War Between Four Walls - Part One
War Between Four Walls
Crucible, Part Two of Two
One
He wakes up all at once, lifts himself up easily onto his elbows, and looks out the window. A clear winter’s sky, a handful of stars like pinpricks of light in the deep purple darkness. It’s a long way towards morning yet, if the shadows on the horizon are anything to go by.
For as long as he can remember, Erik has always loved the winter, has always loved the memories of snow and quiet and great roaring fires. Winter is when he rests, done with the chores and the myriad little tasks of the sunny days. Winter is when he turns his hands to looking after people, after the children of the mountain hamlet and after his soldiers; when he continues on the same path his parents had taken, when he was a child - when they had looked after him during their journeys through forest and over mountain and all the way to the distant ocean. The world’s noises dying down to a reverent hush under a blanket of snow. Maps and trails and fires made out of fragrant wood, pine and ash and smoke.
He thinks of his mother’s voice, sounding out the names of the stars and teaching him his letters and numbers even as she mended their summer clothes, or knitted new hats and scarves for the deep cold months. He thinks of his father’s hands, tracing out constellations in the ground at their feet and coming back from a good day of hunting, laden down with berries and fish and game.
He’s gotten better and better at remembering that his wife never had taken to winter the way he had. She had loved summer best. She had loved warmth and heat and a thousand shades of green. She had loved walking through forests and fording rivers. Never a hint of fear or apprehension in her face. In the years since her death, he’s learned to content himself with remembering, to draw comfort from the wistful smiles caused by the memories of her. The distant sound of her laugh, the light that had danced in her eyes whenever she bestowed one of her rare smiles on him. The wound of her loss, long since healed, and its faint scar on his heart.
Beneath the stars, reflecting their distant pale light: snow as far as Erik’s eyes can see, piled in drifts. A winter full of snow and rain, he thinks, and he looks out at the houses shrouded in darkness from within, covered in snow from without.
In the distance, the quiet of the night is broken by yet another flurry of branches snapping under the weight of the snow, under the freezing cold. A hard winter, such as the mountains seem to have, but in its own way a pleasant one, even enjoyable. The children can’t get enough of the snow and they play games in it at all hours. They sing and they dance and they occasionally fight pitched snow battles among themselves. They laugh themselves breathless; they draw others in with their contagious joy. They seem to stop only for sleep and meals and lessons. A happy industry, one that brings smiles to every face, and Erik can’t get enough of it.
Erik lies back down and he smiles for a long moment, thinking about family and looking forward to the days ahead, to the close of the year. He rests his head briefly on his laced fingers. Then he pushes the thick blanket off his legs and slides his feet into his fur-lined boots.
He knows the hut well enough to unerringly move around it, even blindfolded. navigate it even blindfolded. He knows where his sword and knives are, where the crate that he stows his armor in when he’s not wearing it sits. The neat little bundle of Charles’s black cloak and scarf, in which he wraps his sword and knife for safekeeping.
Erik knows that he has to step carefully around the table and the chairs. It’s easy to navigate when there are only two chairs to be mindful of. He remembers the baskets of clean clothes, the ones that still need mending and the ones that can be taken apart for rags, sitting here and there around the table. He steps out to the necessary and he doesn’t think, simply braces the door open against its creaking hinges - he will really have to repair them as soon as it’s warm enough to start working at the forge again.
Back inside, with the door securely locked and the wind and winter seeping in, Erik feels grateful for the wood and the stone and the warmth provided by the recently re-thatched roof. He shrugs, rubs his hands together for warmth, takes the blanket from his bed and wraps himself in it. His eyes continue their sweep of the house and its comforting half-darkness.
His eyes stop on the shadowed bundle near the fire: Charles in his pallet. Erik looks carefully, and he can just about make out the familiar curve of Charles’s back, huddled into the blankets. Charles sleeps on his side in all seasons and especially during the winter, turned towards the wall, securely tucked in. Impossible to see his face in the shadows, impossible to know if his dreams play out their capricious emotions on his face. Impossible to see what he clutches next to his heart, if there is anything other than the silver cuff on his wrist.
