Fic: In Accord, Part Two - Southern winds (X-Men: First Class, R, WIP)
title: In Accord, Part Two - Southern winds
author: ilovetakahana
word count: approx. 2400 in this installment
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr; Raven Darkholme, Alex Summers, Armando Munoz
rating: R [may go up in later chapters]
notes: Continuing from this, and this. First part is here. These are not the Charles and Erik you think you know.
Work in Progress. Please heed the rating.
Also archived at http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/.
It’s the shift in the wind, he thinks. It’s the sounds in the trees. Distant bird song, and beyond that, a soft soughing rhythm, faint but persistent. It makes him think of advance and of retreat.
Erik starts awake. A moment of panic as a bolt of pain shoots down his arm. He moves that shoulder experimentally, finds the movement restricted.
Bit by bit he remembers as he peels away his sleeve and finds the thick pad of white cloth tied neatly in place, the knots secure but not tight. They’ve been tied off by knowledgeable hands.
How many years of practice, Erik wonders, must a healer have before he can be considered experienced? And what if that healer lived and fought through a conflict?
He’s known healers who were scarcely striplings but who had tended to the injured and to the dying with terrible, worn-in stoicism, nothing that sat well on their faces.
Charles looks like he’s gone beyond stoicism, if those scars are anything to go by.
Thinking about it leads Erik to a moment of stillness, like standing among eternal rocks. He remembers a man calling out commands and, very occasionally, a brief word of encouragement; he remembers rough hands around a quarterstaff. He remembers a flash of a woman’s red hair catching on a knife, cut ends falling short and uneven; he remembers a grimace that’s half a smile and half a map of scars and old pain.
He remembers fighting beside others, remembers leading and following, remembers laughing and sparring with the man and the woman. Remembers looking up into his eyes while he tended Erik’s injuries on some battlefield in some town as they fled. Remembers watching her rough, steady hands throw knives into a target several feet away.
He isn’t really permitted memories; he can barely remember where he’s from, and where he’s been. For the longest time, he’s thought only about the weapons in his hands, the stones the ground the floors beneath his feet as he runs.
He knows, though, that the next time he sees that man and that woman again it will be too late, and too soon, and.... They are familiar to him, and important, and now he can’t see them, for fear of his life - and of theirs.
Erik shakes his head roughly, dispels the memories as best as he can. The trees are shadows both protective and forbidding; Erik looks up, suspiciously. Everything above him is dark and strange and unfamiliar; he can just barely see the leafless branches forming a canopy overhead, and through them he catches a slivered glimpse of a faraway starless sky.
More movement close by, and Erik looks past the little fire, past the faintly glowing embers. There isn’t enough light to see everything, but he can just about make out the figure sitting quietly on the other side of the clearing. His eyes seem to glitter from the depths of his hood; he would fade into the darkness, Erik thinks, if not for that strange light.
“Hello, Erik,” Charles whispers, eyes on the ashes. “Do you hurt?”
“I...no.”
“Something else woke you.”
“Yes, but. Do you do that to all your new acquaintances? Do you try to guess what they are thinking of, and speak to them of it?”
That gets Erik a brief, wondering kind of frown, that dissolves into a smile like a blade. Charles’s expression is beautiful and haunting and frightening all at once - and it makes Erik look away. There is a strange ache in him, something that seems to pull him in a thousand different directions, something he already knows he can’t run away from.
Charles is speaking. “I’m a healer, remember,” and the smile shifts again, turns into something stranger, something self-deprecating. “And I have spent so many years living in pain, and so many more ministering to people in pain. Pain is like a smile; an expression that holds so many possible meanings. And you, Erik, you’ve a face I can read like a book.”
“I hope not,” Erik returns, carefully.
Charles laughs, softly. “I mean what I said about pain, but I’m only teasing you about being able to read you like a book. Be easy. I do not mean to cause you any additional distress.”
Erik watches Charles get to his feet, and draw his cloak close. The soft clinking noises that mean he’s looking for something in his bag. Then Charles is an even darker shadow looming against the night, radiating warmth in Erik’s direction. “Let me see your shoulder.”
He looks away, and grits his teeth. It worries him that this wound is taking such a long time to heal. It makes him uncomfortable to be looked after; he’s always looked after himself.
Then again, what is the point of making do with field medicine when one’s current employer is a healer?
Erik catches his breath as quietly as he can and very quickly, when Charles is done with him. The wound site stings, and the bandages press gently down on it. The hands on his skin - a healer's hands, Charles's hands - leave a memory of strength and of warmth.
