Chapter Text
Charles had given him a set of brushed-steel technical pens for his birthday, a gift Erik appreciated for its craftsmanship more than its utility; he did most of his work on his computer or tablet, only the most occasional sketching in the early stages of an idea. Still, one made its home behind his ear or on the desk at his workstation. The other, he discovered after searching for it one day, had taken up permanent residence in Charles's breast pocket because Charles, an inveterate pen thief, had stolen it.
He still had it, even now, warmed by the skin under his shirt and the heavy cardigan resting over it. Erik thoughtlessly traced the contours of it and reached inside the smooth barrel to the complex of springs and the steel nib, so small and so carefully wrought.
Of course, psionics can be and often are happy with non-psionics. Those relationships can end in differences of opinion over politics or veganism or one partner cheating on the other, not over the place of psionic abilities in the relationship. Even though I've decided not to pursue non-psionics romantically, I talked to some who have enjoyed everything from friends-with-benefits to marriage and everything in between.
"It was rough going with Ben and me at first," confesses Ayesha Bradley. A telepath and actress, she and Ben met at open auditions one day down on Broadway. "We almost split up, but then I was like look: we need to decide what we can and can't live with. I need to know what you want from me. If I can give you that – and you can give me what I need – we can stay together. If not, it's quits. I think it takes more work, but when you've got the right person, the work is worth it."
"Erik." Charles's hand fell away from the door knob. Surprise – not Erik's own – washed over him like a tsunami, and in its wake came a confusion of regret, happiness, suspicion, oh god what is he doing here, enough to be swamped and be drowned in, before the impossible tide vanished. Left in the wreckage, Erik's breath seemed very loud, and feeble in his lungs.
"I'm sorry," Charles said. He hadn't loosened his death grip on the handle of the door; the pressure of his hand seemed about to superheat it.
"Don't be," Erik said. "I – I shouldn't have come without calling. I can't imagine – well."
Charles gazed absently off down the hall for a moment, and in that moment Erik would have given anything to know what he was thinking.
I'm trying to remember if I'd forgotten anything of mine at your place. Charles's mind-voice was not without humor, rueful as it was, although mostly Erik heard exhaustion and something very close to sadness.
"No, you didn't, although I may have finished the box of tea you left." In point of fact, Charles had forgotten something, a scratchy wool scarf striped with the colors of Pembroke College that had fallen off its hanger in the closet. Erik had unearthed it while looking for something else, and the scarf had smelled – well, like dusty wool and only very faintly of Charles's aftershave, but even knowing Charles would probably wonder where it was when the weather started cooling, he hadn't been able to bring himself to return it.
"Then I have to admit I'm at a loss."
Charles shifted from foot to foot, bit his lower lip absently, the way he did when chewing over a difficult problem. Months ago, Erik would have told him to knock it off, did he know what he was doing to Erik for Christ's sake, and then he would have run a careful thumb over the sore spot and replaced it with his mouth.
He did none of this now, and Charles gave no sign that he'd been following Erik down memory lane, only continued to eye Erik warily and wait.
In the few shameful fantasies Erik permitted himself – the ones he never brought out and examined in the light of day – he would have confessed everything and apologized for everything (what the everything was, Erik never detailed in these fantasies), and Charles would know how welcome he was, that he needn't ask for permission. It would have been a few minutes of painful awkwardness before resolution leading to a nebulous happily-ever-after in which they just were, never mind the details.
"It doesn't work like that," Charles said. His mouth twisted, the crooked half-smile he offered on the rare occasions he couldn't bother to pretend happiness. "Sometimes I wish it did."
"I know." That those dreams lay uncomfortably on him – Erik was a realist and a pragmatist from the skin right down to the center of his bones – didn't make them any less real. He took a breath. "I didn't come here expecting anything," he said when he could be certain of his words, "only – only hoping I could," and could what Erik still hadn't worked out yet. Talk, apologize, tell you everything I've learned.
"I was hoping I could see you," he concluded.
Charles exhaled raggedly and seemed to lose something in breathing out. His resolve, maybe; as open as Charles usually was, it was strange to see him vulnerable.
"You'd better come in," Charles said at last, and stepped aside to permit Erik inside.
The office was much like Erik had seen it last, still a chaos of papers and books, all organized according to Charles's non-existent filing system. British to the bitter end despite twenty years in the States, Charles had an electric kettle stationed on top of a file cabinet and a box of his favorite tea sitting next to it. Two computer screens sat on one side of Charles's desk, one of them drowsing in electronic standby dreams, the other open to a screen filled with hieroglyphics and whatever secret code it was Charles knew that let him decipher people's genes.
"For the X-Genome project." Charles gazed at the screen fondly. "My lab is working on the factors that modulate the expression of telepathic and empathic abilities. It's times like this when it's clear that the notion of a single X-gene is woefully inaccurate, although it does sound rather catchy."
"A set of genes, then?" Erik asked.
Charles beamed at him, pleasure lapping up against Erik's awareness, like warm water curling around his toes. "Yes, or rather, that's what we're thinking. My thought is that the expressions of mutant phenotypes, unpredictable as they are, are due to interactions with baseline genes, but of course we haven't – " Charles cut himself off. "I can't imagine you came here to talk about my work."
"No," Erik admitted, "I didn't."
"Would you like to sit down?" Charles gestured at the small sofa and easy chair in the corner opposite his desk. Mercifully, half the sofa was drowned in stacks of file folders. Erik sat on the easy chair anyway, and watched with an increasing sense of unreality as Charles poured filtered water into the kettle and turned it on.
"How is your work?" Charles asked. He was staring fixedly at the kettle. "Are you still the terror of Stark Industries?"
Erik, rather against his will, found himself hypnotized by the slowly heating iron plate under the kettle's base, and had to pull himself together to answer, "Frustrating. My current project is for a rather demanding client."
"Demanding is putting it lightly, when it comes to Emma Frost." Charles favored him with a smile, rather more honest than the last one. "I thought you could choose your own projects."