Sometimes Erik wonders whether Charles sleeps the way he does because he thinks about protecting his sister at all times, even in his dreams, even in the deepest sleep.
Erik lifts one of the chairs away from the table, moving as silently as he can. He sits down next to the fireplace and contemplatively stirs the coals with the poker.
There are things that will need doing as soon as the year passes, as soon as they can start thinking about and preparing for spring. For one thing, he is waiting for reports from the men and women serving as their eyes and ears inside the tower of mages, their spies in the armies. Plans for rescue missions and recruiting expeditions; reconnaissance, tactics, supplies. Most important of all, Erik is expecting Logan.
The banked fire glows orange at him, and more brightly, and he thinks about throwing another log into the fireplace, when there’s a muffled gasp.
Another one?
Charles and his dreams, and during the past three months Erik has seen him in all states of waking and dreaming, and in every state always so apprehensive. What could Charles be seeing, night after night? Waking up, again and again. The soft patter of his steps around the hut, his shadow moving restlessly. The rough murmur of his voice, talking himself to sleep, words Erik tries not to listen to and some he doesn’t even know if he can understand. The few times Charles had left the hut entirely, hours passing before his return, shaking the dust and the rain and the snow from his shoulders.
Erik knows enough of his own emotions - he’s worried, and he doesn’t know what to do with his worry. Show it or hide it? He cannot decide, for Charles to him is still something painfully new, and the bond between them remains nameless and fragile.
Every time Charles slips away in the middle of the night, Erik has stayed awake, moving from his pallet to the table to wait for him, passing the time any way he can. Carving toys for the children, thinking about training regimens, looking over the maps and the information they currently have. Looking up at the door, every now and then, and being torn between relief and worry that there is no one there to see how he frets.
He never has any words for the relief that floods through him when the door opens again and Charles steps back in, regret and pain written on his face.
Erik has had to grow used to Charles’s hand sliding into his: sometimes after he returns, and sometimes when he’s passing by on errands in the village, and sometimes when they are sitting quietly together in the hut. Seeking shelter, and sometimes Erik thinks he feels something that he’s tentatively identified as an apology, Charles apologizing, though he never explains why or what for.
Erik has had to fight back the impulse to simply comfort him, for whatever kind of comfort Charles could need, for whatever kind of comfort Erik could give.
Even now, Erik wants to move; he wants to make sure Charles is all right, but he stays in the chair, forces himself to remain relaxed. He moves his feet closer to the fire. Contents himself with saying the other man’s name, as quietly as he can.
“Charles.”
He watches the knot of limbs and blanket tighten, as though Charles were trying to hide - and then Charles is throwing the blanket off, dark hair falling every which way and most of it into his eyes. The silver cuff reflects the firelight as he moves. Charles sits up slowly, and soon he has his head cradled in his hands. “I was sleeping, and I was warm, and then I was dreaming. Now I’m awake.”
Erik shakes his head at the slurred words. “Are you truly?”
Charles does not reply.
Sometimes, Charles will wake up from his dreams and stay silent for hours. Sometimes he will wake up from his dreams and laugh to himself throughout the day. And sometimes he will wake up from his dreams with his blue-in-blue eyes surrounded by the deep red and orange of fatigue, though he never seems to cry.
Erik raises an eyebrow, quietly perplexed, as Charles gets up from the pallet, pulling his blanket around his shoulders. Two steps to cross toward the fireplace, he’s looming over Erik, and he suddenly and gracefully falls into his usual manner of sitting. Heels tucked neatly beneath, Charles breathes for a few moments, stares into the glowing coals and then it’s all Erik can do to keep Charles upright, as he suddenly lists to the side, eyes sliding closed once again, on a breath that’s almost a sigh.
So that at least answers Erik’s question - not that it’s helping him, not now, not with Charles in a state like this, and Erik torn between worry and the voice in the back of his mind that’s already laughing at the sheer strangeness of their situation.
Erik catches Charles’s shoulder with his hand, pushes at him roughly, trying to keep him in a more or less upright position - and even then, Erik can’t let him go, keeps holding on to him for fear he’ll fall into the fire.
“Charles,” he says, quietly, urgently, “are you all right?” He shakes Charles’s shoulder violently, slides out of the chair to look at Charles’s face.