None of which he can afford to feel. Not pain, not his health or his life, and not his heart.
///
The breeze intensifies into a mistral as Erik follows Charles up and down a series of hills, and then finally, down a long slope into a shallow valley, shaped like a bowl. The last rays of the sun illuminate a path at their feet - some kind of grass, tiny flashes of color.
It’s been a long time since Erik’s seen flowers.
Charles’s steps quicken noticeably, and suddenly Erik is running after him. Reckless leaps and bounds downwards and onwards, headed unerringly toward a cluster of faint lights.
Halfway down into the valley, Erik looks over his shoulder and looks up at the strange ridges of the land, at the trees looming overhead, old growth mixed in with new. Night is falling, and the shadows deepen around him, seem to reach out to him.
He stands there and he feels like he’s standing on the edge of a choice. Strange, that this is where he would face it. It had been a choice to remember the message; it had been a choice to strike out from the cities; it had been a choice to even speak with the healer at all.
But this is the point of no return. He can descend into the valley and follow Charles - who even now has stopped, and is waiting patiently for him, a darker shape in the night that Erik can just barely make out - or he can turn back, and make his way back into the forest and spend his days hunting and being hunted and chasing both the ghosts of his past and the uncertainty of his tomorrows.
Choose, Erik thinks to himself. Quickly, now. Choose.
He can hear the waves more clearly now. He can feel the wind as it shivers through the trees, through their bare branches. He can smell salt and a thousand strange scents.
Nightfall.
He turns away from the forest, and in his mind, he turns away from the cities and from the people in those cities - the people he’s known, the people he’s hunted, the people who’ve hunted him. He turns away from his memories.
He looks down at his feet as he takes the first step on the path, as he moves forward, and suddenly he’s running towards Charles - and Charles turns and together they fall into the valley and its lights.
///
The houses in the village converge on a small square of green grass. There are lights in all the windows: lanterns and flickering glimpses of candle and flame. Fireflies flash cool green sparks over the paths winding around the houses.
Erik drinks it all in. He needs to know about this place. He needs to know about the people who live here. He needs to know what happens here in winter and in spring, in summer and in autumn. He needs to know this place by starlight and by sunlight, in deep darkness and in dawning day.
If he’s going to stand over this village as its protector - one of its protectors, he thinks, watching as a flock of children gathers in a laughing knot around Charles. An unneeded one, perhaps, though he still has no idea of the extent of Charles’s skills and he’s still baffled as to why he’s here at all.
Even so, it would help him to know the lay of the land.
His musings are interrupted with the flare of a lantern being lit and then being carried toward them. “You’re here,” the young man says, skin the color of fine ebony wood, a smile like a beacon in the night, and he holds his other hand out to Charles. “The children were starting to think we should send a search party after you.”
“I am sorry to keep everyone waiting,” Charles says, “but our...newcomer has his reasons for being so delayed. Erik?” He turns, and the lantern light throws his scars into sharp relief against his features. “This is my...ah, well, he insists on being called an apprentice, though he is a skilled healer in his own right, now.”
“I’m Armando,” the young man says. “Welcome.”
“Erik. Thank you,” he says after a long moment.
Charles is at his side again. “I’ll wager you’re tired, and not just from your roundabout route here. Come, you may stay in the infirmary tonight, and we’ll see about moving you to better quarters in the morning. I do have to see about your wound - if it doesn’t respond to the first course of treatment, I’ll investigate further, and perhaps we’ll try something else. I won’t have you succumbing to infection, and you haven’t even begun your task yet.”
He’s about to follow as Charles makes his way down another footpath, but there’s a tug on his sleeve, and it is all Erik can do to avoid jumping or drawing one of his knives.
“Down here,” a girl’s voice says.
She has red hair that glows with a dull copper hue under the lanterns. Brown eyes so light-colored they almost flash golden in the night. She looks about ten or twelve, and she carries the child in her arms very gently, and very confidently. “Hello,” she says in a whisper.
Erik blinks, confused, and then gets down on one knee to look her in the eyes. “Tell me your name,” he says.
“I’m Raven, and this is Alex,” the girl says, and she steps in closer, cautiously.
Erik watches her eyes as they flick over his weapons, and he can tell by the look on her face that she’s wondering what else he’s hiding under his sleeves and in his shirt. He peers at the little boy - wide blue eyes several shades darker than Charles’s, a shock of blonde hair that washes out to white in the light of the lanterns.
As he watches, Alex giggles, and flails out with one small fist that comes within scant inches of making contact with Erik’s nose, but Raven only smiles and catches Alex’s hand; she hums to him, and Alex gurgles once and falls abruptly asleep.
