and quietly keep walking . X-Men: First Class . Charles/Erik kinda . One Shot
Title: and quietly keep walking
Author: pprfaith
Summary: Erik abhors silence and Charles is nothing if not noise. Sequel to make your wars. Modern-day AU, no powers.
Warnings: Less of a trigger bingo than last time: Talk of war, child abuse and PTSD.
Rating: PG-13
Word-count: A bit under 5000.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters, even if I really wish I did. No money being made, which is also sad.
A/N: This is the first time in eight years of writing fanfiction that I actually shortened a story in a substantial way in hopes of making it work better. I’d appreciate any concrit you’ve got. Also, thank you for the amazing comments on the first story! Un-betaed.
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and quietly keep walking
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Prologue
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Silence.
Erik didn’t mind silence.
Silence meant there was no gunfire, no men sleeping and snoring all around him in their graves. It meant no-one was screaming. No children crying under their beds, no drunken men banging on doors, no wounded soldiers falling, falling, falling.
Silence was good.
Except for the fact that it was too silent.
Yes. Oxymoron. Neurosis. Psychosis. Thanks to Emma, Erik knew all the fun words to describe what was fucked in his head.
He liked silence because it was the absence of things and couldn’t deal with it for the exact same reason. Erik needed sensation to remind him that he was alive, but not enough, because that would tip him over into battle mode again.
Last week Emma had slammed a door unexpectedly while he’d been napping and he’d almost bitten her head off for it. No reason. Just that squirming in his gun, fearhateadrenalinepanicfightfightfight.
War had taught him some of that, but not nearly all.
He remembered being whole once, he was fairly sure he did. But it had ended far too early - Alles ist gut - and now... human memory was a distorted, ugly thing.
So. Silence.
Too much of it, white walls closing in, desert winds howling in his memory, screams muted by death and distance. There had to be a place, somewhere between noise and silence, where sanity was reachable, but Erik had never found it.
Inhale. Exhale. He was out of cigarettes. Maybe the withdrawal was making him loopy. He should get up, get dressed, go downstairs and walk the four blocks to the store, stock up. Smokes and booze. Better than any meds Emma would try to shove down his throat.
He didn’t move, paralyzed between the sheets, head pressed against the cool wall, listening to his own silence.
Later, half an hour or five minutes, the phone rang on the nightstand, pulling him out of his headspace. Erik closed his eyes in relief and answered.
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Two hours later Charles Xavier slid into the seat across from Erik the same way Erik had decided the man did everything. Gracefully with a tinge of childishness, like a boy playing at being an old man or, maybe, an old man playing at being a boy. He certainly dressed the part of the old man even if, according to Emma, he partied like a frat boy.
Erik was hard pressed to imagine Charles Xavier doing a keg stand, but then he was only here because had been about to go berserk on the walls of Emma’s guestroom because they were white and quiet, so what did he care?
He flicked his cigarette with his thumb, ash blowing away on the breeze as he took a deep breath. Calm. Quiet. Inhale. Exhale. He felt himself slow down, let himself be still. Xavier - Charles - frowned at the cigarette but said nothing. Erik had chosen a table on the restaurant’s terrace for the express purpose of being able to smoke because a) he was pretty much a chain smoker these days, much as he hated to admit such a weakness and b) there was no way his second meeting with the esteemed Charles Xavier was going to be any less nerve wrecking than the first had been.
“So,” he asked as soon as the other man sat down, not bothering with small talk, “Did you want to practice flirting on my some more or did the urge to analyse me finally overwhelm you?”
Charles looked at him wide-eyed for a moment, then laughed. “Which would you prefer, my friend?”
There it was again. My friend.
Erik raised his eyebrows skilfully. “If you have more tacky pick-up lines, then by all means, go ahead.”
He might get a laugh out of it, if nothing else. And, loath as he was to admit it, the other man was certainly easy on the eyes, all blue eyes and red lips, soft and warm.
Charles sighed as he tried to flag down a waitress. “Ah, yes. Emma has already informed me of your... distrust of psychiatrists.”
Erik shrugged. “I’ve seen too many in my life,” he admitted because that wasn’t exactly a secret. Charles was Emma’s boss and as such, knew about her childhood and, by extension, also about Erik’s. There was no point in getting angry about inescapable facts of life.
“We all have,” Charles simply agreed, with less flair than Erik expected of a man wearing dress pants for a casual Saturday lunch with an acquaintance. Facts. Perhaps Charles, too, understood that. For a brief moment, Erik found himself almost liking the other man. He stomped the feeling down ruthlessly and locked it back into its corner. He didn’t want to like this man.
Suddenly, Charles brightened, “I do have an excellent new pick-up line, though, now that you mention it. In involves genetic mutation.”
The way he beamed at Erik made it impossible to ask what the fuck. “Genetic mutation?”
Charles waved a hand, smiled at the waitress who was finally putting in an appearance and ordered himself a coffee and a salad. Erik went for coffee without the salad and they waited for the girl to leave before Charles continued. “Yes. I have a PhD in genetics, has Emma told you?”
“No. What made you switch from hard to soft science?”
A shrug. “I found, after less than a year of seeing only the inside of a lab, that I wanted to be elsewhere. So I went back to university and got a degree that would allow me to do something useful in the world.”
Erik fought the opposing urges to either pat the man on the head or run away. An idealist, God save him. He’d met people like that before, people who thought that all it took as one good man, some hope and some faith.
Most of them had died screaming.
“Why am I here?”
“I can’t have invited you for a simple conversation?”
With a sigh, Erik shook his head just as the waitress returned, balancing two cups of coffee. She put them down in front of the men, smiled flirtatiously at Charles, who returned the smile with one of his own and a cocky eyebrow. He should have looked smarmy but somehow managed adorable.
