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 166/? TW: CHARACTER DEATH

[tahariel.livejournal.com]

“Oh, good,” Charles murmurs, “I get to watch my lover and my sister get ripped apart by a screaming mob.”

“Cheerful.”

Charles rolls back onto his back, looks up at Erik with a serious expression. “If I say it, it won’t happen,” he says, holds Erik’s hand still now, just presses the flat of it to his chest and reaches up to run his hand over Erik’s cheek, touching the hollow under his lower lip, the swell of his cheekbone, the soft corner of his eye and the broad expanse of his brow, runs a thumb across the lines worn there by years of care and frustration. “I love you. Don’t make me watch you die, alright? Be careful.”

“Of course, liebchen.” Erik smiles, bends again to kiss Charles’ mouth this time, brief and chaste. “I’ll try very hard not to die for you.”

“You’d better,” and Charles sits up to kiss him again, deeper this time, half-curled around until he’s almost falling into Erik’s lap, sat sideways on to him with one hand pulling Erik’s head to a better angle. “You’d better.”



LXVI

Erik leaves Charles sleeping the next morning when he slips out to finish final preparations for the arrival of the AMC delegation. It’s difficult, when all he wants to do is climb back under the covers and wrap himself around that warm, drowsing body, bury his head in pillows and ignore the rest of the world. But he does it anyway, carries his boots with him and puts them on once he’s in the living room, so he won’t wake Charles with his footsteps. He can’t quite resist sitting on the edge of the mattress watching him for a few moments, but Charles doesn’t stir, and Erik really does have to go.

Raven meets him downstairs with an excited, energised grin, and they go to Emma’s office together, for a final conference before they leave for the arrival point, which is already heaving with crowds of mutants and humans and press, all waiting and watching and filming, ready for history to happen.



LXVII

In the days before, the politicians and media men would have staged this whole thing on the southernmost tip of Florida, put Magneto against a backdrop of the place nearest where everything had started. They would have made a symbol of the devastation of Cuba. As it is, it’s far too radioactive for anybody to go there, let alone to hold a press conference; instead he stands in Battery Park on the shore of Manhattan, Ellis Island at his back, the point of entry for so many strange and wonderful minorities who had come to this country. Had his family escaped, he might have been one of them; instead his one and only association with the place is the sight of the Statue itself, and the barely perceptible place where he had stolen metal to crush Schmidt to death. He’d come back to repair it a while after, bending it back into shape until the edges merged in and vanished, a little piece of his history neatly wallpapered over and put away.

They’d argued back and forth about the appropriateness of the location, had decided in the end that those who hated him hardly needed the reminder, and that those who had forgotten that he had put a stop to the Month of the Atom by killing its instigator before he could let loose another nuclear blast might benefit from it.

He wonders if there are still specks of the man’s blood there, on the stones at the statue’s foot, or on the metal, or even inside of it, and it seems appropriate, somehow, for freedom to stand in and on and spattered with the blood of those who had to be crushed to make it so.