Fic: In Accord, Part Three - One step forward, two steps back (X-Men: First Class, R, WIP)
title: In Accord, Part Three - One step forward, two steps back
author: ilovetakahana
word count: approx. 2650 in this installment
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr; Sean Cassidy
rating: R [may go up in later chapters]
notes: Continuing from this, and this. Part One, Part Two. 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/.
Erik dreams of stone balcony and of brick wall. He dreams of roof and of pavement, of lamp post and of window pane.He dreams of salt on his tongue, bitter and heavy, drowning out all other sensations.
Now the sea is in his dreams though he has been in the village for only two or three days. In his dreams, he hears the wind as it blows, as it changes the world around him. He hears the crash of the waves as the shadows - always just out of his reach - ebb and flow at his feet.
He blinks. The houses of the city of his dreams are suddenly frosted over with a thin wreath of salt spray, and the streets are cloaked in a heavy, slow-flowing mist. In the next moment, a silent starless night falls, and the lamps flicker to life, casting their pale lights out against the dark.
Erik is standing atop a roof. Below him is a cross-ways: three roads meeting. He thinks, distantly, of old tales about cities, about cross-ways, about misfortune lurking around every corner. There are heavy footsteps circling just beyond the reach of the lamps. He looks around, alert, wary - he cannot tell if the footsteps are approaching the cross-ways or retreating from it. All he knows is that when he drops to the pavement there will be a shadow waiting to greet him, standing just out of arm's reach.
A shadow in a dark cloak, and he has seen too many of those in his short, eventful life. He draws one of his knives, throws it at the shadow, and there is a soft cry. The cloak crumples to the stones. He approaches, and with dread and a reckless kind of dream-courage he reaches for the hood, intending to reveal its wearer's face.
Erik wakes up.
Dawn is a distant glimmer on the horizon, a faint faraway gleam through the cracked glass of the window.
He turns away and flexes his bandaged shoulder: the first thing he does when he wakes and the last thing he does before he sleeps.
Erik peels off his shirt: the movement is easy and unhampered and he peers at his own skin with a careful but distant regard. The dark edges of his bruises, slowly fading to a mottled yellow-green, are still visible around the bandages. As he does in his dream, he draws one of his knives, and the knots of the linen bandage give way easily. The wound is still a dark, angry red against his skin - but there's no more blood welling around the edges of the scab, not even when he rotates his shoulders more vigorously; not even when he throws an experimental punch.
He was healing nicely, all due to luck and skill. Luck on his part that he had chosen this course of action. Skill on Charles's part.
The pale orange light on the horizon reminds him, suddenly, of a detail from his dreams - this one more familiar to him, unlike the softly unsettling sigh of the sea. Sometimes when Erik dreams, especially when he's still coming down from the awful euphoria of a successful kill, sometimes he sees a boy with orange hair, freckles like dark stars scattered over his face, and strange gray eyes. A boy who ought not to exist. A boy who walks through battles and blood and bodies unharmed, unseen, serving as a guide to the dead, serving as a warning and as a reminder to those left behind.
He remembers the last time he'd seen the boy: a night of pain, of terrible mistakes.
Erik forces himself to turn away from that darkness; forces himself to move forward, into the coming day. A light cape for the wind. A handful of knives on his belt. His sword in its scabbard of simple tooled leather.
There are many gaps in Erik's memory; some he created himself, and many he wishes he could fill. The scabbard is one - he cannot remember who gave it to him. The sword is another - he cannot remember if it came to him bare, or new.
All he remembers is the smell of blood on steel, and he is very nearly inured to it, and it is very nearly the only thing he can smell on his hands.
The village slumbers on in the inky gloom, in the crepuscule light of near dawn. Few lanterns remain lit and, as Erik watches, several go out; a steady breeze rises as if to announce the coming of a new day.
As he holds his cape closed with one hand he thinks carefully about the village, about the way it's laid out. He thinks he remembers its limits, the locations of its houses. The valley is shaped like a shallow bowl, except for its southern border.
Erik quarters the village - it is small, and the houses are clustered closely together - before he turns south, to the place where the rocks give way, and he starts walking in that direction.