“He does that,” Raven says, fondly, and then, with a little quirk of a smile that ought to be out of place on her young features, she adds, “You’ve not been around children before.”
Erik almost wants to wince, but he’d have to look away from her to do that, and he - he won’t. For some reason this child sees him and his weapons, and yet she trusts him. She looks at him and smiles, and he is forcibly reminded of Charles...
...Who is still standing a few feet away. His hood is drawn down over his remarkable eyes - and his terrifying scars.
But Erik can clearly see the smile lurking in the lines around his mouth, and he wants to respond, and doesn’t know how, except to try and smile back.
He tries his best.
Raven laughs again, and hitches Alex more securely into the crook of one arm so she can reach out to him. A brief touch of her free hand on his forearm, and then she’s turning away, heading towards one of the other houses.
Erik follows in Charles’s footsteps as he makes his way toward the largest building in the little village. “This is my...my infirmary, and my home,” Charles says, and waves a hand at the interiors. Six empty pallets laid out in a half-circle around the great hearth, and curtained-off areas on either side. The fire is a low, gentle glow, barely enough to illuminate the hangings on the walls.
As he watches, Charles pulls a bundle from a chest, and throws it lightly onto one of the pallets; he makes up the bed with a few quick motions - a pillow, a close-woven sheet, a light blanket. “There,” he says, and he finally pushes his hood back, and he is wearing a small, genuine smile once again. “Get some rest. Sleep as long as you wish. If you wish to use the necessary, go through that curtain, out the door, and turn left.”
“Thank you,” Erik suddenly says, because there is nothing else he can say, and because he is so surprised, and so worn out. “For saving my life. For this,” and he motions to his bandaged arm. “And for....” He gestures to the infirmary, to the sleepy darkness outside.
Charles frowns, very briefly, and looks away; the next smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Don’t thank me yet.”
Before Erik can ask him for any explanations Charles is backing into the other curtained alcove.
Strange, that he smiles so much, Erik thinks. Charles has an entire arsenal of smiles; there are a few honest ones, and a few real ones, and all the others seem to be some shade of falsehood.
He’s seen healers smile to offer commiseration.
Charles smiles like they do.
He falls asleep to that thought, and to the distant shudder and crash of water and wind.
Part Three - One step forward, two steps back
author: ilovetakahana
word count: approx. 2400 in this installment
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr; Raven Darkholme, Alex Summers, Armando Munoz
rating: R [may go up in later chapters]
notes: Continuing from this, and this. First part is here. These are not the Charles and Erik you think you know.
Work in Progress. Please heed the rating.
Also archived at http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/.
It’s the shift in the wind, he thinks. It’s the sounds in the trees. Distant bird song, and beyond that, a soft soughing rhythm, faint but persistent. It makes him think of advance and of retreat.
Erik starts awake. A moment of panic as a bolt of pain shoots down his arm. He moves that shoulder experimentally, finds the movement restricted.
Bit by bit he remembers as he peels away his sleeve and finds the thick pad of white cloth tied neatly in place, the knots secure but not tight. They’ve been tied off by knowledgeable hands.
How many years of practice, Erik wonders, must a healer have before he can be considered experienced? And what if that healer lived and fought through a conflict?
He’s known healers who were scarcely striplings but who had tended to the injured and to the dying with terrible, worn-in stoicism, nothing that sat well on their faces.
Charles looks like he’s gone beyond stoicism, if those scars are anything to go by.
Thinking about it leads Erik to a moment of stillness, like standing among eternal rocks. He remembers a man calling out commands and, very occasionally, a brief word of encouragement; he remembers rough hands around a quarterstaff. He remembers a flash of a woman’s red hair catching on a knife, cut ends falling short and uneven; he remembers a grimace that’s half a smile and half a map of scars and old pain.
He remembers fighting beside others, remembers leading and following, remembers laughing and sparring with the man and the woman. Remembers looking up into his eyes while he tended Erik’s injuries on some battlefield in some town as they fled. Remembers watching her rough, steady hands throw knives into a target several feet away.
He isn’t really permitted memories; he can barely remember where he’s from, and where he’s been. For the longest time, he’s thought only about the weapons in his hands, the stones the ground the floors beneath his feet as he runs.
He knows, though, that the next time he sees that man and that woman again it will be too late, and too soon, and.... They are familiar to him, and important, and now he can’t see them, for fear of his life - and of theirs.
