round 3 overflow post

[starkmodistries.livejournal.com]

Round 3 Overflow Post

This post is for Round 3 fills only. We ask that when a round hits 8500 comments, fillers begin moving their fills to this post.

Format:
SUBJECT LINE -- Round #, short description of fic (ex: "Alex/Hank, lab partners")
--- Link to the prompt
--- Text of the prompt

--- Link to the fill
OR
--- Entire text of the fill

EXAMPLE:
Prompt: http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/6437.html?thread=1038472#t2038174

Charles/Erik -- Charles is a bakery owner whose most frequent customer is Erik.

Fill: http://xmen-firstkink.livejournal.com/6437.html?thread=0139482#t4502942

Charles started off the morning the same way he always did...

Comments

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 119/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

First things first: you have to check out this beautiful fanart (http://celluloidfloozy.tumblr.com/post/16136429971/oh-my-god-oh-my-god-you-guys-look-what) loobeeinthesky did for me! It's absolutely stunning and deserves all the praise and love in the world. Also, you might notice that the link goes to my tumblr, on which I am celluloidfloozy, and you can follow me if you would like to! NOW FIC.



XII

By the time Rogue comes in to work the next morning Magneto is already at his desk with the folders Mystique had brought him stacked in his out tray ready to be taken away and filed, a pen between his teeth as he flicks through a stack of paperwork that has accumulated in his absence, waiting to be signed. She bustles through the door and jumps about a foot when she looks up and sees him sat there, clapping a gloved hand to her chest and laughing breathlessly. “Oh! Lord, Magneto, you surprised me,” and she takes another couple of steps closer to the desk, stops just on the other side where she can peer at what he’s doing. “Guess ah got used to you being away! It’s good to see you back, safe and sound, if you don’t mind me saying.”

Magneto takes the pen out of his mouth and accepts the mug of coffee she hands him with a small nod, and suddenly he realises he is unexpectedly pleased to see her as well, and gives her a small smile. She lights up like a torch, and he makes a mental note to be kinder to her in future if this is the result. “It’s good to be back,” he says, glancing back down at the papers on the desk before pushing them away a little, already sick of them. “What have you been doing while I was away?”

“Well, there was still a lot of stuff coming into your office that ah was sorting,” she says, and glances behind herself for a moment before stepping back to grab one of the visitor chairs and dragging it up close to the desk, around the side so she’s sitting with him rather than across from him. “Ms Frost gave me some work to do for her, too, and Logan - that’s Wolverine - has been doing some training with me, you know, power stuff. Ah’ve kept myself busy, no fear.”

She’s a bright young thing, sat perched in the chair with feet swinging just a little against the carpet, that great curly mane of hers already trying to escape the elastic she’s tied it back with. Rogue is why he does this job, Magneto thinks, her and others like her - young enough still to be filled up with optimism and hope, with time enough to grow in a world where being a mutant is a good thing. After the unpleasant reading he’d spent the night doing it’s good to have the reminder sat in front of him, keen and desperate for praise. He wonders what Charles would say, settles on “I’m pleased to hear it,” which seems to do well enough; she smiles, anyway.

Magneto glances at the folders on his desk, at the thick bundles of paper filled with his notes, and on a sudden whim he asks, “How much of this do you follow yourself? Not just sorting it into trays, but reading.”

Her feet pause, and she blinks, clearly surprised. “Ah read a lot of it, though the science parts aren’t really my area. Why?”

“I was wondering what you thought of the current situation with the humans.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“It’s just - ” she pauses, bites her lip, then continues, “you’ve never asked my opinion before, is all.”

“Consider it a promotion,” he says wryly, and waves a hand at her, leaning back in his chair. “Go on. It’s not a trick question.”

She tilts her head back as she considers, and her boots start to brush quietly against the floor again, a soft susurration of leather on carpet. “Well. Ah see it like this. They didn’t much like us existing in the first place, and then mutants took over and they had to get used to that even if they didn’t like it. But now the humans got used to it and they still don’t like it - us - mutants. So they’re kicking off all over the place. Plus they’re all scared of you the most and you went out of the country for a couple months, that probably gave them ideas.”

He snorts, and, emboldened, she says, “What was it like down there? Was it awful?”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 120/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“War is always awful.” Magneto steeples his fingers under his chin and looks at her for a moment longer before waving a hand and sitting forward again, picking up his pen with a quick flex of fingers that pulls it to his hand. “That’s why you have to do it unto others before they do it unto you. Thank you, Rogue. Could you ask Emma to come and see me when she’s free, please?”

Rogue jumps up from her seat as soon as he reaches for the pen, smart enough to know when he’s done talking. “No problem,” she says, and puts the chair back neatly where she found it, carefully aligning the feet with the indents of where it usually stood. “Is that a ‘come see me right now’ when she’s free or a ‘come see me whenever’ when she’s free?”

He smiles again, and is a little surprised by it, though not as much as she is, by the look on her face. “The former.”

“No problem,” she says again, snapping him a sloppy salute that would never pass military muster, and buzzes out of the room as quickly as she’d come in, where he can hear her picking up the phone on her desk to call over to Emma’s office. He sips at the coffee - still hot, and she’s put two biscuits on the plate, too, though he leaves those - and starts signing the forms he’s been left, leaving a quick sharp M wherever the pages have been marked. There has to be something practical he can do this afternoon, he thinks, twitching his head slightly to realign the weight of the helmet, all the more necessary if Emma is going to be coming down. Perhaps he can speak with Wolverine about the training program, find out what’s been put in place.

“Magneto?”

He looks up to find Rogue poking her head around the door, and nods, gesturing for her to come in. “Yes?”

“Ms Frost isn’t in her office just yet, but Kitty - that’s Shadowcat - will tell her as soon as she comes in, or checks in.”

Entirely possible, then, that Emma will turn up here without going to her own office at all, if she makes use of her secretary’s brain for a day planner and picks out the ‘appointment’. “Thank you.”

“And, Magneto?” Rogue’s still there when he looks up, stood awkwardly in the doorway. “Ah don’t want to be forward, but ah wanted you to know that we do appreciate what you do, you know? What you did? The humans might not see that mutants are doing a better job putting their country back together after they bombed it to bits than they ever did, but we all do, so. Um. Do you need anything?”

“I’m fine,” he says, and she just smiles at him and ducks back out of sight, that white streak in her hair whipping around with her head as she turns.

Magneto thinks about thanking Emma for giving him Rogue when he sees her, but decides against it. It would only give her a reason to be smug.



XIII

“It’s nothing we didn’t expect,” Emma says as she runs a finger around the rim of her cup, legs daintily crossed in a way Rogue never would, the stiletto heels on her feet delicately slender yet no doubt razor-sharp. “What would you have done differently, Magneto, if I had sent dossiers down to Brazil for you of all the little scuffles? If you’re going to nominate me to fill your shoes while you’re gone, then let me do it.”

“Fill me in on what you’ve been doing,” he says, and the door of his office swings shut without a touch, lock clicking quietly into place.



XIV

His favourite is the one Raven apparently suggested, where they sent Azazel to cow the religious fundamentalist groups into behaving.



XV

Charles has been cooking again that afternoon; when Erik comes in he is sat at the kitchen table with a textbook open in front of him and a highlighter pen tucked behind one ear, another one of a different colour in his hand, making slow progress across the page. They eat the spaghetti bolognese he’s made together, quiet and knock-shoulder close at the kitchen table.

“Raven got me a cooking book for Christmas,” Charles says eventually, when both of them are picking at the last of their meals, twirling his fork in the leftover spaghetti and dragging it in tightening circles across his plate. “She thought I might enjoy learning.”

Erik hums around his own mouthful, sips at his beer with the reverence of long absence. “What did I get you?”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 121/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

It earns him a snort and a sidelong glance, but Charles doesn’t look annoyed. “Some new clothes,” he says, “which I must admit were sorely needed by now, and a haircut, courtesy of Raven. You do understand that the idea is generally to pick things out yourself?”

It’s the most content Erik’s been in months. Warm and with a full stomach, drink in hand in his own kitchen - and Charles, poking gentle fun at him, elbow propped on the table and pen marks on his face where he must have forgotten it was in his hand.

“I’d have sent you something suitably Brazilian, but I didn’t know what you’d like. And explaining it to Azazel would have been an interesting exercise.” Erik reaches out to tug at a lock of Charles’ hair where it lies against his forehead. “Perhaps next time I should cut your hair, if you prefer a straight line.”

Charles laughs, eyes crinkling up at the corners, and leans a little into the touch before reaching for their emptied plates. His hands are brisk and efficient when he stacks them with the cutlery on top, standing to take them over to the sink. “For a girl so obsessed with appearances, she makes a terrible stylist.”

“She’s not really a girl any more, Charles,” Erik says, and picks up the abandoned textbook, eyes roaming over the highlighted passages and finding them incomprehensible, full of words he understands and meanings he doesn’t. “Leave the dishes, you cooked. What’s this?” He slides a finger into the open page and turns the book over to read the title, Principles of Human Genetics.

“I don’t mind,” Charles says, but he leaves them in the dry sink anyway and comes to look at the textbook, taking it carefully from Erik’s hands as though it is a treasure. “I teach from this. Well. Taught.” His eyes are sad as he reopens it to the page he had left it on, runs a thumb across the last section of highlighted text. “I don’t suppose I still have a position any more after such a long absence. And I was on tenure track, too.”

“That’s good?”

“That’s a very good thing. It would have meant a permanent position, eventually. Assuming I didn’t get caught shagging a student or knifing someone.”

Erik smiles. “Were they hard habits to break?”

“What - oh, no, of course not,” Charles says, and closes the book, lays it back down on the table face down, like an ostrich with its head buried in the sand.

It reminds him, painfully, that while he is content with the way things are, it does not mean Charles is.

Trying to decide whether to ask another question leaves Erik unusually torn, because on the one hand he wants to know everything about Charles, every tiny scrap of information or opinion or history, but on the other he doesn’t want Charles to start thinking about his life outside and make things difficult between them again. He hesitates, but before he can make up his mind the point is made moot by Charles saying, “Enough of that, what did you do today?”