"Emma wanted the best," Erik said. It had the virtue of being true – Emma wanted the best and Erik was the best – although it did not have the virtue of being a complete answer; the other half of that answer was that Tony was a sadist. To deflect any possibility of discussing that, he added, "Best or not, though, I'm about ready to turn the whole thing over to Azazel and Janos."
"I thought you liked them."
"Not as much as I value my sanity."
He caught the edge of Charles's grin. The water in the kettle started bubbling ferociously; Erik felt the heating mechanism switch off as the kettle beeped. Charles fixed his cup – a battered mug Erik recognized, a relic from Charles's grad school days – and added milk from the mini-fridge hunched next to the file cabinet. His hand shook once and the milk splashed heavily into the mug.
"Are you sure you don't want tea?" Charles asked.
"I'm fine, thank you." Erik's heart had started to crowd up into his throat, and fear and anticipation had him leaning forward, tense, a tug that either wanted to pull him into Charles or pull him out the door.
Charles settled on the couch, close enough for Erik, if he were foolish enough, to reach out and lay a hand on Charles's knee. For a moment, Erik thought he might be that foolish. Charles looked… like Charles, not that Erik had expected six months to change him, but the fact was surprising nonetheless; Charles in his heavy cardigan and worn corduroys, his habitual button-down with the top two buttons undone, possibly a scientific t-shirt on underneath – all that was unchanged, and Erik found himself desperately grateful for it.
"I suppose we should get down to it," Charles said, eyeing Erik cautiously. "What did you want to see me about?"
Erik steeled himself and reminded himself open open open, even if Charles wasn't reading him. You deserve this; you should have had it months ago. You didn't deserve any of what I did to you.
"I wanted – I wanted to say how sorry I am," he managed. It was an effort, holding Charles's gaze, but the moment and the challenge were upon him and Erik Lehnsherr had never backed down. "You shouldn't have had to apologize for what you can do."
"I'm done apologizing," Charles told him. "But thank you for giving me a special exemption anyway."
"I didn't mean it like that." Erik throttled back the frustration that – already, no no no – started to burn low in his gut. "I only – I meant that it was wrong for me to expect you to apologize for using your abilities. And it was wrong for me to expect that a condition of you staying with me would be you only using your telepathy in ways I wanted you to, without the two of us discussing it."
"It was hypocritical," Charles said in a brittle tone of voice, the words fragmented by anger and disappointment. Disappointment in him, Erik realized, and that stung far worse than the anger did. "It was hypocritical and cruel, whether you consciously meant it or not."
"And I know that now. And that doesn't excuse the fact that I didn't know it when I should have – when I could have spared you all this." Erik drew a breath and hoped Charles could see, or hear, or feel, the truth in him. "And I can't – there are no words to say how sorry I am for that."
"It wasn't only that, Erik," Charles said. The tea in his mug shook, almost splashing over the edge; Charles set the mug down on the coffee table. "It was that you didn't want to know it, however many times I tried to explain it to you. You were too busy being… being resentful and angry at me, to bother listening."
He wanted to bridle at that, the I had a right to be angry when you were invading my privacy welling up instinctively, on the tip of his tongue almost before he knew it. Charles sighed heavily – of course he'd caught that – and Erik wanted desperately to touch him, then, do something to bring him back.
"I didn't have the right," he said, when he could trust his voice again. He searched for his next words, almost impossible with Charles looking at him with those eyes, like he was looking for something in Erik and not finding it. "No matter what I believed then, I know I was wrong. That I am wrong. But thinking like that – thinking you were deliberately intruding – is… I don't trust easily. And I don't like people knowing about me."
"You don't trust me," Charles said. "You might not trust people in general, but you fastened onto my telepathy as a way to justify distrusting me, when I hadn't done anything to you. If you couldn't trust me, why were you ever with me in the first place?"
Because I love you. If this had been a movie, the scene would have ended with Charles launching himself into Erik's arms and the fuzzy happy ending that would fade to black. As it was, Charles looked away, biting his lip again. That makes it worse, you know.
"I don't know why I was with you," Erik said, because the lie was easier to say. "I think… I wanted what you were offering, but couldn't bring myself to accept it. Or, I wanted certain things, just not – not all of you. Of what you could do."
"Did it ever once occur to you how unfair that was?" Charles asked. "Before you read all those books about telepaths and relationships, anyway."
"No." There wasn't much more to say than that.
Charles nodded thoughtfully, and then gave him an image, a memory: framed photos on Erik's wall unit, one of his parents next to a lump of red-streaked iron ore, and next to that a college-aged Erik and Azazel each holding signs, surrounded by mutants. Erik's sign read No more hiding, printed out in marker and blocky, awkward capitals. The memory fuzzed at the edges and dispelled.
"Was there a special exception for telepaths I didn't catch?" Charles asked, and there was an edge of demand to the words. "Should I have read the fine print?"
"There shouldn't have been." But it was there regardless. Erik stared at Charles's hands, clasped loosely between his knees. The corduroy over one knee had gone a bit threadbare. "But – but I'd always thought there was a difference between being able to manipulate physical forces and a person's thoughts. Not that you shouldn't have to hide what you are but – "
"But not do what I am?" Charles snorted. "That's an old argument. A human argument."
Erik bristled at the implication that he was like them, the baselines who'd spent decades regulating mutant lives and bodies, who'd forced registration acts through Congress and refused to allow mutants equal opportunities for employment and equality before the law. The seventies and eighties had changed that, if only in law and not in the hearts of people who thought mutants should be exterminated.
"Even though the government suspended mandatory mutant registration in the seventies, you know we're still subject to scrutiny," Charles pointed out. "Our mutations are noted in our medical and psych files; if we have a… a history with the law, our abilities become a matter of public record." He gave Erik an arch look. "But for telepaths, there are even more restrictions. I can't work for the government outside of a very few positions, and I'd prefer not to work in those I'd be eligible for; the government is also good at acknowledging the utility of telepaths only when it's convenient for them. I can't work with scientists who have access to classified information. And outside of that… I have colleagues who won't go to conferences I'm speaking at. Some of them won't contribute to the X-Gene project because they're afraid I'll steal their research."