Having spent the first few nights in residence methodically and patiently committing to memory the lay of the village, he turns his steps at last to the place that he knows nothing about.
As he walks, the walls of the valley change from the rough jagged rock of the bowl, and he soon finds himself walking through a wide passage framed in smooth dark rock. It throws back distorted reflections of his face and hand, like crazed old glass, when he reaches out to it in surprise. The grass at his feet is tangled in both good, rich soil and a strange, powdery black sand that crunches and eventually yields beneath his boots.
The passage opens out onto a half-circle stretch of coast, onto the strangely soothing crash of waves. The passage opens out onto a broad slope running down to a sharp edge, where the rocks and the sand flow to an end and the water rushes in towards a beginning.
Erik thinks of battle, of conquest, and of union, and as he stands there, the sun breaks free of its confines, and begins to rise in the east - the world is washed in pale golden light, and Erik flings up a hand to cover his eyes, and he turns away from image and afterimage, stumbles blindly and turns his back on the sun.
And when he blinks, and looks up, he suffers his second shock.
Charles, standing right in the shallows. The wild water shatters and breaks on the rocks behind him, washing his bare feet with softer ripples and foam. The wind pulls at hood and hem of his cloak, revealing his face, whipping at the shining tangle of his hair. White mixed in with the silver strands and the dark - and Erik realizes with a start that it's the salt on the wind, and he puts his own hand in his hair and it comes away glittering with crystalline grit.
Charles's scars are always a source of surprise and disbelief, and now they seem even starker because of the light falling on him. Erik wants to draw closer, wants to stay away. The lines in his face are almost familiar, as is the scarf. The cloth rippling and moving on the relentless breeze.
Erik can guess the origin of the three scars below Charles's eye easily enough: claws of some kind. What he is uncertain about is whether the claws belonged to an animal, or to a weapon wielded by a human. He has heard about other...soldiers using such exotic weapons.
But he still doesn't know the story behind the collar, the dark scar of an almost-hanging. He doesn't want to know, and no one in the village seems to want to tell - but he can't help but stare, when Charles drops his guard and lets it show. Those moments, however, are few and far between - even here.
As Erik watches, Charles continues to practice. Shoulders braced in a perfect line. Arms corded with muscle. Wrists held with just the right amount of tension. Right hand relaxed on the bow; left hand nocking an arrow, and drawing back the bowstring.
Erik feels rather than hears the steady thock-thock-thock of arrows striking the target: as regular as the pounding beat of the waves on the shore. Each arrow lands in or very near the red bull's eye - and with a start, Erik realizes he's placing the arrows very close to each other, as close to touching as he can manage.
Charles has almost preternatural accuracy, preternatural consistency - every new draw is identical to the previous one.
Erik watches the archer take the last arrow from the quiver at his feet - watches him as he lets it fly, watches the smile on his face. Half rueful and half amused.
Eventually the smile turns into a soft chuckle, almost lost in the voices of the waves, and then Charles almost falls out of his perfectly tensed, perfectly balanced stance: he drops his shoulders and his elbows. He rests one end of the longbow on the sand - again the incongruous image of the weapon being taller than its wielder - but this doesn't seem to trouble Charles, who reaches for the tip with a deft, easy movement.
"Good morning, Erik," he murmurs, and he unstrings his bow, tucks the coiled-up bowstring away into an inner pocket of his coat. "I hope you are well, and that you slept well."
"I'm all right. And you?" Erik says, turning away from his eyes to look again at the shifting blues of the sea.
"Tired, as I am every morning," Charles says. "I have been a student of the bow for six years now, and every morning since I have gotten up at first light to shoot fifty arrows at a target. Perhaps I should have gotten used to it at some point - but right now everything hurts like I've been in a fight."
Erik turns, and Charles is standing at the target, muttering to himself as he pulls the arrows out.
He doesn't hesitate, even though what he has in mind could only be construed as a joke by the company he used to keep. After all, he, too, needs the practice.
He pulls out one of his knives, takes a stance. He slides forward onto one foot, distributes his weight as best as he can on the shifting sand. He sights carefully - and then he throws the blade. He closes his eyes as it leaves his fingers.