And Erik finds himself recounting his various conversations back to Charles over a sink full of washing up, his hands immersed in the soapy water and Charles laughing helplessly at the story about Azazel and the KKK, leaning against Erik’s shoulder wiping away tears from the corners of his eyes with his free hand and a tea towel clasped in the other.



XVI

He doesn’t tell Charles about the spies Emma has sent into the human resistance, or that Raven was until recently one of them; nor does he tell Charles about the quiet teams they are putting together to deal with the problem discreetly should it get more centralised, more organised. It would only upset him.



XVII

Besides, Charles has left him before on moral grounds, and just because he hadn’t gone through with it last time doesn’t mean he wouldn’t.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 122/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

XVIII

The textbook gives him an idea, though, and the next day he goes over to the building across the street from central command to get what he needs. The other cast-iron blocks around that one original apartment block have been taken over one by one as their government grew and established itself, the occupants either moving out of their own accord or being paid to move if not. Most have been converted now to offices and labs and training spaces. It’s a good location, and Magneto sees no reason for them to move to another place, seeing as they are working well where they are. The White House and Washington are long gone, with all of their purpose-built grandeur and pomp, so SoHo suits their purposes as well as anywhere would.

It’s not too difficult to persuade McCoy, who vacillates between anxious babbling and energetic enthusiasm like a metronome, slowly distracting himself from his nerves and getting more eloquent and impressive before suddenly remembering who he is speaking to all over again and seizing up until he can barely string two words together without an ‘um’ in the middle. At the very least it means he doesn’t ask too many questions. In the afternoon Magneto has a meeting with the West Coast District leaders in Seattle, so he slips back into the apartment as unobtrusively as possible in the short window he has before his rendezvous with Azazel downstairs. He waves Charles back to his work when he makes to get up, tells him it’s just a flying visit and leaves the cardboard box on the table where Charles will find it sooner rather than later.

“Can’t you stop for lunch?” Charles asks, and it takes Erik a moment before he can say no to the look on Charles’ face, not quite begging for the company but certainly not neutral, either.

“I would if I had time,” he says instead, has not even taken off the helmet or the cape, stands by the elevator doors and lets his hand hover over the call button, not quite able to push it. “I’ll be back later.”

Charles smiles, but even Erik can tell it’s not a happy expression. “See you later, then.”

“I love you,” Erik says just before the elevator arrives, steps inside and does not wait to see if Charles says it back, because if he doesn’t know, then there is an equal chance that he did as that he didn’t. That little bit of uncertainty keeps him warm through his meetings, lets him congratulate the team on their excellent work in difficult circumstances and if he doesn’t think about it then it’s easy to be sure that Charles would have said it, if Erik had waited.



XIX

When he walks back in that evening the living room is a sea of paper.

“Erik, where did you get all of this?” Charles asks from where he’s sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a graveyard of half-finished mugs of tea, an opened scientific journal in either hand and a third in his lap, laid open across his thigh like a wilted flower. It looks like a library exploded, though with less charring and bits of librarian.

He looks for places it is safe to stand; there aren’t many places where the floor is still visible and so in the end he walks across the paper to reach Charles, taking off his shoes first so that he won’t leave bootmarks and obscure the type. The rustling carpet slip-slides against itself, rumpling and drifting around where his feet disturb it and sending pages floating off against one another to land in drifts against the couch. “I commandeered it.”

Charles looks up at him when Erik bends a little to peer at the journals he’s holding, and pauses, biting his lip suddenly and frowning. “Oh - they were for me, weren’t they? I just assumed - ”

“Yes.” Erik interrupts him, and slowly reaches out to rest his hand on the nape of Charles’ neck, rubs a thumb across the soft skin there and is rewarded by Charles leaning into the touch instead of away. “Yes, they’re for you.”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 123/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“I can’t decide if this is wonderful or awful.” Charles looks back down at the mess around him, and Erik stiffens, the swelling sense of success punctured in an instant and turning to ash in his mouth. The top of Charles’ head gives him no cues, nor does the pen Charles is twirling between his fingers, an absentminded roll that flicks ink across the nearest paper in a fine spatter when he spins it back and forth a little too strongly. “Damn, where’s that pencap?”

“You don’t want them?”

“No! I mean, yes, yes, I want them,” and the nearest pile is dragged closer to their feet as though Erik might try to take them away, Charles looking back up at him with eyes wide and a little bit desperate, hands clenched in the pages and crumpling them into sharp creases. “Where did you get all of this? I mean, nobody was publishing for so long, but I haven’t read all of these, and there’s so much research here that doesn’t seem to have come from a journal, which I definitely haven’t seen because it’s about mutants, Erik, mutant genetics, and where on Earth did it all come from?”

“What did you mean, awful?” Erik asks instead of answering, and finally crouches down beside Charles to loosen his grip and smooth the paper back out, flatten it as best he can. Another hand lands gently on top of his own and presses down; Charles squeezes, once, and ducks his head to catch Erik’s gaze, lets the papers go.

His smile is wistful. “It’s sort of like being given a photograph of a feast, is all,” he says, “I miss my lab. But I really do appreciate it - it was very kind of you, to bring me this. I assume you liberated it from someone else? A scientist?”

“I’m trying,” Erik says to the floor, tugging his hand out from under Charles’ to rub at his eyes, cover his face for a moment and get a reprieve from being looked at. He does not let the sudden weight in his chest drag him to the ground, stays crouched and able to leave if he needs to, ready to stand. “I’m trying, Charles. I’m not good at this.”

“I know you are,” and there is a touch on his knee, then his shoulder, as Charles reaches for him, slow and steady, the same way he might if he were trying not to startle a bird into flying away, and when did Charles come to be able to read him so well as to know exactly what to do? It’s unbearable, and Erik pushes abruptly to his feet, dislodging the outstretched hand and stepping back, probably crushing the pages beneath his feet and not caring any more, because he can’t be there, any more, trying and failing yet again to make Charles happy, to mend something that has always been broken and will never be fixed, to fill the bottomless pit that yawns wide and black between them. He has never felt more of a fool than he does now, shovelling endless spadefuls of stunted feelings into an abyss that will never be filled.

Charles doesn’t love him, and never will. He cannot say he blames him.

Erik runs away.



XX

“Erik.” There is a long pause outside the closed door, and a creak of floorboards as Charles shifts, uneasy, before he says, “Erik, are you alright? Let me in.”

He hasn’t bothered to turn on the lights in his workroom, content for a while to sit in the dark among his familiar tools and metal, as good as a map to his metal-sense and comforting, in their own way. Erik considers not answering, but Charles knocks again, clearly not going away, so he raises his head from where it has been resting against his hand and says, “It’s alright. You don’t have to placate me all the time. It’s not going to lose you anything if I’m in a bad mood and you don’t jolly me out of it.”

“What are you talking about?” The voice this time is vexed, as though Erik is the one being stubborn, here. “I swear to God, you blow so hot and cold sometimes, Erik. Just make your mind up, alright? And let me in, you ass.”

“I’m busy.”

The floorboards creak again, and even they sound exasperated. “Doing what, exactly?”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 124/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

Wallowing in my own stupidity, Erik thinks, but does not say; instead he reaches out to the nearest lump of scrap iron and presses it between his palms as he thinks, rolls it into a ball and stretches it out again, over and over. It catches underneath his fingernails, smears across his skin when he makes it too liquid, and it takes concentration to firm it up again to something more the consistency of modelling clay, or play-doh, malleable but not dripping. “I’m working, Charles.”

“You bloody well are not, you liar.” There is a barely-audible sigh. “Look. I’m sorry if I seemed unappreciative. It really was a very thoughtful thing for you to do, and I’m grateful, Erik. Would you please open up? Or at least turn the lights on in there if you’re going to pretend that you’re doing something, I can see it’s dark in there through the gap under the door.”

Enough of this.

Charles jerks backward when Erik opens the door without warning, nearly tripping over his own feet, and Erik snaps out a hand to grab at the other man’s upper arm to catch him, letting go only once Charles is steady again. “Look,” he says, folding his arms and making himself meet Charles’ eyes, keeping his expression as neutral as possible. “Look. You don’t have to pretend to be happy. You don’t have to pretend to like anything you don’t, you don’t have to placate me if you think I’m angry with you. Don’t say things you don’t mean. Don’t play games.”

“What,” Charles says bluntly, and stares at Erik wide-eyed and flabbergasted, putting his hands on his hips and leaning forward into Erik’s space, somehow looming despite his short stature, “are you talking about, you madman? When have I ever pretended to like something I didn’t? First you’re complaining that I’m complaining about not being happy cooped up in here for months, and now you’re complaining that I’m not complaining? Erik, we’ve done that conversation to death already. Forgive me for not wanting to hash it out every moment of every day.”

“It’s not that.” Erik looks away down the hall, back towards the living room and the mountains of paper where they’re spread around the floor, hidden from here by distance and furniture. “I don’t want you to feel that you have to - ”

“Erik, shut up,” Charles says, and reaches up to clasp Erik’s face, one hand on either side turning him back to look at Charles. “That’s not why - I promise I’ll never do something I don’t want to just to - what was your word? - placate you. I might be stuck in a tower but I’m not a delicate little princess, alright? I am quite happy to tell you when to fuck off. Can we be done with this now?”

“How can you be sure?” There is a long silence between them after Erik speaks, Charles’ palms still warm against his cheeks, and each word that follows drops into the quiet like a pebble into water, one after another. “How do you know that you’re not just telling yourself that, to make it easier?”

“Fuck off,” Charles says, and does not look away.

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

“Then fuck off again,” Charles says, and when he smiles, tentative and slow, Erik lets his head droop so that his forehead leans against Charles’, breath mingling on a sigh.



XXI

“I don’t know,” Charles whispers later in the dead of night, “but I hope not,” and Erik keeps his eyes closed and pretends not to hear him.



XXII

He knows as soon as he walks in the next day that something is wrong. Raven and Charles’ heads jerk guiltily upright from where they’re sitting tight tangled together on the couch, his arms around her shoulders and hers twined around his waist, her head tucked under Charles’ chin and both of them tear-streaked.