“Is there anything else I can get you gentlemen?”
Charles gave Erik a brief, questioning look, then turned his full attention back on the girl. She looked a bit overwhelmed by it. “Thank you, dear, we’re perfectly alright.”
The waitress swooned at his accent and Erik suppressed a roll of his eyes as he shoved himself into the conversation with a quick and very British, “Thanks for now, love.”
She blinked doe eyes at him before smiling and nodding. “You salad will be just a minute,” she informed Charles and then finally left them alone.
Charles waited until she was out of earshot to laugh and pout. “That’s cheating,” he complained.
Erik shrugged. As the son of German immigrants, English was only his second language. Since he had no native English accent, he’d always found it easy to fake all kinds of pronunciation even if he generally preferred to stick with his own, sharp, slightly tinged accent. He would have had an easier time of it if he’d just assimilated completely, but his native tongue - his mother tongue - was all he had left and he’d never been one to go with the flow.
“As if yours is real,” he shot back with a snort.
“It is, actually,” Charles corrected, looking unbearably smug. “I spent my early years in England before my parents decided to move us back to my father’s estate. I’ve always found American English horribly boring. A British accent sounds much better, don’t you think?”
Arrogance, pride, privilege. What was it that made this man so very, unbearably sure of himself, so at home in his skin? Erik had done much the same thing, refusing to leave his accent behind, but instead of making him special it had made him an outsider, he was the Jerry, the German kid, and, occasionally, the Fritz.
Two men, both doing what they wanted, making their own way, living by their own rules. One ended up a burned out soldier slumming in his sister’s guest room, the other gave dinner parties for his sister’s art student friends.
Privilege. In the end that was what it came down to. Charles was from old money and Erik a poor immigrants’ son.
He wanted to be angry at the other man like he’d wanted to be angry the night of the party three weeks before, but he just couldn’t work up the emotion.
He wanted to ask, “What is it that makes you so special?” but he bit his tongue hard enough to keep the words inside, forcing himself to instead go back to the conversation.
“No straight answer means Emma put you up to this.” It came out sharper than he meant it to, but Emma’s mother-henning always made him angry. All he wanted was to be left in peace.
Charles’s smile stayed fixed on his face. “Your sister did indeed mention that you spend too much time staring at walls, but I assure she didn’t put me up to anything.”
This time Erik’s snort bordered on rude because he knew his sister and he knew she meddled like she breathed. Somewhere along the line Emma had decided that her rare talent of getting into people’s heads meant she had free reign to mess with them, too. Her not putting her boss up to anything would have been equivalent to Erik passing up a free smoke. Didn’t happen.
“I have a clean bill of health,” he felt the need to point out, somewhat vindictive and utterly childish. Look Ma, no mental disorder for you to heal.
The amused huff Charles gave bordered on ridiculous. “My friend,” he said, smile tainting his voice, “You grew up in the system. I have absolutely no doubt at all that you could convince an overworked military psychiatrist of anything you pleased in under thirty minutes.”
More perceptive than Erik would have given Charles credit for, given the man’s penchant for arrogance. Almost a decade of being shuffled between social workers and psychiatrists had indeed taught Erik - like countless other children in his situation - how to lie to people trying to invade his head and get away with it. Most of them had meant well, he knew that now, had known it then, but when you were young, alone and badly traumatized you absolutely didn’t care about people’s motivations. All you wanted was for them to leave you alone. So you lied.
Erik was a fantastic liar. The government sponsored psych evaluation after he’d healed from his combat injuries hadn’t even stumped him. Consequently he had a lovely sheet of paper that confirmed his mental health and that he was dealing with the events of his deployment in an ‘appropriate fashion’. In other words, he was fit to be amongst polite society.
Maybe, if he stared at the paper long enough, he would eventually believe it.
When Emma had seen the letter, she had started laying into him for not wanting help, for being too proud and too stubborn, for enjoying his suffering and driving her crazy with worry. He’d in turn yelled back that he hadn’t asked her to look after him and that he could take of himself and, if she remembered, he’d taken care of her most of her life, fucked in the head or not. It had quickly degenerated from there and they had ended up not talking for three days.
When they had made up it had been hesitant and full of promises on Emma’s part. Promises not to meddle, not to analyze him, not to try to fix him because he wasn’t broken - even if he was. He’d promised nothing at all, staring straight ahead, mute and immovable and pretending the worry and hurt in his little sister’s eyes did nothing to him.
And now here was a man - a stranger - who was attempting to do the same things Emma had been trying for months and by rights Erik should have bashed his face in. But he wasn’t even angry.
The way Charles called him out, so easily, but utterly without judgement, didn’t chafe at Erik like Emma’s gentle care or Janos’s and Azazel’s thinly veiled demands for him to get a life and get straight, goddamn him.
Somehow the man sitting across from him was circumnavigating all of Erik’s buttons and he had no idea whether to be glad or get angry just on principle.
“And that,” Charles suddenly interrupted Erik’s morose thoughts, “is exactly the point, my friend.”
Friend. Again. Every single time Charles used that word, it jarred something inside Erik. Maybe that something was the same something that made him do nothing but watch and listen when he should have been verbally ripping the man apart for being too forward, too daring, too in-Erik’s-space.
He didn’t. He wasn’t.
“The system is flawed.” Charles looked so very serious and Erik, who was busy having a little mental breakdown inside his head, just laughed.
“You’re stating the obvious, Charles,” he said, sounding only half as brittle as he felt.
“No,” Charles shook his head, “Of course the system is flawed. But the ways in which it is flawed...” He looked like he was grieving and Erik found the expression almost hysterically funny, which told him he was losing it. Again.
