The men fear me," Charles said.
His face was blank and stoic, but Eamon’s hands twitched slightly at his reins, and the horse tossed its head. "Aye, m’lord," he answered. "They fear for ye."
"No." Charles shook his head, flipping his hair from his eyes. "And you, Eamon?"
The guardsman didn’t answer, which was rude, but probably his wisest choice at the moment. Charles didn’t need an answer. He could sense the man’s fear deepening, sharpening, and the laran inside Charles’s mind stirred, wanting to reach out, wanting to have more. Charles was afraid, too. He had invaded and ripped away the mind of a trained leronis like it was nothing, like all her years of learning to defend and shield herself had never happened. He could still see her memories in his thoughts, still feel her screams as he had torn her apart and pushed her under his power.
He tried to hold back but his power was reaching out toward Eamon, brushing the edges of his mind, catching on the fear, fear for Charles, yes, but also of him, of this damned sorcery, and then-
Then there was an arrow blooming from Eamon’s throat, a spurt of blood, a rush of pain and darkness in Charles’s head as the life left the mind he was touching, as the guardsman’s soul slipped away. The horse reared and whinnied under the dead weight and the other men drew their swords, and a crowd of rough-dressed bandits poured out of the trees around the road.
Charles was unarmed, his body barely responding to him, but he raised a hand to the matrix pouch at his throat and flung his laran at the nearest bandit, feeling the man’s mind give way before the assault, his battle-greed swirling in the eddies of Charles’s power as his body dropped to the ground.
There was a bright prick of pain and Charles glanced down at the dart protruding from his shoulder, felt the rush of some hot drug through his veins, his mind suddenly covered as if by insulating silk. The men seemed distant, silent figures now, another pair of bandits falling to sword blows and then his last three guardsmen gone, taken down by arrow and sword.
It was like a dream, insubstantial figures laughing and congratulating each other as they surrounded the wagon. His senses increasingly muzzy again, the sun slipping too fast behind the horizon, voices buzzing like bees around him, scratching at his skin, hands hauling him up roughly and smoke in his nose.
When the smoke cleared Charles was sitting in a wooden chair by a fireplace, his body heavy and useless, gazing before him at the main hall of a small keep, dirty rushes on the floor and billowing torches on the stone walls. There was a low voice in his ears, a man’s presence behind him, his left hand resting on Charles’s shoulder. The hand moved, callused fingers sliding up the nape of Charles’s neck and fastening into his hair, drawing his head back. He gazed up into the man’s sleek, cruel face.
The man’s right hand lifted, holding a vial to Charles’s lips. "The sedative should be wearing off now. Drink the kirian." He pressed a thumb between Charles’s teeth, forcing his numb mouth open, and poured the sickly sweet kirian down his throat. Charles swallowed, because he didn’t know why a bandit lord would give him a drug to enhance laran and lower inhibitions, but that was the only weapon Charles had at the moment, so...
Instead of dull, dim, and quiet the world seemed to leap into sharp relief, the light too bright and the noises louder. The man dropped the vial to the floor and stroked Charles’s hair back from his face, turning his head to the side.
Ysabelle’s bare body lay sprawled on the floor, her red robes torn away, a knife jutting out of her bloody chest.
Charles felt sick. Regardless of what these men had done to her, he was the one who had truly killed her. The only mercy was that she had been gone before they had gotten their hands on her. He scrabbled behind him, reaching for the man with his laran, which was now surging high within him on the sweet waves of the kirian.
The man laughed, sharp and mocking like a bird of prey. "That will do you no good, lad." He was correct. Charles couldn’t get hold of his mind; it felt as slippery as a piece of wet soap, and as slimy, twisting away from the grasp of Charles’s powers. The man whistled and two of his men strode into the room, coming up short before them with neat salutes. "These killed your guardsmen and your leronis. Take your revenge on them."
Charles narrowed his eyes and reached for the first man’s mind. It gave way easily to him, no barriers at all. He wrapped himself around and through the man’s thoughts, saw his recent memories of Ysabelle and Eamon, who had trained Charles- the pleasure the man had taken in-
It was easy to tear him apart, crumble his soul into blackness, let his body drop to the dirty floor. It was so fast and easy that the man hardly felt it.
The second man, however... His stance faltered as he turned to look at his comrade, then back to his master and Charles, and then he actually tried to flee the room. The man behind Charles sniffed disapprovingly and Charles felt the same disdain. The man’s fear drew his power like a beacon and Charles pounced on it, taking over the impulses in his nerves and stopping him in his tracks. This man had a chance to know what was happening to him, this man had a chance to scream as Charles slowly shut down his body, clamped down on his heart and lungs until the man spasmed and collapsed. Even then Charles held the man’s mind under his own for as long as he could, held him there in the dead brain, until the man’s screams were ringing so loudly that he finally pushed him away into nothingness.
One hand drew long, cool fingers over his forehead and down his cheek to cradle his jaw and neck, pulling his head back again as the other hand stroked through his hair. "Ah, you are magnificent, chiyu," the man said in his smooth voice. Charles stared up into his pale eyes. "The things I will be able to do with you. For now I think I will put you with my other pretty little toy."
His eyes were hypnotic; Charles felt himself falling into those grey depths. Everything swirled and swirled around him, the man’s voice and his touch growing distant, until they faded away into a grey haze.
***
The hands on him were solid again.