“What’s happened?” Erik asks sharply, looking from one to the other for any clue, but there are none; he wonders if Azazel has done something, or if there is something wrong with the baby, or if -

“The Resistance burned down the mansion,” Raven says in a voice thick with crying, and squeezes her brother’s waist tighter as Charles winces with shared pain, digging his chin into the top of her head and not so much as trying to wipe his wet face.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 125/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

Okay, so, the amazing mirime made this beautiful comic (http://celluloidfloozy.tumblr.com/post/16415824297/everyday-love-in-stockholm-i-just-found-this-fic) of the scene where Charles and Erik discuss Doctor Faustus in Part Three, and it's so atmospheric and perfect. Thank you again, bb, I love it!

Everyday Love in Stockholm is now also on AO3! (http://archiveofourown.org/works/324068) I'll be updating it alongside this thread here. Please be aware that due to my own anal need to organise this by parts instead of chapters new bits will be added to the end of what's called 'chapter four' instead of as a new chapter, so I don't think the new subscriptions feed will work for it. Sorry to be awkward! Also, for some reason their HTML hates me, so I am trying to fix it but the spacing might be a bit weird, sorry :/



XXIII

“What mansion?” Erik asks, and then immediately feels stupid, because he knows very well which mansion she means. Charles has never really spoken about it, but he knows from Raven that they came from money, that they were raised rich in a world very unlike the one he had grown up in. Everything he knows about Charles’ childhood is extrapolated from Raven’s, from her stories of their games and pranks and of Charles looking after her, or more often her looking after him, of the two of them the stronger, the most able to dissuade bullies from taking her on and by extension Charles. He knows which mansion she must mean.

“Mine,” Charles says, and though his face is wet his voice is bland, wiped clean of emotion. “Let’s not call it that, it sounds so pretentious. ‘The house’ is much better, less Little Lord Fauntleroy. I suppose they must have thought I might be inside.”

Raven snorts, the sound wetter than usual, detracting from the humour. “Not likely.”

“Yes, well, I don’t suppose they know me or you particularly well, darling.” And Charles kisses her temple, a light press of lips as his arms tighten around her.

Erik wonders if he ought to be jealous, perhaps. He has so little experience with these sorts of relationships, after all; nonetheless, he cannot find it in him to begrudge affection to Raven, even if he can’t offer it himself. He looks at the two of them and considers the space beside Charles, wonders what’s expected of him in this sort of a situation, and cannot quite bring himself to sit beside them when he might not be welcome, to insert himself into their discrete group of two. He stands uselessly, hands clenching and unclenching at his sides, and all he can come up with to say is, “I’m sorry.”

“Why? You didn’t do it, not unless you’ve been moonlighting for the opposition,” Charles says with a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Don’t look so glum. I hated that house. Really.”

Raven frowns and pulls away with difficulty, sitting up straight so she can look her brother in the eye. “Not really.”

“No?”

“You hated the people in it. You loved the house.”

The expression on Charles’ face turns bitter, a startling twist that changes him into someone new entirely, someone Erik doesn’t know. It’s both disturbing and fascinating, like the sliver of a cracked-open door that has always been locked. “Ah, well. Kurt did make it so very easy, after all.”

“Kurt?” Erik asks, before he can stop himself.

“Our - Charles’ - stepfather.” Raven’s mouth purses up like she’s bitten into a lemon. “Let’s just leave it at he was an asshole, and not in the mostly affectionate way I call you an asshole. And Sharon - ”

“Not now, Raven,” Charles says sharply, and Raven is instantly silenced, something Erik has never seen before.

Was, she had said. Hated. Past tense. “He’s dead, then?”

“Very.” Charles has been sitting so stiffly, supporting Raven’s weight without bending; now he slumps back against the couch cushions, tilting his head back against the seat and looking up at the ceiling instead of meeting Erik’s eyes. “He died saving my life, the bastard. After all those years of beatings and tongue-lashings, he goes and does a thing like that. I could have forgiven him everything else if he hadn’t gone and done something so bloody selfless right at the end and made it impossible to just let myself hate him.”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 126/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

The very idea of someone laying a hand on Charles makes Erik’s blood boil, and he turns away, hides his hands behind his back so they cannot see his knuckles straining white against the skin at the thought of it, hopes the wish that the man were still alive so that Erik could kill him again doesn’t show on his face. He wonders if the man - Kurt - had used his fists, or a belt, what he had picked on Charles for when surely Charles had been as good then as he is now, no doubt eager to please and to care, given the chance. He very deliberately does not say anything in response, because he is not sure what would come out.

“Oh, Erik.” He glances back to see Charles looking at him ruefully, a small smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. “There’s nothing to be angry about now, it’s all very distant history. But thank you anyway.”

“I only - ” Erik starts, then pauses, unsure of what he was going to say.

“Come here,” and Charles reaches out with his free arm to him, beckons him closer. When he gets near enough Charles takes hold of Erik’s hand and tugs him to sit down beside the two of them, hip to hip with Charles in the snug leftover space on the couch. Then it is the three of them sat together, close and warm, Erik shifting to put his arm around Charles and overlapping onto Raven, his hand resting on the back of her neck; she twists to bring her legs up over their laps so that her feet rest on Erik’s thighs, her knees overlapping Charles’. “This is nice,” Charles says, and wipes the wetness from his face with the pad of his thumb, leaning into the cushions and Erik’s arm as though there is nowhere he’d rather be.

“It’s not the house, it’s the memories,” Raven says, after a while. Her voice sounds less damp now than it did before. “Not the bad ones, not - not Kurt and Sharon and Cain. But you and me, Charles, when it was good. It was the first place I could ever really call home, and now it’s gone.”

Erik tries to hide the way he has to swallow down bile at that, along with an onrush of feeling that he ruthlessly crushes, but he’s fairly certain Charles notices, anyway. He thinks about the photograph he is currently keeping in the box in the bottom of his wardrobe, of the pretty little house he had shared with his parents before everything had gone wrong, and he wonders suddenly if they would like to see it, maybe. If maybe it would help if he says that it gets better - it doesn’t - or that he’s suffered the same loss and he understands - he does, all too well.

“Memories don’t burn, Raven.” Charles curls the arm he has around her so that he can stroke his hand over the smooth scarlet of her hair, cupping her head closer in to his shoulder. “The house might be gone, but they can’t take your memories away. Not if you hold on tightly.”

The irony being, of course, that Emma could do that and more without lifting a manicured finger.

“I have nothing that belonged to my parents,” Erik says abruptly, the words coming out of their own accord, without stopping off for approval at his brain, and he wishes intensely that they had, for the way the Xavier siblings turn to look at him, twin expressions of sorrow on their faces when they should be grieving their own loss. “Never mind. It’s not relevant.”

Charles wriggles against Erik so that he’s twisted more towards him, head tilted to one side, considering the look on Erik’s face. “What were you going to say?”

“Nothing. I didn’t mean to say even that much.”

Raven’s heels dig into Erik’s thigh like she’s trying to find bone, and she sits up enough to look around Charles directly at Erik with gold eyes like coins. If they had been silver he might have had to leave. “No, tell us. You really don’t have anything?”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 127/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“There isn’t really anything to say.” Erik thinks about the photograph again, about the one or two very precious ones they had had taken on special occasions when he was a child. His mother had sat primly in her Sunday best on a chair in the middle, Erik standing at her side in a too-tight suit and his father behind her, one hand resting lightly on the slope of her shoulder, very much the gentle protector, the benevolent head of their family. His father had been very noble, and kind, with strong, deft hands Erik had loved to watch when he fixed things around the house. He had liked to leave things for people to find that he thought they would like, instead of making a production of it. Mother had kept the photographs lined up on the mantelpiece until Erik’s aunt had warned her that the sunlight would make them fade, after which she had put them safely in the drawer beside her favourite spot on the settle. She had forgotten them when they had left the house that final time, in too much of a hurry to get away to think of them.

Erik is not very much like his father. Not his biological one, anyway.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” Raven says after they have been quiet for a little while, swinging her feet down to the floor and getting up with a grunt of effort, rubbing a hand in the small of her back. “Ugh, that’s harder than it used to be. Don’t go anywhere, okay?” And she leaves without further explanation, leaving the men cold-lapped on the couch.

“What do you think she’s up to?” Charles turns so that he’s fully facing Erik, weight resting on one hip and head still leant against the arm Erik has along the back of the cushions, snug in the crook of Erik’s elbow.

Erik shrugs, tries to loosen his joints where they have seized up without his input, tight like unoiled hinges. “I try not to speculate when it comes to Mystique. It’s in the name.”

Outside it’s getting dark now, enough that he reaches out and flicks the switch of the standing lamp so that soft light falls out of it as though he’s removed the stopper from a bottle, illuminating the floating dust as it drifts past like flecks of gold. It only takes a little further effort to snap the dust out of the air with a wave of static that sets the hair on Charles’ arms on end and the hair on his head to floating upward a little bit at the top; Charles shudders, a full-body quiver against Erik, and lets out a gasp.

“What did you just do?”

“I hate dust,” Erik says, flicking the collected fluff into the trash can in the kitchen and out of sight. “There was always ash in my nose and in my mouth. It tastes the same.”

The other man looks at him with a sudden focus, not unkind but considering, even as he strokes down the length of his arms to discharge the static and smooth down the hairs again. “I think this is the most you’ve ever talked about it,” Charles says, gently, so carefully, like he is laying a feather on top of something fragile and willing it not to break.

“He made me watch, you know.” Erik did not mean to say this, either, but it’s as though he cannot stop, now that the floodgates have been opened. “He would have made her carry her myself but I wasn’t strong enough. So he made me watch instead, when they took her away to burn. I could taste it for days. I’m amazed he didn’t make me drag her.” He wipes a hand over his face, cannot decide if he is surprised to find it dry, though he does not really cry, any more. Charles’ expression is white and horrified, mouth slack and nostrils pinched, as though he can smell the crematorium the way Erik still can. It had smelled like meat, sometimes. “Sorry. That was too much. It doesn’t matter any more, anyway. Like you said, it’s ancient history.”

“God, Erik,” and Charles leans up to kiss him once, brief and hard, on the mouth, there and gone too soon. “I’m so sorry,” he says, and for once it doesn’t sound like a platitude. “Of course it matters.”

“It was a long time ago.” Erik bends his head to find Charles’ lips again, returning the kiss as carefully as he knows how, closed-mouthed and chaste. “I’m alright now,” he says against Charles’ mouth when they break away, sighing a little under his breath.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 128/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

When he opens his eyes Charles is looking at him with a sad smile on his face, but before Erik can ask what put it there Charles kisses him again, and he forgets.