Too much, too much, too much. Too much silence, too much noise.
A piece of paper telling him he was sane didn’t really make it so. He went fishing for his cigarettes, slapping one out of the pack with shaking hands, lighting it with motions so practiced, he could have done them in his sleep. The first drag was just to light the blasted thing, the second was for sanity and the third was for calm.
Charles watched, leaning on the table, too close, not moving back even as a plume of smoke hit him right in the face. He just watched and waited, like everything was fine. He had to see, absolutely had to, how Erik’s hands shook.
Trust. Friendship. Friend, that word and all the implications. Inside the restaurant, someone slammed something and he almost jumped out of his skin. Charles raised one hand, careful, poised, and reached out, putting it on top of Erik’s.
“You have to calm your mind, my friend,” he said. “Calm your mind.”
Easier said than done, Erik thought, but he closed his eyes, inhaled the scent of tobacco and burning paper and found his feet back on solid ground. Charles’s hand was warm and dry and heavy on Erik’s own. Heavy enough to be real. An anchor.
Thrown to him by a stranger.
Opening his eyes, Erik expected pity, triumph at having been right, sympathy, disgust. Anything but what he found, which was nothing. He waited for his own mortification to set in, for the rage to come and burn everything away.
Rage had kept Erik alive for a very long time. It was a friend, old and familiar. The most familiar of all and, beside his accent, the only thing he had left of his childhood.
If this had happened with Emma, he’d already be screaming at her, humiliated and angry with himself.
Nothing.
Charles relinquished his hold on Erik, pulling his hand back and continued the conversation exactly where it had broken off, not even hesitating. “Most children in the foster system are hurt in ways that demand therapy. They are given one hour a week with an overworked, state-employed psychiatrist, who, most of the time, can’t remember their names, much less their cases from session to session. And even the good ones, the ones who try, stand no chance at helping those children, because they simply don’t have the time.”
No-one had time for foster kids. They were the forgotten, the unwanted, the unloved and unremembered. If anyone had time for them, they wouldn’t have been all that. But they were. Such was life. Erik had come out of it stronger, harder. Emma had, too, in her own ways. Most didn’t. Most just broke. Of the few foster siblings he and Emma had kept in contact with between them, half were already dead from drugs or crime or suicides.
The system kept the forgotten children, but that was all it did. It didn’t heal. It didn’t help. It was a holding pattern, a place to store them until they came of age. Nothing more. Even after twenty years, these facts still left the bitter taste of disappointment on Erik’s tongue.
“I am aware,” he threw in, finding his voice steady. Calm. How?
Charles smiled at him. “I have a friend who works for social services. She sends me her worst cases, the real problem children. I work with them as often as I can fit them in, pro bono, you understand. But it’s not enough. These children need a place to feel safe, with someone who can help them. They need a refuge.”
Even Erik, who didn’t really know Charles at all, could see the gleam in his eye and knew the question to ask. “What do you plan to do about it?”
He wondered, vaguely, when exactly he became invested in this conversation, in this man. Against his own will, too.
“I am, as you have undoubtedly noticed, filthy rich. My parents died early and left me a sizable estate, which includes a home that I have always privately referred to as ‘the castle’, due to both its size and its warmth.”
The irony was heavy on the last word Erik understood the implication all too well. A house didn’t make a home. “Your step father.”
“Among other things, yes,” Charles agreed, easily, like it was nothing to be ashamed off. “My alcoholic mother surely didn’t help things any.” He waved a hand, dismissing the issue. “However, I escaped that place the moment I got accepted to Oxford at the tender age of sixteen and haven’t been home since. My plan, and keep in mind, so far it’s just that, is to return to the house and turn it into such a safe haven for foster children. A home where they won’t be turned out again soon because of lack of funding or space. A place with me around, to help them in whatever way they need.”
There it was again, the arrogance. Worse, idealistic arrogance. But Charles sounded so utterly convinced that Erik found himself believing him every word.
“Raven, bless her, is doing little but sculpting and squandering away my trust fund, which she can do just about anywhere. She has already agreed to come with me to the house and help with the children. I got started with the paperwork today, as a matter of fact.”
Amazing. See evil, find way to cure evil, do it. As if the world really were that simple, as if it really bent to a single man’s will.
“What about your practice?” Erik pointed out, meaning, What about my sister’s job? Meaning, You didn’t think this through, you’ll fail, you’ll crash and burn like everyone else.
Another hand wave. He was starting to dislike those. “Emma has already agreed to take over my patients. She is frighteningly competent at times and I am sure that, with some more practice, she will be as good at the job as I am. She will run the practice and be the go-between for Moira and me, sending more children my way. Splendid, isn’t it?”
Emma, of course, had completely forgotten to inform Erik that she was practically taking over her boss’s practice at the tender age of twenty-five because he was going to go out and save the world, one child at a time.
God help him, Emma had been converted by the idealists.
But try as he might, he could not find an obvious flaw in Charles’s plan. If he had the money, the space and the will... It was going to be hard to deal with the children, if they were anything like Erik had been, belligerent, angry and disappointed with the world at large. But as a psychiatrist, Charles was well aware of what he was taking on.
This might actually work.
It was something good, something selfless, something helpful, and it might actually work. Erik’s world view was tilting dangerously.
“Congratulations,” he finally said, because he had no idea what else there was.
Charles threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, my friend, don’t congratulate me yet. There are many a hoop still to jump through. Which brings me to the actual reason for my inviting you here today.”
Taking a drag of his cigarette, Erik tilted his head to one side, thinking hard. “You don’t want me to help, do you? I am the last person to be around children.”