Charles reached up to ward the person away as someone’s hands felt over his torso. He tried to catch at the arms and fight off the attacker, opening his eyes, his head feeling clearer but still pounding in pain. At least he could move his body.
The hands disappeared as the person slipped away from Charles’s grasp and moved back. A voice said quickly, "I am not him! I am your fellow prisoner."
Levering himself to sitting, Charles looked at the youth kneeling beside him. He was around the same age as Charles, with sandy-brown hair cut roughly short, stubble on his strong features, and brilliant blue eyes. The motion made Charles’s head pound even harder, and he frantically reached up to grasp the cord around his neck. It was still there. Even though he could feel the hard shape inside the pouch, he still drew it open, reached inside the insulating silks, and unwrapped his starstone. The small matrix, which before had been dull and made him vaguely sick to look into, was now a clear blue, and gazing into it helped calm his head, though only a little. Feeling less desperate, he replaced it and tucked the pouch under his shirt. He realized that he was wearing only his shirt, trousers, and stockings. The trousers were the same formal embroidered pair he had been dressing in for his party at home.
He was in a small room made of wood, like a peasant’s hut. There was a small window opening in front of him that showed tree branches and mid-day light in the sky. Charles glanced around. The room was strange and wrong. It had another window but no door anywhere, and none of the furnishings he would expect even in the rudest hovel. He was sitting on a quilted blanket on a pile of straw, and the other boy was settled just out of reach of him, also bootless, though his leather trousers and woolen tunic looked warmer. In one corner was a wicker tray with two wooden bowls on it. That was everything.
A gust of wind blew though the branches, and the room shook and swayed with it unlike anything Charles had felt. He shivered.
"What is this place? Who are you?" Charles asked.
"My name is Erik, and this is my cell." He stared at Charles boldly and directly. He spoke perfectly-inflected casta though with a trace of rough mountain accent.
Charles drew himself up straighter. "I am Charles, Heir to Alton." The youth did not seem impressed. Charles clutched the folds of the quilt tighter. Suddenly the cruel man’s words returned to him. "Oh! Are you what he meant when he mentioned putting me with his other toy?" His voice faltered on the last word.
At that Erik’s gaze did drop and he flushed. "Yes," he said softly, lashes fluttering against his sharp cheekbones as he blinked his eyes closed for an instant. "He styles himself Lord Sebastian of this, Shaw Keep. But he is merely a bandit who... There was also a woman, a leronis, but I have not seen her for over a month. I don’t know if she escaped, or if she’s dead, or worse."
He looked up again and when his eyes met Charles’s, Charles could feel his laran stirring, reaching out. He struggled to hold himself in check but his mind still brushed Erik’s, riffling through the man’s memories. Almost two years ago Shaw’s men had attacked the mountain village where he lived, killing Erik’s parents and many other people. Charles could see the younger Erik screaming, using his own laran to wield the metal implements in the vicinity, turning them on the attackers. And Shaw, striding untouched through the maelstrom, everything Erik threw bouncing off him, until he had reached the boy and knocked him unconscious. After that there had been only this captivity, Shaw and his men, and rough use. Shaw, forcing Erik to aid his attacks. The men, forcing-
Charles shuddered and shied away, yanking himself out and back into his own mind, panting from the effort. He felt a flood of relief that he had been able to control it, that he had not accidentally torn Erik apart as he had Ysabelle.
"How dare you..." Erik growled.
Embarrassed, Charles glanced away from him. Despite everything Erik was certainly not subservient. Charles swallowed heavily. "I apologize," he said. "I don’t have much control. He gave me drugs, had me kill two of his own men that way."
"He is rather free with their lives sometimes, though he always finds more." There was a slight pause. "I saw it in your mind."
Charles still couldn't look at the other man. Instead he levered himself shakily to his feet and crossed toward the window. He didn't know how much Erik had seen in his mind, and Erik probably couldn't say exactly what Charles had seen. Charles wondered if he had broadcast his thoughts to the other minds he had touched. There was no way to ask, as they were all dead now. He shivered.
When he gazed out of the window the view he saw matched the vague images still swirling through his head from Erik. The small room was built between the branches of an enormous tree, high above the ground, made solely of wood and other materials lacking in metal. There were two guards standing at the base of the tree, just small circles of the tops of their heads visible. Shaw had been unable to restrain Erik in his keep without suppression drugs since there were elements in the stone walls that Erik could manipulate. It was the fact that Shaw seemed as impervious to Erik's power as he had to Charles's that had allowed him the time to figure out how to control the captive child with isolation and drugs. Charles knew that Erik had imagined jumping and ending it sometimes but his desire for freedom and vengeance was much greater than those shameful fleeting thoughts. There was something else, though, another image flickering though his mind and wisping away before he could grasp it...
Having gotten himself under control Charles now turned around. An early spring day was not the time to be standing in an open breeze in his shirtsleeves. His eyes lit on the tray in the corner that he had not paid much attention to before. One of the bowls on it had porridge and the other milk. Charles suddenly realized how hungry and thirsty he was, his mouth watering and his stomach clawing. Erik noticed his attention and gave a small mirthless grin. "That's your portion." Charles opened his mouth to ask the question but Erik answered sooner. "They delivered you yesterday evening. You've been out of it all night."
Charles sat himself down wrapped in the quilt again, scooping up porridge with his fingers and drinking milk straight from the bowl. "He can't think to take me with impunity. My family will search for me."