Indignation, entirely his own, pricked at Erik. "As if you'd need to steal their work."
"They don't care about that, but thank you." Charles shrugged. "When I was preparing to defend my dissertation, my committee told me I would have to fly to – to somewhere – and they would conduct my defense via teleconference. They were afraid that they'd be accused of academic impropriety if there were even a hint of the possibility of my influencing them to pass me. That I knew far more about my research than they did, that I had absolutely no reason to cheat – that I had never once been found guilty of cheating throughout my entire career – never entered into it: it was the chance, however remote, that I might be less than honest that made them do what they did."
Charles hadn't told him that. Erik trembled at the border between indignation and anger, held there by the abrupt realization that he, too, had given way to the shadowy, threatening possibility of Charles's power. He thought quickly back over the few times they'd conversed mentally, or when Charles's thoughts had simply sidled up next to his while they sat in on quiet evenings.
"Other mutants have it worse than I do; much worse," Charles said softly, but with a force that held Erik helplessly silent. "I'm not special, not by any stretch of the imagination. But it's – I wish I could describe what it's like, to know people's fear of you, so clear you're afraid of yourself. My mutation manifested early; I can't remember a time I didn't have it, and I can't remember a time people didn't look at me as though I were about to rip their thoughts out of their skulls. I made my sister hide because I couldn't bear the thought of her experiencing that fear directed at her.
"I've made so many accommodations to the human world so I can do what I love and be happy." Charles was leaning forward now, gazing steadily at Erik and what Erik felt coming off him was not precisely anger, but not precisely sadness either. I made those because my work is that important to me, but I had hoped that I would not have to make those sacrifices with my own kind – with those I love. I had hoped – I had thought – you understood and accepted me, because you believed so fiercely in the importance of us being what we are.
"It's easier to do in theory than in practice," Erik admitted. He had long ago stopped accommodating human anxieties about his abilities, or much caring what humans thought of what he could do; six years in in foster care after his parents' deaths, shuttled from human home to human home because mutants were seen as unfit adoptive or foster parents, had burned that caring out of him, along with trust and a great many other things.
"I didn't grow up with much," Erik said, forcing his memories to remain up at the surface, painful as they were. "It's not an excuse, it's an explanation, but… I didn't have much that I couldn't have taken away from me. My powers were one thing I had, my sense of myself was another. I couldn't have that taken from me."
"Oh, Erik," and Charles leaned toward him, and seemed on the verge of reaching out to touch him, "I would never – I would never have taken anything from you. Your thoughts, your memories, dreams… those would always be your own."
"I can't explain what I mean." With an effort, Erik kept the snap from his voice; it wasn't an effort he would make for many people, even if the frustration was mostly for himself. "Some things – I know you see things differently, that you can't help it, but some things aren't for sharing. Not always."
Charles nodded, withdrawing into himself somewhat. "I wish – I wish you simply could have told me that. I never… well, I tried not to pry where there was too much pain. I'd hoped you'd come to share that on your own and let me see it."
I want that, Erik thought with a sudden twist of yearning that surprised him. Swiftly, he backed away from it, no, no I don't want it – except –
"What do you want?" Charles asked softly. "You'll have to tell me; I won't read your mind, not for this."
"I want you with me." It was an effort to say the words, harder because they were so very true; the weight of them sat heavy on his chest and made breathing difficult. "I know – I know I can't expect anything from you, but more than anything, I want you to be with me again."
"I want to be with you, Erik," Charles said quietly, "but I don't know how to be with you, and you don't know either. Come back when you've figured it out."
"Does that – " Erik began, but had to swallow around the words and the sudden impossibility of speaking them. He tapped his forehead, thought Does this mean I can see you again?
"The X-Genome Project conference is next weekend in Philadelphia; I'll be gone for that." Charles pulled out his iPhone and studied it intently; Erik sensed the metal body of the phone warming in the hot, anxious cup of Charles's palm. "But let me know, when you've decided and we can talk."
He hadn't realized he'd been bracing for outright rejection until the moment it didn't come. He wanted to shake from the relief of it. Instead, he only nodded.
"Now," Charles said, "Hank's having an anxiety attack about some gels. I should see to him."
"Of course," Erik said, not quite recognizing the sound of his own voice. "I'm sorry I kept you from them."
"Don't be." Charles stood, pressed a warm hand to Erik's shoulder. Erik hoped it might travel upward to trace his neck and settle against his cheek, one of Charles's favorite gestures when he was being affectionate. Charles didn't, but he did stay still for a moment, and Erik didn't know if the hope-regret-confusion was Charles bleeding into him or him spilling over at the edges.
Roberto Costas, 38, met Jesse Rowley at a work function both of them describe as "tedious and awful." Jesse, a hydrokinetic (and a prosecutor known for her take-no-prisoners approach), explained how she came to terms with Roberto's empathy: "At first I was uncomfortable with him simply knowing my moods – I didn't know if I was ready for that level of intimacy right off the bat. But I realized that asking him to not sense me would be like asking me to ignore what a gathering rainstorm feels like. I know people say there are differences between these two things – a person's thoughts and emotions aren't objects – but I couldn't… I couldn't ignore the thought that I was asking him to sacrifice part of himself to be with me. It's not the same as asking someone to give up smoking, you know?"
Erik took the rest of the day off to wander around the city, paid to do something he'd never done and took the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building. In the small capsule, rocketing skyward, he reached out to the metal above and below and around him, felt the dependable strength of every beam and rivet, like traveling up the spine of a giant. Once up top, the wind bracing and promising a cool evening despite the warmth of a late fall day, he shut his eyes and let his metal-sense wander out across the island, from the surgical steel pins holding a woman's leg together to the steel-and-glass of the buildings around him to the cars processing slowly down the roads and across the arteries of the bridges, iron filings drawn by magnets to their destinations, and deep under the earth the tendrils of the subway tracks and the trains riding them.
This was the world for him, he thought. He tried to imagine it otherwise, not having an understanding of the architecture or engineering of a thing in his bones, or the turn and flux of the earth's magnetic field, and couldn't do it.