It was a confession, a deep, ugly, festering secret. He was dangerous. He was broken. It was the closest he’d ever come to saying it out loud and somehow it figured that the person he was saying it to was this blasted, idealistic, extraordinary man across the table.
“I don’t think you give yourself enough credit, my friend. In fact, I think some of these children would profit immensely from having someone around who can not only emphasize, but has had a similar upbringing. For all my... darker days, I have no first-hand experience with the foster system.” He held up a hand to stall Erik’s coming protest. “However, no, that is not why I have invited you out. Raven keeps accusing me of being too forward, but even I would not invite you to move in with me and a bunch of children on the second meeting.”
He grinned at Erik and Erik found himself grinning back, strangely enough. Charles talked like Erik was a sure thing, like they were going to know each other for years and years. Permanence was a new concept. Erik found himself tentatively liking it, even as he tried to resist.
“No, I simply need some advice. I have severely neglected the house since my step-father’s unfortunate demise-” empty rhetoric only “- since I had no intention of ever returning to that cursed place.”
It was fitting, that a place that had seen a child abused would now become a refuge for other, lost, hurt children and Erik saw in Charles’s expression that he thought the same. It was revenge, in a way.
“The house is in a state of disrepair after all these years and I have an appointment with several contractors later today to go through the house and figure out what work needs to be done. Unfortunately I have absolutely no clue about how these things work. They could be selling me dirt as diamonds and I wouldn’t know. When I told Emma about my dilemma, she informed me that you have some skills in that area. My reason for asking you to lunch today is that I want to ask you to accompany me to Westchester today to help me inspect the house and save me from the sharks.”
He fluttered his eyelashes on save, flirtatious and open and Erik chuckled at the ridiculous sight. “You know,” he complained, only half serious, joking almost automatically, like it was easy. “A simple ‘I need your help’ would have saved us both half an hour of our lives.”
Charles blushed a lovely shade of scarlet. “I am being long winded again, aren’t I?”
With a raised eyebrow, Erik agreed. “A bit.”
“I do that when I’m nervous.”
“And why,” he asked, flicking ash from his cigarette and grinding it into the ashtray, “would you be nervous?”
Charles smiled coyly, even while he was still blushing. “That, I am afraid, brings us full circle in this conversation: Flirting, Erik, flirting.”
“Ah,” Erik realized with a mock-grave expression. “You plan on abducting me into the country and having your wicked way with me, don’t you? This whole story is just a ruse.”
The corners of Charles’s mouth twitched. “Absolutely,” he agreed. “You have discovered my dastardly plans.”
“I am good at that,” Erik allowed and then, after a moment of stillness, both men burst into laughter. Real, actually happy laughter. It was the second time in under a month Erik really laughed and both times Charles had been the cause. He felt some of his reservations melt away and watched them go, helplessly.
“Really, though,” Charles finally managed when he had his laughter mostly under control, “Will you help me?”
Erik stilled, wiping at his face with one hand as he considered. Would he help Charles with the house? Yes. He had nothing better to do, apart from staring at walls that didn’t stare back and trying to make noise enough to cover the silence in his head.
But he got the distinct impression that Charles was asking more than that. The impression that, somewhere along the road, the other man fully intended on integrating Erik in his scheme to save the world.
For the longest moment he looked at Charles, really looked, hard and open. Boyish face, beautiful eyes, the posture of a proud man and an arrogant one, but not of a stupid one. Not of one who wouldn’t move heaven and hell to get what he wanted. And he wanted to fix the world.
He wanted to save children that the rest of the world had already forgotten.
Erik knew, without asking, that Charles counted him as one of those children.
Charles wanted to save Erik from the silence and himself.
It should have made him angry, being someone’s pet project, but it didn’t. He was getting used to that. Charles Xavier and Erik’s anger seemed unable to exist within the same space. He trusted this man, even if he had no logical reason to do so.
How very strange.
Maybe it was because of how they’d met, in the dark, with Erik shaking apart. Or maybe it was Charles’s easy acceptance of the fact that Erik was broken and, in the same breath, his refusal to accept that. Contradictions upon contradictions.
Erik had been an orphan for most his life and a soldier for almost half of it. He was still an orphan now, but he wasn’t a soldier anymore and no piece of paper could ever make him right again because he wasn’t sure he’d ever been right to begin with.
But Charles, who was loud and bright and not silent, wanted him anyway, in ways Erik wasn’t entirely sure he comprehended yet.
“Yes,” he said, fingers itching for a cigarette again. Charles held his hand out with a blinding smile and Erik took it in his own and they shook on it. The itch subsided momentarily.
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Epilogue
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“So, what do you think?” Charles asked.
They were in the front parlour of the ‘house’ that was really a manor, lounging on couches that had had them both in sneezing fits half an hour ago. The dust was everywhere, the grime on the windows turning early evening into pitch black night. They had found some mostly clean blankets in a supply closet and spread them on the couches, were sipping wine that cost more than Erik’s car, taken shamelessly from the cellar.
Charles had no appreciation for expensive things at all.
“About the house?” Erik asked, putting down his plastic cup. They had had dinner delivered and Charles had charmed the restaurant into adding some plastic utensils for them. There was no way either of them was driving back into the city tonight.
Charles hummed a yes, but his face said no.
About everything then, about saving the world, about fixing this house, about banishing the ghost of a scared boy that lurked in all the corners. About making something good out of something bad.
About hope and love and friendship and care, even, maybe.
Erik was, quite possibly, drunk on horribly expensive wine. He looked around the dim, dirty room, found a solemn child staring back at him from a family portrait above the mantle. The face was different, but the sky blue eyes were the same. He looked from one Charles to the other and back.
“It’ll be good,” he said.
Charles smiled but remained silent. Erik didn’t mind.