"No one has yet found this place in these trackless wastes." They were even further north in the hills, almost to the Hellers, and Charles could easily believe it. But he was a telepath now; there must be some way to get a message to his family or to one of the Towers, or someone. Unless... If Shaw could block that too...
He finished the porridge quickly though it was lumpy and tasteless. He could still feel Erik as a mental presence, more than just the warm sound of his breathing.
"Are you Hastur-kin?" Charles asked.
Erik looked at him blandly with merely one eyebrow arched. "Did you not see? My father was a mountain blacksmith, and my mother an orphan raised as an innkeeper's fosterling, hardly among the Hali'imyn. Although, she did used to tell me that her own mother was a disgraced leronis and her father a Comyn lord. But I always thought those only pretty stories for a child's bedtime."
"Mayhap they were more than that." Charles had always been told that all those with laran were of the blood of Hastur and Cassilda. His own mother was part Aldaran, and they ruled in the mountains. But then, Shaw had laran too, and Charles liked it not to think of him as a kinsman.
His stomach began to claw at him in another way and Charles stood, walking to the other corner of the room and relieving himself through the small hole in the floor there. Sadly, the guards knew well enough not to stand close by that spot.
Then he eyed the window again. "How did they get me up here?"
"On a stronger rope through the same pulley that brings up the food," Erik replied. "You were very undignified." He joined Charles at the window with a small laugh as Charles frowned at that. "The rope is long gone now. Shaw was there, and he would cut such a thing if I had tried to use it and let us both fall." Now Charles saw the new image in Erik's mind, though it hurt his brain to attempt even such a light rapport.
"He's not here now," Charles replied. "I can feel you but not the guards. How close would you have to be to use your laran? Halfway down?"
Erik turned, his shoulder brushing Charles's, and stared at him. "It's a risk. Even more with the extra weight."
"But you are not alone, not any longer. I think it was a mistake from his view to put us together. I will do what I can, though my head is still raw from the drugs and his... his..."
"Yes," Erik said softly.
Charles looked down at the drop and then back at Erik.
"Not alone," Erik whispered. He glanced around the bare room behind them. "Now?" Charles nodded. Erik didn't waste even a moment then. He clambered up and balanced himself precariously on the edge of the window hole, legs dangling out into space, then beckoned. There wasn't much room to move without knocking them off too soon but Charles managed to brace himself between the wall and Erik's shoulder and get up there as well. His stomach curdled as he looked down again. The drop seemed much higher from this position. Erik wrapped his left arm around Charles's waist and Charles clung tightly to the other's neck.
"Aldones protect us," Charles muttered and then Erik yanked him into the air.
They dropped like a boulder and Charles shut his eyes to block out the sight of the approaching ground, though he couldn't block out the wind bursting past him. He reached out with his Gift and could sense the edges of Erik's mind as he gathered his own powers to him. Below Charles could just begin to discern the faint sparks of the two guards' minds when he was wrenched to a halt, his arms tightening around Erik's neck, Erik's mind blazing now with power. Charles opened his eyes and they were suspended in the air a few bodylengths above the guards, dangling from Erik's other arm where he gripped the pommel of a sword that was floating above them.
The two guards looked up and shouted in surprise and the other sword whipped its way out of the man's scabbard and curved a great arc through the air that sliced both their throats open. The two bodies dropped to the ground with twin spurts of blood. Charles felt their minds flicker and wink out as they left the world.
Then Erik lowered them the last length to the ground. It was all over so quickly, the fall and the killings.
Charles's legs were still jittery after the drop though his feet were on solid ground now.
Erik stood over the two corpses with a small satisfied grin twisting his features. Charles remembered the rush of pleasure he had felt himself at the deaths of the men who had captured him. And these two guards had been with Shaw a long time, were among the ones who had killed Erik's family, who had violated Erik's person and his honor.
Then he knelt and began searching the bodies, stripping off their boots and handing a pair to Charles before pulling on the other himself. Charles shuddered slightly but put them on. They were a little too large yet fully necessary. Erik also removed the cloaks and padded tunics from the men, setting them aside before even more blood could get on them. Charles swung a cloak around himself, trying to ignore the stain of blood near the fastening, still damp but quickly cooling. Neither man had any money though one had a small pouch of dried fruit and nuts and a skin of water which Erik took. Lastly he handed over a sword belt to Charles, sliding the sword he had been holding into the scabbard.
As soon as Charles buckled the belt on the very weight of the sword against his left hip and the knife on his right brought a flood of reassurance along with it. He felt complete again.
Erik stood and buckled the other belt on, the second sword wiping itself on the grass as it flew to him. "Will you come with me to fight Shaw?" he asked Charles.
"If you face him now, Erik, he will kill you. He will kill us both. Your Gift cannot touch him any more than mine can. Come with me to Alton and we can tell my father of Shaw's atrocities and gather a force to defeat him."
"I do not want to wait any longer," Erik said, eyes narrowed and face steely, hand on the hilt of the sword.
Charles wavered cold inside. To face Shaw now was suicide, but to attempt to cross the Kilghard Hills alone and without supplies was equally so. Even with two of them the journey would be very difficult. Mayhap it was better to perish honorably fighting the bandit than to do so ignominiously fleeing through the forest.
