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 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?”