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Sequel: like nothing's broken
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Author: pprfaith
Summary: Erik abhors silence and Charles is nothing if not noise. Sequel to make your wars. Modern-day AU, no powers.
Warnings: Less of a trigger bingo than last time: Talk of war, child abuse and PTSD.
Rating: PG-13
Word-count: A bit under 5000.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters, even if I really wish I did. No money being made, which is also sad.
A/N: This is the first time in eight years of writing fanfiction that I actually shortened a story in a substantial way in hopes of making it work better. I’d appreciate any concrit you’ve got. Also, thank you for the amazing comments on the first story! Un-betaed.
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and quietly keep walking
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Prologue
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Silence.
Erik didn’t mind silence.
Silence meant there was no gunfire, no men sleeping and snoring all around him in their graves. It meant no-one was screaming. No children crying under their beds, no drunken men banging on doors, no wounded soldiers falling, falling, falling.
Silence was good.
Except for the fact that it was too silent.
Yes. Oxymoron. Neurosis. Psychosis. Thanks to Emma, Erik knew all the fun words to describe what was fucked in his head.
He liked silence because it was the absence of things and couldn’t deal with it for the exact same reason. Erik needed sensation to remind him that he was alive, but not enough, because that would tip him over into battle mode again.
Last week Emma had slammed a door unexpectedly while he’d been napping and he’d almost bitten her head off for it. No reason. Just that squirming in his gun, fearhateadrenalinepanicfightfightfight.
War had taught him some of that, but not nearly all.
He remembered being whole once, he was fairly sure he did. But it had ended far too early - Alles ist gut - and now... human memory was a distorted, ugly thing.
So. Silence.
Too much of it, white walls closing in, desert winds howling in his memory, screams muted by death and distance. There had to be a place, somewhere between noise and silence, where sanity was reachable, but Erik had never found it.
Inhale. Exhale. He was out of cigarettes. Maybe the withdrawal was making him loopy. He should get up, get dressed, go downstairs and walk the four blocks to the store, stock up. Smokes and booze. Better than any meds Emma would try to shove down his throat.
He didn’t move, paralyzed between the sheets, head pressed against the cool wall, listening to his own silence.
Later, half an hour or five minutes, the phone rang on the nightstand, pulling him out of his headspace. Erik closed his eyes in relief and answered.
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Two hours later Charles Xavier slid into the seat across from Erik the same way Erik had decided the man did everything. Gracefully with a tinge of childishness, like a boy playing at being an old man or, maybe, an old man playing at being a boy. He certainly dressed the part of the old man even if, according to Emma, he partied like a frat boy.
Erik was hard pressed to imagine Charles Xavier doing a keg stand, but then he was only here because had been about to go berserk on the walls of Emma’s guestroom because they were white and quiet, so what did he care?
He flicked his cigarette with his thumb, ash blowing away on the breeze as he took a deep breath. Calm. Quiet. Inhale. Exhale. He felt himself slow down, let himself be still. Xavier - Charles - frowned at the cigarette but said nothing. Erik had chosen a table on the restaurant’s terrace for the express purpose of being able to smoke because a) he was pretty much a chain smoker these days, much as he hated to admit such a weakness and b) there was no way his second meeting with the esteemed Charles Xavier was going to be any less nerve wrecking than the first had been.
“So,” he asked as soon as the other man sat down, not bothering with small talk, “Did you want to practice flirting on my some more or did the urge to analyse me finally overwhelm you?”
Charles looked at him wide-eyed for a moment, then laughed. “Which would you prefer, my friend?”
There it was again. My friend.
Erik raised his eyebrows skilfully. “If you have more tacky pick-up lines, then by all means, go ahead.”
He might get a laugh out of it, if nothing else. And, loath as he was to admit it, the other man was certainly easy on the eyes, all blue eyes and red lips, soft and warm.
Charles sighed as he tried to flag down a waitress. “Ah, yes. Emma has already informed me of your... distrust of psychiatrists.”
Erik shrugged. “I’ve seen too many in my life,” he admitted because that wasn’t exactly a secret. Charles was Emma’s boss and as such, knew about her childhood and, by extension, also about Erik’s. There was no point in getting angry about inescapable facts of life.
“We all have,” Charles simply agreed, with less flair than Erik expected of a man wearing dress pants for a casual Saturday lunch with an acquaintance. Facts. Perhaps Charles, too, understood that. For a brief moment, Erik found himself almost liking the other man. He stomped the feeling down ruthlessly and locked it back into its corner. He didn’t want to like this man.
Suddenly, Charles brightened, “I do have an excellent new pick-up line, though, now that you mention it. In involves genetic mutation.”
The way he beamed at Erik made it impossible to ask what the fuck. “Genetic mutation?”
Charles waved a hand, smiled at the waitress who was finally putting in an appearance and ordered himself a coffee and a salad. Erik went for coffee without the salad and they waited for the girl to leave before Charles continued. “Yes. I have a PhD in genetics, has Emma told you?”
“No. What made you switch from hard to soft science?”
A shrug. “I found, after less than a year of seeing only the inside of a lab, that I wanted to be elsewhere. So I went back to university and got a degree that would allow me to do something useful in the world.”
Erik fought the opposing urges to either pat the man on the head or run away. An idealist, God save him. He’d met people like that before, people who thought that all it took as one good man, some hope and some faith.
Most of them had died screaming.
“Why am I here?”
“I can’t have invited you for a simple conversation?”
With a sigh, Erik shook his head just as the waitress returned, balancing two cups of coffee. She put them down in front of the men, smiled flirtatiously at Charles, who returned the smile with one of his own and a cocky eyebrow. He should have looked smarmy but somehow managed adorable.