He hears the thock clearly, and he waits and listens for the sound of someone in pain.
He hears the waves instead - and a darkly amused laugh.
Erik opens his eyes, already smiling, and Charles still has his right hand on the target. Erik's knife is still shivering between Charles's thumb and pointer finger.
"Not bad," Charles says, and when Erik drifts closer, there is a light very much like challenge in those blue eyes. "But I know someone who's better."
"Are you talking about yourself?" Erik asks as he pulls the knife out and drops it back into its sheath on his belt.
"Goodness no, not me. You met her on your first night here. About so tall," and Charles holds out his hand to indicate a point just above Erik's waist.
It takes Erik a moment to remember - long enough for his jaw to sag slightly open. "Raven?"
"Yes." Charles nods. "I don't know how she came by the skill. She says she comes from weavers; I have simply assumed her family is neither like yours or mine. I won't press her, not until she's ready to tell me - or indeed anyone else here. Even you."
Erik brushes aside the implications, and says, simply, "I know nothing about either - my family or yours."
Erik knows when Charles is standing right by his side; he radiates warmth - for all there's so little of it - a warmth that seems a stark contrast to the wind and to the water.
He almost doesn't want to look because he fears pity. There is a gentle pressure on his wrist. He resists, keeps his eyes on the sand. "You were happy, growing up?" he asks Charles.
"Absolutely not."
The complete conviction in that voice makes Erik look up. Now he sees the strange soft sadness in those blue eyes, the smile full of pain. Charles is looking at him, almost, and at the same time seems to be looking through him, into his past.
It's an expression Erik knows well.
"Some of the scars have faded from my skin," Charles murmurs after a moment, "but they have not faded from my memories."
"Sometimes those are the scars that hurt the most," Erik replies. He blinks, and he watches himself reach out to Charles's wrist in turn.
"I see we understand each other on this point. Perhaps you will understand that this is one of the reasons why I follow the rules that I do." Charles shrugs. "Perhaps not. Still, I am glad."
Erik sighs and looks away. "I don't understand, not yet. And I don't know why it makes you glad to know these things, to remember. Or perhaps I find you strange because I...have forgotten many things, because I would rather forget than remember."
"Maybe you know more of mercy than I do, Erik." Another smile full of shadows, and Charles steps away, looking apologetic. "Because I have lain awake through many a night wracked with painful memories - and I have slept and battled my nightmares, and either way, I cannot say that I have much escaped that pain."
Erik watches his fingers drift up toward his throat, watches him touch the cloth that hides his scar. A shadow falls over that expressive face, over its scars - a shadow that not even the bright morning sunlight sparkling off the water can dispel.
That shadow haunts Erik, suddenly; he remembers seeing it in Charles's face, as he led Erik on the road back to the village.
That shadow haunts him, even as he watches Charles sink gracefully onto the sand, cross-legged, palms cupped over his knees; he closes his eyes and turns his face toward the sun, and his shoulders rise and fall evenly with his breathing.
That shadow haunts him, even as he steps into the space Charles had been occupying, as he draws his sword and begins to walk through his forms. The bright sunlight reflects off the waves and off the blade, and it moves him - but not as much as the incredible stillness of Charles. The same stillness from earlier, reaching for a fresh arrow, nocking it in the same smooth motion and letting it fly a breath later.
As strange as the sea in his dreams. As unsettling as the shadow at the cross-ways.
The fear from the first meeting redoubles and grows within Erik, and not even the easy dance of his forms - familiar, comforting, painless - can dispel it.
Ridiculous to fear Charles, rapt in his meditation as he is.
Erik fears him anyway. He feeds that fear, and his fear of his past and of his memories, into the blade in his hands - he traces out a wide circle on the sand, spiraling in and out, attacking and defending.
At the end, he looks up, to Charles's eyes on him, and he finds himself turning away, and the sun-warmed scene is no match for the foreboding, dark thrill that crackles down Erik's nerves.
And that's when he looks up, looks away - to the image of a boy with bright hair like flames, with eyes like the last fading light of dusk.
"No," Erik whispers, almost desperately. "Not here. Not now."