Charles, insensate, doesn’t even seem to know where he is. Fluttering eyelids, mouth shaping silent words.
Erik blinks, and he moves, settles himself on the floor with his legs crossed. He turns Charles away from the fire. He retrieves his blanket and wraps it around his shoulders - and then he wraps himself around Charles. Now Charles’s lips are murmuring and moving against Erik’s skin.
How to care for a mage, Erik thinks, torn between mirth and surprise and worry and something else, an emotion he doesn’t have a name for. All he knows is that it’s the very same emotion that had driven him to get down on his knees before Charles, all those months ago.
Charles shifts restlessly in his arms and Erik breathes and lets him breathe, the two of them staying quietly wrapped in each other. He remembers that they have been dancing around their emotions. A dance they’ve been tracing out to music only they could hear, the two of them walking strange and winding loops around each other.
And Erik might not know how the dance ends - might not yet want to know where the dance will lead - but this, this at least is something that he knows about, and this is one of the few situations in which he actually knows what to do. He’s seen children unwilling and unable to wake up from memories, from the terrible specters of their nightmares. He’s seen mages tormented by their dreams, images and ideas of the future spinning out behind closed eyes. He’s seen ailing women caught up in the double vice grip of fever and childbirth. He’s seen soldiers facing death, bravely, on some distant battleground.
He thinks about the words he’s used before and he discards the old murmurs with a thought. He holds Charles close, one arm braced around those trembling shoulders and the other holding the blankets closed around him.
“I’m here, I’m here, come back,” Erik says, over and over, and he shakes his head because there must be something else that he can say.
He’s known some better words in the past, he’s used better words before, with another mage who dreamed of an uncertain future - but he can’t say them, not here and not now.
If the dreams go on like this for much longer, he will have to ask Raven, ask her for help or advice, ask about the years she and Charles had spent in the wilderness. Surely she must have picked up some rhyme or phrase to say, some way to bring Charles back.
For now, though, he keeps whispering the same words over and over again, hoping almost against all hope that Charles can hear them, trapped as he is in his dreams. “Charles. Listen to me. Come back. I’m here.”
One of his hands has moved up and is now tangled in Charles’s hair. Silver strands among the dark, almost seeming to glow in the firelight. Charles has let his hair grow a little longer, and now it almost brushes his thin shoulders in soft curls.
Erik pulls Charles closer still, tells himself it’s because it’s a winter night and they need to stay warm together. Charles seems to have calmed himself down a little; at least, Erik knows he is no longer speaking - or whatever it was that he was doing that let fevered breaths move rapidly against Erik’s throat.
Erik closes his eyes in relief, and reluctantly begins to undo the knot that the dreams and the worry and the emotions have made of their bodies.
“Erik?”
Charles’s eyes are wide open when he looks down, and he looks awake and confused and alive, and Erik takes back his arms, moves closer toward the fire, away from Charles, who is left to look at the blankets wrapped around his shoulders. “Calm down, Charles. You were dreaming, and you almost fell into the fire - but you’re awake now. It’s all right. It’s over. Just your dreams.”
He means to be soothing, to be reassuring, but he doesn’t miss the sudden startled hitch in Charles’s breathing, and he instinctively replaces his hand on Charles’s shoulder.
“I’ve woken you up,” Charles says.
Erik shakes his head. “I was awake. Be easy; you didn’t disturb me.” He thinks about keeping his secret, and he thinks that Charles already has all of his secrets. “I woke up, and I was thinking about this winter.”
“I don’t like being cold,” is all Charles says, almost a whisper.
“Neither do I, to be honest,” Erik says as he gets easily to his feet, knowing he’s trying to distract Charles, knowing Charles needs to be distracted. “When I was a child, I never wanted to stop traveling, never wanted to stop seeing new things, and winter always stopped us. But it was hard to resent the cold and the quiet and the need to stay in one place for weeks at a time, not when it meant I could spend time with my parents, not when we could huddle together and laugh.”
Charles looks up, though he isn’t looking at Erik, and there is a sad, wistful expression on that face, an expression that could almost be a smile if not for the lines of pain around the blue-in-blue eyes. “That sounds...that sounds wonderful. A little like the winters I spent alone with Raven, when we were children together.”