“Is there anything else I can get you gentlemen?”
Charles gave Erik a brief, questioning look, then turned his full attention back on the girl. She looked a bit overwhelmed by it. “Thank you, dear, we’re perfectly alright.”
The waitress swooned at his accent and Erik suppressed a roll of his eyes as he shoved himself into the conversation with a quick and very British, “Thanks for now, love.”
She blinked doe eyes at him before smiling and nodding. “You salad will be just a minute,” she informed Charles and then finally left them alone.
Charles waited until she was out of earshot to laugh and pout. “That’s cheating,” he complained.
Erik shrugged. As the son of German immigrants, English was only his second language. Since he had no native English accent, he’d always found it easy to fake all kinds of pronunciation even if he generally preferred to stick with his own, sharp, slightly tinged accent. He would have had an easier time of it if he’d just assimilated completely, but his native tongue - his mother tongue - was all he had left and he’d never been one to go with the flow.
“As if yours is real,” he shot back with a snort.
“It is, actually,” Charles corrected, looking unbearably smug. “I spent my early years in England before my parents decided to move us back to my father’s estate. I’ve always found American English horribly boring. A British accent sounds much better, don’t you think?”
Arrogance, pride, privilege. What was it that made this man so very, unbearably sure of himself, so at home in his skin? Erik had done much the same thing, refusing to leave his accent behind, but instead of making him special it had made him an outsider, he was the Jerry, the German kid, and, occasionally, the Fritz.
Two men, both doing what they wanted, making their own way, living by their own rules. One ended up a burned out soldier slumming in his sister’s guest room, the other gave dinner parties for his sister’s art student friends.
Privilege. In the end that was what it came down to. Charles was from old money and Erik a poor immigrants’ son.
He wanted to be angry at the other man like he’d wanted to be angry the night of the party three weeks before, but he just couldn’t work up the emotion.
He wanted to ask, “What is it that makes you so special?” but he bit his tongue hard enough to keep the words inside, forcing himself to instead go back to the conversation.
“No straight answer means Emma put you up to this.” It came out sharper than he meant it to, but Emma’s mother-henning always made him angry. All he wanted was to be left in peace.
Charles’s smile stayed fixed on his face. “Your sister did indeed mention that you spend too much time staring at walls, but I assure she didn’t put me up to anything.”
This time Erik’s snort bordered on rude because he knew his sister and he knew she meddled like she breathed. Somewhere along the line Emma had decided that her rare talent of getting into people’s heads meant she had free reign to mess with them, too. Her not putting her boss up to anything would have been equivalent to Erik passing up a free smoke. Didn’t happen.
“I have a clean bill of health,” he felt the need to point out, somewhat vindictive and utterly childish. Look Ma, no mental disorder for you to heal.
The amused huff Charles gave bordered on ridiculous. “My friend,” he said, smile tainting his voice, “You grew up in the system. I have absolutely no doubt at all that you could convince an overworked military psychiatrist of anything you pleased in under thirty minutes.”
More perceptive than Erik would have given Charles credit for, given the man’s penchant for arrogance. Almost a decade of being shuffled between social workers and psychiatrists had indeed taught Erik - like countless other children in his situation - how to lie to people trying to invade his head and get away with it. Most of them had meant well, he knew that now, had known it then, but when you were young, alone and badly traumatized you absolutely didn’t care about people’s motivations. All you wanted was for them to leave you alone. So you lied.
Erik was a fantastic liar. The government sponsored psych evaluation after he’d healed from his combat injuries hadn’t even stumped him. Consequently he had a lovely sheet of paper that confirmed his mental health and that he was dealing with the events of his deployment in an ‘appropriate fashion’. In other words, he was fit to be amongst polite society.
Maybe, if he stared at the paper long enough, he would eventually believe it.
When Emma had seen the letter, she had started laying into him for not wanting help, for being too proud and too stubborn, for enjoying his suffering and driving her crazy with worry. He’d in turn yelled back that he hadn’t asked her to look after him and that he could take of himself and, if she remembered, he’d taken care of her most of her life, fucked in the head or not. It had quickly degenerated from there and they had ended up not talking for three days.
When they had made up it had been hesitant and full of promises on Emma’s part. Promises not to meddle, not to analyze him, not to try to fix him because he wasn’t broken - even if he was. He’d promised nothing at all, staring straight ahead, mute and immovable and pretending the worry and hurt in his little sister’s eyes did nothing to him.
And now here was a man - a stranger - who was attempting to do the same things Emma had been trying for months and by rights Erik should have bashed his face in. But he wasn’t even angry.
The way Charles called him out, so easily, but utterly without judgement, didn’t chafe at Erik like Emma’s gentle care or Janos’s and Azazel’s thinly veiled demands for him to get a life and get straight, goddamn him.
Somehow the man sitting across from him was circumnavigating all of Erik’s buttons and he had no idea whether to be glad or get angry just on principle.
“And that,” Charles suddenly interrupted Erik’s morose thoughts, “is exactly the point, my friend.”
Friend. Again. Every single time Charles used that word, it jarred something inside Erik. Maybe that something was the same something that made him do nothing but watch and listen when he should have been verbally ripping the man apart for being too forward, too daring, too in-Erik’s-space.
He didn’t. He wasn’t.
“The system is flawed.” Charles looked so very serious and Erik, who was busy having a little mental breakdown inside his head, just laughed.
“You’re stating the obvious, Charles,” he said, sounding only half as brittle as he felt.
“No,” Charles shook his head, “Of course the system is flawed. But the ways in which it is flawed...” He looked like he was grieving and Erik found the expression almost hysterically funny, which told him he was losing it. Again.