Part Four - Haunted and hunted
author: ilovetakahana
word count: approx. 2650 in this installment
fandom: X-Men: First Class [movieverse]
characters: Charles Xavier, Erik Lehnsherr; Sean Cassidy
rating: R [may go up in later chapters]
notes: Continuing from this, and this. Part One, Part Two. 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/.
Erik dreams of stone balcony and of brick wall. He dreams of roof and of pavement, of lamp post and of window pane.He dreams of salt on his tongue, bitter and heavy, drowning out all other sensations.
Now the sea is in his dreams though he has been in the village for only two or three days. In his dreams, he hears the wind as it blows, as it changes the world around him. He hears the crash of the waves as the shadows - always just out of his reach - ebb and flow at his feet.
He blinks. The houses of the city of his dreams are suddenly frosted over with a thin wreath of salt spray, and the streets are cloaked in a heavy, slow-flowing mist. In the next moment, a silent starless night falls, and the lamps flicker to life, casting their pale lights out against the dark.
Erik is standing atop a roof. Below him is a cross-ways: three roads meeting. He thinks, distantly, of old tales about cities, about cross-ways, about misfortune lurking around every corner. There are heavy footsteps circling just beyond the reach of the lamps. He looks around, alert, wary - he cannot tell if the footsteps are approaching the cross-ways or retreating from it. All he knows is that when he drops to the pavement there will be a shadow waiting to greet him, standing just out of arm's reach.
A shadow in a dark cloak, and he has seen too many of those in his short, eventful life. He draws one of his knives, throws it at the shadow, and there is a soft cry. The cloak crumples to the stones. He approaches, and with dread and a reckless kind of dream-courage he reaches for the hood, intending to reveal its wearer's face.
Erik wakes up.
Dawn is a distant glimmer on the horizon, a faint faraway gleam through the cracked glass of the window.
He turns away and flexes his bandaged shoulder: the first thing he does when he wakes and the last thing he does before he sleeps.
Erik peels off his shirt: the movement is easy and unhampered and he peers at his own skin with a careful but distant regard. The dark edges of his bruises, slowly fading to a mottled yellow-green, are still visible around the bandages. As he does in his dream, he draws one of his knives, and the knots of the linen bandage give way easily. The wound is still a dark, angry red against his skin - but there's no more blood welling around the edges of the scab, not even when he rotates his shoulders more vigorously; not even when he throws an experimental punch.
He was healing nicely, all due to luck and skill. Luck on his part that he had chosen this course of action. Skill on Charles's part.
The pale orange light on the horizon reminds him, suddenly, of a detail from his dreams - this one more familiar to him, unlike the softly unsettling sigh of the sea. Sometimes when Erik dreams, especially when he's still coming down from the awful euphoria of a successful kill, sometimes he sees a boy with orange hair, freckles like dark stars scattered over his face, and strange gray eyes. A boy who ought not to exist. A boy who walks through battles and blood and bodies unharmed, unseen, serving as a guide to the dead, serving as a warning and as a reminder to those left behind.
He remembers the last time he'd seen the boy: a night of pain, of terrible mistakes.
Erik forces himself to turn away from that darkness; forces himself to move forward, into the coming day. A light cape for the wind. A handful of knives on his belt. His sword in its scabbard of simple tooled leather.
There are many gaps in Erik's memory; some he created himself, and many he wishes he could fill. The scabbard is one - he cannot remember who gave it to him. The sword is another - he cannot remember if it came to him bare, or new.
All he remembers is the smell of blood on steel, and he is very nearly inured to it, and it is very nearly the only thing he can smell on his hands.
The village slumbers on in the inky gloom, in the crepuscule light of near dawn. Few lanterns remain lit and, as Erik watches, several go out; a steady breeze rises as if to announce the coming of a new day.
As he holds his cape closed with one hand he thinks carefully about the village, about the way it's laid out. He thinks he remembers its limits, the locations of its houses. The valley is shaped like a shallow bowl, except for its southern border.
Erik quarters the village - it is small, and the houses are clustered closely together - before he turns south, to the place where the rocks give way, and he starts walking in that direction.