Back in the 60s they'd experimented with electroshock therapy for mutants, first as a way to keep manifesting children from destroying their homes or schools, and then, in the form of discreet clinics, a quietly doctor-approved method of social control. It didn't matter the mutation, but telepaths and kinetics got the worst of it; that was one form of torment the ones with purely physical mutations escaped. How many thousands had been left stripped of their powers, how many hundreds more had been left without the ability to control them, no one could say. The clinics had died out in the seventies, some of them destroyed by mutant rights activists, some of them silently shuttered when the government stripped their funding. If he'd been alive back then, before those days, he might have found himself "referred" on his first entrance to foster care. Charles almost certainly would have been.
Fury bubbled in him, looking back over all that history. He tried to imagine his world silenced and emptied of meaning, a life spent muffled and hobbled, and couldn't do that either. Then he tried to imagine what it would be like for mutants to do that to other mutants and had to shake his head against the wrongness of it.
He took the elevator back down and went home after that.
Not all psionics are created equal. Thanks to anti-mutant propaganda, though, the mainstream is still flooded with images of psionics as people who casually "mind-control" others or "erase their memories" and any other horrible thing you might see in a classic supervillain movie. We've come a long way since those days, but as the reactions to psionics show, there's still plenty of paranoia to go around; it bubbles up whenever the news reports on a criminal who used his abilities in the commission of a crime. Even non-psionics in stable, happy relationships with telepaths or empaths aren't immune to it.
Friday came without any sense of anticipation for the weekend and with mingled impatience-dread for the length of the week waiting on the other side of it. Erik stalked into his office, impressed the intern with the absolute necessity of his remaining undisturbed and the consequences if he was bothered for any reason, and slammed the door behind him.
"Ah, there is my least favorite engineer." Emma Frost slipped into his office not five minutes later, ignoring the Do Not Feed the Shark sign some joker had posted on Erik's door. She was all cream and white and ice-blue eyes, her pale pink lips upcurved in a smile that held more sarcasm than pleasure. Erik supposed that, for her, they were much the same thing.
"I already emailed you the latest progress report," Erik said, not looking up from his tablet. "If you want things done faster, you could go to Hammer, but you'd be sorry."
"Oh, I'm not here about the progress report; I'm quite satisfied on that score. You may force the Massachusetts Academy to open on time."
"Then may I ask why you're here? I can't change the specs now, not without significantly reworking the entire project."
Without being invited, Emma sank gracefully into the cheap plastic chair opposite Erik's desk. The chair was mercilessly hard and engineered for discomfort; that it was in Erik's office was no coincidence. Emma lost some of her superiority as she shifted, trying to disguise the awkwardness by smoothing her skirt across her thighs. The point of an expensive high heel tapped Erik's desk.
"I'm here," Emma said, apparently giving up, "because Tony informed me you're trying to get back into Charles Xavier's good graces."
"Of course he did."
"Tony never can keep quiet when it comes to juicy gossip," Emma said. "I believe he needs some sort of outlet, having to watch what he says about confidential projects and classified material. But you ought to give him credit for altruism, sugar; he knows you've been doing some… extracurricular reading, shall we say, and thought that you'd like to talk to an actual psionic who isn't Charles."
"And he picked… you," Erik said flatly. "I'm not entirely sure 'altruistic' is the word I'd use."
Emma made an equivocating gesture. "Well, I'm here now, if you must talk about it."
Talking emotions with Emma was like rolling over to expose his soft underbelly. Erik folded in on himself and let the silence stretch, filling his thoughts with equations and orders for Emma to go away.
"Did you know he has something around ten thousand likes on Psingles.com?" Emma asked as she inspected flawlessly manicured fingers.
"Singles.com?" Christ, Charles was on a dating site? For that matter, Emma was on a dating site?
"Psingles with a psi," Emma clarified with a smirk. She drummed those flawlessly manicured fingers on Erik's desk. Erik looked up unwillingly. "It's for psionics seeking other psionics only, much more exclusive than Mutant Match or the other services."
"I wouldn't have thought you needed one," Erik said.
"Why? It's incredibly gauche to break into a relative stranger's head with Pardon me for disturbing you, but I'm interested in you, possibly sexually, and want to know if you'd like to get a drink and come back to my place. Besides, not all telepaths are created equal; some can't project thoughts, others can but only in a very limited range or with direct contact." Emma gave Erik a pitying look. "Contrary to what you may think, we telepaths do have a sense of etiquette and privacy; we even, at times, prefer to keep ourselves to ourselves and not let anybody in. Charles can be damnably hard to read when he wants to be. It makes flirting unnecessarily difficult."
Before Erik could say anything to that, Emma pulled her phone out of her purse. After tapping at the screen a few times, she turned the phone and held it out to Erik, who accepted it suspiciously.
Emma had brought up Charles's listing on Psingles.com. He could have put more effort into his profile, Emma informed him as Erik skimmed over things he knew because he'd known Charles in far more detail than a dropdown menu could provide (the precise shade of the brown of his hair, that Charles had run a 2:41:5 in the New York Marathon in college, that he loved tea and was agnostic and knew three languages and spoke French with an accent that embarrassed Erik to hear) and dwelt on his profile picture. Trust Charles to be clueless about it, Erik thought; he'd used his faculty page head shot, which meant Erik got the full force of the focus and attention Charles had directed at the camera.
"It says you're seventy-eight percent enemy," Erik observed.
Emma snatched her phone back. "Well, those are only baseline rubrics, and as you ought to know, opposites attract and all that. We had a nice time, but Charles is so earnest and passionate. I have a hard time being with people who aren't as jaded as I am."
Erik ignored the twitch of jealousy at the passionate and said, "I don't see what Tony thought he was going to get out of this. Does he want me to back off?"
"I think he wanted you to understand something you're just not getting." Emma sighed. "Look, sweetie, we're mutants. Individuals. Nothing's set in stone for any of us. Charles is distressingly and depressingly honest, but just because he follows the rules doesn't mean all of us do. Yours truly, for example." Emma placed a delicate hand on her breast, just beneath the teardrop glitter of her diamond necklace. "Of course, you oughtn't judge all telepaths based on me, but take us as we come."