Too much, too much, too much. Too much silence, too much noise.
A piece of paper telling him he was sane didn’t really make it so. He went fishing for his cigarettes, slapping one out of the pack with shaking hands, lighting it with motions so practiced, he could have done them in his sleep. The first drag was just to light the blasted thing, the second was for sanity and the third was for calm.
Charles watched, leaning on the table, too close, not moving back even as a plume of smoke hit him right in the face. He just watched and waited, like everything was fine. He had to see, absolutely had to, how Erik’s hands shook.
Trust. Friendship. Friend, that word and all the implications. Inside the restaurant, someone slammed something and he almost jumped out of his skin. Charles raised one hand, careful, poised, and reached out, putting it on top of Erik’s.
“You have to calm your mind, my friend,” he said. “Calm your mind.”
Easier said than done, Erik thought, but he closed his eyes, inhaled the scent of tobacco and burning paper and found his feet back on solid ground. Charles’s hand was warm and dry and heavy on Erik’s own. Heavy enough to be real. An anchor.
Thrown to him by a stranger.
Opening his eyes, Erik expected pity, triumph at having been right, sympathy, disgust. Anything but what he found, which was nothing. He waited for his own mortification to set in, for the rage to come and burn everything away.
Rage had kept Erik alive for a very long time. It was a friend, old and familiar. The most familiar of all and, beside his accent, the only thing he had left of his childhood.
If this had happened with Emma, he’d already be screaming at her, humiliated and angry with himself.
Nothing.
Charles relinquished his hold on Erik, pulling his hand back and continued the conversation exactly where it had broken off, not even hesitating. “Most children in the foster system are hurt in ways that demand therapy. They are given one hour a week with an overworked, state-employed psychiatrist, who, most of the time, can’t remember their names, much less their cases from session to session. And even the good ones, the ones who try, stand no chance at helping those children, because they simply don’t have the time.”
No-one had time for foster kids. They were the forgotten, the unwanted, the unloved and unremembered. If anyone had time for them, they wouldn’t have been all that. But they were. Such was life. Erik had come out of it stronger, harder. Emma had, too, in her own ways. Most didn’t. Most just broke. Of the few foster siblings he and Emma had kept in contact with between them, half were already dead from drugs or crime or suicides.
The system kept the forgotten children, but that was all it did. It didn’t heal. It didn’t help. It was a holding pattern, a place to store them until they came of age. Nothing more. Even after twenty years, these facts still left the bitter taste of disappointment on Erik’s tongue.
“I am aware,” he threw in, finding his voice steady. Calm. How?
Charles smiled at him. “I have a friend who works for social services. She sends me her worst cases, the real problem children. I work with them as often as I can fit them in, pro bono, you understand. But it’s not enough. These children need a place to feel safe, with someone who can help them. They need a refuge.”
Even Erik, who didn’t really know Charles at all, could see the gleam in his eye and knew the question to ask. “What do you plan to do about it?”
He wondered, vaguely, when exactly he became invested in this conversation, in this man. Against his own will, too.
“I am, as you have undoubtedly noticed, filthy rich. My parents died early and left me a sizable estate, which includes a home that I have always privately referred to as ‘the castle’, due to both its size and its warmth.”
The irony was heavy on the last word Erik understood the implication all too well. A house didn’t make a home. “Your step father.”
“Among other things, yes,” Charles agreed, easily, like it was nothing to be ashamed off. “My alcoholic mother surely didn’t help things any.” He waved a hand, dismissing the issue. “However, I escaped that place the moment I got accepted to Oxford at the tender age of sixteen and haven’t been home since. My plan, and keep in mind, so far it’s just that, is to return to the house and turn it into such a safe haven for foster children. A home where they won’t be turned out again soon because of lack of funding or space. A place with me around, to help them in whatever way they need.”
There it was again, the arrogance. Worse, idealistic arrogance. But Charles sounded so utterly convinced that Erik found himself believing him every word.
“Raven, bless her, is doing little but sculpting and squandering away my trust fund, which she can do just about anywhere. She has already agreed to come with me to the house and help with the children. I got started with the paperwork today, as a matter of fact.”
Amazing. See evil, find way to cure evil, do it. As if the world really were that simple, as if it really bent to a single man’s will.
“What about your practice?” Erik pointed out, meaning, What about my sister’s job? Meaning, You didn’t think this through, you’ll fail, you’ll crash and burn like everyone else.
Another hand wave. He was starting to dislike those. “Emma has already agreed to take over my patients. She is frighteningly competent at times and I am sure that, with some more practice, she will be as good at the job as I am. She will run the practice and be the go-between for Moira and me, sending more children my way. Splendid, isn’t it?”
Emma, of course, had completely forgotten to inform Erik that she was practically taking over her boss’s practice at the tender age of twenty-five because he was going to go out and save the world, one child at a time.
God help him, Emma had been converted by the idealists.
But try as he might, he could not find an obvious flaw in Charles’s plan. If he had the money, the space and the will... It was going to be hard to deal with the children, if they were anything like Erik had been, belligerent, angry and disappointed with the world at large. But as a psychiatrist, Charles was well aware of what he was taking on.
This might actually work.
It was something good, something selfless, something helpful, and it might actually work. Erik’s world view was tilting dangerously.
“Congratulations,” he finally said, because he had no idea what else there was.
Charles threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, my friend, don’t congratulate me yet. There are many a hoop still to jump through. Which brings me to the actual reason for my inviting you here today.”
Taking a drag of his cigarette, Erik tilted his head to one side, thinking hard. “You don’t want me to help, do you? I am the last person to be around children.”
It was a confession, a deep, ugly, festering secret. He was dangerous. He was broken. It was the closest he’d ever come to saying it out loud and somehow it figured that the person he was saying it to was this blasted, idealistic, extraordinary man across the table.