Having spent the first few nights in residence methodically and patiently committing to memory the lay of the village, he turns his steps at last to the place that he knows nothing about.
As he walks, the walls of the valley change from the rough jagged rock of the bowl, and he soon finds himself walking through a wide passage framed in smooth dark rock. It throws back distorted reflections of his face and hand, like crazed old glass, when he reaches out to it in surprise. The grass at his feet is tangled in both good, rich soil and a strange, powdery black sand that crunches and eventually yields beneath his boots.
The passage opens out onto a half-circle stretch of coast, onto the strangely soothing crash of waves. The passage opens out onto a broad slope running down to a sharp edge, where the rocks and the sand flow to an end and the water rushes in towards a beginning.
Erik thinks of battle, of conquest, and of union, and as he stands there, the sun breaks free of its confines, and begins to rise in the east - the world is washed in pale golden light, and Erik flings up a hand to cover his eyes, and he turns away from image and afterimage, stumbles blindly and turns his back on the sun.
And when he blinks, and looks up, he suffers his second shock.
Charles, standing right in the shallows. The wild water shatters and breaks on the rocks behind him, washing his bare feet with softer ripples and foam. The wind pulls at hood and hem of his cloak, revealing his face, whipping at the shining tangle of his hair. White mixed in with the silver strands and the dark - and Erik realizes with a start that it's the salt on the wind, and he puts his own hand in his hair and it comes away glittering with crystalline grit.
Charles's scars are always a source of surprise and disbelief, and now they seem even starker because of the light falling on him. Erik wants to draw closer, wants to stay away. The lines in his face are almost familiar, as is the scarf. The cloth rippling and moving on the relentless breeze.
Erik can guess the origin of the three scars below Charles's eye easily enough: claws of some kind. What he is uncertain about is whether the claws belonged to an animal, or to a weapon wielded by a human. He has heard about other...soldiers using such exotic weapons.
But he still doesn't know the story behind the collar, the dark scar of an almost-hanging. He doesn't want to know, and no one in the village seems to want to tell - but he can't help but stare, when Charles drops his guard and lets it show. Those moments, however, are few and far between - even here.
As Erik watches, Charles continues to practice. Shoulders braced in a perfect line. Arms corded with muscle. Wrists held with just the right amount of tension. Right hand relaxed on the bow; left hand nocking an arrow, and drawing back the bowstring.
Erik feels rather than hears the steady thock-thock-thock of arrows striking the target: as regular as the pounding beat of the waves on the shore. Each arrow lands in or very near the red bull's eye - and with a start, Erik realizes he's placing the arrows very close to each other, as close to touching as he can manage.
Charles has almost preternatural accuracy, preternatural consistency - every new draw is identical to the previous one.
Erik watches the archer take the last arrow from the quiver at his feet - watches him as he lets it fly, watches the smile on his face. Half rueful and half amused.
Eventually the smile turns into a soft chuckle, almost lost in the voices of the waves, and then Charles almost falls out of his perfectly tensed, perfectly balanced stance: he drops his shoulders and his elbows. He rests one end of the longbow on the sand - again the incongruous image of the weapon being taller than its wielder - but this doesn't seem to trouble Charles, who reaches for the tip with a deft, easy movement.
"Good morning, Erik," he murmurs, and he unstrings his bow, tucks the coiled-up bowstring away into an inner pocket of his coat. "I hope you are well, and that you slept well."
"I'm all right. And you?" Erik says, turning away from his eyes to look again at the shifting blues of the sea.
"Tired, as I am every morning," Charles says. "I have been a student of the bow for six years now, and every morning since I have gotten up at first light to shoot fifty arrows at a target. Perhaps I should have gotten used to it at some point - but right now everything hurts like I've been in a fight."
Erik turns, and Charles is standing at the target, muttering to himself as he pulls the arrows out.
He doesn't hesitate, even though what he has in mind could only be construed as a joke by the company he used to keep. After all, he, too, needs the practice.
He pulls out one of his knives, takes a stance. He slides forward onto one foot, distributes his weight as best as he can on the shifting sand. He sights carefully - and then he throws the blade. He closes his eyes as it leaves his fingers.