"I will not make it through the hills alone," he said slowly, "so I will follow you even to death if you go after revenge. But if you come with me, I will do all I can to aid you against Shaw at a better time, I swear it. My life is in your hands, bredu." Charles had not known he would say the word until he heard himself doing so. But he would not take it back now even if he could. It seemed right so soon to swear friendship and brotherhood. He had never felt drawn to anyone this strongly and suddenly before, no man or woman. Only Raven, and they had been children then, and it was different. But he caught his breath, not knowing how Erik would respond.
Clouded blue eyes widened in surprise and then Erik's lips parted. He sighed and swallowed heavily. "Then I will take your advice... bredu." He grinned wide now and Charles responded giddily, pulling the knife out of the sheath to set it traditionally alongside the one Erik drew, hilt to blade and blade to hilt. It did not matter that this knife had only been in his possession for a moment before he exchanged it. As he slid the metal that had been in Erik's sheath into his own now it symbolized everything they had risked and done together in this short time.
Erik slid his hands up from Charles's wrists and they clasped each other's forearms, staring into each other's eyes for a long wordless moment.
Then finally they broke apart and slipped away together into the forest.
***
post 2
art by justfollow
Author: ciaan
Artist: justfollow
Betas: Thanks to livewareissue,
elf, and
ilyena_sylph for the great feedback!
For: marvel_bang
Fandoms: X-Men: First Class/Darkover crossover fusion AU
Pairing: Charles/Erik, references to other pairings
Note: Takes characters and plotlines from XMFC and translates them onto Darkover.
Summary: In the time that will later be known as the Ages of Chaos, many strange new mutations and powers are arising. Charles is a young noble lord, and when his psychic abilities manifest in a way that is dangerous for both him and those around him, he is sent away for healing and captured in transit by an evil bandit. He and his fellow captive Erik, a young man with a powerful affinity for metal and magnetism, must attempt to free themselves and defeat the seemingly undefeatable bandit. Meanwhile Charles's foster-sibling Raven seeks to track him down. What new shape will Charles's life have when all this is over? 11,000 words.
Warnings: Contains explicit scenes of physical and psychic violence and references to sexual assault. No explicit sex.
Charles Alton stood in front of his mirror dressing for dinner. It was his birthday and tonight was to be a special celebration, for he was turned fifteen years and a grown man now.
There was a light knock at the door and he turned toward it, leaving his shirt unlaced, recognizing the brush of thoughts just before someone entered. "Raven!" Charles scolded, for his foster-brother was still in riding leathers. Then he saw that Raven was carrying something. "What do you have there, preciosu?"
"It's for you, dear brother." Raven held out the carved wooden cage, revealing the small songbird within it, a brightly colored little thing from the plains of Valeron. The bird fluttered its wings and hopped nervously around inside the cage as Charles stepped closer. Raven set the wooden contraption down on Charles's dressing table and leaned in toward it. "Don't be afraid, little singer, my brother won't hurt you." He whistled, a high, sweet trill, and the bird settled and cooed in response.
Charles's mind flashed to the first time he had seen Raven, when he was twelve and had snuck out to ride alone along the edge of the forest. Suddenly his horse had shied out of his control and plunged toward a strange figure who emerged from the trees, sniffing the being's outstretched hand. Charles had slid from the horse's back and dropped to his knees at the sight of what stood before him.
"Child of light, you lend us grace," he remembered murmuring. Before him had been a strange girl-child dressed in flowing white silks, almost as tall as he yet clearly quite young, her eyes bright molten gold. A mass of flame-red hair fell around the delicate, strange features of her face, skin pale and thin enough that the blood showed through, like a layer of ice on a lake, blue under white. She reached toward him, six slender fingers touching his cheek, staring at him, shy and curious.
An image flickered into his mind from hers, a swirl of birds flashing through a forest, dark shadows winging over a battlefield, crowding down to enjoy the spoils of war. And then a question, clear yet wordless.
"Charles," he replied. "Charles-Francis Xavier Alton y Hastur, of the blood of Hastur and Cassilda." He had never expected to see a legendary chieri, even if her coloring indicated her only a half-chieri child, and though supposedly drops of chieri blood flowed through the veins of all the Comyn lords, including his own. The mysterious, powerful beings who had inhabited the world before humans were generally thought to be gone now.
The girl's fingers dropped away from him and a wave of sorrow emanated from her as she tilted her head to the side. He knew without her speaking that she was alone, and that she had nowhere to go, no family and people she could find.
"You will come with me," Charles said. "My parents will keep you at Armida. They never refuse me anything, and they cannot turn away a child of the yellow forest. You can be my sister." He was alone at the estate, for all his parents' other children had died in infancy, and there were currently no other noble children fostered there.
The small six-fingered hand had slipped into his and the girl had smiled up at him brightly, his horse whuffing at her hair.
Over the next few months Charles had taught his foster-sister to speak and she had quickly picked up both casta and cahuenga. She had learned to ride, and to eat at a table with utensils, and to wear decent clothes and play the rryl and embroider. And then she had declared that she did not like dressing as a girl and following the rules of polite feminine behavior and that she was a boy now. After a few days her nursemaid had told everyone that it was true: the strange child with the strange name of Raven was indeed a boy now.
And so, after three years, the gentle, wild young girl-child Charles had first seen had become his foster-brother, a boy who seemed only slightly younger than Charles himself, tall and slender now as he straightened up from the cage on the table. The bird began to sing, a beautiful rush of notes, and Raven grinned. His face with its high cheekbones and small features always seemed somber in repose but lit up when he was happy.