Erik feels the elevator coming before it arrives, but does not care. Raven doesn’t even stop when she sees them, just drops herself onto the other end of the couch as Charles pulls away, flush-faced and swollen-lipped, his hair mussed from Erik’s fingers. “Get a room, guys.”

“Every room in this apartment is mine,” Erik says without rancour, and frowns when he sees the folders in her hands, three or four of them stacked one atop the other on the curve of her belly. “I don’t think more bad news is going to water down the first.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” and Raven puts the folders down on the footstool, reaching for the first one and putting it on Charles’ lap. “They’re photo albums.”

Charles looks gobsmacked, utterly wordless for a moment before he finally manages, “Raven, where did you get these?” His hands are moving before he’s stopped speaking, flipping open the album in his lap with its glossy black leather cover to reveal a first sheet of tissue paper overlying blurred images, which he pulls back reverently to reveal a photograph of a smartly-dressed couple in what is clearly a studio. They’re posed much the same way as Erik’s parents had been, though their clothes are obviously of much better quality, and the woman is wearing a gleaming choker around her neck, a thick shining bracelet at her wrist that catches the light of the flash.

“From the house.” Raven smirks, clearly pleased with herself as Charles turns the page to see another photograph of the same couple, this time – perhaps at a party? There are other people around, certainly, though none in focus, and the image has faded a little so that the lines are not so crisp as they once might have been. “I went back and pinched them when it was clear you were going to be here a while, since I knew you didn’t have any in your place and I wanted them to be kept safe. Good thing I did, huh?”

“Very,” and Charles puts a hand to her face and plants a loud kiss on her forehead with a smack of lips that has her feigning disgust, though she’s laughing. “Oh, Raven, you are a star. Remind me of this the next time I’m being a prig about something and you can have a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

“You, a prig? Never,” Raven says, reaching over to turn the page again when Charles pauses. “Oh, look. I always loved Sharon’s dresses. It was the best part of being a shapeshifter, they always fit when I tried them on.”

“Shame you had no idea how to do make-up,” Charles says, and Raven half-shrieks with fake outrage, pretending to smack him upside the head. “No, really, Erik, she looked like a circus clown had mated with a blueberry. It was really a very – aah! – unique look – stop pulling my hair, Raven, and pretend to be a grown-up won’t you – ”

Raven is grinning sharply as she lets go, laying her hands primly in her lap, ankles together like a fine society lady, suddenly demure. “It’s not my fault nobody makes blue foundation.”

There are so many photographs, Erik thinks with a feeling somewhere between disgust and fondness, shaking his head as he reaches out to rub the soft, thick cardstock between his fingertips. It even feels prohibitively expensive. The Xaviers must have owned a camera, or perhaps - he chuckles under his breath - a photographer. They put the Lehnsherr family portraits to shame, these sleek black-and-white images of people in motion, only pausing for a moment in a busy day to be frozen in time before moving on to the next thing, the next extravagance. “Are you in here?” he asks, and lets Charles take back command of the folder, flipping through page after page of the same man and woman, getting a little older each time, until suddenly there is a baby in her arms.

“There he is!” Raven crows, slapping a hand down on the photograph so that Charles can’t turn it over with the rest. “Look at him, all fat-faced and undignified like the rest of us. Isn’t he just precious?”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 129/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“Nobody wants to look at that,” Charles says, though Erik is leaning in closer to see the pristine white gown baby Charles is wearing in the photograph, the disgruntled look on his little face as though he cannot wait around to have his picture taken, he has things to be doing. He looks very uncomfortable, actually, and the woman looks uncomfortable too, holding him half away from her body, just secure enough not to drop him, but not enough to keep him from wriggling. In the next photograph Charles is in the man’s arms instead, and looks much happier, hand creeping up towards the tight-knotted tie, about to tug.

“Your parents?” Erik hardly has to wait for the nod, it’s not a giant leap of logic.

“Brian and Sharon Xavier. He died when I was little, and Mother remarried not long after.” Charles grips a thicker chunk of pages this time instead of turning them one by one, and is successful in bypassing the rest of his baby photos - on the next page revealed there are two boys staring back at them, one much bigger than the other, ham-fisted and broad-featured and clearly not Charles; Erik would suspect this of being Raven if it weren’t for the shudder that runs down Charles’ spine when he sees it, and the way he quickly moves them along to the next photograph, which is again two children, but this time one of them is a little blonde girl, and both of them are laughing.

Blonde, blonde, blonde. In every photograph Raven is blonde, blue-eyed, the perfect little Aryan human, the shape of her nose shifting slightly through time, the tilt of her eyes and the proportions of her body, but always, always pink-skinned and unscaled. “Are there no pictures of you?” he asks, as Charles goes for the third album, the first two set aside.

Raven snorts, jabs a finger at the first new photograph, the two of them lolling around in the dappled shade under a tree on a picture-perfect checkered blanket, a wicker hamper between them, like something out of an Enid Blyton book. “Who do you think that is?”

“I don’t know,” and Erik points at the photograph too, “I guess it depends on who you were copying the day you decided on a face.”

“We didn’t dare take any of her blue,” Charles says, brushing both of their hands away so that he can look, tugs a handkerchief from his pocket so he can wipe away their fingerprints from the paper. “In retrospect I wish we had, but there was too much of a risk someone might see. We couldn’t risk it.”

“A pity,” is all Erik says, though he could say much more. It wouldn’t change anything if he did. She looks happy, at least, sprawled across the ground with leaves caught in her hair and head tipped back to enjoy the sunlight where it spangles her skin with leopard-print through the shade of the tree, Charles looking into the camera with a bottle of pop in one hand and a book in the other.

The Raven on the sofa sits up straight and claps her hands in sudden excitement, smiling just as broadly as she is in the photograph, but Erik likes this one more, because it’s really hers. “We should take some!”

“You just want to play at being Twiggy,” Charles laughs, a comment which goes right over Erik’s head, and pokes her in the side, “though you’ve not got the figure for it at the moment.”

“I take it back, you are a prig,” and Raven leans around him to stare soulfully at Erik, who raises an eyebrow at her fluttering eyelashes and does not say anything. “Erik, would you be a dear and get my camera? I left it on the shelf over there and my feet hurt. Because I’m pregnant. And I already got up once and Charles is being horrible to me.”

He tries not to smile, fails miserably, and finds he does not mind overly much. “I’m not getting involved in this.” But he reached out for the camera and floats it carefully over to her waiting hands.

“Smile,” she says, and both he and Charles recoil as the flash goes off in their faces.

“Ow!”

“Damn it, Raven!”

Her laugh is light and breezy and free of the upset of earlier, ringing out loud above the whirring of the camera as it spits out the photograph. “You big babies. Erik, do you think you could hold the camera out and take a picture of all three of us together?”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 130/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

In the end Charles has to get up to look through the viewfinder to make sure it’s focused correctly and pointing in the right direction, but they manage, Erik slowly relaxing from the stiff awkwardness he had felt in his childhood to a half-smile the two of them charm out of him, and it’s almost reflexive to squeeze the button down when Raven jabs Charles in the side and makes him laugh, eyes creasing shut even as the bright light leaves spots dancing in his eyes and another photograph joins the pile of glossy squares on the floor, slowly developing into something worth looking at.



XXIV

When Charles follows him into the bedroom that evening Erik is kneeling in front of the wardrobe, closing the box he keeps there with a soft thunk that catches the other man’s attention; he wanders over to stand behind Erik as he rocks up onto his haunches and stands, what he was looking for clutched carefully in his right hand.

“This is where I grew up,” Erik says as quickly as possible, handing the photograph to Charles almost dismissively, like passing off a grenade.

“Oh.” Charles takes it from him with the sort of reverence usually reserved for ancient artifacts or mugs of tea, pinched carefully between finger and thumb as though he’s worried he might hurt it. “It looks nice, Erik.”

It feels awkward, showing him, waiting for his - approval? Opinion? Erik shifts uncomfortably, pulling a hand out of his pocket where he’d put it safely out of the way and running it back through his hair, wonders if it needs cutting, ignores the tight little breathless feeling in his chest that’s somewhere between panic and love. “This is after. Someone else lived there by the time it was taken, but I - well. I saw all of yours, earlier.”

“Thank you for sharing it with me.” Charles looks up from the picture to smile at him, and it feels right to reach for Charles in that moment, mimicking that dry kiss earlier, gentler than their mouths have met before, almost soft. Erik presses his lips to Charles’ as carefully as Charles holds the photograph, and it’s like meeting him all over again, mouths and tongues moving against one another slowly, wetting the kiss but not hurrying, not pushing and furious but for the first time… sweet.

Charles’ hands grip Erik’s waist tightly, and for a moment he worries about the photo, but Charles has put it down on the dresser and his fingers are free to curl over Erik’s hipbones, hook through his beltloops and tug, pulling them closer together as Erik touches him in a long caress between his shoulder and the nape of his neck, warm skin under his fingertips that he strokes, careful, and teasing a quiet sound from Charles that tingles in Erik’s chest. He’s almost surprised to find himself stiffening, helplessly aroused by just this simple thing, by Charles’ thumbs rubbing just beneath the hem of his shirt, tracing the skin above his belt and pushing a little under it to trace a scar that tracks from back to front; stranger yet, he doesn’t mind, this time, that Charles has found it. When he tugs Charles closer the other man is hard, too, hips jerking a little against his when they meet, aroused but not urgent.

“Let me,” and Erik pushes him a little, back toward the bed, but Charles goes easily, willingly.