He hears the thock clearly, and he waits and listens for the sound of someone in pain.
He hears the waves instead - and a darkly amused laugh.
Erik opens his eyes, already smiling, and Charles still has his right hand on the target. Erik's knife is still shivering between Charles's thumb and pointer finger.
"Not bad," Charles says, and when Erik drifts closer, there is a light very much like challenge in those blue eyes. "But I know someone who's better."
"Are you talking about yourself?" Erik asks as he pulls the knife out and drops it back into its sheath on his belt.
"Goodness no, not me. You met her on your first night here. About so tall," and Charles holds out his hand to indicate a point just above Erik's waist.
It takes Erik a moment to remember - long enough for his jaw to sag slightly open. "Raven?"
"Yes." Charles nods. "I don't know how she came by the skill. She says she comes from weavers; I have simply assumed her family is neither like yours or mine. I won't press her, not until she's ready to tell me - or indeed anyone else here. Even you."
Erik brushes aside the implications, and says, simply, "I know nothing about either - my family or yours."
Erik knows when Charles is standing right by his side; he radiates warmth - for all there's so little of it - a warmth that seems a stark contrast to the wind and to the water.
He almost doesn't want to look because he fears pity. There is a gentle pressure on his wrist. He resists, keeps his eyes on the sand. "You were happy, growing up?" he asks Charles.
"Absolutely not."
The complete conviction in that voice makes Erik look up. Now he sees the strange soft sadness in those blue eyes, the smile full of pain. Charles is looking at him, almost, and at the same time seems to be looking through him, into his past.
It's an expression Erik knows well.
"Some of the scars have faded from my skin," Charles murmurs after a moment, "but they have not faded from my memories."
"Sometimes those are the scars that hurt the most," Erik replies. He blinks, and he watches himself reach out to Charles's wrist in turn.
"I see we understand each other on this point. Perhaps you will understand that this is one of the reasons why I follow the rules that I do." Charles shrugs. "Perhaps not. Still, I am glad."
Erik sighs and looks away. "I don't understand, not yet. And I don't know why it makes you glad to know these things, to remember. Or perhaps I find you strange because I...have forgotten many things, because I would rather forget than remember."
"Maybe you know more of mercy than I do, Erik." Another smile full of shadows, and Charles steps away, looking apologetic. "Because I have lain awake through many a night wracked with painful memories - and I have slept and battled my nightmares, and either way, I cannot say that I have much escaped that pain."
Erik watches his fingers drift up toward his throat, watches him touch the cloth that hides his scar. A shadow falls over that expressive face, over its scars - a shadow that not even the bright morning sunlight sparkling off the water can dispel.
That shadow haunts Erik, suddenly; he remembers seeing it in Charles's face, as he led Erik on the road back to the village.
That shadow haunts him, even as he watches Charles sink gracefully onto the sand, cross-legged, palms cupped over his knees; he closes his eyes and turns his face toward the sun, and his shoulders rise and fall evenly with his breathing.
That shadow haunts him, even as he steps into the space Charles had been occupying, as he draws his sword and begins to walk through his forms. The bright sunlight reflects off the waves and off the blade, and it moves him - but not as much as the incredible stillness of Charles. The same stillness from earlier, reaching for a fresh arrow, nocking it in the same smooth motion and letting it fly a breath later.
As strange as the sea in his dreams. As unsettling as the shadow at the cross-ways.
The fear from the first meeting redoubles and grows within Erik, and not even the easy dance of his forms - familiar, comforting, painless - can dispel it.
Ridiculous to fear Charles, rapt in his meditation as he is.
Erik fears him anyway. He feeds that fear, and his fear of his past and of his memories, into the blade in his hands - he traces out a wide circle on the sand, spiraling in and out, attacking and defending.
At the end, he looks up, to Charles's eyes on him, and he finds himself turning away, and the sun-warmed scene is no match for the foreboding, dark thrill that crackles down Erik's nerves.
And that's when he looks up, looks away - to the image of a boy with bright hair like flames, with eyes like the last fading light of dusk.
"No," Erik whispers, almost desperately. "Not here. Not now."
Part Four - Haunted and hunted