"Charles told me this," Erik admitted.
"Then you shouldn't be surprised when other telepaths tell you the same thing," Emma said. "I don't let anti-psionic prejudice bother me because I can't afford to; if I had to think any more about some pathetic mid-level executive being sent to a meeting in place of his CEO because the CEO is afraid I'd filch company secrets out of his head… Well, my feelings wouldn't be hurt, but I would be annoyed. There's enough in this world to annoy me as it is, and I have more important things to think about."
Charles had said much the same thing too, in one of their arguments. Fights, Erik told himself; they'd been proper fights, when both of them weren't afraid to use weapons to hurt the other. Erik, refusing to admit his own uncertainties about Charles's abilities, had countered with the many, many other areas in which Charles was privileged – and anyway, if he didn't like what people had to think about him, maybe he shouldn't listen in without their permission.
"I still have no idea what to do," he said, and braced himself for the slashing knife of her laughter.
"Oh, sugar," Emma said instead, "he's tied himself up in knots over you. It's both adorable and pathetic." She stood and brushed invisible dust off her immaculate white skirt. "But, as a psionic to a non-psionic, if you can't help him untie himself… you should probably tell him that, leave him alone, and find some nice metallokinetic to get the taste out of your mouth."
Except Erik didn't want the taste of Charles out of his mouth. He tried to quiet the questions in his head, told himself that if Charles had moved on he would have said it and wouldn't have given Erik any kind of hope. Charles had never believed in repaying cruelty with more of the same.
The look Emma gave him told him she knew what conclusion he'd come to: an arch of a sleek brow, that smile again, before she collected her purse and left.
"To be honest, I was worried," says Kevin Huang about his first days after finding out his partner Blair is a touch-activated telepath. "My mutation is pretty physical – super-strength. I didn't have a great past, and I did some things I wasn't proud of. When we started getting serious and Blair told me exactly what it was he could do, I totally freaked. But then I figured if he'd known, he hadn't said anything – and he hadn't judged me because he was still with me. And if the worst that could happen was the man I love finding out some uncomfortable truths about me but sticking around anyway… Well, I guess I've got it pretty good."
The weekend dragged its feet into Sunday without any clear answer to Charles presenting itself. Erik went out Friday and Saturday night -- Friday evening would have horrified his mother, who had insisted on the family being home together even if they didn't go to services (he had stayed in Hebrew school until his bar mitzvah; that was another thing the state couldn't take from him) – but he'd been too restless to get the sort of drunk he wanted. The alcohol and anger had come together in the crucible of his gut and after one college jagoff asked what the fuck Erik was looking at, it had either been magnet the asshole to the floor while Erik pounded the shit out of him, or leave.
He was thirty-three and past this. The night had sharpened the blurred edges in his brain enough for him to walk home and remember that trying to track down Charles was a bad idea. Once sobriety returned on Saturday, he had sense enough to be ashamed; he spent that evening wandering aimlessly, making his way through the crowds headed up to Times Square with the lights pulsing at him and hundreds of voices pushing at his skull.
Was that what it was like for Charles? He thought about the metaphor of the crowded room, if the world was more or less an endless murmur in the corner of Charles's consciousness, a sea of voices out of which one or two would rise to catch his attention, or into which he might dip a hand if he needed or wanted something. Erik imagined being down in that sea, waiting to be pulled up – like a fish on a hook, or a drowning man reaching upward, hoping.
Sunday morning found him at his computer, folded into his usual spot on the couch. He'd opened the laptop with the vague intention of logging into the Stark Industries server and doing enough work to get Emma off his back, but after an hour of wandering around the Internet, found himself writing instead.
Charles:
I never told you this, but maybe you knew for yourself. I never asked if you knew, and if you did you never told me. But anyway:
My parents died when I was twelve, in a robbery that wouldn't have gotten their killer enough money to pay a legal aid attorney. One minute we'd gone to the store to pick up groceries for the weekend (it was Friday afternoon and my mother was hurrying us up so we could be home for Shabbat) and the next I was lying on the floor, watching my mother die. I had manifested only a couple of weeks before. To this day I still wonder if I had manifested earlier, or had better control, if I hadn't been so terrified and confused, if I could have saved her and my father.
I spent the next six years in the foster care system. I don't need to tell you what that was like; you can guess for yourself. Or maybe you know. Those six years I had almost everything that mattered taken from me. The only things the state and my foster "parents" (I can't call them parents, because they weren't parents, not in any sense of the word) couldn't take from me were my abilities – although they tried with one of those wonderful "reform schools" – and my sense of who I was. What I mean by 'sense' I can't tell you; I can only tell you that I had my memories, emotions, and thoughts, and those all belonged to me. I decided my first night in a group home that no one could have those things.
Objectively, I know my thoughts and memories are nothing special. But subjectively – to me – they are. Maybe this is something a psionic can't understand, but that's the way it is for those of us who spent most of our lives trapped in our own heads. For a long time those memories of my family, the waiting to turn eighteen so I could escape, the anger… they were all I had. Still, I should have known to trust you with them, if you'd wanted to see them; if you had pulled them out from wherever I keep them, I should have known you wouldn't have laughed at them or considered them unimportant, because you considered me important.
It still startles me when I think about it, that you thought I was worth knowing that way. There were times when we were together that I wondered why you were with me and what you could possibly see in me. I wonder that now, too. I wonder what you saw, and I wish I'd thought to ask. I don't regret most things I've done in my life, but I do regret that. I regret losing you – or, I suppose, never really having you, because I only allowed you to show me part of yourself. In another world I could hate you right now for not seeing things my way and I would refuse to trust you – but still, I think I'd always regret hurting you.
I don't know why I'm writing this, unless maybe it's because saying it out loud is much harder. I never would say these things, not for anyone. Except you.
By Saturday the island was too small to hold him.
Most people would find some quiet place to hide upstate, the parks lining the Hudson or the Adirondacks. Erik toyed with the idea of Boston, with the steel and alloys of its financial district, a flight to Pittsburgh for the quiet rusting of the bridges.