They strip each other, this time, and even this is slow, with pauses for exploration of each new part as it’s exposed until they’re both bared. Erik kisses him once more on the mouth before moving down, and Charles breathes in sharp and shuddering, fingers tangling in Erik’s hair when he takes the swollen head of Charles’ cock into his mouth. He wraps his lips around it and sucks, tracing the leaking slit at the top with the tip of his tongue, his hand stroking and steadying the length of it he hasn’t reached yet. Under him Charles is quivering and moaning quietly, fingers curling and uncurling against Erik’s scalp, each near-catch of his fingernails like the way Erik imagines it would feel to try and harness lightning, all of that electrical energy prickling across his skin and making him shake, too, groaning around the wide stretch of his lips and the cock in his mouth, soft over hard, pulse thrumming on his tongue as he slides lower, takes more, sucks and pushes down the urge to gag.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 131/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

It’s like tasting Charles’ heart beating, his thighs clenching tight around Erik’s shoulders, and his own cock is dripping onto the covers, hard and begging for a touch he doesn’t want just yet. He reaches up to tangle his hand with Charles’, and their fingers catch and lock together as the human cries out aloud, unable to hold it in; Erik’s tongue strokes the long line of the vein along the underside, traces the join where Charles’ foreskin meets the rest of him, and ignores it when Charles tries to pull him away, sucks harder through the sudden flood as Charles comes, shaking and panting - “Erik! Oh, oh - ” - and keeps licking at the dribbling aftershocks until Charles really is too sensitive and pulls him away more forcefully, up to his mouth for a kiss.

“Erik,” and his mouth must taste bitterly of Charles’ come, but the kiss is no less fervent for it, sloppy and wet as the other man regains a little of the control stripped from him by his orgasm. “What do you want?” Charles asks, between kisses, his breath still unsteady, and when Erik guides his hand to his own cock where it’s desperate for attention Charles is happy to oblige, the first stroke shocking an embarrassingly loud moan from Erik that only gets louder when Charles pushes him over onto his back and shuffles backward on the bed to return the favour.

XXV

Charles sticks their share of the photographs they took to the refrigerator door, which is apparently the traditional spot; it makes getting the milk out in the morning a longer affair, because Erik always pauses to trace a finger over the laughter on Charles’ face, the smugness on Raven’s. His favourite photo is the one where Raven has pretended to swoon across their laps and Charles is grinning into Erik’s neck, face half-hidden but luminous nonetheless.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 132/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

You guys continue to amaze me with all of your lovely comments and kind words - I really do live off them, and I love hearing what you think of the fic, so thank you so much! I value them all immensely :D



XXVI

Charles loves to sing. It's one of the things Erik always misses, when he's away, across the ocean or the country, it doesn't matter; there is a distinct absence of humming, of half-remembered words and the lovely timbre of Charles' voice as he potters around the apartment, sleeves rolled messily to his elbows, a pen tucked behind one ear where he's forgotten it and feet bare and padding across the floorboards.

Erik doesn't sing. Sometimes he wonders if Charles would turn and smile at him if he joined in, but he never quite does; instead he listens, makes it part of the background of home, a word he is starting to use more frequently now that it seems he is going to be staying in one place for a while.



XXVII

He spends the next month working solidly on consolidating infrastructure and government, sometimes from his office, sometimes in board rooms and sometimes out in the world, Azazel accompanying him from city to city and town to town for meetings and tours and demonstrations. He gives three speeches, none of them especially memorable save the last, which gathers a crowd of protesters outside with plackets demanding he step down and hold an election for a replacement, one he assumes is intended to be human. When he tries to speak to them the protesters shout louder and louder until he cannot be heard by anyone, and he deflects a few half-serious missiles, expression growing darker with each until eventually he is forced to accept that he cannot force them to listen and gives up, for now. The fact that since his takeover there has been more food, better healthcare for those sick of radiation, and that mutants with applicable gifts are actively working to reclaim some of the land their human politicians had destroyed, seems to have gone over their heads entirely. Magneto is a despot, and nothing more.

He wonders who they would prefer to have in his place, had they the choice - most of the human leaders had been killed when Washington DC had been bombed, and those that hadn’t had gone underground, most of them too sick or weak without their bases of power to do anything practical or conducive to the survival of the general population. It’s all so frustrating, being slandered for being a mutant who took control of a collapsing system and rescued it when what he is mostly doing is a good job.

Magneto also spends time in South America with Magma, working on their own needs and helping to reassure their supporters that they are in control and doing what is necessary. Magma is extremely competent and has things well in hand, but there is something about Magneto and the long shadow his name casts these days that settles the mutants, reassures them that things will be looked after.

Erik wonders, sometimes, when Magneto became this giant figure, this colossus, a rock for mutants to build on and a hammer for humans to fear. When he is home he is grateful that Charles does not see him that way, and that he is very happy to take him down a peg or two if Charles sees it necessary, a few pointed comments enough to rein in any ego he might otherwise have cultivated. Raven, too, teases him whenever she has the chance, something she had not done before Charles, though she had been the closest he had to a confidante; something has changed to make her feel she can mock him now, and have it be accepted in good humour, most of the time. Where once he was iron through and through, cold and unchangeable, solid as that rock, some days Erik feels more like mercury, now, on the inside, shifting and malleable, like a hidden reservoir, or a lake deep underground, slowly trickling through aeons of rock to reach the surface, a bubbling spring bringing things out into the open air where they can breathe.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 133/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

XXVIII

“Look,” says Mystique, waving her spoon at him after she’s licked it clean, “I might be knocked up, but I’m still Head of Intelligence, which means you have to listen to me when I tell you that the Jets are starting a rumble.”

Magneto gives her a blank look. “What?”

“Not a fan of musical theatre? My mistake. I suppose it would be hard to fit around all your other hobbies.” She scoops up another spoonful of yogurt and eats it with every sign of enjoyment, her feet propped up on the edge of his desk, a liberty nobody else would be allowed to or indeed dare to take. She has the pot balanced on the upper curve of her ever-expanding belly, which seems to swell day by day. “So up until now apart from the occasional assassination the humans have been pretty quiet on the resistance front, which considering their strength of numbers is a very good thing. But they’re getting restless. I think, and all of our operatives think, there’s something bigger coming, that they’re building up to something. We need to decide if we’re going to be ready to mix or not, and how, if it comes to a rumble.”

He sits back in his own chair and steeples his fingers under his chin, forefingers resting in the hollow just under his lower lip, thinking about the protests, about all the little bits and pieces of information Mystique and others bring him every week. Fitting them together is like having the pieces of a hundred jigsaw puzzles thrown in together and trying to fit them together - a cloud here, a corner there. The office outside is very noisy right now - all the better to mask their conversation from anyone who might be trying to listen in, were they clever enough to get past Rogue. “Any rumours as to what this something might be?”

“Not a whisper.” She looks as frustrated as he feels, dropping her spoon into the yogurt and only just avoiding splattering her dress. “We’ve tried getting some of our telepaths close, but we don’t have anyone strong enough to read anyone senior enough from far enough away, and they’re getting pretty good at weeding out mutants from the new recruits. It’s hard to ignore someone thinking very loudly about killing you messily right then and there. I’ve asked Emma for a little of her time, but she has so little to spare, and when we don’t know who we’re looking for…” She tails off, scales flickering in irritation, though she doesn’t noticeably change. “All we have is: big. Unpleasant to be on the receiving end thereof.”

“So no what. How about where? Or when? I’d settle for who.”

Mystique shrugs. “Somewhere in the universe. Some time in the future, which at least rules out the past. Someone who doesn’t like us very much.”

It’s enough to pull a sigh out of him, and Magneto gets up from his seat to pace a little, slowly, just between the desk and the window, looking out at the street below and wondering if this mysterious thing might be happening now, somewhere within a few blocks of where he stands. Mystique watches him move with apologetic eyes, and he knows she is just as annoyed as he is that they have no more information than this, but it doesn’t quite stop him from saying, “So what you’re telling me is that, essentially, we have a sense of amorphous dread and nothing more.”

“Pretty much.”

“If only we had five more of you,” he mutters, as he turns back once again towards the window, arms folded behind his back. “We need to get in there up to our elbows and dig around if we want to find anything, and Mastermind just isn’t as good at subterfuge as you are, more’s the pity. Verdammt!”

She smiles. “You couldn’t handle six of me.”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 134/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

For a moment, he lets himself think about how it would have been with Raven, had he got there first, before Azazel and before he met Charles. Easier, certainly. There would have been no need to hide and no fear of discovery. They could have lived together upstairs in his apartment, him shaving in the bathroom while she tried on different faces in front of the mirror, different clothes; he would cook, as she was a disaster in the kitchen, and maybe it would have been him she curled up with on long evenings with a magazine or a book, casually disinterested in having personal space. They would have worked together downstairs and everyone would think of them as an inseparable unit, a perfect pair of mutants. Her baby might have been his.

Raven is light and witty and charming, but most of all fierce and determined to stand her ground and protect what’s hers with every bone in her body, no matter the cost. She and Charles both fight him freely as and when they please, never laying down before the battle is well and truly over, and neither one of them is afraid of him or his anger. But he does not know, now, if he could ever have relaxed enough for Raven. She has so much vivacity and so little patience, sometimes. She would never have waited for Erik to come to her, the way Charles does when he’s in one of his darker moods, or known how to nag him out of it without pushing him to outbursts of temper, somehow treading that fine line between sympathy and irritation. She is beautiful, but she does not have the same way of understanding Erik that Charles does, somehow always knowing what Erik is trying to say, however poorly he says it. Charles is strong, and gentle, and fierce in his own way, a pacifist not afraid of going into battle when he must.

He still loves her, all the same, even if it is not the burning ardour it once was. Erik has never been a man to let things go. He just found somebody he loves more.

“Keep all ears out,” he says finally, once his feet have slowed from their pacing to leave him back where he started, stood over his desk, the restless energy useless without a target to aim it at. “Let me know as soon as you hear anything.”

“Don’t I always?” Raven smiles, and goes back to her yogurt, humming thoughtfully around the spoon in her mouth. “You know, you’ve really grown into this, Erik. I know you didn’t think you could do it, but look at you now. I told you so.”

He is quiet for a long moment, then he smiles, an expression that goes all the way to his eyes. “Thank you, Raven. You… know, I hope, that the same is true of you.”

“I’ve certainly grown,” she says with a wry grin, and rubs her stomach, suddenly wincing. “Ow. He’s lively, today. Hey, you want to feel?” And before he can say anything she grabs his hand and tugs him closer, laying the flat of his palm against the taut skin of her stomach through her dress, just right of her navel. “Feel that?”