"Thank you, bredu," Charles said, smiling back. The reverence he could dimly remember feeling that first day seemed strange and impossible to him now, made foreign by these years of living together. Though Raven still looked alien in many ways, those brilliant gold eyes were as familiar to Charles as his own blue ones, or as his mother's and father's, and Raven as exasperating much of the time as any younger sibling.
Laughing, Raven brushed a grubby hand through the mop of red curls falling around his face to his shoulders. "And now I will go clean up and dress myself nicely before you kill me for ruining your party!" Charles cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, and Raven turned away to leave, stopping for a moment to allow Charles's body-servant to enter. The man carried the ornately embroidered tunic Charles was to wear.
Charles opened his mouth to speak and the whole world disappeared behind a wall of blue sparkles, colors running and dripping and swirling.
He felt himself fall, all sensation dulled as if through insulating silk and gauze, crashing to the floor, his body convulsing and his head pounding against the floor tiles as his spine arched. From a million miles away he could hear the body-servant yelling, "Dom Charles!" and Raven calling for help. Then other people were in the room, more servants, guardsmen, his mother and father, the household leronis Ysabelle.
Charles could sense Ysabelle reaching out with her laran to monitor him, and something inside him rose up to meet her as her mind touched his. She screamed inside his head, a choked echo that was quickly cut off as all her thoughts were stripped bare to him. Flashes of her memories dropped through his, sinking like stones into the swirling mess inside his mind, images of her childhood, her years spent in the Tower, her lovers, watching Charles himself as a child and testing him, testing his laran and finding potential yet unmanifested. Threshold sickness, he heard her think, convulsion and crisis and late-developing laran, and Charles had long thought he had but little telepathic gift.
He reached to touch her mind and she screamed again, her thoughts dissolving like mist now beneath his own, until they were quiet and he couldn't feel her anymore. But he could see now, through the slashes of color that still obscured his vision, see her body crumpled to the floor beside his, and his mother kneeling to check her pulse.
"She lives." The words meant nothing to him, mere sounds.
"Her body lives," and that was Raven's voice, warbling nonsense like when she had first come to stay with them, "but her mind is gone."
Charles tried to call Ysabelle back to him, to ask her for help, she was a leronis and she could help him, but every time he probed toward her he met only silence.
"Merciful Avarra!" one of the serving women whispered, and a guardsman standing beside her made a warding gesture. Charles felt Raven cupping his head, fingers cooler than a mere human's. Raven's voice trilled again and the world dissolved fully.
The mists rose and faded and rose and faded around Charles’s mind, until finally they flowed away and he could see again, the pale sea-green crescent of Kyrrdis shining high in the violet sky, the only moon showing, and the great bloody sun hanging low in the west off his right side as he jounced along. He was wrapped in a travel blanket and lying in the bottom of a wagon. He could hear horses’ hooves clopping along the road below his head and the low voices of men talking around them.
He turned his head and gasped. The leronis Ysabelle was lying beside him, her eyes closed and arms folded over herself. Her chest rose and fell with low breathing. He remembered feeling her thoughts, remembered them crumbling away beneath him, and Raven’s voice speaking words that hadn’t made sense at the time but jumped back to him now, sharp with meaning. "Her mind is gone."
The clopping hooves of a horse dropped back to the side of the wagon and Charles looked up to see Eamon, the captain of his father’s guards. "Good to see ye awake, m’lord," Eamon said, touching his brow respectfully.
"Where are we going? What happened?"
Eamon frowned slightly. "We travel to Neskaya Tower, where the vai leronis is from, in hopes that the matrix workers there can do summat to aid her, and ye as well."
A rush of anger and embarrassment flushed him. It was his birthday, he was fifteen, he was supposed to be preparing himself for the journey to Thendara, for his first season as a cadet in the Garduin, the city watch that he would one day command as an Alton. Instead he was sick and being carted along to a Tower like a piece of luggage, not even able to ride manfully.
Charles levered up on his elbow enough to glance around. The other three men riding in formation around the wagon were all soldiers who had been at Armida for years, men whose families had long been pledged to the Altons. Eamon himself had taught Charles swordplay when he was a child.
All of these men, loyal strong men, were leaking fear. Behind him, from the still body of the leronis, there was nothing. The Altons were typically strong telepaths, skilled in rapport, but Charles had never been so. He had never been able to send thoughts to anyone or read their mind, unless someone stronger was broadcasting to him, and then he could pick it up. From Raven, or his parents, or a trained laran worker. He had thought that since the ability had not developed yet, at this age, it never would. Now he could taste the men’s fear, stale and metallic, in the back of his mouth.
"The men fear me," Charles said.
His face was blank and stoic, but Eamon’s hands twitched slightly at his reins, and the horse tossed its head. "Aye, m’lord," he answered. "They fear for ye."
"No." Charles shook his head, flipping his hair from his eyes. "And you, Eamon?"
The guardsman didn’t answer, which was rude, but probably his wisest choice at the moment. Charles didn’t need an answer. He could sense the man’s fear deepening, sharpening, and the laran inside Charles’s mind stirred, wanting to reach out, wanting to have more. Charles was afraid, too. He had invaded and ripped away the mind of a trained leronis like it was nothing, like all her years of learning to defend and shield herself had never happened. He could still see her memories in his thoughts, still feel her screams as he had torn her apart and pushed her under his power.