Instead, knowing it was a terrible idea, he went to Philadelphia. It was selfish – a strike against him already – but he went.
The week had passed in a blur of work, the occasional hiatus of a meeting with Tony (who had wisely stopped interrogating Erik about Charles) or talks with Azazel punctuating extended sessions with his tablet and the schematics for the Frost Corp. project. The letter to Charles, printed out in a moment of impulse, stayed folded between the two credit cards in Erik's wallet. Thursday had begun with him standing over the burbling coffee pot, waiting for the first infusion of caffeine and realizing Charles is probably out of the city now.
It wouldn't make much of a difference, would it? He had no idea of Charles's range, if the river and the bent elbow of New Jersey might be enough put him beyond Charles's reach or if the distance was no more effort than Charles brushing a hand against his as they walked down the street. Charles was powerful, he knew that, or surmised it from various conversations that in the past had served to make that instinctive, unthinking anxiety curl up his spine. Still, difference or no, he rode down to Penn Station and before thinking too much more about it, finagled his way onto an Acela and the calming, heartbeat regularity of the iron-skinned train car riding miles of railway.
He found the conference without much difficulty thanks to the conference website and the thicket of anti-mutant baseline protesters gathered outside the convention center. A few scientists, one of them the large blue-furred graduate student Erik had seen in Charles's lab, clustered behind the window and frowned out at them; a handful of police officers, most of them looking like they'd rather be anywhere else, occasionally prodded the protesters back from blocking the entrance. In response, the protesters waved their signs and shouted about how evolution was blasphemy and mutants "didn't exist" and God was going to punish America for them for existing.
Erik resisted the temptation to do something violent – he might have at seventeen, too angry and chafing at the bit, anxious for freedom – and slipped into the echoing, impersonal heart of the convention center, moving upstream against a crowd of academic-looking people.
A program lay discarded on the edge of a marble planter, bookmarked and forgotten by an absent-minded hand. Erik leafed through it to the index, all the way in the back and fifth in the surprisingly long list of Xs.
X-Genome Project Graduate Student Posters 95
X-Genome Project Programming Group 78
X-Phenotype Special Working Groups (see working group headings)
X-Transcriptonomics Working Group 44, 71
Xavier, Charles 10, 58, 113
Session 113 – that was two floors up and over in five minutes. Erik booked it upstairs, in time to catch the sudden rise in voices behind the door, a burst of applause as the moderator asked the audience to thank the presenters for such a stimulating session and discussion.
Erik waited, fuck it was interminable, as the voices died to a companionable buzz, five minutes of that before the door opened and a brace of scientists bustled out, chattering animatedly to each other. The paper seemed an impossible weight in his pocket – he'd taken it out on the train ride, read it, refolded it, put it away, taken it out to read it again, rinse repeat rinse repeat – and the words weighed heavy too. Keeping them in his head made his breath run short, like trust was running a marathon uphill.
A few more scientists trickled out, then a brief flood of them before the doors swung shut. Maybe Charles had canceled – maybe he'd sensed Erik coming and cleared out – maybe Erik had read the program wrong, and fuck, he wasn't used to this, tense with fear and hope instead of the anger that made wanting things, if not easier, then less disappointing when he didn't get what he wanted in the end.
At last, at last he caught the peculiar cadence of Charles's voice – Charles in the grip of lecture mode, ecstatic with knowledge and enthusiasm. He came out alongside two older men and one woman, trying to look them all three in the eye at once as he tried to explain himself to them. Erik could imagine the mental lecture accompanying it, not the dry specifics of genes and proteins, but the passion that had so bemused Emma: it's so beautiful can't you see it when it's laid out like this for you so clear and perfect don't you see please let me help you see it.
"Charles," he said.
Charles froze. The scientists with him also paused and darted quizzical looks between Erik and Charles.
"Oh," Charles said intelligently. Then to his colleagues, "I'm terribly sorry, but I forgot I had an appointment after our session, and I've kept him waiting. Perhaps I could catch up with you later? I have Dr. Neramani's number."
"You should," the woman said, and leaned in to kiss Charles on the cheek. She was dark-haired, striking in a sea of mostly-bland academics – not as magnetic as Charles, but Erik could see where she could compel. He tried and failed to keep the jealousy down, and to stop the memory of Emma smirking at him from across his desk.
"Ah, the open bar," one of the scientists said fondly, apparently oblivious to the byplay. "We'll be there."
"I'll find you," Charles promised. The scientists seemed to accept this and trooped off, Dr. Neramani leaving with one last fond look and hand-squeeze. Charles turned to face Erik then, and the bewilderment on his face would have been endearing if Erik hadn't been spilling over with nervousness.
"You – I wasn't expecting you. This," Charles said at last. "I don't suppose you suddenly cultivated an interest in the X-Project's work toward a reference genome for psionics."
"Not as such." Erik coughed and swallowed, and on the next breath felt peace coming over him. It was, he thought, the peace of resignation and it was strange, because Erik Lehnsherr had never resigned himself to anything, ever. "I couldn't wait."
"I see." Charles glanced around. Most of the other scientists had dispersed, either to other sessions or to lunch. The conference room gaped emptily behind him. "Should we..?"
Erik heeled him, pulling the doors shut by their brass-lined bars. The room was large, stuffy for all that with an undertone of dust and recycled air. Hidden in its recess above, a projection unit hummed its way down into slumber. Charles hitched himself up on the desk positioned at the front of the room, legs dangling and fingers laced casually, but still leaning forward, his eyes fixed on Erik.
"I should have expected something like this." Charles laughed, not sounding particularly amused. "You were never very good at waiting, if there was something you decided needed to be done."
"I want – I want to show you something first," Erik said instead, instead of admitting that Charles was right. He tapped his temple. "If you would agree."
He thought of the letter, the already-worn, torn, and much-folded paper of it, the coffee stain in one corner where he'd been careless. He hoped Charles saw what hid behind that, his need to keep himself close, a habit he'd had long before the two of them had stumbled across each other, and the bewildering notion that Charles had found him worth knowing for more than his engineering skills or his body or anything else most people had wanted him for.