There is nothing, at first, just an overwhelming moment of thinking about how close they are, and of feeling awkward, before suddenly the flesh under his hand jumps in a way that a stomach never should, and Erik is instead suddenly and shockingly aware that there is a miniature person inside of there, that inside of his dear friend is someone entirely new, waiting to come out. His breath catches in his throat, and he glances up to meet Raven’s eyes, which are very soft and fond. “Weird, isn’t it?” she asks, and Erik just nods, smiles back, everything else - politics, revolution, economics, race - put on the back burner for now, as he takes a moment out for wonder.

“You’re going to spoil this kid rotten, aren’t you,” Raven says, “you big marshmallow,” but she doesn’t sound upset at all.



XXIX

At night Erik learns Charles’ body with his hands and mouth and eyes, burns every inch of him into his memory, until he only has to close his eyes to find Charles on the inside of his eyelids, until it might as well be Charles’ name tattooed on the inside of his forearm, scrawled in messy black ink by a hand that cannot keep up with the mind that directs it.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 135/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

XXX

Though he wants it badly enough to burn, so much that he feels sometimes he might spontaneously combust if they don’t, they haven’t had penetrative sex, because Charles has not offered or asked, and Erik cannot bear the thought of asking and being told no, or worse yet, of asking and being told yes if Charles does not want it. He has taken enough from Charles as it is.

It’s easy to say it in the heat of things, when they’re pressed flesh to flesh and he’s so turned on he can’t think and his mouth runs away with him, but when they’re not having sex it’s too hard to ask and Charles never says a word either way.

They sleep curled up together, and sometimes Erik lies behind Charles and thinks about it so hard that he has to slip out of bed to jerk off in the bathroom, gritting his teeth against making enough noise to wake the other man, hand slick on his own cock where he has been leaking precome, and never, ever as good as it would be if it was Charles, but he does not wake him up.

He will not ask. Charles has to come to him. Charles has to want it. Erik will not ask -

He gets back into bed after and gathers Charles back up into his arms carefully, shuffles in close and sleeps with his nose buried in Charles’ hair, inhaling and exhaling, fixing the scent in his mind along with everything else.



XXXI

The news comes in the middle of the night, but Magneto doesn’t hear about it until his morning briefing, none of the staff sure if he would want to be called as soon as it came in or not - he makes it clear he would’ve, and that in future they should wake him up, there’s a phone on his bedside table now for a reason - and so presenting it to him as soon as he appears downstairs, a whole gaggle of assistants and ministers crowding him into his office when the folder is handed over.

“Let me read it,” Magneto snaps, exasperated, and forces them all back to make himself some room, reinforcing the words with a solid push on any metal they have about their persons. “All of you out until I’m done. Rogue, you can stay.”

He reads it standing in the middle of the room, a frown creasing his brow as he scans it quickly, reads it again. The report is brief, little more than a few telegrams from their allies and sources within Japan put together into as coherent a briefing as possible. Tokyo is burning, the Japanese mutant population rising up to turn on their government and the American soldiers still posted there - who, after Magneto’s takeover of power in the States had simply stayed where they were, doing much the same job, for lack of other alternatives, exiles of circumstance - and the mutants are fighting for control of the cities with a single-minded viciousness. It has not exactly been hidden that the Japanese harbour a deep and focused prejudice against mutants that goes far past dislike and into making either social outcasts or corpses of anybody unfortunate enough to be found out or stubborn enough not to hide.

“Good for them,” Magneto says, turning over the sheet to see if there is anything more on the back, but there’s nothing - just these few snippets of information sent through on the wires. “Rogue, who’s still malingering out there?”

The girl opens the door a little, just enough to peek out without giving room for anyone to push past. “Shadowcat’s out there, Emma must have sent her. A couple of flunkies from International Affairs, too. Everyone else is just gawping. Want ah should let them in?”

Not particularly, but needs must. Magneto moves around the desk to sit in his chair, laying the file down on the table in front of him. “Alright. Shadowcat first.”

Emma’s assistant doesn’t wait for Rogue to open the door; instead she just walks right through it, appearing from the wood like a movie ghost. There’s a clipboard clasped to her chest and her eyes are wide the way they always are when she talks to Magneto, as though he might bite, or worse, ask her something. When he sees her in the corridor with Emma she seems chatty enough, but something about him intimidates her. Frankly he’d be more afraid of Emma, if it were him. “Sir, Ms Frost would like to talk to you about the Japan situation as soon as possible. Please.”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 136/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“Is that what she actually said?”

“Not quite, sir.” Shadowcat bites her lip before continuing, and she looks so young it’s physically painful. “She said ‘tell him I want to talk to him about this before he raises merry hell again.’ Sir.”

The corner of his mouth twitches upward, amused, and he gets up from his desk, shaking his cape into place. “No need to paraphrase for me, I can take the unpolished version. I’d best go see what she wants.”

Shadowcat leads him along to Emma’s office as though he might not know where it is after all this time, glancing over her shoulder every so often to make sure he’s still following. She’s a wisp of a thing, even when she’s fully tangible, and the constant looks make him feel like she’s waiting for him to do something, but he doesn’t know what. It’s almost a relief when she lets him into the room at the opposite corner of the building from his own, closing the door behind her.

Emma looks up as he comes in, laying down her pen with a smart click on the surface of her coffee table. She’s sitting in one of the smart white chairs she has arranged faux-casually by the large windows, taking advantage of the daylight and the view; it’s calculatedly informal, as though she holds mother’s meetings in here instead of running half of the country. Everything is white or cream, from the carpet, laid specially, to the paintings she has hung on the walls, white on white, and the vases of pale flowers spread around and filling the room with fragrance. Emma herself is pristine as ever, her white pantsuit elegantly tailored to her best advantage and her beautiful, crisp-cut features as bland and clean of emotion as they always are, though she raises an eyebrow at him as he comes over to join her. “She’s always staring,” he says as he takes a seat across from her, feeling far too large for the finicky furniture.

“Oh, honey,” Emma drawls, uncrossing her legs and crossing them again, somehow pointed rather than sexual, “I could tell you, but it’ll make you uncomfortable.”

“Not much does.”

It earns him a slow smile, devoid of humour but somehow soft, nonetheless. “Kitty is Jewish. She desperately wants to ask you about your time in Germany, but she doesn’t dare.”

He’s… not entirely sure what to say to that. Magneto tries to keep his gaze level and his expression the same, and if he doesn’t quite manage that then at least she can’t pick his reaction directly out of his head when he’s wearing his helmet. “Hmm,” he says eventually, and glances toward the door, toward a girl he couldn’t have said two things about before and now has too many thoughts about, all of a sudden. “Probably for the best. It’s not pretty.” That, at least, is public knowledge, and safe.

“She’s a strong girl,” is all Emma says, still unusually gentle around the edges, before reaching for her own file, its bright red sleeve stark against the paleness of the rest of the room. “Now. Japan.”

Magneto nods, relieved despite himself to have changed topic. “I’m assuming we haven’t had any direct contact?”

“Not as yet, and frankly I shouldn’t expect any. They seem to be handling themselves.” Emma hands him a sheet of paper, which he scans quickly, glancing at the photograph clipped to it without recognition. “This is unconfirmed, though I think it fairly likely to be accurate. Their leader is a mutant called Sunfire, and he’s not much of a team player. I wouldn’t anticipate him calling for aid.”

“Another fire-related mutant,” Magneto murmurs to himself, looking again at the photograph and the ridiculous mask the man is wearing, which covers his entire face, like some kind of comic book character. “They do seem to be popping up everywhere.”

“He’s very powerful. In effect, he’s taking up your banner.” She hands him another sheet, this one so fresh that the ink smudges a little when his thumb rubs across the words. “The Japanese mutants are all falling into line behind him, and he’s declared himself for ‘Magneto’s cause’. Even in Asia your name is a conjurer’s trick, sugar.”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 137/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

He hums thoughtfully, tucking the sheet away with the rest in his file to look at again later. “Europe isn’t going to like this,” he says, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together over his chest. “They were leery enough about South America to send assistance, useless though it was. If Asia starts going too, we could be looking at another world war, if Europe decides they want to step in.”

Emma nods, eyes fixed on his. “Which is exactly why we are going to do nothing.”

The sudden silence is tense and sharp-edged, his full attention snapping to her where usually it would be on their surroundings, keeping track of everything at once. They look at each other for a long moment, two predators sizing one another up.

“And why should I do that?” he asks, maintaining a razor edge of calm. “The quicker we have allies, the more pressure we can lay back against Europe when it comes to that.”

Her voice is neutral, though her eyes are blazing with the love of a good fight. It’s the thing he likes best about her, because he feels it, too. “Getting involved will only make Europe certain that you plan to cross the Atlantic and take the fight to them. It’s an escalation we cannot afford right now, not with two continents to secure and rebuild.”

“Some might say it’s our duty to help our brothers and sisters fight oppression. It’s why we went to war in South America.”

“Two things,” Emma says, counting them off on her fingers. “One, the Brazilian mutants invited us in, which Sunfire has not. Two, I told you not to and you did it anyway, which is why we’re having this discussion now. Enough is enough, Magneto. You can’t take over the world if you don’t secure what you already have, or you’ll go home only to find out someone has reconquered it behind your back.”

He considers what she’s said, listens to the hustle and bustle of their people doing their jobs outside the office, all of them working hard to put into place the things he decides, regardless of what he decides. He could choose, right now, to lend support to the Japanese mutants. It feels right to his gut, to his knee-jerk first reaction. But, perhaps, now is the time to start listening to what others have to say, instead of only to himself and his instincts.

“What would you suggest?” he asks instead, and Emma’s smile this time is not sharp at all but warm.



XXXII

“It’s nice to work for someone who values me for my mind, not what my mind can do, and not for the body it comes in,” Emma says later, before he can leave.

“I’m not Schmidt,” Erik says, and has never liked her so much as when she says “No, you’re not.”



XXXIII

He pauses on the way out of her office, just a moment of hesitation, but he does not speak to Shadowcat after all. Another time, perhaps he’ll offer, if she asks.



XXXIV

Whenever Erik is using his powers in his workroom Charles always seems to wander in, setting himself down in the spare chair and leaning on the edge of the desk as the metal bends and reshapes itself to Erik’s needs. “I could take this into the living room, if you’d be more comfortable,” he says eventually, turning to look at Charles where he’s propped his chin on the heel of one hand, fascination on his face.