“Do you want to tell me about that?” Erik asks as he draws water into one of the pots, as he hooks the pot over the rod in the fireplace. Sweet earthy scent of tea leaves, and the sharp savory bite of dried herbs. Erik’s mother’s recipe, the one that Erik’s been patiently trying to recreate over the years, and each time he makes up a new batch he thinks he’s so close, he’s almost there. A beautiful memory from the past, almost completely restored.
Tucked into the corner of the tea box is a particular group of packets wrapped in coarse cloth, and Erik hesitates over them, feels something inside him draw away from the musty odor and the texture like grit and paper and dust. A unique blend of herbs and a special kind of tea, made for a specific purpose: to put the drinker to sleep. He remembers Jean pressing the packet into his hands after he’d brought Charles back with him, after she’d had a few conversations with the still shocked mage, and her advice: “Only if you think he truly needs it.”
In the end, Erik decides to let Charles make the choice for himself, and he brings the entire box with him when he drops back into his chair next to the fireplace. Charles has already retrieved the cups from their usual place over the mantel, and when Erik looks down at him he’s looking into the flames, he’s running his fingertips over the rim of one of the cups.
He calls Charles’s name, softly, and he watches those eyes blink and focus on him again.
“Erik,” Charles says. A shy smile.
“Were you going to tell me about the winters with Raven?”
Charles’s smile widens a little. A light blush in his cheeks. “I...no, I was going to, but then I looked at the fire and I got distracted.”
“So what did you think about, then.” Erik cocks his head and he can hear the water in the pot boiling, and he takes the pot down carefully, pushes the tea box in Charles’s direction. He pours steaming water into the cups and takes one, carefully, using a corner of his blanket to hold the cup.
When he looks up, Charles is dropping a generous pinch of the usual leaves into his cup, and Erik turns away to hide the expression of relief on his face, and makes his own tea.
Because as helpful as Jean’s tea is - and everyone who drinks it falls into a sleep so heavy that they say they have no dreams and in fact do not move at all - it also has its disadvantages. Erik himself remembers breaking out in a bright red rash all along his arms after one dose, which he’d needed so he could rest after breaking an arm in a riding accident, and his reaction was one of the milder ones, as it turned out. Some of the soldiers have reacted to the tea as though it were a particularly vile type of moonshine, complaining about hangovers after waking up.
And every single mage who’s drunk it has sworn never to touch a drop again, and sometimes in much stronger words. Eliszabeth was struck down by a particularly nasty headache; Shaw complained that he could not feel his feet. Even Emma has tried it, during one of the nights when she refused to dream, and she woke up in tears the next day. Erik still doesn’t know why she cried, but he knows Charles does, since he had been sitting at Emma’s bedside that night.
Erik jerks back to the present when there’s a touch of warmth on his wrist, and he looks up to Charles, and his mouth pinched with concern. “Have you been having trouble sleeping, too? If you were already awake?”
It takes Erik a long time to answer. “No. Not really. It was a passing fancy. I was thinking about that tea that Jean makes, the one in that packet there.”
Charles responds by pulling a disgusted face into his cup, and Erik almost laughs at him, and Charles is smiling and scratching the back of his head with his free hand.
When Charles speaks again, though, he sounds much more serious. “You talked me out of using the tea, Erik, when you first told me about it. When I first came to live here. I’ve not really thought about it since, but perhaps you should know - I almost drank it recently.”
Erik hears his heart pounding in his ears and for some reason, he thinks he knows what Charles is going to speak of. “Is this during or after your sister....”
A laugh that sounds broken, scraped raw around the edges. “After.” He looks haunted, now. “Immediately after.”
Erik remembers the expression well, knowing he’s worn it himself. Charles in the aftermath of the battle with the mage who had kidnapped Raven. Erik remembers the running and shouting as the soldiers and the mages asked after Charles, fearing for his safety as Erik did. He remembers bellowing at them to keep moving, not feeling safe until they reached the mountains.