Erik shakes his head roughly, dispels the memories as best as he can. The trees are shadows both protective and forbidding; Erik looks up, suspiciously. Everything above him is dark and strange and unfamiliar; he can just barely see the leafless branches forming a canopy overhead, and through them he catches a slivered glimpse of a faraway starless sky.
More movement close by, and Erik looks past the little fire, past the faintly glowing embers. There isn’t enough light to see everything, but he can just about make out the figure sitting quietly on the other side of the clearing. His eyes seem to glitter from the depths of his hood; he would fade into the darkness, Erik thinks, if not for that strange light.
“Hello, Erik,” Charles whispers, eyes on the ashes. “Do you hurt?”
“I...no.”
“Something else woke you.”
“Yes, but. Do you do that to all your new acquaintances? Do you try to guess what they are thinking of, and speak to them of it?”
That gets Erik a brief, wondering kind of frown, that dissolves into a smile like a blade. Charles’s expression is beautiful and haunting and frightening all at once - and it makes Erik look away. There is a strange ache in him, something that seems to pull him in a thousand different directions, something he already knows he can’t run away from.
Charles is speaking. “I’m a healer, remember,” and the smile shifts again, turns into something stranger, something self-deprecating. “And I have spent so many years living in pain, and so many more ministering to people in pain. Pain is like a smile; an expression that holds so many possible meanings. And you, Erik, you’ve a face I can read like a book.”
“I hope not,” Erik returns, carefully.
Charles laughs, softly. “I mean what I said about pain, but I’m only teasing you about being able to read you like a book. Be easy. I do not mean to cause you any additional distress.”
Erik watches Charles get to his feet, and draw his cloak close. The soft clinking noises that mean he’s looking for something in his bag. Then Charles is an even darker shadow looming against the night, radiating warmth in Erik’s direction. “Let me see your shoulder.”
He looks away, and grits his teeth. It worries him that this wound is taking such a long time to heal. It makes him uncomfortable to be looked after; he’s always looked after himself.
Then again, what is the point of making do with field medicine when one’s current employer is a healer?
Erik catches his breath as quietly as he can and very quickly, when Charles is done with him. The wound site stings, and the bandages press gently down on it. The hands on his skin - a healer's hands, Charles's hands - leave a memory of strength and of warmth.
None of which he can afford to feel. Not pain, not his health or his life, and not his heart.
///
The breeze intensifies into a mistral as Erik follows Charles up and down a series of hills, and then finally, down a long slope into a shallow valley, shaped like a bowl. The last rays of the sun illuminate a path at their feet - some kind of grass, tiny flashes of color.
It’s been a long time since Erik’s seen flowers.
Charles’s steps quicken noticeably, and suddenly Erik is running after him. Reckless leaps and bounds downwards and onwards, headed unerringly toward a cluster of faint lights.
Halfway down into the valley, Erik looks over his shoulder and looks up at the strange ridges of the land, at the trees looming overhead, old growth mixed in with new. Night is falling, and the shadows deepen around him, seem to reach out to him.
He stands there and he feels like he’s standing on the edge of a choice. Strange, that this is where he would face it. It had been a choice to remember the message; it had been a choice to strike out from the cities; it had been a choice to even speak with the healer at all.
But this is the point of no return. He can descend into the valley and follow Charles - who even now has stopped, and is waiting patiently for him, a darker shape in the night that Erik can just barely make out - or he can turn back, and make his way back into the forest and spend his days hunting and being hunted and chasing both the ghosts of his past and the uncertainty of his tomorrows.
Choose, Erik thinks to himself. Quickly, now. Choose.
He can hear the waves more clearly now. He can feel the wind as it shivers through the trees, through their bare branches. He can smell salt and a thousand strange scents.
Nightfall.
He turns away from the forest, and in his mind, he turns away from the cities and from the people in those cities - the people he’s known, the people he’s hunted, the people who’ve hunted him. He turns away from his memories.
He looks down at his feet as he takes the first step on the path, as he moves forward, and suddenly he’s running towards Charles - and Charles turns and together they fall into the valley and its lights.
///
The houses in the village converge on a small square of green grass. There are lights in all the windows: lanterns and flickering glimpses of candle and flame. Fireflies flash cool green sparks over the paths winding around the houses.
Erik drinks it all in. He needs to know about this place. He needs to know about the people who live here. He needs to know what happens here in winter and in spring, in summer and in autumn. He needs to know this place by starlight and by sunlight, in deep darkness and in dawning day.
If he’s going to stand over this village as its protector - one of its protectors, he thinks, watching as a flock of children gathers in a laughing knot around Charles. An unneeded one, perhaps, though he still has no idea of the extent of Charles’s skills and he’s still baffled as to why he’s here at all.