Charles shrugs, a fluid motion that looks rather like the waves of a woollen ocean as his cardigan rises and falls. “It’s nice in here. I just like to watch you work. Do you mind?”

“No.” Erik ducks his head and turns back to the piece of iron he’s been trying to mould into something resembling a duck, but it’s coming out rather more like a blob, at present. It’s for a mobile he’s making as a present for Raven and Azazel, entirely different than anything he’s tried to make before, and he has never claimed to be artistic. The menorah had been easier, somehow, than this, springing fully formed from some well of inspiration he had not known he had. “You can stay, if you like.”

“Alright,” Charles says, and when he smiles the corners of his eyes crinkle up in a way that makes Erik want to touch them with the tips of his fingers, not to smooth them out but to feel the way the skin lies when Charles is happy.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 138/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

The workroom is Erik’s favourite room in the apartment. It hadn’t been, at first; but slowly over the time he’s spent here it’s become less a room he took over from somebody else and more one he’s filled up with parts of himself, bits of metal and tools lined up in boxes and on shelves, paperwork and sketches of things to work on splayed out like the internal works of some mechanical beast, all gears and coiled springs on show for an engineer to examine. There are abandoned mugs here, too, as in the rest of the apartment, testament to Charles’ ongoing commitment to drowning the both of them in tea. Erik has not told him how much it costs now - it’s a small extravagance he can afford to provide, something workaday and invisible for Charles to appreciate without knowing it.

He tinkers with the duck for a while longer, turning the metal over in his hands and pinching it here, reshaping it there. Maybe iron is too heavy for a mobile, though it’s one of the easiest metals for him to work with. Perhaps aluminum, or tin. He’d already planned to use a variety, for the difference in colour. The fact that they all feel different, have a different resonance that is quite pleasing, to him, will make no difference to anybody else. It’s a shame, he sometimes thinks, that he has nobody with whom to share the particular loveliness of pewter, the reassuring weight of steel. He’s tried to explain it to Charles, once or twice, but it’s as impossible to describe the delicate balance of copper and tin in a piece of well-made bronze as it would be to describe a rainbow to a blind man, or a symphony to someone who is deaf.

“What is it you like about it?” he asks when he’s ready to give up on making a duck, crushing the blob into a ball and starting over. Perhaps it will make a better star than a duck. Stars he can do. “Watching, I mean.”

Charles does not answer for a moment, but then he glances up from the metal as though startled, fully absorbed in what Erik was doing. “Hmm? Oh. I like that you like it, I suppose. And what you can do is amazing.”

Is it appropriate to say thank you? Erik finishes reshaping the iron - stars, being geometric, are much easier - and puts it aside, where Charles picks it up and cups it in his palm, twirling it by the long stem Erik drew out at the top for it to attach to the mobile. “I’m trying to improve my fine control,” he says, picking up the next piece, a small hunk of verdigris-stained copper that will make a nice contrast to the iron. “I spent so long on brute force. I’d like to be better at finesse.”

“So you’re making things? To practice?”

Erik nods, then holds out the copper to Charles, presents it to him pinched between forefinger and thumb, its warm ruddy glow gleaming in the yellowish light of his worklamp. “This could be an arrowhead, or a small knife, or any number of things. Making it sharp is not hard. Making it more than that is difficult, for me. So I practice.”

“I think you like it, too,” Charles says, tilting his head to one side and looking at Erik with an expression Erik can only think of as fond. “You like making things. What did you want to be when you grew up?”

Erik’s fairly certain he doesn’t mean post-Schmidt so he doesn’t say, ‘a murderer’. He takes the copper back and starts rubbing it pliable, ready to mould. “I don’t remember.”

“Hmm.” Charles is quiet for a while as Erik starts shapes the copper into a crescent moon, dulling the points so that they are rounded to the touch and carefully dimpling in the craters with the tip of his little finger. The texture of the verdigris makes the surface light and dark like dappled sunlight. Then, “Erik, why do you like me?”

He startles, taken by surprise and unprepared; thankfully it’s only the stem that he crushes between his fingers. “What?”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 139/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“Why do you like me?” Charles repeats, wide-eyed and earnest, and does not look away when Erik stares at him, mouth set in a determined line. “I mean, of all the people in all the world, I’m forced upon you by my sister and you just happen to lo- like me. It just seems…”

It’s like having his foot caught in a trap; Erik does not know what to say, how to articulate something he does not understand himself. He is eloquent at other times, he knows, and is not falsely modest about it. But something about Charles is disarming, tongue-tying and disconcerting, and he feels like a stumbling idiot, trying to put his feelings for Charles into words. “It’s not about… this,” he says, gesturing at the room around them, meaning this, this apartment, Charles’ confinement and Erik’s part in that, what he will not think of as his control of that. “I could have put you somewhere else a thousand times over, Charles, if I didn’t… I’ve said so before, to you. But. It’s better when you’re here.”

Charles leans forward, just a little, enough that his hair falls forward into his eyes and he has to reach up to push it back, watching Erik’s face like he expects to find something there. “Better than what?”

And that one is easy. “Than before you were here,” Erik says, and gestures around them again. “Somehow, you make me… I’m a difficult person. I sometimes think I’m like a - chestnut?”

“A conker?” Charles asks, with just a hint of humour.

“With the - the spiny casing,” Erik says, moving his palms in together as though cupping something rounded, hoping they’re thinking of the same thing.

Charles is definitely trying not to smile, now, despite himself. His mouth is twitching, like he’s fighting hard to keep it a straight line. “Are you saying you’re spiky on the outside and nutty on the inside?”

“Forget it,” Erik mutters, glowering at the crushed stem of the moon until it snaps back into the shape he’d intended.

When Charles takes his hand he almost pulls away, but he doesn’t, quite, lets Charles catch their fingers together and hold his hand still, tugging until Erik looks back up to meet his eyes, softer now. “No, I’m sorry, what were you going to say.”

“It’s not about the - our situation,” Erik says, even though he’d rather just get up and abandon the conversation so he could stop feeling awkward. “Don’t think that. I just - you make me - happy. Alright?”

There is an odd expression on Charles’ face, startled and flustered and worried, maybe, but over all of that a slow-blooming sweet smile, made sweeter by the flush that rises to his pale cheeks. It makes Erik’s lungs catch on an inhale, hitching on an upswell of unbearable ardour and affection and embarrassment, and in the moment of respiratory failure his heart thuds hard against the inside of his ribcage. It’s uncomfortable and he hides it by turning his gaze sharply away and back to the metal on his desk, though he is electrically aware of Charles to his side, and when Charles gets up from his chair and comes to wrap his arms around Erik’s shoulders, leaning his forehead against Erik’s temple, pressing in close, it’s easier to show him what he means by turning to press his lips to the corner of Charles’ eye, gently, Charles’ eyelashes fluttering against Erik’s skin and fingers curling in Erik’s shirt.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 140/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

You guys are awesome. 'Nuff said, really - you keep me going and I love you! Don't stop :D


XXXV

The unrest in Japan is far away, but not far enough, it seems; of course it makes it into the papers, and from there it’s like some kind of visually-transmitted disease. The words and photographs from far across the ocean infect the population here and leave them muttering and ill at ease, striking back at the police who try to calm them and speaking out publicly in a way they haven’t really dared, before, gathering together on street corners and in shady bars to share their malcontent and spread it further.

Three more of the faces on that list, that verdammt list, are shot in early May, one a prominent mutant doctor and two City Leaders, each of them recognised as having played significant roles in the Uprising last year. Only Ghast, the Chicago City Leader, is sniped the way the previous dead were. The other two are killed by regular citizens who have read the list a few too many times and seen a few too many movies. They’re caught, of course. But it doesn’t solve the problem. The population has tasted blood, and they’re hungry for more.

Anti-mutant hate crime is on the rise again, no matter what rights mutants now have to defend themselves - whatever means necessary - and it’s too late to censor the press, to keep the poison from leaching in. The enemy is already inside the walls.

It makes Magneto even less popular, but the curfew is the only thing that even starts to curb the death toll - both mutant and human. The ratio would be in the humans’ favour if only they bothered to make sure of the powers they were up against before assaulting people who can kill with a touch, wipe a mind clean in the blink of an eye or turn limbs to lead, leaving their attackers weighed down to the pavement and screaming for the cops, when their dead, frozen hand is still clutching a knife.

“If people cannot control themselves, then I must do what I can to preserve their lives, regardless of their stupidity,” Magneto says on television, looking down the camera with a practiced assurance he had not had a year ago, six months ago, curls his hands around the lectern and leans towards them, meets the audience’s eyes and stares them down. “If you cannot stop killing one another, mutant or human, then I will stop you.”

At home Charles has fallen asleep in front of the television Erik had brought him, a blanket falling off his lap and head tipped back against the couch cushions, his solitary plate washed and stacked beside the sink. When Erik wakes him Charles smiles at him sleepily and says “Out after curfew? Whatever will the First Mutant say.”

“He’ll probably ground me.” Erik offers him a hand and pulls Charles to his feet, tugging Charles in close and wrapping his arms around him when the other man leans in, drowsy and compliant, tucking Charles in against his chest and sighing. “We can’t keep this up forever. Something’s got to give.”

“People are afraid of being made obsolete.” Charles strokes a hand down Erik’s side to settle at his hip, heavy and welcome in the space between them. “All through history, wars have been fought and lost over human beings’ need to continue their line, to be remembered. They’re afraid of disappearing.”

“Humans are already obsolete,” Erik replies thoughtlessly, and Charles stiffens in his arms, pushing away to frown at him disapprovingly. “You said it yourself, Charles. It’s not personal - it’s evolution. When a more advanced species is born, the less evolved species fades or is killed. It’s in your dissertation.”

“It doesn’t mean they don’t matter, Erik,” Charles says, and for once Erik knows what he means underneath his words.

“Of course you matter,” he says, and when Charles is still frowning, adds, “it’s not as though I only called the curfew to protect mutants. It’s for the humans’ sake, too. Would you really want to try and surprise me in a dark alley?”