Shaw slumped over on his horse, exhausted; Emma and Jean riding next to him, and Shaw’s reins clasped in Emma’s hands.
Azzel and Raven, marching side by side. Her eyes scanning the sky, looking back every so often, and the persistent downturn to her mouth. Trying not to be worried. Her hand in a white-knuckle grip around Azzel’s, and the worried pinch in the youth’s face.
Erik remembers straightening to meet Raven’s eyes once her gaze had settled on him, wondering what she already knew, what Charles could have already told her about him. The dread in his heart, hoping that the two of them would not just have had a hasty, temporary reunion.
And then the memory of Charles calling, a single long note on the wind. Erik looking up, Raven stepping to his side - and then Charles falling out of the sky, eyes rolling back in his head, very nearly unconscious. Wings of flame cupping him, folding around him as he crashed gracelessly to the ground.
Erik and Raven looking at each other, and then rushing to him, voices calling behind them, concern and shock. Jean shouting for everyone to keep going, and the knife-edge of fear in her voice.
And Charles curled up on the ground at the foot of a tree. Conscious just long enough to smile. One hand reaching out for Raven. His lips, shaping Erik’s name.
After a day like that, after a fight like that, Erik thinks that perhaps Charles would have had the right of it. He beckons the mage closer, and they sit shoulder to shoulder in front of the fire. The quiet of the night is broken by the pop and crackle from the flames. “If you had taken that tea,” he says, after a long moment, “I would have helped you deal with whatever effects it might have had on you.”
Charles nods, and keeps drinking. “Do you know, I wasn’t even thinking about how I’d react to it. I just...I wanted to forget what I’d just seen. I wanted to forget that dream I had, while I was in the collar.”
Erik doesn’t think, doesn’t pause to consider what he’s doing - he puts his arm around Charles’s shoulders again, makes him lean closer. He kisses the top of Charles’s head, a chaste and fleeting touch. “Forgive me; I did not even think to ask what that mage had done to you. It is a small and distant consolation that you suffered only briefly. Speak about it now if you wish, or not,” and Erik hopes he’s reading the fine trembling of Charles’s shoulders correctly, hopes he understands Charles’s fear and his pride and his anxiety all at once. “But not until you’re ready.”
Charles says, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.”
“Then be easy,” Erik says again. “I won’t ask.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be ready to say it, to talk about it,” Charles suddenly says. “But I can show you? I can do that?”
Shaking as he says it, yet Charles is looking Erik in the eyes, that familiar gaze of fire and steel.
Erik smiles. “If you wish.”
And Charles drops his eyes, points into the flames.
Flickering images: Charles shaking his head no no no. Back in the mage tower somehow. Being forced to fight for his life. Face-down on a stone floor, eyebrows pulled tightly together over his closed eyes.
The flames burn a dark, foreboding red along the image’s shoulders: in the fire, in his memories, Charles is bleeding.
When a familiar misshapen face appears, Erik half-turns away, half-closes his eyes.
“Yes, I know,” Charles says, in a voice laced with sadness and strength. “That is not the worst of it. Erik? Open your eyes. This was the dream, this was the heart of it. Look.”
Erik obeys.
The face of the enemy mage is reshaping itself. The scars remain, as do the ugly black lines. The feral grimace that passes for a smile does not change. The rest shifts - and Erik’s heart is gripped with horror as he begins to recognize the new face appearing in the fire.
The face of the man sitting next to him.
It takes him a few tries as he attempts to understand what he’s seeing, and when he speaks, he doesn’t sound like himself at all. He sounds like he’s been screaming, voice scraped raw. “Charles. When the...that...thing collared you, you dreamed that you were him. It.”
Charles nods, once, tightly. “I dreamed that I was fighting his champion, a duel to the death. I looked up to plead for mercy - and I looked into my own face.”
“Is this something that the collar does to its wearers?”
Charles is silent for a very long moment.
When he turns, when Erik is looking into those blue-in-blue eyes again, he already knows what Charles is going to say - and so he says it for him. “You don’t know.”
Charles shakes his head. “The first time I was collared, I - yes, I did hallucinate. I had been hungry for a long time, wasting away for wanting to see Raven. And I can tell you that I wasn’t the only one who suffered from terrible nightmares after being released from the spell. But I do not know if there were others who dreamed within the collar. If there were others who saw visions, as I did.”