Charles rocked back a bit, eyes wide, but said nothing.
"I haven't changed my mind from last week," Erik said when Charles's silence continued. "I want to be with you."
"I still don't know how," Charles told him softly. "I can't answer that question for you."
"The last thing I should have done was expect you to shut off part of yourself." Erik moved closer, shuffling over cheap carpet, absently shifting chairs aside by their metal legs. Charles sat quite still, poised on his desk. "I can't tell you how sorry I am for that – and it's not because I'm terrible with words, but because there aren't any. And I should not have needed anyone to tell me that; I should've realized that for myself."
"Not a lot of people do."
Erik came to a halt a few feet away, close enough that the pulse of iron in Charles's blood was a steady throb in the corner of Erik's awareness where his power sat. Charles made no move to get up, and gave no indication that he was looking in on the maelstrom in Erik's head. Maddening, Erik thought, and that – oh, that tricked a grin out of Charles, who tried to smother it and failed.
I want you to hear me, Erik thought, and barreled on with the clumsiest series of words known to man, because Charles had wanted words: "If you – you said you wanted to be together. And I can't… I want to let you in. I will let you in. And I'll tell you if I can't talk about it, but I won't stop you from looking."
Charles stared at Erik, as poleaxed as Erik had ever seen him.
"I don't say things I don't mean," Erik said. "I've been told it's either my greatest virtue or most annoying quality." Please look, please see how much I mean this.
"You're still afraid," Charles said at last. It didn't sound judgmental, or sad, or much of anything.
"Not of you." I should never have been.
Charles slid off the desk enough so he was more leaning against it than standing, hands gripping the edge. He gazed at some point off to the left, maybe at the minds on the other side of the conference room wall.
"In the interests of full disclosure," Charles said slowly, "I should tell you I used to not be so… scrupulous. At least, not as honest as Emma makes me out to be. But then, I suppose, I'm a paragon of virtue next to her."
"'Virtuous' isn't a word I'd use to describe you, Charles." Not with what we did, all those nights tangled up.
"Thank you for that," Charles said, properly and exaggeratedly aggrieved, and also somewhat red. "But when I was younger I wasn't above – I wasn't above using my abilities in ways and for reasons you might object to. Convincing my stepbrother he was covered in warts after he tried to push me down the stairs, for one. I wished I'd had the power to erase my stepfather's memory or make him divorce my mother, but I was too young and never could manage it."
It was a test, and one Erik had to pass. He fastened onto the human stepbrother and stepfather; Charles had never talked much about them except to say they were in the past and gone, and only had what power they did because Charles chose to give it to them. "They hurt you first," he said at last, "and you struck back. I'd be even more of a hypocrite if I told you what you did to save yourself was wrong."
"But the point remains, I could do, and have done, these things. I don't want you to think I'm innocent." A few more images, almost sheepish: Charles in bars, telepathically gleaning the drink preferences of a pretty girl, the few times Charles had dug up some insecurity or past transgression and used it as a weapon in a disagreement. "Eventually," Charles continued, blushing, "I realized doing that was unfulfilling. Somewhat selfish, but then I realized doing anything under false pretenses – not allowing the other person to see who I was – was unfair to them, and I couldn't be happy, not when I had that kind of advantage and didn't have to be vulnerable if I didn't want to be."
And that – that was an out, if Erik wanted to take it. I could do the same thing to you, too; you're right to fear having your free will taken or compromised. You can leave now and be justified. He didn't want it.
"I meant what I said the last time we spoke." Charles was tilting his head to look up at Erik, eyes startling in the beige monotony of the room. "I can't take anything from you; I never would. The memories of your parents, growing up, all the good things and bad things – your disgraceful taste in shirts, for example – they are you. And if I changed them, you wouldn't be the person I – well."
Charles huffed out a breath and looked away, biting his lip. Erik very much wanted to soothe that spot, to tug that soft flesh out from under the canine and press his thumb to it. He stayed where he was.
"I would have made myself be open for you, you know," Charles said. "If you'd asked, I would have shown you everything, and you would have known me as well as I know you. Better, maybe; I always felt I didn't know you well at all."
"Why the hell you'd trust me with that, I have no idea," Erik said gruffly. He did touch Charles this time, a brush against the back of his hand, and Charles shivered. "Honestly, Charles."
"I should think that'd be obvious." Charles's eyes were very blue and very close, even if he was leaning slightly away.
"I still can't believe that." It was, Erik thought, like an exchange of weapons, one person giving the other the thing that could destroy him.
Or save him, Charles said. It's not always about mutually-assured destruction.
"No," Erik had to agree, "it isn't," because losing Charles – realizing what he'd done to lose Charles in the first place – had almost ended him when nothing else life had given him could.
Can we do this? He wanted to step closer, as if physical proximity could press his case and Charles could feel how much he wanted this written in his skin. I can. With your help, I can. And I can't promise I won't be wrong or I won't hurt you again, but I swear I won't fear you.
"Tomorrow I'll tell you," Charles said, but with a smile that took the edge off disappointment. You know, like we'd originally planned. "I do have professional obligations tonight, and I need – I need time, Erik, truly."
There wasn't anything to say to that, not when Erik had laid himself out already.
So Erik said, "You mean you need the open bar." He made himself not think about Dr. Neramani and the familiar fondness as she'd touched Charles.
"I need to think," Charles stressed, "and that may be aided by alcohol, I admit. But – in all seriousness, Erik, I need tonight and tomorrow, and I swear you'll have your answer." I would never hurt you, not like that – stringing you along.
I know, Erik thought. It had been one of the few consolations in the past week, that at the end of it he would know one way or another.
He let Charles go at last, and made himself take another escalator down into the lobby. Short as he was, Charles was quickly swallowed by the crowd, only the beacon of his watch and the ever-present pen guiding Erik along with him as Charles made his way through the shoals of scientists to an elevator. On the edge of the crowd as he was, Erik could look up and follow the elevator's progress, and see that Charles saw him.
Tomorrow, Charles repeated.