Charles doesn’t look mollified in the least, hands stiff where they’re still pressed against Erik’s chest to hold him at arm’s length. “It’s all very 1984, though, don’t you think? There’s a reason they call it a dystopian novel. It’s not supposed to be a model for a good society!”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 141/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“What do you want me to do, then?” Erik steps back, letting go of Charles and shoving a hand back through his hair, tired and frustrated and cranky with it. “Let them all go out there and kill each other instead of intervening? I can’t both provide the rule of law and refuse to interfere, Charles, you know that.” He sighs, looking at the other man’s frowning, disappointed face, and cannot be bothered to dissemble. “Do I want to protect mutant lives more than I do human lives? Honestly, yes. You know that about me already. I won’t pretend to be someone I’m not for you. But I’m trying to be fair.”

“I just think it’s a slippery slope,” Charles says, folding his arms and not meeting Erik’s eyes, looking down at the floor. The corners of his mouth are curled decidedly downward, and it’s an unpleasant change from the smile when he first woke up, one Erik has to work hard not to resent.

“If you can suggest to me an alternative,” not that there is one, not really, and they both know it, “then I will be happy to hear it, because this is killing me out there every day, and enforcing it is going to drain our already strained resources, and I would call the whole thing off if it wouldn’t mean facilitating a continuation of this murder culture.” A laugh chokes its way out of him before he’s even registered what caused it, and then the words are coming out of Erik’s mouth after, gravelled and dry. “Which is ironic, coming from a murderer.”

Charles looks stricken, and it’s too late to take those words and hide them somewhere Charles will never see them, though Erik would dearly like to try.

“I’m going to bed,” Charles says, face pale as milk, stepping back and walking away without a further word said between them. Erik stands in the living room and curses himself in every language he knows. It takes long enough that when he slips into the bedroom Charles is already asleep, and barely shifts when Erik lies down, snuffling a little into the pillow, curled in on himself on the far side of the bed.



XXXVI

They end up tangled in together the way they always do sometime during the night, and though for once Charles wakes up before Erik he doesn’t get up, is lying there looking at him when Erik opens his eyes, searching Erik’s face again for that unknowable something he always seems to be hunting down in the line of Erik’s brow, the narrow breadth of his mouth, unused to smiling.

“Do you ever find it?” Erik asks when Charles doesn’t say anything, unwilling to detach just yet, warm under covers in this hollow space between arguments, a moment taken out of time.

Charles startles, though he must have known Erik was awake. “Find what?” His voice is still raspy from sleep.

“I don’t know,” Erik says, letting his eyes slide shut again, heavy-lidded and impossible to hold. He shifts against the pillow, digs himself in a little deeper. “Whatever it is you’re hoping to find in me. You’re always looking, so I assume it’s always missing.”

There is a long silence, then, “Maybe I’m admiring it.”

Erik snorts, then gathers his will and rolls over, swinging his legs free of Charles’ and sitting up on the edge of the mattress, his back to the other man, stretching his arms out above his head and cracking his vertebrae back into place. “I have to go to work.”

“Erik,” Charles says quietly, and the tone of it is enough to make him turn against his will, twisting to look back over his shoulder to meet Charles’ gaze. “I might not always agree with your decisions,” Charles says, hands clenching in the covers where he’s pushed himself onto his elbows, and if nothing else his eyes are steady now on Erik’s, focused and awake. “Or your opinions which are, frankly, on certain matters, offensive. But sometimes I’m just looking at you because you’re important to me and I’m trying to understand, alright?”

“Is today one of those times?” Erik asks, curious, and at least Charles is honest enough not to lie.

“No,” he says, with only the smallest of hesitations first. “No, not today. Today I’m a human first and Charles second, and last night you told me my whole species is obsolete.”

“I didn’t mean you.”

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 142/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“So, what, I’m the exception?” Charles raises his eyebrows incredulously, sarcasm dripping from his words like thick tar, and he’s mostly naked and yet still so - so arresting, biting. “Well I never. Of all the millions of humans on this planet I, Charles Xavier, am the only one whose existence has not been rendered meaningless by the advent of mutantkind. I must be some kind of paragon. We’d better hope Raven’s baby doesn’t turn out human, or we’ll be in a right pickle. We’d have to get rid of it, of course.”

Erik blinks, taken aback and feeling utterly lost in this conversation, as though somehow Charles has taken the map from his hands and handed it back, only for it to have turned into another country entirely, one Erik cannot navigate. “…what?”

“There’s no guarantee the baby will be a mutant,” Charles says, calm as you please but for the simmer of anger underneath, the hot flush rising on his chest like a burn. “It’s entirely possible Raven and Azazel will have a baby who’s one hundred percent pure-bred human. Will you tell her her baby is a lesser species, Erik? Are you going to refuse to be the baby’s godparent if he or she is human?”

His eyes are blazing like blue fire, like they could set Erik alight with a thought. “It might be years before we know for sure, the child would be old enough to know you’d turned against it. He or she will probably ask you why. Are you prepared to tell a child that they’re not good enough for you, because he or she is genetically inferior? Will you tell Raven to try, try again to do it right this time? I mean, gosh. I’m not sure she’d take well to that.”

“Stop it,” Erik says, jumping to his feet and pacing like a trapped animal between the bed and the door, full of a fraught energy that keeps winding tighter in his spine, like the mechanism of a wind-up toy. The mattress springs back into shape once his weight is removed, and Charles rocks to the side, momentarily off-balance. “Just stop! What do you want me to do, Charles? A year ago I would have laughed in your face, and yet here I am, softening for you, at least trying to be fair on both sides. How much do you want me to bend? Why don’t you just tell me how you would prefer me to be constructed, so that we can cut out the parts that don’t please you. It might leave a few holes, but I’m sure that wouldn’t bother someone as self-righteous as you if it meant you could lobotomise me of opinions you disagree with. You could lead me around on a leash like your dog and tell me when to bark.”

His breath is heaving in his chest, heart pounding counterpoint in his ears like soldiers marching as Charles stares at him, agape. Erik’s fists clench as he continues, “I’m trying! I haven’t ordered culls, have I? I haven’t gone out of my way to destroy humanity. Everything I do benefits them as well as mutants. That I’ve given mutants more right to exist than they ever had under the previous government - something you yourself campaigned for - I just want them to be happy and to be safe and to live their lives without fear of being killed for being blue, Charles. Nobody did that for me, not until it was too late.” His voice breaks on the last sentence, and he feels humiliation rattle him down to his toes.

“Erik - ” Charles starts, and his voice cracks too, stricken, before Erik interrupts.

“Imagine being me, Charles,” he says, “and seeing the worst thing that ever happened to you happening again all around you, only this time you’re old enough and strong enough to do something about it. Could you stand back and watch it all over again, knowing you could stop it if only you stepped up to the task?”

There is no sound in the room, then, but their breathing, and the faint sounds of the city waking up outside, if it ever really sleeps. In the dim light the space between them is a vast, ragged canyon, and it is nothing at all; they are close enough that they could fall back into each other in seconds, to fight or to fuck, inescapable gravity like a black hole sucking them in. Charles pushes himself upward to sit fully upright, leaning back against the headboard, and chooses his next words carefully, if the slow way he says them is any indication.

FILL: Everyday Love in Stockholm 143/?

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“What happened to you was awful,” Charles says, meeting Erik’s eyes solidly, without flinching. “I can only hate the people who did that to you, to your family, to everyone who was hurt by the Nazis. It was evil, what happened, pure and simple. But it does not mean that an entire species can be written off like that, Erik. You can’t wave your hand and make humans into old technology, swept aside for upgrades. I’m human, and you tell me I’m not obsolete. You don’t mean me. But the only reason you don’t mean me is because I’m the only human you know well enough to see as an individual rather than as a thing. I’m only an exception because you can no longer lump me in with the rest of the herd of nameless, faceless animals. And it is far too early to be making speeches like this at one another. Please think about what I’ve said, instead of dismissing it as - as bleating.”

Erik feels himself tremble, and he leaves the room to step out into the corridor before letting out a loud shout of anger, his back turned to the doorway so that he doesn’t have to look at Charles, frustration bubbling up inside him until he has to let it loose, before it finds its own pathway, one he might not like. His fist collides with the wall before he’s even realised he’s lashing out, and the plaster splinters under his knuckles with a satisfying crunch that it takes a moment for him to register is as much bone as wall. “Scheisse!”

“Erik?”

“Go away!” He cradles his hand and goes to press on the knuckle, but it shifts under the lightest touch and he draws in a sharp breath of pain, suddenly woozy. “Scheisse, dummkopf, Erik, bravo.”

“What did you do?” Charles asks from right behind him, and makes a disapproving noise when he sees the wall, then another one, louder, when he sees Erik’s hand. “What did you do that for, you idiot? Let me see.”

“No,” but though Erik tries to keep it away Charles shoves at him until he manages to get hold of Erik’s wrist, and then he’s pulling it around until he can see the hand itself, hissing between his teeth when he does.

“You idiot,” he repeats, not touching the already-swollen knuckles, turning the hand carefully over so that he can get a better look at Erik’s fingers. “Can’t you talk it out instead of beating things up?”

Erik’s eyes are watering with the pain, and he blinks, hard, trying to get rid of it so Charles won’t think he’s crying; he’s lost enough dignity already for one day, and they’re barely out of bed. “I thought you knew I was a brute already. I’m only helping you decide which parts of me to excise first by putting them on display.”

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” and Charles tightens his grip on Erik’s wrist, glaring up at him in exasperation. “Would you please stop it with the surgical metaphors? I don’t want to change you, I want you to change yourself because you see that maybe I have a point. It’s not the same thing.”

“Sounds to me like you want to hand me the knife and have me smile while I cut myself,” Erik says, staring at the purple colour rising under the skin and slowly darkening. “I’m sorry, Charles, but I won’t do that, not even for you.”

Charles makes a sound halfway between a growl and a shout, letting go to grab at his own hair with both hands, tugging at it as though he might try and pull it out. “Erik, for God’s sake, you’re a good person! I just want you to let that out from under all of the walls of anger and self-defence and not-giving-a-shit that you’ve buried it under! Would that be so bad, for people to see that you actually care about something?”

“I told you that I care about you,” Erik says, trying to wiggle his fingers and stopping before he can even complete the motion, and it’s only with a great deal of effort that he keeps from swaying on his feet. It hurts, a lot. “And you never say it back, do you?”

Charles’ breath hitches, like he’s been taken by surprise.