“Charles?”
“Yes?”
“Let go.” Erik still has his face turned away from the fire.
And he looks back when there are arms around his shoulders, when he can feel Charles’s forehead resting on his shoulder.
Erik closes his eyes and hangs his head. “Forgive me.”
“What? No, it’s good, what you did was - I should thank you, that was the right thing to do,” is Charles’s response, thick and fierce. “I shouldn’t have kept that to myself. I should have told you, or if not you I should have told someone else. Raven or Jean or Shaw. Maybe that was why I kept dreaming about it, maybe I was supposed to let someone know. Three months of that dream, of that terrifying image, over and over again....”
Erik looks back to the fire and finally, thankfully, there is nothing in it now, nothing but shifting light and shadow, nothing but the familiar glow of the coals.
Soft pressure on his skin, and he looks down, and Charles now has his hand on Erik’s shoulder. “It’s I who should be apologizing, for making you see that. It couldn’t have been - good - to see that face again. I will be very grateful when I stop dreaming about him - and he’d only taken Raven from me. She came back to me, whole and alive. As for you, your loss....”
Erik manages to smile, even though he knows it hurts. “I did say, once, that I knew why you were going to recover from your years in the tower. I’ll say it again. It has to do with your heart, with your feelings, with your kindness. What a marvel that you survived without losing that - and here is the proof, that you can spare such regard for me, even in the face of your own ordeal. Charles?”
“Erik?”
“You’re a good person. You should believe in that.”
He gets a weak little chuckle in response. “Is that something everyone here in this village says? Summers told me that when we were on the march, and he was only the first. That child I was looking after for her mother. The boy whose pet bird had flown away; I couldn’t even help him, but he thanked me and said that anyway. Even Raven has heard it; she says Jean told her, that first week after we brought her here.”
“They are words to live by,” Erik says, “and the truth we all strive for. So I suppose the answer to your question is yes.”
The smile on Charles’s face is laced with uncertainty, but Erik shrugs and gets to his feet, goes to stand once again near his sleeping pallet. It is still dark outside, though he can already faintly discern the beginnings of the distant, brief dawn, if he looks to the east and the towering mountains.
Gust of cold air, and he looks up and the door is swinging softly closed. Sounds of splashing water, Charles muttering about the cold and the snow, and Erik smiles. So be it, then, to begin today much earlier than he normally would, and he gets out his woodworking tools, sits down at the table with a vague idea already forming in the back of his mind.
It is perhaps not surprising that when Erik looks at Charles he always sees the ghostly outline of wings and feathers, and now, he thinks about a bird on a branch and a sweet trill of song.
Erik looks up from his work in the village, sometimes, and when he does his eyes are nearly always drawn to Charles. Charles running errands or playing with the children; sometimes working through his knife forms, and if there are people about while he trains he remains conscientiously empty-handed. When Erik walks past and inspects tack and armor and his soldiers’ various tasks, Charles is often sitting next to his sister or next to Emma - and sometimes he is even seated between both - and the expressions on his face are a delight to watch, the smile that suits his eyes, the laughter that often comes from an embarrassing or silly story.
Erik thinks of a prison, of an open door or window. Of a bird and a flash of blue in startled flight, lost against the sky, and only the distant song left in its wake, a reminder and a memory of freedom.
He blinks, and he comes back to himself, sitting at the table. His hands already turning a piece of dark wood over and over, looking critically at the grain and the little knots. His tools waiting for him, a fresh steaming cup of tea within easy reach.
Up, and Erik sees Charles standing over the fireplace, once again wrapped in his blanket. Charles is nodding to himself; he’s moving as though he’s listening to a song. His fingers are moving over the flames, and the room grows brighter, light and warmth flooding out, filling the hut and lighting up the table.
Erik looks over his shoulder at the window, senses the inexorable dawn in the distance, and he smiles and murmurs, “Thank you - and don’t stop on my account.”
And maybe he thinks he hears Charles laughing, in response; and the song continues, Charles throwing a shadow that sways silently.
To Part Two