“I don’t think you give yourself enough credit, my friend. In fact, I think some of these children would profit immensely from having someone around who can not only emphasize, but has had a similar upbringing. For all my... darker days, I have no first-hand experience with the foster system.” He held up a hand to stall Erik’s coming protest. “However, no, that is not why I have invited you out. Raven keeps accusing me of being too forward, but even I would not invite you to move in with me and a bunch of children on the second meeting.”
He grinned at Erik and Erik found himself grinning back, strangely enough. Charles talked like Erik was a sure thing, like they were going to know each other for years and years. Permanence was a new concept. Erik found himself tentatively liking it, even as he tried to resist.
“No, I simply need some advice. I have severely neglected the house since my step-father’s unfortunate demise-” empty rhetoric only “- since I had no intention of ever returning to that cursed place.”
It was fitting, that a place that had seen a child abused would now become a refuge for other, lost, hurt children and Erik saw in Charles’s expression that he thought the same. It was revenge, in a way.
“The house is in a state of disrepair after all these years and I have an appointment with several contractors later today to go through the house and figure out what work needs to be done. Unfortunately I have absolutely no clue about how these things work. They could be selling me dirt as diamonds and I wouldn’t know. When I told Emma about my dilemma, she informed me that you have some skills in that area. My reason for asking you to lunch today is that I want to ask you to accompany me to Westchester today to help me inspect the house and save me from the sharks.”
He fluttered his eyelashes on save, flirtatious and open and Erik chuckled at the ridiculous sight. “You know,” he complained, only half serious, joking almost automatically, like it was easy. “A simple ‘I need your help’ would have saved us both half an hour of our lives.”
Charles blushed a lovely shade of scarlet. “I am being long winded again, aren’t I?”
With a raised eyebrow, Erik agreed. “A bit.”
“I do that when I’m nervous.”
“And why,” he asked, flicking ash from his cigarette and grinding it into the ashtray, “would you be nervous?”
Charles smiled coyly, even while he was still blushing. “That, I am afraid, brings us full circle in this conversation: Flirting, Erik, flirting.”
“Ah,” Erik realized with a mock-grave expression. “You plan on abducting me into the country and having your wicked way with me, don’t you? This whole story is just a ruse.”
The corners of Charles’s mouth twitched. “Absolutely,” he agreed. “You have discovered my dastardly plans.”
“I am good at that,” Erik allowed and then, after a moment of stillness, both men burst into laughter. Real, actually happy laughter. It was the second time in under a month Erik really laughed and both times Charles had been the cause. He felt some of his reservations melt away and watched them go, helplessly.
“Really, though,” Charles finally managed when he had his laughter mostly under control, “Will you help me?”
Erik stilled, wiping at his face with one hand as he considered. Would he help Charles with the house? Yes. He had nothing better to do, apart from staring at walls that didn’t stare back and trying to make noise enough to cover the silence in his head.
But he got the distinct impression that Charles was asking more than that. The impression that, somewhere along the road, the other man fully intended on integrating Erik in his scheme to save the world.
For the longest moment he looked at Charles, really looked, hard and open. Boyish face, beautiful eyes, the posture of a proud man and an arrogant one, but not of a stupid one. Not of one who wouldn’t move heaven and hell to get what he wanted. And he wanted to fix the world.
He wanted to save children that the rest of the world had already forgotten.
Erik knew, without asking, that Charles counted him as one of those children.
Charles wanted to save Erik from the silence and himself.
It should have made him angry, being someone’s pet project, but it didn’t. He was getting used to that. Charles Xavier and Erik’s anger seemed unable to exist within the same space. He trusted this man, even if he had no logical reason to do so.
How very strange.
Maybe it was because of how they’d met, in the dark, with Erik shaking apart. Or maybe it was Charles’s easy acceptance of the fact that Erik was broken and, in the same breath, his refusal to accept that. Contradictions upon contradictions.
Erik had been an orphan for most his life and a soldier for almost half of it. He was still an orphan now, but he wasn’t a soldier anymore and no piece of paper could ever make him right again because he wasn’t sure he’d ever been right to begin with.
But Charles, who was loud and bright and not silent, wanted him anyway, in ways Erik wasn’t entirely sure he comprehended yet.
“Yes,” he said, fingers itching for a cigarette again. Charles held his hand out with a blinding smile and Erik took it in his own and they shook on it. The itch subsided momentarily.
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Epilogue
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“So, what do you think?” Charles asked.
They were in the front parlour of the ‘house’ that was really a manor, lounging on couches that had had them both in sneezing fits half an hour ago. The dust was everywhere, the grime on the windows turning early evening into pitch black night. They had found some mostly clean blankets in a supply closet and spread them on the couches, were sipping wine that cost more than Erik’s car, taken shamelessly from the cellar.
Charles had no appreciation for expensive things at all.
“About the house?” Erik asked, putting down his plastic cup. They had had dinner delivered and Charles had charmed the restaurant into adding some plastic utensils for them. There was no way either of them was driving back into the city tonight.
Charles hummed a yes, but his face said no.
About everything then, about saving the world, about fixing this house, about banishing the ghost of a scared boy that lurked in all the corners. About making something good out of something bad.
About hope and love and friendship and care, even, maybe.
Erik was, quite possibly, drunk on horribly expensive wine. He looked around the dim, dirty room, found a solemn child staring back at him from a family portrait above the mantle. The face was different, but the sky blue eyes were the same. He looked from one Charles to the other and back.
“It’ll be good,” he said.
Charles smiled but remained silent. Erik didn’t mind.
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Sequel: like nothing's broken
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