It was more than he'd hoped for, and more than he'd had any right to hope for. Erik navigated back to the station, and once in the reassuring embrace of the train car (and ignoring the shrieking of someone's brat), tried not to reflect on having to spend the next day at loose ends. He had never done waiting well, but it was for Charles to come back to him if he wanted, not for Erik to go and get him.
The train pulled into Penn Station with a wheeze and moan of brakes, a symphony of steel settling into quiet. Around him humans in their hundreds rose and filed for the exits, their watches, jewelry, pens, surgical steel, hidden weapons, all of it singing quietly in the corner of his head as Erik got up to follow them back up to the sidewalk.
* * *
Monday morning he beat the dawn to the office. Aside from the security guard, the only person Erik encountered was Tony in the throes either of a caffeine high or inspiration ("Oh, is that the time? Am I up late or early?"), and thus not inclined to talk. His office closed around him, familiar and metal-lined, everything in it there for a purpose (a bare space, still, where a photo of him and Charles had been until he'd tossed it) and Erik settled in to work.
By noon he had the fourth iteration of a plasma beam control plate emailed to Emma, tagged with I hope you're satisfied; if you want it to look pretty, find a fashion designer, and so by noon he had little to do except growl at the interns and, while staring blankly at the next looming project, think over the future.
He tried to outrun his anxiety in the park, but it dogged him and breathed over his shoulder, you should be doing something, anything, not this, not waiting – go find him somehow, do what you need to do, how can you wait like this how how how. He wondered if Charles could teach him patience, or if that lesson was beyond him now; Good things come to those who wait, except few good things had ever come to him, and there'd been no point in waiting to accept the bad, Erik reminded himself as he sped up, looking for speed enough to chase after any kind of reassurance. Startled walkers and joggers scattered apart in front of him; Erik blew by, oblivious, trying to screw his focus to the rhythm of his heart and the thunder of his feet on the pavement, trying to run faster.
Defeated and exhausted, he turned for home, back to the office for his clothes and tablet, and then the subway ride, sweaty and repulsive enough that people gave him space despite it being on the border of rush hour. His legs wanted to shake heading up the stairs and then heading down the block to his apartment, and he'd sunk himself deep enough into a series of reminders one foot in front of the other, upstairs, shower, news, don't think don't think that he almost missed the first tentative brushes of warmth and welcome.
Forcing himself to calm, he took the elevator up, ten stories (more steel, the counterweight easing down, the gears and pulley turning, the strength of the cable, don't hurry it). His breath came like he'd only now finished a fast interval, too quick and not full enough to satisfy, and over his heart's sudden pounding he heard and felt calm, like a hand on his shoulder to knead the tension from it.
Stepping out of the elevator and looking down the hall he saw a figure leaning against his door and froze. Charles was looking directly at him, vivid and vibrant and spilling over with anxiety-determination-hope, fear mixed in here and there, enough to sour, and Erik froze, overcome by it. He was, Erik thought distantly, standing in the hallway of his apartment building, disheveled and completely disreputable, with his leather briefcase sweat-glued uncomfortably to his thigh, and petrified in a way that had to do more with what Charles would say and not with Charles seeing him like this – unbarriered, more naked than if they'd been in bed together.
Don't be afraid, Charles told him, straightening as Erik found the presence of mind enough to approach. You don't have to be, I swear.
"I know," Erik said, and sighed to feel the familiar presence of Charles's mind – familiar, missed, longed-for in moments Erik had never let himself examine – slide along his. Is this a yes? Are you –
I couldn't wait. A handful of memories spilled into him, as if Charles were tipping coins into Erik's palm: Charles heading for his hotel room instead of the party, ignoring the texts from the scientists he'd meant to join, the instinctive drawing-back from wanting his answer to Erik to be yes for fear of Erik hurting him – that they might try again, that the pain would be worse the second time – but unable to stop himself wanting anyway, the unhappy thought that often it was better not to have what you wanted balanced by reminding himself of how Erik had communicated with him, mind to mind, without flinching or backing away from Charles's power. I had to – I had to know that you knew I'd forgiven you, hard as it was to do.
It wasn't a yes, I want to be with you, but absolution was maybe more than Erik had deserved anyway. He nodded, not trusting words enough to show that he understood and tried not to think no no no, it's worse don't you see, I can't live with you forgiving me and then wanting to be apart. I would almost rather have you hate me, so I could tell myself I hate you, even if I never could.
"And I want to try," Charles said quietly. Spoken words were heavy, Erik thought; breath and moisture gave them dimension, solid enough to be shaped by Charles's mouth. "On these terms: you don't keep me out, but I'll respect your desire not to talk about everything, not if you don't want to. Another chance, for both of us."
"I don't deserve it," Erik said.
I think I'm the one who gets to decide that here, Charles said. And I've made my choice; you have to make yours now.
Into the space left by disbelief came please tell me yes we can have this please after I came all this way I love you you know and I don't care if the books and common sense say this is a bad idea just say yes say you want to try after all.
"I do." Always, because he couldn't trust that to come through and Erik put all the force of his conviction behind it. No more hiding, not from each other, yes?
Why Charles was relieved when Erik was the one who felt ready to collapse from it, Erik had no idea. But he was, the sudden pulse of it washing over him warm and heady, and behind it the peculiar resonant sense of Charles lingered and settled comfortably down. Where fear or annoyance might have been, Erik found only relief of his own, and too many other things to sort out, at least not when he was sticky and uncomfortable and helplessly caught up in Charles's presence in front of him.
"Are we going to spend all night out in my hallway, or are we going to go in?" he asked gruffly.
"Inside sounds lovely," Charles murmured, and stepped back when Erik flicked open the deadbolt and chain lock with a gesture, and followed him inside. There are still some details to sort out, but those can wait until after you smell somewhat less abominable.
"I feel so very loved," Erik said, not without sarcasm, but not without honesty either, warmth like gold under the sun suffusing him – Charles's happiness, his own on display for Charles to see (his relief still, his not quite believing Charles was here with him, and he wanted Charles to see that, see what this meant to him and how undone he was by it, that he didn't fear it) – and Erik thought, for the first time in years, of the possibility of things like safety and home and staying, with Charles here.