Even so, it would help him to know the lay of the land.
His musings are interrupted with the flare of a lantern being lit and then being carried toward them. “You’re here,” the young man says, skin the color of fine ebony wood, a smile like a beacon in the night, and he holds his other hand out to Charles. “The children were starting to think we should send a search party after you.”
“I am sorry to keep everyone waiting,” Charles says, “but our...newcomer has his reasons for being so delayed. Erik?” He turns, and the lantern light throws his scars into sharp relief against his features. “This is my...ah, well, he insists on being called an apprentice, though he is a skilled healer in his own right, now.”
“I’m Armando,” the young man says. “Welcome.”
“Erik. Thank you,” he says after a long moment.
Charles is at his side again. “I’ll wager you’re tired, and not just from your roundabout route here. Come, you may stay in the infirmary tonight, and we’ll see about moving you to better quarters in the morning. I do have to see about your wound - if it doesn’t respond to the first course of treatment, I’ll investigate further, and perhaps we’ll try something else. I won’t have you succumbing to infection, and you haven’t even begun your task yet.”
He’s about to follow as Charles makes his way down another footpath, but there’s a tug on his sleeve, and it is all Erik can do to avoid jumping or drawing one of his knives.
“Down here,” a girl’s voice says.
She has red hair that glows with a dull copper hue under the lanterns. Brown eyes so light-colored they almost flash golden in the night. She looks about ten or twelve, and she carries the child in her arms very gently, and very confidently. “Hello,” she says in a whisper.
Erik blinks, confused, and then gets down on one knee to look her in the eyes. “Tell me your name,” he says.
“I’m Raven, and this is Alex,” the girl says, and she steps in closer, cautiously.
Erik watches her eyes as they flick over his weapons, and he can tell by the look on her face that she’s wondering what else he’s hiding under his sleeves and in his shirt. He peers at the little boy - wide blue eyes several shades darker than Charles’s, a shock of blonde hair that washes out to white in the light of the lanterns.
As he watches, Alex giggles, and flails out with one small fist that comes within scant inches of making contact with Erik’s nose, but Raven only smiles and catches Alex’s hand; she hums to him, and Alex gurgles once and falls abruptly asleep.
“He does that,” Raven says, fondly, and then, with a little quirk of a smile that ought to be out of place on her young features, she adds, “You’ve not been around children before.”
Erik almost wants to wince, but he’d have to look away from her to do that, and he - he won’t. For some reason this child sees him and his weapons, and yet she trusts him. She looks at him and smiles, and he is forcibly reminded of Charles...
...Who is still standing a few feet away. His hood is drawn down over his remarkable eyes - and his terrifying scars.
But Erik can clearly see the smile lurking in the lines around his mouth, and he wants to respond, and doesn’t know how, except to try and smile back.
He tries his best.
Raven laughs again, and hitches Alex more securely into the crook of one arm so she can reach out to him. A brief touch of her free hand on his forearm, and then she’s turning away, heading towards one of the other houses.
Erik follows in Charles’s footsteps as he makes his way toward the largest building in the little village. “This is my...my infirmary, and my home,” Charles says, and waves a hand at the interiors. Six empty pallets laid out in a half-circle around the great hearth, and curtained-off areas on either side. The fire is a low, gentle glow, barely enough to illuminate the hangings on the walls.
As he watches, Charles pulls a bundle from a chest, and throws it lightly onto one of the pallets; he makes up the bed with a few quick motions - a pillow, a close-woven sheet, a light blanket. “There,” he says, and he finally pushes his hood back, and he is wearing a small, genuine smile once again. “Get some rest. Sleep as long as you wish. If you wish to use the necessary, go through that curtain, out the door, and turn left.”
“Thank you,” Erik suddenly says, because there is nothing else he can say, and because he is so surprised, and so worn out. “For saving my life. For this,” and he motions to his bandaged arm. “And for....” He gestures to the infirmary, to the sleepy darkness outside.
Charles frowns, very briefly, and looks away; the next smile doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Don’t thank me yet.”
Before Erik can ask him for any explanations Charles is backing into the other curtained alcove.
Strange, that he smiles so much, Erik thinks. Charles has an entire arsenal of smiles; there are a few honest ones, and a few real ones, and all the others seem to be some shade of falsehood.
He’s seen healers smile to offer commiseration.
Charles smiles like they do.
He falls asleep to that thought, and to the distant shudder and crash of water and wind.
Part Three - One step forward, two steps back