He tried to hold back but his power was reaching out toward Eamon, brushing the edges of his mind, catching on the fear, fear for Charles, yes, but also of him, of this damned sorcery, and then-
Then there was an arrow blooming from Eamon’s throat, a spurt of blood, a rush of pain and darkness in Charles’s head as the life left the mind he was touching, as the guardsman’s soul slipped away. The horse reared and whinnied under the dead weight and the other men drew their swords, and a crowd of rough-dressed bandits poured out of the trees around the road.
Charles was unarmed, his body barely responding to him, but he raised a hand to the matrix pouch at his throat and flung his laran at the nearest bandit, feeling the man’s mind give way before the assault, his battle-greed swirling in the eddies of Charles’s power as his body dropped to the ground.
There was a bright prick of pain and Charles glanced down at the dart protruding from his shoulder, felt the rush of some hot drug through his veins, his mind suddenly covered as if by insulating silk. The men seemed distant, silent figures now, another pair of bandits falling to sword blows and then his last three guardsmen gone, taken down by arrow and sword.
It was like a dream, insubstantial figures laughing and congratulating each other as they surrounded the wagon. His senses increasingly muzzy again, the sun slipping too fast behind the horizon, voices buzzing like bees around him, scratching at his skin, hands hauling him up roughly and smoke in his nose.
When the smoke cleared Charles was sitting in a wooden chair by a fireplace, his body heavy and useless, gazing before him at the main hall of a small keep, dirty rushes on the floor and billowing torches on the stone walls. There was a low voice in his ears, a man’s presence behind him, his left hand resting on Charles’s shoulder. The hand moved, callused fingers sliding up the nape of Charles’s neck and fastening into his hair, drawing his head back. He gazed up into the man’s sleek, cruel face.
The man’s right hand lifted, holding a vial to Charles’s lips. "The sedative should be wearing off now. Drink the kirian." He pressed a thumb between Charles’s teeth, forcing his numb mouth open, and poured the sickly sweet kirian down his throat. Charles swallowed, because he didn’t know why a bandit lord would give him a drug to enhance laran and lower inhibitions, but that was the only weapon Charles had at the moment, so...
Instead of dull, dim, and quiet the world seemed to leap into sharp relief, the light too bright and the noises louder. The man dropped the vial to the floor and stroked Charles’s hair back from his face, turning his head to the side.
Ysabelle’s bare body lay sprawled on the floor, her red robes torn away, a knife jutting out of her bloody chest.
Charles felt sick. Regardless of what these men had done to her, he was the one who had truly killed her. The only mercy was that she had been gone before they had gotten their hands on her. He scrabbled behind him, reaching for the man with his laran, which was now surging high within him on the sweet waves of the kirian.
The man laughed, sharp and mocking like a bird of prey. "That will do you no good, lad." He was correct. Charles couldn’t get hold of his mind; it felt as slippery as a piece of wet soap, and as slimy, twisting away from the grasp of Charles’s powers. The man whistled and two of his men strode into the room, coming up short before them with neat salutes. "These killed your guardsmen and your leronis. Take your revenge on them."
Charles narrowed his eyes and reached for the first man’s mind. It gave way easily to him, no barriers at all. He wrapped himself around and through the man’s thoughts, saw his recent memories of Ysabelle and Eamon, who had trained Charles- the pleasure the man had taken in-
It was easy to tear him apart, crumble his soul into blackness, let his body drop to the dirty floor. It was so fast and easy that the man hardly felt it.
The second man, however... His stance faltered as he turned to look at his comrade, then back to his master and Charles, and then he actually tried to flee the room. The man behind Charles sniffed disapprovingly and Charles felt the same disdain. The man’s fear drew his power like a beacon and Charles pounced on it, taking over the impulses in his nerves and stopping him in his tracks. This man had a chance to know what was happening to him, this man had a chance to scream as Charles slowly shut down his body, clamped down on his heart and lungs until the man spasmed and collapsed. Even then Charles held the man’s mind under his own for as long as he could, held him there in the dead brain, until the man’s screams were ringing so loudly that he finally pushed him away into nothingness.
One hand drew long, cool fingers over his forehead and down his cheek to cradle his jaw and neck, pulling his head back again as the other hand stroked through his hair. "Ah, you are magnificent, chiyu," the man said in his smooth voice. Charles stared up into his pale eyes. "The things I will be able to do with you. For now I think I will put you with my other pretty little toy."
His eyes were hypnotic; Charles felt himself falling into those grey depths. Everything swirled and swirled around him, the man’s voice and his touch growing distant, until they faded away into a grey haze.
***
The hands on him were solid again.
Charles reached up to ward the person away as someone’s hands felt over his torso. He tried to catch at the arms and fight off the attacker, opening his eyes, his head feeling clearer but still pounding in pain. At least he could move his body.
The hands disappeared as the person slipped away from Charles’s grasp and moved back. A voice said quickly, "I am not him! I am your fellow prisoner."
Levering himself to sitting, Charles looked at the youth kneeling beside him. He was around the same age as Charles, with sandy-brown hair cut roughly short, stubble on his strong features, and brilliant blue eyes. The motion made Charles’s head pound even harder, and he frantically reached up to grasp the cord around his neck. It was still there. Even though he could feel the hard shape inside the pouch, he still drew it open, reached inside the insulating silks, and unwrapped his starstone. The small matrix, which before had been dull and made him vaguely sick to look into, was now a clear blue, and gazing into it helped calm his head, though only a little. Feeling less desperate, he replaced it and tucked the pouch under his shirt. He realized that he was wearing only his shirt, trousers, and stockings. The trousers were the same formal embroidered pair he had been dressing in for his party at home.
He was in a small room made of wood, like a peasant’s hut. There was a small window opening in front of him that showed tree branches and mid-day light in the sky. Charles glanced around. The room was strange and wrong. It had another window but no door anywhere, and none of the furnishings he would expect even in the rudest hovel. He was sitting on a quilted blanket on a pile of straw, and the other boy was settled just out of reach of him, also bootless, though his leather trousers and woolen tunic looked warmer. In one corner was a wicker tray with two wooden bowls on it. That was everything.
A gust of wind blew though the branches, and the room shook and swayed with it unlike anything Charles had felt. He shivered.
"What is this place? Who are you?" Charles asked.
"My name is Erik, and this is my cell." He stared at Charles boldly and directly. He spoke perfectly-inflected casta though with a trace of rough mountain accent.
Charles drew himself up straighter. "I am Charles, Heir to Alton." The youth did not seem impressed. Charles clutched the folds of the quilt tighter. Suddenly the cruel man’s words returned to him. "Oh! Are you what he meant when he mentioned putting me with his other toy?" His voice faltered on the last word.
At that Erik’s gaze did drop and he flushed. "Yes," he said softly, lashes fluttering against his sharp cheekbones as he blinked his eyes closed for an instant. "He styles himself Lord Sebastian of this, Shaw Keep. But he is merely a bandit who... There was also a woman, a leronis, but I have not seen her for over a month. I don’t know if she escaped, or if she’s dead, or worse."
He looked up again and when his eyes met Charles’s, Charles could feel his laran stirring, reaching out. He struggled to hold himself in check but his mind still brushed Erik’s, riffling through the man’s memories. Almost two years ago Shaw’s men had attacked the mountain village where he lived, killing Erik’s parents and many other people. Charles could see the younger Erik screaming, using his own laran to wield the metal implements in the vicinity, turning them on the attackers. And Shaw, striding untouched through the maelstrom, everything Erik threw bouncing off him, until he had reached the boy and knocked him unconscious. After that there had been only this captivity, Shaw and his men, and rough use. Shaw, forcing Erik to aid his attacks. The men, forcing-
Charles shuddered and shied away, yanking himself out and back into his own mind, panting from the effort. He felt a flood of relief that he had been able to control it, that he had not accidentally torn Erik apart as he had Ysabelle.
"How dare you..." Erik growled.
Embarrassed, Charles glanced away from him. Despite everything Erik was certainly not subservient. Charles swallowed heavily. "I apologize," he said. "I don’t have much control. He gave me drugs, had me kill two of his own men that way."
"He is rather free with their lives sometimes, though he always finds more." There was a slight pause. "I saw it in your mind."
Charles still couldn't look at the other man. Instead he levered himself shakily to his feet and crossed toward the window. He didn't know how much Erik had seen in his mind, and Erik probably couldn't say exactly what Charles had seen. Charles wondered if he had broadcast his thoughts to the other minds he had touched. There was no way to ask, as they were all dead now. He shivered.
When he gazed out of the window the view he saw matched the vague images still swirling through his head from Erik. The small room was built between the branches of an enormous tree, high above the ground, made solely of wood and other materials lacking in metal. There were two guards standing at the base of the tree, just small circles of the tops of their heads visible. Shaw had been unable to restrain Erik in his keep without suppression drugs since there were elements in the stone walls that Erik could manipulate. It was the fact that Shaw seemed as impervious to Erik's power as he had to Charles's that had allowed him the time to figure out how to control the captive child with isolation and drugs. Charles knew that Erik had imagined jumping and ending it sometimes but his desire for freedom and vengeance was much greater than those shameful fleeting thoughts. There was something else, though, another image flickering though his mind and wisping away before he could grasp it...
Having gotten himself under control Charles now turned around. An early spring day was not the time to be standing in an open breeze in his shirtsleeves. His eyes lit on the tray in the corner that he had not paid much attention to before. One of the bowls on it had porridge and the other milk. Charles suddenly realized how hungry and thirsty he was, his mouth watering and his stomach clawing. Erik noticed his attention and gave a small mirthless grin. "That's your portion." Charles opened his mouth to ask the question but Erik answered sooner. "They delivered you yesterday evening. You've been out of it all night."
Charles sat himself down wrapped in the quilt again, scooping up porridge with his fingers and drinking milk straight from the bowl. "He can't think to take me with impunity. My family will search for me."
"No one has yet found this place in these trackless wastes." They were even further north in the hills, almost to the Hellers, and Charles could easily believe it. But he was a telepath now; there must be some way to get a message to his family or to one of the Towers, or someone. Unless... If Shaw could block that too...
He finished the porridge quickly though it was lumpy and tasteless. He could still feel Erik as a mental presence, more than just the warm sound of his breathing.
"Are you Hastur-kin?" Charles asked.
Erik looked at him blandly with merely one eyebrow arched. "Did you not see? My father was a mountain blacksmith, and my mother an orphan raised as an innkeeper's fosterling, hardly among the Hali'imyn. Although, she did used to tell me that her own mother was a disgraced leronis and her father a Comyn lord. But I always thought those only pretty stories for a child's bedtime."
"Mayhap they were more than that." Charles had always been told that all those with laran were of the blood of Hastur and Cassilda. His own mother was part Aldaran, and they ruled in the mountains. But then, Shaw had laran too, and Charles liked it not to think of him as a kinsman.
His stomach began to claw at him in another way and Charles stood, walking to the other corner of the room and relieving himself through the small hole in the floor there. Sadly, the guards knew well enough not to stand close by that spot.
Then he eyed the window again. "How did they get me up here?"
"On a stronger rope through the same pulley that brings up the food," Erik replied. "You were very undignified." He joined Charles at the window with a small laugh as Charles frowned at that. "The rope is long gone now. Shaw was there, and he would cut such a thing if I had tried to use it and let us both fall." Now Charles saw the new image in Erik's mind, though it hurt his brain to attempt even such a light rapport.
"He's not here now," Charles replied. "I can feel you but not the guards. How close would you have to be to use your laran? Halfway down?"
Erik turned, his shoulder brushing Charles's, and stared at him. "It's a risk. Even more with the extra weight."
"But you are not alone, not any longer. I think it was a mistake from his view to put us together. I will do what I can, though my head is still raw from the drugs and his... his..."
"Yes," Erik said softly.
Charles looked down at the drop and then back at Erik.
"Not alone," Erik whispered. He glanced around the bare room behind them. "Now?" Charles nodded. Erik didn't waste even a moment then. He clambered up and balanced himself precariously on the edge of the window hole, legs dangling out into space, then beckoned. There wasn't much room to move without knocking them off too soon but Charles managed to brace himself between the wall and Erik's shoulder and get up there as well. His stomach curdled as he looked down again. The drop seemed much higher from this position. Erik wrapped his left arm around Charles's waist and Charles clung tightly to the other's neck.
"Aldones protect us," Charles muttered and then Erik yanked him into the air.
They dropped like a boulder and Charles shut his eyes to block out the sight of the approaching ground, though he couldn't block out the wind bursting past him. He reached out with his Gift and could sense the edges of Erik's mind as he gathered his own powers to him. Below Charles could just begin to discern the faint sparks of the two guards' minds when he was wrenched to a halt, his arms tightening around Erik's neck, Erik's mind blazing now with power. Charles opened his eyes and they were suspended in the air a few bodylengths above the guards, dangling from Erik's other arm where he gripped the pommel of a sword that was floating above them.
The two guards looked up and shouted in surprise and the other sword whipped its way out of the man's scabbard and curved a great arc through the air that sliced both their throats open. The two bodies dropped to the ground with twin spurts of blood. Charles felt their minds flicker and wink out as they left the world.
Then Erik lowered them the last length to the ground. It was all over so quickly, the fall and the killings.
Charles's legs were still jittery after the drop though his feet were on solid ground now.
Erik stood over the two corpses with a small satisfied grin twisting his features. Charles remembered the rush of pleasure he had felt himself at the deaths of the men who had captured him. And these two guards had been with Shaw a long time, were among the ones who had killed Erik's family, who had violated Erik's person and his honor.
Then he knelt and began searching the bodies, stripping off their boots and handing a pair to Charles before pulling on the other himself. Charles shuddered slightly but put them on. They were a little too large yet fully necessary. Erik also removed the cloaks and padded tunics from the men, setting them aside before even more blood could get on them. Charles swung a cloak around himself, trying to ignore the stain of blood near the fastening, still damp but quickly cooling. Neither man had any money though one had a small pouch of dried fruit and nuts and a skin of water which Erik took. Lastly he handed over a sword belt to Charles, sliding the sword he had been holding into the scabbard.
As soon as Charles buckled the belt on the very weight of the sword against his left hip and the knife on his right brought a flood of reassurance along with it. He felt complete again.
Erik stood and buckled the other belt on, the second sword wiping itself on the grass as it flew to him. "Will you come with me to fight Shaw?" he asked Charles.
"If you face him now, Erik, he will kill you. He will kill us both. Your Gift cannot touch him any more than mine can. Come with me to Alton and we can tell my father of Shaw's atrocities and gather a force to defeat him."
"I do not want to wait any longer," Erik said, eyes narrowed and face steely, hand on the hilt of the sword.
Charles wavered cold inside. To face Shaw now was suicide, but to attempt to cross the Kilghard Hills alone and without supplies was equally so. Even with two of them the journey would be very difficult. Mayhap it was better to perish honorably fighting the bandit than to do so ignominiously fleeing through the forest.
"I will not make it through the hills alone," he said slowly, "so I will follow you even to death if you go after revenge. But if you come with me, I will do all I can to aid you against Shaw at a better time, I swear it. My life is in your hands, bredu." Charles had not known he would say the word until he heard himself doing so. But he would not take it back now even if he could. It seemed right so soon to swear friendship and brotherhood. He had never felt drawn to anyone this strongly and suddenly before, no man or woman. Only Raven, and they had been children then, and it was different. But he caught his breath, not knowing how Erik would respond.
Clouded blue eyes widened in surprise and then Erik's lips parted. He sighed and swallowed heavily. "Then I will take your advice... bredu." He grinned wide now and Charles responded giddily, pulling the knife out of the sheath to set it traditionally alongside the one Erik drew, hilt to blade and blade to hilt. It did not matter that this knife had only been in his possession for a moment before he exchanged it. As he slid the metal that had been in Erik's sheath into his own now it symbolized everything they had risked and done together in this short time.
Erik slid his hands up from Charles's wrists and they clasped each other's forearms, staring into each other's eyes for a long wordless moment.
Then finally they broke apart and slipped away together into the forest.
***
post 2
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